In the anthroposophical view, the world of the angels forms a living order. This order permeates nature, the human being, and the cosmos. Michiel ter Horst offers one approach to how angelic beings become active in thinking, feeling, and willing, and in the Foundation Stone Meditation.
During an intermission of the 100th performance of Goethe’s Faust, Christiane Haid and I met in front of the sunny western entrance of the Goetheanum. Both of us were filled with the magnificent images we had just seen: Faust with his doppelgänger in five different forms, ever in search of the beautiful Helen. As the counterpole to Mephisto, is Helen the embodiment of Faust’s higher ‘I’? The drama begins and ends in the world of the angels, with three angelic choirs. I have been occupied for a long time now with the question of whether it is the angels who, in fact, speak the Foundation Stone Meditation. When, under Christiane Haid’s direction, I was given the opportunity to edit a collection of texts by Rudolf Steiner on this question,1 we had talked at length about the ninefold structure of the angelic world. Drawing on these conversations, Christiane asked me whether I could summarize the essentials in a short article.
A challenging request! The text encompasses the role of the angels in the evolution of the Earth as described in An Outline of Occult Science and in many other works by Steiner, culminating in the Foundation Stone Meditation and in the Class Lessons of the School of Spiritual Science. It concerns the foundation of anthroposophy as a whole. Fortunately, as preparatory research for the little book mentioned, I had already collected 150 texts by Steiner on the angelic hierarchies. From these, I venture the following sketch.
Nature
To see, understand, and comprehend the world is anthroposophy—but no less so is listening for the World Word in the deepest ground of the soul, as it says in the Calendar of the Soul. In August, we may lead the World Word through the gates of the senses into the depths of our souls. Through the gates of the senses. Senses that behold the divine in nature, if we look and listen well.
Once, on a drive from Basel to Bern, I was able to experience something of this. A valley of unimaginable beauty appeared before me. Tall, sharp rocky peaks on the horizon, sunlight all around, fresh air, white snow. The world of earth, water, air, and fire—the world of the elements. Farther down, everything was covered with grasses, plants, and trees. The whole plant kingdom was interspersed with farms, paths, and other traces of human settlement. Three worlds of entirely different nature, each with its own lawfulness. In and around the mountain peaks, the world where the laws of nature, of the elements, reign. In the middle realm, life, which, despite gravity, strives livingly upward instead of falling down—a tremendous difference! How fast an apple falls from a tree can be calculated, but no one can calculate how long it took the apple to get up into the tree in the first place. The sphere of life follows its own, biological laws. And the human being, down in the valley, knows yet another, completely different aspect: freedom. Three different spheres: the elements above, life in the middle, the human being below. The hierarchy of the creative forces of thinking becomes something one can experience here. Were the hierarchies of the Spirits of Strength, Spirits of Light, and Spirits of Soul, as Steiner summarizes them in the Foundation Stone Meditation, perhaps visible in this image, through the gates of the senses?
Occult Science
The great course of evolution of the human being and the cosmos through three preceding incarnations of the Earth was presented in words by Steiner in An Outline of Occult Science. Three hierarchies, each with three groups of angels, guide this evolution. Each plays its particular role, which he described precisely. Yet the world of the angels is described in such a living, mobile, bustling, dynamic way, and the groups of angels receive so many new and different names—Moon, Sun, and Saturn forces, Spirits of Love, Spirits of Harmony, Spirits of Will, of Movement, of Form, of Personality, Primal Forces, Primal Beginnings, Fire Spirits, Sons of Twilight, Mights, Powers—and all this this quite apart from the original Hebrew and Greek names—that the underlying, crystal-clear division into a first, second, and third hierarchy of three angelic groups is not easy to grasp. But during his work on Occult Science, Steiner gave a lecture series on the same theme: our natural surroundings as a mirror of the angelic hierarchy.2 In it, he uses the long-familiar Greek and Hebrew names of the angels more consistently than in the manuscript, which makes the systematic structure easier to recognize.
For example, the hierarchy of the Angeloi, Archangeloi, and Archai is active in our soul: the Angeloi in thinking, the Archangeloi in feeling, the Archai in our activity of will. The second hierarchy creates and sustains life in all of living nature. The Kyriotetes bestow their innate wisdom. The Dynamis work as forces of growth and movements of growth, which are then used by the Exusiai to shape the successive stages of form. Yet life cannot unfold without earth, water, air, and the warmth of the sun—the gifts of the Thrones, Cherubim, and Seraphim of the first hierarchy. At this point the scheme starts to sound too simple, dry, and rigid, but Steiner immediately makes it dynamic—he depicts the evolution of the cosmos as surprising: constantly transforming, renewing, permeated with life, with warmth, struggling fiercely with opposing powers, ever and always seeking love. Hidden within it, however, is always the consistent order of three times three angelic groups, with the Godhead above and humanity below as a potential fourth hierarchy, just as Dante and Dionysius described. Besides this dynamic evolution of the hierarchies, Steiner also depicts a manifold exchange among all the angelic groups. But evolution, exchange, and interaction of the hierarchies are not found only in texts. They can be felt in nature through the gate of the senses.
The Angelic Hierarchy
Wisdom concerning the world of the angels and the celestial hierarchies stems from early esoteric Christianity and was written down around 485 AD by an unknown author, who called himself Dionysius and identified so strongly with Dionysius the Areopagite, the disciple of Paul, that he kept his own personality completely hidden. The only thing we really know about the author of the Dionysian works is that he wished to be seen as a disciple of Paul. These works have had an enormous influence on nearly all streams of Christianity.3 Thomas Aquinas quoted them more than 1,700 times.
And Steiner, referring to Dionysius, says that his interpretation of Christianity is the same as what anthroposophy seeks to bring to light.4 Between Dionysius, Aquinas, and Steiner there is an intimate kinship, which has led me to the following conclusion: Steiner proves to be just as great an expert on Dionysius as Aquinas. But he does not simply adopt the teaching as it stands. The sovereign manner in which Steiner engages, reshapes, and develops the teaching of Dionysius is, in my view, an indication that he not only knew its content but was also able to perceive it directly in his spiritual-scientific research. Steiner himself gives a hint of this in a unique statement about “pre-creational thoughts” [vorschöpfliche Gedanken]. He actually uses this unusual word and attributes it to Aquinas and Dionysius. The following passage shows clearly that he himself had access to this sphere.
“In this way we find the pre-creational divine thoughts in Thomas Aquinas, thought entirely anew, free of error and illusion, as they could only be thought in a monastery cell, far removed from the noise of the world. The man of the world hastens to understand, to quickly turn a view into his own, and to simplify everything. But the Godhead is not so simple! With Thomas Aquinas, human thought rises up. He is no less a mystic than a scholastic. For he was able to give such descriptions because he saw the spiritual hierarchies, just as the seer Dionysius the Areopagite has given them to us.”5
The descriptions of the angelic hierarchy as a reality prior to the creation of the Earth are descriptions of a supracelestial reality to which Steiner returns again and again in new ways. The angels and the angelic hierarchy appear in more than 200 volumes of his Collected Works—in perhaps 3,000 passages altogether, as I cautiously estimate.6 In October 1905, Steiner named the complete angelic hierarchy for the first time;7 in Occult Science it is worked out in every detail. In the Foundation Stone Meditation and in the Class Lessons, the final chord of the supraterrestrial lives on further.
The Foundation Stone Meditation
For eight days, from Christmas 1923 to New Year’s 1924, every morning at ten o’clock and on the last day in the evening as well—nine times in all—Steiner spoke the Foundation Stone Meditation in different versions. He directly addressed the hierarchies of the angels using their Hebrew and Greek names and asked them to let their voices resound. Each hierarchy then answers with a part of the Latin verse of Christian Rosenkreutz.8
A few sentences by Steiner offer an initial preparation: “Let us consider a thought, that is, what we, as human beings, think. At first these thoughts are in our consciousness, but they are not only in our consciousness. They are, at the same time, in the consciousness of the beings of the next higher hierarchy, the Angeloi, the angels. While we have a thought, our entire world of thought is, for example, a thought of the angels. The angels think our consciousness.”9
And let us then hear the words of the hierarchy that stands closest to us:
“Archai Archangeloi Angeloi!
Let be implored from the depths what will be heard in the heights.
Then, it speaks, through the world,
Per Spiritum Sanctum reviviscimus.”“Archai Archangeloi Angeloi
o lasset aus den Tiefen erbitten, was in den Höhen erhöret wird
Dann spricht es durch die Welt
per Spiritum Sanctum reviviscimus.”10
Now perhaps the question arises: Who is it that thinks this thought through? Am I open to the speaking of the angels? Do I understand the reviviscimus—we are reborn?
What is it like when Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones are asked by Steiner to let their creative word resound?
“Seraphim Cherubim Thrones!
Let sound out from the heights
what finds echo in the depths;
this speaks: Ex Deo nascimur.”“Seraphim Cherubim Throne
lasset aus den Höhen erklingen
was in den Tiefen das Echo findet
dieses spricht
ex Deo nascimur.”11
Let us compare this with another text by Steiner concerning the Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones: “Thus it is infinitely important to know that these beings, when they come into being, behold God, that in living they continually behold God. Whatever they now do, whatever they accomplish, they do out of their beholding of God; God does it through them. They could not do otherwise; it would be impossible for them ever to act otherwise than they do.”12
Who speaks through Steiner when he asks these highest angelic beings to sound from the heights? Is he asking for words of the Creator? And what is it like when I speak the verse of the second hierarchy? Does the second hierarchy then speak from me? Through me? Does my angelic being hear it from out of the hierarchies?
“Kyriotetes Dynamis Exusiai!
Let be enfired from the East
what is formed through the West;
and it speaks:
In Christo morimur.”“Kyriotetes Dynamis Exusiai
lasset vom Osten befeuern
was durch den Westen sich gestaltet
und es spricht
in Christo morimur.”13
This hierarchy is not only the creator of life in general; it is the creator of each individual etheric body. What does that mean? Steiner says, “Only now have you drawn out of the word ‘etheric body’ what the essential etheric body of the human being actually is. It is a working together, a flowing together, a weaving together of the Exusiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes, who individualize their streaming, flowing, sounding, speaking activity and form the human etheric body.”14
When we picture Steiner as he stood there in the carpentry workshop, shaping the Foundation Stone, enfired from the East, with the ruins of the First Goetheanum in the West—how, then, do we understand his words?
Translation Joshua Kelberman
Footnotes
- Rudolf Steiner, Michiel ter Horst, ed., Angels Speak the Foundation Stone Meditation (Great Barrington, MA: SteinerBooks, 2025); originally published as Rudolf Steiner, Michiel ter Horst, ed., Das Sprechen der Engel im Grundsteinspruch: Betrachtungen zur Anthroposophie [The speech of the angels in the Foundation Stone verse: Reflections on anthroposophy] (Dornach: Verlag am Goetheanum, 2023).
- Rudolf Steiner, The Spiritual Hierarchies and the Physical World: Zodiac, Planets and Cosmos, CW 110 (Great Barrington, MA: SteinerBooks, 2008), Düsseldorf, April 12–18, 1909.
- Even extending to the kabbalistic interpretation of Holy Scripture.
- Rudolf Steiner, Spirituelle Seelenlehre und Weltbetrachtung [Spiritual teachings concerning the soul and observation of the world], GA 52 (Dornach: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1986), Berlin, Sept. 1903–1904; see lecture in Berlin, Jan. 4, 1904, p. 83.
- Ibid., 61.
- Ibid., 59.
- Rudolf Steiner, Foundations of Esotericism, CW 93a (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1983), Berlin, Sept. 26–Nov. 5, 1905; see lecture on Oct. 8, 1905.
- In terms of content, the Rosicrucian verse is already found in Greek in Dionysius the Areopagite, in his Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, as a description of baptism.
- Rudolf Steiner, The Fifth Gospel: From the Akashic Record, CW 148 (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1995), Oslo, Berlin, Cologne, etc., Oct. 1, 1913–Feb. 10, 1914; see lecture in Cologne, Dec. 18, 1913.
- Per Spiritum Sanctum reviviscimus: Through the Holy Spirit, we are reborn.
- Ex Deo nascimur: From God, we are born.
- See footnote 2, lecture on Apr. 18, 1909, evening.
- In Christo morimur: In Christ we die. Dionysius the Areopagite depicts baptism as an image of death and resurrection, in order to live as a second human being in Christ. See footnote 1, pp.. 51, 52, 65.
- Rudolf Steiner, The Human Soul in Relation to World Evolution, CW 224 (Spring Valley, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1984), Dornach and other cities, April–July 1923; see lecture in Stuttgart, May 2, 1923.
