The Karma of Anthroposophy by Rudolf Steiner

Author:Rudolf Steiner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rudolf Steiner Press
Published: 2013-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

6. A New Michael Age and the Battle with Ahriman

Lecture given at the Goetheanum on 28 July 1924

In this lecture I want to elaborate on what has been said so far about inner developments in the karma of the Anthroposophical Society. We have traced events in the physical and super-physical worlds which underlie what is now trying to communicate itself to the world in anthroposophy. We know, my dear friends, that recent decades have witnessed two radical impetuses in humanity's evolution. One, which I have often mentioned, is the end of the so-called dark age at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. Compared with the dark age which has passed, a new age of light has dawned. We know that this dark age culminated in the state of soul which seals our spiritual eyes to the supersensible world. In ancient times, as we know, people in general had the capacity to gaze into the world of spirit, in a dreamlike and more or less instinctual way. It was quite impossible at this ancient stage of humanity's evolution to doubt the reality of the world of spirit. But if this condition of soul, this instinctive vision of the world of spirit, had continued, what we can call individual human intelligence could never have developed: the use of reason and understanding by each person. This is also, of course, connected with what leads us to freedom of the will—the one is inconceivable without the other. In that dull, instinctive perception of the world of spirit in ancient times, we could not have found freedom. Nor could we have developed that self-reliant thinking which can be called the use of intelligence by each individual.

Both developed together: independent, individual use of intelligence and the freedom of the human will. And for this reason, our original, instinctual vision of the world of spirit had to be hidden from human consciousness, had to darken and grow dim. All this occurred if not clearly for each individual then at least for all humanity in general. By the end of the nineteenth century this age of darkness, which veiled and hid the world of spirit but in doing so allowed the development of individual intelligence and free will, had expired. And now we are entering an era in which people must penetrate again into the reality of the world of spirit, in the ways in which this is possible.

Certainly it is clear that this new era has not begun in a very light-filled way. It seems, on the contrary, as if the first decades of the twentieth century have afflicted humanity with all the worst that it has ever previously experienced at any time in its history. But this does not negate the fact that, in general, an opportunity has entered human evolution to penetrate the light of spiritual life. It is just that, through lethargy as it were, people have perpetuated the habits implanted in them in the age of darkness, so

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