Human History in the Light of Spiritual Investigation

GA 61 — 16 November 1911, Berlin

From Paracelsus to Goethe

It was on a beautiful September day this year that my work took me to Zurich. And since I had a day off between work days, I traveled with some friends to Einsiedeln, a town near Zurich. This is a Benedictine abbey that was founded in the early Middle Ages and has achieved a certain fame through various circumstances. On that September day, it was precisely what is called a pilgrimage day or pilgrimage festival in Catholic regions. Einsiedeln was prepared to receive a large number of pilgrims and was getting ready for the bustling activity that is typical of Catholic pilgrimage sites. I myself wanted to make a kind of pilgrimage at that time, but not directly to Einsiedeln, rather from there to a neighboring site. A carriage was taken, and it was said that the destination was the “Devil's Bridge.” After a rather bumpy ride, uphill and downhill, we finally arrived and found a fairly modern inn that had been built relatively recently. On this inn there is a plaque: “Birthplace of the physician and natural scientist Philippus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, known as Paracelsus, 1493-1541.”

That was the initial destination of my pilgrimage: the birthplace of the famous, and in many respects notorious, Theophrastus Bombastus Paracelsus von Hohenheim. At first, we saw a strange place where many paths crossed, surrounded by a truly lush field of plants and rich flowers, and at the moment we were there, the place was also particularly populated by herds of cattle, which are still so common in Switzerland. One could feel something very special due to the uniqueness of nature, which is hard to find anywhere else in Europe except in the Alpine regions. Nature has something there, as if the plants spoke their own language, as if they wanted to tell you something, as if they could become quite talkative. The place there is also very suitable for becoming one with what the spirit of nature can tell you.

And the image of a boy arose before my soul, who had grown up in that natural environment during the first nine years of his life, who had actually been born in a house that once stood there and was then replaced by the new one mentioned above. For in the fifteenth century, the old physician Bombast von Hohenheim lived in that place, and the son of that Bombast von Hohenheim was the future Paracelsus. One could really empathize with the boy, knowing how intimately he had been connected with all of nature from his earliest childhood. One could imagine the boy in this natural environment, conducting his intimate childish conversations with the plants. In a certain sense, the external configuration certainly still shows what that boy Paracelsus must have said to himself countless times from early morning until late evening, except for those times when he accompanied his father on his walks to the neighboring villages. And it can be taken as certain that even with the little boy in the midst of the nature of that time, his father was able to exchange many interesting thoughts on the certainly interesting questions that the child was already able to ask about what nature immediately reveals in experience. Much of what then matured in that boy, what we can learn about in the life of Paracelsus, comes to us in a childlike form when we have before us the image of the old, honest, but very knowledgeable licentiate, the old Bombast von Hohenheim, leading the inquisitive, nature-loving boy by the hand.

As this image rose in my soul, I had to think of another image that I had had many years ago when I stood in front of a house in Salzburg with a plaque indicating that Theophrastus Bombastus Paracelsus von Hohenheim had died in this modest house at the age of forty-eight. Between these two images, this eventful, this completely unique life unfolded before me.

If we take a closer look at Paracelsus' life, we find that, although still very much in keeping with the character of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, a deep knowledge of nature arose in his soul, which then became medical science and philosophy, and ultimately theosophy. A deep knowledge of nature that cannot be measured by what we have today in terms of external knowledge of nature through experimentation and through the mind and intellect, but which stems from deeper soul forces, clairvoyant soul forces, whose true form we have already been able to hint at in the lectures already given in this cycle. But what awakened these deeper powers of the soul in Paracelsus and enabled him to see beyond what the outer senses and the outer intellect can perceive in nature was in fact brought about by his intimate connection with nature, by the feeling of kinship of all his soul forces with what germinates, blossoms, and sprouts in nature. Even when the nine-year-old boy moved with his father to Carinthia and was transported to a similarly sprouting nature, he was able to feel connected to everything that lives as spirit in nature. And as Paracelsus grew up in this way, he developed further and further in his individual, very unique and personal view of nature. How could it be otherwise! Everything that took root in his mind was intimately connected with his unique strengths and abilities, with the way he related to things, with the way they spoke to him. That is why, throughout his life, he attached particular importance to being so intimately connected with nature. And when he wanted to emphasize to those who became his enemies how closely his inner being was related to nature, he often pointed this out later on. These are his words: "Mark how I answer for myself: I am not subtly spun by nature, nor is it the way of my country to achieve anything with silk spinners. We are not raised on figs, nor on mead, nor on wheat bread; but on cheese, milk, and oat bread, which cannot produce subtle fellows. Those in soft clothes and those who are raised in women's chambers, and we who grow up in pine cones, do not understand each other well. Therefore, even those who consider themselves to be subtle and graceful can be judged as coarse. So it happens to me that what I consider to be silk, others call coarse cloth and homespun." He believes himself to be like those people who have not separated their entire being from the mother soil of natural existence, but who are intimately connected to this mother soil, and from this connection he draws his strength and wisdom. That is why his motto throughout his life was: “No one who can remain alone for himself should be another's servant.” This permeated his entire manner, showing us this man in a vivid and soulful way. We can therefore understand that when he later entered university, he was unable to adapt to the way in which what he knew about medicine, inspired only by conversations with nature and with his father, was now to be taught. At first, he really could not digest it.

To understand what he had to endure, we must take a look at the way medicine was practiced at that time. Above all, what was decisive was what was written in the ancient traditions and documents of the ancient physicians Galen, Avicenna, and others. The lecturers preferred to comment on and interpret what was written in the books. This was deeply repugnant to the young Philippus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, and he found above all that there was a wide gap between the spiritual work and creativity that could be intuitively recognized directly from nature and what had become so distant from it as a learned being, as mere intellectual concepts and ideas. Therefore, he wanted to attend a different school. And he thoroughly attended this different school. We soon see Paracelsus leaving academia and wandering throughout Europe, not only through all of Germany and Austria, Transylvania, Poland, Hungary, Italy, Spain, and Portugal, but also through France, England, Holland, Prussia, Lithuania, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, with the intention of learning something everywhere he went about the way in which — to quote Goethe — “nature lives in creation.” For what he actually had in mind was the idea that Although nature as a whole is uniform, it speaks many different languages, and it is precisely by learning to recognize how one and the same thing changes form and takes on different shapes in different areas and environments that one penetrates to the essence of its inner unity, to that which, in contrast to everything that can be perceived by the senses, is the underlying spiritual element.

But he did not only want to learn how each ore, each metal, immediately after the configuration of the mountain and depending on where it is found, stands out from its surroundings in order to gain an impression of how nature lives in creation. He did not only want to learn how plants take on different forms depending on the climate and environment, but he also had something else in mind. He said to himself: The entire human organism is connected to its environment. What a human being is, physically and spiritually, cannot be grasped as the same being everywhere; at least, one cannot recognize a human being by observing them in only one place. That is why Paracelsus traveled through the most diverse regions of the earth that were accessible to him, in order to recognize everywhere, with his deeply spiritual insight, how humans are related to nature, depending on how they are influenced by the most diverse conditions in climate and geography. And only when one has measured this difference everywhere does one arrive at what Paracelsus meant by enlightenment about healthy and sick beings. Therefore, he was never satisfied with learning about any form of illness in only one place, but said to himself: It is the subtle substances that make up the human organism that differ depending on whether a person lives in Hungary, Spain, or Italy, for example, and no one can understand human beings who cannot follow the subtle substances with a gaze that penetrates to the depths of the matter. — And when he was reproached for what he called his “high school,” which others called vagrancy, he replied that the deity does not come to those who sit on the stove bench. He was clear that man must go where the divine spirit weaves and works in the most diverse forms of nature. Thus he developed a knowledge that can truly be called clairvoyant and individual in the highest and most beautiful sense, which he could only have through his fusion with nature.

But Paracelsus also felt that this knowledge was so intimately intertwined with his own inner soul that he became increasingly aware that what he had learned directly at the high school of nature could only be made clear through an intimate manner of expression. He called nature his “book” and the various regions of the earth the “individual pages” of this book, which one reads by stepping on them. And he gradually became full of contempt for those who only studied the old Galen, Avicenna, and so on, and who, through the books of men, distanced themselves from the book that lay spread out before him in its various pages as the “book of nature.” But he also felt that what he was able to learn in this high school of his could only be expressed intimately in words. Therefore, he felt the need not to express himself in a language that had actually become foreign to the immediate life of the soul, in Latin, in which everything that was taught at universities at that time was presented, as has just been indicated. He did not feel the need to express himself in this language, which, like the scholarship that used it, was foreign to immediate nature, because he believed that he would not be able to bend and formulate the words in such a way that they could directly express what flowed out of all being. Therefore, he had a deep need to express what he wanted to express in his mother tongue. These things had a twofold effect. First, he did not have a high self-confidence about the value of what he could know out of a desire for renown or out of arrogance, for he was basically a humble nature in relation to what was awakened in his soul by the great nature. Because what nature spoke to him was reflected in his soul as if in a mirror, he said that nothing could really be learned from all other branches of medical science, but that one must approach nature directly again in the renewal of medical science. Hence his proud words: "Whoever seeks the truth must enter my monarchy. Follow me, I will not follow you, you follow me, Avicenna, Galene, Rhazes, Montagnana, Mesu&, follow me and I will not follow you. You of Paris, you of Montpellier, you of Swabia, you of Meissen, you of Cologne, you of Vienna, and those who live on the Danube and the Rhine, you islands in the sea: you Italy, you Dalmatia, you Sarmatia, you Athens, you Greeks, you Arabs, you Israelites. Follow me, and I will not follow you... I will become monarch, and mine will be the monarchy, and I will lead the monarchy and gird your loins!"

Not out of arrogance or pride, but out of an awareness of how nature speaks through him, he said: The monarchy is mine! — By this he meant the monarchy of scientific and medical knowledge of his time.

The other consequence of this was that such an attitude and such knowledge soon brought him into conflict with those who were the official representatives of his field at the time. First of all, they could not tolerate his expressing himself in German, which they considered possible only in Latin. In this respect, he was a complete innovator. Furthermore, they could not understand that he traveled through the countries and wanted to learn. Above all, they could not comprehend that someone like him, who was so deeply connected to the whole essence and fabric of nature, had a vivid sense of how human beings, wherever they may be, in the development of their souls, and also in the prime of their physical development, everywhere a blossom, a fruit of natural existence in the region concerned, and that one must not only see how the plants bloom, how the animals thrive, but also how, in human beings who are directly interwoven and intertwined with nature, what comes in from the rest of existence is expressed in the soul. That is why Paracelsus valued people who, as farmers, shepherds, and even knackers, worked more in and with nature. He was convinced that their simple knowledge contained something of a real knowledge of nature from which he could learn something, so that he learned, as it were, as a vagrant from the vagrants. That is why he says of himself: I pursued my art at the risk of my life and was not ashamed to learn from vagrants, messengers, and shearers. My teaching was tested more sharply than silver in poverty, fears, wars, and hardships. — This could not be forgiven. And when he was later appointed to the University of Basel — as if by mistake on the part of the representatives of his field — one of the guild scholars noticed with horror that Paracelsus did not walk the streets in the manner and attire of professors, as was customary for them, but like a vagrant, like a cart driver! That was unacceptable; it disgraced the reputation of the entire profession.

And so it came to pass that when he wanted to apply what he had learned from the great book of nature, he encountered opposition from his colleagues and went through what those who experience the worst envy and resistance have to go through. But what was least forgivable was that, thanks to his deep insights into nature, he succeeded where others could not even dream of success, or where they had tried everything in their power and failed. It is true that when he encountered resistance here and there, he did not spare the harshest words from his proud consciousness, but when one considers the circumstances under which he worked, one knows that it was well deserved. When he was pressed to discuss one or another medical question with this or that colleague, things got heated. For example, the others would speak in Latin, which he understood quite well, and then he would shout back at them in German what he considered to be evidence, but which they considered to be foolishness. And this is a picture of the whole way in which he clashed with his contemporaries.

What he gained in insight can be summarized as follows. He said: Man, as he stands before us as a healthy and sick being, is not a single being, a single species, but is placed within the whole of nature. And what happens in humans as a healthy or sick phenomenon can, in a certain sense, only be judged if one knows all the influences that emanate from the great world, from the macrocosm, to draw humans into their circles. — Thus, humans initially appeared to him as individual beings in the whole great world, in the macrocosm. That was one way in which he viewed humans. And he went on to say: Anyone who wants to judge how all the phenomena that otherwise take place outside in the wind and weather, in the rising and setting of the stars and so on, flow through human nature, so to speak, and play into it, must acquire an intimate knowledge of everything that goes on in the great nature outside. Because Paracelsus did not limit himself to specific knowledge about humans, but let his clairvoyant gaze wander over the entire macrocosm, over physics, astronomy, chemistry, and took in everything he could get hold of, for him, humans were part of the macrocosm.

At the same time, however, he saw humans as highly independent beings, in that they process the substances of the macrocosm and, through the way in which they process them, live either in harmony or in opposition to the macrocosm. Insofar as humans are part of the macrocosm, Paracelsus regarded them as the lowest, most primitive, purely physical beings. But insofar as humans nevertheless receive a certain sum, a certain cycle of substances and forces into their organization and develop independently, acting independently within them, Paracelsus saw in humans something he called the “Archaeus,” which was like an inner architect and builder, which he also called the “inner alchemist.” And he draws attention to something that may no longer be considered particularly significant today, but which he recognized as deeply mysterious and enlightening: how this inner builder, this inner alchemist, transforms external substances that bear no resemblance to what humans need internally, how he transforms milk and bread into flesh and blood. This seemed to him to be a great mystery. It expressed what he saw as the work of the inner alchemist, who either blends harmoniously into the universe or stands in opposition to it. This was, for him, the human being in a second direction, who can have such an inner alchemist within himself, who either turns substances into poisons that destroy the organism, or into those means that develop the organism in a corresponding way and bring it to fruition.

Then he distinguished a third: what man is, apart from the entire external world. Here Paracelsus found something that could already be hinted at here, namely that man in his entire organization is such that in the interaction of forces and organs there is a small world, a microcosm, a reflection of the large world. It should be noted that this is something different for Paracelsus than the first point of view. According to the first point of view, human beings are part of nature insofar as the currents of nature flow through them. Insofar as the individual parts of nature interact in his third point of view, he finds in the blood and heart system, the nerve and brain system, and the interaction between blood and heart and between nerves and brain system, a reflection of what is depicted in nature in the mutual relationship between the sun and the moon. And in the other organs he finds an inner kingdom of heaven, an inner world structure. The outer world structure is like a great symbol to him, which is repeated in the human being as a small world. And in a disorder that can occur in this small world, he sees a third way in which human beings can become ill. He saw a fourth point of view in what is present in passions, soul stirrings, desires, and drives that go beyond a certain measure, for example in anger and rage, which then has a retroactive effect on the physical organization. And finally, he saw a fifth aspect, which is not at all acknowledged today, in the way in which human beings are integrated into the course of the world, and how the causes of illness can come to them from the whole course of spiritual development.

Paracelsus thus developed five points of view, which did not arise from his theoretical approach, but from what he saw as the nature of man, which he deduced from his direct observation of man's relationship to nature. By focusing his attention on how human beings are placed within nature and by allowing the way in which the individual members interact to affect him not intellectually but with clairvoyant insight, Paracelsus was able to relate to sick people in a very special way. What was unique about him was that he related to the whole world not with one, but with all the powers of his soul. Hence his beautiful saying: Through the mind we learn to recognize God the Father in the world; through faith we learn to recognize Christ, the Son; and through imagination we learn to recognize the Spirit.

Just as knowledge of healthy and sick people emerges from these three directions, he wanted to place people before his soul. But he did not want to look only at people; he wanted to see how individual things in nature are related to each other and to people. This allowed him to see what was unique: when he stood before a sick person, he saw how nature worked from the perspectives just mentioned; his intuitive gaze, rising from the depths of his soul, revealed the irregularity of substances, the irregularity of organs. He had the whole human being before him. He could not put into abstract words what arose before him, what he experienced before the sick person, he could not put it into a formula; but he lived himself into the other, into the sick person. He did not need a name for the disease, but by immersing himself in the disease, something completely new dawned on him: how he should combine the substances, how he had to combine the substances he knew in nature in order to find a remedy for this disease. But it was not only the spiritual that he immersed himself in, but also the moral, intellectual, and mental. Call him a vagrant if you will, as one might regard what he did as charlatanism, emphasize how he was stripped of all means, how he had to go into debt, and so on. But let us not forget how selfless he was, able to become completely one with the disease he was facing.

Paracelsus could therefore say that even though he used everything nature gave him for the sick, the most important remedy was, first and foremost, love. It is not substances that heal, he said, but love. And love also flowed from him to the sick, for he saw himself completely transported into the nature of the other person. The second thing that had to spring from his particularly intimate relationship with nature was that in each individual case he saw the remedies he applied as effective; he saw them unfold their powers in the human organism. This led him to the second thing: confident hope. He called love and hope his best healing powers, and he never went to work without love and hope. He was a man who wandered around as a vagrant, completely imbued with the most selfless love. In doing so, however, he often had strange experiences. His love went so far that he healed those who had no money for free. But he also had to live. Some people often cheated him out of his fee; well, then he moved on and didn't make a fuss about it. But there were also clashes with those around him. For example, the following happened to him. When he was in Basel, because he was later appointed city physician to Basel, as if by some kind of mistake, he had performed many famous cures. Once he was called to Canon Lichtenfels, who had an illness that no one could cure. Paracelsus had stipulated a fee of one hundred talers if he would cure him; the canon agreed. Paracelsus then gave him the appropriate remedy, and after three or four times the illness was cured. The canon then said that if it had been so easy, he would not pay the hundred talers — and Paracelsus was left empty-handed. To set an example, he even sued the canon, but the Basel court ruled against him: he had to pay his fee. It is said that he then had nasty notes distributed against the court and especially against the canon. This caused bad blood. Then a friend pointed out to him that his stay in Basel was unsafe. And so he fled Basel under cover of night. Had he left the city gates half an hour later, he would have been thrown into prison.

Anyone familiar with this man's extraordinary life will understand the profound impression made by the image that emerges from Paracelsus's final years: an image that shows us a face expressing great intellectual depth. He had lived and experienced a great deal, but at the same time, life had dealt this soul and body a heavy blow. The suffering, relatively young man with the old features, wrinkles, and bald head shows, on the one hand, the struggle and striving, the essence of the entire evolution of time that lay within Paracelsus, and on the other hand, how he had to endure the tragedy of a man who stood in opposition to his time. And even if it is only a legend, even if what is said to have happened in Salzburg is not to be taken literally, that the Salzburg doctors once decided to incite one of his servants to throw Paracelsus from a height, which resulted in his death and then he was carried into his house — even if it is not true, one must still say: Paracelsus' life was such that there was no need to split his skull; his life was made so sour, so bitter, that we can well understand his early death. If we wanted to have him even more vividly before us, he would have to be described in many more features and details.

A man like Paracelsus made a deep impression on all those who sought the path to the spiritual worlds in the following period. And anyone familiar with Goethe's life senses that Paracelsus, whom he became acquainted with at an early age, also left a great impression on Goethe. For there was something in Goethe that can be called, as in Paracelsus, an intertwining with the surrounding nature. On another occasion, I have already emphasized how Goethe, as a seven-year-old boy, showed his intertwining with nature by rejecting all the religious explanations about nature that he had heard from his surroundings and building his own altar. He took his father's music stand, placed stones from his father's collection and plants on it, waited for the sun to rise in the morning, collected the sun's rays with a magnifying glass, placed a small incense candle on top and lit it with the magnifying glass to kindle a sacrificial fire that was ignited by nature itself, and thus offers a sacrifice to the god of great nature. This fusion with nature appears so early in Goethe and later develops into the great, even clairvoyant ideas about nature. And we see this way of thinking continue to have an effect in Goethe, who is already in Weimar, in the prose hymn “To Nature”: "Nature! We are surrounded and embraced by her—unable to step out of her, and unable to penetrate deeper into her. Uninvited and unannounced, she takes us into the cycle of her dance and carries us along with her until we are weary and fall from her arms..."

We also see many similarities between Goethe and Paracelsus in other ways. We see how he becomes a true student of nature in botany and zoology, how he seeks to understand the essence of natural objects on his Italian journey by observing how the individual manifests itself in its diversity. It is beautiful how he sees the innocent coltsfoot, which he knows from Germany, revealing itself in a different form. There he learns how external forms can express the same essence in the most diverse ways. 'Thus we see how he — seeking unity in diversity everywhere — wanted to recognize the unified as the spirit. And the statement Goethe made to Knebel in Weimar from Rome on August 18, 1787, is significant: “After what I have seen of plants and fish near Naples and in Sicily, if I were ten years younger, I would be very tempted to make a trip to India, not to discover anything new, but to see what has been discovered in my own way.” He wants to intuitively perceive in the right way what unfolds in the sensory world. Paracelsus focused on the spirit in nature, Goethe focused on the spirit.

No wonder, then, that when he became acquainted with the life of Paracelsus, this life of Paracelsus appeared vividly in Goethe's soul alongside the life of Faust. When we allow Goethe's life to have a particular effect on us, his Faust stands before us, not only as the Faust of the sixteenth century, who in a certain sense is a kind of contemporary of Paracelsus, but Paracelsus himself stands before us, as he had an effect on Goethe. In the character of Faust, we have something to which Paracelsus contributed. Let us just take the answer to the question: Why did Goethe fall for Faust? The legend of Faust tells us that he put the Bible behind the bench for a while, became a doctor of medicine, and wanted to study the forces of nature. In Paracelsus, we see that he remained faithful to the Bible and was even a Bible scholar, but we also see how he “put behind the bench” the old medical authorities, Galen, Avicenna, and so on, even burning them once, and went directly to the book of nature. This was a trait that made a great impression on Goethe. And further: do we not see a similar trait when Faust translates the Bible into his “beloved German” so that what comes from it can flow directly into his soul, and when Paracelsus translates what natural science is for him into his beloved German? And we could cite many other traits that would show how something of the resurrected Paracelsus lived on in Goethe when he created the character of Faust. Yes, one might say: In “Faust,” — Goethe only translated it into the ideal — what often took place between Paracelsus and his staid father when they went out together, as Faust recounts how he used to interact with his father. In short, Paracelsus can appear before our eyes when Faust, as a figure of Goethe's creativity, of Goethe's art, has an effect on us.

With these two figures beside us, we encounter something that shows in a no less peculiar way how Goethe was able to do something completely different with both the Faust figure and the Paracelsus figure of the sixteenth century. Let us consider Goethe's Faust: he is dissatisfied with what the various sciences, medicine, theology, and so on, can offer him. However, Goethe cannot portray this Faust in such a way that we see this immediate immersion in nature. It is not that Goethe was incapable of doing so, but there must have been a reason why he did not. Why did he not do so?

First of all, it is striking that it is not merely an external circumstance, an external fact, that Paracelsus, with an inwardly harmonious soul fused with the spirit of nature, dies at about the same time that we can imagine Faust saying the words:

Now, alas! I have studied philosophy,
jurisprudence and medicine,
and, alas, theology too!
Studied thoroughly with ardent effort ...

And what Faust experiences next, he experiences at an age that Paracelsus did not reach in the physical world. Thus, Goethe presents us with a kind of Paracelsus from the age at which Paracelsus died, but a Paracelsus who was unable to grow into the living spirit of nature.

And how does he present him to us? Although he shows that Faust has found a deep understanding of nature, even a kind of kinship with nature, it is different from what it was with Paracelsus. We feel this when Faust addresses the spirit in nature with the words:

Sublime spirit, you gave me, gave me everything,
Why I asked. You did not turn your face to me in vain
In the fire.
You gave me the glorious kingdom of nature,
The power to feel it, to enjoy it. You do not
cold, astonished visit,
You grant me to look into its deep bosom
As into the bosom of a friend.
You lead the ranks of the living
Past me, and teach me to know my brothers
In the silent bush, in air and water.

Faust grows together with nature in a certain way, since he was previously separated from it. But it cannot be shown that Faust penetrates the details of nature as vividly as Paracelsus did; it cannot be shown that this also occurs immediately when he speaks to the sublime spirit of nature in this way. Goethe cannot show us how Faust would grow together with nature, but must show us a purely inner development of the soul. Faust must undergo a purely spiritual development in order to reach the depths of nature and the creation of the world. Thus, we see in Faust's path, even though it is reminiscent of Paracelsus in many ways, that everything Faust experiences is undergone in the moral, intellectual, and emotional spheres of life, and not as in Paracelsus, where the threads of feeling reach directly into nature, as it were. And it must come to the point where Faust can ascend to selflessness, to an intimate love of the spiritual at the end of the second part, not by growing together with nature, but by distancing himself even further from it. Goethe lets Faust go blind:

The night seems to penetrate deeper and deeper,
But within, a bright light shines.

Faust becomes a mystic, a personality who develops his soul in all directions, who sees himself opposed in the forces of Mephisto to all the resistances of the soul. In short, Faust must develop himself purely within his soul, must awaken the spirit in his soul. Then, when this spirit is awakened within, not as with Paracelsus in direct contact with nature, even Faust's sensory perception is destroyed by his blindness, by his inability to see physically:

Only within does a bright light shine.

Faust realizes—as we see from the conclusion of the poem—that when a person develops their inner soul forces, the spirit that reigns in nature also drives up the inner soul forces. And when this spirit is sufficiently developed, the person directly attains what pervades human beings and nature as spiritual. So says Faust at the end.

In order to bring his Faust to the same goal that Paracelsus reaches, Goethe has Faust undergo an inner spiritual journey. When one thinks about what causes this, one comes to the realization of how the forces of time determine the successive epochs of development, historical life. One comes to realize the significance of the fact that Paracelsus's year of death lies somewhat before the great upheaval that was brought about in the external natural sciences by the work of Copernicus. Paracelsus's life still falls within the time when it was considered correct that the earth stood still in the world, that the sun revolved around it, and so on; this also had an effect on Paracelsus. It was only after his death that a completely different view of the solar and world system emerged. The ground was literally pulled out from under people's feet. Anyone today who takes the Copernican world system for granted has no idea of the storm that broke out when the Earth was “set in motion.” One could say that the ground beneath people's feet literally shook. But this also meant that, when people reached the height of their education, the spirit no longer flowed into the soul in its immediate form, like an aroma, as it did with Paracelsus. If Copernicus had remained limited to what the senses can see, he would never have established his world system. Because he did not believe the senses, he was able to establish his world system by going beyond the appearance of the senses through intellect and reason. Such was the course of development. Man had to develop his spirit and reason directly. And the times since the sixteenth century have not passed without effect.

In elevating his Faust from a sixteenth-century Paracelsus figure to an eighteenth-century Faust figure, Goethe had to take into account that man can no longer relate to nature in such a direct and primitive way as Paracelsus did. Faust therefore became a figure who could not discover the forces of existence, the meaning of being, through direct communion with nature, but through the hidden forces from the depths of the soul. At the same time, however, we see the essential point that the stream of existence does not pass by human beings without meaning. Paracelsus, as a great, towering figure, is a son of his time. And in Faust, Goethe created a poetic image, a figure, which he made in a certain direction to be the son of his time, who learned to use reason and intellect in the natural sciences of his time, and who was also able to work out the mystical. Therefore, it must be said: the fact that Goethe felt compelled to present not a Paracelsus figure but another figure shows the whole turning point from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century in the development of European humanity. The significance of such a turning point is evident even in the greatest geniuses, and therein lies the difference between these two figures. And for those who want to get to know Goethe, it is extremely interesting to look at his work on the figure of Faust, because his Faust enlightens us about him more than any of his other characters.

If we consider spiritual science or anthroposophy from these observations, it can feel closely related to Goethe, but in a different way also closely related to Paracelsus. How so with Paracelsus? Paracelsus was able to gain the deepest insights into nature from the developed powers of the soul through direct contact with nature. But the time when those who progress with development can arrive at the foundations of existence as Paracelsus did has passed since Copernicus, Galileo, Giordano Bruno, and Kepler. A different era has dawned. In Faust, Goethe showed the type of this era, in which one must work with the hidden powers of the soul so that higher sensory powers arise from the depths of the soul. Just as the eyes see colors and the ears hear sounds, these higher senses will perceive what is present as spirit in the environment and what cannot be seen as spirit with the ordinary senses. Thus, modern man must experience the deeper soul forces not by becoming one with nature, as in the case of Paracelsus, but by turning away from nature. But when he comes to draw the deeper powers from his soul, when he can develop an understanding of what lives and weaves invisibly behind the visible, behind the sensory nature of the world as spiritual and supersensible, when man works out the Faustian from within himself, then the Faustian ultimately becomes a clairvoyant insight into nature. And in a certain way, with the unfolding of the inner spirit, every human being can experience—without having to go blind—that even if they cannot believe the mysteries of the world have been solved by what their eyes and outer senses teach them, they can nevertheless say: “A bright light shines within!” And that is something that can bring us closer to the spirit that reigns in all things.

Thus, the path from Paracelsus to Goethe is extremely interesting when one sees in the character of Faust, brought to life from Goethe's soul, what is essential for Paracelsus and also for Faust: that human beings cannot penetrate the depths of the world and the laws with which the eternal, immortal spirit of human beings is connected not through the outer senses, but only through a direct fusion with nature, as in Paracelsus, or through a development of the higher senses, as Goethe suggested, albeit only poetically, in the continuation of the sixteenth-century Faust figure. Thus, Paracelsus increasingly adopted the principle that Goethe then emphasized for his Faust with the words:

Mysterious in the light of day
Nature cannot be robbed of its veil,
And what it may not reveal to your spirit,
You cannot force it out with levers and screws.

This does not mean — neither in Paracelsus's nor in Goethe's sense — that the spirit of nature cannot be explored, but rather that the spirit in nature reveals itself to the spirit awakened in the soul, but not to the instruments we form in the laboratory, not to levers and screws. That is why Goethe says: “What it may not reveal to your spirit, you cannot force out of it with levers and screws.” But it can reveal it to the spirit. That is the correct interpretation of Goethe's words. For Goethe, in creating a reflection of Paracelsus in “Faust,” was in complete agreement with Paracelsus, and Paracelsus would have had to accept Goethe's inspired words as valid:

Whoever wants to recognize and describe something living,
First seeks to drive out the spirit,
Then he has the parts in his hand,
Unfortunately, only the spiritual bond is missing.

And Goethe adds, when he first conceived Faust, as he himself was still youthfully exuberant and did not belong to the “cat-pure and super-fine” in the sense of Paracelsus:

Encheiresin naturae calls it chemistry,
Drills itself an ass and does not know how.

He later changed this to:

Mocks itself and does not know how,

as we now find it in “Faust.” But this means that no one who approaches nature without the developed higher powers of cognition can recognize the reasons of nature, nor can they recognize how the immortal spirit of man is connected to nature, how it resembles it, or, in the words of Jakob Böhme, where it “originated.”

If one traces the path from Paracelsus to Goethe, as we have attempted to do today in a few strokes, one finds that Paracelsus and Goethe are living adherents of the other principle, not the principle of those views of nature and the world that they sought to express with Goethe's saying:

Whoever wants to recognize and describe something living,
First seeks to drive out the spirit,
Then he has the parts in his hand,
Unfortunately, only the spiritual bond is missing.

No! Paracelsus and Goethe approach nature and human nature in such a way that the following applies to them:

Those who wish to recognize and understand living things
Seek to find the light of the spirit in the essence of beings.
Then they will have the parts in their hands,
And they will never again misjudge
The truth of things in the spiritual bond.