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A READER'S JOURNAL
The Challenge of the Times, GA#186
6 Lectures in Dornach in 1918
by
Rudolf Steiner
Translated by Olin D. Wannamaker
Published by Anthroposophic Press/NY in 1961
A Book Review by Bobby Matherne ©2014
Chapter: Spiritual Science
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"It is not improbable that man, like the grub that prepares a chamber for the winged thing it never has seen but is to be, that man may have cosmic destinies he does not understand," written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes on the title page of Spencer Heath's Citadel, Market, and Altar. Heath dealt with our emerging society, much as Steiner spoke about in 1918, some forty years before Heath's words. Heath's three parts of society, the Citadel, the Market and the Altar mirrors the three-fold society that Steiner speaks about in this passage. (I have included Heath's words in parenthesis for convenience.)
[page 3] . . . this threefold organization . . . will be distributed as the political, or security, order (Citadel); the second, as the sphere of the social organization, the economic organization (Market); the third, as the sphere of free spiritual production (Altar).
Steiner speaks about our cosmic destinies with a scope that one rarely finds. He explains how the West is held back by the ghost of its Roman roots and the East is being led by a nightmare vision which it has yet to fully understand. As we are in the middle of the fifth epoch, the epoch of the West is descending, and already we can anticipate the ascent of the sixth epoch, the epoch of the East.
[page 26] In the West an image of the human being that is on a descending path and appears, therefore, as a specter; in the East an image that is ascending, but that must not be accepted in its present form since it is still merely an imagination of an oppressive nightmare and will appear in its true form only after this nightmare has been overcome.
This next passage will take many aback with Steiner's claim that Christianity is just beginning. What can that mean, some 2,000 years have passed have they not? Yes, but who knows but that we are still in Kindergarten so far as Christianity is concerned? Have any of the various Christian religions revealed the spiritual realities of the Christ? Many still claim Christ was born when Jesus was born, refusing to distinguish Jesus the human from Christ the Great Spirit which infused Jesus at his Baptism in the Jordan.
[page 27] As I have often indicated, the Roman Church has contributed more toward hindering the introduction of the image of Christ into human hearts and minds than it has helped because the conceptions that have been applied" within the Roman Church for the purpose of comprehending the Christ are all taken from the social and political structure of the ancient Roman Empire. Even though human beings do not know this, it works within their instincts.
Exactly as the aspects of Roman law works in our instincts today and so few comprehend how much of our social life is driven by its Roman roots. And even fewer can comprehend the essential difference between Judaism and Romanism, especially with the clarity that Steiner lays out for us.
[page 27] Now, the conceptions that were dominant in the Old Testament, that must be designated primarily as conceptions of Old Testament Judaism, and that took their worldly form in Romanism, which is in the worldly sphere the same thing as Judaism was in the spiritual sphere even though it is in opposition to Judaism, have come over into our own epoch by way of Romanism; they haunt our age in spectral forms. This Old Testament thinking, unpermeated by the Christ must be found in its true origin within the human being.
If you find yourself claiming, "This is in my blood" or "She is not part of my blood", then you are displaying an example of Old Testament thinking, "unpermeated by the Christ". It was a type of thinking which valued people of one's blood, one's kinsfolk, over everyone else in the world. Thinking which valued relatives over strangers simply because they were relatives. The New Testament over-turned such thinking with the injunction, "Love your neighbor as yourself", but millennia of Old Testament thinking left behind deep trace of blood-thinking in our hearts and minds.
[page 27, 28] This thinking depends upon what can be inherited with the blood from generation to generation. The capacity to think in the manner characteristic of the Old Testament is inherited with the blood in the succession of human beings. What we inherit as capacities from our fathers through the simple fact that we are born as human beings, that we were embryonic human beings before our birth — what we inherit as the power of thinking, what lives in our blood, is Old Testament thinking.
What is permeated by Christ cannot be acquired by Old Testament or blood-related thinking which comes into the world with us from our embryo, but can only be acquired by us after we have arrived in the world as a personality through our spiritualized exercises of the type Steiner teaches in his Knowledge of Higher Worlds and Its Attainment.
[page 30] This is the essential fact. The kind of thinking we possess because of our embryonic development leads to the recognition of the Godhead only as the Father. The kind of thinking that is acquired in this world through the personal life after the embryonic stage leads to the recognition of the Godhead also as the Son.
Steiner says elsewhere that if, e. g., a Middle East terrorist hates America, he will be reborn in his next incarnation as an American, i.e., hate creates such a bond to the person or thing hated that one must turn into or live in the thing hated. In this next passage, he indicates that intercommunication must exist between people in order for them to live as total human beings. Without that communication connection people of the West (America) will be stuck to an earthly existence as a ghost, and people of the East will experience a psychic-spiritual evolution apart from earth. If one understands the essential nature of communication between the peoples of the West and the East, one get a better understanding of the spate of wars such as Iraqi and Afghanistan which has involved so many American soldiers in those lands, and the terrorists from the same regions who have exerted such enormous attention on America.
Steiner distinguished three types of occult capacity and the section of the world who concentrate on each capacity: West: materialistic, Central: Hygienic, and East: Eugenic. Each section has much to learn from the other.
[page 100] In other words the people of the East and those of the Central countries will have to receive material occultism from the West. They will receive its benefits, its products. Hygienic occultism will develop primarily in the Central countries, and eugenic occultism in the Eastern lands. It will be necessary, however, for intercommunication to exist between people. This is something that must be taken up into the impelling forces of the social order of the future. It makes it imperative for people to see that they will be able to live in future throughout the world only as total human beings. If an American should wish to live only as an American, although he would be able to achieve the loftiest material results, he would condemn himself to the fate of never progressing beyond e arthly evolution. If he should not seek social relationships with the East, he would condemn himself to being bound within the earthly sphere after a certain incarnation, haunting the sphere of the earth like a ghost. The earth would be drawn away from its cosmic connections, and all these souls would have to be like ghosts. Correspondingly, if the people of the East should not take up the materialism of the West with their eugenic occult capacities that pull down the earth, the Eastern man would lose the earth. He would be drawn into some sort of mere psychic-spiritual evolution, and he would lose the earthly evolution. The earth would sink away under him as it were, and he would not be able to possess the fruit of the earthly evolution.