One of Steiner's seven soul-moods: the inward tone in which the quieted soul seeks the divine light in its own depths rather than behind outer things.
Mysticism, in Rudolf Steiner's scheme of the seven soul-moods, is not a worldview of its own but a way of holding one. It is the tone the soul takes when, no longer content with what the senses report, it falls quiet and turns inward, expecting the world's secret to rise from within rather than to be reasoned out from without.
In Steiner's Own Words
One can be a Mystic of the world of matter, and one can be a Mystic of Idealism. An ordinary Idealist or Gnostic Idealist is not a Mystic of Idealism. A Mystic of Idealism is one who has above all the possibility in his own soul of bringing out from its hidden sources the ideals of humanity, of feeling them as something divine, and of placing them in that light before the soul. We have an example of the Mystic of Idealism in Meister Eckhardt.
What it Means Today
Steiner places the mystical mood by what it refuses. The Empiricist takes the world as it arrives and asks for nothing behind the appearance; the Transcendentalist grants a hidden essence but holds that it stays outside the soul, approaching yet never entering. The Mystic parts from both. For this mood the essence does flow in: the quieted soul becomes the place where the divine declares itself, and the riddle is solved inwardly or not at all. That is why Steiner ranks it with Venus and offers Meister Eckhart, the Rhineland Dominican of the early fourteenth century, as his example. Eckhart did not argue his way to God; in sermons on the birth of the Word in the ground of the soul he reported a seeing from within, which is exactly Steiner's "bringing out from its hidden sources the ideals of humanity."
The lineage Eckhart opened runs straight on through the Theologia Germanica that Luther printed in 1516, through Johannes Tauler and Henry Suso, to Angelus Silesius and the apophatic theology still taught in centres such as the Eckhart Society in England. Reading these writers as bearers of one soul-tone, rather than as rival doctrines, is the practical gift of Steiner's January 1914 lectures. It also carries a caution he made plain: the mystical mood can settle on any of the twelve standpoints, and a mysticism that sinks into mere bodily feeling, a Mysticism of matter, loses the inward light that gives the mood its worth. Held rightly, it is the soul grown still enough for what is highest in it to speak.
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