GA 349: The Life of Man on Earth and the Essence of Christianity

Themes and Structure

The volume opens with colour. Steiner treats yellow and blue not as finished properties of things but as the outcome of processes, light seen through darkness and darkness seen through light, and he carries this into the plant world. A yellow blossom makes its colour in the blossom itself; in a blue flower such as chicory the decisive process works in the root, and what appears above ground is only its outcome. This distinction between blossom processes and root processes then becomes a tool he applies to living nature generally, including, in the second session, the outward variety of the human family, an argument framed in the vocabulary of its day. The early sessions also turn the same lens inward, to the red of the blood and the whitish blue of the nerve, reading the two colours as signs of opposite processes in us, one building life up and one breaking it down.

A second group of sessions builds the fourfold picture of the human being. Steiner starts from the difference between living and speaking. Life burns; speech, he argues, does something stranger, binding nitrogen in a process he compares to the formation of cyan compounds, a mild self poisoning that must be balanced from within. Whatever lives in speech he calls the astral body, distinct from the etheric body that repairs us in sleep, and above both stands the I, the member through which the child learns to walk, to speak, and finally to think. The animal, he says, has speech organs but cannot take hold of them in this way, and the difference marks off what is animal in us, the imprint the astral body makes on the body, from what is human.

From there the questions push toward destiny. Why do children resemble their parents? Not, Steiner answers, through inheritance working like a stamp, but because the small child is the greatest imitator on earth, shaping its own body in imitation of the people around it. He describes the germ from which a body grows as matter thrown into complete disorder, so that the cosmos, not the parents, can order it anew. Why do we not remember earlier lives? Because life itself is a slow forgetting of what we brought with us at birth. "Our lifetime is approximately the forgetting time," he tells the men, and from the way memory thins across a biography he sketches, half as arithmetic and half as image, the centuries a soul needs between death and a new birth.

Two sessions widen the frame to the earth and the heavens. One takes up Dante, whose earth centred cosmos Steiner refuses to dismiss as mere error, treating it instead as an honest picture of a different age of consciousness that Copernicus replaced rather than corrected. Another considers the continents themselves, which he describes as floating masses held in their places not from below but from the surrounding cosmos of the fixed stars, an image that turns geography into astronomy.

The final sessions answer the question named in the volume's title. Steiner sets the hardening, mineralising tendency he calls ahrimanic against the softening, dissolving tendency he calls luciferic, shows both at work in health and illness, and argues that every real remedy must lean the organism toward one side or the other to restore its balance. The Christ he then presents as the being who holds the middle between the two. He recalls the old mysteries in which the student of the sun's secrets was called a sun disciple and, when fully trained, a sun master, and reads the baptism in the Jordan as the moment this solar wisdom entered Jesus of Nazareth. Against the local gods of particular places, which he calls earth religions, he sets the thought of Pentecost, one religion for all people, and closes with death, resurrection, and ascension read as events in the life of the earth itself.