Becoming Michael's Companions

Rudolf Steiner's lectures to the youth movement in October 1922 (CW 217)

In October of 1922, Rudolf Steiner met with about 80 young people between the ages of 18 and 25 in Stuttgart to deliver a series of 13 lectures that have since been translated and published as Becoming the Archangel Michael's Companions: Rudolf Steiner's Challenge to the Younger Generation. Below are my fragmentary comments on the text.

Steiner began by admitting that then, as today, young and old people speak entirely different languages of soul. No one is to blame or can be rightly accused of wrongdoing in this case. It is a function of deeper social forces. He then noted the obvious—that materialism has been on the rise for much of the 19th and early 20th centuries. This trend has only intensified today. That superficial forms of pre-packaged spirituality have created a billion-dollar industry only exemplifies the point.

He lamented that Central Europe had forgotten Goethe and accepted only Darwin, insisting that Goethe grasped the root of what Darwin indicates only superficially. Steiner noted how materialism has arisen alongside the proliferation of cliché in cultural life. Again, it has only become truer today that we are all but overcome with empty phrases, with words that replace real living concepts.

Steiner pointed to the idealism of the first third of the 19th century (eg, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel) as an example of a more principled and willful form of thinking. This last gasp of spiritual intuition waned with the rise of mechanism and logicism in the latter part of the 19th century.

Steiner lays bare the sad truth that, where the empty phrase dominates, the inner soul experience of truth dries up. In social life human beings cannot find their fellows any longer.

“When words sound forth without soul from the mouth,” Steiner says “then we pass by other human beings and cannot understand them.”

We are losing our capacity for social feeling. We have the greatest interest only in ourselves, in our own standpoints, our own opinions and points of view. What really matters is a strong individual will. But this means precisely to cultivate a heart confident enough to feel the world from every standpoint—in other words, to be able to sympathize with other individuals. Great power means not just the power to affect but to be affected by another. We must become courageous enough to allow others in without fear of being exterminated by them. A strong will doesn't mean constantly imposing on others; it means being confident enough to allow them in, to take an interest in others without fear of losing ourselves.

Steiner claims that it is only in the Spirit that human beings can find a world that is common to all. It is our sense-bound intellect, and the opinions we form with it, that separate us. If we want to come into genuine contact with each other, we have to move beyond just our materialistic concepts and opinions to reach the web of ideas that unites us all. This web of formative forces is the realm of spirit from which each of us breathes our life. If we fail to become conscious of our participation in this etheric web of forms, we remain tangled in an abstract web of our own making:

“In our institutions, we actually live very much as if we are no longer among human beings at all. We live in an [externalized] intellect in which we are entangled, not like a spider in its own web, but like countless flies that have got themselves caught in a spider's web.” —Steiner

Our thoughts must not remain so feeble that they remain up in the head; they must stream through our heart into our hands and feet and out into the world. This does not mean we can or should cast off the thoughts of modern science, but that these heady thoughts must be given a heart.

It is past time for awakened human beings to thaw the spiritual ice age that has made us grow forgetful of nature’s true mode of expression. This true mode of expression is art. Nature is artistic; nature is not merely utilitarian, as the Darwinian view would have it. Thus, science, too, must become artistic. The human being must recover their artistic capacities alongside the scientific skills and cleverness that they have developed in the modern period.

Goethe asked, “Which secret is of the highest value?” He answered, “The one that is manifest—the open secret.”

Steiner suggests repeatedly that we must discover a way to grow old without losing our inner childlikeness. The only way that the young and the old can come to speak to one another again is for the young to rediscover a way of respecting the old, and for the old to rediscover a way of remaining young in soul and spirit, despite the aging of their bodies.

Steiner speaks to the way that university students are seeking something in their education, but that they find very few, if any, thought leaders among their teachers. They find only researchers, and research institutions that focus on producing more textbooks and scientific abstractions, and of course, more industrial applications. Universities focus less and less on teaching, on initiating students into a living knowledge. Universities no longer really serve human beings; they serve Big Science. They serve the accumulation of instrumental knowledge objectified away from everything that is human.

“Human beings do not fit in with this objective being strutting around in their midst.”
—Steiner

There is no place for the human being in the picture of the universe presented to us by materialistic science. It describes the universe as if the human being did not exist. Already expelled from Eden in the Book of God, the human has been expelled once more by its own mechanizing knowledge from the living Book of Nature. Love and wisdom no longer have a place in academic research facilities and scientific laboratories. The heart has been severed from the head.

Students are seeking what Goethe had Faust seek—the All, the Universe, an intimacy with the whole of things. But in universities, then as now, students find a nothingness, nihilism—an abyss that they, if they are lucky and capable, must cross themselves. The objective knowledge they are urged to absorb is meaningless and provides no bridge between their souls and a soulless world.

Today as in Steiner’s time a century ago, there is endless talk about education, but we have forgotten what it means. Education is concerned with human development. It requires a living understanding not only of childhood but of how adults can remain young at heart even as their bodies grow old. EEducation, like philosophy, is ultimately a preparation for dying. And the best way to prepare to die is to remember who you were before you were born. This is why Steiner insists we must recognize the pre-earthly soul-spiritual reality that radiates from each child. Education must be based on our religious response to the primal phenomenon of child consciousness. Each child is a new face of God we are meant to welcome into earthly life. Education is not delivered to the child from adults. Rather, teachers and students participate together in education. Each educates the other in their own way. Learning is the growth occurring between them. 

Since the end of the 19th century something genuinely new has entered into Earth evolution. Steiner reminds his audience of his spiritual scientific account of the ages of the world (see also Schelling’s Weltalter), whereby our current Earth is seen as a heritage of prior world existences. In his Occult Science, Steiner unfolds the metamorphosis of cosmoi going back to ancient Saturn, ancient Sun, and ancient Moon, through to the present Earth phase, and on into the future phases of Jupiter, Venus, and Vulcan. These are evolutionary transformations that build up the cosmos as it exists today, present with us now as our various layerings and sheaths that include but transcend the material-sensible (ie, the etheric, astral, and I).

In short: old Saturn was “when” time itself arose, and when the precursor of the physical body was first forged. Old Sun is where the life body—the etheric forces, or the precursor of the plant realm as we now call it—was first formed. In the old Moon phase, the astral body was born, giving us our animal souls. And now on the Earth, added to this ancient embryological layering, this complex organization of physical, etheric, and astral, is the “I,” the ego—a free conscious awareness of existence, of being alive, becoming in time, thinking, feeling, willing, and co-creating the future.

With the I now awake among human beings, the further evolution of life on and beyond the Earth is up to us.

It is in the late 19th century, Steiner insists, that the dragon of materialism—Ahriman—became an undeniable presence on this planet. The Muses have fully dried up and shriveled away, leaving the modern soul with a desiccated culture of brand names and clichés. And yet materialism serves a secret evolutionary purpose. Without this period of alienation and descent into seemingly spiritless matter, true wisdom, love, and freedom would not be possible for human beings. Without it humanity could not develop the power to shape all that is human out of ourselves. Primal humanity received its thoughts from outside, as if revealed and commanded by God. Modern humanity must develop thinking out of our own will, forged in our own feeling and individual freedom. Kant was not wrong to challenge us to dare to think for ourselves. But Steiner calls us beyond Kant’s legalistic categories to the artistic creation of our own concepts (which may become expressive of common spiritual ideas).

Steiner asks what would have become of the Earth without the Christ event. He says that the incarnation had to occur when humanity still had a vestigial memory of our soul’s connection to the cosmos. Human beings did not yet stand before nothingness around the turn of the first millennium. Now, more than 2,000 years later, we have lost all tradition and all feeling for deep religious questions. We are cut off from the stream of world happenings. We’ve replaced this ancestral memory with incalculable sums of technical intelligence. If the Christ had come today, we would have medicated him. If the incarnation had not occurred when at least some people were still capable of perceiving it, the deed, the cosmic sacrifice, could not have so deeply penetrated human hearts that it continues to beat today even in our scientific heads, though we hardly hear it anymore. Even materialists are still warmed by blood. Whether we think in imaginations or in brainfolds, a living etheric fluid informs us.

…

World War I should have given the modern West more pause to consider how the march of technoscientific progress concealed a deeper rot. Indeed, Steiner did not live to see World War II but did foresee it on the horizon. Human beings fight against one another when it is the dragon we ought to be fighting. And we have Michael’s help in this fight. But Michael is only effective when we welcome him into our hearts, when we become his companions, when we eat with him and recognize in our own eating the recreation of the world—that knowledge is true communion with the universe.

Mere intelligence is dreadfully deceptive. It replaces concrete experience with dreamed-up models that isolate us from reality. Today, well into the age of the consciousness soul and nearly halfway into Michael’s several century reign, we face a reversed or negative inheritance. We have discovered that debits exceed assets when it comes to our cultural history. We are now in debt as regards the Mystery of Golgotha, as regards the Christ event, the incarnation. A new experience is being sought in the darkness of the human soul, and a loving light is being found.

How does one achieve the most primal, spiritual experiencing in the soul? The human being remains an all-embracing, unexpressed riddle. We have ignored this riddle and fallen into a scientistic nightmare. Awakening must be sought in what is super-earthly in the human spirit. This does not mean escaping to some other world, but recognizing that, while the kingdom is not of this world, it is through Christ that we are to mediate between the heaven beyond and the earth here below. We are to breathe the love of God into this world.

…

Steiner is careful to point out that it’s unhelpful to try to refute materialism theoretically—to, in other words, rely upon the methods of intellectualization in an effort to criticize and attack materialism. That is only to reinforce the deeper mood of soul out of which materialism comes. In the end there is actually something true about materialism, which is that the more people have materialistic thoughts, the more they in fact begin to think with their brains. The real danger is that materialism makes itself true. Many human beings may in fact lose and forget their spiritual nature if materialism is able to further proliferate. It will destroy our cultural life and our psychological strength, shriveling our soul forces to such an extent that we will no longer be capable of the spiritual work of bringing the worlds together, of mediating between the earthly and heavenly realms. That is the task we are called to by Christ, and Michael is our companion in that work.

The human being is a bridge—a bridge between the worlds. We are not to seek escape from earth, nor are we to sever ourselves from heaven by imagining we are merely material bodies. We are to be the bridge between spirit and matter.

Nowadays we take seriously only what waking consciousness reveals—in other words, we think what we experience through our physical senses between waking up in the morning and going to sleep at night is all that is truly real. When we go to sleep and dream, we assume we are experiencing mere fantasy. In earlier epochs, people perceived the moral-spiritual qualities of elements around them, like phosphorus (the inner light of which signaled both wisdom and the risks of Luciferic egoism on the spiritual path). They experienced the moral quality of this element like an etheric aura; they saw this directly, as we perceive the color red today. In that time, sleep and dreams still enriched daily perceptions; there was not such a sharp divide between the waking and the dreaming states. We work on outer culture while awake and upon ourselves while asleep. Today, we no longer experience sleep as a journey to the spiritual world.

Steiner pointedly asks his young audience: How do we prepare for sleep today? Do we prepare prayerfully, contemplatively, or do we prepare with a belly full of beer?

…

Scientific materialism looks upon the past as being full of childish beliefs, but it does not ask what its own depersonalization and objectification of knowledge has done to developing children through its effect on education. We teach children what we know about nature as if they were floating heads. Even worse, we treat their brains as computers and feed them a diet of stale information. Materialism insists that thinking is a product of the brain, and about modern thinking Steiner agrees this is for the most part correct—modern thinking is a product of the brain. We no longer feel our thoughts, and so our concepts die in the skull.

We must come to speak of spirit just as we speak of plants, animals, and stones, as something obvious. It must become something plainly evident, not something to be argued about or that one might demand or provide proof of. Nothing is of less importance today than the theoretical strife between materialism, spiritualism, and idealism. The refutation of materialism accomplishes nothing. Even Theosophy can become materialistic when the arguments for it are merely intellectual. The point is not to defend the word “spirit,” but to speak out of the spirit with mobile concepts. Do not fight against materialism; instead, produce living spiritual concepts. It is better to have a living understanding of chemical elements, for example, than an abstract schematic of the etheric and astral bodies.

If knowledge is to become anything real, it must follow the course taken by God with the world—that is, incarnation or materialization of the spiritual.

Steiner does not think philosophical trends play a role in renewing cultural life, but they can be read as symptoms of what comes into a society from deeper sources. We cannot start from the intellect alone, but philosophy can serve as a thermometer. It is not a heater but a means of measuring what is already happening. This is much like Hegel’s view of the role of philosophy, always coming in retrospect, looking back on the flow of cultural life.

As an example of philosophical trends, Steiner discusses the ideas of Herbert Spencer. Spenser coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” as a pithy way of summarizing Darwin’s theory of evolution. Spencer also developed the social implications of Darwinism by applying the theory of natural selection to the ethical domain. This entails the rejection of moral intuitions that stem from free individual acts of thinking and willing. Instead, people are said to express impulses either in alignment or out of alignment with existing conventions, and social forces then select whether these instinctual expressions are preserved or ostracized. Moral ideals are thus believed to evolve in a more or less utilitarian way in the cultural sphere, just as animal traits do in the natural sphere.

Steiner wrote his book Philosophy of Freedom precisely to counter this trend, to reject the application of Darwin's theory of natural selection to human society. Rather than dismissing their reality, we must strengthen our awareness of the moral intuitions in our soul. In the late 19th century, the human being, as a soul being, stood face to face with nothingness—with nihilism. This was the condition in which Nietzsche developed his philosophy, and Steiner goes into the life of Nietzsche in great detail. His spiritual development, and decline, serves as a canary in the cultural coal mine.

Real experience of the spiritual always becomes individual. Real spirituality has nothing in it that is generic. “God enters by a private door into every individual,” as Emerson put it. It follows that we must find a completely new feeling in ourselves for each individual we meet. We commit moral harm whenever we define a person based on generic characteristics. In doing this we refuse to acknowledge their soul-spiritual nature.

…

Premodern people took moral intuitions for granted. This shifted when people started needing proofs for the existence of God. No one in the first centuries of Christianity would have had any idea what Saint Anselm meant by a proof for the existence of God, much less why such a proof would be needed. The old intuitions that were given to the soul began to dry up after the 15th century. By the nineteenth century, the sense-bound intellect had finished the job. No inner effort was required for ancient people; the soul received moral truths like commandments. But modern materialist science has silenced these intuitions.

Anthroposophists must become awake in this nothingness, and in the nothingness seek the All. Our task is to cultivate our thinking so that it penetrates to the will and becomes not just observation or passive reflection but living imagination.

Intellectual thought is a mere corpse; the physical organism is the tomb of living thinking, and the receptacle of dead thoughts. Steiner claims that, among contemporary human beings, thinking is already quite dead by puberty. Adults prefer the laws of logic to guide our thoughts because living thinking feels like a swarm of ants has hijacked our brain.

Only once our thinking had dried up and died could we begin to grasp nature as a mere machine. Concepts and words must become transparent so as not to hide the world from us. Steiner asks, What is our attitude toward the nothingness? He says that the modern West has lost the capacity to remember the pre-earthly existence of the soul. We believe we are just aging bodies with no soul-spiritual origin. We look at children not as incarnate spirits, but as clay to be molded. We ought to approach each child as a riddle, a revelation of spirit in material form. The world riddle cannot be solved by intellectual means alone. As was said to Socrates by the Oracle of Delphi: “Man, know thyself.”

The human being is the solution to the world riddle. Our every living movement is a hint, a pointer for cosmic mysteries. But the human being is infinite, so the solution is never final. The world riddle must be solved again and again by each individual soul. Each human being is a world book, and each book is still being written.

…

Old moral intuitions grew out of our tribal and familial relations, out of our relations to the opposite sex, and so on. Today we need new moral intuitions, and we must find the courage to live them. Steiner points to two main moral impulses emerging today: moral love, as well as trust or confidence in the other. He says that love strengthens and emboldens the soul. It grants the will wings. Bringing love into our thinking allows the head to reconnect with the heart.

Steiner rejects Kant’s moral theory, which replaces love with duty defined as disinterested submission to something outside us. He rejects Kant’s moral theory even more forcefully than he does Kant’s theoretical limitation on knowledge. Steiner is very critical of Kant’s epistemology, but it becomes apparent that this is because Kant’s epistemology stems from his moral philosophy. Steiner really zeroes in on Kant’s deontology, his categorical imperative, and the claim that if we show any interest—indeed, if we love the person that we feel a moral responsibility toward—then the deeds that we perform on their behalf are not in fact moral but somehow ignoble. Kant makes love not only irrelevant but actually incompatible with moral action. For Steiner this can only sever us from spiritual reality by dropping a veil between us and other human beings.

Steiner argues for ethical individualism alongside a renewed sensitivity to social coexistence. Love is our only hope for an ethical future. We must be loyal to the future, as Josiah Royce would say, by forming community bonds, by becoming confident in our relationships with our fellow human beings. Each human being must be met as a walking world riddle. Social life must be built up out of the confidence that each individual has in another. Even our political activism must stem from moral love for those we seek to help, not from hate for those we believe stand in the way.

…

Steiner tells the youth movement they are justified in making demands on the old, but that they should also be Janus-faced by considering the demands that the coming youth are making on them. Young people might feel rebellious and oppositional at first, but eventually this gives way to a deeper feeling of yearning. The young tend to resist the old, to rebel against tradition, but they also feel a deeper sense of longing for meaning, truth, beauty, and goodness.

Science has been reduced to dead information, and so students no longer really grow tired when they learn. Steiner tells the youth that this is why they toss and turn at night. Knowledge has become stale and cold, so students go to school and don’t actually become tired or challenged or have any interest in what they’re learning. Part of this is a result of scientists and philosophers becoming increasingly professionalized, knowing and speaking about their subjects only behind podiums, out of books, leaving the knowledge depersonalized. And when professors leave the lectern, they no longer want to talk about their subject of expertise; they want to talk about anything else. In other words, their pursuit of scientific knowledge is merely their profession; it's not a way of life, it has no deeper significance.

Ancient people took it as a matter of course that thought is born not in human heads but in heaven. Steiner laments that “we have only an external history; we have no history of feeling, no history of thought, no history of the soul.” We no longer even know how to imagine thoughts as divine footsteps. This began to change several centuries after Christ, when people began to wonder again about the origins of thinking. Eventually, this led to nominalism. 

Nominalists began to imagine that thoughts and ideas did not descend from heaven like the footsteps of God impressed upon human souls, but rather each individual human soul is thought to develop its own concepts as a kind of inner picture of the particular perceptual experiences that it has of the sensory world. Concepts are just faded impressions of the sensory world, and they have no independent existence. The Platonic realists, in contrast, would continue to argue that ideas have a kind of real existence as universals independent of particulars. In Steiner’s view, we must not imagine these universals as static concepts but as living forms in evolving resonance with the world-process. The group-soul of particular lions, for instance, is a Real Idea that learns from and is enriched by the lives of each lion.

The scholastics worked out this debate in great detail, giving philosophical expression to a momentous spiritual event. With the subsequent rise of modern scientific materialism, external observation and the art of experimenting reached great heights because the inner conceiving of thoughts was replaced by gleaning them from external sense perceptions. Steiner points to Kepler as one of the few early modern scientists who still had a kind of residual participation in the spiritual world, reading the motions of matter as a sign of something spiritual.

Steiner discusses the effect of the microscope on our understanding of nature as increasingly spiritless. This doesn’t mean that we ought to give up the use of microscopes and telescopes, but rather that if we fail to keep our imaginations of nature in proportion, we may lose track of why matter matters to us. We may find that the infinite abysses of materiality in either direction—micro or macrocosmic—drown us.

True to his hermetic roots, Steiner says we must look for the secrets of life, of the very small, in the stars, the very large. Life radiates in from the world periphery from every direction—at least that becomes our perception when we are sensitive to etheric forces. This perception is only possible if we connect the head and the heart. We must activate our thinking, which is a problem of the will, ultimately, and of the will experienced through feeling. There are no abstract theories that can solve what we are seeking today. We must find what we are seeking in our own thinking, feeling, and willing.

…

The ancient Greeks still had a living intellectual soul, which is very different from our modern dead intellectualism. It used to be that belief was only important for the young—that they would come to believe in their older teachers until the point where they became capable of knowing for themselves. But nowadays, it is supposed to be that even adults can only have beliefs about the spiritual world. Up into the medieval time, grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric were taught as arts that teachers first performed for students to win their belief, their confidence. Then they moved on to arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music.

Speech is learned by children out of their innate power of imitation that lasts up until the time that the teeth change. We must ask how to educate children from this point of view, and how this educational process must change from the point that the teeth change through the end of adolescence. The latter is a very pressing matter, in Steiner’s view. The youth movement of Steiner’s time found nothing in schools and so drifted out into the meadows and the groves and the fields. These were the Wandervögel. Schools must keep beauty and artistic spirit alive, since Beauty is the pathway to truth.

Steiner quotes Schiller: “Only through the dawn of beauty do you penetrate to the land of knowledge.”

…

Psychophysical parallelism became popular in the late 19th century. Steiner jokes that this sort of materialism or reduction of the soul to the physical is indeed a kind of parallelism, since body and soul meet only at infinity, just like parallel lines in projective geometry. Materialistic science can never understand the etheric layer of nature; for this, our perception must become artistic. Plants can continue growing even if scientists deny anything more than physics and chemistry is going on in them, but humans must develop etheric knowledge to continue to grow and evolve.

Human life, like human history, runs its course in rhythms. Goethe reflected on the 1755 Lisbon earthquake as a child and realized that he had to outgrow childish ideas of God. We must learn to age consciously. Intellectualism is a stage reached during the consciousness soul “that brings no further progress in the sense of deepening, but only in proficiency.”

Steiner saw people’s addiction to cinema in the 1920s as a function of their fear of becoming inwardly active. The images on the screen create for us so that we do not have to become creators ourselves. Now, a century later, consider how much more addicted we are to screens that provide imaginative content to us from the outside, thereby atrophying our own organ of imaginative freedom.

It is the flow of pure thinking that we must recover. Steiner admits he was asked by Eduard von Hartmann if pure thinking is really possible. Steiner of course affirms that it is, but only as pure willing. He says you begin to think purely only when your heart overflows with love. The consciousness soul struggles with abstractions on the surface, while in the depths, the most concrete life desires are about to boil over. We know nature only through our heads, seeing color only with our eyes, but we desire also to feel it in our blood.

The infant is still all sense organ. Once we learn to speak, the head senses become dominant. We lose the ability to perceive soul-spiritual realities, but we gain conceptual prowess. Steiner speaks about Fichte’s unique walk, his way of planting his heel, and how people used to perceive the individuality of human beings more in their etheric expressions and gestures rather than in some fixed concept of them as this or that kind of person. In the realm of the artistic, everyone is an individual. Our moral as much as our scientific concepts must become artistic.

In primary school, it is far more important than the scientific content of the lessons that students be given a real sense of the individuality of their teachers. Students learn from the individuality of the teachers; they learn more from the person they are with than they do from textbooks or from scientific observations. The head cannot recognize what human beings bring with them into life from pre-earthly existence. The head is made only for grasping what is on the Earth. Spiritual insight cannot be grasped in concepts which have fixed contours and external boundaries. Human individuality reveals itself as qualitative intensities. Perceiving these intensities requires purifying our thinking by molding it into will.

“All human beings are teachers, but the teacher within us is slumbering and must be awakened, and art is the awakener.” -Steiner

For fear of losing ourselves, we do not fully encounter the individuality of others. We have entered an epoch when human egos must meet one another unveiled, when we must see each other I to I. In the ancient Indian epoch, people lived in their senses in a fuller way and still perceived the soul-spiritual workings of the world. The physical was not mere illusion but the expression of spirit. Ancient India perceived the human I through the sheath of the physical body. Ancient Persia perceived the human I through the etheric sheath. In the ancient Egyptian epoch, the I was perceived through the astral sheath. Today we are learning to encounter one another I to I. This is frightening for most of us.

“Today we must feel the intensity of being surrounded by a thinking bound to nature, which gained life force from nature but which devours the human being.” —Steiner

Earlier civilizations perceived the kingdoms of nature as aspects of the human being. Now we understand humanity as the apex predator that evolved out of nature. “Nature has become for us a human-devouring dragon.” Is this dragon a being of our own creation? Only if we have not succumbed to belief in the material world.

We have sought in the modern period to reconcile our materialistic cosmology, such as the Kant-Laplace nebular hypothesis, with our moral ideals, but reconciling physical with moral laws is, finally, impossible. Steiner points to the fact that matter, in the form of what we eat, is continually being changed into nothingness and created anew in us. We turn food into thoughts. The abstract laws of thermodynamics—the conservation of energy and entropy—cannot possibly be reconciled with our moral intuitions. Moral laws and thermodynamic laws are in fundamental conflict.

Today every science has been conquered by Ahriman. There is nowhere to run from the dragon. We have help in this battle, but Michael must be built a chariot to enter into our civilization: that chariot is education. Education is the invitation offered by the old to the young to grow into this earthly realm, bearing the gifts of the spiritual world. Renewal of the spirit of education is the chariot upon which Michael is to ride into this world to defeat the dragon. It is the task of the human to make the spirit brought to earth by Christ into a living content of this world. The human being must discover a “mediating spirituality.”

We are called to be mediators between the earthly and the spiritual, to bring about a reconciliation that overcomes the divisions wrought by materialism.