IN the 1920s, Rudolf Steiner created a sort of liturgy of the natural and spiritual year in the form of fifty-two short verses. Experience—my own and others—testifies to the powerful effect that a short meditation on the relevant verse throughout the course of the year can have in respect to awakening and sensitizing the soul to each season’s unique quality and gesture.
Below is Dr. Steiner’s original Seelenkalender, or “Calendar of the Soul” verse for this week followed by my translation into English. I have opted to follow, whenever a conflict arose, the spirit over the letter in my translation efforts, attempting to convey the “mood” before the propositional content.
EIGHTEENTH WEEK OF THE YEAR 18. Kann ich die Seele weiten, Dass sie sich Selbst verbindet Empfangnem Welten-Keimesworte? Ich ahne, dass ich Kraft muss finden, Die Seele würdig zu gestalten, Zum Geistes-Kleide sich zu bilden. ∇∆ CAN I allow my soul to dilate that in her compass she receive the cosmic Word* into her passion? I strain the answer to conceive: I must find the strength to fashion the soul into the spirit’s raiment.
*Greek λóγος, or l ó g o s, often rendered in English as “Word”; cf. John 1.1:
In the beginning was the Word (Lógos), and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.1
and Heraclitus:
Though this Word (lógos) is true evermore, yet men are as unable to understand it when they hear it for the first time as before they have heard it at all. For, though all things come to pass in accordance with this Word, men seem as if they had no experience of them, when they make trial of words and deeds such as I set forth, dividing each thing according to its kind and showing how it is what it is. But other men know not what they are doing when awake,2even as they forget what they do in sleep.2
λóγος, lógos, means “meaning” and it also means “speech,” “word,” “argument,” reason,” “order,” “definition,” “account,” and “language.” C. S. Lewis famously translated lógos as “Tao” in his 1943 work The Abolition of Man in an effort to emphasize its transcendent and superuniversal nature and to preempt a grasp of its meaning being contravened by foregone associations with the Greek term. Clearly, if lógos means all of these things, it means none of them exclusively and if we are to comprehend the term, it will be necessary to learn a new word and not merely affix a new definition to a word we already know.
Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ Λόγος, καὶ ὁ Λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν Θεόν, καὶ Θεὸς ἦν ὁ Λόγος.
fragment No. 1:
τοῦ δὲ λόγου τοῦδ ἐόντος ἀεὶ ἀξύνετοι γίνονται ἄνθρωποι καὶ πρόσθεν ἢ ἀκοῦσαι καὶ ἀκούσαντες τὸ πρῶτον· γινομένων γὰρ πάντων κατὰ τὸν λόγον τόνδε ἀπείροισιν ἐοίκασι πειρώμενοι καὶ ἐπέων καὶ ἔργων τοιούτων ὁκοίων ἐγὼ διηγεῦμαι κατὰ φύσιν διαιρέων ἕκαστον καὶ φράζων ὅκως ἔχει· τοὺς δὲ ἄλλους ἀνθρώπους λανθάνει ὁκόσα ἐγερθέντες ποιοῦσιν ὅκωσπερ ὁκόσα εὕδοντες ἐπιλανθάνονται
Beautiful: “Clearly, if lógos means all of these things, it means none of them exclusive. . . .”