Faust, the Striving Human Being

GA 272 — Hildesheim

Foreword by Marie Steiner

The lectures printed here were an immediate experience for the speaker and the audience, arising out of the dramatic eurythmy presentation of scenes from Goethe's “Faust”, which brought all the forces of the participants into action, from the development of an understanding of the given riddles to the creation of every scenic detail. The work of the intellect was only the bridge to grasping the essential reality that Rudolf Steiner opened up here, which stands behind the secrets of this work and seeks ways of expression for which the previously known artistic means are no longer sufficient. In eurythmy, Rudolf Steiner had created a means of expression through which the supersensible element can speak its own language: the language of movement, which is the form of expression of those worlds that have not hardened down to the physical. Secret laws of nature can be revealed again through the medium of a new art. And in his wisdom of man, in his science of initiation, Rudolf Steiner has opened the gate through which we can find access to those realms into which the Faustian poetry repeatedly transports us, and which must appear to us throughout as phantasmagoria if we cannot handle the key that opens that gate. Who then understands Faust? Commentaries and learned reflections cannot help us here. They do little more than weigh down, even stifle, the spirit that wants to speak to us through poetry. Although we owe a debt of gratitude to Schröer, because his diligent explanations enable us to refresh many things that would otherwise easily disappear into the depths of our memory, this work often reminds us of the pain we go through when example when reading the “Divina Commedia”, when one's soul is crushed by the commentaries that almost every spirited terzetto is accompanied by: a difficult-to-bear dissection into the pedantic-dry. The distance between text and commentary is not so enormous here. Schröer has an affinity with Goethe and enthusiasm, and so his scholarly work seems not so much drying as conscientious. You can put it aside without annoyance and then experience the text of the Faust poem directly. What is behind the poem speaks to us at first like a hunch. Something seizes us that no learned commentary could explain, that would be word and sound if it did not contain profound truths that are not accessible to us at first. The rushing of undercurrents becomes audible; secrets murmur in our inner ear. We are grateful to Schröer for not having drowned the voice of the deep, for only helping to imprint some mythological or historical elements more precisely on our memory. These explanations have not been able to lead us to the sources that pulsate through the poetry. The sources that Faust presses for, yearns for, so that he risks the salvation of his soul, they, which are supposed to give him back his lost humanity through the potion of life that he wants to drink from them, have not flowed into this scholarly existence either; they have only shaken his soul as a yearning and as a moral impulse. Faust, and through him Goethe, cries out for the sources of life; it is also the cry of today's humanity, which still fully deserves this name, which has not numbed its humanity with the noise of machines and the pressure of soul-crushing mechanics. It should hear this cry in poetry in its harrowing force, let it rummage in itself, react to it. On the stage, however, we usually see a jaded Faust, who talks to us about something that sounds very abstract and does not touch him strongly in his depths, only filled with endless boredom and disgust, which ultimately make him reach for the bottle of brown liquid; that makes him somewhat sentimental. It is hardly possible to feel a real relationship with the experience of the earth spirit. Then a piece of not quite well-founded, unreal, legendary romance takes place on stage, a medieval spook - and Faust only really comes to life when it comes to Gretchen; then he knows where he stands. But his game with her does not last long. He has to get back into the spooky romance. Then follows some remorse at the sight of Gretchen in the dungeon, who has gone mad. But he quickly forgets and wakes up refreshed and strengthened in a flowery meadow.

How harrowing reality and crazy superstition combine here to create an overall effect of inescapable grandeur is rarely thought about. Admittedly, the human aspect of this Gretchen tragedy is so grippingly expressed that it is enough to give the poem lasting value, even if one only perceives the other, the actual driving force in Faust, as an ingredient. But since the other material far outweighs the Gretchen episode in volume, at least when reading the work, where one cannot freely abridge or delete as in a stage presentation, one can still be amazed that the poem has become so established and is recognized for its high cultural value, which elevates it to the first place among the treasures of German intellect. The sparks that fly from the finely polished diamonds of thought, that flash out at us everywhere in the dialogues with Mephistopheles and in Faust's soliloquies, they have, along with the magic of the blossoms and the suffering of Gretchen, , in their colorfulness and luminosity, to save the entire work from obscurity, despite Goethe's own statement that his “Faust” could not become popular: it is too mysterious.

And we have to take this fact into account. Before Rudolf Steiner no one could lead into the deep shafts of Goethe's thought processes, his hunches and intuitions, into the world of those imaginations from which the finely honed words have received their wealth of images and eternal value. He alone makes it possible for us to go deeper into those layers of soul-forming human events from which today's insights derive their substance. They provide the carbon from which, through metamorphosis, the diamond is formed. And just as carbon could not become a diamond unless the sun's rays were captured and stored in it, so too does thought receive its light from the spiritual sun that underlies the archetype.

Rudolf Steiner has opened up the path to these deep shafts of emerging events, the path to the “Mothers”. Unlike Faust, created by Goethe, and like the Faust of legend, we should not seek this path with the means of medieval occultism, which had already become obsolete by the time Faustian figures were struggling between outdated, decadent alchemical research methods and newly emerging exact natural science at the dawn of the modern age. At that turning point in the age, people were working with many aberrant, murky means to penetrate the secrets of life: with faded magic formulas, with incantation experiments, with mediumship, hypnosis, tinctures and ointments that would also entice today's experimental psychologists to enrich their science. Rudolf Steiner showed us other ways to access the sources of life: the paths of pure thought, moral self-education, scientific and artistic work, and the free activity of the I in the service of humanity. But in order to do so, it was necessary to prepare ourselves by doing what has happened in the meantime: the renunciation of the last remnants of atavistic clairvoyance on the part of advanced European people, the immersion in the limits of natural science, the conquest of technology, the temporary severing of the personality from its spiritual source. Now we are standing before another turning point. We are on the verge of losing our personality, of letting mechanics kill the human being. The power of thinking must lead us back to our soulfulness, to the seizing of pictorial contemplation, to the understanding of the spirituality that rules in us and underlies all phenomena of life. In our striving towards the highest goal, the figure of Faust, as portrayed by Goethe, can be our example and incentive. We no longer need to be tempted by the aberrations of medieval sorcery. In spiritual science we are shown a sure path to knowledge.

The tragedy of the medieval occultists, standing at the threshold of modern times, was that through the tradition of the secret schools they still knew about the real spiritual intercourse of the most highly developed people with the intelligences of the cosmos, but they also knew that this path was now closed to them. They could not advance further than to communion with the powers of the intermediate realm. A gradual darkening, a turning away from the strict paths of spiritual research, was often the result of this experimental work with retorts and with the forces of the elements and their animistic natures. The striving went astray, grasped in desperation to the means of despair, chased after mirages. In this sense we have to understand what the soul of Faust was going through. Yet there was a strength in the intensity of striving of these researchers that awakened the I. Through suffering, their consciousness opened ever more to the alert impulses of the I. Through the conquest of matter, the human being strove toward the center of his being, where he would be able to find himself, which could bring him back to life in the spirit. In the smaller dome of the burnt Goetheanum, in which Rudolf Steiner had the representatives of the different cultural epochs of humanity created in image and color, one could also see this figure of Faust, the serious alchemist at the threshold from the Middle Ages to modern times, in a pensive gesture and with a deep gaze, raising his right hand to his face, behind whose eloquent finger gesture the word “I” appears; stretching out his hands to him, the higher, spiritual self of man hovers in the form of an angelic child. Below him looms the skeleton, the other pole of the human ego; above the figure of Faust, the inspiring genius bends towards him.

We cannot approach an understanding of Faust from a narrow-minded perspective; we must gain perspective. The lectures presented here provide us with a basis for understanding Faust. They are not commentaries written in the study, but an introduction to the fields of spiritual science based on a work of poetry inspired by them, the secrets of which can only be properly illuminated through this spiritual science. There is no other way to get to the heart of the Faust problem. And only then will this greatest poetry of the German spirit be able to become popular when spiritual science will have penetrated the cultural life of the people as much as natural science has done in the last few centuries.

Of course, there are many objections that could be raised to publishing a book like this, which seems to consist of fragments. The explanations were given on a case-by-case basis, depending on the work at the Goetheanum; the scenes in which Faust wrestles with the secrets of existence and moves into the supersensible realm were presented. The play was performed in the large carpentry workshop at the Goetheanum, where the columns of the burnt building had been constructed. The conditions were primitive, but the aim was to bring out the spiritual reality on which the play is based. The art of movement known as eurythmy, which is practised at the Goetheanum, was found to be the appropriate means of reproducing those scenes that take place in the supersensible worlds, whether in the upper or lower world. It was as if the Faust poem had been waiting for this form of expression in order to come to life on stage, to transform the otherwise unspeakable into artistic reality. What would otherwise have remained abstract and conventionally stereotyped found in eurythmy the appropriate living language. Rudolf Steiner helped and advised the actors in every detail of the performance. Our suffering consists in the fact that under the prevailing circumstances at the time, only partial performances could be given. However, they serve as a guide for us to grasp the whole. Therefore, we must not anxiously reserve this gift to a small circle. We must pass on to our contemporaries and to the future what we have received here for the formation of knowledge. Unfortunately, these are only inadequately transcribed lectures that arise from an immediately given situation, but they contain what no one else can give and what will further humanity's salvation. The people, whose task it is to conquer the spiritual, should be able to draw from the greatest work of German poetry, which at the same time aims to educate world views, the impulses that will give them strength and courage for their difficult task.