Fall and Redemption (Living Knowledge of Nature) gathers eleven lectures that Rudolf Steiner gave at Dornach across January 1923, a few short weeks after the first Goetheanum burned on New Year's Eve. The opening words read out the names of friends who sent their sympathy after the fire, and the grief of that moment colours the whole series. The volume, catalogued in the Collected Works as GA 220, takes up a single large question from many sides: how did human beings lose their old, living feeling for nature, and what does it mean to win a knowing relationship with nature back again?
These lectures circulate in English as a working translation prepared by the Steiner Online Library; no settled published English edition carries the full cycle, so renderings of individual passages may vary.
Place in Steiner's Work
By 1923 Steiner had been building anthroposophy for two decades, and the lectures of this winter sit at a hinge in that effort. The Goetheanum fire had destroyed the carved wooden building that housed the movement, and Steiner repeatedly urges that the Anthroposophical Society must now find a firmer footing and a clearer sense of its task. That call would ripen at year's end in the Christmas Conference, when the Society was refounded. GA 220 belongs to the run of lecture courses that prepared the ground for that renewal, and it does so by returning to first questions about knowledge itself.
The cycle also sits close to Steiner's wider concern with the history of human consciousness. He had long taught that the way people experience themselves and the world has changed across the ages, and here he traces a particular loss: the fading of an inward, felt knowledge of nature that older humanity once possessed. The lectures speak to readers who already know the broad anthroposophical picture and want to see how its account of knowledge bears on the rise of modern science.
Read in this light, GA 220 is less a course on nature than a course on the conditions of knowing. Steiner is asking what it costs a civilisation to trade an inward, participatory relationship with the world for an outward, measuring one, and what a renewed inwardness might look like that does not simply revive old superstition. That double question gives the series its tension and explains why it ranges so widely, from the chemistry of folk wisdom to the closure of the philosophical schools of late antiquity.
Themes and Structure
Steiner builds the series around a contrast between two ways of standing toward nature. In earlier ages, he argues, a person experienced the processes of the outer world by first experiencing them within the body. When someone ate salt and dissolved it, the inner forming of the salt shape in the etheric body let them know, from inside, that salt takes the form of a cube. The thoughts of the world were felt as one's own inner thoughts. He calls this an inward, picture-rich way of knowing, dreamlike yet vivid.
From roughly the fifteenth century onward, he says, this capacity faded. People who looked inward found themselves empty and were thrown back on the outer senses to learn what nature is. To dramatise the turn, Steiner reads three figures from the close of the sixteenth century: Giordano Bruno, whose grand cosmic images stay blurred; Jakob Boehme, whose stammering speech of Salt, Mercury and Sulphur reaches back toward the older wisdom yet cannot quite reconstruct it; and Francis Bacon, who turns the mind wholly outward to gather the laws of sense-nature. Each, in Steiner's reading, strains to know the human being and falls short, marking what he names the loss of the human being for human awareness.
A long thread of the cycle works through the three principles Boehme drew from folk wisdom. Steiner reframes Salt as the thinking and forming process, the hardening that one once felt while thinking; the warming, willing process he aligns with Sulphur; and a middle, flowing process with Mercury. He is careful to say these words mean something other than the substances of the chemistry lab, and that without the anthroposophical view Boehme's sentences dissolve into mist.
From this analysis the title themes emerge. Steiner reads the old consciousness of sin as arising when the soul felt itself sinking too deeply into the physical body during sleep, a sinking that dimmed its freedom in the spirit. The fall is thus bound up with the soul's descent into matter and with the loss of living knowledge; the redemption lies in a new path that meets nature with spirit rather than abstraction. In the later lectures Steiner describes elemental beings that once dwelt in the human organs and taught us from within. As humanity grew toward freedom these beings lost their dwelling, and he frames our task as a kind of gratitude: to seek the spirit again in what we see and hear and touch, so that what we once received can be repaid.
Other strands round out the cycle. Steiner contrasts Greek soul-life, still close to the human being, with the Roman and post-fourth-century world in which the old clairvoyant culture was destroyed. He dwells on the burning of temples and the closing of the philosophical school in Athens, reading these not as isolated acts of intolerance but as outward signs of a deep change in the constitution of the soul. The same shift, he suggests, later made the natural science of the modern period both possible and one-sided.
He weighs the medieval dispute between realism and nominalism, the quarrel over whether general ideas name real things or only words, and shows how that argument prepares the modern habit of treating concepts as mere labels laid over a world that science alone describes. Then he closes the series with a lecture on electricity, asking what kind of nature-force the modern age has unlocked. For Steiner electricity is not simply a useful power but a force that sits below the ordinary level of life and warmth, and he frames its mastery as a question of human responsibility rather than mere technical triumph. Throughout, the structure is cumulative rather than linear: each lecture re-enters the central theme from a fresh angle, so that the cycle is best read whole rather than in single lectures.
Glossary Terms from this Volume
Several entries in the Thalira glossary draw directly on GA 220. This page serves as the hub for those terms; follow each link for a focused study of the idea.
Where to Read It
You can read the full text of the lectures at the Rudolf Steiner Archive, which hosts the German originals and the English working translations side by side. For print and bookshop editions of Steiner's related nature and knowledge cycles, search the publisher catalogue at SteinerBooks. Because the full GA 220 cycle has no single settled English title in print, you may find the individual lectures most easily through the Archive.
Continue Your Study
- Browse the full Thalira glossary to see how the ideas in this volume connect to Steiner's wider vocabulary.
- Trace the theme of human knowledge through related entries such as Salt, Mercury, Sulphur, which unpacks the threefold inner process at the heart of these lectures.
- Return to the GA Work Library to find neighbouring volumes from Steiner's Collected Works and follow the development of his thought across the years.