Rudolf Steiner - A Biographical Sketch
by Alfred
Heidenreich
One
spring day in 1860, an autocratic Hungarian magnate, a certain Count Hoyos, who owned
several large estates in Austria, dismissed his game-keeper, because this
game-keeper, Johannes Steiner, wanted to marry Franziska Blie, one of the
Count's innumerable housemaids. Perhaps the old Count had a foreboding as to
what a great spiritual revolution would be born of this marriage. (The baroque
palace of Hom, where it happened, is still in the possession of the Hoyos
family, and stands today just as it was one hundred years ago.) So Johannes
Steiner had to look for another occupation, and got himself accepted as a
trainee telegraphist and signalman by the recently opened Austrian Southern
Railway. He was given his first job in an out-of-the-way request stop called
Kraljevic (today in Yugoslavia), and there his first child, Rudolf, arrived on
February 27, 1861. On the same day the child was taken for an emergency baptism
to the parish Church of St. Michael in the neighboring village of Draskovec.
The baptismal register was written in Serbo-Croat and Latin, and the entry
still can be read today as of one Rudolfus Josephus Laurentius Steiner.
"Thus it happened," Rudolf Steiner writes in his autobiography,
"that the place of my birth is far removed from the region where I come
from."
In later life,
particularly in his lectures on education, Steiner frequently made the point
that the most prodigious feat any man achieves at any time is accomplished by
him in the first two or three years of his life, when he lifts his body into
the upright position and learns to move it in perfect balance through space,
when he forms a vital part of his organism into an instrument of speech and
when he begins to handle and indeed to fashion his brain as a vehicle for
thought. In other words, when the child asserts his human qualities which set
him dramatically apart from the animals.
This initial
achievement the boy Rudolf performed in Kraljevic. Kraljevic (meaning King's
Village) is situated in the western outskirts of the vast Hungarian plain, the
Puszta. Even today endless fields of maize and potatoes extend in every
direction, and the solemn monotony of the country is more enhanced than
relieved by the lines of tall poplars flanking the primitive, dead straight
roads. It is basic three-dimensional space at its severest, domed over by the
sky, which local people say is nowhere else so high nor so blue as over the
Puszta. One might almost say that nature provided laboratory conditions in
which the boy learned to stand, to walk, to speak and to think. One could
justifiably say of Rudolf Steiner what the biographer, Hermann Grimm, said of
Goethe: "It seems as if Providence had placed him in the simplest
circumstances in order that nothing should impede his perfect unfolding."
From the severity
of the Puszta the family moved, when the boy was two years old, into one of the
most idyllic parts of Austria, called "the Burgenland" since 1921.
Comprising the foothills of the eastern Alps, it is of great natural beauty,
very fertile, and drenched in history. It takes its name from the many Burgen,
i.e. castles which at different times of history were erected on nearly every
hill. During recent excavations coins bearing the head of Philip of Macedonia,
the father of Alexander the Great, have been found near Neudorff, where the
Steiners now settled, and where a daughter and a younger son were added to the
family.
The management of
the Austrian Southern Railway seems to have taken a sympathetic view toward the
promising boy, and agreed to move father Steiner as stationmaster to several
small stations south of Vienna, so that the eldest son was able to attend good
schools as a day student, and finally in 1879 could matriculate at the Technical
University of Vienna, then one of the most advanced scientific institutions of
the world. Until then Rudolf Steiner's school life had been fairly uneventful,
except that some of his masters were rather disturbed by the fact that this
teen-ager was a voracious reader of Kant and other philosophers, and privately
was engrossed in advanced mathematics.
In his first year
at the University Rudolf Steiner studied chemistry and physics, mathematics,
geometry, theoretical mechanics, geology, biology, botany, and zoology; and
while still an undergraduate two events occurred which were of far-reaching
consequence for his further development.
In the train in
which the young student travelled daily to Vienna he frequently met a curious
personality, an herb-gatherer, who turned out to be a latter-day Jacob Boehme.
He was filled with the most profound nature lore to which he had first-hand
access. He understood the language of plants, which told him what sicknesses
they could heal; he was able to listen to the speech of the minerals, which
told him of the natural history of our planet and of the Universe. In the last
winter of his public life, in December 1923, Steiner provided something of a
historic background for this wisdom, notably in his lectures on the Mysteries of
Eleusis. Steiner immortalized the herb-gatherer in his Mystery Dramas, in the
figure of "Father Felix." But "Father Felix" was
instrumental in bringing Steiner together with a still more important and
mysterious personality.
"Felix was
only the intermediary for another personality," Steiner tells us in his
autobiography, "who used means to stimulate in the soul of the young man
the regular systematic things with which one has to be familiar in the
spiritual world. This personality used the works of Fichte in order to develop
certain observations from which results ensued which provided the seeds for my
(later) work.... This excellent man was as undistinguished in his daily job as
was Felix."
While these fateful
meetings occurred on the inward field of life, a very consequential
relationship developed on the outward field. The Technical University of Vienna
provided a chair for German literature, which was held by Karl Julius Schroer,
a great Goethe enthusiast and one of the most congenial interpreters of Goethe.
Schroer recognized Steiner's unusual gifts, and anticipated that he might be
capable of doing some original research in the most puzzling part of Goethe's
works, i.e. his scientific writings.
Only two years ago,
Dr. Emil Bock, of Stuttgart, Germany, one of the most eminent Steiner scholars,
discovered the correspondence between Professor Schroer, Steiner, and the
German Professor Joseph Kurschner, who was engaged in producing a monumental
edition of representative works of German literature from the 7th to the 19th
century. In the first letter of this correspondence, dated June 4, 1882,
Schroer refers to Steiner as an "undergraduate of several terms
standing." He says that he has asked him to write an essay on Goethe and
Newton, and if this essay is a success, as he thinks it will be, "we have
found the editor of Goethe's scientific works." Steiner was then
twenty-one years of age. Schroer's letter is reminiscent of the letter Robert
Schumann wrote to the great violinist Joachim, after he had received the first
visit of the then twenty-one year old Brahms: "It is he who was to
come."
The introductions
and explanatory notes to the many volumes of Goethe's scientific works which
Steiner was now commissioned to write were much ahead of their time. They blazed
a trail into the less familiar regions of Goethe's universal genius which only
today begins to be followed up by other scholars.
The young Steiner
wrote these, his first works, in outward conditions of great poverty. The
family lived in two rooms, which are still shown today. The larger one of the
two was kitchen, dining, sitting and bedroom for the parents and his younger
brother and sister, and off this larger room a few steps led into a narrow,
white-washed, unheated cubicle where the young Steiner worked as in a monk's
cell. No wonder that a Viennese celebrity of the time refers to him in his
memoirs as one "who looked like a half-starved student of theology."
However, this first
literary success led to Steiner's call to the central Goethe Archives at
Weimar, where despite his youth he now became one of the editors of the great
Standard Edition (Sophien Ausgabe) of Goethe's Complete Works. This
concentrated occupation with Goethe, continued for seven years in Weimar, from
1889 to 1896, had a profound effect upon the unfolding of Steiner's own mind
and philosophical consciousness. Goethe was the catalyst which released new
mental and spiritual energies in Steiner s own personality. It was during these
years that Steiner's fundamental philosophical works were conceived and
written.
In 1886 he
published An Epistemology of Goethe's World Conception. In 1891 his small
concentrated thesis on Truth and Science earned him his Ph.D. In 1896 his
comprehensive Philosophy of Spiritual Activity opened a completely new approach
to the understanding of the human mind and the nature of thought. It represents
the first really fresh step in philosophic thought and in the philosophic
interpretation of the human consciousness since Kant. It is no wonder that in
those years Steiner began to be looked upon in Germany as "the coming
philosopher" upon whom before long the mantle of the dying Nietzsche would
fall. But his genius led him a different way.
In his thirty-sixth
year - "Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita," as Dante calls it,
Steiner moved to Berlin, and the next seven years were perhaps the most
dramatic period in his life. His new position in Berlin was that of editor of
the weekly, Das Magazin fur Litteratur, founded in 1832 (something equivalent
to the London Saturday Review). He wrote the leading article and the dramatic
reviews, occupying in Berlin a position somewhat similar to that of Bernard
Shaw (who was five years his senior), with his weekly dramatic criticism in the
Saturday Review. This assignment brought Steiner into close social contact with
the intellectual and artistic elite of Berlin at the time, and for some years
he pitched his tent among them. In the last years of his life, during rare
moments of relaxation, he would at times tell stories of this exciting and
often amusing period.
Side by side with
these literary circles, or perhaps in polarity to them, Steiner was also drawn
by objective interest and personal attraction into the camp of Haeckel and the
militant monists. To move in this manner abreast of the spirit of the time
would be a most interesting experience for anyone. For Steiner it was more. And
I must now touch upon that side of his life about which I shall have to speak
presently in greater detail. From childhood while for others such "being
involved in this or that fashion of thought would be no more than an
ideology," for anyone standing in the spiritual world it means, as Steiner
says in his autobiography, that "he is brought close to the spirit-beings
who desire to invest a particular ideology with a totalitarian claim."
Steiner refers to his experience as a "Soul's Probation" which he had
to undergo. (He later chose The Soul's Probation as the title of one of his
Mystery Dramas.) He speaks of the "tempests" which during those years
in Berlin raged in his soul, a rare expression in the otherwise very even and
dispassionate style of his autobiography. At the end of those "forty days
in the wilderness" -- which were in fact four years -- the thunderclouds
lifted, the mist cleared, and he stood, to use his own phrase. "in solemn
festival of knowledge before the Mystery of Golgotha." He had come to a
first-hand experience of Christ and His active presence in the evolution of the
world.
We have now reached
the point where we must venture into the great unknown: Steiner the seer, the
Initiate.
It is a plain fact
that in some form or other spiritual knowledge has existed throughout the ages.
Secret wisdom has never been absent from human history. But in Steiner it
assumed a totally new form. In order to appreciate this revolutionary novelty,
we must first have a picture of the old form.
The faculty of
spiritual perception and secret wisdom is obtained through certain organs in
the "subtle body" of man, to borrow a convenient term from Eastern
Indian medicine. In Sanscrit these organs are called "chakrams"
generally translated into English as "lotus flowers." They fulfill a
function in the "subtle body" similar to our senses in the physical
body. They are usually dormant today, but can be awakened. We can disregard for
the moment the rites of Initiation which were employed in the Mystery Temples
of the ancient world, and confine ourselves to the survival of more general
methods which today are still practiced in many parts of the world. They all
have one thing in common: they operate through the vegetative system in man,
through bodily posture, through the control of breathing, through physical or
mental exercises which work upon the solar plexus and the sympathetic nervous
system. I realize that I am presenting a somewhat crude simplification. But
nevertheless I am giving the essentials.
Steiner broke with
all this. He began to operate from the opposite pole of the human organism,
from pure thought. Thought, ordinary human thought, even if it is brilliant and
positive, is at first something very weak. It does not possess the life, say,
of our breathing, let alone the powerful life of our pulsating blood. It is,
shall we say, flat, without substance; it is really lifeless. It is "pale
thought," as Shakespeare called it.
This relative
lifelessness of our thoughts is providential, however. If the living thoughts
filling the Universe were to enter our consciousness just as they are, we would
faint. If the living idea in every created thing simply jumped into our
consciousness with all its native force, it would blot us out. Fortunately, our
cerebro-spinal system exerts a kind of resistance in the process; it functions
like a resistor in an electric circuit; it is a sort of transformer, reducing the
violence of reality to such a degree that our mind can tolerate it and register
it. However, as a result, we see only the shadows of reality on the back wall
of our Platonic cave, not reality itself.
Now one of the
magic words in Steiner's philosophy with which he attempts to break this spell,
is "Erkraftung des Denkens." It means putting force, life into
thinking, through thinking, within thinking. All his basic philosophic works,
notably the Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, and many of his exercises, are
directed to this purpose. If they are followed, sooner or later the moment
arrives when thinking becomes leibfrei, i.e. independent of the bodily
instrument, when it works itself free from the cerebrospinal system.
This is at first a
most disturbing experience. One feels like a man who has pushed off from the
shore and who must now strive with might and main to maintain himself in the
raging sea. The sheer power of cosmic thought is such that at first one loses
one's identity. And perhaps one would lose it for good, if it were not for a
fact which now emerges from the hidden mysteries of Christianity. One does not
finally lose one's identity because He Himself has walked the waves and
extended a helping hand to Peter who ventured out prematurely. Gradually the
waves seem to calm down, and a condition ensues which Steiner expresses in a
wonderful phrase: "Thinking itself becomes a body which draws into itself
as its soul the Spirit of the Universe.''
This is a stage
which, broadly speaking, Steiner had attained at the point of his biography
which we have reached. Now he made a discovery which was not known to him
before. He discovered that this "living thinking" could awaken the
chakrams from "above," just as in the old way they could be
stimulated from "below." Thought which at first in the normal and
natural psychosomatic process "died" on the place of the skull, but
which through systematic exercises had risen again to the level of cosmic
reality, could now impart life to the dormant organs of spiritual perception
which have been implanted into man by Him who created him in His image. From
about the turn of the century Steiner began to pursue this path with ever
greater determination, and gradually developed the three forms of Higher
Knowledge which he called Imagination: a higher seeing of the spiritual world
in revealing images; Inspiration: a higher hearing of the spiritual world,
through which it reveals its creative forces and its creative order; Intuition:
the stage at which an intuitive penetration into the sphere of Spiritual Beings
becomes possible.
With these
unfolding powers Steiner now developed up to his death in 1925, in twenty-five
momentous years, that truly vast and awe-inspiring body of spiritual and
practical knowledge to which he gave the name "Anthroposophy."
(Incidentally, this word was first coined by Thomas Vaughan, a brother of the
English mystical poet, Henry Vaughan, in the 17th century.) Anthroposophy
literally means wisdom of man or the wisdom concerning man, but in his later years
Steiner himself interpreted it on occasion as "an adequate consciousness
of being human." In this interpretation the moral achievement of Steiner's
work, his mission, his message to a bewildered humanity which has lost "an
adequate consciousness of being human," to which Man has become "the
Unknown," is summed up. This monumental work lies before us today and is
waiting to be fully discovered by our Age -in some 170 books and in the
published transcripts of nearly 6,000 lectures.
Three
characteristic stages can be observed in Steiner's anthroposophical period. In
a lecture given at the headquarters of the German Anthroposophical Society at
Stuttgart (on February 6, 1923) he himself described these stages. Stage one
(approximately 1901-1909): to lay the foundation for a Science of the Spirit
within Western Civilization, with its center in the Mystery of Golgotha, as
opposed to the purely traditional handing down of ancient oriental wisdom which
is common to other organizations such as the Theosophical Society. Stage two
(approximately 1910-1917): the application of the anthroposophical Science of
the Spirit to various branches of Science, Art and practical life. As one of
the milestones for the beginning of this second stage, Steiner mentions the
building of the Goetheanum, that architectural wonder (since destroyed by fire)
in which his work as an artist had found its culmination. Stage three
(approximately 1917-1925): first-hand descriptions of the spiritual world.
During these twenty-five years of anthroposophical activity, Steiner's
biography is identical with the history of the Anthroposophical Movement. His
personal life is entirely dedicated to and absorbed in the life of his work.
It was during the
last of the three phases that Steiner's prodigious achievements in so many
fields of life began to inspire a number of his students and followers to
practical foundations. Best known today are perhaps the Rudolf Steiner or
�Waldorf� Schools for boys and girls, which have been founded in many countries
and in which his concept of the true human being is the well-spring of all
educational methods and activities. A separate branch are the Institutes for
Curative Education which have sprung up both in Europe and Overseas, and whose
activities have been immensely beneficial to the ever increasing number of
physically and mentally handicapped children and adults. Steiner's
contributions to medical research and to medicine in general are used by a
steadily growing number of doctors all over the world, and his indications are
tested and followed up in a number of research centers and clinics. Another
blessing for humanity flowed from his method of Biodynamic Agriculture, by
which he was able to add to the basic principles of organic husbandry just
those extras which, if rightly used, can greatly increase both fertility and
quality without those chemical stimulants which in the long run poison both the
soil and its products.
In the field of Art
there is hardly an area he did not touch with the magic wand of creative originality.
The second Goetheanum, which replaced the first one destroyed by fire, shows
the massive use of reinforced concrete as a plastic material for architecture a
generation before this use was attempted by others. Steiner's direct and
indirect influence on modern painting with the symphonic use of color, on
sculpture, on glass-engraving, on metal work and other visual arts is too
far-reaching for anyone even to attempt to describe in condensed form. Students
and graduates of the Steiner schools for Eurythmy and for Dramatic Art have
performed before enthusiastic audiences in the cultural centers of the world,
ably directed by Marie Steiner, his wife, and her successors
To those who have
been attracted to this present publication by its title and its reference to
Christianity, it will be of particular interest to hear that among those
foundations which came into being during the last phase of Steiner's
anthroposophical work was a Movement for Religious Renewal, formed by a body of
Christian ministers, students and other young pioneers who had found in Rudolf
Steiner "a man sent from God," able to show the way to a true
reconciliation of faith and knowledge, of religion and science. This movement
is known today as "The Christian Community" and has centers in many
cities in the Old and New World. Apart from the inestimable help this movement
received from him in theological and pastoral matters, Rudolf Steiner was
instrumental in mediating a complete spiritual rebirth of the Christian
sacraments for the modern age and a renewal of the Christian priestly office.
�Christianity as
Mystical Fact and the Mysteries of Antiquity� holds a special place in the
story of his remarkable and dedicated life. The book contains the substance of
a series of lectures Rudolf Steiner gave in the winter of 1901-1902 in the
"Theosophical Library" of Berlin at the invitation of the President,
Count Brockdorff. This series had been preceded by another on the German
mystics from Master Eckhardt to Jacob Boehme (published in the Centennial
Edition of the Written Works of Rudolf Steiner under the title Mysticism at the
Dawn of the Modern Age, See Multimedia edition) in which Steiner had ventured
for the first time to present publicly some measure of his spiritual knowledge.
After these
lectures on the mystics which was something of a prelude, �Christianity as
Mystical Fact� ushered in a new period in the understanding of the basic facts
of Christianity as well as in Steiner's own life.
Compared with the
free flow of spiritual teaching on Christianity offered by Steiner in his later
works, the book may appear somewhat tentative and even reticent in its style.
But it contains as in a nutshell all the essential new elements he was able to
develop and unfold so masterfully in his later years.
Steiner considered
the phrase "Mystical Fact" in the title to be very important. "I
did not intend simply to describe the mystical content of Christianity,"
he says in his autobiography. "I attempted to show that in the ancient Mysteries
cultic images were given of cosmic events, which occurred later on the field of
actual history in the Mystery of Golgotha as a Fact transplanted from the
cosmos into the earth."
It will not be out
of place to round off this biographical sketch with a few personal reminiscences
of the last four years of his life when I met Steiner as man and Initiate among
his friends and students, and saw quite a good deal of him.
What was Rudolf
Steiner like? In the first place there was nothing in the least pompous about
him. He never made one feel that he was in any sense extraordinary. There was
an astonishing matter-of-factness about him, whether he spoke at a business
meeting of the Anthroposophical Society, presided over faculty meetings of the
Waldorf School, lectured on his ever increasing discoveries in the spiritual
field, or spoke in public discussions on controversial subjects of the day.
I attended small
lecture courses of less than fifty people, heard him lecture in the large hall
of the first Goetheanum, was present at large public meetings when he expounded
his "Threefold Society" ideas in the electric atmosphere of the
Germany of 1923, during the occupation of the Ruhr and the total collapse of
the German Mark. He was always the same: clear, considerate, helpful, unruffled.
In those days he could fill the largest halls in Germany, and his quiet voice
was strong enough to be heard without artificial amplification in the last rows
of the gallery.
His hair remained
jet black to the end; I cannot remember a strand of grey in it. His brown eyes,
they sometimes had a shimmer of gold in them, looked with sympathy upon
everything. And he possessed a wonderful buoyancy of carriage.
From 1913 Steiner
lived permanently at Dornach, near Basel, Switzerland, in a house known locally
as "Villa Hansi." However, he spent most of his time in his studio,
which was really nothing but a simple wooden building adjoining the large
carpentry-shop where much of the woodwork of the first Goetheanum was
prefabricated. In this studio he received an unending stream of callers. One
would, perhaps, be shown into the room by a helping friend, but at the end he
would always conduct one to the door himself. He put one at ease with such
courtesy that one was in danger of forgetting who he was. And he gave the
impression that he had no other care nor interest in the world than to listen
to one's immature questions.
He would sit on a
simple wicker chair, his legs crossed, perhaps occasionally moving one foot up
and down. On the lapel of his black coat one might see a slight trace of snuff,
because he indulged in the Old-World pleasure of taking snuff, but he neither
drank nor smoked. I have never met anyone, and I am sure I shall never meet
anyone who seemed so constantly at rest and in action simultaneously, all the
time perfectly relaxed and absolutely alert.
The last summer of
his life, in 1924, was the most prolific of all. He gave specialized courses on
agriculture, on curative education, on Eurythmy. Then followed a summer school
in August at Torquay in England; and when he returned to Dornach in early
September, he increased his activities still further and gave as many as five,
sometimes six different lectures each day. There was a daily course on the New
Testament Book of Revelation for the priests of the Christian Community,
another on pastoral medicine for priests and doctors together, another on
dramatic art, where I remember him one morning acting single-handed the whole
of �Dantons Tod�, a drama of the French Revolution by the German writer, Buchner.
On another morning he acted the Faust fragment by Lessing. And in addition to
all this, he also held lectures for the workmen of the Goetheanum.
Besides these
specialized courses, the general lectures and other central activities of the
Goetheanum School for the Science of the Spirit continued without interruption.
But the inevitable
moment approached when even his resilient body showed the strain of his immense
work. Sometimes for the period of a whole week he would hardly sleep more than
two hours each night. I believe that he knew what he was doing. He well knew
why he burned the candle not only at both ends but also in the middle.
My last memory of
him is of the night when I was privileged, together with another friend, to
keep vigil at the foot of his bed on which his body was laid out. It was the
night before his funeral. The bed stood in his simple studio where he had been
confined during the last six months of his life. Looking down on him was the
great wooden statue of Christ which he had carved and nearly finished. Even in
the literal sense of the word he had laid down his life at the feet of Christ.
The dignity of his
features was enhanced by the marble whiteness of death. In the stillness of the
night, with only a few candles burning, it was as if ages of human history
converged to do homage. With a deep sense of reverence I wondered who he was. I
am wondering still.
London, England,
August 1961
