Anthroposophic Medicine in the 21st Century

Digitalization and acceleration threaten to alienate life and isolate the soul. In anthroposophic medicine, the concepts of the etheric and warmth provide powerful tools and perspectives for individual healers and the therapeutic community.

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It may sound presumptuous to describe the tasks of anthroposophic medicine in the 21st century, and yet, as someone who shares responsibility for the Medical Section, I’d like to ask: What’s coming on the horizon? Where do we stand today in the history of medicine? Since the turn of the millennium, our medicine has been shaped by three developments that demand our full attention. First, economization, that is, the need to generate profits in the healthcare sector, has increased exponentially. With that comes the second development: the advance of technology into the realm of the living. The third is digitalization. These three developments began with the new millennium, have gained momentum, and are shaping all fields of medicine.

Rudolf Steiner, in the first chapter of Extending Practical Medicine: Fundamental Principles Based on the Science of the Spirit—a book whose contents he said would eventually become established science—describes the dramatic process of the human being’s spiritual entity permeating the human organism’s earthly materiality as the starting point for all understanding of illness and therapy:

Just as one can only understand the healthy human being by recognizing how the higher members of the human entity take hold of the earthly substance in order to rein it into their service and by also recognizing how the earthly substance changes as it enters the sphere of activity of the higher members of human nature, so too can one only understand the sick person by realizing the situation into which the whole organism or an organ or a series of organs falls when the working of the higher members becomes irregular. And one can only think of remedies by developing knowledge of how an earthly substance or earthly process relates to the etheric, to the astral, and to the ‘I’.1

The earthly substance is thus transformed, “transubstantiated,” into the spirit entity of the human being.

Living in a Technologized World Created by Humans—from Nature to Subnature

Around the same time as this chapter—shortly before his death on March 30, 1925—Rudolf Steiner also wrote his last Michael letter, “From Nature to Subnature.”2 While everything we find in natural phenomena and their lawfulness is still permeated by the divine-spiritual forces of the cosmos, all technology has developed purely from earthly-human thinking and has lost all connection with the cosmic-divine origin of the world. We are no longer dealing with nature but with a newly created subnature. This material, lifeless technological sphere is as clear to the human spirit as a crystal, while the God-created nature reveals ever deeper secrets the further one penetrates it with cognition. Cool, crystal-clear technology harbors no secrets at all; in principle, it is completely transparent.3 This nature, which has been emancipated by being deposited down below the divine sphere, is thus immersed in the sphere of Ahriman and “must be comprehended as such. It can only be comprehended if human beings ascend in spiritual knowledge as far to the supraearthly supranature as they have descended into the subnature in technology.”4

This text is an excerpt from an article published in the (online exclusive) Goetheanum Weekly. You can read the full article on the website. If you are not yet a subscriber, you can get to know the Goetheanum Weekly for 1 CHF./€.

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