Wilt Thou Be Made Whole? Healings in the Gospels

by Georg Kühlewind, translated and introduced by Michael Lipson; Lindisfarne Books, 2008, 120 pages. Review by Frederick J. Dennehy

Some are born to anthroposophy, some cultivate it, and some have anthroposophy thrust upon them. A stumbling block for many who encounter it is the connection between anthroposophy and the New Testament.

I do not mean the relationship between anthroposophy and Christianity; that is a separate question. I have in mind the hostility from organized Christianity that many readers, greatly interested in Rudolf Steiner, have experienced in their lives. I am thinking, too, of those who wandered away from mainstream Christianity after hearing the Gospels portrayed as fairytales or, equally off-putting, after being given bowdlerizations that edit out the hard sayings and astonishments and present us with a predictable moral code and a Jesus who would have won the Nobel Peace Prize had it been available during the reign of Tiberius. For not a few the response is to accept Steiner’s epistemology, anthropology, and even eschatology, but to return the gift of his Christology unopened.

For anyone who has had an uneasy relation to the Gospels, and in particular the stories of the “miracle” healings, Georg Kühlewind’s book may prove a revelation. Rudolf Steiner spoke repeatedly about the healings in the Gospels. Kühlewind’s book provides a contemporary bridge to Steiner and also presents his own spiritual research on the healings.

The book’s introduction by Michael Lipson gives us a wonderfully intimate glimpse of Georg Kühlewind at the conferences he held in New England for many years. In one of the last such gatherings, at the time he was writing this book, the main theme was healings in the Gospels. The impression Kühlewind gave at first meeting was of a profoundly intelligent, urbane, witty man fully in control of his feelings. But when he spoke of the New Testament his feelings were very close to the skin. When he turned his attention to “the Lord,” his gestures and even his appearance changed. He knew the Gospels, quite literally, chapter and verse, and he studied the healings with the care of a scholar and the insight of a master teacher. He understood what so very few scholars and commentators do—that the stories of healings in the Gospels are neither presented as journalistic accounts of events nor as “evidences” of the divine power of Christ, but rather are reports of the authors’ meditative experiences that are meant in turn to be meditated by readers.

What does this mean? Kühlewind evokes the ancient Orphic text in which the human being acknowledges: “I am a child of Earth and of the starry Heavens.” We are, in other words, born both “from above” and “from below.” This is the polarity that configures our lives, our missions, our infirmities, and our deaths. Healing always means that “the ‘one from above’ heals the lower part of us, which is the only part of us that can become sick.” Healing means “wholeness”; the Self is present, even if temporarily, in the world “above.” It means the dissolution of what separates us from ourselves and others; a reversal, even if only for a time, of the Fall. For this to occur we have to return, for a brief time, to the “openness” characteristic of archaic times and our own infancy.

This condition is termed pistis or “faith” in the Gospels. Faith is not a willed belief when reason can go no further. Rather, it is complete certainty, understanding without any doubt. It is a direct experience of our connection with the “Source”—as real for us as the act of climbing a mountain. The realization of faith takes place in the realm of arche, of primal beginning, where one I-Being—who exists as communication—interpenetrates another without mediation. The sign in the healing stories for this realm is the healing touch. It may also become present through the Word of the Lord. The healing stories in the Gospels often include the word dynamis, which is usually translated “power,” but whose most resonant translation is “meaning.” As Kühlewind puts it in a meditation that itself touches wholeness, “the power of the word is its meaning.”

Kühlewind proceeds by detailing a human “anthropology”— based upon statements by Rudolf Steiner but presented in a modern idiom—that accounts for both the possibility of healing and the manner in which healings occur. He describes the sentient or vegetative body (which relates to what is currently referred to as the autonomous nerve system. It is “a mechanism through which the state of the soul can effect changes upon bodily function without conscious intervention”); the “I” body, which is characterized by noncognitive self-perception and is related to egotism; and the spiritual core of the human being. He then examines the healings themselves—the “psychiatric” demon expulsions, the healings through personal touch of the afflicted one; and the mediated healings that take place at a distance. What emerges for the reader is an experiential, often first-time understanding of what the healings mean, and in addition, the basis for a revelatory, anthroposophicallybased spiritual psychology.

Kühlewind was thoroughly fluent in Greek, and he provides new translations for key recurring words and phrases in the healing stories that change the meanings of the healings from familiar recitations of miraculous powers to meditative experiences in which we may choose to participate. Through a detailed analysis of anthroposophical anthropology, he shows what the healings mean in terms of the conscious, the superconscious, and the subconscious. He makes it clear why, as Steiner emphasized, healings were more apt to occur 2,000 years ago than they are now, as well as why they are more apt to occur again in the near future.

It is not too much to say that for many who read this book, the New Testament will be “opened” in a way previously unforeseen. But this is not a book to sit back and imbibe. It includes twenty-five meditations that readers should stop reading and do, and almost as many preludes to meditation, which Kühlewind calls “ponderings.” To read this book actively is to read the New Testament—whether one has heretofore avoided it or worn its pages brittle with turning—for the first time: to arrive at the place of beginning and to finally know oneself.