A Century of Anthroposophy

commentary by John Beck

Anthroposophy is a hundred years old. The word is older, but it has found its particular meaning in the work of Rudolf Steiner. To render it from Greek merely as “the wisdom of the human being” is today highly ambiguous; how much wisdom does the human being show? In 1923 Rudolf Steiner said that the word should be interpreted as “the consciousness of our humanity.” And the next year he described it as a path from the mind-and-spirit in the human being to the mind-and-spirit in the cosmos, immediately and crucially adding:

It arises as a need of the heart.

In this short review we will not look at the 1912 action of members of the German section of the Theosophical Society in forming an Anthroposophical Society. Our interest is in drawing a larger picture of anthroposophy, and the society devoted to it, in human history and culture, and today, here in the USA.

Should we expect it to have accomplished more? A rather small group of people has carried a large sense of responsibility for humanity’s future. They have shown many failings, but have persisted and endured. Alongside that crucial fact, two others appear: First, the great foundation for their work was the spirit and idea of Europe, and it failed, catastrophically, in World War I. Second, according to the threefold gesture Rudolf Steiner described as “how one becomes an anthroposophist,” there are millions of anthroposophists alive today, outside and perhaps ignorant of the movement calling itself “anthroposophy.”

In other words, “anthroposophy” seems like a failure—but one which Steiner and others just refused to accept almost a century ago. And yet today it is a present and future success which we are struggling to recognize.

Anthroposophy’s European foundation

Today it’s polite to play down Europe’s role in world history, but it was through Europe that physical, commercial, military, political, scientific, technological, and cultural globalization were set in motion. And until 1914 European powers were the masters of the world. The USA and imperial Russia became Europe’s huge, awkward wings; but small countries beginning with Portugal took control of vast areas of the planet. European rule unfolded relentlessly, harshly, but the aggressive outward side of it was partnered by an inner cultural triumph, the development of modern science. Out of nature’s sub-basement poured such vast hidden forces that, tamed by machines, we could provide well for every human being alive today, if that were our choice. But to start telling these stories, of the ships and guns and trade, the observations and experiments and hypotheses, would take many, many pages.

What matters is that by 1900 old Charlemagne’s European children had actually reached the threshold of becoming partners with the creative powers of the cosmos. The early adventurers’ stolen or created wealth had fed a culture approaching the sublime.

So at the historical moment when Rudolf Steiner became active, Europe had become capable and worthy of leading the development of a world culture. Slavery had been abolished. Reformers sought to care for the poor and elevate the displaced peasants who were now the urban industrial proletariat. The days of privilege by birth-right were fading fast (and near forgotten over in America). The magical experience of reading was open to all. Art had begun to see and speak to everyone. Romanticism reaffirmed the meaning of the individual. The novel, the canvas, and the opera created overwhelming alternate realities: imagination awakening imagination.

Science had revealed vast invisible fields of forces stretching to the stars. “Matter” was recognized to be not quite what we naively take it for. Evolution now told us we had endured a vast process of development not mentioned in the Bible. Psychology was probing the inner life, finding unknown regions, determined to conquer the soul just like another hemisphere. If Christian theology held back, Mme. Blavatsky’s Theosophy offered ancient Hindu-Buddhist concepts to raise thinking into worlds of consciousness higher than the human. Europe was even beginning to listen to the world. Debussy learned from the Javanese gamelan, Picasso from African masks.

This Europe was an idea and an ideal. Imagined esoterically, it was a chorus of archangels—a chorus of cultures and languages reaching up together to shape planetary destiny. It was a harmony of diverse voices hymning an exalted purpose. And with the failing and falling away of old social forms and traditional understandings, it was demanding a new and higher stage to rise onto.

All that was missing was a way of understanding, objectively, just what the human signifies in the cosmos, and what our choices signify for our future. It is in this situation that Rudolf Steiner appears, in a modest workingclass family of lower Austria. What he eventually brought would have made no sense, gained no traction, either outside Europe or earlier in its history. It was a consummating step in a thousand years of cultural becoming.

The fall of Europe

But in August 1914 Europe set about to destroy itself in “the Great War.” By Christmas 1916 the last chance to stop the war on the old terms, within the “idea of Europe,” failed. A year later Tolstoy’s Russia fell to an atheist regime enflamed with class hatred. By 1920 imperial Germany was shattered socially and economically, and Austria-Hungary dissolved. The surviving young of all countries were outraged by their elders’ stupidity. Left and right were murderously at each other’s thoats. Americans who helped win the war “over there” for the Western powers took a victory lap and went home again to isolate.

The world into which Rudolf Steiner was bringing his vision and his tools for a higher cultural development—that world just vanished. The possibility of his anthroposophy’s rising with Europe, as its highest and most progressive imagination, no longer existed. Anthroposophy would have to find new possibilities in a world that would continue to destroy itself, and tens of millions of human lives, for many decades to come.

Italy went fascist in 1922. Germany succumbed in 1933, Spain in a hideous civil war from 1936 to 1939. Then German arms swept across most of continental Europe—until Hitler unwisely invaded the USSR.

The aftermath from 1945 forward was a choice of politically benign but culturally corrosive consumerism from the USA—or a long harsh winter under the commissars. In 2012 the once world-conquering Europeans celebrated the simple fact that they are not killing each other with a Peace Prize to the European Union.

America’s responsibility

Individuals from Europe can be as idealistic and influential as individuals anywhere else. But their shared cultural vision has been stunted, and their sense of a world responsibility is largely buried under the shame of colonialism and its cultural brutality. The point for us is that Europe since 1916 was not a platform from which an “anthroposophy” could graciously make its way in modern civilization. The USA may have a vaudeville culture and brutal means of global force projection, but despite the economic rise of China, India, Brazil, the world is still looking for leadership from America.

Rudolf Steiner was asked about this in 1919 (see CW 194, lectures of 14-15 December). He had already spoken three years before of an Anglo-American “economic world empire.” Now, questioned by the first English visitors since the armistice, he noted that the defeated countries would have no further role to play as nations. Britain and America would build their empire “like a force of nature.” To help balance out the materialism which is their natural and karmic contribution to world culture they would have to bring forth new spiritual impulses.

The Anthroposophical Society in America was formed in 1923, but as late as the 1950s its members were still speaking about a “catacomb period”—when the early Christians met secretly and literally underground in imperial Rome. And despite German being America’s largest single ethnic background, there was now a cultural stigma attached to everything German. The defensive posture required for anthroposophy’s survival in Europe was also emulated in the USA; perhaps we just assumed that “that is how anthroposophy is done.”

So if it had depended on the Anthroposophical Society alone, anthroposophy in America today would be invisible. Two related impulses have succeeded, however. One is the increasingly able translation and publishing of Rudolf Steiner’s work, so that spiritual seekers and openminded cultural activists can discover that he is relevant if not still well ahead of the times. The other factor, helped by the publications and by staunch immigrants from Europe, is applied anthroposophy, the “practical” initiatives especially in education, agriculture, health, and special needs. Today anthroposophy in the USA is actually wellrepresented by a very substantial infrastructure of human services. They are widely recognized as outstanding in their goals and very credible in accomplishment. Most often society members initiated and carried this work, but there has been, so to speak, a hole in the doughnut when the question is asked: “So what is this anthroposophy?”

What is anthroposophy?

With all good will, anthroposophists have often gagged on that simple question, or thrown up a cheerful roadblock like, “Have you got a week?” One purpose in naming this publication “being human” was to suggest the option of saying right away that “anthroposophy is about being human.” No one is turned away by such a response. It can flow on easily with words like, “And my connection with it is...” Self-development? My kids’ education? Health? Nutrition? Healing the Earth? Understanding where we’re headed? Try “being human” next time.

But there is a deeper story to “what is anthroposophy” which we need to explore. That story lives in the phrase we use as a synonym, “spiritual science.” This “spiritual science” is a plausible but inadequate translation of the German word Geistes-Wissenschaft (hyphenated here only for clarity). Wissenschaft is a freer term than English “science”; it suggests “creative intelligence” rather than just the cold, hard facts. And Geist is a word which points to mind and intellect and spirit. When Rudolf Steiner said words which we translate as “thinking is already highly spiritual [Geist-lich],” his claim was supported for a German-speaking mind by the broader meaning of Geist.

For English-speakers today, “spiritual science” may be a pleasantly surprising contrast in thoughts. Or it may be a laughable oxymoron that places anthroposophy in the company of religions like Christian Science and Scientology. What anthroposophists are bizarrely unaware of is the fact that this term Geistes-Wissenschaft was coined in 1883 by a prominent German thinker named Dilthey and has become the standard word for what English speakers call “the humanities.”

Dilthey noted that natural science (Natur-Wissenschaft) had been established by Francis Bacon on brilliant foundations which led to its stunning success. But Dilthey’s interests—history and new disciplines like sociology and psychology—were a bad match for Bacon’s science, which sought to exclude human feeling and intentionality from its framework. Dilthey called for a science (Wissenschaft) of mind-and-spirit (Geist); he saw this being founded on an understanding of the individual human spirit. Given the right basic principles and researches, a whole great second pole of “science”—human sciences—could be opened up alongside nature science.

Rudolf Steiner actually did this foundational work. His “Philosophy of Free Spiritual Activity” justified the individual human mind-and-spirit as foundation for a view of reality. His How to Know Higher Worlds is a preparatory manual for the researcher in this new field. Theosophy gives the “lay of the land.” “An Outline of Esoteric Science” takes the new science back to the beginning of time.

Academic thinkers did not recognize the significance of his early works, and eventually he found his audience in the Theosophical Society and went public with his esoteric researches. Steiner ended by revealing an “inner” science of evolving humanity. Though it radically challenged established and conventional modern thought, if Europe had not collapsed, it might have been understood.

So what is anthroposophy? It really is “about being human” and we can speak of it just that simply. And this “science of mind-and-spirit” is a revolutionary cultural paradigm shift. Anthroposophists will have to acknowledge and clarify and defend it in those terms, too.

Where do the simple being-human and the new cultural paradigm meet? In individual human development: in our choice to become more fully and more consciously citizens both of the physical world we have mastered (by Bacon’s shrewd tactics), and of the metaphysical-spiritual world where we can find our enduring being.

The leadership anthroposophy needs

Individuals matter in anthroposophy’s future, and so does geography. Celebrating Rudolf Steiner’s 150th anniversary last year gave many anthroposophists in the USA a strong sense of opportunity around the core mission and ideas of anthroposophy—its whole civilizational perspective on humanity’s future. This is very timely. If Europe was once like a “chorus of archangels” raising the global vision and culture, since 1945 the eyes of the world have been on the USA. In our outer role as world power, the single world power now, we often do not earn the world’s respect, and our past is replete with abuses. But in the inner American impulse to form one nation out of free individuals, wherever they come from, and to afford all persons an opportunity to manifest their potential—in that unique organic principle the world senses an enduring ideal. By accepting the breadth of our differences, Americans reach up to that same high level of the universally human which the idea of Europe once achieved.

Anthroposophy is not needing to be led globally by US-Americans, who could not match all its rich development in Europe. But over here, in the inner America where humanity often sees a real generosity of spirit, Americans must help anthroposophy grow strong and open and credible. This will come both out of Rudolf Steiner’s work and its worldwide development, and out of our work with compatible American roots and branches. Is that possible? For sure. There is nothing inherently strange to Americans in “the consciousness of our humanity.” And a path from the mind-and-spirit in the human being to the mind-and-spirit in nature, the planet, the cosmos—that, too, arises “as a need of the heart” in a great many Americans. Emerson, Bronson Alcott, Margaret Fuller, Whitman, Thoreau, Dickinson and many more have been singing this great anthem which was heard before by the original inhabitants of this continent.

A culmination?

Steven Usher wrote recently about a “culmination” of anthroposophy at the end of the 20th century (posted at anthroposophy.org). I agree with him that the success of our initiatives in the late 1990s was indeed a culmination. But do we imagine things stopping there? Only if our perspective stays within “the anthroposophical bubble,” where no word is heard unless uttered by Rudolf Steiner and no success counts unless it wears our colors. Perhaps that is what Manfred Schmidt-Brabant, the last president of the General Anthroposophical Society, was seeing when he spoke at Michaelmas 2000 of the “occult imprisonment of the Anthroposophical Society.” A grim phrase. The efforts we make into the world are turned back on us, he said. Why? Because we do not take others’ capacities and intentions seriously enough?

The “consciousness of our humanity” should assist us, not prevent us, in seeing beyond ourselves. In many places but especially in the USA a huge new, non-sectarian, non-traditional spirituality blossomed from the 1960s forward. What Steiner had called for in 1919 as a counter-balance to our materialism actually appeared. By the end of the 1990s, psychographic researchers (who assess and measure the spread of personal beliefs, values, and ideals) had identified tens of millions of Americans who “care deeply about ecology and saving the planet, about relationships, peace, social justice, and about authenticity, self actualization, spirituality and self-expression.” These are neither cultural traditionalists nor “moderns,” and the research shows them growing: “In 1995, 23.6% of the US adult population, or 44 million adults... In 2008, 34.9% of US adult population, or 80 million adults.” Yes, this is the “values cohort” dubbed the “cultural creatives.”

Creating culture globally is central to the mission of anthroposophy, along with the self-development (or “selfactualization”) required for such a culture to appear and endure. The link to “cultural creatives” is even clearer. Rudolf Steiner described “how one becomes an anthroposophist” (on 2/13/1923, in Awakening to Community). He describes a process essentially identical to “Becoming a Cultural Creative,” the second chapter of The Cultural Creatives, published in 1999. There are three steps:

1. Our heart (perceptive feeling) tells us that the world we are trying to engage has something (or many things) seriously wrong in it.

2. We turn inward and look upward in our thinking to find higher insights and values to will allow us to understand the situation.

3. We turn back outward with these insights, with a will to try to heal things in the world.

This threefold gesture in human consciousness, Steiner implies, is the movement-in-consciousness by means of which we can recognize the being he calls Anthroposophia. And researchers who knew nothing of Steiner’s work recognized this gesture, her signature, in the hearts and minds of tens of millions of Americans in the 1990s.

Conclusion

The time span of a hundred years is reinforcing, according to Steiner’s research. So the anniversary of the founding of the original Anthroposophical Society should be wind in our sails. We can also take note of the “cosmic day,” a 72-year span, one degree measured by the movement of the starry heavens. These cosmic days seem to measure out human lives and impulses. The Bolshevik regime in Russia lasted, as Steiner said it would, for a cosmic day: 1917-1989. A cosmic day after Rudolf Steiner said in 1919 that additional spiritual impulses would have to arise in the West, American researchers began finding evidence of a new spirituality among tens of millions of “cultural creatives.” A cosmic day after his great “practical” initiatives (1919-24), Waldorf schools and biodynamic farms and CSAs and Camphill villages were sprouting across the USA. Tens of thousands of “cultural creatives” have been finding and embracing these initiatives. Emerson, too, observed the Days. (1)

Daughters of Time, the hypocritic Days, / Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes, / And marching single in an endless file, / Bring diadems and fagots in their hands. / To each they offer gifts after his will, / Bread, kingdom, stars, and sky that holds them all. / I, in my pleached garden, watched the pomp, / Forgot my morning wishes, hastily / Took a few herbs and apples, and the Day / Turned and departed silent. I, too late, / Under her solemn fillet saw the scorn.

What a difference a day makes, if we accept her gifts.

Notes:

1 Hypocritic: perhaps in its oldest meaning, “like a stage actor”; fagots: bundles of sticks; pleached: with interlacing branches; fillet: a headband.