Anthroposophy and the Russian Soul

- a view from the true West -

introduction

This is a second essay that wanted to be written just for this book.  I should not have been surprised, but I was.  In fact, it was on the evening of my 66th birthday, that it became my choice to rise or not from bed and write.  Having trusted such impulses now for many years, how could I refuse.  So, with a cup of hot chocolate for company, and in the quiet of the midnight hour on December 23rd - 24th, 2006, I wrote the first words of this essay.

While this essay was originally set in the section on Critical Anthroposophy, it would be an error to assume that in any way antipathy is involved here.   The only authentic motive for writing any of these essays has always been the same - love.  Love for the object of the thinking, whether it is earthly personalities, Anthroposophy itself, America, Rudolf Steiner, or any aspect of the Divine Mystery - the motive is the same - love.

It is not a pleasure, however, to have to write words that some are certain to consider an unkindness.  Love is not always easy, as the reader will know.  It often requires of us difficult tasks.  It frequently requires courage, and without doubt a willingness to appear foolish, or even to expose ones own being to another's excesses of antipathy.  However, there are acts that must be done, or the soul loses something of itself that in the beginning we can only call self-respect, and in the end we will have to recognize as a love of the true and the good, at whatever cost to the I.

main body

In other places I have written concerning a man that has to be considered a giant in our work: Sergei O. Prokofieff.  His genius as a reader of Steiner, and his efforts to re-ignite our appreciation for the Christmas Conference are graces of soul well deserving of our admiration.  But, as he himself said to me at the Ann Arbor Conference in August 2005, when I spoke to him for several minutes regarding the Gordienko book, as well as my own thoughts concerning his work: "None of us are perfect".

Now this can be both a self-serving observation (an excuse), and something wise as well.  I had asked him if he was knowledgeable and practiced with regards to certain texts and aspects of soul life, and instead of directly replying, he offered his comment.  In effect, it appears he was saying no in answer to my question.  Even if we just assume this, we still have the wise observation that each of us can be discovered to have holes in our character, for he didn't say "I am not....", he said "None of us are perfect."

Anthroposophy is something with which we all strive, but will probably never fully attain in a single life time; and, the questions next to be addressed concern grave matters of direction in our Movement and as regards the future of the Anthroposophical Society.  Given the seriousness of the problem and the need for the greatest discernment, I ask the reader's forgiveness for whatever human errors enter into the following discussion. I would be wrong not to address these matters, and just as wrong to assume that I will get all of it right.

In order to place some context around the theme of this essay, I have broadened it beyond Prokofieff, and set out to include a number of those who work out of the Russian Soul in their contributions to the Life of Anthroposophy.  Some readers will perhaps not consider this important, but Steiner certain did, for his considerations of the threefold nature of the world were numerous and extensive, sometimes involving whole lecture cycles.  In fact, if there is a finger pointing to this, it can be found not in the presence of deep and wise considerations of the different primary soul gestures in the world in modern anthroposophical literature, but rather in the absence of their discussion among modern anthroposophists.  These matters are hardly ever discussed in our circles, which relegates their perception into the unconscious, a soul place that frequently subverts our best intentions.  It is time to be honest and forthright about the fact that not only are none of us perfect, but we are quite different in fundamental soul nature, whether we are of the East, the Center or the True West.

The Anthroposophical Movement and Society have encountered a number of Russian Souls, of which I will refer to four: Valentin Tomberg, Gennady Bondarev, Sergei O. Prokofieff and Irina Gordienko.  Each has their following among anthroposophists, and each is controversial, some more than others.

It is my observation that the Russian Soul loves tragedy.  I don't mean this in the sense that this Soul seeks out tragedy and encourages it, but rather that this Soul finds earthly existence to be a veil of tears, which one should not only expect, but to a degree embrace.  In a way, this Russian soul - this soul of the East is the opposite of the American Soul, with its endless romantic belief that all problems have a solution.

Even the most cursory examination will reveal that pain of soul when engaged in life is celebrated in Russian literature and poetry.  This Soul of the East is not yet very awake to the Consciousness Soul (toward which the American Soul has far better instincts), but bears within and behind its outer tragic countenance the dreaming seeds of the Spirit Self - of the 6th Cultural Epoch.  This embrace of expected suffering builds a camaraderie which will ultimately form the basis for that aspect of the Spirit Self, which is to find that it can not feel whole unless it forges true empathy with the suffering of others.

This dreaming tragic Soul of the East then encounters in the Center: Anthroposophy.  The Russian Soul's deep yearning for the Christ Mysteries (themselves partially Mysteries of great suffering) cannot but lead it to the flame of new spiritual Life being born in the Center.  A powerful hunger to not only understand, but to embrace and meet, fills this Soul, and Anthroposophy becomes the object of its spiritual passions.

Tomberg, to begin the examples, arrives in Dornach (in the early 1930's) where the premature death of Steiner has led to the serious internal strife on the Vorstand (which was ultimately to lead to the split among the national societies).  Here is spiritual tragedy on a grand scale.  Gifted inwardly with remarkable genius, Tomberg pours his whole soul into a striving to contribute to the struggling Spiritual Scientific Impulse.  His passions, however, are too much for many in the Center, who had lived for a long time with Steiner's relatively speaking more restrained force of personality.  As a consequence, Tomberg makes enemies, and by 1939 has been encouraged to leave the Society, which he does.  Ultimately he finds a place for his genius and his passion in what he calls: Christian Hermeticism, yet still carries with him a whisper of anthroposophical tragedy, for many in the Movement and Society refuse (wrongly) to accept his later work as spiritually valid.

Because Tomberg is the more successful in his spiritual endeavors, it is likewise more difficult to perceive his real weaknesses with respect to Anthroposophy.  In his book Meditations on the Tarot: a Journey into Christian Hermeticism, we can find his love of tragedy, as regards Anthroposophy, further developed into a serious blindness.  He does not see or recognize in that book Steiner's achievement as regards objective philosophical introspection (for details see the next essay).  Nor does he in this book appreciate Goethe's scientific works or the follow on Goethean Science being developed out of Anthroposophy (Goetheanism).  This is not all he does not see in Anthroposophy, and it would seem that his sense of tragedy regarding the fall of the Society and its capture by an excess of fascination with the hierarchies of Evil (a whole other story) has blinded him to the real meaning of Anthroposophy in the world.  For all the breadth of Tomberg's observations of the riches of the spiritual life in the Center (as laid out in this book), he was unable (or unwilling) to really include in his survey of Western spiritual life the full nature of the positive developments of Anthroposophy.

But Tomberg is not the main lesson here, so we must move on.

Many years later, Bondarev follows the flame of Anthroposophy, and absorbs Steiner's writings as if he has spent the early parts of his life in a spiritual desert.  He too has genius, and becomes a master of Steiner-thought.   Yet, his Russian Soul finds the world following the second great war to be full of tragedy and evil, and applies his anthroposophical learning to the task of painting word pictures of this evil in the world on large canvasses - books full of anthroposophical terminology.  He mistakes his passions in a number of cases for truth (not having mastered and transformed in his soul the impulses to antipathy and sympathy), and offers such a critical view of the Jews and of the Holocaust, that the Anthroposophical Society is eventually forced to officially reject him.

Around the same time comes Prokofieff, who as a youth too senses a great tragedy in the Anthroposophical Movement in the form of a general failure of the members to appreciate, with his same passion, the Christmas Conference.  He too has genius, and like Bondarev absorbs the writings of Steiner to a degree few would consider possible.  But this striving is rooted in a great flaw, to which we will later return.

Finally comes Gordienko, who is not only a contemporary of Prokofieff, she is also rumored to have been romantically attached to him.   The tragedy that calls to her is her perception of Prokofieff's fall from grace, and using her youthful genius of spirit (she is a mathematical adept in the field of topology), she writes an astoundingly detailed book (Sergei O. Prokofieff: Myth and Reality) criticizing Prokofieff's works, and the Society and Movement in general as failing to understand what it means for Anthroposophy to be a science.  Shortly after its publication, she dies alone on a mountain road, apparently struck by a vehicle that did not stop.

This then is the movement from the East, from the Russian Soul, as it pours forces perhaps not yet fully in the Consciousness Soul into and onto the Center - the Anthroposophical Movement and Society mostly as it is configured in Europe.  Deep passion and openness to the tragedies of life burn in this Soul and direct its light.

What are we to make of this, if we wish not to be asleep ourselves to the truth being written here?

Consider for a moment an approach of Goethe, who looked at certain phenomena of nature as representing an archetypal instance worth a thousand - a single gesture of nature which explains much deeper and more general conditions.  In this light then let us consider Prokofieff.  It is not his personal flaws that are to help us understand something, but rather that particular flaw which is so typical of the Movement and the Society, that in understanding how this arises in Prokofieff, we acquire great insight into the deepest weaknesses of our shared work.  His genius makes this typical flaw not only very visible, but the flaw itself becomes a remarkable teaching, and we should be grateful that: "None of us are perfect".

In becoming aware of this, we also become aware of how a certain law of karma reveals itself to us.  Many biographies, in that they stir us to excesses of antipathy or sympathy, are in that instance a sacrifice - a gift.  The more public and outstanding the flaw, the greater the lesson to those who learn to observe its truths.  Prokofieff, in this sense, then displays his flaw (which normally in biographies are usually private) on a grander scale, as perhaps a sacrifice chosen before birth, so that not only do we learn from each others genius, but we can also learn from each others mistakes.

In this way the Russian Soul then gives us not only its genius out of its fascination with life's suffering, but as well the sacrificial example of its own tragedies and failings.  What then does Prokofieff teach us out of this sacrificial and public display of his own (and our) imperfections?

First, of course, he teaches this lesson itself - that grand errors made in biographies also teach.  There are many public figures in the world toward whom we feel antipathy (or an excess of sympathy), who have made similar sacrifices. [See the latter part of the essay earlier in this book: The Meaning of....]

Second, he confronts us with a personal question, as to whether we can receive such a lesson without making the compounding error to turn his natural feet of clay (which we all have - "None of us are perfect", which by the way has to include Steiner) into a reason to question all the rest that his life has given.  There is a deep challenge here to practice discernment - to distinguish the true from the false, the essential from the non-essential - in such a way that (to borrow a horrible but apt cliche) we don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

What then is Prokofieff's flaw that teaches, in that it is a weakness so very typical of far too many modern day anthroposophists?

It is the failure to have taken up the objective philosophical introspective practices of Steiner's The Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World Conception and The Philosophy of  Spiritual Activity (Freedom), with the consequence that we do not know how to distinguish in the soul the difference between belief, understanding and knowledge. [Lest someone believe there is no basis for this conclusion, Gordienko's book carefully examines the evidence for whether Prokofieff knows the philosophical material, whether he knows Goetheanism or whether he knows the Consciousness Soul.  The result of her examination is that he does not know any of these quite important matters of soul life.  In addition, during my conversation with him in Ann Arbor, I specifically asked him if he felt he knew these matters.  I explained Gordienko's views, and my own views (made on the basis of reading his book on Tomberg).  After which I asked him directly if he knew these three (the philosophical introspection, Goetheanism and/or the Consciousness Soul), to which question he replied: "None of us are perfect".]

When this confusion about the difference between belief, understanding and knowledge is coupled with the ongoing idolatry (excess of sympathy) regarding Steiner-said, the result is a religion of Steinerism, full of dogmas that are never questioned and seldom even understood.  Prokofieff then becomes, as far too many also have become, a mere theologian of Steinerism, and not a true practitioner of Anthroposophy (the New Thinking) or the New Mysteries.

Many anthroposophist have devoted hours upon hours (totaling perhaps years of their lives) to the reading of Steiner's books and lectures.  Few appreciate, however, the consequences for the soul of filling it to the brim with the thoughts of a single individual, without developing the conscious ability to stand in relationship to such a enormous world view in an independent and objective fashion.  The soul drowns in such a excess of concepts, and the I is unable to breath freely in such an atmosphere flooded as it is with almost nothing but what Steiner said.

What is worse is that this defect in the introspective discernment of our own soul activity causes our work to acquire an excess of either of what we ourselves call the luciferic or the ahrimanic.  Prokofieff, already full of Russian passion for tragedy, writes frequently out of luciferic flights of fantasy and a vague mysticism, such that the gold he does produce is buried under a burden of excesses of concepts - flocks of ungrounded thoughts (long long books), when what might have been much more useful was a few tight lines of verse (his best book by far, on Forgiveness, is quite short).

Some others in our Movement, suffering the same inability to distinguish belief, understanding and knowledge, reduce Steiner to rigid rules of conduct, giving to the public face of Anthroposophy the ahrimanic tendency to dogmatic moral judgments, such that drives others to think we are nothing more than a fundamentalist cult.

Yet, such gestures within the Movement and Society are not without their higher purpose, for the Russian Soul calls out to the American Soul - the East calls across the Center to the true West.  This then brings forward that earthly pragmatic Consciousness Soul sensibility of Americans, as the right counter-balance to the dreamy, mystical and somewhat premature flirtation with the Spirit Self that Prokofieff unwisely promotes.

[This essay and this book may more be read in America than elsewhere.  If American Anthroposophists take up these indications, then much will be set right in the Movement and Society as the 21st Century continues to unfold.]

Even so, we now need to address what it means that so many do not appreciate in practice the difference between belief, understanding and knowledge, for this is the typical state of soul of most anthroposophists, for which Prokofieff is being offered as the archetype. [the following was written Christmas Morning, 2006, when I found time to return to this work]

The core question is to what extent do we have self knowledge of how concepts arise in the soul.  If this self knowledge were easy to come to, it would not have been necessary for Steiner to write his books on objective philosophical introspection.  At the same time, there is an initial decision that has to be taken, and that is the decision to self-observe.  Merely reading the books, A Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World Conception or The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity (Freedom) is not enough.  We have to be willing to become objective as we look within.

For the human being to have knowledge, they must be able to unite in the soul two elements of soul life: the experience (the percept) and the thought (the concept).  In the absence of the experience (the percept) there is no knowledge.  To read about Michael, or Christ, is quite different from having an experience of either.  Reading may lead to understanding, but only experience can lead to knowledge (in the sense Steiner has used this term).  The true study and practice of The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity (Freedom) is to lead to a practical appreciation of monism, not just its idea.  [Monism in the sense being used here means that for every experience there is an Idea - a Being.  Gravity, for example, is not an abstract force due to mass, but rather the will of Cosmic Beings.  On the simplest level this means that for every object of experience there is a corresponding complex of concepts or Idea.  Experience and thought are two sides of one coin.]

The 19th Century left behind a residue of materialism in philosophical thought, such that it was held that the human being could not know "the thing in itself".   Steiner showed how to discover in ones own experience, that thought bears within itself the inside of its object.  Thought can know "the thing in itself."  But this does not happen automatically.  It is not a given aspect of thought, but comes only into being if the I itself (again, Emerson's active soul) calls it forth, and this calling is an inner act that is essentially moral in nature (thus The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity speaks so exactly of moral imagination, moral intuition and moral technique).

Most of what is read by those reading Steiner produces only concepts (thought), without the related percepts (experience).  This means that when we read, for example, about the various incarnations of the Earth in Occult Science: an outline, we do not acquire knowledge, as we lack the relevant experience.  It is also possible we have not intensely enough read the material, or worked it over, so that the concepts we do create out of reading the text are a kind of weak tea in relationship to the concepts we could create were we to be more active inwardly.

If we are sufficiently active inwardly (consciously awake to our recreation of the pictures, instead of passive) during the concept formation process of reading, the deeper will these texts (such as Occult Science: an outline) give us understanding.  If we read carefully the introductory material to both Occult Science: an outline and Theosophy (for example) we will find there that Steiner repeatedly uses the term understanding and never uses there the word knowledge.  Only in the books on objective philosophical introspection does he use the word knowledge in the particular way a practical monism requires.

With the fall from grace of the Society and Movement that followed Steiner's death and then the internal wars on the Vorstand leading to the split in the Society, it slowly became an unquestioned habit of soul for many to act as if the reading of a Steiner text gave knowledge.  People began to treat the texts as a source of spiritual  knowledge, such that recently I heard a lecture given by the head of the pedagogical section of the School of Spiritual Science that had this phrase: "We know through Rudolf Steiner that...".  This sentence cannot be true.  It could be said: "we might understand through Rudolf Steiner that...", but not that we know.   Real knowledge never comes through another, but only out of our own activity such that we are able to unite experience (percept) and thought (concept), which is a major reason why Steiner repeatedly insisted we not use him as an authority (the other major reason is that we are not to make our thinking dependent on him, otherwise we are not free).

What this social process (the almost universal assumption that a reading  of a Steiner text provides knowledge) means is that not only have we failed to appreciate the true value of these texts for enlivening our understanding, but we may have allowed this material to enter the soul as a mere belief.  In this way then the teachings of Spiritual Science become in the soul religious - not scientific, which is why I have been forced to use the term Steinerism to describe this system of beliefs.

This process also has led to the intellectualization of the Michaelic Cosmic Intelligence given by Steiner, but that is a theme better related elsewhere.

This problem is exacerbated by the habits of conduct within the institutional social forms of the Society and Movement, wherein the books about objective philosophical introspection are read, but not practiced (if they were practiced, we'd get a whole different kind of activity out of the Vorstand and Councils).  Instead people seem to concentrate on the Six Exercises and Knowledge of Higher Worlds.  This substitution will not achieve the same inner result.  It is the Vorstand itself that tolerates the fall from grace that has made of Spiritual Science a system of beliefs.  And it is Prokofieff, with his Russian mystical passions who has made vast aspects of Spiritual Science into Steinerism in his soul and released it over our Society and Movement filled with a hypnotizing beauty and power not unlike that of Lucifer.

Absent the profound, necessary and intimate understanding of his own soul-life through introspection, Prokofieff teaches a Lucifer-like visionary Steinerism (a system of mere beliefs), and has set himself up as its chief theologian.  This is what Gordienko discovered, which is why she criticized anthroposophists in general for their failure to be scientific, and Prokofieff in particular in that his luciferic visionary and mystical mixture of beliefs and understanding that falsify what Steiner actually taught. [Gordienko, by the way, demonstrates considerably more self-understanding via introspection, than did her countryman, Prokofieff, which is what enables her book, Sergei O. Prokofieff: Myth and Realty, to be so essentially sound.  This is evident from the descriptions of her approach in her book.]

This problem is made all the more difficult, in that much of what Prokofieff gives is filled with some degree of understanding (but seldom, if ever, knowledge), which is why it resonates so strongly with the membership, who share this confusion of understanding mixed with belief.  With all of them lacking the needed deep introspective knowledge of their own souls, the result is that the vast majority of the Society and Movement are unable to distinguish that which in Prokofieff's theological teachings of Steinerism is true from that which is false in the understanding, or to separate out what is mere belief.

Some may assert to themselves: I understand myself.  I know myself, Wendt is a nut job!  Obviously I cast a wide net here.  At the same time, thinking which has come to know itself, also recognizes when such thinking is absent in another, or when our institutional leaders speak and behave in ways that essentially demonstrate they do not know, in a practical fashion, what is to be learned by a many years practice of the science of objective philosophical introspection.  The proof is not to be found in any ones assertions.   It only appears in deeds.  The New Thinking leads to inner and outer action, and is not a mere thought-content.

As Steiner predicted, karma will hold sway.  What was sown in the 20th Century is now being reaped.  Further, as he also predicted in The Challenge of the Times, there would come a time when the East would come to discover and to regret its own tragic failures in that its over-reaching into the Center actually harmed the spiritual life of that Center.

Is it the point of this essay to blame Prokofieff for this?  Not really.  He entered an anthroposophical social environment which had already fallen away from its scientific principles.  He was taught an unscientific standard of the practice of Anthroposophy, as this unscientific standard had already taken possession of the Society and Movement.  When he offered his first work (Rudolf Steiner and the New Mysteries) at age 26, he was not met with the same skeptical resistance as was Tomberg, whose first offerings were at age 31-33.  In Tomberg's case, Marie Steiner had insisted that Tomberg violated a spiritual law (attributed to Steiner) that said one could not teach original contributions to Spiritual Science before age 42.  In the case of Prokofieff, this assertion seems never to have been made, perhaps in part because so many are unconsciously confused as to what in Prokofieff's writings is original and what is derivative.  I doubt even Prokofieff could separate out his beliefs and understandings that are rooted in what he has read in Steiner, and those original thoughts that arose in his own soul.  There is no evidence he has produced his vast corpus of work with the necessary degree of self awareness.

With respect to Prokofieff's works, just consider and contrast that work with the work of Jessiah Ben-Aharon, as appeared one after the other in the book: The Future is Now: Anthroposophy at the New Millennium. 

First, was Prokofieff's essay, The End of the Century and the Tasks of the Anthroposophical Society.  This essay was largely confusing and rambling, with its main focus a kind of self justification for Prokofieff's already favorite theme, The Christmas Conference.  Again and again Prokofieff urges us to believe what he believes, namely that from the spiritual world one can hear today (suggesting he himself hears) "...this call of the Guardian of the Threshold, this voice from the land of the spirit sounding to us from the entire esoteric essence of the Christmas Conference..." such that this "...leads a person to actually laying the Foundation Stone in his heart, ...".

Without doubt a most wonderful sentiment, but is it the truth?

Then came Ben-Aharon's essay: The Global Situation at the End of the Century.  Here we read that a true development* of the "...way to higher worlds, brings one to the time-place in which Rudolf Steiner and the anthroposophical work was striving to enter rightly into world evolution in 1922/3/4/5.  This place-of-time, this very specific sought-for entrance (though not, of course, the eternally relevant content of the First Class) is wholly past.  Its place has been taken by subsequent esoteric and exoteric history".

*[Ben-Aharon established his developmental credentials with his remarkable The Spiritual Event of the Twentieth Century, a most amazing three panel Imaginative Cognition of the Second Coming.]

One says turn to the Christmas Conference and follow me for I know its value for the present, and the other clearly says that "This place in time...is wholly past.  Its place has been taken by subsequent esoteric and exoteric history."  We could ask ourselves whether the Christmas Conference, shortly to be followed by the death of Steiner and then the Vorstand's descent into disarray, can in any way have the same esoteric significance for the 20th Century as the Second Coming of Christ in the Ethereal.

Prokofieff writes and writes and writes huge long books preaching the Christmas Conference as the main spiritual and esoteric heart of the 20th Century, becoming a star in the tiny firmament of the Anthroposophical Society, while Ben-Aharon writes very little, and does far more in the contemporary world of activists and members of civil society, living his life in the quite dangerous world of Israel.  Who do you think knows more about the esoteric truth of the 20th Century? 

It is a fair question to ask how I know what is asserted here, concerning the nature of belief, understanding and knowledge.  The simple fact is that the confused mixture of belief and understanding was also taught to me by the social environment through which I meet the Society and Movement.  My own soul, in its efforts to imitate what it assumed was a healthy anthroposophical practice, eventually found itself lost and in prison - captured by the excess of not-experienced (percept-less) concepts.  Further, I had also assumed (incorrectly) that my fellow anthroposophists took the science of objective philosophical introspective teachings seriously.  As a result, I had to learn to untangle this confusion of belief, understanding and knowledge on my own, for the Society and Movement knew not this problem or its significance.  Otherwise, we would be taught these dangers from the beginning, instead of being feed the so-called basic books, and have modeled for us in lecture after lecture the approach that teaches that Steiner has given us knowledge.

As a result, Prokofieff is as much a creature of the anthroposophical community that accepted uncritically his youthful Russian passions, as he is the victim of those same passions.  The two unscientific impulses, one social and surrounding and the other inward and unfolding, married each other, with the result that the Vostand accepts and supports beliefs mixed in a confusing fashion with understanding, all the while ignorant of the real necessity for knowledge.  [The following was written after attending Mass late on Christmas Day.  Why do I go to Mass, by the way?  Am I another anthroposophist seduced by Tomberg into joining the Church? I go there, every once in a while, because Christ is always there, and it is a wondrous experience to open the soul in prayerful meditation in the social environment in which the Mass is celebrated.]

Is there a way out for anthroposophists as regards the problem of leaning to distinguish in the soul mere belief, from true understanding and both of these from real knowledge?

Oddly enough the way out is Faith.  The soul is not meant to only be of the Kings and of Gnosis, but also of the Shepherds and of Faith.  We are entitled to have Faith in the New Revelations of Christ given to us in the form of anthroposophical Spiritual Science as taught by Rudolf Steiner, as long as we are conscious of this acceptance and do not mistake, as an experience and activity within our own souls, what is mere belief for true understanding or either of those for real knowledge.

What does this mean in practice for both the individual and the group?

For the individual this requires of us an introspective observation of our own soul life, in order to with almost brutal self-honesty admit that we are acting as if we know something, when in fact we may only believe it, and/or may not entirely understand it.  We have to carefully and with discernment, tease apart the collection of concepts we hold concerning the spiritual and its relationship to the material.  We have to honestly ask ourselves: What do I in fact know?  What do I have that is both concept and percept (experience and thought) united?

What cannot pass that first test, which for most will be almost everything they ever read in a Steiner text, we have next to more carefully examine.  Of this large collection of concepts, we then need to ask what do I hold as mere belief (all of which should be held at a distance from the I, in order to not be imprisoned by the concept), and what then finally remains that I can honestly say I understand of what Steiner gave.  This then we can draw nearer, and contemplate carefully.  Yet, in this last category there again may well be little, for understanding in the sense that it was offered to us by Steiner requires inner activity and not mere passive reading.

As to the group, when we do this it will also become necessary to change the social environment of the Society and Movement itself.  We need to introduce into our shared vocabulary these three words: belief, understanding and knowledge.  We need to speak in this way to each other with modesty, and admit that this which we have read I believe, this which we have read I understand, and of this which we have read I do or do not have knowledge.

Only in this way will Prokofieff's sacrifice, so as to model our most fallen ways, serve our need.  It is not Prokofieff who needs change as much as us.  The fallen nature of the Society and Movement cannot be redeemed by those in the institutional hierarchies, but only from below out of the social commons where the New Mysteries are meant to be practiced in the Branch and Group work.

Let us finish this contemplation by adding one more nuance.  As we have come to understand, real knowledge, as conceived by Steiner and as is potential in the soul, requires the union of experience (percept) and thought (concept).  Yet, in the literature of Anthroposophy, in part as a result of certain necessities faced by Rudolf Steiner and today as often practiced (especially by Prokofieff), we have an excess of concepts for which we have little real experience.

This excess of concepts really needs to become grounded in experience, otherwise it floats free of the earthly element of life (becomes luciferic).  

In the East, where the ancient mysteries of Light were produced, the soul finds its more natural state above the Earth.  Gautama Buddha sought and achieved Nirvana - the Way of Enlightenment - the leaving behind of the cycle of reincarnations for the surrender of ego to the experience of the heights.  The East elaborates its intercourse with the Divine via this Enlightenment into profound pictures of Cosmic Existence, which then become remarkable systems of belief.  For the East, the belief in Cosmic Truth alone is the center of the spiritual element of earthly existence.  The Russian Soul bears an aspect of this impulse within, thus its tendency to religious mysticism.

In the Center, where the ancient mysteries of Man found a home in the social life of Western Civilization, the striving to fully leave behind earth existence is tempered by the Way of Initiation, which seeks to bring down from the heights into earthly social life, via Art, an understanding of the Divine Mystery.  Here the Ideal is sought to be comprehended, and then to the extent possible, incarnated.  All is to be made into Beauty. (which is why so many of Steiner's lectures and books are really works of art, with some of the deepest truths rendered into verse - the Calender of the Soul, and drama - the Mystery Plays.)  Think also of the remarkable Statue of the Representative of Humanity.

In the West, under the influence of the ancient mysteries of the Earth, social life is most fully sought to be realized in practical ways.  Science as a means of knowledge takes root quite easily here.  Enlightenment and Initiation are less important, and the center of earthly social life is found in character, which is what becomes the founding impulse of America - the citizen as incarnated Virtue, or Goodness.

So we have then in the poetic vision of the song America the Beautiful, a profound truth expressed in these words: "...and crown thy good with brotherhood...".  It is out of this striving for earthly virtue that union with all other humans flows as an impulse into earthly social existence, first appearing most strongly in America, and now reaching across the Center, from the true West, and toward the East.  In spite of the wanderings and flaws of politicians, the true West wants to Love the Center and the East, yet only out of its own - pragmatic and earthly - genius; that is: because of the Goodness of such Love.  It is in this spirit that this essay was written. [For hints on the New (as contrasted with ancient) Mysteries of the Earth, read the last and next essay in seven essay test drive.]