Rudolf Steiner

Bio

Michael Martin:

"One day, Rudolf Steiner will be understood as one of the great geniuses of the twentieth century, if not of modernity whole cloth. Steiner’s entire project, it could be argued, was dedicated to the regeneration of culture via a Christianity of the Imagination—which is not to say an imagined Christianity, but one that could transfigure not only religion, but art and science as well. And in this way, he carried the Romantic legacy forward in a way that has yet to be truly appreciated and recognized.

His contributions to farming (the biodynamic method) and beekeeping, education (Waldorf education), medicine, and work with the developmentally disabled (the Camphill Movement) were so far ahead of their time that it is only over the last couple of decades that they started to gain the respect of the mainstream currents in all of their domains. When people interested in Steiner’s work in these areas decide to pick up one of his books (and there are hundreds) they often find themselves bewildered by references to reincarnation, the various “bodies” of the human being (in addition to the physical, the etheric, astral, and ego), and the unabashed Christian esotericism that permeates every aspect of his thought. Then, if they have the misfortune to pick up Steiner’s Occult Science, with its descriptions of the various stages of “earth evolution,” essentially the various reincarnations of the cosmos itself, they might very well feel that they have wandered into someone else’s mushroom trip. Not surprisingly, a lot of people find Steiner’s writing off-putting.

Steiner, born in 1861 in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in what is now Croatia, was a child of German Idealism with its deep roots in the thought of Goethe and Schiller as well as the legacy of the Silesian mystic Jacob Boehme. In addition, Steiner inhabited the tradition of Rosicrucianism, an esoteric Christian school of thought from the seventeenth century that rejected the encroaching scientific materialism of Descartes and Bacon and sought to preserve a natural science that acknowledged the invisible worlds and the beings that inhabit them as not beyond scientific inquiry (which is why Steiner referred to his work as “spiritual science”). The Rosicrucianism of Steiner’s age was cluttered to some degree with the excesses of the “Occult Revival” then in vogue, but Steiner remained, for the most part, anchored in the Rosicrucian traditions of the seventeenth century, though ideas from Blavatskian Theosophy, the lingua franca of esoteric circles of the time, inevitably wormed their way into his discourse.

In his early twenties), Steiner was commissioned to edit the scientific writings of Goethe for the prestigious Weimar edition of the poet’s work, so he was deeply immersed in Goethean phenomenology and way of scientific inquiry, the method of which was grounded in a “delicate empiricism” (zarte Empire) and intuition (Ahnung) and which approached phenomena with reverence in radical defiance of a mode of scientific inquiry whose first method of operation is, in Wordsworth’s apt phrase, to “murder to dissect.” Owen Barfield, one of the Inklings and whose work can be described as a popularization of Steiner’s, called Goethe “the uncrowned king of Romantics,” even though Goethe didn’t think of himself as a Romantic. Nevertheless, he was a fountainhead of German Romanticism, particularly in its origins in Jena with a group of gifted and romantically radicalized young men—Fichte, Schelling, the Schlegels, and Novalis among them—and this stream of Romanticism was the atmosphere in which Steiner lived, and moved, and had his being. Steiner, that is, was a Romantic, and probably the most Romantic of all the Romantics, which is why Barfield thought of Steiner’s spiritual science (Anthroposophy) as “Romanticism come of age.”

Foremost in Steiner’s epistemology is the development of imagination, intuition, and inspiration as tools necessary for higher knowledge, which places him not only in the company of Goethe but of Coleridge as well, not to mention William Blake. Steiner, like the Romantics, rejected the materialist epistemologies of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment and proposed an alternative epistemology that could provide access to the perception of spiritual realities, everything from the seeing auras and nature spirits to beholding angels and how all of these things (and others) interact and influence the human being. These may be qualities intrinsic to the poet, but Steiner, following Goethe who was a scientist as well as a poet, sought to bring them likewise into science. Imagination, intuition, and inspiration, in this way, bring thinking into the realm of magic. And this kind of magic is Romanticism writ large. As Novalis writes, “We must seek to become magicians in order to be able to be truly moral. The more moral, the more harmonious with God—the more divine—the more bound to God.” In this, Romanticism thus becomes not only magical, but it also becomes Christian, as idiosyncratic—or even heretical to some—as that Christianity might be.

Born into a Catholic home, Steiner was basically indifferent to the truth claims of Christianity as a young man and well into the beginning of his career as an intellectual. However, his spiritual scientific investigations into the gospels led him to change his mind, as he writes in his Autobiography:

During the period when my statements about Christianity so contradicted my later ones in literal content, a conscious knowledge of true Christianity began to dawn within me. Around the turn of the century this knowledge grew deeper…. This experience culminated in my standing spiritually in in the presence of the Mystery of Golgotha in a most inward, profound and solemn festival of knowledge.

Steiner’s might not be your vicar’s variety of Christianity, but it’s Christianity nonetheless.

An important component of Steiner’s Christian Romanticism is the role the Divine Feminine plays within it. Going back to at least Jacob Boehme in the early seventeenth century, it seems almost inevitable that imagination, intuition, and inspiration not completely inured to a doctrinal confession will invariably lead to the intuition of the Virgin Sophia. This is evident in some of the Rosicrucian philosophy of the seventeenth century English physician and philosopher Robert Fludd, as well as in the work of the Metaphysical poet Henry Vaughan and his twin brother, the Anglican priest and alchemist Thomas. It also informs the mystics of England’s Philadelphian Society (John Pordage, Thomas Bromley, and Jane Lead, among others). Later it manifests in Russian thinkers such as Vladimir Solovyov, Sergei Bulgakov, and Pavel Florensky, to name just a few. From there it even spread to (some might say “infected”) the Catholic Church."

(https://romanticon.substack.com/p/rudolf-steiner-the-last-of-the-german)

Discussion

A note on Steiner and the potential relation with fascism, by Matt Segall:

" I must mention here the polemical essays on Steiner published by historian Peter Staudenmaier. In numerous articles on the Institute for Social Ecology website and elsewhere (e.g., https://social-ecology.org/wp/2009/01/rudolf-steiner’s-threefold-commonwealth-and-alternative-economic-thought/), Staudenmaier has accused Steiner and anthroposophy of sheltering anti-democratic, pro-capitalist right wing political views, promulgating racism and nationalism, and even of holding proto-Nazi sympathies. While Steiner must be criticized for any misguided or racist statements, it seems to me that Staudenmaier’s accusations often reflect his own metaphysical and ideological presuppositions rather than a good faith consideration of Steiner’s own ideas and efforts in response to the social breakdown of the First World War. In Between Occultism and Nazism: Anthroposophy and the Politics of Race in the Fascist Era (2014), Staudenmaier describes the apparent internal contradictions and political pluripotentiality of Steiner’s views (which a more sympathetic reading would see as attempts to hold a dialectical tension between otherwise opposed social forces) while condemning many of his anthroposophist followers for accommodating themselves to Nazi rule in the 1930s (Steiner died in 1925). Despite the condemnable associations of some of his followers, it is important to note that, while critical of the propagandistic use of “democracy” as a label for political systems whose strings were pulled by oligarchs behind the scenes, Steiner was unambiguous in his support of actual democracy in the domain of law-making and political rights (unlike in the domains of arts and sciences, athletics, and entrepreneurship, etc., where the leveling effects of majority rule would be inappropriate given the self-evident fact that individual talents in these areas are unequally distributed: the protection of equal rights and fair distribution of resources does not require denying differences in ability). Further, Steiner’s rejection of ethno-nationalism could not have been more clearly stated. Hitler himself lashed out at Steiner’s threefolding proposals in a 1921 newspaper article as “one of the completely Jewish methods of destroying the peoples’ normal state of mind...” (Völkische Beobachter). “If these people come to power,” Steiner said in response to Hitler’s March on the Feldherrnhalle in November 1923, “I can no longer set foot on German soil” (Samweber,Aus meinem Leben, 44). That said, like most 19th and 20th century European philosophers and anthropologists, Steiner upheld a Eurocentric view of human history. His comments scattered through various lecture transcripts concerning historical racial hierarchies must be condemned even while they should also be read in the context of his resolutely anti-racist and anti-sexist view of the human present and future. To offer just one example, in a lecture series in 1917 on the evils that must be overcome in the future course of human evolution, Steiner states: “Nothing is more designed to take humanity into its decline than the propagation of ideals of race, nation, and blood. ... The true ideal must arise from what we find in the world of the spirit, not in the blood” (Steiner, The Fall of the Spirits of Darkness, 186). Also crucial in this context are Steiner’s arguments in Ch. 14: “Individuality and Genus” in The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity."

(https://cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/1069/1723)