How Can Mankind Find the Christ Again?
Rudolf Steiner
8 Lectures in Dornach, Dec 22, 1918 to Jan 1, 1919
Translated by Frances E. Dawson and Gladys Hahn
Published by Anthroposophic Press/NY in 1984
Review by Bobby Matherne �2002
Deep into the Christmas season with a lit Christmas tree nearby, Steiner
conjured up for his audience a figure in shadowy garments and then said:
[page 30] Whoever learns to see that figure in
garments woven of shadows, has prepared himself in the right way to look at
something else: to look at the tree that can illuminate even today's darkness
with its lights. Whoever is pure in heart and does not allow himself to be
misled by the threefold shadow-existence -- antiquated symbolism, antiquated
ecclesiasticism, antiquated materialistic science -- will see what wills to
shine in the darkness as a real Christmas tree, and lying beneath it the
Christ-Jesus Child, illuminated anew by the Christmas light. This is the real
aim of our anthroposophically-oriented science of the spirit: to seek the
Christmas light, so that the Jesus Child, Who entered the world first to work
and then to be understood, may gradually be understood; to illuminate in a
modest way the greatest of all events in earth existence.
To decipher the threefold shadow, let's first
read how a shadow is formed:
[page 29] If something is taken in an absolute
sense, and carried on after it has become antiquated, it then becomes the
shadow of itself. And the shadow is not the light; it may suddenly change into
the opposite of the real thing.
This idea, that a shadow may change into the
opposite of the antiquated thing it seems to represent is essential to
understanding what follows. Can you think of one antiquated thing that has
outlived its usefulness so that it has evolved into the opposite of its
original self? My first thought was of words that devolve from descriptive to
evaluative, like "awful" which originally meant something attractive
that is "full of awe" and now means the opposite. In our modern society
it is easy to pinpoint once useful elements, minerals, and chemicals that are
now considered toxic and no longer useful such as asbestos, lead, and DDT, to
name a few. Once the reversion to its opposite has become obvious to all, the
case is simple: we avoid using them as we formerly did. But when we're talking
about cultural mores and norms, it is not so easy to identify these antiquated
remnants or shadows of once useful forms. Let's take the three that Steiner
identified above, one at a time.
1. Antiquated symbolism - [page 21] "Solomon's Temple
embraced in marvelous, magnificent, sometimes gigantic symbols all that was
contained in the world conception of the Old Testament. It was the image on the
entire universe so far as this could be represented by the ancient world
conception, in its conformity to law, in its inner structure, in its permeation
by divine-spiritual beings."
2. Antiquated ecclesiasticism - [page 28] "The essence of
Christianity is not to be found in the organization of the Catholic Church, or
indeed of any of the Christian churches. One sees in their hierarchical aspect
what existed and developed in the Roman Empire from Romulus to the Emperor
Augustus."
3. Antiquated materialistic science - [page 29] "Aristotelianism
still shows something of the greatness of ancient Greece. Aristotle in modern
raiment is materialism." [page 26] "... materialistic natural
scientists believe that everything in a human being is inherited from parents,
grandparents, etc., ignoring the fact that the soul comes from spiritual
regions and only puts on the body as a garment ..."
These are the antiquated forms that comprise
the threefold shadow of what we inherited from the ancient Jews, Greeks, and
Romans, which forms Christianity was born into. The Jews provided the soul, the
Greeks the spirit, and the Romans the body into which Christianity was born. Given
the perspective of 2,000 years, it is possible for us to view these three
shadowy forms and their after-effects and to distinguish out of them "the
completely unique character of the Christ Impulse." This is the challenge
Steiner gave his audience some 85 years ago during the Christmas season, and
this challenge remains for each of us in our individual lives today.
How does a human being progress during one's
life? One is born with the maximum impulse towards equality at birth and this
impulse tapers off during one's life. The impulse for freedom begins at birth
and increases continually during one's life. The impulse for fraternity,
brotherhood, or community begins at birth and moves to a peak during one's
middle years and tapers off in one's later years. [From a diagram on page 35.] When
one observes human beings of a certain age, it would be useful to remember
these three time- and age-based impulses are at work if we are to avoid a
narrow-minded opinion of them. [RJM: Italics added below]
[page 36] You see again how one-sidedly the
human being is often observed. One fails to take into account the time element
in his being. He is spoken of in general terms, in abstracto, because people are not inclined
today to consider realities. But man is not a static being; he is an evolving
being. The more he develops and the more he makes it possible to develop, so
much the more does he fulfill his true task here in the course of physical
life. People who are inflexible, who are disinclined to undergo development,
accomplish little of their earthly mission. What you were yesterday you no
longer are today, and what you are today, you will no longer be tomorrow. These
are indeed slight shades of differences; but happy is he in whom they exist at
all -- for standing still is ahrimanic! There should be shades of difference. No day
should pass in a man's life without his receiving at least one thought that
alters his nature a little, that enables him to develop instead of merely to
exist.
The temptation is great for me to paraphrase
Milton's famous line in one of his sonnets, "They also serve Ahriman who
only stand and wait." I observed such a person recently who stood
firmly within the antiquated shadow of the Roman body into which the Catholic
church had been poured when he insisted on remaining outside of a marriage
ceremony for his nephew because it was not a Catholic ceremony and therefore
somehow sinful. This man was acting as if he were a schoolboy just out of
catechism classes, full of rules to follow, and absolutely certain that every
rule was essential for his immortal soul. And yet he was well into his fifties,
with his schoolboy views solidly intact.
Steiner recapitulates in these lectures how
humans have changed such that in the present time the age of maturity has moved
down to 27 years old. This is the age of maturity today; in Christ's time, it
was 33, and in earlier epochs the age of maturity was higher. For the ancient
Indian epoch it was 55+, the Persian epoch 42+, the Egypto-Chaldean epoch 35+,
and the Greco-Roman epoch 28+. What does this expression the "age of
maturity" mean? It means that one develops naturally in soul
development (what we really mean by maturity) up to that age. Steiner
tells us that one might say to a youth in the ancient epochs with their shorter
life expectancies than ours:
[page 38] "When you are old you may expect
something will come into your life, will be bestowed upon you simply by your having
become old, because one continues to develop up to the time of death."
It is not so today. People today may live for
fifty or more years past the age of 27, the age at which their natural soul
development or maturity ceases. Ceases, that is, if they do not focus on their
own soul development past the age of 27. If they do not, they will stand
and wait and thus serve Ahriman.
It came as a revelation to me when I first
encountered this thought about ten years ago because it was easy for me to see
that 27 was the age of the young urban professionals (the "yuppies")
that were taking over business decisions, that 27 was the age of those running
the new TV channels like MTV, and that it was the 27-year-old age group for
which manufacturers seemed to be designing new products. The important thing to
be gained from this insight is to notice that 35-, 45-, 55-, and 65-year-olds
still handle the many important tasks of our culture such as the legislative
and justice system, and many of them have not any more soul-condition
development than the 27-year-old MTV generation. They stand at the bar or
the podium and speak while waiting for maturity to descend upon them by virtue
of their age, up until now. Here's how Steiner describes this condition:
[page 60] Given all the soul-forces the man of
today expends upon his external life, this soul-condition would today still
never be reached. With the soul-forces he likes to use he can eat and drink, he
can conform to the social customs of the various classes of society recognized
today, he can carry on a business, play the bureaucrat, even become a professor
or a scientist -- all that: but with these capacities actually he can know
nothing whatever that is real. The condition of soul in which an individual
sought enlightenment in those ancient times -- remember that I am speaking
steadily about that ancient time -- the condition of soul was essentially
different.
During the Egypto-Chaldean epoch, much that
happened during the time between death and a new birth was carried over into
one's life on Earth. This direct knowledge and remembrance was known as Gnosis.
By the time of the Greco-Roman epoch (800 BC) this knowledge survived only as a
pale shadow of the former living Gnosis - it existed in the form of ideas. Plato
knew of it, so did Aristotle to a lesser extent, and Socrates, rightly
understood, paid for his knowledge of it with his life. (Paraphrased from page
47.)
[page 47, 48] People today are inordinately
proud of their power of thinking, but actually they can grasp very little with
it. The thinking power that the Greeks developed was of a different nature. When
the Greeks entered earthly life through birth, the images of their experiences
before birth were lost; but the thinking force that they had used before birth to
give an intelligent meaning to the images still remained. Greek thinking
differed completely from our so-called normal thinking, for the Greek thinking
was the result of pondering over imaginations that had been experienced before
birth.
I doubt anyone can read that above passage
without conjuring up the metaphor of Plato's Cave with new intensity. What
Plato was trying to convey in that metaphor was this reality of imaginations of
the reality of the spiritual world; imaginations that were so strongly infused
into him and his contemporaries from the time of birth that their circadian
life on Earth seemed like the mere glimpsing of shadows on the wall of a cave
in comparison to the bright realities that earlier blazed before them in the
spiritual world! Alas, even this ability waned with the evolution of
consciousness during the Greco-Roman epoch till only faint shadows yet flicker
upon the cave walls today.
A feeling of envy came over me when I first
read of the wonderful abilities possessed by ancient people, such as the
clairvoyance of the third post-Atlantean Egypto-Chaldeans or the wonderful
imaginations of Plato and the other fourth post-Atlantean Greco-Romans, but no
more. You see, we, the people living today in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch,
have the most wonderful abilities of all; we are the most developed and
advanced of all because we have the capability to examine the accumulated
knowledge of the ancient humans, understand their abilities, and to develop
abilities that exist within us that they could not dream of possessing.
[page 48] Now in this fifth epoch the power to
think must again be developed, out of our earthly culture. Slowly, haltingly,
we must develop it out of the scientific world view. Today we are at the beginning
of it.
With our nascent thinking ability we are able
to follow Steiner's thought as he looks back at how the "Greeks shaped the
thoughts with which the gnostic pictures were set in order and mastered." By
the time the Romans came around, this ability had waned such that the Romans
were hardly able to comprehend the greatest event in world history, the Mystery
of Golgotha, and this cosmic mystery was "reduced to hardly more than a
few sentences at the beginning of the Gospel of St. John, telling of the
Logos, of His entrance into the world and His destiny in the world, using as
few concepts as possible; for what had to be taken into account was the
decreasing thinking power." (page 49) Such gnostic concepts as remained in
doctrine, such as the Trinity, were "taken over from gnostic ideas and
reduced to abstractions, mere husks of concepts." (page 50)
One of the questions about Aristotle today is
whether he accepted reincarnation or pre-existence. Steiner has no doubt that
he did and states his reasons plainly and cogently for why some have questioned
Aristotle's beliefs on reincarnation.
[page 51]This has all come about because his
words can be interpreted in various ways. It is because he worked with a system
of concepts applicable to a supersensible world but he no longer had any
perception of that world.
Near the beginning of our fifth post-Atlantean
epoch even the Mystery of Golgotha, while it remained in people's hearts, could
not be understood. But exactly at this time, the study of nature began even
though there were "no concepts for actually grasping the phenomena that
were being observed." (page 52) Similarly the Scholastics were unable to
find concepts to penetrate the religious revelations and were forced to go back
to Aristotle to find the intellectual force with which to explain both natural
phenomena and to formulate religious revelations. (paraphrase of pages 52, 53)
[page 53] Only thereafter did there rise again,
as from hoary depths of spirit, an independent mode of thinking -- not very far
developed, even to this day -- the thinking of Copernicus and Galileo. This
must be further developed in order to rise once more to supersensible regions.
The ego of Christianity, in effect, had clothed
itself in the Jewish soul (as expressed in the Temple of Solomon), the Greek
spirit (in the Aristotelian mode of thinking), and the Roman body (in Roman
hierarchy and Roman law). With the waning of supersensible knowledge as the
Greeks so poignantly experienced it, the direct gnostic knowledge of the spiritual
world shrank into the few words at the beginning of the Gospel of St. John,
and the rest of Gnosticism was systematically extirpated by the Church fathers
who left behind only those documents on Gnosticism that were written by those
who considered it anathema to the welfare of the Church. We humans living today
have a chance to acquire insights and abilities that none of the peoples of
previous epochs could have acquired because we have the ability to study
Steiner's spiritual science which deals with the complete human being, anthroposophy.
(paraphrased from pages 53, 54) [RJM: italics added below]
[page 54] In ancient times man could survey the
world, because he entered his body at birth with memories of the time before
birth. This world, which is a likeness of the spiritual world, was an answer to
questions he brought with him into this life. Now the human being confronts
this world bringing nothing with him, and he must work with primitive concepts
like those, for instance, of contemporary science. But he must work his way up
again; he must now start from the human being and rise to the cosmos. Knowledge
of the cosmos must be born in the human being. This too
belongs to a conception of Christmas that must be developed in the present
epoch, in order that it may be fruitful in the future.
The interest in being a "re-born
Christian" that exists in the new 21st Century can be
understood as a faintly conscious wish for the cosmos to be re-born in
oneself. This re-birth is what Steiner's spiritual science offers to each of us
who are not willing to stand and wait idly by for enlightenment to
fall into us unbidden by virtue of our increasing age. And it does not arrive
by our bidding it to come within our ordinary consciousness of space and time.
[page 64] The truly supersensible does not
really begin until one has abandoned not only sense impressions and their time
processes, but space and time themselves. One enters into conditions of
existence entirely different from those that have to do with space and time.
One must pass through three gates: the gate of
man, the gate of self-knowledge, and the gate of death before one is ready to
enter the fourth stage and become a Christophorus or Christ-bearer. (paraphrase
of page 66, 67) When a human of ancient times passed through these gates,
"he found his ego; even though dimly sensed and not in fully
conscious concepts, still he found his ego." [RJM: Unless otherwise
stated, the word ego refers to the "I am" of humankind,
one's immortal spirit. The reflected ego is the usual Freudian ego.] Ancient
man was born with something of the ego present in him after he was born. The
human ego, however, did not appear in active consciousness till after the
Mystery of Golgotha; it was born with Christianity. Today, due to our evolution
of consciousness, "when we are born the true ego comes to a stop. We
actually experience only a reflection of our real ego."
[page 69] Only indirectly does the human being
experience something of his ego: namely, when he comes into relation with other
people and his karma comes into play.
This explains for me a phenomenon that I have
noticed since spending a year studying the eight Karmic Relationship volumes
of Steiner's lectures. My karmic connection with others shows up in my relationship
with them. Something draws me to them, almost inexorably, even when in the
moment my inclination is to stay away from them. I met my first wife at a
wedding that I did not want to go to. I turned down the chance when it was
offered and forgot about it. Instead I went to a friend's house and we sat out
on a swing talking. The couple that invited me drove past, stopped and asked me
again if I'd like to accompany them. "No, thanks. I'm not dressed. You go
on." But they insisted that it would be no trouble for them to drive me
home to change clothes, so I went. Four wonderful children arose from that
chance event that I twice attempted to keep from happening. Given that my true
ego, my immortal I, had plans for those four off-spring to arise from me, it
exerted the forces necessary to get my arm twisted until I eventually relented.
My Freudian or little ego who wanted to keep me talking about trivial things on
that swing was only a reflection of my true ego and could not hold sway against
it.
To reiterate, a human being of old could become
a Christophorus through initiation, but a human being of today who underwent
the same initiation could not. This is not easy to understand or explain, but
Steiner shows us the way to think of this situation.
[page 73] The man of old, when he was
initiated, really became a Christophorus. But in the course of earth evolution
man lost the possibility of finding within himself that Being Who became the
Light-of-the-World Being. When a man of our time seeks in the same way, he
finds within himself a hollow space.
This point cannot be overemphasized in a world
in which mystery schools using ancient initiations make all kinds of promises
to initiates today, but if they use the tried and true initiation processes of
ancient man, their initiates will be left unfulfilled, hollow. I cannot help
but apply T. S. Eliot's phrase, "we are the hollow men, men filled with
straw" to the students of these schools. Such schools are easy to spot by
their advertising to provide their prospective clients with some very ancient
knowledge of, e. g., Aztecs, Mayans, Orientals, Persians, Hindus, Egyptians,
Druids, Celts, Maoris, or Aborigines.
[page 89, 90] And when someone wants especially
to captivate people with some sort of occult science, he at least announces
that it is Rosicrucian, or even Egyptian -- but surely old; it must be
something or other old. That corresponds pretty well to the fact that in those
societies knowledge that has been obtained in the immediate present is not
cultivated. (Some direct research is carried on, to be sure, but only according
to the rules of ancient, antiquated occult science.)
And yet as Steiner reminds us, "When man
loses something, he is changed because of it." What the ancient peoples
using their ancient techniques found impossible, namely, to find any reality in
the external world, we, the "hollow men," can. How? By following the
paths described in Steiner's "Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment”--
one definitely learns processes of the recent past and not the ancient past. He
elaborates on how this change has come about that allows us to find reality in
the external world.
[page 74] What is possible today is this: to
acquire in a certain way a deeper view of the outer world, using the same
soul-faculties (if we use them properly) with which we now view it. Natural
science does not do this; its aim is limited to finding laws, the so-called
natural laws, which are nothing but abstractions. If you acquaint yourselves a
little with current literature, which cloaks the natural-scientific concepts in
a sort of little philosopher's mantle . . . , you will see that the people who
talk about these things are quite unable to relate their natural laws to
reality. They reach natural laws, but these remain abstract concepts, abstract
ideas. Such an individual as Goethe tried to push beyond natural laws. And what
is significant . . . is . . . that Goethe tried to penetrate beyond the laws of
nature to the forms of nature, to nature formation. Hence, he originated a
morphology on a higher level, a spiritual morphology. He tried to capture --
not what the outer senses yield, but the processes of formation: what is not to
be discovered by the senses, but is hidden in the forms.
Alright, if this concept of formation, of
Goethe's morphology, is new to you, you probably have a big, "So
what?" forming in your head. You might find it interesting to consider
that your head today, understood through Goethean morphology is your human body
sans head from a previous incarnation. In my review of The Riddle of Humanity by Rudolf Steiner, I likened this
to the progressive incorporation in the automobile dashboard of status
indicators that were formerly located in the body of the automobile, such as
"Oil Level" "Door Ajar" or "Low Tire Pressure."
How does one arrive at this thought? One begins
with nature forms such as plants, sees them in the transformations they undergo
during one entire life cycle and the next life cycle, and then applies a
similar process to the human life cycle, i.e., a metamorphosis at the highest
level.
[page 75] Goethe saw the colored petal [RJM: a
flower] as a transformed leaf, the skull bones as transformed dorsal vertebrae.
If someone continues . . . then he really begins to observe, not merely the
skull bones that are transformed vertebrae, but the whole human cranium. He
discovers that the human head is the whole human form metamorphosed from the
previous incarnation, except only the former head.
Isn't modern science wonderful? Surely the ways
that it has thought us to think are more valuable than Goethe's way of
thinking! One might think so at first glance, and certainly few would dispute
such a statement in polite society. Modern science is wonderful, but curiously
its ways of thinking are as antiquated as the processes used by the mystery
schools we read about earlier.
[page 90] Whence, then, comes modern thought
that fancies itself so enlightened? My dear friends, it is merely the child of
an ancient religion! To be sure, the religious conceptions have been discarded.
People no longer believe in Zeus or in Jahve -- many not even in Christ -- but
the mode of thought from the age when Zeus, Jahve, Osiris, Ormuzd, were
believed in, the manner of human thinking has remained. It is applied today to
oxygen, hydrogen, electrons, ions, Herzian [RJM: radio and tv] waves; the
object makes no difference, the mode of thought is the same. Only through
spiritual science can a new kind of thinking be employed for the supersensible
world and for this world as well. As I have often said, Goethe provided an
elementary beginning in natural science with his morphology, which consequently
is also combatted by the antiquated views. With his physics Goethe created a
beginning, but the fruitfulness of that beginning is still hardly recognized.
What was formerly available to humans in the
form of divine grace or visions was available as a gift from the Spirits of
Form (Elohim). What was formerly a natural psychological process for
ancients human beings is now devolved into a pathological process. We
lock up people who have involuntary visions in mental institutions or dose them
with anti-psychotic drugs. And yet the mystery schools continue to encourage
people to seek the spiritual world through such visions, oblivious of the
danger or fruitlessness of the process, up until now.
[page 93] Many still seek this path today,
because it is easier - but it is only attainable now in a pathological
condition. Mankind has evolved, and what was psychological in earlier times is
pathological now. Everything in the nature of visions, everything that depends
upon involuntary imaginations, is pathological in our time and pushes a man
down below his normal level. What is demanded today of anyone who wishes to
push forward to initiation science, or actually to initiate vision, is that he
shall develop his imaginations in full consciousness.
During the next level of spiritual growth
Steiner says one will not be happy so long as one achieves personal
happiness by making others unhappy. Here's Steiner talking about it in Lecture
V, December 28, 1918.
[page 98] As we approach the sixth post-Atlantean
epoch, of which embryonic impulses are now present in Russia, this fact will
become so potent that a current axiom will be: No happiness is possible for one
individual without the happiness of all -- just as a single organ in man can
only function if the whole functions. In the future this will be recognized as
an axiom simply because it will be a fact of consciousness. We are still far
from it -- you may make your minds easy! -- for a long time to come you will be
able to consider your own personal happiness even though it may be built upon
much human misery. But that is the direction in which humanity is developing. It
is simply a fact, as when a man has a cold he must cough. He finds it
unpleasant. Just so, a few thousand years from now, there will be unpleasant
soul-conditions aroused when a man wishes as an individual to have any sort of
happiness in the world without its being shared by others. This interdependence
of mankind is inherent in human evolution, and is making itself felt today in
the social demands. This is simply the direction in which the human soul is
developing.
Thus, Steiner pointed out that the brand new
Russian Revolution was pre-figuring the Sixth Cultural Epoch, the Russian
Epoch, which will begin some 1600 years later. It will take that amount of time
for the laudable goals of the Russian Revolution to work its way into the human
soul. Even a cursory look at the events following the Russian Revolution will
reveal the absence of freedom. They created a society in the political sector
geared itself directly to the cultural and market sectors so that the three
moved as one with no more freedom than a gear meshed with another gear has. When
one moved the other did. The evils of communism were a good about 1600 years
out of its time.
Most people think that the laws of science are
infallible - Newton's laws hold to very close tolerances even after being
updated for Einstein's relativity considerations. So too for the laws of
thermodynamics, heat transfer, Maxwell's equation, etc. What about the laws
promulgated by the church, are they infallible? Steiner in this passage
dispatches one such law.
[page 123] And religion itself, has sunk into
materialism. One of the most telling examples of the tendency toward
materialism in Roman Catholicism has been the establishment of the dogma of
infallibility, a purely materialistic measure.
Something I have noticed in my own life as I
have studied spiritual science in greater depth is that I feel younger now than
when I began my studies some 14 years ago. Often when I begin a new book of
lectures by Steiner, I find myself filled with new and mind-boggling concepts
that make me feel as I did in going into the third grade from the second grade,
for example, where everything I learned the previous year was taken as a given,
and I was forced to learn completely new things that I had no inkling were
coming upon me. It was no surprise, then, for me to read Steiner talking about
this very phenomenon.
[page 139, 140] . . . spiritual science, when
taken up earnestly, keeps us young in a certain way, does not let us grow old
as we would without it. This is one of the results of spiritual science. And it
is of quite special importance for the present time. It means that we are able,
however old we may be, to learn something in the way we learnt as a child. Usually
when someone arrives at his fiftieth year, he feels from the standpoint of
ordinary consciousness that he has lived in the world a long time. Ask your
contemporaries whether at fifty they still feel inclined to do much in the way
of learning! Even if they say "yes," notice whether they really do
it. A lively acceptance of anthroposophical concepts and ideas can gradually
confer on people of a ripe age the power still to learn as children learn - in
other words, to become increasingly young in soul -- not abstractedly as often
happens, but in such a way that they are actually able to learn just formerly
they learnt when eight or nine years old.
The usual attitude I find in others about life
is expressed in the automobile bumper sticker, "Life is a Beach, and then
you Die." The idea is you should lie on the beach in the sand and have fun
while you're young, because too soon you grow old and die, at which time you
lie down again to sleep forever. This is not a new idea as you will gather when
you read Steiner talking about it over 85 years ago.
[page 163] We should not simply imagine that
behind the scenes of physical existence there is a place where we can lay
ourselves down to go pleasantly to sleep. That is the paradise usually pictured
by materialists. Their dearest dream is to have a really good sleep once they
have passed through the gate of death. They love to imagine this because
sleeping is, after all, very comfortable. But I'm sure you know that the matter
is not like that. On the contrary, behind the scenes of physical existence we
could not possibly entertain a desire to satisfy certain instincts in order to
enhance our own personal egotism. Consequently, we become participants in a
battle, a real battle.
Now let's draw our attention to the physical
world: someone mistreats us, lashes out at us, what are we to do, how do we
respond to that attack? If we lash back, we risk stoking the fires of the very
forces that led to the attack in the first place. What are we to do? How are we
to understand what is at work in these situations? Steiner gives us some
practical advice in this next passage, which serves as a fitting conclusion to
my review:
[page 164] Naturally, if someone boxes our
ears, we can't return it to the demon who incited him to the action; we have to
deal with the man who confronts us in his physical body. However, what is so
necessary on the surface of existence is not really adequate for understanding
the world; it is particularly useless for grasping our social life. In other
words, a person gets nowhere today if behind what goes on physically he does
not fully recognize a spiritual world in its reality and concreteness. This is
most important. But the majority of people are afraid of it.
To this fine sentiment I can only add my limitation
eraser like a 21st Century AMEN to the end of the last
sentence of the above passage:
But the majority of people are afraid of
recognizing the spiritual world at work behind the physical world, up until now.
� 2002 Bobby Matherne
E-mail: [email protected]
More book reviews can be found at Bobby’s website:
