The Karmic Mysteries of our Time

The Karmic Mysteries of our Time

From the Second Lecture: The History of the Michaelic Movement after the Death of Rudolf Steiner

The Twilight of Humanity and its Resurrection

The History of the Michaelic Movement since the Death of Rudolf Steiner

An Esoteric Study

Dear friends, let me say this rather clearly: the recent Michaelic impulse, intensified so much during 2017-2019, requires us to dare and say things that we couldn’t say before. One knew them since the end of the century; but one is deeply involved in them oneself; and also, you, dear friends, are involved in them yourself. To share such things in which one’s karma is involved, isn’t possible in an objective way before one is 63, or, in other words, before one can overcome the strong ahrimanic- luciferic challenges on the path, from within and from without, as we described in our first lecture. Therefore, one couldn’t speak about it before the right time had come, and this is the reason why I gave you in the first lecture a biographical review of my spiritual development. Let us therefore begin to speak about it today and continue to do so in the near future... (79).

As Rudolf Steiner describes so intimately in many of his karma lectures, such intimate collaboration between the leaders of the two streams took place in the twelfth century, when the Aristotelians were in the spiritual world and the Platonists in the physical world, and it was reversed in the thirteenth century. This was changed again at the beginning of the twentieth century, when the Platonists remained in the etheric world and supported and inspired the Aristotelians incarnated on the earth with Rudolf Steiner. And once more, as part of the new Michaelic agreement at the middle of the twentieth century, the two streams changed their loca- tions and roles. What happened at the end of the last century can be described as a repetition, on a higher level of consciousness, of what took place in the twelfth century. Rudolf Steiner says that in the twelfth century, when the Platonists were incarnated, the Aristotelians supported and inspired them from the spiritual world: ‘We see the teacher of Chartres sitting there on this earthly ground, unfolding his studies that are permeated by spiritual vision, while there penetrates into this earthly scene the inspiring ray from the Aristotelian souls above, bringing the Platonically coloured teachings into the right channels... One may believe it or not, but it was so. Looking back spiritually into those Middle Ages we find such a spirit as Alanus ab Insulis sitting in his lonely cell, given up to his studies, and receiving from the supersensible world, like a spirit-visitor who comes to him as a companion, an Aristotelian soul.’ (97) Many such episodes from the end of last century could be told about this intimate weaving and communication between the Platonic souls on the earth and the leading Aristotelian souls in the etheric world. I will mention here only one example.

In the Preface to the German translation of The New Experience of the Supersensible, I wrote that in the 1980s, especially in 1985-8, my knowledge struggles and development benefited a great deal from Walter Johannes Stein’s Ph.D. dissertation, edited, commented on and interpreted by Thomas Meyer. (98) As I wrote in this Preface, at this time Rudolf Steiner’s book, written in the decisive year 1917, Von Seelenrätseln (Riddles of the Soul), dedicated to the recently departed Aristotelian scholar and thinker Franz Brentano, became a significant impulse in my work. I used it also as my guide to study Brentano and delve intensively into Aristotle, Maimonides and Thomas Aquinas. This allowed me to combine, in my way, my inborn Platonic forces with what can be gained from the renewed anthroposophical Aristotelian force that Rudolf Steiner could develop in this form in the last seven years of his life. Walter Johannes Stein wrote his dissertation aided by the close mentorship and collaboration of Rudolf Steiner and invested it with a special cognitive intensity. In those years, I could have felt—among other aspects—that through this soul also his teacher himself could work inspiringly into my knowledge struggles. I often experienced that this collaborative work was used to allow me to sharpen my knowledge faculties on the Aristotelian technique and solid power, which helped me a great deal in my task, described above, to confront and overcome the ahrimanic death forces of the intellect, and transform them into the new, thoroughly thought-permeated, lucid, imaginative faculty.

For me, the experience of the difference between the thinking of Plato and Aristotle, was just as important for my spiritual development, because I had to bring the two together in a way that would allow me to accomplish my task at the end of the century. Rudolf Steiner’s words about this difference, spoken during the evening lecture in the Christmas Foundation Conference, became in these years, my guiding meditation, as I was struggling to assimilate and at the same time also spiritualize, the new Aristotelian anthroposophical forces: ‘When a modern man reads Plato with true spiritual feeling and in an attitude of meditation, after a time he begins to feel as though his head were a little higher than his physical head actually is, as though he had, so to speak, grown out beyond his physical organism. That is absolutely the experience of anyone who reads Plato, provided he does not read him in an altogether dry manner.’ This experience was part of my spiritual constitution, I can say, since the twenty-first year of my life, as a given faculty, which I had to learn to balance, ground, and condense, and in this way also spiritualize, by the opposite, Aristotelian force: ‘With Aristotle it is different. With Aristotle you never have the feeling that you are coming out of your body. When you read Aristotle after having prepared yourself by meditation, you will find that he works right into the physical man. Your physical man makes a step forward through the reading of Aristotle. His logic works; it is not a logic that one merely observes and considers, it is a logic that works in the inner being... In a certain sense we may say with truth that Aristotle’s works are only rightly comprehended when they are taken as books for meditation.’(99)

The fully conscious individuation of this logic, that ‘works right into the physical man’, is therefore the most fruitful way to penetrate—and overcome—the ahrimanic forces of death, that took over the cosmic and human intelligence. We must make this experience of death again into fully human experience, in the way Alexander could experience it, when he told his teacher Aristotle: ‘You are pressing together all the bones of my head!’, or, as another pupil of Aristotle would experience it, this logic was ‘thrusting his head into cold water and thereby became estranged from himself for a moment’, and Goethe said that ‘There will your mind be drilled and braced, As if in Spanish boots ‘twere laced!’ (100).  In our time, this is an indispensable first step to actualize real spiritual science, and our task at the end of the century was first and foremost to spiritualize and redeem this fallen intellect and return it to Michael, using for this purpose the etheric forces streaming from the etheric body of the Christ. In doing so, we were also fully conscious of the fact that we are paying part of the Platonic karmic debt to Rudolf Steiner, helping him in his task to redeem Aristotle’s deed, that led to the falling of the intelligence from Michael to Ahriman. Furthermore, as Rudolf Steiner took upon himself the karmic task of the reincarnated Plato, Karl Julius Schröer, at the end of the nineteenth century, (101) part of our task at the end of the twentieth century was also to take upon ourselves the results of the failure of our Aristotelian comrades at the beginning of the century.

In these years, until the end of the 1980s, I could feel often that beside the soul of Walter Johannes Stein, also other souls, that belong specifically to this Aristotelian stream of the School of Michael, paid me repeated visits in my small study, and their living presence, warmly supported and inspired me in this important step on my path, in which I had to permeate my imaginative faculties ‘with Aristotelian clarity and definition of concept, and yet at the same time with Platonic spiritual light’, as Rudolf Steiner described the fruitful result of the synthesis between the two spiritual streams. (102)

I have called this work of knowledge, whose aim is to grasp and investigate the appearance of the etheric Christ in full imaginative cognition, ‘the knowledge drama of the Second Coming’, and this Aristotelean-Platonic synthesis had to be created, because it was clear to me, that it is an indispensable requirement of this knowledge practice. In these years I was completing my book, The New Experience of the Supersensible, based on this knowledge practice, in which the anthroposophical spiritualization of Aristotelianism could be spiritualized further by the Platonic imaginative forces, so that, while ‘in the Anthroposophical Society we have Aristotelianism working on, in a spiritualized form, awaiting its further spiritualization’ at the end of the century.(103) This spiritualized anthroposophical Aristotelianism could be penetrated and transformed by the new anthroposophical Platonic forces, which work now again on the earth, and carries the new etheric Christ impulse that was experienced in the etheric world in the 1930s-50s. This means also that ‘the principle of the Mysteries’ that at the end of the twelfth century ‘had ascended to the heavens [with the Platonic souls] and sent down its Sun-rays thence upon all that was working on the earth’, (104) descended at the end of the twentieth century to the earth and is working since then fully on the earth; the ‘sun rays’ of this ‘principle of the Mysteries’, that the new anthroposophical Platonism brings to the earth, united with the further spiritualized anthroposophical Aristotelianism, radiated at the end of the century as the sun-rays of the Earthly-Human Sun, working from below upward. The sun light of the etheric Christ, radiating through the new Michaelic Mysteries, illuminated also the path of incarnation for those Aristotelian souls, that could see in this light that shines from the earth to the etheric world, the waited sign that confirms the fulfilment of the Platonic part in the new Michaelic agreement. When this sun light of the new etheric Christ began to radiate from the earth through the resurrected Anthroposophy, as the new spiritualized Aristotelian-Platonic synthesis at the end of the century, they knew that it signals that the Platonists have accomplished this part of their mission and that they can now descend as well to fulfil their part. It allowed them to incarnate in the last years of the twentieth century, to become fully active partners in the future work from the 20s and 30s, of this century.

It was the successful development of this fully conscious etheric cognition, that signalled to our Aristotelian co-workers that they could come down to the earth. And therefore, right now as we speak in 2019, they begin their adult earthly life and must seek and find themselves, their path and their mission, to begin with, only by means of their individual forces, as we had to do as well.

Continue to read the whole second lecture:

The Twilight of Humanity and its Resurrection

The History of the Michaelic Movement since the Death of Rudolf Steiner

An Esoteric Study