The Enigma of Canon XI
The
'Abolition' of the Spirit –
The Year 869 & Its Significance in the Destiny of
Europe
This
article first appeared in New View
magazine Second Quarter Spring 2008
At
the Christmas Conference for the refounding of the Anthroposophical Society
Dec. 24th 1923
– 1st Jan. 1924
,
Rudolf
Steiner
restored to western culture something that had been lost for nearly 1100 years,
namely, the threefold image of Man – once known as the Trichotomy - the image
of Man as consisting of body, soul and
spirit. This had been missing since the year 869, when it was deviously 'abolished'
by fiat of a Church Council. In the years 1916-1924 Steiner laid ever greater
emphasis on the historical significance of the 8th Ecumenical Council
of Constantinople 869 (1), which is
usually completely ignored in conventional histories, and which, he often said,
had "abolished the human spirit". By that he meant the Council had
denied the separate existence in each individual of a spiritual
soul through which the individual could seek communion with the spiritual world;
instead, the individual was to depend on the Church and its hierarchy for
guidance. The 11th Canon (ruling) of the Council closed off for
westerners the individual's path to the spiritual world, which remained open in
Asia
through meditation and other spiritual practices.
The
Council of 869
What
was the real significance of the year 869, and what was the context in which
the Council took place? There is not the space here to go into the
momentous events happening in the spiritual
world at that time, which Rudolf Steiner describes in considerable detail in
various places; we shall restrict ourselves to the earthly plane.(2)
On the surface, the 8th Ecumenical Council (869-870) (3) had one overriding purpose – the joint effort by the Byzantine
Emperor Basil I (867-886) and the Roman Pope Adrian II (867-872; also known as
Hadrian II), for very different reasons, to discredit and seal the overthrow of
the Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople, Photios, which is why it is sometimes
known as the anti-Photian Council.
Basil
's reasons were short-term and political; having come to power in a coup he
needed to unify the empire behind him; he also needed western aid in defeating
the Saracens and wanted to out-manoeuvre
Rome
in controlling
Bulgaria
– but carefully. The stridently anti-Roman Photios was an obstacle to
Basil
's aims. For his part,
Adrian
sought to establish papal precedence over the patriarchs of the East and also
to impose
Rome
's spiritual suzerainty over the Slavic peoples and the peoples of the Balkans.
Like
Adrian
's predecessor
Pope
Nicholas
I ('the Great', 858-867), Patriarch Photios was keen to evangelise the Bulgars,
Slavs and the
Varangian
Rus
(Russians) Patriarch Photios, and disagreed strongly with
Rome
on various theological issues such as the understanding of the Trinity. He and
Nicholas
were the two greatest leaders their respective churches produced in the 9th
century, and their wills crossed mightily. In 867 Photios even excommunicated
Nicholas
, who had, however, died beforehand. For Rome, then, the struggle against was
above all a matter of establishing the spiritual
authority of the Latin West over Constantinople and the Eastern Church and of
having its authority recognised too among the peoples of eastern Europe.
The
8th Ecumenical Council met in ten sessions 5th Oct. 869
– 28th Feb. 870 in Constantinople's greatest imperial church, that
of Hagia Sophia (the Holy Spirit). At the first session there were, unusually,
only 30 clerics present from both Empires of East and West; by the last session
the number had risen to 103, still not great by previous standards of such
meetings. In order to attend, all were required to sign beforehand an
extraordinary document, the libellus
satisfactionis, an oath of obedience recognising the primacy of the Pope in
Rome
, for this was a Council utterly dominated by the Latin Church, imposing its
will on the East. The proceedings were overseen by a
Roman
Cardinal
and directed by three papal legates who had brought from
Rome
the documents agreed on at a synod there in the summer and which they intended
to have the eastern clergy at
Constantinople
simply approve. The documents brought from
Rome
consisted of a long Definition text and 27 Canons. All the canons the others
deal for the most part with matters of church administration, except for the
short Canon 11 which relates to a matter of dogmatic theology. Sandwiched, like
the devil in the detail, between two other innocuous Canons, it anathematises
the doctrine of "the two souls", and even that phrase is mentioned
only once. The complete text reads:
Though
the old and new Testament teach that a man or woman has one rational and
intellectual soul, and all the fathers and doctors of the church, who are
spokesmen of God, express the same opinion, some have descended to such a depth
of irreligion, through paying attention to the speculations of evil people, that
they shamelessly teach as a dogma that a human being has two souls, and keep
trying to prove their heresy by irrational means using a wisdom that has been
made foolishness. Therefore this holy and universal synod is hastening to uproot
this wicked theory now growing like some loathsome form of weed. Carrying in its
hand the winnowing fork of truth, with the intention of consigning all the chaff
to inextinguishable fire, and making clean the threshing floor of Christ, in
ringing tones it declares anathema the inventors and perpetrators of such
impiety and all those holding similar views; it also declares and promulgates
that nobody at all should hold or preserve in any way the written teaching of
the authors of this impiety. If however anyone presumes to act in a way contrary
to this holy and great synod, let him be anathema and an outcast from the faith
and way of life of Christians. (4)
This
Canon was not at all discussed by the Council; it simply went through 'on the
nod'. Why was it inserted at all? It has often been implied that this was aimed
at Photios who was allegedly teaching this doctrine, but in fact, there is no
real evidence that he did. He denied pre-existence and reincarnation, but did in
one place distinguish between a
higher spiritual soul and a lower animal soul (5)
Apart from this, his writings show no other sign nor is he know in the Orthodox
tradition for being a particular firm representative of the two souls doctrine.
However, he was very much interested in the question of the Holy Spirit, and
between 860 and 869 he did strongly advocate the cult of the Virgin Mary, which
in the East was always somehow connected with the feminine Sophia being in the
Old Testament sense of the feminine divine wisdom (ruach – spirit, wind,
breath)(6). Also, in 868 the two
great Orthodox missionaries Cyril and Methodius, who had been sent out on their
missions into the Balkans and beyond by Photios arrived in Rome, where they were
treated well by Pope Adrian and Anastasius but where Cyril died (14 Feb. 869).
Significantly, Photios is not mentioned in the Canon as having actually taught
the two souls doctrine, though the six other Canons that
criticise him do not fail to take him specifically to task on other
matters. Canon 11 seems to have been "slipped in". It seems not to
belong to the whole when read in context. This is but the beginning of the
mystery.
For it is the source of
Steiner
's
contention that precisely here, in this Canon XI, the Church "abolished the
spirit", and moreover, in Christendom's great church of the Holy Spirit. (left)
The
teaching of the two souls can be traced back to the threefold
picture of the human being shared by the Greeks – the Trichotomy.
Aristotle
spoke
of pneuma (spirit) psyche (soul), and
soma (body). This idea, the reflection of ancient wisdom and real insight is
also reflected in the teachings of
St.
Paul
; in 1
Thessalonians 5:23 for example, he speaks clearly of pneumatikos anthropos (spirit man), psychikos anthropos (soul man), and somatikos anthropos (bodily man). By the 4th century,
however, this threefold picture of Man was beginning to crumble as merely
rational intellectualism developed and spiritual insight declined. Human beings
were beginning to feel that they had their own ideas, instead of experiencing
divine beings thinking in them or through them as with the Greeks and earlier
cultures, but greater intellectual development meant confusion and disputation
as each insisted on his own understanding. The threefold nature of the spiritual
world, and especially the Holy Spirit in man and world was no longer understood,
especially in the West.
There
were however, Gnostics in the East
who maintained that Man had two souls, a higher spiritual one that lived in the
light of spiritual reason and a lower one that responded to the needs of the
body. Ultimately, this doctrine of the two souls was the last remnants of the
knowledge that the individual human being has his own spirit (the higher
'soul'), a spirit that in its essential being is not the same as the soul. In an
effort to rid themselves of these troublesome Gnostic views, the Church Fathers
had in 382 at the
Synod of Rome pronounced the anathema on the views of Apollinaris of
Laodicea, who had declared that there was never human consciousness in
Jesus
.
"There are no two Sons," he declared, "such as God's Son of
Nature, that is, of God, and a Son of Grace,
the human being from
Mary
."
After the 4th century, and particularly in the West, real
understanding of what had happened at the Baptism in the Jordan (Epiphany) faded
away, so that Roman clerics in the 9th century could misuse a
decision made in Rome in the 4th century, ignore the context in which
it was made (i.e. understanding of the Baptism), and twist Apollinaris' denial
of the human nature of Jesus into a denial of the spiritual nature of Man. This
amounts to the one sin which
Christ
said
would never be forgiven, the sin against the Holy Spirit.(7)
The way this was done in 869 was so devious
that it was hardly perceived any
longer by most clergy as the new dogma slipped in over the ensuing decades and
centuries under the threshold of consciousness. At only one other Council did
the dogma of the single soul and of a dichotomous human nature (body and soul
only) raise its head; this was the Council of Vienne (1311-1312) that condemned
the Order of the Knights Templar. The 11th Canon in 870
thus signified the anathematisation of the individual's equivalent
experience of the the
Whitsun experience, the second baptism though the fire of the Holy Spirit
through union with one's own spirit being; western individuals were not to be
allowed this experience. "The spirit was not spoken against
in 869-70; it was simply no longer mentioned."(8)
Despite their claims that they were returning to the ways of the early
Church, Protestant Reformers too
rejected the idea of the Trichotomy (body,
soul, and spirit) because they held
that it implied a division of the unity of the soul, and that further, it
implied that the Holy Spirit, which they believed was only of Father and Son,
was also accessible to the human being. The famous Swiss Protestant theologian
Karl
Barth
(1886-1968) wrote:
One
can therefore not describe him [the human being] as spirit, because spirit in
the biblical sense denotes that which God
is and does for Man, and also because, in the biblical sense Man is
identical with the soul (of his body)....
The spirit is immortal, which is precisely why it cannot be identical either
with Man or with a part of the human being. The spirit is the fundament, that
which determines the boundary of the entire human being; in this sense it is of
its own nature and is really no third element within
the human being, no further element of its nature that enters into the soul and
body."(9)
The consequences of the 11th Canon
continued on after the Reformation to affect the whole development of modern
European culture. The Protestants were unaware of the fact that they were
upholding a 9th century papal dogma.
And
so there developed on the protestant side a materialistic
natural science and an unspiritual
philosophy. Later philosophers...do not suspect that they are in fact good
Catholics insofar as they always study the body on the one hand and the soul on
the other and are of the opinion that such studies are based on real
observation. They have no idea that they are following the dogma of the 8th
Ecumenical Council when they do not speak of spirit. ....Almost all
psychological doctrines are built upon the error of the twofold division of the
human being.... One speaks of the fundamental problems of physical psychology or
of psychophysical parallelism, but has in fact lost sight not only of the
spirit, but also of the soul. The tendency of our times is increasingly towards abolition of the soul also. (10)
It is not the case that
Pope
Nicholas
or his
Counsellor
Anastasius
were
behind 'the abolition of the spirit'. Here we come to another, more sinister
aspect of the matter.
Pope
Nicholas
died
in 867 and was followed by
Pope
Adrian
II
, a
much weaker man.
Rome
and
Central
Italy
were
turbulent places to be in those days. The descendents of the
Lombard
tribal
leaders were developing into early mediaeval aristocratic familes, some of them
extremely unscrupulous, vicious and
violent. They allied themselves with corrupt and decadent members of the Church
hierarchy, three of whom were the Papal legates who would be sent to
Constantinople
in
869. In the autumn of 868 these forces persuaded the Pope to put Anastasius on
trial on trumped up charges; he was stripped of all his offices and forced into
exile. He fled to the court of the
Frankish
Emperor
Louis
II
, who
made him the tutor of his daughter. Anastasius attended the last session of the
8th Council in February 870 as the Emperor's emissary; he was there
on a mission to arrange a marriage between
Louis
'
daughter and the son of the Byzantine Emperor (it fell through). It was only
because of Anastasius' foresight in having a copy of the complete record of the
Council made that we know what happened there. Meanwhile, when Anastasius had
been out of
Rome
, from
autumn 868 to autumn 869,
Pope
Adrian
had
been under the influence of the corrupt nobles and clergy. It was from among
this circle, a circle in which, according to
Rudolf
Steiner
black
arts were used, that someone – it
is still not known who – produced the documents that included Canon XI. They
appeared at the
Roman
synod
in the summer of 869 and were then taken to
Constantinople
by the
three legates
Deacon
Marinus
, and
Bishops Donatus and Stephanus. Marinus would later become
Pope
as a
result of the murder of
Pope
John
VIII
in
882, after which the
Vatican
fell
into utter decadence until the 960s. Canon XI then, which "abolished"
the individual spirit, emerged in a devious way from an unknown source. This was
a time in Church history when clever and unscrupulous men were beginning to use
forged 'ancient' documents alleged to be from the early Church to prove their
right to this or that. The most infamous of these, the so-called Pseudo-Isidorian
Decretals, had surfaced by the early 850s, so that, if indeed Canon XI was
inspired by the example of the
Roman
Synod
of
382, there was already a precedent for such deception. Certainly, the false
Decretals were soon appealed to in
Rome
's
battle against Photios.
We can note in passing the mysterious fact that
the numbers 8 + 6 + 9 add up to 23, which contains both the number of duality
and trinity within it.(11) Also, the
process of estrangement that was so accelerated in 869-70 by the disagreement
with Photios culminated in 1054 with the Great Schism of the two churches of
East and West, which even now is not yet healed.
Mysterious too in this context is the arithmetical fact that 869 + 1054 = 1923, the year of the
existential crisis and resurrection of the Anthroposophical Society, when at the
Christmas Conference in December, Rudolf Steiner restored to western culture the
Trichotomy, the threefold image of Man, thus signifying that the time to begin to roll back the heavy iron curtain of 869 that had closed
off the spirit had now arrived.
Helmuth
von
Moltke
Before
he laid the Foundation Stone of the refounded Anthroposophical Society on
that morning of
25th December 1923
Rudolf
Steiner
declared to those present: "Let the first words to resound through this
room today be those which sum up the essence of what may stand before your souls
as the most important findings of recent years." By those "most
important findings" he surely meant the elaboration of the threefold
picture of man that he had developed in works such as Riddles
of the Soul (1917) that he had been working on through the war years. And
during that time he had been connected with a very special individual. Unlike
New Age gurus of that time or this,
Steiner
did not indulge in channelling communications from those who had crossed the
threshold of death. He always emphasised consciousness and consistently warned
against trance states or anything that reduced the human state of wakefulness.
However, there was one very special individual whose post-mortem thoughts he
did, through his own spiritual capacities,
communicate and those only to the deceased person's wife. The individual in
question happened to be the man who had had supreme responsibility for the
German army at the outbreak of the war in August 1914 – Chief of the General
Staff, Colonel-General Helmuth von Moltke. He had been responsible for the
campaign of August-September 1914 that had failed to win the much
hoped-for quick and decisive victory for
Germany
.
Rudolf
Steiner
saw in
Helmuth
von Moltke
the reincarnation of
Pope
Nicholas
I.
(12) In both lives, in positions of
terrible responsibility in the middle of a
Europe
in great crisis, this individuality was faced with keeping at bay both East and
West and with preserving a central cultural space that could be of service to
humanity in the future. Nicholas and
his close adviser Anastasius Bibliothecarius faced a strong spiritual challenge
from Photios and the church of Orthodox Christianity in the East, and more
physical challenges from marauding, anti-Christian Vikings in the northwest and
Saracens in the southwest (Spain, Sicily). He also had to combat the egotistical
and anarchic tendencies
of the nominally Christian Frankish leaders of the territories of the
West and those self-seeking clergymen who supported them and were supported by
them. Within this still superficially Christian society of the Franks there was
yet much that was pagan and it included an esotericism
that was related to the ancient cults of the Druids and the nordic
initiations of the individual will as well as being
inwardly open both to Celtic influences from Ireland, all of which,
infused by the southern culture of Provence, would in later centuries coalesce
in the knightly cult of chivalry. But in the 9th century it was still
far too wild and undisciplined. Nicholas and Anastasius were far-sighted men;
they saw that they had to create a social and cultural space in Europe that
would not be overwhelmed either by the will forces of the north-west or the
mystical and ritualistic thinking of the south-east – a space of form,
intellectually disciplined, that could hold its own against these two, more
compulsive poles, a space in which eventually, individual and community could
find their balance.
Nicholas
had very little at his disposal except the power of his formidable mind and
will, and the advice of his counsellors, especially
Anastasius
Bibliothecarius
. In addition to all these problems, in the vicinity of the Pope, threateningly,
were dark and sinister forces in the corrupt clergy and the ambitious nobility
of nearby
Campania
; these forces sometimes resorted to the black arts.(13)
By
contrast,
Helmuth
von Moltke
commanded the most formidable army in
Europe
but was saddled with an almost impossible strategic task – war on two fronts
against the two giant armies of
Russia
and
France
and the resources of the world's largest empire, the British; he was also
burdened with two rather useless allies,
Austria-Hungary
and
Turkey
. In his immediate environment von Moltke too had to deal with the chaotic will
impulses of unscrupulous men, the
Kaiser
and those around him.
Thomas
Meyer
's book makes clear that a number of these men had also been incarnated in 9th
century
Italy
, some of them in that degenerate Mystery stream. For an understanding of the
complexities of
von Moltke
's situation and his destiny,
Meyer
's book is a must-read. Suffice it to say here that what began for
Europe
and the West in the mid-9th century with
Pope
Nicholas
I (and the decisions he took then for profound and historically justified
reasons) came almost full circle in the lifetime of
Helmuth
von Moltke
(1848-1916) (right). Rudolf Steiner
gave a memorial address soon after the General's death on 18 June 1916 and also
spoke verses which, in their threefold structure, prefigure in a seed-like way
the Foundation Stone Meditation of 1923.(14)
Steiner continued to mediate communications from the spiritual individuality of
Helmuth von Moltke until he himself succumbed in September 1924 to the illness
that would kill him six months later; the last such communication was on 17 June
1924, only three months before he fell ill. The fact that – as far as this
author knows – there was no other contemporary individual with whom, after the
person's death, Rudolf Steiner had such an extraordinary relationship, points to
the outstanding significance with which Steiner regarded Moltke, recognising in
him someone whose own destiny was profoundly bound up with that of central
Europe, the region in which Steiner was unfolding his own teaching. Helmuth von
Moltke's destiny was related to Rudolf Steiner's own life task, which was to
bring healing to western culture, and through it to the world as a whole, out of
the cultural ground of Central Europe; for this to happen, Central Europe itself
had to be defended and affirmed as a cultural space between the poles of East
and West. Since the events of the 9th century, European culture had
been riven – for reasons of historical necessity – by the consequences of a
dualistic picture of Man that had resulted in
Europe
being pervaded by the materialistic worldview that had produced the catastrophe
of the war through which
Steiner
and Moltke were both living. In addressing Moltke,
Steiner
knew he had before him the individuality who, as
Pope
Nicholas
I had had the karmic task of separating off central and western Europe from the
more direct spiritual influences of the East. This was so that the West would in
fact be able to develop, through the application of rationality and intellect as
well as its own culture's forces of feeling and will, the skills of natural
science and technology that are needed by mankind.
Lotharingia
and
Europe
One
of the aids to historical understanding that
Rudolf
Steiner
taught was what could be called the 'principle of the axial year'. He described
it this way:
In
the deeper structure of events as they proceed we may discover a repetition of
what proceeded them...If we consider the year 1879 [as axis], we can proceed to
1880, or we can back to 1878. If we proceed to 1880, we shall observe in the
deeper spiritual structure of that year that what has happened in 1878 is still
active within it; behind the events of 1880 there stand as active forces the
events of 1878...in starting from an incisive historical event, you will find
the proceeding spiritual event repeated in the subsequent one.(15)
If we
then take as axis the year 1413, the beginning of our modern epoch according to
spiritual science (16), the events of
1412 will somehow be reflected in those of 1414. That means that we can expect
some correlation between the events of the year 869 and those of the year 1957,
as those two years are 544 years on either side of 1413. What happened in 1957?
The signing of the Treaty of Rome! That was the beginning of the
European Economic Community
, today's increasingly monolithic European Union. The process that led to the
Treaty was initiated 7 years earlier by
Jean
Monnet
(1888-1979)(left), the wily technocrat and consummate networker who was
responsible for economic planning in two world wars and for post-war French
economic reconstruction. During the war, in 1943
Monnet
had drawn up a plan to unite
Europe
politically through the 'back door' -
by economic means, the first step to be the combination of the coal and steel
resources of eastern
France
and western
Germany
. He specifically referred to this plan as the 'recreation of Lotharingia'.(17)
This is remarkable because 869 was the year the
kingdom
of
Lotharingia
(
Lorraine
) disappeared. Charlemagne's empire was divided between his three grandsons by
the Treaty of Verdun in 843 (see illustration); the Middle Kingdom, at first
unnamed was from 855 onwards known as Lotharingia after its ruler, Charlemagne's
great-grandson Lothar II and existed for a further 13 years. It comprised a long
swathe of lands that included
Holland
and
Belgium
in the north, the
Rhine
valley,
Luxemburg
,
Alsace
,
Switzerland
and the whole of northern
Italy
as far as
Rome
. It thus included territory from all six countries of the EEC, founded in 1957,
plus
Switzerland
. This middle realm between what would later become France and Germany
disappeared in 869 when two of Charlemagne's grandsons, Ludwig, king of
Austrasia (later Germany), and his brother half-Charles the Bald, king of
Neustria (later France) joined forces to invade the kingdom of their brother
Lothar II after he died (8 Aug. 869), leaving an infant son whose legitimacy was
in question. By the Treaty of Mersen (870)
Charles
and
Ludwig
divided Lothar's lands north of
Italy
between them; northern
Italy
remained as a rump which soon broke up into squabbling princedoms and duchies.
Geopolitical Trichotomy was thus reduced to a Dichotomy, one could say, and
paralleled what happened theologically at the same time in Constantinople.(18)
In 869, Lotharingia died, and in 1957, it was, in a sense, reborn.
1957
was also the last full year of the pontificate of
Pope
Pius
XII
(1939-58). Seven years earlier in 1950 – the same year as Monnet erected the
European Coal and Steel Community that was modelled on his idea of a new
Lotharingia - Pius XII
had declared ex cathedra (i.e.
the declaration was held to be infallible) the dogma of the Assumption of the
Virgin Mary which stated that Mary, "having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body
and soul into heavenly glory." [my emphasis] This was the first such
dogma based on papal infallibility since the dogma of papal infallibility
itself was first declared at the Vatican I Council of 1870. The
treaty of Rome came into force on Ist Jan. 1958; the new Pope, John XXIII,
elected later that year, soon announced his intention to hold Vatican II, the
second Ecumenical Council of the
Vatican; this far-reaching event took place 1962-65. Vatican I had been held
1869-1870, thus exactly 1000 years after the Constantinople Council of 869-70.
In accordance with the above-mentioned axial year principle, 1869 corresponds to
957, the second year of the pontificate of Pope John XII (955-964). The first
half of the 10th century was perhaps the most degenerate period
in the Vatican's long history.(19) It
was also a time of major significance in Central Europe in that Otto I, King of
Germany (936-973), who was married
to Edith of Wessex, re-established the Holy Roman Empire (962) and brought the
papal humiliation to an end. Of the motives of Emperor Otto in refounding the
Empire in 962, historian Geoffrey Barraclough wrote:
...it
was not so much to Charlemagne that Otto looked back, as to Lothar I, who
combined the imperial title with
rule over the Middle [Frankish] Kingdom [known as Lotharingia 855-870]...the
imperial title was...important to Otto as the highest expression and
legitimization of his right to rule not over Italy alone...but over all the
territories of the old Middle Kingdom [Lotharingia] which had come into German
hands...(20)
Otto
I began the process that would bind the states of Germany with the Italian
peninsula and for a thousand years, involve German-speaking Emperors in the
affairs of Italy. The period that corresponds to his time and the Papacy of John
XII around the axis of 1413 is 1859-70, when Germans and Italians separated from
each other and formed their own nation states. 1870, the year papal
infallibility was declared at Vatican I, 1000 years after the Council of
869-870, thus saw the birth of modern Germany and Italy under a historical star
that was not exactly propitious. Then, Germany and Italy 'joined together' again
on 1st Jan. 1958 when the Treaty of Rome came into force, the first
year of the new Pope John XXIII, who created Vatican II. A key in understanding
all this is the 'Middle Kingdom' of Lotharingia (Lorraine), the land, or perhaps
we could say, 'the concept of the middle'.
This territorial concept, which includes such places as Rotterdam,
Amsterdam, Maastricht, Brussels, Aachen, Cologne, the Ruhr, Strasbourg, Basel,
Zurich, Geneva, Marseilles, and in Italy, Milan, Venice and Rome, became the
foundational basis for the European Economic Community. Following a conference
in Sicily
(21),
the EEC was founded by the Treaty of Rome
in 1957, which corresponds to 869.
In
1922-23, when Rudolf Steiner was speaking about the need for a new, threefold
social order in Europe based on the threefold picture of Man, Count
Richard
Coudenhove-Kalergi (1894-1972), (left) an aristocrat with family roots deep
in Lotharingia, began a contrary movement; his 1923 manifesto Paneuropa
advocated a United States of Europe rooted in Catholic spirituality and
exclusive of both Britain and Russia. The honorary President of the
Paneuropa Union today is Otto von Habsburg, son of the last Habsburg
Emperor. Coudenhove-Kalergi's efforts gave birth to the Council of Europe, which
since its founding in 1949, has concerned itself with the cultural and political
direction of the emerging European superstate. Coudenhove's goal of uniting
Europe through traditional concepts of culture failed in face of the dominant
economic drives of the post-war years, which were understood by the businessman
and technocrat Jean Monnet. It was Monnet's economic path to European union, via the reconstruction of
Lotharingia, which supplanted Coudenhove-Kalergi's Vatican-oriented initiatives
in 1945-50. But what was common to both these two very different individuals was
their strong personal links to Washington and the American elite. Without
backing from that quarter, neither of them would have succeeded. As it is,
aspects of the symbology of Coudenhove-Kalergi's movement – the EU flag and
anthem, for example and the European Parliament – have been grafted in an
almost marxist superstructural sense onto the economic infrastructural machine
generated by Monnet and his allies.
In
all the seemingly mundane historical developments considered in this article,
one can discern something much more profound and spiritual working within the
destiny of the West. It is the struggle for the image of the human being. The
Vatican, which was responsible for the original 'excommunication' of the spirit,
in 869-70, patiently and purposefully as ever, aims for a Europe that will be
animated by but one soul – that of the Church, guided by its intellectual
hierarchy. From the West come those anti-spiritual economic and scientific
forces which would root out both soul and spirit and subjugate all social and
cultural life to the drives of economics and genetics – a culture of body
only. Neither of these forces belong to any truly human future, as they lead to
the denial of human freedom; they are forces of dualism on the one hand and even
what can be called materialistic monism on the other – forces which insist
respectively, that the human being is either only of body and soul, or even of
body only. Both of them claim that modern human beings can only be informed,
guided and led by a priesthood, whether religious and overt, or scientific,
financial and covert, and in this insistence on the impossibility of the
individual human spirit finding its own way to freedom and truth, they both
reflect the spectre of the 11th Canon of the Council of
Constantinople in 869. Meanwhile, the image of the human Trichotomy, the
trinitarian image of the human being as body, soul and
spirit, described and articulated by Rudolf Steiner in 1923, is struggling to re-emerge in a modern form, and slowly
but surely, is gaining ground.
NOTES
(1) It is noteworthy that
Steiner
's main philosophical work The Philosophy
of Freedom was published in 1894, the same year as Otto Willmann's
History of Idealism. It was from Willmann's book, one of the few to discuss
the Council of 869 in any detail, that
Steiner
grasped the significance of the Council. See R.Wagner, 'Das achte ökumensiche Konzil von 869' in H.H.Schöffler ed., Der
Kampf um das Menschenbild (Verlag
um Goetheanum, 1986)
(2) RS goes into the spiritual
dimension in the eight volumes containing his lectures on Karmic Relationships
(1924) especially Vols 3 & 4
(3) Also known as the Fourth
Council of Constantinople
(4) Schöffler,
pp.19-20.
(5)
Markus
Osterrieder
, Verschweigen
des Geistes (Silencing the Spirit) www.
celtoslavica.org/bibliothek/trichotomie.pdf
(6)
See n.5
(7)
Matt. 12: 30-32
(8)
See n.5
(9)
See n.5
(10)
Schöffler p.28
(11)
This number contains a challenge: is the 2 before the 3 in the sense of primacy,
superiority as in ⅔, the
inverted pentagram? Or do we see the 3 following the 2 in time, the 2 giving way
to the 3, the age of Dichotomy yielding to the New Age of Trinity?
(12)
Thomas Meyer's fascinating and illuminating book Light for the New Millennium – Rudolf Steiner's Association with
Helmuth and Eliza von Moltke: Letters, Documents and After-Death Communications (1993,
English transl. 1997, Rudolf Steiner Press) reveals much of the remarkable
pattern of destiny in the life of von Moltke.
(13)
In these circles were the
historical antecedents of some of the darker characters in Wolfram von
Eschenbach's Parzival, such as Klingsor. See
W.J.
Stein
, The Ninth Century and the Holy Grail,
(Temple Lodge Press, 1988)
(14)
Meyer
, pp. 164-171
(16)
'our modern epoch' - also known in Anthroposophy as the 5th Post-Atlantean
epoch, the 5th period of 2160 years since the end of Atlantis, or the
age of the Consciousness Soul, when the third human soul element is to be
developed – that which enables us to recognise ourselves as spiritual individuals who must apply their free thinking to distinguish
between Good and Evil, or the Age of the Fishes (Pisces), the 2160 year-long period
when the Spring Equinox stands in the zodiacal sign of Pisces. N.b. there is a
1200 year interval between the cosmic astronomical phenomenon and its earthly
reflection in human history. Thus the astronomical age of Pisces: 215-2375 AD,
but the cultural age of Pisces = 1413-3573 AD. The 1200 year interval is
'determined' by the movements of the
cosmic pentagram formed around the Zodiac by the conjunctions of
Venus
and the Sun. For a more detailed but clear explanation of this, see
R.
Powell
, Hermetic Astrology, Vol. 1(Hermetika,
1987), ch.3.
(17)
See
F.
Duchêne
, Jean Monnet – The First Statesman of
Interdependence (W.W. Norton, 1994), pp.126-127.
(18)
That border area between the east and west Franks has been a bone of contention
in European history ever since, as the rulers of France continually sought to
gain the whole length of the Rhine as the 'natural'
French border, which naturally led them to seek to dominate the Low
Countries.
(19)
It was known as the 'Pornocracy' or Rule of Harlots because power was held by a
series of strong but exceedingly degenerate female aristocrats connected with
the House of Spoleto.
(20)
G.
Barraclough
, The Origins of Modern Germany (Basil
Blackwell, 1966) p.53
(21)
Messina
Conference, 1-3 June, 1955
Terry
Boardman 2008
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