Rudolf Steiner: 'Scientist of the Invisible'

Can one Rudolf Steiner fan be wrong? Particularly if it's Saul Bellow?

In the early 1970s, novelist Bellow discovered anthroposophy, the "spiritual science" developed by Austrian thinker Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925). According to Bellow biographer James Atlas, the wiseguy Chicago writer regularly attended Windy City sessions of the Anthroposophical Society, kept a photo of Steiner on his desk, practiced Steiner's meditation exercises, bought his books by the bagful, and pursued the Steiner scholar Owen Barfield for further illumination. Charlie Citrine, the Bellowish protagonist of the future Nobel laureate's next novel, Humboldt's Gift, could be found intently studying Steiner's Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment in a Madrid hotel room.

Steiner believed modern materialism blinds us to a spiritual world we can reach through our senses and inner consciousness, yet he also declared a variety of more controversial and bizarre beliefs over his decades of frenetic lecturing and writing. Steiner warned against a devilish spirit named Ahriman, who threatened the world; discussed the activities of the Buddha on Mars; advocated reading to the dead; accepted reincarnation and karma (the idea that actions in past lives affect present ones); and proclaimed acquaintance with the Akashic records of everything that has happened in the universe.

Bellow wrote a foreword to The Boundaries of Natural Science, a book of Steiner's lectures, and often spoke warmly of anthroposophy, remarking: "It puts back into life a kind of magic we've been persuaded to drop. ... When Steiner tells me I have a soul and a spirit, I say, yes, I always knew that."

Atlas argues that the novelist never became a full-fledged "mystic." Ruth Miller, another Bellow biographer, recalls Bellow confiding that he didn't believe in clairvoyance, the Ouija board, or spirits, but did accept the spirit and soul and an afterlife, just like Whitman and Tolstoy. Citrine appeared to express Bellow's selective engagement with Steiner, remarking: "There were passages in Steiner that set my teeth on edge. I said to myself, this is lunacy. Then I said, this is poetry, a great vision."

Steiner's amalgam of humanistic warmth, love of nature, and oddball occultism exerted a similar push-pull effect on other 20th-century artists. The brilliant Russian novelist Andrei Bely said Steiner could "transform every situation into an unforgettable moment," broke with Steiner, then returned to the fold. Painter Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Kafka also experienced their Steiner moments. Today practical upshots of Steiner's anthroposophical movement — Waldorf schools, Camphill schools for the disabled "in need of special care of the soul," biodynamic farming, and Anthroposophical Societies themselves — keep his name alive, though not at the household level he enjoyed in the first quarter of the 20th century.

"Steinerology," unlike Scientology, can't claim a well-publicized celebrity practitioner today such as Tom Cruise or John Travolta, who can win its principles and founder some limelight as part of tabloid coverage. Welcome, then, to Gary Lachman's recently published Rudolf Steiner: An Introduction to His Life and Thought (Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin), the first study in quite a while not issued by an anthroposophical press. It's a welcome opportunity to reassess the so-called "Scientist of the Invisible," a man Citrine's pal Thaxter calls "a very rational kind of mystic."

You might think of Steiner as the philosophical equivalent of a Caribbean resort — he's an all-inclusive. He offered advice on religion, art, food, medicine, politics, horticulture, economics, and more. A child of Austrian Catholic village culture, he took a Ph.D. in philosophy at Rostock, then pursued a nonacademic philosophical career — in German-speaking Europe, about as easy as trying to get rabbinical work in Saudi Arabia. His first jobs involved editing Goethe's scientific writings, eventually at Weimar's Goethe-Archiv. That work put Goethe's theory of "imaginative observation" — watching nature with the ardor of an artist — forever at the center of Steiner's own thought. He later named the central building at his compound and headquarters, in Dornach, Switzerland, near Basel, the Goetheanum.

Described by a friend as looking like an "ill-fed seminarian," Steiner next served as editor and drama critic for Berlin's Magazin: Monatschrift für Litteratur. His naturalistic interest in philosophers like Nietzsche and Ernst Haeckel soon merged with his attraction to theosophy, whose adherents responded predictably well to his assertions of spiritual realms beyond material reality. In 1902, Steiner became general secretary of Germany's Theosophical Society and began an Emerson-like career of barnstorming European lecture halls.

Like psychoanalysis, however, theosophy, the brainchild of Russian mystic Madame Blavatsky and her successor, Annie Besant, split into camps. In 1913, after theosophy under Besant took an Eastern route and announced Jiddu Krishnamurti as the messiah, Steiner, who always preferred his spiritualism in Western forms that incorporated Christianity and European mystics such as Jakob Boehme and Meister Eckhart, renamed his philosophy "anthroposophy," and spent the last 12 years of his life establishing it as a movement. His most famous definition of it? A "path of knowledge, to guide the spiritual in the human being to the spiritual in the universe."

Steiner confuses many readers of philosophy because his first important book, The Philosophy of Freedom (1894), contains no overt occultism. He sounds like a recognizable 19th-century Idealist and anti-mechanist, familiar with Kantian philosophy and its upshots. After he turned 40, though, Steiner came out, like a newly tenured literature professor switching from his credentialed scholarship to a maverick tome on iPods and sex tourism. Steiner posited that we have four bodies: a physical body, an "etheric" body (which comes with an aura), an "astral" or soul body that survives the physical body, and the spirit or "I." Similarly, after World War I, Steiner advocated a "threefold" ideal of a state's political organization, in which legal, spiritual, and economic areas of life mirror a human being's three aspects of thinking, feeling, and willing. The latter gained him, as Lachman reports, a substantial European following.

Ah, but the funny stuff!

In Karmic Relationships, Steiner began identifying the former lives of famous folks. (He lived too early, alas, for a Fox reality show.) Karl Marx became Karl Marx because he'd previously been a landowner stripped of his property. Nietzsche lost his marbles because he remembered mortifying himself in his earlier incarnation as a Franciscan friar. A medieval precursor of Richard Wagner? Why, Merlin the magician! A neat game. Steiner luckily disappeared before his brusque fellow Austrian, Karl Popper, came on the philosophical scene with the falsifiability police.

That leaves those who encounter Steiner today of two minds. Parents love to send their children to Waldorf schools, so named because the first sponsor of one was the owner of Stuttgart's Waldorf-Astoria cigarette company. Waldorf kids receive a Dewey-plus-spirits education rich in role models, personal freedom, and creativity. Fresh-food types love the organic revolution that arose partly from Steiner's emphasis on "biodynamic" farming. Fans of homeopathic medicine like anthroposophic medicine, a holistic approach. And who could actively oppose Steiner's virtues, in Lachman's list, of "patience, reverence, open-mindedness, respect, detachment, tranquillity"?

Lachman brings an ideally quirky scholarly background and sensibility to his subject. As Gary Valentine, he cofounded the rock band Blondie and entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. A writer subsequently about the esoteric and occult, he's published six previous books, including studies of P.D. Ouspensky and Swedenborg. While never mocking Steiner "the occult seer," Lachman admits his doubts about Steiner's far-fetched claims. He nonetheless regards his man as a "polymath" and "genius" whose more tactile principles appeal to opponents of secular corporatism and rampant materialism.

Steiner tests the loose boundaries that exist among our concepts of "philosopher," "thinker," "guru," and "religious teacher." He didn't argue so much as announce. His charisma and generosity drew acolytes and repelled conventional academics — as Citrine remarks, "In the learned world, anthroposophy was not respectable." Steiner's life teemed with eccentricities that add to curiosity about him. As a child, he believed cups and plates should be used only once, so he smashed them. Married twice, he remained celibate, according to his biographers. He liked to dump some of his daily coffee on the ground so the earth could share it.

Perhaps, as Bellow's whirlwind romance with anthroposophy indicated, there's a place for all-inclusive thinkers who invite people with precise intellectual and emotional needs to wander and ponder on their grounds. In his advocacy of a kindly balance between the natural and spiritual, a harmony of the whole person, Steiner sometimes resembled an occultist Aristotle, a spiritualist Sartre. He remains a bulwark, for those comfortable entering his compound, against modern naturalists who want to dissolve the "I" of consciousness into a software program.

So what if he thought that we all had telepathic powers in the "Old Moon" past, that kids shouldn't be taught to read until they lose their first teeth, that Atlantis figures mightily in the history of Western culture? Nobody's perfect.

Carlin Romano, critic at large for The Chronicle and literary critic for The Philadelphia Inquirer, teaches philosophy and media theory at the University of Pennsylvania.