The Life and Work of Rudolf Steiner
The Turn of the Century
Upon one who is called to the spiritual guidance of mankind, the destiny of the world bears heavily. Not to destroy the law is he sent, but to fulfill it. He is pledged to the primal law of evolution—spiritual continuity. He is linked to millennia of the past, let the future call as it will. Upon his shoulders presses the responsibility for what has already come to be, as well as that which is to come. No new chapter will he write, if he has not thrust his roots deeper than others into earlier times and sensed their meaning in good and evil across the ages. He must have looked into the faces of those Spiritual Powers who, behind outer appearance, lead forward or hold in check the world process. For him, the beginning of a new century denotes retrospection and meditation in alert consciousness, in order to be able to fathom the world's plan, its laws of growth and its contradictions, before setting out to mold the contours of a new century by the means of knowledge, word, and deed.
In the year 1900, Rudolf Steiner completed his work on Conceptions of the World and of Life in the Nineteenth Century, which he later amplified, under the title The Riddles of Philosophy, to a history of human thought from antiquity to the present day. In the preface to this historical-spiritual retrospect he says:
“A fruitful idea must have its roots in the evolutionary processes which man has to pass through in the course of his historical development. ... Evolution itself must be taken far more seriously than is generally done if one is to find one's way in this domain.... Whoever wishes to regard the chronicles of human thought-development from a correct standpoint should be capable of admiration for the greatness of the thought of an epoch and must be able to work up the same enthusiasm upon seeing this idea expose its imperfection in a following epoch... The disposition to see earlier modes of thought as imperfect and superseded by present-day `perfect thoughts' is unfit to understand the philosophic development of mankind. I have tried, through grasping the significance of the fact that one age refutes the philosophy of a preceding one, to comprehend the course of human thought-development.... With the history of thought more than with some other branch of historical observation the only possible course is to see how the present develops out of the past.”
In Chapter I the truth is already emphasized that “the history of the philosophical evolution of mankind brings the proof of the presence of objective spiritual impulses—wholly independent of man—which develop progressively.” The thoughts of God and the thoughts of man determine the destiny of the earth. A true Prometheus as well as Epimetheus, man must begin a new century by examining where he stands in consciousness. Hence at the beginning of that work of retrospect written by Rudolf Steiner in the year 1900 there are found the words: “Know thyself.”
Let us inquire into the outward situation and inward mood in which mankind bade farewell to the past century. To be sure, no previous epoch had so greatly estranged humanity from the knowledge of its spiritual nature and origin, had to all appearances so enriched humanity outwardly, yet so impoverished the race inwardly. If, for a moment, we bring to memory the mood that held sway, we find not only that a tremendous wave of centrifugal force had, through the birth of new kingdoms or the expansion of existing empires, driven man far afield, but also that in the realm of knowledge, natural science, and technology, the so-called triumphal procession of discovery had made progress in physics, chemistry, and biology, giving him the belief that his kingdom was now and forever really of this world. It seemed as if man were able to expand his being, his thought and will, across every kingdom of nature. With the energy and self-complacency of the conqueror, he had jettisoned, as it were, the ballast of the past and directed his vision into distances from which apparently there was no return. Yet the spiritual rhythm of life demands of men that exhalation shall be followed by inhalation, expansion by contraction, and self-expenditure by self-recollection.
The reverence for cosmic Creative Powers in primeval times, the knowledge of the inner light of the human being in the mystics of the Middle Ages, and everything connected with this had disappeared when the electric light became a thing in daily use. Man was filled with pride at his mastery over such an earthly force. Only a few lonely souls warned that humanity had not come any closer to the real nature of the Creation or of light. But more and more voices questioned as the end of the century approached whether it was right to employ technology for the creation of weapons of immeasurable destruction; whether there was possibly as much evil as good in the increasing speed of transportation and the multiplication of labor-saving machines. Looking back upon this turn of the century, one thoughtful observer wrote: “But, since the 'nineties of the last century, an increasing mood of the twilight of the gods has permeated the world....” Humanity passed out of the final stage of one century into a new age in confusion between exultation over its achievements and profound depression, between pride and shame, external assurance and inner helplessness.
Rudolf Steiner's attitude at this time is characterized by a clear recognition of the extremes of the age for what they were. He saw that man would win nothing by merely describing this world of the twilight of the gods with the fine gesture of the man of letters or the world-remote isolation of the hermit; but that he would also win nothing by tenaciously clinging to what had once been achieved, surrendering science and technology to their own laws of development. He sought out all such extremists, searchers after the spirit and subjugators of matter, in their individual spheres of activity, but only in order to deliver them from one-sidedness and provide them with enlarged scope through a higher synthesis of both worlds.
In a suburb of the largest city of Middle Europe, where these extremes were ruthlessly pitted against each other in all their crassness, there arrived shortly before the turn of the century a man approaching the end of his thirties. Born in Eastern Europe of Austrian peasant stock, having acquired the technical and academic training of the West, schooled in the afterglow of the cultural center at Weimar, where, through editing with a commentary scientific works of Goethe, he had retrieved these for a new age, he now chose his place in the midst of the chaos where of all places, as Nietzsche had said, the possibility existed for a new star to be born. Let us pursue the simple facts of this career.
After the close of that period of his life-span in Austria and then at the Goethe Archives in Weimar, Rudolf Steiner had settled three years before the end of the century in the center of intensive activity which Berlin then was, where men from North, South, East, and West congregated, and where the hope was entertained that life's pulse-beat would be stronger there and the spirit of the times expressed in clearer outline than elsewhere. In one of its many lodging houses he took up his quarters, first at No. 11 Strassburgerstrasse and then in 1901 at No. 95 Kaiserallee, more on the periphery.
Of necessity, he had been accustomed always to earning his own living. As a spiritual worker, he found his place among the spiritual fighters of his time. Whereas at Weimar, however, at the Goethe Archives, he had worked in the quiet and sedate atmosphere of learning with its bias toward the past, in Berlin he now found himself in a world of a different kind. It was as if this course of life stripped off in its first three phases external sheaths woven out of the past. Born and having grown up in the tradition-soaked environment of the Austrian Empire prior to the turn of the century, he had been led by the succeeding phase of his existence at Weimar to the place where the unique cultural heritage of Goethe was guarded. The seed resting there in the Archive-catacombs he brought to the light of the sun and planted in fertile ground, pregnant for the future. The retrograde atmosphere of Weimar was unfavorable to further development; the steps of his life from Austria by way of Weimar on to Berlin led him to cross also thresholds of time which manifested themselves as well in the life-trends of the surrounding world.
When, twenty-four years later, Rudolf Steiner once walked with me through the streets of Weimar and, entering vividly into the past, pointed out in his genial manner the places where he had lived and labored—the Goethe Archives, his own lodgings, the cafe where he used to meet learned men and artists of an evening—I could begin to understand what a deliberate leap into the abyss of the unknown and formless it must have been for him when, at the change of the century, he moved to Berlin, where, amid the throng of outer events, one would feel one's loneliness and self-dependence all the more acutely.
Since he felt, however, that an orientation of values according to the past must not be brought to an abrupt end, even though one bore within oneself a compass for the guidance of future destiny, he sought from the beginning for contacts with such circles in Berlin as, following the lead. of personalities of the past or marching under the banner of what they believed to belong to the future, were prepared to collaborate together in spiritual activity. Hence in those years he gave lectures before the Free Literary Society, the Association for Technological Pedagogy, classes in the Workers' Continuation School, the Free Technical College, the Giordano Bund, the society known as Die Kommenden, the Association for the Furtherance of Art. It was in just these fields of activity that he had already amassed considerable experience—for example, through his earlier lectures in Vienna before various types of scientific organizations of educational circles.
The rare thing about Rudolf Steiner, however, was that he integrated within this broadening into the general human sphere of learning, teaching, and striving spiritual concentration, deepening, and self-discipline through persevering meditation, which gave it direction and content. He stood alone with this rhythm of soul and spirit within that sea of buildings and stream of life. To him, because of the whole course of his development, were denied those helps which were at the disposal of many others through church connections from the past. Although Austrian born of a Roman Catholic family, his development as described in his autobiography had led him from the beginning into the orbit, then emancipated from the Church, of those scientific and academic circles which were entirely devoted to the natural sciences. At the same time, through the experience of an actual spiritual background, he was placed under the necessity through personal knowledge and direct spiritual guidance of searching for an entirely new path of inward training, adapted to the level of consciousness of the approaching age, the necessity of discovering and building this up within himself. Respect for the privacy of the individual permits us here to do no more than to mention the description given by Rudolf Steiner himself in The Course of My Life, and in lectures. He there refers to his conscious contact with the dead while still a youth, and to a new world of "spiritual impression" in his fourteenth year, and to the renewed and profound revolution in experiencing an actual spiritual world during that significant period of life, his thirty-fifth year. He then describes how, immediately preceding the turn of the century, the reception and experience of spiritual impressions became increasingly and methodically transformed within him into spiritual discipline by means of the practice of intensified meditation and concentration. He reports this inward process in the following words:
“Associated with the revolution in my soul-life were inner experiences of grave import for me. I came to know in the inner experience of the soul the nature of meditation and its importance for an insight into the spiritual world. Already before this time I had lived a life of meditation, but the impulse to this had come from knowing through ideas its value for a spiritual world view. Now, however, something came about within me which required meditation as a necessity of existence for the life of the soul. The soul-life, at the stage then attained, needed meditation just as an organism at a certain stage in its evolution needs to breathe by means of lungs.
“In such meditation, practiced because of the inner requirement of the spiritual life, the consciousness gradually evolves of an ‘inner spiritual man’ who, in complete detachment from the physical organism, can live, perceive, and move within the spiritual. This self-sufficing spiritual man entered into my experience under the influence of meditation. The experience of the spiritual thereby underwent an important deepening.”
What is significant for Rudolf Steiner's future is that this inward development was for him never focused merely upon self-redemption or personal benefit, but always upon common tasks connected with the total development of mankind. Thus he says:
“Thus I experienced at that time from all sides the question: ‘How can a way he found in order to bring that which is inwardly beheld as true into forms of expression that can be understood by the age?’ When one has such an experience, it is as if in some way or other the necessity exists of climbing up to an almost inaccessible mountain peak. The endeavor is made from various points of departure; one continues to stand there after all these efforts, which must be considered as futile. . . .
“And this question became inner experience: Must one become silent?
“With this state of my inner life I then faced the necessity of introducing into my outer activity an entirely new note. No longer could the forces which determined my outer destiny remain in such unity as hitherto with those inner directives which came from my experience of the world of spirit.”
He was now faced with the two extremes—the scientific world derived from the nineteenth century which, in spite of duBois-Reymond's ignorabimus in his Limits of Natural Science, yet set up as a postulate the idea of an absolute dominion in the sphere of human thought; and on the opposite side the inner world, which beheld with the vision of the spirit that beyond those limits also reality exists. In this situation one of the paths along which Rudolf Steiner sought to approach his "mountain peak" could at that moment be made accessible to man only by means of lectures and literary activity.
The external occasion of his transferring from Weimar to Berlin was his taking over the editorship of the Magazin für Literatur. In this magazine and its supplement, Dramaturgische Blätter, he now began to publish numerous articles on important questions of the day and outstanding personalities living at that time, as well as scientific and artistic problems. And, through this magazine, he provided the opportunity for many other progressive personalities of the scientific and literary realms to ventilate their own views on questions which were agitating the world.
In spite of spiritual loneliness, Rudolf Steiner was decidedly a sociable person, to whom the vital stir of varied contacts with other people was a necessity. His touch with world affairs was intimate, and through his social intercourse with other significant personalities he became well versed in all the phenomena of the age. Because his roots reached ever to greater depths in spirit realms, he was able to enjoy in an external environment alien to the spirit an intense and understanding intercourse with others without running the risk of losing sight of his mission.
To enliven serious and animated discussion, that indispensable element of human intercourse, humor also came into its own. Many an amusing jest from that period remains on record. Indeed, many companions of those days who knew him only superficially remembered only this side of his nature. Many a time he was to be found in those places where the cultural world—comprising both the actual and the would-be leaders of art, literature, and music—was wont to gather of an evening: for instance, at the cafe Nollendorf, where Wolzogen, Peter Hille, Nikisch, Busoni, Oscar and Richard Strauss foregathered. As editor of the magazine, he was able to feel the pulse of the life and activity in this province of art. He used to relate how, during those days of companionship and discussion, it often happened that in the evening several young literary men met in the rooms of a friend living in the suburbs who, being fond of a good argument lasting throughout the night, was in the habit of throwing into the discussion some particularly paradoxical bone of contention, about midnight when the last train left for the city, so that in the heat of battle the last train was forgotten and the friends were forced to spend the rest of the night in argument.
But through it all devotion to his great mission was consistently maintained, and as much of that treasure which he carried within him was dispensed to the world around him as it was capable of receiving and spiritually assimilating. It was one of Rudolf Steiner's unfailing habits never to speak over the heads of his listeners nor to overtax their receptive capacity, but always to find contact with the existent capabilities. If we turn to a few characteristic themes in his articles in the Magazin für Literatur about the turn of the century, we find Goethe's Hidden Revelation (August 1899), Basic Ideas for the Understanding of Goethe's Inner Life ( July 1900), Morality and Christianity (August 1900). While the Goethean world of spirit and Christian discipline thus stood at the center of his spiritual striving, conflicting opposites—natural science on the one hand, religious tradition and mysticism on the other—at the same time made their demands on one who was determined to look the realities of his time in the face. Later on there were to be found those who misconstrued as an inconsistency the fact that he was ready at one moment to address people devoted, for example, to Giordano Bruno's world of ideas and at another those who were disposed to find salvation from the petrified thinking of the times through recourse to Medieval mysticism. The contradiction lay, however, in the nature of the times and the Powers in the background, clearly recognized by him; and, if he addressed both types of men in their own language, he was thus able by his balance to lead them out of their one-sidedness to a recognition of those elements in both aspects which were of permanence and value. He pointed also to what deviated from the future path of mankind or to that which was capable of transformation and fructification through the sources of old and new spirituality. With this goal in view, he was able in the same week to give a lecture one evening in the Giordano Bruno Bund and on another to speak in the Theosophical Library on Mysticism at the Beginning of Modern Spiritual Life and Its Relation to Modern World Concepts (translated under the title Mystics of the Renaissance); and thus out of the same inner substance to satisfy quite different types of persons with the new impulses which they needed.
To the believers in Monism at the Giordano Bruno Bund, who were infected to a large extent with materialism, a knowledge, scientifically tenable, of the divine-spiritual such as a true Theosophy could have given seemed something unattainable, even absurd; whereas those Theosophists who had not, like Rudolf Steiner, gone through the scientific training of the West but leaned upon the Eastern spiritual material of the past, execrated materialism instead of courageously penetrating the sphere of what they believed to be evil and forcing open the locked gates. To rescue both from one-sidedness was the task which Rudolf Steiner set himself. In a lecture delivered years later, he describes in a magnificent picture what it was which made it possible for him to speak, for example, to seeking human beings in the Giordano Bruno Bund. He said:
"He who has a knowledge of man's spiritual course of development knows that truth has always had to overcome obstacles to its development. One has only to think how Giordano Bruno had to confront a mankind which had always held the belief : Above is the blue vault of heaven which bounds space. Giordano Bruno had to say to these people: There is nothing where you behold that blue vault of heaven; you yourselves place it there with your own eyes. Space extends into infinity, and infinite worlds dwell therein. What Giordano Bruno then did for physical sight, spiritual science has to do for the psycho-spiritual and for the temporal. For the psycho-spiritual, a kind of firmament is also there, on the one side birth, or let us say conception, on the other side death. Yet this firmament is in truth just as little real as the blue firmament above; but only because one can see no further with the ordinary human capacity of knowledge than birth, or conception, and death, one believes that there is a boundary, just as the belief once existed that the firmament was a boundary."
Strange mental combinations must have arisen when Rudolf Steiner presented suddenly in this would-be thoughtful yet hardened milieu the ideas of Scholasticism, pointing out its merits in comparison with the one-sidedness of Kantianism. He dared at that time to speak, for example, at the Giordano Bruno Bund on the spiritual significance and achievement of Thomas Aquinas. Similarly it must have caused much heart-burning and even some external excitement at the school for working men when he gave upon invitation a lecture on history. Expecting a pleasant materialistic Marxist flavor, his hearers were indeed regaled with a straightforward discourse on the broad spiritual outlines and impulses in the history of man. This demanded inflexible and incontrovertible knowledge of the subject as well as inner freedom such as only one possesses who is determined to follow no master but his own inner vision and mission. It must have been as if a lightning flash cleared that twilight of the gods at the turn of the century in that great metropolis when, one evening in 1902 in the Giordano Bruno circle and amid the illustrious leaders of the scientific world and their docile followers, Rudolf Steiner made his first public confession of a true Theosophy and Anthroposophy. In the full vividness of a personal experience, one of the members of the Bund—later for many years a valued member of the Anthroposophical Society—Frl. Johanna Mücke, described to me the resulting uproar and how groups of members afterwards stood about the street till three o'clock in the morning, in lively discussion. She, not knowing what to think about the new impulse, frankly asked Rudolf Steiner the next day, somewhat doubting but greatly thirsting for knowledge: "What actually is this Theosophy? Is it spiritism?" To which he replied : "On the contrary, I have never been a materialist, and the spiritists are the worst materialists of all." He then and there categorically dissociated himself from such by-paths, which tend to lead the spirit into the sphere of the senses instead of releasing it from the chains of materialistic thought.
A similar task of releasing certain spiritually-minded persons from the fetters of thinking spread over certain groups was awaiting Rudolf Steiner in the opposite direction. It was necessary to demonstrate the principles and potentialities of a spiritual science born out of an exact Western type of knowledge to such persons as were striving to find escape from the materialism of the age through a perpetuation of Medieval mysticism, or through a Theosophy with an Oriental direction. It may well be regarded as one of those occurrences due, not to mere chance, but to immanent spiritual current and rhythm of history, that precisely at the turn of the century Count and Countess Brockdorff arranged meetings in the library of their home, where culture and spiritual values were prominent, and that they also invited Rudolf Steiner to lecture there. After lecturing in this home in September 1900 on Nietzsche and on Goethe, he began a course of lectures on October 6, which extended throughout the winter and which later appeared in book form and has been translated under the title Mystics of the Renaissance. Thus the Michaelmas period of 1900 saw the inauguration of a new phase in his activity. In the following winter of 1901-1902 he delivered before the same circle the introductory lectures on the fundamentals of his Christian world-picture: Christianity as Mystical Fact and the Mysteries of Antiquity.
The year 1900 saw the birth of Anthroposophy, only a small germ at the beginning planted in the souls of seeking men of many types, but blessed by the spirit of a new epoch and nurtured by one whom the divine spiritual world had endowed with the necessary courage, strength, and capacity to bring it to fulfillment. The cosmic Sylvester was followed by a cosmic New Year in that complete hush which, from time immemorial, has attended the birth of a new historical-spiritual impulse. Those who, after the passage of a catastrophic half-century, are able to contemplate with quiet mind and alert spirit the later spectacle of the employment of violence by contending human forces will recognize that this struggle is a never-ending one and that the spiritual seed will need many generations for its ripening. But two decades later Rudolf Steiner was able in retrospect to establish the fact, so potent for the future, that "the Anthroposophical Movement was founded at the beginning of the century." It has already been mentioned that, recognizing the laws of spiritual evolution and conforming with them, he deliberately made connection with whatever had hitherto been achieved through historical and spiritual tradition, even if temporarily it had disappeared from man's consciousness and sunk into oblivion. Thus, too, the name "Anthroposophy" is linked with the spiritual striving of great personalities of the past. As the term was earlier used, however, only as a philosophical designation and went no further, the task now was to endow it with inner life, spirit breath, and earthly reality in human action. In a note appended to a printed lecture of January 11, 1916, Rudolf Steiner referred to this prior philosophical history of the term "Anthroposophy," saying that it:
"arose at the present time, not as something thought out but as a fulfillment of hopes which are to be observed in the spiritual process of development of the West. Here only two examples will be given out of much that could be advanced in support, which show that Anthroposophy is a thing long thought about. In 1835 Troxler, a too little honored thinker of the first half of the nineteenth century, published Lectures on Philosophy. In it occurs the sentence: `If it is much to be welcomed that the latest philosophy ... must reveal itself in every Anthroposophy ... thus in poetry and in history, it must not be overlooked that this idea can be no fruit of speculation, nor can the real personality or individuality of man be confused either with what appears as subjective spirit or as ultimate ego or with what it is confronted with as absolute spirit or absolute personality.' And what Troxler brings forward as his idea of an Anthroposophy is joined to sentences which plainly show how close he is to the assumption of essential members of the human organism beyond the physical body. He says: `Even earlier, the philosophers distinguished between a subtle exalted soul-body and the cruder body, or regarded this as a kind of sheath for the spirit, which bore upon it an image of the body, called by them Schema and which was for them the inner, higher man.' The connection in which Troxler uses these words and his whole world conception give evidence in him of attempts which may be justified by a spiritual science in the sense of these writings. Only because Troxler is not in a position to recognize that Anthroposophy is possible only through development of soul capacities in the direction indicated by this writing did he fall short in his view which, compared with what J. G. Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel accomplished, did not constitute an advance but a retrograde movement... With I. H. Fichte, the son of the great philosopher, ... one finds the sentence : `But even anthropology finishes with the conclusion, reasoned in a great variety of facets, that man, alike in the true character of his being and the actual source of his consciousness, belongs to a supersensible world. Sense-consciousness, on the contrary, and the phenomenal world which appears to his eye together with all sense-life, even that of man, have no other significance than merely to be the seat where that supersensible life of the spirit is consummated, in which, by its own act in free consciousness, it introduces the spirit content of ideas into the sense world.... This basic conception of the being of man elevates anthropology in its final aspect to Anthroposophy.'
“Regarding these sentences, I. H. Fichte says: ‘Thus in the last resort anthropology in itself is able to find finality and support only in Theosophy.’ The fact that I. H. Fichte, too, failed to reach an Anthroposophy with his own world-conception, but fell behind J. G. Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, is due to the same reason as with Troxler. These examples will suffice here for abundance of spiritual-scientific facts which show that the Anthroposophical spiritual science set forth in these pages corresponds with a long-standing scientific endeavor. I referred to these utterances of I. H. Fichte (which had for me the appearance of a modern spiritual current of thought rather than only the opinion of an individual) in a lecture which I gave at the Giordano Bruno Bund in 1902, when a beginning was being made of that which appears now as the Anthroposophical method of presentation. One sees from this that an enhancement of modern cosmological ideas to a veritable perception of spiritual reality was in view. The attempt which was being made was not to extract some opinion or other from the publications which were then called Theosophical and are still so named, but to continue the endeavor which had been begun by the later philosophers but with them had become bogged down in abstraction, and therefore had not been able to find access to the true world of spirit. This continuation appeared to me as an extension of the world conception which Goethe did not express but did experience as his theory of nature, described by him as `conforming with spirit.’”
There were thus three currents of human endeavor which Rudolf 'Steiner at the change of the century rescued from becoming submerged in the unconscious mind of humanity: the gifts of the great figures of German Idealism; the sources, which had remained unconquered through the centuries, of an esoteric Christianity; and the spirit-permeated natural science of true Goetheanism, threatened with extinction by the nineteenth century dogmas of materialism.
Whether, as at first, it was to small private audiences that he lectured or, as in 1921, to an audience of 3,000 at the Philharmonic Hall in Berlin, he invariably tried to maintain a personal contact with the many who were seeking instruction from him, although later on this could be done only with a selected few. Formerly there was almost always intimate conversation after every lecture, with questions and answers. A small characteristic example from the year 1903 may be related which was mentioned to me by Frl. Mücke, a keen listener. Rudolf Steiner had been speaking on the history of literature; and, during the discussion after the lecture, she said to the lecturer who, by the way, in private talk often liked to express himself in his native Austrian dialect: “Herr Doctor, it is noticeable sometimes when you don't like a poet." Dr. Steiner: "So? That's against the rules! Which one, then?” Answer: "Heine." Dr. Steiner: “That's true, for I don't like him a bit” Regarding Heine, he had once written: “He takes a flight of fancy to the loftiest heights of feeling, only to pour scorn upon them in a capricious willfulness.”
In the forefront of his lectures in 1900 stood two personalities regarding whom, as a result of the closest personal research, he was highly qualified to speak—namely, Goethe, to whose writings on natural science, in spite of their having been brushed aside by the scientific thought of the nineteenth century, he now gave a central position in future research in nature; and Nietzsche, whom he had visited on his sick bed and whose tragic fate afforded such forceful proof that the hour had come when man must be called to a true spirit knowledge. In his work Nietzsche as an Adversary of His Age, Rudolf Steiner had as early as 1895 drawn attention to these perils.
To illustrate the comprehensive character of Dr. Steiner's knowledge, it may be mentioned that, in addition to the lectures already referred to on philosophy, history, literature, and art, he was invited to speak before scientific groups. Thus, for example, he spoke to the Association for Technological Pedagogy on the theme Methods of Treatment of the Law of the Conservation of Energy in Technical College Instruction. During the
second half of 1900, speaking each Friday evening, he delivered a course of lectures on The History of Culture in Outline from the Beginning of Civilization to the Present Day. He used also to speak at special celebrations. On June 17, 1900, he spoke on invitation before an audience of 7,000 on the occasion of quincentenary Gutenberg jubilee on Gutenberg's Deed as a Landmark in Cultural Development. At the same time he was lecturing each week to the very small circle gathered at the Theosophical Library of Count and Countess Brockdorff on Mystics of the Renaissance.
During 1901 the series of lectures initiated during the previous year were continued. We may mention certain typical themes and audiences of the early part of this year: on January 6, 1901 before students in a school for working men, Modern Enthusiasts and Scientists; on February 13, before university students, Haeckel's Riddle of the Universe; on May 9, the address at the funeral of his friend Ludwig Jacobowski. Thus he was already active in manifold ways in scientific, artistic, social, and religious circles in this world city.
One of the fundamental courses of lectures which Dr. Steiner gave during the same period in the Kreis der Kommenden bore the title From Buddha to Christ. It is highly significant that, a year before he consented to place himself at the disposal of the Theosophical Society as its General Secretary and teacher, he had already publicly indicated in so emphatic a manner that the excessively strong Oriental trend in that movement did not meet his approval; that for him, on the contrary, the way led from Buddha to Christ, and that his world picture was anchored, therefore, in Christianity from the very beginning. In The Course of My Life he himself said:
“In these expositions I sought to show what a mighty advance the Mystery of Golgotha signifies in comparison with the Buddha Event, and how the evolution of humanity, as it strives toward the Christ Event, approaches its culmination.”
If one considers Rudolf Steiner's lectures and writings of that time, dealing as they do with such polar opposites as Haeckel's Riddle of the Universe and his own Mystics of the Renaissance, it is scarcely to be wondered at that there were persons who pretended to see a contradiction in the very coexistence of such opposite themes. He wrote, therefore, in September 1901 in the Foreword to the first edition of his Mystics of the Renaissance:
“What I am presenting in this work formed earlier the substance of lectures which I gave at the Berlin Theosophical Library last winter. I was invited by Count and Countess Brockdorff to speak before an audience on Mysticism, to whom the matters there discussed were an important living question. Ten years ago I should not have ventured to comply with such a wish. Not that the body of ideas to which I gave expression did not dwell in me then. This world of ideas is already fully contained in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity (1894) . But to give expression to it as I do today and make it a basis for a course of reflections as has occurred in this book, something quite different is required from being firmly convinced of its intellectual truth. There is required an intimate intercourse with this world of ideas such as only many years of life can give one. Only now, after having enjoyed this intimate intercourse, do I dare to speak in the manner of this book. One who does not enter my world of ideas without prejudice will discover in it contradiction after contradiction. Only recently I dedicated a book on the world conceptions of the nineteenth century (1900) to the great natural scientist Ernst Haeckel, and ended it with a justification of his realm of thought. In the exposition following on mysticism I speak with full approval of the mystics, from Meister Eckhart to Angelus Silesius. Other contradictions to which my attention is drawn by some one or other I will not mention. I am not surprised if, on the one hand, I am branded as a mystic and on the other hand as a materialist... Any one who, like me, ploughs his own furrow is bound to meet with many misunderstandings.”
Recognized by now as a great Goethe expert, Rudolf Steiner published in August 1900 an essay in which, referring to similar reproaches leveled at Goethe, he stated the issue thus:
"It is necessary to probe to the core of his personality, which to a great extent lies hidden behind his utterances. What he says may often seem contradictory; what he expresses in his life belongs always to a consistent whole."
This sentence is applicable to Rudolf Steiner himself. We have already indicated above how, speaking from the vantage point of a middle position made it possible—indeed, rendered it a duty—to do justice to both aspects, so that the resulting synthesis is no longer a contradiction.
The autumn of 1901 saw in addition to the above lecture course another lecture before The Free Literary Society on Haeckel, Tolstoi, and Nietzsche, a course of lectures on German Spiritual Life in the Nineteenth Century, and in November a public lecture on Goethe's Fairy Tale, the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. This esoteric fairy tale became later deeply significant as providing an impulse for Rudolf Steiner's Mystery Dramas. True to his general task, he spoke on November 22 to the students of the Technical College on Hegel, and he afterwards devoted much writing and lecturing to the great philosophers of German Idealism. As a former student at the Vienna Technical College, he must have felt particularly at home among the students of this school.
The great event of this winter season was the fundamental lecture course on Christianity as Mystical Fact, which appeared in print the following year. Especially deserving of mention are the Forewords which Rudolf Steiner himself prefixed to his works, in each of which is often expressed the position to which he had attained at the time in relation to life and knowledge. They also give a picture of the opposition with which he had to contend or the misunderstandings he met with. Thus he says in the Foreword to this volume:
“The contents of this book alone can prove that its author does not designate as mystical a point of view which tends more to knowledge based on vague feeling than to strict scientific exposition. In wide circles mysticism is understood at the present in such a way and is, therefore, held by many to be a realm of human soul-life which can have nothing to do with real science. As used in this book, the term mysticism is intended to designate spiritual fact which can be known in its essence only when the perception is derived from the sources of spiritual life itself...
“At present, many people have the strongest antipathy to such means of knowledge. They regard them as contradicting true scientific methods. This is so, not only with those who are prepared to admit the validity only of their own pattern of world conception, based on what they call a real natural-scientific system of cognition, but also with those who, as believers in Christianity, wish to consider its nature. The author of this work takes his stand on the basis of a conception which looks upon the natural-scientific discoveries of the new age as a challenge to ascend to a true mysticism. This conception is able to show that any other attitude toward knowledge is in direct contradiction with everything which these scientific conquests have to offer. With such methods of cognition as are alone applied by many who believe they stand on the firm ground of natural science the facts of this science can simply not be grasped. Only those who are able to admit that doing full justice to our admirable present-day natural science may be reconciled with a true mysticism will not reject this book.”
In this connection, attention must be drawn to the present confusion between one form of mysticism and another, although each of these, if properly understood, is rooted in an entirely different attitude of soul. The practice of a Meister Eckhart, for example, is not mysticism in the sense of what nowadays is mostly practiced under that name, which is no such thing in the strict sense of the word, but simply a false kind of mysticism, of a sort firmly rejected by Rudolf Steiner. The word mysticism was applied by him in his book in the sense of "spiritual training," a training, indeed, just as exact in its methods as that prevailing in research in nature or in the laboratory. Only, in this case, it is man and his spiritual principles as well as the spiritual in the universe which is the subject of research. It was, therefore, with justification that Rudolf Steiner adopted the name spiritual science. Regarding his early writings at the turn of the century, he observed:
“Let it be noted how, in my Mystics of the Renaissance and Christianity as Mystical Fact, the concept of mysticism leads in the direction of this objective cognition. And one should observe especially how my Theosophy is built up. At each step made in this book, spiritual vision stands in the background. Nothing is said which does not proceed from this spiritual vision. But, as the steps are made, it is the natural-scientific ideas at the beginning in which the vision is clothed until gradually it has to become active, in rising to the higher worlds, more and more in a free picturing of the spiritual world. But this picturing grows out of the natural-scientific element like the blossom out of the stalk and leaves of a plant. Just as the plant is not seen in its completeness when observed only as far as the blooming, in the same way nature is not experienced in its fullness if one fails to rise from the sensible to the spiritual. Thus did I strive in Anthroposophy to bring to manifestation an objective extension of science.”
Regarding the progress of his inward development in those years, he said:
“There was the added fact that I at no time penetrated to the spirit realm along the path of mystical feeling, but constantly desired to proceed by way of crystal-clear concepts. The experiencing of concepts, of ideas, led me out of the ideal into what is spiritually real. The real evolution of the organic world from primeval times until the present arose before my imagination only after I had worked out my Views of Life and the World (1900) ...Man, as a microcosmic entity, who carried within him all the rest of earthly creation and who has become a microcosm by throwing off the rest,—this was for me a revelation to which I attained only during the early years of the new century”
That period of the turn of the century was, therefore, in many respects of decisive significance for Rudolf Steiner's inner development.
In Christianity as Mystical Fact is discussed the period of preparation for Christianity in the ancient Mysteries, but also the uniqueness of the Christ Event. After having recognized in a spiritual-scientific manner the nature of man in his cosmic origin, he laid the foundations for a picture of the universe, in which the spiritual, macrocosmic and world-historical act of Christ could be grasped both religiously and in knowledge. Thus, before the decisive step which he took in the year 1902, Rudolf Steiner had that winter once again made unmistakably clear his positive attitude both toward natural-scientific knowledge and toward the spiritual truths of Christianity.