The Goethe biographer and art historian Steiner named as the closest bridge from conventional scholarship toward spiritual science.
Herman Grimm (1828 to 1901) was the Berlin art historian and Goethe biographer whom Rudolf Steiner repeatedly cited as the conventional scholar who stood nearest to spiritual science. Steiner devoted a full 1913 lecture to Grimm's personality-centred reading of Homer, Raphael, Michelangelo, and Goethe, in which documents matter less than the inner soul-life carried forward by leading individualities across three millennia of Western culture.
Herman Grimm in Anthroposophy is the art historian and Goethe biographer (1828 to 1901) whom Rudolf Steiner held up as the conventional scholar who came nearest to spiritual science without crossing into it. In the lecture printed in The Worldview of Herman Grimm (GA 62, Berlin, 1913), Steiner describes Grimm as a mediator between everything connected with Goethe and the emerging spiritual stream. Grimm wrote his Goethe lectures, his Homer, and his studies of Raphael and Michelangelo from one governing idea: that the real substance of history is not external documents but the inner soul-life that leading individualities transform into what he called creative phantasy. For Steiner this personality-centred, idealistic historiography prefigured the path that spiritual research itself must take, the soul allying itself with the cultural phenomena it studies rather than standing coldly objective before them. Grimm marks, in Steiner's account, the outermost reach of scholarship toward the threshold of spiritual knowledge.
In Steiner's Own Words
However, something else has arisen in the cultural life of humanity. What took place outwardly, what happened has, thanks to leading individualities, undergone a spiritual rebirth. This is evidenced by personalities who have transformed it artistically, who have utilized it for cultural purposes. Thus, in looking back for instance to the time of ancient Greece, Herman Grimm said to himself: Some documents exist concerning this Greek age, but these are insufficient to enable one to understand the Greek world. Yet what the Greeks experienced has found its rebirth in the works of Greek art, has been re-enlivened by significant Greek personalities. Immersing oneself in them, letting the Greek spirit affect one, a truer picture of the Greek world is attained than in merely assembling external facts.
What it Means Today
Grimm's quarrel with document-bound history did not end in 1901. In 1973 the American theorist Hayden White published Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Johns Hopkins University Press), arguing that every great historian, Michelet, Ranke, Burckhardt, and the rest, first shapes the raw record through a poetic act, an imaginative emplotment, before any "facts" can speak. White was reading the same generation of German and French historians that Grimm belonged to, and he reached a strikingly parallel verdict: the historian's creative form is not a distortion laid over the evidence but the very thing that makes a past world legible. Where the positivist gathers documents and trusts them to yield a picture, both Grimm and White insist that the picture comes from the historian's own formative imagination meeting the material.
Steiner saw in this the doorway, not the destination. Grimm's "creative phantasy" lets a reader feel the Achilles-soul or the spirit of Raphael as living realities, yet it stops at the human personality and never asks what spiritual beings stood behind the gods of Homer. Thalira synthesis: Grimm is the model of a scholarship that has recovered soul but not yet spirit, the exact halfway house Steiner asks the reader to pass through and then beyond. To work with Grimm today is to practise reading culture as an inward stream first, and only afterward to ask the further question he left politely undecided.
Where to Read More