In GA 97 Steiner describes Jesus of Nazareth as a chela of the third degree, a pupil whose three bodies were purified enough to receive the Christ.
Jesus of Nazareth as Third-Degree Chela in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's 1906 account of how one human being became capable of carrying the Christ. Speaking at Cologne on 2 December 1906, in lectures collected as The Christian Mystery (GA 97), Steiner used the Theosophical grade-word chela, Sanskrit for the pupil of a spiritual teacher, and placed Jesus at the third degree. At that degree the pupil has purified and sanctified all three sheaths, physical body, etheric body and astral body, transforming them into Atma, Buddhi and Manas, which Steiner also names Spirit-Man, Life-Spirit and Spirit-Self. In ordinary people only insignificant portions of those sheaths are so transformed. Because the three bodies of Jesus stood fully purified, his Ego could withdraw in his thirtieth year and leave them free, so that the Christ individuality could fill them from the Baptism in the Jordan onward. The term marks the human precondition of the Mystery of Golgotha.
Jesus of Nazareth as a third-degree chela is the way Rudolf Steiner answered a blunt question in 1906: who could hold the Christ? A chela of the third degree, in the Theosophical grading Steiner was then using, has worked through his physical, etheric and astral bodies until each is sanctified. Jesus had done that work. The purified sheaths, not a miracle of biology, made room for the Sun-Being.
In Steiner's Own Words
In the case of ordinary people, only insignificant portions of the astral body, the etheric body and the physical body are transformed into Manas, Buddhi and Atma, or into Spirit Self, Life-Spirit and Spirit-Man. Jesus of Nazareth was a Chela of the third degree, and his bodies were therefore in a state of high purification. When a Chela has absolved the purification of his three bodies, then he acquires at a certain moment of his life the capacity to sacrifice himself. In his 30th year, the Ego of Jesus left his three bodies and passed over into the astral world, so that the three sanctified bodies remained behind on earth, emptied as it were of their Ego, so that room was made for a higher individuality.
What it Means Today
The word chela did not come from Steiner. It entered European occult vocabulary through Helena Blavatsky, whose 1883 essay Chelas and Lay Chelas in The Theosophist set out a graded discipleship, and whose Theosophical Glossary of 1892 defined the chela as the pupil of a guru. When Steiner spoke at Cologne in December 1906 he was General Secretary of the German Section of the Theosophical Society, addressing listeners who had learned that vocabulary. For Blavatsky the chela climbs toward his own liberation. For Steiner he purifies his bodies in order to hand them over and step out, which inverts attainment itself.
This kind of reworking is what the academic study of Western esotericism now tracks. Wouter Hanegraaff, who holds the chair in History of Hermetic Philosophy and Related Currents at the University of Amsterdam, argued in Esotericism and the Academy (Cambridge University Press, 2012) that such currents are living traditions of rejected knowledge which reshape whatever they inherit. Read that way, the Cologne lecture is not Steiner repeating Theosophy but testing whether a Theosophical ladder can carry a Christian event, and finding that it can only do so if the top rung is renunciation.
Thalira synthesis: in Steiner's usage the third degree is not a rank a pupil holds but a vacancy he becomes, and every later anthroposophical statement about the Christ entering history rests on that emptiness being real.
Where to Read More
- The Christian Mystery, GA 97
- Find The Christian Mystery at SteinerBooks [THALIRA_BLOG_LINKS_PLACEHOLDER]