Experiencing spirit through form >>> ‘Stil’ magazine analyzes Rudolf Steiner’s use of language and form

Goetheanum, Dornach, Switzerland, 26 January 2026

Six authors use Rudolf Steiner’s creative language to illustrate how spirit can be experienced. Depending on their content, structure and style his books provide different kinds of access to the spirit. Active thinking on the part of the reader is essential.

“To live in love of action and to let live in understanding the will of others is the fundamental maxim of free human beings.” A statement like this not only conveys content through the meaning of the words it uses but also through its rhythm. ‘Stil’ magazine analyzes six of Rudolf Steiner’s books to explore how he uses the potential of language to present spiritual content and make spirit tangible.

Ariane Aichenberg points out that language has an influence on human physiology and brain activity: “Brain scans of people reading Shakespeare show significantly increased brain activity and formation of synaptic connections compared to people reading simple newspaper articles.” Ariane Aichenberg is referring to research conducted at Liverpool University’s Centre for Research into Reading, Literature and Society. Lifeless letters can generate a complex experiential world just as sheet music can unfold into a powerful symphony. This is not possible without prior practice – of an instrument in the case of music and of reflecting on content in the case of reading.

Style, images, comparisons, word creations and the rhythms and sounds of language are starting points, to which the conscious use of different semantic nuances of a word, the creation of potentially unusual contexts and (seeming) contradictions are added to inspire thinking, comparable to the experience of solving a riddle: at first it is incomprehensible, one struggles to find the solution and then it becomes evident.

Renatus Ziegler describes how even grasping a structure – that is to say the construction of a complex thought – becomes self-created experience and therefore “a path to independently processing the facts presented as cognitive results in Theosophy.” Based on the book ‘Riddles of Philosophy’, Eckart Förster points out that a different cognitive approach is required for this approach to knowledge, a transition from thought to experience. This cannot happen, he says, by reading something once; it might even take an entire lifetime.

Jaap Sijmons sees Rudolf Steiner’s book ‘Christianity as Mystical Fact’ as a dramatic performance. Rudolf Steiner himself characterized his book ‘Theosophy’ as spiritual research results presented in a “dry and mathematical fashion.” According to Christiane Haid, this requires increased will activity which leads to the awakening of spiritual perceptiveness. She also uses the analogy of a play. It is, she says, about experiences, about inner tensions and solutions experienced by the soul during reading, through active thinking. “As a consequence the ‘I’ now forms the vessel for the revelation of the spirit.”

Anna-Katharina Dehmelt finds various presentational qualities in the book ‘Esoteric Science’ such as definitions, the moving of concepts and their contemplation from different perspectives, as well as inversion: “[…] what the self has experienced is now spread out around it, in other words, inner experience becomes world.” According to Rudolf Steiner, this is already spirit experience.

(3293 characters/Sebastian Jüngel; English by Margot M. Saar)

Stil magazine (in German) Rudolf Steiner lesen und verstehen [reading and understanding Rudolf Steiner], 96 pages, CHF 20, Humanities Section Web (in German)

Contact person Christiane Haid