Works of Goethe
Goethe's Faust (Parts I and II), Theory of Colours, and The Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. Foundational works of German Romantic-Idealist culture; Steiner edited Goethe's scientific writings (Kürschner edition, 1883–1897) and described Anthroposophy as 'the extension of Goethean phenomenology into the supersensible.'
Source context· Western European stream · Anglo-German cultural age
- Stream
- Western European
- Cultural age
- Anglo-German (5th post-Atlantean cultural age)
- Composed
- c. 1800 CE
Faust (Parts I and II)
Goethe's two-part poetic drama (Part I 1808; Part II 1832 posthumous) — the most-cited literary work in Steiner's lectures and the central modern document of the Faustian-Mephistophelean encounter. Bayard Taylor's 1870-1871 translation (archive.org goethetaylorfaust01 + 02).
Read →Theory of Colours
Goethe's 1810 phenomenological treatise opposing Newton's particle-and-spectrum theory — colour as the dynamic of light-and-darkness at their boundaries (the Urphänomen).
2 sections · 193,380 words
Read →The Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily
Goethe's 1795 Märchen embedded in the Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten — a mystery fairytale of bridges, snakes, lilies, and kings that Steiner devoted six lectures (GA 22) to interpreting esoterically. Thomas Carlyle's 1832 translation.
1 sections · 11,518 words
Read →JSON: /api/sources/goethe-works/index.json · Back to Sources.