Communicating Anthroposophy: Actual/Potential, Youth/Age

by John Beck, editor

Last January (2009), when the national council was meeting with friends and members in East Troy, Wisconsin, my intermittent work with the ideas of Owen Barfield and Samuel Taylor Coleridge focused into one persistent thought. Anthroposophy connects human and cosmic spirit, and Coleridge seeks a similar connection in considering how the ultimate potentiality, or power to become, —what we perhaps ought to mean by the word “spirit”—enters into actual manifestation. To express its whole character, potentiality must stretch itself into a “polarity of contraries,” a pair of linked qualities in which one side increases only at the other’s expense. (Barfield’s great example is the polarity in language between exact communication and unique self-expression. The more you get of one, the less you have of the other. Pushed to either extreme, meaning itself disappears from the communication.)

Coleridge discerned that the cosmic creative gesture must unfold between limitless expansion and a pulling back into the minimum. On that bitter cold night in Wisconsin it struck me that Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy reaches out with the same gestures. On the one side it stretches and leads us out, to the beginning of time and to futures beyond imagination. On the other side it enters into particulars of our individual situation, right into the intimate space of free conscience in the human heart.

In this issue polarities are at work as we listen in to the wonderful, multi-layered renewal of youth participation in the anthroposophical movement. Nathaniel Williams gives a wise and gentle account of the youth movement in Steiner’s time. Maika Munske shares the stark transcendent vision of the newly arrived young adult. And Caitlin Balmer speaks about the impulse of the 2009 Connect Conference at the Goetheanum, for Waldorf senior classes. In each account I hear, at different pitches, the isolation of individuality reaching to affirm that community—alongside self-development—is our avenue for regaining our higher identity.

Youth’s seeking challenges elders’ absorption into the fixity and exclusions of material existence, into the culture of death. And age notes youth’s uncertainties and inexperience and hesitant compassion. Meanwhile, some youth carry the sobriety of a staggering cosmic old age. And some very old persons reveal on this earth the enduring youthfulness of real freedom won.

Into these contrasts and disparities anthroposophy can bring understanding, good will, peace—if we open ourselves to the possibility. Whether we are reaching out beyond our comfort level to meet needs, or drawing back into the immense solitude of meditation, the work that Rudolf Steiner has led us into can accompany us. In life’s polarities anthroposophy reveals meaning and purpose that steadily become intelligible, a great fabric of conscious human being, woven by love.

In subsequent articles the theme of youth becomes hidden, but we can discern its spirit of renewal grappling with the isolation of farm life, with an old anthroposophical community’s need for social transition, with the general economic and ecological crises. And then, from young-old Herbert Witzenmann to the newest eurythmists going out into the world, the timeless speaks again into our mortal situations, and blesses them.

The full issue referred to here is as issuu.com/anthrousa/docs/enfmf-200902-final