The self-giving power of the Spirits of Wisdom on Old Sun, who pour out their own being as a gift, and so weave wisdom into the world.
The Bestowing Virtue in Anthroposophy is the giving power of the Spirits of Wisdom (Kyriotetes) on the Old Sun stage of cosmic evolution, who pour out their own essence as a gift to their surroundings. Steiner describes this outpouring as the true inner reality behind the Sun's light and air. Where the Thrones on Old Saturn gave through sacrifice, the Spirits of Wisdom give through grace, founding the bestowing virtue as a cosmic act of generosity.
Steiner draws the term from Dionysius the Areopagite, naming these beings the great Givers of the universe. Their gift is received and reflected back by the Archangels as light, and through this rhythm of giving and reflecting, the first dimensions of space come into being. The bestowing virtue (in German, schenkende Tugend) names a self-creative generosity, the same productivity an artist feels when sending an idea into the world. It belongs to the lecture cycle Inner Realities of Evolution (GA 132, 1911), where Steiner reads the Sun-existence not as a physical body but as the visible deed of giving beings.
In Steiner's Own Words
Seen from afar it appears as the illusion of a body consisting of light and air; but if we approach nearer, we have no longer a body of light and air but it appears as the great bestowing virtue of the Spirits of Wisdom. And no one learns the real nature of air who only describes it according to its external physical properties. That is only maya and illusion, only outer manifestation. For wherever there is air in the world, the deeds of the Spirits of Wisdom lie behind it. Weaving, active air means the manifestation of the bestowing virtue of the macrocosm.
What it Means Today
Steiner's bestowing virtue describes a gift that does not deplete the giver, but increases the world by leaving him. That paradox is the central claim of Lewis Hyde's 1983 study The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (reissued in 2007 as The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World). Reading Marcel Mauss and the Kula exchange of the Trobriand Islands, Hyde argues that a true gift must keep moving, that it stays alive only in circulation, and that the creative gift of the artist works the same way: a poem or a melody given to the world enriches both maker and receiver rather than dividing a fixed sum. Steiner uses the identical image. The Spirits of Wisdom pour out their being, the Archangels receive and reflect it back as light, and the gift returns to its source magnified, having brought space itself into existence on the way.
Thalira synthesis: Where Hyde locates the increase of the gift in human community and the market it resists, Steiner locates the same generosity one cosmic octave higher, as the very substance of a world being born, so that what an artist feels as the urge to give a form away is, on his reading, a faint earthly memory of the Sun's own creative outpouring.
Where to Read More