Preface to Edouard Schuré's drama The Children of Lucifer

Goethe spoke of art as a revelation of secret laws of nature that would otherwise remain hidden forever. In doing so, he places art in the realm of knowledge. He makes it the interpreter of the secrets of the world, thereby prophetically pointing to something that must be the ideal of those minds of the present who know how to interpret the signs of the times. An art that seeks to reconnect with the paths of the searching soul, which lead to the sources of existence, is what these minds have in mind. They want to speak to the soul that longs for beauty; but what they say must also be the expression of the highest truths and insights. Religion, mysticism, research, and art should spring from a single source. In this way, the human spirit today seeks to renew something that was present at the dawn of our cultures. To the contemplative spirit, the Egyptian pyramids and sphinxes are the great truths embodied in small stones, which the sages of the Nile country had to proclaim. In the ancient poems of the Indians, we have at the same time monumental records of the wisdom of this people. And in Greek drama, the intuitive imagination senses a work of art that was at the same time an expression of the religious truths of primeval times. The god who descends into matter, suffers, and finds his redemption in human work is the hero of this drama. Looking at the development of the world in this way, we look back on a human culture in which religion, art, and science still formed an inseparable unity. The One Truth found expression in forms that represented beauty, wisdom, and religious exaltation at the same time. Only in a later period did the mind find a special religious expression, the senses an artistic expression, and reason a scientific expression. This was inevitable, for only when human beings developed each of their abilities to the highest degree along separate paths could perfection be achieved. For thousands of years, truth, beauty, and divinity followed separate paths. The great works of art of the Greeks and all subsequent ages were made possible by a striving for beauty that followed its own laws and assigned the role of master solely to the imagination. The depths of the Christian religion stem from a deepening of the soul that eluded the forms of beautiful sensuality. And the achievements of our science have sprung from rational thinking and rigorous experience, which denied access to the imagination as well as to the religious needs of the soul.

What sprang from one source now strives to reunite. What else did Richard Wagner want than a work of art that at the same time elevates the soul to the sources of the divine? And what did Goethe really want when, in the second part of his “Faust,” he sought to lead the hero to redemption in the regions of the highest truth? He himself says (to Eckermann on January 29, 1827): “But everything (in Faust) is sensual and, when conceived for the theater, will be pleasing to everyone's eyes. And that is all I wanted. If only the audience enjoys the performance, the initiated will not fail to grasp the higher meaning.” And this “higher meaning” is none other than that of human existence itself. And it is revealed by religion, art, and wisdom.

If art becomes aware of its connection with truth, then it must draw its inspiration from the same source as religion and science.

Such awareness permeates the entire personality of the creator whose work is now being presented to the German public. Edouard Schuré, the witty and profound French writer, should have a significant impact on our contemporaries. For he is gifted as an artist to be a herald of truth and as a researcher to be a revealer of the mystical paths of the soul. With an intuitive mind, he has delved deeply into the mysteries of the human spirit. His “Great Initiates” (Grands Initiés) lead to those heights of human development where Krishna, Hermes, Moses, Pythagoras, Orpheus, Plato, and Jesus walked. The paths along which these leaders showed their peoples and times the goal of humanity, which they drew from the source of their divine insight, are described in brilliant colors. And even before that, Schur€ had already shown in his books on “musical drama” and on “Richard Wagner” the goal of our time, which lies in the union of the truth-seeking spirit, the religiously striving soul, and the sense of beauty. In “Sanctuaries of the Orient” (Sanctuaires d'Orient), he ingeniously reconstructed the sacred drama of Eleusis, that primal drama which was both a work of art and a religious ritual. Later Greek drama applied the art form, which had previously been the creator of divine world events, to the sphere of human action and experience.

Thus, Edouard Schuré—to use Goethe's expression—went from searching for truth to artistically interpreting truth. In the preface to his “Sanctuaries of the Orient” (1898), he said that he wanted to express “through the artistic word and the translucent medium of poetry” what goes on in the deep shafts of the searching and striving human soul. He calls “Children of Lucifer” and the associated drama “La Soeur Gardienne” “theater of the soul.”

Schuré's entire oeuvre shows how deeply he is imbued with the need to reunite contemporary culture with the intimate mystical experience of the soul. For him, dramatic action is a symbol of the deeper processes within the human being. What the eye sees is an image of what the soul experiences when the forces that connect it to the eternal are at work within it. One is tempted to write the words of Goethe's “Chorus mysticus” about the drama “Children of Lucifer”: “All that is transitory is but a parable—the inadequate becomes an event here—the indescribable is accomplished here.” For what takes place here in the context of the fourth century, when Hellenism and Christianity fought their great battle, is a parable for two eternal forces in the struggling soul. Man eternally strives from the depths to the heights; and eternally he must await salvation from the heights. Freedom and grace are the poles that seek each other, longing and will strive for completion. These “two souls” struggle in the human breast. And all external events are images of the struggling souls. Creation and reception are embodied in a thousand forms. And what takes place between human beings is an interaction between creating and receiving, or – to quote Goethe once again – between taking and giving. And the “miracle of love” always brings about balance. This “mystery of the world” cannot be grasped with the intellect; it must be experienced with the deepest powers of the soul. Those who love creatively are filled with living energy, which unites with their lives in a creative bond. In the loving devotion of one's own self, the seed is sown that integrates human beings into the eternal fabric of the world. Just as blood flows through the body, so these mysteries of humanity flow through Schuré's drama.

The “Children of Lucifer” are “theater of the soul” because behind the plot one can see the eternal hieroglyphs of the struggling human spirit. They are inspired by what mysticism calls the One Cause of Humanity. Imagination and mystical sense play an equal part in this work of art. When the mystical sense does not lose itself in the darkness of feeling, but calls the clarity of vision its own, and when the imagination does not surrender to the arbitrariness of subjective ideas, but follows the intuition of truth, then such a work of art alone can come into being.

If we could see works of art of this kind in the theater, they would be temples of truth; and beauty would not be a servant of the religious sense, but its child. And such a deepening of art would hopefully have a reciprocal effect on its sisters: religion and wisdom. Reason, imagination, and religious edification could once again come into harmony with one another.

In Schur&, this harmony lives as a goal. Because he is a mystic as an artist, and because he has the power to express mystical knowledge in the form of art, the time should hear him. Something of what the future must bring lives in his work.

The last few centuries have transformed our lives with reason and the senses; but the “life of the soul” will be brought about by those who once again impress upon external life the great intuitions of the true and the divine. It is in this spirit that this drama is presented to the German reading public.