עברית This was a decisive turning point in my spiritual development, and the foundation of the growing anthroposophical Platonic-Aristotelian synthesis.
The Three Meetings
Christ, Michael, Anthroposophia
From Chapter 3
The Platonic-Aristotelian Essence Exchange at the End of the Twentieth Century
This was the decisive turning point in my spiritual development, and the foundation of the growing anthroposophical Platonic-Aristotelian synthesis. The conscious individuation of this Aristotelian spiritual force, that ‘works right into the physical man’, is the only way to penetrate the physical brain, nerves, and senses, to overcome the ahrimanic forces of death, that have taken over the cosmic intelligence of Michael since the middle of the nineteenth century. I realized that I had to make this experience of death into a fully human experience, and share willingly the fate of poor Alexander, who told his teacher Aristotle: ‘You are pressing together all the bones of my head!’, or, as another pupil of Aristotle experienced the Aristotelian logic, as if he were thrusting his head into cold water and thereby became estranged from himself for a moment; or as Goethe experienced it, ‘there will your mind be drilled and braced/ As if in Spanish boots it were laced!’. But one must voluntarily choose to suffer this Aristotelian death, also in the modern form in intellectualized anthroposophy, to spiritualize and resurrect it, and rise again from this brain grave to unite an Aristotelian spiritualized anthroposophy with the anthroposophical Platonism. And this can only be done, if our heart is ablaze with the spiritualized fire that Ahriman fears most.
As a result of this experience with Aristotle’s work through the centuries until today, I could also begin to be more receptive to the impact of the knowledge riddles of Riddles of the Soul. For example, the work with the original works of Aristotle, in connection with Brentano, especially in his Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint together with Rudolf Steiner’s interpretation of the concept of ‘intentionality’ in Riddles, proved immensely fruitful. My attention was sharpened considerably, and I could experience the truly unique spiritual nature of the Aristotelian forces, and how they helped me condense and incarnate my Imaginative faculties. The active spiritual force of a ‘spiritualized anthroposophical Aristotelian worldview’, was experienced in the sense of Rudolf Steiner’s words from 1924 about the possible culmination of anthroposophy at the end of the century through the new synthesis between the Aristotelian and Platonic streams. There he says, ‘and so we have, I would say, working further in the anthroposophical society an Aristotelian worldview, but today in a spiritualized form, expecting its future spiritualization [at the end of the twentieth century]’. I could experience this with great intensity from the middle of the 1980s until the middle of the 1990s, as described in the second lecture in the Twilight and Resurrection of Humanity.
To appreciate the nature of the essence exchange between the Platonic and Aristotelian spiritual forces, it is helpful to get acquainted with the picture given by Rudolf Steiner at the beginning of the book Riddles of the Soul. It was used again and again in my meditations in this period of my development. This picture describes the way in which supersensible cognition reaches down and crosses the threshold from above downwards, and how it meets there the highest forces of ordinary human cognition that ascend to the threshold from below. I found that my innermost soul- and spirit situation, standing, as described above, on the edge of the uncompleted ‘bridge’ of my divided existence, was described faithfully in this picture:
‘In that Anthroposophy advances from experiences of the spiritual world outside of the human being, to the human being, it finds, eventually, the human being that lives in the sense-body and developing in this body a consciousness of sense-reality. The last thing that it finds in the human being on its way down, is the soul being with its living mental pictures. This it can describe with coherent imaginative pictures. Then it can still use the spiritual gaze—at the end of the path of spiritual research—to see how the essential life of the mental pictures is suppressed [abgelähmt, herabgelähmt] by sense-perception. In this suppressed life of mental pictures, it illuminates, from the spiritual side, the human being that lives in the sense-world, in so far as he is a thinking being’.
It is there, so to say, that the lungs and heart of the knowledge drama of the Second Coming breathe and pulse, expand in a Platonic way upward and contract in an Aristotelian way downwards, inhaling and exhaling with Michael’s Yoga will, and on passing through each
other, offer the other a potent seed essence of itself, interchangeably; there it must be grasped and condensed: ‘If we go in both ways, the anthroposophical and the anthropological correctly, so they meet together in one point... those that observe the two ways... shall achieve with their mental pictures a fitting-together similar to the one found between the positive and negative plate images of a photographed picture’.
When this living essence exchange was well established, a new challenge emerged, that must be pointed out as well. After a certain balance between the Platonic and Aristotelian forces was achieved, it tipped over to the materialistic side, as an opposite mirror pic- ture of the fact that previously my forces were centred in the spiritual side. It seemed that the forces of old and new aristotelism and intellectualism, that brought the knowledge drama thus far, became too strong. I found myself engaged in a soul-desolating fight with the decadent, fallen forces of the modern Ahrimanic intellect. This struggle became now inevitable. I realized that my engagement with natural science and academic philosophy also contributed to this tipping of the balance downward.
From the middle of the Mind Soul period, I had to increasingly face the impact of modern, ahrimanic intellectualism and materialism. But I felt that this was an inevitable part of the bridge construction, and that the struggle with these forces of death is necessary, to develop the forces to overcome Ahriman’s strongest influence. The spiritual forces from the Platonic source were always available, but by themselves, they could not fulfil this task, and I felt that some help must be found from the Aristotelian side, because I had to develop the strongest spiritual forces of spiritualized Aristotelism itself. Therefore, I was searching for the pertinent ‘road sign’ to direct me in this new crucial turn of the path, but some difficult times of wanderings were required before such help was vouchsafed.
The new guidance came unexpectedly, in two steps. The first was found in Walter Johannes Stein’s book on the Grail in the ninth century. I found there a reference to the connection between Aristotelism and the Grail stream in the past, that gave me an important clue to search for the present connection. One important indication was about what could have happened in the past:
‘What a turning in human history could occur if the mysteries of antiquity, gathered in Aristotelism, could fully enter the Persian cultural element, renewed through Manichaeism’.
Above we pointed out the significance of Rudolf Steiner’s lecture cycle in Berlin, in March-April 1917: Building Stones to the Understand- ing of the Mystery of Golgotha. In the lecture dedicated to Aristotle’s spiritual path, we find also this indication concerning Emperor Julian. ‘The aim of Manichaeism was the conquest of evil and of matter by thought. Julian was brought face to face with the deeper implications of the problem of evil and the relation of Christ Jesus to this prob- lem. He hoped to find an answer through initiation into the Persian Mysteries and to return to Europe with the solution.’ This directive was now confirmed in Stein’s indication, when he characterized the relation of Aristotelism, in this sense, to the Christ impulse:
‘The thinking of Aristotle has the power to spiritualize matter and evil. This is the reason why Christianity took into itself the thought of Aristotle because the center of the Christian mystery, the transubstantiation of matter in the Mass, can only be understood by means of Aristotelian thinking’.
I felt that Stein was pointing my attention towards an essential aspect of future Aristotelism, that has much to do with the formation of ordi- nary consciousness through the dying of the given imaginative con- sciousness and its conscious resurrection in modern supersensible cognition, that constitute the centre of the knowledge drama of the Second Coming. And then came the second hint, that indicated the place I had been searching for during that time. It was a most essential ‘road sign’ at this juncture of the path. This ‘sign’ was found in Stein’s philosophical Ph.D. Dissertation, that in 1985 was made available for the first time since 1921. This happened in the moment in which I found myself in ‘the middle of my path’, exactly in the middle point between the original, given meeting with the Christ, and the second, consciously individualized meeting. As Thomas Meyer shows in his fine commentary, Stein was writing his dissertation under the per- sonal guidance of Rudolf Steiner and was striving to create a seed for ‘a knowledge theory of the higher stages of supersensible cognition’. It was written during Stein’s service in the First World War, while Rudolf Steiner developed what came to light in Riddles of the Soul in 1917, and I experienced it as a vital addendum to this book.
In a very special way (described in the 2nd lecture of The Twilight and Resurrection of Humanity), Stein became an energetic spiritual companion on this path and helped me locate and actualize the missing link in the construction of the bridge, when the crossing point of the middle was tipping in the ahrimanic direction. It made it possible to find the path that leads directly to the conscious con- frontation with the mystery of death, that lies at the foundation of modern cognition and consciousness.
I needed the key to this mystery of death to fulfil the spiritual development of my Mind Soul in the 1980s, to complete the two-way bridge between the etheric and physical worlds, between the new revelation of the etheric Christ and the free spiritual activity of spiritual science. I realized how this form of anthroposophical Aristotelism, ‘in the person who is developing spiritually the Consciousness Soul, is transformed into the Imagination Soul [...] and the Consciousness Soul makes use of the brain of the physical body ... the Imagination Soul actually enters into the physical body and permeates it’. And further, I could experience what it meant in practice, that ‘occult training will, by the transformation of the physical body, show the Mystery of the Living Christ in a new way’. This realization finally allowed me to bring together all my cognitive efforts from the first part of my life and create the bridging knowledge drama of the Second Coming at the end of the twentieth century...
In these years, I felt the need, in my meditations, to contemplate again and again, how Rudolf Steiner himself experienced the creation of The Riddles of the Soul. He said that this book ‘is not written with the pen, but with spiritual spades that want to tear down the boards that seal the world, that is, to eliminate the limits of the knowledge of nature, but to eliminate them through inner soul work... What is written in this first chapter of The Riddles of the Soul is the attempt to smash these boards away... with which the world has been sealed for centuries, with spades’.60 And we experienced with inner shudder the tragic karma of humanity in the twentieth century, in Rudolf Steiner’s untiring effort to spiritualize the Aristotelian impulse, with which his individual karma is intimately connected, when we realize that when the book was published, in the autumn of 1917, he already said that ‘in many things that are written in this way for the present, one already has the feeling that one writes something testamentary’.
The overcoming of the ahrimanic intellect, and its resurrection through the etheric Christ forces, made it possible to anchor the bridge also on the physical side of the River of Lethe. One could become a conscious worker also on the physical side of the bridge and direct its construction from both directions simultaneously. Now it was possible to find the best spiritual practice to proceed towards the meeting point of the two streams from both sides of the Threshold. At this stage of the work, the central task was to transfer the unique spiritual forces, extracted from the ‘spiritualized anthroposophical Aristotelism’ in the physical body, to the etheric body and the given imaginative faculties.
The key to fulfil this task was discovered, when it was realized that this intensive Aristotelian spiritual extract, harvested in the overcoming of Ahriman in the physical body and cognition, added a wholly new and special force to the etheric body. This special etheric force was now on the same level as the despiritualized Platonic etheric forces. The Aristotelian etheric force was spiritualized and extracted from the physical body below and was now led upward to the etheric body; the Platonic spiritual forces, coming from above, were condensed in the etheric body. Both could now mutually interpenetrate and enhance each other in the etheric body. The middle etheric crossing point between them could be found and actualized in imaginative perception, cognition, and spiritual self-consciousness.
In other words, I discovered something that had far-reaching consequences for the entire development of the knowledge drama, namely, that the new anthroposophical Aristotelism could accomplish in the etheric body what the original Aristotelism accomplished in the physical body. In the etheric body it could merge with the imaginative Platonic forces, and help them to condense further, etherically speaking. What is more, this etheric concentration and condensation developed the forces of supersensible cognition beyond the Imaginative Soul. I discovered that in this way the forces of the Imaginative Soul, the spiritualized Consciousness Soul, were transformed. The forces of the Imaginative Soul became saturated with inspired and intuited forces, that later could develop into the forces of the Inspirative- and Intuitive Souls, described in greater detail in The New Experience of the Supersensible. I found out that paradoxically, when this ahrimanic force, that causes the killing of spiritual perception and its paralysis (‘harablähmung’) into ordinary representations, is spiritualized, it has the opposite effect. It saturated the original imaginative perception with inspired and intuited forces, from which the bridge could receive its necessary solid etheric forces and substances. An enhanced imaginative faculty was the result, that could perceive in real time, simultaneously, the downward and upward streaming formative spiritual currents, and could hold them at their crossing point, through which the bridge could be finally completed...
Christ, Michael, Anthroposophia