Steiner's diagnosis that the nineteenth century idea of nationality arises when a people binds its feeling life to one Archangel and forgets that the Archangels cooperate.
Nationality as Archangel Egoism in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's diagnosis of the modern nationality idea as a social form of spiritual egoism. In The Karma of Vocation (GA 172, lectures of November 1916, Dornach), Steiner teaches that the Archangels, the second rank of beings above the human being, guide the peoples of the earth not singly but as a cooperating company. When the feeling life of a population leans toward one Archangel alone and overlooks that cooperation, the nineteenth century idea of nationality arises. The doctrine has a personal counterpart: the believer who renames his own Angel "God" practices a concealed private egoism, and the nation that adores only its own guiding Archangel repeats that gesture socially. Spoken midway through the First World War, the teaching reads competing nationalisms as misdirected reverence, and it names one remedy: recognition of the full spiritual hierarchies and of the cooperation among the guides of all peoples.
Nationality as Archangel Egoism names one of the sharpest political teachings in Steiner's wartime lectures. Peoples really are guided by Archangels, he says, yet these beings work together as a company. The nationality idea of the nineteenth century arises when a people attaches its feeling life to a single Archangel, so that what looks like patriotic devotion is, seen spiritually, egoism operating at the scale of a whole society.
In Steiner's Own Words
But in the relationship between human beings and the archangel hierarchy, we are no longer where human beings know much; they talk a lot about it now, but they know little. Today, we do indeed profess our belief, not in the hierarchy of archangels, but very often in one archangel; not clearly expressed professions of faith, but a leaning, an emotional leaning toward one archangel or another. In the 19th century, this bore particularly strong fruit in at least one area: in the emergence of nationalist ideas, which are unconsciously based on overlooking the interaction of the archangels and bowing down only to one archangel. This is based on something similar to egoism, only something socially egoistic, like bowing down to one angel.
What it Means Today
The historian Elie Kedourie opened his study Nationalism (1960) with a famous claim: nationalism is a doctrine invented in Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Writing at the London School of Economics, Kedourie treated the nation not as an ancient fact of nature but as a recent intellectual construction, assembled out of post-Kantian philosophy and carried by intellectuals until whole populations felt it as self-evident. Steiner's lecture of 26 November 1916 arrives at the same dating from the other side. Where Kedourie tracks the doctrine through Fichte and the heirs of Herder, Steiner asks what stands behind the feeling itself, and answers: a real being, one Archangel, received in isolation from the company of Archangels with whom it works. Both accounts refuse to naturalize nationalism. For Kedourie it is a constructed doctrine mistaken for nature; for Steiner it is a genuine spiritual relation deformed by exclusivity.
The practical reading follows. Honouring the guiding genius of one's own people is not the error; the error begins where the feeling life stops there, and the cooperation among the guides of all peoples drops out of sight. Thalira synthesis: nationality as Archangel egoism is private angel worship raised one storey, the same misaddressed devotion performed by a crowd rather than by a single soul. A reader who holds Kedourie and Steiner together can watch modern national feeling with double vision, seeing at once the constructed doctrine and the misdirected reverence inside it.
Where to Read More
- The Karma of Vocation, GA 172
- Find The Karma of Vocation at SteinerBooks
- The Shahnameh (Book of Kings) by Ferdowsi: Complete Guide to the Persian National Epic
- Occult America by Mitch Horowitz: How Mysticism Shaped a Nation
- The Mission of Individual Folk Souls by Rudolf Steiner: Nations, Archangels, and Destiny