Five
Rebirth
HIS book The Philosophy of Freedom marked a turning point in Steiner's life. ‘During the first chapter of my life I was destined to experience the riddle of the universe as it faced modern science; in my Philosophy of Freedom I formulated the ideas demanded of me by this experience…Now I faced the task of formulating ideas that would present the human Soul's experience of the spiritual world itself.’
And on the threshold of this new epoch in Steiner's life we must ask the fundamental question: how did he go about gaining access to the ‘spiritual world’?
A vital clue is offered by his friend and disciple Friedrich Rittelmeyer:
In earlier years, it seemed to me that when he was giving advice to people, he liked to sit where he would not be obliged to look against the light. When he began to use his faculties of spiritual sight one noticed a certain deliberate adjustment of his being, often accompanied by a lowering of the eyes. One remembered then what he says in his books, namely that the physical body of a man must be wiped out before the ‘higher members’ can be perceived.’ *
In other words, Steiner deliberately withdrew ‘into’ himself, ‘wiping out’ his perception of the external world. He says elsewhere:
When, with spiritual perception, I observed the soul-activity of man: thinking, feeling and willing, a picture of a ‘spiritual man’ became clearly perceptible to me…I saw these inner manifestations of life as creative forces and they revealed to me ‘man as spirit’ within the spirit. If I then looked at the physical appearance of man, I saw it supplemented through the structure of spiritual forces, active within the physically perceptible.
Steiner adds another interesting clue: that in these moments of spiritual perception, he experienced a flood of warmth . This is important because it is an experience that most of us have shared. Listening to music, reading poetry, kissing a baby, listening to rain pattering on the windows, can all bring that strange, exhilarating flood of happiness and warmth. And in the case of a favourite piece of music or a poem, it is not difficult to see how it happens. The music or poem has certain associations , and as we relax and enjoy it, these associations come flooding out. This in turn describes the experience described by Proust: ‘I had ceased to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal…’.
Even more significant is the experience of the Hindu saint Ramakrishna. As a child, he was crossing a paddy field when a flock of white cranes flew across a black storm cloud: the sight struck him as so beautiful that he collapsed in a faint. Undernourishment may, of course, have had something to do with it, but this does not obscure the central point. Ramakrishna was born with a tendency to ‘spirituality’; the beauty of the cranes against the storm cloud brought a flood of ‘associations’, and a sense of ‘access to inner worlds’ that produced a sudden and total relaxation—and loss of consciousness. As a young priest, Ramakrishna fell into a state of despair because he had ceased to experience these floods of insight; he seized a sword with the intention of killing himself when ‘suddenly the Mother revealed herself to me…The buildings…the temple and all vanished, leaving no trace; instead there was a limitless, infinite shining ocean of consciousness or spirit.’
From this time on, any mention of the Divine Mother or of Krishna could send Ramakrishna into this total ecstasy which the Hindus call samadhi . The name itself was enough to conjure up the flood of associations.
Steiner tells no similar story about how he first learned to gain ‘access to inner worlds’, and we may infer that there was no single event, but a great number of experiences of this inner-warmth. Music, for example, played a central part. ‘Music became all-important for the kind of spiritual experience I wished to establish on a secure foundation within myself.’ So did poetry, particularly that of Goethe and Schiller. So at a fairly early stage, by his mid- or late-teens, Steiner had acquired the same basic knack as Ramakrishna: of being able to retreat into himself and cause an instantaneous flood of inner warmth.
The career of the Silesian mystic Jacob Boehme affords another clue. His biographer records that, when Boehme was twenty-five (in 1600), his eyes fell on a pewter dish whose dark surface reflected the sunlight. Like Ramakrishna, he went into ecstasy, and experienced the sensation that he was looking into the heart of nature. He went out into the fields, and felt as though he could see into the trees and grass, as if they were made of glass and lit from within. Steiner's own account of ‘spiritual vision’, while more down-to-earth in tone, reveals that he is speaking about the same thing:
While in earthly life man develops from birth onward, he confronts the world with his power of cognition. First he gains insight into the physical sphere. However, this is but the outpost of knowledge. This insight does not yet reveal everything the world contains. The world has an inner living reality [my italics] but man does not reach this living reality at first. He shuts himself off from it. He forms a picture of the world which lacks inner reality because his own inner reality has not yet faced the world. The world-picture he forms is, in fact, an illusion. As man perceives the world through his senses he sees an illusion. But when, from his own inner being, he adds sense-free thinking to sense perception, the illusion is permeated with reality; it ceases to be illusion. Then the human spirit experiences itself within man and meets the spirit in the world; the latter is no longer hidden from man behind the physical world; it weaves and moves within it .
The last phrase—italicized by Steiner—makes it clear that the experience he is describing is identical with Boehme's vision of the ‘signature of all things’ (by ‘signature’ Boehme meant the inner reality). Steiner is asserting that once man has learned to create that curious glow of inner warmth and to retreat into it , the world ceases to be an ‘illusion’, and becomes a spiritual reality, permeated with its own vital spirit.
Most of us can grasp what he means. Every nature poet has described the sensation: the feeling that the earth is alive with meaning. We experience it ourselves on a spring morning, when everything seems to glow with a new life. But we are inclined to dismiss this as a ‘manner of speaking’. We feel that our own sense of warmth and excitement is conferring warmth and excitement on nature. Steiner is denying this view, and stating that what we see in these moods is closer to the reality than what we see in ordinary perception.
What emerges very clearly is that Steiner's attitude is fundamentally romantic, as romantic as Keats, or Shelley, or Hoffmann. This is nowhere more apparent than in his next major work, Friedrich Nietzsche, Fighter for Freedom . Steiner had come across Nietzsche's writings in Vienna in 1889, and had become increasingly fascinated by his ideas. This in itself is difficult to understand, since it would be hard to find two thinkers with less in common than Steiner and Nietzsche. Steiner was convinced of the existence of a spiritual world that somehow runs parallel with this one; Nietzsche was convinced that the only world is the one we live in, and that people refuse to face this reality because they are too weak. According to Nietzsche, if people had more strength, more courage, more willpower, they would glory in the existence of ‘this world’, and recognize that all ‘other worlds’ are delusions conjured up by weakness and neurosis. This conviction was not the result of intellectual analysis, but of a number of experiences of overpowering ecstasy, moments in which Nietzsche was swept away by a Dionysian flood of strength and optimism; it was after one such moment, on a Swiss mountainside, that Nietzsche conceived the idea of Zarathustra, and wrote on a slip of paper ‘Six thousand feet above men and time’. It seems a fair assumption that Nietzsche would have dismissed Steiner as what he liked to call an ‘other-worlder’.
Steiner, for his part, admits that he was at first repelled by Nietzsche and by his self-assertiveness: ‘I loved his style, I loved his daring, but I did not love the way he spoke of the most significant matters without entering into them.’ But then, Nietzsche was a visionary who was convinced that he had seen the truth about human existence. That truth is that man is slowly evolving towards the Superman, and that the sooner he recognizes this and directs all his efforts towards it, the sooner he will forget the religious fairy stories that keep him weak and deluded.
The rather more dubious side of Nietzsche's ‘evolutionism’ is his glorification of the warrior—particularly when, as an exemplification of the warrior-hero, he chooses an archetypal ‘spoilt brat’ like Cesare Borgia. Nietzsche's own physical weakness and consequent inability to escape the atmosphere of the study leads him to take a rather unrealistic view of the man of action.
Then how could Steiner bring himself to admire Nietzsche? The answer can be found in the Autobiography:
I felt him to be a personality who was compelled by disposition and education to live intensely in the cultural and spiritual life around him, but who also felt: ‘What has all this to do with me?—so much repels me. There must be a different world, a world where I can live.’ This made him a fiery critic of his time, but a critic made ill by his own criticism.
This view seemed to be confirmed when Steiner met Nietzsche. The philosopher's sister, Frau Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche, came to the Goethe Archive to ask advice about founding a similar Nietzsche archive—her brother had been insane since 1889—and took a liking to Steiner. He was invited to her home, and that of Nietzsche's mother, in Naumburg. On the first visit, he was taken in to see Nietzsche. ‘He was lying on a couch. His exceptionally beautiful forehead was that of a thinker and artist. It was early afternoon. His eyes, though dying, still reflected his soul; they took in his physical surroundings, but this no longer reached his mind. One stood there, but Nietzsche was not aware of one's presence. Observing his intelligent features one could believe they belonged to someone who had spent all morning engaged in thought and now wished to rest awhile.’
Steiner now experienced another of his ‘spiritual insights’:
The inner shock I experienced led to what I can only describe as an insight into the genius of Nietzsche whose gaze, though directed towards me, did not meet mine. The very passivity of this gaze, resting upon me for a long time, released my inner comprehension…In inner perception I saw Nietzsche's soul as if hovering over his head, infinitely beautiful in its spirit-light, surrendered to the spiritual worlds it had longed for so much but had been unable to find before illness had clouded his mind…Previously I had read Nietzsche. Now I saw the actual bearer of ideas from the highest spirit realms, ideas that even here shone in their beauty despite having lost their original radiance on the way. A soul who had brought from former lives on earth golden riches of great spirituality but was unable to let it shine fully in the present life. I admired what Nietzsche had written; now I saw his radiant spirit behind what I so greatly admired.
In fact, what Steiner saw in Nietzsche was largely a reflection of himself. He felt of his own age: ‘What has all this to do with me? There must be a different world, a world where I can live.’ Nietzsche had conceived his own philosophy of Dionysian strength in his student days, after taking shelter from a storm in a hut where a shepherd was killing a goat; the crash of the storm mingled with the bleating of the goat and the smell of blood, and brought an overpowering ecstasy which expressed itself in the words: ‘Lightning and tempest are different worlds, free powers without morality. Pure will, without the troubles and confusions of intellect—how happy, how free!’
All this is a long way from the romantic, world-rejecting Nietzsche that Steiner ‘saw’ that day in Naumburg, with his ‘golden riches of great spirituality’ (a phrase that would have made Nietzsche wince). In spite of which, the book Steiner wrote on Nietzsche—and published in 1895—is remarkably perceptive. It reveals Steiner's extraordinary power of empathy—at times, the style even sounds like Nietzsche. And the reason is that, in spite of their many differences, there is a certain basic kinship between Nietzsche and Steiner. To grasp this kinship is of central importance in understanding the essence of Steiner's thought. It can be found in a passage in his earlier book On the Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World Conception . There * Steiner attacks the view that the world of thought is dim and unreal compared to the world of sensations:
The truth is entirely overlooked that mere ‘beholding’ is the emptiest thing imaginable, and that it receives content only from thinking…When one who has a rich mental life sees a thousand things which are nothing to the mentally poor, this shows as clearly as sunlight that the content of reality is only the reflection of the content of our minds, and that we receive from outside merely the empty forms. Of course, we must possess the inner power to recognize ourselves as the creator of this content….
Here we could say that Steiner has already grasped the essence of Nietzsche's Zarathustra, four years before he came across Nietzsche's writings. This is even more clear in the penultimate chapter of the book, which deals with Optimism and Pessimism. Here Steiner states: ‘Man is the central point of the world order…Things really are only as they are illuminated by him. This point of view declares that man possesses within himself the central essence of his own existence. It makes him a self-sufficient being…’. And he goes on to dismiss optimism, which says the world is basically good, and pessimism, which says it is bad. ‘The external world is, in itself, neither good nor bad; it only becomes one or the other through man.’
This is why, in spite of basic differences of approach, Steiner could write so sympathetically about Nietzsche. Like Nietzsche, his fundamental message is that man is far stronger than he realizes. The mind itself transforms reality, as the sun transforms the world when it rises in the morning. As Blake said: ‘The fool sees not the same tree that the wise man sees.’
But we should also bear in mind that the book in which Steiner made these assertions is about the ‘theory of knowledge implicit in Goethe's world conception’. He is not speaking in his own person, as Rudolf Steiner, but as a kind of mouthpiece for Goethe. In the book on Nietzsche, he is speaking as mouthpiece for Nietzsche. At this point, in his mid-thirties, he has still not acquired the courage to express his convictions in his own voice. And in fact, his next major work—published two years after the Nietzsche book—was yet another study of Goethe, Goethe's Weltanschauung .
Oddly enough, this final—and most definitive—work on Goethe was written as a result of Steiner's friendship with a circle of Nietzsche enthusiasts, the von Cromptons, one of Weimar's most prominent families. Steiner's book on Nietzsche made him a welcome visitor. The von Crompton circle was outspokenly critical of Weimar, which they found ‘human, all too human’. They wanted to know how German culture could develop when Weimar, the home of Goethe, made so little effort to fulfil its mission.
Goethe's Weltanschauung differs from Steiner's earlier books in its sense of intellectual passion; at last, he is daring to raise his voice, and speak with a warmth that must have made his fellow Goethe scholars raise their eyebrows. The reason, he explains in the Autobiography, is that he was strongly under the influence of the von Crompton circle, particularly their discussions about the nature of human personality. But he had already grasped this important matter in the earlier book on Goethe. There, after declaring that the ‘content of reality is only the reflection of the content of our own minds’, he went on: ‘Of course, we must possess the inner power to recognize ourselves as the creator of this content; otherwise we shall forever see only the reflection, and never our own mind which is reflected. Indeed, one who perceives himself in an ordinary mirror must know himself as a personality in order to recognize himself as the reflected image.’ (He might have added that very few animals recognize themselves in mirrors.) All of which is to say that until I dare to recognize myself fully as an individual personality, I shall never understand that unconscious creativity which transforms the world around me. Now Steiner was allowing that realization to overcome his natural modesty—and his caution as a scholar—so that the Goethe book rings with a new depth of personal conviction.
There is, of course, irony in the fact that he still has to take refuge behind Goethe. But Steiner himself was intelligent enough to grasp that irony. He was slowly becoming aware that, whether he liked it or not, he would soon have to stand before his audience as Rudolf Steiner, and dare to use the word ‘I’.
It was at this period, when he was writing the final Goethe book, that ‘a profound transformation began to take place in my inner life’. The chrysalis was slowly turning into a butterfly. What happened was that Steiner ceased to feel the need to shrink away from the real world and take refuge in his mental world. It was a kind of rebirth.
I became able to observe physical things and events more accurately and completely than before. This was the case in regard to scientific investigation, and also to external life in general…There awakened within me a new awareness of sense-perceptible things. Details became important. I felt that the sense world has something to reveal which it alone can reveal. I felt one ought to learn to know the physical world purely through itself without adding any of one's own thoughts.
These remarks sound oddly commonplace for such a climactic change. We have to bear in mind Steiner's admission that he always had great difficulty coming to terms with the real world, as if his sense organs were somehow too weak to make proper contact. For modern readers, that sentence ‘I felt that the sense world has something to reveal which it alone can reveal’ may bring to mind Aldous Huxley's description of his experience under mescalin: that sense that the world has suddenly become fifty times as real , and that the sheer ‘is-ness’ of things is speaking to us. Our senses filter the real world, and ‘turn it down’ like the volume control on a radio; mescalin removes the filter and turn up the volume. This seems to be what Steiner is trying to describe. And his sentence about learning ‘to know the physical world purely through itself without adding one's own thoughts’ brings to mind Nietzsche's triumphant cry: ‘Pure will, without the troubles and perplexities of intellect! How happy! how free!’
What was happening was that Steiner was slowly ceasing to be the shy, shrinking, self-conscious young man, of whom Friedrich Eckstein said ‘He didn't know a thing.’ It had taken him a long time to grow up. During the first half of his life he had been a typical ‘outsider’ figure, withdrawn into a world of his own thoughts, looking at the real world as if he was looking through the glass of an aquarium. Now, at last, he was in contact with the real world, and felt no more need to retreat hastily back into the safety of his mental world.
‘I was aware that I was experiencing an inner transformation of soul-life which normally occurs at a much earlier age.’ And he came to the interesting conclusion that for most people, it happens too early. They emerge from the shy, inner world of the child and adolescent, and learn to come to terms with the real world around them. The result is that the two worlds mix, like hot and cold water, the result being lukewarm water. Because Steiner had taken so much longer to make contact with the external world, he had also acquired the knack of preventing the two from diluting one another.
It had happened at exactly the right time. Steiner's work in Weimar was drawing to a close; he had completed his edition of Goethe's scientific writings. And while no doubt he could have stayed on at the Goethe Archive indefinitely, he was experiencing the need to move on. The desire to express his convictions was becoming increasingly strong. ‘My special concern at this period of my life was that ideas which I had to reject emphatically had taken such an intense hold upon thinking in general. These ideas were so universally accepted that people were unable to see the possibilities inherent in anything that opposed them.’ And Steiner had to face the fact that his own books were doing nothing to change the opinions of the age. His highly abstract style guaranteed that very few people read them. Sooner or later, he would have to go out into the world and preach. But where would he begin? ‘Thus at every turn I met the problem: How can I find the way to express in terms understandable to my contemporaries what I inwardly perceive directly as truth?’ And it is significant that the following chapter of his Autobiography—Chapter 24—is the only one that bears a title: ‘Must I remain silent?’
Steiner's thoroughly unpractical solution to the problem was to purchase a moribund magazine called The Review of Literature . It was unpractical, to begin with, because the magazine had only a few subscribers. A Frank Harris or a G. K. Chesterton might have turned it into a success; but Steiner was the last man in the world to improve its circulation. His brief editorship of the German Weekly Review in 1888 had shown that he had no talent in this direction. Worse still, the owner would only sell it if Steiner accepted as co-editor a pleasant but lazy man-about-town called Otto Erich Hartleben, an ‘aesthete’ who spent half his time in Italy and the other half in Berlin cafés. Steiner liked him—he seems to have liked everybody—but found it impossible to work with him.
Nevertheless, the magazine seemed to offer the only solution to the problem of how to reach a wider audience. So in July 1897, Steiner finally severed his connection with Weimar and became an editor in Berlin.
The change was not particularly pleasant. Once again, he found himself living in uncomfortable lodgings. The people he now associated with were friends of Hartleben and members of a group called the Independent Literary Society who regarded the magazine as their own platform. Steiner says mildly: ‘Those who were connected with the Review …were not particularly serious-minded people. Only a very few had any deeper interests.’ And it does not take a great deal of reading between the lines to see that they regarded Steiner as what would nowadays be called a ‘nut’. With charming honesty, Steiner admits that Weimar friends had failed to understand his ideas, but had been willing to accept that he had something of value to contribute. This new circle, he says with obvious understatement, did not share that impression. So his first experience of attempting to reach the wider public must have been something of a disillusionment.
Steiner, fortunately, was not the kind of man to be discouraged by incomprehension. His ‘spiritual insight’ suggested that all this was ‘the working of destiny’, a healthy-minded attitude that protected him from the discouragement he would have certainly experienced as a younger man.
His permanent lack of money did nothing to ease the situation. The magazine staggered on from crisis to crisis, and caused endless anxiety. Steiner's own reviews and articles, far from increasing its circulation, alienated many subscribers, particularly a group associated with the University of Berlin. Once again, he was spending his time sitting around in cafés with impecunious writers, just as if the last ten years had never happened. Some of the writers—like the dramatist Frank Wedekind—were men of genius; but they still had nothing whatever in common with Steiner. ‘My position became uncomfortable within this circle because I realized why I was there, but the others did not.’ And why was he there? To fulfil his destiny, to speak openly of his knowledge of the spirit. It was a pity that no one seemed interested.
At least he was able to renew his acquaintance with the theatre. The magazine was also associated with an independent Drama Society’, who hired theatres for matinée performances of uncommercial plays—such as Maeterlinck's symbolist drama The Intruder . Steiner introduced this play with a short lecture, and thoroughly enjoyed himself. Whether his audience did is another matter: ‘it afforded opportunity to convey a mood of true spirituality’. Cultivated Berliners found Steiner's brand of spirituality incomprehensible. In this age of Freud and Ibsen, Strindberg and Wedekind, H. G. Wells and Bernard Shaw, his ‘idealism’ must have struck most of them as a stale leftover from the 1850s.
Not the least of his personal problems was the ‘utter misery of living alone’. At least this improved when Anna Eunicke moved from Weimar to Berlin in 1898; she took a house in the suburb of Friedenau, and invited Steiner to become a lodger. But the daughters were now grown up, and the presence of this still fairly young man in a house full of women probably gave rise to gossip. For whatever reason, Steiner and Anna Eunicke were married on 31 October 1899.
For the short period it lasted, Steiner's marriage seems to have been a happy one. An interesting glimpse into his domestic life can be found in the memoir written by a working man named Alwin Rudolph, who called upon Steiner towards the end of 1898 as an emissary of the College of the Workers’ Educational Association. The College was looking around for someone to undertake the thankless task of lecturing on history—the lectures were usually so dry that most of the students dropped out after a week or so, and the lecturers became discouraged. Someone suggested a certain poet, and the poet suggested Steiner. So a delegation led by Herr Rudolph called upon Steiner at the house in Friedenau.
They were shown into a large room with an enormous desk by a young woman—one of the daughters. There was an older woman in the room, as well as Rudolf Steiner, a small, slim man dressed in black, with an untrimmed moustache and a flowing bow tie. Steiner was friendly and welcoming, and in no time at all, pastries had been produced and a coffee grinder was at work on the table. Of the women, Rudolph says: ‘Actually I ought not to speak of them as “ladies”, because they were two simple women, open-minded and many sided.’ Presumably he means to say that they did not strike him as at all ‘upper class’—if anything, the reverse. They seemed to treat Steiner with reverence, and it never occurred to Rudolph that the older woman might be—or might become—Mrs Steiner.
Without hesitation, Steiner agreed to give the course of lectures. The working men were so overwhelmed by all the hospitality and friendliness that they even forgot to mention the question of money—the fee for the course was a mere eight marks. Accordingly, Rudolph was ordered to return and find out whether Dr Steiner would be insulted by such a small sum. His reception this time was even friendlier; Steiner greeted him by taking both hands. Once more, coffee was produced, and when Steiner told him it was heated by spirits, there was a certain amount of joking about the word. The daughter produced a rag doll of Dr Steiner, and lifted the black frock coat to reveal a bottle of brandy. The girl explained that ‘his whole body is spirit’. Rudolph, a Marxian materialist, was a little bewildered by these jokes, but deeply impressed by Steiner—so much so that he again omitted to mention fees.
On 13 January 1899, Steiner arrived for his first lecture at two minutes to eight—it was due to begin at eight—once more accompanied by his two faithful females. The room was small, for the College was accustomed to the audience dwindling steadily during the ten-week course. The little man with the friendly face and Austrian accent lauched himself into the lecture, speaking without notes, and the crowded audience was deeply impressed. Some of them even said afterwards that he ought to be a Member of Parliament.
The situation was, of course, paradoxical. The Workers’ Educational Association was founded on Marxian principles, so its view of history was totally materialistic. Steiner was not in the least bothered by this; in fact, he saw it as his task to convert them to his own views in the gentlest possible manner. We may regard his attitude as either pragmatic or Machiavellian. He says: ‘It must be remembered that there are partial truths in the materialistic ideas on economics…Had I simply ignored them and taught history from an idealistic point of view, the workers would have sensed that what I said was not in agreement with the partial truths they knew…’. In other words, Steiner allowed them to assume that he agreed with Marx's economic theory of history. But he immediately added a reservation. It was nonsense to speak of economic forces dominating history before the sixteenth century, because economic life did not take on a form that could be understood in a Marxian sense until that time. Any good Marxist would have told him indignantly that the sixteenth century was the age of mercantile capitalism, and was just as dominated by class conflict as the nineteenth century. Fortunately, Steiner's audience consisted of respectful workers who were overawed by his enormous erudition. So they raised no objections when Steiner explained that before the sixteenth century, the great human ideals were spiritual, and that only in recent centuries have these become weakened by materialism. Probably no one even guessed that Steiner was not an orthodox Marxist. ‘It would have been useless to enter into a controversy about materialism; I had to let idealism arise out of materialism,’ says Steiner cunningly.
Fortunately, he adds, the leaders of the workers were not in the least interested in the College, so he had a free hand. Besides, no one could afford to look a gift horse in the mouth; Steiner charged only eight marks, and his lectures remained crowded throughout the course. Soon, other workers wanted him to come and address them. Trade unions asked him to lecture on science: Haeckel's Riddle of the Universe was the current bestseller, and discussing this was a delicate task, since it was a passionate attack on all forms of religion. (Steiner solved this problem by telling his audience that only the biological part of the book was valid, and the rest ought to be destroyed.) For the Gutenberg anniversary, he was asked to address an audience of seven thousand in the Berlin circus.
But if Steiner was quite happy to consort with the enemy, the enemy was less broad-minded. Sooner or later, the leaders of the working-class movement in Berlin were bound to realize that they were nurturing a viper in their bosom. One of them attended a lecture, and declared ‘In the proletarian movement we do not want freedom—we want reasonable compulsion.’ But Steiner's pupils remained loyal. His audience in the rented rooms in the Annenstrasse swelled from fifty or so to over two hundred; instead of lasting until eleven o'clock, his lectures usually went on until after midnight. And Steiner was in his element. At last he was addressing the ‘masses’, and discovering that, in spite of his somewhat abstract mode of expression, he was a charismatic orator. It took the leaders of the Berlin socialist movement another four years to dislodge him; and by that time, Steiner had moved on to an even more appreciative audience.
What excited Steiner's listeners so much was that they were asked to participate. The German method of teaching tends to be authoritarian; the audience listens quietly, then goes home. Steiner's friendly manner made it easy for his audience to ask questions and join in the discussion. The lesson he learned became the basis for Steiner's later educational theory. Nowadays we take it for granted that audiences join in the discussion after a lecture and that the aim of education is to encourage the student to develop his individuality. It is almost impossible to grasp how revolutionary these ideas seemed in Berlin in the last year of the nineteenth century.
Steiner was involved with other groups and societies beside the Workers’ College. One of these was called ‘die Kommenden’, the Future Ones, and its central figure was the Jewish writer and social thinker Ludwig Jacobowski, who ran a magazine called Society and devoted his life to combating anti-semitism. In fact, Steiner went on to lecture to the Jacobowski group after his opening lecture at the Workers’ College. When Jacobowski died of meningitis in 1900, at the age of thirty-two, Steiner gave his funeral oration.
Another group with whom Steiner soon became involved was the Giordano Bruno Union, a group of ‘monistic idealists’—i.e. people who believe that the only basic reality is spirit. Steiner attended the opening lecture, given by his friend Bruno Wille in 1900 and demonstrated that, in the social sphere, he was still prone to ineptness. Wille lectured on Goethe's remark that there is no matter without spirit. Afterwards, Steiner commented that Goethe had supplemented these words with the important amplification that ‘polarity and intensification are direct manifestations of the spirit at work in creation’. Understandably, Wille saw this as a form of one-upmanship—as Steiner would have realized if he had thought twice before speaking. But the friendship survived, and Steiner was later asked to teach history at a newly created Independent College launched by Wille and other ‘Brunoites’.
Philosophically speaking, Steiner's friends—and critics—must have wondered whether he was coming or going. In Jacobowski's Society he published a spirited defence of Haeckel, whose Riddle of the Universe he had dismissed so cavalierly. In his Review , Steiner published articles by an anarchist friend, the Scot John Henry Mackay, who preached a non-violent social revolution. He was influenced by his liking for Mackay and the fact that Mackay had been best man at his marriage; but respectable readers of the Review were outraged that it should be turned into a platform for anarchism, and cancelled their subscriptions by the dozen. (The magazine was also banned in Russia.) Steiner's lectures at the Workers’ College lent credibility to the view that he was a disguised fellow-traveller. Yet he infuriated the members of the Giordano Bruno Union with a lecture on ‘monism’ in which he praised Scholasticism, pointing out that thinkers like Duns Scotus and Thomas Aquinas were monists in the sense that they believed that the universe is basically spiritual in nature. His audience found it impossible to understand why Steiner should speak sympathetically of the Church that had burned Giordano Bruno, and suspected that he was trying to smuggle in Catholicism by the back door.
In spite of these controversies—and the steady decline of the magazine—Steiner's reputation was spreading by word of mouth. In 1900, a young member of the Berlin lodge of the Theosophical Society approached two of its leading members, Count and Countess Brockdorff, and suggested that Rudolf Steiner would be a suitable person to deliver a lecture on Nietzsche. He had been excited by a curious article Steiner had written about Goethe's ‘Fairy Tale’, which Steiner interpreted as an ‘esoteric’ parable about the supersensible world. On 22 August 1900 Steiner delivered a lecture on Nietzsche in the library of the Berlin Theosophical Society. It went down well. Steiner had forgotten about Theosophy since his brief flirtation with it in Vienna in the 1880s, although he had made some hostile comments about it in his magazine. Now he noticed that some people in the audience were ‘people who had great interest in the world of spirit’. He was asked to come again. On 29 September 1900, he lectured on the ‘secret revelation’ of Goethe's ‘Fairy Tale’. It was, in a sense, a historic occasion, for this was the first time that Steiner had ever spoken out publicly about his ‘spiritual researches’.
The Theosophists asked for more. Steiner obliged with talks on two mystics, Meister Eckhart and Jacob Boehme, and followed them up with another twenty-three lectures on various aspects of mysticism and the inner life. One member of his audience told him one day that his ideas were not in accordance with those of Annie Besant, leader of the English branch of the Theosophical Society. Steiner replied mildly: ‘Is that so?’, and went on as before.
But most of the members, including Count and Countess Brockdorff, were less critical. They sensed that Steiner was speaking from some direct personal knowledge, and they were intrigued. So, apparently, was a rather attractive young woman who began to appear at the lectures—Marie von Sivers, who had been brought up in Russia, studied drama at Paris, and only recently had decided against making a career as an actress. She approached Steiner and asked him whether it was not time to launch a new spiritual movement in Europe. Steiner agreed that it was, and sensing—correctly—that she was asking whether he was willing to lead such a movement, replied that he would only be available to ‘call into life’ a movement linked to Western occultism. He meant, of course, that he was not interested in developing Madame Blavatsky's Eastern form of theosophy.
According to the biographer of Marie von Sivers, * it was this conversation that brought Steiner to a decision. ‘After the decisive question had been put…it became possible for Rudolf Steiner to approach his task, to become a spiritual leader of mankind.’
The meeting with Marie von Sivers marked the end of Steiner's marriage—although he and Anna were to live together until 1903—and the beginning of his career as a public personality.
* Rudolf Steiner Enters My Life , p. 71.
* Chapter XI.
* Marie Steiner-von Sivers , by Marie Savitch.