by Colin Wilson
In a sense, therefore, the young Rudolf Steiner was a typical figure of the fin de siècle period—a romantic dreamer who never seemed quite at home in the physical world. Yet in one important respect, he was far more fortunate than so many contemporaries in that ‘tragic generation’. Most of them also felt alienated from physical reality; but their ‘inner lives’ also failed to satisfy them. They felt like dissatisfied strangers, ‘outsiders’, shipwrecked in the world of actuality. Steiner had no such problem. He may have felt awkward and out of place in the physical world, but he never had the slightest doubt that his inner world was just as real as external reality. His genuine enthusiasm for ideas saved him from falling into the despair that wrecked or destroyed so many of his contemporaries.
In Weimar, that ‘Athens of the north’, to which he moved in the autumn of 1890, he needed all his self-sufficiency. There was, admittedly, a great deal of lively social activity—although never as warm and intimate as in Vienna—and Steiner made many friends. But as a ‘spiritual home’, Weimar was a disappointment. The spirit of Goethe—the feeling that nature is God's living garment—was totally absent from the Archive. Men like Bernard Suphan, Hermann Grimm, Julius Wahle, Eduard von der Hellen, Reinhold Koehler, were pleasant enough, but Steiner felt that the underlying spirit of the place was pedantic. In a short time he was referring to Weimar as ‘the home of the classical mummies’, and telling Eckstein (whom he called Eck): ‘You can have no idea how alone I feel here, and how little understood.’ Soon after arriving in Weimar, Steiner gave a lecture entitled ‘Imagination as a Creator of Culture’, in which he argued that ‘what man creates in real imagination is in fact a product of the spiritual world’. From what Steiner says of his colleagues in Weimar, we may infer that it was received with bemused incomprehension.
Yet in another sense, the spiritual isolation was a benefit. In Vienna there were too many friends, too many cafés, too many distractions. In Weimar, there was little to do but develop his ideas. Even with friends like Julius Wahle and Eduard von der Hellen, Steiner could not speak about his spiritual experiences. He seized the opportunity to work on his Philosophy of Freedom—a book whose title suggests it was intended as a counterblast to Hartmann's Philosophy of the Unconscious—and to write a thesis for his doctoral degree.
Since he was now a staff member of the Goethe Archive, it was important that he should acquire some academic qualifications. The problem was that, since he had not attended the Gymnasium in Vienna, he was not eligible for a degree. But in Germany, regulations were, oddly enough, less rigid. During his final days in Vienna, Steiner had read with enthusiasm a vast work called The Seven Books of Platonism by a certain Heinrich von Stein, of the University of Rostock, a Baltic sea port. It excited him because it ‘presented Plato as the great bearer of a philosophy that awaited fulfilment through the Christ impulse’. Perhaps because he sensed that von Stein was a sufficiently original thinker to recognize another when he saw one, Steiner decided to send him his thesis: ‘A Theory of Cognition, with special reference to Fichte's scientific teaching’. In May 1891 he travelled to Rostock to defend his thesis—in those days a part of the formal machinery for acquiring a degree. Von Stein proved to be old, serene, and tolerant. He told Steiner: ‘It is obvious that you have not been under the guidance of a professor.’ But he liked the thesis and accepted it.
Typically, when the thesis was published the following year, Steiner dedicated it to Hartmann. Steiner disagreed fundamentally with Hartmann, and—as we have seen—their encounter in Berlin had failed to bring about any meeting of minds. But Steiner, always modest, still hoped to achieve some degree of mutual understanding with his eminent contemporary.
The same modesty—amounting almost to lack of self-confidence—seems to explain his relationship to another influential thinker, the biologist Ernst Haeckel. Like T. H. Huxley, Haeckel had taken up the cudgels on behalf of Darwin at a time when Darwin was being denounced as an infidel. In fact, Darwin was neither an atheist nor a materialist; Haeckel was both. Like Hartmann, he possessed the ability to write highly readable prose, and his Riddle of the Universe became a bestseller.
The two became acquainted by a misunderstanding. Haeckel called his philosophy monism, meaning that the physical world is the only reality, and that ‘spirit’ is a kind of by-product of matter. Steiner also claimed to be a monist, but he took a diametrically opposite view: that spirit is the only reality, and that matter is a by-product of spirit. In February 1893, both Steiner and Haeckel happened to give lectures on ‘monism’ to a scientific society, and Haeckel sent Steiner a copy of his talk. Steiner reciprocated by sending his own lecture to Haeckel. In the following year, Steiner was invited to the celebrations for Haeckel's sixtieth birthday; he was introduced to the sage, and found him ‘a fascinating personality’. Steiner concluded that Haeckel's ‘gentle gaze could absorb sense impressions only’, and that he was incapable of real thinking. He reached the interesting conclusion that in some previous existence Haeckel had been a fanatic ‘related to Church politics’ (i.e. an Inquisitor), and that this tendency combined with his natural gentleness to make him a fanatical opponent of religious dogmatism.
Steiner thereafter defended Haeckel in print on a number of occasions—a circumstance that caused bafflement to many of his later followers. It was obviously impossible that Steiner could have had the slightest intellectual sympathy for a man who declared ‘There is no God, no immortality and no freedom of the human soul.’ And Steiner's rather patronizing remarks about Haeckel in his Autobiography make his sympathy more puzzling than ever. Steiner's attitude can only be understood by recognizing what Edouard Schuré later called his ‘empathetic and feminine sensibility’. He was a modest man with a gift for friendship, so he found himself leaning over backwards to defend views that had nothing in common with his own.
Why underline this point? Because the Autobiography, written in his final years, gives the impression of a man whose philosophical and spiritual views were already fully formed when he came to Vienna at the age of eighteen, and who thereafter marched undeviatingly towards his intellectual goal, without glancing to right or left. But the picture that emerges from comments by his contemporaries, and from his own early work, is quite different. They suggest a shy, modest, socially inept but highly ambitious young man, determined to obtain a hearing from his contemporaries, but not sure how to go about it. Hartmann and Haeckel both provided models—not because Steiner agreed with what they had to say, but because both were immensely successful. And Steiner also, presumably, wished to be successful, an ambition that no one would suspect from the austere pages of the Autobiography.
Another case in point is that of Anna Eunicke, the widow Steiner married in 1899, and from whom he separated when he met Marie von Sivers. During his first two years in Weimar, Steiner had not been particularly happy with his lodgings. Then he was introduced to the recently widowed Anna Eunicke who, according to one biographer,* asked him to supervise the education of her five children. Steiner moved into her home (he was given his own part of the house) and he and the widow became close friends. When he moved to Berlin in 1899, the Eunicke family soon followed, and Steiner again became their lodger; then, shortly thereafter, he married Anna Eunicke, who was eight years his senior.
Clearly, Frau Eunicke played an important part in Steiner's life, and one might expect him to devote a certain amount of space to her in the Autobiography—at least as much, say, as he devotes to Maria delle Grazie, Rosa Mayreder, Gabriele Reuter, and other female friends. But he is strangely reticent. He tells us that, through the family of Dr Heinrich Fränkel, a liberal politician, he met ‘yet another family’, whose father had recently died. There follows a lengthy anecdote about Steiner's own curious relation with the dead man, of which we shall speak in a moment. After several more pages, Steiner mentions that the name of the dead man was Eunicke. Only then does he devote a few brief lines to the family in whose house he went to live, mentioning that he and the widow
became close friends, but omitting any mention of his role as educational adviser of the children. Finally, at the end of a chapter about his struggles in Berlin, he mentions casually that ‘shortly afterward my friendship with Frau Eunicke was consolidated in civil marriage’. Then he adopts a distinctly defensive tone:
Let this suffice in regard to a private relationship. In this account of my life, it is not my intention to relate private matters, except those that are in some way connected with my spiritual path. And my life with the Eunicke family afforded me the opportunity of a quiet basis for a life that was both inwardly and outwardly extremely eventful. For the rest, a person's private life does not belong to the public. It is of no concern to the public.
All this may be conceded; yet once again the reader is left with the vaguely uncomfortable impression that Steiner the human being has been edited out of existence to make room for the more impressive portrait of Steiner the spiritual prophet, standing with folded arms and looking into the distance.
But the story of the deceased Herr Eunicke takes us once again to the very heart of the Steiner enigma. In the Autobiography, Steiner claims that he was in contact with Herr Eunicke after his death. Yet the contact was not of the kind we might expect from a man who had once seen the ghost of a relative in a station waiting room. Steiner explains that when he moved into the Eunicke household he became interested in the deceased father through the books in his library. Herr Eunicke had apparently been something of a recluse, and Steiner became increasingly intrigued by his personality. Something almost identical had occurred eight years previously in Vienna, when Steiner had been introduced to the family of a fellow student. The father spent most of his time locked up in his study, and Steiner never even caught a glimpse of him. Yet when the father died, Steiner felt he knew him so intimately that he was asked by the family to deliver the funeral oration.
This sounds straightforward enough: Steiner became deeply interested in this man who had turned his back on the world, asked many questions about him, and gradually came to feel that he knew him intimately. But, as the Eunicke story makes clear, there was a great deal more than that to it. ‘What I [now] have to say will be regarded by most people as sheer fantasy. For it will concern the way I was privileged to come into close contact with these two human souls in that sphere where they found themselves after they had gone through the gate of death.’ And he goes on to remind the reader that ‘I have always approached spiritual knowledge in the same state of clear consciousness as is necessary for the pursuit of such exact branches of knowledge as mathematics or analytical mechanics…’.
But when Steiner says he will describe ‘the way’ he came into contact with the two dead men, he is speaking loosely. He merely informs us: ‘The powers of spiritual sight which I then possessed enabled me to enter into a close relationship with these two souls after their earthly death.’ We are told no more about the precise means by which he was able to follow their progress after death. Instead, he tells us that although both men were ‘materialists’—as far as their intellectual approach to life was concerned—they did not act like materialists (i.e. they were not ruthless or unsympathetic men). The result was that ‘the spirit of both men…shone with wonderful light after death’.
In a lecture of 1918, ‘The Dead Are With Us’, he is much more forthcoming. In this, he emphasizes the similarity between sleep and death. He goes on:
Besides waking life and sleeping life there is a third state, even more important for intercourse with the spiritual world…I mean the state connected with the act of waking and the act of going to sleep, which last only for brief seconds…If we develop a delicate sensitivity for these moments of waking and going to sleep we shall find that they shed great light on the spiritual world…At the moment of going to sleep the spiritual world approaches us with power, but we immediately fall asleep, losing consciousness of what has passed through the soul.
In order to understand all this, says Steiner, it is necessary to grasp a basic fact about the spiritual world.
In the spiritual sense, what is ‘past’ has not really vanished, but is still there. In physical life men have this conception in regard to space only. If you stand in front of a tree, then go away and look back…the tree has not disappeared…In the spiritual world the same is true in regard to time. If you experience something at one moment, it has passed away the next as far as physical consciousness is concerned; spiritually conceived, it has not passed away. You can look back at it just as you can look back at the tree. Richard Wagner showed that he possessed knowledge of this with the remarkable words: ‘Time here becomes space.’
In this lecture Steiner certainly shows no reticence about the matter of intercourse with the dead. (He adds, in parenthesis: ‘The methods of modern spiritualism, of course, must be avoided…’.)
We encounter the Dead at the moment of going to sleep and again at the moment of waking…As far as physical consciousness is concerned, these are two quite different moments in time; for spiritual consciousness the one is only a little further distant than the other.
He goes on to say that the moment of falling asleep is specially favourable for communication with the dead. If we wish to ask something, we should ‘carry it in the soul’ until the moment of sleep, then put the question. The moment of waking is the best moment for the dead to communicate with us. The question must be imbued with feeling and with will. Then it will be committed to the ‘subconscious’, and will be automatically passed on to the dead at the moment of falling asleep.
There is another rather confusing piece of information. When we put a question to the dead, what we say actually comes from the dead person: the answer comes from us. The dead inspire the question, so to speak, and the answer comes from our own soul. This, says Steiner, is the reason why, although we are constantly surrounded by the dead, we cannot communicate with them—we are unfamiliar with this curious back-to-front language (which, admittedly, sounds like something from Alice in Wonderland). This also explains why, when the dead communicate with us at the moment of waking, we may be unaware that they are communicating; we simply assume that we thought it. ‘A great deal of what we undertake in life is really inspired by the dead,’ says Steiner.
What are we to make of all this? The reaction of someone who comes to it for the first time is bound to be one of deep scepticism; it sounds as if he has made it up for the consumption of a particularly gullible audience. But anyone who has looked into these matters more closely will be aware that Steiner's comments are less bizarre than they sound.
To begin with, Steiner's method of communication with the dead seems to have much in common with that of another eminent ‘spiritual scientist’, Emanuel Swedenborg, who lived two centuries earlier. Swedenborg (1688–1772) also claimed to be able to establish direct contact with the ‘spirit world’, and his methods also had nothing in common with those of modern spiritualism. One brief anecdote will suffice. The queen of Sweden asked Swedenborg to give a message to her dead brother. Next time he saw her, Swedenborg told her that her brother sent his greetings, and apologized for not answering her last letter. He would do so now. Swedenborg then delivered a long and detailed message. The queen turned pale and said: ‘No one but God knows this secret.’
In his book about Swedenborg, Presence of Other Worlds, the American psychologist Wilson van Dusen advances the interesting hypothesis that Swedenborg's ‘visions’ of the spirit world were obtained in a ‘controlled hypnogogic state’—a hypnogogic state being the twilight realm between sleeping and waking, or vice versa. The whole book could be regarded as detailed support for Steiner's assertion that the secret of communication with the dead lies in these hypnogogic states.*
Another ‘scientist of the invisible’ was the Cambridge don T. C. Lethbridge, who devoted his retirement to the study of dowsing and similar mysteries of the ‘paranormal’. † Lethbridge became convinced that a pendulum—a lead bob on a piece of string—will respond accurately to various subst
ances (lead, silver, tin, garlic, oranges, potatoes), swinging over them in a circle when the pendulum is adjusted to the correct ‘rate’ for any particular substance. (For example, it responded to tin at 28 inches, alcohol at 26, cherries at 12, apples at 18, and so on.) He further discovered that the pendulum also has ‘rates’ for abstract ideas, like love, hate, anger, death, and so on. Everything he tested responded at some length between one and forty inches. Forty was the ‘rate’ for death. Yet, oddly enough, if he lengthened the pendulum over forty inches, all the substances began to register again—at a rate of forty plus their previous rate (so cherries now reacted at 52, apples at 58, and so on).
For reasons too complex to explain here, Lethbridge came to the curious conclusion that when the pendulum was extended beyond forty inches, it was responding to the world beyond death—the ‘next world’, so to speak. Lethbridge did not regard this as some other ‘place’, up in the sky for example. He believed that it interpenetrates our present world, but has a much faster rate of ‘vibration’, so we cannot see it.
Through the use of the pendulum, Lethbridge also came to some curious conclusions about time in this ‘next world’. Time exists there, he concluded, but is completely ‘static’. Time in the next world is a perpetual ‘now’. He speculates that this world is a kind of museum, in which all events are preserved, as in the BBC's sound archives. This sounds very close indeed to Steiner's comments about time in the world after death.