The Christian Mystery: Lecture 8 of 18

by Rudolf Steiner

Overview

This book provides a broad overview of Steiner's fresh thinking on "social threefolding." He acknowledged that the demand for social change, derived above all from the working class, whom industrialization had forced into a kind of indentured life dominated by economics. From Steiner's perspective, the underlying issue was not only economic, however, but also spiritual or cultural. Culture and the cultured classes had become estranged from "real life." Society needed a "free" culture that would include all classes. It also needed to shift labor into the legal sphere of rights, the only place where workers could find real freedom in society. Capital, too, needed to be liberated from egotism and allowed, like goods, simply to circulate. Above all, Steiner understood that social realities could not be separated from the spiritual realities of human existence.

From this point of view, we lack knowledge of ourselves as spiritual beings. Thinking has become abstract. To remedy this, we must first admit it and develop modesty and humility. Second, we must increase our capacity to love one another and the world. Approaching this reality from another side, we see that what ordinary individual thinking also afflicts culture in general, which is also removed from reality. Culture, like thinking, must become alive and universally human. This is impossible, however, unless we develop what Steiner calls "freedom of thought." Authentic freedom of thought is always ethical and overcomes egotism. Indeed, a more general exercise of freedom in thought, as Steiner conceives it, provides a way through the twin dangers of materialism and abstraction, which together threaten society both in the narrower sense of "national" life and in the more global, geopolitical sense.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780880108072
Publisher:	SteinerBooks
Publication date:	01/01/2008
Series:	The Collected Works of Rudolf Steiner
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	250 KB

Table of Contents

Introduction Christopher Bamford ix

1 The Threefold Aspect of the Societal and Class Question 1

2 Insight into the Supersensible Human Being and the Task of our Time 25

3 Realizing the Ideals of Libery, Equality, and Fraternity through Social Threefolding 43

4 Spiritual Science, Freedom of Thought, and Societal Forces 63

5 The Assets and Liabilities of World Cultures 83

6 Spirit Cognition as a Basis for Action 97

Reference Notes 113

Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works 121

Significant Events in the Life of Rudolf Steiner 137

Index 151