Anthroposophy (Steiner)

Anthroposophy is what happened when a Theosophist decided that Christ was not one Master among many but the centre of the whole story, and left to build a movement on that.

Rudolf Steiner was born in 1861 on the Austrian-Hungarian border, the son of a railway official. He trained in science in Vienna, was hired at twenty-one to edit Goethe's scientific writings, spent the 1890s at the Goethe archive in Weimar, took a doctorate in philosophy, and published The Philosophy of Freedom in 1894. Nothing in that career suggested the occult. Then in 1902 he accepted the leadership of the German section of the Theosophical Society, on the condition that he would teach only what he had verified himself. For ten years he did, lecturing across Europe on karma, reincarnation, the planes and the evolution of the earth in the Theosophical scheme, while steadily re-centring all of it on the crucifixion, which he called the Mystery of Golgotha, the turning point of cosmic evolution.

The break came over Krishnamurti. When Besant and Leadbeater proclaimed the boy the coming World Teacher and founded the Order of the Star of the East in 1911, Steiner refused to let its members into the German section. Adyar expelled him, and in 1912 he and most of the German membership founded the Anthroposophical Society. He built its headquarters, the Goetheanum, at Dornach in Switzerland with his own hands and those of volunteers from seventeen nations during the First World War. The first, carved in wood, burned down on New Year's Eve 1922, almost certainly by arson. He designed the second in concrete and did not live to see it finished. He died in 1925.

Steiner's teaching he called spiritual science: the claim that the spiritual worlds can be investigated by a trained clairvoyance as rigorously as nature is by a trained eye, and that he had done so. What he reported was Theosophy in outline, the planetary epochs, Atlantis, the fourfold human being of physical, etheric, astral and ego, reincarnation and karma, but with a different heart. Christ is the being who descended into a human body at the baptism in the Jordan and through the crucifixion turned the earth's evolution from descent to ascent. Humanity is pulled off course by two adversaries, not one: Lucifer, who tempts it upward into pride, fantasy and disembodied spirituality, and Ahriman, who drags it downward into materialism, mechanism and the denial of spirit. Christ stands between them as the balance. Steiner also claimed the Rosicrucian stream as his own, treating Christian Rosenkreuz as a real initiate and his own work as its modern form.

What makes Anthroposophy different from every other branch on this map is that it built things. The first Waldorf school opened in Stuttgart in 1919 for the children of a cigarette factory; there are now more than a thousand. Biodynamic agriculture began with a lecture course in 1924 and gave the world the first organic certification. Anthroposophical medicine produced Weleda. The Camphill communities care for people with disabilities on four continents. Eurythmy is a whole art of movement. Millions of people have been through a Steiner institution without ever reading a word of Steiner, which is a kind of influence no magical order has approached. His evolutionary scheme also contains statements about race that his own society has had to repudiate, and it is fair to say so.

You can recognise this branch by its double adversary. Wherever a teaching says that the spiritual danger is not one thing but two, that fleeing the body is as much an error as denying the spirit, and that the balance between them has a name, it is either Steiner or something that arrived at the same place by another road. He kept the Theosophical map and changed what stood at the centre of it. That decision, more than any of the institutions, is his legacy.