Novalis
Steiner
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"Man," the German Romantic poet Novalis
proclaimed, "is the Messiah of Nature" (quoted in SA 160). For Barfield,
our mission of salvation will be the bringing-back-to-life of the natural
world, in lock-step with the advent of final
participation. With nature's re-animation, materialism and mechanism
will no longer reign, and imagination will govern man's polar relationship
to the perceptual world.
The Romantic movement, with its theory of the
power of imagination, had, as its central
historical mission, the resuscitation of a qualityless world, "a world
drained of its immanent life by the very evolution which enabled them to
perceive its deadness" (BAR 36). When Romanticism came of age in the thought
of Rudolf Steiner, so too, did the concept of
humankind's messiahship:
The spirit of man was . . . for Steiner
not only a microcosm; it was a microcosm into
which a dying natural world had long been slowly withering. And he gave
all the energy of his own life to the task of proclaiming that this withering
process can only be arrested and reversed by the energy of the microcosm--of
man himself! Thus, the Spirit of man was, for him, really a seed or germ,
out of which the dying Spirit of nature seeks to be reborn. (RCA
238)
For Anthroposophy
and for Barfield:
Man has not only to know nature; he
has to reawaken her. But this he can only do by knowing her--truly knowing
her--knowing her in depth. And this re-awakening, which began only when
the conscious gaze of poets and artists first rested on her sleeping form
in admiration and rapture--this will continue . . . until she
stirs, and opens her eyes, and arises again in strength, in the strength
of the Spirit of Man, to walk hand in hand with science now, as well as
with art. (RCA 238-39)
See in particular "Man, Thought, and Nature"
(RCA 223-40), Unancestral Voice,
passim,
Saving
the Appearances, passim. |
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