The first-century sage Steiner casts as Christ's polar opposite: he gathered place-bound earthly wisdom, while Christ spoke from beyond the earth.
Apollonius of Tyana in Anthroposophy is the first-century Neopythagorean sage whom Rudolf Steiner, in the Dornach lecture of 28 March 1921 (GA 203), positions as the exact counter-pole to Christ-Jesus. A contemporary of Christ, Apollonius journeyed to the Brahmin sages of India and the Gymnosophists of Egypt to gather a wisdom still bound to particular earthly localities, a wisdom dependent on the place where it was sought. Christ-Jesus, by contrast, never travelled to acquire wisdom: he spoke entirely from the super-earthly, from worlds beyond the earth. For Steiner these two figures stand at the two poles of humanity at the dawn of the Christian era, and their contrast marks the historical turning point from place-bound wisdom toward a wisdom no longer tied to any locality.
In Brief
Apollonius is not a member of the human being or a spiritual hierarchy but a historical individuality Steiner uses to throw the nature of Christ into relief. Where the old sages of India and Egypt drew their wisdom from the sun's particular angle upon their land, and so could only be wise in one place, Apollonius wandered the world to gather these last echoes of locality-bound knowledge. Steiner reads him as a man already standing in a new era, yet still seeking outwardly what Christ brought inwardly from beyond the earth.
In Steiner's Own Words
The essence of the matter is that two beings stand in contrast to one another in the same epoch: on the one side, Christ-Jesus, who speaks only out of the super-earthly; and on the other, Apollonius of Tyana, who gathers what is actually to be found on the earth, although through his own great gifts he is able to absorb it into his very soul. That is the fundamental and significant difference, and those who do not perceive it fail to understand what the existence of these two personalities signifies for a later age.
What it Means Today
The historical Apollonius is no longer a figure of pious legend but a subject of careful scholarship. The Polish classicist Maria Dzielska, in her study Apollonius of Tyana in Legend and History (L'Erma di Bretschneider, Rome, 1986), worked back through the third-century biography by Philostratus to separate the real first-century Pythagorean teacher from the wonder-worker that later pagan and Christian polemic made of him. Dzielska shows how Apollonius was repeatedly recast: first as a rival miracle-worker set against Christ by writers like Hierocles, then, in the opposite direction, as a noble philosopher by Renaissance and Enlightenment readers. Steiner, lecturing in 1921, knew this comparison tradition well, and named G. R. S. Mead's 1901 study in his own remarks. What Dzielska supplies through textual history, Steiner supplies through spiritual reading: both insist the comparison with Christ-Jesus is the wrong question if it stays at the level of matching miracles.
Thalira synthesis: Read together, the scholar and the seer point the same way, that Apollonius matters not because he resembled Christ but because he is the last great representative of a wisdom you had to travel to find, a wisdom Steiner says the Mystery of Golgotha rendered forever localityless.
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