Book Review / the Rudolf Steiner Library Newsletter is simply between science and religion. Rather, the division is between those persons who sense and seek an intrinsic meaning and purpose in the world, and two other groups: (1) those who see any notions of meaning and purpose as the ephemeral projections of needy humans, determined by a combination of biochemistry and “contingency”; and (2) those who believe in the existence of objective purpose and meaning but think that these are destined to be realized elsewhere, in a “heaven” somewhere beyond Earth. That “somewhere” is often conceived to be on a “thinner” or disembodied plane that is subject nonetheless to “ordinary consciousness”—the same consciousness that regulates our experiences at ten in the morning on a not very exciting workday. Mr. Stedall takes his stand unmistakably on the first side of this divide, but not as a combatant, a philosopher, or a systematizer. Instead, he reports to us as an observer of long standing who has seen and inquired into a vast range of human experience. A significant part of that experience is closely related to anthroposophy. Mr. Stedall returns again and again to Rudolf Steiner, as a philosopher, an esotericist, and the source for the creation of Camphill therapeutic initiatives and Waldorf education. Very little in these pages could be deemed to be “original” regarding Steiner, and a fair portion of the commentary is overtly mediated through secondary sources. Mr. Stedall was enormously impressed with the Camphill movement, which he encountered through his work documenting the Camphill community, Botton Village, and the school at Camphill Aberdeen. He was strongly influenced by his nine-month stay at Emerson College in England, particularly by the scientific method of founder and principal Francis Edmunds. During that same stay he boycotted all eurythmy classes. While he enrolled both his children in a Waldorf school, he found the experience there insufficiently flexible to accommodate the particular interests evinced by his children when they did not conform to the time frame expected by the teachers concerned. But this is not a book for students of Rudolf Steiner or for participants in the daughter movements of anthroposophy who want to go deeper. Nor is it a book in which you will find the struggles and hurdles encountered by a man who at long last “finds” anthroposophy. What you will find is an intelligent, intensely curious, and candid thinker who experiences and digests the insights of Rudolf Steiner along with those of Carl Jung, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and many others, albeit with a partiality toward Steiner. You will find a man fascinated by the human side of great thinkers and doers. And so he places Steiner in both surprising and unsurprising company, along with Tolstoy, Gandhi, Sir Bernard Lovell, Malcolm Muggeridge, the poet John Betjeman, Laurens van der Post, and many
Where on Earth Is Heaven? By Jonathan Stedall; Hawthorn Press, 2009, 566 pgs Review by Frederick J. Dennehy Books describing an author’s spiritual journey generally tend toward an ending. Readers find themselves traveling along with the author and sense in the final pages that a “destination” of some sort will be reached. Where on Earth Is Heaven? is not structured in that way. As Richard Tarnas aptly notes in his foreword, Jonathan Stedall’s book is more like a fireside chat. His account has the freshness and honesty of a friend’s impressionistic reminiscences, as well as the meandering and somewhat repetitious features of informal conversation. Mr. Stedall’s original intention was to write very little about himself, and to focus on the people whom he had come to know and the ideas he had encountered that had influenced him spiritually. Readers Editor’s Note: by separate routes we of the first draft received two reviews of this unusual book. suggested that Since they are relatively short and different the book needed in character, we are publishing both. The to be more ausecond review, by Signe Schaefer, follows the tobiographical; continuation of this review, on page 59. consequently, Mr. Stedall, with some reluctance, extended his account to include moments from his “own bumpy journey—the downs as well as the ups.” “Where on Earth is heaven?” was a question originally asked many years ago by the author’s then seven-year-old son. This book is Mr. Stedall’s effort, after a gap of twenty years and his encounter with serious illness, to answer it. Each of the thirtysix chapters is connected—directly or indirectly—to the possibility and meaning of immortality. The chapters loosely follow Mr. Stedall’s career as a BBC documentary film producer. His employer (hard to imagine this now!) allowed him to travel—geographically and spiritually—almost wherever his most burning questions dictated. Mr. Stedall is not a scholar but a producer of films. He is not a man of personal visionary experience but a person of natural devotion and highly focused attention. In the words of Nicolas Malebranche, “attention is the natural prayer we make to inner truth in order that it may be revealed in us.” This book takes its place on one side of a cultural divide whose fault lines have been visible for a long time and have been widening at an ever-increasing speed. The topography of that divide has also altered appreciably since it was delineated by C.P. Snow in The Two Cultures in 1961. The split is not so much between the scientific method and the humanities (Geisteswissenschaft), and it would be crude to maintain that it
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