(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)
No comments:
Post a Comment