Goethe and the Present

GA 68c — 13 January 1912, Winterthur

XXXV. From Paracelsus to Goethe

Dear attendees!

The point of view from which I am to speak this evening at the request of some local friends of the theosophical or spiritual scientific world view is by no means a popular one in the world and recognized in wider circles. With the exception of a few, relatively few of our contemporaries, who, from a deep knowledge and long study of the subject, have gained an intensely effective conviction in the direction of the world view under consideration, with the exception of these, this point of view is everywhere met with opposition, doubt and misunderstanding. And anyone who speaks about such a subject for the first time in a particular place does not, of course, harbor any illusions that a mere suggestion of a few remarks that can be made in a short lecture can somehow lead to conviction. This evening, I find myself in the somewhat dubious position of having to cite a variety of things from the theosophical worldview, for which there is sufficient evidence for those who delve deeper into the subject, but which cannot be cited this evening with all the necessary proof.

In accordance with the wishes of our local friends of our world view, we will start with a figure in the spiritual development of humanity who must, to a certain extent, be of interest to this part of the world in which we find ourselves, because he lived here in this city for a long time. We will then move on to a personality who, as everyone must recognize, has had a profound impact on the intellectual life of our time – Goethe. Not that it is to be shown that one could only find confirmation in the world view of Paracelsus and Goethe of what can arise from spiritual science, but it is to be shown that figures are already given in them which, precisely in their struggle and striving, show that what spiritual science or Theosophy wants has been longed for and striven for by those who, with the approach of modern spiritual development and our present time, tried in their own way to interpret the signs of the times and the needs of the human soul.

But before we can tie in with the spiritual significance of Paracelsus and Goethe and the path that development has taken from Paracelsus to Goethe, we must first characterize the point of view of Theosophy as it presents itself to us in the world today. Theosophy or spiritual science is by no means to be confused with any religious It has no intention of interfering with outward religious observances, nor of forming a religion or sect of its own. Such a thing is far from its mind, for its sources are such that it cannot in any wise impair religious beliefs or convictions.

On the other hand, the subject characterized finds its opponents namely among those who believe that they stand firmly on the ground of natural science, which is also appreciated by spiritual researchers. The greatness of the spiritual-scientific view is that, in terms of its way of thinking, it stands entirely on the ground of scientific thinking; but, starting from this scientific thinking, it wants to lead up to the highest regions of existence, which the human soul longs to know. It longs for this because man needs views of higher worlds if he wants to be secure in his work within the outer visible world in which he has to work. It is into the world of the spiritual, into that world which can also be called the supersensible world, that theosophy or spiritual science should lead. At the same time, this indicates, my dear ladies and gentlemen, what must create an enormous number of opponents for you at the present time, because even today, quietly thinking first scientists admit that what is achieved by the means of ordinary science cannot provide any information at all about the highest powers and entities that permeate and permeate this world. So it is often admitted that a spiritual world underlies our sensual one. But even if such level-headed people of the present do not want to put themselves on the level of those people who, out of materialistic thinking, want to say: Man knows that nothing is real but what surrounds us, they still often stand on the ground that they say: May a supersensible world exist behind our sensual world — but the powers of human knowledge are so limited that one has to stop before this spiritual world.

That there is a spiritual world to which man belongs with his soul and with what lives spiritually in him, just as man belongs to the outer world with his physical powers, is something that is to be made known to the world again through spiritual science. The second is that one can penetrate into this world with the same means as in natural science. It will be good, since our time is limited, to now draw attention to how man, in the way of natural science and its thinking, can look up into the spiritual world. Natural science penetrates into what it wants to explore through observation, but it also penetrates through experiment. Exploration through observation, but also through experiment, are also the means of spiritual science. Here too, it must be emphasized that spiritual science must place itself quite honestly and sincerely on the ground of a Goethean saying that anticipated the method of our science:

Mysterious in the bright day
Nature cannot be robbed of the veil,
And what it may not reveal to your mind,
You cannot force it with levers and screws.

What does such a saying mean in essence? It means that we can penetrate into the outer world of things and into the forces on which they are based with all the tools that are made in the world. And if we disregard the new instruments of natural science, we already know that in the elementary realm, the world of the infinitely small has been explored through the microscope, and the infinitely large world, the macrocosm, through the telescope. In this way, one penetrates into the world of things, but one cannot penetrate into the world of the spirit. Only the spirit of man can penetrate into the world of the spirit, and there can only be one tool: the spirit of man himself.

Now it is the case that what this spirit is in man has certain limits, that only certain things can be grasped that are bound to the intellect. You can read about what can only be touched on here, and what means more than all power and all riches, that man can be led further, that he can penetrate into completely different worlds, in my writing: “How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds”.

Just as one does it in the laboratory, as in the clinic, so one cannot make the human soul suitable to penetrate into the supersensible world. Only through purely spiritual processes can one do that. One understands the whole meaning of this spiritual process when one realizes the following example, which shows that one can be very clever in thinking, in the way it is done in the methods of natural science.

If you have water, you know that this water can be understood if you break it down into its two parts: hydrogen and oxygen. You know that. But to examine what hydrogen is and what oxygen is, you have to separate it, the oxygen or the hydrogen, and then you can look at it on its own.

The mind and soul are now in the human being, as he stands in the world, connected with the whole body, like oxygen and hydrogen with water. Our soul and spirit perceive only the external world through the senses, through the mind, in colors, sounds, smells and tastes. One forms a picture by discovering the laws of nature. Everything that reaches the spiritual and soul reaches it in the same way as oxygen, when it is combined with hydrogen in water. But if we want to examine it, we have to separate it from the physical just as we have to separate the oxygen from the hydrogen when we want to examine it. Now there are means to secrete this spiritual-mental: meditation, concentration. All these are means by which something is achieved in the soul that is similar to what the chemist achieves when he breaks down water into oxygen and hydrogen.

To characterize this, we will see what fills people between waking and sleeping in terms of volitional impulses, hopes and worries. All that which fills us so, if we look more closely, we will find [and we will see] that it is not there without external cause. We know that when we see the red roses, we then hold on to the image, as one has not created the image itself in the soul. This is also how we find the laws of nature through our mind. When we look at our hopes, as well as our desires and passions, we find them stimulated by external factors. How can we say that we have acquired this through our own will? We know how it happens through external influences, through unknown depths of our soul life. Our pain, our joy, our suffering and our desire are prepared by the outer world without our intervention. We have not placed the experiences in the soul at the center of the soul. That is what the spiritual researcher must undertake. When the spiritual researcher brings such ideas, which he has made himself, into his soul through pure inner will, we say “symbols”. For example, let us imagine the light emanating from some cosmic body. But we imagine this light as the body of a spiritual being, which also has a body of light, just as we have a body of flesh. If you tell me that this is a mistake, I would like to point out that when we use such images as spiritual instruments, we do not in any way succumb to the illusion that we are thereby gaining an idea of the external world. When such images are given, they are not intended to be true in the sense that our usual images of the external world are true; they have the function of serving as facts of the soul. The person needs infinite patience and energy to arrive at such images, because he must reject all thoughts that relate to the external sense world. He must become as a person is in sleep. When all external impressions are silent and the mind is also silent, while the person is surrounded by darkness and unconscious, the person who devotes years and years to inner exercises – as soon as we have our own idea of the moral content – will come to be in relation to the outside world and the rest of the soul life as he is in sleep. Only that the unconsciousness is not there. Powers arise there. Now we know that the soul is a spiritual being that can give itself content. The soul does not arrive there in platitudes, as in mysticism. Through the same kind of efforts at contemplation as a person makes externally with the help of physical tools, the soul comes to experience itself inwardly. There it comes to an experience that is as free of corporeality, of materiality, as oxygen is free of hydrogen when they are chemically separated.

It is difficult to believe in it from the outset. But it is no more difficult than believing in a new scientific finding, to believe that a person comes to know that he has spiritual eyes and spiritual ears. An initial finding that can be gained through this path is that a person becomes aware of what actually happens when we fall asleep at night. Spiritual science tells us that what remains in bed is what man has in common with the plant world, an external corporeality, but that an inner spiritual-soul core of being emerges from this corporeality. This spiritual-soul core of being is not in the physical being of man from the time of falling asleep to the time of waking up, but in his own world. Man is just not able to perceive this. But it is perceived when the human being has acquired spiritual eyes and ears. Then the person knows that he is in a world in which spiritual facts take place just as they do in our sensual world. Every night, nature separates what the spiritual researcher has obtained as consciousness, only the person does not know it. Now an important result of spiritual science comes to light: that by means of spiritual science one can give proof of something that great minds have always suspected, which is, however, regarded as a dream in the widest circles, but which will make a way through world culture, like many other things that have lived through many a contradiction in the world. I would like to draw attention to something similar. Not so long ago, mankind believed that lower animals, small lower animals, can develop from mere inanimate matter, lifeless matter. It was even believed that worms could develop from river mud. And until a few centuries ago, it could be found in books that were considered scholarly how animals developed here.

It was a great deed of the Italian naturalist Francesco Redi to have pointed out to people that nothing can develop from non-living matter, but that only living things can develop from living things. In truth, there was a living germ in this river mud, originating from living beings. The man who recognized this and first expressed it barely escaped the fate of Giordano Bruno.

Modern spiritual science must apply this sentence: “Living things come only from living things” to man, but must then also come to proofs that stand just as high above the sentence “Living things come only from living things” as man stands above all living things, because with man we are dealing with an individual, while all other living things present themselves in groups and species. In our time, it is quite natural that we have to speak in terms of the spiritual and soul-related in the same way that Francesco Redi does in terms of the living; that we have to say: If a person is born with certain aptitudes and abilities, and even with a certain destiny, and people then think that this is based merely on heredity, this is based merely on inaccurate observation, just as it was based on inaccurate observation that people believed that worms can develop from river mud.

Spiritual research shows, as Lessing demonstrated, that as a human being grows up, the features become more and more distinct, the abilities become more and more distinct, and the soul and spiritual express themselves more and more. Then we may say that it is not only inherited from father and mother, grandfather and grandmother, but we must trace it back to the spiritual and soul, which is laughed at in the present, but which will become established in the same way as the sentence: 'Living things can only arise from living things'. What is born with us, what shapes us from birth or from conception, comes from a previous life on earth, and what we now carry within us as our spiritual and soul essence is something that will continue to live in the spiritual world when we pass through the gate of death, to form a body again in a later life on earth. In line with the natural sciences of our time, spiritual research comes to the view of different earth lives, to that doctrine of reincarnation decried as madness and to that doctrine of karma, which says that what we experience, what we are and how we face the world can be an effect of what we have done, experienced and felt in previous earth lives. That what we do, experience and feel now will be a cause for what we will do, experience and feel in a later life on earth.

Thus the spiritual researcher divides his life between what is between birth and death and a new birth, and in this he is a spiritual being. One only attains independence, the distinctiveness of the human being, through spiritual science, when one separates the spirit. Just as little as one can recognize oxygen as long as it is connected to hydrogen in water, so little can one recognize the spirit as long as it is connected to the body. When it is separated from the body, it can be recognized. Then one also recognizes that it cannot be destroyed by the body, that it characterizes it as something lasting, as something eternal.

When we see this spiritual science or theosophy emerging in modern times, it should not be something that ties in with the old, that can be picked up here or there. For example, some people say: Yes, this spiritual research with its doctrine of reincarnation and karma is only bringing something that we find in Buddhism. But we can find that it differs in its most important and essential aspects from the doctrine that Buddhism teaches as the doctrine of reincarnation, something that it recognizes from within through the spirit. It is a mistake to think that it is based on Buddhism; no, it stands on its own ground. It comes to what it wants to recognize through the investigations of those who make their own soul into an instrument that can penetrate the spiritual world.

We can see how the best of our minds, with all their yearning, have tended towards what spiritual science today wants to pick as a ripe fruit from the tree of knowledge. And so we come to direct our gaze to a mind that we understand when we have spent a long time in the area, as I was able to do near Maria-Einsiedeln, and we know that this spirit saw the light of day, that this is the birthplace of this spirit, that Paracelsus was born there in 1493 and lived there until the age of fourteen. We find a remarkable spirit in this Paracelsus. It is so very special in the soul when you are in this nature of Maria-Einsiedeln. What surrounds us in nature reminds us of how the boy grew up in wonderful surroundings into what later confronts us so greatly in his spirit. And this awakens the wish in us: May those who will be our successors be fairer to us than we were to our ancestors. We say so lightly: Yes, actually Paracelsus had a very commendable aspiration, but what he brought to light, no one can take seriously today, we have gone beyond that. In short, in a more or less veiled sense, one says nothing other than that such a person is a drip. If only posterity would be fairer to us, because what the botanist now knows will be able to be characterized in the same way after a few centuries, because only a short-sighted person will be able to say that this will last for all eternity.

But Paracelsus is an individuality who presents himself as strange to those who want to penetrate into the higher world because he was a wiser and more characteristic expression of his time, a time that seems strange precisely in a time when it presents itself as such. Paracelsus appears to us as if from his earliest youth he was intimately connected with everything that works and lives in nature. One cannot but apply the words spoken by Goethe to Paracelsus:

Nature! We are surrounded and embraced by you – 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. She is forever creating new forms; what is there has never been, what was does not return – everything is new and yet always the same.

In a wonderful way, Goethe honors this interweaving of people with nature there. With Paracelsus, it was present only in the sense that he saw in his spirit, not just with his eyes and mind. And it was still the case that he did not need the kind of soul training that has been described today. Rather, it was his nature to perceive the spiritual forces of nature when he heard the trees rustling and felt the wind playing through the room; he never perceived in isolation what is found in nature. He said, “A soul is expressing itself, as in a human being who is not just made of papier-mâché.” Thus, Paracelsus saw in nature not only the outer appearance, but gestures for the spiritual entities that are present in a supersensible world and are active in nature. Therefore, wherever he encountered a natural fact or a natural being, he sought the spiritual and soul-like. He was predestined for this by the way he had grown up. He therefore always said later that he was proud of the way he had remained a primitive man: I did not grow up with wheat bread and figs like the Sugar Fairies, I grew up with rye porridge and coarse rye bread. From this close relationship with nature, an inner certainty arose in Paracelsus, a connection with the spiritual world. It is also a wonderful life, how the boy walked through nature at his father's hand in Maria-Einsiedeln, and how much he had already learned in the earliest days of childhood about the secrets of nature.

And how differently it touches us when we saw the man grow up, feeling so strongly this coexistence with nature that he dared to oppose what was around him. We just have to put ourselves in the shoes of the science of the time. The focus was not on the facts of nature, but rather on ancient traditions, traditions preserved in books, which were passed down. People listened to what people said, what Aristotle and Galen had taught. What I am telling you now is by no means a mere legend, to show how things were at that time. It was believed and taught by Aristotle that the nerves of the human being do not originate in the head but in the heart. Galileo had a friend who was a scholar. He pointed out to him that it could easily be demonstrated on a corpse, but his friend did not want to believe it. So Galilei took him there and showed him on the corpse that the nerves emanate from the brain, and then the learned gentleman said to him: “That may be right, you may be right, but when I see nature and ask Aristotle, I am more inclined to believe Aristotle.”

It is clear to see how enormous the efforts had to be to lead back to the source of nature. Paracelsus did not want to learn from books. Therefore, we see him traveling through all neighboring countries: England, France, Hungary, Poland, Turkey. Those who want to know about the world must not let it come to them, but go there. The world is like a large organism: it makes humanity healthy and sick. But health in France is one thing, health in Germany is another. Paracelsus wanted to read in the great book of nature. Therefore, he did not hesitate to hear what the farmers and the shepherds said, and even what the knackers said. He knew that with their elementary observation they could find something for true knowledge.

It was not surprising, therefore, that this Paracelsus, after he had, so to speak, put all the learned works behind him, according to which the others were taught, that he wanted to express what he had learned in word forms that were deeply related to what nature spoke to him. He expressed what nature allowed to shine into his soul from its spirit: he wanted to shape it, not in Latin, as was customary at the time, but in his mother tongue. That was what brought him into such stark contradiction with the scholarship of the time. When he was called to Basel, he not only taught what he had observed himself, but also dared to teach it in German. And when he went against other customs of the time, he was no longer tolerated. His wonderful teaching, so to speak, broke his neck. He had performed cures that were appreciated by the respected people of the time, esteemed by Erasmus and other great minds, but never had he confronted his patients in such a way that he would have seen a fee. It was the spiritual and mental state of the people that he was referring to. He never just saw what was on the outside. He said, “My main remedy is love. I immerse myself in my patients with love and feeling; and that which was in the body came to life in the soul of Paracelsus. When the image of the inner illness of a person met with the own soul of Paracelsus, then the image of the plant or mineral that he had to process arose in his soul as if by itself. This is why he had his great and significant successes. Even if, in a certain sense, he could be seen by people as a tramp, he was a great benefactor of humanity.

But that did not prevent something like the following from happening. A great gentleman went to Paracelsus to be cured by him. A fee of one hundred thalers had been agreed upon. Paracelsus prescribed a remedy. After taking it three times, the gentleman recovered. But then he said: “Yes, if I have recovered so quickly, it is not worth a hundred thalers.” And although Paracelsus did not usually attach particular importance to payment, Paracelsus flew into a rage and had “evil notes” printed, as it was said at the time, or as they say today: pamphlets. He had them passed around. A friend then advised him to flee, and he lost his job.

But that was how he usually felt about life. On the surface, the story of his death may be a legend, but the doctors had hated him so much that it does not seem incredible that an individual in Salzburg pushed him down a slope and killed him – in 1541. Since Paracelsus was a very temperamental person and represented with all his enthusiasm what he experienced, it can be said that this has an inner truth, especially when we look at the last picture of Paracelsus with his furrowed face, then we have the feeling: He met a tragic end because what lived in greatness in his soul was not compatible with the smallness of his time.

When we consider how he viewed the times, we can say: He has not yet been able to penetrate to the teaching of repeated earthly lives, but he knows that the human being standing before me is not a being that exhausts itself with its physical existence, but a being that has an inner nature, is connected to inner invisible forces of a supersensible world. Yes, he said: Man can only be recognized if he is seen as a threefold being. First of all, there is the human being who can be known with the physical mind. But above this physical world there is another world that can only be seen with the eyes of the spirit. This human being is taken from the astral or sidereal world, as Paracelsus also called it. He then further distinguishes the highest human being, who belongs to the purely spiritual world. There Paracelsus saw two others interwoven into our sensory world, and the human being interwoven with these two others, and knew that the human being belongs in the spiritual-soul world.

And then Paracelsus said again: When we look at this human being, the way he thinks and ponders must indeed present himself as a spiritual-soul being. When he saw how a choice was made within his organism regarding food, for Paracelsus this was a sign that between the person who thinks and researches and the one who presents himself in the body, there is still another one present. He speaks of a spiritual body that is taken along when a person passes through the gate of death.

Paracelsus calls this inner man the inner alchemist because he transforms the substances of nature so that they can become a builder of the human being. And Paracelsus is aware that he must not only use external means if he wants to heal people, but that the supernatural powers are at work when a person is healthy or sick. Therefore, he not only says: “The person must have passed a nature test, but he is also a pious man.” He knows that if he wants to heal people, he must penetrate to the deepest hidden causes of the illnesses. Therefore, when I am standing in front of a sick person, I know that I have a preparation, but more than anything else, if I can let something overflow in my soul, that is my hope. That in the spiritual course of events, what I have gained as a spiritual experience can also flow in, that the power of my hope, which completely permeates me, can flow out.

There is still much to be said, but one can divert one's gaze from Paracelsus in order to get to know him in yet another way, in a later, even more awakened spirit, in Goethe. And here, the figure of Paracelsus stands quite remarkably beside the contemplation of Goethe, as if Paracelsus were looking over Goethe's shoulder, and especially when one devotes oneself to the contemplation of Goethe's life's work, “Faust”. It is remarkable that in terms of external characteristics, Faust bears some similarity to Paracelsus. But this is understandable. Besides the sixteenth-century Faust, Goethe always had the figure of Paracelsus before his soul. And just as Paracelsus once placed the ancient Galen to one side, so we read of this Faust: He put the Bible behind the bench for a while and became a man who lives in the world. Paracelsus did not put the Bible behind the bench, but he turned away from the old medical books and wanted to gain independent knowledge. And when we follow Faust, in everything as Goethe describes him, how he goes out with the country people and how he is remembered by them, how his father taught him as a boy, the image of this boy Paracelsus, holding his father's hand, comes to mind. And one has the same image as Goethe gave in the walk before the gate.

But one thing is still very strange. Paracelsus lived to be 48 years old. He passed through the gate of death after a life of rich inwardness, and if he had had good health, not affected by the smallness of his time, he would also have had to say: There you stand alone; which is the ideal of “Faust.” Can we not imagine Faust as being as old as Paracelsus when he died? There is nothing to prevent us. But while Paracelsus would have stood there through his rich, precious, appreciative inner life, through the harmonious balance with all the longings of the world, Faust stands before us – at about the same age at which Paracelsus stands at the height of eminent satisfaction and knowledge, Faust stands before us in despair. Paracelsus could not have stood there with the words:

“I have now, alas! studied philosophy, jurisprudence and medicine, and unfortunately also theology with great endeavor.

Paracelsus would have said: Thank God that I soon ran away when I was supposed to study all these things, and went to nature. Therefore, he had a different relationship to the great things of nature than Faust. No one would have said of him:

You resemble the spirit you comprehend, not me!

Rather, he was akin to the spirit that

In the floods of life, in the storm of action
I surge up and down,
weaving back and forth!

and from which Faust turns away in horror:

terrible face.

And so Faust stands, despairing of what science can give us, yet unable to find what he seeks, having surrendered to magic. We can, of course, only touch on this, as time is of the essence.

Goethe lets his Faust go through everything that man can achieve through his aberration, he lets him go through all the aberrations that man goes through when he does not enter the spiritual world in the right way, and he presents this particularly in the witches' kitchen. The one depicted in Faust does not arrive in a harmonious way at what Goethe particularly desired in his “Faust”. Only Goethe penetrates more and more, especially through his Italian travels, more and more into what nature gives him.

Eminent Spirit, you gave me, gave me everything
I asked for. You did not turn
your face to me in the fire for nothing.
You gave me the magnificent nature for my kingdom,
the strength to feel and enjoy it. You do not
allow only cold, astonished visitors,
grant me to look into their deep chests,
as into the bosom of a friend.
You lead the line of the living
before me, and teach me my brothers
in the silent bush, in air and water.

This interweaving with the spirit of nature is something that Faust possesses: but he has not yet reached the point where he can recognize the spirit in a mature form. Therefore, Goethe must depict the recognition of the higher world in the characterized form of the witches' kitchen. But we move on and see how he — Faust — arrives at the imperial court and how he has to amuse the emperor in all sorts of ways, and finally has to bring him Helen from the underworld. We see how Goethe lets him descend into the realm of the mothers, that is, into the world of the soul and spirit. But at first he only brings up the image of Helen. But in the course of time he must bring up not only the image that resembles the spiritual Helen, but also what she really is in the spiritual world. What is needed for this? That he gets to know the right connection between body, soul and spirit, namely the physical body, the etheric and the astral body in the spiritual-scientific sense. Just as Faust initially fails to hold on to Helena, but first has to connect body, soul and spirit, so this soul must first be presented in such a way that the body can penetrate into it from one side and the spirit - homunculus - from the other. Goethe uses a strange image here, which people have studied a lot about:

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

And Thales advises him:

Give in to the praiseworthy desire
to start creation from the beginning!
Be ready for rapid action!
You move according to eternal norms,
through a thousand and one forms,
and you have time until the human being.

That he - the homunculus - is to become human is clearly stated. Furthermore:

Come with me spiritually into the moist expanse,
There you live equally in length and breadth,
You can move about here as you like;
Just do not strive for higher orders.

The comments come entirely from the text because the emphasis is on the word “order” as if he had been striving to receive an order. But it is a very simple matter. As so often, Goethe was speaking his Frankfurt German, and people also printed it that way, but it should simply be written Orten: “But do not strive for higher places”. When he arrives at the classical Walpurgis Night, the Homunculus, who is not lacking in spiritual qualities, is advised that he must pass through such realms of nature, through what natural science teaches, that man develops through the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms to human corporeality.

You have to start at the very bottom. The passage through the greenness of the plant world is depicted to characterize what a person experiences when they reach the plant stage, and Homunculus says:

It grunelt so.

And now to come to what is brought about in man through love, we experience the end of the second act, where Homunculus, who has progressed so far that he has the powers of the three kingdoms of nature within him – this is shown to us by the allusion to the elements – is dashed against the shell of Galathea. Then, when the spiritual has become so embodied through the three realms, this appears to us as the image of Helen.

Then Goethe shows further how Faust develops. It is wonderful how he demonstrates how Faust comes to ever deeper realization, which Goethe shows as complete only at the moment when the eyes go blind. Darkness outside, but inside the light shines. Through experiencing the spiritual world, he can become free from the external world. He shows us this by the fact that Faust only experiences inner vision when the outer light goes out. And yet, Goethe should not present Faust as Paracelsus. Faust falls into misfortune: He can only come to the realization of the spiritual light by dying to the external, by becoming a completely different person. Paracelsus was able to lead his enemies to their deaths.

Why did such a transformation of human research and forms of knowledge occur on the path from Paracelsus to Goethe? The answer is provided by an event that occurred a few years after Paracelsus passed through the gates of death, and which was experienced as a major event on the path from Paracelsus to Goethe. The world was introduced to the Copernican system of the world. It has not yet been realized what this means. Until then, the earth had been regarded as the center around which the firmament moves. Now, through Nicolaus Copernicus, the ground was taken from under people's feet, so to speak. There has been no greater upheaval in the world view. What was the fruit of such a change? That from now on such a path of the soul could lead to direct knowledge of the spiritual world. Until now, a supreme being had provided a worldview that recognizes that which is in physical space as the only thing, and presents it as if the senses recognize it. A sensual process was presented as the decisive one, and the solution to the riddles of the world was sought in external facts.

Paracelsus now faced the world unperturbed by such a materialistic solution to the world's riddles and acquired what he could recognize through direct observation of nature. But in his time, the solution of the world's riddles was otherwise sought in external facts and sensory processes. But this meant that the power to direct oneself to the spiritual in the innermost part of the soul was suppressed for a while in the innermost part of the soul.

Faust cannot gain any satisfaction from his yearning for the spiritual world. The human soul had been taught different ways of thinking. Faust faced spiritual science with despair, because the first thing that reveals itself as spirit to him is: “Don't talk to me like that!” – which is how Goethe made Faust a person of the eighteenth century. Goethe had to experience in Faust what he was to attain in the spiritual world. In this way, Goethe also characterized our immediate present, our time.

Goethe made his Faust character a tragic one, saying: In our time, man has not yet reached the point where he can penetrate into the spiritual world without losing the context of the world of sense. Faust had to lose his eye.

Spiritual science or theosophy, however, has a kind of fulfillment of what Goethe characterized as the task of modern times, because spiritual science wants to be a balance between what modern science has brought about as facts and what the spirit can be as a fact of the spiritual world. Man needs this, and we need nothing more as proof of this than the correctly understood Faust figure. Man needs not only his theory of the development of external facts, but he needs a knowledge of what is the bearer, the creator of the external world. And so, in addition to the law of Francesco Redi, that living things can only arise from living things, there is another: spiritual and soul forces in present earthly life arise out of spiritual and soul forces in earlier earthly lives.

Thus, spiritual-mental aspects will appear as the very legitimate continuation of natural science, as it were a re-embodiment of a Faust. A Faust who does not need to go blind, and yet has spiritual eyes and spiritual ears, so that it will be as we can read in Goethe:

Hark! Listen to the storm of the hours!
The new day is already born for the ears of the spirit.
Rock gates creak and rattle,
Phoebus' wheels roll and clatter.

What a roar brings the light!
It drums, it trumpets,
the eye blinks and the ear is amazed,
unheard-of things are not heard.

Thus Paracelsus appears as a personality that we still find in ancient times, where people still had an old heritage, where the spiritual powers of vision could draw from the spiritual world. But the time came when the spiritual powers of the soul were obscured by external materialism. Now we are at a time when they will develop again, and science will be warmed and enlightened by the assurance, hope and fulfillment of all that we strive for in our thoughts and meditations. Thus science will become much more useful, but spiritual science or theosophy will teach that man, with his innermost core of being, belongs to the spiritual world.