10 minute read
Looking Toward Higher Worlds
Conversations with Saul Bellow on Esoteric-Spiritual Matters, A Publisher’s Recollections, by Stephen E. Usher; SteinerBooks, 2017; 71 pages.
Review by Dwight Ebaugh
The contents of Stephen E. Usher’s new book are accurately described by the title, Conversations with Saul Bellow on Esoteric-Spiritual Matters, A Publisher’s Recollections. I am happy to add that the conversations are most engaging and Steve presents the conversations after telling the fascinating story of how he came to be in that improbable situation. In 1980 Steve sacrificed his position as a young Ph.D. economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to take on the management of the Anthroposophic Press. Managing the Press “was like patrolling a beach where waves were always washing up some curiosity or other to keep one engaged and interested.” One such curiosity was a letter discovered in the attic of a house near the offices of the Press in Spring Valley, New York. The letter was dated December 16, 1919 from Rudolf Steiner in Dornach, Switzerland. The gist of the letter was Rudolf Steiner’s agreement that his book, The Threefold State (now available as Towards Social Renewal) be published in English and his suggestion that Bernard Shaw be enlisted to write a review of the book. At the time of the letter, Shaw was on his way to becoming the leading dramatist of his generation (he authored Pygmalion in 1912) and he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925.
Steve described the “peculiar effect” that the letter had on his soul. “Chance, I felt, was not the agent that delivered it to my desk. Rather, I felt the agent was Rudolf Steiner.” Seven years earlier, Saul Bellow, the novelist and Nobel Laureate (and a person suspected of being an anthroposophist), had published Humboldt’s Gift, which earned him a Pulitzer Prize. The novel’s protagonist studied Steiner’s writings with an anthroposophist in Chicago. Steve wondered: “Would Saul Bellow be willing to write a foreword to a translation of one of Steiner’s works? Might the impulse that failed with Bernard Shaw succeed with Bellow?” From Steve’s reading of Bellow’s novels, Steve knew that the protagonist in Humboldt’s Gift, Charlie Citrine, was a writer modeled on Bellow himself. In the book, Charlie occasionally visits Dr. Scheldt, an old anthroposophist, and they discuss Rudolf Steiner. Steve knew that Dr. Scheldt was the fictional counterpart to Peter DeMay, a real life anthroposophist with whom Saul Bellow visited regularly to discuss Steiner.
At the University of Michigan, Steve Usher was introduced to Rudolf Steiner by Dr. Ernst Katz (1913-2009), a physics professor and a steady force in the anthroposophical movement for over sixty years. Ernst, in turn, introduced Peter DeMay to Steve. Peter liked the idea of a Bellow foreword and Peter assured Steve that Bellow’s interest in Steiner was genuine and serious. In late 1981, accompanied by Peter DeMay, Steve came face to face with Saul Bellow, the internationally famous writer and Nobel laureate, a name known in households across the world, a person to whom publishers would gladly pay large sums of money for the prestige of a foreword. In the course of this first meeting, with no money to offer, Steve put the question: would the renowned author write a foreword for a forthcoming English translation of Rudolf Steiner’s Grenzen der Naturekenntnise, a series of eight lectures given in 1920 (eventually published in English as The Boundaries of Natural Science)? Bellow agreed.
Steve characterizes Saul Bellow as an American “great soul,” a great artistic soul, a person who illuminated reality in an especially twentieth-century-American kind of way, a writer able to turn prose into high art. However, it took the great American soul nearly two years to write his eight page foreword to The Boundaries of Natural Science. The finished product is a masterpiece, a beautifully written piece that displays a true coming to grips with Rudolf Steiner’s concepts. It is evident from the foreword that Bellow took it upon himself to go deeply into the effects of the scientific world view on the modern social order, the Ignorabimus (the absolute inability of natural science to explain the source of human consciousness with which we human beings examine the outer world), the phenomenon of initiation, the difference between ordinary thinking and sense-free thinking, and the overwhelming significance of that which our sensory experience does not touch—the spiritual world. During and after the long period in which Saul Bellow worked on the foreword, he met and communicated with Steve Usher. Much of Conversations with Saul Bellow on Esoteric-Spiritual Matters is given over to these interactions.
On one occasion, Bellow spoke to Steve about the difficulties of a writer’s life. You can’t just dive into life like a normal person, he explained. At every moment, part of you is detached; it’s observing and taking mental notes and cataloguing the experiences. He said, “As a writer, you’re handicapped. It’s like going through life with one arm tied behind your back.” It struck Steve that Bellow was describing an essential characteristic of modern consciousness—the “consciousness soul” or observer consciousness or detached consciousness. In "May Human Beings Hear It!" (Temple Lodge 2004, p. 63), Sergei O. Prokofieff observes the same phenomenon from a slightly different perspective:
On another occasion, Bellow opined: anthroposophists have an easy time of it. They live in a beautiful cocoon, insulated from the real trauma of modern life. They have their own medicines, their biodynamic foods, their Waldorf education. This protects their health and personalities from the disintegration afflicting modern humanity. Moreover, Christianity has been preserved for them by Steiner’s spiritual insights. They still have it. For much of the educated Western world it is becoming untenable; the possibility of believing in the divine and an afterlife, much less Christ, has been eaten away by materialistic scholarship. It struck Steve that Bellow was characterizing anthroposophists as Essenes in the manner that Essenes were characterized by Rudolf Steiner in The Fifth Gospel lectures: In his late twenties, Jesus came to realize something that caused him great sorrow. He recognized that the Essenes [with whom He lived for periods of time] purchased their spiritual advancement at the expense of other human beings. The pure Essene life made it impossible for certain harmful spirits to approach Essene communities. With supersensible sight, Jesus saw these spirits running from the gates of an Essene village. He knew they were running to other human communities. They attacked the inhabitants of the other communities all the more. Jesus was seeking a road that all people could travel to the spirit, so he rejected Essene life, which could save only the few. Steve understood Bellow to be saying that anthroposophists try to be Essenes, but Steve disagreed on the grounds that modern life simply will not accommodate this, “Modern life finds you out no matter where you try to hide.” In other words, some anthroposophists may attempt to live in an esoteric cocoon but they cannot escape confrontations with today’s deep seated ahrimanic and materialistic forces.
In a telephone conversation, Steve spoke with Bellow about the problem of materialists denying the possibility of a science of the spirit. Bellow recounted his experience in debating a Kantian philosopher and a mathematician. Both refused to discuss Steiner. They would not even explain their objections. In our time, Bellow felt, academics control what is regarded as credible. Their strategy with Steiner is to ignore him.
Peter DeMay crossed the threshold shortly after Saul Bellow completed his foreword to The Boundaries of Natural Science. The crossing sparked a conversation between Steve and Bellow concerning communication with the departed. They attempted Rudolf Steiner’s exercise for communicating with the dead. Bellow worried that his friend Peter was having a hard time because the afterlife was not as he expected it to be. Steve, on the other hand, likened Peter’s afterlife experience to seeing an elephant for the first time. Even if one is well prepared for seeing an elephant, the actual experience would still be shocking.
Steve Usher and Saul Bellow also conversed about the indications in Rudolf Steiner’s widely read lecture, "The Work of the Angels in Man’s Astral Body". As a general proposition, Steiner states in that lecture that every rank of the spiritual hierarchies (Angels through Seraphim) are continually at work in the sheaths (physical, etheric, astral) of each human being in each stage of human evolution. As a concrete example of the general proposition, he details the work of the Angels in each human Astral Body at the current stage of our development (the age of the consciousness soul or spiritual soul). He asserts that the Angels’ current work is bringing about impulses within our Astral Bodies, while the current work of we human beings is to consciously heed these impulses and carry them out with deliberate moral intention in physical life. Specifically, we are (1) to relate to other human beings with genuine brotherly love, with a will to selflessly administer to the needs of others, with the end result being that we are unable to enjoy our own happiness when we are aware of another person’s unhappiness; (2) to recognize in ourselves and in each other human being a divinity, a spiritual essence, to the end that institutional churches will become obsolete as each meeting between human beings carries the full potential for a sacred religious experience; and (3) to gain direct access to spirit through our thinking, the thinking described by Rudolf Steiner in "The Philosophy of Freedom" and elsewhere as sense-free thinking or intuitive thinking, a conscious experience in pure spirit of a purely spiritual content (as opposed to our current everyday thinking which amounts to a conscious experience of a purely non-spiritual content). Steiner goes on to say that the Angels will do their work of bringing about the three impulses even if we do not perform our work of consciously heeding the impulses. But if this comes to pass, the consequences will be “baleful;” that is, the impulses will manifest as instincts within our etheric bodies and instead of brotherhood, sacred recognition, and direct spiritual experience, we will produce aberrant sexual behavior, harmful medical treatment, and highly destructive weapons.
Steve and Bellow speculated on whether we are already seeing evidence of these baleful consequences. In Humboldt’s Gift, Bellow compares Rip van Winkle’s twenty-year nap to modern society’s inability to wake up to spiritual reality. In conversation with Steve, he pointed to the growth of the pornography industry in relation to home video (internet porn would not arrive for another decade) as an initial manifestation of sexual aberrations. Together, they speculated that anxiety disorder medications like Librium and Valium might be examples of medicines that make one “feel good” while actually causing illness. Most of the antidepressants had yet to hit the market and Viagra was still unknown. Steve also recounts an exchange of letters in which they examined Steiner’s indications in lectures similar to "The Work of the Angels", namely, "Entry of the Michael Forces"; "Decisive Character of the Michael Impulse" and "Mechanistic, Eugenic, and Hygienic Aspects of the Future".
The book ends appropriately with Bellow’s foreword to The Boundaries of Natural Science. A warning: after you read Stephen E. Usher’s delightful new book, you may also want to read The "Boundaries of Natural Science" and "Humboldt’s Gift".
Dwight Ebaugh is a retired lawyer and secretary of the General Council of the Anthroposophical Society in America. He is active in the Great Lakes Branch of the Society.
