WorkRudolf Steiner

Mystics of the Renaissance and Their Relation to Modern Thought

Eckhart, Boehme and Angelus Silesius read as allies of Haeckel and modern science by a lecturer speaking to theosophists.

by Rudolf Steiner148 passages held

English, a translation held here, and your language

Original title: Die Mystik im Aufgange des neuzeitlichen Geisteslebens
First published: 1901(aged 40)
Original language: German

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Overview

The audience was about twenty people, meeting once a week at the Theosophical Library in Berlin, the reading room run by Count and Countess von Brockdorff. Rudolf Steiner gave them twenty-six lectures, the last on 26 April 1901. That autumn he published the book drawn from them, Die Mystik im Aufgange des neuzeitlichen Geisteslebens, which Bertram Keightley, an English theosophist who had worked with Helena Blavatsky, translated in 1911 as Mystics of the Renaissance and Their Relation to Modern Thought. The book runs from Meister Eckhart through Tauler, Suso and Ruysbroeck, Nicholas of Cusa, Agrippa and Paracelsus, Weigel and Jacob Boehme, to Giordano Bruno and Angelus Silesius, and it opens on the old command of the Delphic oracle, know thyself. Steiner's claim is that these men looked for the spirit in the soul that comes to know itself, not in a God standing behind nature, and that this makes them forerunners of modern science. Science, in his account, had removed from nature everything that belonged only to the human mind, and the mystics, had they lived to see it, would have welcomed the removal. In the afterword Steiner declares that he stands entirely on the ground of natural science, and of Ernst Haeckel's account of evolution in particular; he accepts his descent from animals calmly; and he points his readers back to The Philosophy of Freedom for his own view. He also hears a harsh discord whenever the pious creeds of his day collide with the facts Haeckel set out, and he finds a higher piety in Boehme and Silesius that has no quarrel with those facts.

Key concepts

What does the book mean by the birth of God in the soul?

Eckhart's phrase, which Steiner reads as self-knowledge carried to its end. When the soul knows itself, it does not find one more object among others; the spirit becomes aware of itself, and that awakening is what the mystics called God's birth within. On this reading God is not an outside being the soul reaches, but something that comes to life in the knowing.

What is Nicholas of Cusa's learned ignorance?

The knowledge that ordinary concepts, which work by setting one thing apart from another, fail before the infinite, where opposites coincide. Cusa did not treat this as a defeat. In Steiner's reading, knowing exactly where concepts end is itself a higher knowing: the point at which the soul stops describing the divine from outside and begins to experience it.

Why does the book call the mystics forerunners of natural science?

Because, having found the spirit in the soul's self-knowledge, they had no need to look for spirits hidden in nature. Nature could then be explained by natural causes alone, which is what modern science went on to do. Steiner argues that the mystics, had they lived to see science strip nature of everything that belonged only to the human mind, would have welcomed it.

What does know thyself mean in this book?

The Delphic command, taken literally and pushed to its limit. For Steiner it names the one act in which the spirit is both knower and known: in knowing itself, the soul does not add another fact about the world but lifts itself to a higher stage of being. The mystics he discusses, from Eckhart to Silesius, are read as different ways of carrying that command out.

What is the friendship with God the book describes?

The name of the fourteenth-century circle of mystics around Tauler, Suso and Ruysbroeck, the Friends of God. In Steiner's reading they carried Eckhart's insight from knowledge into conduct: the birth of God in the soul had to show itself in a changed life, not only in understanding. Tauler, in the story Steiner retells, learned this from a layman who showed him that learning alone was not enough.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

God Born in the Knowing Soul

Where should a person look for the spirit: behind nature, or in the soul that comes to know itself? The book reads the mystics from Eckhart to Angelus Silesius as choosing the second, and taking the old command, know thyself, at its word.

Meister Eckhart said that the eye in which he saw God was the eye in which God saw him, and Steiner takes that as the key to the whole line. In self-knowledge, he argues, the spirit does not observe some object; it becomes aware of itself, and what had been a God outside the world is born within the soul. Tauler turned the insight into a way of living, Nicholas of Cusa into a learned ignorance that knows where concepts fail, and Angelus Silesius into couplets claiming God cannot live an instant without him.

mysticism
self-knowledge
selfhood
inner experience
spirit
spiritual transformation
divine immanence
divinity
divine union
meister eckhart
theology
scholasticism
revelation
faith and reason
spiritual perception
spiritual knowledge
freedom
subjectivity

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Mystics as Allies of Natural Science

Could mystics and Darwinists be on the same side? The book claims that by finding the spirit in the soul rather than behind nature, the mystics left nature free to be explained in natural terms.

Science, Steiner argues, has removed from nature everything that belonged only to the human mind, and the mystics would have welcomed that. Having found the spirit in self-knowledge, they needed no spirits in stones and stars. So Paracelsus studied nature as a physician, Bruno opened an infinite universe, and Boehme looked for the origin of good and evil within the world itself. In the afterword Steiner declares that he stands entirely on the ground of natural science, accepts his descent from animals calmly, and finds in Boehme and Silesius a piety with no quarrel with Haeckel's facts.

nature
evolution
science and religion
epistemology
knowledge
cognition
perception
philosophy of perception
cosmology
idealism
consciousness
human nature

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Within this work

passages held: 148
distinct concepts: 226
by passages held, corpus-wide: #420

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “epistemology” and “self-knowledge”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 24 pairings. 83 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
epistemology	self-knowledge	8
mysticism	selfhood	8
knowledge	mysticism	7
mysticism	self-knowledge	7
nature	spirit	7
epistemology	nature	4
epistemology	spirit	4
epistemology	inner experience	3
epistemology	knowledge	3
epistemology	mysticism	3
inner experience	knowledge	3
inner experience	mysticism	3
inner experience	self-knowledge	3
knowledge	nature	3
knowledge	self-knowledge	3
knowledge	selfhood	3
knowledge	spirit	3
mysticism	spirit	2
self-knowledge	spirit	2
epistemology	selfhood	1
inner experience	selfhood	1
mysticism	nature	1
nature	selfhood	1
selfhood	spirit	1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1891 Die Grundfrage der Erkenntnistheorie (Die Grundfrage der Erkenntnistheorie mit besonderer Rücksicht auf Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre)
A doctoral thesis and the groundwork for The Philosophy of Freedom, though most readers know it only through the 1892 book that absorbed it.
DE
1894 The Philosophy of Freedom (Die Philosophie der Freiheit)
The philosophical centre of Steiner's work, written in his Weimar years before any theosophy, and the book he kept sending later readers back to.
DE
1895 Friedrich Nietzsche, Fighter for Freedom (Friedrich Nietzsche, ein Kämpfer gegen seine Zeit)
Written between The Philosophy of Freedom and the Goethe book, while Steiner still counted himself among Nietzsche's allies and before his dealings with the Nietzsche Archive turned sour.
DE
1897 Goethe's World View (Goethes Weltanschauung)
The last book of Steiner's Weimar years and the summing-up of his work as Goethe's scientific editor; The Philosophy of Freedom supplied its theory of knowledge.
DE
1901 Mystics of the Renaissance and Their Relation to Modern Thought (Die Mystik im Aufgange des neuzeitlichen Geisteslebens) you are here EN
1902 Christianity as Mystical Fact (Das Christentum als mystische Tatsache und die Mysterien des Altertums)
The book that marks Steiner's turn from philosophy to esoteric Christianity, given first as lectures to the Berlin theosophists in the months before he became their leader.
EN
1904 How to Know Higher Worlds (Wie erlangt man Erkenntnisse der höheren Welten?)
The practical companion to Theosophy: that book describes what the trained seer claims to see, this one the training that is meant to lead there.
DE
1904 Theosophy (Theosophie)
Begun two years after Steiner took charge of the German theosophists, and the systematic foundation that his later accounts of initiation and cosmic evolution build on.
DE
1910 An Outline of Occult Science (Die Geheimwissenschaft im Umriß)
The fullest single statement of Steiner's cosmology, begun inside the theosophical movement and revised under anthroposophy through four prefaces from 1909 to 1925.
DE
1911 The Spiritual Guidance of Man and of Mankind (Die geistige Führung des Menschen und der Menschheit)
Steiner's second book on the figure of Christ, nine years after Christianity as Mystical Fact, and one that carries the account far deeper into esoteric claims.
EN
1919 The Threefold Commonwealth (Die Kernpunkte der sozialen Frage in den Lebensnotwendigkeiten der Gegenwart und Zukunft)
Composed for the months after the German revolution, and Steiner's chief written statement on society; it reached English readers within a few years as The Threefold Commonwealth.
DEEN

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