Steiner's name for the religious emptying of the modern soul: hearts left barren by intellectualism, because almost nothing is spoken to them out of the spirit.
The Desolation of Hearts in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's name for a specifically religious emptiness in the modern soul, given in German as Verödung der Herzen and stated in the priests' course of July 1923 published as GA 345, Course for Priests of the Christian Community. Steiner locates its cause in intellectualism, the habit of wanting only to understand, and in the near absence of any speech addressed to people that comes directly out of the spiritual world. Its bearer is the heart as an organ of religious perception rather than the reasoning head. Steiner names an unexpected symptom: intellectuals in particular, having arrived at this emptiness, run back in crowds to the old churches, above all the Catholic Church. The remedy he gives is not better argument but a language that is not earthly, the supersensible speech carried by the cultus, which is why the rite, and not a fresh set of doctrine, stands at the centre of the movement he was addressing.
The Desolation of Hearts is what Steiner heard behind the religious restlessness of the early 1920s. He was not describing unbelief. He was describing hearts that had been argued at rather than spoken to, until the organ that receives the spiritual went dry. The condition explains why a sharpening intellect and a hunger for old ritual can rise together in the same person.
In Steiner's Own Words
Today in fact there are more people than one suspects whose hearts feel deserted by religion. Hearts feel deserted by religion while all too seldom words spoken to them come directly out of the spiritual realm. For quite large layers of humanity, it is simply impossible to address these deserted feelings in their hearts, when it is not addressed in words which are not merely of earthly origin, which implies words presented in a supersensible language in the rituals. You must never forget how powerfully effective the Roman Catholic Church in its mass is just at present, still in its old form yet working strongly on the soul and even more effectively in the way it can be spoken.
What it Means Today
Charles Taylor gave the same condition a secular name eighty-four years later. In A Secular Age (Harvard University Press, 2007), grown out of his 1999 Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh, Taylor argues that the modern West does not live in a world where God was disproved, but inside what he calls the immanent frame: a closed order of natural cause where belief became one contested option among many. His central image is the shift from the porous self of 1500, open to spirits and forces arriving from outside it, to the buffered self of today, sealed against them and holding every meaning at arm's length. Taylor describes the cross-pressure of people who cannot believe and cannot settle for unbelief either, and who reach for older and more ritual forms exactly where argument has run out. That is Steiner's 1923 observation in a different vocabulary: the intellectuals arrive at the emptiness first, then walk back to the churches.
Thalira synthesis: Taylor diagnoses the sealed room and stops there, because philosophy can describe a seal but cannot break one; Steiner treats the same seal as a wound in a particular organ, the heart, and prescribes a particular medicine, speech that is not earthly, which is why his answer was a rite rather than a better argument.
In practice that yields a test, not a belief: notice whether what you meet in a service or a verse addresses your understanding, or something underneath it.
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