Faust, the Striving Human Being

GA 272 — 22 May 1915, Dornach

5. The Mood of Whitsun: Faust's Initiation with the Spirits of the Earth

following a eurythmy presentation of the first scene of the second part of “Faust”

It will be understood that it is hardly possible to give a Whitsun lecture in the usual sense this year, especially at this time, namely at Whitsun itself. Let us consider what characterizes the time of Whitsun in the document of Christianity, the New Testament. We will find that the significant characteristic of the Pentecost is that the Spirit is poured out on those who are called apostles. And the consequence of the outpouring of the spirit is, as we see from the second chapter of Acts, that the people of the most diverse languages, who are gathered together at the Feast of Pentecost, ten days after the so-called Ascension, each hears what is to be proclaimed to them in a way that sounds familiar to him, even though each one expressly emphasizes that he is only capable of his mother tongue.

And so the outpouring of the spirit at the Feast of Pentecost appears like the outpouring of the spirit of love, of unity, of harmony among those who speak the most diverse languages across the globe. Or, to put it better, to match the wording of the Bible, the matter could be put in the following way. One could say: In the Pentecost proclamation, something is given that resonates so powerfully with the human mind that everyone can understand it, even though they only understand their mother tongue.

Almost everyone feels that it contradicts what surrounds us at this year's Pentecost festival if only one interpretation of what this Pentecost proclamation can mean is given. We need only consider that nineteen centuries after this Pentecostal proclamation, the world has managed to follow this Pentecostal proclamation in such a way that this Pentecost now sees thirty-four different speaking peoples fighting with each other, in a sense completely contradicting the meaning of Pentecost. Perhaps this language of fact will at least lead a certain number of people to realize that the Pentecost message has not yet spread throughout the world in a far-reaching way, that it has not yet sufficiently taken hold of people's minds and that it must speak to the minds of men in a new form, more urgently, more meaningfully than it has spoken up to now, so that it can be understood in the future in the way in which it must be understood.

And so this year, as a Whitsun reflection, a general point of view will be taken, so to speak, a point of view that can bring us closer to the new Whitsun proclamation from a certain side, which we mean by spiritual science. For we must regard what has just been explained in the lectures that we have completed here as a Pentecostal proclamation to humanity; we must understand this spiritual science as a Pentecostal proclamation.

Let us take what we know about the Mystery of Golgotha and let it enter our soul. What is the essence of this Mystery of Golgotha? This essence of the Mystery of Golgotha consists in the fact that a spiritual entity, which we know to belong to the cosmic spheres, descended and underwent earthly destinies, earthly suffering in a physical human body, that the Christ-entity lived for three years in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. Through what the Christ-being experienced in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, this Christ-being has been united since the Mystery of Golgotha with what we can call the spirit of the earth, what we can call the auric of the earth. So that for us the entire evolution of the earth breaks down into a time before the Mystery of Golgotha, when that which the Christ-spirit is can only be hinted at when man rises through initiation out of the earthly sphere, in order to perceive not that which lies within the earthly sphere, but that which the earth has no part in, which is only predetermined for it for a later future, and in the time after the Mystery of Golgotha. Since the Mystery of Golgotha, we know that the human being, with his spiritual soul, does not need to flee from the earth, but can remain within the earthly sphere and can perceive within this earthly sphere the impulses contained in the Christ-being.

Now we must realize that for centuries until our time, a part of humanity has become aware that the Christ Impulse is connected with earthly existence. Something has changed in the collective consciousness of those human beings who have felt and sensed something of the Christ Impulse. Something has changed in the overall consciousness of these people. The belief has entered the soul that the Christ is with man, that the human mind can unite with the Christ, that the human mind can experience something within earthly existence that is vividly imbued with the Christ impulse. But an understanding of what the Christ impulse is in the entire earthly existence in the development of humanity must first really penetrate into human souls through spiritual science. And for this it is necessary to recognize how this Christ impulse works in the human soul in such a way that two other spiritual impulses are, as it were, kept in balance.

This is what our sculpture, which we are erecting in the east of our building, will have to depict. There we will place the representative of humanity, the representative of the human being insofar as this human being can experience the deepest things in himself, insofar as this human being can experience what one experiences when one has taken up the Christ impulse as a living impulse in one's soul. For my sake, the main figure in the building in the east can be called the Christ; he can also be called the representative of the internalized human being in general. But one will have to see this spirit, which speaks through a human body, in connection with two other spiritual entities, with Lucifer and Ahriman. The representative of humanity will have to express his relationship to Lucifer and Ahriman while standing upright. Everything about this figure must be purely characteristic. Above all, you will notice later, when this figure has just been set up, that the gesture of the raised left hand and the gesture of the lowered right hand are very special. This gesture of the hands will be understood when one sees how, above, on the rock toward whose summit the left hand of the Representative of Humanity is raised, the left arm rises, just as above, on this rocky summit, Lucifer falls from the reason that he breaks his wings.

Now one can easily believe that this breaking of the wings would be caused by the power emanating from the arm of the representative of humanity, as if, as it were, this power radiated out to Lucifer and broke his wings. That would be a false conception. And hopefully we will succeed in preventing this false conception from arising through the vivid description. For it is not a matter of something emanating from the fully Christianized human being that breaks Lucifer's wings, but rather that Lucifer experiences something within himself when he senses the proximity of the Christ, which leads to the breaking of his wings. Because he cannot bear the Christ-power, the Christ-impulse, he breaks his wings. It is a process that is not brought about by a battle between Christ and Lucifer, but it is a process within Lucifer himself, something that Lucifer must experience within himself, and there must be no doubt for a moment that it would be impossible for Christ to feel hatred or feelings of struggle against Lucifer. Christ is Christ and only fills the world-being with positive things, does not fight any power in the world! But it must fight against the power that now comes into its proximity as the power of Lucifer. Therefore, the hand raised on the left must not work aggressively, nor must the left half of the face work aggressively with this peculiar gesture. Rather, it is as if it is pointing out that, in the context of the world, Christ has something to do with Lucifer. But it is not a fight. The fight arises only in the soul of Lucifer himself. He breaks his own wings, they are not broken by Christ.

And it is the same with Ahriman, who crouches in a rocky cave under the right side of the thoroughly Christianized human being, under which the earth is driven upwards: the material that is driven into people, but which cannot gain strength and weakens because the power of Christ is near it.

In turn, the power of Christ, flowing through the arm into the hand, must betray nothing of hatred against Ahriman. It is Ahriman himself who weakens and who, through what is going on in his soul, wraps the hidden gold in the veins of the earth around him like fetters, so that he makes fetters out of the gold of the earth and forges them for himself. He is not forged by Christ, he forges himself on by feeling the proximity of Christ.

But this only lays bare, I might say, the primal relationship, which must be recognized so that what the Christ impulse is can really be understood by human souls.

A simple parable can be used to explain this Christ impulse in abstract terms. Imagine a pendulum. The pendulum swings to one side, then falls to the lowest point under its own gravity and swings to the other side, and so on until there is a point on this other side that we call the point of equilibrium. This point would be a dead point, a stationary point, if the pendulum did not now swing to the other side. There is life in the pendulum in that it swings to both sides and has a resting point in the middle.

Since the Mystery of Golgotha, we can imagine the evolution of the Earth in the following way: a pendulum swing to one side, to the Luciferic side, and a pendulum swing to the other side, to the Ahrimanic side. And the point of equilibrium is the Christ in the middle.

That this must first be recognized may be seen from a significant historical fact. We all admire the painting that Michelangelo called 'The Last Judgment'. You know it from reproductions of the original, which is in the Sistine Chapel. We see there, painted with magnificent mastery by Michelangelo, Christ, sending some to hell, triumphantly, to the evil spirits, and sending the others, the good, to heaven. And if we look into the face of this Christ, we see the wrath of the world in him. And if we have taken in spiritual science, if we have truly united in love with our minds everything that we have been able to take in of spiritual science so far, then today, despite our admiration for what Michelangelo created, we say: This is not Christ, because the Christ does not judge! People judge themselves, as Lucifer and Ahriman experience their own processes, not what is brought about by any kind of struggle of the Christ against them.

When Michelangelo created his Christ, the time had not yet come to recognize the Christ in true perfection. I might say that a lack of clarity still prevailed in people. In Christ Himself, something was seen of which we know today that it must be attributed to Lucifer or Ahriman. And we can understand something of it today when people have found something of Lucifer or Ahriman in the Michelangelo Christ, for He is not yet free, as Michelangelo portrays Him, from that of which the Christ is completely free.

If we take a good look at ourselves, we can see that from the perspective that gave birth to Michelangelo, it was impossible to create an image of Christ that corresponded to a true understanding of the mystery of Golgotha, because the one thing that had to be known was still unresolved: the relationship between Christ, Lucifer and Ahriman.

How often has it been emphasized in our circles that it is a false sentiment to point to Lucifer and say, “I want to flee from him,” or to point to Ahriman and say, “I want to flee from him.” That would only mean wanting to make a pact with weakness, would mean advising the pendulum to remain in a state of equilibrium, not to swing to the left or to the right, but always to remain at rest. We cannot escape the world forces that we call Lucifer and Ahriman; we just have to find the right relationship with them. And we find this right relationship when we understand the Christ impulse in the right way, when we see in the Christ Being the guide who can place us in the right relationship with the Luciferic and Ahrimanic powers, which must one day be the powers of the world.

Let us consider everything that Lucifer brings into human life. He brings into it everything that is connected with perception, with the passions, with the life of feeling and of the emotions. Life would be dry, sober, abstract if it were not for the living sensation and feeling that permeate it. If we look at the development of history, we see what passion, often called the noble passion — and rightly so, the noble passion — has achieved in history, what feeling and sensation have achieved. But we are never able to cultivate feelings and sensations at all without entering the sphere of Lucifer. It is only because we never enter this sphere without the guidance of the Christ impulse.

And on the other hand, we see how necessary it has become, especially in more recent times, to understand the world more and more, to develop science, to master the external forces of nature. Ahriman is the master of that which is external science, of that which lives in the external forces of nature. And we would remain foolish and stupid if we wanted to flee the Ahrimanic element. It is not a matter of fleeing the Ahrimanic element, but of entering, under the guidance of the Christ Impulse, into that sphere in which Ahriman rules in the world. And thus not indolently seeking merely the point of rest, but to witness the living movement of the world pendulum, to experience it in such a way that we do not take a step without the guidance of the Christ Impulse. Knowledge of Christ is only possible when the relationship of the Christ impulse to the Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces of the human soul has become clear. Therefore, the proclamation of the Luciferic and Ahrimanic side of the world is part of what our spiritual scientific movement had to take up, since it was aware that it had to place itself on the ground of the Christ impulse. And that is why you cannot find anything in the non-Christian theosophical teaching about the Ahrimanic and Luciferic elements, because this Luciferic and Ahrimanic element had to arise at the moment when the spiritual scientific movement had to reckon with the Christ impulse in a serious way.

I think it is something extraordinarily important for the human soul to feel how spiritual science has the task of really bringing something new into human consciousness, something so new that we ourselves may measure it against such great creations of humanity as the Michelangelesque Christ of the “Last Judgment”. And what we have in mind through spiritual science must appear to us as the new Pentecostal proclamation in the true sense of the word.

Around Easter time, we saw how one of the great minds of modern times, Goethe, wrestled with the question of how to relate the one he presented as the representative of humanity, Faust, to the Christ impulse. And we have seen how Goethe was not yet able to do this in his youth, but only in his mature years. And so, in many ways, spiritual life, as it has developed up to the present day, appears to us as a struggle, as an unceasing struggle. It truly appears to us in such a way that we must become extremely modest when we see how the most exquisite spirits of humanity have labored to gain insights and perceptions of what the Christ Impulse signifies. We realize how modest we must be in our human striving for this knowledge of the Christ Impulse.

Goethe – as we have seen – was initially concerned with allowing what works around people as a Luciferic and Ahrimanic element to really take a back seat to his representative of humanity, to Faust. And we have seen how Goethe mixed up the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic element so that it is not easy to distinguish them in the figure of Mephistopheles. We have shown in the Easter lectures how the Luciferic and Ahrimanic elements are mixed together in the figure of Mephistopheles, because Goethe was not yet able to have a clear insight. Basically, Goethe felt throughout his life the striving within him to come to a clear understanding of the relationship between man and Lucifer and Ahriman. When, at the end of the 18th century, he was asked by Schiller, as a mature man, to continue his “Faust” and saw again what he had written in his youth, he called what he had put together at different times a tragelaph – half animal and half human; that is how his “Faust” appeared to him. And he called his “Faust,” to indicate the difficulty of continuing it now, “a barbaric composition,” so that we have the judgment of Goethe, who must have known more about his “Faust” than those who are not Goethe, that the “Faust” is a tragelaph, “half animal and half human,” that it is a “barbaric composition”! What I wanted to present at Easter, and what can so easily be misunderstood, ultimately leads back to a judgment of Goethe's own. Yes, of course, very clever people see in “Faust” a perfect work of art, see in “Faust” that which cannot be surpassed. It was not Goethe's opinion and must not be our opinion either. Even if we see in Faust a rise to the highest, we must realize that this Faust suffers above all in its inner composition from the fact that in his figure of Mephistopheles, Lucifer and Ahriman are mixed together in a completely inorganic way.

But despite all this intermingling, Goethe felt darkly: Lucifer and Ahriman should have appeared together. Goethe just mixed everything together and called it all “Mephistopheles”, so that in the individual scenes in “Faust” Lucifer is often Lucifer, in other parts Mephistopheles or Ahriman. But this was quite clear to Goethe: something is happening in the human being that is taking place under the influence of Lucifer and Ahriman, of Lucifer and Mephistopheles. Such things happen in people.

Now let us look at the end of the first part of Goethe's “Faust”. How does it end? Faust has incurred the most terrible guilt imaginable, has a human life on his conscience, has betrayed a person, incurred the terrible guilt, towards himself and towards the other person. And the last word of the first part of “Faust” is: “Her zu mir!” (To me!), at the same moment as, only through a voice as if from heaven, resounding: “Heinrich, Heinrich!” (Henry, Henry!) We therefore know from this end of the first part where Faust has come. He has come to Mephistopheles. Mephistopheles has him. There is no doubt about that.

And now we see the beginning of the second part. This beginning of the second part presents us with a charming scene: “Faust, tired, restless, lying on a flowery meadow, seeking sleep.” Ghosts appear. And from what they say, we get the impression: we are dealing with nature, yes really, with nature – we just need to go out at this time of year – and we have this nature. Whitsun nature, for example! Whitsun mood, for example! This Whitsun mood has an effect on Faust. And afterwards he continues on his journey through life.

A scholar made a comment about what Goethe had done, which, it can be said, has something to it, even though the remark is philistine and pedantic. The scholar said: When you have incurred a grave guilt, as Faust did towards Gretchen, then go to a charming region, to a flowery meadow, perhaps go on a mountain expedition, and your soul will be cured and capable of further deeds. One could say that, realistically Ahrimanically conceived, this saying of the scholar Rieger has much to be said for it. For it should actually be unbearable for all people who, in the usual sense of today, have a purely materialistic world view, to let the second part of “Faust” have an effect on them, after the great, powerful guilt that Faust has taken upon himself is characterized in the first part. But unfortunately, when it comes to the human and personal, we do not take humanity's greatest work of literature – for that is “Faust”, despite being a barbaric composition and a tragicomedy in its first part – we do not take it literally enough. If we took it literally enough, we would know that the line “Her zu mir!” (“To me!”) is true... Mephistopheles has Faust. As he has him, Faust is now lying on a flowery meadow, restlessly seeking sleep. We must not think of Faust as being separate from the infernal powers at the beginning of the second part. But Goethe was striving for true spiritual knowledge. How close Goethe was to spiritual knowledge may be seen from a passage in a letter that Goethe once wrote to his friend, the musician Zelter. It is a significant passage! Goethe writes: “Consider that with every breath an etheric Lethestrom permeates our entire being, so that we remember the joy only moderately, the suffering hardly.” With every breath, our inner being is indeed permeated by an etheric life stream, but that means nothing other than: Goethe knew very well about the etheric body that humans have. Of course, in his time he only brought this up in his circle of friends.

How Goethe stood by the entire human being, how he, looking at this human being, said to himself: This human being can become guilty, because something dwells in him that is under Mephistophelian influence, that belongs to Mephistopheles belongs. As Goethe looked at this human being, who belongs to this sphere, it was clear to him at the same time that something lives in human nature that can never fall prey to this influence, that can be protected from the Ahrimanic-Luciferic influence. And it is this element in Faust that can be protected from the influence of Ahriman and Lucifer that we are dealing with at the beginning of the second part. Faust, who was capable of guilt, who allowed himself to be drawn by Mephistopheles into the most trivial, most banal pleasures of life, who then tempted Gretchen, has become guilty. In our spiritual language we would say: This part of Faust must wait until the next incarnation.

But there is something in the nature of man that is his higher self, that remains in relationship to the spiritual powers of the world. Therefore, the spiritual powers of the world confront this eternal in Faust. We must not imagine the Faust that we see at the beginning of the second part in the realistic sense as Faust who has become so and so much older, but he is really only the representative of the higher self in Faust. He still wears the same form. But this form is the representative of something that could not have been guilty in Faust. This, which could not have been guilty in Faust, now enters into a relationship with the servants of the Earth Spirit.

From his youth, Goethe longed to gain an insight into the nature of human guilt, of evil in the world, and yet to know that something hovered over all that must have a balancing effect on guilt and evil. And so Goethe ventured, since he had to surrender, so to speak, Faust's one nature to Mephisto – “Come to me!” And we must be quite clear about this: now, at the beginning of the second part, it is not the same Faust that speaks as we know from the first part, but a different, a second nature that only externally bears Faust's form and that can enter into that which, as a spiritual being, permeates the external world. But what has no immediate connection with Faust's outer physical body must find its way into it. For the physical body naturally retains, as long as we remain in the same incarnation, all the signs of the guilt into which we have fallen. Only that in us which frees itself from the physical body can truly connect with what the higher self is. And so Faust must undergo this transformation, which we can call the transformation of guilt into higher knowledge.

He will carry what he bears as guilt into his next incarnation. For this incarnation, he bears the guilt as the source of a higher knowledge that opens up to him, a more precise knowledge of life. And so, despite bearing the most monstrous guilt on his soul, the possibility opens up for Faust that his higher self will be brought into connection with what pervades, lives through and interweaves the world as spiritual.

Faust's higher self comes into contact with a spirit of the earth aura. Goethe wanted to show, so to speak, that what is highest in man could not be grasped by Mephistopheles, we would say: Lucifer-Ahriman, — that must have been preserved, that must be able to enter into other spheres. And so Goethe is quite sincere when he says that this higher self in Faust now enters into a relationship with what the elemental world contains as spiritual beings.

We shall see later how this is connected with what has already been said here in the Easter lectures. But now let us consider how these spiritual beings, which are under the guidance of the air spirit, for such is Ariel, how these spirits, which we can thus call air spirits, are connected with the outer processes of nature, but how they reveal themselves as that which is another spiritual world, in contrast to the self that is not exposed to the influence of Lucifer and Ahriman in the supermundane nature:

When the blossoms of spring rain
Over all, floating sinks,
When the fields of green blessing
All earth-borns flashes,

— so when nature sprouts and sprouts in the spring-whitsun time, then the elemental spirits come out. They are small for the external material, they are great as spirits, for they are exalted above that which in the human heart can fall prey to good or evil.

Small elf spirit size
Hasten where it can help;
Whether it be holy or evil...

— this is left to the next incarnation, it is not the concern of these spirits —

Whether he is holy or evil,
The man of sorrows laments...

The spirits are dealing with his higher self, which is preserved from what has to play out in karma or incarnation. But these spirits can only work in their own element, in which the human being is with his essence when he has left the outer bodily shells as a spiritual soul. And now Goethe explains what these elves, with their greatness as spirits, have to achieve:

You who hover around this head in airy circles,
Show yourselves here in a noble elfin way,
Calm the grim bouquet of your hearts;
Remove the glowing, bitter arrows of reproach,
His innermost being cleansed of the horror he has experienced.

This cannot happen to Faust, who is exposed to Ahriman-Lucifer. This purification is called: Bring out Faust's higher self, present it purely. - And now something that proceeds like an initiation with Faust, who is outside of his body, is taken seriously:

There are four pauses in the night,

— from six o'clock in the evening until six o'clock in the morning the elves fulfill their duty by connecting the soul from falling asleep to waking up with what spiritually permeates and interweaves earthly existence.

Now without delay, she fills it kindly.

— the four pauses that the soul experiences from falling asleep to waking up.

First sinks his head upon the cool pillow,
Then bathes him in the dew from Lethes flood;
Joints soon are the cramp-frozen limbs,
When he strengthened towards the day rests;

• when he has taken in what the spirit that permeates the world has to offer, when this spirit has entered into that which is preserved in Faust's being as a higher self.

The elves' most beautiful duty perform,
Give him back to the holy light.

What happens externally between falling asleep and waking up are real, actual processes, similar to an initiation. And now we see what happens in each of the three hours from six to nine, from nine to twelve, from twelve to three and from three to six. First, there is the break from six to nine:

When the air is gently warmed
Around the green-bordered square,
Sweet scents, veiled in mist
Dawn descends;
She softly whispers sweet peace,
Lulls the heart to child-like calm,
And to the eyes of this weary one,
Locks the day's gate shut!

The soul is gone, separated from the body.

The second part:

Night has already fallen,
Star joins star in holy union;
Great lights, little sparks
Glitter near and shine afar;
Glitter here in the lake, reflecting,
Shine above the clear night,
Sealing the deepest rest,
The moon's full splendor reigns.

The harmony and wisdom of the spheres are absorbed by the great lights, the small sparks. And the secrets of the moon, all that we absorb in spiritual science from the secrets of the spheres, is sunk into Faust's higher self.

The third part of sleeping:

The hours have already faded away,
Pain and joy have vanished away;
Feel it first! You will recover;
Trust the new day's view.
Valleys green, hills swell,
Bushes to shadowy rest;
And in swaying silver waves
The seed of the harvest undulates.

Inwardly connecting with the existence of nature; we have also spoken of this before. Read the last Hague cycle, how the human soul, when it rises from the body, becomes one with the surging and weaving of external existence. But it also means the becoming in the soul of Faust:

And in surging silver waves
The seed - the soul of Faust - surges towards the harvest.

And do you remember how I said that during sleep, man desires to re-enter the body? That is the last part of the night.

Desire to fulfill desires.
Look at the brightness there!

The sun can already be sensed.

You are gently embraced,
Sleep is a shell, throw it away!

An important sentence! A great poet does not write empty phrases! What does it mean: Sleep is a shell, throw it away!? — For someone who sleeps through an ordinary sleep, sleep is not a shell; for someone for whom this time from falling asleep to waking up becomes an absorption for the secrets of the world, sleep is a shell.

Do not delay to take heart,
When the crowd hesitantly roams;
Everything can be achieved by the noble,
Who understands and quickly seizes.

And now the tremendous roar that announces the approach of the sun, reminding us of what Goethe said in the “Prologue in Heaven” in the first part of “Faust” about this sounding of the sun:

The sun sounds in the old way
In brotherly spheres of singing,
And its prescribed journey
It completes with a thunderclap.
Its sight gives strength to the angels,
When no one can fathom it;
Its incomprehensibly high works
Are glorious, as on the first day.

When the sun comes up and the light pours over the physical plane, the soul, when it is outside the body, hears this approach of the sun as music of the spheres, as a special element in the music of the spheres. Spirits hear it naturally. Man does not hear it because he must hear through his physical body. But that is incorporated in the physical plane, and when the sun is in the physical plane, that is the time when man can be awake. Therefore spirits must withdraw. What Ariel, the spirit of the air, now says to his servants, that is suggestive of the approach of the music of the spheres. The spirits can hear it. He who is outside of his body can hear it. Faust can still hear it, this rising of the music of the spheres. Then he returns to his body. Then Ariel has the task of disappearing. Ariel instructs his servants what they have to do: they have to disappear from the physical plane. Because when the sun, which they can only find as a sounding sun, strikes them with its light, they go deaf from it. They go deaf from the light, while they can easily bear the sounding sun, in whose tones they themselves live.

Hark! Hear the storm of the hours!
The new day is already born
for the ears of the spirit.
The gates of rock creak and clatter,
Phoebus' wheels roll and clatter;
What a roar brings the light!
It trumpets, it trompets,
The eye blinks and the ear is amazed,
Unheard-of things cannot be heard.
Slip to the flower corollas,
Deeper, deeper, to dwell in silence,
In the rocks, under the foliage;
If it strikes you, then you are deaf.

And now the elves disappear. Faust returns to his body. But Faust remains unconscious of his guilt. He does not stand before us. He has descended deep into Faust's subconscious and remains there until the next incarnation. Faust, who has just experienced being with the whole spiritual cosmos, must now realize how what he has experienced relates to the four breaks of sleep-life, to how he now perceives the world. He now lives as a higher self in his body.

A person who, after sleeping one night and not having everything within himself that Faust has within himself, a person who then, after waking up in the morning, would say: You, Earth, were also constant this night – would be a fool, because no one expects anything other than that the Earth was also constant this night. But indeed, if one has gone through what Faust experienced as an initiation with the spirits of the earth, then one has experienced something through which one could indeed believe that the whole earth had been transformed. Then it is justified to say that one has become a new person, or rather, that the new person has been awakened in one: “You, Earth, were also constant this night - despite what I have experienced. Then the world appears completely new, because it is indeed given to a new person.

Life's pulses beat freshly alive,
Gently welcoming ethereal dawn;
You, Earth, were also constant this night
And breathe newly refreshed at my feet,
You are already beginning to surround me with joy,
You stir and move a strong resolve,
To strive for the highest existence forever. —

Even now, when the mind has freed itself from what must be stored for the next incarnation!

In the twilight the world is already revealed,
The forest resounds with a thousand-voiced life,
Valley after valley a strip of mist has poured out;
But heavenly clarity descends into the depths,
And twigs and branches, freshly refreshed, have sprung
from the fragrant abyss where they slept submerged.
And color after color is released from the ground,
where flowers and leaves drip with dew,
A paradise is all around me.

This is what a person sees when he, I am not saying, undergoes the initiation, but when he lives the initiation. And he has reason to see the world anew. He would not utter the words he now speaks if only the person who had become guilty and who would live under the impression of this guilt in this incarnation were in him.

Look up! The mountain peaks
already announce the most solemn hour;
They may enjoy the eternal light early,
Which later turns down to us.
Now to the green meadows of the alp
new splendor and clarity is bestowed,
And step by step it has succeeded; –
She steps forward! – namely, the sun – and unfortunately already blinded,
I turn away, pierced through by eye pain.

The higher self is now unable to see what the senses were able to see, the sun. Nevertheless, Faust has learned so much that the sun is now something essentially different for him. And now something stirs within him that is connected with human knowledge:

So it is when a yearning hope
The highest wish,
Finds wings spread open at the gates of fulfillment.

What fulfillment gates? Only those that have become close to him during his sleep. But even the ordinary world now appears to him as if it were breaking like a blaze of flames from eternal reasons:

But now from those eternal depths
A blaze of fire breaks out, we stand amazed;
We wanted to light the torch of life,
A sea of fire embraces us, what a fire!
Is it love? Is it hate?...

We know this from the past, but what we are experiencing now is more than love and hate.

Is it love? Is it hate? The feelings that burn within us,
Alternating between pain and joy,
So that we look down at the earth again,
To hide ourselves in the most youthful veil.

He cannot look at the sun now; he looks at the waterfall, in which the sun is reflected, and which shows him the colors of the rainbow in an arc. He turns away from the sun. He becomes a world observer, just as this world shines in as a reflection of spiritual life – this world of which one can say: All that is transitory is only a parable of the eternal.

So let the sun remain behind me!

He has looked at it before. Now he turns to the waterfall.

The waterfall, breaking through the rock,
I look at it with growing delight.
From fall to fall it now rolls in a thousand,
Then again in a thousand streams,
Foam rushing high into the air.
But how wonderful it is to benefit from this storm,
The colorful arch of changing duration arches...

• which reflects in seven colors what is in unity in the sun.

Sometimes drawn in, sometimes dissolving into thin air,
spreading cool, fragrant showers around.
It reflects human endeavor.
Contemplate it, and you understand more precisely:
We have life in its colored reflection.

We have life in its colored reflection! – This is how far Faust has come after this night: he no longer wants to plunge into life as Faust did in the first part, when he was thrown into guilt and evil, but instead turns to its colored reflection. It is the same colored reflection that we call spiritual science, which appears to him only as a colored reflection, and through which we gradually ascend to experience reality.

What now follows, the second part, is the colored reflection of life at first. It is nonsense to understand this second part merely realistically. We have Faust, who, with his higher self, contemplates life through the physical body in its colorful reflection; he now carries this physical body through life as something he is preserving, so that everything in him can develop that, as his higher self, preserves him from that which comes in later incarnations.

It was quite difficult for Goethe to continue his “Faust” after Mephistopheles' word had been spoken: “Come to me!” But we see how Goethe strives to penetrate the secrets that we today recognize as the secrets of spiritual science. How he approaches them. And then follow this second part, how Mephistopheles really has Faust at first, how Mephistopheles is everywhere in what happens at the “imperial court” and so on. And how, through the after-effects of the initiation living in him, Faust gradually breaks away from Mephistopheles in the course of the action of the second part. But these are further secrets of the second part. Goethe himself said that he had mysteriously included much in this second part! — People have not taken the word seriously enough. Through spiritual science, they will now gradually learn to take such words more and more seriously.

But there is one thing you will have gathered from today's reflections, and that is that Goethe, in his “Faust”, strives to go further in this respect than in the first part, to express something in his “Faust” of the mood that is really symbolically hinted at here in the course of the seasons.

When Pentecost approaches, and when the spirits of the elemental world draw near to men in such wise that it may be said of them:

When the blossoms' spring rain
Over all, floating sinks,
When the fields' green blessing
All earthly born,
Little elves, size of a ghost,
Hurry, where they can help,
Whether holy or evil,
The unfortunate man laments them.

Pentecostal mood! Outpouring of the spirit in the next sentences, which the choir speaks, in the four times of sleep from falling asleep to waking up!

Thus we also show through this Faust from a certain point of view the necessity that humanity be handed down little by little what spiritual science wants to proclaim to it as a new Pentecost message. Faust is so well suited to show us how complicated that is, which exists down there at the bottom of human nature. It lives down there in human nature, which is constantly exposed to the Ahrimanic-Luciferic powers of the world, and there lives that which man can find when he places himself in the guidance of the Christ impulse.

Why do we speak of a threshold? Why do we speak of a guardian of the threshold? We speak of it because, as if by a grace of the wisdom-filled steering of the world, what struggles and rumbles and wages war in our everyday lives was initially withdrawn from the human soul, down there on the deep underground of the human soul. It is as if there were a surface, and below it rumbles and fights and wages war in our everyday life. And even what we live through in our everyday life is a continuous victory. Only it must be fought for again and again. And in the future it will only be fought for again if people will know that which has unconsciously guided them up to now, a benevolent, wisdom-filled world guidance. In the depths of the soul we must really find that which is not known in ordinary everyday life, but which the spiritual can experience. In those human depths where the human being is connected with those powers of the world that transcend good and evil with their spiritual magnitude.

I would like to express this with a Whitsun saying, in which I have combined how man, at the bottom of his soul, has elemental powers that oppose each other, and how that which lives in his consciousness is victory over that which wages war down there in the depths of his soul.

We will speak tomorrow, or perhaps the day after tomorrow, about how these things relate to the context of human life. Today, however, I would like to conclude with this Whitsun saying, which basically expresses what always lives as the innermost nerve in our spiritual science, and to which we have also referred today:

Where sense knowledge ends,
There stands the gate,
Which reveals the realities of life
To the soul's existence;
The soul creates the key,
When she grows strong within herself
In the struggle that world powers
on their own ground
with human forces,
When they banish through themselves
the sleep that envelops the powers of knowledge
at the boundaries of their senses
with a spiritual night.