Kicking Against the Pricks

Catholicsm vs. Individualization/Faith vs. Gnosis

“The positivist Christianity disseminated through the world today is preparing Ahriman’s incarnation. In a great deal one can hear today that claims to represent the orthodoxy of the church, we ought really to discern a preparation for the works of Ahriman.” Rudolf Steiner, Understanding Society (p. 158).

Disclaimer, vis a vis all this Steiner:

Spiritual teachings, so-called, that are valid don’t offer pat or fully formed answers. They present only half of the truth, and they can only really be understood if we have the other half and can meet those teachings, those interpretations, with our own felt sense and experience and intellectual formulations. Only so can we complete the teachings internally and make sense of them.

This may be compared to the original meaning of the word “symbol,” as an object broken in two halves. One person kept one half and another kept the other half, so it was a way for them to recognize each other when they met, to complete a transaction. A symbol, in this original sense, is half an object, half a reality. Spiritual teachings are always symbolic, as in fact is anything that is language-based.

It is always half the picture, and can only be completed with our own internal symbolism, which is not a teaching but an experience-based knowledge set that gives context to the words, the teachings, the ideas being presented, and completes them. This is similar to the idea that real learning is a form of anamnesis, or remembering; that real spiritual teaching has to do with mnemonic devices that trigger memories in the body (or the energy bodies, or the soul).

“Let us recognize that it lay in the interests of ecclesiastical confessions to withhold important truths about human nature from people, that they more or less made it into their mission to do so. By this means the churches were able to wrap people in dullness and illusion. And now today we must no longer be deceived about this, nor seek a tactful compromise here with all kinds of ecclesiastical confession. No compromise should be made. . . . And let us be clear that it will serve no purpose to try to say that Anthroposophy is concerned with the Christ, is not atheistic, nor pantheistic and so on. This will never help, since the Church confessions will not mind in the least if you do not concern yourself with Christ. They wish to hold a monopoly on speaking about Christ and they will simply be irritated that you concern yourself with Christ. They want to hold a monopoly on the subject, and there is no point in your forbearance, for if you accommodate them you will always be inclined to conceal the most important aspects of life in fog and obscurity. Humanity at present needs to work its way through to spiritual insights, to which the dogmatic Church confessions are most of all opposed, especially those confessions that have gradually developed here in the West” (Steiner, Understanding Society, p. 142).

In The Gospel of John (lectures from 1909), Steiner offers up his esoteric interpretation of Christ as “the spirit of the Sun,” one of the seven Elohim, with Yahweh as the one that splits off and becomes the spirit of the Moon as a way to mediate the divine light to humanity. The background to this is Steiner’s cosmic spiritual evolution, in which Earth, Sun and Moon were originally one body, or one energy-sphere, or one something, before the Earth separated from the Sun, and then the Moon from the Earth (something even hard-nosed scientists could agree with!).

The human form was slowly evolving during this process into full physicality, “condensing” from a vaporous energy body down into the biological vessel we have today (the fall). Steiner’s seven Elohim are the spirits of the sun that together make up the God of the first chapters of Genesis, responsible for the initial act of creation. Yahweh splits off and enters the Moon to mediate the light of the Sun to Earth, making him the engineer of the second creation story, that of Adam and Eve. The six remaining solar Elohim together make up the Logos, the spirit of Christ.

This Being then incarnates 2000 years later, in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. It is active for three years, then undergoes death via crucifixion. Through the spilling of the Christ-being’s blood, his essence enters into the body of the Earth, and from there all the way into humanity. Then begins the evolutionary return journey, as the Sun, Moon, and Earth begin to join together again.

None of this fantastically speculative “spiritual science” (or mythology) is in accord with Christian theology. But this is partially because it dares to try to create a cognitive bridge between a very broad faith-creed (Jesus = God) with metaphysical nuts and bolts. For this reason, it stimulates my imagination. These are concepts that are seemingly impossible to corroborate, obviously, and hence nothing for “serious” scholars to contemplate. But are they bigger or harder to corroborate than the church’s theological claims for the New Testament? Or claims within the New Testament itself (especially by Paul and John), which 2000 years of theological hermeneutics (including the liberal theologians and the historical apologists) have failed to convert into working gnosis?