Steiner's inner sacrament in which a person's own living thoughts, permeated by the Christ Impulse, become a true communion with the divine-spiritual world.
The Spiritual Communion of Mankind in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's name for the inner sacrament in which a person's own living, self-produced thoughts, raised to Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition and permeated with the Christ Impulse, become a true communion with the divine-spiritual world. Steiner first stated it in his 1886 book A Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World Conception, then unfolded it in the closing lecture of GA 219 (Dornach, 31 December 1922), naming spiritual knowledge itself as the beginning of a cosmic ritual fitted to the modern human being. Where the Act of Consecration of Man is an outer sacrament served at an altar, this communion is enacted within thinking, the knower becoming at once priest and offering. By quickening dead mirror-thoughts into living ones, the human being shares spirit with the world and confers a future on a dying Earth.
In Steiner's Own Words
Concerning these creative thoughts, I once said in my book entitled A Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World Conception, that such thinking represents the spiritual form of communion among mankind. For as long as man gives himself up to his mirror-thoughts about external Nature, he does nothing but repeat the past. He lives in corpses of the Divine. When he himself brings life into his thoughts, then, giving and receiving communion through his own being, he allies himself with the element of Divine Spirit which permeates the world and assures its future.
What it Means Today
This was the teaching Steiner gave on the night the first Goetheanum burned. He delivered the lecture at Dornach on 31 December 1922; the fire was discovered one hour after he finished. Three months earlier, in September 1922, priests gathered around Friedrich Rittelmeyer had founded The Christian Community and received from Steiner the Act of Consecration of Man, a renewed Mass with bread and wine on a visible altar. The spiritual communion of mankind is the counterpart that needs no altar. It happens when a person stops merely reflecting nature and begins to quicken thinking itself into Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition, so that the thought becomes a living offering shared with the divine-spiritual world.
You can find the same idea worked out in his earliest book, the 1886 A Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World Conception, where Steiner already called living, productive thinking the spiritual communion among human beings. A contemporary reader meets it most directly in contemplative cognition, the patient holding of a single living concept until it warms from a dead reflection into something the thinker participates in. Thalira synthesis: in Steiner's grammar the modern altar is the act of attention, and the bread is a thought one has truly made one's own rather than borrowed. The practice is not belief but cognition raised to the temperature of life, which is why he set it on the longest night of the year, when the Earth is shut away from the cosmos and the human being must light the festival from within.
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