Steiner's teaching, given in Dornach in January 1917, that the so-called dead remain active in earthly affairs and seek to work into the thoughts and deeds of the living.
The Dead and the Living in History in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's teaching that souls who have passed through death remain participants in earthly affairs, so that history is shaped by traffic between the two conditions. Steiner developed the theme in The Karma of Untruthfulness, Volume Two (GA 174), lectures held in Dornach in January 1917, in the middle of the First World War. In older, atavistic ages, he argued, people perceived their dead directly and felt them join in deed and counsel; the materialistic age has since narrowed human thinking to brain-bound concepts the dead cannot enter, leaving events to run their course almost without them. Spiritual science, Steiner held, rebuilds the meeting ground. Thoughts directed to the supersensible world form a common realm in which the dead approach the living, a relation he practised himself in his documented notes for Eliza von Moltke from 1916 onward.
Among the themes of Steiner's wartime lectures, the dead and the living in history is perhaps the most intimate. Speaking in Dornach on 20 January 1917, Steiner told his listeners that events on earth are not made by the living alone. The so-called dead, he said, stand ready to work into human affairs, yet materialistic thinking has built a wall they cannot pass; spiritual science exists partly to take it down.
In Steiner's Own Words
In this way the living have the possibility of approaching the dead. And similarly the dead have the possibility of working into the thoughts of the living. When you have absorbed the spirit of spiritual science you will be able to form from such arguments a fair conception of the fact that in the materialistic age we human beings have lived through for so long the dead can have less and less influence on the course of events here in the physical world where human beings have turned towards more materialistic ideas relating only to the physical plane, ideas which are of no use to the dead. So events in the physical world now run their course without any, or with only very little, influence from those who have passed on. This will have to change. Active communication must once more be established between the living and the dead.
What it Means Today
Steiner did not leave the idea in the abstract, and one documented case lets us watch it at work. In June 1916 Helmuth von Moltke, the former Chief of the German General Staff, died in Berlin. Steiner had known him since 1904, and from 1916 onward he wrote private notes for the widow, Eliza von Moltke, recording what he presented as the dead man's evolving view of the European catastrophe. The papers stayed in the family for decades; the Basel researcher Thomas Meyer published them in 1997 under the title Light for the New Millennium. Whatever a reader concludes about their source, the documents show Steiner treating a recently dead contemporary as a co-worker in history, which is exactly the relation the 1917 lectures describe.
The practice Steiner attached to the teaching is quiet. He recommended what anthroposophists still call reading to the dead: forming clear thoughts about the supersensible world and directing them, in inner stillness, toward a particular person who has died. In his account this builds the common realm where a meeting becomes possible, and patience matters more than any technique. He added one warning that ties the theme to the untruthfulness cycle around it. Public lying, he said, thickens into a fog the dead cannot penetrate, so plain truthfulness in everyday judgment is itself part of keeping history open to them.
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