Steiner's name for the process by which European bodies, bearers of the intellect since the fifteenth century, have grown steadily denser, bonier, and less inwardly alive.
The Hardening of the European Body in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's name for the slow densification of the Western physical body that began around the middle of the fifteenth century, when European humanity took the intellectual principle not into the soul, as Asia did, but into the physical organism itself. Steiner describes the process in Polarities in the Evolution of Mankind (GA 197), a lecture cycle held in Stuttgart in 1920: European bodies have grown steadily denser, bonier, and less inwardly alive than the bodies of the first, third, or even the eleventh century, a change ordinary anatomy cannot measure. Because the oriental tradition that first carried the Mystery of Golgotha was framed for a culture of soul, the dying European body could no longer receive it, and the old creeds decayed into the written word alone. The term therefore names the bodily precondition of Europe's task: a spiritual science, cultivated independently of the hardened organism, through which the Mystery of Golgotha can be understood anew.
The Hardening of the European Body is where Steiner locates the real cause of Europe's religious crisis. Asia received the intellect as an experience of soul; Europe bound it to the physical organism, and that organism has been dying ever since. What looks like a loss of faith is, for Steiner, a change in the instrument itself: creeds framed for living bodies reaching bodies that have turned to bone.
In Steiner's Own Words
In early times the human bodies of Europeans were very much the instrument of their kind of elementary intellectual thinking, but then this body gradually began to die. Physical evolution of European humanity until the 15th century and even to this day consisted in the physical body growing more and more dead. Our physical bodies are growing denser and denser and more and more bony. We cannot demonstrate this with the methods of ordinary anatomy and physiology, but it is true. We no longer have bodies as inwardly alive as those of people living in the 1st, 3rd and even the 10th and 11th centuries. Our European bodies of today have grown bony, paralyzed, compared to those ancient bodies that were inwardly alive.
What it Means Today
The closest thing contemporary philosophy has to this idea sits in Charles Taylor's A Secular Age (Harvard University Press, 2007). Taylor opens by asking why belief in God was nearly unavoidable in the Europe of 1500 and has become one option among many in the Europe of 2000, the same five centuries Steiner marks off in Stuttgart. His answer is the shift from the porous self to the buffered self. Medieval Europeans experienced themselves as open to spirits, blessings, and curses; the modern Western person feels sealed inside a boundary the spiritual world cannot cross. Taylor treats this as a change in social imaginaries, in the shared background picture of what a person is. Steiner makes the stranger claim underneath it: the boundary is physiological. The buffering is bone. A body dense enough to host free intellectual thought is, by the same stroke, too hardened to receive creeds composed for the porous bodies of the first Christian centuries.
Thalira synthesis: we read Taylor's buffered self as the biography of the hardened body, so that secularization is not a failure of belief but a completed stage of incarnation, and the counter-movement Steiner asks for, a cognition practised independently of the body, begins exactly where Taylor's account ends.
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