Steiner's name for the modern proletarian movement: a migration of peoples that no longer rolls across geography but rises vertically from the social depths, calling for a descending spiritual stream.
The Vertical Migration of Peoples in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's reading of the modern proletarian movement as a Völkerwanderung that has changed direction. In the lecture of 26 January 1919 at Dornach, published in Migrations, Social Life (GA 188), Steiner recalls the migrations recorded in the history books: Goths, Huns, Vandals, and Suevi rolling from the east to the south-west, where they encountered the spreading current of Christianity. That meeting made the following epoch possible. The migration of the present starts from no definite place. It rises vertically, out of the proletarian sub-stratum of humanity, toward the surface of social life, and it must be met from above by a new spiritual revelation, the spiritual science Steiner taught. The bearer of the concept is the Consciousness Soul epoch, in which the masses awaken to their own judgment. Historians such as Arnold J. Toynbee later traced a parallel pattern in the internal proletariat of declining civilisations.
When Steiner surveyed the social upheaval of January 1919, he named what he saw the vertical migration of peoples. The old Völkerwanderung crossed geography: barbarian tribes moving east to south-west into the stream of Christianity. The new one crosses social strata. It begins nowhere on the map, surging up from the proletarian depths, and Steiner insisted only a descending spiritual stream could meet it.
In Steiner's Own Words
And this proletarian element must be met with a spiritual element which comes from above! You might say that a Spiritual-scientific influence should be exercised upon social conditions, upon the conception of the world. Those who do not wish to believe that a new spiritual revelation comes towards this migration of people, which now follows a vertical, and not a horizontal direction, those who remain by the old spiritual revelation suited to the horizontal direction, in short, those who prefer to remain by the Roman way of propagating Christianity and do not wish to become acquainted with the new revelation of Christ Who passed through the Mystery of Golgotha, those people lose a great deal; they lose as much as might have been lost in the Middle Ages if the barbarian stream, which rolled from the East to the South West had not encountered the spreading current of Christianity.
What it Means Today
Fifteen years after this Dornach lecture, the English historian Arnold J. Toynbee began publishing A Study of History (twelve volumes, 1934 to 1961) and built his account of civilisational decline on a strikingly similar pair of images. Toynbee's external proletariat is the barbarian world beyond the frontier, the Goths and Huns of the textbooks. His internal proletariat is the mass inside a civilisation that no longer feels it belongs to it, and in Toynbee's reading it is this internal proletariat, not the elite, that creates the universal church which carries life across the wreckage: Christianity itself was born, he argued, in the internal proletariat of the Hellenic world.
Steiner's 1919 lecture works with the same two streams but reverses the question. He does not ask what the rising mass will create; he asks what must descend to meet it, as Christianity once met the horizontal migrations. The Thalira synthesis: the vertical migration is Steiner's test of whether a civilisation can do consciously, through a freely chosen spiritual stream, what earlier epochs did by historical collision. Where Toynbee reads the pattern backward from the ruins, Steiner reads it forward as a task. Anyone weighing today's mass movements and crises of confidence in the leading classes can set the two accounts side by side: both insist that the decisive spiritual impulses of an age are absorbed from below, by those the educated classes had written off, and both make the meeting of the two streams, not the victory of either, the hinge of the epoch.
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