Priestly consciousness is the celebrant's inner honesty in the cultus: the awareness that one speaks not one's own content but as a tool of the spiritual world.
Priestly Consciousness in Anthroposophy is the inner constitution Rudolf Steiner asked of anyone who celebrates a ritual: a state of mind, resting on unconditional inner honesty, in which the one celebrating knows that the words of the cultus are not personal content but the speech of the spiritual world through a human instrument. Steiner set it out on 11 July 1923 in Stuttgart, opening the course later collected as GA 345, Course for Priests of the Christian Community, to the young priests who had founded Die Christengemeinschaft the previous September. The German is Priesterbewusstsein. Steiner was explicit that it cannot be conferred at a stroke, by ordination or by office: it has to be struggled for, day by day, and that struggle is what actually constitutes the priestly vocation. The Christian Community still trains toward it in seminaries at Stuttgart, Hamburg, and Toronto.
Priestly consciousness is not a rank, a vestment, or a certificate. Steiner described it to the first priests of The Christian Community as a way of standing inside the ritual: you know, while you are speaking, that the speech is not yours. Everything rests on one condition, the utmost inner honesty, and ordination does not supply it.
In Steiner's Own Words
The cult that arises when you ask the spiritual world is the cult that lives with you. It is not that it is some special external form, but it is the cult that will find its future, but through life. The correct presence in the cult is intimately connected with the priestly consciousness. Priestly consciousness can only come about through the utmost inner honesty. Therefore, it would be good if what lives subjectively in the souls, what the individual personalities experience by practicing the cult, were to come out on this occasion. Only then, when you express your subjective needs, will we be able to speak fruitfully.
What it Means Today
The man whose opening remarks Steiner answered that morning was Friedrich Rittelmeyer (1872 to 1938), the Lutheran preacher who left his church in 1922 to found and lead Die Christengemeinschaft. Rittelmeyer took the demand personally, and the record of what he did with it is his book of letters on self-education, published in English by Floris Books as Meditation: Guidance of the Inner Life. Its method is small and unglamorous: work the imagery of the Gospel of St John through thinking and feeling every day, then watch what the inner life reports back. That is the honesty Steiner meant, kept as a daily account rather than a single vow.
The movement built the same assumption into its training. The first Priest Seminary was consecrated in Stuttgart in 1933, and candidates today still pass through a residential course there, in Hamburg, or in Toronto, where study, communal living, and a daily service are treated as one discipline. No examination measures priestly consciousness, because Steiner defined it as something the candidate has to keep winning. Thalira synthesis: the Roman answer to the unworthy celebrant, settled at the Council of Trent in 1547, was to make the sacrament effective regardless of the priest's inner state; Steiner asked the opposite question and made the inner state the whole of the work, which is why he could tell these priests that their vocation was not a status they had received but a struggle they had entered.
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