Steiner's discipline of priest-physician collaboration at the borderline where bodily illness opens into spiritual experience.
Pastoral Medicine is the field Rudolf Steiner opened for priests and physicians working together at the threshold of illness and spiritual life. Given as a lecture course in September 1924 at Dornach, it teaches both vocations to read the loosening and re-binding of the four members of the human being, so that a person standing between health and revelation can be met with medical care and spiritual guidance at once, rather than dismissed as merely sick.
In Steiner's Own Words
Out of the knowledge that Anthroposophy gives us, we can say that the human being stands before us in physical, etheric and astral bodies, and an ego organization. In waking life these four members of the human organization are in close connection. In sleep the physical body and etheric body are together on one side, and the ego organization and astral body on the other side. With knowledge of this fact we are then able to say that the greatest variety of irregularities can appear in the connection of ego organization and astral body with etheric body and physical body.
What it Means Today
Steiner gave the Pastoral Medicine course to priests of The Christian Community, founded in 1922, and to physicians already gathered around the medical work that Ita Wegman had begun when she opened the first anthroposophic clinic at Arlesheim, near Basel, in 1921. The setting matters. One year earlier, in 1925, Wegman and Steiner wrote Fundamentals of Therapy, the founding text of anthroposophic medicine. Pastoral Medicine sits beside it as the founding text of a different collaboration: not doctor and nurse, but doctor and priest, each trained to recognize where the other's competence begins.
The borderline cases Steiner described are still met today in the consulting rooms of clinicians at Klinik Arlesheim and in the pastoral practice of Christian Community priests, who continue to train alongside anthroposophic doctors in joint conferences. A patient whose sense impressions grow misty while inner visions sharpen is, for the materialist diagnosis, a psychopathological case. For the pastoral physician, the same loosening of the ego organization from the astral body may be the first dwelling place of God that St. Teresa of Avila described in her Interior Castle of 1577. Thalira synthesis: Pastoral Medicine is Steiner's instrument for the single hardest discernment in spiritual life, telling the saint from the patient when both wear the same constitution, by reading which member has loosened and whether the loosening is breaking the person or opening them.
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