Review: A Spiritual Way of Working

“A Spiritual Way of Working” - Two Anthroposophical Views of an Endowment from Rudolf Steiner

Review by Gertrude Reif Hughes

Rudolf Steiner’s Endowment: Centenary Reflections on His Attempt for a Theosophical Art and Way of Life, 15 December 1911 - By Virginia Sease; Temple Lodge, 2012, 102 pgs.

Rudolf Steiner and Christian Rosenkreutz - By Peter Selg; SteinerBooks, 2012, 170 pgs.

I would like to offer a double review of Virginia Sease’s 'Rudolf Steiner’s Endowment: Centenary Reflections on His Attempt for a Theosophical Art and Way of Life, 15 December 1911' and the first chapter of Peter Selg’s 'Rudolf Steiner and Christian Rosenkreutz, “Portrayal of Christian Rosenkreutz.”' In what follows, readers will see that the two pieces share a theme that arises as “A Spiritual Way of Working.”

The “Endowment” upon which Sease reflects became one hundred years old in December 2011. The Endowment has little to do with money, with certainty, or even with a gift. Rather, readers of the carefully organized and titled sections in Sease’s book will find that the Endowment followed originally from the Annual General Meeting of December 1911 in Dornach. The Endowment contained elegant descriptions that Sease’s deep reflections find in “A Theosophical Art and Way of Life,” also called “A Way of Working.” The “Theosophical Art and Way of Life” demonstrates a creation in process rather than a finished plan. Its “Way of Working” will serve those who follow its knowledge and attend to its “what” and its “how”—particularly its how.

It seems to me, the “ways of working” are the Endowment, since interested persons can feel endowed by this way of life, because their own biographies feel enriching to readers who follow what Steiner offers to them. In his book, Rudolf Steiner and Christian Rosenkreutz, Peter Selg’s opening chapter, “Portrayal of Christian Rosenkreutz,” shows how “Rudolf Steiner informed the members of the Anthroposophical Society of the foundation for a “Society for Theosophical Art and Way of Living.” Selg emphasizes Steiner’s sense of a “foundation…directly inspired by the individuality…referred to since ancient times in the West as Christian Rosenkreutz.” As the following passage from Steiner quoted by Selg suggests,

I have particularly emphasized this most eminent experience of calling. I could use other events that relate directly to the spiritual world that can be found in life between death and birth, but in our spiritual context it is precisely this event that should seem significant to us, because it has to do with our spiritual movement (“Portrayal” p.7, emphasis added by Selg).

Steiner gave the following account as an example of a calling by Christian Rosenkreutz. Such callings, Selg says, demonstrate Steiner’s intimacy with Rosenkreutz (and Master Jesus, too), through Steiner’s own destiny with Christ and Christianity in his life. That destiny and inner vision Steiner found in his own soul experience, as he expresses it here:

The Christianity I sought was not to be found in any of the creeds…I had to enter deeply into Christianity, and found myself in the world where the spirit itself speaks of it. … Having stood spiritually before the mystery of

Golgotha in a deep and solemn celebration of knowledge was highly important for the development of my soul. (1)

Despite their quite different tones and interests, both Selg’s “Portrayal” and Sease’s Endowment make wise and apt readings that enrich and clarify one another. Each author reflects upon and explores how to cognize spiritual acts that human beings need to attend to, indeed take responsibility for. Selg focuses upon Steiner’s connection to Rosenkreutz—both in Steiner’s incarnations and in his spirit existence—while Sease, too, sees the spiritual importance of Rosenkreutz’s connection to Steiner’s “theosophy” (later anthroposophy). Selg frames Steiner’s life in a portrayal that connects Steiner and his anthroposophy to Rosenkreutz, and to Sease’s “way of working” regarding the Endowment that is possible and appropriate to create out of anthroposophy. The two intimate and carefully written explorations feel both strange and enriching: strange because each piece has its own tone, but enriching because each piece offers readers a comprehensive consideration of the shared theme.

Sease (and Steiner) carefully emphasize the distinction between an endowment and a foundation. Whereas in 1905, “the fact that the difference between endowing and founding had not been grasped,” Sease clarifies that six years later, the Endowment “with its way of working stands under the protectorate of Christian Rosenkreutz and…Rudolf Steiner is the interpreter of its spiritual intentions.” 'Rudolf Steiner’s Endowment' gives readers a deep view of Sease’s interest in deciding whether the Endowment of 1911 can be viewed as a current success, or must be perceived as having to wait for a later time. Throughout the various reflections Sease brings to bear on the “Endowment” and on Steiner’s “attempts” for a Theosophical Art and Way of Life, Sease knows (as does Selg) that Steiner and Rosenkreutz are interwoven, in part through the Michael School and its cultus. She quotes Steiner’s remark that “Rosicrucianism flowed into our stream; it will be worked on collaboratively, and also practiced to a certain extent.” Continuing what Sease says about Steiner’s Rosicrucianism, she offers “a further indication of the presence of Rosicrucianism,” which Steiner explained in the following words:

We are the Rosicrucianism of the twentieth century! For us, there is no other task than to connect with those principles that Rosicrucianism had and to make them applicable to the advancement of theosophy…All our strivings are directed towards understanding what sounds so easy: opening the heart to the spiritual world that is always around us; understanding a phrase such as this in the way Christ Jesus spoke it: I am with you always [even] unto the end of the world. (Sease, p. 5)

Sease’s “century reflections” on Steiner’s attempt to create an endowment occur in seven carefully explained chapters, each with a telling title. Something is being sought—it is not a thing, nor is it a person, but rather it is a “Way of Life” (soon to be called a Way of Working). A “Way of Working” is to be endowed, Sease says. She continues, “It was an attempt,” which sounds less like a result and more like a missed try. Nevertheless, she goes on to speak of the “continuing effect of the endowment impulse.” Steiner himself insists that the character of this continuing endowment impulse will be work done by a “tiny circle” of people who have been concerned, so far, with others entering and joining them slowly. Not that a society “or anything like one” is being built, nor will there be people with ranks or special powers. Rather, Steiner says that not just people but what people actually do will “exist in a living flow, a living development. Thus today no other principle will be set forth than the first: Recognition of the spiritual world as the fundamental reality. Sease closes with remarks Steiner made on 21 August 1915, when he returned to the fact that he had “once tried to assign certain titles to a number of close colleagues and long-standing Society members.” But, Steiner said, “The way in which the matter was understood…made it impossible. It was an attempt.”

Did Steiner mean that he had consciously risked this particular attempt knowing that one colleague had psychological difficulties as well as very fine capacities? Did Steiner perhaps try to give her an opportunity to discover herself as able to “attempt” her art among the team of the other individual contributors? Could there have been a spiritual situation that made it necessary for Steiner to offer her this attempt precisely because it might have allowed her to find herself able to carry out the endowment rather than finding herself overwhelmed or at least defeated by difficulties that remained in her from a much earlier time in her life?

Aside from such questions as these, another kind should be explored, or at least mentioned in some further descriptions of the futuristic aspects with which Sease and Selg speak to their readers—Selg in his first and important chapter “Portrayal of Christian Rosenkreutz;” Sease in her final chapter, “The Continuing Effect of the Endowment Impulse.” Both authors connect their readers with a clear sense of the future. One hundred years after the events Sease and Selg portray, the work they want us—their readers—to understand, indeed to wake up to, brings us the realization that each of us can experience our own spirituality during our life and also thereafter. After all, when we read anthroposophy by reading Steiner, what our reading can give us is discoveries of new knowledge that we need in order to continue our own understandings of Steiner’s thought and deed—his anthroposophy. Now in my seventies, having begun working with anthroposophy in my twenties some fifty years ago, the futuristic portrayal by Selg and the “continuing effect” demonstrated by Sease’s descriptions—what but something new do I find? And what makes it new? The longer I realize what my long life of reading has brought me and still does, the more I discover that Steiner has been accompanying me and is still doing so today.

Steiner’s accompanying has the grand (or is it quiet?) presence of new understandings that live in my being so that I can find them there as mine and you can find them in your being as yours. No single date is needed! What happens for each of us comes in a specific way, perhaps, and perhaps at a specific moment, but the happening I am trying to uncover here has its own way of coming to us, and we have our own way or ways to recognize, cognize, or otherwise receive such happenings. Whether you or I read Selg and some day find Sease, or whether the opposite happens to you or to me is interesting, of course, but it is not the point. If you think of the receptions you experience, you find that the reality you “have” or “receive” happens in you, through you. Selg speaks of Rudolf Steiner saying of Benedictus (the character in the mystery dramas who plays Steiner) that he had to “serve the spirit spheres” with his counsel, meaning that Benedictus shows that Steiner’s own greatness includes difficulties and pains.

Steiner’s physician, Ita Wegman, who looked after him during his last six months, described his passing:

His passing away was like a miracle. He left quite naturally. It seemed as if the die was cast in the last moment. And once it was cast there was no struggle, no attempt to stay on earth. For a while his gaze remained steady and calm; then he said a few kind words to me, and deliberately he closed his eyes and folded his hands. In my work as a physician I had never seen anyone pass away so quickly from the earth. The die had been cast and the other activity in the spiritual world began immediately. No further preparations were needed. (“Portrayal,” 84)

According to Selg, Wegman said that Rudolf Steiner’s presence in the spiritual world was absolutely essential because of the knowledge (or earth experiences) that only he could take to the spiritual world (my emphasis): “He was needed in the spiritual world; that was obvious. It was equally obvious that he had important knowledge to impart to the spiritual world; knowledge that only he could impart. …” According to her notes, Steiner told Wegman that in his last lectures and writings, he had given everything “that people were able to take in,” adding with regard to the present and future: “The main weight is on the spiritual world now. The dead need to be prepared for new earthly incarnation as does the third hierarchy” (“Portrayal,” 91). Selg adds that Ita Wegman wrote “in accord with her teacher” that with the active help of Michael, who is always by his side, Christian Rosenkreutz and his stream ensure with their active support that the work begun by Rudolf Steiner in 1879 will continue. Wegman adds this note (note 307):

The Doctor often said, “Rosicrucianism must be taught as part of anthroposophy. Christian Rosenkreutz stands as an inspiration next to another whom he has chosen; we will never be able to keep the Goetheanum alive if the Rosicrucian stream, be it ever so concealed, is not intertwined with our anthroposophic movement.”

Selg finishes the entire “Portrayal” section with these words about Steiner’s role in humanity’s history:

Rudolf Steiner said that Christian Rosenkreutz had suffered and endured much in the spiritual history of humanity, and that he would suffer more in the future— “that has to do with the great dangers that the truth will have to face in the future.” The individuality of Rudolf Steiner will be fully included in the suffering and martyrdom still to be endured by Christian Rosenkreutz in connection with the future of spiritual life.

Selg and Wegman deeply understand the dangers to be faced in coming times through Steiner’s individuality and the further suffering to be endured by Christian Rosenkreutz in connection with the future of spiritual life. The “truth” referred to above is anthroposophy (p. 93). Sease’s views also weigh Steiner’s truly strong will to bring anthroposophy to bear on what is needed for immediate and further management of activity by and for the individuals who decide to work, alone and/or in groups, toward future needs. The needs have to do with what Sease’s essay has pronounced in its various ways and situations, which she summarizes this way in Steiner’s words:

You might say I am using many words and phrases that are perhaps not entirely understandable. This must be the case in matters like the one being considered here, because the matter itself must be taken hold of directly from within its life. (Endowment, 87; 86)

In 'Rudolf Steiner’s Endowment: Centenary Reflections on His Attempt for a Theosophical Art and Way of Life', Sease describes a first point that she wants to communicate. Clearly, her title, which points to 15 December 1911, covers the seven people who felt called to specific tasks coming from their karmas. “These tasks,” Sease says, “unite their identity inseparably with the development of anthroposophy and with the individuality of Rudolf Steiner in the twentieth century.” She continues: “We can imagine or even sense that these seven people [among others] continued to work under the protectorate of Christian Rosenkreutz even if it was not in the sense that might have been made possible had the Endowment entered into existence.” Indeed, she caps that continuing vision, saying “These people are united by a shared karma through the fact that they had been interpreted for their individual tasks at that time.” (78-79) (2)

What is at stake in Sease’s careful movement of taking something “directly from within its life,” as she calls it, at the start of the paragraph above? Sease reveals what is at stake when she speaks about the nature and content of Steiner’s Soul Calendar:

Since Rudolf Steiner’s Soul Calendar first appeared at Easter 1912, people around the world have been living with its verses. In them, Rudolf Steiner steps forward as the great interpreter of nature, the soul, and the cosmos. In his foreword to the first edition, he “endows” a more significant indication, namely how the individual human being can develop his or her own capacities to become an interpreter. …He does not offer “prescriptions;” … instead, we are shown the way to the living weaving of the soul as it can come to be in the future. (79; 80)

In Steiner’s foreword to the second printing in 1918, Sease adds that Rudolf Steiner gives an even more precise orientation for those who wish to undertake the Calendar’s exercises. Sease describes them this way, poetically and yet officially:

For each week, a verse is given in this calendar that allows the soul to experience what is happening during this week as part of the life of the whole of the year. What this life lets sound in the soul when the soul unites with it will be expressed in the verse. The intention is a healthy ‘feeling of being at one’ with the course of nature and an associated powerful ‘finding oneself’ that arises from it. The thought is that empathy with the course of the world in the sense of these verses is something the soul longs for—if only it understands itself rightly.

Yes! Our soul can find itself in the Calendar’s weekly verses. With each one, the soul of our being comes into a unity with its content. Steiner does not offer “prescriptions.” Rather, his Calendar leaves each of us to find our ways. Those ways are still to come—from the future in the future. Those future ways will clearly shape new forms for all who want to be “interpreters” of what they themselves decide to take on: “[E]ach soul,” says Sease, “will find its way in accord with its own particular coloration.” (80) Leaving her readers with potentially strong seeds for the future, she ends with these words:

When we look at Rudolf Steiner’s work in the years following the end of the First World War (1918), we recognize that Rudolf Steiner—as the great initiate of the twentieth century—endowed impulses for humanity in every area of life, in education, medicine, agriculture, eurythmy (which was born in Berlin in December 1911 and January 1912), and social life not to mention art and other areas. He did not just endow them for decades but for centuries. Even though the Endowment of 15 December 1911 did not achieve fulfillment, seeds were planted for the future, especially through the 'Calendar of the Soul', which can call forth metamorphoses in every human soul when cultivated in daily practice.