Rudolf Steiner delivered a lecture on 15 June 1915 that has become relevant to world events happening in our own day. This is how he starts:

It is our desire and aim to recognize out of knowledge that the world has meaning, significance and purpose, and that the world is not filled merely with evil and degeneration. It is our aim to realize through direct knowledge that the world has meaning. By this realization we try to prepare for actual experience of the Christ.

Oswald Spengler was working on his two volume masterpiece, The Decline of the West, around the same time as Steiner’s lectures. Both were heavily influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and both were interested in the cycles of cultures. Despite their differences in approach and world outlook, there are certainly correspondences between the two.

Unlike Spengler, Steiner was not interested in isolated cultures like the Mexican. Rather, he recognized a continuity as the end of one culture gives birth to the next. Steiner’s cultures, or ages, are then close to Spengler’s, as shown below:

1. Ancient India
2. Persian
3. Egyptian
4. Greco-Latin
5. Western Europe (and its diaspora in North America and Australia). This is the current dominant culture.
6. To come: East Europe, Slavic/Russian

This matches up, at least in general outline, with Spengler’s list of cultures. However, there is one significant difference between them. Spengler believed that the process of the birth, decline, and death of a culture was blind, unplanned, and unrelated to each other. He explains:

Mankind… has no aim, no idea, no plan, any more than the family of butterflies or orchids. ‘Mankind’ is a zoological expression, or an empty word. … I see, in place of that empty figment of one linear history which can only be kept up by shutting one’s eyes to the overwhelming multitude of the facts, the drama of a number of mighty Cultures, each springing with primitive strength from the soil of a mother region to which it remains firmly bound throughout its whole life-cycle; each stamping its material, its mankind, in its own image; each having its own idea, its own passions, its own life, will and feeling, its own death.

Steiner, on the other hand, saw the development of successive cultures as part of a larger process. Rather than a blind process, each successive stage was prepared by a spiritual elite. In brief, he wrote:

The centers of the mysteries were the places in which the form of external life belonging to the next epoch of culture was prepared. The mysteries were associations of human beings among whom other things were cultivated than those cultivated in the outer world.

Hence, there is an overlap during the transition from one cultural age to the next. The psychic and spiritual environment has to be prepared for souls with affinity to such environments to come to birth in each age. One thing is certain, however: those at one stage can only with difficulty understand those at another.

Characteristics

Apollonian

Spengler referred to the Classical Greco-Latin culture as Apollonian. It was characterized by its preference for the local and the present moment.

This is similar to Steiner’s conception. The ancient Greek identified with his city; an inhabitant of Athens saw himself as an “Athenian”. Similar for the citizen of Rome. Outside of the city, there were only barbarians. Cosmopolitanism was an alien concept because, at that age, a human being was a member of a group.

Faustian

Spengler believed that this Faustian culture is characterized by the unlimited search for knowledge, as exemplified by the elusive search for the “Theory of Everything”. He figured that it is has run its course since the goal is unachievable and predicted that it would begin its final decline right around the current time.

Steiner said that, at this age, the individual strives to grow beyond the community, that is, to be a “human being”, pure and simple, transcending his local community ties. This is expressed by extreme individualism, with each man his own master. But individualism is the principle of multiplicity, so this age led to several major conflicts.

Slavic Age

Both Spengler and Steiner saw a special role for Russia. Spengler predicted a new High Culture emerging from Russia, which Steiner called the Sixth Age. However, Russia is still at the Greco-Roman stage since the Russian soul still identifies with the community. They regard this as their birthright and achievement and are therefore opposed to the extreme individualism or the West. That attitude is retrograde, if not dangerous, and its true destiny is to establish communities based on spiritual affinity rather than on blood.

World War X

The war that was being fought in 1915 is analogous to the European conflict now. Then, the instigation for the war was Austria vs Russia/Slavs, representing the fifth cultural age and the fourth, respectively. (The war was triggered in Serbia—aligned with Russia—against Austria). Steiner defines the former:

A great and terrible symbol stands before the eyes of the world. Think of the two states where the war had its starting-point. On the one side, Russia with the Slavic world in general, declares that the war is based on brotherhood of blood, and on the other side, there is Austria, which comprises thirteen distinct peoples and thirteen different languages. The mobilization order in Austria had to be issued in thirteen languages because Austria encompasses thirteen racial stocks: Germans, Czechs, Poles, Ruthenians, Rumanians, Magyars, Slovaks, Serbs, Croatians, Slovenes (among whom there is a second and separate dialect), Bosnians, Dalmatians and Italians. Thirteen different racial stocks, apart from all minor differentiations, are united in Austria. Whether the implications of this are understood or not, it is obvious that Austria consists of a collection of human beings among whom community can never be based on blood relationship, for what its strange boundaries contain shoots out into thirteen different lineages.

This was opposed to the Russian soul:

The most highly composite state in Europe stands in opposition to the state that strives most intensively for life in a group soul, or for conformity. But this striving for life in a group soul brings a great many other things in its train
.

The analog to today is irresistible. Now the EU and NATO, represent the polyglot raceless state, against the Russian soul based on blood. This is confirmed by recent talks delivered both by Putin and by the Patriarch of the Russian Church. Putin believes, as he made clear, that Ukraine is still part of the Slavic community of blood. But Ukraine has been emerging from that stage as the attraction of the Faustian stage is strong.

There seems to be little possibility of any mutual understanding between the Russian ideal of the community of blood and the Western ideal of the cosmopolitanism of individuals. The West regards Putin as mad and Putin regards the West as evil. The Russian church is adamantly opposed to Western “rights” like same sex marriage and transgenderism. That baffles the West, which has no sympathy at all for the Patriarch’s worldview.

Common Task

To remain at the community of blood, while a necessary stage at the time, is no longer appropriate. Individualism leads to atomism, thereby inhibiting common action unless imposed by the forces of ideology. It has no explanation for the origins or eradication of evil; neither new government programs, nor alterations to the social structure have been adequate. Evil persists and unhappiness endures in the West.

The Common Task inaugurated by Nikolai Fyodorov, is a start. Intentional communities of spirit will replace dying cultural relics. The Christian world has yet to fully understand the process of the streams of thought inaugurated by Vladmir Solovyov and continued by Sergei Bulgakov and Nikolai Berdyaev.

Then there is the esoteric current in the Slavic soul that has been brought into the daylight by Valentin Tomberg. He recapitulates ideas from G. O. Mebes, Nina Roudnikova, and Vladimir Schmakov, which have only recently been published in English.

Steiner’s view is decidedly Eurocentric. Although it recognizes the contribution of the Vedas to the esoteric tradition, he leaves out the contributions of the Islamic World, or Magian in Spengler’s understanding. For this, we need to rely on the works of Rene Guenon.

Part 2, on Evil in the World, will appear tomorrow.