ANTHROPOSOPHY AND THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES
Rev. A. P. Shepherd
Although it is sixty years since Rudolf Steiner first began to expound his world-picture of the fundamental reality of spirit as the primary creative force throughout the universe, his teaching has been almost unnoticed by the Christian Churches, In its early stages this was largely accounted for by the historical situation. The birth of Anthroposophy at the opening of the twentieth century was historically a surprising phenomenon. Science, in the first flush of its confident development of the Darwinian theory of evolution, was complacently asserting the sufficiency of matter and its functions to explain the whole universe, including man himself. The first violent orthodox reaction against the Darwinian theory had died down, and public opinion was gradually accepting the scientific view-point as proved. On the continent, and especially in Germany, where Haeckel’s version of Darwinism had swept the board, Protestant theologians were humanising Christianity, extracting from it almost everything that was supernatural. In the Protestant Churches of England and America theology was at a low ebb, and there was a complacent indifference to the apparent contradiction between credal and scientific beliefs, in the confident expectation that the world was getting better and better every day.
It was amazing that at that moment of complacent materialism, a young Austrian scientist, under the impulse of his own highly-developed supersensible faculties and of an overmastering experience of Christ, should begin to expound factually the spirit background of man and the universe, and the working of spirit from the very beginning of creation, through the whole evolutionary process, up to its continuous immediate activity in the kingdoms of nature and in man. Moreover, that he should place at the pivotal point of this cosmic evolutionary process the person and earthly life of Christ, and expound in their full supernatural significance the recorded incidents of his life that so many theologians were engaged in explaining away. The first if his series of lectures and publications was an exposition of the full significance of the redemptive deed of Christ in the spiritual world-setting, and this was shortly followed by a similar treatment of the four Gospels.
In his deliberately undertaken life-work of expounding the reality of spirit and its universal working it was almost inevitable that Steiner was at first brought into close contact with the Theosophical Movement, for that was the only movement “at that time that was consciously based on the immediate apprehension of spirit reality. From the commencement this association was somewhat strained, for the Theosophical Movement sought its inspiration in the ancient spirit-wisdom of the East, while Steiner revealed spiritknowledge as a new possibility of the present age, through the metamorphosis of the powers of thought which were the main-spring of western scientific progress. Moreover, Steiner’s unswerving assertion of the crowning finality of the deed of Christ was distasteful to the Theosophical viewpoint which saw all religions as equally a manifestation of divine truth. In a few years the Theosophical leaders could no longer tolerate this deep division of approach within their Society, and Steiner carried on his task independently under the title of Anthroposophy or Spiritual Science.
This movement was almost entirely confined to the Continent, but there Steiner travelled from country to country and from place to place in an almost ceaseless round of lectures, given to ever-increasing audiences of those who were seekers after the spirit. His great appeal was that he spoke out of direct perception of supersensible reality, and also fully expounded the methods by which ordinary human consciousness might acquire that faculty. He had just completed the full exposition of the spirit-nature of man and the universe, when, like an unexpected clap of thunder out of blue skies, the first World War shattered the complacency of mankind.
After the war Steiner proceeded to establish his teaching by applying its principles to all departments of human life and social activity, and in those years he visited England and made a deep impression upon some of its leading thinkers. The Churches, however, were still impervious to his message. Only the Church of Rome, with its invariable opposition to any spiritual revelation that had not its immediate source in its own authority, showed open hostility to Anthroposophy. The other Churches in Germany were still too busy trimming revelation to the accepted scientific pattern, while to the Churches of England and America it was unknown or, at best, a strange foreign "ism”.
In 1925 Rudolf Steiner died, and his followers, stunned by the loss of his personality, took a considerable time to organise and make effective their propagation of his work. To-day, however, Anthroposophy is a world-wide Movement and has imposed itself deeply on many departments of human life. Nevertheless, to-day, over forty years after Steiner’s death, it remains almost unknown to and unnoticed by the Christian Churches. If this seemed strange at the beginning of the century, it is all the more amazing now, when the Churches are facing crises and problems in all directions. At the dawn of the Russian revolution in 1917 Dr. Steiner foretold the cataclysmic changes which would follow it, especially after the middle of the century. One after another they have occurred, National-Socialism, race-persecution, a second World War, an ordered and defiant political materialism which captures whole people, a cold war which toys with the menace of world destruction, and, above all a Science, which no longer concerns itself chiefly with the natural relationships between Earth and Man, but has penetrated to a sub-human level, at which, with brain washing, human processing, and artificial insemination, it denies or would destroy the spiritual being of man.
There are some Church leaders who comfort themselves with the fact that there is an increase in Church attendance in the last decade. This is undeniable, especially in the U.S.A., and there is no doubt that the uncertainty of the world-situation is driving many to the assurance and comfort of a gospel of personal salvation. No one would deny or belittle the value of this personal attitude to Christianity, but its real effectiveness for humanity is in the measure in which it penetrates the every-day concepts of life and the world. A leading American writer in a recent interview declared that although perhaps 75% of the American people attended some place of worship on Sunday, during their week-day life almost all of them accepted unquestioningly the materialistic scientific interpretation of man and the universe.
There, in the enormous prestige of a materialistic Science, dominating, absorbing, fascinating the human mind, and especially that of the rising generation, is the problem that confronts the Christian Churches. To Science, with its astounding advances and almost daily breath-taking discoveries and anticipated possibilities, the Christian Faith is irrelevant, a possible solace to the individual, but of no vital significance to the evolutionary past or future of humanity, and, still less, of the universe. Personal religion will lack force, if indeed it can survive, with this divided outlook. The answer to it, is not to bring religious faith more into line with scientific opinion, though that seems to be the objective of a certain type of theology. It is to see whether a deeper consideration of the factual findings of scientific observation will lead to conclusions consistent with Christian belief. It would appear that it is the scientist himself, rather than the theologian, who doubts the certainty of scientific conclusions. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin is a Jesuit priest, but in The Phenomenon of Man, his penetrating criticism of scientific materialism, he writes as a scientist.
But more directly menacing to the Churches than the theoretical materialism of Science is the deliberate hostility of the powerfully organised social and political system of Communism, based upon a complete denial of spirit in man and the universe. Already it dominates two-fifths of the human race and it expands by ceaseless and ruthless propaganda. It can only be effectively countered by proving the reality of spirit and manifesting the nature of its working at every level of being.
Yet another problem that confronts world-Christianity is the rapidly increasing racial and national consciousness in the non-white peoples. It manifests itself in a deep antipathy to European and American domination. The Christian religion, which perforce has been propagated under the forms of its western historical evolution, is coming to be regarded as a foreign importation, and the revival of the indigenous religion as a symbol of independent self-development.
To all these problems Anthroposophy has specific answers, but it has received no serious consideration by the Churches. It is either casually dismissed by the traditional theological substitute for impartial judgement, as “the revival of a long disproved heresy”; or it is rejected on the ground of some startling or unfamiliar item of belief, taken out of its context, and with no consideration or even knowledge of the basic principles on which it rests.
In point of fact the Churches are not to-day so completely averse to supersensible phenomena as they were at the beginning of the century and they regard with sympathetic interest the study, under approved control, of spiritualism and spirit-healing. But these movements provide only empirical evidence of spirit reality, and the rationale of their belief is very largely speculation. It is all the more surprising that the Churches should show no interest in Anthroposophy, a rationally articulated world-outlook, based on the reality and activity of spirit and derived from direct perception. This perception is based upon the development of inherent organs of supersensible perception by methods which are exactly described, and which involve penetration in full consciousness into different levels of soul experience, factually linked with each other. In the understanding of these levels of experience we arrive at the understanding of the great mysteries of man and of space and time. In speaking of the Christian Churches I have deliberately made no reference to “The Christian Community”, for that Church came into being in 1922 as the expression in a Christian Church of the teaching of Anthroposophy, in despair at the indifference and opposition of the traditional Churches. This Church has a large membership in Germany; in English speaking countries it is small, but quietly and steadily growing. It manifests a new understanding of the Christian verities in the light of Anthroposophy. But for the traditional Christian Churches the path of discovery of the message of Anthroposophy is not, at first, through its direct interpretation of Christian doctrine, whether in the practice and worship of the Christian Community, or in Dr. Steiner’s lectures on the Gospels or on the life and work of Jesus Christ. To do that is to be confronted immediately with statements that may seem to contradict long-accepted views, without any knowledge of the principles on which they are based.
Through his direct experience of spirit and by thorough penetration of this experience by clear thought and honest judgement, Steiner arrived at certain fundamental principles that underlie the whole problem of man and the universe. Some of these are new, some are a clarification of ancient instinctive knowledge. Some of them challenge accepted scientific and theological conceptions, but they do so in a scientific way. Steiner urged repeatedly that none of these principles should be accepted on authority, but that they should be tested, either by developing in oneself the power of direct spirit-perception, or by submitting them to the most searching tests in the light of existing, indisputable factual knowledge. They are, however, so fundamental to his whole world-outlook that it is only comprehensible in the light of them. Moreover, if they are true, they so vitally concern the thinking and life of humanity, that nothing can be more important than an honest consideration of them.
The first principle is the apprehension of the objective reality of spirit, a vast, inter-related supersensible world of spirit-being, existing behind and functioning through material reality, the Alpha and Omega of physical, sense-perceived existence. Such a concept should not be unfamiliar to Christians, who speak in their services every Sunday of “Cherubim and Seraphim”, “the heavens and all the powers therein”. In spite of this, however, any real living relationship to heavenly spirit beings is almost non-existent in their minds. Natural Science is governed by the principle of not treating as factual anything that is not capable of being proved by sense-perceptible experiment, but already there is a gathering mass of evidence of events that do not admit of a scientific explanation of this sort. Moreover, if such a world of spirit does exist, it cannot, by its very nature, be subject to sense-derived proof.
The second principle that runs through the whole relation between the spiritual and the physical worlds is that of “Descent and Ascent”. For the past hundred years Science has been fascinated by and absorbed in the picture of “Ascent” manifest in the physical world. With varying views as to the motive power in this ascent, the picture remains as a process which had its origin in the lowest physical forms and will have its conclusion in the highest. But Dr. Steiner has revealed the whole process as a continuous “descent” of spirit into matter, shaping first its own being in the supersensible world to the needs of descent, and then evolving a material medium, which it progressively shaped more and more adequately to its self-manifestation in physical form. The natural scientific approach is like that of examining the pictures of a great painter, and deciding how they could be arranged in an order of objective artistic merit, and what explanation could be given from the pictures themselves of their artistic advance. It would be seen as a manifest “ascent”. The anthroposophical approach would be to regard the pictures as the progressive “ascending” expression of the artist’s creative imagination continually “descending” into pictorial form, how he trained his imagination towards self-expression and how by adaptation and new discovery he made his material more and more capable of expressing his genius, a process of descent and ascent continuously repeated at every stage of advance. Whenever there is life in the physical world this process is continuously repeated, in a rhythm of descent, ascent and withdrawal; and where, in man, spirit itself completely and consciously descends into the material medium, the process resolves itself into the nextgreat principle that is fundamental to Anthroposophy; the principle of reincarnation, or successive earth-lives.
The belief in reincarnation is one to which the Christian Churches are instinctively opposed, partly because it is not an explicit element in the teaching of Christ, and partly because it has long been regarded as one of the mistaken beliefs of Eastern religions. In point of fact the Eastern conception of reincarnation is quite different from that presented in Anthroposophy. The Eastern religions, based as they were on a primeval human clairvoyance, spoke out of a direct perception of a previous existence. But to them man’s lives on earth are a calamity, an exile from his true spirit-existence, and he seeks to bring to an end their repetition by asceticism. But Dr. Steiner explains reincarnation as the necessary application to the individual man of the principal of descent and ascent manifest in the whole universe. It is the spiral of spiritual evolution, by which man is enabled by purgation and spiritual re-integration finally to carry the purpose of his earthly incarnation into pure spirit-existence. In recent years there has been among Western people a growing interest in the possibility of reincarnation, but it has tended to concentrate all interest and importance on the repeated earth lives, and to fail to realise the process as a great rhythm of being, in which the earth lives are held together in an unbroken chain of moral consequence, the goal of which lies in the spiritual world.
It is impossible within the scope of this article to consider the relevance of this belief to the Christian Faith, why it was necessary that for nearly two thousand years, while man was achieving an ever deeper knowledge of himself and his material environment, it should be hidden from his consciousness; how vitally important that at this moment in his evolution he should recover that knowledge; how deeply relevant to its needs is the redeeming work of Christ; how it answers many of the apparently inscrutable inequalities of human life and opportunity; and how significant to each one of us it makes, not only our own present earthly existence, but the whole history of man and the earth. Indeed, if reincarnation is true there is no fact that is more vitally urgent today for man to apprehend. It leads directly to the next fundamental principle of Anthroposophy, the nature of the being of man in his earthly existence.
The concept of the nature of man governs the thinking and the life of humanity. The greatest menace of our age is the utterly false view of man implicit in materialistic science, and blatantly explicit in Marxian Communism. In Spiritual Science earthly man is seen as a physical-spiritual being. His eternal self, which moves as spirit through this repeated rhythm of being, dwells in each earth-life in a soul-element of thinking, feeling and willing that it has fashioned out of its earth-existences; in a life-element, that brings it from spirit life to conscious inner experience in a continuous time-existence, and finally, in a physical body, a controlled spatial existence, in which alone man can realise himself in moral freedom. Dr. Steiner shows the interplay of these elements in man’s being on earth, both when awake and asleep, and in the spiritual life after death.
In one sense this revelation of the true being of man is the very core of the revelation of Rudolf Steiner, as is implicit in the strange-sounding name of his movement. For “Anthroposophy” is the wisdom attained through the discovery of the true nature of man. For the Church it must be of vital importance, for, as we said earlier, there is a widespread tendency to-day to combine a profession of Christian faith with the modern scientific view of man.
This true view of man was unconsciously and only partially present in ancient religions, but since the time of Aristotle man has lost any direct awareness of it. In the first three centuries of Christianity an attempt was made to express the Christian faith in terms of it, but from the fourth century it faded away. It is not too much to say that most of the great theological disputes which have tom the Church asunder since that time have been due to the ignorance on both sides of the true nature of man.
This understanding leads directly to the next great principle explicit in Anthroposophy, the meaning of History. This is a problem which has pressed urgently upon men’s minds in the last fifty years. Here again Dr. Steiner saw the working of this great principle of “Descent and Ascent”. Here the rhythm is as long as the whole course of human evolution. Slowly man descended from an unself-conscious spirit existence, into gradual incarnation into a material existence. More and more deeply the human race has penetrated into material knowledge and experience, with a corresponding loss of awareness of spirit. From that depth man is slowly ascending, but for that he needs a reawakened spiritual consciousness. The question for our day is whether that consciousness will be blinded by the dazzling splendor of man’s latest material discoveries.
The external course of history, the rise and fall of civilisations, the gradual advance in physical knowledge and power from the Stone Age to the Atomic Age, are only half the tale of human history, and can only be properly understood as an element in man’s spiritual devolution and evolution. In this long slow rhythm, the quicker rhythm of the individual is not only the necessary condition whereby he may survive the stress and incomprehensibility of the slower movement, but provides, through the return of the spiritually quickened power of great lives, the impulse which leads to new civilisations.
Perhaps the most striking point and the one most relevant to the Christian Churches is the place which Dr. Steiner gave in this cosmic view of history to the Deed of Christ, the Incarnation. To him it was not only the intervention of God into human history, bringing forgiveness and the hope of immortality to the individual believer, and drawing out a redeemed community from a doomed world. It was the central point of all human history, occurring at the very nadir of mankind’s spiritual descent, and bringing new spiritual forces and creative possibilities for the whole future of the spiritual destiny of man. He saw the Incarnation not as a sudden deed erupting into history, but as a gradual descent through the levels of existence from spirit to matter, a descent of which great human spirits were aware at different levels and which they expressed in the great religions of mankind, but which found its fulfilment only in Christ. This picture of the Cosmic Christ, the Christ of human destiny, can be the answer to the new race-prejudice, which sees Christianity as a Western ideology.
Anthroposophy proclaims to human thinking the objective and immediate reality of spirit. It also restores to the study of Christian documents and origins the reality of the supersensible. In its light the Bible takes on a new spiritual and rational meaning, the accounts of the Creation and the Fall, the call of Abraham and the segregation of the Hebrew people, the task of Moses, the nature of prophecy, the deep significance of the Exile, the Messianic expectation. So too the New Testament, the deep mystic significance of the four Gospels in their varied presentation, the meaning of Apocalypse. This new understanding of the Bible, based on the teaching of Rudolf Steiner, has been set out with great erudition and spiritual insight by the late Dr. Emil Bock of the Christian Community, in his studies of the Old and New Testaments.
But the chief possibility that lies in an unprejudiced approach to Anthroposophy by the Christian Churches is that with which we began, a real reconciliation of Science and Religion. If the Church can see the work of Christ and the spiritual destiny and redemption of man as involved in the whole evolutionary process; and if Science can see the evolutionary process in the light of its spiritual origin, nature and destiny; then it might begin to happen. That was the task to which Rudolf Steiner devoted his life.
Nineteen centuries ago Saul of Tarsus, a gifted man of about forty, deeply versed in the culture and religious thoughts of his age, yet wholly committed to the most definite and uncompromising religion of the world, the Jewish faith, had a vision of Christ. As a result of the spiritual initiation which flowed from it, Saul, now become Paul, transformed what was then only a Jewish sect into a world-religion. That involved for him and for all Jewish Christians, the surrender of religious convictions and rites of the Jewish faith, which had behind them undoubted divine authority, — circumcision, the strict observance of the Jewish Sabbath, the keeping of the whole law of Moses. No greater renunciation of belief, previously held as essential, has ever been made in response to a divine revelation of wider spiritual possibilities.
When he too was about the same age, Rudolf Steiner had an experience of Christ which cannot be better expressed than in his own words: “I stood before the Mystery of Golgotha in a most inward, most solemn festival of knowledge.” He too was versed in the scientific and philosophic culture of his day, but also, quite uniquely, in the direct experience of the objective reality of spirit. This he saw as a divinely ordered opportunity for a great advance in the spiritual evolution of humanity, and at the heart of it — the only possibility of its realisation — a new understanding of the Deed of Christ for mankind. Like Paul, he “was not disobedient to the heavenly vision”. He saw it as the divine revelation of the possibility of a great renewal of the Christ Impulse in the life of humanity.
The acceptance of this view of the Christ of human destiny might involve the Churches in the renunciation and re-adaptation of some forms and beliefs that, in the evolution of Christianity in the Western world, have come to be regarded as fixed. But that renunciation would be far less than that which was involved in the birth of Christianity. The message of Anthroposophy is a challenge and an opportunity which the Christian Churches should face in the deepest seriousness.
End
First printed in 'Journal of Anthroposophy,' USA, Autumn 1966
and also published in his book 'The Battle for the Spirit' in 1994 which is now out of print,
Other books by A. P. Shepherd are,
'A Scientist of the Invisible,' an introduction to the life of Rudolf Steiner 1954.
'The Redemption of Thinking', a study in the Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas' 1956, three lectures by Rudolf Steiner translated by A. P. Shepherd with an introduction and appendix by him.
Ven. A. P. Shepherd DD.1885 - 1968 was Archdeacon of Dudley, Canon of Worcester, England.
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