The three indestructible forces of the soul, faith carried by the astral body, love by the etheric body, hope by the physical body.
Faith, love, hope are, for Rudolf Steiner, the three fundamental forces of the human soul that can never be torn out of it. In the Vienna lecture of June 1911, he bound each force to one member of the human being and to one stage of cosmic evolution. Faith feeds the astral body, love the etheric body, hope the physical body. Deprive any of them, and the soul, then the body, falls ill.
Faith, Love, Hope in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's account of the three indestructible fundamental forces of the soul, each anchored in one member of the human being. In the lecture of 14 June 1911 in Vienna, printed in The Mission of the New Spirit Revelation (GA 127), faith is named the force of the astral body, the body of faith, formed during the Old Moon stage. Love is the force of the etheric body, the body of love, formed during the Old Sun stage. Hope is the sustaining force of the physical body, the body of hope, formed during Old Saturn. Steiner taught that starving any one of these forces sickens both soul and body, and that spiritual knowledge nourishes them back to health.
In Steiner's Own Words
The germ of the physical human being was laid on the old Saturn. How so? Spiritually it was laid there, namely in that which should continue: hope. Therefore, the physical body can justifiably be called the body of hope. The characteristic of the physical body is its density. When the waves of the soul's life beat against the human body over and over again and penetrate it more and more, it is permeated by hope, by the certainty that something will develop out of it that lasts forever, that is imperishable.
What it Means Today
Steiner's central claim in this lecture is medical as much as devotional: when the soul is robbed of what it can believe in, hold dear, and hope toward, the deprivation works downward into the body and makes it sick. That claim has a striking modern parallel in the work of Aaron Antonovsky, the medical sociologist who, in his 1979 book Health, Stress and Coping, named a quality he called the "sense of coherence," the felt confidence that life is comprehensible, manageable, and meaningful. Antonovsky's salutogenesis asked not why people fall ill, but what keeps them well, and his answer turned on exactly the inner orientations Steiner placed at the soul's foundation. Anthroposophic medicine, organised through the Medical Section at the Goetheanum in Dornach, took up this salutogenic question directly. Clinicians at hospitals such as the Filderklinik in Filderstadt and the Ita Wegman Clinic in Arlesheim work from the premise that the patient's inner life, the will to trust, to love, and to hope, is itself a healing force to be nourished rather than bypassed. Thalira synthesis: where Antonovsky measured a sense of coherence as a buffer against illness, Steiner had already located its three roots in the bodies themselves, naming faith the food of the astral body, love the food of the etheric body, and hope the food of the physical body, so that to lose hope is, quite literally for him, to loosen the body's hold on its own continuance.
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