Saturday, August 18, 2018

Dornach ramblings




A review of "Anthroposophy and the Catholic Church" 

Rudolf Steiner was the creator of Anthroposophy, a spiritual path combining elements of Theosophy with older Christian esotericism. Steiner is de facto regarded as a guru or prophet by the Anthroposophists, and everything he ever said or wrote has therefore been piously preserved for posterity. Nowadays, most of it has been published, too. Unfortunately, this means that the available Steiner material is of very varied quality.

This publication is easily one of the worst.

It's a collection of three relatively short Steiner lectures delivered in Switzerland in 1920, supposedly on the Catholic Church but really about everything between Heaven and Earth. The lectures are incredibly rambling, to the point of being incomprehensible. The only things I could make out were: that Steiner didn't like the Jesuits (no surprise there), that somebody (a Jesuit?) attacked an Anthroposophist and burned his posters promoting Steiner's second lecture, and that the only alternatives to “Lenin and Trotsky” (meaning militant atheism and social chaos) are authoritarian Catholicism or Anthroposophy. Humanity should, of course, choose the latter path…

No?

Perhaps only worth one star, but since Steiner may have hidden something really deep somewhere in these rambling tomes, I will give it two.
Don't count on it, however!

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