Rudolf Steiner: Theosophy

Context

The cultural seeds for the composition of Theosophy and the establishment of the discipline as a “spiritual science” date back to Steiner’s scientific studies at Vienna’s Technical University in the late 1870s. There Steiner studied mathematics, biology, physics, and chemistry as principal subjects, coming to understand the importance of scrupulous research. Significantly, Steiner’s doctorate, which he would obtain in Germany in 1891 at Rostock University, would be on the relationship between truth and science in the thinking of the German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte and would be published in 1892 as Truth and Science. Fichte’s influence on Steiner would be lasting, and the German idealist is quoted at the beginning of Theosophy.

At the same time, Steiner developed a keen interest in the classics, the arts, and the humanities. As a result of his double focus on science and classics, Rudolf was fascinated by the German poet and intellectual Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s scientific writings, whose spiritual view on the world he came to share. At only twenty-two years of age, Steiner was appointed to edit Goethe’s scientific writings for the Deutsche National Literatur, a scholarly series of German literary classics, and this task acquainted him with Goethe’s notion of the “sensory-supersensory” form, which would be an important influence on Theosophy. This form represents an interposition between natural vision and spiritual perception, between a sensory and a spiritual apprehension. At this point, Steiner became clearly interested in overcoming the boundaries of single disciplines and to depart from received notions of what formed orthodox and acceptable fields of enquiry. Goethe showed Steiner that thinking could be an organ of perception just as a material organ like an ear or an eye. While these organs perceive material events, thinking recognizes ideas.

Goethe’s “sensory-supersensory form” and Fichte’s idealist philosophy were two unlikely models for a young researcher to observe, given the prevailing intellectual milieu at the turn of the century. This milieu was characterized by the fast dissemination of the French philosopher Auguste Comte’s positivist beliefs. Comte’s philosophy aimed at demonstrating how humankind had finally succeeded in throwing off all religious superstitions and was moving toward an understanding of the world in purely material terms without any recourse to spiritual realms. To Comte’s optimistic teleology of human existence, based on belief in linear progress, philosophers like the Germans Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche, whom Steiner would meet in 1896, opposed a nihilistic vision of humankind, whose evolution they found ultimately meaningless. Such a pessimistic vision would receive impetus from the tragic historical events that took place during Steiner’s life and which, culminating with World War I, brought to an end the Russian, German, Ottoman, and Austro-Hungarian empires. Theosophy rejects the positivist understanding of the world in mere material terms and its tenet that the visible and earthly world encompasses the entire reality that humans can experience. At the same time, Steiner could not share Nietzsche’s skepticism and agnosticism because his awareness of the spiritual led him to believe that human life has a purpose.

Theosophy originated in Steiner’s conviction that, in addition to his numerous lectures on the issue, he had to find a more inclusive mode of communication for his anthroposophical work. After the foundation of the German section of the Theosophical Society in 1901, the following year Steiner launched the monthly journal Lucifer with the help of Marie von Sivers, one of Steiner’s closest collaborators and his second wife. The title refers to the doctrine found in the ancient mysteries that Christ is the true Lucifer, in its literal meaning as “bearer of light.” (The mysteries were secret religious groups that flourished during the Hellenistic period and sought to initiate individuals into cults of deities, stressing private worship and a personal relationship with the god rather than a public expression of faith.) As the number of subscribers increased quickly, the journal absorbed the Viennese publication Gnosis and was renamed Lucifer-Gnosis. Steiner wrote most of the articles for the journal, and its reputation grew steadily.

Steiner did not initially conceive his lectures to be later published in volumes. His first cycles of lectures were given to the small audiences who attended the Theosophical Society and the Theosophical Library in Berlin. But Steiner’s oratorical skills were rapidly appreciated by the most diverse audiences, as the author is estimated to have given over six thousand lectures throughout his career. In contrast to the simple language of the lectures, the written books, including Theosophy, may baffle the reader in several passages. Steiner reflects in the preface to the first edition of the book that the reader will have to figure out each and every page as well as many individual sentences. The author goes on to explain that this is intentional, so as to make the reader experience and live the truths that the book has to communicate. This reflection points to the tension and difficulty of describing phenomena belonging to an immaterial world with a means—language—usually employed to represent the physical world. Form and content, therefore, are closely interrelated, as the style in which the material is narrated leads the reader to pursue an active path of knowledge. Reading thus becomes a form of spiritual exercise.

Steiner found an initial forum for his ideas in European theosophical circles, but he also immediately marked the difference between his thought and the prevailing ideas in those circles formed by the Russian medium and Theosophical Society founder Helena Blavatsky and the Theosophist and political activist Annie Besant. While these thinkers looked at Oriental philosophies to substantiate Theosophy, Steiner identified the incarnation of Christ or, in his preferred designation, “the Mystery of Golgotha” (referring to the site where Jesus was crucified), as the central event in the history of humanity for his spiritual science. Although he was critical of religious dogmas, Steiner regarded as unique the appearance on earth of the Son of God as Jesus of Nazareth. Blavatsky and Besant did not accept this centrality and this uniqueness, as their goal was to reach a synthesis of all different religions, which they held to all contain equally valid truths. After a years-long process of separation, in 1911 a section of the Theosophical Society encouraged by Besant founded the Order of the Star in the East, a branch that believed that Christ had reincarnated in a Hindu boy, Jiddu Krishnamurti, in a new earthly existence. By 1913 it had become apparent to Steiner that the two branches could not remain together, and he decided to found an independent Anthroposophical Society.