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RUDOLF STEINER, SCIENTIST, MYSTIC, OCCULTIST by Agnes Blake




(The following text is an example of the praiseful articles that the Rudolf Steiner´s followers wrote about him, but unfortunately when one studies the work of Rudolf Steiner, one realizes that these praises are very undeserved, because Rudolf Steiner is one of the instructors more delirious and wrong that I have known, and as I show you in this blog, but still I put this text so you have an idea of what Rudolf Steiner’s defenders wrote.)



The subject of the present article may in truth be acclaimed one of the most remarkable men our generation has produced. Ours has been an age of brilliant achievement — an age of “specializing,” that practice whereof the greatly over-estimated value has been so persistently and blindly extolled. Hence a growing conviction is gaining ground that a certain one-sidedness has crept into almost every department of exact science, giving rise to a corresponding “grooviness” and lack of mental elasticity on the part of the majority of its exponents.  It is in relation to all these outward signs of a materialistic age that Dr. Rudolf Steiner, of whom we would speak, differs so widely from the accepted man of science of the day.

Well able to hold his own with any whose work, be it in the study or laboratory, entitles them to speak with authority, Rudolf Steiner’s genius is yet so constituted as to render it impossible that it should rest satisfied within the limits of any one branch alone. It has often been maintained that the domains of science are now too vast for one human mind to comprehend them all. Yet have we in Rudolf Steiner one of those extraordinary minds which, like those of Leibnitz and Pascal, seem mentally able to assimilate not only the salient points but the intricacies of each and all, while the pursuit of material knowledge has but served to intensify his spiritual convictions as a Theosophist, a mystic and occultist of the first order.

Rudolf Steiner was born in February, 1861, in a small border town of Upper Austria, and his childhood and early boyhood were spent in Hungary amid the wild romantic scenery of the Carpathian Mountains.  Here the rugged grandeur may indeed have served to influence the character of the silent sensitive boy, endowed, it would seem, from an early age with the strange gift of “seeing souls,” and though at the present day the Doctor’s genial smile and ready humorous response betoken as keen an appreciation of fun and wit as any, yet must that early burden of involuntary clairvoyance have dimmed those childish days before he had become clearly aware of its actual import, and it is said that as a child he was ever grave " and preternaturally silent.” Solitude and nature were his companions, and much of the boy’s spare time, after his duties as chorister in the Catholic church of his native town were over, he spent in long rambles, on one of which a friendship was struck up between the little seer and a Stranger of similar, although maturer gifts, a Herbalist versed in the healing property of plants.

This meeting — anything but a chance encounter, as young Steiner was in later years to know — was the first step taken on the ladder of his life — the first rung to be climbed towards his present achievement. From his unknown friend the boy — ever athirst for knowledge — received his earliest lessons in botany, and in natural as well as occult science, for this man, whose powers revealed to him the vital principles of plants, their etheric body, and what is known as the elementals of the vegetable kingdom, would converse upon this subject as though such knowledge were the most ordinary thing imaginable. Nor was so fascinating a topic limited to the occult properties of the plant-world alone, and so it came that from the Messenger placed thus early in his path Rudolf Steiner acquired knowledge of the twofold life current, of the flux and re-flux, pulsations that constitute the very movement of this world of ours.

From this time forward Rudolf Steiner was fully conscious of the Powers that were working for his guidance; yet were these verities in his sight of too profoundly sacred a nature to be lightly communicated to any other living creature: he knew, and in those boyish days, as also later on when the struggles of early manhood beset his path, that knowledge, the wondrous restfulness derived from unerring conviction, gave to his character the calm and steady equipoise now perceptible in every communicated thought, be it the written or the spoken word.

The impetus thus given to a mind at once alert and contemplative was bound to lead to its seeking an outlet for its energies in philosophic study, and so it came to pass that having barely completed his seventeenth year young Steiner, already deeply read in Kant, Fichte and Schelling, became a student at the University of Vienna, where he at once plunged into the transcendental idealism of Hegel.

But mere speculative philosophy was by no means the sort of mental food calculated to satisfy such a mind as Rudolf Steiner’s. His "positiveness" demanded the more solid basis of practical observation, and he therefore turned to such studies as mathematics, chemistry, mineralogy, botany and zoology — studies, all of which, to use his own words, “afford a surer basis for the construction of a spiritual system of the universe than do either history or literature.” And in spite of the fact that so much of his time was devoted to acquiring a thorough knowledge of the exact sciences (a thoroughness to which his remarks made in the introduction to his last great work, Occult Science, most amply bear witness) young Steiner yet found leisure wherein to indulge in the pursuits of literature and the critical study of art. To Julius Schroer, a friend of the brothers Grimm, he was indebted for his earliest initiation into the art of oratory.  His delivery now testifies amply to his aptness as a pupil. Nor was the connection here formed confined to one of professor and pupil only, for Julius Schroer — fully recognizing the compelling genius, the winning personality of the younger man — extended to him a friendship which has made a lasting impression on Rudolf Steiner’s memory; alluding thereto he has been known to observe, "In a desert of prevailing materialism Schroer’s house was to me a very oasis of idealism.”

While thus unconsciously fitting himself for his life-work Rudolf Steiner had not as yet taken any definite steps towards the choice of a professional career. While working for his degree he had found it necessary to take up private tutoring, and in addition to all these activities he was engaged in editing a literary weekly. It was indeed while thus "teaching the young idea how to shoot” that he became so painfully alive to the evils of the present educational system prevailing among all classes alike, and the substance of the observations he then gathered at first hand have since been embodied in a booklet under the title of The Education of Children.

It was towards the end of what we may term the Vienna period of his career that Rudolf Steiner, now a fully accredited Doctor of Philosophy, came to know his Master, meeting for the first time in the flesh that Personality who for so many a year had watched over the unfolding of his mind, noted his ripening talents and the bent of his unmistakable genius with care that was indeed akin to the love of a father for a beloved son. Thus before long was Rudolf Steiner made fully aware of the mission that awaited him. He embarked on it joyfully without hesitation or a thought of self — a mission that should “re-unite Science and Religion, bring back God into Science and Nature into Religion, thus re-fertilising both Art and Life.”

This was the task the young Initiate henceforward set himself to accomplish, nor has he during years of struggle, the target many a time for shafts of jealousy and misconception, ever wavered in his faithful and untiring service for the spiritual uplifting of the race. A member now of his Master’s Order, Rudolf Steiner was both spiritually and mentally equipped to seek a wider field wherein to sow the seed among such as might be fit for the receiving of supersensual knowledge ; his life was dedicated to his fellow men, and he was ready to follow the call wherever it might take him.

The year 1890 saw him in Weimar, his scholarly attainments having attracted the authorities in whose custody repose those invaluable treasures comprised in the Goethe and Schiller archives. A new edition of Goethe’s scientific works was contemplated, and it was agreed that no better man than Steiner could be found to undertake so important a labour, requiring as it did the combined abilities of a literary man as well as a professional scientist. Though the spirit of the age has, alas! touched this “Athens on the Ilm” to the detriment of some of its most cherished associations, yet do the " old ghosts ” linger still, and we may be very sure that to Steiner this “atmosphere” meant much more than to the modern Weimaraner. The work he did there, apart from that connected with the post he was officially accredited to, reveals the attitude of his mind during the Weimar period: it comprised among others two volumes entitled respectively Truth and Science and The Philosophy of Liberty.

It was during his sojourn in the Grand Duchy of Saxe-Weimar that Rudolf Steiner, who had written an impartial treatise on Friedrich Nietzsche, received an invitation from the sister of the great "super-man” — then already mortally stricken with his terrible and lingering malady. Frau Foerster-Nietzsche was anxious to find a commentator and co-editor for her brother’s works, and hoped to enlist the interest and sympathies of this brilliant young publicist.  Her plan was, however, doomed to failure. To a man of Dr. Steiner’s spiritual conviction work of such a nature became a practical impossibility. Sympathy with so tragic a fate was a very different thing to a complacent association of himself with the Nietzsche Theory, and his firm rejection of repeated overtures made him on this subject led to a rupture of relations in that quarter. This was Rudolf Steiner's first “encounter” with the dragon of modern scepticism and materialism which he had set himself to combat and if possible to slay. The next with whom he was to break a lance was Ernst Haeckel, the great Jena biologist, who in his ardour maybe said to out-Darwin Darwin himself.

In Haeckel Dr. Steiner has an opponent whom he loves even as much as he admires him! For nothing could be more chivalrous than the manner, in which he presents the case for Haeckel in his pamphlet Haeckel und seine Gegner, nothing more generous than the manner in which he comments on the great scientist’s achievements when criticising his monumental work. The Riddle of the Universe, albeit he somewhat humorously observes that taken all in all Professor Ernst Haeckel’s convictions might not unfitly be regarded as "first steps in theosophical teaching,” and “very good Theosophy they make too” we have heard the Doctor remark with a twinkle in his eye.

Other works dating from about this time are of a more purely mystical nature, the two qualities of mystic and occultist being so intimately blended in Dr. Steiner’s nature as to make it difficult to determine to which we should give the preference. It is indeed this peculiar dual gift that, so to speak, places him apart from others as highly endowed in perhaps one or the other capacity, yet not possessing both in so marked and evenly balanced a proportion.

The early nineties brought Rudolf Steiner to Berlin, literary work being again the ostensible call thither, and here it was that his real life labour was to assume its definite shape, for he now became the acknowledged leader of a great spiritual movement. At the time of which we write the German Theosophical Society was, so to speak, in its death-throes. It had lingered on after the first blow dealt it by the Coulomb affair, and had striven tentatively to regain life and increase its membership. That it survived at all may indeed be said to have been solely due to the energy and devotion of Dr. Hubbe-Schleiden (see April number of The Theosophist), the importance of whose labours for the cause can hardly be over-estimated. Strength, new interest and, above all, new blood was wanted.  The question was becoming a vital one for many, and the momentous issue lay with Rudolf Steiner, a born spiritual leader, albeit an initiate of another school.  It is as such, as one of the ancient Order of the Rosicrucians, that Dr. Rudolf Steiner entered Theosophy as General Secretary of the German section, henceforth to devote his genius and energy to the propagation of Western — that is, Christian — Theosophy. Under his careful and intuitive leadership the tenets of Eastern and Western Theosophy are being welded to one homogeneous science, and the marvelous way in which teachings once looked at askance have spread, not only through the German Empire but far across its borders, is a powerful tribute to Dr. Steiner’s earnestness and compelling personality.

While constantly delivering public lectures, not alone in Berlin but in every important city, he has yet found time to accomplish an amazing amount of literary work, to say nothing of the mystical drama so finely performed at Munich last year, Die Pforte der Einweihung. In a periodical entitled Lucifer, he has, in addition to shorter articles dealing with many pressing spiritual and ethical questions of the day, published the "Akashic Records,” which have made so deep an impression upon all readers by the vivid and explicit manner in which the deeper causes at work during the Lemurian and Atlantean world-periods have been set down. (These have been translated into English and will shortly be available, forming a very useful companion-work to those more descriptive records already known and taken from the same source.)

Before closing what we feel to be but a very inadequate sketch of one of the greatest leaders now among us, we should like to bear witness to the highly intellectual section of the public who form his audiences at the public lectures held during the winter months in Berlin. It is no elementary Theosophy this, but a blend of metaphysics and science tempered with a dissertation on the higher ideals in art, an intellectual feast such as the German mind above all else delights in. The Hall, a vast one, is filled to its utmost sitting and standing capacity long before the Doctor mounts the rostrum, while the great percentage attending comprise professional men, scientists and students.

The writer of this article once inquired why the Doctor had chosen Berlin of all German cities as his headquarters, when there is not one that is not more spiritually and artistically attractive — and the answer given was: "he chose Berlin because of its rank materialism."


(Occult Review, June 1911, p.323-329)













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