The Karma of Anthroposophy: Rudolf Steiner, the Anthroposophical Society and the Tasks of Its Members

by Rudolf Steiner, Matthew Barton (Compiler), Margaret Jonas (Compiler)

“If such authentic souls, such honest anthroposophists can be found...then an upward movement and dynamic will arise. If such souls do not appear, then decadence will take its inexorable downward course.... Today humanity stands before a great either it will see all civilization collapsing into the abyss, or else spirituality will raise civilization up by the power of the Michael impetus, through which the Christ impetus works, thus continuing, enriching and sustaining it.” During 1924, the last full year of Rudolf Steiner’s life, he gave a series of urgent, sometimes impassioned, talks to members of the Anthroposophical Society about their karma and its relationship to contemporary culture, referring in particular to the vital task of renewing civilization and preserving it from the threat of decline. Steiner’s words reveal a great gathering of forces to do spiritual battle for the soul of humanity. He presents a striking panorama in which anthroposophists are compelled to broaden their vision―to see true esoteric and exoteric anthroposophic work as a living yeast that can leaven all culture. To awaken members of the Anthroposophical Society to the significance of their task, Steiner could see that it was essential for them to understand the various karmic threads that form the fabric of the anthroposophic movement. Such recognition―of both difference and unity―offers strength of diversity, which easily leads to division if it remains unconscious and unrecognized. In the lectures and excerpts in The Karma of Anthroposophy , Rudolf Steiner speaks of an unprecedented convergence of two specific groups of souls with the anthroposophic the Platonists and the Aristotelians. Thus, a conflict of approaches forms the karmic background, whereas today’s task calls for unity based on love and knowledge―to work with the Archangel Michael and Christ in the face of Ahriman, materialism, and the possibility of social collapse and decadence. Given the challenges we face today, it is urgent for those who embrace spiritual science to study, absorb, and take to heart the substance of this critically important material.

192 pages, Paperback

First published June 30, 2009

About the author

Author also wrote under the name Rudolph Steiner.

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...


Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner was an Austrian occultist, social reformer, architect, esotericist, and claimed clairvoyant. Steiner gained initial recognition at the end of the nineteenth century as a literary critic and published works including The Philosophy of Freedom. At the beginning of the twentieth century he founded an esoteric spiritual movement, anthroposophy, with roots in German idealist philosophy and theosophy. His teachings are influenced by Christian Gnosticism or neognosticism. Many of his ideas are pseudoscientific. He was also prone to pseudohistory.
In the first, more philosophically oriented phase of this movement, Steiner attempted to find a synthesis between science and spirituality. His philosophical work of these years, which he termed "spiritual science", sought to apply what he saw as the clarity of thinking characteristic of Western philosophy to spiritual questions,  differentiating this approach from what he considered to be vaguer approaches to mysticism. In a second phase, beginning around 1907, he began working collaboratively in a variety of artistic media, including drama, dance and architecture, culminating in the building of the Goetheanum, a cultural centre to house all the arts. In the third phase of his work, beginning after World War I, Steiner worked on various ostensibly applied projects, including Waldorf education, biodynamic agriculture, and anthroposophical medicine.
Steiner advocated a form of ethical individualism, to which he later brought a more explicitly spiritual approach. He based his epistemology on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's world view in which "thinking…is no more and no less an organ of perception than the eye or ear. Just as the eye perceives colours and the ear sounds, so thinking perceives ideas." A consistent thread that runs through his work is the goal of demonstrating that there are no limits to human knowledge.