No Accident

These last days I have been suggesting that there is a certain **distinctive** form of spirituality that animates much of the New Age movement.

Now it seems to me that the image often given by the New Age is that much of its spirituality is **not** so distinctive – but rather that it is universal and all-embracing.

But I have been trying to suggest that although I blithely accepted this for many years, it no longer seems true at all to me.

And that one can observe certain distinct qualities that highly differentiate much of New Age spirituality, from other kinds of spirituality.

I suggested, for example, that one of these was a call to detached centredness, sometimes with a corresponding nonchalance in the face of tragedy.

Still although I sense more and more deeply a distinctive kind of spirituality that lies behind the claim to an all-embracing holism, it remains difficult for me, at least at the moment, to do more than **suggest** all I feel in this regard.

But in the unfinished manuscript I have been quoting (with a few small changes), I turned to the image and example of the Christian esotericism of Rudolf Steiner, again, just to suggest what I am trying to say …

“Whatever Rudolf Steiner’s faults and failings, whatever his regrettably critical attitude toward the Church, and the Church’s understandably critical attitude to Rudolf Steiner, neither the Church, nor the neo–paganism of the New Age, should be under any illusion that Rudolf Steiner’s esotericism is simply just another species of New Age esotericism.

Clearly it is not. Its entire thrust is very, very different. If Rudolf Steiner’s Christian Hermeticism is not so concerned with the objective of simply becoming calm, centred, detached, unconcerned;

If Rudolf Steiner’s Christian Hermeticism is about epistemology via thinking, passionately thinking and strengthening thinking so as to cognise a vast spiritual world centred in the Mystery of Golgotha;

If Rudolf Steiner’s Christian Hermeticism is about engaging passionately with the culture of the West from Plato and Aristotle to Goethe, Hegel and Schelling;

If Rudolf Steiner painted a profoundly tragic picture of human evolution since the Fall and the battle with the forces of darkness,

If Rudolf Steiner drew profound strength from the daily intonation of the Pater Noster (though admittedly an esoteric version thereof) and encouraged the profound value of saying 'forgive us our **debts** ... deliver us from **evil**' ...

If Rudolf Steiner’s Christian Hermeticism is about all of these things … so profoundly different from so much of the New Age milieu;

If Rudolf Steiner’s esotericism appears so different from, say, the neo-theosophy of Alice Bailey, it is not simply by ACCIDENT.”