The Occult Movement in the Nineteenth Century and Its Relation to Modern Culture: Ten Lectures Given in Dornach, 10th to 25th October, 1915

Collected Works of Rudolf Steiner #CW 254

by Rudolf Steiner

English, German (translation)

190 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1986

About the author

Author also wrote under the name Rudolph Steiner.

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...


Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner was an Austrian occultist, social reformer, architect, esotericist, and claimed clairvoyant. Steiner gained initial recognition at the end of the nineteenth century as a literary critic and published works including The Philosophy of Freedom. At the beginning of the twentieth century he founded an esoteric spiritual movement, anthroposophy, with roots in German idealist philosophy and theosophy. His teachings are influenced by Christian Gnosticism or neognosticism. Many of his ideas are pseudoscientific. He was also prone to pseudohistory.
In the first, more philosophically oriented phase of this movement, Steiner attempted to find a synthesis between science and spirituality. His philosophical work of these years, which he termed "spiritual science", sought to apply what he saw as the clarity of thinking characteristic of Western philosophy to spiritual questions,  differentiating this approach from what he considered to be vaguer approaches to mysticism. In a second phase, beginning around 1907, he began working collaboratively in a variety of artistic media, including drama, dance and architecture, culminating in the building of the Goetheanum, a cultural centre to house all the arts. In the third phase of his work, beginning after World War I, Steiner worked on various ostensibly applied projects, including Waldorf education, biodynamic agriculture, and anthroposophical medicine.
Steiner advocated a form of ethical individualism, to which he later brought a more explicitly spiritual approach. He based his epistemology on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's world view in which "thinking…is no more and no less an organ of perception than the eye or ear. Just as the eye perceives colours and the ear sounds, so thinking perceives ideas." A consistent thread that runs through his work is the goal of demonstrating that there are no limits to human knowledge.

Reviews

[Roger Buck]

Nearly 90 years after the Rudolf Steiner's death, the Christian Mystery becomes ever more obscured by the New Age-Theosophical hijacking of Western spirituality. Here is what so gravely troubled Rudolf Steiner - and in this book he tackles Theosophy like nowhere else. Now, Steiner hoped the Anthroposophic movement could be a solution for the new millennium - helping millions of people and yet it is like a damp squib compared to his hopes.

Faced by the failure of Anthroposophy and the dominance of Theosophical-New Age thinking everywhere now, what can one do? My answer involves what Steiner says here:

http://corjesusacratissimum.org/2011/...

These are very strange things indeed. That what he was so opposed to was the only wakeful consciousness within our sleeping civilization …
For reasons indicated at the above link that I do not wish to rate this book.

I simply want to say I have read it and that whilst Steiner served to free me from Eastern Theosophy and the New Age scene I found at Findhorn, Valentin Tomberg, in turn, provided me with a very different hermeneutic with which to engage Steiner.

I hope the above link however can contribute a little to the tangled issues involving Steiner and Tomberg - and why I believe this "very different hermeneutic" is necessary for a world plunging into a dark, mechanised society ...