Eurythmeum

The above is a view of Steiner's Eurythmeum, in Dornach, Switzerland.  Where or when before has a group of steps been made to appear as the confluence of two streams flowing from opposite directions?  The outermost step (which actually is about level with the ground and, from our point of view, forms a sort of ‘2’ shape that snakes around its brother steps) streams from the left side of the building and appears to sweep underneath all the others, which flow from the right.  Steps, as usually designed, have a monolithic unity about them and are frequently either a graceful or clumsy assemblage of inert blocks, plus ornamentation; whereas here steps image forth the interpenetration of opposites so that in some sense mind or spirit overcomes matter, which left to itself decrees the mutual impenetrability of things.

The steps, moreover, seem to overflow generously and liquidly from the building, and form a sort of analog of two welcoming and supporting hands, one of which cradles the other so that both can then extend themselves with visible loving care to people entering the building, who in effect walk up the gentle fingers.  However I do not wish to insist on a manual metaphor.  What seems essential here is a liquid, welcoming, self-sacrificing gesture.

Even more essential is that the forms of these steps, by seeming to the inner eye to take shape out of a liquid matrix, visually suggest their (the forms’) gradual differentiation out of an originally undifferentiated oneness.  These forms thus subtly depict for us their own process of emergence into being, their mysterious transition from potential to actual; their form allows them to work as a threshold of transition between those two regions.

And thus these steps lead us toward moments of birth or creation, experiences of which are the only thing that can teach us what words like ‘sacred,’ ‘divine,’ and ‘god’ mean when put their truest usages.  This is not intended as some kind of soaring rhetoric.  Either ‘creation’ means nothing at all, or it means the emergence of something that in some sense is truly new during the moments of transition from potentiality to actuality.  And that which is truly new, to the extent it is so, has specific characteristics that have often been ascribed to the ‘sacred’ or to the ‘divine,’ by Christian thinkers as much as by Zen monks, by Aristotle as well as by history’s mystics.  To what characteristics do I refer? 

The new, while it is coming into being and not yet fully present, must, in some sense, or to some degree, be giving birth to itself. To the extent it is new, it has no true precedents, no prior causes that fully explain it.  Somewhat like God as described by some Christian theologians, or like the First Cause of Aristotle, the new thus seems to have a hand in its own process of creation.  That is why when we participate thoroughly enough in the creative process, we get the feeling of seeing to the very bottom of our existence: the First Cause is not at some distant dark remove.  We begin to participate directly and consciously in the living core of the ultimate cause. 

If we really experience how there is no hidden distant cause that provides ‘the explanation’ for the creative process, or that is a precedent for what is emerging in that process, we experience a kind of Zen moment, when appearance becomes one with reality, when in a sense all is made visible, when that which presents itself to us is utterly self-contained and presents all that it contains.  This intimation of a kind of divine immediacy in the new is fairly alien from everyday awareness, which is concerned mostly with already-formed ideas rather than with the process of thinking, and with material things rather than with the immaterial processes out of which all matter, I would argue, was gradually born.  To feel ourselves at the core or foundation of matter and of ideas, we must experience, or somehow recreate, the process of foundation:  we must create, re-create, co-create.  Steps like those above are a distinct aid in this effort.  And the apparent emergence of form out of a liquid or quasi-liquid matrix is a central characteristic of Steiner’s fields of architectural transformation with their interpenetrating opposites.