Rudolf Steiner

Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) was a truth-seeker, visionary and seer. He was an exceptional spiritual teacher, whose unique genius was to translate into modern consciousness humanity’s most ancient striving to know itself and, in knowing itself, know nature, the cosmos, and the divine. A philosopher, scientist, and esotericist, Steiner was a dedicated servant of humanity, who gave unstintingly to the world of the wisdom he gained through the radical method of meditative, spiritual research that he inaugurated and practised. The range of this research, far-reaching in its practical implications, included every aspect of human striving, from cosmology, evolution and history to physics, mathematics, biology, psychology and astronomy. On this basis, Steiner was able to make significant practical contributions to fields as diverse as education (Steiner schools), agriculture (biodynamics), medicine (anthroposophic medicine), and social theory (the threefold social order). He was also an artist, a playwright, and an architect. As a spiritual teacher, we may say he was the foremost exponent of the inner path of Western spirituality in the twentieth century. The movement he started, Anthroposophy, represents the growing tip of the Western spiritual traditions. Above all, he was a thinker, a world-transforming, paradigm-creating figure, often likened in his far-reaching significance to other great thinkers and world-creators like Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. Because he was a thinker, his anthroposophical path of meditation, whatever form it took (Theosophical, philosophical, Rosicrucian, or Christian-Gnostic) was always (whether it involved thinking, feeling, or willing) a path of knowing. – Christopher Bamford