Steiner's claim that around 1850 an inherited spirituality ceased flowing into humanity, leaving man thrown back on his own resources and free to seek the spirit consciously.
The Mid-Nineteenth-Century Turning Point in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's name for the moment, around 1850, when the last remnant of an old, inherited spirituality faded out of human culture and humanity was thrown back on its own resources. Steiner develops the claim in two Dornach lectures of 24 and 25 January 1919, published in Goetheanism as an Impulse for Man's Transformation (GA 188, 1919). Before the turning point, a gifted spiritual element still worked through outstanding individuals: Schiller carried it in his abstract thinking, visible in the Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795), and Goethe carried it in his spiritualised instincts, visible in the Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. After it, the social question was born, materialism crested, and spirituality became attainable only in freedom, through conscious spiritual-scientific work. Historians of secularisation study the same fracture from the outside.
For Steiner, history has a hinge. The Mid-Nineteenth-Century Turning Point marks the years around 1850 when the spirituality that had flowed into human beings as an unearned gift finally ran dry. Schiller and Goethe still wrote out of its last echo; the generations after them could not. In the Dornach lectures of January 1919, Steiner argued that everything from the social question to modern materialism dates from this break.
In Steiner's Own Words
If we try to discover what main influence was then at work, we find that in those days the very last remnant, the last echo of the old spirituality, was present in men, before it finally faded away in the middle of the nineteenth century and humanity was thrown back on its own resources. It lived on in such a way that a man like Schiller, who thought in abstractions, possessed spirituality in his abstract thinking, and a man who had spiritualised instincts, such as Goethe had, had it living in these instincts. In some way it still lived. Now it has to be found on the paths of spiritual knowledge; now man has to find his way through to spirituality in freedom. That is the essential thing.
What it Means Today
Two years before Steiner gave these lectures, Max Weber stood before students in Munich and described the same condition from the outside. His lecture Science as a Vocation, delivered in 1917 and published in 1919, handed the century its most quoted diagnosis: die Entzauberung der Welt, the disenchantment of the world. Rationalisation and intellectualisation, Weber argued, had driven the ultimate values out of public life; whoever cannot bear this fate of the times, he said, may return to the old churches, at the price of a sacrifice of the intellect. Weber and Steiner were diagnosing one fracture in the same years, for German-speaking audiences standing in the same post-war rubble. Weber spread the process across centuries of Western rationalism; Steiner located its decisive click around 1850, the point after which no Schiller and no Goethe would be possible again. The difference lies in the response. Weber counselled sober endurance and distrusted every attempt at re-enchantment. Steiner treated the emptied world as an assignment: the gift was withdrawn so that the spirit could be reached in freedom, by inner work, or not at all. Thalira synthesis: the Mid-Nineteenth-Century Turning Point is disenchantment read from the inside, Weber's sociology of loss retold as the biography of a gift that ceased on schedule so that freedom could begin.
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