Steiner's reading of modern history since 1413 as the age of the consciousness soul, when human beings must form their judgments independently instead of receiving them from tradition.
History and the Consciousness Soul in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's account of the modern era, dated from roughly the year 1413, as the period in which the consciousness soul (Bewusstseinsseele) becomes the driving force of historical life. In From Symptom to Reality in Modern History (GA 185), delivered at Dornach in October 1918, Steiner argued that the Avignon papacy, the rise of national feeling, the Reformation, and English parliamentary government are outer signs of one inner change: human beings ceasing to receive their convictions from tradition and beginning to form judgments for themselves. He placed this turning point at the opening of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch in the early fifteenth century, and he read the crises of the modern age as the growing pains of self-reliant consciousness. The concept allows a student of Steiner to treat political and religious history as the biography of an awakening faculty.
Open a school textbook and modern Europe appears as a parade of battles and treaties. History and the Consciousness Soul names Steiner's counter-reading, set out in lectures at Dornach in October 1918: the events of the modern era, from Hus at Constance to the English civil wars, trace the slow birth of one soul faculty, the capacity of each person to judge for themselves.
In Steiner's Own Words
Whenever one stage of evolution which is to some extent complete in itself passes over into another stage we must always speak of approximation. It is impossible to determine the precise moment when an individual arrives at puberty; the onset is gradual and then runs its course to full physical maturity. And the same applies, of course, to the year 1413 which marks the birth of the Consciousness Soul. The new consciousness develops gradually and does not immediately manifest itself everywhere in full maturity and with maximum vigour. We completely fail to understand historical change unless we give due consideration to the moment when events take on a new orientation.
What it Means Today
Steiner delivered these lectures at Dornach in October 1918, in neutral Switzerland, weeks before the Armistice. He offered his audience no consolation. He argued instead that the catastrophe outside belonged to the same development he had traced from 1413: the consciousness soul prying individuals loose from inherited certainties. An age that requires every person to verify their own judgments will first produce isolation and conflict, he held, much as adolescence produces turbulence before maturity. On this reading the modern era is a schooling, and its crises are the curriculum rather than interruptions of it.
The most sustained continuation of this reading in English came through Owen Barfield, the anthroposophist among the Oxford Inklings. His History in English Words (1926) followed the same turning point philologically, watching meanings migrate inward in the centuries after 1400 as words for outer condition became words for inner character. Barfield named the process the evolution of consciousness, and historians of ideas still draw on his books, often without knowing the Dornach lectures standing behind them.
As a working tool the concept is a question you can put to any modern institution. What stage of judgment does a parliament, a newspaper, or a church assume in the people it addresses: the received kind, or the self-won kind? Thalira reads this as the grading function of modern history; the era keeps testing how far our judgments are actually our own.
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