The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In Memoriam
by D.N. Dunlop

In making the sad announcement, I am aware that the personal loss on the physical plane is hard to bear. But from our knowledge we know how he would regret if any of us lingered by the road-side to indulge in personal grief.

We were brought into the Movement by the hope that Spirit is victor over Matter; Dr. Steiner has transformed that hope into a firm assurance, and it will be a test of our faith to persevere more strongly than ever in the firm conviction of the truth he has given us, with the steady resolve to carry on the work he has entrusted to our care in closer communion with his sun-lit spirit.

H. Collison,
Secretary General, Anthroposophical Society in Great Britain
—Anthroposophy, April 1925, Vol. IV, No. 4

“Seek him if ye would not seek in vain
There, in the rhythm and music of the whole;
Yea, and for ever in the human soul
Made stronger and more beauteous by his strain.”

In a decade when materialism was at its height, when in the supersensible worlds a war was raging between the powers of light and of darkness, in an age when various forms of atavistic occultism were gaining a greater and greater hold over many minds, a child was born ‘for the healing of the nations’ in a little Austrian village, of peasant parentage, in peasant surroundings. Wise Men once read in the sky scriptures that a Child-Saviour was born in Bethlehem. Not so the ‘Wise Men’ of 1861. They did not know the signs in the heavens which mark the birth of a great Initiate. Rudolf Steiner’s childhood was passed in obscurity and seclusion. A quiet, peaceful Nature revealed her secrets to eyes that already then ‘looked through life and gazed on God’. He tells us of his shyness and retiring disposition, of his deep susceptibility to all the impressions he received from outer life during his early years, of his profound religious sense and his passionate love for the beauty of Nature around him in that Austrian village. We can picture him as he enters his school life, lonely still, for there were few with whom he could share his experiences of that spiritual world which was as real to him as his everyday physical life. For some of his teachers he had the deepest affection, and a few of them, in their turn, loved this child intensely, without, however, understanding the might of the being incarnate there before them. We see him passing on quietly through his educational life to the university, having been intended, so he tells us, for a career of railway engineering, brilliant always, but isolated still in his spiritual life, like an eagle flying in mighty solitude along the blue vault of heaven.

A turning point in his outer life seems to have been reached when he met at the university, Karl Julius Schröer, who perceived with the profound insight inherent in him, that here was no ordinary student, but a young man who could contribute in no small measure to the spiritual culture of his age. It was Schröer who persuaded Rudolf Steiner to enter more intimately into the literary and philosophical life of Central Europe where ample opportunity was afforded him to develop his own world-conception, and to penetrate the world conceptions of other great minds. This period of Steiner’s life gave us ‘The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity,’ ‘Truth and Science,’ ‘Goethe’s World-Conception,’ and many other works as yet too unfamiliar to the philosophical world. Schröer stands as a decisive figure in the course of Rudolf Steiner’s destiny, but even he can have had no more than a dim, semi-conscious perception of the possibilities of his student’s genius. He could not know that here was one who had come to proclaim the true science of the spirit, the science of the Heavens and the Earth, to inaugurate the age of Michael among men.

The 20th century dawns and Rudolf Steiner enters publicly on the sphere of history as a teacher and knower of spiritual and occult truths, at first within the ranks of the Theosophical Society, whose leaders at first respected and then feared him, realising subconsciously that the wealth of his wisdom put their materialistic interpretations of things spiritual in sunless shadow. By the action which deprived the Theosophical Society of Steiner’s cooperation it lost its chance of being the instrument of a truly spiritual influence in this age. And so the years went on. Mighty lecture courses, books, the Goe-theanum, the Waldorf School, Eurhythmy, were given to humanity. Science, Art, Religion and Medicine were permeated by Initiation Wisdom. What a heritage! There was absolutely no sphere of life that Steiner’s genius could not illuminate; he held the pass key to the problems of the Universe. That he had fulfilled the Mystery of the Grail was written in the stars at his death. Not by an accident was his mortal body committed to the elements on the third day of the fourth month – the first Good Friday. He died, as he had lived, in Christ.

And now that the magic of his personal presence has passed into the golden haze of the past, our test has begun. Initiation wisdom is there, the Michael-age has been proclaimed and we have to ‘make good’. For those of us who knew and loved him there can be no talk of sacrifice in our labours for Anthroposophy. There can only be joy that, at least, our karma has enabled us to further Rudolf Steiner’s work in some small degree. He warned us of the West in 1922 that the opposition here would be terrible, meaning that the Ahrimanic powers would wage a mighty war against the spread of Spiritual Science. Ahriman well knows the strength of his weapons; he knows the stupefaction which the senses have brought about in the spiritual life of man; he works consciously in the fear men have in face of concrete spiritual revelation. We should realise that the opposition to Spiritual Science is only just beginning; it will grow stronger and more insidious. The absurdities that we have read lately in certain portions of the press are the mere distant tremor of the thunder that will roll in violence when Anthroposophy begins to come to its own. Therefore for us there must be no compromise with materialism in whatever form it may be; we have to assert a wisdom that is ‘not of this world’ and therefore in its pure form, inaccessible to the darts of Ahriman.

That little wooden building on the Dornach hill is doubly sacred now because of the final tragedy it enshrined – a tragedy indeed, and yet a triumph. For behind the grief that befell us on that March day when the Gates of Death swung open for the spirit we knew as Rudolf Steiner, we could hear the echoes of the trumpets that were sounding for him on ‘the other side’. The hosts of heaven were welcoming him back to the regions which he left for six short decades because he had been mindful of the cries that went up to him from the Earth. The Michael-Wisdom which he proclaimed must now be wrested from the spiritual world and made real in the physical world by us. We must storm the Kingdom of Heaven with our human forces that he made more strong, if his earth mission is not to be in vain. Mighty he was in life, but he may yet be mightier in death if our hearts are strong enough to beat to the sun-rhythm that is his rhythm, if our will is strong enough to embody his will in act.