«Michael is a silent spirit. […] Because what we experience in Michael is actually not the word but – if I may put it like this – the gaze, the power of the gaze. And that is based on the fact that Michael actually most concerns himself with what people accomplish out of the spirit.
He lives in the consequences of what humans have accomplished. The other spirits live more with the causes, Michael lives more with the consequences. The other spirits inspire in human beings what they are meant to do. Michael will be the actual spiritual champion of freedom. He lets people do what they want to do, but then takes up what becomes of human deeds in order to carry it on in the cosmos, in order to carry on in the cosmos what people are not yet able to do with it. […] But Michael is not only a reserved, silent spirit; Michael, in approaching human beings, comes to them with a clear rejection of much in which human beings still live on earth today. For example, all the knowledge that is formed in the human being or in animal life or in plant life, which relates to inherited qualities, which relates to that which perpetuates itself in physical nature, is such that it appears as if Michael is rejecting it. He wants to show thereby that such knowledge can be of no avail to the human being for the spiritual world. Only what the human being finds independently of what is purely hereditary in humanity, in the animal world, in the plant world, can be taken up before of Michael.»
From Rudolf Steiner, GA 233a, p. 93 f.
Graphic Sofia Lismont Translation Christian von Arnim
