by Colin Wilson
Steiner was undeterred by objections such as these; he dismissed them as the fruit of old-fashioned materialistic thinking. Neither did he regard it as any objection that he had no practical plan through which his ideas could be implemented. He was convinced that the ‘threefold commonwealth’ would come about of itself once it was understood by men of good will; in fact, he prophesied that it would inevitably come to pass during the next forty years. As far as he was concerned, the chief problem was simply to make sure that everyone heard about it. And the publication of his book The Threefold Commonwealth seemed to demonstrate that there was enormous appetite for Steiner's type of idealism; it became something of a bestseller, and was translated into many languages. As the war came to an end, Steiner once again launched himself into feverish activity, lecturing all over Europe, but concentrating most of his attention on Germany. And while a young ex-corporal named Adolf Hitler was inspiring the German Workers’ Party by preaching nationalism and anti-semitism, Steiner was telling his own audiences to turn their minds to higher things: ‘Instead of thinking about the very next requirements of the moment, a broader conception of life must now take place which will strive with strong thinking to comprehend the evolutionary forces of modern humanity…’.
Steiner was startled by the bitterness of the opposition he encountered. In the early years of the century, he had been able to tell the workers that Marxism was intellectually unsound without arousing too much resentment. But conditions were now changed; half Germany was starving; the mark was almost valueless. After the Russian revolution, the German communists felt that their moment had come, and they were intolerant of half-baked anarchists who felt Utopia was round the corner. They forbade their members to attend Steiner's meetings. As for the Nazis, they were quite determined to see the communists destroyed; Steiner was simply an irrelevance. But when he preached against patriotism, and announced that his ‘threefold commonwealth’ would gradually erode all national boundaries, they began to regard him as a menace. So his meetings were interrupted by hecklers. Things came to a climax in May 1922, when Steiner lectured in ten German cities in two weeks. In Munich—Hitler's city—young Nazis continually interrupted his talk on ‘Anthroposophy and Spiritual Knowledge’. Then, in the Four Seasons Hotel, he was physically attacked, and only the prompt intervention of his friends saved him from injury; Steiner had to escape ignominiously by the back door. After that, his lecture agents decided that, for the time being at any rate, it was too dangerous to book him in Germany.
Steiner went on immediately to a West-East conference in Vienna, at which he was one of the major speakers. Wachsmuth notes: ‘A large part of the press was either extremely reserved or hostile…’. Steiner was experiencing this reaction more and more frequently, and it worried him. Wachsmuth mentions his ‘acute distress’ when an ‘aggressive pastor’ published a pamphlet full of ‘crass falsehoods’. Wachsmuth himself is obviously baffled that a man of Steiner's sincerity and benevolence should be so violently attacked, and puts it down to sheer human wickedness. He seems unaware that most people saw Steiner as a woolly-minded crank, full of preposterous ideas borrowed from Madame Blavatsky, and that there was a general feeling that it was time he met his come-uppance.
In August 1922, Steiner went to Oxford to speak at an educational conference. Since the end of the war, Steiner had acquired a new reputation as an eminent educationalist. An Anthroposophist named Emil Molt, who ran the Waldorf-Astoria tobacco factory in Stuttgart, asked Steiner's advice about setting up a school for the children of his workers. Here Steiner was in his element; he was an educationalist by nature and vocation. Above all, he understood that the task of the teacher is to persuade children that they want to be educated—a concept that would have struck most Germans as perversely paradoxical. The Waldorf school in Stuttgart was an immediate success; within a few years it had eleven hundred pupils, and hundreds of others had to be rejected. So when Steiner lectured at Oxford, he was able to stand as an equal among eminent educationalists, including Professor Gilbert Murray; when the Manchester Guardian said that ‘the entire congress finds its central point in the personality and teaching of Dr Rudolf Steiner’ it meant, of course, his educational theories, not his ‘spiritual’ teachings.
Back in Dornach in September, another important event took place: the founding of the ‘Christian Community’. Steiner was presenting a course of lectures for theologians, and many of those present felt that a new religious impulse was needed. Steiner himself had come to recognize that Anthroposophy—the quest for ‘spiritual knowledge’—cannot replace the daily practice of religion, with its rituals and sacraments. It was an important recognition that seemed to mark a change in attitude, for the Steiner of ten years earlier had seemed to feel that the new Orphic Mysteries could replace the element of ritual. Now he told the assembled ministers and theologians that if a religious revival was to be achieved, then the bearers of the message would have to be ‘God-inspired’. It furnishes additional evidence of Steiner's charismatic personality that many of them decided to accept the challenge, and gave up their own pulpits to serve the new movement. The Christian Community was founded under the leadership of Friedrich Rittelmeyer; its forty-five priests included a Buddhist scholar and three women. Steiner provided a sacrament called The Act of Consecration of Man, which Rittelmeyer found deeply moving. There were some members of the Anthroposophical Society who thought that Steiner had now founded an Anthroposophical religion; on 30 December 1922, Steiner had to deliver a lecture that was, in effect, a mild rebuke. But when the news of the Christian Community percolated through to the outer world, it was inevitable that the same misunderstanding should arise, and Steiner suddenly found that he had a host of new enemies within the established Church.
The ‘come-uppance’ that his opponents had been hoping for arrived with disastrous suddenness on New Year's Eve 1922. That evening, Steiner delivered the last lecture of a course on the Spiritual Communion of Mankind. Wachsmuth says: ‘In the great domed hall of the building people listened to his words. The mighty columns also, the forms of their capitals, the paintings of the dome in the lofty work of art of this most living of all human buildings spoke to them of spiritual action and the sense of sacrifice, of a decade of creative moulding through a human being who was leading towards the spiritual communion of mankind.’ The deeply moved audience left at about ten o'clock. Soon after, a watchman noticed smoke in the White Hall. No fire could be found, until a wall in the south wing was broken into; it was burning inside. The fire brigade arrived quickly; Anthroposophists rushed into the building to rescue sculptures and paintings. But by morning, little was left of the Goetheanum but its concrete foundations. Most commentators suggest that the fire was due to arson, but the fact that it began inside a wall suggests an electrical fault.
Steiner bore the blow with dignity. He was heard to mutter: ‘Much work and many years.’ But the next day, he ascended the rostrum in the nearby joinery shop and announced that the play scheduled for that afternoon would still take place. And in the evening, Steiner gave a lecture on Science in World History in the workshop. In the disaster, he had shown himself to be a true leader.
The building of a new Goetheanum began immediately; Steiner once again designed it. The new building was made of concrete.
The destruction of the Goetheanum seems to have brought to a head Steiner's own inner sense of dissatisfaction; on 23 January 1923, he delivered an address to the Society that was a powerful rebuke. Anthroposophy, he said, was losing its sense of inner purpose. People had started ‘premature undertakings’ and failed to follow them through. What was needed was a new spirit of dedication. He began to brood on a new constitution for the Society, and on the reorganization of foreign branches. Then, with all the old nervous energy; he threw himself once more into lectures and international travel: Switzerland, Germany, Czechoslovakia, England and Wales, Austria, and Holland. Wachsmuth was greatly impressed when Steiner climbed with him to the plateau containin
g the stone circle of Penaenmawr, discoursing all the way on the Mysteries of the Druids and of Mithras, and was still apparently unfatigued when they came down again.
Steiner's discourse on this occasion is a remarkable example of his genuine insight into the past. In 1923 very little was known about prehistoric stone circles, and they were generally assumed to be of ‘Druid’ origin (the Druids being a Celtic priesthood who arrived in England from Europe around 600 BC). We now know that most stone circles predate the Druids by many centuries, some as much as two thousand years. Yet in spite of his mistaken assumption about the Druids, Steiner recognized that the circles were basically astronomical calculators, and that the stones were somehow aligned with surrounding peaks.
He suggested that I look at the peaks of the mountain domes surrounding the plateau, and described to me…how the Druid priests, through viewing the signs of the zodiac passing along the horizon in the course of the year experienced the spiritual cosmos…He explained how they determined the consecration of the festivals and the cults of the year according to these cosmic rhythms, and gave their priestly directions to those belonging to their communities; how the occurrences in the course of the year had to be spiritually mirrored in the cult, and physically even in the carrying out of agricultural labour. He spoke of the experience of sunlight and shadow in the stone chamber of the ancient sacred place, and of the spreading of the visions there received and their impulses into the expanses of the earthly environment…
More than half a century after Steiner's death, this sounds like sheer inspiration. In Steiner's day, monuments like Stonehenge were assumed to be the ‘Druid’ equivalent of churches; it is only in the past decade or so that unorthodox archaeologists like Professor Alexander Thom and Gerald Hawkins, and unorthodox astronomers like Fred Hoyle, have shown them to be astronomical calculators, and that an even more unorthodox fraternity known as ‘ley hunters’ have suggested theories of their purpose that are practically identical with Steiner's.
This provides an interesting clue to the riddle of Steiner's ‘spiritual insight’. It was not sufficiently accurate to enable him to distinguish between a late Neolithic site and an Iron Age site, yet where the actual purpose of the site is concerned, it seems to go straight to the heart of the matter. This seems to confirm the suspicion that arose in connection with his visit to Tintagel: that Steiner possessed some deeply intuitive insight into such matters, but that when he attempted to bring it into logical—and historical—focus he was liable to go hopelessly awry.
Steiner's insight into the natural rhythms of the earth formed the basis of his agricultural theories, whose influence after his death was to be as widespread as that of his educational theories. Wachsmuth explains how in 1922 Steiner's followers asked him for some practical suggestions about agriculture, and were told that they must acquire ‘preparations’ out of the realm of plants and animals, and then expose these ‘in a particular way to the rhythms of the cosmic and earthly forces in summer and winter so that the forces beneficial to life…might be concentrated and enriched.’ They were told to take cow horns and fill them with various natural substances, then leave them buried in the earth for the winter. When they were dug up, the preparations were stirred vigorously into water, and the resulting mixture used as a fertilizer. Steiner was strongly opposed to chemical fertilizers and insecticides, and there can be no doubt that his ‘biological farming’ methods were based on his ‘spiritual insights’ into the farming methods of prehistoric man, as well as on Goethe's vision of nature.
Steiner's medical insights were equally revolutionary, and just as far ahead of their time. His starting point—inevitably—was his Goethean ‘anti-reductionism’. The reductionist theory accepts that the cells of our bodies interact according to some more-or-less ‘chemical’ law which governs their reproduction and growth. The anti-reductionist view was expressed by Dr D. W. Smithers when he said that it was as impossible to deduce the form of a human being from the study of his cells as to deduce the rules of billiards from the study of individual billiard balls.* And at the turn of the century, the biologist Hans Driesch argued that living organisms can only be understood as wholes, and that if they have ‘purpose’ in their growth, then this purpose is something quite separate from their mechanical bits and pieces. In the 1930s, two Yale professors, Harold Burr and F. S. C. Northrop, connected delicate voltmeters to trees and discovered regular seasonal variations in their electric fields. Burr went on to conclude that living cells are held together and ‘arranged’ by these fields in the same way that iron filings are ‘arranged’ by a magnet. In fact, the life-field (or L-field) is a kind of jelly mould into which the living matter is poured. This is, of course, coming very close to Goethe's view that nature is controlled by spirit.
It would follow that, for example, a cancer—which consists of normally healthy cells running riot—is due to some kind of breakdown of control of the L-field, and that therefore, in a sense, a cancer is controllable by will (bearing in mind Steiner's insistence that will operates basically on the metabolic level).
A pupil of Steiner's named Ita Wegman asked about the application of his principles to medicine, and as a result went on to found the Arlesheim Clinic, based on principles that would now be called ‘holistic’. As with Steiner's educational theories, the movement has spread until it has become worldwide.
Steiner's theories on medicine included important insights into the mentally ill, and these were developed by Dr Friedrich Husemann, who founded the Wiesneck Sanatorium at Buchenbach. A request for advice about mentally ill children led to the founding of an Institute for Therapeutic Education at Jena. Steiner's belief in reincarnation played an important part in his attitude to handicapped children and to mongols; he taught that they had been placed in sick, misshapen bodies or burdened with underdeveloped brains for ‘karmic’ reasons, and that a certain development is possible with love and understanding. His attitude was based on his own personal experience with the mentally retarded Otto Specht, who was totally cured by Steiner's loving care. Steiner also taught that the doctor's spiritual interaction with the child is of importance for the doctor's own development. Since Steiner's death, more than a hundred homes for handicapped children have been founded by Anthroposophists.
So at the beginning of 1924—the last full year of his life—Steiner was involved in a bewildering number of activities: education, medicine, agriculture, politics, the Christian community, Eurhythmy and speech training, as well as in lecturing on all aspects of Anthroposophy. He was also engaged in writing his Autobiography, one of his most important books, which appeared in weekly parts in the periodical The Goetheanum (edited by Albert Steffen). He was also becoming increasingly preoccupied with problems of karma, and at Dornach in February and March, delivered a series of lectures called ‘Esoteric Reflections on Karmic Relationships’. The eight volumes in which these were published are certainly among the most fascinating of Steiner's works, even for readers who are not Anthroposophists. They are far more readable than many of his earlier works, and have a direct, personal tone which conveys his immense charm. They also reveal his enormous knowledge of history, and the sheer breadth of his intelligence. Even for the more-or-less sceptical reader, they are a treasure house of remarkable insights. In April he was in Prague, in May in Paris, and in June in Breslau, where he was a guest on the estate of another philosopher, Count Keyserling, and lectured on agriculture. There followed more lectures in Stuttgart and Dornach, then a trip to Arnhem, in Holland. Then, after more lectures in Dornach, he attended a summer school in Torquay, Devon. But it was clear to his associates that he was beginning to find the pace too much for him; he began to suffer from a stomach ailment that often left him exhausted. Instead of relaxing and taking a holiday, he worked harder than ever: there were seventy lectures in two and a half weeks during the Torquay trip.
Yet his friends seem to be in agreement that what finally caused Steiner's fatal illness was not the travel and lecturing, but t
he demands of people, many of them strangers. Steffen has described how, after lectures, there would be long queues of people waiting to talk to him about their personal problems. Nothing can be more exhausting than listening to other people's problems. It seems clear that Steiner's major mistake was to make himself available for hundreds of ‘personal consultations’ when he was already exhausted from lecturing. And after leaving Torquay, he went on to London and gave still more lectures. When he returned to Dornach in September, he was a dying man. On 28 September 1924, he gave what was to be the first of two lectures on St John and the Mystery of Lazarus—he was still lecturing in the workshop, since work on the new Goetheanum had hardly begun. Members who came to hear the second lecture found it unbelievable that Steiner was unable to deliver it because of illness; they had come to think of him as inexhaustible.
From late September until his death the following March, Steiner was unable to leave his bedroom. He still continued to work—Wachsmuth brought in his correspondence every day, he dictated replies to letters, and he continued to write his Autobiography by hand. The festival at Christmas was the first at which he had not been present; he sent a message saying that he was present in spirit.