Goethe and the Present

GA 68c — 29 March 1904, Berlin

IX. Introduction to Goethe's Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily

Goethe is one of those minds in world history that have always inspired a very special response in observers. If you approach a poem or any other of Goethe's works, regardless of which one – I emphasize that this also applies to Goethe's so-called scientific writings – at any age, you will find beauty and depth, wisdom and art in abundance in all of his works. You will encounter satisfaction from reading or any other kind of contemplation. If, perhaps after years, you approach the same work of Goethe, having matured in the meantime, having come to know the world and people yourself, you will discover that when you first approached Goethe's work, you overlooked a great deal in it, that you were unable to recognize the abundance of wisdom, beauty, depth and truth in Goethe's works. This is the case with all great and significant people in world history. And one certainly comes to know the actual significance of the truly leading spirits precisely from the circumstance that, when one approaches them, one discovers something new in them again and again, depending on the degree of spiritual maturity that one has attained. And then there is the added fact that these discoveries, so to speak, never reach an end in human life. With Goethe, if we study his truly fundamental works from five to five years, we discover something new every five years, provided that we ourselves continue to develop and do not remain at the level we have once attained. We see into an almost unfathomable depth when we begin to understand Goethe's work.

This is how it is with Goethe's “Faust”. Anyone who has seriously approached Goethe's “Faust” will be able to say, in a completely different sense than is often claimed, that Goethe's “Faust” really does contain a kind of modern gospel. If the statement that a kind of modern gospel is contained in Goethe's Faust is justified, then the statement that the little-known poem, the so-called Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily contains Goethe's apocalypse, Goethe's secret revelation, is equally justified.

This fairy tale of the green snake and the beautiful lily contains Goethe's world view and philosophy of life in their depths. Those who read this fairy tale for the first time will usually be able to make little of it. Those who try to gain the key to it will first recognize that Goethe wanted to express something special through this fairy tale. This fairy tale of the green snake and the beautiful lily can be found in every major edition of Goethe's works. I emphasize this because I have been asked again and again: Where can I find the “fairy tale”? If you look it up in the “Conversations of German Emigrants,” you will find it at the end. This fairy tale is designed, as it were, as a completely independent piece of writing.

Before the reading of the “fairy tale” by Ms. H[olger], let me just say a few words about how Goethe came to write this fairy tale. It was in the mid-1790s, when Goethe was at the height of his creative powers. It was the time when he had gained that deep insight into nature that is expressed in his scientific writings. It was the time when he had completed the first part of Faust, which was published as a fragment in 1790. It was during this time that the idea came to him of developing Faust into a great, comprehensive picture of humanity. This work of Goethe's, which was found sealed in his estate when he died, presents itself to us as the second part of Faust. Eckermann spoke repeatedly about this second part of Faust. I would like to emphasize just one characteristic saying. Goethe says: Those who enjoy my second part of Faust as a series of dramatic images may have an aesthetic pleasure. But there will also be those who, from time to time, will intuitively recognize what I have secretly hidden in these images. And Goethe again indicates in his conversations with Eckermann that in the second part of Faust, there is a hidden, as we would say in theosophical language, an esoteric meaning. A meaning that is hidden behind the images, which one then expresses in the way that Goethe did in the second part of Faust. When we find the ordinary language of the intellect, the language of words, too poor, too dry, too barren, too sober, too mundane to express the rich abundance of the spirit that we have to present when we want to express our own deep opinion about the life of the world. The esotericists, the priests of wisdom of all times, spoke in a pictorial language. The deeper we enter into the world of ancient legends, the more we recognize that this world of legends contains symbolic disguises of great, eternal truths. It was in this sense that Goethe spoke in the second part of Faust. But he spoke even more in this sense in the fairy tale of the green snake and the beautiful lily.

In 1794, he described how he had once again set out to solve for himself the problem that occupied the minds of the time. The problem or question of human destiny, or the problem of freedom. After the great struggles for freedom had stirred hearts in Germany and France, the problem of freedom was also that of the greatest minds. Schiller was involved and he asked himself: Is a person free who is trapped in eternal necessity? Are his actions to be understood as taking place with inner necessity, like external natural phenomena with the external? Like a falling stone, or in such a way that they arise from within the person himself and he is the author of his actions? Is man a free being? That is the question that occupied not only the great minds, but the hearts of all people. Hegel, Fichte, Schelling, Novalis, the Schlegel brothers, and so on, belong in this circle. The problem of freedom is a heart problem. Schiller dealt with freedom in one of his most important works, his “Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man”. He argued that man is a threefold being, that on the one hand he is subject to nature, and there is man in terms of corporeality. Then, at the highest pinnacle of his being, we have man as a rational being, as a spiritual being. There, according to Schiller's extraordinarily spirited explanations, he is governed by the laws of eternal life, eternal truth and goodness. These laws permeate human life. Man cannot escape them because he is clear about the fact that his destiny can only be achieved in the realm of truth and goodness. Body and mind are the two poles. And Schiller says: even the mind is subject to necessity, to logical and dutiful necessity. In this area, there can be no question of freedom, because man cannot be free. Nor can the spirit be free, for it would have to voluntarily submit to the laws of truth and goodness. On the one hand, we have the necessity of nature, on the other hand, the necessity of the spirit. Between nature and spirit, Schiller interposes the soul of man. The soul, which is in the middle, and as the connecting link between body and spirit, constitutes the actual personality of man. That which causes man to experience joy and sorrow, that which rises above natural necessity and has not yet ascended to the brazen necessity of reason. On the other hand, there is the duty of eternal truth and eternal goodness, which has a compelling effect on man. But joy and sorrow take up our laws of goodness and truth in such a way that they develop sympathy for them in their souls, that they bring them to the spirit. Thus Schiller says: “Nature's necessity is raised up to the spirit and [truth] and goodness are brought down and felt as beauty. And in this way it is incorporated.” In the sense of Schiller, Kant emphasized the eternal necessity too harshly in his categorical imperative. Schiller rejected this with the words: “No categorical imperative!”

I am happy to serve my friend, but unfortunately I do it with inclination, and so it bothers me that I am not virtuous.

– because he does not make service a matter of compelling natural necessity. Man should not be so deeply immersed in his passions that they pull him down. He should inspire them and elevate them. On the other hand, he should allow himself to be imbued by the laws of the good and the true, so that he can surrender himself to his inclinations and his inclinations give him a soul that represents eternal necessary truth and goodness. That is Schiller's problem of natural necessity. At its center stands freedom, that is Schiller's solution.

But Goethe says that all problems in man can only be solved if they are considered in the context of the greater world. He says to himself: I also want to solve the problem, but in a different way. I need a rich, comprehensive imaginative life to solve this problem. Man is a small world, and when I consider him in the context of the cosmos, then I can solve this problem.

Therefore, Goethe puts all the imagery that he has acquired from his studies to date at the service of solving this question. On the other hand, he puts all the experiences he has had as a truly spiritual participant in the work of Freemasonry at this service. It was through Freemasonry that he was able to absorb the ideas he wanted to express. Therefore, all of this must be taken into account in order to somehow solve this Goethean fairy tale of the green snake and the beautiful lily, which is so rich in content. People already tried to solve it during Goethe's lifetime. And Goethe himself said: “I do not want to talk about the ‘fairy tale’ before there are a hundred solutions from others.” There were not that many at the time, or they did not come to his attention. But then many, all too many solutions came. People have tried to solve it from the point of view of criticism, of rationalists, from a purely Masonic point of view and so on. But these are only individual points of view and are not sufficient. They are one-sided points of view. If time permits, we will make at least a few suggestions and comments after the lecture by Miss Holger about what Goethe wants to say with this enigmatic fairy tale. I will therefore only say that today, with the short time, I can only give hints. For those who want to delve deeper, I would like to draw attention to the lecture on “Goethe as a Theosophist,” where I will try to show the depth of his world view.