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donnalynn
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donnalynn
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Eleanor
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Hi, Donna --
It seems as if you're feeling pretty conflicted about this. I'm sorry that it's such a painful subject for you. I do stand by my words, though, and a quick search has turned up many citations to back them up. I'll give just one, from the Waldorf Early Childhood Association of North America.
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The Waldorf Kindergarten: The World of the Young Child
The first seven years of life are a time of tremendous growth and transformation. Having left the spiritual worlds, the child begins the journey of incarnation, and the soul and spirit have to struggle to adapt to the vessel of the body. During the first three years of life, the child faces the monumental challenges of learning to walk, to speak, and to think. In the following years, countless other capacities and skills will need to be developed in order for the child to become independent. The education of the young child is a particularly challenging endeavor, for it demands that parents and teachers penetrate both the spiritual and the practical tasks of leading the child into earth existence.
(...)
[Updated post to include the following section of the article, which is a quotation from Steiner:]
During the time between birth and the change of teeth, we acquire the forces of our still unborn spirituality through the activity of playing and through what is enacted before our eyes in such a dreamlike way. They are unborn because they have not yet been absorbed by the physical body. As I have told you, the forces that have been building up the child’s physical organism become independent of the body after the change of teeth and become the forces for thinking and ideation. During the change of teeth something is being withdrawn, as it were, from the child’s physical body. However, by contrast, the forces that flow through the activities of a child at play have yet to anchor themselves to earthly life and its practical tasks; they have not yet incarnated in the child’s physical organism.
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Several more paragraphs here: What is Waldorf Early Childhood Education?
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Regarding your concerns about the books, of course this would be a matter for personal discernment, with the assistance of a faithful Catholic priest if at all possible. For what it's worth, though, I did throw out a couple of boxes worth of New Age-y books when I returned to the Church. (I removed the covers and some of the pages first, to minimize the chance of a passerby taking them from the recycling bin.) It was hard at the time, but it helped to read Acts 19:19. Now, looking back, I can't imagine having done otherwise. Books aren't sacred -- they're just a tool, and if they don't serve the purpose of truth, they're a waste of paper, at the very least.
Another box of "undecided" went in the garage, to be looked at in several years' time. When I finally got around to opening it, I had grown in my faith to the point where it was obvious which materials were edifying, and which ones were not. I did keep a few of the latter, for an apologetics project that I hope to get around to some day, but they stay in the garage.
BTW, I do think Steiner was brilliant in a sense -- not for his weird Anthroposophical doctrines, but for his ability to find and assimilate some very good practical and aesthetic ideas from a variety of sources. For instance, as far as I can tell, most of the best parts of Waldorf Kindergarten are lifted directly from traditional, pre-industrial, pre-Reformation Germanic childhood and family life. As such, they're part of our European Catholic heritage. My sense is that we should be putting our energy into rediscovering that heritage for ourselves and our children, without getting sidetracked into lengthy consideration of strange and un-Catholic worldviews.
At the risk of getting long-winded, I'll stop there -- and will say a prayer that you have a wonderful and safe vacation. 
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donnalynn
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Eleanor wrote:
Hi, Donna --
It seems as if you're feeling pretty conflicted about this. I'm sorry that it's such a painful subject for you. I do stand by my words, though, and a quick search has turned up many citations to back them up. I'll give just one, from the Waldorf Early Childhood Association of North America. |
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Um...no - I am not conflicted at all - I guess my main reason for wanting to get this right is that it doesn't help people to have respect for what you might want to share if you are making inaccurate statements about their ideas. Again - you are taking little bits of ideas but not getting the whole picture. You could find all the quotes you want to support what think they are trying to say - that doesn't make it correct.
BTW just to be clear - just because I understand all this from having been in it doesn't mean I support it as true. There are many things that have rung true to me but that does not say to me that Steiner necessarily had everything right.
I have time (not really) to comment briefly, but I'm still not sure why you are so convinced I have this wrong and you have this right - no biggy - I just find it curious.
Eleanor wrote:
The Waldorf Kindergarten: The World of the Young Child
The first seven years of life are a time of tremendous growth and transformation. Having left the spiritual worlds, the child begins the journey of incarnation, and the soul and spirit have to struggle to adapt to the vessel of the body. During the first three years of life, the child faces the monumental challenges of learning to walk, to speak, and to think. In the following years, countless other capacities and skills will need to be developed in order for the child to become independent. The education of the young child is a particularly challenging endeavor, for it demands that parents and teachers penetrate both the spiritual and the practical tasks of leading the child into earth existence. |
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"Having left the spiritual world..." What do you think leaves the spiritual world and where has it gone? It is the soul that has left the spiritual world to unite with the body. This uniting takes place in the womb before physical birth.
What Steiner did talk about was different "members" of the soul - just as we can talk about an arm, Steiner talked about different parts of the soul. But just as the arm is not separate from the body - the different "parts" of the soul have different functions - briefly - willing, feeling, and thinking - but they are not in some other place - you could say that certain parts of the soul still have more access to spiritual world but they still have some connection to the body. Just because my arm or a leg can extend out in space further than the rest of my body doesn't make it any less a part of the body than say my head.
In a tiny infant the body is very small but the soul is seen as huge - extending out - the "process of incarnation" then is this soul fitting into the body. They the process of the soul *fully* conforming to the body as a process. I guess you could say that the soul (in the younger years the etheric portion, specifically) is working on the physical body from the inside and outside. But the soul must be in the body - how could a baby move, gurgle, nurse, or anything of the like without a soul?
Eleanor wrote:
During the time between birth and the change of teeth, we acquire the forces of our still unborn spirituality through the activity of playing and through what is enacted before our eyes in such a dreamlike way. They are unborn because they have not yet been absorbed by the physical body. As I have told you, the forces that have been building up the child’s physical organism become independent of the body after the change of teeth and become the forces for thinking and ideation. During the change of teeth something is being withdrawn, as it were, from the child’s physical body. However, by contrast, the forces that flow through the activities of a child at play have yet to anchor themselves to earthly life and its practical tasks; they have not yet incarnated in the child’s physical organism. |
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Again...in this passage we have "still unborn spirituality"...this refers to protective sheaths of the mother - the different members of the soul each have their own sheath.
This is a more difficult passage because now we are dealing with the word "forces". The best I can explain is that the different members of the soul through their activity create "forces" which either act upon the child in some manner of growth and then once they are freed from their perspective sheath, they become available to the child in a different way - the child is able to use new capacities. It is when certain members of the soul become active before their due time that there is the possibility of imbalance. So just as we don't want the baby born too early from the mother's physical womb care is taken that the other parts of the soul do not leave their protective sheaths too soon.
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Eleanor wrote:
Regarding your concerns about the books, of course this would be a matter for personal discernment, with the assistance of a faithful Catholic priest if at all possible. For what it's worth, though, I did throw out a couple of boxes worth of New Age-y books when I returned to the Church. (I removed the covers and some of the pages first, to minimize the chance of a passerby taking them from the recycling bin.) It was hard at the time, but it helped to read Acts 19:19. Now, looking back, I can't imagine having done otherwise. Books aren't sacred -- they're just a tool, and if they don't serve the purpose of truth, they're a waste of paper, at the very least. |
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I'm not really concerned and I have talked things over with a very good priest. He really gave me the best advice for me - I don't know that he would have said the same to someone else.
Eleanor wrote:
BTW, I do think Steiner was brilliant in a sense -- not for his weird Anthroposophical doctrines, but for his ability to find and assimilate some very good practical and aesthetic ideas from a variety of sources. For instance, as far as I can tell, most of the best parts of Waldorf Kindergarten are lifted directly from traditional, pre-industrial, pre-Reformation Germanic childhood and family life. As such, they're part of our European Catholic heritage. My sense is that we should be putting our energy into rediscovering that heritage for ourselves and our children, without getting sidetracked into lengthy consideration of strange and un-Catholic worldviews. |
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I would agree  - but for me 14 years ago when I had my first child - I didn't even know where to look. Honestly - as I child, neither my mother nor CCD taught me the Rosary, or read stories to me about the Saints, there were no private devotions, no Eucharistic Adoration - we had Christmas and Easter and those with a good dose of the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus. It was Waldorf that allowed me to bring more reverence and a fuller Christian festival life to my children. I didn't have change any of what I already had in place but we've certainly deepened our understanding since coming to the Church. It also important to understand that many people find themselves separated from the Church through painful circumstances. Mine was due to many factors that are a bit too personal for a public forum but I needed time to heal some very deep wounds - I needed something to break my self destructive thinking - Waldorf and anthroposophy did that for me.
Eleanor wrote:
At the risk of getting long-winded, I'll stop there -- and will say a prayer that you have a wonderful and safe vacation.
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Thank you so much Eleanor - it means a lot - I think the beach is the perfect place to be on the Feast of the Assumption - last year we tried several churches in the area where we camp and we'll go back to our favorite this year before spending a day with the sea and sky and the Star of the Sea! 
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Eleanor
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Hi, Donna --
These aren't quotes I've pulled randomly out of context; they're from an introductory article published by a national Waldorf association. I couldn't post the entire thing, but provided a link so others could read it for themselves.
We could get bogged down for days in discussion of various esoteric details of Anthroposophic philosophy ("members of the soul," etc.), but the point remains that:
1) Anthroposophists believe that the young child's soul, in some sense, is still in the process of "incarnating in the child's physical organism," as Steiner put it. (Hence all the references to "the incarnating child" among Waldorf writers and teachers.)
2) Because of this, they believe that young children should be kept in a "dream-like state," with any kind of intellectual work delayed until after age 7.
Quote:
| I guess you could say that the soul (in the younger years the etheric portion, specifically) is working on the physical body from the inside and outside. But the soul must be in the body - how could a baby move, gurgle, nurse, or anything of the like without a soul? |
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I'm not sure why this question would even arise. Baby animals don't have souls (not even "floating in the ether," or "sheathed by their mother," or wherever the human child's soul is supposed to be according to Steiner), and yet they're quite capable of doing all of the above things.
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organiclilac
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I don't have anything to contribute to this discussion, although I do find it interesting. I had a question about this, though:
Eleanor wrote:
Baby animals don't have souls (not even "floating in the ether," or "sheathed by their mother," or wherever the human child's soul is supposed to be according to Steiner), and yet they're quite capable of doing all of the above things.
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My understanding is that animals do have souls, but they are (obviously) different than the immortal human soul that we have. Anyone know where to find the official word on that?
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Tracy, wife to Shawn, mama to Samuel (4/01) and Joseph (11/11), and Thomas (2/15)
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donnalynn
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I can live with #1
#2 still needs a little work. Another time perhaps or perhaps not.
As to the case of animals or even plants - you might sometime look into St. Thomas Aquinas' ideas on the vegetative soul and animal soul.
Most certainly as far as I understand Catholic teaching - only humans possess unique individual souls created by God that have a hope of gaining Heaven. Not at all suggesting that plants or animals have souls in the way people do. But there remain philosophical questions - what is it that makes a plant *live* and reach for the sun? What makes an animal *live* and *feel* pain? We never refer to a rock dying. There is no life in a piece of plastic or metal. What is that thing we call *life* in the case of plants and animals?
Of course - I'm not really looking for answers - but maybe I'll bring what's left of my old tattered college text that delved into Medieval philosophy to the beach! Mmmm - I think not!
There are some answers in carbon based chemistry, I suppose.
I also just found this.
I am going to pack - I really, really mean it this time!
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Willa
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organiclilac wrote:
| My understanding is that animals do have souls, but they are (obviously) different than the immortal human soul that we have. Anyone know where to find the official word on that? |
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The old Catholic Encyclopedia has an article on the Soul. Not very easy going.
Also, here is an article on Thomistic Psychology
Quote:
There is a hierarchy of vital functions, and thus of different kinds of souls. First of all, there is the vegetative soul which accounts for the functions of nutrition and reproduction. Plants have only this kind of soul. Next, there is the sensitive soul, by which higher animals perceive and respond to their environment. This kind of soul, for some animals, also includes the power of local motion. Finally, there is the rational soul, by which humans are able to use speech and have abstract thoughts. In all of the higher kinds of organisms, the functions that were performed by lower kinds of souls are performed by the higher. Thus, there is only one soul in any particular animal even though it is has the same vegetative capacities as plants. The vegetative functions, which are performed by a plant's soul without sensitive functions, are also performed by the sensitive soul. Likewise, the rational soul is the principle also of sensitive and vegetative functions of human beings. Thus there is a hierarchy of souls and of vital functions, such that the higher souls subsume the lower, but the lower vital functions are necessary for there to be higher ones. The higher are never found without the lower, but the lower are found without the higher. Moreover, there is an interaction between the capacities that characterize higher and lower souls: a lion uses sight to find food, and moves toward the lamb it spies, which it then eats and digests so that it may chase other prey. |
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These are not "souls" precisely in the traditional religious sense of "eternal, made in the image of God" but rather seem to have more to do with the different hierarchies of living things... the same ones we learn in grade school Life Science about classifying plant, animal and man. Only the human, rational soul fits the religious definition.
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Willa
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Helen
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I want to personally thank Donna and Eleanor for taking the time to share with us their knowledge and experience with Waldorf philosophy. It is very helpful to have this information presented to us especially since both women have embraced Catholicsm to its fullest.
I would like to add some links for the new Catholics and converts who read this forum. In the above discussion, words were used that are often associated with Catholicism but were not used in a Catholic way. This is a form of modernism.
Catholic Encyclopedia on Modernism
St. Pius X Encyclical on Modernism
There is another papal teaching document on the New Age which also refers to Steiner’s thoughts and belief system (anthroposophy) by name and mentions the role of the soul in Steiner’s thought.
Jesus Christ The Bearer of the Water of Life
Definition of the New Age:
Jesus Christ The Bearer of the Water of Life wrote:
For many people, the term New Age clearly refers to a momentous turning-point in history. According to astrologers, we live in the Age of Pisces, which has been dominated by Christianity. But the current age of Pisces is due to be replaced by the New Age of Aquarius early in the third Millennium.(14) The Age of Aquarius has such a high profile in the New Age movement largely because of the influence of theosophy, spiritualism and anthroposophy, and their esoteric antecedents.”
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Anthroposophy is mentioned by name:
Jesus Christ The Bearer of the Water of Life wrote:
“However, it is well to be aware that the doctrine of the Christ spread in New Age circles is inspired by the theosophical teachings of Helena Blavatsky, Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophy and Alice Bailey's “Arcane School”. Their contemporary followers are not only promoting their ideas now, but also working with New Agers to develop a completely new understanding of reality, a doctrine known by some observers as “New Age truth”.(85)
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anthroposophy and the Soul in this document:
Jesus Christ The Bearer of the Water of Life wrote:
” In the West, since the time of Lessing, reincarnation has been understood far more optimistically as a process of learning and progressive individual fulfilment. Spiritualism, theosophy, anthroposophy and New Age all see reincarnation as participation in cosmic evolution. This post-Christian approach to eschatology is said to answer the unresolved questions of theodicy and dispenses with the notion of hell. When the soul is separated from the body individuals can look back on their whole life up to that point, and when the soul is united to its new body there is a preview of its coming phase of life. People have access to their former lives through dreams and meditation techniques”
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(The part just before 2.2.4. Wholeness: A Magical Mystery Tour)
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MaryM
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Wow - "the soul" - a complicated topic - one contemplated and studied by many great thinkers through time. Due to complexity and varying interpretations, it seems unlikely in this thread to truly be able to present Steiner's thought and beliefs and understand them totally.
Since we are a Catholic board it's always helpful to have available for reference what the Church teaches. There have been several links to some writings of great Catholic thinkers and saints. I just wanted to add the section from the Catechism of the Catholic Church regarding the definition and reality of the soul.
Quote:
II. "BODY AND SOUL BUT TRULY ONE"
362 The human person, created in the image of God, is a being at once corporeal and spiritual. The biblical account expresses this reality in symbolic language when it affirms that "then the LORD God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being."229 Man, whole and entire, is therefore willed by God.
363 In Sacred Scripture the term "soul" often refers to human life or the entire human person.230 But "soul" also refers to the innermost aspect of man, that which is of greatest value in him,231 that by which he is most especially in God's image: "soul" signifies the spiritual principle in man.
364 The human body shares in the dignity of "the image of God": it is a human body precisely because it is animated by a spiritual soul, and it is the whole human person that is intended to become, in the body of Christ, a temple of the Spirit:232
Man, though made of body and soul, is a unity. Through his very bodily condition he sums up in himself the elements of the material world. Through him they are thus brought to their highest perfection and can raise their voice in praise freely given to the Creator. For this reason man may not despise his bodily life. Rather he is obliged to regard his body as good and to hold it in honor since God has created it and will raise it up on the last day. 233
365 The unity of soul and body is so profound that one has to consider the soul to be the "form" of the body:234 i.e., it is because of its spiritual soul that the body made of matter becomes a living, human body; spirit and matter, in man, are not two natures united, but rather their union forms a single nature.
366 The Church teaches that every spiritual soul is created immediately by God - it is not "produced" by the parents - and also that it is immortal: it does not perish when it separates from the body at death, and it will be reunited with the body at the final Resurrection.235
367 Sometimes the soul is distinguished from the spirit: St. Paul for instance prays that God may sanctify his people "wholly", with "spirit and soul and body" kept sound and blameless at the Lord's coming.236 The Church teaches that this distinction does not introduce a duality into the soul.237 "Spirit" signifies that from creation man is ordered to a supernatural end and that his soul can gratuitously be raised beyond all it deserves to communion with God.238
368 The spiritual tradition of the Church also emphasizes the heart, in the biblical sense of the depths of one's being, where the person decides for or against God.239 |
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Really, the one thing that is clear in the discussion, regardless of how exactly Steiner is interpreted, is that his understanding and beliefs about the human soul differ from those of the Catholic Church.
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Mary M. in Denver
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4Real Forums : Philosophy of Education
Topic: Waldorf and the soul (
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