Transformations of religious experience: the approach of Rudolf Steiner

Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) did not put himself forward as the teacher of any new religion or sect. His ‘Anthroposophy’ which forms the basis, e.g. of the Waldorf Education for which he is increasingly well-known, is not, in the strict sense a religious teaching, although it aims to affirm the cognitive value and even, as one might say, evolutionary significance of humanity’s religious experience. He began his life’s work as an academic philosopher, with a thesis on Fichte, a connection with Nietzsche, and a fundamental book on the relationship between issues of freedom and issues of knowledge.Like the emerging school of Phenomenologists, whose mentor Franz Brentano he had heard lecturing when he was a student in Vienna, he was moving out of the idea of philosophy as an attempt to define the necessary foundations of all knowledge and toward a fresh look at the way the world shows itself to us. Turning away from nineteenth-century objectivism, his was an attempt rather to explore the human perspective as such – hence that difficult and, in English at least, rather awkward term Anthroposophy (Gk. ‘wisdom of man’). In some respects, moreover, his ideas reach right forward here to what are now called ‘anthropic ideas’ in modern science. The world we encounter, many scientists now tend to acknowledge, cannot be thought of as just happening to be there before our eyes, nor is it just a random part of the world that we encounter. For what we know first of all about it is that the world (or our bit of it) is such that it has produced us, with our living senses and the consciousness with which to become aware of it. We are therefore in a quite concrete and specific way ourselves a key to the nature of that world