Die Mystik im Aufgange des neuzeitlichen Geisteslebens: und ihr Verhältnis zur modernen Weltanschauung

by Rudolf Steiner

Warum stossen eine besondere Form der Mystik und die Anfänge des gegenwärtigen naturwissenschaftlichen Denkens in der Zeit vom dreizehnten bis zum siebzehnten Jahrhundert aufeinander?

Die Mystiker, von denen hier gesprochen wird, sind letzte Ausläufer einer Forschungs- und Denkungsart, die in ihren Einzelheiten dem gegenwärtigen Bewusstsein fremd gegenübersteht. Nur die Seelenstimmung, die in dieser Forschungsart gelebt hat, ist in innigen Naturen der Gegenwart vorhanden. Die Art, die Dinge der Natur anzusehen, mit der vor dem hier gekennzeichneten Zeitalter diese Seelenstimmung verbunden war, ist nahezu verschwunden. Die gegenwärtige Naturforschung ist an ihre Stelle getreten.

Was die Menschenseele mit einer Forschungsart verträglich findet, das muss sie auch aus ihr gewinnen können, wenn sie stark genug dazu ist. Die mittelalterliche Mystik verkümmerte, weil sie den Untergrund der Forschung verloren hatte, der den Seelenkräften hinauf die Richtung zum Geiste gibt. Anregen will dies Buch dazu, die nach der geistigen Welt richtunggebenden Kräfte aus der rechtverstandenen neueren Forschung zu gewinnen.

129 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 26, 2018

About the author

Author also wrote under the name Rudolph Steiner.

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Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner was an Austrian occultist, social reformer, architect, esotericist, and claimed clairvoyant. Steiner gained initial recognition at the end of the nineteenth century as a literary critic and published works including The Philosophy of Freedom. At the beginning of the twentieth century he founded an esoteric spiritual movement, anthroposophy, with roots in German idealist philosophy and theosophy. His teachings are influenced by Christian Gnosticism or neognosticism. Many of his ideas are pseudoscientific. He was also prone to pseudohistory.
In the first, more philosophically oriented phase of this movement, Steiner attempted to find a synthesis between science and spirituality. His philosophical work of these years, which he termed "spiritual science", sought to apply what he saw as the clarity of thinking characteristic of Western philosophy to spiritual questions,  differentiating this approach from what he considered to be vaguer approaches to mysticism. In a second phase, beginning around 1907, he began working collaboratively in a variety of artistic media, including drama, dance and architecture, culminating in the building of the Goetheanum, a cultural centre to house all the arts. In the third phase of his work, beginning after World War I, Steiner worked on various ostensibly applied projects, including Waldorf education, biodynamic agriculture, and anthroposophical medicine.
Steiner advocated a form of ethical individualism, to which he later brought a more explicitly spiritual approach. He based his epistemology on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's world view in which "thinking…is no more and no less an organ of perception than the eye or ear. Just as the eye perceives colours and the ear sounds, so thinking perceives ideas." A consistent thread that runs through his work is the goal of demonstrating that there are no limits to human knowledge.