"I through the law am dead to the law, that I might live unto God. I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me. I do not frustrate the grace of God: for if righteousness come by the law, then Christ is dead in vain." — Galatians 2:19-21
Rudolf Steiner:
But now let us weigh the consequences this implies for an anthroposophically oriented person. He cannot just cut himself loose from external life and practice. He has taken flight into the Anthroposophical Society, but life's outer needs continue on, and he cannot get away from them in a single step or with one stroke. So his soul is caught and divided between his continuing outer life and the ideal life and knowledge that he has embraced in concept as a member of the Anthroposophical Society. A cleavage of this sort can be a painful and even tragic experience, and it becomes such to a degree determined by the depth or superficiality of the individual. But this very pain, this tragedy, contains the most precious seeds of the new, constructive life that has to be built up in the midst of our decaying culture. For the truth is that everything in life that flowers and bears fruit is an outgrowth of pain and suffering. It is perhaps just those individuals with the deepest sense of the Society's mission who have to have the most personal experience of pain and suffering as they take on that mission, though it is also true that real human strength can only be developed by rising above suffering and making it a living force, the source of one's power to overcome.
The path that leads into the Society consists firstly, then, in changing the direction of one's will; secondly, in experiencing super-sensible knowledge; lastly, in participating in the destiny of one's time to a point where it becomes one's personal destiny. One feels oneself sharing mankind's evolution in the act of reversing one's will and experiencing the super-sensible nature of all truth. Sharing the experience of the time's true significance is what gives us our first real feeling for the fact of our humanness. The term “Anthroposophy” should really be understood as synonymous with “Sophia,” meaning the content of consciousness, the soul attitude and experience that make a man a full-fledged human being. The right interpretation of “Anthroposophy” is not “the wisdom of man,” but rather “the consciousness of one's humanity.” In other words, the reversing of the will, the experiencing of knowledge, and one's participation in the time's destiny, should all aim at giving the soul a certain direction of consciousness, a “Sophia.”
Related post: Catharsis
Source:
February 13, 1923 Living Anthroposophically
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