Goethe and the Present

GA 68c — 6 March 1908, Amsterdam

XXIII. Theosophy, Goethe and Hegel

I. Excerpt from a Dutch brochure

The above was the title of a lecture given by Rudolf Steiner in Amsterdam on Thursday evening in the “Van het Nut” building.

The speaker, introduced to his audience as the General Secretary (Chairman) of the German Section of the Theosophical Society, began by describing the concept of Theosophy. Theosophy wants to be a movement to deepen our spiritual life. And it is fair to say that Theosophy in our time represents what we perceive as a great movement in the whole cultural world.

The speaker then points out the growing internationalism and the continued disappearance of the walls between people and people, between nations and nations, over the centuries. In the material field, we see the banker, the industrialist, the merchant playing an important role here. But all of this as material phenomena are consequences of the existence of common ideas, the internationalization of ideas.

What we saw in earlier centuries (and even now) in the religious sphere, dividing one person from another and one people from another, is magnificently bridged by Theosophy, and this is only possible because the theosophical spiritual current extends to the deepest foundations of spiritual life.

It is not the theosophical attitude that says, “How is it possible that we have come so wonderfully far,” and looks back with a certain pity at the old “childlike” beliefs.

We in Theosophy have completely turned away from the delusion that we can look down on what humanity has achieved in earlier times.

In order to show the relationship between Goethe, the poet, and Hegel, the philosopher, and the theosophical view of life, the speaker will present the latter in a few basic principles:

The first principle is that this visible world is based on an invisible world; secondly, that man can get to know a supersensible world behind the sensual world. But: the supersensible world cannot be reached with ordinary sensual perception. Theosophy is not concerned with magic, with superstition, with falling back into old fantasies. The one who perceives not only the facts of the material world, but also the spiritual causes of it, becomes aware of a higher faculty within himself.

Dr. Steiner then gives a favorite example of a person who was born blind and underwent an operation. A world of perception opens up for him. An infinity of light and color flows into his eye that now sees, of which the person previously had no concept and could not form an idea. As a citizen of the lower nature kingdoms through his lower nature, the human being belongs on the other hand through his higher nature to the realm of the higher worlds, from which his being is built. And so the human being stands with his inner being between two realms.

Now we see the life of the individual human being playing out externally between birth and death, and we see how he becomes richer and richer in experience through the perception of the external world. And we ask ourselves: What is it and where is it that the human being has taken in during all this time? What we have absorbed is transformed by death into a seed for a different development. The sum of our life experiences has reached our soul, and at the moment of death the fruit of life presents itself as a seed. In a new life, in a new embodiment, the seed unfolds. We can perceive this in the development of a person from the moment of birth.

What we perceive cannot be explained by this one life alone. Just as the plant germ leads us to an earlier plant, so this spiritual soul germ leads us to an earlier spiritual life. This is what is usually called reincarnation.

Each life enriches the soul with the fruits of life, and each life the person enters richer: Everything we have within us, we have acquired in previous lives. And we also know that the thoughts living in this world are the fruit of earlier human development. But we see that both the old fairy tales and myths and what we currently call our science are only forms of human development – and that we will later achieve other and higher forms of this development.

When we survey all this, we are able to build a bridge to the poet Goethe and to the philosopher Hegel. From the very beginning, we find a basis for theosophical feelings in the whole being of Goethe. Even as a boy, Goethe was trying to find his own divine spiritual nature through his spiritual experiences.

The seven-year-old boy cannot recognize the external religious forms of his time as his own, so he builds himself an altar on a lectern and places stones and plants from his father's geological collection on it: natural products that he perceives as expressions of divine life. And then he wants to light a sacrificial fire, and he lets the first rays of the rising sun fall through a burning glass and ignite the sacrificial candle on the altar he has erected himself.

As an artist, too, he seeks nothing but the great life of the supersensible world, for example on his Italian travels. He also says that art is the most worthy interpreter of the spiritual world. One should also look at his letters to Winckelmann, where he describes his view that everything that exists in nature in terms of order, harmony and measure is reflected in man, where it exults to the highest peak of perfection.

Schiller writes to Goethe: “Dearest friend, I have been watching the course of your spirit for a long time, albeit from afar.” — “You are taking a difficult path, but you will surely find it... etc. From the very beginning, Goethe feels that he was born out of the spiritual-cosmic nature.

That Goethe recognized the spiritual in man is shown not only by a poem from the 1790s, “The Mysteries,” in which he speaks of the Rosicrucian symbol: the black cross with the red roses; he gives his creed even more beautifully in the fairy tale of the beautiful lily and the green snake and in his Faust poem. The speaker refers to Goethe's letters to Eckermann, where he says that his Faust can be viewed from two perspectives: firstly, it is something for people in the theater, but then there is also something in it for the initiate who sees the spiritual life behind the sensual life of man. Those who do not have that, the dying and becoming, remain only a dull guest on this dark earth.

Then the speaker points out other things that are so well known to most people, but understood by so few, and certainly not by most commentators on Goethe: in the prologue, where Goethe speaks of the “harmony of the spheres” and the heavenly choirs; in the reappearance of the figure of Helen in the second part, Helen who had already died; and finally on the homunculus, with which he wants to imply nothing other than that which is human, from embodiment to embodiment: the soul: He was all too happy to be embodied.

The speaker is briefer with regard to Hegel, namely because of the already advanced time of the assembly. Hegel is a contemporary and in many respects the student of Goethe. He understood everything about Goethe, except for the theosophical basis. Hegel shows how far one can come who does not know the above-mentioned foundations of Theosophy.

Take a glass of water: you can only draw water from it if it is in it. And man can only draw wisdom from a world that is itself built of wisdom. Hegel strove to prove this.

Hegel recognizes the world of ideas as a coherent spiritual world, independent of nature, and he calls this world pure logic. For Hegel, “logos” has the meaning of: the great original plan of the world, the sum of the ideas that underlie this world.

The speaker then points out the well-known systematics of Hegel and follows how he speaks of the three sides of the ideas: - the idea in itself - the idea in nature, spread out in space and time, where it will become self-aware, descending into different forms, to humans and further - then the idea, returning to its own pure essence, having become self-aware.

But, says the speaker, Hegel carries within himself all the limitations of his time. We must not see the philosophical lines alone, nor consider the “world of ideas” as something absolute. (The speaker seemed to mean: not as a concrete thing).

For Hegel, the scientific view of the world had become an absolute, and one always has the feeling that Hegel means that when man has grasped the world of ideas, humanity has come to its end. Hegel knew nothing of the infinity of forms through which the world of ideas gradually becomes conscious in successive lives, and that man must learn the logos of feeling as well as the logos of idea to live and experience. From Hegel's philosophy, a kind of materialism emerged.

[After speaking] tirelessly for almost two full hours with great mental strength, this extraordinary speaker concluded his lecture with the apt words of Goethe:

If the eye were not solar,
how could the sun delight us?
If the soul were not divine,
how could the divine delight us!

II. Report in the “Algemeen Handelsblad” of March 7, 1908

Theosophy, Goethe and Hegel.

The above topic was discussed yesterday evening at the 'Nutsgebouw' in a large public meeting convened by the Dutch Section of the Theosophical Society, with Dr. Rudolf Steiner, Secretary General of the German Section, as the speaker.

The speaker – an interesting figure: a sharply defined, ascetic thinker with deep, sparkling black eyes and long, matt black hair swept back; on top of that, a talented speaker – began his talk with a summary of the essence of Theosophy and its teachings.

He spoke of the possibility, so familiar and encouraging to those who have immersed themselves in theosophical ideas, but still so shocking, imposing, not to say fearsome, for novices, that man outgrows the physical, sensually perceptible world that surrounds him directly and moves and develops on a supersensible level of existence, thus elevating itself above itself; the possibility that man, not through magic or with the help of all kinds of superstition, but by cultivating the faculties of the soul that lie dormant within him, seeks and finds the spiritual foundations on which his sensual existence is based.

Dr. Steiner went on to speak of the doctrine of reincarnation, according to which the human soul, gathering life experience in a series of lives, grows in abilities, faculties and aspects, unfolding again and again in a new life as an effect, a consequence, a result of previous lives, and then, enriched by new experience, moving back to a state of condensation and concentration to finally fight his way up from the world of unconscious feeling, from which it was born, through the world of ideas or conscious feeling, to that world plan where the unity of knowledge and will will be born from the consciousness of ideas and the human soul will return to the eternal-spiritual core of existence from which the universe emerged.

The boy Goethe was already aware of this eternal spiritual core of existence. He built himself an altar of plants and minerals to glorify all creation, and he lit the incense candle on it in the sun, the eternal greatest manifestation of the eternal God.

Having also reached male puberty, he did not stop searching for the transcendental foundations of all that exists. Traveling in Italy and admiring ancient art treasures, he wrote to his friends in Weimar about his discovery of the “necessity of creativity-God”.

And also: “I suspect that the ancient Greeks created a work of art according to the same laws by which nature also performs its creative work, laws [that] I am on the trail of.”

And later, still in his work on Winckelmann, he wrote: “Everything that nature possesses in terms of order, harmony and measure is summarized in man.

Other great fundamental ideas on which Theosophy is based also dominated Goethe and are expressed in his works.

Thus, his unfinished work “The Mysteries,” dating from 1780, is an apt summary of theosophical ideas, where the doctrine of reincarnation is recognized in this beautiful image: “From the mouth of this pilgrim flows wisdom, as from a child's lips.

And again, in the fairy tale of the green snake and the beautiful lily, but especially in the second part of “Faust,” we find recognition of this teaching and other apt interpretations of Goethe's theosophical ideas.

Without going into detail, we could not follow the speaker in his quotations. We will just mention his surprising explanation of the enigmatic “homunculus figure” from the second part of Faust as a human soul on the path to reincarnation.

Dr. Steiner also sensed the great fundamental thoughts of the world that Goethe had “secreted into the poem” in Hegel's philosophy. He too recognized God, the Logos — this word traced back to its original meaning — in the “original idea of the world”. He saw the sum of ideas underlying the sensually perceptible existence, which thus becomes an image of the “spirit in itself”. And in the isolated subjective spirit of the human being, Hegel saw and honored the macrocosm reflected as microcosm.

But Hegel's absolutism, born of the worldview limitations of his time, prevented him from going further. The continuous development of the human soul as a microcosm until unity with the cosmic core is achieved is not recognized by him. But this does not detract from the greatness – now mostly misunderstood greatness of his basic idea, which was purely theosophical, like Goethe's when he wrote:

If eyes did not see the sun, How could light delight us then. If in us were no God's power, How could divinity delight us then.

With this quotation Dr. Steiner ended his lecture, which was listened to with great interest by the numerous audience of ladies and gentlemen.