LOVE AND THE UNIVERSAL HUMAN
Steiner often spoke of love. He advocated love, for which we must commend him. But our commendation needs to be tempered.
Often, Steiner’s discussions of love were abstract, hypothetical, or perfunctory. Religious leaders generally endorse love, sometimes equating Love with God. Steiner didn’t go that far — his polytheism didn’t allow him to do so. But he talked about love a lot, and he forecast love as the final fulfillment of our evolution. Gnostic wisdom will take us there, bringing us to a Cosmos of Wisdom from which we will move up to a Cosmos of Love. [1] “For it is of the very nature of true spiritual knowledge to be transmuted into Love.” [2]
Steiner was speaking of an extremely distant period, following the series of enormously long evolutionary stages that began with Old Saturn. Our ultimate guide is Christ, although “fundamentally Jesus is only the external sign, making the path of the sun forces visible to the physical eye.” [3] Since most people misunderstand Christ, according to Steiner, the near-term guide we need to follow is — Steiner himself. [4]
Eventually, Love will be produce interplanetary harmony. “[I]n the future the I of man will harmonize with the beings of Earth, Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan by virtue of the new force which Earthly evolution is implanting in the pristine Wisdom. It is the power of Love. In man on Earth it has to have its beginning.” [5] Wisdom is “pristine” in its spiritual purity, but we in our highly evolved state will add Love to it. Man on earth will be central to this cosmic evolution — the transforming power of our loving influence will spread outward.
Of course, wisdom and love are not confined to the distant future. The perfected forms of these ideals are not available to us yet, but Steiner said that occult science illuminates the path toward them. This raises some questions, however. What did Steiner mean by the words “wisdom” and “love”? And can we square Steiner’s ideas about these subjects with what we actually know about our lives and the universe?
Wisdom, for Steiner, includes such concepts as recognition of racial hierarchies, that is, higher and lower human races. Love, by Steiner’s lights, includes suppressing diversity and, one day, casting the “evil race” into the abyss. Steiner’s followers try to justify such propositions. Thus, after one of Steiner’s racist rants, some of his followers argued, “Suffice it to say that, throughout his entire life of service to humanity, Rudolf Steiner stood for the ‘universal human,’ for the substance of the earth becoming love, and for the overcoming of racism and the concept of race.” [6] But does this suffice? Converting the substance of the earth to love is the process we have just been discussing, the transforming evolution toward Love. But what of the “universal human” and “overcoming racism”? Steiner argued that races are high or low precisely to the extent that they approach the ideal human type: “A race or nation stands so much the higher, the more perfectly its members express the pure, ideal human type.” [7]
Steiner said that two devils created racial havoc for mankind: “Lucifer and Ahriman preserved older racial forms that had developed, so that there was a coexistence of races rather than a succession.” [8] In brief, some humans evolved to higher racial levels as the gods intended, but Lucifer and Ahriman preserved older, less-evolved races that should have died out. The humans who evolved properly became modern whites; the others became blacks, browns, reds, and yellows. (If you have such skin coloring, Steiner’s loving message to you is that you are a mistake.) The differences between races run much deeper than skin color, according to Steiner, but skin color is very important. “One can only understand history and all of social life, including today's social life, if one pays attention to people's racial characteristics. And one can only understand all that is spiritual in the correct sense if one first examines how this spiritual element operates within people precisely through the color of their skin.” [9]
If we had not been forced to coexist with one another, a single, beautiful, white human race would have existed: “In that case, a human race of Grecian beauty would have spread over the earth, and in our age we would already see humanity approaching more and more this beautiful Grecian type....” [10] The closest any race comes, now, to such an ideal can be found among Europeans. Steiner taught that after Atlantis sank, one set of survivors evolved properly while others did not. “[I]t was the normal human beings that were ... the most capable of evolving. [Abnormal] peoples ... gradually wandered to the West and became ... the Red Indians of America ... [Other abnormal] people ... migrated to the East, and became the subsequent Negro population of Africa ... The human beings who had developed normally lent themselves best to progress.” [11] The “normal” humans went to Europe and became the vanguard of further human evolution.
The consequences of mankind’s racial misfortunes will persist for some time. In fact, “external diversity will increase more and more ... We will have to face calmly and courageously the increasing diversity of human nature....” [12] This will be unpleasant: lower humans will “strive to bring to the fore what is unique among various groups of human beings so as to exclude others.” [13] But through Christ, we will become inwardly more alike, until mankind’s lower soul elements have been overcome. “We have the right feelings for Christ only when we see in him the savior, rescuing humanity from dispersion and separateness ... In the future, it will not matter much whether what Christ is will still be called by that name. However, a lot will depend on our finding in Christ the spiritual uniter of humanity....” [14]
In becoming inwardly similar, we will evolve toward a single universal human type and our racial divisions will be behind us. “[T]he attainment of the unity of humanity from within” is the promise Steiner held out in the lectures comprising THE UNIVERSAL HUMAN. [15] The subtitle of that book is “The Evolution of Individuality.” Steiner says we will become individuals, free and unique, with racial diversity a thing of the past.
That’s Steiner’s vision. How loving is it? According to the Bible, Jesus told us to love one another as we love ourselves. He taught us to embrace one another in all our diversity. The parable of the good Samaritan deals with precisely this point. The Samaritans were the enemies of the Jews, yet a Samaritan helped his “enemy,” a Jew who had been wounded. [Luke 10: 25-37] Christ did not postpone the ultimate fulfillment of love to some theoretical future period. He urged it on us now, immediately, as we are. This is the Christian ideal.
What we find in Steiner’s teachings is something quite different. Coexistence among dissimilar peoples has been forced on us by a cosmic error. We must be courageous in facing the disagreeable consequences. Steiner’s premise is that humans are spiritually dissimilar now. We are unequal — some of us higher, some of us lower. This is the opposite of what love or morality — or, indeed, science — would teach us. In Steiner’s ideology, we will become equal only when we are essentially indistinguishable, when we are all “universal humans” rather than representatives of various branches of the human family. A more humane proposition is that all humans are equal already. This is what people mean when they say that we are all equal in the sight of God, and it is the only moral premise for our behavior toward one another. We are equally valuable, now, equally deserving of love and respect, now. Morally, politically, spiritually — we are all of equal worth, now.
Steiner fundamentally misunderstood the ministry of Christ. Steiner’s solution to racial prejudice is not to end the prejudice but to end the races. This is not only backwards, but it is actually a confirmation of racism. The existence of more than one race is wrong, he said. Races are inferior to the degree that they diverge from the racial “ideal,” he said. Inferior races constitute a drag on humanity’s progress, he said. The only hope he held out for us is that eventually we will remove the lower racial strains from ourselves and, cleansed, move toward a far-off promise of “Love.” [16]
Without question, love is wonderful. To the extent that Steiner advocated love, we must commend him. Sadly, however, Steiner’s gnostic conception of love is such a pallid abstraction that is belied by many of his doctrines. We’ve seen some of the unloving statements Steiner made about various groups, including his doctrine that whites must wage battle against colored humans. If further evidence is needed, here are some more Steiner teachings: ◊Jews are spiritually blind, [17] ◊blacks are inherently childish, [18] and ◊native Americans (“Red Indians”) are decadent. [19] ◊Asians are generally incapable of original thought, [20] and ◊they cannot evolve further. [21] Among Germany’s World War I enemies, ◊the French “race” is declining, [22] ◊Americans in general are the henchmen of Ahriman (aka Mephistopheles), [23] ◊Russians/Communists are in league with Lucifer, [24] and ◊the English have institutionalized their grasping selfishness. [25] ◊Among the human population at large, some people are demons in disguise, [26] and ◊some are, in effect, robots. [27] ◊As a matter of fact, quite a number of “people” are not really human beings at all. [28]
Perhaps Steiner said such things dispassionately, “objectively,” without rancor. But does this matter? Try an experiment. Imagine Jesus making any of those statements. Imagine Mother Teresa doing it, or Martin Luther King, or Buddha, or... No one truly committed to love would make any one of those remarks, let alone all of them. But Steiner made them all, and more. Steiner’s brand of spiritualism lacks true charity — it is an ideology that gives only lip-service to love.
Here is a little scene showing Rudolf Steiner in action. Ask yourself if an apostle of love would act so. Steiner brings a small boy onto a lecture platform and uses him to illustrate some of Steiner's quack medical ideas:
"And now, if you will begin to observe the child for yourselves — [to the boy] Come here a minute! — you will find many things to notice. Let me draw your attention, first of all, to the strongly developed lower half of the face. Look at the shape of the nose and the mouth. The mouth is always a little open, which has an effect on dental development.1 It is important to note these things, for they are unquestionably bound up with the whole soul-and-spirit constitution of the child... The formation you see here in the jaws — the jaws belong, of course, to the limb system — is wholly part of the head system ... (Look, he's amused! I think Fraulein B. was asking him why he keeps his mouth open, and his reply was: 'To let the flies come in.' This is a firmly fixed opinion of his.)
"... Here (in the front) as we remarked, the head is pressed together. In all probability this points back to a purely mechanical injury, either at birth or during pregnancy, a mechanical injury in which we can see nothing else than a working of karma ...
"[T]he whole breathing system ... is very little under control ... Hence the symptom that is so conspicuous in a child of this kind ... What ought to happen is that gradually, in the course of life, the whole system of movement in man should become a servant of the intellectual system. [To the boy] Stand still a minute.2 And now come here to me and do this! (Dr. Steiner makes a movement with his arm as if to take hold of something; the boy does not make the movement.) Never mind! We mustn't force him. Do you see? It is difficult for him to do anything; he has not the power to exercise the right control over his metabolism-and-limbs system...." [29]
Steiner's behavior — using a child as a living specimen during a lecture, criticizing his body and mind in his presence — was perhaps considered less offensive in Steiner's day than in ours. But it is hardly the behavior anyone should expect from a wise and loving spiritual leader.
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1 Another translation [CURATIVE EDUCATION (Rudolf Steiner Press, 1972)] renders "dental development" as "the peculiar formation of the teeth": "The mouth is always a little open. With this symptom is connected also the peculiar formation of the teeth. It is important to note these things...."
2 CURATIVE EDUCATION puts an exclamation point after this statement, which would be more consistent with the way Steiner addressed the boy: "(To the boy) Stand still a minute! And now come here to me and do this! (Dr. Steiner makes a movement with his arm...."
— Roger Rawlings
“Just think how dead the cosmos is when we look out there and see only burning bodies of gas that shine! Just think how alive it all becomes when we know: Those stars are expressions of love, with which the astral cosmos works on the etheric cosmos!”
[Rudolf Steiner, BLACKBOARD DRAWINGS 1919-1924
(Rudolf Steiner Press, 2003), p. 150.
My sketch of Steiner's sketch, 2009.]
Steiner’s words were sometimes pretty, but did they convey anything real or true? Did his use of the word “love” carry real significance?
Actually, a statement such as the one above reveals the desires and fears motivating Steiner and his followers. Anthroposophists want a universe of love; they want it very much. But wanting something, even wanting it desperately, doesn't make it so. The stars are indeed balls of gas; they burn with atomic fire, not — so far as we can know — with love. This does not mean that the universe is cold and empty. But our deep longings can never be truly satisfied by fantasies.
And consider this. Science — real science, intellectually honest science — is fully as heartfelt as fantasy creeds such as Anthroposophy. Real scientists can have the same profound aspiration as mystics and false "spiritual scientists." The chief difference lies in the degree of honesty, not in the degree of love sought or offered. Here is a statement by a real scientist, describing a genuine inquiry into the deep core of nature: "The state of mind which enables a man to do work of this kind ... is akin to that of the religious worshipper or the lover; the daily effort comes from no deliberate intention or programme, but straight from the heart." — Albert Einstein.
The chief difference lies in the degree of honesty, not in the degree of love sought or offered. We all want love. We all want a universe of love. But fantasized love is only a heart-rending illusion. The "astral cosmos," the "etheric cosmos" — these are illusions. We live in the real universe, on a real planet — where we can find and create love if we have the wisdom, and decency, and blessedness to do so. Steiner's delusions — whether or not he believed them — are false. They can never lead us to our true hearts' desires.
Painting by a Waldorf student
[courtesy of PLANS].
A more conventional image of divine mercy and assistance than Steiner's. [Image from http://karenswhimsy.com/]
Here we see a Hindu image of androgyny: Ardanari-Iswara, standing on a lotus blossom. Steiner said we have evolved from uniformity toward individuality. The division into sexes as an advance, but our evolution requires moving beyond the backward female principle. "We have reached the period at which the earlier androgynous organism, representing a kind of group-soul, divided into male and female ... We see in our stage of evolution the female as the principle which still preserves the old conditions of folk and race, and the male that which continually breaks through these conditions, splits them up and so individualizes humanity ... [H]uman beings will become more and more different from one another ... That is the course of human evolution." [Rudolf Steiner, ROSICRUCIAN WISDOM (Rudolf Steiner Press, 2000), p. 128.]
For information on good, moral, loving behavior — as prescribed by Steiner —
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ENDNOTES
[1] “The Cosmos of Wisdom is [i.e., will be] thus evolving into a Cosmos of Love. All that the I [i.e., the “I”] of man brings to development [i.e., growth or evolution] within him[self] will grow into Love. It is the sublime Sun Being ... who at His revelation stands forth as the all-embracing prototype of Love. Into the innermost depth of man’s being the seed of Love is thereby planted. Thence it shall grow and spread until it fills the whole of cosmic evolution.” [Rudolf Steiner, OCCULT SCIENCE - An Outline (Rudolf Steiner Press, 1979), p. 311.]
[2] Ibid., p. 312.
[3] [Rudolf Steiner, THE UNIVERSAL HUMAN (Anthroposophic Press, 1990), p. 66.
[4] Christ’s earthly embodiment and crucifixion — the “Christ-Event” — set in motion the “Christ Impulse” that permits humans to evolve toward Wisdom and Love. The “Christ Event” is the Mystery of Golgotha, i.e., the mystic meaning of the Crucifixion and Resurrection. [See, e.g., Rudolf Steiner, HOW TO KNOW HIGHER WORLDS (Anthroposophic Press, 1994), p. 234.] But the meaning of Golgotha has not yet been fulfilled; other events must occur: “This Christ Event is not limited to one point in time ... [T]here is [i.e., will be] no second physical incarnation of Christ ... Now, however, with the higher faculties human beings will be able to see the ether body [or life body] of Christ ... That is what one can call the mighty event that lies ahead of us — the Reappearance of Christ — taking place gradually, at first only for a few, then for more and more human beings ... A number of human beings who are incarnated today will also still be incarnated at the time when this Christ Event takes place ... [T]he Event of Golgotha was not only an event for the physical world, but it carried its effect over into spiritual worlds ... so will the Christ Event, which will present itself in our century [i.e., the twentieth], have its effect also in the world between death and a new birth [i.e., reincarnation, not born-again salvation].” [Rudolf Steiner, COMPILED LECTURES (Anthroposophic Press, 1944, pp. 44-45.] The Event was a “Mystery” and/or it is taking place for only a few Initiates now. This is gnosticism, and Steiner — the main Initiate of his time — points the way to “true” gnostic knowledge.
[5] OCCULT SCIENCE, p. 311.
[6] Rudolf Steiner, FACULTY MEETINGS WITH RUDOLF STEINER (Anthroposophic Press, 1998), p. 559.
Anthroposophists today often try to distance themselves from Steiner’s racism. Some make extra efforts to be kind to members of nonwhite races. But unless they repudiate every vestige of the racism preached by their guru — which would blow a gaping hole in the body of Steiner’s teachings — such treatment may be little more than condescending patronization.
[7] Rudolf Steiner, KNOWLEDGE OF THE HIGHER WORLDS AND ITS ATTAINMENT (Rudolf Steiner Publish Co. & Anthroposophic Press, 1944), p. 149.
Steiner often spoke in such terms. “Races would not stay behind and become decadent if there were not people who wish to stay behind and are obliged to stay behind ... Older races only persist because there are people who cannot or will not move forward to a higher racial form.” [NATURE SPIRITS, p. 69.] A person who evolves properly move upward through racial forms: “By striving forward ... he is drawn up from race to race to ever higher stages.” [Ibid., p. 69.]
[8] THE UNIVERSAL HUMAN, p. 76.
Ahriman is the devil of Zoroastrianism. Steiner taught that, contrary to Biblical doctrine, there are two great demons: "For Rudolf Steiner, Ahriman was synonymous with the biblical Satan — although distinct from Lucifer, whom he relates to the being referred to as 'the devil.'" [Rudolf Steiner, THE INCARNATION OF AHRIMAN (Rudolf Steiner Press, 2006), p. ix, introduction.]
[9] Rudolf Steiner, VOM LEBEN DES MENSCHEN UND DER ERDE (Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1993) p. 52. Translations provided by Peter Staudenmaier.
[10] THE UNIVERSAL HUMAN, p. 82.
[11] Rudolf Steiner, THE BEING OF MAN AND HIS FUTURE EVOLUTION (Rudolf Steiner Press, 1981), pp. 118-119.
[12] THE UNIVERSAL HUMAN, p. 90.
Steiner suggests that differences between humans will be deep: Different people will actually have different types of human nature. Such thinking epitomizes racism. Differences that rationally must be considered minor, such as differences in skin pigmentation, are taken as reflections of deep qualitative differences. Steiner's racism is all the more abhorrent precisely because it is "spiritual." This is, obviously, the opposite of what one might expect if spiritualism is considered a force for morality and love. But in Steiner, much is inverted and corrupted. Steiner saw spiritual significance in all things. Anything physical is a reflection of a spiritual reality, he taught. Thus, members of different races are not just superficially different but they represent different soul states. They are different at the deepest possible level. This is not just deplorable thinking, it is utterly divorced from scientific truth. Scientists decoding the human genome have discovered that all human beings "are more than 99.9% genetically identical" proving that "race has almost no biological validity." White skin, for example, "involves a change in just one letter of DNA code out of 3.1 billion letters in the human genome." [Rick Weiss, “Scientists Find a DNA Change That Accounts for White Skin,” THE WASHINGTON POST, Dec. 16, 2005, p. A01.] Differences that Steiner considered serious and deep are actually extremely superficial.
[13] Ibid., p. 90.
[14] Ibid., pp. 89-90.
Steiner generally paints evolution as a process heading toward increasing individuality, but here he deplores “separateness” (diversity).
[15] Ibid., p. 85.
[16] Steiner’s followers sometimes pretend that divisions among humans will soon be resolved. This is not, however, what Steiner said. Even after our immediate racial divisions are behind us, many humans will fail to evolve properly and will be left behind. Steiner’s vision of the future is grotesquely convoluted, but it is sufficient to know that in the following passage he is “looking” very far into the future. (Reading a lengthy Steiner quotation is a chore. You may want to skip ahead to the sections I have italicized and/or my interjected explanations.) “When the seventh epoch has run its course, another great convulsion will overwhelm the Earth, comparable to the catastrophe between the end of Atlantean and the beginning of post-Atlantean time. Under the altered conditions following upon this event the life of man will once again evolve through a succession of seven epochs. The souls who will then be incarnated will experience in an enhanced degree the community with spiritual worlds enjoyed by the Atlanteans on a lower level. But among human beings not everyone will without more ado prove equal to the new conditions then prevailing [i.e., some people won’t make the grade]. It will only be those in whom souls are incarnated who have duly benefited by the influences of the Graeco-Latin and the succeeding fifth, sixth and seventh post-Atlantean epochs [i.e., the only ones to evolve properly will be those whose souls have benefited from all the recent cultural epochs]. Their inner life will be in harmony with what the Earth will have become. The others will perforce remain behind, while formerly they had been free to choose whether they were making themselves fit to go forward with the world's progressive evolution or were neglecting to do so [i.e., laggards will have only themselves to blame; they chose their fate]. For the conditions that will prevail after the coming cataclysm, those above all will be well fitted who, in their incarnations between the fifth post-Atlantean epoch and the sixth, succeed in integrating the supersensible wisdom and their own human powers of intelligence and feeling [i.e., the humans most fit for evolution will be those who incorporate Steiner’s teachings into their lives]. The fifth and sixth are the decisive epochs. In the seventh, the souls who have reached the evolutionary goal of the sixth [epoch] will go on evolving. For those who have not, even the surrounding world will be too greatly altered; they will find little opportunity to recover their lost ground, and must await a more distant future when the conditions will again be favorable [i.e., there will be no place for the laggards — they will have to wait a very long time for another chance].” [Occult Science, p. 308.] The emergence of the “universal human” will not resolve all problems, nor will Love absolutely prevail for millennia to come.
The concept of the universal human might be considered "post-racial," a term that has gained favor recently. Some see hope that, with the election of Barack Obama, America is becoming post-racial. Getting past racism is surely important, but it need not entail denying the value of racial diversity. A writer, self-identified as black, has said "[P]ost-racialism outside that political pageantry [i.e., the celebrations of Obama's election] gets more complicated. It means the loss of so much that I cherish about who I am and where I come from ... Isn't the point to live lives that are open to differences but still celebrate our unique cultural heritages, families and religions?" [Krissah Williams Thompson, "Obama's Identity Isn't a Matter of Black and White," THE WASHINGTON POST NATIONAL WEEKLY EDITION, Dec. 8-14, 2008, p. 25.]
[17] “The Jews have a great gift for materialism, but little for recognition of the spiritual world.” [Rudolf Steiner, FROM BEETROOT TO BUDDHISM (Rudolf Steiner Press, 1999), p. 59.]
The problem for Jews, according to Steiner, is that they are spiritually stuck in a form of thought that is appropriate only for human fetuses: “This was the essential characteristic ... of the ancient Jewish people that, in the world in which we live between birth and death, they did not wish to learn anything in addition to what the human being brings with him as a capacity because of the fact that he was an embryo up to the time of his birth.” [Rudolf Steiner, THE CHALLENGE OF THE TIMES (Anthroposophic Press, 1941), p. 28.] Note that like the laggards discussed above, the Jews chose their fate, according to Steiner.
[18] “[A] centre [sic] of cosmic influence [is] situated in the interior of Africa. At this centre are active all those terrestrial forces emanating from the soil which can influence man especially during his early childhood ... The black or Negro race is substantially determined by these childhood characteristics.” [THE MISSION OF THE FOLK SOULS, p. 75.]
[19] Concerning Native American Indians, Steiner said, “If you look at pictures of the old American Indians the process of ossification is evident in the decline of this race. In a race such as this everything pertaining to the forces of the Saturn evolution has become realized in a special manner; then Saturn withdrew into itself, abandoned man to his bony system and thus hastened his decline....” [Ibid., pp. 108-109]
Steiner taught that Amerindians failed to evolve significantly beyond the Saturn stage of evolution, which was the first. (Steiner’s comment, here, is at odds with the descriptions of the Saturn stage we saw earlier. Steiner frequently confused himself.)
Steiner associated Amerindians with the “bony system” because photos of some Amerindians showed prominent cheekbones. Truly, this is how profound his thinking could be.
[20] “This sort of independent thinking which Europeans develop in dealing with their surroundings, the Asians do not have this. The Japanese will therefore follow all the European inventions, but they will never think up something on their own.” [VOM LEBEN DES MENSCHEN UND DER ERDE, p. 59.]
[21] “The sixth and seventh races of Atlantis allowed themselves to become hardened and therefore became stationary. As we have said, the Chinese civilization is a remnant of that. The old Chinese possess a wonderful Atlantean heritage, but they could not progress beyond this zenith.” [Rudolf Steiner, THE APOCALYPSE OF ST. JOHN (Anthroposophic Press, 1993), p. 140.]
Im general, it has been essential for Europeans to resist inferior Asiatic consciousness: “If the Asian way of thinking had been victorious then, a great spiritual darkness would have descended on Europe....” [LIGHT FOR THE NEW MILLENNIUM, p. 273.] Steiner claimed that he received this statement psychically from a dead German general. More likely, of course, the words are Steiner’s.
[22] “The French are committing the terrible brutality of moving black people to Europe ... The French as a race are reverting.” [Rudolf Steiner, FACULTY MEETINGS WITH RUDOLF STEINER (Anthroposophic Press, 1998), pp. 558-559.]
[23] “America was discovered under the influence of the greed for gold, under the influence of a purely materialistic culture ... This is the region where, through the prevailing external conditions, above all a relationship is developed with the mephistophelian-ahrimanic nature.” [Rudolf Steiner, SECRET BROTHERHOODS (Rudolf Steiner Press, 2004), pp. 67-69.]
Steiner’s statement hardly accounts for the motivation of the Pilgrims and other immigrants who yearned for freedom to live as they chose.
[24] “Lucifer-Bolshevism should not be allowed to do the only deed.” [LIGHT FOR THE NEW MILLENNIUM, p. 230.]
Steiner attributed this statement, like many others we find in the same book, to the dead German general, Helmuth von Moltke.
In general, Steiner associated Lucifer with Eastern spiritual strengths and weaknesses, and Ahriman with more modern materialistic strengths and weaknesses. The Slav/Russian soul receives light, which is both good and bad. “We must think of this Slavonic soul as being able to see entities in natural phenomena ... the Slavonic soul conceived of a vast number of beings in this strange spiritual world which we can best compare with the world of the Elves of Light.” [THE MISSION OF THE FOLK SOUL, pp. 164-165.] Elves of light, in Norse mythology, are good elves; but Lucifer (Latin: light-bearing) is the son of the dawn, and Ahriman brings the misleading light of intellect. The Sun gives us both Christ and the Antichrist. The receptivity of the Slav soul has been a mixed blessing. "[T]he Eastern European expresses his natural receptivity to pure Spirit by assimilating Western European culture with great devotion.....” [Ibid., p. 165.] This receptivity has enabled evil conspiratorial Westerners to foist Communism on Russia, planning thereby to ensnare humanity in a combination of Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces. "What are they trying to attain in the civilization of Eastern Europe? An attempt is being made to do away with everything human ... and to harness together Lucifer and Ahriman....” [Rudolf Steiner, THE COSMIC NEW YEAR (Kessinger, 2007), p. 103.] The Russian Revolution was actually beneficial to German war aims, since the new Russian government withdrew from the war. For more about Russian Bolshevism, see THE CHALLENGE OF THE TIMES, p. 42ff. The coming cultural epoch will be the Russian Age (3573 to 5733 A.D.) when cosmic light will help us to combat the conspiracies against us (“The Slavonic Folk Spirit works in this vibrating light....” [THE FUTURE OF HUMANITY AND THE EARTH AS FORESEEN BY RUDOLF STEINER, p. 41]). That period will be followed by the American Age (5733 to approximately 7900 A.D.). [Ibid., p. 54ff]
[25] “Among the English-speaking people self-seeking and political goals simply coincide.” [THE CHALLENGE OF THE TIMES, p. 197.]
England stands at the hub of English-speaking peoples, but the foul characteristics of the English extend far and wide. “The British-American impulse toward world empire ... manifests itself as a nightmare....” [Ibid., p. 19.]
Steiner’s criticism of various national and racial groups was almost universal, extending even to Germans — or, at least, to those Germans who failed to follow him. All people who harbor conceptions of humanity that differ from the doctrines of Steiner’s “spiritual science” harbor, deep in their souls, distorted visions of human nature. “Even if the American, Briton, Frenchman, German, Chinese, Japanese or Russian speaks to you of the human being, expressing quite unsatisfactory conceptions and ideas, there yet dwells in his subconsciousness something more comprehensive ... [T]he image of the human being lurking instinctively in human souls varies greatly in people belonging to the West and those belonging to the East ... Now, the situation is such that those instincts living in the West, as constituting the image of the human being ... appear ... as specters. The image of the human being living in the people of Eastern Europe with its Asiatic hinterland, manifests itself as a nightmare.” [Ibid., pp. 10-14.] In LIGHT FOR THE NEW MILLENNIUM and elsewhere, Steiner portrays Germany as standing as buffer between East and West. The image of humanity found in German culture is sound: “No other mythology gives a clearer picture of evolution than Northern mythology. Germanic mythology in its pictures is close to anthroposophical conception of future evolution.” [THE MISSION OF THE FOLK SOULS, p. 17.]
In passing, we should note: For those who remember Germany’s war aims in two world wars, the notion that any part of Asia is a European hinterland is chilling.
[26] “Quite a number of people have been born [who] are not reincarnated but are human forms filled with a sort of natural demon.” [FACULTY MEETINGS WITH RUDOLF STEINER, p. 649.]
[27] “It is also possible that something like an automaton could occur. The entire human organism exists” but it is automated, soulless. [Ibid., p. 650]
[28] “Imagine what people would say if they heard that we say there are people who are not human beings. Nevertheless, these are facts ... Such things are really shocking to people. I caused enough shock when I needed to say that a very famous university professor, after a very short period between death and rebirth, was reincarnated as a black scientist.” He “needed” to say that. The statement caused a “shock” because a black scientist would be, according to racist belief, an incompetent scientist.
[29] Rudolf Steiner, EDUCATION FOR SPECIAL NEEDS (Rudolf Steiner Press, 1998), pp. 106-110.
I have excerpted from a long passage. You can find the entire passage, in a slightly different translation, at http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/19240701p01.html. |
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