I. Confusion at the Center

A report in the "News from the Goetheanum" issue of May/June, 1994 (vol. 15, no.3) is an extraordinary document. In the essay that follows, I will comment on this report and link my findings to what I consider to be disturbing recent trends in the Anthroposophical Society.

I am writing this paper not to attack the Anthroposophical Society, nor any individuals in it personally. I consider Rudolf Steiner’s legacy to be a genuine gift to the Modern Age. When the deepened understanding of life made possible through a study of Anthroposophy is integrated into historical consciousness and a commitment to furthering what is valuable in our civilization, here indeed is a step forward, here indeed is progress. My concerns in this paper have to do almost solely with this historical consciousness and the nature of anthroposophical commitments to society at large. I believe that a failure to address these issues has made the Anthroposophical Society vulnerable and confused in its leadership -- unwilling or unable to recognize that the "End-of-the-Century" attack it has for so long anticipated may be reaching into Anthroposophy itself.

I have been a member of the Anthroposophical Society for twenty-two years. Throughout this period, the membership figures in the Society have not changed significantly. In the most recent issue of the Goetheanum News (Sept/Oct 1996) Manfred Schmidt-Brabant reports that world membership in this Society currently stands at 52,203. This figure was much the same 22 years ago -- then about fifty thousand world-wide members. Manfred Schmidt-Brabant then says: "We may ask, as so often, why is the Society growing so slowly?"

The following essay may be taken as one member’s effort to provide an answer to this question -- to ask whether there is anything that anthroposophists could do to improve this situation. At the Michaelmas Meeting of 1993, the former General Secretary of the Anthroposophical Society in America remarked that "everywhere in the periphery we find ourselves in existential crises, largely in matters of financial support." Here is an honest statement of the problem. Whether it can be as honestly addressed remains to be seen.

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In 1993 there was a Michaelmas Meeting conducted at the Goetheanum in Dornach for members of the Anthroposophical Society. Summaries of this meeting and the discussion groups were published in the May/June, 1994, issue of the "News from the Goetheanum," the English-language newsheet published six times a year by the General Anthroposophical Society in Dornach, Switzerland.

The summarizing article (10 pages) was signed by Theodore Van Vliet. People participating in the conference are rarely quoted in their actual words. Perhaps this indirect means of reporting conversations accounts for some of the stiltedness of expression, the frequent use of the passive tense and of the impersonal "one" -- ("It was felt that now one should be more reticent or careful in voicing critical remarks about Dornach," etc.)

This is not to say that uniform summarizing cannot be useful, but only to point out that to a greater degree than direct quotation, this stylistic device can lend itself to monotony, colorlessness and general lacklustreness of communication. I have called this stylistic device the "authorial voice."

Few anthroposophists seem willing to risk robust self-expression. There was one incident reported, when "One member left the room, slamming the door behind him." This moment of individual passion does not disturb the quiet drone of the authorial voice: "Reflections on this phenomenon followed." A phenomenon? One -- and I say -- "one would have liked to know" whether any of the other members of the session followed this apparently disgusted individual out of the room to give him comfort or to commiserate with him. If anyone did, it was certainly not mentioned, evidently out of a desire not to get too personal. For, as one member later remarked -- "Have we entered into the differentness of others? Our involvement in events hides this from us. We must remain silent to know where and with whom we are." (Anders Kumlander, General Secretary from Sweden)

According to this view, non-involvement is the key to relationship. This is certainly an unusual approach to take to human fellowship!

But, let us return to the door-slammer. It all began with "a hard statement of fact." The participants were discussing the abyss: facing the beasts in oneself. It began as follows: "A hard statement of fact reflecting the abyss opened the discussion: that we have clearly failed in our task of bringing Anthroposophy to a culmination in time for the end of the century." Here is the central problem, directly and admirably stated. "Will we have the strength to face the coming catastophes?" the writer asks. "Unbearable prospects for some; are we with such thoughts simply ‘shovelling humanity into its grave’?"

This was the moment in which the door-slammer chose to act. Of all the remarks -- in the simpering tediousness of this document -- this was the most honest. This was the response I would have most wanted to hear. I would like to know who he was and what happened after the door was slammed. In this document, only this person, and possibly Heinz Zimmermann, do not simper.

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A person who simpers is a person who does not allow himself to be quoted, who does not say anything definite enough to be quoted. He moves in a haze of verbiage; meaning well but saying nothing, he wants others to be judged by their actions but only he, himself, to be judged by his intentions. Since his intentions are so good, how can he be judged? He pokes his head out to hear the judgment that is coming and that he knows he deserves, but scurries back again quickly before the sentence can be said. The simperer is a person who half-listens to you. He will give you two fingers, but tighten the other fingers in his hand, the fingers that clutch the trump card.

This trump card is, for the anthroposophist, his relationship to the spiritual world, which has been declared to exist by Rudolf Steiner through the Anthroposophical Society. Nothing you can say to the anthroposophist will cause him to release that trump card and place it flat up on the table: that is, to question or examine it. Rudolf Steiner’s voice is, for the anthroposophist, the sole authority, the guarantor of spiritual relationship. In contrast to the Catholic doctrine of Papal Infallibility, which is only invoked in specific moments (i.e. when the Pope speaks ex cathedra, on matters of doctrine or morals) Rudolf Steiner’s infallibility is considered, by anthroposophists, to be universal. This makes it impossible for the anthroposophist to distinguish what in Rudolf Steiner’s legacy is permanent and lasting from what is of lesser value.

The crippling weakness of anthroposophy as it has manifested in this century is that no forum or framework has been developed for the expression of legitimate doubt. But where legitimate doubt is suppressed, a kind of soul-mood of doubt and self-distrust infects everything. This mood can be frequently detected in this Dornach document: e.g., "The shadow side of this conference is our lack of any clear task." "What are we supposed to come up with here?" No one seems to know. But the terrible possibility that Rudolf Steiner can be doubted lurks in the background. For example, an American member commented: "... Our faithfulness to Rudolf Steiner stands over against the preference of many for secondary literature, e.g. Tomberg or Herbert Witzenmann." This comment is followed by the authorial observation, that "A gentle etheric element that must be awakened is hindered by intellectualism."

If I can disentangle this thought, it would be somewhat as follows. The American member was saying that there are many people in anthroposophy who actually prefer reading other authors to Steiner. Here is an arresting thought. It shows that there is life in the movement after all, for both Tomberg and Witzenmann have taken up anthroposophy and developed it along new lines. But lest these heresies of renewed creation attack the trump card, we have the authorial voice gently warning us of the dangers of intellectualism. Thus the followers of those renewing creators are ever-so-gently condemned. The authorial voice wants to assure us that he is not really and actually condemning these people. Thus he disguises the criticism in a general statement about the opposition of intellect and etheric.

It might, in fact, actually be true: that the etheric and the intellectual are at odds with each other.  It is an important question, and would allow for an opening into the whole question of the role of intellect in anthroposophy. What is the relation between ‘living thinking’ and the actual thinking most of us practice in the world? What is the relation of the spiritualized intelligence to mundane or ordinary intelligence? How can we get from the former to the latter otherwise than through developing the ordinary intelligence we have? Are these not the essential questions? And why is nobody asking them?

Which brings us to the cosmic intelligence, and Michael’s role in it. St. Michael the Archangel "stands at our right side, encouraging our presence of mind as we pull the cosmic intelligence out of the dragon’s maw, to return it to the service of Michael." Thus spoke a member from Berlin.

In my earlier days of anthroposophizing, I had the naive view that the cosmic intelligence (somehow connected with Michael, who was somehow connected with anthroposophy) was somehow to be brought down, via anthroposophy, to the world of history and society. I see now that I was mistaken. The anthroposophists, according to this Berlin member, stand at the side of Michael, they fight the dragon, rescue the cosmic intelligence, and then return this cosmic intelligence to Michael. From the cosmic intelligence to anthroposophists and back again makes a closed circuit. And somehow what is actually involved in this rescue operation gets submerged in all the heroics.

Maybe the world of history and human beings, which goes on despite everything, is just to be consigned to the anthroposophical category of knowledge of the threshold: for -- in remarks attributed to Georg Glockler -- "At the threshold we are lamed and terror-stricken, unless we are prepared to sacrifice our illusions that somehow things can go on as they are. Our knowledge that if something is simply going onward it is also headed downward, can help us to take matters seriously..."

Here is the ultimate sneer at human history. As it happens, things might very well be getting worse, but not simply because they are continuing or going on, but because the right sort of civilization-building attitudes are not continuing and going on. For the anthroposophist continuance itself is the evil.  Thus nihilism has entered the anthroposophical movement

 Let us look at this equation of evil with historical continuity. "Is it not difficult for us to see beyond the limits of Central Europe?... [But] don’t we have to learn to overcome the traditional western values and move on from political to spiritual ideals? Can we think of the Waldorf school curriculum as an example of western imperialism?..." (From a section marked "The Conversation Group" -- no name provided.)

With these remarks the anthroposophists have allied themselves with the forces of hatred against Western civilization. They have caved in to the forces of political correctness and leftist doctrine without so much as a murmur. They have betrayed not only the very society of ordered laws and guaranteed liberties that permits them to utter such inanities. They have betrayed Rudolf Steiner himself and everything he stood for.

For it was never Rudolf Steiner’s intention that anthroposophy should be conjoined with the forces that undermine Western civilization. In Three Streams in the Evolution of Mankind he calls attention to the fact that it is the Beast who wants to rip us out of history and start everything over again at zero. But apparently anthroposophists have the capacity to read such passages in Rudolf Steiner’s work with only half an ear. They began with spiritual knowledge but end in deconstruction. They have collapsed in the face of the great debate of our time -- the question of the moral worth of Western history -- without so much as a sign that they have even the slightest realization of what is at stake.

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I must be missing something. If you wrest the cosmic intelligence from the dragon, will not this deed have some effect in the world of human beings? But you will look in vain for any real grappling with history and the world of human beings in this document. As I look it over once again, I doubt whether the word "history" is ever used at all. There is a lot of end-of-the-century lamentation, talk of "old cultural forms," need for new thinking, salvation through art, etc., but never any mention of actual and contemporary (or even ancient) historical deeds or personalities.

This absence of history is particularly noticeable when it comes to Christianity -- in which, presumably, these anthroposophists believe (or say they believe.) As the authorial voice puts it: "At this stage we mostly stand alone and helpless in our lack of knowledge, but out of this helplessness we gain access to Christ forces in the earth around us." It might be pointed out that Christ forces can be more directly contacted in history, and specifically the historical Church. But history is the one place where the anthroposophist refuses to look.

Michaela Glockler summed up all these plenums and conversations when she said that "It has been a formidable task, to give an exposition and justification for Anthroposophy as it has unfolded over 70 years." In effect she admitted that it had not been done, perhaps could not be done. Or perhaps there was no justification at all. Thus has self-doubt conquered the whole enterprise. Michaela Glockler’s comment was, of all the quotations in this document, perhaps the one that stood out most in its resigned sadness -- all the more poignant in the inability of the speaker to face the real feeling.

Of all participants, only Heinz Zimmermann actually delivered a coherent thought. He "gave his judgment that the ‘credit’ we have drawn from the first generation of anthroposophists has been exhausted. The expansion of the movement has brought no new forces. How then are we to replace this exhausted substance? -- by hard work on the basis of anthroposophical work and experience."

Theodore Van Vliet’s next-to-last sentence sums up the whole enterprise: "And our relation to one another can be maintained in the world of sleep, where the conference may go on and on." Indeed this conference took place in a "world of sleep." No truer word was ever spoken.

A line of division runs through the Anthroposophical Society with respect to the Catholic Church. There are two parties, one party of favor and one of opposition. The party of opposition may be called "Dornach;" the party of favor may be called "Tomberg." The current leader of the opposition party is Sergei Prokofieff, General Secretary of the Anthroposophical Society in Russia. The champion of the Tomberg party is Robert Powell, author of several profound works on astrosophy and Christian meditation. Prokofieff believes that the Catholic Church should dissolve in the next century; Powell, by contrast,  is deeply sympathetic with the Church and believes its true mission will be brought to fruition only in the coming centuries.

There could not be a starker contrast between the two wings of anthroposophy than in these two views, so opposed as to make common ground impossible. The Dornach party is deeply contemptuous of Valentin Tomberg’s conversion to Catholicism. The Catholics, however, appeared to welcome Tomberg with open arms. Tomberg's anonymous magisterial work, Meditations on the Tarot, was once shown in a photograph of Pope John Paul II; the book was lying on a table in the background.

Rudolf Steiner himself was not comfortable with his Catholic background, nor with the whole enterprise of autobiography in general. He once commented in his autobiography that he would rather not have to write anything in this sphere at all. He rarely spoke of his parents, nor of his sister; the question of who he was, as an historical, biographical individual, was left veiled in deep reserve. Some of this reserve may have sprung from reticence. But a larger component may spring from that aversion to the personal which so many anthroposophists seem to think is an indelible sign of advanced spirituality.

For this initiate of the Consciousness-Soul epoch, for whom "all sensory experiences are only I-experiences in different modifications or gradations," there was remarkably little of historical and personal life pertaining to this "I" -- still less of any "Thou." We have seen this same unconcern for the "Thou" manifested in the Dornach document discussed previously, where the "phenomenon" of the door-slammer was discussed,and where Anders Kumlander seemed to be advocating silence in the face of the differentness of others. Kumlander followed  this remark by saying that: "This is a prerequisite for a change in consciousness whereby the being of things begins to speak to us from behind their surface."

Is he talking about a person or a thing? At one moment he  seems to be talking about people; in the next the subject is inanimate things. This confusion of subject is very revealing. The preoccupation of the anthroposophist seems to be, ever and at all times, his own imperial self, his "I." Yet this "I" has nothing to do with the body as such, with one’s incarnated life, one’s tradition, history, or family - or, as this passage from Kumlander shows, even with other people.  As one German eurythmist put it, she had to battle with "arrogance and self-love" before she discovered the "etheric quality in movement." This discovery led her to "body-free" movement, in which she found the element of love. It is in this freedom from the body, she finds, that "art is not accessible to the counter-forces."

The "new ritual form" of the Imperial Self entered onto the stage of anthroposophy with Goetheanism -- the near-idolatrous status accorded, by anthroposophists, to Goethe. Rudolf Steiner originally intended to build his temple for spiritual science in Munich, and call it the Johannesbau. This temple, standing in commemoration to St. John, would then be linked with Christianity in its metaphysical-mystical stream, the stream of St. John. 

It is certainly possible to read Rudolf Steiner’s intentions in this way, and his stellar contributions to Biblical studies -- his lectures on the Gospels, lend additional support for this view. This grafting of anthroposophical inspiration onto the stream of Christianity would have provided a potent, civilization-affirming and historically-conscious means for anthroposophy to make its presence known in the wider culture. To the extent that it has happened -- in the works of Valentin Tomberg, Robert Powell, Emil Bock, Owen Barfield, and others, it has been astonishingly fruitful. This alliance of historical-Christian sensibility with anthroposophy would have in no way detracted from Rudolf Steiner’s discoveries of, and appreciation for, Goethe’s scientific researches.

But Goethe was elevated beyond the realm of science and even literature. The spiritual temple itself was named after him; and for ever after, anthroposophy became allied with Goetheanism. And it is this Goetheanism which I call the Imperial Self. We may note, to begin with, the problematic nature of Goethe’s relationship to Christianity.

F.W. Zeylmans Van Emmichoven has a chapter on "Goethe’s Relationship to Christianity" in his book, The Reality In Which We Live (1964). "Without a doubt Goethe regarded himself as a Christian," he remarks. And continuing: "To Chancellor Mueller he said, ‘Who is still a Christian today, as Christ would have had him? I am perhaps the only one, although you take me to be a heathen.’ "

Van Emmichoven, in a masterful understatement, comments: "For many, such words sound like an expression of pride. It cannot be otherwise considering how Christianity has evolved through the ages; for Goethe the many garbs in which Christianity appeared were mere attempts to approach the real nature of it -- attempts which for his mighty spiritual insight did but seldom seem fortunate."

For "mighty spiritual insight" concerning Christianity, Goethe is certainly not the individual I would consult. His statement that he was the only Christian "as Christ would have had him" is not an expression of mere spiritual pride. It is megalomania, an expression of the Imperial Self, an arrogance beyond belief. This is the man for whom the anthroposophists have named their spiritual congregation place. This fact is a misfortune of history for which Rudolf Steiner himself must shoulder some of the blame. And it is a misfortune which, in our time, has begun to reveal the slow, sad shadows of catastrophe.

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Yet there are other elements from which we must draw in attempting to understand the anthroposophist’s distaste for history and the personal. Rudolf Steiner gave out as one of his important esoteric exercises, the practice of the attainment of inner tranquillity. "The student must seek the power of confronting himself as a stranger. He must stand before himself with the inner tranquillity of a judge. . . If we attain the calm inner survey, the essential is severed from the non-essential... This exercise will not and need not succeed with present occurrences of destiny, but it should be attempted by the student in connection with the events of destiny already experienced in the past."

The validity and usefulness of this exercise, which is to be practiced only in selected moments, loses its meaning and force when adopted as a rule of life in general. Indeed, it can be used to create, not only a flight from real life and a denigration of the past, but a kind of schizoid self-alienation and detachment. Misused in this way, it undermines the confidence and belief in oneself that is the necessary precondition for acting as a flesh and blood, historical and biographical individual. For it is not as "strangers to ourselves" that we can act, that we can take a stand. The true retrospective review of one’s actions should be a reminder to us to act better, not as a call not to act at all.

A new problem arises, however, when Rudolf Steiner’s statements about the Mystery of Golgotha are taken as a way of removing Jesus Christ from the historical context. Rudolf Steiner wrote that the Mystery of Golgotha is a "solemn festival of knowledge," a cosmic deed not accessible to ordinary cognition and historical knowledge. Anthroposophy claims to represent a purely "supersensible Christianity." In bringing the supersensible contents of the Christ Mystery into prominence, Steiner de-emphasized the role of the Church, which has institutionalized the Christ Impulse.

This putting-aside of historical Christianity has had grave consequences for anthroposophy. In the 1991 video, "Rudolf Steiner and the Science of Spiritual Realities" -- a highly professional and in many ways admirable introduction to the work of Rudolf Steiner (narrated by Henry Barnes) everything in Rudolf Steiner’s life-work is acknowledged except for his contributions to Christianity and his relationship to Jesus Christ. There was no mention of religion, of why Steiner broke away from the Theosophical Society, or of his important  Gospel lectures. Stewart Easton, in the introduction to Rudolf Steiner’s lectures, The Gospel of St. John and Its Relation to the Other Gospels (1982 edition) comments that, "... it should never be forgotten that Steiner’s teachings about Christ constitute the core of Anthroposophy, nothing in it making any real sense if it is not understood within the context of the working of the Christ Impulse in humanity in the age of the consciousness soul and on into the future."

How should the student of anthroposophy address the situation raised by this video -- this total obliteration, this erasure of the central event? Who is responsible for an omission of this magnitude, this act of betrayal of the very heart of Anthroposophy?

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With some justification Rudolf Steiner ridiculed the common historianship of his day, which was then still deeply mired in positivism and mechanical notions of cause and effect.

History-writing has changed a great deal since Rudolf Steiner’s time -- in many ways for the worse (as in the new ‘postmodern’ style, in which no respect at all is accorded the realm of factuality -- about which more later) but in some ways for the better. The better historians of our time are wrestling with issues of fact and symbolism and of non-mechanical causation. They are indeed dealing with issues of spiritual history, of memory and imagination, with symbolic fact. It is highly significant that Owen Barfield, perhaps Rudolf Steiner’s most-respected expositor in the English-speaking world, entitled his last work History, Guilt and Habit. This great teacher of the evolution of consciousness realized, towards the end of his life, that history is the stage on which spiritual issues are incarnated and revealed.

Owen Barfield also took a very different attitude toward the personal, remarking in Unancestral Voice that "It is the paradox, it is the mystery, of the Michael age that you can test the objectivity of thinking only by making it most deeply and intimately your own." But how are we to reconcile Barfield's statement of the making-intimate of objective knowledge with the Goetheanism of the Imperial Self and with statements made by Rudolf Steiner against the personal? One final quote from Rudolf Steiner’s autobiography should suffice to explain how difficult this task really is.

On the second paragraph of his Autobiography, Rudolf Steiner comments: "I have always tried to shape what I had to say or felt obliged to do as demanded by the circumstances, rather than by anything personal. In my opinion, the personal element often lends a valuable coloring to human activity, but it seems to me that it should be expressed in how one speaks and acts rather than as the expression of one’s own personality."

One may ask, how is one to do otherwise, than speak out of one’s own personal situation? Personality, race, gender, class: all of these form a part of one’s personal situation, where speaking begins. To the extreme multiculturalist, all speaking ends here as well. Rudolf Steiner recognized the dangers of this viewpoint, which has come to be so prominent in our time -- an "identity politics" of thinking. When everybody prefaces his speaking with his identifying label -- "I speak as a woman, as a black, as a worker, as a Democrat . . ." etc. even the purpose of speaking is undermined. For that purpose has to do with the forging of common ground, of community -- communication -- and the making of common agreements by which we distinguish levels of truth and validity in what is spoken.

The anthroposophist’s aversion to the personal could spring from the recognition of the problem of identity politics.  But is the answer to the problem of identity politics to disregard the personal, or is it to reaffirm distinctions of truth and validity that transcend such an identity politics? Isn't it to affirm that there is a difference between the personal and the egotistical? Here is a tremendous opportunity for the anthroposophist to have an impact in the wider culture. This would consist in showing the connection between the esoteric exercises which are recommended for spiritual development and the fruits of those exercises in the sphere of speaking and thinking. It is spiritual development which enables one to distinguish bad thinking from good. Logic, coherence, rationality, intellectual honesty, respect for evidence, tact, fairness, disinterestness: all of these are spiritual qualities of thinking, and all of them are under attack in the modern world, which has lost the feeling of the transcendent realm of truth.

Yet these spiritual qualities of thinking are also under attack by anthroposophists, who lump them under the general category of "dead intellect." But are all efforts to establish logic, coherence, evidence, corroboration, etc. merely holdovers from dead intellectualism, or are they a recognition for the need to establish common historical ground, common standards and methods of discernment? The anthroposophical condemnation of "dead intellect" undermines at heart the whole enterprise of spiritual science, which consists in the training and development of thinking. Here indeed has anthroposophy failed in its historic mission: which is, to provide a point of entry for knowledge of initiation, which Rudolf Steiner once declared must become the principle of civilization itself.

This initiation can mean very little unless it gives us some way of distinguishing the quality of thinking. And it becomes mere futurism -- the belief that because something is new, it is always good -- when Anthroposophy is used as a dodge by which the anthroposophist avoids coming to terms with himself as a historical personality. He is given an excuse to devalue and despise his own cultural heritage, to run away from his own past, and take refuge in a pseudo-universalism which he equates with real spirituality.

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Goetheanism is the context in which we must try to understand the visceral prejudice against Catholicism on the part of some anthroposophists. This Goetheanism may be understood as a rejection of the Christian teaching of the moral fall of man; as a rejection of one’s own cultural heritage; and as a belief in man’s fundamental goodness and innocence, provided the right methods are used to achieve enlightenment.

It is the Enlightenment which in fact forms the real background of Goetheanism. I refer to the faith in reason and education which was a prominent feature of the period of Kant, Locke, Newton, Jefferson, etc. -- the faith that with right reason, history can be redeemed. The Gulag, Auschwiz and Hiroshima toppled forever this touching faith in innate human goodness. This realization apparently has never crossed the minds of the anthroposophists, in whose hands the Rational Enlightenment has become transformed into the Spiritual Enlightenment. We may say that the nihilists and the postmodernists have used the facts of history to destroy the belief in reason altogether. This is not a good response either. But the anthroposophists show no signs of having dealt with the question at all.

Dr. Virginia Sease, formerly a teacher at Highland Hall Waldorf School in Los Angeles, and currently a member of the Vorstand, journeyed to America in 1984 and wrote a report of her visit, which was published in the Sept/Oct 1985 issue of the "News from the Goetheanum."

Dr. Sease comments in her Report that "In general ... one observes in America the spread of Catholicism... Strangely enough this spread of Catholicism is often connected with a strain of nationalism. Recently I saw a bumper sticker with the inscription: ‘Pax Christi USA’ -- that speaks for itself... There are quite large religious movements which spread their message in a strongly ‘mystical’ manner, in that, in a subdued way, mass psychology plays into the picture... An example may be seen in the movement with thousands of members led by Elizabeth Claire Prophet."

In this passage Dr. Sease conjoins Catholicism with nationalism and with a fringe, heavily-armed cult in Montana. It is hard to see how the international and universal Catholic Church can be condemned along with nationalism. Perhaps the only thing the two have in common is a kind of fundamental resistance to the idea of the New World Order. But even that seems a bit farfetched.

Rudolf Steiner also has little good to say of the Catholic Church. "So it is that Romanism [i.e. that which comes from Rome], by taking from Christianity as much as suited it, became the Catholic Church, which develops also in this spirit; for directly there comes to mankind a new revelation, leading to further knowledge of the Mystery of Golgotha, the Catholic Church turns not towards it but away from it."

Rudolf Steiner, of course, could not know that the Catholic Church in the modern age is one of the few  institutions that has spoken out clearly against abortion, against nuclear weapons, against the dissolution of the family and against the "culture of death" that modern civilization seems to be becoming. But Dr. Virginia Sease should know it.

But Virginia Sease’s comments, and even those of Rudolf Steiner, appear mild when compared with the rabid anti-Catholicism of Sergei Prokofieff. He declares that in the next century the Catholic Church should dissolve. He bases this judgment on anthroposophical ideas concerning spiritual evolution, ideas which plainly categorize certain impulses and certain movements with the label "progressive" or "retarded." Because these categorizations spring from the revelations of Spiritual Beings (via Rudolf Steiner), it is presumably not possible to challenge them. This viewpoint nullifies history by implying that Spiritual Beings control it.

"From the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch,... the element of Roman Catholicism ‘takes on the character of a retarded impulse,’ within the evolution of mankind. [This is a quote from Steiner.] Such retarded impulses, which therefore represent a force that runs counter to earthly evolution, are nevertheless not intended, in the normal course of evolution, to go on forever. [The evil of continuity again.] Hence in the new circumstances the higher powers have set certain limits to their existence, beyond which they would be destined either to disappear completely, or, in the event of the artificial continuation of their activity, to degenerate rapidly into impulses of undisguised evil. For the element of the Roman Catholic Church the natural limit to its existence is the end of the first third of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, that is, around the year 2135."

I don’t know what this act of calling down annihilation upon a whole religious identity of people (numbered in the world at one billion souls) can be called. Somehow ‘ethnic cleansing’ doesn’t fit the bill, and ‘religious cleansing’ sounds like some sort of reform movement. It sounds to me like an anthroposophical jihad against Catholicism.  Imagine the screams of protest, if this call for dissolution had been directed against a religion mainly practiced by dark-skinned people -- which, as it happens, may even be true of Catholicism.

To be fair, I have heard that Mr. Prokofieff’s anti-Catholic diatribes have even begun to embarass Dornach. I have it from a reliable source that there is dismay brewing in anthroposophical circles over Mr. Prokofieff’s soon-to-be-published book, which is to be a violent dismemberment of Valentin Tomberg and his conversion to the Roman Catholic Church. And also to be fair, it must be said that Prokofieff’s anti-Catholicism has its roots in Rudolf Steiner’s writings. But Dornach is due for a dose of heavy embarassment nonetheless. For anthroposophists have yet to come to terms with Rudolf Steiner himself -- not to mention Catholicism and the historical church. By refusing to distinguish what in Rudolf Steiner is of lasting value, and de-emphasizing what is of lesser value, they have symbolically embalmed him.

 I do not think Rudolf Steiner would have wanted to be slain by adulation. At least I have a higher opinion of him than that. His greatest cross to bear may be that he founded a Society among people who were not capable of challenging some of the things he said.

Anti-Catholicism has been called "the antisemitism of the intellectuals." These anti-Catholic anthroposophists do not merit the term intellectuals, but they are nevertheless following in the well-worn footprints of the liberal intellectuals the world over, who are bent upon establishing the New World Order of Correct Thought everywhere. The "gentle etheric" of anthroposophizing comes to resemble the ideology of a society of enablers, each assisting the other in how not to think things through, how not to take a stand, how not even to have a ground upon which to stand. Gentle etheric anthroposophizing fits very well into this new order of supine tolerance. It slides gently into the arms of embrace, the reign of the New World Order -- without a trace, without a murmur of regret, without a last look at all it is leaving behind.

Part III. Academic Nihilism and the Moral Will.

If Rudolf Steiner once remarked that 2+2=5, it does no service to his memory for those who come after in his name to promote the teaching that 2+2=5. The problem is that there seems to be no means of determining when Rudolf Steiner said that 2+2=5.

In what follows, I shall adduce some instances when, in my opinion, Rudolf Steiner said something that was not true. I shall give reasons for why I hold this opinion, and I shall attempt to show the consequences of accepting Rudolf Steiner’s error as truth. I am not attacking Rudolf Steiner, though some may think so. On the contrary, I am very clear about the nature of my debt to him -- so confident on this point that, indeed, my points of disagreement may be taken as a sign of my respect for him.

Not long after Dr. Arthur Zajonc assumed the leadership of the Anthroposophical Society in America, he gave an interview, "To Spiritualize the Will -- the American Way," (October 14, 1994) which was published in the Rudolf Steiner Library Newsletter (Issues 12 & 13). Two years after this interview was given, it came into my hands. I was shocked at what I read.

Dr. Zajonc said: "In the members’ meeting we oriented along two quite opposing directions. One was that we can only take a step into the future by linking it to the past. This was emphasized. But the other was that the past must disappear completely. In February of 1920 Rudolf Steiner gave a lecture to an English audience in which he told them that the old had to become mere cliches so that something new might come into being. That is how I sense my position as general secretary: The position should become for me a cliche, quite empty and meaningless. First I should feel, I am at the head of Nothing. And that seems right to me. It is just like the description of the trials by fire, water and air: we cannot take anything of the old along, we have to leave it all behind. That is what Rudolf Steiner meant in that lecture. Americans have no past."

Rudolf Steiner also had many other things to say about spiritual candidacy and initiation. One important point he made was that we should cultivate a feeling of gratitude for all that lives, even for the grass under our feet -- for all that makes our human life possible. If we must learn to feel gratitude for the grass, why should we not accord some equal amount of respect for the Dead -- specifically our forebears, for all who lived before us, and who made our historical life possible? For instance, Rene Querido’s excellent book The Golden Age of Chartres opens with the famous quote by Bernard of Chartres about respect for our intellectual predecessors: "If we see further than they, it is not in virtue of our stronger sight, but because we are lifted up by them and carried to great height. We are dwarfs carried on the shoulders of giants."

Rudolf Steiner’s remark -- and Arthur Zajonc’s gloss on it, about the old as mere cliche -- are a defamation of the Dead. Indeed there is Nothing here. It is pure nihilism. This dismissal of history is the real source of the anthroposophist’s failure to gain respect for his movement; here is the reason, in essence, why anthroposophy has failed to make itself relevant in our time. For those who show contempt for history -- for the Dead -- will never gain the respect of the living. Normal people will pick up on this attitude, which will always strike them, deep down, as wrong. Such normal people may not be particularly historically-conscious or even especially knowledgeable about history. But they will feel that this attitude is either naive or arrogant. Given this overwhelming obstacle at the beginning, is it any wonder that normal people have so little curiosity to explore anthroposophy further? Is it any wonder that anthroposophy finds itself in "existential crisis"?

It is significant that George Orwell’s hero in 1984 was named Winston Smith -- this "Winston" being a literary allusion to Winston Churchill. And that this Winston Smith raised his glass in toast "To the past." The most horrifying image in that book, which is about the elimination of civilized man, is the elimination of memory -- of the past. Remember, it is the Sorat Beast who wants history to begin again, starting from the ultimate nihilism -- the Year Zero.

Unfortunately, the anthroposophical tendency to be dismissive of the past may find support in Rudolf Steiner’s writings. Yet responsible anthroposophists have always resisted it, knowing full well that without a full-bodied sense of the past, even the idea of metamorphosis becomes incomprehensible. Hans Gebert, writing in the Newsletter of the Anthroposophical Society in America, in the Fall of 1989, commented that "In occult teaching, innovations must be linked to existing occult traditions. Part of an initiate’s work is, therefore, necessarily concerned with existing knowledge, although the older ideas may be considerably metamorphosed..."

He could not have said it better: epistemology (how we know something) is inextricably involved with history. The historian John Lukacs puts it in this way: know thyself means know thy history. Here is the true requirement for any spiritual manifestation in the Modern Age. Support for this view can even be found in Rudolf Steiner himself -- though it must be admitted that we have to do a little digging.

In his discussion of the moral will in The Philosophy of Freedom, Rudolf Steiner remarks that "A free being is one who can want what he himself considers right." Here is the problem in a nutshell: for how can anyone know something to be right unless he has some moral principles by which he is guided? And how is he to arrive at these moral principles unless he possesses historical knowledge -- both his own history and experience and that of mankind in general?

Certainly Rudolf Steiner’s epistemology and ideas relating to the moral will can be clearly distinguished from Aleister Crowley’s nihilism -- "Do as thou wilt is the whole of the law." Yet there are anthroposophists who, in dismissing the role of historical knowledge, come dangerously close to Crowleyism. This problem has arisen, I think, because Rudolf Steiner failed to provide, in his epistemological work, any historical examples of what he considered the moral will to be.

I do heartily wish that in his chapter, "Moral Imagination" (in which his definition of moral will is found) Steiner had refrained from condemning laws in general, Catholic confession, and the like. And I wish he had given us some concrete historical examples to go on. He says: "[From this it follows] for ethics that, though we can certainly see the connection between later moral concepts and earlier, we cannot get even a single new moral idea out of the earlier ones. As a moral being, the individual produces his own moral content."

But the fact of individuality as such is not sufficient for a grounding of ethics. The whole problem for ethics is not individuality, but the fact that individuals live together in society. Thus to ground ethics in individuality as such is deeply incoherent. We live with others, and ethics is about the "how" this living-together is possible.

I think that Steiner’s great discovery here is that true morality does indeed spring from inner freedom. If this were not the case, morality could only mean an automatic obedience, the conformity of an automaton to an external rule. Yet the problem with this passage is that the cut he makes between nature and society is a little too clean. For man is neither wholly natural nor wholly social: man is a historical being. History is the missing term of Steiner’s ethics. It is an omission of astonishing dimension -- an absence from which the anthroposophist can only erect improvisation as a moral stance. "But the question today is, what shall we fashion -- quite fresh and new, without a past, without a tradition -- at the periphery, not determined by any center." (Arthur Zajonc)

Here is a clear statement of postmodernism, which is the philosophy of the historyless, centerless void. It might be useful to quote a sample of postmodernist prose, as a way of making my point. For people do not acquire moral ideas out of the void. Rather, they absorb the decayed ideologies and hackneyed moralisms in their environment, the "received ideas" which are circulating through society in any given time. In erecting these whims of the moment as monuments, people expose themselves to the ridicule of later ages.

People in later times can only shake their heads at the folly of an age, not realizing that they themselves are mired in different follies. One of the follies of our time is postmodernism, which is the philosophy of clever people whose cleverness consists in showing how foolish it is to take a stand about anything. Therefore they have eliminated stand-taking from their philosophy altogether. By doing this they have not eliminated folly; they have only elevated it. Foolishness, no longer confined to the status of description -- of how people act -- has been raised to ontology, the nature of action itself. This is not to free oneself from folly; it is to incarnate it.

The following passage is from Ihab Hassan, a postmodernist historian. It is quoted in Gertrude Himmelfarb’s book, On Looking into the Abyss (1994). She says that "this description of postmodernism by a postmodernist may read like a parody, but it is all too typical of the genre":

"... indeterminancy and immanence; ubiquitous simulacra, pseudo-events; a conscious lack of mastery, lightness and evanescence everywhere; a new temporality, or rather intemporality, a polychronic sense of history; a patchwork or ludic, transgressive or deconstructive approach to knowledge and authority; anironic, parodic, reflexive, fantastic awareness of the moment..."

In Arthur Zajonc’s interview, the postmodern Nothing is superimposed upon gentle etheric anthroposophizing: "Of course this is the way of uncertainty. But that is often just what is needed today. At first one is not at all clear about intentions, aims, objectives. We just wait, and then gradually something happens, quite delicately. It is not a thunderbolt from heaven. When a thunderbolt from heaven strikes, we have to examine it carefully to make sure it was a thunderbolt and not just our idea of a thunderbolt... One may have to wait a little longer, until the next day, perhaps, or until next week or next month. But gradually greater and greater clarity grows out of this delicate impression. This practice of openness or uncertainty introduces a wholly new mood into our initiative circle..."

One may ask, with all this waiting, what are we waiting for? In this passage even anthroposophy itself has been deconstructed. There is no cognitive certainty, not even confidence -- we can’t even be sure about that thunderbolt from heaven. Our own perceptions mislead us; all is thought upon thought; the only safe course is to whisper, to simper, and to wait. Anthroposophy has here culminated in anti-anthroposophy; the Spirit has been turned inside out to reveal the Hollow Void. Nothing upon Nothing.

                                       ****

Has anthroposophy died? If it has, let it die so that it can go through death and Resurrection.

In the European center: intellectual confusion, uncertainty, doubt, the inability to make coherent statements, to raise genuine questions, to show genuine feeling -- a kind of terminal gnosticism.

In Russia: in the leader of the Russian Anthroposophical Society, a virulent anti-Catholicism unfolding amid claims of superiority for unexamined anthroposophical ideas about history -- a kind of poisonous hatred.

And in America, as represented by the academic nihilism currently embraced by the General Secretary of the American Society: a submergence in the ideologies of immediacy, of postmodernism, of ethical abandonment and ignorance of history celebrated as virtues.

The spiritual strength and knowledge it is possible to gain through deep and prolonged study of Rudolf Steiner and related authors is genuine.  Here indeed is a stream of wisdom from which it is possible to drink, to gain a deeper sense and appreciation for Western civilization, for the sublime understandings and achievements of spiritually-initiated human beings, for the sense of our importance to the cosmos and for the importance of moral action. Here indeed we meet Noah and Moses and Christ in a way that has deep meaning for us in our time. Indeed through anthroposophy we can gain a renewed intimacy with history, so that we have the strength to carry history forward, to welcome what is good in it, and to add, if we can, some deeds of encouragement, knowledge, and strength to what is good.

May this essay, and the dialogue and debate it intends to encourage, help to lead anthroposophy back to its true foundations and into the next millennium.

Caryl Johnston and Robert Horner

Caryl Johnston, M.A., M.L.S., is a published writer whose articles and reviews have appeared in The Journal for Anthroposophy, Towards, The University Bookman, and other publications. She is the author of The Blooded Colt: A Meditation on Spiritual History and Southern Identity; and Consecrated Venom, Studies in Biblical Epistemology. Neither of these books could have been written without a prolonged study of anthroposophy -- especially that further development of it which may be called anthroposophy’s rejected "historical stream."

Robert Horner, M.A., a graduate of Yale University, is a trained Waldorf teacher and has taught small seminar classes and lectured on the work of Rudolf Steiner in several U.S. cities. He is especially interested in building up a universal, ecumenical Christian co-working which is so necessary as we head into the 21st century.

Council of the Anthroposophical Society in America ( registered mail)

Dr. Arthur Zajonc, General Secretary of the American Society

Dr. Hilmar Moore, editor, Journal for Anthroposophy

Mr. Herbert Hagens, American Anthroposophical Society Newsletter

The Vorstand, Dornach, Switzerland (in care of Dr. Virginia Sease)

Mr. Theodore Van Vliet, Dornach, Switzerland

Mr. Fred Paddock, Rudolf Steiner Library

Mr. Sergei Prokofieff, General Secretary of the Society in Russia

Mr. Christopher Bamford, Co-Director, Anthroposophic Press

Mr. Robert Powell

Dr. Clopper Almon

Tom and Jennifer Mellett

Various members of the Anthroposophical Society