Faust, the Striving Human Being

GA 272 — 9 September 1916, Dornach

13. Goethe's Insights into the Secrets of Human Existence

after a eurythmic presentation of the scenes “Midnight” and “Entombment”

Once again we have allowed a piece of Goethe's 'Faust' to pass before our minds. In the last lecture here, I tried to develop some of the spiritual-scientific principles that can help us understand it when I spoke about the nature of the lemurs, the fat and scrawny devils. On such occasions, we always try not just to seek out something for the understanding of this poetry, but to gain something from the poetry in terms of general spiritual significance, to look into those true realities that Goethe tried to reach with his “Faust”.

Today I would like to tie in a few observations with what has just passed before our soul. It may seem significant to us that this scene, which we have just seen come to an end, is not the last scene of Goethe's “Faust”, but that, as we know, it is followed by that other scene that we performed here some time ago. You remember: mountain gorges, forest, rock, solitude, holy anchorites, chorus, echo, forest that staggers along and so on, where we are led through the devout meditation of the Pater ecstaticus, Pater profundus, Pater Seraphicus, through the chorus of the blessed boys , where we meet the angels again, who in the scene we saw today carry Faust's immortal into the upper regions, where we also meet the trinity of the penitent women, Doctor Marianus, and Mater gloriosa as Gretchen's guide until the final chorus, the actual mystical chorus:

All that is transitory
is but a parable.

All this follows on from the scene we have seen today, which depicts the battle of the spirits of light with the spirits of darkness for the soul of Faust.

When attempting to explain Faust, one often proceeds from scene to scene, sometimes even from sentence to sentence, without asking the questions that could be asked and that would actually shed light on this great, powerful work of literature. Today we have seen how Faust's burial took place, how Mephistopheles-Ahriman has lost his game, how the soul has been carried up into the spiritual regions. From a certain point of view, one might ask: Could the Faust epic not actually end here? Do we not now basically know everything that it is about? Do we not know that Mephistopheles has lost his wager, that all the efforts he has made throughout the lifetime of Faust, which he has been able to accompany, are lost, that Faust's soul has been accepted into the region of light, that thus the words spoken by Lessing with regard to a Faust epic vis-à-vis the spirits of darkness: “You shall not win” have been fulfilled? Could we not believe that with this everything is actually over, that the Faust epic has found its end? — The question presents itself to our soul: Why then does the conclusion known to us now follow on from what we have seen today? — And by raising this question and then dealing with its answer, one touches on significant secrets of human life in its connection with the whole world. The fact that Goethe shaped this conclusion of Faust as he did shows precisely how deeply he penetrated into the foundations of his life in an age when spiritual science had not yet come into being, and into the secrets of human existence. Much, much lies in the scene that was presented today, and even more lies in the fact that this scene is followed by other final scenes. Much of it proves that Goethe knew the deepest secrets of existence, but that he was also compelled to present the secrets of existence in such a way that they are only accessible to those who want to delve deeper into spiritual life, into its essence. Quite deliberately, Goethe expressed much of it in veiled terms, as he himself said, enwrapped in the poetry of Faust. Much of what is said in veiled terms, so to speak, triggers hatred and opposition in dull-witted people who, out of fear and laziness, do not want to approach the knowledge of the spiritual world. However, as a result, Goethe's Faust poetry has remained more or less misunderstood for eighty-four years and will only gradually, when we can live towards the future, reveal itself to humanity in its depths. Yes, it can be said that spiritual scientific knowledge will only be able to trigger those artistic perceptions that can convey an understanding of the Faust poetry.

Let us first look back at the hauntingly impressive scene in which Faust beholds the four gray women: Want, Guilt, Hardship, and Worry. Let us be clear about the fact that Faust has this experience with the four gray women at a moment when he has gone through many, many spiritual life experiences, or rather, life experiences that have evoked spiritual understanding in him. Goethe imagines his Faust in the time that is presented for Faust through this final scene, having reached the age of one hundred. Today, Faust first stood before us with all the spiritualized experiences in his soul, as he stands on the balcony of his home, which he created at a workplace from which he wanted to do work for the human future. We look at his soul in such a way that all his feelings of satisfaction, all that he has been able to achieve for humanity by wresting a free country from the sea for free men, are summarized in his soul.

The stars hide their gaze and glow,
The fire sinks and burns low;
A chilling wind fans it,
Bringing smoke and haze to me. Offered quickly, too quickly done!

Now, seemingly before his eyes, but in reality in an inner vision, what the appearance of the four gray women forms:

What floats in the shadows?

We have to imagine that through the deepening that Faust's soul has experienced, this soul has become capable of having the vision of the four figures — of lack, of need, of worry, of guilt — from the deep inner source itself. This “scene at midnight” is an inward experience in the truest sense of the word, an inward experience as it is evoked in Faust by the soul slowly beginning to detach itself from the body. For that is the strange mystery that Goethe quite evidently intended, that from the moment the three gray women speak the words:

The clouds roll by, the stars fade away!
Back there, back there! From afar, from afar,
Here comes he, the brother, here comes he, the - death,

— that from this moment on, death already really spreads over Faust's life. And we only understand this scene correctly if we think of Faust from then on as a dying man, as one in whom the soul is slowly detaching itself from the body. And it would be wrong to think that what follows is meant to be merely realistic in terms of the external senses. It is not. As we see Faust in the room of his palace, where worry has entered, we find, as he sits there, that the soul has already loosened itself to a certain extent from the body, that the experiences of physical life merge with the experiences that the soul has when it has already loosened itself from the body. And only then do we understand the strangely interwoven sentences when we consider this interplay of the spiritual world, in which Faust is already empathizing through his loosening soul, this interplay of the spiritual world with the physical-sensual world, in which Faust is still, because the soul is loosening, has not yet detached itself. Lack, guilt, and need were powerless; they were only the heralds of death. But the consuming worry remains where the vision is transformed in such a way that it is already the vision of the soul released from the body:

Four I saw coming, three only going;
I could not understand the meaning of the speech.
It sounded as if it said - distress,
A gloomy rhyming word followed - death.
It sounded hollow, ghostly muffled.

If one knows what Goethe felt when he heard the word gespensterhaft (ghostly), he who felt much more concretely than today's dull materialists, then one does not take such a word

It sounded hollow, ghostly muffled

not light, but important and essential, and seeks the feeling that Goethe had when he put these words into the mouth of Faust. Among other things, Goethe uses a beautiful word in which he expresses the following. He says: “Sometimes life seems to me as if distant past events were entering into the present consciousness, and then everything that is distant in the past appears like a ghost that has entered the present.” Goethe had a very concrete concept of what he called ghostly. Visionarily, millennia-old times of his own life stood before him, which he often believed he saw moving into his present life like ghosts. These are not assertions that I make out of arbitrariness; this can be strictly proven from what Goethe himself expressed when he spoke intimately about the experiences of his inner life.

Now the views and thoughts that Faust has, half in the spiritual world and half still living on the physical plane, flow together. If you could imagine the interplay between these two worlds, that is what it is like for Faust. He is now experiencing something that can actually only be experienced in this interplay between the two worlds, which would not have developed if he had distanced himself more from his physical body. He still feels bound by the events of the beyond to the events of physical life:

I have not yet fought my way into the open.

And now for the remarkable speech, which to many will seem like a mere contradiction, but which becomes understandable if one understands the experience to take place between physical life and spiritual life. The spiritual world sought to reach Faust throughout his life. Spiritual science in the true sense did not exist at that time. He tried to recognize the spiritual world by means of magic inherited from the Middle Ages, the same magic that brought him into contact with Ahriman-Mephistopheles in the way we have often discussed, and also in the last lecture. This magic, by which he entered the spiritual world, cannot be separated from Mephistopheles. If you look back at what happened around Faust, you will see everywhere that Mephistopheles has set the magical actions in scene. We cannot hope that Faust wants to hold on to this magic now that he is already halfway into the spiritual world:

Could I remove magic from my path,
Unlearn spells altogether.

Those spells that he has drawn from old books and that have already become Luciferian and Ahrimanic because they have been preserved from ancient times. In this way, he now finds, when he really enters the spiritual world, that what he has achieved was not what he was looking for after all. And now he looks back. He begins to look back, as one does when one's soul is relaxed. Now he begins to look back at the life that has just passed. The moment stands vividly before him, the moment before he reached for the medieval books, before he uttered the fateful word:

That is why I devoted myself to magic.

He has been protected by good powers that have guided him mercifully in the sense of the “Prologue to Heaven” from the fruits of that magic that he would have had to pluck if these merciful workings of special powers had not passed through his path through life. Now he already sees into the spiritual world, now he knows differently. This plays a role. With the present knowledge, he would make the path different:

If I, nature! were a man alone before you,
it would be worth the effort to be a human being.

He could not say this earlier, before he had loosened his soul from his body, not in this way. Then he had to go the whole way of error. Now he looks back and sees that it was indeed the path through the darkness of Mephistopheles. He looks back first to the time in his life when Mephistopheles had not yet crossed his path:

That was I otherwise,

— a man alone

eh' I's in the dark sought,
With sacrilegious word me and the world cursed.
Now the air is so full of such spooks,
that no one knows how to avoid it.

The full weight of what has happened now weighs on his soul.

Even when a day smiles at us with clear reason,
the night entangles us in dream images;
we return joyfully from the young meadow,

— so he has spent his life, half naked in the physical world, half already - albeit in the physical body -— transferred by Mephistopheles to the spiritual world, looking into the spiritual world, but always having to return to the physical world, because Mephistopheles cannot find it, nor can he convey it, the access, because he cannot properly find the connection.

A bird caws; what does it caw? Misfortune.

Only superstition can be found on this path.

Entwined by superstition morning, noon, and night –
It lends itself, it shows itself, it warns –
And so, intimidated, we stand alone.

But the path of superstition has always mixed with the strong path that Faust was able to walk through his own strong nature. And now he has the vision that could remain with him as his soul loosens more and more: the vision of worry. And try to feel how Goethe also lets the highest in language resonate in his words here. One would like to say that the whole of world history lies on our soul when we feel the weight of these words. Worry creeps in. Is anyone there? Faust asks.

Is anyone here?

The answer sounds:

The question demands yes!

Not a simple answer: Yes! The question demands Yes! I said: The whole of world history forces its way into our soul through the arrangement of the words. For how could one think of those magnificent scenes, where before the court Christ Jesus is asked: “Is it you, the Son of God?” He does not answer simply: Yes – but: “You say it!”

Now it is not expressed in an abstract word whom Faust is now experiencing:

I am here.

But it is in him. It is basically a soliloquy. And it is a deep soliloquy. Only gradually will humanity learn, through inner experiences, the full weight of this soliloquy. With what is to be given to humanity as spiritual science, insights will also come to humanity that will be linked to deep, deep feelings and sensations about life, feelings and sensations that the dull, dull materialism dreams of, nor does the easily acquired worldview that believes that everything has been gained with sentences that characterize the physical or spiritual-real. We have such sentences. We know that they have been achieved through difficult inner experiences. We keep them in our souls, we carry them with us through life. But they are not what they can and must truly be for the human soul if they are not accompanied by all possible moods, by those moods that often make our soul life appear as if it were living over an abyss. And when we have attained spiritual knowledge, we can never lose the concern that comes over us about the relationship of spiritual knowledge to the whole reality of life. Man must feel, especially when he enters the spiritual world, that it is a platitude to speak of it in false asceticism, that this earthly life is only a low one that one would most like to cast off. Man feels the whole deep meaning of this earth-life for eternity precisely through spiritual realizations: that this earth-life must be gone through in order that that which exists can be incorporated into the impulses which we carry through death into the sphere of eternity. But how could it be otherwise than that at the end of a life of trial, just at such a moment, when the soul is loosened, man becomes aware, in serious, grave concern, of what may become of his life just experienced, when he now has to go through the spiritual world with his soul, what the fruits of this life just lived may be. Faust has struggled through much, much. But he is great because now, when he has just entered the spiritual world and is half in it and half still feeling back to his physical existence on earth, he knows in the very significant comparison that arises between the physical and the spiritual in such a life-and-death situation:

I have only run through the world;
I seized every desire by the hair,
What was not enough, I let go,
What escaped me, I let go.
I only desired and only accomplished
And wished again, and so with might
stormed through my life; first great and mighty,
but now it goes wisely, goes deliberately.

Feel the harmony that now arises in his soul: how he has passed through the small and the great world, as it says in “Faust”, and with an overall view that is just opening up, as in the moment he feels a flood of spiritual illumination in his vision, he can survey with wisdom and deliberation all that he has gone through in the rush of the floods of life. And now: what does he see? What does he begin to see? —- He begins to see what he has experienced in the circle of the earth. Think back to what we have discussed about the review that overtakes the soul, which is now slowly overtaking Faust, at the beginning of the life after death. Think of this review. He sees his life on earth. He sees it in such a way that he has to say to himself:

The circle of the earth is well enough known to me.

What he had experienced on earth, he now sees. He is already halfway into the spiritual world. You can feel the words in this mood:

The view to the other side has vanished.

That is what one can say when looking back on earthly life. This is not a philosophical confession of materialism, but an immediate experience after death has already taken hold of the soul. Dopes who have become Faust commentators have interpreted this passage as if Faust, in his old age, were once again reverting to a materialistic creed. But now, in this situation, Faust would truly be a fool if he wanted to look back on life and now, with a blink, see that spiritual world, which is often described here by those fools who build this spiritual world in such a way that they simply write about their own kind, as is done in many confessions. He wants to stand firm on the result of his life. And now words of deep significance are actually falling, before which every semblance of materialism must fade, must fade completely. The vague mystics, those dreadful mystics who always speak of wanting to merge with the universe, of wanting to grasp eternity mystically in the chaotic darkness of the universe, which they call universal light, want to wander into eternity. The one who wants to grasp the spiritual life in a concrete way grasps it where it can be grasped in its concreteness. He does not become a fool, losing himself in vague distances that actually contain nothing but emptiness and empty space, and into which the soul dreams itself away. He will not be seduced into roaming into such eternities, but will grasp knowledge concretely. That which he recognizes can be grasped:

Thus he walks along the day on earth.

Consider how wonderful this sentence becomes when one considers that it marks the beginning of the retrospective view of earthly life: the vision walks along the day on earth. Now he has arrived at the point where he can find the right relationship to those haunting ghosts to which Mephistopheles has seduced him here.

When ghosts haunt,

– now in retrospect

he goes his way;
In walking on, he finds torment and happiness,
He! unsatisfied every moment.

We have to imagine the not yet fully completed, but now incipient review, that review, which is still full of the concern, through which fruits from the experienced earth day can be carried into the spiritual world. And always like this: over, over. Spiritual experience, but because he still clings to the body, also physical experience, so we find Faust. Care still holds him to the physical body. He is meant to enter consciously into the spiritual world, made conscious precisely by the burden of care. That is why he grows into the spiritual world in such a way that, while already bearing the spiritual world in his soul, he still believes that he can command the physical world. Those people who hold the banal contemporary view that man has always been essentially as he is now, do not know that many Greeks died as Faust dies, or rather, as Goethe had Faust die. We can prove from Greek literature that this death was almost a desirable one for the Greeks, like reliving some of the physical existence, while the soul has already been released. In Sophocles you can find words that suggest how the Greeks saw something special in such a death, not a sudden death, but a slow dying, in which consciousness is already dimming for the physical world, but what enters physical consciousness as twilight is gradually illuminated to see fully into the spiritual world. And Goethe did indeed try to incorporate much of the Greek element into the second part of his Faust. We may well imagine that he wanted something of what could be characterized as if he had wanted to depict Faust as a dying Greek. Thus, what he puts into the words in terms of feeling flows over from the spiritual world, even when he is still commanding here. And we can follow this further, follow how Goethe consciously presents what I have been talking about.

You saw Faust arrive at the scene where his grave is already being dug. Again, one can say that those commentators who accuse Goethe of bad taste by having the grave dug while Faust is still alive are not very tasteful themselves! That would, of course, be mere bad taste. We see the dying Faust. Then it is not bad taste, but a wonderful imagination, when we see the grave dug not only by the dying Faust but also by those half-spiritual creatures, the lemurs, of whose nature I spoke recently. But how does Faust speak? Well, I will first pass over the words that he speaks as he gropes his way out of the palace and toward the doorpost. I will draw your attention to the words that Faust speaks when he gives the order, so to speak, to dig the ditch that will divert the polluting swamp. At first, one might think that everything is meant physically. But Goethe was well aware that Faust speaks half out of spiritual consciousness, and that is how he wants these words to be understood. And what is revealed from this physical-spiritual, spiritual-physical consciousness? First of all, a wonderful sense of well-being in Faust. Consider what Faust says:

A swamp extends along the mountains,
Polluting everything already achieved;
To strip the foul pool too,
The last would be the highest achievement.
I open spaces for many millions,
Not to dwell securely, but actively and freely.

Beautiful, but now other words follow:

Green the field, fruitful; man and herd At once at ease on the newest earth, Immediately settled on the strength of the hill, Which the bustling, industrious people have rolled up.

— these words are consciously set down, consciously out of the physical-spiritual, spiritual-physical. The paradisiacal land is the play of the spiritual into physical consciousness, then back into the physical again: Of course, it also means the external situation, but the fact that the words are chosen is something that Goethe was fully aware of when he did it. And now some strange words: One must hear this word repeated over and over again as a beautiful word that Faust utters because he feels: You have done something for the common good, you have worked. — And now he is overcome by the tremendous feeling of how this will continue to work through eons, how he has, as it were, founded his fame in his deeds, and he surrenders to his sense of well-being. It is often quoted. I have even heard it quoted by people who wanted to say something nice to someone else and quoted these words. You can also say: “The trace of my days on earth – that is, of your days on earth – will not perish in aeons.” And yet, however much this is understood as a beautiful saying, let us be clear about it: it is a purely Luciferic saying, a feeling of well-being in fame. We feel once more how Faust's soul is completely seduced by Lucifer, not only contemplating his deeds, but also feeling his glory through the aeons in a wildly spiritual and selfish way. This egotism grows to gigantic proportions and is still sealed: Truly, the devil is no drip. After such a Luciferian outburst, one might well think that the devil had him, for it is once again a completely Luciferian blissful feeling, a supreme eternal desire. And we must not think of the stupid devil, but of the clever Mephistopheles-Ahriman, when he now says, which is quite appropriate: The soul has completely loosened itself, but has separated from the body with a Luciferian quality. It connects quite well with the no less inwardly voluptuous words that Faust utters as he steps out of the palace and gropes his way along the doorjamb: One should not think that it is not tempting to think again in this last moment that the crowd indulges you! The Luciferic temptation is there once more, clearly there. And Mephistopheles is not stupid if he believes that now is the moment to follow up on that conversation in which Faust signed over his soul to him. They have conversed with each other: we recall the first part, where Faust, not yet out of the half-won spiritual consciousness, but out of the physical consciousness, said the words: