Many people wish they’d met Rudolf Steiner during his life on Earth. What’s behind this longing?
Perhaps there’s a somewhat secret motive: an instinctive feeling that we could know what he was “really” like, that we’d be able to have direct experiences of what we only know from traditions and stories—how he walked, how he spoke, how it felt to greet him in person. We can’t help but make the distinction between someone we’ve only heard about and someone we’ve actually seen, someone who appears before our physical senses. It feels like this person who doesn’t appear before our senses is not actually someone we can interact with directly; that they’re not a “you,” but a “he.”
Many of us can confirm this hidden longing in our souls, but we’d have to follow this by saying, “That’s crazy, especially from an anthroposophical perspective.” That means we’re considering that a physical-sensory appearance makes a person more real than an appearance in the imagination. We could say to ourselves, “Dear Thomas, my dear apostle, you hold yourself to be an ‘I,’ but then you say you want to ‘see,’ physically, perceive through the body.” Rudolf Steiner himself made a delightful comment about how happy he was not to have met Goethe in person and to have been born 29 years after his death. I was born 34 years after Rudolf Steiner’s death, and I’m glad. We all know how quickly, how easily, some sudden emotion (even a positive one like awe, etc.) can obscure our view of someone. We later generations experience this question of what he was really like, this person Rudolf Steiner solely in the spiritual world, in the suprasensible—where it truly belongs in every encounter! For what we see, what physically walks around on two legs in front of us, is (as we know) not the human being, but only the organism organized into a form and equipped with matter. The real human being is invisible.
Whoever wants to perceive or get to know the real, invisible Rudolf Steiner is undoubtedly already in the midst of anthroposophical imaginative practice and therefore has already met anthroposophy, and through anthroposophy, Rudolf Steiner. This leads to the challenging question: Could I have met Rudolf Steiner without knowing it? Is it possible that there’s a gap in the timing, possibly a very long one? Everyone who feels deeply connected to anthroposophy is connected by that fact that they have experienced an important moment: when, where, and how they met anthroposophy in their own life. Let’s call it a moment of birth—spirit birth in a living body. Afterwards, nothing was as it was before. Even those who come from an anthroposophical family have a moment when they meet it themselves for the first time, independently. They say, “This is me. This is part of me; this is so connected to my being that I cannot live without it, nor do I want to.” This moment of spiritual birth gives Rudolf Steiner the role of midwife, in the Socratic sense: a person who helps me come into the world as the person I truly am. The experience of myself as a reality is not the experience in the intellect where my self appears as if in a mirror; rather, it is an actual encounter with my Self; it feels like coming home. We should share these precious biographical moments because they connect us in a common memory—the same experience, experienced differently.
I was sitting in a library where the new admissions to the institute were going through their interview processes. I’d just canceled my enrollment. I was so glad the theater had accepted me, so I didn’t have to go to this strange institute with its strange furniture and even more unusual people. They had an art program here—the only place in the world I found the concept of art that I loved—but everything else was strange and seemed sectarian…. At least, that’s what I was saying to myself as I sat there, all relaxed and in a good mood that I wasn’t enrolled anymore—when a sword drove into my chest. It was an immense pain, a terribly sharp physical, bodily pain—it felt like what I imagined a heart attack should feel like—and I thought: What is going on? I heard a clear voice speak inside me. It was my own, and it said, “You just lost the most precious thing in your life….” “What are you talking about?” I happily countered, “It was my choice….”
Someone sitting across from me looked at me as if she could see and understand everything that I was experiencing but that I couldn’t understand myself. She smiled and invited me up to the attic of the Independent Youth Seminar in Stuttgart. There, director Karin Mittmann and I talked for hours, and then things proceeded in a way that… well, I hope this article speaks for itself.
This year, we are bringing you a series of articles titled “Rudolf Steiner as…” to honor the 100th anniversary of Rudolf Steiner’s death. These articles are sometimes essays, sometimes simply thoughts or reflections, but always an aspect of his being.
Translation Joshua Kelberman
