Mystics of the Renaissance and Their Relation to Modern Thought, Including Meister Eckhart, Tauler, Paracelsus, Jacob Boehme, Giordano Bruno, and Others

by Rudolf Steiner, Bertram Keightley

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Genres: Nonfiction

302 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1901

About the author

Author also wrote under the name Rudolph Steiner.

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...


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.

Reviews

[Andrew Simmons · Rating 3 out of 5]

Resourceful, helpful, references to more authors to read, but ultimately not much here aside from reiterations of the same premises. Additionally, some rather weak explanations of thinkers such as Giodarno Bruno.

[Ümit Sevgi · Rating 1 out of 5]

Kitabın ilk bölümünde 11 mistiği tanıtmak yerine, Steiner daha çok kendisinin onlar hakkında ne düşündüğünü yazıyor, ikinci bölümde ise P.M. Alan bu mistiklerin düz hayat hikayesini anlatıyor. Ama kitapta onların mistik lezzetlerini bulamadım. Tek dişe dokunur cümle Meister Eckhart'dan:
"Benim tanrıyı gördüğüm gözle tanrının beni gördüğü göz aynıdır."

[Peter · Rating 2 out of 5]

Somewhat interesting read but didn't really contribute much to my paper

[Jacqueline Nalbandyan]

Spectacularly honest and eye-opening, Steiner conveys the importance of individual search and understanding, the necessity for integrating the inner within the outer world and vice-versa, the mission of mankind which is penetrated by the vision of freedom and love.
His words are more and more welcomed nowadays, than in the epoch of industrialization and of increased focus on the material plane of being. A human being is a complex work of that which is 'natural', yet nature itself hopes for 'man' to strengthen and to raise their sight beyond the ever-changing astral/mental states and instincts. Imagination which is well-directed is a tool for transforming dormant intuition into a primary modus operandi - in man lies the key to another key note, an ever self-renewing web of life.