Goethe and the Present

GA 68c — 15 June 1908, Munich

XXIV. Goethe, Hegel and Theosophy

Many readers of Goethe's Faust will feel something very significant for every human soul and heart when they hear the poet's words resound, which depict how Faust, this representative of humanity's highest aspirations, how this Faust, after having gone through everything that can be our science of the most diverse branches can achieve, stands at a loss, struggling for a knowledge that means more than the satisfaction of the theoretical needs of the mind, that encompasses everything that is most needed by man in his darkest hours, for consolation and for uplifting of life, for strength of existence and for creativity in reality. And when we are pointed by the poet's words to a possibility of soaring beyond mere intellectual theory into the realm of the spiritual world, when we are pointed to the fact that there is something higher to be gained than theory and wisdom of the mind, it may well may well urge us, if we are interested in what is to be incorporated under the name of theosophy into modern spiritual paths, to look at what has flowed into German cultural life through Goethe from this particular angle. We may be urged to look into what actually lies behind that expression of Goethe's when, as Faust, he beholds the sign of the macrocosm before his eyes, he says that he now knows what the wise man means by the words:

The spiritual world is not closed,
Your mind is closed, your heart is dead!
Rise up, bathe, disciple, undaunted
The earthly breast in the morning dawn!

This is, in a sense, an invitation from Goethe's work itself to be viewed from the standpoint of spiritual science. Such a consideration of the work of great personalities who have had a profound effect on cultural life is very much in the realm of spiritual science, for this science can never fall into the error of other currents in claiming that everything that is truly valuable in terms of human knowledge has been created only through them. Mankind could then have little trust in a realization that would arise with the saying: “Like a shot from a pistol, it has only just been created.” Since human thinking and striving has existed, people have searched for truth. Should all those who preceded the truth researchers in question have searched in vain, only to be caught up in error?

How can we behave in a manner befitting a worthy attitude if we keep saying how we have come so gloriously far precisely with our wisdom? Theosophy does not make such demands. It seeks only to have the ancient wisdom that has always flowed into the hearts of those who have striven for truth and wisdom put into a special form and shape; this shall be given a new form that corresponds to the present life. Therefore, it is part of the task of Theosophy to inquire of the great minds of the past how their striving relates to what we are exploring today through our spiritual science.

We choose one who has achieved something so significant, Goethe, and if we place next to him someone who is unknown today and has been so for a long time, not unknown by name but by what he has wanted and commanded, Hegel, , then today's reflections may show us how, precisely, theosophical life makes it possible for us to appreciate some of the unrecognized, because theosophy is an instrument for finding and recognizing depths that would not be revealed in any other way. If we first immerse ourselves in Goethe, it is truly not difficult for us to find in his nature that basic trait of spiritual-scientific will and knowledge, which is characterized by seeing the invisible of the spiritual world in everything visible.

In everything visible we see the outer physiognomy of a spiritual, the outer expression of something supersensible, just as we see in the human countenance the expression of what lives in the spirit, in the soul. But we must not look at Goethe as some sycophants do, saying that Goethe had in his mind's eye what all mankind longs for, but was unwilling to express in clear words, unable to express it in quite definite forms of words, and that he sought to express it here in more obscure, nebulous feelings. The Swabian Vischer, the author of “Auch Einer”, has already raged about the fact that one wants to find Goethe's creed in the fact that Faust speaks to Gretchen:

Feeling is everything;
name is sound and smoke,
fogging up heavenly glow.

As true as that was in conversation with Gretchen, it is just as untrue in all other respects, for not everyone who has a sincere aspiration wants a Gretchen wisdom, although in many cases it is only striven for as a Gretchen wisdom. But in Goethe, something quite different had been alive from his youth, from his boyhood on. If we follow him back to his childhood, we do not find any kind of spiritual-scientific knowledge, but we do find the same emotional formation of the soul, the whole attitude of a theosophically thinking person. We see the seven-year-old boy unsatisfied by all kinds of emotional experiences from all the external religious forms that flow to him from his surroundings; but he can vaguely sense and feel a higher spiritual reality. He searches his father's botanical collection for all kinds of plants, selects all kinds of mineral objects and places them on a music stand, which is his altar. And already in his boyhood, in his yearning child's soul, he wants to make a sacrifice to the great God of nature, as he later calls him in clear words, who is conjured up by what happens in the world, he wants to bring him so mysteriously before his soul. He takes a small incense stick, places it on top and, by focusing the first rays of the morning sun, ignites the candle. In this way, he performs his sacrifice with a candle lit by the forces of nature itself. Even as a boy, he thinks of what is hidden and enchanted behind the physiognomy of nature. And that remained in his soul throughout his life. It sounds wonderful to us when we hear his prose hymn, which he speaks to a writer as an expression of what nature means to him, soon after his arrival in Weimar. It is the hymn “Nature”:

Nature! We are surrounded and embraced by it – unable to step out of it, and unable to get deeper into it. Uninvited and unwarned, she takes us into the cycle of her dance and carries on with us until we are tired and fall out of her arms.

Or when we think of the great words: everything is nature. She invented death in order to have much life. And so it goes on. Goethe himself later confessed that the poem was based on the idea that a spirit dwells in all natural processes, just as a spirit also underlies everything that is personal. He seeks the physiognomy of spiritual life; through this we see him driven to observe nature in its interrelationships. We cannot go into detail about him as a naturalist here, but we may point out that he goes beyond what was to become his specialized field of study in every respect. We see in him everywhere the endeavor, which can already be seen during his student years, that the individual natural object should provide him with information about the interrelationships in life. To this end, he later studied in Weimar; he attended Loder's lectures on bone structure, comparative anatomy and so on. He did not want to consider only the fragmented parts of nature; we see from this that on his Italian journey he wrote: “After all that I have seen here of plants and animals, I would like to make a journey to India, not to explore new things, but to look at the old in my own way.” His way of looking at things, however, is to see writing in everything, which mysteriously expresses the spiritual life behind it. That Goethe has this in mind becomes particularly clear to us when we see how he brings all life under one point of view, under one perspective. In Italy, he gains an initial idea of what Greek art can mean to his great mind. Before that, he had discussed many things with Herder. He educated himself through Spinoza's thinking to the idea of a divine-creative essence behind the phenomena; but he was not satisfied with this. He wanted to recognize a divine-spiritual essence in man himself. He writes to his friends from Italy, as he stands before the work of art that has given him the secret of Greek art: There is necessity, there is God. I have the feeling that the Greeks proceeded according to the same laws by which nature works, and I am on their trail.

Thus, art is the continuation of nature's creative process. The artist should immerse himself in the laws of the world and then continue nature's work; what nature allows to pass from the supersensible to the sensual at a lower level, the artist should do at a higher level. In his book on Winckelmann, he says:

When the healthy nature of man works as a whole, when he feels in the world as in a great, beautiful, dignified and valuable whole, when harmonious comfort gives him pure, free delight - then the universe, if it could feel itself, would exult as if it had reached its goal and would admire the summit of its own becoming and being.

Thus, for Goethe, the human spirit is that which already lives in the strict nature, in rocks and plants, what develops there through the animal, becomes conscious for Goethe in the innermost human being, and when man pours his spirit into forms, then he himself creates as higher nature beyond himself. But this was something he was born with, to see the spirit in everything he saw, it was natural for him, so natural that the momentous conversation between Goethe and Schiller after a lecture by Batsch in Jena could take place. Schiller remarked afterwards that there was always something bleak about looking at nature only in detail and never as a whole. Goethe replied that one could also proceed differently, one could also go from the whole to the parts and base one's actual observation on the spiritual. He then drew the symbolic picture of a plant and said of it that it was the original plant and contained all others within itself; with it, one could form and invent new plants in any way, from the lowest to the highest plants. Schiller, who at that time could not rise to such heights, soon worked his way to this view himself. But now he replied to Goethe that what he had sketched was not an experience, but an idea. Goethe did not understand this at all, but rather thought that if it was an idea, then he saw his idea with his eyes. Here two worldviews stand starkly opposed to each other. Schiller believed that he could only grasp the spiritual through abstraction; Goethe through the beholding of the idea with spiritual eyes. Goethe was clear about the fact that the spirit lives in everything, that creative spirits prevail under the sensual, and Goethe not only developed this world view in a theoretical way, but he also embedded this world view in his works, in everything he did in a poetic way. This is particularly evident when we try to grasp the depth of the second part of Faust.

At that time, this world view was by no means limited to Goethe or found only in a few people; rather, it was an intellectual atmosphere in which Germany's best minds lived at the time, and Hegel also grew out of this intellectual philosophy. Of course, for many who have only heard a little about Hegel, he is a dismissed philosopher, one of the great bearers of error of the past. When people approach great minds, they behave very strangely. There is a beautiful writing by a Russian scholar, Chwolson: Hegel, Haeckel and the Twelfth Commandment. In it, a good characterization is given in a certain way. The author is an excellent physicist; he is good at drawing the conclusions that can rightly be drawn from our present-day world view. His twelfth commandment is actually very self-evident; but it is not understood by many. It reads: “You shall never write anything about which you know nothing!” Those who are well-versed in intellectual life know that Chwolson does not understand Hegel; so he is a perfect example of his commandment. It is easy to ridicule when something is taken out of context. One must know the whole context. Hegel is a mind that was ripe, very ripe, but was only coming into its own for the first time with its own ideas. Born in Stuttgart as early as 1770, he published his first work, which for those who are superficial in spiritual matters is perhaps in many ways quite incomprehensible today, only in his old age. But this work should be deeply significant for anyone who wants to scale heights in spiritual life. It is the “Phenomenology of Spirit”. It must appear to us as if it springs from spiritual life through its outward genesis.

He shows that he was able to disregard the things of the external world in the utmost concentration. It took tremendous intensity of spiritual power to write these subtle things; the last pages were written while the cannons thundered in the Battle of Jena. There this work was completed, which was to introduce us to the spiritual world. And he always took his time; almost a decade later his “Logic” was published, and we also have an encyclopedia and a work on jurisprudence by him. The majority of his works emerged from his lectures through his students. It is difficult to give just one picture of the meaning and spirit of Hegel's teaching in a few words, but it is perhaps possible to give a broad outline. There has been much ridicule because Hegel wanted to construct the whole world, all objective being out of the spirit, out of the idea, because he first builds up nothing but concepts, nothing but a world of ideas that can only be followed through the human intellect; therefore, it is said that he did not research experience, but wanted to get everything out of the spirit, which one can only experience in this way by examining nature. This is where the greatest error in judging Hegel lies; it is quite wrong to say that Hegel wanted to spin the whole world a priori out of his head. He was quite clear that reality was spread out in space, but he also knew that behind this objective reality there are spiritual connections that man grasps in the images of ideas. What could he do about seeing the idea in things? He explored the world empirically, but he just saw more than the others. Nature also gave him the ideas beyond the gross material, just as it was with Goethe. Could Goethe and Hegel help it that the others could not find these ideas? Those who can't find them then believe that Hegel spun them out of his head. Lichtenberg, the great German humorist, once spoke of a book and a human being and said: When a book and a human head collide and it sounds hollow, it is not always the fault of the book. And when the human head and nature collide and the head remains empty because it cannot find any ideas, it is truly not nature's fault. Hegel made it his task to erect that which expands in space into the mighty structure of ideas that he calls his logic. That fabric of ideas, of which he figuratively says that it is the god that he was before the creation of nature. That was more than a figure to him. From abstract being to absolute being, one has something before oneself like a creation. He says: The diamond web of concepts and ideas is something in which the things of nature are woven. This web became a mirror image for him, from which nature apparently comes to meet him again. He follows nature through all its stages to show how it is the idea, the creative thought, that lives in everything. He considers the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms, then the human being; he shows how the human spirit gradually becomes more and more perfect until it stands out through understanding and reason to the contemplation of the spirit in the external world. It is a gigantic edifice that rises before us, even if it is flawed in detail. It is a building that anyone can construct, and at the same time it is a good training, since one concept necessarily arises from the other, and every conceptual mass must fit into what is created in ideas. At most, we only find a similar necessity where the human mind delves into the connections provided by mathematics. There will come a time when we will again ascend to this significant schooling of the spirit.

When we try to sense how spirit and nature are combined in Goethe and Hegel, do we not feel the spirit of theosophical perception? Yes, we do feel it. Only one thing will be missing for the spiritual scientist in Hegel, which he finds in Goethe in the words of “Faust”, which Goethe calls “Chorus mysticus”:

All that is transient
Is but a parable;
The inadequate
Here it becomes an event;
The indescribable
Here it is done;
The eternal feminine
Draws us on.

Let us take the first three lines. We see nature as it arises and passes away in its individual parts; everything that has to go through birth and death is a parable for the eternal, the transcendental, for everything that stands behind it. Here, Hegel is a kindred spirit to Goethe; he, the philosopher, expresses the same thing intellectually: “All that is transitory in nature is a parable of the eternal world of ideas.” Then follows something that the poet could aspire to, but that was lost to the philosopher:

The inadequate,
here it becomes an event;
the indescribable,
here it is done.

If we feel these words correctly, we notice here where Hegel's purely logical explanation of the world is lacking. We can also apply the tighter discipline in this ascent to this network of concepts and ideas that lies behind the transitory. But there is something in this web of ideas that is inadequate, but which cannot become an event through intellectual contemplation alone. Hegel means: In this logical structure I have before me the God before He has entered into His appearance. But we must feel: Yes, you have something of the God who could have appeared to you as the great plan of the world, into which everything is fitted. But this web of ideas lacks life, and Hegel felt that.

The philosopher, the mere logician, cannot penetrate to the supersensible life. Here his mind, which was set up mainly for logic, could not penetrate. All idea is inadequate when it comes to letting the content flow out. From the realm of shadows, reality radiates when life comes to the structure of ideas. This life can only be found if man does not just stop at what is presented to his intellect, but must take the path to the stages of higher knowledge. Man must begin to let the spirit live in himself. For this, one needs a kind of knowledge that does not live only in sharply contoured concepts, but in what we have often mentioned here: in the realm of images and imagination, which represent a kind of knowledge that strives beyond all conceptualization. Behind all ideas lies a world of creative principles that is richer than all ideas. This is the inadequacy that can never enter into the idea, that must and can be experienced if one goes beyond the idea to the image that the poet has, or to the supersensible reality, to the spiritual. That is why the poet Goethe was able to approach what was missing for Hegel.

In the second part of Faust, Goethe comes as close as possible to what we today call a theosophical world view. He strives for nothing less than to include in the content of the highest spiritual human culture that which connects human beings to the great spiritual realm, which they sensed as children, sought as adults, and expressed in the fairy tale of the green snake and the beautiful lily. He really wants to place these secrets before his soul, secrets about the spiritual and sensual-physical aspects of the human being. He also seeks to do the same in the second part of Faust, but we must approach it with different eyes than those usually used by scholars. We must take something on board that will strike some of today's interpreters of Faust as something quite crazy; but we will find confirmed what Goethe says to Eckermann: “I have worked in such a way that those who only want something for their own external curiosity will get their money's worth, but for esotericists I have included many a secret.

First, Faust is led through the small world. After he has gone through sensual happiness and sensual misery, we see how he is to be accepted into a circle of ideas where the greatest secrets of the nature of the world are to become clear to him. He is introduced to the great world. Faust wishes to unite with the Greek Helen, who has long since died. She is to unite with Faust as a physical woman. For Faust and Goethe, Helena means something quite different than for most people. For them, she is the representative of the people and creativity that Goethe admired in the Greeks, of whom he said that they had come to the bottom of the secret of all natural creativity and hinted at it in their works of art.

But only if we are well prepared can we experience the mystery that the eternal, the immortal in man can come to us in a new embodiment; nothing less than the riddle of embodiment confronts us here. Faust strives for Helena – he touches her, but at first there is an explosion because he is not yet inwardly purified, and he must first grasp the secrets of the incarnation, which are shown to Faust step by step. For Goethe, the human being also consists of the physical human being, who represents the outer physicality of the human being, that which he has in common with all the surrounding minerals. Then there is also a second link in Goethe's view: the soul, the astral body, the carrier of desires and so on. For Goethe too, the spirit is supreme, for it is the true eternal essence that hurries from embodiment to embodiment, undergoing incarnation after incarnation. And Faust is to experience how spirit, soul and body come together to form this sensual world. He must first recognize where the eternal is when it is not physically embodied on earth. The eternal is in a purely spiritual realm. Therefore Faust must be led down into the spiritual realm, into that kingdom where the “Mothers” are, the primeval mothers of all spiritual beings. Mephistopheles stands by Faust's side with the key to the kingdom of the Mothers, which he hands over to Faust. That is what Mephistopheles can do; he can describe the outer realm, but he cannot enter into it. He is the representative of the purely intellectual human being; he even describes the realm as nothingness. Therefore, he is the representative of realism, of monism. One should reach the threshold of spiritual life; the strictest science has the key, but it only opens the door. Those who have only sensual experience still clearly speak the words of Mephisto that there is nothing in the spiritual realm. But Faust replies what should be replied even today:

In your nothingness I hope to find the All.

And Faust descends into the realm of the mothers and brings up the living eternal spirit of Helen, that which moves from embodiment to embodiment. Whoever follows and understands the description of the “realm of the mothers” will recognize the knower in Goethe in every word.

Sink then! I could also say: Rise!

In this realm, this is the same — our concepts of space are no longer sufficient. The Mothers sit on a glowing tripod. This is the symbolic suggestion for what is actually eternal in man, which is divided into: Manas, Budhi, Atma or spirit self, life spirit and spirit man. This symbol of the tripod, surrounded by the eternally creative mothers, expresses enough in such a meaningful place. The spirit that Faust brings must be enveloped in the astral and physical sheaths, and that is what happens. Goethe presents what stands between the spirit and the physical body in the middle of it, the astral world, in Homunculus. That which has nothing to do with anything in the physical world, which is created separately from the spirit of Helena, but which is later to connect with it, that is the astral in man, that which dwells in the physical body in man. Goethe does everything to point out that in Homunculus we have the astral in man. If the astral could be separated from the physical, then it would have to be clairvoyant – it would have to see clairvoyantly into the astral world. It is no longer clairvoyant in the physical body. And Goethe presents the homunculus as clairvoyant. As soon as he appears, he sees what Faust dreams; he sees the whole world of ideas of Faust. And if we go further – are we not clearly told:

He does not lack spiritual qualities,
but he is all too lacking in the tangible and practical.

– after all, he lacks the physical. Homunculus is a soul that wants to embody itself. In every word that is spoken, one can recognize Goethe's opinion in the indicated direction. But Goethe's words must also be understood in the right sense.

It will! The masses are stirring more clearly
The conviction of the true, the true.

We find this even in commentaries on Faust: in Wagner, the conviction of the true is stirring. But what is meant is that the astral nature begets in a way that is above human procreation. It is a conviction—like Übermensch. It is difficult for people to understand Goethe where he is esoteric. Even during his lifetime, he had to hear people always pointing out what he had poured into it from the abundance of his youthful nature and his poetic feeling, for which one does not need much to understand it. He dealt with such people nicely. A note was found in his estate:

They praise Faust
And what else
In my works
In their favor.
The old Mick and Mack
Is very pleased;
The pack of ragamuffins thinks
It's no longer them!

They also believe the spiritual researcher. Goethe points out in everything that he wants to characterize in Homunculus this second link of the human being, that this soul, before it can take up the spirit, must unite with all that is in the lower kingdoms of nature. We see how the astral passes through all the kingdoms of nature up to the human being. With Faust, Mephisto and Homunculus, he therefore leads us to the classical Walpurgis Night. This is an important chapter that tells us what Homunculus actually wants. There are the creative forces in nature, and Homunculus wants to learn the secret of how to structure the physical shell around himself as an astral being, how to start from the mineral kingdom in the lowest realm and put shell after shell around himself — up to the human realm you have time. In the transition from the mineral to the vegetable, Goethe finds the beautiful expression: “It grunelt so” (it grunts). It is then shown how he progresses further up to where he is ready to create a physical shell from the elements. That is when Eros appears, love. When a person wants to step out of the spiritual into the sensual, then, according to the great secrets, spirit, soul and body must combine. When the three unite, then the human being can appear before us in a sensual and spiritual way. Helena is docile, the eternal spirit has come up from the realm of the mothers. Homunculus has surrounded himself with sensual matter, united with the spirit, and Helena stands before us. The poet could not have portrayed the embodiment any differently. In the third act, the secret of becoming is presented.

The inadequate, here it becomes an event,

he says in summary, what he wants to express after this examination. There, where we ascend the higher path of knowledge to higher forms, there the spirit shows itself as creating, alive, there it is placed before our soul in a living form. And we see what the spirit must also have if it is not to be a mere specter of eternal ideas – it must have will. He suggests that it must not only have thoughts and concepts. The indescribable, that must be done, that is the will. He confronts us as a capacity for knowledge, where we feel the innermost source of the highest knowledge flowing in us. When we turn away from all sensual and physical things. Man can reach this level, and Faust has reached it. Goethe shows us this symbolically by making Faust go blind at the highest level, so that he cannot see the physical.

But within, a bright light shines.

We find ourselves in the deeds of the spiritual world:

The indescribable, here it is done,

that which cannot be described with words from the world of the senses. We see how the living, logical, willing spirit can flow into us. And this fertilizes what is considered feminine in the highest sense, the soul. Thus we understand what Goethe means by the last words of “Faust” when we know that the soul is always represented as something feminine that needs to be fertilized and that draws us towards everything that becomes action. This is what Goethe wants to show us.

I have only been able to give a few rough strokes. What has been said about Hegel will show you that Hegel was on the path of theosophy. He went as far as he could. With tremendous energy, he researched nature, sought and found the connections. Goethe, the poet, went even further. In his poetic images, he sought to expand the rigid contours of conceptual images, that which is to become wisdom and science in life, by capturing the living spirit. Thus, through his Faust, Goethe truly affirmed that it was a deep truth to him, which he emphasized at the starting point of his scientific writings, that we see the external things of the physical world because our senses are created for external sensual things. The external image presents itself as our eyes are:

If the eye were not solar,
It could never behold the sun;
If not in us the God-own power,
How could we divine delight!

Just as the physical sun is seen through the physical eye, so is the spirit the creator of the spiritual eye in man, and is seen through the spiritual eye in its effectiveness. These words are the result of his world view. This is how he understands the spirit that permeates the world, and this is how he has struggled in his strength to a realization that only a few find. He says to one of his friends at the very end of his life: “The most important thing I have written is not for the great world, but for a few who can seek the same on spiritual paths.

What he has achieved for a few must become common property for many. It must not remain a theoretical world-view but must take hold of mind and will. And so, precisely those who approach Goethe's and Hegel's world-views from a spiritual-scientific point of view must come to the conviction of how much Theosophy can be found in both of them. This conviction is summarized in the words of the wise man:

The spiritual world is not closed,
Your mind is closed, your heart is dead!
Rise up, bathe, disciple, undaunted
The earthly breast at dawn!