The nature of man : approached through the philosophy of Rudolf Steiner

realised and conscious to itself in a single person. The Christian revelation is witness to the truth that in Christ Jesus the Whole became incarnated in a human person: he was Infinite and he knew it. By this the Earth evolution achieved its meaning. In the periods of organic evolution, the mixed confusions of the earlier forms had first to be clarified by the elimination of the animal forms until the human became manifested. But there was still that confusion in the more spiritual nature of Man which has been known in religious terminology as Original Sin, originating in the so-called Fall of Man. Through this Man had remained unable to attain to full realisation of Truth, particularly of the nature of death. Through the Christ event Man achieved his goal in one person and became the world-organ of truthknowing. From now on the task is the gradual transformation of the old natural, unaccomplished forms in which the full human and divine are not manifest. To these belong all our social forms and institutions which like Dinosaurs still stalk about, and all those old atavistic emotional aspects of our inner lives which still make us miserable with our egotistical, criminal and neurotic impulses.

But we mustreturn froma glimpse of the future into the present and try to follow Steiner into the web of the so-called psychosomatic problem—the problem of how our immortal souls and spirits are related to our mortal and spatial bodies.

When at the beginning of our modern age Galileo and Descartes reduced objective existence to the purely corporeal, devoid of all positive properties, and consigned those properties to an attic of subjectivity, they formulated in new terms the body-soul question. They mistakenly converted what was justified as a fiction of science into an unjustified affirmation of a truth of fact. Descartes himself sought to relate the utterly immaterial soul to the utterly mechanistic and material body through the pineal gland, an effort which must leave most moderns bewildered. On the whole the dogmas of our science today seck to locate the soul exclusively in the nervous system, an equally bewildering concept; if indeed it can even be called a concept. It would seem to arise from the experience that I look out through my eyes and therefore must be behind them. But the concepts of a purely subjective soul and purely objective body

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