Steiner taught that Francis of Assisi carried a woven copy of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth, the hidden source of his humility, devotion, and Christian love.
Francis of Assisi in Anthroposophy is the medieval saint of Assisi (c. 1181 to 1226) read by Rudolf Steiner as a bearer of a copy of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth. In The Principle of Spiritual Economy (GA 109, 1909), Steiner relates that after the Mystery of Golgotha the astral sheath Christ had worn was preserved in the spiritual world and multiplied in many images. From the eleventh century onward such an image could be woven into the forming astral body of certain reincarnating souls, and Francis received one. His own ego stayed his own, which explains his human errors; the woven sheath explains his humility, his devotion, and the Christ-imbued love that flowed toward lepers, beggars, and the birds he preached to. When the members of a new branch at Malsch named it after Francis, Steiner dedicated it in April 1909, calling him the splendid bearer of Christ.
Among all the figures Steiner discusses in his 1909 lectures on spiritual economy, Francis of Assisi receives the most tender portrait. The poor man of Assisi, who kissed lepers, rebuilt ruined chapels, and sang to Brother Sun, owed his radiant devotion, in Steiner's account, to a grace he never knew by name: an image of the astral body of Jesus woven into his own.
In Steiner's Own Words
By contrast, we see human beings whose astral body received the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Such a personality was Francis of Assisi. When we look at his life from this point of view, we will understand it in quite a few ways. His qualities of humility and Christian devotion will become especially clear to us when we tell ourselves that such a mystery lived in him. In the time from about the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries such human beings became the heralds of Christianity by the very fact that the astral body of Jesus was woven into their own astral body. Hence, they received Christianity by virtue of Grace.
What it Means Today
Every biographer of Francis has faced the same puzzle. Paul Sabatier, whose 1894 life of the saint opened modern Franciscan scholarship, could document the merchant's son, the soldier, the prisoner of Perugia, yet the sudden flowering of complete Christ-likeness in his mid-twenties resisted explanation. Steiner's reading in GA 109 supplies the missing term. What lived in Francis was not learning, for he had little, and not inherited temperament, for his father Pietro Bernardone was a cloth merchant of a very different fibre. It was a sheath of feeling, woven by grace into his forming astral body, that had once been worn by Jesus of Nazareth. Wherever Francis felt, a feeling-life warmed in Palestine felt with him. That is why his compassion never reads as ethics; it reads as memory.
Steiner did not leave the thought in the lecture hall. On 6 April 1909 he travelled to Malsch, near Karlsruhe, to dedicate a working branch of his movement, and its members had chosen to name it the Francis of Assisi Branch. In the dedication address he asked that something of the saint's harmonizing light shine into the group's daily work. The practice this implies is open to anyone: read the Canticle of the Sun or the stories of the Fioretti not as moral examples to imitate but as the speech of a borrowed sheath, listening for what a feeling-body once warmed by Christ sounds like. Elizabeth of Thuringia, Steiner adds, carried the same gift in the same centuries, so the two saints of poverty and charity stand as sister voices of one stream.
Where to Read More
- The Principle of Spiritual Economy, GA 109
- Find The Principle of Spiritual Economy at SteinerBooks
- Francis of Assisi at Wikipedia
- The Rosicrucian Enlightenment by Frances Yates: Complete Guide
- The Art of Memory by Frances Yates: Complete Guide to the Memory Palace Tradition
- Violet Flame Meditation: Saint Germain Transmutation