Steiner's teaching that all human souls descended from one sea of divine-spiritual life and will reunite in one future goal, the Christ, across the two halves of Earth evolution.
Common Origin and Common Goal in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's name for the double feeling that binds humanity together: the memory that all human souls once lived in a single sea of divine-spiritual life before their first incarnation, and the certainty that all souls will reunite in a single future goal. Steiner develops the idea in the Bremen lecture of 26 November 1910, published in Paths and Goals of the Spiritual Human Being (GA 125). Three or four thousand years ago, he says, every soul still felt its common origin, and the ancient mystery schools built human fellow feeling on that memory. As the memory cooled, the Mystery of Golgotha planted its replacement: a shared future in the Christ, toward which humanity travels through the remaining half of Earth evolution into the Jupiter state. Feeling for origin becomes feeling for goal; kinship of source becomes solidarity of destination.
Common Origin and Common Goal names the axis on which Steiner hangs the whole story of human fellowship. Ancient peoples loved one another because they remembered coming from one divine source; modern people must learn to love one another by willing one shared future. In the Bremen lecture of 1910, Steiner shows envy and lying as the forces that fray this bond, and the Christ as the power that reties it.
In Steiner's Own Words
Just as our origin is common to all of us, just as all human souls sprang from a common source, so too all human souls will come together in a common goal. And how can we reach this goal so that we can continue to evolve once Earth has achieved its own goal and the material sphere beneath us is dissipating and falling away? How can we have a common understanding of this goal so that we proceed into our future together? The awareness of what we have in common will need to extend into the deepest sinews of our soul. This is only possible if we develop a feeling for our future, similar to the feeling people in ancient times had for their human origin, a feeling that is growing ever colder among humanity.
What it Means Today
Four decades after the Bremen lecture, a French Jesuit paleontologist reached a strikingly similar architecture from the opposite direction. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) argued in The Phenomenon of Man (published posthumously in French in 1955, in English in 1959 with an introduction by the biologist Julian Huxley) that evolution is convergent: matter complexifies into life, life into thought, thought into a planetary web of mind he called the noosphere, and the noosphere presses toward a final point of unification he named Omega and identified with the cosmic Christ of Pauline theology. Steiner's polarity maps onto Teilhard's almost term for term. The sea of divine-spiritual life from which souls descended is the common Alpha; the gathering of humanity in the Christ for the Jupiter evolution is Omega under another name.
The differences are just as instructive. Teilhard built his goal-point out of biology and left the origin to physics, while Steiner grounds both poles in the soul itself: the origin was once a living memory, and its cooling is the precise reason a goal-feeling must now be cultivated deliberately. Thalira synthesis: Steiner treats human fellowship as a conserved quantity that must change carriers, so the work that memory of the source once did for kinship, the will toward a shared future must now do, and a culture that has dropped the first without building the second hangs between trapezes. Read beside GA 125, Teilhard stands as an independent witness to the same convergence, working from the rocks upward rather than from the spirit downward.
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