The Origin and Goal of the Human Being

GA 53 — 26 January 1905, Berlin

Goethe's Gospel

In this lecture, I would like to present a picture of the theosophical worldview that is completely free of any dogmatism, by attempting to show what is unique to it through phenomena of our Central European spiritual life. This is not a matter of introducing some foreign Oriental worldview, but of showing that theosophy is life and must become life. It is not a new gospel, but the renewal of feelings deeply rooted in the human soul.

What should interest us most is how geniuses close to us are imbued with what we call the theosophical worldview. Lessing, for example, believed in rebirth. In Herder's writings we find ideas of reincarnation. In Schiller, we find them in his Philosophical Letters (1786), in the correspondence between Julius and Raphael (Schiller and Körner), and in the letters “On the Aesthetic Education of Man” (1793/94). Novalis also believed in it. In particular, we find a theosophical worldview in Goethe's later works. Although this may seem surprising at first, anyone who studies Goethe, especially his profound Faust poem, will increasingly come to understand what I am trying to explain. What I am now going to attempt to describe has revealed itself to me in the most natural way.

Goethe was a theosophist in his entire nature, in the innermost meaning of his life, because he never accepted any limits to his cognition, knowledge, and activity. Goethe's entire disposition determined his worldview, which we are discussing here. He was convinced that human beings are deeply connected to the world, and that this world is not material, but rather an active, creative spirit; not just pantheism with an indefinite, incomprehensible essence, but that we can ascend to a living relationship with the great God.

As a seven-year-old boy, he collected the sun's rays and lit a candle; he wanted to light a sacrificial fire with the fire of nature. In “Poetry and Truth,” he says: When we look at the different religions, we find a common core of truth in them. — The wise men of all times have always shown the pendulum swing between the higher and lower self.

When Goethe returned home after studying in Leipzig and suffering a serious illness, he devoted himself to mystical studies. He decided to express what was going on inside him, all his urges, in the Faust poem, in the legend in which the Middle Ages seeks to depict the struggle between the old and new worldviews.

The 16th century did not believe that one could attain salvation through the power of one's own soul; it allowed Faust to perish. But Goethe did. After portraying Faust in his youth, in the original Faust, as an aspiring human being, he placed him on a new foundation in the 1890s. In Faust, Goethe depicts the development of the human being from the lower to the higher soul forces and, as we shall see, also in The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. His view was that only those who have gone through the stages of development, who have felt drawn to the divine, who have gone through doubt, have full conviction, have attained faith, and have struggled through disharmony to harmony. His Faust is a song of human perfection. We do not need to seek the path to perfection in the Bhagavad Gita. We also find the great problem in Faust. In Faust, Goethe sets himself the task of solving the mystery of evil.

It is through the prologue in heaven that Goethe wants to show us what Faust is all about. The physical world is a reflection of the balance of power in the supernatural world. With the words of the prologue in heaven, Goethe describes the world of Devachan, the resounding world. He captures it in the image of Pythagorean spherical music:

The sun resounds in the old way
In brotherly spheres, singing in competition.

Anyone who says that this is only a superficial image is saying something superficial.

Listen! Listen to the storm of the hours!
Resounding for spiritual ears
The new day is already born.

he also says at the end of the Ariel scene; Goethe always speaks of the sounds of the spiritual world.

In theosophy, we speak of three worlds: the dream world, the astral or soul world, and the mental or spiritual world. The awakening of the spiritual eye first brings about tremendous changes in dream life. When the new vision, the new world, opens up, it becomes very regular. Of course, no science can be based on what a person experiences there. The student or chela must learn to carry the consciousness of the second, the astral world, into his daytime consciousness through dreams. Later, in dreamless sleep, they experience things that allow them to perceive the spiritual, mental world.

The consciousness of the astral world expresses itself in images; the consciousness of the spiritual world in spiritual hearing. The Pythagoreans called this the music of the spheres.

Another important principle of human beings is revealed in the prologue: the law of karma. Anyone who knows that Goethe was thoroughly familiar with the mystics of the Middle Ages will not speak of external images when Goethe says:

The spirit world is not closed,
Your mind is closed, your heart is dead!
Come, bathe, student, undaunted
Your earthly breast in the morning light,

“Morning light” is an expression familiar to mystics. Jakob Böhme's first work was called “Aurora or the Morning Light at Dawn.”

From the beginning, Faust strives beyond the limits of physical life. The description of the Earth Spirit is entirely in technical-mystical terms, a wonderful description of the astral body of the Earth, an imperishable garment of the soul, spiritually wrought and woven from the fruits of life. The Earth Spirit is not a symbol; it is a real being for Goethe. He assumed that there were planetary beings in the planets and that their bodies, like ours, were made of flesh. Goethe's creed was that the Earth Spirit had taught him not only to observe the unified nature of stones, plants, animals, and humans, but also to feel and sense it. It had taught him the brotherhood of all creation, including humans, the crown of creation. He also expressed his creed at the age of thirty-five and thirty-six in “The Secrets.” A pilgrim walks to the monastery. At the gate, he sees a rose cross. The Rosy Cross is a symbol of the realms of nature: stone, plant, animal = cross. Roses = love. Goethe himself later said that each of the twelve personalities in “The Secrets” represents one of the great world creeds or one of the great world religions. The pilgrim's purpose was to seek the true inner core of the world religions.

In the first part, we see the young Faust full of emotion and disharmony. With the help of the tempter, Faust must guide his lower self through all his errors. In Mephistopheles, Goethe created the image of an ancient idea contained in all deep spiritual wisdom. He attempted to solve the mystery of evil. Evil is the sum of all those forces that oppose the progress of human perfection. If truth consists in further development, then every obstacle is a lie. Mephistopheles is the name of the one who corrupts through lies, Mephiz, the corrupter — Tophel, in Hebrew, the liar. He leads through all kinds of experiences of the lower self.

Towards the end of the first part, Faust stands differently before the Earth Spirit; he gains the insight that it is possible to truly know the self. After he has finished with his errors, he reaches the spiritual world through purification.

Faust ends in old age, and that is when one becomes a mystic. In Eckermann's conversations with Goethe, Goethe says: “It will soon become apparent to the initiate that there is much depth to be found in this ‘Faust’.”

The journey to the mothers: in all mysticism, the highest spiritual is feminine; knowledge is a process of fertilization. The fire on the tripod is the primordial matter; the realm of the mothers represents the source of all things; from this comes the spirit. In order to enter the spiritual realm—Devachan in the language of theosophy—a moral qualification is required. The aim of theosophy is to lead people upward. Man must first make himself capable, make himself worthy. When Faust leads Helena up for the first time, he bursts into wild passion and thus Helena vanishes.

Faust is supposed to fathom the deep mystery of human nature, how body, soul, and spirit are connected.

The spirit is eternal; it existed before birth and will exist after death; the soul is the link between spirit and body; in its development, it first inclines more toward the body, then toward the spirit, and with it toward the permanent, the eternal. The development of the spiritual eye helps in this process.

In “Faust,” we are now led into the laboratory where the homunculus is created; it becomes wonderfully understandable when the homunculus is understood as a soul that has not yet incarnated. The homunculus is to receive a body. Goethe depicts the gradual development of the physical body in a magnificent image in the classical Walpurgis Night. Proteus is the sage who knows how physical metamorphoses take place. The homunculus must begin with the mineral kingdom, followed by the plant kingdom. Goethe uses the expression “it sprouts” to describe its passage through the plant kingdom.

Sexuality only appears at a certain stage. Eros connects with the homunculus: the union of the male soul and the female soul gives rise to the human being.

Faust's blindness represents the physical world dying for him; his inner vision awakens. A magnificent image for this process: “And as long as you do not have this: Die and become . . .” The mystics express it this way: “And so death is the root of all life.” And: “He who does not die before he dies, perishes before he dies.”

In the final scene of “Faust,” the mystical chorus says:

All that is transitory
Is but a parable;
The imperfect
Here becomes an event;<
The indescribable,
Here it is done:
The eternally feminine
Draws us upward.

In all mysticism, the striving human soul is described as something feminine. The union of the soul with the mystery of the world: spiritual union is expressed by mystics as the marriage of the Lamb. Goethe expressed this view even more deeply in “The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily.” Goethe himself said in his conversations with Eckermann that in the last part of his “Faust,” he wanted to depict Faust's ascent in the image of Montserrat. This is hinted at in the poem “The Secrets.” Parzival, the wanderer of the valley. When Faust went blind, he was given the opportunity to develop rapidly. Then he came to the higher regions, to Devachan, we would say. But Goethe also needed Catholic ideas. So he had Father Marianus appear in the “cleanest cell.” This implied liberation from all sexuality, thus standing above man and woman. That is why he also gave him a woman's name with a masculine ending. Now, instead of the two sexes, there was the one sex. He had awakened completely in Buddhi. Buddhi, the sixth fundamental part, had gained the upper hand over everything else.