Rudolf Steiner and Anthroposophy: Where the Term Spiritual Science Came From

Most people meet Rudolf Steiner indirectly. They know a Waldorf school nearby, see a Demeter biodynamic label on a bottle of wine, or find Weleda creams on a pharmacy shelf. All three trace back to one Austrian thinker who said he could perceive a spiritual world as clearly as others perceive tables and chairs, and who called his method of studying it spiritual science. This article covers his life, his ideas, what grew from them, and what the evidence says.

From Goethe Scholar to Esoteric Teacher

Steiner was born in February 1861 in Donji Kraljevec, then part of the Kingdom of Hungary in the Austrian Empire, the son of a railway official. He studied at the Vienna Institute of Technology from 1879, and in 1882, still a student, was asked to edit Goethe's scientific writings for a new edition of Goethe's works. He later worked at the Goethe archives in Weimar until 1896 and earned a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Rostock in 1891 with a dissertation on Fichte. His main philosophical book, The Philosophy of Freedom, appeared in 1894.

Around the turn of the century this freethinking literary critic began lecturing to the Theosophical Society, and in 1902 he became head of its new German section. He never fit easily there. The society leaned toward Indian sources, while Steiner wanted a Western path rooted in Christianity, natural science and European philosophy. The break came when Annie Besant presented the young Jiddu Krishnamurti as a coming world teacher, a claim Steiner rejected. In 1912 and 1913 he and most of the German members left and formed the Anthroposophical Society.

What Spiritual Science Meant to Steiner

Anthroposophy combines the Greek anthropos, human, and sophia, wisdom. The word was not new. Steiner used it as a counterpart to theosophy, divine wisdom. His starting point would be the human being.

His name for the method was Geisteswissenschaft. The philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey had used that German term for the humanities. Steiner gave it a new meaning: a disciplined, systematic study of spirit as something real, starting from the premise that human beings can perceive what lies behind the world of the senses. In English it is usually translated as spiritual science.

Steiner believed this research could be as rigorous as natural science. Following Goethe, he treated thinking as an organ of perception, in the way the eye perceives color. Through moral discipline and meditation, he taught, anyone could develop higher cognition in three stages he called Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. His book How to Know Higher Worlds sets out the training, including concentration exercises such as holding the attention on a simple object like a seed, and reviewing the day's events in reverse order. A recurring rule is that each step in spiritual perception should be matched by three steps in moral development.

He then reported what this training revealed: reincarnation and karma, the evolution of human consciousness over vast ages, lost civilizations such as Atlantis and Lemuria, and a spiritual chronicle of the world's past and future that he called the Akashic Record. He presented these as research results. William James, in The Varieties of Religious Experience, collected other people's reports. Steiner described a spiritual world he said he had observed himself.

The Goetheanum

In 1913 construction began on the first Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland, a home for the movement's conferences and plays. Designed by Steiner and built largely by volunteers, it was a double domed wooden building on a concrete base. It opened in 1920 and burned to the ground on New Year's Eve 1922. Police reports pointed to arson as the probable cause, though that was never proven.

Steiner designed a replacement in cast concrete, completed in 1928, three years after his death in March 1925. The Second Goetheanum is regarded as a pioneering use of visible concrete and is protected as a Swiss national monument. It remains the world center of the movement and the seat of the School of Spiritual Science, which Steiner founded at Christmas 1923.

The Practical Movements

Waldorf education

In 1919 Emil Molt, who ran the Waldorf-Astoria cigarette company in Stuttgart, invited Steiner to lecture to his workers, and out of those lectures came a school for their children. The Waldorf movement now counts more than 1,200 schools and nearly 2,000 kindergartens in 75 countries. Its teaching follows Steiner's view that childhood unfolds in stages of roughly seven years, and leans on art, storytelling, handwork and eurythmy, an anthroposophical movement art.

Biodynamic farming

In 1924 Steiner gave eight lectures on agriculture at Koberwitz in Silesia, now Kobierzyce in Poland, for farmers worried about declining soil and crop health. Biodynamics treats each farm as a self sustaining organism and was the first of the modern organic movements. It also uses a lunar and astrological planting calendar and preparations such as manure or ground quartz packed into cow horns and buried, said to bring cosmic forces into the soil. Steiner told his listeners the methods should be tested. As of 2022 they were used on about 255,000 hectares in 65 countries.

Anthroposophic medicine

With the physician Ita Wegman, who opened the first anthroposophic clinic in Arlesheim, Switzerland, in 1921, Steiner developed a medical system that links organs, metals and planets and treats illness partly in terms of karma and past lives. It uses many remedies diluted in the manner of homeopathy, along with mistletoe preparations for cancer. The company Weleda was founded under his guidance the same year.

What Critics and the Evidence Say

• Spiritual research: none of Steiner's clairvoyant findings has been independently confirmed, and mainstream historians treat his Atlantis and Lemuria accounts as pseudohistory. The biographer Helmut Zander argues that Steiner reworked theosophical texts and presented them as his own insight.
• Biodynamics: no difference in beneficial outcomes has been established between certified biodynamic farming and similar organic methods. The long running DOK trial found that organic and biodynamic systems both improved soil but gave lower yields than conventional farming. Researchers such as Holger Kirchmann and Linda Chalker-Scott call the special preparations unproven and pseudoscientific.
• Medicine: anthroposophic medicine is widely classed as pseudoscience. Highly diluted remedies are biochemically inert, and there is no evidence of clinical benefit from mistletoe in cancer. The danger comes when such remedies replace effective treatment, and when some practitioners discourage vaccination, which has been linked to preventable outbreaks.
• Waldorf schools: research is small in scale and mixed. Some studies report strong creative and social outcomes. Critics point to esoteric ideas in parts of the curriculum, low vaccination rates in some school communities, and several state funded Steiner academies in England rated inadequate by inspectors from 2018.

Race

The most serious criticism concerns race. Steiner's work contains both universalist statements and racial hierarchies. At times he described some peoples as flowering and others as backward or destined to disappear, and presented white or European culture as the high point of human development so far. He also condemned racial prejudice, attacked antisemites in his early career, and taught that because each person reincarnates among many peoples, race is superficial and will lose its meaning. Yet he wanted Jewish culture to fully assimilate, and he paid for and wrote the foreword to a 1919 book by Karl Heise blaming Freemasons and Jews for the First World War. The historian Peter Staudenmaier writes that Steiner's works "contain pervasive internal contradictions and inconsistencies on racial and national questions." Hitler attacked Steiner in his lifetime, and anthroposophical institutions were later banned under Nazi rule. In 1998 the Anthroposophical Society in America stated that it rejects any racial theory that may be read into Steiner's writings.

Why Steiner Still Matters

The historian of religion Olav Hammer has called anthroposophy "the most important esoteric society in European history." Steiner wanted his spiritual science judged like any science, which means testing each claim on its own. Attention to soil health or to art in education can be valued without the metaphysics. The claims about cosmic forces, karmic illness and clairvoyant history have not held up.

For readers coming from New Thought, or from the Hermetic principles of The Kybalion, Steiner is a useful case study: a teacher who used the language of science sincerely, and whose story shows how much depends on whether that language is matched by tests anyone can repeat.

Sources and further reading

• Rudolf Steiner (Wikipedia)
• Anthroposophy (Wikipedia)
• Biodynamic agriculture (Wikipedia)