Bruce Charlton's Notions

Of all the important thinkers of the twentieth century, Rudolf Steiner is perhaps the most difficult to come to grips with. For the unprepared reader, his work presents a series of daunting obstacles. 

To begin with, there is the style, which is formidably abstract, and as unappetizing as dry toast. But a determined reader could learn to put up with that.

The real problem lies with the content, which is often so outlandish and bizarre that the reader suspects either a hoax or a confidence trick. 

Books like Cosmic Memory, with its account of Atlantis and Lemuria, seem to belong on the same shelf as titles like Our Hollow Earth, or My trip to Venus in a Flying Saucer. 

The resulting sense of frustration is likely to cause even the most open-minded reader to give up in disgust.

The first paragraph of Rudolf Steiner, by Colin Wilson, 1985.

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The Big Problem with Rudolf Steiner (as I have said many times) is that most of what he said and wrote was wrong; but some of what he wrote is sufficient to establish him as one of a handful of the most vital thinkers of the past couple of centuries. 

But because most of Steiner (a very high percentage!) is wrong; on the one hand, most people reject his work outright; while on the other hand, Steiner's disciples and followers (mostly in the Anthroposophical Society, which he founded) are mostly wrong in what they believe - to the point that they miss the significance and importance of what he was right about.  

What Steiner needs, therefore, is scholars who will take was is good and leave aside what is not; and the closest we have to this is Owen Barfield who, in addition, added much of value to what he took from Steiner. 

But even Barfield seems to have been unable to be clear about the nature of Steiner's work, and respected him to the point that he never (that I have seen) denied anything that Steiner ever said. What Barfield instead did was - in his writings - focus on the aspects of Steiner about which he was most sure; and said little or nothing about the colossal number of claims that Steiner made about... everything under the sun, and indeed from many ages before the sun. 

Barfield always recommended Steiner's earliest philosophical books; but did not make clear to the putative reader that most of Steiner's later books will strike most people as simply absurd, and obviously false. 

My understanding is that the major problem for those who regard Steiner as important, and who accept his core analysis and teachings; cannot find grounds from within this teachings for rejecting anything that Steiner ever said or wrote. 

Steiner purports do be doing a spiritual science; and repeatedly emphasizes that anyone can test his claims for themselves by spiritual investigation - yet, in practice, it seems that nobody ever feels able to do this, and must therefore treat all of Steiner's claims as if they constituted inerrant scripture.  

This seems to be because Steiner was able (at will) to produce in himself - while awake and alert and with full reasoning and memory capacities - a kind of consciousness that perceived the occult world - from which he reported back his observations and interpretations; and nobody else has since been able to do this. Certainly not in the vast volume that Steiner did in his lectures after about 1897, and accelerating until near his death in 1925. 

Because Steiner's followers cannot do what Steiner did to generate his claims, they feel unable to check his claims; and therefore simply take them on trust - regarding them as true because Steiner said them. Steiner discourse is therefore closely analogous to 'fundamentalist' Protestants in terms of Anthroposophists citing their scripture, and argument proceeds by proof-texting - by trading quotes and citations. 

For reasons that I set out in the post earlier today; I believe there is another and practical way of checking Steiner's claims; which can be done by anyone serious about understanding what is valid in Steiner, and using methods that Steiner recommended as the best and himself practiced. 

And that 'method' is simply by reading Steiner in the spirit of direct-knowing, of heart-thinking. 

Instead of trying to replicate Steiner's method of observing the hidden spirit world by inner perception; the reader tests Steiner's claims by intuitive means. 

Whenever a claim of Steiner's fails to be sustained by heart-thinking, whenever his premises or a line of argument is unsupported by the direct-knowing of our deepest thinking - then it is rejected as untrue. 

In other words; we accept from Steiner only that which is specifically sustained and confirmed by our own deepest-possible intuitive responses. 

This, I repeat, is exactly what Steiner recommended in those works of his that he regarded as his most important (specifically The Philosophy of Freedom, which he repeated many times was his fundamental publication). 

Therefore, we can - and in a viable and valid fashion - refute the mass of Steiner, and filter-out from the nonsense that which we most need and could benefit from. 

I continue to engage with the work of Rudolf Steiner, and continue to find him to be A Problem!

In the first place, it is important to acknowledge that the problem arises from the fact that Steiner was a genius of first rank importance in our cultural history - and therefore is thoroughly deserving of the most careful and sustained consideration.

To put it the other way around; it would be hazardous to leave-out Steiner from our thinking. He is certainly not indispensable; but we, at least, would each need to discover Steiner's contribution from other, often related and influenced-by sources (such as, in my experience, Barfield and Arkle; and Mormon theology) plus personal meditation.

But - within the overall context that Steiner is someone who made a deep and vital contribution; he comes-across as one of the most maddening and off-putting of writers!

I think this is due to the unfortunate historical fact that Steiner built an organisation, a movement, around his philosophy - the Anthroposophical Society; and that this became an institution; and that this institution has become the sole source of Steiner's legacy... Steiner and his work comes down to us, as it were, inside the Anthroposophical Society.

The further problem is that mainstream intellectual culture (partly, but only partly, because of this institutional capture) has completely ignored Steiner. So there is no independent tradition of engagement that takes Steiner with the extreme seriousness he deserves.

And for the Anthroposophical Society; it is clear that Steiner's work is regarded as primarily a vast and (apparently) systematic collection of set of spiritual scientific facts. Thus Steiner expertise comes in the form of people with an encyclopaedic knowledge of what Steiner wrote and (mostly) said on hundreds of topics and in hundreds of thousands of words.

This is a Big Problem, because We get Steiner via his Society, and the Society regards Steiner as systematic and vast; so that in practice we are confronted with an 'all-or-nothing' demand.

If we are to take Steiner seriously, we are asked to take him whole - and this means either a lifetime's work of reading and comprehending more than a hundred dense books, or getting him secondhand and through the lens of the Anthroposophical Society - for whom Steiner's nature and oeuvre are regarded as essentially perfect and infallible.

This sounds exaggerated, and I suppose Anthroposophists would strenuously deny it!; but I believe that it is literally correct.

The situation seems to have arisen from a contradiction in Steiner's teachings, and another contradiction between what he said and what he did... but noticing and taking-seriously this kind of contradiction is exactly what the Anthroposophical Society regards as tabu. 

Indeed, it was because Steiner despaired of having his early philosophical works noticed by 'mainstream' intellectual culture, that he began to put his energies into lecturing to various niche audiences - an educational groups for socialist workers, Nietzchians, Theosophists and then forming his own Theosophical off-shoot called Anthroposophy. But in principle, Steiner might not have done this, might have remained 'independent'; and his books then would have come down to us as the work of a spiritual philosopher analogous to Coleridge, Emerson, Nietzsche, William James or Owen Barfield.

In a nutshell; the AS regards Steiner as systematic - therefore all-or-nothing; and the Society regards the person of Rudolf Steiner as wholly-well-motivated - but I do not.

Instead, I regard Steiner as a significantly-flawed individual; whose work is deeply self-contradicting, in multiple ways. And therefore to take Steiner whole is to lose his essence and to dissipate his importance.

Thus, I believe that we must be selective in reading Steiner; and this selectivity is not just in superficial details but in primary aspects of his legacy. As we read Steiner we need to recognise contradictions, and to take sides - accepting the valid, and rejecting the wrong. We also need to recognise the man's flaws, errors, and mistakes - and not to assume that he always meant well, nor that he was always truthful, nor that everything he did (or that happened to him) was For The Best.  

The difficulty is - as I said - that Steiner comes to us inside the Anthroposophical Society, and all Steiner expertise is among Anthroposophists. So someone who wants to engage with Steiner as a major Romantic Christian and as an autonomous thinker is compelled to set himself against all this! - and to contradict those who know far more than he does!

This can, however, be done coherently by regarding Steiner as primarily a metaphysical philosopher, and regarding his teaching as primarily about each individual using this metaphysical understanding to attain a different and higher state of consciousness. The millions of 'facts' (i.e. the findings of spiritual science that Steiner provides in his later work) should therefore be regarded as merely suggestions.

In a nutshell, we can choose to regard Anthroposophy as a way or path; and to reject (in part or in whole) the vast collection of facts and theories by Steiner (on subjects such as cosmology, evolutionary history, politics, agriculture, medicine, education, dancing, music, drama, bees etc. etc.)

And finally, Steiner must be regarded as a Christian, and his whole philosophy as making sense only within a Christian framework.  

For Steiner, Christianity is mandatory. Everything of primary value that Steiner said needs to be understood within a specifically-Christian frame.

And, significantly, Christianity is perhaps the only aspect of Steiner's legacy which is Not, in practice, taken seriously by the Anthroposophical Society.

Advisory note added for Romantic Christians: Do read Rudolf Steiner, anticipate learning from one of the great thinkers of all time and one of a handful of the most important thinkers for modern Westerners; but read selectively and critically - being prepared to reject the bulk of what he says. Focus on the early three philosophical books (GA 2, 3, 4) - up to 1894 - but don't restrict yourself to them. Interpret the later books in light of the early three. Understand that the whole must be interpreted in light of the foundational fact (for Steiner) that the incarnation and death of Jesus Christ is the centre and most important 'event' not just in the history of human society, but in the history of the earth - and indeed the history of all creation.

Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) founded a movement called Anthroposophy, and has been (pretty much) ignored or ridiculed outside that movement.

So the attitudes to Steiner have tended to fall into extremes of uncritical acceptance and approval of everything he said - or wholesale rejection. My own attitude is that Steiner was a genius of world-historical importance and vital to Western concerns here-and-now; but that most of his best work came in the late 1800s and before he was an Anthroposophist; and, quantitatively, the great bulk of what he wrote after 1900 is wrong.

Because of my interest in Steiner, and the qualified nature of my admiration, I have been interested in his biography; but I have found it difficult to grasp due to the uncritical/ hagiographical nature of his admirers.

Also, until recently, not much has been known about Steiner's life except what he wrote in his autobiography (or in admiring memoirs by insider anthroposophists); and this document - while very interesting and well worth reading - is clearly framed by the requirement to justify and synthesise everything Steiner ever did; to present his life as a consistently-developing whole.

Indeed, Steiner spent a great deal of time and energy in his late lectures and books (and revised editions of books) works insisting that he had never really changed in any fundamental way, that the entirely of his work and life were part of a single coherent project; and that any contradiction or qualitative changes are an illusion.


Anyway, I am currently, carefully reading the first biography of Steiner that is sufficiently detailed to provide sufficient data to get past the hagiography and allow the reader a chance to reach his own conclusions about Steiner's life. This is excellent the multi-volume Peter Selg biography - Rudolf Steiner: Life and Work.

In fact; Selg is a professional Anthroposophist, and in his interpretations he generally endorses Steiner's own version of his motivations - but the detailed information he provides does allow for alternative views to be developed.

To cut to the chase; from Selg I have found confirmation of what was previously just a hunch:

1. Until at least 1897 Steiner was Not a Christian; but was essentially anti-Christian - a Nietzschian individualist, atheist. And largely disdainful of spiritual matters.

2. The period from 1898-1900 is essentially unrecorded, unfortunately; because during this time (according to Steiner's Autobiography written in the mid 1920s) Steiner had become a Christian due to a direct mystical experience; but was not yet a Theosophist.

3. In 1900 Steiner met Marie von Sivers at a series of lectures he delivered to the Theosophical Society. She bowled him over (younger, attractive, talented, charismatic, aristocratic); and became first Steiner's close collaborator/ secretary; then later his second wife. MvS was - from the start - keen for Steiner to be a movement-leader, and had a socio-political (rather than primarily spiritual/ Philosophical) focus of interest.

4. And from 1900 and the embrace of MvS as lifelong companion; Steiner became first a Theosophist and later set up his own splinter Theosophical group called Anthoposophy - which rapidly grew-away-from the parent organisation. But for Steiner, the early years of the 20th century were occupied in re-presenting the major pre-existing elements of Theosophy in a way compatible with Steiner's personal philosophy. These then became permanent and core elements of Anthroposophy.

5. Steiner was a very political young man, for sure - whereas there is near zero objective contemporary evidence for him having been 'spiritual' until about 1900. Up to the early 1900s he was involved in radical anarchistic left-wing society and politics; via articles in magazines (including editing magazines), a book strongly advocating the person and ideas of Nietzsche, and heavy professional involvement in lecturing at socialist working men's colleges.

6. Steiner worked closely with Marxists, but was himself an individualist - and hated the collective aspects of socialism/ communism.

7. Steiner's later political activities focused on building the Anthroposophical Society as an international movement; including extending Theosophy/ Anthroposophy into dance, speech, drama, music, medicine, agriculture, education, architecture and indeed every possible human sphere of action.

8. From the 1914-18 war period and for several years, Steiner's political activities focused on promoting his Threefold Society ideas - this briefly gained high level national influence, and led to a powerful and dangerous backlash against Steiner and his movement (e.g. an assassination attempt, the destruction by arson of his new headquarters building).

9. Immediately after Steiner's death, the leadership of Anthroposophy was taken-on by Marie von Sivers; and she presided over many years of bitter schism, infighting and legal battles among Anthroposophists. In many ways, the movement has never recovered.

10. Nowadays, Anthroposophy has all-but disappeared into the socio-political side of Steiner's work (especially Steiner 'Waldorf' Schools) - but now with a collectivist mindset, in-line with modern Leftism (and with the preferences of Marie von Sivers). So far as I can establish, all modern Anthroposophists are assimilated to collectivist New Leftism (except for one correspondent of mine!)


In sum; it looks as if the inflexion point in Steiner's life and the many new initiatives of his post-1900 career was primarily due to Marie von Sivers. From my perspective she was 'to blame' for most of what I find unacceptable about Steiner!

My regret is that nothing is known from contemporary sources of Steiner's self-reported (but not externally-validated) brief period as a Christian-but-Not-a-Theosophist - from 1898 to the summer of 1900.

So - for those - like me - who regard Steiner's philosophical and spiritual insights as vital, but want to set-aside his Theosophical and socio-political aspects; there is a large task of sifting and discriminating, extracting and reconstructing, to be done!

An enjoyable task - and extremely worthwhile!

Rudolf Steiner was a genius and one of the most important writers of the past couple of centuries; furthermore, he was someone who directly influenced other great writers such as Owen Barfield and Valentin Tomberg; and who continues to inspire some of the most important thinkers of today such as Jeremy Naydler and Terry Boardman.

But there are many serious problems about Rudolf Steiner the man and his legacy, which tend to render him beyond the pale, a 'hopeless case' for most serious Christians - even Romantic Christians.

So, here is some personal advice about how to 'tackle' Steiner in a way that does the most good - based upon about seven years of intensive study and thought concerning Steiner's work; but as an independent outsider to his movement.

Importantly, you can booth read and listen-to All of Steiner's major works (plus most of his minor work) free of charge at Rudolf Steiner Archive and Rudolf Steiner Audio.

You can start Now...


1. There are several books from you can take Steiner whole - his philosophical books and the history if ideas, where he is absolutely brilliant and fascinating. 

A theory of knowledge implicit in Goethe's world conception - 1886
Truth and Knowledge - 1892
The philosphy of freedom - 1894
Mysticism at the dawn of the modern age - 1901
Riddles of philosophy - 1914

2. Moving on from here, a different method is needed. Steiner is capable of tremendous, vital insights on a wide range of spritiual matters - especially to do with consciousness. Such gems are embedded all over the place, in the other books and the various collections from his thosands of transcribed lectures.

But these embedded gems (that you would not want to have missed) will be surrounded by a variable - sometimes a very large - amount of rubbish, nonsense, tedium; misleading and bad ideas.  And much of the bad stuff with be very complicated, dry, systematic - bureaucratic in style and tendency. I find this particularly the case when Steiner is writing about practical, applied, social questions - politics, medicine, education, agriculture and so on: this comes across to me as essentially pseudo-academic and pseudo-science.

3. When Steiner addresses individuals - one man speaking to another, across time - then he is at his best. But when Steiner addresses groups of people, or is focused upon matters of groups, or speaks as a The Doctor - leader/ guru/ administrator/ would-be man-of-action - then I think he is at his worst. Often you can tell when he switches from one mode to another.

4. Beyond the books on philosphy and history of ideas; I would therefore advise exploring - he is well worth reading. But read following Ralph Waldo Emerson's own practice, and practice skimming for 'lustres'; dance-across the text or swim-through the audio; seeking what speaks to you personally - and setting aside the rest.

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I have written before about the strange genius of Rudolf Steiner


http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/where-did-rudolf-steiner-go-wrong.html

In a nutshell, Steiner strikes me as a mixture of amazing and genuine visionary insights, mixed with a mass of material about history, cosmology etc. that is so bizarre, and so complex (and so - I am compelled to say - silly) that I honestly cannot imagine there is or ever has been anybody (including Steiner himself) who could remember it all, wholly believed it all, or could make sense of it all.

(I suppose the poet William Blake is another example of this - with some of his vast,  incomprehensible and mega-dull 'prophetic' poems; although Steiner is utterly un-poetic, indeed strikes me as a poor writer in terms of organisation, emphasis and explanation.)

In the end, whether to expend any time on at all on Steiner depends on an evaluation of his honesty, decency and sincerity. I think he was a basically good man, so I am prepared to spend at least a bit of time sifting the what from the chaff- particularly in what Steiner had to say about Christianity.

Steiner was emphatically self-identified as a Christian in his later life (i.e. during the years of his greatest fame), and regarded the life of Christ as unique and by far the most significant event in the history of the world. He wrote and lectured copiously on Christian subjects and clearly regarded the subject as of vital importance

(Steiner's Christian focus brought him considerable conflict and opposition even when he was alive, lost him influential support; and indeed Steiner's remnant modern followers seem to have all-but abandoned Steiner's Christian focus and assimilated into mainstream New Age-tinged Leftism. All this is, for me, evidence that Steiner's Christianity was absolutely sincere, and that he regarded it as of prime importance.)

Having said that, Steiner's explanations regarding the nature of Christ, the mechanism of his achievement etc are highly idiosyncratic, and apparently contradictory, bound-up with his bizarre account of history.

So I certainly would not recommend Steiner to anyone who was not already a Christian, and had some solidity of faith  - because it would be just too confusing. But if you are already a Christian, and looking to increase your depth of understanding, you might find some inspiration, nudges and hints in Steiner (I say this having only read a small fraction of Steiner's vast published output).

Anyway, I have found myself returning to Steiner from time to time recently, and the process is made far more enjoyable by listening to the (home made) readings of a US college professor called Dale Brunsvold - if you search his name on YouTube, you can find a mass of Steiner material he has contributed free of charge - including some lecture series on the distinctive qualities of the four Gospels.

Brunsvold is gifted with an extremely pleasant, soothing voice which adds greatly to the experience. I find it much easier to let the bizarre aspects wash over me - while listening-out for scattered nuggets of inspired wisdom - than I do when I have to plough through turgid prose for myself, ignoring most of the content. 

http://www.rudolfsteineraudio.com/

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Owen Barfield regarded himself as a disciple of Rudolf Steiner - in a not-altogether healthy way; because it exerted a constraining effect on his potential and caused Barfield to leave out - unexplained - considerable aspects of his world view. 

Instead Barfield, at a certain point, would merely recommend his audience to 'read Steiner'; which is, for most people, way too much to ask; since locating and extracting the undoubtedly gold insights from Steiner's voluminous dross of error and nonsense is the work of several years hard labour...

I speak as one of not-many of Barfield's great admirers who actually have put-in these years of work. Having done so; I was rather surprised to find that Barfield makes a very noticeable change to Steiner's terminology from The Philosophy of Freedom (insights from-which form an essential basis to Barfield's schema as expressed in (for example) Saving the Appearances, Unancestral Voice, Speaker's Meaning and History, Guilt and Habit.

How do we attain knowledge of reality, and is such knowledge indeed possible? This question forms the basis of that branch of 'modern' (post-medieval) philosophy called epistemology. 

However, the modern attempt to make epistemology fundamental (as does so much 19th and 20th century philosophy) is actually an error, and has gone nowhere. 

Nowhere; because epistemology takes-for-granted the primary level of philosophy, which is metaphysics: that discourse which tries to describe our most fundamental assumptions about the nature of reality. 

Thus, both Steiner and Barfield fail to describe their primary assumptions about reality before they embark describing their model of knowledge - which has the effect of giving these models a rather arbitrary, take-it-or-leave it quality. 

(For instance, both Steiner and Barfield ought to describe what they assume about God before they describe what they believe about knowledge; since for them both the possibility of knowledge depends on a personal creator God who has certain attitudes towards Men.) 

Nonetheless, since I share broadly the same metaphysical assumptions as Steiner and Barfield, I regard their models of knowledge as very useful - which is all that can reasonably be asked of any simple model of reality; especially one that aims at a time-less hence 'static', cross-sectional description of reality. 

The following is a comparison of the terminological equivalents of the epistemological models of Steiner and Barfield: 

Rudolf Steiner

Percept + Concept = Thinking

Owen Barfield

Perception + Thinking = Consciousness

The potential confusion when reading these authors is that they use thinking to mean different things: Steiner's thinking is the end result of our perceptions of the world being understood and interpreted by concepts. 

But for Barfield, thinking is (more or less) what Steiner means by concepts': the processes by which we understand and interpret perceptions  - or 'images' in the case of ancient Man, whose perceptions came packaged with meanings. 

Steiner thus talks a lot about 'thinking' of a particular kind (e.g. 'pure' thinking, or 'heart-thinking') as being the main aim of modern Man; the destined path ahead. This thinking (says Steiner) can be cultivated by meditative exercises which are intended to (but actually do not!) promote the desired kind of thinking. The desired kind of thinking is itself True Knowledge - and this is therefore Steiner's epistemology.

By contrast; Barfield talks about the destined and desirable future state of Consciousness; which is self-aware, active and chosen (rather than unconscious, passive and automatic): he calls this Final Participation; and for Barfield this is True Knowledge - as well as the proper aim of created Man (because Final Participation is to join with God in the work of creation).

After struggling to 'get' this for a few years; I think the above equivalence is broadly correct; and might be helpful to those who wish to read both Steiner and Barfield.   

"There slumber in every human being faculties by means of which he can acquire for himself a knowledge of higher worlds."

Thus wrote Rudolf Steiner, the founder of Anthroposophy. In The Philosophy of Freedom he demonstrated that thinking was the power that allowed modern human beings direct access to the spiritual worlds, an access that had once been the privilege of only a handful of mystics. 

No longer was it necessary for average human beings to depend on scripture and other forms of religious authority, for they could discover spiritual truth directly through strengthened thinking. This direct knowledge, he argued, was the only foundation for true moral freedom. He went on to develop and teach practical methods by which it could be achieved.

A century later, the Society he founded seems dedicated mainly to preserving and disseminating his nearly 60,000 transcribed lectures [Note: this number seems considerably too large an estimate, since Steiner only lectured actively for about 25 years, which is about 9,000 days - and he did not deliver six lectures every day]. 

The result of his own spiritual research, these lectures cover everything from gnomes to seraphim, from the history of Atlantis to recipes for compost. "Steiner says" is the constant refrain of anthroposophists, who seem to prefer citations from these lectures to direct knowledge of anything. While Steiner's initiatives in education, biodynamic agriculture, homeopathic medicine and care of the mentally retarded have been lovingly preserved, anthroposophy has, since his death, produced little in the way of social innovation. 

Anthroposophists, when they can be understood at all, express superstitions and prejudices that would embarrass a redneck. Fearing injury by everything from rock music to microchips to Jesuits, they have become a society of esoteric hypochondriacs, in neo-Amish withdrawal from modern political and economic life.

How is it that a movement dedicated to strengthened thinking produces so many goofy and morally useless ideas?

How did the author of The Philosophy of Freedom become this ghost to whom his readers so idolatrously surrender their independence of judgement?

That sound and stirring concepts give rise to corrupt and neurotic human organizations is pretty much a summary of the history of all spiritual movements...


I have been again engaging with Rudolf Steiner - because I regard him as one of the most significant thinkers of all time, and because he is a vital contributor to my deepest understanding of reality. Steiner is essential, but...

Yet again I find myself up against the phenomenon of which MacCoun speaks above. When I read or listen to Steiner's own lectures, or to the best of his followers expounding, I am overwhelmed by a sense of suffocation under such a mass of wrongness that I find it hard to continue.

But I disagree with MacCoun in her specific diagnosis that this is due to the Anthroposophical Society (AS), and the way it dealt with Steiner's legacy. I also disagree with her belief that the AS could - in principle - be reformed... I regard the AS as a symptom of Steiner's deep mistakes, and therefore it is unreformable

The problems lay with Steiner himself, and with his decision to become a spiritual leader of an organised movement.  But I repeat myself...


The problems are deep, because Steiner made the serious error of developing a meditative technique that he regarded as intrinsically scientifically valid; and spent two and a half decades, day after day, putting himself into this trance-state and spouting forth in lectures whatever came to him in this state.

Steiner did not live up to his own best understanding - indeed as a matter of daily routine he fell below the standards he himself had understood and explained. Steiner distinguished the Luciferic and Ahrimanic types of spiritual evil - and he fell into both in his late work of lecturing and organising the Theosophical then Anthroposophical societies.

Steiner's focus on meditative technique - and training in this method - was Ahrimanic, materialistic. But (contrary to his own assertion that meditation should be in clear, alert consciousness) the actual meditative method he used was Luciferic - it was (according to multiple descriptions) a dissociated trance state of lowered consciousness, including lucid dreaming. He then took this unconsciously-generated, 'altered state', 'atavistic' material and systematised and taught it as fact - Ahrimanic again.

For many years, Steiner had this working like a machine. Ask him a question, he would go into a trance, and from his unconscious would generate vast masses of material on the subject - and by Steiner's unique intellectual brilliance (he was a genius) this dream-material would be systemised and rationalised even as it emerged in his speech. 

The vast bulk of Steiner's work from about 1900 was, then, an exemplification of exactly those errors and evils that he himself first diagnosed as spiritual problems of our time: the backward looking Luciferic trances, and the modern bureaucratic organisation he founded, led and left-behind: the Ahrimanic Anthroposophical Society.

'I'll hae nae haufway hoose, but aye be whaur
Extremes meet - it's the only way I ken
To dodge the cursed conceit o' bein' richt
That damns the vast majority o' men.'

From 'A drunk man looks at the thistle' by Hugh MacDiarmid

Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) was prone to the cursed conceit of being right! - he always tried to show that he had been consistent in all his assertions (when looked at deeply), and never - really - changed his mind about anything.

Well, we all have our faults - but this one was very misleading when it comes to describing how it was, by what stages, that Steiner became one of the most insightful and important thinkers of recent centuries.

As a child and young man he was a natural 'clairvoyant' of the usual type seen throughout history - the state that Steiner later called 'atavistic clairvoyance' - a 'throw-back' to Man's original unreflective and unselfconscious state of perceiving spirits and being a part of everything.

That is, Steiner lived spontaneously in a dream-world that was true - yet imprecise. He could perceive the universal spiritual reality, but in a state of altered (and somewhat impaired) consciousness. By his own account; he found it difficult to focus on the material mundane world, he lacked interest-in and awareness-of specific details and was naturally forgetful of facts.

But from his later twenties, Steiner the philosopher created a theoretical world-view in which active, alert, purposive thinking - thinking of the real and universal self - was considered to be reality and truth. Indeed the key to all knowledge - past and present - including knowledge of meaning, purpose and morality.

This is brilliantly argued in his early works, at first only partly consciously but with increasing clarity and explicitness: developing throughout the prefaces to Goethe's scientific work from 1883, the book on Goethe's implicit philosophy (1886), the published PhD thesis of 1892 (Truth and Knowledge) up to The Philosophy of Freedom (published 1894) where it reaches its final and complete statement.

 So - first Steiner was a dreamy-spiritual person; then from his early twenties to his middle thirties he developed a theoretical framework for a new kind of clairvoyant (clear seeing) spirituality based on thinking rather than dreaming.

But only when Steiner was in his mid thirties was he actually able to live this new kind of alert and thinking focused spiritual-seeing - which he later called Spiritual Science.

And that was not the end - because in his middle thirties Steiner was broadly hostile to Christianity. However, over the next seven or so years he used his new ability in spiritual science to explore Christianity; and at the end of this time, around 1900 and aged about 42, Steiner finally arrived at what was to be his resting point of Christianity as the basic metaphysical and theological frame within-which the method/ process of Spiritual Science operated.

Steiner changed - he ended up very different from how he started-out; and the change took many years - about twenty years, in fact, from beginning to end!

Why is this important? Because:

1. It shows that change is possible.

2. But change is slow. If it took Steiner twenty years, it might well take us longer...

3. Theory may be well worth doing, and productive and constructive - it can lead to a change of person.

4. Method (spiritual Science) is not enough: religion is also required.

5. Religion can be a thing of the spirit, primarily.

6. Steiner's personal trajectory was very unusual - in that he went from being naturally an atavistic (dreamy, passive, mediumistic) atavistic clairvoyant - to Spiritual Science; whereas most of those who wish to follow him will be coming-from the opposite direction - from an utterly un-spiritual materialism.

7. For me this explains the proven ineffectiveness of Steiner's spiritual 'exercises' - since they were implicitly designed to increase concentration and precision in people who were naturally dreamy-spiritual; while most of us nowadays are all-but unable to be dreamy spiritual and live in a meaningless, purposeless dead-materialism.

8. In sum - to end up where Rudolf Steiner was aged from 42 onwards; we modern Westerners need first to escape materialism and enhance our spiritual sensitivity - perhaps initially with dreamy-clairvoyance: but with the conscious eventual aim of both spiritual science as process, and Christianity as framework.

*

Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) was an Austrian 'philosopher' - the quotes are positioned because there is not really a term for what Steiner was. He was the founder of a very large international movement which was certainly spiritual, and often functioned as a Christian, or Christianised, denomination; but also the Steiner movement created many schools and residential care centres of many types, and other things.

*

I have been vaguely aware of Steiner for many years: there were a couple of people in medical school who had attended a Steiner School, and one of these had parents who ran a Steiner home for mentally handicapped adults (I visited once, and it seems a wholesome and admirable place); I came across many apparently bizarre references to Steiner in Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow; and then my interest in The Inklings led to reading Owen Barfield.

Also, shortly after it was published in 1985, I bought and read Colin Wilson's small critical biography Rudolf Steiner: the Man and his Vision. I re-read this a couple of weeks ago; and then tried to read several essays on the topic of Angels, and some other online pieces.

*

My interest is in Steiner as a phenomenon - I simply do not respond to his ideas; although neither am I hostile to them - and as a phenomenon Steinerism has several very striking aspects.

One is that Steiner's biography seems to indicate that up until age the age of about forty he was a fairly minor scholar - and it was only from around 1900 that he very quickly rose to international fame and considerable influence.

And this was mainly by means of lectures: Steiner travelled all over Europe and Britain giving lectures; and these were the primary means of his influence.

As Colin Wilson puts it:

Steiner's life between 1900 and 1925 is basically a record of his travels and his lectures. In twenty-five years he delivered over six thousand lectures - an average of one lecture for every single weekday. 

There were periods when this lecturing activity seemed to rise to a frenzy, as during the period of two and a half weeks in 1924 when he delivered seventy lectures.

Wilson quotes Wolfgang Treher:

[Steiner] began to lecture. His gaze, first turned outward, seemed now and then to be turned inward. He spoke out of an inner vision. The sentences were formed while he spoke. There was power in his words.

In his words dwelt the power to awaken to life the slumbering unison of hearts. The hearts sensed something of the power of which his words were formed, and felt a strengthening of that tie which...connected them with the reality of a broader, richer world. 

*

My interpretation is that Steiner - who was gifted with a strong intellect, deep and wide scholarship, and many powerful and vivid intuitive and visionary experiences - was able to perform in 'real time' a relevant analysis of the problems of modern man and the modern world (which is a fairly common ability); and then communicate - via the lecture medium - a comprehensible, optimistic and satisfying vision of how things might be made better (which is much less common); and finally to link this positive motivation to seek enactment in various forms of action and organization (which is very unusual indeed).

So, some people (including those of the calibre of Owen Barfield) would attend Steiner's lectures, listen and think - and then give-up their jobs and re-locate to join-in the work of his 'movement'.

All this from the medium of 'the lecture'.

*

This is fascinating to me, because the lecture - or public speech - is an ancient form of communication (indeed - via the large amphitheater of Greek or Roman times - perhaps the very first mass medium) of very considerable, although currently underestimated, power. And a series of lectures by the same person has much greater possibilities yet.

Steiner is evidence of this - and of the capacity of lectures - which are merely an amplified form of person-to-person communication - to build an international movement and institutional organization even in the modern age of mass communications.

*

Another example was Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose fame and impact were rooted in his abilities and activities as a lecturer (not as a writer).

And I think the method and effect of Emerson can perhaps be glimpsed in the style of the recent Mormon Apostle, Neal A Maxwell:

http://www.jrganymede.com/2014/06/02/some-neal-a-maxwell-to-refresh-your-consecration/

*

My feeling is that mainstream modernity is hostile to 'the lecture' in its classic form - and is continually subverting it with the written word, with 'visual aids', with internet pre-summaries... with a multitude of encouragements NOT to pay attention here-and-now.

This is perhaps mostly because the real lecture cannot be 'managed' - and relies on a specific person at a specific place and time with a specific audience.

Yet (and this may be a clue about the hostility) it may be that lectures could be, already are, or will become the basis of the next major international movement against Leftist modernity and in favour of traditional and religious values - because lectures are a direct and person means of communication which does not depend upon the modern Mass Media and can, therefore, act outside-of and against the Mass Media.

**


Reference to my 2006 essay on lectures as a teaching medium:

http://www.hedweb.com/bgcharlton/ed-lect.html

I always wondered why Rudolf Steiner did not (so far as I know) try to become a Professor; since the scholar's life would probably have suited him a lot better than being the leader of first Theosophical then Anthroposophical Society groups - and lecturing (on every topic under the sun) to the general public.

But as I consider the matter, I do not think a German Professorship would have been a possibility for Steiner - although I suspect that, if he could have developed sufficient proficiency in the English language, he would have walked-into a Professorship in the Anglosphere.

The first difficulty was that Steiner's editorial work on Goethe's scientific writings was controversial, and criticised for being insufficiently scholarly (lacking the usual scholarly 'apparatus'). Another problem was that Steiner was awarded his PhD from Rostock, which (I gather) was among the couple of least prestigious ('lowest standard') universities in Germany.

Then he did not proceed to work on his higher/ post Doctoral 'Habilitation' thesis - which was necessary to teach in a German university as a Privatdozent (an unpaid position occupied while waiting/ hoping for a 'call' from the Ministry of Education to occupy a Chair). Steiner also lacked the  private income or family backing, as well as the network of upper class supporters, needed to take this long-slow-risky career path.

Steiner's PhD was published in 1892 (Truth and Knowledge) and his magnum opus, the work of his heart, Philosophy of Freedom in 1994 - but both failed to attract approval, or even interest.

On the other hand, Steiner's qualifications and publications were extremely good by the standards of UK and US universities, and in that sense he could surely have obtained an academic job there, or in many other places other than Germany (which was without question the premier university system in the world, at that time).

But I presume Steiner either could not or would not move from the Germanic nations - he was consequently unable to make a living, despite trying a few careers. When the chance for paid lecturing came along, he grabbed it and made a great success of it.

Nonetheless, intellectually and spiritually speaking, I would have to regard it as a mis-step when Steiner allied with the Theosophical Society, and began to generate spiritual science in accordance with Madam Blavatsky's channelled revelations... He made a further error in getting 'mixed up with politics' from 1918, with his 'Threefold Society' ideas...

I think it took Steiner until 1924, and after he became terminally ill, before he began to rework his ideas in some very interesting (incomplete, not followed-up) directions in the Autobiography and Anthroposophical Leading-Thoughts/ Anthroposophical Guidelines...

A subject to which I will return soon, I hope.

But I regard it as a matter for regret that Steiner was, in a sense, 'forced' to make-a-living by becoming a spiritual leader - it would have been better for him if he could have remained a Dichter und Denker (poet and thinker) - a scholar-intellectual.

*
It is hard to think of anything to match Dale Brunsvold's epic enterprise in reading-aloud and recording 24 books and 116 book-length lecture series of the works of Rudolf Steiner - and making them all available online and free of charge!

http://www.rudolfsteineraudio.com/

Brunsvold is gifted with one of the pleasantest, smoothest and most-soothing voices since Bob Ross; so it is very difficult not to enjoy listening to him! - but the particular value of these audio-presentations comes from the fact that Steiner is such a very difficult writer to read for oneself - hearing these works read aloud is the perfect solution.

*

But why should a Christian engage with Rudolf Steiner at all - you might ask? The positive reasons are:

1. Steiner was a Christian - that is, his life and ideas were focused on Christ - whom he came to know through an extremely powerful mystical encounter with the event of Golgotha.

2. Steiner was a genius - one of those vastly-learned, Germanic, encyclopaedic, endlessly-productive 19th century geniuses.

3. Steiner was a mystic - and of an unusual kind, whose experiences took place not in a trance  - as is usual - but in clear consciousness, full alertness.

4. Because of the above, he had many interesting and potentially useful insights.

5. The strong impression is that Steiner was a good and honest man - well-motivated.

*

Why not read Steiner? Because his work can be over-elaborated, pedantic, and hard to follow. And because he expresses so many bizarre ideas of so many types - and in such a detailed and inter-connected system - that it is hard to imagine that anybody has ever believed all of them, or even been able to remember a tenth of them. These ideas are - on the one hand - impossible to believe wholly and literally; and - on the other hand - difficult to interpret symbolically.

I don't have any answer to this! I think there is something unique and valuable (although not absolutely essential) to be gained from reading Steiner - but he is one of the most all-round-difficult of all writers that are worth reading.

One book that almost anybody would enjoy, is also just about the last thing Steiner wrote (from his death bed, unfinished) is the Autobiography. So maybe that would be the best way to start - for someone who primarily wishes to get to grips with Steiner as an unique example of a world-historic genius.


Further discussion:

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=steiner

Regular readers will know that I regard Rudolf Steiner as an indispensable genius for our time and task. And/but also that I have considerable reservations about a great deal of what he did and said; and even more about the Anthroposophical Society (the AS) that he founded, and which regards itself as the guardians of all-things-Steiner now and evermore (or, at least, for the foreseeable).

One of my big reservations about Steiner concerns the massive emphasis he placed upon the role of the Archangel Michael in our world - and in the life of all of us in The West.

It all begins with the name. For English speaking Anthroposophists, it is necessary to pronounce Michael as something like My-kie-ell - with three syllables. You must do this, and if you don't - well it is a kind of blasphemy (only worse).


Why?

Because on a visit to England; Steiner once, in a personal conversation (that was lovingly recorded, repeated, and taught from thenceforth) expressed an aesthetic dislike of the usual English pronunciation of this name - which he regarded as too brief, slovenly, disrespectful.

That's it!


Here we encapsulate the problem with the followers of Steiner, in a nutshell. A century-plus years ago, Steiner casually opined concerning the pronunciation of a word (not in his native language) - and because everything Steiner ever said about everything* was literally and eternally true and vital - the Anthroposophical Society immediately fell into line, and enforced this practice on all members.

This kind of literalistic, legalistic fundamentalism is normal and mandatory among the mass of Steiner's followers - with, perhaps, expectations tacitly made for the (many) instances in which Steiner said something not-politically-correct about race, nation, sex or socialism (instances of non-woke-ness are explained away, re-contextualised out-of-existence, ignored or just not-acted upon - and given the pervasive Leftism of the AS, this is tolerated without dissent). 

The pronunciation of Michael would not matter except that Steiner, in his later years, developed a version of Esoteric Christianity in which Michael takes an absolutely central and indispensable role. This centrality is based upon Steiner's assertion that Michael was personally promoted above the Archangel level in 1879 (following a war in Heaven) to take the lead in this current cultural phase; especially in opposition to the dominance of the Satanic demon Ahriman.


(Ahriman is - with some filtering - one of Steiner's great insights, and a tremendously valuable - I find it essential - concept for understanding our times. Here we see the characteristic Steiner at work - indispensable insights cheek-by-jowl with massed arbitrary assertions.) 


I have read/ listened-to some tens-of-thousands of words by Steiner on the subject of the role of Michael; and his supposed intermediary job as the 'countenance' of Christ; and how we in the West are supposed to organise our spiritual lives around him - but despite my best efforts, I find the whole Michael theme tedious, unnecessary and essentially incomprehensible.

We are all (here-and-now) supposed to be living a Michael-centred spiritual life; but I canot see why. Especially given (for example) that Jesus Christ is personally accessible to each and every one of us, everywhere and all of the time. It is rather like those extra layers of bureaucracy that managers are so keen to inflict upon the modern world.

In sum; the Michael theme in Steiner is itself an aspect of the dominance of Ahriman.


So; the subject of Michael is representative of much that I find un-acceptable and un-interesting about Steiner - and also fits my narrative that Steiner (overall) got worse throughout his adult life after his towering philosophical achievements over about a decade from the middle 1880s to middle 1890s.

There is a Great Deal of value in Steiner's later work - right up to his death, so we still need to read with care and attention; but as time goes by, the nuggets of gold become more and more swamped by the (irrelevant, tendentious and just-plain-wrong) dross.

So, the serious reader needs to mine and filter a great deal of crude ore when considering the later Steiner. This is the proper approach; rather than the Anthroposophical Society practice of regarding every grain of dross - every casual comment - from The Master as a precious and binding jewel of revelation.

*In his 300-plus books, and all his recorded chit-chat.

My interest in Rudolf Steiner is focused mainly on his early three philosophical works culminating in The Philosophy of Freedom (1894).

However, I believe that post 1900-ish Steiner became (I have to say) corrupted by his later situations - and that he reverted to extensive use of what he termed Atavistic Clairvoyance (or, what Owen Barfield termed Original Participation) - in other words the post-1900 Steiner increasingly employed mediumship, or what we now term channelling.

This is quite explicitly described in passages of his later works (although Steiner strenuously denied that it really was atavistic clairvoyance - nonetheless, he describes visualisation and hearing words; much like Jung's hallucinatory Active Imagination); it is described in eyewitness accounts of Steiner's behaviour (eyes closed, frequent trance-behaviours); and it accounts for the vast and indiscriminate productivity of his later years: a vast productivity of (let's be honest...) mostly-nonsense; albeit highly-systemised* nonsense.

(All this behaviour is in stark contrast to the purposive, alert, aware thinking so convincingly explained and advocated in Philosophy of Freedom.)

My position is therefore that Rudolf Steiner was a great man, a genius of historic stature, originator of among the most important and relevant truths vital for our situation - yet, taken in total, he was mostly wrong about most things.

And for all their good work - this wrongness has been accentuated by the Anthroposophical movement - who have in practice taught almost everything except his core and essential philosophical insight.

This failure of the Anthroposophy movement was indeed made almost inevitable by Steiner's own errors in trying to systemise spiritual development into a (wholly-conjectural, on his part) process of 'initiation' and formal cognitive exercises. He should instead have pointing at the goal (which he had already done, in Philosophy of Freedom) and recognised that each person must find their own path to reach that goal; by trial and error (and repentance); as Steiner himself had done. 

I believe we need (and I mean literally need) to take Steiner's insights from PofF and apply them in our lives and in our civilisation - and we should (pretty much, but not entirely) ignore the truly vast structure of Spiritual Science he generated after writing Philosophy of Freedom^.

...With the exception of recognising that Steiner became a Christian in 1898 - and we too must have a Christian framework for our spiritual work on transforming consciousness.

We know this by experience of the multitudes who have tried to be spiritual but not religious (often implicitly anti-Christian), and observing the feebleness of the results. Our proper lineage includes William Blake, ST Coleridge, Owen Barfield and William Arkle - all of whom were serious Christians - as well as mystics or esotericists. 


Notes:
   *Steiner was a genius of quite astonishing intelligence and knowledge - and he was culturally German - so had capacities for systemisation far beyond normal, perhaps unique in history. My understanding is that he took information derived partly from channelling, and substantially information from reading, and incrementally elaborated these into his massive ideological system by addition and interpolation.
    ^Although there are indeed many nuggets of insight scattered throughout the post-1900 work which I would not wish to be without - for instance I am amazed and fascinated by the prophecy in lecture The Work of the Angels in Man's Astral Body, of 1918. Half of the lecture is 'nonsense' (harsh, but I mean it is incorrect and inessential) - but the other half is the only absolutely compelling example of prophecy I have ever encountered. 

*
I have read a couple of books about Rudlof Steiner (1861-1925) the Austrian philosopher and founder of Anthroposophy, and made some effort to sample from some of his scores of books.

I have known of Steiner's for many years - indeed I once visited a friend whose parents ran a Steiner residential home for mentally disabled adults, and it seemed like an excellent institution. Most recently, I have engaged with Steiner's work a little more deeply due to reading Owen Barfield - CS Lewis's best friend, and an Inkling.

Anyway, I think I have now read enough to form some kind of evaluation of Steiner; enough to know that I don't really want to read much more - because I have not got much benefit from him.

*

In the first place, I am convinced Steiner was a real genius. The account of his life makes clear he was a man of really remarkable understanding and ability and creativity - and a gifted leader.

Furthermore, he had an extraordinary spiritual capacity - and an unusual one, in that his spiritual insights seem to have been more or less continuous, and happening in clear and alert consciousness, with full retention of his very logical and thorough analytic intellect.

*

I was surprised to find that Steiner was a Christian, or at least believed himself to be.

In his early forties he had a born-again, personal experience of the central importance of Christ's life and death to the history of everything and the future of man.

Aside from that minimal Christian core, much of the rest that he believed about Christ was... idiosyncractic; but I would say that he was a devout Christian of sorts, for the last main part of his life.

*

But the solid core of insightful Christian mysticism in Steiner, and his range of contributions to alternative medicine, education, horticulture and what-not - are diluted and swamped by all kinds of complicated and systematized details which he regarded as spiritually validated.

A vast quantity of sheerly arbitrary and silly stuff, on every topic under the sun and beyond it, makes-up the bulk of what Steiner wrote (and spoke in thousands of lectures) - mainly in the last 20-25 years of his life.

(I could not summarize this, and even to think about writing about it is embarrassing - if you don't already know, then look it up for yourselves.)

So what went wrong? How did a spiritual genius, and a Christian, come up with this stuff?

*

I think it was because Steiner devised a method.

Spiritual insight was natural to him, and needed no forcing; but Steiner wanted to be able to train everybody else in this method - so he seems to have taught and used a way of 'spiritually' generating answers to any question he wanted to know, or which anybody asked him, on any subject.

Steiner treated himself as if fundamental knowledge of reality was something 'on-tap'. He would merely need to enquire, and out-it-came like a ticker-tape: pedantic, literalistic, systematic, dogmatic stuff - fact upon fact upon fact - filling dozens and dozens of turgid books - take-it-or-leave it.

*

In the end, Steiner made it almost impossible to do anything but accept him as an infallible prophet, or reject him lock-stock-and-barrel.

I enjoyed both books about Steiner, and would recommend them - they were by Colin Wilson and Gary Lachman; but I did not enjoy it when I then turned to Rudolf Steiner himself, and read (or tried to read) the man himself.

My conclusion is that Wilson and Lachman have read Steiner, so I don't have-to.  

I am convinced that there are many genuine, inspired insights scattered through Steiner's work - and that he was basically a very good man; but frankly, sifting through the reams and reams of turgid nonsense is just not worth the effort.

*

I have read several biographies of Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) - including his partial Autobiography, which I would recommend (albeit it is not factually reliable, but more of an apologia working from the covert agenda of explaining 'why I was always right').

However, none of the biographies greatly impressed me so far except for volume two of Peter Selg's seven (!) volume study; which is that covering the years 1890-1900. 

This was the period after Steiner finished University and began seven years of editorial work on a collected edition of Goethe's scientific writings, in Weimar; then moved to become a journalist in Berlin.

This is also the period when Steiner wrote his PhD thesis (now published as Truth and Knowledge) and his major philosophical work The Philosophy of Freedom. 

It was also the period when he began his remarkable career as a lecturer, and (around 1898) became a Christian. This was a major and sudden change, since up to the early 1890s, Steiner was apparently anti-Christian (according to his writings), moving in radical anarchist circles; also deeply engaged with the work of Nietzsche (befriending for a while Nietzsche's sister, and meeting the mute and demented philosopher; and having published a book about him in 1895). 

I am currently reading the first volume of Selg's biography (1861-90) having read all but one of the later volumes). So far there is very little detail beyond what was reported by Steiner retrospectively and many years later. 

Indeed, his early years are extraordinarily poorly documented, for such a famous and influential man. It seems that none of his thousands of disciples made any serious attempt to collect information while he was alive or just after. Or perhaps enough effort has not yet been made?

But I am looking forward to the later years, from when Steiner studied at the Vienna Institute of Technology; where I anticipate more in the way of external corroboration from independent sources. 

In general, nobody has so far been much interested in Steiner except for his followers (Colin Wilson and Gary Lachman's overviews probably make the best starting point); and Anthroposophists seem incurious to seek beyond what Steiner himself said about himself. This is not difficult to understand, given the past and continuing attitude to Steiner within the Anthroposophical Society... 

In Steiner circles, he is not really seen as a Man - but as something more like an angel or deity whose entire vast work is necessarily necessary, coherent and of timeless relevance. It would be blasphemous for any normal person to select-from, critique, let alone criticize, such an individual. 

For example, Stanley Messenger was asked in the Q&A after a talk whether Steiner had ever made an error; and SM was unable or unwilling to mention even one instance - but instead said that Steiner may sometimes have been misunderstood. 

Even Owen Barfield - a major genius in his own right, as well as (probably) Steiner's greatest follower and developer - never (to my knowledge, in print) allowed himself to reject anything ever written by Steiner; the furthest OB would go was to state that he did not speak about that which he had not, yet, confirmed. 

So, I am not exaggerating. And this attitude serves to maintain the near-total neglect of Steiner, who was certainly a major genius and of vital relevance to these times; but who (to one outside the charmed circle) was a also flawed character, most of whose work outside of philosophy and the history of consciousness can and should be ignored or set-aside.  

Nonetheless, as a major genius with such vital things to say; I find myself driven to continue exploring Steiner's biography, through the available channels; and to draw my own conclusions. 

Thinkers I respect such as Owen Barfield and Jeremy Naydler have stated that Rudolf Steiner is essential to our time. But given the truly vast volume of his work, its range, as the problematic nature of his legacy this leaves open the question of just what it is about Steiner that is essential? (In contrast with what is of perhaps important but lesser status: as well as what may better be neglected or ignored.)

Steiner himself gave a clue in the importance he attached to his earliest books, especially those about Goethe's science, his doctoral thesis published as Truth and Knowledge and (in particular) The Philosophy of Freedom. In other words, these were works of a metaphysical nature rather than being concerned with Steiner's specific or detailed 'findings'.

Steiner's modern legacy, by contrast (as far as I can determine) is focused around these specific findings - for example in relation to education, medicine and agriculture. There is also a considerable and commendable publishing and dissemination activity with respect to the vast number of works and the scholarship of summarising, systematising and analysing these works. Beyond this, there is the activity of teaching and supervising a specific technique of meditation.

My feeling is that none of this captures the essence and none is 'essential'.

(In one paragraph) What seems to me essential is what Steiner called monism and modern people might call holism - in particular, the bringing of imagination into the realm of one, single mode of thinking that can be called true 'science'; so that the perceptual ('objective', external) world of the natural sciences is united (again) with the conceptual ('subjective', inner) world of imagination; and this in a way that both heals our personal alienation and also creates a realm of public and shared discourse - a realm which is variously referred to by Steiner as Spiritual or Occult or Esoteric Science. 

This making of a science of the imagination, and the possibility that each of us participate in it; requires, first, a proper understanding of the nature of science. This comes from the Goethe books - but has, I think, been lost underneath a focus on the Steiner-described and recommended technique of meditation as if this was the science.

As I argue in my book Not Even Trying

http://corruption-of-science.blogspot.co.uk

real science cannot be defined by technique but only by aim and ideals - science is, descriptively, nothing more specific than a truthful sustained examination of some rather specific class of phenomena, done in such a way that it is a social activity - which entails group production of some kind of public, communicable, evaluable content.

Thus, spiritual science cannot be captured by any particular technique of meditation, but only by the aim of some (perhaps small) group of investigators studying the imagination (presumably mostly by introspection, but in principle by any helpful method); honestly and in a sustained manner, and inter-communicating and critically evaluating their findings.

If this description of Steiner's essence is correct, then we can see that his essence is a mid-level activity, as appropriate to any science - it is not an ultimate activity like a religion.

This is confirmed by Steiner's biography - he was himself a Christian (albeit of a very unusual type) but did not require of his followers that they be Christian. But, and this is important, Steiner's philosophy presupposes religion of a certain type - it only makes sense within the metaphysical context of a religion that enables his work to have meaning.

Steiner's work does not make sense in a secular, atheistic context - with the nihilistic metaphysics that entails - because in such a context it is no more than a large number of bare assertions.

In sum, a true follower of Steiner must be religious (within a restricted range of deistic religions) - if he is not to be engaged in a self-refuting and ultimately incoherent activity; but he need not necessarily be Christian as Steiner himself was.

What makes Steiner essential (or, at least, nearly so) is that he uniquely offers the possibility of a Science (which modern Man seems to require) of the Imagination (which Modern Man to desperately lacks); and as an active, fundamentally-engaged participant (not merely as a passive observer, consumer or obedient follower).

In this sense, therefore, the essence of Steiner is as necessary for modern Christians and other religious people as it is for the secular majority.

One of Rudolf Steiner's deepest prophetic hints was from a series of lectures in late 1917 which were collected and published in 2004 under the title Secret Brotherhoods and the Mystery of the Human Double. 

(All the lectures are also available free on the Rudolf Steiner Archive as GA 178, although these translations are less comprehensible than the 2004 collection.) 

I have been re-reading these remarkable works - as always sifting and reinterpreting Steiner's valid 'raw insights' from the (wrong) metaphysical schema and his frequent errors of overelaboration. 

Steiner's prediction was that through the twentieth century and into the next, the demonic powers, assisted by their human servants (i.e. the 'secret brotherhoods' of the book title - nowadays broadly corresponding to the highest human levels of component institutions of the global totalitarian System) would have the primary strategy of convincing the masses that this is a wholly material world. 

This is the ideology we may call leftism; but which is in essence identical with philosophical materialism/ positivism/ reductionism/ scientism. 

Indeed, so successful has this strategy been, and so dominant and habitual its world-view, that we do not have a generally-accepted name for it! Why name what (nearly-) everybody believes?

The reason behind this materialism project is demonic, in the sense that it is the most effective way of achieving mass damnation. 

In the past, it was necessary to induce Men to reject Christ and choose Hell in an explicit kind of way; but with global materialism Christ, God, creation, and the whole spiritual world are simply regarded as not-real, nonsense; a childish and foolish delusion.

The question of Jesus Christ has not been refuted by materialism, it has instead been rendered incomprehensible, meaningless, absurd! Which is far more effective.  

But the plan of materialism needed to account for Man's perennial seeking for 'spiritual' meaning; for something beyond the mundane - and Steiner perceived that therefore there would need to be ways of rendering and reducing 'the spiritual' to the material. 

So that people who regarded themselves as spiritual would actually conceptualize 'spiritual' in a materialist way - without realizing the fact!

And this is precisely what has happened with the New Age tendency in spirituality; which itself evolved and expanded from roots in 'Eastern' or 'Perennialist' Beat Generation in the 1950s, then 1960s Hippy spiritualties.  

What happens in such 'spiritualities' is that the spiritual is very rapidly 'operationalized' as something material. 

Most obviously there tends to be a focus on this world rather than life beyond death; thi world is seen as the most urgent, the most important, the most real - eventually the only really-real. Therefore, the New Age assimilated to mainstream Leftist political ideologies and projects...

Perhaps the commonest example is when spirituality or consciousness is interpreted as an abstraction therefore not as personal - and using terms from physics; as when New Agers talk - and think! - about spirit in terms of energy, light, vibrations and frequencies. 

Another spiritual reduction is when there is a focus upon Healing - and the bulk of New Age spirituality gravitates towards some model of Healing or Therapy - which is both this-worldly, and rooted in feelings, which are substantially material phenomena since they depend on the body and brain, and can be (to some extent) manipulated and controlled.

Thus we arrive at the typical New Age spirituality - rooted in this world, and in feelings; and spiritual practices (such as meditation) become a type of psychotherapy.  

Ironically, Anthroposophy has itself taken exactly this path into materialism; and (in its institutional manifestations) has consequently become assimilated into mainstream materialistic leftism. This tendency towards abstraction (including physics metaphors) is seem in Steiner's metaphysics, and his explanation of the nature of Christ. 

And the energies of 'Steinerism' became focused on the institution (Anthroposophical Society) rather the individuals; and on the 'applied' materialistic and this-worldly aspects in medicine, education, agriculture etc. 

Furthermore (and Steiner himself had encouraged this) the legacy of Steiner became materialistic - with 'expertise' being understood in terms of comprehensive and accurate scholarship of 'what Steiner said' on this, that and the other - regarded as de facto infallible. 

Therefore, Steiner's greatest 'disciples' - who are all more or less 'heretical' in terms of the materialist orthodox interpretations rooted in 'what Steiner said' - have been largely ignored, rejected or unnoticed - for example Valentine Tomberg (expelled), Owen Barfield (marginalized), or Joseph Beuys (unnoticed). 

Looking back over the past century we can easily see that Steiner was profoundly correct about the way in which materialism has triumphed - explicitly in the realm of public discourse; and implicitly in a great deal of the 'spirituality' of today; which is characterized by abstraction, usage of 'scientistic' vocabulary and concepts, and a focus on 'therapy and 'making this world a better place'.  

What is needed is almost the opposite - and Steiner also said this in these lectures; which is to regard the universe as a creation populated with personal Beings - not abstractions; and therefore true spirituality as consisting in a personal relationship with the many spiritual-Beings - such as God, Jesus Christ, angels, the 'so-called dead', and indeed aspects of other Mortal Men.  

And, on the other side - the side of evil; the capacity to recognize that evil is also personal not abstract; therefore purposive, not accidental. 

From this comes our only genuine defense against the dark arts of evil which is recognition, understanding, and rejection - rejection by means of affiliation with God, which (as of 2022) must come through commitment to following Jesus Christ.  

Note: the term 'defense against the dark arts' is a reference to the Harry Potter series of novels; which I am currently re-reading with pleasure and profit. 

The late Christopher Bamford was the editor-in-chief of Rudolf Steiner Books; and provided many excellent introductions to variously-themed collections of Steiner's lectures. 

Here Banford was interviewed for a documentary about Steiner; and from about 6-28 minutes, he provides a really excellent insight into what is best, deepest and most important about the work of Rudolf Steiner. It is a distillation of many years of reading, thinking and editorial work. 

For anyone with even the slightest interest in Steiner this deserves careful and focused listening. 

TW - Although Bamford was born in Wales, and lived his adult life in the USA, the trace of accent is Hungarian, deriving from childhood and youth.  

In case the video goes down, I will provide my own paraphrased summary of what Bamford says, derived from notes I took while watching. 

Where I amplify upon Bamford, I will put my own notions into [squared brackets]. 

***

The essence of Steiner's message is that we are already, here and now, living in a spiritual world. This is true despite our habits of reductionist-positivistic thinking - which actually materializes the world; nonetheless we live in a spiritual world: here and now. 

Everything is consciousness. 

...And all consciousness is of a Being which is conscious. 

We inhabit a world of Beings in relationships. 

So, reality consists of relationships in consciousness. 

These relationships continue after that transformation which is death - indeed our relationships with the so-called-dead are highly significant. 

The so-called-dead are not just active on this life on earth, that is their major focus and interest; they desire (sometimes need) to be involved in our lives. 

This reality was reflected in religions where ancestors were with the living, and participating in everyday life. 

After 'death' we will be with those we had relationships with during this life. And in this life we should continue to stay connected with those we love who have 'died'. 

Such two-way relationships continually strive to operate via the spiritual (not material) world; [which is why it is vital to acknowledge that this is primarily a spiritual world].  

Steiner's teaching is about The Earth - which is the centre of concern for the universe. This concern includes the Earth, and Men, through the long history of its developmental-evolution. 

The purpose of the Earth and Men - what this world is essentially for - is the creation of relationships. And this is vital because only on Earth and among Men can Beings learn to love. 

Steiner's most fundamental teaching is that the most important thing in reality is the cultivation of Love; and the development of consciousness of Love.

Therefore, consciousness [i.e. personal awareness, by a Being, of that which is] has a positive transformative capability.

Also both love and freedom are needed and inseparable - you cannot have one without the other. 

[Steiner's concept of freedom is related to the development of consciousness; we become free by first becoming conscious and then by choosing; and this applies to love.] 

The most important activity of the universe takes place on earth, and the rest of reality participates in the development of Love between beings on Earth. 

[This is creation. Our life on Earth is spiritual; this spiritual life is about love; and this love is creation. Creation is made-of love; and the aim of evolution is to develop this love and consciousness of love.]

Earth is the centre of reality. And Love is what makes creation possible - what makes creation happen.  

The gods [i.e. divine Beings, and God the primary creator] are focused on the Earth. Humanity is therefore "the religion of the gods". 

The incarnation of Jesus Christ turned the universe inside-out. God was beyond and 'there', but God is now right here. 

Jesus's instruction to love one another meant that Men could become his friends. Indeed, we must love among our 'brothers and sisters' or else we cannot love God. 

[Love among Men is not sufficient, but it is essential. The first commandment to love God, and the second commandment to love fellow Men are no longer, since Christ, possible to separate. Both are necessary for each other.]

Steiner realized the centrality of Christ by a personal and initiatory experience of consciousness; which reality became a central and guiding light of his whole life and teaching.  

Christianity began as a religion but became more than a religion. The reality of Christ is now global, and in all Men and all religions, everywhere.   

I have been exploring Rudolf Steiner over the past seven or so years - the amounts to a really large project of reading or listening-to scores of his works; tackling books and essays about his ideas; several biographies and memoirs... and reading online sources and watching videos of all kinds of people talking about Anthroposophy.

I did this initially because of Owen Barfield, who regarded Steiner as a thinker of world historical importance and who was an Anthroposophist from his middle twenties - one of the first in Britain. And then because I agreed with Barfield's estimate - but in an extremely qualified fashion.

I am gradually forming some kind of overview of the problem with Steiner; how it is that he can be so important - a major genius; and at the same time mostly, nearly always, productive of utter nonsense. How he can be so important, yet his legacy is mostly a series of essentially (i.e. in their essence) bogus initiatives in education, farming, politics, and medicine.

His writings on medicine, for example, are so terribly bad that I would not know where to begin in criticising them - they are wrong at almost every level - in their basic approach, their detail, the kind of mind set they encourage... they have nothing to do with medicine as I understand it.


But really this is nothing unusual for geniuses. When it comes to most geniuses, we are quite happy to take what we value and leave the rest behind. We value Isaac Newton for his mathematics and physics, and leave aside his theology and alchemy... and we do not find it hard to acknowledge that Newton was perhaps the greatest scientist ever and also a horrible man.

The deep problem with Steiner is that he insists over and again and with all the force he can muster - that his work is a wholly consistent and coherent whole which should be taken in toto. The Anthroposophical Society (in practice) regards Steiner in exactly this way - he is wholly well-motivated, wholly good, always right.

They really do regard Steiner as being as infallible as any human ever has been - and that is the way that his ourvre has been preserved and is presented to the world. It began during Steiner's life; and it has continued ever since. Any acknowledged faults are so minor and quibbling as merely to stress his overall and essential infallibility (rather like when job applicants admit to such 'faults' as perfectionism and working too hard).


But Steiner had flaws, including serious ones; and probably the worst was his defensive refusal ever to admit that he had changed his mind, said anything wrong or made a mistake. He was what Colin Wilson termed a Right Man - whose self-esteem depends on a brittle self-image that - ultimately, at root - he is always right, all the time, about everything.

If ever a Right Man is confronted with contradiction or incoherence - then he will explain (perhaps patiently, perhaps angrily) at endless length how this is not really contradiction or incoherence - at a deeper or higher level, everything fits together perfectly; and anyone who says otherwise is malign, foolish or incompetent.

The type is surely familiar to most people.


The problem for Steiner's self-image is that - at least at the level of obvious common sense; he changed a great deal, many times, throughout his life. And, being the massively productive genius that he was, the amount of information and assertion he generated was phenomenal - yet somehow all his life, and all his enormous body of work - had to be made into a unity, bound-together in a fully harmonious system...

This led Steiner into all kinds of tortuous assertion, selection, special pleading - and what would certainly be called dishonesty if it wasn't that he seemed to have been able to persuade himself; so I suppose it is a species of delusion.

In the last year of his life, Steiner wrote an autobiography The Story of My Life (published 1928) covering the first 2/3 of his life. It is very interesting, at times profound - I would recommend it. If you don't fancy reading; it is available free of charge and beautifully read by Dale Brunsvold in an audiobook format.

But it is a fiction of Steiner's life, not history. It isn't just that Steiner focuses (quite rightly) on spiritual aspects as contrasted with material one; it is that the picture painted is untrue: it is an old man looking back and making a unity of what was diverse, making coherent what was a sequence of U-turns and reversals. It is projecting the elderly Steiner back onto his childhood, youth and young adulthood.


The autobiography asserts that Steiner was secretly (on the inside) always exactly what he ended being - a magically insightful and charismatic figure of hypnotic presence; the dominant, confident leader of an international movement and but that this was necessarily hidden for various reasons, or people had misunderstood, or enemies had misrepresented, or whatever.

To the eye of common sense; Steiner was a very insecure young man, often lonely, dependent on being looked-after by others (including his first wife - that seems to have been almost the entirety of the relationship); apparently lacking direction and being rather passively led by offers and opportunities from others, rather than by any life strategy.  

Steiner was always extremely intelligent; but his personality underwent not one but many extreme transformations. The younger Steiner showed no signs of spirituality or clairvoyance; and was variously, explicitly, obviously at different times a Roman Catholic, Kantian, atheist, political radical, materialist, nihilist, Nietzchian, anti-Christian and much more.

Somehow this is all brought into a apparent coherence by a brilliant act of synthesis that has convinced Anthroposophists ever since. But the real story is much more interesting and remarkable. It is a story of one of the most extreme personal transformations in history; such that one can hardly recognise the older and younger Steiner as being the same person.


This is important to recognise because Steiner did himself a terrible disservice by his insistence on consistency, coherence, and system; he made it almost impossible for anyone but a disciple prepared to swallow everything uncritically to take him seriously.

By insisting on taking him in an all or nothing fashion, Steiner created a small minority of cult-followers who are intellectually servile and worshipping; and a barrier against the vast majority of people who are interested and impressed only by a small proportion of his output.

The best thing that could happen to Steiner would be if he came to be treated as just an ordinary genius.

I need to keep explaining the importance of Rudolf Steiner, and why it is that - for example - so many of my recent posts have been about or inspired-by him... Despite that almost-all of his advocates and followers, and the Anthroposophical Society itself, are anti-Christian, Satan-allied Leftists (whatever and despite their self-identification). And despite that most of what Steiner wrote and spoke is just plain wrong. 

In the first place 'almost-all' Steiner's advocates misses-out that among the small handful of The Most valuable, insightful and important Good Guys at work today; there are several Steiner followers such as Terry Boardman, Jeremy Naydler, Amo Boden; and the editors of New View and The Present Age. 

These are among the extremely few people and venues currently worth reading; where, for instance, you can see a solid understanding of the world historical events of 2020, and what led-up-to them. Or of the long-term purpose and effects of the sexual revolution; the computer/ internet revolution - the 5G mania; or the strategy behind the climate change agenda.  

But the core of what Steiner supplies the discerning reader - above all other authors and sources - is his insistence that the core task of Men in this time and in The West - is a new-restoration of the spiritual to our thinking. 

 

A 'new-restoration' (both restored and new) because what's required is something on the one hand unprecedented in world history; and also a restoration - because it represents (in several respects) a return to the basic, original, primal way of knowing. 

As a brief summary, Steiner advocates (in vital respects) a return to the 'animistic' world-view; that saw the universe as alive; composed of multiple Beings - each with life, purposes, and a distinct nature that develops through time. But this primal animism was unconscious, unchosen, passive. Men were simply immersed-in this spiritual reality, and (pretty much) passively and instinctively responded-to it. They were swept-along by the thoughts of spiritual Beings - to the point that Men's thinking was itself the thinking of spiritual beings. 

When Men (in Ancient Greek times) first began to become aware of this situation; it was captured by the idea of 'inspiration', in its original sense; that we 'breathe-in' the spirits of Heavenly beings, which are all around us, as-it-were in the wind. But there was almost no freedom, and life was passive, responsive.

Steiner's idea is that mainstream Modern Man incrementally has become detached from this primal situation. Man can now originate his own thinking and is free to choose; but until now has rejected the reality of the spiritual. He has becomes an isolated and alienated consciousness, and feels his own thoughts to be sealed inside his mind (=brain) and thereby disconnected from external reality. For Modern Man; 'subjective' means private, and unreal. 

 

Steiner advocates that Modern Man needs to move to an unprecedented primacy of intuition; where intuition means a creative, generative thinking; that originates from our real, true and divine self. A 'heart thinking' that takes primacy over both primitive unconscious instinct and current conscious materialism.

By 1917; Steiner saw very clearly that Modern Man - trapped in his own consciousness and rejecting of the spirit - would inevitably and inexorably degenerate. That the paradoxes of materialism would tend to destroy everything of positive value. That, for example, pervasive materialism would destroy even that autonomy and agency of human thinking which generated materialism in the first place! That a consciousness disconnected from the spiritual, would end by denying consciousness itself!

Steinr saw (among other things) how the consequences would include the (now mainstream and mandatory) value-inversions of the sexual revolution; and he saw that this corruption would be 'validated' and supported by an increasingly corrupted materialist 'science'. He also foresaw a 'healthism' that destroys actual health and causes death; along with destroying basic human needs and freedom. And he described a society in which technology became organised towards totality of mind-control by an integration of the electronic-technological with the demonic. 

 

In sum, Steiner expicitly foresaw the essential features of 2020 if we did not restore the spiritual to thinking, to life-in-general. And he further described what we need to do, what we should aim-at; which is - as individuals - developing (in our-selves) a qualitatively-different and spiritual way of thinking, living, and being in our own lives.

Now, much of the detail Steiner described about what exactly we should do - such as his prescribed mental exercises designed to train concentration, visualisation, imagination; and a large role for 'initiated Masters', and a major role for the Anthroposophical Society itself - almost all of this I regard as mistaken - or even counter-productive. 

But in terms of what we most need to accomplish (aside from the suggested methods of doing it); Steiner was solid, vital and unsurpassed. 

 

I completely agree with Steiner's core teaching, which is that our primary urgent task - here and now in 2020 - is to choose consciously to live by-and-from the spiritual (including to discover what that means for us, as individuals). 

This should be what we think about when we awaken each morning, and when we look back on our day each evening, and as we settle to sleep at night. 

This should be a focus of our meditations and prayers. 

Nothing is more important than this: here, now; for you - and for me. 

Note: The Spiritual must be Christian - that comes first; but Christianity without a newly-developed return to spiritual-based-thinking/living is Not going to be sufficient. Indeed, it is not even a working possibility; as can be seen by taking a clear look at what has happened to the mainstream - including traditional - Christian churches this year of 2020. Christian Churches are in essence Gone, Finished, Closed - have ceased operations. 100 years after Steiner, and of refusing to follow Steiner's advice; Christians Now have 'Hobson's Choice' - i.e. no choice at all. Either they follow Steiner's direction of developing personal spirituality, or else they they will de facto cease to be Christian (unless that has, indeed, already happened). In this necessary transition; the West might have followed a gentle path of gradualism - but did not. Having rejected multiple opportunities over the past generations; Christians now have a sudden, massive spiritual shock, applied by external events; and the prospect of being compelled to choose-between either an almost instantaneous, and 'mind-blowing', transformation - or else passively going over to the-other-side (which the majority have already done).