Chrestos is the suffering figure in purple robe and crown of thorns that Mystery candidates were shown at the close of their preparation, before the risen Christ replaced him.
Chrestos in Anthroposophy is the name Rudolf Steiner gives to the picture of the suffering man that candidates were led before at the close of their preparation in the pre-Christian Mysteries: a human being suffering wholly within the physical body, clothed in a red purple robe, wearing a crown of thorns, with drops of blood standing at the vital points of the figure. Steiner describes it in his lecture of 27 March 1921 at Dornach, translated into English as Spirit Triumphant and as Thoughts on Easter, from the cycle The Responsibility of Man for World Evolution through his Spiritual Connection with the Planet Earth (GA 203). Contemplating the Chrestos was meant to kindle the power that makes a human being fully human, so that knowledge is owed to suffering risen above rather than suffering endured. In those same Mysteries the Chrestos was later taken away and the triumphant Christ set in his place.
Chrestos is Greek for what is good, kindly, and serviceable, and in Steiner's telling it names a picture rather than a person. The Mysteries showed the tested candidate the one who suffers in the body, then took that picture away and set the risen Christ in its place. Steiner reads Western art's long attachment to the crucifix as that same movement left unfinished.
In Steiner's Own Words
In looking upon this Chrestos the soul of the aspirant to initiation was expected to gain the power which would make of him a true man. The drops of blood which were shown to the aspirant on all the more important places of that ancient Chrestos were for the purpose of removing all human weaknesses and calling up the triumphant Spirit from the man's inner being. The contemplation of suffering was intended to indicate the resurrection of the spiritual nature.
What it Means Today
The two words never stopped shadowing each other in the manuscripts. Suetonius, writing around 121, reports in his Life of Claudius (25.4) that Jews were expelled from Rome for disturbances made impulsore Chresto, at the instigation of Chrestus. Tertullian, in the Apology of about 197, complains that outsiders say Chrestianus when they mean Christianus, and grants that even the error carries a meaning, since chrestos is the word for kindness. Codex Sinaiticus, the oldest complete Greek New Testament, has its first scribe writing chrestianoi in Acts and in the First Letter of Peter, corrected afterwards by another hand. Since July 2009, when the British Library, Leipzig University Library, the National Library of Russia, and Saint Catherine's Monastery at Sinai finished putting the whole codex online, anyone can look at those letters directly.
Thalira synthesis: the scribes were not muddled so much as early, still copying from a world in which chrestos and christos named two stations on one road, the one who suffers in the body and the one who rises out of it, which is exactly the sequence Steiner says the Mystery schools walked their candidates through.
The practical consequence is narrow. Steiner does not ask anyone to look away from the suffering figure, and he refuses to call that suffering symbolic. He asks that the looking arrive somewhere: the drops of blood stood at the vital points to be passed, not dwelt on, and the knowledge carried out of pain is owed to the rising.
Where to Read More
- The Responsibility of Man for World Evolution, GA 203
- Find The Festivals and Their Meaning at SteinerBooks
- Read Codex Sinaiticus in facsimile [THALIRA_BLOG_LINKS_PLACEHOLDER]