by Colin Wilson
Fortunately, he adds, the leaders of the workers were not in the least interested in the College, so he had a free hand. Besides, no one could afford to look a gift horse in the mouth; Steiner charged only eight marks, and his lectures remained crowded throughout the course. Soon, other workers wanted him to come and address them. Trade unions asked him to lecture on science: Haeckel's Riddle of the Universe was the current bestseller, and discussing this was a delicate task, since it was a passionate attack on all forms of religion. (Steiner solved this problem by telling his audience that only the biological part of the book was valid, and the rest ought to be destroyed.) For the Gutenberg anniversary, he was asked to address an audience of seven thousand in the Berlin circus.
But if Steiner was quite happy to consort with the enemy, the enemy was less broad-minded. Sooner or later, the leaders of the working-class movement in Berlin were bound to realize that they were nurturing a viper in their bosom. One of them attended a lecture, and declared ‘In the proletarian movement we do not want freedom—we want reasonable compulsion.’ But Steiner's pupils remained loyal. His audience in the rented rooms in the Annenstrasse swelled from fifty or so to over two hundred; instead of lasting until eleven o'clock, his lectures usually went on until after midnight. And Steiner was in his element. At last he was addressing the ‘masses’, and discovering that, in spite of his somewhat abstract mode of expression, he was a charismatic orator. It took the leaders of the Berlin socialist movement another four years to dislodge him; and by that time, Steiner had moved on to an even more appreciative audience.
What excited Steiner's listeners so much was that they were asked to participate. The German method of teaching tends to be authoritarian; the audience listens quietly, then goes home. Steiner's friendly manner made it easy for his audience to ask questions and join in the discussion. The lesson he learned became the basis for Steiner's later educational theory. Nowadays we take it for granted that audiences join in the discussion after a lecture and that the aim of education is to encourage the student to develop his individuality. It is almost impossible to grasp how revolutionary these ideas seemed in Berlin in the last year of the nineteenth century.
Steiner was involved with other groups and societies beside the Workers’ College. One of these was called ‘die Kommenden’, the Future Ones, and its central figure was the Jewish writer and social thinker Ludwig Jacobowski, who ran a magazine called Society and devoted his life to combating anti-semitism. In fact, Steiner went on to lecture to the Jacobowski group after his opening lecture at the Workers’ College. When Jacobowski died of meningitis in 1900, at the age of thirty-two, Steiner gave his funeral oration.
Another group with whom Steiner soon became involved was the Giordano Bruno Union, a group of ‘monistic idealists’—i.e. people who believe that the only basic reality is spirit. Steiner attended the opening lecture, given by his friend Bruno Wille in 1900 and demonstrated that, in the social sphere, he was still prone to ineptness. Wille lectured on Goethe's remark that there is no matter without spirit. Afterwards, Steiner commented that Goethe had supplemented these words with the important amplification that ‘polarity and intensification are direct manifestations of the spirit at work in creation’. Understandably, Wille saw this as a form of one-upmanship—as Steiner would have realized if he had thought twice before speaking. But the friendship survived, and Steiner was later asked to teach history at a newly created Independent College launched by Wille and other ‘Brunoites’.
Philosophically speaking, Steiner's friends—and critics—must have wondered whether he was coming or going. In Jacobowski's Society he published a spirited defence of Haeckel, whose Riddle of the Universe he had dismissed so cavalierly. In his Review, Steiner published articles by an anarchist friend, the Scot John Henry Mackay, who preached a non-violent social revolution. He was influenced by his liking for Mackay and the fact that Mackay had been best man at his marriage; but respectable readers of the Review were outraged that it should be turned into a platform for anarchism, and cancelled their subscriptions by the dozen. (The magazine was also banned in Russia.) Steiner's lectures at the Workers’ College lent credibility to the view that he was a disguised fellow-traveller. Yet he infuriated the members of the Giordano Bruno Union with a lecture on ‘monism’ in which he praised Scholasticism, pointing out that thinkers like Duns Scotus and Thomas Aquinas were monists in the sense that they believed that the universe is basically spiritual in nature. His audience found it impossible to understand why Steiner should speak sympathetically of the Church that had burned Giordano Bruno, and suspected that he was trying to smuggle in Catholicism by the back door.
In spite of these controversies—and the steady decline of the magazine—Steiner's reputation was spreading by word of mouth. In 1900, a young member of the Berlin lodge of the Theosophical Society approached two of its leading members, Count and Countess Brockdorff, and suggested that Rudolf Steiner would be a suitable person to deliver a lecture on Nietzsche. He had been excited by a curious article Steiner had written about Goethe's ‘Fairy Tale’, which Steiner interpreted as an ‘esoteric’ parable about the supersensible world. On 22 August 1900 Steiner delivered a lecture on Nietzsche in the library of the Berlin Theosophical Society. It went down well. Steiner had forgotten about Theosophy since his brief flirtation with it in Vienna in the 1880s, although he had made some hostile comments about it in his magazine. Now he noticed that some people in the audience were ‘people who had great interest in the world of spirit’. He was asked to come again. On 29 September 1900, he lectured on the ‘secret revelation’ of Goethe's ‘Fairy Tale’. It was, in a sense, a historic occasion, for this was the first time that Steiner had ever spoken out publicly about his ‘spiritual researches’.
The Theosophists asked for more. Steiner obliged with talks on two mystics, Meister Eckhart and Jacob Boehme, and followed them up with another twenty-three lectures on various aspects of mysticism and the inner life. One member of his audience told him one day that his ideas were not in accordance with those of Annie Besant, leader of the English branch of the Theosophical Society. Steiner replied mildly: ‘Is that so?’, and went on as before.
But most of the members, including Count and Countess Brockdorff, were less critical. They sensed that Steiner was speaking from some direct personal knowledge, and they were intrigued. So, apparently, was a rather attractive young woman who began to appear at the lectures—Marie von Sivers, who had been brought up in Russia, studied drama at Paris, and only recently had decided against making a career as an actress. She approached Steiner and asked him whether it was not time to launch a new spiritual movement in Europe. Steiner agreed that it was, and sensing—correctly—that she was asking whether he was willing to lead such a movement, replied that he would only be available to ‘call into life’ a movement linked to Western occultism. He meant, of course, that he was not interested in developing Madame Blavatsky's Eastern form of theosophy.
According to the biographer of Marie von Sivers,* it was this conversation that brought Steiner to a decision. ‘After the decisive question had been put…it became possible for Rudolf Steiner to approach his task, to become a spiritual leader of mankind.’
The meeting with Marie von Sivers marked the end of Steiner's marriage—although he and Anna were to live together until 1903—and the beginning of his career as a public personality.
* * *
*Rudolf Steiner Enters My Life, p. 71.
*Chapter XI.
*Marie Steiner-von Sivers, by Marie Savitch.
Six
Occultist and Guru
THE rise of the Steiner movement in Europe between 1900 and 1910 was one of the most remarkable cultural phenomena of our time. It raises certain basic questions that must be examined before we proceed any further.
James Webb put the problem in a nutshell when he wrote: ‘[Steiner's] transition from liberal academic to mystical lecturer is at first sight baffling.’ He goes on to explain that S
teiner's work on Goethe had prepared the ground for his theosophical convictions. We have already seen that this is untrue; the gap between the Goethe scholar and the author of Cosmic Memory is so vast as to be unbridgeable in normal intellectual terms.
Steiner's enemies had an uncharitable but plausible explanation: that Steiner seized the opportunity presented to him by a gullible group of Theosophists to create a new ‘religion’ that would appeal to his contemporaries. Steiner's followers reply that, on the contrary, his convictions all sprang from inner experience, and that most of them had already formed before he became a Theosophist. Let us try to study both sides of the argument impartially.
The anti-Steiner case runs as follows. Before he began lecturing to the Theosophists, Steiner was known as a liberal academic who was opposed to the total materialism of Haeckel. Yet his views were so confused that he wrote a book defending Haeckel. In these same years—towards the turn of the century—he made many hostile remarks about Christianity. Yet by the autumn of 1901 he was lecturing to the Theosophists on ‘Christianity as Mystical Fact’, and apparently accepting Madame Blavatsky's cosmology of the ‘seven root races’ and the existence of Atlantis and Lemuria. As time went by, Steiner expanded his view of Christianity until it became the central event in human history; as a result he acquired a large following of Protestant clergymen. Towards the end of his life, he had actually created his own branch of the Protestant Church, the ‘Christian Community’.
It must be admitted that there is a certain amount of supporting evidence for the ‘opportunist’ view. In the Autobiography, Steiner states that ‘a conscious knowledge of true Christianity’ began to dawn in him in the Berlin period, and that it grew deeper towards the turn of the century, culminating in a revelation when he stood ‘in the spiritual presence of the Mystery of Golgotha in a most profound and solemn festival of knowledge’. According to the later Steiner, the ‘Christ event’ was the central event in human history. What happened, he said, was that a divine being, who had been preparing for incarnation since the beginning of human evolution, descended to earth in the last three years of the life of the historical Jesus and took over his body. His purpose was to turn the tide of battle against the forces of materialism (aided by ‘evil’ powers called Ahriman and Lucifer), which would otherwise have overwhelmed humankind. Further complications are added to this story by the fact that, according to Steiner, there were actually two historical Jesuses, one a descendant of kings and a reincarnation of the Persian prophet Zarathustra, and the other a ‘simpleton’ who had never before been reincarnated as a human being. They lived together in Nazareth at the same time. But the ‘Zarathustra Jesus’ died, and his mother took over the upbringing of the other Jesus. All this, according to Steiner, explains why there is such a discrepancy between the early chapters of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke: they were talking of two different Jesuses…
None of this, however, is to be found in the series of lectures Steiner delivered to the Theosophists in the winter of 1901–2, Christianity as Mystical Fact. Most of the book is devoted to an exposition of the ‘ancient Mysteries’, those secret rites and doctrines that contained the essence of the old religions. Those who were admitted to these secrets were the Initiates. The initiate knew that God ‘slumbers’ in nature. But the initiate knows that God is also to be found in his own soul, and that ‘the soul is a sacred place where the spellbound god may wake to liberty’. The Father is the spellbound god, asleep in nature; the Son is the awakened God, born out of the human soul. All of this is, of course, perfectly in accordance with the doctrines Steiner has already enunciated in his books on Goethe and Nietzsche: man must awaken his hidden powers.
The lectures continued with a section on the Greek sages before Plato, the mysticism of Plato, the neo-Platonists, the Mystery wisdom of Egypt, and finally, Jesus as a representative of the Mystery religions, an Initiate.
There was nothing here that was likely to offend a Theosophist—after all, Madame Blavatsky had stated that all religions are different approaches to Truth, and that there is no religion higher than Truth. In fact, what Steiner had to say in Christianity as Mystical Fact bears a remarkable resemblance to a work that had been published in 1889, The Great Initiates by Edouard Schuré. Schuré, twenty years Steiner's senior, was a French dramatist and critic who, like Steiner, detested scientific materialism. The Great Initiates—an immediate bestseller—began with the sentence: ‘The greatest evil of our time is the fact that science and religion appear as two hostile forces that cannot be reconciled with one another.’ It goes on to speak about esoteric teaching: ‘All great religions have an exterior and an interior history, one open to all, the other secret.’ This secret religion, ‘once seen, shines out, luminous and organic, always in harmony with itself. It might also be called the history of eternal, of universal religion.’ And in the remainder of this large book, he sets out to show that various religious figures of the past—Rama, Krishna, Hermes, Moses, Orpheus, Pythagoras, Plato, and Jesus—were all ‘great Initiates’ of this one, universal religion. Much is made, of course, of Jesus's initiation into the mystery sect of the Essenes, and the ‘esoteric instruction’ he received. ‘We are beginning to understand that Jesus at the very height of his consciousness, the transfigured Christ, is opening his loving arms to his brothers, the other Messiahs who preceded him, beams of the Living Word as he was, that he is opening them wide to Science in its entirety, Art in its divinity, and Life in its completeness.’
Marie von Sivers had been deeply influenced by Schuré, and became his translator. So it seems conceivable that it was she who introduced Steiner to The Great Initiates, and who was responsible for the view of ‘Jesus the Initiate’ that we find in Christianity as Mystical Fact.
In the Autobiography, Steiner defends himself against many of these criticisms and, if we can accept his basic premises, it must be admitted that his arguments are convincing. Steiner insisted that when a man has developed the power to withdraw ‘inside himself’—through Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition—he becomes aware of spiritual realities, and that these include the life history of the human race. He develops the power to read the ‘Akashic records’, the imperishable record of the past that is imprinted on the psychic ether. Madame Blavatsky also had this power, but she only achieved it in trance, when the ‘hidden Masters’ spoke through her. The result was that much of what she records in Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine was only partly true. Steiner was able to perceive the ‘spirit world’ in full consciousness, and he insisted that his own revelations about the remote past were as accurate as he could make them.
In writing about Steiner's description of the ‘etheric body’, Anne Bancroft comments: ‘It is here that we begin to pull back a little, if we are honest. For nobody except a clairvoyant has actually seen an etheric body.’* This is true; but then, there is a great deal of evidence for the existence of the etheric body or ‘life field’, not only in the testimony of hundreds of clairvoyants, but in the work of scientists like Harold Burr, who established the existence of this electrical ‘life field’ by attaching delicate voltmeters to living creatures.† We may choose to be intellectually convinced by such evidence, even if we have never actually seen a ‘life field’. The same is true of the power of ‘psychometry’ (which I have discussed in Chapter 1.) There is extremely convincing evidence that certain people can ‘read’ the history of objects which they hold in their hands. Most of these people actually ‘see’ these past events, as if looking at a mental cinema screen.
Dowsing as we have seen, is another baffling faculty that eludes scientific explanation, although it has been extensively studied by science. A good dowser can ‘tune in’ to whatever he happens to be looking for, and ignore other things. He can, for example, locate copper coins hidden under a carpet, and ignore silver ones; then, a moment later, he can locate the silver coins and ignore the copper ones. It is as if some curious faculty of the mind could be brought into operation at will. There
is a certain amount of evidence that this faculty may be connected with the right cerebral hemisphere.
So no one who has considered the overwhelming evidence for ‘extra-sensory perception’ will dismiss Steiner's claims out of hand. Moreover, no reader of the Autobiography or The Philosophy of Freedom is likely to conclude that Steiner was an intellectual charlatan. He makes an impression of rigid intellectual honesty.
This leaves us with a problem which looks in rational terms, basically insoluble. It would be simple if we could dismiss Steiner as an opportunist who adopted Theosophy because it offered him a platform, and deliberately formulated his views about Atlantis and the Christ Revelation as a mythology to satisfy the needs of his followers. But this would involve the assumption that the Dr Jekyll of The Philosophy of Freedom turned into the Mr Hyde of Cosmic Memory and An Outline of Occult Science, and this seems, to put it mildly, unlikely.
It might be more constructive to ask: does it really matter? And the answer is: probably not. An interesting parallel case is that of Gurdjieff, whose complex cosmology involves a hierarchy of ‘higher worlds’, and the belief that men are ‘food for the moon’. But it is possible to regard Gurdjieff as one of the greatest teachers of the twentieth century without paying the slightest attention to his cosmology. The essence of Gurdjieff's teaching lies in his statement that men are victims of a form of mechanicalness which he calls ‘sleep’, and that with sufficient effort, we can wake up. In short, we may feel that Gurdjieff's greatest significance lies in his psychology, not his cosmology.