The Genesis polarity Steiner read as humanity eating of knowledge while life was withheld, the two streams meeting again at Golgotha.
The Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge name the two paradisal trees of Genesis 2 and 3, which Steiner treats as a single polarity rather than two separate symbols. Humanity tasted of the Tree of Knowledge and was banished lest it also eat of the Tree of Life. For Steiner this records a real division in human history: a knowledge cut off from life, awaiting reunion through the Christ impulse.
In Steiner's Own Words
You remember the pronouncement of the God Jahve, radiating from the far distance, which stands at the beginning of the Bible, after the Fall had come about. The words announced that now men had eaten of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil they must be banished from their present abode, so that they might not eat also of the Tree of Life. The Tree of Life was to be protected, as it were, from being partaken of by men who had already tasted of the Tree of Knowledge.
What it Means Today
Modern biblical scholarship reads the two trees much as Steiner did, as a deliberate pairing rather than a doubling. Robert Alter, in his translation and commentary The Five Books of Moses (W. W. Norton, 2004), notes on Genesis 3:22 to 24 that the expulsion turns on a single human predicament: having gained the knowledge of good and evil, the man must not now also reach the tree of life and "live forever." Alter reads the cherubim and the flaming sword at the gate of Eden as guarding exactly that boundary, mortal knowledge sealed off from endless life. Where the literary scholar sees a narrative drawing the limits of the human condition, Steiner in GA 162 hears the same verse as a description of real historical forces, the drying of primeval wisdom into Greek and Latin concepts on one side and a withheld life-stream on the other.
This is also the soil of the Kabbalistic Etz Chaim, the Tree of Life that orders the ten Sephirot in Jewish mysticism, and of the Christian reading that sees the Cross as the Tree of Life restored. Thalira synthesis: what Alter frames as the boundary of mortality, Steiner frames as a wound in time, a knowledge that grew cold because it was severed from the life it once carried, and which only the Christ impulse can rejoin. For a reader today the practical point is to notice when thinking has become dead, accurate but lifeless, and to ask what living source it was cut from.
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