Steiner's name for the point where Christianity turned material: the crucified body replaced the risen Spirit, and art perfected the substitution.
The Crucifix as Christian Materialism in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's reading of one image, the crucified Man of Sorrows, as the point at which Christian consciousness passed from spirit into matter. He set it out in the Easter lecture of 27 March 1921 at Dornach, printed in GA 203 as Three Lectures on Easter and Pentecost and again as Spirit Triumphant. The historical claim is exact: the suffering figure on the Cross was not part of Christianity in its original form, it appeared as the faith fused with the declining culture of Rome, and it spread after the fourth century, when Christianity became a state religion under Constantine. Early Christian feeling had held instead to the Resurrection and to the sentence "He Whom ye seek is not here." The more skilfully art rendered bodily agony, Steiner argued, the more firmly the seeds of materialism were planted in Christian feeling. The term names a habit of devotion, not a verdict on any artwork.
The crucifix as Christian materialism is not an argument against sacred art. It is Steiner's account of what one devotional image did to a faith. Once attention settled on the dying body, the risen Christ slipped out of view, and a religion that began with the victory over death learned to contemplate death instead.
In Steiner's Own Words
Through this a break occurred in the whole outlook of the Christian world; for this presentation of the crucified, pain-filled Christ, which since then has continued through the centuries, is a Christ Who can no longer be grasped in His spiritual nature, but only in His corporal nature. The more that signs of suffering were imprinted on the human body, the more that Art, in all its perfection, gave expression to the suffering Redeemer throughout the various epochs, so much the more were seeds of materialism implanted in Christian perception. The crucifix expresses the transition into Christian materialism.
What it Means Today
Steiner made a datable claim in 1921, and art historians have since worked the same ground with catalogues rather than clairvoyance. Robin M. Jensen, professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame, sets out the record in Understanding Early Christian Art (Routledge, 2000) and The Cross: History, Art, and Controversy (Harvard University Press, 2017): for roughly the first four centuries Christians drew the Good Shepherd, the fish, the anchor, Jonah, and the raising of Lazarus, and did not draw the Crucifixion. The earliest surviving narrative examples come late, around 420 to 430, on the carved cypress doors of Santa Sabina on the Aventine in Rome and on the small ivory panels in the British Museum known as the Maskell Ivories. Both show a Christ upright, open-eyed, unbroken. The agonised body arrives centuries afterwards, and reaches full force in the fourteenth-century Rhineland, in the forked plague crosses called Gabelkreuze. The sequence Steiner described from spiritual research is the sequence the surviving objects show.
Thalira synthesis: the crucifix did not make Christianity material by being sorrowful, it made it material by becoming the only picture, and a devotion recovers its Easter direction the moment a second image, the empty grave, is allowed to stand beside it.
Where to Read More
- Three Lectures on Easter and Pentecost, GA 203
- Find The Festivals and Their Meaning at SteinerBooks [THALIRA_BLOG_LINKS_PLACEHOLDER]