Rudolf Steiner: Theosophy

Impact

Theosophy, as well as the author’s other writings and lectures, helped revise the religious philosophy that had been identified with the Theosophical Society, established by Helena Blavatsky and Henry Steel Olcott, an American military officer and journalist, in New York in 1875. The Theosophical Society emphasized the importance of mysticism by stressing that God must be experienced directly to be known. In addition, it refused to identify one supreme religion but claimed that all faiths shared universal values and that their teachings represented quests for truth. Steiner became the head of the German branch of the society in 1902 but, less than a decade after the publication of Theosophy, broke away from it in 1913, founding his own Anthroposophical Society.

One of the main reasons for the theosophical controversy was Steiner’s interest in finding a Western spiritual path to knowledge that would not discount Christianity to privilege Oriental and Eastern philosophies. Steiner also did not accept what he perceived as the uncritical adoption of occult traditions as a tenet of Theosophy as formulated by Blavatsky and Annie Besant. Steiner, whose training as a scientist taught him to value rigorous standards of research, constantly argued for the application of such standards to all types of observations. Significantly, his biographer, A. P. Shepherd, describes him as a “scientist of the invisible” because, throughout his oeuvre, the philosopher suggests means for a scientific investigation of the spiritual world that would not transcend a rigorous methodology of observation. Steiner’s oeuvre has not only contributed to the fields of religion and mysticism but has also had far-reaching effects on education, agriculture, and medicine.