The future of anthroposophy relies how we hold its tensions and contradictions. A retrospective on the 100 Years Rudolf Steiner conference, held at Harvard Divinity School in 2025.
Despite well-known initiatives including Waldorf education, biodynamic agriculture, anthroposophical medicine, and a century of artistic and esoteric experimentation, Rudolf Steiner’s work remains under-explored in U.S. academia. In October 2023, two researchers of Western esotericism, Henry Holland and Aaron French, wrote to Dan McKanan, director of the Harvard Divinity School Program for the Evolution of Spirituality, proposing a conference marking the centenary of Rudolf Steiner’s death. Two years of thoughtful planning later, researchers from multiple disciplines, practitioners of “applied anthroposophy,” and the general public convened at Harvard in an open dialogue about the life and contributions of this prolific figure. This many-voiced inquiry about Steiner’s legacy suggests that U.S. universities can still function as sites where controversy is metabolized rather than repressed.
Tensions Surface
At the opening reception sponsored by the Anthroposophical Society of America (ASA), General Secretary and President Mary Stewart Adams delivered a reverent welcome that set the ceremonial mood one would expect at an event commemorating Steiner’s legacy. Indeed, Adams, who is also a Star Lore Historian, spoke with a quiet undertone of cosmic significance that filled the hall.
Nevertheless, tensions surfaced almost immediately after the opening keynote by Henry Holland and Aaron French, which examined the polemical context of Steiner’s autobiography. Their academic tone and effort to demythologize and historically situate Steiner were bound to ruffle the feathers of some attendees who may have been expecting a more hagiographic approach. To paraphrase what one audience member wondered aloud, “Why open a conference about the legacy of a spiritual leader like Rudolf Steiner with a politicization of his autobiography rather than expressions of reverence?”
However, Holland and French did not seem to be leveling accusations at Steiner. Rather, they explored the possible motives behind his autobiographical self-representation, particularly as a response to both antisemitic insinuations and false charges that he was of Jewish descent. As they said in response to questions after their presentation, the conference was not intended to be an anthroposophical gathering per se. Its goal was to offer new perspectives on Steiner and critical approaches to his legacy, in order to shed light on this legacy and provide a forum to explore complex issues.
The dual nature of the opening evening—part academic conference, part spiritual gathering—became emblematic of the productive tension that would characterize the rest of the conference: a sustained and thoughtful effort to hold together critical analysis and reverential devotion.
Encountering a Spiritual Stream
For the next 2 days, over 70 speakers from a variety of scientific and artistic disciplines presented in concurrent tracks. What follows is far from a comprehensive treatment of the contributions, but reflects what the authors of this retrospective witnessed and feel was significant.
The meta-question we felt to be hovering over nearly every session was: what does it mean to study a spiritual stream that creatively contests the materialistic norms of contemporary academia while simultaneously carrying what some feel are problematic residues from the European cultural matrix out of which Steiner spoke? In other words, how can we practice a “hermeneutics of reverence,” as Dan McKanan characterizes it? This involves remaining open to the possibility that we may not yet be capable of grasping what cultivated modes of higher cognition illuminate—while at the same time critically examining Steiner’s spiritual scientific work with an alertness to his potential biographical and cultural bias.
Many talks thematized Steiner as a tireless teacher and described the living ecology of his esoteric instruction: diagrams, exercises, individualized guidance, and the slow formation of perceptual faculties rather than mere belief in the unseen. It was made clear that anthroposophy is not a set of consumable information but—to borrow from philosopher Peter Sloterdijk—an “anthropotechnic life practice” intended to catalyze transformation. Co-director of the Rudolf Steiner archive, Angelika Schmitt, shared newly uncovered hectograph diagrams and meditation journals—concrete examples of such a practice, intended by Steiner to be used by students of esotericism. They mapped planetary evolution, human development across cultural epochs and seven-year cycles, and correspondences among multiple occult traditions. Four meditation notebooks by Asya Tugeneva and 124 drawings by Andrei Bely revealed how students of Steiner’s work attempted to translate his instructions into imaginations.
Steiner’s emphasis on spiritual practice also came into focus in Ryan Boynton’s reflections on reading Steiner alongside Alfred North Whitehead (who taught philosophy at Harvard from 1924 to 1937). Modernity trains us to treat texts as containers of content, whereas both Steiner and Whitehead demand something closer to spiritual practice in which reading becomes a metamorphic activity. This does not simply invite the exchange of old ideas for new ideas but transfigures the very form or Gestalt of the reader’s relation to experience. Boynton suggested that without this, spiritually rooted schools of thought can degenerate into sectarian pathologies: when the distance between a founding teacher’s indications and one’s own experience feels unbridgeable, the temptation can be to substitute loyalty for verification and to become attached to words rather than attentive to their meaning.
Art as a Transformative Spiritual Practice
The panel discussions on art and aesthetics emphasized the potential of an anthroposophically informed approach to transforming cultural imagination. A presentation by Arnau Ricart, a doctoral researcher at Pompeu Fabra University, traced Steiner’s influence on the emergence of abstract painting, especially in Wassily Kandinsky. He argued that Steiner’s descriptions of the imaginative world—a realm of “floating colors without ground and foundation” revealing spiritual beings—helped make thinkable a pictorial language no longer tethered to representation. Abstraction appears here less as an escape from concrete reality than as an attempt to relocate the sacred from external nature into imaginative consciousness.
Steiner’s “third realm,”1 mediating between sensory particular and universal idea, was invoked as a way out of the modern split between brute fact and abstract concept. Alexis Braun, a doctoral researcher from the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), delivered a powerful treatment of Hilma af Klint’s nature drawings as an example of Goethean “delicate empiricism” wherein scientific precision and spiritual receptivity coexist.2 Architect and somatic practitioner Maria Prieto approached anthroposophical architecture as a kind of spiritual-scientific instrument. The first, wooden Goetheanum was presented as a living organism, a Gesamtkunstwerk in which carved columns and double domes made metamorphosis spatially palpable. The second, cast concrete Goetheanum was described as an experiment in plastic form, water movement, and lemniscatory rhythms, inviting visitors to “think in movement” rather than right-angled Cartesian space.
Poet Luke Fischer revisited Steiner’s 1889 lecture “Goethe as Father of a New Aesthetics,” arguing that Steiner anticipates his later Philosophy of Freedom by treating art as the place where the sensible can be transfigured into spiritual form. In this view, aesthetic creation is not a mere illustration of concepts but a continuation of nature’s own formative activity, and ethical individualism is a kind of moral artistry where the free deed becomes “art applied to life.” Fischer’s talk helped clarify why Steiner could later describe himself, and be described by others, as a “social artist” whose institutional inventions (schools, farms, clinics) were extensions of this aesthetic-ethical imagination. During another panel, artist and Goetheanum Youth Section leader Nathaniel Williams showed how Steiner’s Schillerian approach to aesthetic education and Goethean approach to science allowed him to develop a perception of “true price” at the heart of economics, illustrating the comprehensive promise of anthroposophy’s aesthetic culture.
Spiritual Impulse and Institutional Form
The social and political strands of Steiner’s thinking were taken up in several sessions. A presentation by Armin Steuernagel, research fellow at the University of Witten/Herdecke, and Philip Kovce, co-director of the Steiner archive, on the similarities in Steiner’s and Hannah Arendt’s social and political thought helpfully diagnosed the effects of trying to enforce democratic equalization across all sectors of society without any internal differentiation. Steiner’s social threefolding and Arendt’s distinctions between labor, work, and action were shown to converge around the question of protecting true political equality, cultural liberty, and economic solidarity without regressing into technocracy or nationalist ideology. Both thinkers advocated for the autonomy of cultural institutions from political deliberation, warning against the dangers of politicizing truth and creative life.
The poet and musician Oliver Ray pressed the political implications of anthroposophy even further. Working through Steiner’s Philosophy of Freedom, Brentano and Husserl’s phenomenology, and an 1898 exchange between Steiner and the individualist anarchist John Mackay, Ray argued that anthroposophy is essentially “anarchic” in the sense of decentralizing moral and cognitive authority. He gently challenged anthroposophy to remain receptive to individual living thinking so as to avoid the tendency of institutionalized movements to harden into self-protective monuments.
Education was another arena in which the friction between spiritual impulse and institutional form was openly addressed. Long-time Waldorf educator and former CIIS Provost Liz Beaven asked what it might mean to reclaim the radical nature of Steiner’s pedagogy. Drawing on four decades in classrooms and administration, she described how our fixed ideas of what school is—age-graded classes, time-tabled days, standardized curricula, etc.—have gradually weighed down Waldorf as much as mainstream education. Beaven traced the controversial emergence of publicly funded US Waldorf schools in the 1990s, and the subsequent debates over what counts as “real Waldorf,” as symptoms of a deeper drift away from personalized spiritual pedagogy into transposable fixed forms. Her call was to not abandon Waldorf principles but to approach them afresh in each context, especially in relation to indigenous knowledges and decolonial critiques, so that Steiner’s renewal of education can once again become a living experiment.
Steiner as Eagle, Lion, and Bull
At the final panel on Tuesday evening (“Constructive Anthroposophical Responses to Racism”), the room felt somewhat divided. You could hear it in the varied applause and the tense silences after each speaker. Some presenters argued that anthroposophy must do more to address Steiner’s apparent inconsistency on the question of race and the suffering stemming from the historical legacy of white supremacy and colonialism.
Robert Karp, an anthroposophical educator and threefold activist, offered a nuanced reading of Steiner’s views of race in terms of a) his Eagle teachings intended to initiate humanity into a genuinely cosmopolitan future; b) his Lion teachings reflecting his role as Central European culture hero; and c) his Bull nature reflecting his struggles to come to terms with his own limitations and the limitations of his time.3 Karp emphasized the way Steiner’s Eagle and Lion teachings bring a balance to the dominant “postmodern” social justice narrative that trains people to see only the West’s shadows, reducing “the West” to little more than a patriarchal white supremacist power plot, and thus disowning the very sources of transformation that may be capable of redeeming it. As CIIS professor Matt Segall noted on a different panel, encountering anthroposophy enabled him to recover a living spiritual current from within the Western cultural matrix itself—one he could inhabit without relying on the appropriation of Indigenous and Asian wisdom traditions.4
Educator Billy J. Choi-Gekas attempted to integrate ideas from Critical Race Theory (CRT) to develop an anti-racist and decolonial method of anthroposophic psychosophy, building specifically on the Seven Life Processes articulated by Steiner. During the discussion portion of this panel, it was suggested that “the West” either has no meaning (because of cross-cultural influence) or that any positive mention of it reinforces narratives of white supremacy. The first criticism acknowledges the internal ethnic and cultural hybridity that has always characterized the Western project, which has never been reducible to a single “white” identity. The fact that these two criticisms are mobilized simultaneously may indicate deeper unresolved tensions. While “the West” is indeed a 19th-century construct, it nevertheless names an emergent constellation of peoples, impulses, and institutions that—however porous, heterogeneous, and internally contested—has been sufficiently coherent to shape and enable the possibility of a planetary modernity.
This division is unlikely to be healed by rhetorical escalation in either direction. In his presentation, Ashton Arnoldy used historical background with methodological humility to help situate Steiner within the context of 19th-century scientific racism while contrasting this with his resolutely transethnic Christian spirituality.5 The aim was to undermine the simplistic judgments that either “Steiner was clairvoyantly reporting facts” or “Steiner’s racial prejudices invalidate his whole stream of thinking.” Such attempts at more careful framing, holding complexity and contradictions without evasion, provide steady ground for building a future-oriented anthroposophy that is responsive to the unique concerns of the third decade of the 21st century.
Lasting Impressions
From our perspective as American academics sympathetic to the mission of anthroposophy, the HDS conference raised questions worthy of consideration as this mission expands into diverse cultures outside the cultural and historical milieu endemic to Europeans. Steiner himself acknowledged that spiritual researchers can err.6 As researchers, if we cannot calmly and critically assess his work with this in mind and allow that some of his statements may be mistaken, then it may be that we are not practicing spiritual science but doing religious apologetics.
If anthroposophy is to have a flourishing future, it will be secured by a capacity that was modeled well by many at this conference: disciplined spiritual imagination conjoined with committed historical conscience. That HDS hosted a conference on Rudolf Steiner is immensely significant. It signals that such a conjunction is still possible in public intellectual life, and that the Great Work of integrating scientific truth-seeking, moral warmth, and spiritual imagination need not be ceded to stale institutional dogmatism or to rituals of ideological purification.
More 100 Years Rudolf Steiner, Harvard Divinity School Program for the Evolution of Spirituality
Video 100 Years Rudolf Steiner Conference Interview Sessions
Title image Conference organizer Aaron French speaks with presenters and participants in the lunch room at Harvard Divinity School. Photo: Garret Harkawik
Footnotes
- Rudolf Steiner, “The Aesthetics of Goethe’s Worldview” in Art as Spiritual Activity, GA271, lecture on November 9, 1888.
- Alexis Braun, “Visionary Dialogues: Hilma af Klint, Rudolf Steiner, and the Spiritual Aesthetics of the Third Realm,” at 100 Years Rudolf Steiner, Harvard Divinity School, December 2025.
- Robert Karp, “Rudolf Steiner’s Eagle, Lion, and Bull Teachings on Race and Culture,” at 100 Years Rudolf Steiner, Harvard Divinity School, December 2025.
- Matt Segall, “A Whiteheadian Approach to Rudolf Steiner’s Spiritual Science,” at 100 Years Rudolf Steiner, Harvard Divinity School, December 2025.
- Ashton Arnoldy, “Reverent Impiety: Reading Rudolf Steiner’s Christian Cosmology Against his Racialism,” at 100 Years Rudolf Steiner, Harvard Divinity School, December 2025.
- Rudolf Steiner, “The Errors of Spiritual Investigation” in GA69a, lecture on November 27, 1912.
