Multiplied copies of the astral sheath of Jesus of Nazareth, woven into the most important pillars of Christianity from the twelfth to the fifteenth century, in Steiner's GA 109.
Copies of the Astral Body of Jesus in Anthroposophy are the multiplied reproductions of the astral sheath of Jesus of Nazareth which, according to Rudolf Steiner's lecture cycle The Principle of Spiritual Economy (GA 109, 1909), were preserved after the events of Palestine and woven into the astral bodies of the most important pillars of Christianity from the twelfth to the fifteenth century. Steiner relates that because the Christ dwelt in the threefold sheath of Jesus, the astral body could be multiplied innumerable times and given to mature souls of any nation, never bound to one tribe or bloodline. The astral body bears judgment and devotion, so its bearers showed deep fervor and an immediate certainty of holy truths even when their ego-life lagged behind. Steiner names Francis of Assisi and Elisabeth of Thüringen among them. Today the teaching serves as a reading key to the devotional genius of the high Middle Ages.
When Steiner traced the intimate history of Christianity in Berlin in February 1909, he distinguished a second stage of inheritance. The copies of the astral body of Jesus were held back, he relates, until souls had matured enough to carry them; then, from the twelfth to the fifteenth century, they were woven into the men and women whose fervor built the orders, the schools, and the mysticism of the Middle Ages.
In Steiner's Own Words
But later, from the twelfth to the fifteenth century, it was numerous copies of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth that became interwoven with the astral bodies of the most important pillars of Christianity. In those days the human beings had egos capable of forming extremely false ideas about all sorts of things, yet in their astral bodies a direct force of strength, of devotion, and of the immediate certainty of holy truths was alive. Such people possessed deep fervor, an absolutely direct conviction, and also in some circumstances the ability to prove this conviction. What sometimes must strike us as being so strange especially in these personalities is that their ego development was not at all equal to that of their astral bodies because the latter had copies of the astral body of Jesus Christ woven into them.
What it Means Today
Steiner's account hands the historian of devotion a working key to a period that scholarship can measure but struggles to explain: why the centuries he brackets, the twelfth through the fifteenth, produced personalities whose feeling-life towered over their reasoning. According to GA 109, what set these figures apart was nothing in their ideas. It was the astral body, the member that bears judgment and devotion, into which a copy of the astral sheath of Jesus had been woven. Where the copy carried his sentient soul, the result was the burning charity of Francis, whose Order of the Franciscans, founded in 1209, carried similar copies among its servants and minorites, and of Elisabeth of Thüringen, born in 1207. Where it carried the intellectual element, it became the concept-chiselling discipline of scholasticism, which Steiner says trained humanity between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries to think with acute and penetrating logic. Where it carried the consciousness soul, the inner Christ rose resplendent in Meister Eckhart, Johannes Tauler, and the pillars of medieval mysticism.
One synthesis from this lecture reaches into the present. Steiner insists that scholastic discipline became modern natural science, so that Darwin and Haeckel think in forms first exercised by bearers of the woven astral copies. A practical habit follows for any reader of medieval lives: watch the world of sentiment rather than the ego. The clumsy self that puzzles modern biographers of Francis stands beside a fervor Steiner calls magnificent and exalted, and the second weaving holds both sides of such a life together without explaining either away.
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