Goethe and the Present

GA 68c — 28 August 1899, Berlin

V. Goethe and the Present

I. Report in the “Deutsche Warte - Tageblatt für Politik und Gesellschaft, geistiges und wirtschaftliches Leben” from August 29, 1899

On Monday evening, the Freie Volksbühne held a Goethe celebration in Keller's Festsäle at Koppenstraße 29, which was attended by a large number of members and guests. Dr. Rudolf Steiner spoke about: “Goethe and the Present”. The speaker presented Goethe as a child of the 18th century, but at the same time as a man of the future who placed science above all other things. Even as a boy, he had instinctively sensed the scientific worldview of the future, and early on had opposed the prevailing worldview. At the age of six, on the occasion of the great earthquake in Lisbon, in which thousands died, he rejected the idea of a benevolent God and created his own natural religion. The same thoughts had guided him during his studies in Leipzig, where he had enthusiastically followed the natural science lectures but had stayed away from the philosophy classes. Thus, he became convinced that man is a natural product, like any other, and has not received any special moral qualities from a higher being, and he expressed this conviction in the words: “Noble, helpful and good, let each one be, for that alone distinguishes him from all other creatures we know.” A new idea of God then emerged for him from the sight of Greek works of art in Italy, as he expressed in his “Hymn to Nature”: “She, nature, has put me in, she will lead me out – I trust her.” The lecturer then went on to explain how the mighty spirit titan had undertaken to embody the entire workings of the world in a single idea handed down from the sixteenth century, in “Faust”, the contrasting figure to Luther. In Faust, Goethe wanted to show how man can find satisfaction through his own deeds; however, he was unable to carry out his work because he was not a man of action, but an artist who observed. This truth also emerges when we look at his personal life – Goethe was an experimenter in life. Now followed a detailed discussion of “Faust,” as it has become, along with a description of the individual phases of the Olympian's life and the influence these had on his work.

II. Report at the “Freie Volksbühne” in October 1899

In accordance with the decision of the last general assembly, the association's board had organized a Goethe celebration on August 28, 1899 in Keller's festival halls. Dr. Rudolf Steiner had been won for the evening. He gave a lively lecture that captivated the audience and said roughly the following:

One does not show proper reverence to a mind like Goethe's by engaging in blind worship, but rather by separating the lasting aspects of his creations from the ephemeral trappings, in which he reveals himself to be only a child of his time. Goethe is the herald of the scientific world view that is bearing fruit in the present, and at the same time the son of the eighteenth century. Despite its enlightenment, this century could not rise above the prejudice that man is a special, higher being than other creatures of nature; it could not come to the realization that nature produces man according to the same eternal and necessary laws as the simplest animal or plant creature. The assumption of a creative God outside and above nature was held fast. From his earliest youth, Goethe worshipped nature as the only gradual, creative entity. He sought to gain insight into the course of world events not through supernatural truths but by immersing himself in the natural sciences. He also saw only higher natural laws at work in the work of artists. When he saw the works of art of the ancient Greeks in Italy, he became convinced that they had been created according to the same laws that nature itself follows. He wrote down the words “There is necessity, there is God” after seeing these works of art. In the prime of his career, Goethe's work was a service to nature. Goethe gave the most forceful rejection of all supernatural deities in his Prometheus. Everything that man can be and become, he should strive for out of himself, not through the prospect of an otherworldly existence. He originally wanted to express this idea in his Faust as well. The aim was to show that man can achieve a satisfying existence by developing his own powers. Nothing of heaven and hell, of God and devil, was contained in the Faust plan which Goethe had in mind in the early seventies in Frankfurt. Instead of the later God, there was at that time the Earth Spirit, who is only a personification of the forces of nature; and Mephistopheles was not conceived as the devil, but as the embodiment of evil; he was not a messenger of God, but of the Earth Spirit. When, at the end of the 1890s, Schiller encouraged Goethe to continue Faust, a break in his world view had already occurred. He had interwoven his earlier ideas, through which he had become the prophet of the nineteenth century, with the thoughts of a dying time. He could no longer finish Faust as he had begun it. He introduces God and the devil into the poem. These now become the main characters, fighting for Faust's soul. Faust, a great character, an image of striving humanity, became a plaything in the hands of heavenly and infernal powers. This is how Faust says in the first part of the poem of the earth spirit:

You lead the line of the living before me, and teach me to know my brothers in the silent bush, in the air and water,

in other words, how a Darwinian understands nature and man together as a single great unity. And in the second part, the same Faust is redeemed not by his own strength but by the blessed host, because “love from above” has taken hold of him. The Goethe who drafted the first plan for Faust continues to influence our views and perceptions to this day; the Goethe who completed Faust belongs to the eighteenth century. The speaker was thanked with enthusiastic applause.