St. Paul

Evolution of Anthropocentricity
A concept, central to Anthroposophy, which refers to the development over time of mankind, of the human mind, as the microcosmic self-consciousness of the Earth. "For the earnest expectation of the creature," as St. Paul put it (quoted in SA 160) "waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God."

"The task of Homo sapiens, when he first appeared as a physical form on earth," Barfield explains in Speaker's Meaning, "was not to evolve a faculty of thought somehow out of nothing, but to transform the unfree wisdom, which he experienced through his organism as given meaning, into the free subjectivity that is correlative only to active thought, to the individual activity of thinking" (113-14). Thus "We have to assume," according to "Science and Quality," "not that man, after having been for a long time non-existent, eventually emerged as one of the higher animals, but rather that anthropos was present from the beginning, though without the 'centric' consciousness which we experience today focused clearly and sharply into body and brain" (RM 181).
 

See in particular "Science and Quality" (RM 176-186) and Speaker's Meaning, Chap. 4.