Tomberg and Anthroposophy

[Federica]

There is this widespread mistaken notion, perhaps held over from previous centuries, that the Church is somehow a political actor and that it should operate at the level of positivist earthly governance. Like we have discussed, this is simply not the function of the Church in the hypermodern era.

It is also a question how the active diplomatic role of the RCC, its activity of influence on nation states and its role in the UN connect with what you say about the non political role of the Church. This excerpt is from a lecture given by Archbishop Jean-Louis Taurant on The presence of the Holy See in international organisations:

"Secretary General of the UN, Vatican City, the Pope, the Catholic Church: all show the complexity of the topic we wish to treat and reminds us that the Catholic Church is the only religious institution in the world to have access to diplomatic relations and to be very interested in international law.

She owes this to her universal and transnational organization.

She owes it to her Head, who, from the moment of his election in the conclave, assumes an international character.

Above all, she owes it to her history, as I shall try to show in this lecture.

The Holy See

In effect, it is important to make clear at once that the subject who enters into contact with the leading figures in international life is not the Catholic Church as a community of believers, nor the State of Vatican City - a miniscule support-State that guarantees the spiritual freedom of the Pope with the minimum territory - but the Holy See, namely, the Pope and the Roman Curia, universal and spiritual authority, unique centre of communion; a sovereign subject of international law, of a religious and moral nature."

Holy See's Presence in the International Organizations https://share.google/CfllqhfMQUOHR7NNO

This excerpt encapsulates the function of the Church very well, highlighting what might be referred to as its "metapolitical" nature. In Tomberg's The Art of the Good, he identifies three levels of "legal consciousness": positive law, natural law, and divine law. He points out (and this is all the way back in the 1940s) that law in the civilized world has degraded to the point of mere positivism. The Church is organized to have an organizing/harmonizing influence on the hierarchical interplay between the three levels. It therefore does not directly participate at the level of mere positivism -- again, much to the disappointment and even bewilderment of souls within and without its walls who have been completely subsumed within a positivist frame. This is why there are simultaneous cries of the Church's "wokeism" and "failure to adapt to modern society." Natural law, which was still an object of great concern during the Enlightenment and its American extension, is already beyond this framing. The Church not only serves to uphold natural law (which supervenes over positive law), but also divine law, which when brought to full expression is completely noncoercive and simultaneously universal and particular. It's good to recall that the Law was the crystallized image of the progressive revelation of the 'I' to the Hebrew people. In the era of the Gospel, that Law has become universally applicable to all of humanity via the instrumentality of the Church. It is protected as natural law and rises to divine law to the extent that individuals find it written on their hearts.

Ok, but politics is not the same as positivism and not the same as law. it's not possible to dismiss the fact that the Church is also organized as a political institution. It directly participates in national and international political life. For example in the European Union, it does active, day-by-day lobbying, through the COMECE (Commission of the Bishops' Conferences of the EU) influencing decision-makers on issues such as sustainable development, environmental policies, to name a few. I understand that you prefer to call it "meta-politics" and call "political" a mistaken notion for the RCC, but how not to see it as mere play of words? And what do you do of an entire discipline, namely the discipline of political theology, and the multitude of studies on the unique (and growing) political role of the Roman Catholic Church? Are all these political theologians people who are not getting it, engaged in an empty discipline?

I get a sense that here too, you are depicting a sort of gradient of options. I already pointed at the problem of a separation between "doctrinal rigor and pastoral care", and it seems you propose something analogous here. The RCC opens to exceptions to justify gender-affirming surgery and you say, there is doctrine and there is compassion, that was compassion not doctrine, and we need to strike a balance between the two. The RCC does systematic lobbying in major international institutions and you say, that's not politics but meta-politics, there are different levels of law and the Church is striking the balance between them. At the end of the day, the strategy to make the RCC always look exemplary in any circumstances is the same: to introduce conceptual gradients around the problematic thing, so it can be seamlessly recontextualized at will. It was in that same way that Tomberg's mill of death of spiritual science became a mill of life.



image attribution

[Federica]

To be clear, what I meant to show with the image above is that “A” can be purposefully contextualized and made to look something quite different, purely because of the added context. In the image, “B” is such recontextualized “A”. “B” is made to look very different from “A”, but in reality it is identical to “A”. Their color is not different. As I see it, that’s how you have argued about the role of the Church and the Hermeticism of Tomberg so far. The problem is that the added context is not phenomenological but arbitrary. In the analogy of the image, I could name “A” “B”, and “B” “A”, and then I would make “A” look much darker than itself, not brighter.

[AshvinP]

To be clear, what I meant to show with the image above is that “A” can be purposefully contextualized and made to look something quite different, purely because of the added context. In the image, “B” is such recontextualized “A”. “B” is made to look very different from “A”, but in reality it is identical to “A”. Their color is not different. As I see it, that’s how you have argued about the role of the Church and the Hermeticism of Tomberg so far. The problem is that the added context is not phenomenological but arbitrary. In the analogy of the image, I could name “A” “B”, and “B” “A”, and then I would make “A” look much darker than itself, not brighter.

That is also a great image for how the discursively separated A-B facts of the flattened intellectual plane indeed begin to look like something quite different, and fit into our understanding of reality quite differently, when knowledge of the depth axis (green cylinder) is introduced as added context. That is not because the latter adds additional facts or opinions that we can continue combining with the previous ones to extrapolate new conclusions, but because the depth knowledge transforms the manner in which our thinking perceives and works with the already given phenomenal facts. We begin to perceive the archetypal structure of such facts and how they fit into a wider intentional flow of activity, either in our individual lives or at the collective scale.

What is phenomenological along the depth axis will also look quite arbitrary to a perspective flattened on the intellectual plane. Many illustrations of that have been given before, for example, here. We cannot treat as only "phenomenological" that which is easily accessible (through google searches, for ex.) and seems obvious. VT's delineation of positive law, natural law, and divine law is one such phenomenological distinction that only becomes apparent when we move away from what is easily given and investigate along the depth axis. All such distinctions often relate closely to the threefold, fourfold, sevenfold, etc. structures of archetypal man (we could say 'legal consciousness' expresses differently when embodied through the physical, etheric, astral, and ego sheaths, for example). The more we become intimately familiar with the latter, the more we will recognize how it comes to expression in the ideas painted by others. We will no longer feel like they are arbitrarily conjuring up 'facts' to justify their narrative, but rather we will clearly see how they are recontextualizing the already given facts within spiritual scientific knowledge of the depth axis.

[Federica]

To be clear, what I meant to show with the image above is that “A” can be purposefully contextualized and made to look something quite different, purely because of the added context. In the image, “B” is such recontextualized “A”. “B” is made to look very different from “A”, but in reality it is identical to “A”. Their color is not different. As I see it, that’s how you have argued about the role of the Church and the Hermeticism of Tomberg so far. The problem is that the added context is not phenomenological but arbitrary. In the analogy of the image, I could name “A” “B”, and “B” “A”, and then I would make “A” look much darker than itself, not brighter.

That is also a great image for how the discursively separated A-B facts of the flattened intellectual plane indeed begin to look like something quite different, and fit into our understanding of reality quite differently, when knowledge of the depth axis (green cylinder) is introduced as added context. That is not because the latter adds additional facts or opinions that we can continue combining with the previous ones to extrapolate new conclusions, but because the depth knowledge transforms the manner in which our thinking perceives and works with the already given phenomenal facts. We begin to perceive the archetypal structure of such facts and how they fit into a wider intentional flow of activity, either in our individual lives or at the collective scale.

What is phenomenological along the depth axis will also look quite arbitrary to a perspective flattened on the intellectual plane. Many illustrations of that have been given before, for example, here. We cannot treat as only "phenomenological" that which is easily accessible (through google searches, for ex.) and seems obvious. VT's delineation of positive law, natural law, and divine law is one such phenomenological distinction that only becomes apparent when we move away from what is easily given and investigate along the depth axis. All such distinctions often relate closely to the threefold, fourfold, sevenfold, etc. structures of archetypal man (we could say 'legal consciousness' expresses differently when embodied through the physical, etheric, astral, and ego sheaths, for example). The more we become intimately familiar with the latter, the more we will recognize how it comes to expression in the ideas painted by others. We will no longer feel like they are arbitrarily conjuring up 'facts' to justify their narrative, but rather we will clearly see how they are recontextualizing the already given facts within spiritual scientific knowledge of the depth axis.

I agree with that, in general (although I think you are underestimating what Steiner referred to as practical thinking that can develop a sense for truth, or, in other words, you are underestimating what Martin O'Keefe-Liddard shared in the excellent post you reported in the other thread).
The whole point is whether or not the argumentations of this thread - Rodriel's and yours, to the extent you adhere to them - are of the kind you indicate. The bold naturally depend on what ideas we are talking about.

[AshvinP]

I agree with that, in general (although I think you are underestimating what Steiner referred to as practical thinking that can develop a sense for truth, or, in other words, you are underestimating what Martin O'Keefe-Liddard shared in the excellent post you reported in the other thread).
The whole point is whether or not the argumentations of this thread - Rodriel's and yours, to the extent you adhere to them - are of the kind you indicate. The bold naturally depend on what ideas we are talking about.

Yes, this seems to be the perennial question across recent threads, including this one. It is a question of supreme importance to orient toward properly, because there is such a fine line between intellectual combinatorics and unprejudiced 'practical thinking' with a sense for truth. Of course, I cannot say how Martin understood this phrase in his post, but I would say his post is only accurate insofar as the work with spiritual science as hypotheses engages a primarily introspective-meditative element (what we have referred to as study-meditation). In other words, the testing of such hypotheses against the phenomenal facts of experience cannot adequately unfold without this study-meditate element. It means we remain quite conscious of how our thinking is living within and probing the same states as the clairvoyant who issued the communications, while we study those communications. Only in this way does our inner life transform in the process of exploring spiritual scientific observations and work toward the fulfillment of the PoF seed point. This is what 'practical thinking with a sense for truth' looks like, and it is not something given to us by the default trajectory of cognitive development. It is a capacity that is effortfully attained by meditatively weaving through the inner process reflected in works like PoF, KHW, and MoT.

We have to admit this is a burden for most of us. It means we can't easily understand the 'argumentation' of VT, for example, without living within his inner process and transforming our cognitive perspective on the content of his works (which, of course, requires we first go through the works with the same patience and diligence as we would go through PoF). It means we have to renounce forming inflexible opinions and conclusions about those contents for some time. It means we need to realize, in all seriousness, that the 'argumentation' is working at a deeper level than the given intellectual plane and its familiar gestures, which give rise to A-B "contradictions" and so on. This is the same thing Steiner had to continuously caution against with respect to PoF, for example:

"I wanted just to sketch these things today, for they have often been discussed by me here before. What I had in mind was to indicate the regions in which, in recent years, anthroposophy has been carrying on its research. Those interested in weighing what has been going on surely recall how consistently my lectures have concerned themselves in recent years with just these realms. Their purpose was gradually to clarify the process whereby one develops from an ordinary consciousness to a higher one. Though I have always said that ordinary thinking can, if it is unprejudiced, grasp the findings of anthroposophical research, I have also emphasized that everybody can attain today to a state of consciousness whereby he is able to develop a new kind of thinking and willing, which give him entry to the world whereof anthroposophy speaks. The essential thing would be to change the habit of reading books like my Philosophy of Freedom with the mental attitude one has toward other philosophical treatises. The way it should be read is with attention to the fact that it brings one to a wholly different way of thinking and willing and looking at things. If this were done, one would realize that such an approach lifts one's consciousness out of the earth into another world, and that one derives from it the kind of inner assurance that makes it possible to speak with conviction about the results of spiritual research. Those who read The Philosophy of Freedom as it should be read speak with inner conviction and assurance about the findings of researchers who have gone beyond the stage one has oneself reached as a beginner. But the right way of reading The Philosophy of Freedom makes everyone who adopts it the kind of beginner I am describing. Beginners like these can report the more detailed findings of advanced research in exactly the same way in which a person at home in chemistry would talk of research in that field. Although he may not actually have seen it done, it is familiar to him from what he has learned and heard and knows as part of reality. The vital thing in discussing anthroposophy is always to develop a certain soul attitude, not just to project a picture of the world different from the generally accepted one. The trouble is that The Philosophy of Freedom has not been read in the different way I have been describing. That is the point, and a point that must be sharply stressed if the development of the Anthroposophical Society is not to fall far behind that of anthroposophy itself. If it does fall behind, anthroposophy's promulgation through the Society will result in its being completely misunderstood, and its only fruit will be endless conflict!"

(New Thinking, New Willing - Feb 6 1923)

When I quoted this to someone (a seasoned Anthroposophist) on the Facebook page for the same reason, one of his responses was:


"I understand that you are not interested in what Rudolf Steiner intended in 1895. And this was neither the subject of my comment. What I was talking about is what Philosophy of Freedom DIRECTLY is about. Not about its intepretations, early or later, by Steiner in 1925 or us in 2025, but what the text says directly. I take the text, read it and understand it as it is. Beginning from the title: Philosophy of FREEDOM. Not philosophy of spiritual worlds or spiritual activity, but of freedom. And this is what this book is about directly: How human being is able to be a free being in the world of nature. Nothing about initiation or higher worlds or spiritual science, nothing of this appears in the book. We can read it as long as we wish, examine every word, every passage and we wil find nothing about spiritual worlds in the text, literally nothing. Freedom is the main and fundamental subject of this book."



So he didn't realize that Steiner was directly addressing him and his way of thinking about PoF. Or, to be more accurate, he subconsciously sensed that the quote was about him and therefore tried to rationalize ways of avoiding its implications, of taking it seriously. And if we review the discussion of VT and what he (and, by implication, the 'Catholic project') is 'all about' on this thread, we will find much that echoes the above. It is the practically the same objection transferred to the domain of MoT and Rodriel's elaboration of the underlying ideas. The latter is seen as twisting 'what the text says directly', adding arbitrary facts, putting a shiny gloss on VT's method, and so on, to introduce a depth axis into the works that simply doesn't exist. Instead, the 'main and fundamental subject' of the works is how the current Church institution should become the unquestionable center of all our future spiritual progress. Most of that results from simply failing to approach these writings like PoF should be approached, in a wholly different way of thinking and willing and looking at things, which is the study-meditate approach, which alone leads to practical thinking with a healthy sense for truth.

[Rodriel Gabrez]

To be clear, what I meant to show with the image above is that “A” can be purposefully contextualized and made to look something quite different, purely because of the added context. In the image, “B” is such recontextualized “A”. “B” is made to look very different from “A”, but in reality it is identical to “A”. Their color is not different. As I see it, that’s how you have argued about the role of the Church and the Hermeticism of Tomberg so far. The problem is that the added context is not phenomenological but arbitrary. In the analogy of the image, I could name “A” “B”, and “B” “A”, and then I would make “A” look much darker than itself, not brighter.

When it comes down to it, Federica, I think we are just not interested in having the same type of conversation. I personally have no desire to debate, and since your responses tend to come in that form, I do my best to address them without engaging in a style of conversation I prefer not to. I realize that this seems evasive. As long as we continue to engage with each other, this is what you can expect from me. If you aren't able to detect anything of substance in my words, I trust you find some value in the discussion nonetheless.

[Federica]

To be clear, what I meant to show with the image above is that “A” can be purposefully contextualized and made to look something quite different, purely because of the added context. In the image, “B” is such recontextualized “A”. “B” is made to look very different from “A”, but in reality it is identical to “A”. Their color is not different. As I see it, that’s how you have argued about the role of the Church and the Hermeticism of Tomberg so far. The problem is that the added context is not phenomenological but arbitrary. In the analogy of the image, I could name “A” “B”, and “B” “A”, and then I would make “A” look much darker than itself, not brighter.

When it comes down to it, Federica, I think we are just not interested in having the same type of conversation. I personally have no desire to debate, and since your responses tend to come in that form, I do my best to address them without engaging in a style of conversation I prefer not to. I realize that this seems evasive. As long as we continue to engage with each other, this is what you can expect from me. If you aren't able to detect anything of substance in my words, I trust you find some value in the discussion nonetheless.

I'm not sure what "type of conversation" you are interested in, but for my part I am not interested in one type of conversation or another, and I find it weird to be interested in types of conversation. Other than that, thanks for the info about what I can expect, but keep in mind that - as surprising as it may sound to you - not everyone is focused on what your next replies could be. Maybe this is relevant to your other discussions as well. In my case for example, what I am interested in is not to let detrimental ideas unaddressed on this forum. I don't think they should dominate the space and possibly influence others without counterbalance. How you would then engage or not engage with my posts is your complete purview, I don’t come with expectations to that. Anyway, the subtle posture of superiority that you habitually display should alone be enough for anyone to seriously wonder about the foundations of your communications.