The Mystery of the Heart by Peter Selg

The Mystery of the Heart by Peter Selg

Every moral deed and every physical action in human life is connected in the human heart. Only when we truly learn to understand the configuration of he human heart will we find the true fusion of these two parallel and independent phenomena: moral events and physical events Rudolf Steiner

Today we know very little about the true nature of the human heart. Our knowledge arises only from a materialistic or an emotional standpoint. However, the human heart, as Rudolf Steiner knew and taught, is both spiritual and physical--the place where body and soul come together. It is the place of their unity. We have lost this knowledge, yet it is integral to the Western understanding of what gives humanity its vocation--our spiritual/physical, our earthly/heavenly nature.

In this astonishing and inspiring book, Peter Selg focuses on the evolution of the spiritual understanding of the heart as transmitted through Aristotle, the Gospels, and Hebrew Scriptures to the Middle Ages, when, in the light of the Mystery of Golgotha and its sacramental life, it was synthesized and transformed by Thomas Aquinas, after whom, with the rise of modern science, it was lost until Goethe began a process of recovery and development that led to its complete renewal and transformation in Rudolf Steiner.

The Mystery of the Heart tells this story in three parts. Part one, The Anthropology of the Heart in the Gospels, examines the spiritual anthropology of the heart in the Gospels in the light of Ezekiel's prophetic saying: I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a living heart of flesh. Part two, De Essentia et Motu Cordis, describes Aristotle's understanding of the heart and its transformation and deepening in Aquinas. Part three, The Heart and the Fate of Humanity, examines the spiritual-scientific view of the heart as developed in Rudolf Steiner's teachings.

Also included is an appendix containing selected meditative verses and therapeutic meditations for the heart.

C O N T E N T S

Foreword to the Second Edition
Introduction

1. The Anthropology of the Heart in the Gospels
2. De Essentia et Motu Cordis
-- Aristotle's Study of the Heart
-- Thomas Aquinas
3. The Heart and the Fate of Humanity

Epilogue: And the Word lives in my heart

This volume was originally published in German by Verlag am Goetheanum 2003 as Mysterium cordis: Von der Mysterienst tte des Menschenherzens Studien zur sakramentalen Physiologie des Herzorgans. Aristoteles, Thomas von Aquin, Rudolf Steiner. Second edition in German, Verlag am Goetheanum 2006, Dornach, Switzerland.

Peter Selg was born in Stuttgart in 1963 and had his medical education in Witten-Herdecke, Zurich, and Berlin. He worked as the head physician of the Herdecke hospital's adolescent psychiatry department until 2000. Dr. Selg is now the head of the Ita Wegman Institute for Fundamental Anthroposophical Research in Arlesheim, Switzerland, and a professor of medicine at the Alanus University of Arts and Social Sciences in Germany. Seeing Christ in Illness and Healing (2005), The Thera-peutic Eye (2008), A Great Metamorphosis (2008), The Figure of Christ (2009), Rudolf Steiner as a Spiritual Teacher (2010), and Rudolf Steiner and the Fifth Gospel (2010) are only a few of his writings. He has five children and is married.