Nobody Understands My Relationship to Rudolf Steiner

There are but a handful of individualities whom I turn to again and again as spiritual mentors, though all returned to the undiscovered country long before I was born. Individuals I thought would have a long-lasting effect at the first blush of my love for them—William Butler Yeats, Valentin Tomberg, and Martin Heidegger, for example—have not had the same impact, though my love for them persists. But of those who have tinctured my very soul, one is the poet, engraver, and visionary William Blake, in whose honor I named the literary journal I edit after a conception of his, Jesus the Imagination. Another is the formidable Russian thinker and spiritual revolutionary Nikolai Berdyaev, whom I first encountered by happenstance at a used bookstore long ago and whose thought still provides thrills for me over a quarter of a century later. Still another is the philosopher, mystic, and activist Simone Weil, whose powerful spirit has haunted me for most of the past thirty years. But perhaps the most significant is the Austrian philosopher, educator, and practical visionary Rudolf Steiner.

People who are willing to put up with my affection for Blake, Berdyaev, or Weil, are nevertheless often nonplussed by my love for Steiner. Likewise, those who appreciate my love for Steiner, from what I can tell, are often uncomfortable with the fact that I am what most would interpret as a small-t traditional Catholic (though I think my spirituality may be a little more complicated, a little more nuanced, than they give me credit for).

Primary in my admiration for Steiner, is the fact that he actually did something concrete. This is not to denigrate anyone else in my list, but he actually made a practical difference in the world through the astounding number of initiatives he contributed, all of them in the last five-to-ten years of his life. He gave the world the gifts of Waldorf education (I was a Waldorf teacher for sixteen years), biodynamic farming (I’ve been a biodynamic practicioner since 1992), not to mention Anthroposophically-extended medicine and his contributions to architecture, the arts (eurythmy, for one), liturgy (the Christian Community), and beekeeping. Most reformers and innovators write or talk. Steiner certainly did those things (he gave over 3000 public lectures!). But he also turned thoughts into action: and on a scale unmatched by any individual in recent history, if ever. And that, more than anything else, is the reason for my love for this man.

Of course, there are things I don’t necessarily accept from Steiner; for example, his proposal that there were two different Jesus children who more or less amalgamated in Jesus Christ—but I don’t need to be in absolute congruence with anybody to love them and learn from them. (Indeed, I cannot think of one person from history—with the exception of Jesus—about whom this would be true).

I could probably write a book about Steiner (and perhaps I should), but in lieu of that, let me here provide just a little background on Steiner from my book The Submerged Reality. More people need to know about him. He is too important to be the property of only Anthroposophists.

The first Goetheanum, designed by Rudolf Steiner and destroyed by arson on New Year's Eve 1922

From The Submerged Reality

Steiner, it could easily be argued, is one of the most fascinating geniuses of his era. He was a philosopher trained by, among others, the important thinker and psychologist Franz Brentano (1838–1917). In addition to Steiner, Brentano greatly influenced subsequent streams of phenomenology, analytic philosophy, and psychology, including Edmund Husserl, Gilbert Ryle, and even Sigmund Freud. Steiner studied with Brentano just before Edmund Husserl did, and Brentano’s influence, especially in terms of his notion of intentionality, manifests in both. In Husserl’s work, phenomenology becomes more fully realized, a genuine movement, whereas Steiner investigates the possibilities in intentionality in his important book, Die Philosophie der Freiheit (1894; known in English by three different titles: The Philosophy of Freedom; The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity; and Intuitive Thinking as Spiritual Path). Steiner, while still in his early twenties, was chosen to edit Goethe’s scientific writings for the Weimar edition. Goethe’s influence on Steiner’s thought was enormous.

For the first half of his career, Steiner drew on the traditions of German Idealism, though he also owed a debt to Romanticism, particularly Novalis’s Marian intuitions and communitarianism. Having been born into a working class family, Steiner, though an important intellectual, never lost his appreciation for the lives of the common folk and for what he called the “peasant wisdom.” Indeed, he saw more wisdom in the peasantry than he did in the rampant materialism he found among intellectual elites, certainly a Romantic sensibility. Around the turn of the century, however, Steiner unexpectedly turned to Theosophy, the highly intellectually suspect occult movement founded by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and H.S. Olcott, and at that time directed by Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater.

Why Steiner turned to Theosophy is not at all clear. He was not impressed with his first encounter with the movement, A.P. Sinnet’s book Esoteric Buddhism. He found the table-rapping and sensationalism of the then-vogue spiritualism equally repellent. Steiner, it is true, claimed a kind of clairvoyance achieved through thinking1 (and not through what he called “atavistic clairvoyance”), and his insights led him to affirm the truth of the Eastern notions of karma and reincarnation—ideas certainly central to the quasi-Buddhism/Hinduism of Theosophy. But Steiner was no quasi-Buddhist/Hindu. Indeed, central to his own system (which, subsequent to his break with the Theosophical Society, would later be named Anthroposophy) is what he called “the Event of Golgotha” and the Incarnation of Christ. As Jonael Schickler has written, for Steiner Christianity was not to be understood as one religion among others (certainly the view of Theosophy) “but as a universal and defining spiritual-natural event for humanity; in short as an event with a profound inner logic.”2 Steiner, that is, though an esoteric thinker, was a thoroughly Christian one. In that way, he had much to offer Theosophy. All Theosophy, a tremendously popular phenomenon at the time, had to offer Steiner was an audience receptive to his esoteric ideas.

Though he had grown up in a nominally Catholic household—and spoke feelingly about his time as an altar boy in his local parish—Steiner, a man of his time, in the early part of his career was uninterested in religious questions and had only a passing knowledge of the Bible and theology. However, he came to understand the Incarnation of Christ, culminating in the death and resurrection of Jesus, as the most important event not only in the history of the human race but in the history of the earth and cosmos as well. This understanding came gradually, but it came completely, as Steiner writes in his Autobiography:

“During the period when my statements about Christianity so contradicted my later ones in literal content, a conscious knowledge of true Christianity began to dawn within me. Around the turn of the century this knowledge grew deeper…. This experience culminated in my standing spiritually in in the presence of the Mystery of Golgotha in a most inward, profound and solemn festival of knowledge.”3

Elsewhere, Steiner speculates that had not things turned out as they did in his biography, he would have become a Cistercian priest. “For in the town where I spent my youth,” he told an audience in Arnhem, The Netherlands, on 18 July 1924,

“the Gymnasium was only a few steps away from the Real Schule and it was by a hair's breadth that I went, not to the Gymnasium but to the Real Schule. If, however, at that time I had gone to the Gymnasium in the town, I should have become a priest in the Cistercian Order. Of that there is no doubt whatever. For at this Gymnasium all the teachers were Cistercians. I was deeply attracted to all these priests, many of whom were extremely learned men. I read a great deal that they wrote and was profoundly stirred by it. I loved these priests and the only reason why I passed the Cistercian Order by was because I did not attend the Gymnasium.”4

It is evident in his voluminous writing and lecture transcripts that Steiner, a man who every afternoon at three o’clock would stop whatever he was doing to say the Lord’s Prayer in Latin, is ever mindful of Christ.5 But he did not merely hold the reality of Christ as a personal truth. Rather, he held it to be a tremendously scientific, existential, ontological, and teleological reality. As he spoke in a lecture in 1922:

“Humankind must become increasingly ‘Christened,’ through and through. This, above all, is important—that we experience only here on Earth, as a human being with other human beings, be carried through the gate of death by means of Christianity. This is a most essential truth.”6

Christopher Bamford interviewed for the documentary The Challenge of Rudolf Steiner.

Michael’s latest books are an edition of The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz and Transfiguration: Notes toward a Radical Catholic Reimagination of Everything. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses.

1 As Jonael Schickler has written, Steiner’s “phenomenology of thinking lays a basis for understanding the clairvoyance which grows out of it.” See Jonael Schickler, Metaphysics as Christology: An Odyssey of the Self from Kant and Hegel to Steiner (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005) 139.

2 Jonael Schickler, Metaphysics as Christology, 146

3 Rudolf Steiner, An Autobiography, trans. Rita Stebbing (Blauvelt, NY: Rudolf Steiner Publications, 1977), 319.

4 Rudolf Steiner, Karmic Relationships, Volume VI: Esoteric Studies, trans. E.H. Goddard, D.S. Osmond and M. Kirkcaldy (1971; reprt. Forest Row, UK: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1989), 137.

5 Rudi Lissau, Rudolf Steiner: Life, Work, Inner Path and Social Initiatives (Wallbridge, UK: Hawthorn Press, 1987), 40. He also recommended that Children in Waldorf schools begin the day with the Lord’s Prayer. See Faculty Meetings with Rudolf Steiner, 1919 – 1922, Volume I, trans. Robert Lathe and Nancy Parsons Whittaker (Hudson, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1998), 38.

6 Rudolf Steiner, Isis Mary Sophia: Her Mission and Ours: Selected Lectures and Writings, ed. Christopher Bamford (Herndon, VA: Steiner Books, 2003), 237. Steiner’s emphasis.

In the Season of This Our Exile

Praying amid the ruins. France, 1915

Notes on chronos and kairos:

I. I am not under the impression that Christians realize the import of the words “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you.” Christians are too devoted to politics for that to be possible, or so it seems from the timbre of much of what currently passes for Christian discourse. Not the Kingdom we were looking for. The Parousia is not to come, but is. Perhaps this is too much to bear. Perhaps we prefer deferral.

II. Considering Margaret Barker’s argument that the canon of the Hebrew Bible (the Masoretic text) has been compromised by the political machinations of King Josiah and his scribes, who, she asserts, among other things excised the veneration of Lady Wisdom from Jewish religion and the Bible, and also considering the recent discovery that the importance of Mary Magdalene may likewise have been edited from the New Testament (particularly from John’s Gospel), it’s getting to be more and more of a challenge to accept the integrity of Scripture (forgive me my past sins against you, Bart Ehrman) at least in the sacrosanct way it has been delivered to us. Luther was not the first to project his wishes into Holy Writ.

III. Perhaps Joachim of Fiore was onto something. Only, maybe it was the Age of Sophia he anticipated, and not that of the Holy Spirit. Without a proper vocabulary available to him, he could only work with what he had.

IV. An Age of Sophia would be synonymous with the recognition of the Kingdom of Heaven within us; that is, within the Creation itself as well as within the human heart. This is the parousaic moment, the parousaic movement.

V. The problem, for Christian theologians and philosophers at least, is that these discoveries unsettle what has been long thought to have been settled. People have commitments, obligations, to their own conversion stories, to their training, to this or that tradition into which they landed. To appropriate the language of Pierre Duhem, they wish to “save the phenomena.”1 It can only last so long. Then follows an unraveling.

VI. In the Christian telling of history, the Chosen People forfeited their birthright (Esau usurped by Jacob). Don’t think it can’t happen again.

V. “The history of humanity – or, more precisely, all the horrors of the history of humanity – is, by one word of the Almighty, ‘annulled’; it ceases to exist, and becomes transformed into phantoms or mirages: Peter did not deny; David cut off Goliath’s head but was not an adulterer; the robber did not kill; Adam did not taste the forbidden fruit; Socrates was never poisoned by anyone. The ‘fact,’ the ‘given,’ the ‘real,’ do not dominate us; they do not determine our fate, either in the present, in the future or in the past. What has been becomes what has not been; man returns to the state of innocence and finds that divine freedom, that freedom for good, in contrast with which the freedom that we have to choose between good and evil is extinguished and disappears, or more exactly, in contrast with which our freedom reveals itself to be a pitiful and shameful enslavement. The original sin – that is to say, the knowledge that what is is necessarily – is radically uprooted and torn out of existence. Faith, only the faith that looks to the Creator and that He inspires, radiates from itself the supreme and decisive truths condemning what is and what is not. Reality is transfigured.” ~ Lev Shestov2

VI. We live as exiles in our native land, and know it not.

1 To Save the Phenomena: An Essay on the Idea of Physical Theory from Plato to Galileo, trans. Edmund Doland and Chaniniah Maschler (University of Chicago Press, 1969).

2 Athens and Jerusalem, trans. Bernard Martin (Ohio University Press, 1966), 18-19.

Christian Neopaganism for Dummies

The Feast of Saint John, by Jules Breton (1875)

for Tyler

Happy Solstice.

It was on this day in the Year of Our Lord One-Thousand and Ninety-Two that my very pregnant wife (she was four months along, but looked ten) and I attended a “Summer Greeting Rite” at the invitation of a friend, a millionaire composer and esotericist (I almost wrote “esoterrorist”) and his wife, a professor of psychology. The Rite, I was told, was brought to Canada by British expatriates who still practiced “the Old Religion” (meaning some sort of pre-Christian folk religion) and who wanted to preserve the Rite by releasing it to outsiders. It was kind of a Mummers Play thing, and I was chosen to play a character along the lines of Jack o’ Green or the Fool (no laughing!), more or less the emcee and director of festivities. I don’t recall all of the characters in the play/rite, but I do recall the Lord and Lady of Summer (our hosts). The Rite was followed by feasting, music, drinking, and finally by a game of hide-and-seek wherein the men were to try and catch the Lady and the women the Lord. Whoever caught their targets first were then to reign as Lord and Lady the following year. As it turned out, I caught the Lady and my wife—who was not really participating due to the enormity of her size—almost “accidentally” caught the Lord. As it also turned out, I subsequently had a falling out with my friend and my wife and I were not invited back the following year. So I guess, according to the august and venerable regula of the Rite, we must still be Lord and Lady. Huzzah!

The Rite had a very PG-13 Wicker Man vibe to it (without the human sacrifice, of course) and, while I have my doubts about whether it was some ancient relic of English folk religion or wonder if it was instead a modern imaginative reconstruction of what one might have looked like (there are boatloads of historical research from which to draw, Sir James Frazer’s exhaustive The Golden Bough, though certainly superseded in the interim, effectively provided a vocabulary for the genre), it certainly was a great deal of fun.

Of course, such elements of folk religion need not be understood as antedating the arrival of Christianity in Western Europe (or anywhere else, for that matter). In fact, they were to a profound degree intertwined (Ronald Hutton’s The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year 1400 – 1700 is a classic text on the subject). Indeed, the English poet and Anglican priest Robert Herrick’s Hesperides & Noble Numbers (1648) fairly serves as an instruction manual for mixing Christian (particularly Catholic) along with pagan (as in Roman) and folk religious modes. It’s a chaotic mix, but, like life itself, what a glorious chaos it is. (I write about Herrick in the chapter entitled “Robert Herrick, Little Gidding, and Spectres of an Old Religion” in my book The Incarnation of the Poetic Word). Herrick, who was kicked out from his living as a pastor in Devon when the killjoy Puritans came to power, well knew the value of what we would now call the neopagan elements of rural English Christianity in the seventeenth century, as he writes in his famous poem, “Corinna’s Going a-Maying”:

Rise; and put on your Foliage, and be seene

To come forth, like the Spring-time, fresh and greene;

And sweet as Flora. Take no care

For Jewels for your Gowne, or Haire:

Feare not; the leaves will strew

Gemms in abundance upon you.

Every year at our farm (Stella Matutina), my wife and I host a May Festival (as well as a Michaelmas Festival in September) and for a couple of sessions prior to the event I teach the children who will be in attendance a brace of Maypole dances. At one practice, a couple of the girls, sisters who were usually very enthusiastic, became standoffish. I later discovered that when they told someone at their parish what they would be doing that afternoon (they attend a traditionalist church) they were upbraided by Saint Holyroller for participating in paganism and devil worship. The warmth. Of course, this was exactly the charge laid on Catholics maintaining folk religious customs in early modern England by the Puritan religious police. Alas for reincarnated partypoopers, even if they wear mantillas.

I’ve known many neopagans over the years. Perhaps my favorite was a woman (and her long deceased husband) who hired me as her gardener right about the time my wife became pregnant with our first. Seeing all the tricks I had for helping plants thrive (nettle teas, a deft hand at encouraging recurrent bloom in roses, a gift for pruning trees that borders on mysticism, etc.)—even though she knew I was a practicing Byzantine Catholic, one day she told me, “Michael, you’re more pagan than anyone I’ve ever met.” I hold it as a great compliment.

So, let’s just say I get highly annoyed when any of my religious confreres talk smack about “pagans” or use “pagan” as a pejorative. Neopagans, as far as I’m concerned, are trying to recapture what Christianity, to its shame, has lost: a connection not only to a community and to divinity, but a connection to the cosmos. And by “cosmos” I don’t only mean the stars and the planets, I also mean clouds and soil, birds and animals, rivers and meadows. As I write in The Submerged Reality: Sophiology and the Turn to a Poetic Metaphysics, “Tragically, Wiccans and Neopagans, sensing the loss of something sacred in a cultural milieu surreptitiously poisoned by Enlightenment values, have appropriated for themselves a host of (previously) Christian customs, stripping them of their Christian elements in the process. One can hardly blame them.”1

One of the central insights of Sophiology is that the spiritual and created orders are not so distant as we may have been led to believe. Folk customs, like those mentioned here, tend to acknowledge their coinciding. Christianity, alas, has become more an intellectual or political position-taking or identity than a lived experience. We have replaced life with explanations (... “if you don’t believe in Purgatory yet, just wait until you’ve run through ten weeks of RCIA.”)

It does not need to be this way. I find comfort in the ancient story in Plutarch that, at the moment of the Crucifixion of Christ, a sailor named Thamus heard a voice coming across the sea, crying “Great Pan is dead!”2 Some, like Eusebius, interpreted this as referring to Satan and his power being broken (look around—do you buy this?) but others interpreted it as an evocation of Christ, the God of All (“pan” meaning “all” in Greek).

So, if I’ve learned one thing from Sophiology, it may be that it is nearly impossible to be a good Christian without also being a good pagan, that is, a person connected to the cosmos as well as to community and divinity. Anything else, it seems to me, is simply pathology.

But at my house, we don’t celebrate the Solstice. Our celebration takes place on St John’s Day, the moment the strength of the sun begins to wane; or, in the language of the gospel, when “He must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:30).

I hope that your joy will be complete.

Blessings.

Everyone's favorite neopagan folk-rock band.

Michael's latest book is Transfiguration: Notes toward a Radical Catholic Reimagination of Everything. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses, including courses on Sophiology and Valentin Tomberg’s Meditations on the Tarot.

1 Page 171.

2 De Oraculorum Defectu, 419b-d