Goethe and the Present

GA 68c — 29 November 1909, Leipzig

XXX. The Mission of Art (Homer, Aeschylus, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe)

Art is something that appears essential or inessential for life to different people, depending on their temperament and life experiences. How different were the points of view in the past: Plato had drafted that powerful plan of statecraft, but he saw poets and artists as dispensable in the whole organism. Schiller saw art as an uplift for humanity.

What does art have to say about the true forces of life? Theosophy lets things speak for themselves and asks: What has art shown us in the different ages of the world? We must first try to find our way around in sketch form. Theosophy is something quite new in this form. It is based entirely on a certain premise, on the premise that the supersensible spiritual world can be investigated. There are powers in the human soul that can be developed through awakening the soul's powers of spiritual vision. This is as much a fact as learning to see after undergoing an operation for blindness.

In the past, art did not look the same as it does today. It has changed a great deal over centuries and millennia. Today, this is often not taken into account. The ancient Greeks were not the same as we are. At that time, they were much closer to the state of soul in the spiritual world, which lies behind the physical. In prehistoric times, there were countless people who, through their natural gifts, were able to see into the spiritual world. This was linked to the fact that people were different then than they are today, both in themselves and in their feelings. Today, people have to develop the same qualities in their outer lives as others. Everything that prehistoric people did was influenced by the supersensible world. They saw, for example, the spiritual power behind stone and plant. Now, the one who is spiritually developed, who sees into it, knows that there is a spiritual lawfulness in it, and that what happens in the physical world is the reflection of spiritual processes. For the ancient Greeks, it was quite clear that when something happened in the physical world, the reason for it lay in the beyond.

For the ancient Greeks, there was one very special event: they transitioned to a completely different way of life. What we today call intellectual cultural life did not exist back then. They were beings who developed from clairvoyance. They had various clairvoyant abilities. Some outstanding individuals, what we now call geniuses, were those who knew their way around the spiritual world. Those who transformed their higher clairvoyant gift into action were the masters of the heroic age. This clairvoyance was a fact back then. Today, genius is not bound to heredity, but back then it was bound to blood. There were very specific families who were able to acquire this clairvoyant leadership. The heroes and rulers were people who had an instinctive connection with the supersensible world. They did not need to think about what to do, they acted out of their instincts, their desires. They followed them without rational consideration. That was the significant change, that feeling was transformed into intellectual culture. Such a Greek may well have felt in later times: Our ancestors acted on the direct impulse of their soul, but now such a quality is no longer inherited. The Greeks expressed this in images: the gods have taken this gift of clairvoyance from us and brought it to Asia Minor to the priestly state of Asia Minor, by having the most beautiful Greek woman, Helen, the wife of Menelaus, as the representative of clairvoyance, carried off to Troy, the priestly state of Asia Minor. Helen is another word for Selena – moon. It was felt that the service to the sun had replaced the old moon culture. Achilles, Agamemnon, Menelaus were seen as belonging to the age of the moon. Homer ties in with that event with his Iliad.

The Iliad begins: Singe, o Muse, mir vom Zorn des Achilles. Von Leidenschaften sollte gesungen werden, um auf die Zeit hinzuzuweisen, die der Verstandeskultur voranging.

The woman as a representative of clairvoyance is lost in two ways. The fight is for what has been lost, what has been banned to the priest-state of “Troy”. Homer describes the second way in which the ban is lifted when the storm rises, and it is only appeased when Iphigenia is sacrificed at [Aulis]. Greek legend shows us the replacement of the culture of clairvoyance with the culture of reason. Odysseus is the bearer of the modern culture of reason – a wooden horse, with the horse being a symbol of reason. He forms the transition to this.

Poseidon, the god of the sea, is the protector of the old. Athena is wisdom, and also a symbol of reason. Athena guides Odysseus home. Here, the fate of nations is to be described, and people are only used to illustrate it. The poet looks at the great world events and uses art to provide answers to them.

Plato, on the other hand, took the view that it is those who live that count, not those who come afterwards and tell the tale. He associated priestly poetry in the pre-Homeric period with looking up to the gods. This poetry was the first to contemplate life; before that, such contemplation did not exist.

Aeschylus is still completely absorbed in the contemplation of the supersensible world. The Eumenides and Prometheus Bound show the supersensible world growing into the sensual one.

More and more people grew into the culture of reason, and now we come to the thirteenth century, when Dante wrote his “Divine Comedy”. What does he present to us? A world of supersensible being. The whole philosophy of Thomas Aquinas and Albertus Magnus lived in Dante. Dante was a sage before he wrote that poem. The supersensible vision was before his soul. He was led through hell, through purgatory, his soul wandered through heaven. Man then became aware of his individual individuality. He asked about his relationship to his environment. This meant progress for humanity. Goethe says, for Goethe felt this as something powerful: What high thanks are to be said to him who brought us this world so freshly!

Again we skip a few centuries and come to the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries, to Shakespeare. Humanity was different. It had made progress in physical-sensual reality. How did Shakespeare create? For whom, first of all? He did not create for those who set the tone in education. He wrote for the lower classes and created his dramas in a completely abandoned society. The educated would never have come there, exposed themselves to shame and ridicule. Those who set the tone at the time were completely absorbed in the physical world, but the lower classes still retained a receptivity. Shakespeare takes man as he is in his actions, his destinies. The impulses of his characters were played out in the physical world, but it only created an image. He described only individual destinies. If Shakespeare had lived for centuries, he could have singled out many more such individual destinies and written many more such dramas. The greatest poet, Goethe, could not have created a second drama like “Faust”. “Faust” is what goes beyond the individual human being. Up to Shakespeare, man stands on the ground of the sensual world. Goethe rises above it and seeks to reconnect heaven and hell. Faust describes what is not the fate of an individual.

Schiller's search for and expression of the task of poetry can be found in his Letters upon the Aesthetic Education of Man. He asks: How does the human being rise from the everyday to the higher, the supersensible?

Wherever Goethe creates a single work of art, there is always a falling out of man from himself.

In this way, art moves in step with the development of man. Goethe leads from the sensual world into the supersensible one. The longing for the supersensible world is clearly shown to us at the end of “Faust”. The twentieth century will bring us Goethe's testament. In spiritual science, humanity is to absorb what art longed for. Now art is to lead humanity into the supersensible. Art is a secret manifestation of the laws of the world.

Spiritual science will be a fulfillment of the longing that Goethe expresses at the end of “Faust” in the “Chorus mysticus”:

All that is transitory
Is but a parable
The inadequate,
Here it comes to pass;
The indescribable,
Here it is danced
The eternal feminine
Draws us on.