15. Goethe's Search for the Depths of Becoming and the Mysteries of the World in His “Faust” The Luciferic and the Ahrimanic Temptation

Goethe sensed all this, deeply sensed it. If you go through his “Faust”, you will see that he connects the luciferic and ahrimanic forces to the nature of Faust in such a way as it must be seen by man if man wants to properly place himself with consciousness in the impulses of the fifth post-Atlantic period. In detail and on a large scale, the forces of Ahriman and Lucifer work against the human being. If Ahriman were not recognized, if Lucifer were not recognized, one would not be able to continue to live in the appropriate way. And all this must be brought about through spiritual science. One would like to say that it cannot be discussed strongly enough today, because one is still little understood today according to the weight of what has to be brought out of spiritual science. Things are taken too lightly, too easily forgotten. What our time demands is the deepening and strengthening of the personality, a sense of fact, a sense for true facts, and working with them on a large scale, one could say today, with the external events of the world. There are two things that work against what is necessary for the progress of humanity: an absurd nationality principle that has become atavistic. That is the first. A perverse nationality principle, as it was brought into the world by the Napoleons in the 19th century in particular, a nationality principle in the name of which many impulses are invoked today against the true sense of human development. A befogging nationality principle that befogs and confuses concepts, that places concepts in false spheres. I will make myself clear in the following way.