Tag: Simon Blaxland de Lange

Economic Associations and Britain’s Task Today

This article by Simon Blaxland-de Lange was first published in New Economy, a journal of associative economics, in its March/April 1997 edition. It is apparent from the text that it was written in 1996. As Blaxland-de Lange notes, in an endnote in his biography of Barfield, to some extent the article is the fruit of conversations with Barfield which they had, while he was also engaging with him as a biographer towards the end of Barfield’s life. The article is reproduced by the kind permission of Simon Blaxland-de Lange.


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The Place of Rudolf Steiner in World Culture

A transcript of a talk given by Simon Blaxland-de Lange on 30th March 2025 during the marking of the centenary of Rudolf Steiner’s death at Rudolf Steiner House, London.

It is a symptom of the present condition of earthly humanity that many people would say that one cannot realistically speak of something such as “world culture”. Quite apart from the inherent problems of trying to define any kind of global phenomenon with a single differentiated, localised idea, the very notion of “culture” (other than as a memory or reflection of former times) is often called into question or used synonymously to refer merely to entertainment.


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Owen Barfield and the Mystery of the Word

In his lectures, Rudolf Steiner spoke on a number of occasions about the enactment of a decree at the 8th Ecumenical Council in Constantinople in the year 869 – in defiance of the view of the Eastern Church, represented by Patriarch Photius – to the effect that man does not have a spirit but only a soul with certain spiritual attributes. Steiner adds that the Catholic Church has done its best to instil this notion in the minds of those belonging to Western Christendom, thus in his view laying the foundations for the Scientific Revolution and the materialistic paradigm.


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Owen Barfield: Harbinger of the 21st Century

The following article was first printed in the 2005 edition of The Golden Blade, an annual anthroposophical publication which survived until 2009. It was written as the draft of a lecture ultimately given in the English Auditorium at the Goetheanum on Thursday 7th August 2003. As Simon Blaxland de-Lange wrote in a footnote to its appearance in The Golden Blade, “the actual lecture took into account what had been expressed during the preceding days of the second ‘English Week’ conference, and was strongly based on Barfield’s remarkable text of the modern mysteries, Unancestral Voice, from which several quotations were taken.


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