The cosmic creative Word, the Christ-being through whom all things came to be, which became flesh once in Jesus of Nazareth.
The Logos is Rudolf Steiner’s name for the cosmic creative Word that the Gospel of St John places at the beginning of existence. In his 1908 Hamburg lectures Steiner reads it as the Christ-being, the spiritual sun-force from which the mineral, plant, animal, and human kingdoms streamed forth, and which entered earthly history when it took on a human body.
The Logos in Anthroposophy is the cosmic creative Word, the spiritual being behind the visible world from which the mineral, plant, animal, and human kingdoms came forth. In The Gospel of St John (GA 103, 1908) Rudolf Steiner identifies the Logos with the Christ-being, the sum of the six Sun Elohim or Spirits of Light. What esoteric Christianity calls the invisible world behind the waking-day world, the Logos, became flesh once in history when its forces incarnated in Jesus of Nazareth at the Baptism in the Jordan. The Logos is therefore both the origin of existence and the giver of the human I AM, the creative power Steiner reads in the prologue of John as the source through whom all things came to be.
In Steiner’s Own Words
This Divine-Spirituality, in the present form, lying as it does at the foundation of all that appears to clear, waking-day consciousness, in other words, the invisible world behind this entire visible day-world, this is called in Esoteric Christianity, the “Logos” or the “Word.” For just as from the human being speech can finally come forth, be uttered from his own inner being, so too has everything, animal kingdom, plant kingdom, mineral kingdom first come forth into existence from the Logos. Everything is an incarnation of the Logos and just as your soul rules invisibly within your inner being and creates an external body, so too everything in the world of a soul nature creates for itself the external body fitted to it and manifests itself through some sort of physical organism.
What it Means Today
For esoteric Christianity, the Logos is not a philosophical abstraction borrowed from Greek thought but a being with a history. Steiner draws a sharp line here between his reading and the early Gnosis: the Gnostics kept the Logos forever invisible and spiritual, while esoteric Christianity rests on the sentence from the prologue of John, “the Word became flesh.” This distinction still organises how the term is used in practice. In the Christian Community, the renewal-of-religion movement that Friedrich Rittelmeyer founded with Steiner’s help in Stuttgart in 1922, the Act of Consecration of Man opens by naming the Logos as the creative being that lives in the bread and the wine, not as a memory but as a present force. Priests trained at the seminary in Hamburg, the same city where Steiner gave the GA 103 cycle, still read the prologue at the centre of the service. What Anthroposophy adds to the older church reading is the specifically cosmic dimension: the Logos is the sum of the six Sun Elohim, the spiritual force that streams to earth in sunlight, so that working with the term means holding together the Christ of the Gospel and the light of the physical sun as two faces of one creative Word. That synthesis, the Sun-Logos read at once through Genesis, through John, and through the visible day-world, is what marks the Anthroposophical use of the term apart from a purely textual theology of the Word.
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