The Greek initiate Steiner described as a modern soul born too early: mature enough to seek the Christ in retrospect, centuries before the Christ had come to earth.
What is Empedocles in Anthroposophy?
Empedocles in Anthroposophy is the fifth-century BC Greek philosopher of Sicily whom Rudolf Steiner presents, in Paths and Goals of the Spiritual Human Being (GA 125, 1910), as a soul with an altogether modern mentality and a modern aura, born too early. Statesman, architect, philosopher, and initiator of pupils, Empedocles possessed a scientific knowledge of the four elements of a kind otherwise known only to modern humanity, framing the world as the mixing and separating of earth, water, air, and fire. Mature enough to have found the Christ in a backward spiritual survey, he could not, because the Mystery of Golgotha still lay centuries ahead; Lucifer approached him, and he leapt into Mount Etna to unite with the elements. Steiner places his rebirth after Christ at the turn of the Middle Ages. Peter Kingsley's 1995 Oxford study now reads Empedocles the same way, initiate first.
Empedocles occupies a singular place in Rudolf Steiner's account of human evolution. In lectures of 1910, Steiner described sailing into Palermo and finding the atmosphere of Sicily still saturated with this initiate's presence: a statesman, architect, and mystery teacher whose elemental science belonged to a later age, and whose despair at a world he could survey but not complete carried him into the crater of Etna.
In Steiner's Own Words
Empedocles had an altogether modern mentality, a modern aura, and he was indeed constituted in such a way that he sought to discover the origin of the world. In fact, according to his degree of development and everything which had taken place, he would necessarily have found the Christ in his retrospective survey. But the Christ had not yet appeared. It was not possible as yet to find Him upon the earth; He was still absent from the earth. These experiences in particular made Empedocles waver and developed within him a strange desire, and in his case it transformed itself into something entirely different from what takes place in the superficial minds of modern times. This desire transformed itself into the passion to consider the world in a materialistic way. Lucifer approached him.
What it Means Today
For most of the twentieth century, historians of philosophy treated Empedocles as two irreconcilable men: the sober physicist of the four elements and the embarrassing wonder-worker of the Purifications. Peter Kingsley's Ancient Philosophy, Mystery, and Magic: Empedocles and Pythagorean Tradition (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1995) dismantled that split. Reading him against his Sicilian and southern Italian setting, Kingsley argued that Empedocles was a practicing initiate, healer, and magician inside a living mystery lineage, and that his four roots were divine powers before they were proto-chemistry. Four years later the manuscripts caught up: the Strasbourg papyrus, published in 1999 by Alain Martin and Oliver Primavesi, recovered new verses showing that the physics and the religious teaching belonged to one poem and one voice.
Classical scholarship thus arrived, nearly a century late, at the portrait Steiner sketched from the deck of a ship approaching Palermo in 1910: a man whose science and whose initiation were never separate faculties. The Thalira synthesis: Empedocles is the archetype of the prematurely modern soul, a consciousness that develops the instruments of a coming epoch before the event that could steady them enters history, and his leap into Etna names the risk every such soul runs, the moment an unanswerable backward gaze hardens into materialism. Steiner adds one deliberate silence to the story: the philosopher's later incarnation, a figure of the turn of the Middle Ages and the modern era, is left unnamed in GA 125.
Where to Read More