Anthroposophy is food for the soul

 

Rudolf Steiner:  "We must bear in mind what a life-force for humanity might be developed from a spiritual method of looking at things. That must be pointed out again and again, because that is just what human beings today understand least of all. They say that a spiritual view makes a man live apart from the world — but my dear friends, it is the present modern view which makes one avoid the world. Why is this so? Because it works with the dogmas of the past, which in the past served a good purpose, because they then arose from a certain instinctive clairvoyance. But this instinctive clairvoyance has now disappeared, and human beings have no longer any relationship to it. The dogmas still retained are no longer understood. It is not a question of their falsity, but of modern humanity having no longer a living relationship with them. And outside of the dogmas still maintained, humanity today only has a nature science devoid of spirit. Anthroposophy will give a spirit-filled science of nature, a science able to animate man, and that which trickles, as a knowledge of the spirit, into nature, will then transform itself in man in the same way as do the food-substances in a physical respect. That knowledge is transformed in man into social force, and one would experience it if one earnestly realized that spiritual knowledge is nourishment for the soul, and can be absorbed and digested — if I can use that expression — it can be digested and reappear as a force working socially. We can get social impulses in no other way than by taking up spiritual cognition from surrounding nature. Anyone who thinks he can carry out social reforms from any other impulse thinks about the things of this world as one who meditates about man and, wishing to explain him as clearly as possible, and in order to explain him to himself, forbids him food. Whoever speaks today of social forms without having spiritual knowledge does the same thing with reference to the social order of humanity as a man who wishes to explain man and prescribes for him a hunger cure. That is just what stands as a deep absurdity in the modern views of humanity, and which it cannot see through."

Source: January 21, 1921. GA 203