Goethe and the Present

GA 68c — 13 February 1910, Frankfurt

XXXII. Goethe's “Faust” Exoteric

In August 1831, Goethe sealed away the second part of his “Faust” as his spiritual testament to humanity. The importance he himself attached to this work is evident from the words he addressed to Eckermann: “Now I have actually fulfilled my life's work, whether I do this or that in the years that may now remain to me, it no longer matters.” The yearning thoughts and interests that he put into this life's work go back to the poet's earliest youth. It is said that not everything I will say about it today is in it, but it has worked and lived in his soul in his creative power. In 1827, he said that he had made sure in his second Faust that the soul-related aspects of the external images, the theatrical aspects, were such that they could appeal to the external, sensual view, but that for those with a deeper insight, the esoteric meaning would become quite clear. It is the predispositions, the moods, it is the whole constitution of his soul from which emerged what became image, figure in Faust. From his birth, Goethe was attuned to what may be called man's penetration into the spiritual world. Not to remain with what the outer senses and the mind bound to them give as knowledge and worldly wisdom, but to penetrate through the veil of the sensual world of observation, of the world of the mind, to the invisible, supersensible foundations of existence!

We cannot find in young Goethe the mature wisdom that has found its way into the second part of “Faust”; he could only give the most mature, profound and profound things at the end of his life. To those who later find his works incomprehensible, such as “Pandora” or “The Natural Daughter”, the youthful Goethe appears as a naive poet who has expressed great and powerful things in his works, including the first part of “Faust”. That is something that powerfully moves people; in the second part, he has woven quirks and incomprehensible stuff into it.

Then they praise Faust
And what else

In my works roars
In their favor,

The old Mick and Mack
Is very happy;

It means the pack of rags,
It would no longer be!

We want to follow how “Faust” grew out of Goethe's life, how he always tried to penetrate to the spiritual sources of external nature. Even as a boy, he sought to approach what he then understood as the great God of nature, as the spirit that rules over all natural phenomena. As a seven-year-old boy, he took a music stand, laid minerals, rocks, plants from his father's herbarium on it to hold the realms of nature together. — This expressed a feeling in the mood, the representatives of what nature is. For the seven-year-old Goethe, this was the altar at which he wanted to make his sacrifices to the great god of nature. He placed a small incense stick and a burning glass on top and waited for the rising morning sun to collect its rays and ignite the small incense stick to a sacrificial fire before the great god of nature.

We then see how his soul gradually matured to the mood – after the move from Frankfurt to Weimar – that he enthusiastically expressed in the prose hymn “Nature”. Here he expresses his reverence for the spiritual realm, in the words:

Nature! We are surrounded and embraced by her – unable to step out of her, and unable to get deeper into her. 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.

He knew himself so at one with everything excellent and everything seemingly deformed in nature that he said:

Even the most unnatural is nature, even the most clumsy philistinism has something of her genius.

And the other:

she invented death in order to have many lives.

What lies between these two times? Frankfurt and Weimar. How did he ascend to what we find in the powerful lyrical outburst in that prose hymn? From step to step, sometimes in unconscious urge, he has ascended in life. In his innermost being, at first unconsciously, he felt an irrepressible, invincible urge to know, which could not be hindered by anything, and which was connected with the whole of his life at every moment, pouring out, as it were, into the whole of his life, so that there can be no theory, no world of ideas for him at all, without his whole world of feeling and emotion being impregnated with his heart's blood. During his student years in Leipzig, he studied natural science, although he was destined for jurisprudence. In nature, he saw a kind of writing, in the natural world and natural facts, parables that express, speak like a writing, something that reigns as a secret in the outer sensual nature. Not through flashes of inspiration and fantasies did he want to penetrate the secrets of existence – he was born to the quiet walk through the world, which goes from step to step, from appearance to appearance. He did not want to grasp the phenomena of the world with a fanciful philosophy, even if the outer life, the passions, often rule more stormily and make invisible, so to speak, the actual, inner, calm, sure striving — this was always present in Goethe's life as a deep foundation. Now, towards the end of his time in Leipzig, a life event of the most serious kind occurred that immensely deepened his quest for knowledge: He fell dangerously ill. Where must knowledge lead us if it is to be true knowledge? It must lead us to where we penetrate into the secrets of life, as if led through closed gates, to those gates that life itself locks. Knowledge that would recoil from the problem of death could not satisfy the earnest striving of the human soul. The passing of death, which puts an end to everything that lives within the human mind and can be perceived with the external senses, imbued him with the seriousness in his quest for knowledge that his soul demanded.

In Frankfurt, where he now returned, it was other important experiences that strongly influenced him and about which he gives us hints in his autobiography “Dichtung und Wahrheit”. He came into contact with circles that were characterized by the earnest striving to connect what lives as spirit in ourselves with the great spirit of the world. At the center of those circles, which aspired from the depths of their souls to the depths of the world, was Susanne von Klettenberg. He turned to the study of very strange works, for example, “Aurea Catena Homeris”. Some of today's intellectuals would find only the most extravagant nonsense in it. Goethe did not. He did not find the kind of information one would find in a book on natural science, but rather things that affected him in such a way that he felt forces well up in his soul that he had to assume were otherwise dormant in man. He felt like a blind person born blind, in relation to the physical world, when he is operated on and his eyes open so that he can now perceive what was previously also present but not perceptible. He found symbolic thoughts in those books. The dragons, triangles, signs of the planets awakened in him a hunch that our soul can become like an organ for spiritual worlds.

He was still in this mood when he moved to Strasbourg. The first mood pictures of “Faust” emerged from this mood. So it is part of his soul, of his heart's blood, when we see Faust at the very beginning, how he has studied all the sciences - like Goethe in Leipzig - and then, unsatisfied by this, tries to penetrate into the supersensible world through a special method of spiritual research. Nostradamus, Sign of the World Macrocosm. He now lets Faust experience that his soul is still too small to develop within itself a sense for the great world. He seeks to evoke within himself the mood with which he can penetrate into what lives as a spiritual being, beyond earthly existence. He conjures up the earth spirit. From the answer that this gives him,

In the flood of life, in the storm of action I surge up and down, weaving back and forth! Birth and grave, an eternal sea, a changing weaving, a glowing life, that is how I create at the whirring loom of time and work the living garment of divinity.

It is clear that the earth spirit is a creative, productive force, that life is expressed in the elements of earthly existence, but one thing is missing: there are no passions or desires in it – only birth and death. He, the earth spirit, appears as an entity that expresses the higher, desire-free, purified forces of human nature in his character. It is an important law of the spiritual world that knowledge is not independent of moral endeavor. Knowledge in the higher sense can only be attained when our soul sheds that which is connected with desires, affects, inclinations, passions. The passions slumber in the depths of the soul, pervading the world of thought and knowledge. Goethe knew that the purity of the earth spirit is an ideal, but he also knew how difficult it is to fulfill. When the earth spirit then calls out to Faust:

You resemble the spirit you comprehend, not me,

sounds like the echo of his own inner being, which is aware of how far removed it is from the actual spirit of knowledge.

The body also hinders its materiality from revealing the pure forces that can approach the spirit. Faust feels: I am held down by what I do not see in my outer corporeality, not by the material forces, but by what is supersensible in corporeality. The embodiment of this supersensible in the physical is Mephistopheles; that is the spirit that he grasps for the time being. All the scenes in which he portrays how this companion and fellow attempts to lead Faust through the whole life of sensuality arise from him, always trying to pull him down from the regions of spiritual life into that which man as spirit and soul can only experience within the body. Step by step, Faust seeks to overcome Mephistopheles. Through the development of his own soul, he wants at all costs to penetrate into the spiritual world. But not through artificial, tumultuous means - spiritists - but seriously, piece by piece, [Goethe] lets the world affect him until he sees in all the details of nature something like characters that express the mysterious life of nature. After all that he had seen in the way of minerals and plants, he wanted to make a journey to India to look at what he had discovered in his own way, to read it again with the powers of the spirit that had now become his own. Appearance after appearance, fact after fact, he wanted to let it work on the soul, so that through the spiritual eyes and ears developed for the soul, the spiritual natural reasons for existence would leap out of the facts.

In Italy he examines everything to see if it can be a sign in the great cosmos. When he saw the works of art, he wrote, who had previously been a follower of Spinoza's theory:

There is necessity, there is God!

because he felt that there is a spiritual force behind art, that each individual work of art is a letter and that letter by letter, work of art by work of art, they fit together to teach us to read what, as a spirit, stands behind creative humanity in relation to art. Nature, plants, animals, everything, even in the mineral world, does not belong to dead material, but to the written character for the spirit behind it.

When Faust addresses the earth spirit:

Exalted spirit, thou gavest me, gavest me everything,
why I asked. Thou didst not in vain
turn thy face to me in fire

etc., it is as if he wanted to say: I now have a different relationship to the exalted spirit, which at the time touched me like a presentiment that made me unhappy because I could not realize it. I am beginning to understand you! The difference between the Promethean urge of the young Goethe and the overarching wisdom of the old Goethe is expressed in the fact that he does not want Faust to translate the first chapter of the Gospel of John: “In the beginning was the Word.” In contrast, in Pandora-1807, he writes:

From heaven descend
Word and deed, blessing each other,
Gift descends, unimagined before.

Man is more than what he locks up in himself, he is something that great cosmic forces fight for, forces of good and evil – prologue in heaven. The human soul is the theater of their struggle. The soul world is a world of spiritual colors and sounds: the new day is already born for spiritual ears, it trumpets, it sounds, the unheard does not hear itself.