Goethe
Blavatsky
Lewis
Dante
Goetheaneum
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Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) was born in what is
now Croatia. The man who would later become an occult thinker and founder
(in 1912) of the philosophical and educational movement known as Anthroposophy
studied natural science as an undergraduate and then embarked on an intensive
study (1889-1897) of Goethe's writings on science
(in preparation for the definitive Weimar edition of his work).
After a short stint as a literary editor and
as general secretary of the German division of the Theosophical Society,
he broke with Madame Blavatsky and Theosophy
to found his own rival group, establishing its headquarters in Dornach,
Switzerland, building (in 1913) the Goetheaneum, an art noveau architectural
monument to the ideas of Anthroposophy and launching the Waldorf School
method which would incorporate his educational theory.
A prolific lecturer and author (a projected
collected works would contain over three hundred volumes!), he was the
author of such books as A Theory of Knowledge: Implicit in Goethe's
World Conception (1886), Occult Science
(1914) and The Philosophy
of Freedom (1916).
Barfield's growing interest in and indebtedness
to Steiner, whose ideas C. S. Lewis greatly mistrusted,
led to Lewis and Barfield's "great war" in the 1930s.
Overt discussion of Steiner's huge influence
is surprisingly rare in Barfield's work (though he never fails to acknowledge
his debt). The following represents a sampling of Barfield's comments on
Steiner's consequence and significance.
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Steiner's lifework reveals--even to those who
reject his findings--mental capacities and qualities of heart and will
which may reassure us, by exemplifying, that the stature of microcosm is
not, or may at least not be in the future, out of reach of man as we know
him. In him we can observe, actually beginning to occur, the transition
from homo sapiens to homo imaginans et amans. (LS 100)
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It was a year or two before my first book was
published [History in English Words (1926)] that I first came into
contact with the writings of Rudolf Steiner. I began, after some hesitation,
to study his spiritual science, or Anthroposophy, seriously and steadily;
and this went on side by side, in close interaction with [my] other studies.
As time went on, three things in particular struck me most about Anthroposophy.
The first was, that many of the statements and ideas which I found there
produced an effect very similar to the combination of words to which I
have already alluded [see felt change of consciousness].
As in the one case, so in the other, this effect was independent of belief.
Something happened: one felt wiser. . . . The second was that, so far as
concerned the particular subject in which I was immersed at the time, that
is the histories of verbal meanings and their bearing on the evolution
of human consciousness, Steiner had obviously forgotten volumes more than
I had ever dreamed. . . . some of my most daring and (as I thought) original
conclusions were his premises. . . . The third was, that Anthroposophy
included and transcended not only my own poor stammering theory of poetry
as knowledge, but the whole Romantic philosophy. It was nothing less than
Romanticism
grown up. (RCA 12-13)
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From Steiner . . . I learned for the first time
that a serious attempt to obtain exact results with the help of a perceptive
faculty developed through controlled [systematic]
imagination had been made more than a hundred years earlier, and by
no means without success, by that uncrowned king of Romantics, Goethe.
(RCA 16)
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I have been shocked and puzzled to have it borne
in on me over and over again that even those who are prepared to lend a
very sympathetic ear indeed to my own observations, whether on language
and poetry or on the wider issue of the whole evolution of human consciousness,
are not in the least interested in the news about Steiner which it has
been one of my main objects in life to set before the educated public with
all the earnestness and sobriety at my disposal. (RCA 16-17)
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That future historians of Western thought will
interpret the appearances of Romantic philosophy towards the close of the
eighteenth century as foreshadowing the advent of Rudolf Steiner towards
the close of the nineteenth I have no sort of doubt. (RCA 19)
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To say that [Steiner] advocated, and practiced,
"the systematic use of imagination" is to place so much emphasis on the
mere beginning of what he taught and did, that it is rather like saying
that Dante wrote a poem about a greyhound. Steiner
showed that imagination, and the
final
participation it leads to, involve, unlike hypothetical thinking, the
whole man--thought, feeling, will, and character--and his own revelations
were clearly drawn from those further stages of participation--Inspiration
and Intuition--to which the systematic use of imagination may lead. (SA
141)
See as well the Rudolf
Steiner page elsewhere on this website.
See in particular "Listening to Steiner,"
"Introduction" (RCA 7-24), Saving the Appearances, Chap. XX. |
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