The wisdom of the human being. Steiner's name for the consciousness that arises when the human being awakens to itself as both natural and spiritual.
Anthroposophia is Rudolf Steiner's name for the wisdom of the human being, fused from the Greek Anthropos (the human) and Sophia (wisdom). Where ancient Sophia was experienced as a divine wisdom shining into the soul from outside, Anthroposophia is the same wisdom risen now from within the awakened human being, carrying his own being inside it as it returns to consciousness.
In Steiner's Own Words
These are the things through which anthroposophy also points to what is important in social relationships today. And it wants to express something of this in its name, this anthroposophy, anthroposophia, which is also a wisdom. During the Greek period, the human being was taken for granted. Sophia was already a human wisdom because the human being was still full of light and wisdom. Today, when one says Sophia, people only think of the ghost of Sophia, of science. Therefore, one must appeal to the human being one is calling upon, to the Anthropos: Anthroposophia. One must point out that this is something that comes from the human being, that shines out of the human being, that blossoms out of the best forces of the human being.
What it Means Today
Anthroposophia is best understood as the Western counterpart of Sophiology, the Russian Orthodox stream that Vladimir Solovyov opened in the 1890s and Sergei Bulgakov carried into systematic theology in the 1920s. Solovyov and Bulgakov treated divine Wisdom as a personal reality, Sophia, who closes the distance between God and creation and who, in Solovyov's phrase, holds the cosmos together as its inward soul. Steiner stood inside the same Sophianic tradition but gave it a different historical task. He saw that the Sophia who once entered the soul from outside, who could be addressed as a celestial figure or sung to in a love poem like Dante's, can no longer be reached that way by modern consciousness. She has to be brought forth out of the human being herself.
That is why he renamed her. Anthroposophia is Sophia after she has passed through the human soul and now bears that soul inside her. The practice this points toward is not devotion to an external goddess of wisdom and not the cleverness of a science detached from spirit. It is the patient work of bringing thinking, feeling, and willing to a clarity in which knowledge of the world and self-knowledge become the same act. When that happens, the wisdom of the human being shines, in Steiner's words, out of the best forces of the human being. Anthroposophy grew from the seed of Goethe the scientist, whose participatory method Steiner extended into spiritual research. Anthroposophy can take up each of the twelve world-outlooks in turn, for it dwells one-sidedly in none of them. Sharing a source in GA 211, see The Three Stages of Sleep.
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