Empedocles…
And Pythagoras…
The Triadic Circle of the Soul…
In the cosmogony of Empedocles, we encounter a conception of the world-process that is no less moral than that of Parmenides, while at the same incorporating much of the mystical monism of his Eleatic predecessor.
Empedocles, c. 490-430 B.C., was a citizen of Acragas, an important Greek colony in Sicily. A tradition going back to the fourth century B.C. has it that he was a disciple of Pythagoras–plausible enough, if only because of the geographical proximity of Acragas to the Pythagorean community in Croton in southern Italy—and that he was rebuked by his fellow adherents for having revealed the secret teachings of the master in his writings. The charge is substantiated by the many fragments that have come down to us; all the same, Empedocles was said to have been revered in his own right as a god, and to have inspired a cult following no less devoted than that of Pythagoras.
Empedocles was the author of two important poems, one called the Purifications, full of conventional Orpheo-Pythagorean mythology and asceticism, and the other, On Nature, which purports to be a philosophical account of the creation and organization of the world. The two poems have been thought by scholars to be doctrinally at odds with one another, but as I hope I can show, they are really transcriptions of the same mythopoetic vision.
In several fragments preserved from the Purifications, Empedocles describes the exile of the soul from heaven, and its wanderings about the weary wheel of rebirth. The souls of men, as Empedocles relates, have fallen from their original home in heaven amongst the blessed gods for having sinfully violated “the edict of Necessity” and “followed Strife”, whereafter they are condemned to wander through the regions of Air, Sea, and Earth. As Empedocles laments, in language as poignant as any to be found in Plato, the Gnostics, or St. Paul:
Of these now am I also one, an exile and wanderer from God, having put my trust in raging Strife.
The doctrine contained in these fragments was hardly invented by Empedocles, but has assimilated all of the essential features and idioms of the anthropological and eschatological mythoi of the Orphics and Pythagoreans. The soul first falls from a “region of light” into its bodily prison, as a penalty for “sin”. In its earthly life, it is a “wanderer” from its homeland, an exile in an “unfamiliar land”, a “joyless place”, where it “roams in darkness” and despair. The earthly body is a “roofed-in cave”, an “unfamiliar garment of flesh”, subjected to “wasting diseases”, “growth and decay”, “repose and waking”, “movement and immobility”—that is, all of the “opposites” which are the modalities of the mutability and transience that afflict existence in the sensible material order.
But while the body is corrupt and corruptible like the world in which it comes to be and passes away (a “muddy vesture of decay”, in Shakespeare’s later formulation), the soul is indestructible. At the death of the body, it is thus invested in and wears out a never-ending succession of new ones, the One that remains unchanged amidst and in spite of the sensible transformations of the Many.
Racked on the wheel of time, the soul struggles to preserve its individual identity and divine nature—it is in fact of the same divine substance as all other Soul in the world–while passing through all the species and ranks of life, human, animal, and vegetal, and traveling the humiliating round of the four elements, which compose the bodies which it serially inhabits. Nonetheless, during the successive cycles of birth, death, and reincarnation, souls may rehabilitate themselves morally, and, gradually purified of the taints of sensation and matter, rise by degrees to higher forms of existence. In the end, they may
…live among men on earth as prophets, poets, and princes. Thence they rise up as gods, exalted in honour.
Sharing the hearth with the other gods, and sharing the same table with them, they have no part in the griefs of men, indestructible.
To this blessed state, Empedocles assures us he has himself attained:
I go about among you an immortal god, no longer mortal, honoured by all as is my due, crowned with fillets and flowing garlands. When I enter the prosperous towns…, I am revered. They follow me in countless numbers…, some seeking prophecies, others, long racked by grievous pains, begging to hear the word that heals all manner of sickness.
Like the wise man of the later Platonists and Stoics, Empedocles is a god who walks on earth among men, part philosophical sage, part religious saviour. And having attained to perfection, like the initiate of the Orphic mysteries, he can expect that at his next death, he will have escaped the weary wheel of incarnation, and fly back into the eternal aether, a god in perfect communion with God.
Thus the tripartite history of the soul begins with its union in God, devolves with its tragic fall and alienation from God, and ends in its re-ascent and re-absorption into the Divine, after passing through all the provinces or moirai of the cosmic elements; the soul passes from unity to multiplicity and back to unity; and on this familiar triadic circle, the course of the world too is modeled.
To be continued…