Rudolf Steiner

The teaching

Taught from his own books and lectures, from The Philosophy of Freedom (1894) to the Agriculture Course (1924).

Thinking and freedom

The Philosophy of Freedom begins with thinking. The world comes to us first as percepts, what the senses and the inner life present; thinking brings to them the concepts that belong to them, and knowledge is the joining of the two. Thinking is therefore not a copy made inside the head of a world outside it, but the place where a person stands within the world's own order. In thinking, which a person can observe as their own activity, they meet something that rests on nothing but itself.

From this comes his ethics. An act is free when it springs from a person's own insight into what the moment asks, a moral intuition grasped in thinking, and is done out of love for the deed itself, not from command, custom or fear. Steiner calls the one who acts so a free spirit, and gives the rule of a society of such people: to live in love toward one's own actions, and to let others live in understanding of their will.

Body, soul and spirit

Theosophy describes the human being as threefold, body, soul and spirit, and then in finer detail. There is the physical body, which a person shares with the minerals; the life body or etheric body, the body of formative forces, shared with the plants; and the soul body or astral body, the bearer of feeling and desire, shared with the animals. In the soul the I lives and works, first as the sentient soul, then as the intellectual or mind soul and then as the consciousness soul, and the I is to transform the bodies into spirit, as spirit self, life spirit and spirit man.

The I is the centre, the one name each person can give to themselves alone. It returns to earth in life after life, each life shaped by the deeds of earlier ones, the law he calls karma. Between death and a new birth the soul passes through the soul world, where it is freed of its longing for the physical, and on into the land of spirit, where it gathers the fruit of the life just lived and prepares the next.

The path of knowledge

How to Know Higher Worlds teaches that the powers of higher knowledge sleep in every person and can be woken by patient inner work. Its first condition is reverence: a mood of devotion toward truth and knowledge, cultivated in place of criticism and judgement, since the soul that venerates grows and the soul that only criticises dries up. Its golden rule is that for every step taken toward higher knowledge, three are to be taken toward the perfecting of one's character for the good.

The practice begins with moments of inner quiet set aside each day, in which the student looks at their own experiences and deeds as a stranger would, calmly and without excuse. Then come exercises of feeling: to look at a seed and picture the plant that will grow from it, to look at a plant in full bloom and then at one withering, and to give oneself wholly to the feelings of growing and of fading that rise in the soul. In the evening the day is reviewed backward, from evening to morning.

Beside these stand six exercises of the soul, each practised for a month and then carried on with the next: control of thought, holding the mind for a few minutes on one simple object; control of action, doing one small chosen act each day at a fixed time; equanimity in joy and sorrow; seeing the good in everything; openness to what is new; and the harmony of all five together. Steiner warns against any practice that dims clear waking consciousness or weakens a person's duties in ordinary life. The training is meant to make a person more awake and more capable in daily life, and the house adds that anyone whom inner exercises unsettle should stop and seek help.

The evolution of the world

Occult Science traces the world and humankind through a series of earlier states before the present earth, which Steiner names Old Saturn, Old Sun and Old Moon, as he says he read them. On Saturn the first seed of the physical body was laid down, on the Sun the life body was added, on the Moon the soul body, and on the earth the I, so that the human being is in his teaching the oldest of the earth's creatures and not the youngest. Three states are still to come, which he names Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan, in which the I is to transform the bodies into spirit.

Lucifer, Ahriman and the Christ

Two powers work against the human being's balance. Lucifer draws upward and inward, into pride, fantasy and a spirituality that flees the earth; Ahriman draws downward, into coldness, materialism and a mind that knows only what can be measured. Neither is simply to be fled, since each holds something a person needs, and the task is to stand between them in balance. That balance, for Steiner, is the work of the Christ.

The deed at Golgotha is the centre of the whole evolution. A being from the spiritual sun, in his teaching, entered the man Jesus at the baptism in the Jordan, and through the death and the rising united himself with the earth, which has carried his life ever since. It is a deed done for all humankind and not for one faith alone, and the free I of the present age can find the Christ within its own thinking and willing.

The child's three ages

His education rests on a picture of growth in periods of seven years. From birth to the change of teeth the child learns by imitation, while the life body is still at work building the physical body, so what matters is a good example and a world worth imitating. From the change of teeth to puberty the child learns through pictures, rhythm and feeling, under a teacher loved as an authority, since the life body is now set free for learning. After puberty, with the soul body born, judgement awakens and the young person is ready to think things through for themselves. The Waldorf schools take their plan from this.

The farm as an organism

The Agriculture Course teaches that a farm is to be an individual organism, as closed in itself as it can be, raising its own feed and making its own manure, with soil, plants, animals and people in one living whole. The soil is alive, and the farmer is to tend its life rather than feed the plant with salts. The plant stands between two kinds of influence: the near, earthly forces, which he ties to lime and to the planets nearer than the sun, and the far, cosmic forces of light and warmth, which he ties to silica and to the outer planets.

For this he prescribed preparations. Cow manure is packed into a cow's horn and buried through the winter, then stirred into water for an hour, the vortex reversed again and again, and sprayed on the soil; ground quartz is packed into a horn and buried through the summer, then stirred and sprayed finely on the plants. Six more, made from yarrow, camomile, nettle, oak bark, dandelion and valerian, are put into the compost heap. The house teaches them as his doctrine.