I had a bad migraine day yesterday and was grateful for Dale Brunsvold's audio versions of Steiner to give me an enlightening distraction from the state.
I found much to appreciate in the lectures, which focused on Steiner's intellectual and spiritual history of Man since the time of Ancient Egypt including the work of what he terms the Luciferic and Ahrimanic impulses.
These represent the false ideals of losing individually into a primal will-less consciousness and the will towards a consciousness, rationalist, materialism. The Luciferic yearns for the immersive spirituality of childhood or Hunter gatherer animus; the Ahrimanic for science, control, order, mastery. Each has some good, both are ultimately fatal.
Anyway, I found many sharp insights and understandings but also something very important missing. Then I realized it was God who was missing - specifically the recognition of divine providence... of the purpose and phases of history as the product of a personal Creator God.
Everything about Steiner's scheme describes history as unfolding towards a purpose and according to a scheme, and a scheme that is relevant, indeed unavoidable, for every person as an individual. This only makes sense, and carries a moral imperative, if it is a divine scheme - and if the divine scheme comes from a God who has our best interests at heart. If the scheme Just Is, then there is no reason except expediency to embrace it.
I then recognized that this unsaid presence of God, the Christian God, is necessarily implied by Steiner's system - the lack of explicit mention of which is confusing. And it has been profoundly distorting to Steiner's legacy - which has been broken and dispersed and assimilated into mainstream New Age and Leftist political movements.
But if the reader fills in this explanatory gap, and restores God at the head of Steiner's universe - which he personally would have agreed with - things suddenly become considerably clearer and more coherent.
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