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The Path of the Soul after Death: The Community of the Living and the Dead as Witnessed by Rudolf Steiner in His Eulogies and Funeral Addresses
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by Peter Selg. SteinerBooks, 2011, 271 pgs.
Review by Sara Ciborski
The stated purpose of this soul-stirring book, “to help deepen our awareness of our connections with the dead,” is too modest, for its themes are cosmic and its scope vast. The main content is indicated in the book’s subtitle: extracts from Rudolf Steiner’s eulogies and funeral addresses, along with knowledgeable commentary by Selg, make up the rich substance of three-fourths of the book. The rest is a compelling overview of the results of Rudolf Steiner’s research on the path of the soul after death.
After mentioning earlier occasions, dating back even to his student days, when Rudolf Steiner responded to requests for funeral addresses, Selg focuses on Steiner’s appeals to anthroposophists to work concretely with the dead. The task—and Steiner viewed it as anthroposophy’s most important task—is to build and nurture a community that bridges the abyss that separates us from the dead and that encompasses souls on both sides of the threshold. Such work in anthroposophical groups can sustain connections that have the potential both to enrich earthly life and to support the path of the deceased—even more than do memories of the dead cherished by non-anthroposophical family members. Rudolf Steiner gave many practical suggestions for this work, for example, the re-creation in thought and feeling of an image of the deceased. Such an image
“becomes a force, an organ of the spiritual world through which the deceased is able to initiate connections and contribute to shaping earthly events.”
Among many aspects of the topic that Selg touches on is Steiner’s experience of dwelling in the thinking of deceased persons: he reported that there were subtle, individual differences among them depending on the stage of I-consciousness each had attained. We also learn that the words he spoke at a funeral or a cremation actually emanated from the deceased through Rudolf Steiner’s “orienting” his soul toward that of the other. And we learn why he considered ritual, specifically the Christian Community’s ritual for the dead, to be essential. He was emphatic that rituals performed by an ordained priest are indispensable, even stating (Selg cites GA 345, not yet translated into English) that he would refuse to speak without one being present.
Selg devotes considerable space to detailed accounts of Rudolf Steiner’s responses to the deaths of individuals who were connected in some way with the building of the first Goetheanum. He quotes at length from beautiful eulogies, verses, interment, cremation, and memorial addresses for Sophie Stinde, Hermann Linde, Edith Maryon, and others. His words show deep compassion as well as penetrating knowledge of the destinies of these individuals whose forces united with, inspired, and strengthened the souls left behind. Always modest, always speaking as spokesperson for the anthroposophical community, Steiner never denied the pain of loss. It is especially moving to read about his loving and wise support for the family of seven-year-old Theo Faiss, who died in a tragic accident, and whose etheric body, Steiner said, became active in the atmosphere around the Goetheanum as a source of artistic inspiration.
The second part of the book, only twenty pages long, is dense with important, not-to-be-missed notes (as is the first part), mainly extended quotes from the sources, along with Selg’s contextual remarks. Much of the text here concerns the meaning of the actual moment of dying, which Steiner called the “consummate event” (Selg cites GA 157a, 'The Forming of Destiny and Life after Death'). We experience dying not as a departure of soul from body (as the common image would have it) but as the body departing from the soul (a very different image). And more wondrous: any enhancement of I-consciousness after death depends absolutely on the very power of our experience of our own death. Dying, says Rudolf Steiner, allows us for the first time to see the entire physical body (which we could not do while inhabiting it), and it is the looking back on our death that gives us post-death self-awareness. Selg quotes from GA 209 (lecture of 7 December 1921, not translated):
Beholding the entire physical body, the gift of I-consciousness, in the moment of death makes a tremendous impression. That impression endures and forms the content of I-consciousness between death and rebirth, when everything becomes temporal and the spatial aspect…no longer exists.
Self-experience gained through our connection with the moment of dying also helps to reorient us amid the excess of consciousness in the spiritual world. No one can ponder these thoughts without being moved. Are there implications here for what in this light might be viewed as the excessive use of pain medications during terminal illness?
Steiner has of course described the path of the soul after death in a number of lecture cycles long available in English. But here we find details and precise images from quite a few sources yet to be translated. I was especially struck by Steiner’s description in one of those sources (GA 168) of the spirit-soul’s experience of the emptiness in the cosmos that is the space that was occupied by our physical body:
It is the perception of something in the world that must be repeatedly filled by you. You then arrive at the perception that you are in the world for a purpose that only you can fulfill. You sense your place in the world; you sense that you are one of the building blocks without which the world could not exist. That is what our perceiving this emptiness does.
Most of us have the intuition that every individual life has meaning. But what Steiner expresses here could scarcely be more uplifting and inspirational.
Also inspiring to read are Steiner’s indications about the individual’s encounter after death with the Christ as the “cosmic archetypal image of the human being” and thus the “ultimate Christological foundation of conscience.” Selg expands this statement in the notes with extracts from three different sources: the feeling of accountability to the Christ will develop ever more in coming centuries, and we will experience the spiritually radiant cosmic archetype ultimately and objectively as our Self and as “implacable judge.”
A warning: reading this book can be extremely frustrating, owing to the way that the publisher has handled the references. Note numbers send you to the endnotes, which cite sources by German title. When you look in the bibliography, you find sources listed, perversely, not by title but by GA number. You must then scan five pages of titles searching for the one you seek, hoping meanwhile that you don’t lose the thread of the text. This awkward system obliges you to hold fingers in two places whenever you want publication information and whether a title is available in English and other. And there are 305 notes!
Notwithstanding the efforts required to cope with the references—and, after all, patience and slowed reading have value in reading spiritual texts—The Path of the Soul after Death is a treasure. The first part, in revealing so much about Rudolf Steiner’s relationships with coworkers, provides some of the satisfaction of a wellwritten biography, amplified by the reach of the subject matter. It reveals an aspect of Rudolf Steiner’s character that some readers (those perhaps unfamiliar with published reminiscences and memoirs) will not have encountered: his unconditional, warmhearted, and very personal support for the grieving relatives of those deceased. And throughout, readers will be grateful for the many extracts from works not yet translated into English, for example, 'Das Geheimnis des Todes' (GA 159) and works mentioned above, 'Die Verbindung zwischen Lebenden und Toten' (GA 168) and 'Vom Wesen des wirken Wortes' (GA 345). Another frequently cited work, 'Unsere Toten' (GA 261), is listed in the bibliography as only available in German, but it has just been published by SteinerBooks as Our Dead: Memorial, Funeral, and Cremation Addresses, 1906-1924.
The book has an added bonus of eighteen black-and-white illustrations: photos of the people mentioned in the text and of the first Goetheanum, and reproductions of Steiner’s handwritten verses and notes.
