The Bridge, the Moral Order & the Trinity
The bridge between the moral and natural orders of the world (GA 202), moral ideals as world-forming forces, and the mystery of the Trinity (GA 214). Part of Thalira's Anthroposophical Glossary of 525 terms, and companion to the in-depth guide Anthroposophy.
Steiner's teaching that moral ideals are not private feelings but real seed-forces, working through human warmth to become the life, light and tone of future worlds.
Steiner's teaching that the moral and physical world-orders, split apart by modern thought, are rejoined inside the human being, where moral ideals become world-creating forces.
The place where soul crosses into body in Steiner's teaching: enthusiasm for moral ideals quickens the human warmth-organism and so becomes physical process (GA 202, 1920).
The Father Principle is Steiner's name for the divine ground of the world: the pole of origin working in nature, heredity, and the body before any consciousness awakens.
The divine being Christ sent at Pentecost so that, in Steiner's account, human beings can grasp the supersensible consciously and in freedom, without losing their own I.
Steiner's name for the reality of the moral: what lives as moral impulse in human beings today becomes the physical nature of future worlds.
Steiner's 1922 account of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as living realities working through cosmic and human evolution, recovered from the initiation-wisdom of early Christianity.
The natural and moral orders are causal nature and moral freedom, split apart by modern thought; Steiner treats them as two aspects of a single evolving world.
In Rudolf Steiner's spiritual science, the Son is the divine in becoming: the Christ principle that entered a human I at Golgotha and continues to work in freedom and transformation.
Steiner's GA 214 reading of how Father, Son and Holy Spirit each work in one member of the human being: bodies, I, and awakened spirit.