All or Nothing
WHAT nonsense to say that man is reduced to insignificance by the galaxies! The stars are a common brightness in every eye. What 'out there' have you that does not correspond to an 'I; here'? The mind of man is the biggest thing the universe, it is throughout the universe, it invents the universe. Professor Kyle's head is exploding and Professor Hoyle's head is con- tinuously created. Or if reality out there does in fact correspond to either of these splendid pic- tures, then the lump exploding or the cistern filling and leaking only know about themselves through the mind of Professor Ryle or Hoyle. We are a foolish and ignorant race and have got ourselves tied up in a tape-measure. One man who spent his life fighting the Laocoon ligatures of the tape-measure was Rudolf Steiner, the centenary of whose birth is commemorated by this volume of essays. The 'various hands' are painstaking and sometimes elaborate. Each author has tried to translate some aspect of Steiner's work into terms acceptable to the pre- sent generation.
There have been many seers in history, men who claimed knowledge on two or perhaps more levels of perception. We tend to treat them with a mixture of contempt and compassion. They were such good men, really, such decent chaps, and usually on our side in history. But if only Socrates had been acquainted with modern psychology, and known that he couldn't possibly have an attendant daimon! If only George Fox had met Freud, and known the true nature of
the flaming sword that barred the gate of Paradise!
We cannot treat Rudolf Steiner in this way. His seership was exercised in the broad daylight of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His life coincided with the great days of rationalism. It was a head-on collision; and in that collision Rudolf Steiner suffered far more severely than the philosophical establishment. This was not surprising, for the first law of the spirit is eva- luation and he lived during and perhaps through an age which saw less and less point in evaluation. To Steiner, thinking itself is a spiritual activity, a kind of celestial dance that the sons of the morning are performing in the mind of man. Therefore philosophy and science, with their exercise of the strict forms of thought, are a direct way into communion with God.
Even to those philosophers and scientists who had a trace of yearning after Plato left in their souls, Steiner's elaborate Weltanschauung was too much to swallow. He was thought to have made nothing but an infertile synthesis of the greater religions, without contributing anything of significance to them. Nor did his early friendship with Madame Blavatsky do him much good in the general eye. It was fairly easy to jeer at Madame Blavatsky, and by lumping Steiner with her, you could get rid of them both.
But today Steiner cannot be got rid of so easily. To begin with, there is a deep desire in the minds of people to break out of the globe of their own skulls, and find the significance in the cosmos that mere measurement misses. Any man who claims to have found a bridge between the world of the physical sciences and the world of the spirit is sure of a hearing. Is this not be-
cause most of us have an unexpressed faith that the bridge exists, even if we have not the wit to discover it?
The essays in this book bear witness to the extraordinary diversity of his interests—architec- ture, mathematics, medicine, education, politics, history, all the arts and always, at the heart of his work, Christianity and the fate of man. The essays are the work of devoted disciples; and he would be a brave man who thought himself competent to comment on them all. Yet there is only one way of assessing the work of a seer, judgment by results. His building, the Goethea- num, still stands, his disciples flourish, his schools increase in number. Their work impresses even casual visitors. In some fields, notably in the care of handicapped children, he is acknowledged to have been generations ahead of his contem- poraries. This is a good record for a man who went wholly against the main stream; and the bridge is still there, to be tested by any man who cares to take the trouble.
WILLIAM GOLDING
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