Interest is the English working title given to GA 155, a gathering of public and members' lectures Rudolf Steiner delivered in Scandinavia between 1912 and 1914. The volume collects ten lectures across four short cycles, three of them given in Norrkoping, Sweden, with the opening pair spoken in Copenhagen. Though the bound German edition carries the single catalogue title, the contents move through three connected questions: what gives life its meaning, where morality is rooted, and how the Christ impulse lives inside the individual soul. The thread that ties them is the moral force Steiner calls interest, the quality by which a person genuinely turns toward the world and other beings rather than withdrawing into the self.
Place in Steiner's Work
By 1912 Steiner had spent more than a decade building the cognitive and cosmological framework of anthroposophy, from the schooling path of inner development to the great evolutionary picture of Saturn, Sun, and Moon. GA 155 marks a turn from that architecture toward its ethical consequence. Having described how the human being is constituted and how spiritual knowledge is won, Steiner now asks what such knowledge obliges us to become. The lectures sit alongside his written ethic of freedom: where the earlier book argued that genuine moral action springs from individual insight rather than external command, these talks describe the inner faculties through which that insight ripens into deed.
The dating matters. The Copenhagen and first Norrkoping lectures of May 1912 come just as Steiner is moving toward the formal independence of the Anthroposophical Society from the Theosophical movement. The July 1914 cycle on Christ and the human soul falls on the very eve of the First World War, and its meditations on guilt, conscience, and reconciliation read with unusual weight against that approaching darkness. GA 155 therefore belongs to the mature middle period, when Steiner was translating a spiritual cosmology into a practical doctrine of how to live.
The setting also shapes the tone. These are lectures given to a small Scandinavian audience, several of them open to the general public, and Steiner pitches them as foundations rather than advanced esoteric instruction. He repeatedly insists that anthroposophy is not the founding of a new religion or sect but an attempt to extend the rigour of natural science into the life of soul and spirit. That self-description gives the volume an accessible quality: it asks the listener to test its claims against ordinary moral experience, the way one tests an interest in a child or a friend, rather than to accept doctrine on authority.
Themes and Structure
The volume opens with two Copenhagen lectures on the meaning of life. Steiner begins from the plain fact that everything in nature arises and decays, and asks whether human existence is more than another instance of that perishing. He observes the plant world budding in spring and withering in autumn, the long-lived trees that still finally pass, even the continents that rise and sink across vast ages. Set against that universal decay, a single earthly life looks like a brief flicker. His answer reframes the question through repeated earthly lives: meaning is not handed to us ready-made but is woven across incarnations, so that each life carries forward what earlier ones prepared and hands on its own fruit to those still to come. The meaning we seek is therefore not a fixed object to be found but a work continually under construction.
The central cycle, given in Norrkoping and titled in English as Anthroposophical Ethics, is the heart of the book. Here Steiner traces how the great virtues change their form across history. He notes how many systems of ethics philosophers have built, from Plato and Aristotle through the Stoics to modern thinkers, and argues that none reaches the living source of moral action. To find that source he follows wisdom as the gift of the ancient East, then valour and bravery as the chief inheritance of the early peoples of Europe, who carried, he says, a superabundance of inner force they could pour out in deeds. He then shows how, in a figure such as Francis of Assisi, that raw bravery is inwardly transformed by the Christ impulse into selfless love. The virtue is not abolished; its energy is redirected to a higher aim. This account of how the virtues do not vanish but ripen into new shapes underlies the glossary study of the metamorphosis of the virtues.
Within this cycle Steiner places his striking analysis of interest itself. The sentient soul, he says, can stray toward two opposite poles. At one extreme lies apathy, the person who passes everything by and lives only in himself; at the other lies a fanaticism that overheats. Between them stands healthy interest, the active turning of attention and warmth toward beings and things. Steiner insists this matters more morally than the repeated preaching of love:
"Apathy separates us from the world, while interest unites us with it."
Real interest in another, he argues, awakens compassion and right action from within, where mere exhortation cannot. To widen one's interests, taking in souls of different temperament, nation, and conviction, is how the brotherhood of humanity is actually built.
The final cycle, Christ and the Human Soul, with its companion public lecture on anthroposophy and Christianity, turns to the most intimate religious question of the book. Steiner names a real difficulty for anyone who accepts both teachings at once. If karma is the long self-balancing of deed and consequence across lives, so that every debt is eventually discharged by the one who incurred it, how can there also be a forgiveness of sins granted from outside? Many, he notes, simply set the two ideas side by side and feel the tension. Rather than letting one cancel the other, he reads them together through the scene of Christ between the two thieves, where the repentant man is promised paradise that very day. Steiner suggests that the Christ impulse works on a layer of the human being that karmic compensation alone does not reach, touching the part of the self that stands in relation to the whole community of souls rather than only settling a private account. Forgiveness, on this reading, does not erase the consequences a person must still meet; it changes who that person becomes while meeting them.
Glossary Terms from this Volume
These Thalira glossary entries draw directly on the lectures gathered in GA 155. Each links to its full study page:
Where to Read It
You can read the full text of these lectures online at the Rudolf Steiner Archive, which hosts the available English translations of the GA 155 cycles, including the lectures on the meaning of life, anthroposophical ethics, and Christ and the human soul. For print and study editions in English, search the publisher catalogue at SteinerBooks, where the ethics and Christ-and-the-soul cycles appear under their separate English titles rather than the single catalogue number.
Continue Your Study
To follow the ideas in this volume further:
- Begin with the four entries above, then return to the full Thalira glossary to see how interest, virtue, and conscience connect to the wider vocabulary of anthroposophy.
- Read the entry on The Metamorphosis of the Virtues alongside Moral Interest to see how Steiner links the changing of the virtues to the single faculty of attention.
- Pair The Forgiveness of Sins with The Meaning of Life to trace how karma and Christian reconciliation are held together across this volume.