Michael's heavenly teaching given to discarnate souls of the Platonic and Aristotelian streams at the dawn of the fifteenth century, the heavenly preparation for earthly Anthroposophy.
The Supersensible School of Michael in Anthroposophy is the great heavenly teaching that the Archangel Michael gave, at the beginning of the fifteenth century, to the discarnate souls gathered in his solar sphere. Drawing the Platonic stream and the Aristotelian stream together, including the masters of Chartres, Michael renewed the old solar Mysteries for souls who would later carry the anthroposophical movement onto the earth.
In Steiner's Own Words
What had once been Michael-mystery, that which had been proclaimed to the initiates in the old Michael-mysteries, that which now had to be changed because the intelligence from the cosmos had found its way to earth, was summarized in tremendously significant features by Michael himself for those whom he now gathered in this supersensible Michael-school at the beginning of the 15th century. Everything that had once lived in the solar mysteries as Michael-wisdom came to life again in the supersensible worlds. There was then summarized in a grandiose way what had been Platonism in its Aristotelian continuation and had been brought over to Asia and down to Egypt by Alexander the Great.
What it Means Today
Steiner places this school inside a precise piece of Mystery history, given as a series of lessons to the General Anthroposophical Society at Dornach in the summer and autumn of 1924, the karma cycles that became GA 237. At the dawn of the fifteenth century, as the Consciousness Soul awoke and cosmic intelligence descended from Michael's keeping into earthly heads, Michael gathered the souls of his sphere in the heavens. Among them sat the great teachers of the School of Chartres, Alanus ab Insulis and Bernardus Silvestris foremost, who had taught the old spiritual cosmology with mouths of fire. To them Michael joined the souls of the Aristotelian stream, many soon to work through the Dominican order alongside Thomas Aquinas, so that Platonist and Aristotelian were united in a single heavenly classroom. There Michael renewed the solar Mysteries, gave the prophetic anticipation of the new Michael age, and prepared these souls for the rulership that would open in 1879.
This is why Steiner calls Anthroposophy a continuation, not an invention. The teaching given supersensibly came down with these souls when they returned to earth, and Steiner names a double preparation: this fifteenth-century school of teaching, then an imaginative cult in the supersensible at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, where the same lessons were cast into living pictures. Thalira synthesis: read this way, the Supersensible School is the heavenly Anthroposophy that precedes the earthly one, and the modern movement is its echo, the recollection in incarnated minds of a lesson first heard among the hosts of Michael. To study Steiner is, on this reading, to remember a school one already attended before birth, where the Chartres masters and the Schoolmen sat side by side under one archangelic teacher.
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