Steiner's name for the divine being that works in a child during the first three years of life, before the I wakes and memory begins.
The Son of God in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's name for the divine spirit-soul being that works in a human body only during the first three to three and a half years of life, before ego-consciousness and continuous memory begin. In the lecture of 11 February 1911 in Munich, printed in The Mission of the New Spirit Revelation (GA 127), Steiner describes the infant I as standing in what he calls a telephonic connection with the Angels, Archangels and the higher Hierarchies, sculpting the brain and setting the limbs upright while remaining unaware of itself. Esoteric language called this being the divine man, or Son of God, and called the self-aware human who follows it the Son of Man. Steiner then reads the three years of Christ's ministry, from the Baptism in the Jordan to the Mystery of Golgotha, as those same childhood forces borne consciously in an adult body. Curative educators in the Camphill movement still study the span he marks off.
The Son of God is the term Steiner took from esoteric usage for the being who builds the infant body from within. It is not a title reserved for Christ. Every person carries it, though only for the first three and a half years, when the I works on the brain and the limbs without yet knowing itself as an I.
In Steiner's Own Words
Under the guidance of the Beings of the higher Hierarchies a childhood Ego works at the development of man’s instrument of thinking. This ‘I’, this Ego, then passes into the instruments themselves and can no longer work at them. Man’s instruments of thinking must then already have developed. Certainly they can develop to further stages, but the ‘I’ can no longer be working at this development. The human being may therefore be thought of as twofold: the one we see during the first three and a half years, and the one which represents the rest of his life. In the language of esotericism, the first being is called the divine man, or the Son of God, because he is connected with the higher Hierarchies; the other is called the Son of Man.
What it Means Today
Karl König, the Viennese paediatrician who fled to Scotland and founded the first Camphill community in Aberdeenshire in 1940, treated this passage as a working brief rather than a doctrine. His book The First Three Years of the Child, drawn from lectures he gave in the 1950s and published in English by Floris Books of Edinburgh, follows exactly the span Steiner marks off: the winning of upright walking, then of speech, then of thinking, ending at the moment a child stops using its own name and says I. König's argument is that these three are not separate entries on a milestone chart. They are one deed, performed by a builder the child cannot yet see, and each leaves a signature in the body that lasts for life. Camphill's curative educators still read a child this way, watching how the walking and the speaking arrived before asking what a test says.
The boundary Steiner draws is visible to research that never reads him: developmental psychologists call it childhood amnesia and place it near the third birthday, close to where he places the severing of the telephonic connection.
Thalira synthesis: the working value of this term is that it makes Christology and infancy one study, so the three years at the Jordan and the three years in a cot are read as a single measure of how long a divine being can inhabit human flesh before the flesh gives way.
Where to Read More
- The Mission of the New Spirit Revelation, GA 127
- Find this volume at SteinerBooks [THALIRA_BLOG_LINKS_PLACEHOLDER]