Get started

WorkRudolf Steiner

The Spiritual Guidance of Man and of Mankind

Three Copenhagen lectures in which Steiner first put into print his account of two Jesus children.

by Rudolf Steiner85 passages held

  • English, a translation held here, and your language
Sign in or subscribe to discuss this work See it in context
Original title
Die geistige Führung des Menschen und der Menschheit
First published
(aged 50)
Original language
German

Report a rights issue

Overview

Three lectures given in Copenhagen in June 1911, at the general meeting of the Scandinavian Theosophical Society, make up this book. By August Rudolf Steiner had rewritten the stenographer's transcript and signed a preface in Munich. He warned that anyone who had not read Theosophy and An Outline of Occult Science would take the book for fantasy, and he said he had reasons for letting it appear at once rather than recasting it as a written book. The first lecture starts from the small child. In its first three years, Steiner argues, a child learns to walk upright, to speak and to think with a wisdom greater than anything the adult can later summon consciously, and he treats this as evidence that higher powers guide every human being before memory begins. The second widens that guidance to humanity as a whole, which he describes as led through its epochs by spiritual beings of ascending rank, from angels upwards. The third turns on a puzzle every reader of the New Testament can check: Matthew and Luke give Jesus two different genealogies, one through David's son Solomon and one through his son Nathan. Steiner's answer is that there were two Jesus children, one from each line. In his account the individuality of Zarathustra was reborn in Matthew's child and passed, when the boys were twelve, into Luke's child, the boy whom Luke shows among the teachers in the Temple; at the baptism the Christ entered that body for three years. It was the first time Steiner had put this teaching into print. An authorised English translation followed in 1915.

Key concepts

What does spiritual guidance mean in this book?

The work of wiser powers on a human being beyond anything the conscious I can do. In the first lecture it is the force that teaches a small child to stand, speak and think before memory begins; in the second it widens to the beings who lead peoples and ages. Steiner's claim is that one kind of guidance runs from the single child to the history of humanity.

Why does the point where memory begins matter to the argument?

Because it marks, in Steiner's account, the moment when the conscious I takes over from the wisdom that shaped the child. Most people remember back only to about their third year; before that, the child is formed rather than forming itself. The boundary shows him where guidance works unconsciously and where a person's own responsibility begins.

Who are the spirits of personality, or time spirits?

In the book's hierarchy, the beings above angels and archangels who guide not a single person or a single people but whole ages of civilisation. Angels, in Steiner's account, accompany individuals, archangels lead peoples, and the time spirits give each epoch its character. He presents the ranks as the way humanity is led through its cultural epochs towards ever greater self-consciousness.

What are the Solomon Jesus and the Nathan Jesus?

Steiner's names for the two children he finds behind the two genealogies: the child of Matthew's Gospel, descended from David's son Solomon, and the child of Luke's, descended from David's son Nathan. In his account the first bore the reborn individuality of Zarathustra, the second a soul that had never been incarnated before, and at twelve the one passed into the other.

What does becoming as a little child mean in the book?

Steiner reads the Gospel saying as pointing to the forces that worked in a person's first three years. In his account those forces, which teach the child to stand, speak and think, are the same powers the Christ can awaken in the adult, so that Paul's words, not I but Christ in me, describe the forces of childhood made conscious.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

The Wisdom of the First Three Years

How does a small child learn to walk, speak and think, with a wisdom no adult could summon on purpose? The first lecture treats that achievement as evidence that higher powers guide every human being before memory begins.

No one remembers learning to stand upright or to speak, and no adult could consciously plan the work a child does in those years, shaping even the fine structure of its own brain. Steiner argues that the wisdom at work there is greater than anything the conscious I later commands, and that it comes from the individual's higher nature acting together with spiritual powers. Once memory begins, around the third year, the I takes over and that guidance withdraws. He links this with the saying that one must become as a little child.

  • child development
  • childhood
  • human development
  • unconscious
  • memory
  • language
  • brain
  • higher self
  • ego
  • self-knowledge
  • consciousness
  • spiritual guidance
  • spiritual development
  • embodiment
  • human nature

Enter a dialogue

Beings Who Guide the Ages

Is human history only the sum of human choices? The second lecture widens the guidance of the single child into the guidance of all humanity, led through its epochs by spiritual beings of ascending rank.

In Steiner's account, as the individual is guided by an angel, peoples are led by archangels and whole ages by beings he calls spirits of personality, or time spirits. Humanity passes through a sequence of cultural epochs, from ancient India and Persia through Egypt and Chaldea, Greece and Rome, to the present, and each hands on what the next must build on. His own age, he argues, has lost sight of that guidance through materialism, and the spiritual science he teaches is meant to make it conscious again.

  • spiritual beings
  • cosmology
  • spiritual evolution
  • human evolution
  • civilization
  • materialism
  • astrology
  • spirituality
  • spiritual science

Enter a dialogue

Two Jesus Children

Why do Matthew and Luke give Jesus two different genealogies? The third lecture answers a puzzle any reader of the New Testament can check, with a claim Steiner put into print here for the first time.

Matthew traces Jesus through David's son Solomon, Luke through his son Nathan, and the two birth stories barely touch. Steiner's answer is that there were two Jesus children, one from each line. In his account the individuality of Zarathustra was reborn in Matthew's child and passed, when the boys were twelve, into Luke's child, the boy Luke shows among the teachers in the Temple. At the baptism in the Jordan the Christ entered that body and lived in it for three years. Steiner warns that without his earlier books this will read as fantasy.

  • christology
  • christ
  • christianity
  • reincarnation
  • clairvoyance
  • esotericism

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held
85
distinct concepts
137
by passages held, corpus-wide
#541

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “christology” and “cosmology”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 20 pairings. 80 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
christologycosmology7
clairvoyancespiritual beings5
cosmologyreincarnation5
spiritual beingsspiritual evolution5
human developmentreincarnation4
spiritual evolutionspiritual guidance4
christologyclairvoyance3
christologyreincarnation3
clairvoyancespiritual evolution3
christologyhuman development2
christologyspiritual evolution2
human developmentspiritual beings2
christologyspiritual beings1
clairvoyancecosmology1
clairvoyancehuman development1
cosmologyhuman development1
cosmologyspiritual evolution1
cosmologyspiritual guidance1
human developmentspiritual evolution1
reincarnationspiritual beings1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1891 Die Grundfrage der Erkenntnistheorie (Die Grundfrage der Erkenntnistheorie mit besonderer Rücksicht auf Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre)

    A doctoral thesis and the groundwork for The Philosophy of Freedom, though most readers know it only through the 1892 book that absorbed it.

     DE
  2. 1894 The Philosophy of Freedom (Die Philosophie der Freiheit)

    The philosophical centre of Steiner's work, written in his Weimar years before any theosophy, and the book he kept sending later readers back to.

     DE
  3. 1895 Friedrich Nietzsche, Fighter for Freedom (Friedrich Nietzsche, ein Kämpfer gegen seine Zeit)

    Written between The Philosophy of Freedom and the Goethe book, while Steiner still counted himself among Nietzsche's allies and before his dealings with the Nietzsche Archive turned sour.

     DE
  4. 1897 Goethe's World View (Goethes Weltanschauung)

    The last book of Steiner's Weimar years and the summing-up of his work as Goethe's scientific editor; The Philosophy of Freedom supplied its theory of knowledge.

     DE
  5. 1901 Mystics of the Renaissance and Their Relation to Modern Thought (Die Mystik im Aufgange des neuzeitlichen Geisteslebens)

    The first book to come out of Steiner's lectures for the theosophists, still written in the voice of the naturalist philosopher of the 1890s; Christianity as Mystical Fact followed from the next course.

     EN
  6. 1902 Christianity as Mystical Fact (Das Christentum als mystische Tatsache und die Mysterien des Altertums)

    The book that marks Steiner's turn from philosophy to esoteric Christianity, given first as lectures to the Berlin theosophists in the months before he became their leader.

     EN
  7. 1904 How to Know Higher Worlds (Wie erlangt man Erkenntnisse der höheren Welten?)

    The practical companion to Theosophy: that book describes what the trained seer claims to see, this one the training that is meant to lead there.

     DE
  8. 1904 Theosophy (Theosophie)

    Begun two years after Steiner took charge of the German theosophists, and the systematic foundation that his later accounts of initiation and cosmic evolution build on.

     DE
  9. 1910 An Outline of Occult Science (Die Geheimwissenschaft im Umriß)

    The fullest single statement of Steiner's cosmology, begun inside the theosophical movement and revised under anthroposophy through four prefaces from 1909 to 1925.

     DE
  10. 1911 The Spiritual Guidance of Man and of Mankind (Die geistige Führung des Menschen und der Menschheit) you are here EN
  11. 1919 The Threefold Commonwealth (Die Kernpunkte der sozialen Frage in den Lebensnotwendigkeiten der Gegenwart und Zukunft)

    Composed for the months after the German revolution, and Steiner's chief written statement on society; it reached English readers within a few years as The Threefold Commonwealth.

     DEEN
Sign in or subscribe to discuss this work

— or open another of their works