Steiner's name for the collective of exalted spiritual individualities who inspire genuine esoteric schooling by harmonising the feeling-life, never by commanding belief.
Masters of Wisdom and of the Harmony of Feelings is Rudolf Steiner's name for the company of exalted individualities, the great inspirers in spiritual realms, whose inner development reaches far beyond ordinary humanity. From these guides, Steiner taught, the impulses of genuine esoteric schooling flow. He renamed the Theosophical Masters of Wisdom deliberately, adding the harmony of feelings to mark that they work by ordering the feeling-life, not by demanding faith.
In Steiner's Own Words
We say rightly that Theosophy did not come into the world through this or that book, nor through this or that sum of dogmas. Theosophy comes from those exalted individuals whom we call the Masters of Wisdom and of the Harmony of Feelings, because they have opened the sources of spiritual life, which can henceforth flow into human beings. Spiritual life ultimately goes back to those sources that we seek in those individualities whom we call the Masters of Wisdom and of the Harmony of Feelings. In them we find the impulses, if we seek them rightly, of how we are to work from epoch to epoch, from age to age.
What it Means Today
The phrase carries a precise act of revision. When Steiner led the German Section of the Theosophical Society from 1902, he inherited the language of Helena Blavatsky and Alfred Percy Sinnett, whose 1883 book Esoteric Buddhism had fixed the term Masters of Wisdom, or Mahatmas, in the Western occult vocabulary. Those Masters, named Kuthumi and Morya, were presented as adepts who issued teachings and tested obedience. Steiner kept the dignity of the title and changed its centre of gravity. By adding and of the Harmony of Feelings, the German Meister der Weisheit und des Zusammenklangs der Empfindungen, he relocated the work of these beings from the head, the seat of received doctrine, to the harmonised feeling-life, where insight is weighed by the student's own moral sense.
This is why he could insist, in the same Berlin lectures, that the Masters appeal to nothing but one's own human insight and demand faith in no authority and no dogma. The renaming is not cosmetic. It draws a line between the older Theosophical model of transmitted occult authority and the schooling Steiner built into his own Esoteric School, where the student applies full reason to everything taught. Thalira synthesis: the shift from Mahatma to Harmony of Feelings is Steiner converting a hierarchy of command into a discipline of inner consonance, the same move that later separated Anthroposophy from the Theosophical Society in 1912 and 1913.
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