by Colin Wilson
So Goethe's instinct was correct; the eye does invent colour. But Newton was also correct: white light does consist of the seven colours of the rainbow.
Steiner could edit Goethe's scientific works with a perfectly clear conscience because he felt that Goethe's attitude to reality was fundamentally correct. He instinctively rejected the view that the ‘truth’ behind nature is a world of sound waves and light waves and heat waves: ‘It drove all spirit from the external world.’ Neither could he accept the view of pessimists like Maria delle Grazie and Eduard von Hartmann that the meanings we see around us are merely reflections of our emotions and desires. For Steiner, it was an urgent necessity of life to find intellectual grounds for believing that the world of meaning is a spiritual reality. Goethe provided him with precisely what he was looking for. This is why Goethe became, now and henceforward, the centre of Steiner's intellectual life. He was the one undoubtedly great man of the nineteenth century who was totally untainted by materialism or pessimism. In his introductory essays to Goethe's scientific writings (later collected as Goethe the Scientist) Steiner hurled himself with enthusiasm into his task of rehabilitating Goethe's vision of nature. And when he had completed the editorial work, he went on to write his first book, Theory and Knowledge in the Light of Goethe's Weltanschauung, published in 1886.
Later in life, Steiner was asked by a disciple why he had kept silent about ‘occult matters’ until he was forty. Steiner's reply was that he had to make a position for himself in the world first, and to acquire the necessary courage. But the impression made upon the reader of these early writings is that occult matters were still far from his mind; he hoped to overturn nineteenth-century materialism and pessimism with purely intellectual tools. They give the impression that Steiner regarded himself basically as a philosopher, like von Hartmann, and that he hoped to create a kind of optimistic metaphysics. This surely explains his obsessive interest in philosophy during this period of his life, and why he read Fichte and Hartmann—and later Nietzsche—with such passionate interest. It is the view of most of Steiner's followers that he was busy laying the foundations of ‘spiritual science’ from the time he came to Vienna in 1879, and that he devoted himself to philosophy during his earlier period to lay the foundation for his later teachings. It can only be said that the writings themselves provide no support for this view. They suggest that Steiner saw himself simply as a philosopher whose basic task was to make materialism untenable. In these early years, he seems to have hoped that the solution lay in the immense prestige attached to Goethe's name. Later, he came to realize that even Goethe's fame as Germany's greatest writer lent no authority to his views on science; the scientists could simply declare that Goethe was no scientist. When Steiner finally reached this conclusion, he realized that his approach needed rethinking. But in 1886, that time still lay far ahead.
By the mid-1880s, Steiner's enthusiasm for Goethe had given him the ‘start in life’ he so badly needed; in Austria and Germany, a man who has edited Goethe has established his intellectual credentials, and can never thereafter be dismissed as a nonentity. He was slowly becoming something of a personality in Vienna. He published a few newspaper articles, including the one on Maria delle Grazie which led to their friendship. Physically speaking, Steiner was unimpressive: a small, thin man with untidy long hair and metal-rimmed spectacles; a friend described him as looking like an undernourished seminarian. Socially speaking, he was comically inept and liable to faux pas; one upper-class acquaintance mentioned that he used the intimate du where it was inappropriate, and that he ‘didn't know a thing’. In the ‘Megalomania Café’ he had long arguments with a young writer named Hermann Bahr, who claimed to be the founder of a new literary group called ‘young Vienna’, and who represented in Vienna the symbolist and ‘decadent’ ideas that Oscar Wilde represented in London or Stéphane Mallarmé in Paris. Steiner's instinct was all against them; but, as yet, he was unable to defend his position intellectually.
His circle of friends continued to widen. He became a regular visitor at the house of a pastor, Alfred Formey, where literary and musical celebrities gathered. There he met the widow of the dramatist Hebbel, who gave recitations (presumably from her husband's works), and an actress named Ilma Wilborn, who was soon inviting Steiner to her own ‘At Homes’—rather livelier than those of Pastor Formey. Like Goethe, Steiner was deeply interested in the theatre as a medium for presenting ideas—an interest that later came to fruition in his four mystery dramas.
Steiner's circle widened further when, in January 1888, he became the editor of a newspaper, the German Weekly Review; it appeared simultaneously in Vienna and Berlin, and had a strongly political flavour. Steiner felt obliged to write and think about politics, although the subject did not come naturally to him. ‘I wished to introduce something containing an impulse towards the great spiritual goals of mankind.’ Nowadays, an editor who tried to talk about ‘great spiritual goals’ in a political newspaper would find himself out of a job; but in nineteenth-century Vienna, an idealistic tone was perfectly acceptable. Steiner nevertheless found journalism hard going, and was not sorry when, after six months, the owner of the newspaper quarrelled with its founder, and he lost the job.
His work as a newspaper editor led to an acquaintance with the socialist leader Victor Adler, and many other active socialists. In his usual omnivorous way, he began to study the writings of Marx and Engels. Predictably, he found their materialism distasteful:
It was impossible for me to find any inner relation to all this. Personally it was painful for me to hear it said that in human history it is the material-economic forces that carry forward man's evolution, while the spiritual is merely an ideal superstructure to this ‘truly real’ foundation. I knew that the spirit is a reality. To me, what the theorizing socialists maintained meant closing one's eyes to the real facts.
But even at this stage, at the age of twenty-seven, Steiner had still not formulated his ideas clearly enough to be able to express precisely why he rejected dialectical materialism. In spite of his intellectual brilliance, he was still an awkward, earnest young man who could not formulate his deepest convictions in words. Steiner was a slow developer; what he needed was some sheltered environment in which he could develop at his own pace.
In the following year, 1889, he was offered what he needed. On Schröer's recommendation, he was asked to present himself at the Goethe-Schiller Archive at Weimar, to be considered for the task of editing Goethe's scientific manuscripts for the Archive's complete edition. Steiner had little difficulty in convincing the director, Bernard Suphan, that he was the right man for the job. It was arranged that he should start in a year's time.
On the same trip he visited Martin Luther's room in the Wartburg, as well as spending time in Berlin and Munich. There can be no doubt that this first journey into the greater world was of immense importance for Steiner. His natural capacity for floating off into mental worlds meant that every historical site and art gallery was a vital imaginative experience. Most of us find historical sites a fairly superficial experience; the guide assures us that such and such an event took place there, and we take his word for it; but we are more aware of the other tourists and the souvenir shops and the ice cream vans. All his life, Steiner had the ability to enter into the spirit of a place, to conjure up the scenes that had taken place in the past. So in front of Goethe's statue in Weimar he felt that a ‘life-giving air was being wafted over everything’, while his visit to the Wartburg impressed him so much that he felt it was one of the most memorable days of his life. In these surroundings, Steiner could sense the birth of a spiritual revolution; it is inconceivable that he failed to reflect upon his own role as the spiritual successor of Luther and Goethe.
He went to Berlin specially to meet Eduard von Hartmann—further evidence of his obsession with the ideas of the great ‘philosopher of the unconscious’. The meeting was a disappointment. Hartmann was an impressive, bearded man, who, because of a knee ailment, spe
nt most of his life sitting on a couch with his legs outstretched; but he talked with zest and confidence. Clearly, he regarded Steiner merely as a young admirer. ‘He did not really inwardly listen to what I said.’ And Steiner, for his part, seems to have over-reacted. He took exception to Hartmann's idealist view that all we can know of reality comes from the mental pictures it makes on our senses. Steiner replied that he felt we ought to ask whether our mental pictures are unreal, only to be told that the very term ‘mental pictures’ proves it. ‘I felt inwardly chilled. “Word definition” as a serious point of departure for a view of life!’ This is hardly fair; Hartmann's comment was perfectly reasonable. Steiner's account of the interview suggests that there was no genuine exchange of ideas because he had not yet learned how to formulate his own basic intuitions.
Back in Munich for the winter, Steiner became increasingly interested in a phenomenon that had become the latest intellectual fashion: Theosophy, the system of ‘esoteric wisdom’ propagated by Madame Blavatsky and her followers. The Theosophical Society had been founded in New York in 1875; ten years later, following an investigation by the Society for Psychical Research, Madame Blavatsky was denounced as a fraud. But her followers remained convinced that she had been ‘framed’ by her enemies. And in Vienna, the chief of her followers was a wealthy dilletante named Friedrich Eckstein, who had met Madame Blavatsky in London in 1884, the year before the denunciation. He had returned to Vienna with the newly published Esoteric Buddhism by A. P. Sinnett, the book that was to convert the Irish poet W. B. Yeats to Theosophy. Steiner almost certainly met Eckstein, who was his own age, in the ‘Megalomania Café’ in 1888. This was the year that Eckstein and his fellow Theosophists took a castle, the Schloss Bellevue, for their summer colony, filling it with all kinds of aesthetes, spiritual aspirants, and students of ritual magic. In this circle it was more or less de rigeur to be a Wagnerian, and in this respect Steiner qualified; he was always a lover of music. But Steiner was not equally impressed by Esoteric Buddhism; he read it in its German translation and professed to find it repellent.
Chief among the Vienna Theosophists were the feminist Marie Lang and her husband Dr Edmund Lang. That winter of 1889, Steiner began to visit their home, and learned more of the doctrines of Theosophy. There was a great deal in it that appealed to him: for example, its belief that the human soul evolves through many incarnations, and that ‘salvation’ is actually a process of self-realization. Sinnett declares that Theosophy sees no need to keep science and religion in separate compartments; physics and spirituality are not only reconcilable, but interdependent; this was Steiner's own profound conviction. Theosophy teaches that the spirit evolves through a chain of worlds or planets—again a doctrine to be found in Steiner's later work. Steiner's account of the after-death process, with the soul's progress through ‘Kamaloca’ (or purgatory), is again very close to that to be found in Esoteric Buddhism. And Steiner, like the Theosophists, accepted the doctrine of reincarnation; he explains in the Autobiography that it became increasingly obvious to him as he talked to various people and sensed intuitively that some of their qualities could not be explained either in terms of heredity or experience since birth. (For example, he felt that there were qualities in the poet Ferther von Steinwand that could only have developed at a remote epoch when Greek paganism coexisted with Christianity.)
All this explains why Steiner later became so deeply involved with the Theosophical Society. What is far more difficult to determine is how far his own ideas were derived from Theosophy, and how far he developed them for himself. He says of Esoteric Buddhism: ‘I was glad that I had not read it until after I had attained spiritual perceptions of my own.’ Inevitably, Steiner's hostile critics regard such statements as attempts to hide the extent to which his own ideas are derived from Madame Blavatsky and Sinnett. And it is certainly difficult to point to concrete evidence that proves the contrary. Steiner's anti-materialism first found expression through his admiration of Goethe. But it also seems clear that Theosophy exerted a far greater influence than he was willing to admit.
It is necessary to make an imaginative effort to understand why Theosophy exercised such a wide appeal. A century after the death of Madame Blavatsky, it seems to be generally agreed that she was a mixture of charlatan and literary genius, and that works like Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine are Christmas puddings into which she tossed every possible ingredient from Buddhism to the Atlantis myths. But in the late nineteenth century, there was a deep and powerful craving for some great religious revival. There was a general feeling that materialism and agnosticism had gone too far, and that it was time for a backswing of the pendulum. Old-fashioned Victorian Christianity was not likely to take on a new lease of life; but the natural religious impulses of man were bound to rise up in some new form, and bring mankind back to a perception of spiritual realities. Once again, religion would triumph over materialism, just as Christianity had triumphed over the paganism of the Romans. There was an intense feeling of expectancy—not so much of some new messiah as of some new messianic doctrine. This explains what we shall otherwise find very difficult to understand: why Steiner's doctrines later spread with such speed across Europe. But before Steiner came along, the major candidate in the ‘new religion’ stakes was Theosophy. Madame Blavatsky's Isis Unveiled was too long and complex to exercise any wide influence. But Sinnett's Esoteric Buddhism, with its claims about hidden wisdom derived from Mahatmas in Tibet, was a literary sensation; it went through edition after edition. In 1885, the world had not grown cynical, as it was to do a century later. Yeats read the book, handed it to his friend Charles Johnston, and Johnston was so excited that he rushed off to London immediately to get permission to set up a Dublin branch of the Theosophical Society. In Vienna, Eckstein was the bearer of the torch. It is important to note that men like Sinnett, Johnston, and Eckstein were not dubious cranks; they were regarded as respectable members of society with sound intellectual credit. If they could accept hidden masters in Tibet, so could thousands of other respectable middle-class people.
Now Steiner was, beyond all doubt, a man who possessed his own spiritual vision; in that basic sense, he was indebted to nobody. From the beginning, he experienced a powerful sense of ‘the unseen world’. But he was also a natural ‘intellectual’, a lover of philosophy and science and mathematics. A young man with strong intuitions that run counter to the prevailing temper of his age, looks around for allies, for men he can set up as models. Steiner's natural allies should have been the great mystics of the past, men like Eckhart, Boehme, Swedenborg. But he had no patience with mystics because they were not scientific enough; they insisted that their visions were ‘ineffable’. By the time he had reached his mid-twenties, Steiner had found only one ‘ally’—Goethe.
So the advent of Theosophy was bound to make him thoughtful. It was carrying the doctrines of spiritual evolution to a far wider audience than Steiner could ever reach with his books on Goethe. Eckstein records that Steiner asked him to explain the doctrines of Theosophy in 1888. We know that Steiner eagerly read Esoteric Buddhism soon after this; he apparently found its doctrine of ‘secret masters’ a little too ‘materialistic’. But in the following year, he became a regular visitor at the home of Marie Lang, and decided that ‘within herself she had a store of mystical knowledge which life's hard trials had caused to become conscious in a spontaneous way.’ So although Steiner continued to have reservations about Theosophy, particularly in the form in which it was presented by a rather dishonest ‘occultist’ named Franz Hartmann, he was persuaded by Marie Lang that it deserved taking seriously.
All this made Steiner decide that it was time he tried to set out his own ‘philosophy of spiritual activity’. He discussed it with a new friend, the feminist writer Rosa Mayreder (who is remembered nowadays mainly as the librettist of Hugo Wolf's opera Der Corregidor). From what Steiner says about her in the Autobiography, it seems clear that there was no real intellectual sympathy between them. ‘My attempt
to reach conscious experience of the spiritual on the basis of acknowledged science could not possibly appeal to her’; and, again, ‘Nor did Rosa Mayreder find my relation to art in the least satisfactory. In her opinion I misunderstood the essence of art…’. That Steiner could nevertheless find her a sympathetic companion, to whom he could pour out the ideas later embodied in The Philosophy of Freedom, seems to indicate that he craved an audience. ‘She partly relieved the inner-loneliness I felt.’ At twenty-eight, Steiner lacked self-assurance. The thin, bespectacled young man, who still looked like a ‘half-nourished seminarian’, was grateful for the sympathy and attention of an older woman, even if she thought most of his views were nonsense.
In that last year in Vienna, Steiner felt that an epoch of his life was drawing to a close. The future in Weimar looked bright and promising. At this point, Steiner had no suspicion that his seven-year exile in the city of Goethe would be little more than a period of marking time.
Four
The Long Apprenticeship
STEINER was an exceptionally slow developer. It is probably safe to say that if he had died before his fortieth birthday, he would now be totally forgotten. Unlike Yeats, whose ‘chosen comrades thought at school He would be a famous man’, Steiner seems to have failed totally to convince any of his early friends that he was a potential genius—or if he did, we have no record of it. He was a withdrawn, introverted young man, so inept at expressing his feelings that one of his closest friends was convinced that he was cold-hearted. The same friend also considered him a rationalist, because he seemed to spend so much time wrapped up in his own thoughts. In the Autobiography, Steiner himself admits that while knowledge of the spiritual world always struck him as self-evident, he had considerable difficulty coming to terms with the real world. He found it ‘difficult to relate…to the world of the senses’. A psychiatrist would probably have diagnosed him as a mild schizophrenic, schizophrenia meaning a lack of contact with reality.