A new 8-volume critical edition of Rudolf Steiner’s works is being published by the respected German academic publisher frommann-holzboog. The edition, Schriften, Kritische Ausgabe (SKA), is edited by Christian Clement, associate professor of German at Brigham Young University, Utah, and  is being jointly distributed by the Rudolf Steiner Verlag. The first volume (actually volume 5 in the series) was published in August 2013 and second volume (volume 7 of the series) came out in November. Ansgar Martins took a look at the second volume of the SKA for NNA.

STUTTGART (NNA) – This second volume contains Rudolf Steiner’s works Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. How is it achieved? (1904-5) and The Stages of Higher Knowledge (1905-8). The appendix contains documents on Steiner’s work in the “Esoteric School” of the Theosophical Society as well as from his Masonic rites.

The new volume provides a documentation which goes far beyond the two published works and precisely for that reason reveals them in a completely new light. Both books are based on essays by Steiner in the Theosophical journal Lucifer-Gnosis. Each new edition of Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. How is it achieved? was revised by Steiner, sometimes significantly, and the SKA sets out the differences between the various editions. It thus allows us to see how Steiner’s thinking deepened and evolved over the years.

The textual commentary examines both works in detail for their philosophical and literary antecedents. Here it becomes clear that although Steiner took on theosophical ideas and retained their motifs, he increasingly turned them into something of his own, as Clement shows. At the beginning, for example, the figure of the spiritual teacher had been an unavoidable part of Steiner’s concept of “initiation” but over time that had developed into the idea of an individual path of spiritual schooling without any teacher authority.

Broad panorama

Clement makes clear in his introduction and commentary that the intellectual references of Steiner’s esoteric “path of schooling” were by no means exhausted in their theosophical sources. Clement interprets them in a broad panorama of the history of thought in which the Christian mysticism of Schiller’s “higher human being” and Goethe’s Faust play a role as much as the “animal magnetism” of Franz Anton Mesmer or the pioneers of psychotherapy. “Between neo-mystical esotericism and scientifically pursued depth psychology as characteristic phenomena of the European fin de siècle, Rudolf Steiner’s writings on training our faculties of higher knowledge take a middle position of their own,” Clement argues.

Furthermore, Steiner’s concept of such training is not restricted to the two edited works, Clement says. Steiner’s Masonic rites, his Mystery Dramas, educational theory and aesthetics also have to be included to tap its many different dimensions. Clement’s multi-perspective analysis allows for a diverse understanding of the “path of schooling” in which neither the contradictions which arise from Steiner’s revisions nor the continuity go short.

Blind spots

However, Clement’s introduction and contextualisation also show some blind sports such as when Steiner’s School of Spiritual Science, the continuation of his esoteric work in the 1920s, is hardly mentioned. Neither does Clement really deal with Steiner’s intention to establish an empirical science of the “spiritual world”. “The only being whom a person encounters in meditation is, according to Steiner, ultimately himself or herself,”  Clement writes, although Steiner unambiguously says the opposite.

Relevant secondary literature is not mentioned either, such as for example Johannes Kiersch’s book on the Freie Hochschule (School of Spiritual Science) (Dornach 2012), Wouter Hanegraaff’s methodological reflections on research into esoteric practice or Olav Hammer’s study Claiming Knowledge (Leiden 2004) which in particular analyses the epistemological dimension of Steiner’s “path of schooling” from the perspective of the history of religion. The discussion of such parallels in the study of esotericism, particularly with regard to the question of the methodological approach to esoteric practice, would have benefited Clement’s analysis.

Rudolf Steiner: Schriften – Kritische Ausgabe (SKA). Volume 7. Schriften zur Erkenntnisschulung: Wie erlangt man Erkenntnisse der höheren Welten – Die Stufen der höheren Erkenntnis. Edited and annotated by Christian Clement. With a foreword by Gerhard Wehr, Stuttgart 2014. CXXX, 495 pages.

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Item: 141214-01EN Date: 14 December 2014

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