The Spanish Carmelite mystic Steiner reads as legitimate Catholic mysticism, and names Spiritual Science the rightful continuation of his path into the spiritual world.
St John of the Cross (San Juan de la Cruz, 1542 to 1591) was a Spanish Carmelite friar and poet whom Rudolf Steiner singled out in 1919 as the rare mystic whose ascent into the supersensible the Catholic Church still honoured. Steiner uses him to mark where genuine mysticism ends and where Spiritual Science, the path fitted to the modern consciousness soul, takes up the same task.
In Steiner's Own Words
At that time these things were said not in the way that Rome speaks, but rather as Spiritual Science speaks. Spiritual Science is the real continuation of the noble strivings to enter the spiritual world as they appear in John of the Cross. But Spiritual Science is the continuation suited for the present age: it reckons with the progress of mankind. And very beautiful is the description by St. John of the Cross of the union with the divine spiritual: The union is accomplished when the two wills, namely, the will of the soul and the divine will, become one.
What it Means Today
The modern doorway to John of the Cross runs through the Institute of Carmelite Studies in Washington, D.C., whose scholars Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodríguez produced the standard English critical edition, The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross (ICS Publications, revised 1991). That edition gives readers the same four texts Steiner worked from in 1919: the Ascent of Mount Carmel, the Dark Night, the Spiritual Canticle, and the Living Flame of Love. Where Steiner read John as a contemplative whose night of the senses and union of wills the Church had quietly downgraded to mere belief, the Carmelite editors restore John as an exact phenomenologist of prayer, mapping the soul's stages with the precision Steiner admired. Anthroposophy and the Discalced Carmelite tradition both insist that the mystic reports lawful inner facts, not private moods.
Thalira synthesis: John of the Cross marks the last bend of the contemplative road before the turn Steiner called the age of the consciousness soul, the point where the few who could be led into darkness give way to the many who must now find the light through clear, waking thinking. Read the Ascent of Mount Carmel beside Steiner's Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and the two ladders rhyme: emptying the senses, then steadying the will, then meeting a reality that was always speaking.
Where to Read More
- Goetheanism as an Impulse for Man's Transformation, GA 188
- Find at SteinerBooks
- The Gospel of St. John by Rudolf Steiner: The Hamburg Lectures
- The Confessions of St. Augustine: Complete Guide to the First Spiritual Autobiography
- The Apocalypse of St. John by Rudolf Steiner: Revelation Decoded Through Spiritual Science