Steiner's teaching that each sphere of the threefold social order is the earthly meeting place of one rank of spiritual beings: Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai.
The Hierarchies Behind the Three Members in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's account of which spiritual beings work into each sphere of the threefold social order. In the third lecture of Past and Future Impulses in Society (GA 190, Dornach, 23 March 1919), Steiner describes a descent. As the fifth post-Atlantean age proceeds, the Angeloi come into closer communion with human souls, and they can do so only where spiritual life, schooling and research included, has been emancipated from state and economic control. The Archangeloi, whom Steiner elsewhere names as the folk-spirits, work into an independent rights-state as quiet inspirations rather than as commands. The Archai, the Spirits of Time, become administrators of an economic life organised associatively around consumption rather than profit. The three members are therefore not an administrative convenience. Each one is a threshold, and the case for separating them is that the beings behind them cannot reach a merged organism.
The hierarchies behind the three members is the spiritual-scientific ground Steiner gave for social threefolding. He argued that the case for a free spiritual life, an independent rights-state, and a self-standing economic life does not rest on politics or efficiency. It rests on the claim that three ranks of spiritual beings are drawing nearer to humanity, and that each can reach us only through its own sphere.
In Steiner's Own Words
Thus, out of that which, I would like to say, flows towards us from the future: first, the necessity of independent spiritual life, through which the Angeloi make themselves more intimate with man; second, independent state life, through which the Archangeloi make themselves more intimate with man; third, independent economic life, through which the Archai make themselves more intimate with man. Thus the forces of development of mankind are approaching. The most rapid progress must be made in the independent spiritual life, for this, if mankind is not to meet with a great calamity, must be ready, that is, independent, by the end of the fifth post-Atlantean period.
What it Means Today
The Section for Social Sciences at the Goetheanum in Dornach, led since 2016 by Gerald Häfner, a co-founder of the German Green Party who sat in the Bundestag and then in the European Parliament until 2014, is where this lecture is still handled as a working research programme rather than a memory. The section treats the three spheres as domains with incompatible governing principles: liberty belongs to spiritual life, equality to the rights sphere, and fraternity to economic life, so a principle transplanted into the wrong sphere turns destructive. That practical rule is the visible half of the 1919 argument. The invisible half is what this entry names, since Steiner's reason for the separation was that Angeloi, Archangeloi, and Archai each need an uncolonised sphere to work into.
The oldest continuously working instance is a bank. GLS Gemeinschaftsbank in Bochum, founded in 1974 by the lawyer Wilhelm Ernst Barkhoff with Gisela Reuther, was the first German bank built on a social and ecological mandate, and it grew directly out of threefolding circles trying to make lending rest on relationship rather than collateral. Depositors choose which projects their savings fund, which is the associative principle Steiner described in the same lecture: production regulated by consumption instead of by profit.
Thalira synthesis: read this way, a quarrel about school funding or central banking is also a quarrel about which beings can come close enough to speak, and the threefold order is less a policy than a set of doors held open.
Where to Read More
- Past and Future Impulses in Society, GA 190
- Find Past and Future Impulses in Society at SteinerBooks [THALIRA_BLOG_LINKS_PLACEHOLDER]