As a man of towering intellect, it should seem fairly obvious, upon adequate inspection, that Rudolf Steiner could have been recognized as a salient genius in any human discipline he may have chosen to follow. Instead, following his soul's transcending demand, he embarked at the turn of the twentieth century upon a rigorous, lonely, and emotionally and physically excruciating spiritual path. The nature of that path can perhaps best be understood in the light of a little book that first appeared a few years earlier (in 1877),³¹ on the very threshold of the new age of the Archangel Michael (which began in 1879) so extensively perceived and expounded by Steiner. Flatland is an incredibly clever caricature of the society of that day, yet timeless in application and certainly pertinent in our own. Abbott, an educator, set his story in Euclidean terminology and humanized its elements. One group lives and perceives in the domain of the point, another in that of the line, then the plane, then the three-dimensional figure, and so on up. The dialogue between those who perceive in different geometric domains brings out the ever-present conflict where attempts are made to communicate between human beings who perceive in different dimensions. Steiner claimed to have perceived in what he called the "supersensible" world, dimensions many levels higher than those indwelt by (at least almost all of) the rest of us.³² A relatively small, but nevertheless numerically significant number of people with the necessary soul disposition and intellectual capacity have sufficiently investigated his works over the last century to have formed deep conviction in the validity of his claim. I am one of those, as is Zajonc. Neither my career nor my present circumstances, unlike most scientists, theologians and clergy, constrain me in any way from expressing my convictions freely. My writings are an effort to do so in relation to the meaning of the Bible.

Of the many initiatives begun by Steiner, probably none is so well known as Waldorf Schools. The initial Waldorf School was founded by Steiner in Stuttgart, Germany, at the request of an industrialist for the purpose of educating the children of his employees according to the principles of child development unique to anthroposophy. Anthroposophy is not taught to the child, nor even to the teachers (though some study it), but anthroposophical insights into child development are applied in Waldorf education, which has become highly sought by many who have no interest in anthroposophy as such.³³

From 1900 to 1925 Steiner wrote thirty or forty books and gave over 6,000 lectures all over greater Europe, from the Balkans to Great Britain to Scandinavia. The Waldorf system did not commence until after World War I. Quite a number of Steiner's lectures were to train teachers for this school at Stuttgart. Over the years of his lectures, he typically lectured on a Christ-centered Christmas topic at or near Christmas. One would have expected this to be his focus on the occasion in question. His ten-lecture cycle to which attention is now directed commenced in Stuttgart on December 23, 1919 and went through January 3, 1920. It is entitled Light Course (LC) and is the first of three cycles that have been called his "scientific courses" (though other cycles also deal with scientific matters to some extent or other).³⁴ The other two are the Warmth Course (WC), the main basis for the "Fire" essay above, and what is called the "Astronomy Course" in spite of his insistence that it was to be called Astronomy: The Relation of the Diverse Branches of Natural Science to Astronomy (ARNS), the basis for the final essay in this volume.

Steiner's Light Course

Introduction

Some indication of his genius is indicated by the fact that he did not know this course was desired by the teachers until his arrival at Stuttgart shortly before. In the first paragraph of his lecture he says, "On this occasion as you must also realize, I was only told that this lecture-course was hoped-for after my arrival here. What I can therefore give during these days will be no more than an episode." He admonished his hearers also that his remarks were directed to them as teachers of children, not for direct material for their lessons "but as a fundamental trend and tendency in Science, which should permeate your teaching." Moreover, the reader should remember that relativity and quantum theory, while broached by then, were still in their infancy and not nearly so well developed as they are today. Among other things, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle postdated Steiner's death in 1925; Einstein's test, later known as EPR, from which "non-locality" came into scientific awareness, was not till 1935, and the bulk of the refinements developed by the litany of scientific geniuses of the twentieth century, upon which the works of Liderbach, Fagg and Zajonc rely so extensively, were then still in the future.

Immediately Steiner told his audience that he had been invited in the nineties "to speak on Goethe's work in Science" (having become, by then, perhaps its foremost authority by having edited those works for the Goethean archives in Weimar). He explained that he had confined his remarks at that time to the organic sciences,

For to carry Goethe's world-conception into our physical and chemical ideas was, as yet quite impossible. Through all that lives and works in the Physics and Chemistry of today, our scientists are fated in regard, whatever takes its start from Goethe in this realm, as being almost unintelligible from their point of view. Thus, I opined [in the nineties, before either the Planck or Einstein pronouncements], we shall have to wait till physicists and chemists will have witnessed—by their own researches—a kind of "reductio ad absurdum" of the existing theoretic structure of their Science. Then and then only will Goethe's outlook come into its own, also in this domain.

This foresight, so typical of his recurring prescience, ran like water off the sophisticated back of modern science in his day, and runs off theologians still in our own. Perhaps it will not come in my lifetime, but the day must surely come in the not too distant future when this prophet is recognized for the exalted spirit that he was (i.e., is), herald and servant of the Archangel Michael and of the returning Christ.

Between scientists and theologians, the scientists seem to have been the first to begin humbling themselves in the light of twentieth-century discoveries in relativity and quantum theory. Liderbach points this out about them. Only the more open-minded theologians have seen that perhaps religion also is in need of a drastic revision in approach and understanding. As the work of Liderbach the theologian seems to suggest in its focus upon the scientific minded, that self-recognition has not yet widely dawned in the theological camp.

The "reductio ad absurdum" is already somewhat recognized in science by the FAPP ("for all practical purposes") approach. Those who refuse to rest with this have still to come up with a theoretical (i.e., kinetic) alternative, having not as yet embraced the ancient four elements and their related etheric conditions as the basis of creation (I-22). The Prodigal is still studying the situation in the pigpen, but hopefully with a dawning awareness that there is a higher and better dwelling.

Every scientific work cited above recognizes that the twentieth century witnessed the death of common sense in the subatomic realm. Only the mysterious quantum theory, far beyond the reach of direct human observation and experience, has been able to reconcile the emerging phenomena, and some have gagged on it while the rest have suffered indigestion. Einstein, the century's most celebrated physicist, died still alienated by the answers of quantum theory and mystified by his life's study of light. And how far can we be from that "reductio ad absurdum" when Richard Feynman (1918-1991), brilliant corecipient of the 1965 Nobel Prize in physics for the final formulation of the QED (quantum electrodynamics) theory, said that its phenomena are "impossible, absolutely impossible, to explain in any classical way"?³⁵

One thing seems clear to all. Light has never revealed itself to human senses except in its capacity as revealer, and in that capacity it still has concealed its deeper nature from observation. As Zajonc has shown us, even those four characteristics that have been used to describe it are ambiguous and indefinite. It seems to have a character that exists only in the unity of all creation. How very like the Christ ("I have come as light into the world," Jn 12,46), the most adored and consequential individual who ever lived, who has attracted the desire and devotion of a wide swath of humanity who yet quarrel and disagree among themselves on who he was or what he accomplished save in general and humanly ambiguous terms. John says of him as light, "The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not understood it" (Jn 1,5).³⁶

As the works cited above suggest, science has reached the point in its work with light, where matter touches upon non-matter, where it can calculate but not explain. It hasn't yet given in to the idea that it must come to the still further region that it might call, for want of a better term, "non-force," where it cannot even calculate. If it is to move from its fascination with the mineral kingdom into gnosis (divine knowledge; "science") of the higher plant, animal and human kingdoms, it must "leave home,"³⁷ for to date it knows only the mineral aspect of these higher kingdoms. Knowledge of them does not lie in the world of matter and force (as we know force), but rather in the etheric, astral and spiritual realms, respectively. These realms can only be known through what may properly be called "spiritual science." It is this study that Steiner propounds and brings. Let us look at a part of the light "episode" he gave impromptu to the Waldorf teachers in 1919-1920.