Tree of Life, catalogued as Volume 162 of Rudolf Steiner's collected works, gathers thirteen lectures he gave at Dornach, Switzerland, across the summer of 1915, from the Whitsun season in late May through the first days of August. These were not public addresses but talks to members of the Anthroposophical Society, delivered beside the rising timbers of the first Goetheanum while the First World War pressed on the world outside. The volume takes its English name from its concluding cycle on the biblical Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, yet its true subject is broader: how human consciousness is bought at the price of an inner dying, and how thinking, feeling, and willing may again be brought into a living relation with the cosmos.
Place in Steiner's Work
By 1915 Steiner had already laid down the architecture of his spiritual science in written books such as Theosophy and Occult Science, and had given hundreds of lectures on the Gospels, karma, and cosmic evolution. The Dornach talks of this period belong to a later, more intimate phase of his teaching. He is no longer only mapping the higher worlds; he is asking how a modern soul, shaped by natural science and cut off from older forms of vision, can find a genuine footing in the spiritual. The building of the Goetheanum gave these lectures their setting and much of their mood, and the war gave them their gravity.
The volume sits close to Steiner's lectures on the cycle of the year and on the human being as a small image of the greater world. It shares with them a central conviction: that the year breathes, that the earth wakes in winter and sleeps in summer, and that the festivals mark real turning points in this cosmic rhythm. Where those companion cycles dwell mainly on the seasons, Volume 162 turns the same insight inward, toward the hidden processes by which a person becomes aware at all. It is a bridge between Steiner's cosmology and his practical concern for the inner life of the individual seeker.
Readers who know Steiner's earlier Christ lectures will recognise a familiar figure here, treated in a new key. Rather than narrating the events of the Gospels, he asks what it means to understand them from within, and he insists that the deeper one enters the question of Christ, the more it opens rather than closes. This willingness to let a mystery grow larger under study, instead of reducing it to a formula, is one of the marks of the volume, and it sets the tone for everything that follows. The lectures reward slow reading precisely because they refuse quick answers.
Themes and Structure
The opening lecture, given at Whitsuntide, sets the keynote. Steiner argues that consciousness in the physical world rests not on growth but on its opposite. Where nature only buds and sprouts, no awareness can arise; awareness dawns only where the soul breaks down and consumes the body's own upbuilding forces. Waking life wears the organism away, and sleep restores it, so that each person carries within a small winter and a small summer. From this he draws the three great sayings that thread through the cycle: that out of the divine we are born, that in Christ we pass through death, and that through the Holy Spirit we are raised again.
The middle lectures widen this picture. Steiner takes up the human relation to the wider cosmos, the meaning of certain Gospel words about heaven and earth passing away, and what he calls the lost union of speaking and thinking. He describes how, in earlier ages, speech and thought were experienced as a single stream, and how their separation shaped the modern intellect. Running underneath is a warning he states plainly: modern culture has trained itself to look only at what is growing and measurable, and so has made itself blind to the spiritual, which shows itself first where things begin to dissolve.
He grounds this claim in vivid, everyday pictures. A decaying tree trunk, he says, is the first thing to reveal its spiritual character, because the withdrawing of physical life lets the spirit become visible. The point is not a taste for decay but a correction of vision. We are so trained to trust only what flourishes that we let everything else drop out of reality altogether, and with it drops the whole life of the soul. Steiner also turns a sharp eye on the culture of his day, on a public and a press that greet any serious view of the world with indifference, and he treats this apathy not as a small failing but as a symptom of an age that has lost its feeling for truth.
The final four lectures form the cycle that gives the volume its title. Here Steiner reads the account of the Fall as a key to inner life. The eating of the Tree of Knowledge, he suggests, corresponds to the way we now form detached concepts and images of the outer world, ideas emptied of inner life. The Tree of Life, guarded and withheld, points to the creative forces of feeling and will, which have become enclosed within the person and shut off from the cosmos. In the lecture on harmonizing thinking, feeling, and willing, he sketches the task: to bring warmth and life back into cold thought, and to open the will again toward the world, so that the two trees may in a sense be reunited within the awakened human being.
Throughout, Steiner keeps returning to a single practical point. One need not be clairvoyant to take part in this work. A soul that honestly studies the results of spiritual research, and lets them take hold of its feeling and not only its intellect, is already carried into a living relation with the spiritual world. The lectures are meant less as information than as an inner exercise.
Glossary Terms from this Volume
The following entry in the Thalira glossary draws directly on this volume for its source material. It gathers and defines a concept that Steiner develops across these lectures, and this study guide serves as its hub within the GA Work Library.
Where to Read It
You can read the full text of these lectures at the Rudolf Steiner Archive, which hosts English translations of the collected works and is the standard open reference for Steiner's lecture cycles. Visit the archive at rsarchive.org and search within the collected works for Volume 162.
For a printed English edition, or to check current publication status, search the catalogue of SteinerBooks, the principal English-language publisher of Steiner's work: SteinerBooks search for Tree of Life. Titles and volume groupings sometimes differ between the German originals and the various English translations, so it is worth comparing the lecture dates listed above against any edition you find.
Continue Your Study
If this volume has opened questions for you, several paths lead further into the same territory:
- Browse the full Thalira glossary to see how single terms from across Steiner's work are defined and cross-linked.
- Return to the GA Work Library to find study guides for neighbouring volumes on the cycle of the year, consciousness, and the human being as microcosm.
- Follow the term above into its own entry, where the imagery of the two trees is set beside related ideas of knowledge, life, and the Fall.