New Essential Steiner: An Introduction to Rudolf Steiner for the 21st Century - Softcover

Rudolf Steiner

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1584200561 ISBN 13: 9781584200567

Publisher: Lindisfarne Books, 2009

Synopsis

“Rudolf Steiner was in fact not merely a phenomenally educated and articulate philosopher but also a Man of Destiny.... By comparison, not only with his contemporaries but with the general history of the Western mind, his stature is almost too excessive to be borne.” ―Owen Barfield

The New Essential Steiner is an illuminating, completely new introduction to the philosophy and essential writings of Rudolf Steiner, introduced and edited by Robert McDermott, who also edited the now-classic Essential Steiner. This new volume offers selections from a wide variety of Steiner’s published works, presenting a broad, accessible overview of Anthroposophy.

In his introduction, McDermott recounts Steiner’s life and work, from his childhood and education to his work as a natural scientist, philosopher, scholar, educator, artist, interpreter of culture, and seer. He places Steiner in relation to major traditions of thought and explores the genesis and development of Anthroposophy.

Although Rudolf Steiner is considered by many to be the greatest spiritual seer and philosophical thinker of the twentieth century and is credited with major cultural contributions such as the worldwide Waldorf school movement and the ever-growing biodynamic agricultural movement, he nevertheless remains relatively unknown to both academics and the public. The purpose of this volume is to redress that situation by introducing Steiner's work to a broader audience and making his name more universally recognized.

Includes selections from Steiner’s writings, which are grouped into chapters that demonstrate the breadth of his thinking and spiritual accomplishments.

The New Essential Steiner is an invaluable compendium and introduction to the works that form the foundation of Anthroposophy.

About this title

About the Author

Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) was born in the small village of Kraljevec, Austro-Hungarian Empire (now in Croatia), where he grew up. As a young man, he lived in Weimar and Berlin, where he became a well-published scientific, literary, and philosophical scholar, known especially for his work with Goethe's scientific writings. At the beginning of the twentieth century, he began to develop his early philosophical principles into an approach to systematic research into psychological and spiritual phenomena. Formally beginning his spiritual teaching career under the auspices of the Theosophical Society, Steiner came to use the term Anthroposophy (and spiritual science) for his philosophy, spiritual research, and findings. The influence of Steiner's multifaceted genius has led to innovative and holistic approaches in medicine, various therapies, philosophy, religious renewal, Waldorf education, education for special needs, threefold economics, biodynamic agriculture, Goethean science, architecture, and the arts of drama, speech, and eurythmy. In 1924, Rudolf Steiner founded the General Anthroposophical Society, which today has branches throughout the world. He died in Dornach, Switzerland.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

INTRODUCTION
RUDOLF STEINER AND ANTHROPOSOPHY
1. RUDOLF STEINER’S LIFE AND MISSION

RUDOLF STEINER (1861–1925), a highly original and increasingly influential spiritual and esoteric teacher, is the founder, teacher, and exemplar of Anthroposophy. Esoteric refers to a worldview and to specific ideas that are very difficult to know without a special capacity such as clairvoyance or intuition. Anthroposophy combines anthropos, the ideal of the human being, and Sophia, divine feminine wisdom. The word Anthroposophy refers to spiritual knowledge gained by the conscious integration of three disciplines: thinking, feeling, and willing. Anthroposophy includes esoteric research and spiritual practice. Through extraordinary capacity and diligent effort, Steiner made significant theoretical and practical contributions to philosophy, sciences, social sciences, arts, education, and religion. He also wrote and lectured extensively on various esoteric subjects such as the early evolution of the Earth and humanity, karma and rebirth, and the collaborative interrelationships among Krishna, Buddha, and Christ, as well as the relationships between Christ and Sophia and Christ and the Archangel Michael. In addition to writing approximately forty books, beginning in 1891 with Truth and Knowledge, his philosophy doctoral dissertation, and ending in 1924, the year before his death, Steiner delivered more than six thousand lectures, most of which have been published in more than three hundred volumes. He is perhaps best known for the Waldorf school movement, which today consists of several thousand schools in more than one hundred countries. Waldorf teachers continue to draw guidance from Steiner’s hundreds of lectures on child development, curriculum, and pedagogy.

We can treat Steiner’s teaching under two headings: first, its content, the results of his esoteric research; and second, its practice, the path by which others can attempt to develop a capability comparable to Steiner’s. As a path, or spiritual discipline, Anthroposophy includes a detailed method for schooling one’s consciousness, leading to the attainment of spiritual knowledge and the gradual transformation of the individual practitioner.

Steiner’s practical contributions―which include the Waldorf school movement, biodynamic farming, new art forms, the sciences, anthroposophically extended medicine, and social concepts―are the fruits of a clairvoyant capability that was both innate and further developed. Through his foundational books, The Philosophy of Freedom (1894), How to Know Higher Worlds (1904), Theosophy (1904), and An Outline of Esoteric Science (1909),1 Steiner offers a spiritual worldview and a discipline through which others can develop higher capacities. All of these works serve the same essential task of Steiner’s Anthroposophy, or spiritual science: an attempt to gain a loving and creative knowledge of the spiritual in the individual and the spiritual in the universe, and the relation between them.

Anthroposophists are understandably in awe of the fruits of Steiner’s spiritual-scientific research and thus tend to emphasize the study of his writings and practical recommendations at the expense of cultivating their own spiritual cognition. Even in his own day, this mistaken emphasis caused Steiner considerable frustration and sadness, and it almost certainly has limited the effectiveness of Anthroposophy as a spiritual esoteric teaching and movement. He intended his research concerning spiritual realities to exemplify his method and to show the need for solutions on a higher level of insight than the level on which arguments ordinarily swirl.

Rudolf Steiner’s teachings are continuous with Rosicrucianism, Theosophy, and esoteric Christianity. He referred to his particular esoteric teaching as Rosicrucian to emphasize its close relationship to the tradition of deep esoteric knowledge of the human being and higher beings cultivated first in Egypt, then Greece, and then entwined somewhat with Christianity. Esoteric Christianity refers to the profound spiritual teachings and texts such as the Gospel of John or the writings of Dionysius the Areopagite that are difficult for most people to understand but have indirectly exercised a significant influence on the more accessible, exoteric teachings of Christianity. In the same way, and for the same reasons, that esoteric and mystical dimensions of Christianity tend to be held at a distance by the institutional church and advocates of its dogmatic teachings, Steiner’s life work seems to have had very little influence on Christian traditions, whether Roman Catholic or Protestant. Steiner delineated a comprehensive and detailed account of the evolution of consciousness, both cosmological and human, as a background to his plea for the transformation of thinking, feeling, and willing and for the role of the Christ and other spiritual beings.

While they are continuous with past esoteric teachings, Steiner’s research and method are characterized by a modern Western sensibility, in that they strive for scientific validity and verification by others. Hence, another name for anthroposophic research is spiritual science. Steiner confronts the fact that in recent centuries human beings, particularly in the modern West, find it increasingly difficult to know the spiritual world. One of his tasks was to show how modern Western humanity generally lost the direct knowledge of the spiritual world that had been possible, and typical, in earlier times―for example, that of shamanic guides of indigenous peoples worldwide, the pharaohs of Egypt, the prophets of Israel, and the teachers in the mystery centers in ancient Greece. Anthroposophy is a method for re-forging such connections, though in a way that is appropriate for contemporary consciousness. Steiner offers a method through which each individual spiritual seeker can develop a warm and will-filled means to overcome the alienation that he shows to be characteristic of modern Western consciousness. Steiner considered the purpose of the evolution of human consciousness, for which he regarded the incarnation of the Christ as the central event, to be the attainment of human love and freedom.

Not only was Rudolf Steiner endowed with a capacity for imagination, inspiration, and intuition, he also carefully explained how such modes of knowing could be cultivated. He emphasized that the cultivation of these capacities by a Western individual is difficult because modern Western culture firmly rejects the very possibility of spiritual and esoteric knowledge. He tried to show that ordinary ways of knowing and knowledge by faith cannot lift Western humanity out of its present impasse. Rather, it requires a form of knowing that is individual and objective, spiritual and reliable.

Steiner’s spiritual and esoteric teachings are positive about the evolution of the cosmos and of the natural world and optimistic about the future of humanity―though not without a great struggle. Steiner was profoundly aware of evil and, in various ways, suffered its effects, but he was nevertheless positive in his attitude toward people, challenges, and initiatives. He died at age sixty-five, probably as a result of desperate esoteric struggles with negative forces and unceasing labors in service of his spiritual mission. Steiner’s life serves as a model of a spiritual-esoteric researcher, servant, and teacher.

Rudolf Steiner was born on February 27, 1861, in Kraljevec, Croatia, within the Austrian Empire. His parents, Johann Steiner (1829–1910), an employee of the Southern Austrian Railroad, and Franziska Blie Steiner (1834–1918), were both born in southern Hungary. Steiner spent his early childhood, from the age of two to age seven, in the Austrian countryside; his grade school years were spent in a rural town south of Vienna. He attended a scientific high school and then graduated from a polytechnic college in Vienna. As a college student, Steiner was employed as a tutor to a family of boys, the youngest being Otto Specht, who had Down syndrome. The boy’s family had given up the idea that he would live a normal life. After two years of patient work, however, Steiner educated the boy to the level of those of his age and equipped him for productive life. Otto eventually became a physician and, later, lost his life in World War I.

At age twenty-two, through his professor Karl Julius Schroer, Steiner became the editor of Goethe’s natural scientific writings. At age twenty-five, he wrote Goethe’s Theory of Knowledge: An Outline of the Epistemology of His Worldview. In 1891, at the age of thirty, he received his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Rostock, and a year later, he published his dissertation under the title Truth and Knowledge. In 1894, he published his primary work in philosophy, The Philosophy of Freedom (published as Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path), followed immediately by Friedrich Nietzsche: A Fighter against His Time and Goethe’s Worldview.

If karma, or destiny, is to be taken at all seriously, clearly Steiner was born to be an initiate; that is, he was sent by the spiritual world to undertake an important work for humanity. Steiner was seven years of age when, in the railroad station where his father was stationmaster, his aunt who had committed suicide, and whom he had never met, appeared in ghostly form to the boy and sought his help. The woman must have seen some special capacity in this boy as she viewed the human world she had left behind.

When his elementary school teacher gave him a geometry book, Steiner found that the pure geometric forms were rather like the world of spiritual forms with which he was already familiar. This discovery of geometry was one of the great experiences in his early life, for it provided reassurance that knowledge of the spirit world could be shared and communicated.

At age fourteen, Steiner realized that he had to study Kant2 and confront the limits to knowledge that Kant had established in his extremely influential work, The Critique of Pure Reason (1781). Subsequently, Steiner was also led to the early nineteenth-century idealist philosophies of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. He used Fichte’s concept of the “I” as a basis for his doctoral dissertation. From his earliest philosophical writings, however, it was clear that Steiner would not rest exclusively in subjective idealist philosophy, but would add to it the more objective natural philosophy of Goethe, as well as his own esoteric empiricism, his careful observation of the inner life of the natural world. This synthesis typifies Steiner’s intellectual and spiritual work: he habitually sympathized with diverse and competing positions in such a way as to save and reconcile the positive contributions of each. We should also acknowledge, however, that throughout Steiner’s life, he was severe in his opposition to Kant’s Critique and the influence of the Kantian worldview. By his thought and action, Rudolf Steiner repeatedly brought together perspectives ordinarily kept separate. Together, his life and his thought can be seen as an attempt to embody the reconciliation of polarities: science and art, matter and spirit, individualism and community, and many other dichotomies that can be brought into a higher and truer synthesis.

In a brief autobiographical sketch (included in this volume) called “The Barr Document,” written in 1906,3 Steiner acknowledged meeting his master, but does not identify him:

I did not at once meet the M. [master], but first someone sent by him who was completely initiated into the mysteries of the effects of all plants and their connection with the universe and with human nature. For him, converse with the spirits of nature was a matter of course, which he described without enthusiasm, thereby awakening enthusiasm all the more.

This intermediary was an herb gatherer named Felix Koguzski. He gave Steiner his first opportunity to share with another human being the reality of the spiritual world manifested in nature, which had been an integral part of Steiner’s experience from his earliest years. After meeting the herb gatherer, Steiner’s spiritual master, or initiator, reportedly gave him several tasks, including the seemingly impossible task of reversing the plunge of Western thought and culture into atheistic materialism, as well as the more specific task of restoring to the West an understanding of the dual concept of karma and rebirth.

Prior to 1899, Steiner’s intellectual and academic work was brilliant, but not yet publicly esoteric. He was not yet known for his ability to tell the secrets of the natural or spiritual world. It was not until age thirty-nine that he publicly manifested clairvoyant capacities, the ability to “see clearly.”4 At that time, as he later reported in his autobiography, Steiner entered a deep spiritual struggle, after which he experienced the mystery of Christ in the evolution of Earth and humanity. As a result of this life-transforming experience, his spiritual-scientific research and teachings were bathed in the light of Christ guiding the cosmos, the Earth, and human destiny.

Despite the increasingly significant role that he ascribed to Christ, Steiner continued to lecture to large audiences of theosophists, most of whom, it seems, focused more on Krishna and Buddha than on Christ.5 From 1902 to 1909, he served as general secretary of the German branch of the Theosophical Society. In 1909, during the Theosophical Congress in Budapest, Steiner recognized that he would need to separate from the Theosophical Society, primarily because Annie Besant, its president, was not amenable to Steiner’s increasingly Western perspective and emphasis on the importance of Christ. Besant also opposed Steiner’s introduction of the arts into the annual meetings of the Theosophical Society. The break came in 1911, when C. W. Leadbeater and Annie Besant announced that sixteen-year-old J. Krishnamurti was the vehicle of a coming world teacher. Leadbeater believed that his student was the Master Jesus. Whether Besant held the same conviction or not, she agreed with Leadbeater and created the Order of the Star as a vehicle for Krishnamurti, who renounced this claim at age twenty-one.

From 1904 until 1909, Steiner wrote three of his foundational books: How to Know Higher Worlds (1904), Theosophy (1904), and An Outline of Esoteric Science (1909). He also lectured on a wide variety of themes in the history of Western esotericism. Beginning in 1909, he delivered many lectures on events in the Christian Gospels, as well as on the interrelationships among Krishna, Buddha, and Christ.

In 1912 in Berlin, Steiner’s followers, principally those who had worked with him in the Theosophical branches and had heard hundreds of his lectures throughout Europe, formed the Anthroposophical Society. Steiner neither founded nor joined the society that his followers formed at that time, but ten years later, during Christmas week of 1923, Steiner reestablished the General Anthroposophical Society and became its leader. In 1913, Steiner laid the foundation stone for the Goetheanum,6 an enormous wooden structure that he designed, to be built on an imposing hill near Basel, in Dornach, Switzerland. Since then, the Goetheanum has served as the public and esoteric center for the worldwide work of the Anthroposophical Society.

Steiner chose the name Goetheanum to honor Goethe’s aesthetics. Steiner’s architecture, including the double-cupola structure, with various spiritually enlightened forms, was unprecedented and influential. The building was made of various types of wood from all over Europe and North America and was under construction from 1913 to 1922. During World War I, workers from seventeen nations, including Austria, Germany, France, and England, lived and worked together on a hill in Switzerland, within hearing of the guns and battles raging around them. Soon after the Goetheanum was completed, an arsonist burned it to the ground on New Year’s Eve 1922.

In 1899, Steiner married Anna Eunike, the widowed mother of five children for whom Steiner had been a resident tutor. Steiner had his own section of Frau Eunike’s house for his work and for meetings with colleagues. When asked about that relationship, clearly a marriage of convenience lasting approximately three years, he dismissed the inquiry, stating simply, “Private relations are not something to be publicized.” Anna Eunike died in 1911. In 1914, at the outbreak of World War I, Steiner married Marie von Sievers soon after she crossed the border from Germany into Switzerland. Throughout the previous decade, von Sievers had been his assistant in the German branch of the Theosophical Society. While we remain uninformed about their marriage, it is clear that Marie Steiner shared every detail of Steiner’s work on behalf of Anthroposophy. She was particularly helpful to Steiner’s many contributions to the spiritual and esoteric renewal of the arts.7

Steiner believed that his relationship with Dr. Ita Wegman, his personal physician, extended through previous lifetimes. For more than two decades they collaborated on medical research, some of the results of which are published in their book Extending Practical Medicine: Fundamental Principles Based on the Science of the Spirit.

With the exception of his teaching on karma and rebirth and his founding the General Anthroposophical Society in 1923, Rudolf Steiner’s entire lifework was in response to people’s requests for help. In 1924, he delivered a series of nineteen lectures to followers who had joined the School of Spiritual Science (an esoteric membership at the core of the Anthroposophical Society dedicated to spiritual-scientific research). Except for these lectures and those he delivered to priests of The Christian Community (see section 5 of this introduction), Steiner gave all of his innovative ideas and methodologies openly, and in a way intended to be shared by anyone interested in them.

Just a few months before his death, in a series of letters written to members of the Anthroposophical Society and published as Anthroposophic Leading Thoughts, Steiner wrote the following characterization of Anthroposophy:

Anthroposophy is a path of [spiritual] knowledge, to guide the spiritual in the human being to the spiritual in the universe. It arises in the human being as a need of the heart, of the life of feeling, and it can be justified only inasmuch as it can satisfy this inner need. Only those who find in it what they themselves feel impelled in their inner lives to seek can acknowledge Anthroposophy. Only those who feel certain questions on the nature of the human being and the universe as an elemental need of life, just as one feels hunger and thirst, can be anthroposophists.

Anthroposophy communicates knowledge that is gained in a spiritual way. Yet it only does so because everyday life, and the science founded on sensation and intellectual activity, lead to a barrier along life’s way―a limit where the life of the soul in the human being would die if it could go no further. Everyday life and science do not lead to this limit in such a way as to compel the human being to stop short at it. For at the very frontier where the knowledge derived from sensory perception ceases, the further outlook into the spiritual world is opened through the human soul itself.8

As this frequently quoted description indicates, Anthroposophy refers to human wisdom, or a way of knowing the essentially human, in contrast to knowledge gained by faith or by other traditional ways of understanding divine revelation. It was Steiner’s aim to enable human beings to develop their spiritual faculties and, thereby, develop knowledge of the spiritual reality of the cosmos without the help of a religious tradition, though he was careful to emphasize that Anthroposophy is, in principle, compatible with all religious traditions. According to Steiner, this achievement is possible by a kind of thinking that he describes synonymously as active, loving, spiritual, and free. He tries to show that this new mode of spiritual thinking is at the core of great advances in science, art, and religion. He intends his ideal of spiritually active thinking as a work of the heart, of the affective, and artistic. He develops his concept and method of spiritual “living” thinking as a contrast to religious revelation, ordinary intellectuality, and passive, sensory-based awareness.

Perhaps Steiner’s most significant contribution to contemporary humanity is the method he developed for acquiring spiritually clear knowledge. Through his contributions to thought and culture and the methods he bequeathed for others to test and advance his insights, Rudolf Steiner remains one of the most important exemplars of the transformative and practical effects of esoteric knowledge. Although there would seem to be many clairvoyants throughout the world, Steiner is distinctive, and perhaps unique, in the degree to which he understood his clairvoyance, disciplined it, applied it to numerous fields of knowledge and culture, and, most important, published instructions for those born with ordinary consciousness to develop a modicum of spiritual intuition.

The following introductory summary of these initiatives corresponds to the twelve chapters of selections from Steiner’s writings and lectures reprinted in this volume.

Edition details

• Publisher: Lindisfarne Books
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1584200561
• ISBN 13: 9781584200567
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336
• Editor: Robert A. McDermott