In The Magma of War: An Ontology of the Global, Edgar Illas explores conflict as the driving force in politics. He uses the geological metaphor of magma to explain how the volatile, flowing nature of conflict constantly organises and disrupts our modern global society.

Encountering the title, and reading the Introduction, inspired me. When the circulation of glory, that perfect convection of praise and devotion that we read about in Revelation 4, was interrupted, what became of the incense-clouds of glory that were rejected by the higher powers? I have always thought about this moment in terms of space — a new space opens, outside of the circulation, where contrary powers can take hold. But if we follow the image, the space isn’t empty — it’s filled with the cooling embers of the perfect offering. I am connecting this to Heraclitus’ Ur-fire as the primordial element, and to his image of War as the Father of All.

For Heraclitus, development always unfolds through opposition. Even after so many centuries, and in a world that understands the elements quite differently than he did, it is hard to disagree. In fact, looking from our earthly perspective, it’s hard to find much to interest us in a world without conflict. There is a humorous telling of this in Robert Bloch’s The Hellbound Train, where the hero realises that the eponymous train is the ‘heaven’ he has been waiting to attain, because all the interesting people are on board.

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Speaking with colleagues from Ukraine at the recent synod turned my thoughts to war. I realised that I’ve been reading and thinking about war for a long time, but I’ve never tried to get a systematic overview.

Things that have crossed my path: Just War Theory (inevitable for someone with theological interests); the current debate about war as a social construct of a biological inevitability (the subject of 2018’s Reith Lectures); the clash of pragmatic and idealistic views of war.

I also vividly remember Tolstoy’s theory of history, which includes a theory of war, in War and Peace. Unlike many readers, I found his discourses on the movement of populations from West to East and back again fascinating, even if they are somewhat didactic.

I am interested in history and as I’ve been preparing for this new series of posts, I realised that the history that I learned in school is punctuated by war. Not surprising that the philosophy of history is also the philosophy of war.

Thinking theologically and cosmologically, can we see war as the degenerate manifestation of a fundamental driver of evolution? The only way that the perfect, enclosed circulation of glory of Revelation 4 can give way to the beginning of evolution in Chapter 5 is through the deed of the Lamb, who seemed as one who had been slain (or sacrificed). No one else in the spiritual world is able to open the scroll and start the story’s unfolding. Perhaps Hegel had an inkling of this when he spoke about the ‘slaughter-bench’ of history as the driver of progress.

In Steiner’s cosmogony, only the creative resignation of the Cherubim can leave space for something to fall out of the circulation of pure, undifferentiated will, the sacrifice of the Thrones, to become the basis of opposition.

So the opposition of something ‘other’ is the ground of material existence: not the ultimate ground, which is ‘deeper magic’ still. But it is no surprise when we learn there that there can be war in heaven (Revelation Chapter 12). As I write this I realise that there may not be such a jump from my posts on evil to this topic!

In the next few posts I will try to map some of the different ways of understanding war onto Steiner’s twelve world-outlooks, which I have been working with a lot recently.

So we will start with what they have drawn on themselves: the crosses; then pass through the Epistle, and use the Creed to amplify points.

Current plan: a day each per Person.

Then go over to a little bit of Dogmengeschichte, once experience has grown strong, like Anselm: faith seeking understanding. First faith (= experience), then understanding.

The two points I want to get over in the dogma section are: the tragedy of the C4, when either Arius or Athansasius had to be ‘right’, and the possible resolution in the recovery of the spiritual hierarchies as agents of creation, not just intercessors for salvation. And the open-ended nature of perichoresis → Bulgakov’s Circulation of Glory and Knowledge of Higher Worlds Ch10. It’s dawning on me as I write this that these are two sides of the same picture.

Let me know if you’d like to witness thoughts evolving, and if you have any suggestions. And please forward this to anyone who might be interested.

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But if we gave up on the task of seeking a framework for understanding, we would be left with the nihilism of empty materialism. In The Experience of God, David Bentley Hart argues that materialism is not a position arrived at through honest thinking. The absurdity of the position that being can explain itself, or that we can live without an explanation; that consciousness can emerge from inert matter and find a world that it can understand — this is not reasoning but flinching from deeper questioning.

When we genuinely attend to what the simple facts of consciousness and being actually disclose, the materialist framework cannot account for them, not because science has not yet caught up, but because the categories are wrong in kind.

In a lecture of 1921, Steiner describes the same recoil when he puts words in the mouth of an imagined Oriental sage surveying Western civilisation from outside: You live entirely steeped in fear. You found your social order upon fear; you have given birth to your materialistic world-conception out of fear. People became materialists because they were afraid to descend into the depths of human nature. The denial of anything beyond birth and death is not a conclusion but a recoil.

Steiner’s picture of what causes this recoil is unsettling. Within every human being, beneath the mirror of ordinary consciousness, there is what he calls a centre of destruction, a zone where matter is dissolved into nothingness. This is the basis for thinking itself: the forces of thinking work destructively on the physical body and the human ego is forged in that inner furnace. We are the shell around a centre of destruction. And the destructive forces can only be transformed into creative forces when we become conscious of this.

This is what Weil seems to be describing from the inside. Affliction is what happens when the centre of destruction breaks through into conscious experience and the annihilating forces seize the whole person. The insect pinned alive. The Stück. And the theodicies, the bright sides to look on, the plans of God — all these are the ego’s attempts to rebuild the mirror that affliction has shattered, restoring the barrier between itself and the void.

What Hart calls a cognitive distortion, Steiner calls fear. Weil might call it a retreat from the cross. Each shares the picture that the obstacle is not ignorance but avoidance: the ego’s recoil from a depth it cannot survive intact.

Each of them points in their own way not to a better argument but to the surrender of the ego that is doing the flinching. Weil calls it consent — the act of not blocking the passage of divine love through the soul. It is not an answer to the problem of evil. It is something older and stranger than any answer. I found myself thinking of Aslan’s ‘deeper magic’ from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe — a magic that has the power to break the rightful claim of the forces that profit from betrayal and despair. And remember the mice that stay with him all night, gnawing at his bonds in utter futility, because they love him.

If we remain in our darkness, we might find that next time we meet someone standing by the Cross, we have words — or the service of silence — to offer them.

Müller knew about Anthroposophy all his adult life but only started to be interested later in life. He has written a book directed at the world whose scepticism about Steiner and Anthroposophy he shared until recently.

I found it an interesting read. However, I had hoped that Müller’s recent adherence to the world that views Anthroposophy sceptically would have allowed him to represent that world to anthroposophists on its own terms, and to show them (us) how we seem to that world. Instead, he seems to have travelled far enough on his journey to have taken on an unfortunate tendency within the movement, namely to refer to the world of learning that existed in Steiner’s day, and to defend Anthroposophy against a monolithic scientific and philosophical orthodoxy that existed in Steiner’s day, but no longer does.

Writing about the incapacity of the life-sciences to acknowledge those aspects of our humanness that transcend our commonality with the animals, he asks:

Why does our modern era not want to know anything about this? Why – apart from the babbling of the esoteric scene – does it view everything spiritual with such scepticism and feel such a powerful pull towards the sensory and material? (p. 74)

Now of course it is precisely in the life-sciences that some of the most hard-headed reductionist thinking can be found. Even there, there are signs of a growing awareness that the reductionist models don’t work. Just taking the passage quoted, if we substitute the word ‘mind’ for spiritual (the German Geist gives both meanings), it takes us into a rich field that has been one of the most important fields in philosophy for the last few decades: the philosophy of mind. And in that field, some of the most rigorous secular thinkers have been asking questions that would have seemed impossible even twenty years ago — questions that create a very different context for what Steiner was attempting than the one Müller is defending against.

The philosophers and scientists I have in mind include Thomas Nagel, whose Mind and Cosmos (2012) argued from within secular analytic philosophy that the standard neo-Darwinian account of reality cannot explain consciousness, cognition or value, and said so with enough rigour that it could not simply be dismissed. David Chalmers named what he called “the hard problem of consciousness” — the question of why any physical process gives rise to subjective experience at all — precisely enough that it has become one of the central problems of contemporary philosophy. Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary argued that Western culture has systematically suppressed a primary mode of knowing — broad, receptive, attending to living wholes — in favour of a narrower analytical mode, with consequences visible across science, politics and culture. David Bentley Hart’s The Experience of God makes the case for classical theism as philosophically rigorous and scientific materialism as incoherent, finding a serious readership well beyond confessional Christianity, and offering some rare treats to those of us used to reading the high-priests of materialism. Hart can be polemical, but it is genuinely refreshing to encounter a thinker who turns the tables — pointing out that it is the committed materialist who must maintain a remarkable faith in the face of what he regards as the absurdity of their position.

Within biology, the physiologist Denis Noble has shown that causation in living systems runs top-down as well as bottom-up — that the organism cannot be understood from its molecular components alone. None of these thinkers are anthroposophists. But collectively they have shifted the intellectual terrain so that the questions Steiner was asking about the limits of materialist explanation, about consciousness as something irreducible, about the human being as more than a sophisticated animal, are now live questions in mainstream intellectual culture in a way they simply were not in 1913, or even in 1980.

None of this ‘proves’ Steiner, whatever that would look like. There is another unfortunate tendency, which is to go on raiding-parties into contemporary scholarship to find things that demonstrate that Steiner was right. Much more interesting is the question: how have these thinkers arrived at their conclusions from within the current worldview as it were from below? And what would it mean to join that discourse using the tools Steiner gave us? These are the questions I want to explore in subsequent posts.

I’d be grateful for comments and questions, and particularly interested to hear about authors you have read that add to this picture of an emerging field that goes beyond reductionist materialism.

The day comes when the soul belongs to God; when it not only consents to love, but when truly, effectively, it is love. It must then take its turn in traversing the universe to go to God.

Consent, in Weil’s sense, is not resignation. It is not the spiritual equivalent of looking on the bright side, or trusting that God has a plan. Those responses — however kindly meant — are a retreat from affliction, not an engagement with it. They try to restore meaning where affliction has dissolved it, to rebuild the ego’s defences at precisely the moment when their dissolution might make something else possible. And encouraging someone else to develop such a response is ultimately about self-soothing — we cannot bear to leave the sick-room without the feeling that we’ve achieved something constructive.

Consent is not an achievement. The afflicted person cannot will their way into it. Weil is very clear that the soul in affliction may be so crushed that it cannot find the strength to consent at all. Affliction can simply destroy. The consent she describes arrives at a threshold: a moment, when the soul can either close or open.

What passes through when the soul opens is divine love. The soul becomes a kind of instrument, a medium, through which the love of God moves into the world.

This is no argument about theodicy; it is an event in the soul, expressed in the silence that affliction produces, in the wordless cry that goes up, in the darkness that resists being made into meaning. Something moves through that darkness, and the soul’s consent is the act of not blocking it.

And this event — a recapitulation, at the human level, of the Passion of Christ — draws us into the life of the Trinity.

The Father is the source of the love that is given; the Son has borne the maximum distance of that love’s self-giving in the dereliction of the Cross; the Spirit is the movement of love across and through that distance. When a human soul in affliction continues to love — or rather, consents not to withdraw — it is drawn into that same movement. Not as a spectator, but as a participant.

Among the various theodicies there is the theodicy of solidarity — the idea that the cross shows us that God does not leave us abandoned in the midst of evil and unearned suffering, but joins us there. Weil’s essay goes beyond this. There is a crucial difference between a God who suffers with us and a God who enters into the substance of what afflicts us and begins to change it. The theology of solidarity — moving and important as it is — risks stopping at the Cross without reaching Easter. Solidarity says: you are not alone in the darkness. Transformation says: the darkness itself is being changed.

The claim of Christian faith at its most radical is that something irreversible happened at Golgotha — not only in the soul of Christ but in the world. The earth itself, the very substance of the physical, was entered by a love that did not retreat from it. And the resurrection is not the cancellation of that contact but its completion: the physical body transformed into something that has passed through death and is therefore different in kind from what it was before. Not the same body restored. Something new, that bears the wounds and is not destroyed by them.¹

This does not explain suffering. It does not make it deserved or purposeful in any tidy sense. But it means that the darkness into which affliction plunges us is not sealed. Something has been in there before us. Something is still moving through it.

I said in the first part that I could not remember what I said to the young woman in the clinic. I remember that I stayed with her. I have come to think — not as consolation but as theological conviction — that staying is not merely a gesture of human sympathy. When one person remains present to another in affliction, something of the movement Weil describes becomes possible. The one who stays is not producing comfort; they are consenting, on behalf of both of them, to be a space through which something can pass.

The sacraments are precisely this: not arguments, not explanations, not performances of religious obligation, but structured occasions for the consent Weil describes — enacted collectively, bodily, with bread and wine. They enact the movement of Trinitarian love through the hardened, the separated, the material — and in doing so, participate in the transformation that began at Golgotha and is, in ways we cannot see from inside our own darkness, still continuing.

I imagine that the young woman died. Her children grew up without her. I do not know whether my presence offered her anything that mattered. What I believe — and what I have tried to think through in these posts, tentatively, as something worth sitting with rather than a solution — is that the question she was living was not finally about God’s power or goodness. It was about whether love could survive the worst the world could do to it. At the heart of every Act of Consecration of Man, we encounter the bread and wine that will be given to us as the body and blood of a transformed earth, through the portal of the Passion: the ‘agony of his passing’.

My thanks, as always, for reading and for your responses — they continue to shape the article and course these posts are moving towards.

Simone Weil describes a kind of suffering that she calls affliction, which crushes us and can, without cancelling that out, connect us to the heart of the life of the Trinity1.

Weil distinguishes affliction (malheur) sharply from suffering. Suffering is what happens to the body or the soul in isolation; affliction seizes all three registers at once — body, soul, and social being. It is “an uprooting of life,” she writes, a near-equivalent of death. What makes it distinctive, and terrible, is its compulsory nature: the afflicted person does not choose to dwell in their condition; they are nailed to it. Weil uses the image of an insect pinned alive. Affliction also carries contempt — not just pain but the social abasement that makes the sufferer feel, and appear, like less than a person. This is why, she insists, “the great enigma of human life is not suffering but affliction.”

Because affliction degrades the social self, it takes language with it. The afflicted cannot speak their condition; those around them cannot hear it. There is a cry — Weil hears it throughout the Psalms and in Job — but it is wordless, a cry that “goes up to the eternal silence.” This is not a failure of communication but a structural feature: affliction is the moment where language breaks down. The experiences described in the last post and in the comments resonate with this: the most grievous suffering leaves people unable to say what has happened to them, and leaves others unable to receive it even when it is said.

Saint Paul echoes the Hebrew Bible to express the paradox of the incarnation: Christ, our blessing, becomes ‘a curse’ for our sake (Galatians 3:13) Weil continues this thought.

It was not only the body of Christ suspended on wood that was made a curse—it was also true of his whole soul. In the same way, all innocent beings in affliction feel themselves cursed.

The cry from the cross — “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” — is for Weil the concentrated essence of affliction. Christ takes on not merely suffering but the full weight of malheur: the bodily agony, the social degradation (crucifixion was designed to destroy dignity), and the interior desolation of felt abandonment. When a human being in affliction continues, somehow, to love God, they are not imitating Christ at a safe distance — they are participating in that same situation.

Someone struck by affliction is at the foot of the Cross, near to the greatest distance possible from God.

The distance between Father and Son at the Passion represents the maximum distance possible within creation — “the infinity of the distance between God and God.” Yet it is caused by love — by the Father’s desire to love the world in leaving it free — and crossed by love, by means of the Holy Spirit. Affliction, received without withdrawal of love, becomes the place where the human soul is drawn into the inner workings of the Trinity. The void is the space through which God loves God.

If we are crushed by earthly necessity, we sink out of the experience of that love; if we are filled with the love of God, we traverse the distance and experience the other drive of love — to hold close. Then the soul attains its true nature:

The day comes when the soul belongs to God; when it not only consents to love, but when truly, effectively, it is love. It must then take its turn in traversing the universe to go to God. The soul does not love like a creature loves. The love in it is divine, uncreated, for the love of God for God passes through it. God alone is capable of loving God. We can only consent to forfeit our own sentiments to allow the passage of love through our souls. This is what it is to deny oneself. We are created only for this consent.

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“Is [God] willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?”1

‘Theodicy’ is the philosophical justification of God in the face of unearned suffering and evil – the attempt to answer Hume’s accusation that God is either weak or a monster, if he can allow the evil and suffering of the world.

There are theodicies of pedagogy (we learn through encountering and overcoming evil); of protest (we are called to stand up to evil) and resignation (evil is part of a mystery that we can’t fathom), among others.

However, many thoughtful theologians reject the idea that an intellectual argument could solve the ‘problem of evil’ at all. And it is true that when we meet someone like the young woman in the clinic, any argument seems inadequate. What conceivable lesson was she or her children supposed to draw from her plight? Victims of systemic oppression might grow weary of the need to protest and some are so crushed by the circumstances they find themselves in that they can’t find the strength to stand up at all.

Simone Weil wrote about ‘affliction,’ which goes far beyond anything that can be fruitfully integrated into a path of learning and growing, because it destroys the capacity to make meaning, to find our voice. I will explore this in the next post.

The reason that any argument about theology seems inadequate as a response to someone who is suffering might be that it begins with the observer’s question, not the sufferer’s reality. Even if their question seems to be a challenge that asks for an answer - ‘How can God allow such things?’ they are not asking for a theological seminar. The pastoral response is not explanation but presence, solidarity, comfort. I can’t remember exactly what I said to the young woman – the encounter was many years ago. I was reading about Plato at the time and I think I talked about the world as a place of opposites from which harmony emerges. I’m sure it was inadequate. But I stayed in the room; I stayed with her. I hope that my presence touched her.

I will explore what presence in the face of suffering and evil can mean in forthcoming posts. I would be grateful for any comments – they will shape what is going to become an article and then part of a course.