Cleric wrote: ↑Sun Sep 28, 2025 10:41 pm
Let's consider again the question: why would the Peter stream even consider accommodating the John stream? Last time we conversed, I tried to point out that, as things are, there’s no real incentive for a soul to seek deeper development, higher cognition, and so on. Unless one feels called to a higher mission, it makes no difference whether the soul tries to develop deeper abilities on Earth, as long as it is good
enough to make it to Heaven. It even makes more sense to focus on a basic and simple virtuous life, rather than pursuing the risky path of the supersensible (not to mention that such a path is actually forbidden. AFAIK, only
natural spiritual gifts are accepted by the Church).
Okay, so here's attempt #2 at a response to this. I think I'll focus this time on the first paragraph, as this alone is quite a bit to unpack.
I don't believe the Peter stream will consider accommodating the John stream. That's a feature of the pattern I've been describing, not a bug. A primary component of this pattern is that the John influence will necessarily be a subtle one. People within the Church walls will (perhaps over quite a long period of time) be led gently to increasingly clear personal experiences of the depth axis. The manner in which this will occur will be multifaceted, likely involving - among other things - a re-veiling of spiritual scientific truths into more symbolic language (in the manner of MoT), exemplary deeds of interpersonal morality, and an earnest reexamination of PoF on the part of theologians, perhaps in some rearticulated form. Regarding this latter component - such an examination has never really been done, as PoF largely escaped the notice of both philosophers and theologians and disappeared into obscurity soon after publication. As it relates to theologians, this was no doubt reinforced by the bad reputation Steiner earned within the Church during the moral panic around Anthroposophy at the height of its popularity in the 1910s. After that, there was little incentive to return to the work. But it's my opinion that serious, honest Catholic theologians would find its core premises challenging but ultimately difficult to argue with. Those taking up the task of submitting PoF for reconsideration would do well to approach this from a perspective highly educated in Thomism and the history of the Church. Proving from the beginning that one fully understands the tradition is table stakes for a serious conversation with that tradition. Steiner himself of course held these prerequisites to an extraordinary degree. Unfortunately, most Anthroposophists - in my experience, at least - know next to nothing about Christian history, other than what they have directly received from Steiner. This is obviously not an ideal situation. All the talk of the Christ Impulse in history falls a little flat when such knowledge, either physical or supersensible, is lacking.
Now, regarding your point about only natural spiritual gifts being accepted by the Church, this is not exactly true. It's a tricky and highly nuanced topic. Your comment combines two elements which are treated separately by the Church. It's understandable that you would combine them since this is essentially what Anthroposophy exists to do. The two elements are: epistemology and that which is afforded to saintly individuals by grace, namely illumination.
Epistemologically speaking, you are right that the Catholic theology does not admit of supersensible knowledge attainable through thinking. "Nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu" (Nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses) is the famous Aristotelian assertion taken up by Thomas Aquinas and used as a foundation for Catholic epistemology. St. Thomas worked the ramifications of this premise to the furthest extent possible, and this body of work became basically the quintessence of Peter thinking, the terminal limit of the powers of the Intellectual Soul. The elephant in the room in this complex intellectual system was of course that the final personal verification of the system itself - that which is done via thinking - is relegated to a leap of faith, placing verification instead in an external given framed as ontology (the axiomatic assertion of subjects and objects independent of thinking). The history of continental philosophy from that point forward was the centuries-long rupture in this framework, in which the 'I' was hazily grokked through a series of distorted mirrors until Steiner showed the way forward with PoF.
As far as supersensible illumination goes, this is an accepted and highly revered phenomenon in the Church. St. Thomas directly states that supersensible knowledge can be received as a gift of God's grace to saintly individuals, and that when this happens the angels bestow spiritual understanding in the form of imaginations and purely invisible communications of the principles of creation. This phenomenon was much more of a focal point in the first Christian millennium, and then attitudes became increasingly skeptical about it the more materialism took hold. Skepticism, not in the sense of denying the possibility of illumination but in the sense of suspicion toward those claiming to be in possession of this gift. This skepticism reached its painful and dramatic culmination in Joan of Arc, the very figurehead of the transition to the era of the Consciousness Soul. St. Joan (the feminine form of John), not herself a representative of the Intellectual Soul but of the burgeoning virginal Consciousness Soul, held fast to her personal certainty of supersensible guidance (granted by the Archangel Michael) to the death, staying true to both herself and the Church. She was burned at the stake by the very institution she championed, only much later being exonerated and canonized. This is a sobering but hopeful pre-image of what will unfold for those entering the John path, clothed like Joan in the outer armor of the Intellectual Soul.
So, like I mentioned above, we know that these two separate elements - the epistemology and the God-given graces, must spiral together. In a certain sense the path toward this within the Church seems inevitably blocked. On the one hand there is a denial of cognitively gained supersensible knowledge. On the other hand there is a suspicion around graced illumination. But there are openings to this blockage on multiple fronts, and I believe that these openings are a viable way forward. A serious reappraisal of PoF would be possible now, given the distance of our current time from the panic around Anthroposophy. Anthroposophy is barely on the Church's radar these days. Not to mention there has been a direct, while filtered, Anthroposophical influence on the Church itself via Pope John Paul II, who was part of a Steiner-influenced drama troupe prior to becoming pope and who famously took interest in Tomberg, paving the way for respected theologian Cardinal Hans Urs von Balthasar to write the afterword to MoT and not be rebuked. Another opening is the fact that Steiner's methods, if they were to be examined honestly, can be shown to be entirely unproblematic from the standpoint of the Church's antipathy toward the occult. As outlined in the Catechism of the church, published in 1994, the Church's explicit prohibitions are the following: necromancy, mediumship, clairvoyant aspirations (in the sense of atavistic clairvoyance - the only form known to the Church), astrological determinism, and black magic. These are all explicitly rejected by Steiner as well. The common thread is that they stir up astral forces and either occlude the 'I' or develop the Luciferic ego. The fact that Steiner's Rosicrucian methods rely on etheric-cognitive develop make them fundamentally different from all the occult phenomena that the Church rejects. In fact, if a Catholic were to pick up the method section from HTKHW and read it (perhaps with the mention of auras redacted) without knowing what it was, they would likely find no fault with it. I've described the techniques to other Catholics who have expressed zero alarm or concern.
Anyway, none of this is to say that the path Tomberg has laid out will be an easy one, but I don't think it's impossible or doomed to fail. I'll have to return to your images of the amniotic sac another time, as I am about out of steam for now.
