In Steiner's reading, the French Enlightenment writer who heralded the consciousness soul, his reason both clearing the old order and blocking the spiritual path.
Voltaire in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's portrait of the French Enlightenment writer Francois-Marie Arouet (1694 to 1778) as a herald of the consciousness soul, the self-aware thinking that Steiner says has been developing in humanity since the fifteenth century. In his Berlin lecture of 26 February 1914, "Voltaire from the Perspective of Spiritual Science" (GA 63), Steiner reads Voltaire as a symptomatic figure who stood between the dawn of consciousness-soul striving and his own age. Voltaire's scepticism and ardent advocacy of reason cleared away the worn traditions and intolerance of his Catholic surroundings, preparing the modern path toward independent knowledge. Yet the same corrosive intellect cut him off from any living connection to the spiritual world, which remained for him only abstract ideas of God, freedom, and immortality. Steiner therefore treats Voltaire as both the brilliant herald and the unwitting obstacle of the modern path to spiritual knowledge.
In Steiner's Own Words
Voltaire lived in the middle between us and the dawning of the striving for consciousness soul development. And one understands this spirit when one can place it historically in this age of experiencing the consciousness soul. For Voltaire, with all his brilliant intellectual qualities, with all his sovereign intellectual activity, with all that was good in him, is a symptomatic expression of the striving for consciousness soul development, just as he is with all his, one might say, bad, evil, questionable qualities.
What it Means Today
The clearest modern continuation of Steiner's reading is the work of Owen Barfield, the English writer who attended a Steiner lecture in 1924, became an Anthroposophist, and spent his life tracing how human consciousness has changed across history. In his 1957 book Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry, Barfield argues that humanity moved from an early "original participation," in which the world was felt as inwardly alive, toward the detached, onlooker consciousness of the scientific age, the very separation Steiner located in the rise of the consciousness soul after Copernicus and Galileo. Voltaire stands exactly at the hinge Barfield describes. He could no longer participate in the older sense of a soul-filled cosmos, yet he had not reached the freely won spiritual knowledge that Steiner says must follow. His reason was the solvent that dissolved the old participation, and that same solvent left him stranded among abstractions.
Thalira synthesis: read together, Steiner and Barfield show that Voltaire's scepticism was not the enemy of spiritual life but its painful birth pang, the necessary emptying out that the consciousness soul must pass through before it can find the spirit again from within. For a reader today, this reframes the Enlightenment doubt many inherit as a stage rather than a verdict. The corrosive question that strips away inherited belief is, in this reading, the same faculty that, turned inward and developed further, becomes the organ of independent spiritual cognition. Voltaire cleared the ground; the building belongs to a later phase.
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