Rudolf Steiner: Theosophy

About the Author

Rudolf Steiner was born on February 25, 1861, in Kraljevic, in the eastern Slavic provinces of the Austrian Empire. At the time of Steiner’s birth, the vast empire ruled by the Hapsburg monarchy was beginning to dissolve under the pressures for independence among its different populations. After its humiliating defeat against Prussia in the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, the Austrian Empire found that the only way to survive was to strengthen its links with its eastern Slavic provinces. While consenting to greater independence for the Hungarian provinces in internal matters, the central government disregarded appeals for the preservation of the linguistic and cultural heritage of these regions. It tried to force a unified Germanic identity, against which Hungarian patriots vehemently reacted. Steiner was to experience firsthand the cultural clashes that took place in Austria-Hungary, as both of his parents were German speakers from Lower Austria but worked in the eastern provinces for much of his childhood and adolescence. His father, Johann, was an employee of the Austrian Southern Railway. Rudolf was the eldest of the three children born to Johann and his wife, Franziska. Because of their father’s job, the family often moved during Rudolf’s early life, at a time when he had already begun to experience visions of a higher, spiritual world.

For a few years the family lived in the Lower Austrian town of Pottschach, near the Hungarian border, where Steiner received private instruction at his home, owing to disagreements between his father and the village teacher. However, in 1869, the family moved to the Hungarian village of Neudörfl, where patriots were trying to revive the traditional Magyar language and culture in opposition to what they considered the imperialist policies of the Austrian government. Meanwhile, because Steiner’s father wanted him to become a railway civil engineer, his formal studies were mainly scientific and technical. From a very early age, however, he also developed a keen interest in philosophy and psychology. Because his family lived at a subsistence level, Steiner had to use his pocket money to buy secondhand philosophy books. He began reading the German philosopher Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781) at age fourteen and became convinced that he could find the bridge between the material and spiritual worlds only by acquiring and mastering the philosophical method advocated by Kant, which postulates that knowledge is independent of experience. During his childhood and adolescence, Steiner also discovered that he had supersensory abilities. At the age of seven, he saw the form of one of his aunts asking for help; unknown to his family, the aunt had died in a distant town. His childhood visions initially contributed to a deep feeling of loneliness, as he understood that he could not communicate the visions to his friends. With adolescence and maturity, these supersensory perceptions developed in the author the persuasion that he should translate them into conceptual structures so that they could be communicated to others in words.

Steiner’s experiences of ethnic tensions can account for his decision, once his studies at Vienna’s Technical University were complete in 1883, not to live in Austria again. Indeed, the cultural conflicts and crumbling of the existing social and political order left a deep mark on Steiner, as reflected in the cosmopolitanism of Anthroposophy and its rejection of preconceived ideas. He would remark directly in The Threefold Commonwealth (1919) on the failure of Austria-Hungary to find a balance between its peoples that could have had historical significance. Through the 1880s, 1890s, and early twentieth century, Steiner lectured extensively throughout western Europe, with the German cities of Berlin, Munich, and Stuttgart proving particularly important in the development of anthroposophical circles. When World War I broke out, he settled in Dornach, Switzerland, where he supervised the building of the Goetheanum, “a school for spiritual science” that he himself had designed and which would be used to spread Anthroposophy.

The carnage that Steiner witnessed during World War I certainly stimulated his reflection on life after death, which became a major theme in his postwar works. After the conflict, Steiner continued lecturing to disseminate anthroposophical ideas through initiatives with an ever-widening scope, embracing pedagogy, medicine, and agriculture. The folly of the war had persuaded Steiner that cultural renewal was essential, and to such a process he devoted the last years of his life, continuing to lecture tirelessly and focusing, in particular, on education. His ideas in this area gave rise to the first Waldorf School in 1919. Despite disagreements within the Anthroposophical Society, the burning of the Goetheanum in 1922 (with arson suspected), and his weakening health, Steiner embarked on a major reformation of the society he had founded, a project he worked on until his death on March 30, 1925.