Description
On the 28th September, the eve of St. Michael’s Day, Rudolf Steiner “raffte sick auf” and with super-human strength once more gathered all his energy together to give a lecture in honour of the festival of St. Michael. It had been a focusing point in his lectures during that summer to reveal the Archangel Michael as the Spirit of the Age, the inspiring and guiding Guardian of the present period of history. He had described him as the “fiery Prince of Thought” with whom the souls had been connected who are drawn into the Anthroposophical Movement and by whom they had been prepared and taught in a “Michael School” in the spirit-world before they descended into incarnation in this century.
The present “Last Address” is a transcript of what Rudolf Steiner said on that evening. It is a delicate, precious legacy. Technically it is a fragment. Rudolf Steiner requested that the transcript should not be made available before he had given the second half. But he was never able to complete the lecture. And thus it was eventually published as it stands, an earnest token, perhaps, of the fact that his very life—all too brief for his disciples and students in spite of the incredible wealth of his creative gifts—was cut short by the stone-walling of an uninspired, intellectually self-satisfied and basically dull age.
As it stands, the “Last Address” presents a serious problem of thought to Anthroposophists. Never before had Rudolf Steiner linked together the Individualities of John the Baptist and Lazarus-John in the manner in which he did it in this last lecture. Of the Individuality of John the Baptist he had spoken many times before. The spirit who lived in the Baptist was in fact treated by Rudolf Steiner as the paradigma of a representative sequence of consecutive lives of the same Individuality. Elijah—John the Baptist—Raphael—Novalis—this was the first series of reincarnations declared by Steiner early on in his teaching and never added to by any other examples until the very last months of his life. In their various ways these four historic personalities were the lives of the herald-angel of Christ.
The Last Address, Rudolf Steiner, Rudolf Steiner Press, 1967
First English edition. Hardback. Octavo. Bound in white cloth with gilt lettering. Boards curl upwards slightly. Previous owners name indented to end paper. Pages unmarked and clean. 21 pp.
