The Rudolf Steiner Archive

I may say that the question of how one should speak about the arts is one with which I have actually wrestled throughout my whole life, and I will take the liberty of taking as my starting point two stages within which I have attempted to make some headway with this wrestling. It was for the first time when, at the end of the 1880s, I had to give my lecture to the Viennese Goethe Society: “Goethe as the Father of a New Aesthetic.” What I wanted to say at the time about the essence of the arts made me feel like a person who wanted to speak but was actually mute and had to use gestures to express what he actually had to point out. For at that time it was suggested to me by certain conditions of life to speak about the nature of the arts through philosophical judgments. I had worked my way out of Kantianism into Herbartianism in philosophy, and this Herbartianism met me in Vienna in a representative personality, in the esthetician Robert Zimmermann. Robert Zimmermann had completed his great History of Aesthetics as a Philosophical Science a long time before. He had also already presented to the world his systematic work on Aesthetics as a Science of Form, and I had faithfully worked my way through what Robert Zimmermann, the Herbartian aesthetician, had to communicate to the world in this field. And then I had this representative Herbartian Robert Zimmermann in front of me in the lectures at the University of Vienna. When I met Robert Zimmermann in person, I was completely filled by the spirited, inspired, excellent personality of this man. What lived in the man Robert Zimmermann could only be extraordinarily and deeply appealing. I must say that, although Robert Zimmermann's whole figure had something extraordinarily stiff about it, I even liked some things about this stiffness, because the way this personality, in this peculiar coloring that the German language takes on in those who speak it from German-Bohemia, from Prague German, from this linguistic nuance, was particularly likeable. Robert Zimmermann's Prague German was exceptionally appealing to me in a rare way when he said to me, who was already intensively studying Goethe's Theory of Colors at the time: Oh, Goethe is not to be taken seriously as a physicist! A man who couldn't even understand Newton is not to be taken seriously as a physicist! And I must say that the content of this sentence completely disappeared behind the flirtatious and graceful manner in which Robert Zimmermann communicated such things to others. I was extremely fond of such opposition.

But then I also got to know Robert Zimmermann, or perhaps I already knew him, when he spoke as a Herbartian from the lectern. And I must say that the amiable, likeable person completely ceased to be so in aesthetic terms; the man Robert Zimmermann became a Herbartian through and through. At first I was not quite clear what it meant when this man entered, even through the door, ascended the podium, laid down his fine walking stick, strangely took off his coat, strangely walked to the chair, strangely sat down, strangely removed his spectacles, paused for a moment, and then, with his soulful eyes, after removing his spectacles, let his gaze wander to the left, to the right, and into the distance over the very small number of listeners present, and there was something striking about it at first. But since I had been intensively studying Herbart's writings for quite some time, it all became clear to me after the first impression, and I said to myself: Oh yes, here we are entering the door to Herbartism, here we are putting down the fine walking stick of Herbartism, here we are taking off our Herbartism coat, here we are gazing at the audience with our glasses-free eyes. And now Robert Zimmermann, in his extraordinarily pleasant dialect, colored by the Prague dialect, began to speak about practical philosophy, and lo and behold, this Prague German clothed itself in the form of Herbartian aesthetics.

I experienced this, and then, from Zimmermann's subjective point of view, I understood well what it actually meant that the motto of Zimmermann's aesthetics on the first page was the saying of Schiller, which was indeed transformed into Herbartianism by Robert Zimmermann: The true secret of the master's art lies in the annihilation of material by form – for I had seen how the amiable, likeable, thoroughly graceful man appeared to be annihilated as content and reappeared in Herbartian form on the professorial chair. It was an extraordinarily significant impression for the psychology of the arts.

And if you understand that one can make such a characterization even when one loves, then you will not take amiss the expression that I now want to use, that Robert Zimmermann, whom I greatly admired, may forgive me for using the word ” Anthroposophie', which he used in a book to describe a figure made up of logical, aesthetic and ethical abstractions, that I have used this word to treat the spiritualized and ensouled human being scientifically. Robert Zimmermann called his book, in which he carried out the procedure I have just described, “Anthroposophy”.

I had to free myself from this experience, in which the artistic, so to speak, appeared to be poured into a form without content, when I gave my lecture on “Goethe as the Father of a New Aesthetic”. I was able to accept the fully justified part of Zimmermann's view, that in art one is not concerned with content, not with the what, but with what is made out of the content of what is observed and so on through the imagination, through the creativity of the human being. And from Schiller we also saw Herbart taking form. I could well see the deep justification for this tendency, but I could not help but contrast it with the fact that what can be achieved as form by real imagination must be elevated and must now appear in the work of art in such a way that we get a similar impression from the work of art as we otherwise only get from the world of ideas. To spiritualize what man can perceive, to carry the sensual into the sphere of the spirit, not to extinguish the material through form, that was what I tried to free myself from at the time, from what I had absorbed in a faithful study of Herbart's aesthetics.

However, other elements had also been incorporated. A philosopher of the time, whom I liked just as much as Robert Zimmermann, who is extremely dear to me as a person, Eduard von Hartmann, he wrote in all fields of philosophy, and at that time he also wrote about aesthetics, about aesthetics from a partly similar, partly different spirit than Robert Zimmermann had written. And again, you will not interpret the objectivity that I am trying to achieve as if I were being unkind for that reason. Eduard von Hartmann's aesthetics can be characterized by the fact that Eduard von Hartmann took something from the arts, which were actually quite distant from him, and called it aesthetic appearance. He took what he called aesthetic appearance from the arts, just as one would roughly proceed by skinning a living person. And then, after this procedure, after he had, so to speak, skinned the arts, the living arts, Eduard von Hartmann made his aesthetics out of them. And the skinned skin — is it wonderful that it became leather under the hard treatment it then received at the hands of the aesthete, who was so far removed from the arts? — That was the second thing I had to free myself from at the time. And I tried to include in my lecture at the time what I would call the mood: the philosopher, if he wants to talk about the arts, must have the renunciation to become mute in a certain respect and only through chaste gestures to hint at that which, when speaking, philosophy can never quite penetrate, before which it remains unpenetrating and must hint at the essential like a silent observer.

That was the mood, the psychological characterization, from which I spoke at the time in my lecture on “Goethe as the Father of a New Aesthetic”.

Then later on I was given the task of making a second stop on the way to the question that I characterized at the beginning of my present consideration. It was when I spoke to anthroposophists about the “essence of the arts”. And now, in view of the mood of the whole environment at that time, I could not speak in the same way. Now I wanted to speak in such a way that I could remain within artistic experience itself. Now I wanted to speak artistically about art. And I knew once more that I was now on the other side of the river, beyond which I had stood at the time with my lecture “Goethe as the Father of a New Aesthetic”. And now I spoke in such a way that I carefully avoided slipping into philosophical formulations. For I felt that slipping into philosophical characterization immediately takes away the actual essence of art from the words. The inartistic quality of mere concepts used to stir up the forces from which speech arises. And I tried to speak about the arts from that mood, which in the strictest sense avoids slipping into philosophical formulations. Today I am supposed to speak about the psychology of the arts again.

It is not particularly easy, after having lived through the other two stages, to stop at any other point. And so I could not help but turn to life with my contemplation. I sought some point through which I could enter into life through my contemplation of the artistic. And lo and behold, I found the amiable romantic Novalis as if he were something self-evidently given. And when, after this glimpse of Novalis, I ask myself: What is poetic? What is contained in this special form of artistic experience in poetic life? — the figure of Novalis stands before me alive. It is strange that Novalis was born into this world with a peculiar basic feeling that lifted him above the external prosaic reality throughout his entire physical life. There is something in this personality that seems to be endowed with wings and floats away in poetic spheres above the prose of life. It is something that has lived among us humans as if it wanted to express at one point in world history: this is how it is with the external sensual reality compared to the experience of the truly poetic. And this personality of Novalis lives itself into life, and begins a spiritual and thoroughly real love relationship with a twelve-year-old girl, Sophie von Kühn. And all the love for the girl, who is still sexually immature, is clothed in the most magnificent poetry, so clothed in poetry that one is never tempted to think of anything sensually real when considering this relationship. But all the fervor of human feeling that can be experienced when the human soul floats freely above prosaic reality, as in poetic spheres, all the fervor of this feeling lives in this love of Novalis for Sophie von Kühn. And this girl dies two days after her fourteenth birthday, at the time when other people are so strongly touched by the reality of physical life that they descend into the sexuality of the physical body. Before this event could happen to Sophie von Kühn, she was transported into spiritual worlds, and Novalis, out of a stronger consciousness than the instinctive-poetic one that had been with him before, decided to die after Sophie von Kühn in his living soul experience. He lives with the one who is no longer in the physical world. And those people who approached Novalis after that time with the most intimate human feelings say that he, walking around alive on earth, was like someone who had been transported into the spiritual worlds, who was talking to something that is not of this earth, does not really belong to this earth. And within this poetic reality, transported into prose, he himself feels that what other people see only in the control of external forces, the fullest expression of the will, merging into reality, already appears within the poetic-ideal world, and he speaks of “magical idealism” to characterize his direction in life.

If we then try to understand everything that flowed from this wonderfully formed soul, which was thus able to love without touching reality, external reality, which was thus able to live with what was truly wrested from it before a certain stage of external reality was reached, if we open ourselves to all that then flowed from this Novalis soul, then we receive the purest expression of the poetic. And a psychological question is resolved simply by immersing oneself in the artistic stream of poeticization that flows from Novalis's poetic and prose writings.

But then one has a strange impression. One has the impression, when one delves psychologically into the essence of the poetic in this way, into a reality of life, into that of Novalis, that one then has something floating behind the poetic that resonates through everything poetic. One has the impression that this Novalis emerged from spiritual and soul spheres, bringing with him what, with poetic radiance, showered the outwardly prosaic life. One has the impression that a soul has entered the world that has brought with it the spiritual and soul in its purest form, so that it has inspired and spiritualized the whole body, and that it has absorbed space and time into the state of mind, which was spiritual and soul, in such a way that space and time, stripping off their outer being, reappeared poetically in the soul of Novalis. In Novalis' poetry, space and time seem to be devoured.

You see, with a strong soul and a strong spirit, poetry enters the world, and out of its strength it integrates space and time. But it overwhelms space and time, melting space and time through the power of the human soul, and in this melting of space and time through the power of the human soul lies the psychology of poetry. But through this process of melting space and time in Novalis, something resounds that was like a deep fundamental element within it. You can hear it everywhere, you can hear it through everything that Novalis has revealed to the world, and then you cannot help but say to yourself: What soul, what spirit is, it came to light there, to remain poetic, to poetically melt space and time by appropriating space and time. But there remained at first something as the foundation of this soul, something that lies most deeply within the human soul, so deeply that it can be discovered as a creative power by shaping the deepest inner conditions of the human organism itself, by living in the innermost being of the human being as soul. Musicality, the musical, the sounding artistic world, was a fundamental element in all of Novalis's poetry. This reveals itself out of the harmony of the world and is also what creates artistically out of the cosmos in the most intimate aspects of the human being.

If we try to enter the sphere in which the spiritual and soul-life in man create most intimately, then we come to a musical form within the human being, and then we say to ourselves: Before the musician sounds his tones out into the world, the musical essence itself has taken hold of the musician's being and first embodied, shaped into his human nature the musical, and the musician reveals that which the world harmony has unconsciously placed in the depths of his soul. And that is the basis of the mysterious effect of music. That is the basis for the fact that, when speaking about music, one can really only say: The musical expresses the innermost human feeling. — And by preparing oneself with the appropriate experiences for contemplation, by entering into this Novalis poetry, one grasps what I would call the psychology of music.

And then one's gaze is drawn to the end of Novalis's life, which occurred in his twenty-ninth year. Novalis passed away painlessly, but surrendered to the element that had permeated his poetry throughout his life. His brother had to play for him on the piano as he died, and the element that he had brought with him to infuse his poetry was to take him back when he died, passing from prosaic reality into the spiritual world. To the sound of the piano, twenty-nine-year-old Novalis died. He was searching for the musical homeland that he had left in the full sense of the word at his birth, in order to take the musicality of poetry from it.

So one settles in, I think, from reality into the psychology of the arts. The path must be a tender one, the path must be an intimate one, and it must not be skeletonized by abstract philosophical forms, neither by those that are taken from rational thinking in the Herbartian sense, nor by those that are a bone from external observation of nature in the Gustav Fechnerian sense.

And Novalis stands before us: released from the musical, allowing the musical to resonate in the poetic, melting space and time with the poetic, not having touched the external prosaic reality of space and time in magical idealism, and then drawing it back into musical spirituality.

And the question may arise: What if Novalis had been physically organized to live longer, if what had musically resonated and poetically spoken in the inner effective psychology of the human soul and human spirit had not returned to its musical home at the age of twenty-nine, but had lived on through a more robust physical organization, where would this soul have found itself? Where would this soul have found itself if it had had to remain within the prosaic reality from which it had departed at the time when it was still time, without contact with outer space and outer time, to return to the spaceless world of music?

I have no desire to give this answer in theoretical terms. Again, I would like to turn our gaze to reality, and there it is; it too has played itself out in the course of human development. When Goethe had reached the age at which Novalis withdrew from the physical world out of his musical and poetic mood, the deepest longing arose in Goethe's soul to penetrate into that artistic world which had brought it to the highest level in the development of that entity which can express itself in space and time. At this stage of his life, Goethe felt a burning desire to go south and to discern in the works of art of Italy something of that from which an art was created that understood how to bring the genuinely artistic into the forms of space and time, especially into the forms of space. And when Goethe stood before the Italian works of art and saw that which could speak not only to the senses but to the soul from out of space, the thought escaped his soul: here he realizes how the Greeks, whose work he believed he recognized in these works of art, created as nature itself creates, and which natural creative laws he believed he was tracking down. And he was overwhelmed by the spiritual and the soul-stirring that met him in the forms of space, the religious feeling: There is necessity, there is God. — Before he had moved to the south, he had searched for God together with Herder in the reading of Spinoza, in the spiritual and soul-stirring expression of the supersensible in the external sensual world. The mood that had driven him to seek his God in Spinoza's God together with Herder had remained. He had not found satisfaction. What he had sought in Spinoza's philosophy about God was awakened in his soul when he stood before the works of art in which he thought he could again discern Greek spatial art, and the feeling escaped him: There is necessity, there is God.

What did he feel? He apparently felt that in the Greek works of art of architecture and sculpture, what lives in man as spiritual and soulful has been created, what wants to go out into space and what gives itself to space, and when it becomes pictorial, also spatially to time. And Goethe has experienced the other thing psychologically, which is on the opposite pole to the Novalis experience. Novalis has experienced how, when man penetrates into his innermost being in space and time and wants to remain poetic and musical, space and time melt away in human comprehension. Goethe experienced how, when the human being works and chisels his spiritual soul into the spatial, the spatial and temporal does not melt away, how it surrenders in love to the spatial and temporal, so that the spiritual soul reappears from the spatial and temporal in an objectified way. How the spirit and soul of the human being, without stopping at the sensory perception, without remaining seated in the eye, penetrates to get under the surface of things and to create the architecture out of the forces that prevail under the surface of things, to shape the sculpture, experienced Goethe in those moments that led him to the saying: “There is necessity, there is God.” There is everything that is of divine-spiritual existence in the human subconscious, that man communicates to the world without stopping at the gulf that his senses form between him and the world. There is that which man experiences artistically when he is able to impress, to chisel, to force the spiritual-soul into the forces that lie beneath the surface of physical existence. — What is it in Novalis that makes him, psychologically, musical-poetic-creative? What is it in Goethe that impels him to feel the utter necessity of nature-making in the plastic arts, to feel the utterly unfree necessity of nature-making in 'the spatial, in the material works of art? What is it that urges him, despite the feeling of necessity, to say: there is God?

At both poles, with Novalis and with Goethe, where at the one pole lies the goal that the path to the psychological understanding of the poetic and the musical must take, and where at the other pole lies the goal that the psychological understanding must take if it grasp the plastic-architectonic. At both poles lies an experience that is inwardly experienced in the field of art, and in relation to which it is its greatest task of reality to also carry it outwardly into the world: the experience of human freedom.

In ordinary mental, physical and sensual experience, the spiritual and soul-like penetrates to the organization of the senses; then it allows the senses to glimpse what external physical and material and in the senses, external physical-material reality encounters inner spiritual-soul existence and enters into that mysterious connection that causes so much concern for physiology and psychology. When someone is born into life with the primal poetic-musical disposition, which is so self-sustaining that it seeks to die out under the sounds of music, then this spiritual-soul-like does not penetrate to the sensory organs Then it permeates and spiritualizes the whole organism, shaping it like a total sensory organ, and then it places the whole human being in the world in the same way as otherwise only the individual eye or the individual ear is placed in the world. Then the soul-spiritual takes hold within the human being, and then, when this soul-spiritual engages with the material world externally, it is not absorbed into the prosaic reality of space and time, but space and time are dissolved in the human perception. That is how it is at one pole. There the soul lives poetically and musically in its freedom, because it is organized in such a way that it melts the reality of space and time in its contemplation. There the soul lives without touching the ground of physical prosaic existence, in freedom, but in a freedom that cannot penetrate into this prosaic reality.

And at the other pole, there lives the soul, the spiritual part of man, as it lived, for example, in Goethe. This soul and spiritual part is so strong that it not only penetrates the physical body of man right down to the sense openings, but it penetrates these senses and extends even beyond the senses. I would say that in Novalis there is such a delicate soul-spirituality that it does not penetrate to the full organization of the senses; in Goethe there is such a strong soul-spirituality that it breaks through the organization of the senses and beyond the boundaries of the human skin into the cosmic, and therefore longs above all for an understanding of those areas of art that carry the spiritual-soul into the spatial-temporal. That is why this spirituality is organized in such a way that it wants to submerge with that which extends beyond the boundaries of the human skin, into the ensouled space in sculpture, into the spiritualized spatial power in architecture, into the suggestion of those forces that have already internalized themselves as spatial and temporal forces, but which can still be grasped externally in this form in painting.

So it is here too a liberation from necessity, a liberation from what man is when his spiritual and soulful self is anchored in the gulfs of the sensory realm. Liberation in the poetic-musical: freedom lives in there, but it lives in such a way that it does not touch the ground of the sensual. Liberation in sculptural, architectural, and pictorial experience: but freedom is so strong that if it wanted to express itself in any other way than artistically, it would shatter the external physical-sensual existence because it dives below the surface.

This is felt when one truly engages with what Goethe so powerfully said about his social ideas, let us say in “Wilhelm Meister's Journeyman Years”. What cannot be entrusted to reality, if it is to be shaped in freedom, becomes musical-poetic; what in contemplation one must not bring to the reality of sensual physical imagination, if it is not to destroy external reality, what must be left in the formation of spatial and temporal forces, must be left in the mere reproduction of the block of wood, because otherwise it would destroy the organic, to which it is death, becomes sculpture, becomes architecture.

No one can understand the psychology of the arts without understanding the greater soul that must live in the sculptor and the architect than in normal life. No one can understand the poetic and musical without penetrating to the more that lives in the spiritual and soul life of a human being, who cannot allow this spiritual more, this spiritual projection of the physical organization to the physical and sensual, but must keep it behind it in freedom. Liberation is the experience that is present in the true comprehension of the arts, the experience of freedom according to its polar opposites.

What is man's form is what rests in man. This form is permeated in human reality by what becomes his movement. The human form is permeated from within by the will and from without by perception, and the human form is initially the external expression of this permeation. Man lives in bondage when his will, his inwardly developed will, which wants to enter into movement, must stop at the sphere in which perception is taken up. And as soon as man can reflect on his whole being, the feeling comes to life in him: There lives more in you than you, with your nervous-sensory organization, can make alive in your intercourse with the world. Then the urge arises to set the dormant human form, which is the expression of this normal relationship, in motion, in such movements that carry the form of the human form itself out into space and time. Again, it is a wrestling of the human interior with space and time. If one tries to capture it artistically, the eurhythmic arises between the musical-poetic and the plastic-architectonic-picturesque.

I believe that one must, in a certain way, remain inwardly within the arts when one attempts to do what still remains a stammering when talking about the arts and about the artistic. I believe that not only is there much between heaven and earth that human philosophy, as it usually appears, cannot dream of, but that what lies within the human interior, when conditions with the physical body enter into, first brings about liberation within the artistic towards the two poles. And I believe that one cannot understand the artistic psychologically if one wants to grasp it in the normal soul, but that one can only grasp it in the higher spiritual soul of the human being, which goes beyond the normal soul and is predisposed for supersensible worlds.

When we look at two such eminently artistic natures as Novalis and Goethe, I believe the secrets of the psychology of the arts reveal themselves to us phenomenally, out of reality. Schiller once felt this deeply when he spoke the words at the sight of Goethe: Only through the dawn of the beautiful do you enter the realm of knowledge. In other words, only by artistic immersion into the full human soul can you ascend into the regions of the sphere toward which knowledge strives. And it is a beautiful, I believe an artist's saying, when it is said: Create, artist, do not speak — but a saying against which one must sin, because man is, after all, a speaking being. But just as it is true that one must sin against such a word: “Form, artist, do not speak” – it is also true, I believe, that one must always atone for this sin, that one must always try, if one wants to talk about the arts, to form in speaking. Artist, do not speak; and if you are obliged to speak about art as a human being, then try to speak in a creative way, to create through speech.

after the eurythmic-dramatic presentation of the “Easter Vigil”

Among the Easter performances that have just passed before our minds were also those that depict how a soul that is about to pass through the gate of death through its own decision is brought back into the world of earthly life through the Easter message. I believe that, of the many impressions that the Faust story can have on us, this scene must be one of the most profound. Now, after the transformation, I would like to say, after the transformation, ¹ the scene that signifies the world with its evolution, bring that you have absorbed as a prospect within the Faustian poetry into your soul, in connection with what was said here yesterday, so to speak, before the transformation, about that meaningful real vision that can arise in the human soul when it steps before the symbol of Jesus Christ resting in the tomb. Let us bear in mind that yesterday we were able to say that the sight of what is connected with human life through its development on earth in relation to the world of Lucifer and Ahriman is evoked through a corresponding spiritual contemplation or spiritual perception. Let us bear in mind that in the Faust epic we have a soul which announces itself to us immediately at the beginning of the poem as having absorbed Ahrimanic knowledge and insights. And then let us look into this soul as it struggles out of its connection with the Ahrimanic wisdom towards the — we may say from our point of view — Christ-imbued source of life: a momentous moment that is presented to us for a human soul. Let us visualize this human soul! There she stands before us with all the knowledge she has absorbed through observing the external material world and its interrelations, with the insight she has been able to gain through the instruments by which the external naturalist attempts to penetrate the interrelations of nature... And what has this soul come to with all the research that is linked to the various instruments and also to the phial containing the juices that “quickly make one drunk” for earthly life? We feel how an Ahrimanic nature already rules at the side of the Faust soul, and how this Ahrimanic nature is linked to what is earthly death. Do we not see how this human soul, filled with Ahrimanic nature, draws the result of its Ahrimanic insights? And this result of knowledge that Ahriman can give to man on earth is what is summarized in the words:

I greet you, you only vial!
Which I now bring down with devotion,
In you I honor human wit and art.
You epitome of the sweet slumber potions,
You distillation of all deadly subtle powers,
Do show your favor to your master!
I see you, pain is alleviated,
I grasp you, the striving is diminished,
The spirit's flood tide ebbs away little by little.
I am expelled into the high sea,
The mirror tide glistens at my feet,
A new day beckons to new shores.

And already this soul has the vision of coming to the other shore, where it may be able to find that which it must believe it cannot find on this earth because of its ahrimanic entanglement. Already it has the vision of crossing over to the other shore:

A chariot of fire floats, on light wings,
Towards me! I feel ready,
On a new path to penetrate the ether,
To new spheres of pure activity.
This lofty life, this divine bliss!
You, still a worm, and do you deserve them?
Yes, just turn your back resolutely
to the lovely sun of the earth!
Dare to tear open the gates,
before which everyone likes to sneak by.
Here it is time to prove by action
That manly dignity does not give way to the height of the gods,
Not to tremble before that dark cave,
In which the imagination condemns itself to its own torment,
To strive towards that passageway,
Around whose narrow mouth the whole of hell is aflame;
To take this step serenely,
And, even if it means flowing into nothingness,

And now that he has also taken up the other Ahrimanic instrument, he is ready to take the path over to those realms that he learned in Ahriman's school are numberless to the soul as long as it is enclosed in the earthly body. And this soul is torn out of this mood by the sound of the Easter bells and the choir of the Easter song. And so the Faust soul has lived an earthly life to now seek within the earthly body what this human soul, as a result of its seeking in the earthly body, is to carry through the gate of death, so that it can carry it up into the spiritual realm where it needs it for its further development.

What you have heard today from the first part of Goethe's “Faust”, and much of what belongs to this part, to this scene of Goethe's “Faust”, first appeared as the completed first part of the poem in 1808. But before that, in 1790, Goethe had already published “Faust, a fragment”, this fragment, which did not yet have the last Gretchen scene. But this fragment did not even have the scene that has brought the events of such significance for Faust's soul to our own soul today. In 1790, Goethe published his fragment without this Easter scene and without the monologue that leads to the deepest depths of human and spiritual experience. And at the end of the 19th century, what Goethe had finished in the 1780s, even as early as the 1770s, was discovered in the 1790s. It was then published under the tasteless title “Urfaust”. In this Urfaust, we do not find, one might say, of course, this Easter scene. Why is it not there? Yes, Goethe, who was a child of his time, had to mature in order to be able to depict the effect of the Christ impulse on Faust's soul in his own way, in accordance with his soul; he first had to mature for this. And Goethe was not ripe for it until 1790. The nineties saw the deepening of Goethe's soul, which found its reflection in the well-known “Fairytale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily”. It falls into the time between the moment when “Faust” was published without the Easter scene and the moment when it was published with the Easter scene. Goethe's soul experienced a profound deepening through what it developed in the “Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily”. And it was only through this experience that Goethe realized how he could allow the Easter experience scene to affect Faust's soul.

Now, let us look into this soul of Faust itself, and try to put ourselves in the place of the beginning of Goethe's “Faust,” which is more or less the same in the various successive publications. We know that it reads:

I now, alas! have philosophy,
Jurisprudence and medicine,
And unfortunately also theology!
Thoroughly studied, with hot endeavor.
There I stand now, I poor fool!
And am as wise as before;
I am called Magister, even Doktor,
And for ten years now,
Up and down and hither and thither,
I have led my students by the nose –
And I see that we cannot know anything!

So he has been a lecturer for ten years. Let us assume that he entered the teaching career regularly, then we might think that he became a lecturer around the age of thirty. In fact, he has been leading his students by the nose since the age of thirty! Let us recall what I said yesterday. In the thirties, the human being will stand before the image of the Jupiter existence when he visualizes the seduction I spoke of yesterday. And a vision, a prophetic vision of this seduction, is what one has before one when one stands before Christ Jesus lying in the tomb. Do we not have this vision dramatically developed in Faust? Does he not stand before us before the Easter Mystery, and does he not stand before us, one might say, at the end of the 1830s, before the Easter Mystery? May we not assume that in his feelings, what man must feel from the Easter Mystery, rumbles like a premonition of the Jupiter experience with Lucifer and Ahriman? In Goethe's time one could not present it as one can present it now, but Goethe could present the rumbling sensation in the heart towards the Easter Mystery, and it rumbled in Faust's soul. And is it not as if Faust felt, when Mephisto-Ahriman approaches him, how his soul has fallen prey to the Ahrimanic powers? How he has to save himself from something? Yes, but from what? From what must he save himself? Can we not say that Goethe sensed something of this when, as a mature man, as a mature soul, he allowed the spirit of his own Faust to take effect on him again, as he was able to sense it in his time, of the Easter mood that we have been picturing in our minds these days, and that this gave rise to the need to insert the Easter scene into “Faust”, which did not have this Easter scene before? The “Faust” was re-written into Christian verse with the insertion of the Easter scene between the years 1790 and 1800.

So what years did Faust have to live through? Before which years of life did he shudder so much that he wanted to reach for the vial himself? Well, before the second, descending part of life, that part of life of which we have said how man, when he stands before the vision of the Jupiter existence, knows that later on he must carry to Jupiter that which the Christ can give him as provisions for the journey, because otherwise he would have to go without nourishment in the second half of life. What is Faust seeking? He seeks nourishment for the soul for the second half of life. We have all been seeking it since the time when the Mystery of Golgotha has passed over the evolution of our Earth. We are all seeking it. For that which will take physical and psychic form on Jupiter is already living in the depths of our souls, and we must all feel something of this Faustian mood. We need a power that we cannot have through that which, as human beings, only gives us freedom and thus leads us to Ahriman and Lucifer; we need a power for those impulses in us that are connected with the descending half of life. It is the power of Christ, the power of Christ, which the Christ has after he has passed through the gate of death and has not lived through in an earthly body the second half of man's life. Why did he not live through it? Because this power, which must be bestowed upon people in the second half of life, had to flow into the earth aura so that all people can find themselves through the evolution of the earth. Through the Easter mystery, that which we need to enable us to journey through our entire life on earth with our soul is resurrected. And now imagine this profound connection in Goethe's “Faust”. Faust has absorbed within himself — Goethe knew how to absorb this, because he presented it without the Easter mystery when he published his fragment without the Easter mystery — Faust has absorbed within himself what man can absorb through the connection with Lucifer and Ahriman, what gives us the possibility of a free soul. But Faust, who measures the depths of the soul, is aware that he cannot continue to live with him; he needs something else in order to live. And Goethe was ripe to show what Faust needs, what is the impulse of the Easter Mystery. Does not the Easter Mystery stand profoundly before us in what Goethe made of his “Faust” only as a fully mature man, what he could not yet have included in 1790 because he did not yet understand it?

How did the poetic idea for this poem, which takes us to such depths, come about in the young Goethe? We know that the young Goethe was deeply impressed both by the puppet show of Faust, which he saw, where the fate of Faust was simply presented through puppets, and by the folk play of “Doctor Faust”. This thoroughly popular element came before Goethe's soul. What then is this Faust? And Goethe's soul immediately realized: this Faust must be the striving human being in general, who, through his striving, can dive down into all the depths of the human soul and must find the way up to the bright heights of the spirit. That an inner path must be traversed by a human soul, the young Goethe knew that. For what is it, after all, if not a meditation that Faust experiences in his soul as he gazes at the various signs? It is a meditation that ultimately leads him to the vision of the Earth Spirit that flows through and permeates the Earth. The meditation receives the words in response:

In the flood of life, in the storm of action,
I surge up and down,
Weaving back and forth!
Birth and death,
An eternal sea,
A changing weaving,
A glowing life,
So I work at the whirring loom of time
And weave the living garment of divinity.

Meditation and counter-meditation! It leads Faust into the depths of life, but how to get out? How to ascend to spiritual heights?

Now that we have placed ourselves before the soul, what a grandiose idea of the striving Faust in Goethe's soul arose from the puppet show and the folk play, and what form this grandiose idea took through the penetration of the Goethean soul into the mystery of the soul, we now ask ourselves: What did Goethe make of Faust throughout his life? After we have realized the magnitude of what Goethe's soul was capable of through the impact of the Faust impulse, we may well ask ourselves: What did these impressions become in artistic and poetic terms? Well, one thing I just said can help us in our quest to understand this 'Faust' in aesthetic and artistic terms as well. Goethe published a fragment that roughly concludes with the cathedral scene in 1790. What makes the “Faust” seem so grandiose to us today is not in it. He added it later, when he was in Rome. In 1787, he added what we now know as the “Witches' Kitchen”. He inserted other scenes into the manuscript at other times. The original manuscript was written and copied by someone else, and at the time the later scenes were added, Schiller himself described it as a “yellowed manuscript”. And when Schiller called upon Goethe at the turn of the 18th to the 19th century to do something to round off Faust, Goethe said that it would be difficult for him to take on the old monster Faust again and to appropriately complete what had been left unfinished for so long. Goethe was afraid of incorporating into this his “Faust” that with which he had later matured, into all that he was and had appeared by the year 1790.

And now let us look at the first part of this “Faust”. Is it not a work that we can clearly see has been patched together from what was created at different times? If people were not attached to traditional judgments, they would see in “Faust” the most magnificent poetic idea that has ever come into the world with regard to the individual human being. At the same time, they would have to admit to themselves that in terms of art and poetry, this “Faust” is the most inconsistent, that it is a thoroughly disharmonious work, into which one could still put many things that are not in it, that has cracks and fissures everywhere, that is artistically far from perfect. Goethe's great genius could only ever complete fragments of what was before his soul. And however much we may admire the magnificent beauty of individual scenes, if we are not merely attached to the traditional judgment that literary historians have passed, but if we are unbiased, we cannot deny that “Faust” as it is is not a harmonious work of art, that it is glued in many places, but shows cracks and fissures everywhere. Why is this so? At a very advanced age, Goethe once again undertook to complete the second part of his Faust, for which he already had individual scenes, to which he added what he could add in his very old age. For example: the beginning of the classical-romantic phantasmagoria, the Helena interlude, was already completed around the turn of the 18th to the 19th century, and some parts were completed earlier. And again, we have every reason not to say, as some literary historians say, that one cannot understand the second part of “Faust,” or, as a very clever man, who is by no means stupid, said, that “Faust” is “a cobbled-together, patched-up concoction of old age.” It is not! On the other hand, it is a work whose task was so great that even Goethe's rich life experience was not enough in his time to shape it. One may well have one's own opinion even about the greatest things in the world. But why is that so? Well, I have already indicated on one occasion, in a lecture series held in The Hague, that this Faust is by no means, I would say, so extraordinarily young in world history. Faust, as he lived in the folk play that Goethe saw and as he lived in the puppet show, represents the human being descending into the depths of spiritual life and the human being wanting to rise to the light of the heights; he represents him in such a way that the greatest poet of modern times needed the Easter mystery for the liberation of his soul. As he appears in the folk play, he is a combination of the external physical reality, of the Dr. Georg Faust, who lived in the second half of the Middle Ages and wandered around like a tramp; of whom Trithem of Sponheim as well as other important men who met him report, and who even had a certain respect for him, the respect that one has for a remarkable personality who, through the way he expresses himself emotionally, knows many things and is capable of many things. And it was not for nothing that this real Doctor Faust was called by the name, as I have once stated here:

Magister Georgius Sabellicus Faustus Junior, fons necromanticorum, Magus Secundus, Chiromanticus Aeromanticus, Pyromanticus, in hydra arte secundus.

That was the name he gave himself. Now, it was common in those days to have many titles, and a long list of similar-sounding titles could be said of Giordano Bruno and many other important minds of the Middle Ages. If today's sophisticated people may find it strange that Trithem von Sponheim and others who knew about the existence of this real Faust thought that he was in contact with demonic powers of the world and the earth and through them was able to accomplish many things, then we must remember that in Luther's time, for example, there was nothing special about telling such a story. We know how Luther himself wrestled with the devil. We know that all this was common practice, the views and stories of that time. But a feeling lived in all this, which helped to shape Faust in the popular consciousness. The feeling lived — I say the feeling and not the concept, not the idea — natural science is coming up, natural science, which brings the Ahrimanic part of real reality before the human soul. And from this arose the feeling that Faust is a personality, and always has been, who has something to do with these Ahrimanic powers. People saw, as it were, the secret spiritual connecting threads that went from the soul of Faust to the Ahrimanic powers. And they found that Faust's destiny was tied to this inclination towards the Ahrimanic powers. That the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic has to do with the entire evolution of the human soul was still sensed and felt from the remnants of ancient clairvoyance and clear-sighted knowledge. And so the Faust figure was linked to this feeling of man's connection with the Luciferic and Ahrimanic powers. But at the same time, this intuitive knowledge was already descending into twilight, becoming unclear. And so, one might say, the feeling arose that one could depict the striving human being with all his temptations and dangers for his soul in the figure of Faust. But how this striving of the human being is connected with Lucifer and Ahriman was no longer known exactly. It had become blurred, and that is where the tremendous vagueness came from, which one gets a sense of when one picks up the medieval Faust book, in which all that the folk character is said to have experienced is where everything is thrown together in a grotesque ragout of all kinds of adventures that the human soul experiences in its quest to master all possible demonic and elementary spirits, Ahriman and Lucifer. After they were no longer seen in their full form, after they were shattered and ground into a ragout with all possible elemental spirits of nature, the figure of Doctor Faust was now placed in this ragout in this folk book. It was only Goethe's inspired insight that was able to discern in this gruesome ragout the mighty fundamental idea and to develop it to the point of the Easter Mystery. But it is really quite interesting to observe how, I might say, Lucifer and Ahriman were gradually dismembered into such ragout pieces.

If we go back and search for the figure of Faust in ancient times, we can look in books that were written as popular books at the time and that were in the hands of all those who were dealing with matters related to such things at the time. Augustine's works were very widespread when this book was written, cobbled together, glued together. One has the feeling of a bookseller who wanted to make a book that was as thick as possible, and not as if it were from a writer or even a literary man. But he must have known his Augustine, especially the biography of Augustine. And Augustine presents himself to us in all his development in such a remarkable way. How he at first cannot understand what Christianity is in its essence, how he gradually overcomes the inner resistance that he must bring to bear on Christianity in the development of his soul, first to what can now become known to him from the Manichaean doctrine. And from a great and important man within the Manichaean sect, Augustine receives knowledge from the Manichaean bishop Faustus. And we almost sense who this Faustus senior is, in comparison to whom the Faustus I mentioned earlier calls himself Faustus junior. He is the one whom Augustine once encountered in ancient times, the one who represented something of the Manichaean doctrine as Faustus, as bishop of the Manichaeans.

But what did he represent of the Manichaean doctrine? That which is corroded by Ahriman, that which no longer allows one to see how man, with his soul, is connected to the whole cosmos, to all cosmic, all stellar impulses. One can say: Even in the Manichean Bishop Faustus, the bond of knowledge that leads up to the cosmic insights that show how the human soul is born out of the cosmos, and which one must know if one wants to understand the Easter mystery in truth, is already torn. So it could be that in the person who wrote the folk book about Doctor Faust, precisely through the figure that Augustine describes as the Manichean bishop Faustus, it could emerge in this writer and compiler through the figure of Faustus, who had fallen prey to Ahriman. But since everything had become blurred, he did not understand that it was going against Ahriman. We see the scraps of the Ahrimanic danger shimmering through the stories of the folk play, but we see nothing clear. Yet we can get a clear feeling that Faustus is to be presented as the representative of the striving human being, so that danger threatens him from the Ahrimanic side. And much of what has been added to the Faust figure as it developed up to Goethe has been added by that Manichean Bishop Faustus, Faust senior. Many chapters of the folk tale seem as if they had been copied, but badly copied, only from the book in which Augustine describes his own development and his encounter with Bishop Faustus. We can prove that the Ahrimanic trait in the Faust figure points in this direction, and that when the folk book was written only the last dark urge remained to depict the Ahrimanic elements of human nature in the Faust figure.

And now, what about the Luciferic element? How were the Luciferic elements chopped up into those ragout pieces, which were then cooked into the ragout of elemental spirits and pieces of Lucifer and Ahriman, as I just said? Yes, we have to search if we want to find the connection between Faust and Lucifer. We can also search for it historically, we don't even have to go terribly far, we just have to go to Basel, and we can find clues in Basel as to how Lucifer was chopped up into a ragout. We are told that Erasmus of Rotterdam met with Faust in Basel, where they wanted to have a meal in the college, but could not find the right food. And since Erasmus lacked something that should now taste good to him, he told Faust, who was sitting with him and wanted to eat with him, but they had nothing right. So the Faust saga tells us that Faustus was now able to suddenly bring to the table, cooked and roasted, from somewhere - we don't know where - very strange birds that were not otherwise available in Basel. So we see a scene between Erasmus of Rotterdam and Faust, in which Faust is able to present such birds, which could not be bought in Basel at the time, nor far and wide in the surrounding area, to Erasmus. What is it actually? As such, it is not at all comprehensible in the legend, one can say, completely incomprehensible, but it becomes more understandable to us if we go back and bring together what we can gain from the writings of Erasmus of Rotterdam, who himself tells us that he made the acquaintance of a certain Faustus Andrelinus in Paris. This Faustus Andrelinus was an extremely learned man, but also an extremely sensual man. At first, Erasmus became so familiar with this Faustus that he had no real taste for the sensual sides of this Faustus. But again, we hear about a meal that the two are said to have eaten together. Now, however, two learned gentlemen of the time, such as Erasmus of Rotterdam and Faustus Andrelinus – we cannot expect them to serve each other such birds and in such a way, as Faustus of Basel is said to have served them to Erasmus. So it is likely that what has been handed down to us is just a kind of, I would say, joking speech that the two exchanged at the meal. But we do get a little behind this jocular talk when we also hear within this talk that Faust – this time it is probably Faust – was not satisfied with what was served to him, and demanded something else. Faust would now like to eat, in order to particularly torment himself, strange birds and rabbits; yes, strange birds and rabbits. Erasmus initially has the idea that this must mean something. So he behaves exactly like some theosophists who reflect on what things mean. Well, then the other one says, okay, he wants to do without the rabbits. Erasmus said: Could it not mean flies and ants? He wants to do without the rabbits. But the birds really are flies, and he wants to kill himself with flies for a change. Now we are very far. Now the birds have transformed into flies through astral transformation. And in Goethe we have the god of the flies in the figure of Mephisto. All that is needed is the spirit that commands these beings, and it could conjure up these beings. And so we have built the connecting bridge from the incomprehensible Basel legend and the strange birds to the flies that simply come from the devil. And we need not be surprised that the devil presents flies to him whom he invites to the table. But what kind of soul Faustus Andrelinus has, what kind of soul he has, that much becomes clear to us when we follow Erasmus a little further on his journey in Paris. In Paris, Erasmus was not yet quite inclined to engage with this Faustus Andrelinus character. But then he has to make a trip to London. There he writes that he has now learned – truly, Erasmus, think! , that he had manners like a coarse peasant, — that he has now learned to bow and even knows how to move around on the court parquet! And, yes, Erasmus writes it, that he lives in an atmosphere where, as you come and go, you always kiss each other by mistake. One recognizes from this that he wants to meet the tastes of his Parisian friend. He writes: “Come over here.” And if the gout prevents you too much, come over through the air in the spirit chariot. That is an element for you! — One sees that Faustus has a connection with the Luciferic kind of soul tendency.

With Goethe, we then encounter how Faust carries out his seductions by seducing Gretchen and so on. Lucifer has really fallen so far from the surroundings of the Faust figure that one must already do such literary investigations if we want to state the connection of Faust with Lucifer in the Parisian Faust. But we literally see Faust standing there, Lucifer and Ahriman at his side, albeit indistinctly through the confused time, boiled down into a ragout in the folk play. Should we be surprised to find in the folk play and folk drama, and even in Marlowe's Faust, something that is a remnant of ancient beliefs, still rooted in those times when man's connection with Ahriman and Lucifer was recognized through atavistic clairvoyance? But all this has become blurred, and in the literary product of which we have spoken, it is presented in a thoroughly blurred way. Goethe sensed the deep connection. But what could Goethe not do? He could not separate Lucifer and Ahriman from each other. They merged for him into the hybrid figure of Mephisto, in whom one does not really know whether it is the devil, Ahriman, or the real Mephisto. For he has also taken upon himself what Lucifer has. Goethe receives the ragout, as it were; he senses that Ahriman and Lucifer are at work, but he cannot yet sort it out; he devours them in the occult impossibility of the figure of Mephisto, who is a hybrid of Ahriman and Lucifer. One would like to be able to name the time that Goethe looked into by getting to know the Faust book: the last darkening of an old knowledge of this matter, the dying evening twilight of the old knowledge of Ahriman and Lucifer. And Goethe's Faust is the first dawn of the as yet unascended knowledge of Ahriman and Lucifer, dark and confused in the figure of Mephisto, Ahriman and Lucifer still mixed up. But already with the need to depict what the human soul can have by allowing itself to be affected by what has flowed into the earth's aura through the Christ being having passed through the mystery of Golgotha!

The Easter Mystery appears to us as the dawn of a new era of spiritual life for humanity in Goethe's “Faust”, which, despite its grandiose nature, still has something confused about it, something of a dark, foggy dawn. It appears to us as something within this dark dawn that we can see when we climb a mountain and see the sun rise earlier than we could see it before we stood on the mountain. We feel how one of the greatest of men, in his striving for the renewal of ancient knowledge, turns his soul towards the Paschal Mystery, when we allow Goethe's Faust to take effect on us. And if we allow it to take effect on us in the right way, then we feel what can take place in the heart of one of the greatest of men when this human heart has been touched by the Paschal Mystery, as Goethe himself felt at the same time. There is also something in this intuitive presentiment of Goethe to the Easter Mystery in Goethe's anticipation of it, is something like a hint: Yes, after the dawn, into which the first dark-light rays of the Easter Mystery shine, will come the sun of a new spiritual knowledge. The human soul will rise from the grave of darkened knowledge into which it too must descend. In the course of its development, the human soul will experience the Easter Mystery, the resurrection of that which is the Christ impulse in its deep, grave-like depths, when it unites with the power that emanates from the contemplation of the Christ Easter Mystery.

So, one would like to say, we feel Goethe's call and, after letting the tragedy of the Easter mystery take effect on us, would like to transform it into the call: May spiritual knowledge appropriate to the future rise in human hearts, in human souls! May human hearts and human souls, after sensing the deepest tragedy of the Easter mystery, feel and experience its depth in their innermost being, and may they experience resurrection in themselves through Christ!

May you, today, through the words that I have taken the liberty of speaking to you, absorb something of the feeling in your soul, so that you are united here, in our building dedicated to spiritual research, so that you, through the power of your souls into the future, something of that resurrection impulse which is so powerfully illustrated in the Easter mystery, and from which we could see how the greatest spirits of that time, which has now passed away, longed for it.

Feel in “Faust” something of what the magical sound of the Easter bells can resonate in the spirit of your souls.

• 1. At the words “Christ is Risen,” the black color of the scene transformed into a red one.

after a eurythmy-dramatic presentation

Today we have preceded the Easter scene in 'Faust' with the scene in which the Earth Spirit appears to Faust. Eight days ago, we were able to tie in many thoughts from 'Faust' that can be meaningful to those who want to approach the laws of the world, the life of the world, in a spiritual scientific way. It is not just to give you explanations of Goethe's 'Faust' that I am taking up Goethe's poetic creation last time on Easter Sunday and this time here. The reason is because the human soul can truly perceive something of the artistic images that confront us in “Faust” that must be called the development of this soul into the spiritual worlds, which one can call becoming familiar with the spiritual worlds. To the extent that we can, so to speak, immerse ourselves in “Faust” from a spiritual scientific point of view, we may indeed tie one or the other reflection to this poetic creation. In essence, Goethe's 'Faust' is the expression of the striving into the spiritual world in Goethe, and thus the expression of how, at an important turning point in modern history, a mind as deep as Goethe's tried to enter the world that we seek through our spiritual deepening.

Last time, we were able to convince ourselves that Goethe lived in a time in which it was really not yet possible to find the way into the spiritual worlds in a clear, I would say unambiguous, way. We were able to convince ourselves that such truths as those of the significance of Lucifer and Ahriman still hovered before Goethe's soul as an unclear realization, one might say, like an unclear sense of the spiritual world, and we were able to convince ourselves that in the figure of Mephistopheles the two figures of Lucifer and Ahriman have been conflated, so that Goethe has before him an unclear figure in Mephistopheles, to whom he cannot get close in an unambiguous spiritual-scientific relationship. And so we can see precisely in this striving of Goethe's, as it is expressed in 'Faust', with what seriousness and with what inner conscientiousness, one might say, with what responsibility before our own soul we should pursue what spiritual-scientific deepening is intended to open up. When a spirit so profound encounters such difficulties in the way of what many, many people today are seeking, there is truly an opportunity to learn a great deal from Goethe's own quest and striving. One would wish that everyone who has delved a little into the results of our spiritual science would again approach this document, Goethe's “Faust”, which is a document from the dawn, not yet from the time after the sunrise of spiritual-scientific endeavors. Last time I said that Goethe needed the maturity of his life to emerge from the state of his soul in his youth. Goethe's soul cannot be satisfied with just seeing in the world what the sensory eyes see and what the mind, bound to the brain, perceives. And what lived and raged in his soul for the deeper spiritual foundations of life, he shaped it in the striving Faust, who is not a likeness of Goethe, but who does present certain aspects of Goethe's striving and Goethe's life in a truly artistic way. And so we have here, in the scene with the Earth Spirit, one of the oldest parts of Goethe's Faust that he wrote down.

Last time I spoke about Goethe's “Faust” in such a way that if I were misunderstood as I often am, one could go and say that I had called “Faust” a defective work of art and would even have said some harsh words about it. And someone who is particularly inventive might say that I have undergone a change in my view of Goethe, for I was of course once an admirer of Goethe and have now proved myself to be someone who criticizes Goethe. Now, I should not need to mention that I venerate Goethe no less than I ever did, that he appears to me as the most magnificent spirit of modern times. But what is venerating devotion to a personality should never lead us to a blind sense of authority, but should always keep us clear-sighted for that which we have recognized as truth.

The various parts of Faust can be said to have been pieced together, not to mention glued, and it can be said that at the time when Goethe wrote the oldest parts of Faust in the 1770s, 18th century, was really incapable of writing the later parts, that he really had to mature first in order to come from his longing for the spiritual world to what one might call his understanding of Christianity. It was only through the maturity of life that Goethe was able to continue Faust, who is searching for the spirit world, in such a way that Faust comes to be preserved in life through the Austrian memory, and that Faust even comes to take the Gospel into his own hands and to begin translating the Gospel of John. When one hears some people today saying that they need no spiritual knowledge to fathom the depths of Christianity, that this spiritual science is unnecessary stuff, because Christianity can be sufficiently understood by what every pastor proclaims from the pulpit, that mere belief must prevail, especially in this Christianity, and one compares such soul mood with what must be said about Goethe, who, as one of the deepest took decades to mature to his understanding of Christianity, then one can get an idea of the tremendous arrogance, the tremendous conceit, that is in people who, conceited and haughty, always speak of the simplicity of their minds, and who dismiss what they do not need — the content of spiritual science, what they do not need according to their view.

In the scene with the Earth Spirit, we see something of what occupied Goethe in his youth, in his thirties, and also in the last twenties of his life. We can see from this earth spirit scene and from what preceded it, the so-called first Faust monologue, how Goethe immersed himself in so-called occult-mystical literature and how he tried to find the spiritual world through meditation and meditative devotion, through what this literature gave him. We see him in the scene that has been presented to us today, in the midst of his search through meditation, which arises from the allusions that he, as it is said here, can gain from an occult-mystical book, from an old mystical book by Nostradamus, as he strives through his meditation, which arises from a mystical book, to rise up into the spiritual worlds.

Let us try to imagine the worlds to which Faust, and thus also Goethe, actually wants to go. When the soul of man has really managed to strengthen its inner power so that the spiritual-soul core of man's being is released from the instrument of the physical body, when the soul, so to speak, with its powers that are not perceptible to it in ordinary everyday life, has slipped from the physical body, what becomes – not the physical body itself in its spatial boundaries, but the physical life, with which the human being is always spiritually connected because a ray or stream goes to this physical life – what becomes for the human soul this physical experience? In the time between death and a new birth, a ray or stream of spiritual life goes back to what we have experienced on earth, as you can see from the illustrations of earlier lectures. So there is always something like a spiritual reaching out, or even more than a spiritual reaching out, back to what is physical experience. What then does this physical experience become for the human soul, which has been freed from the use of the instrument of the physical body? I would like to say: the whole physical experience becomes a soul organ for the person who has emerged from this physical experience. The physical experience becomes, as it were, an eye or an ear; the whole human being becomes a sense organ, a spiritual sense organ, an organ, one might say, of the whole earth, which looks out into space. In order for our eye to see physical objects, we have to be outside of our eye. The eye has to be embedded like a kind of independent organ in the eye socket, which is even closed off by bony walls, so that the eye is a relatively independent organ. In a similar way, the ear is also closed. Again, the whole physical apparatus of the brain is enclosed in the head cavity and closed off from the rest of the human body. The physical experience of the human being must become so closed off that it becomes a kind of sensory organ, a kind of eye or ear through which the human being, who is outside of what his physical experience is, looks out into the vastness of space.

What is experienced there can also be described as follows: one can say that one is now in the world that is presented in the book 'Theosophy' as the soul world. This is the world that one first enters when one has the experience of being outside the body with the soul that has become independent and having one's own physical experience outside of it. In the Vienna Cycle of April 1914, I described how, in the life between death and a new birth, the human being has a spiritual-soul sense organ through his last life on earth to perceive the rest of the world, that is, he perceives the rest of the world through this life on earth. In this world we find our deceased for quite some time after their death, until they advance to another world, which can only be reached by a later state of development of the soul, even for the human initiate. In this world, into which we enter, many things must strike the observer. Only details about this world can be said. From the various lectures, one must gather what characterizes this supersensible world. Above all, what the soul immediately notices is that, having become free from the body and entering into a new world, the soul now sees the stars going out, feels the stars going out. The soul settles into an elementary world, so that it now weaves with the sea of air, itself surges with the warmth surging in the world, radiates out with the light, and since the soul radiates out with the light, it cannot see external objects through the light. That is why the sun and stars fade, and the moon extinguishes its light before the soul. It is not an external looking at, in which one then is, it is a co-experiencing of the elemental world. And at the same time it is a co-experiencing of that which one calls the power of historical happenings, of historical becoming. In this world one can see in process what history really does in human life.

In its further meditative development, the soul can then struggle up to a higher experience. Then, not only its own experience becomes a spiritual-soul sense organ, but the whole earth becomes a sense organ. To put it quite paradoxically, but you will understand me, the human soul must advance to such an experience, of which one can say: The human being is now something in which the whole globe is inserted, as otherwise the eye or ear is inserted into our body, and as we otherwise see with our eyes, hear with our ears, so we perceive the cosmic space with the whole earth and its experiences. There we become aware that what physicists say about the sun and the stars is mere materialistic dreaming. The stars have indeed already gone out, the sun, the moonlight has gone out in the previous world. But now we become aware that where we suspected the sun there is a community of spirits, that everywhere we suspected a star there is a spiritual world. And we become aware, by remembering our life on earth, that the materialistic reverie of which the physicists speak is a fantastic one, because when stars or suns appear to us, it is because somewhere in the spiritual world there is the seat of a spiritual community, just as the earth is the seat of a community of people. But just as little as one would perceive the physical bodies of a distant star, only the human souls, so little can it be said that something up there among the stars could interest us that is not of a spiritual-soul nature. But what we see, we must imagine as the vapors of the earth's atmosphere, which collide with what is coming in, and the physical eye can see nothing of what the star really is, but only the vapor that the earth itself throws out into space. All that we see as the starry sky is nothing but the material, albeit ethereal, material of the earth itself woven together, it is a curtain that the earth draws across what is behind it. But when the soul comes to live itself out in this world, then it perceives that out there are not these fantastic stars, these materialistic-fantastic stars that physicists speak of, but living beings, living communities of beings, floating up and down, weaving back and forth in the outer space of the universe, passing the gifts from top to bottom, and in turn the gifts are passed from bottom to top. If you translate the words into the spiritual:

How everything is woven into the whole,
One thing within the other lives and works!
How heavenly powers ascend and descend
And pass the golden buckets!

— Powers, but now in the sense in which we speak of primal forces -,

With wings that smell of blessing
From heaven through the earth they penetrate,
Harmoniously through all the universe they resound!

But if we imagine all this in spiritual and mental terms, then we have roughly the world in which the soul lives out itself.

Now, what did Faust have of all that has been described here at the time when he is presented to us? He has opened an old book, written by someone who has recorded an ancient observation in signs: this was given by the sign of the macrocosm. But Faust is naturally not in a position to project his soul into worlds where the entities in space develop their great happenings. Faust is not able to reach that level. He only sees the sign that someone who has reached that level has written down, the sign of the macrocosm. But a dream, a presentiment is evoked that this sign means something. So imagine yourself in your soul, that you had never heard of spiritual science, that you had the sign in front of you, but that you had an inkling that someone had once seen something similar that you would also like to see, then you are in Faust's soul. At first you can dream yourself into it, so that your imagination brings to life something through these outer signs, which are essentially the signs of the zodiac, the signs of the elements, the signs of the planets. You can even begin to break out with overflowing feeling into the words:

What a spectacle!

But this strikes back at you, for now you become aware that you have nothing but the sign in the book, nothing but a fantasy...

But alas! only a spectacle!

Even just a spectacle as an inner fantasy! And you are thrown back. The sign has brought you to nothing, on the contrary, it has thrown you back, has brought you the feeling: there is the world of the spirit, before which you stand, but nowhere can you find an entrance.

Where can I grasp you, infinite nature?
Your breasts, where? You, the sources of all life,
On which heaven and earth depend,
Where the withered chest presses –

Nothing but feeling inside the elements, in the light and in the air, as I said, in the subordinate world. And now even more clearly expressed. Faust has pushed his way up into the spiritual world, fallen back into the world that I described earlier as the next supersensible world. This with the air and light life, that expresses itself very well in the words:

You spring up, you water, and must I languish in vain?

He has fallen back completely, back from the spiritual world into the elemental world. But he is not yet able to recognize this either. It helps him that he opens the book and sees the sign of the earth spirit. That is the sign that someone has written who has had this lower world, the elemental world, as his own world. Now he feels at home in it. He has a presentiment of being at home in it.

How differently this sign affects me!

— because he feels something in it, because he has turned away from the appearance of meaning and feels something of the world's inner workings. Now he is actually always speaking of this world:

Already I feel my powers increased,

— that which one experiences when one lives in warmth and light -,

I glow like new wine.

Imagine feeling warmth in your soul when you live and weave in the world as a heat wave!

I feel brave enough to venture out into the world.

It really is like moving in the elements. I told you that life on earth becomes a sense organ, and just as you feel your eyes and ears within you, you now feel your sense organs in the earth.

To bear the earth's sorrow and its joy,
To battle with the storms around me,

when you are a wave in the air.

Clouds gather overhead,
The moon hides its light.

No wonder! I have just described to you how this happens, how stars like the moon go out. The light goes out because it goes with the light itself.

It steams! – Red rays
Twitch around my head

This is now internal perception.

A shuddering blast
From the vaulted roof descends
And seizes me!
I feel it, thou art hovering around me, implored spirit.
Reveal thyself!
Ha! how my heart is torn!
To new feelings
All my senses are awakened!

Do you not notice how life is expressed in the elements here?

I feel my heart completely given to you!
You must, you must! Even if it costs me my life!

And now, out of his meditation, he speaks the spell that is added to the sign of the earth spirit, a meditative, suggestive spell that really does lead him to the sight of the spirit, who is the leader of the spirits in whose realm we enter when we enter the elemental world. But immediately we realize that Faust is not actually ready for this world, and above all cannot feel ready for this world. What will become of him, then, of Faust? He will come to self-knowledge, in the sense that this is the highest knowledge of the world, in that we all experience what can be experienced when we swim and weave and roll and dwell in the elemental world. But Faust cannot recognize what individualizes itself in it.

This spiritual conversation between Faust and the Earth Spirit is so very characteristic of the state of maturity of Goethe at the time when he wrote the scene, as he describes his tremendous striving into the spiritual world.

Spirit: Who calls me?

Faust is already turning away. Of course, it doesn't sound like what we usually hear with our ears, that it sounds to us from afar, but rather so that we live in the sounds. It sounds different from what can be heard on earth, very different. Just as one does not see what one sees through the light, but rather shines with it. It looks different. Faust wanted to become a superhuman. That is, he wanted to enter the spiritual world, but he is seized by horror at this spiritual world. Through this encounter with the earth spirit, it becomes clear to Faust that one must become a different person than one was before as a human being if one wants to enter the spiritual world, that one cannot enter this spiritual world with one's ordinary powers, feelings and passions. Faust must have felt this deeply, how he was first thrown back, falling from the higher spiritual world into the elemental world, and how he is now thrown back in the elemental world in his knowledge, because he has remained only the ego he used to be, because he did not develop into this elementary world, to which the suggestive meditation brought him, which he carried out through the saying attributed to the earth spirit. He was able to see for a moment what kind of beings are within. But the spirit says to him:

Where are you, Faust, whose voice resounded for me,
Who with all his powers penetrated me?

That this voice resounded from the subconscious, I have already pointed out, that this was the Faust whom the outer Faust himself does not even really know.

Is it you, surrounded by my breath,
Trembling in all depths of life...

This “you” now refers to the ordinary Faust, while the striving Faust was the higher human being Faust.

A timid, cringing worm?

But now Faust's defiance awakens. He wants to plunge into the world for which he is not ready:

Shall I yield to you, flame formation?
It is I, I am Faust, I am your equal.

Now he can still hear how the spirits of the elemental world, into which he has transferred himself, live with human history, with what takes place on earth through the races and cultures, and how they live with it. And the secret of the elemental world is expressed by the earth spirit; it never speaks of being, but of becoming, of happening.

Spirit: In the floods 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,
So I labor at the whirling loom of time
And weave the living robe of divinity.

Not in space, but in time: read the lectures given in The Hague!

Faust can grasp that this is the spirit that walks through history:

You who wander the wide world,
Busy spirit, how close I feel to you!

You who wander the wide world! You who are the spirit that belongs to the spirits of the age, how close I feel to you! — So he says in his presumptuousness. The spirit now tells him what Faust himself later calls the word of thunder, which strikes his soul like a word of thunder and in turn strikes him back into the ordinary world in which he is because he is not yet mature. He should seek self-knowledge and in the self expanded to the world, the spiritual world. He cannot yet find it, so the word of thunder must sound to him from this earth spirit:

You resemble the spirit that you comprehend,
Not me!

What spirit is it then that Faust comprehends? What spirit does Faust comprehend? He, the image of the deity, who cannot comprehend the earth spirit? How can he then advance in self-knowledge? What kind of human spirit can Faust comprehend? Enter the other Faust, wearing a dressing gown and nightcap: this is the spirit you comprehend! You do comprehend Wagner! You have not progressed any further, for the other part of you lives only in defiance, as a passion! In self-knowledge he comes a little further. That is precisely what is so remarkable about Goethe's Faust, that is the beautiful artistic form of Goethe's Faust, that what is brought onto the stage in real form is always, at bottom, a piece of self-knowledge. Just as Mephistopheles is a piece of self-knowledge, so is Wagner also a piece of Faust's self-knowledge. Wagner is Faust himself. And it would not be wrong to stage “Faust” in such a way that the character of Wagner, dressed in a dressing gown and nightcap, to whom Faust turns away, would be a likeness of Faust himself. Then people would immediately understand why it is precisely this Wagner who comes in. What Wagner says is basically what Faust already understands; he only recites the rest. He just lets it out. He believes he is elevating himself to the highest truths, which he can recite in a phrase-like manner, but which he does not experience inwardly. And now a piece of self-knowledge takes place. Wagner speaks the truth. Basically, Faust has not spoken his innermost experiences, he has recited.

Forgive me! I hear you declaim.

That is one truth: he only declaimed. And it is a piece of self-reflection to realize that you do not approach the spirit of the world in this way, but at most read a Greek tragedy. So many people, when they approach spiritual science, want to declaim about the highest truths, even if it is often a self-declamation about the highest truths. Basically, they want nothing more than to benefit from this spiritual science, to profit from it, to delude themselves with a hazy mist. With regard to today, it can be said that this is often the case in some circles. Some people are very interesting when they talk about their visions. In earlier times, we heard this from the priests; now the actors have learned it even better, so that the priests can learn something from the actors. If Faust were to go only as far as his understanding, he would have to say the words that Wagner speaks, his mirror image. But he goes beyond the limits of his passion, and goes beyond with the Luciferic, not with the genuine, full, human core of the soul, but with the Luciferic core. It is the Lucifer in Faust who now answers what Faust is, but what stands before us as Wagner:

Yes, when the pastor is an actor;
How that may come about in time.

This contempt, this arrogance comes from the Luciferian in Faust, because if Faust were not seized by Lucifer, he would speak as Wagner does when he expresses only what he can honestly admit as the subject of his understanding. The other thing is a dark foreboding in him of something he wants to get to. But this soliloquy – really, it is only a conversation with himself – does get him a little further. You get so much further in life when you encounter yourself in another. You don't like to admit to yourself that you have these or those qualities. But when they confront you in another, you are more willing to study them. In this way, we acquire self-knowledge when a quality presents itself in the form of another, as in Faust by Wagner. Faust has not yet reached the point where he would say to himself, now that Wagner is gone: Yes, that is actually me. — If he had already fully penetrated to himself with his understanding, he would say: I am only a Wagner, the Wagner is only here in my head!

How all hope does not fade from the mind,
That clings forever to stale evidence,
With greedy hand digs for treasures,
And is glad when it finds earthworms!

For up to now he has done nothing else, except seek the spirits in the manner described. It is self-knowledge that confronts Faust in Wagner. Who sent Wagner into him? The Earth Spirit sent him in, the Earth Spirit:

You resemble the spirit you comprehend,
Not me!

And now Faust shall see what spirits he resembles. He does not resemble the Earth Spirit, who is the ruler of the Earth, but he shall see one of the forms within him: there is your Wagner! This Wagner is in you!

But now there is not only Wagner in Faust, but the Luciferic element is opposed to Wagner, that is, opposed to itself. There is another element in him.

If you look at “Faust” in its earlier form, as it was at the beginning, it is the case that Goethe did not finish the following after the earth spirit scene at the time. It continues like this: conversation with Wagner, then with the student, Mephisto... Mephisto enters, of whom Goethe does not quite know whether he is Lucifer or Ahriman. If he had studied spiritual science, Lucifer would appear now. But he has the other one, who is sent to him by the earth spirit. The earth spirit sends him Wagner, sends him Mephisto, we would say Lucifer. Faust is to get to know little by little what is in him. Mephisto is sent by the earth spirit: There you have another one of the spirits that you understand. Try to understand the Lucifer that is in you, and not immediately look at the spirit of the earth!

How unclear Goethe was about the matter can be seen from the fact that a small piece, which was later left out, is in the original writing, in four lines. In 1775 there were four lines after the scene where Mephisto has brought Faust so far that he has led him to Gretchen, and that Faust now wants to force himself on Gretchen. There are four lines that were no longer in the fragment as early as 1790. After Faust, who is actually Lucifer – Goethe just mixes them up – has asked Mephisto to take care of the jewelry for Gretchen, Mephisto says in the old manuscript, after Faust has left:

He acts as if he were a prince's son.
If Lucifer had a dozen princes,
They would surely conjure up something for him;
In the end, he would get a commission.

There it is, Mephisto himself calls himself Lucifer. As I said, the four lines were later omitted. So what was Goethe actually trying to do in his earlier days, when he wanted, one might say, to express himself in his “Faust”? Well, he wanted to show how man should come to self-knowledge. But, one might say, there is an inkling of it in this first scene, which Goethe wrote in his youth, and which you can now read with clarity, where it is described in “How to Know Higher Worlds?” the encounter with the Guardian of the Threshold. You foresaw in Faust how the human being, who gradually realizes how different entities are within him, divides himself up, how he divides himself up into Wagner and Lucifer-Mephisto. He gets to know himself bit by bit in his individual parts, he gets to know himself as Wagner, he gets to know himself as Lucifer-Mephisto. But as I said, Goethe first had to mature in order to really see the great significance of the Christ impulse for humanity, as far as that was possible in his time. Therefore, we see how Goethe, in his later years, sought to supplement what he had written earlier about Faust's striving until man encounters himself in his various images, including the image of Lucifer, by having Faust come into contact with what has been incorporated into earthly development through Christ. One could say that the cultic symbols of Christ approach Faust. And so we see in Faust the document that shows us how Goethe himself brought occultism to Christianity, to the Christ impulse, and how we are indeed continuing today to work on the path that Goethe took with regard to its first steps. In Goethe's time one could only get a glimpse. Today, the time has come when it is possible for man, through spiritual science, to truly enter into the realm of spiritual life, into which all of Goethe's striving was directed. Today, Faust must be understood differently than Goethe himself understood him. Yes, the world is progressing, and if we do not fully recognize that the world is progressing, then we are not serious enough about the world. But such experiences, that one splits, that one encounters oneself in one's true form, in a Luciferian form, such experiences do bring one forward, but always only a little way. We must part with the belief that we can see the whole spiritual world if we have only made small advances, such as we can make through meditation. One always advances only a little.

There are two natures in Faust: the Wagner nature and that which now strives forward. When Goethe wanted to point this out in his later years, he did it very beautifully. Goethe felt the need, when Faust had already approached Christianity, to show what the Wagner nature in Faust is. Therefore, he lets Wagner and Faust take the Easter Walk together. It is now the case that, as is naturally dramatic, two people are presented to us, showing what is going on in Faust's soul. The higher man in Faust strives forward, but the Faust-Wagner holds Faust back. A spark of comprehension of the spiritual world has been kindled in Faust, so that he now sees not only the sensual poodle, and there really is something like a soul force in Faust that expresses itself in the conversation with Wagner:

Faust: Do you see the black dog roaming through the seed and stubble?

Now the nature of Wagner awakens in Faust.

Wagner: I saw him long ago, he seemed unimportant to me.
Higher Nature: Look at him closely! What do you think the animal is?
Wagner Nature: A poodle, who in his own way is trying to follow his master.

These are objections that Faust himself actually raises. And now it continues. Faust begins to see the supersensible behind the sensual; he already senses it. So, it is a hunch, brought on by the experiences he has had. A spark of the spiritual world has entered into him. And it is beautiful, one wants to say, how infinitely artistically sincere and honest Goethe is, one just has to understand him. When Faust now feels the Luciferic in himself – as you know, the Luciferic is connected with obstinacy, with inner egoism – he, Faust, now also carries this Luciferic into his being gripped by the Christ impulse. It is a Luciferian trait that the Gospel of John, in that he wants to translate it, does not seem perfect to him at all. For the understanding, the Goethe commentators are a bit curious, who really go along with the poet, because they always go along with the poet, even where he distributes the things he wants to say among his characters. Faust does not yet understand the text of the Gospel at all, otherwise he would stop at “In the beginning was the word”. He falters because he does not yet understand it. The professors present it as if Faust understood it better, but he does not yet understand it. What appears to him now is the power, the deed – so he brings rationalism and intellectualism into the gospel. This now evokes the opposite phenomenon. Whereas he was once pushed down into the sensual world, he is now drawn up into the spiritual world. By fully asserting his limitations, by setting 'sense and power and action', he is pushed up into the spiritual world, because there is already a spark of spiritual power in Faust. Then the spirits come and again as the messenger of the earth spirit... Mephisto, this unclear figure between Lucifer and Ahriman. So you see, one must understand Goethe's struggle to penetrate Faust's spiritual world, and one can learn an infinite amount from it, especially for our present time.

What I particularly wanted to do in the last lecture on Easter Sunday and in this lecture was to show you how it is more difficult for a spirit that wants to delve deeper to penetrate to the Christ impulse than for a spirit that remains in its infinite pride and conceit and does not want what spiritual science can offer it. On the other hand, I also wanted to use Faust to illustrate how powerful the impact of the Christ Impulse has been on the world. There will come a time when we will learn to understand the inner nature of the Christ impulse ever better and better, precisely through what spiritual science has to give. It stands there in the world – I would like to say, as an illustration of the development of humanity on earth, brought about by world history, of what the Christ impulse is – the fact stands that centuries after the Christ impulse entered into the development of humanity on earth, something occurs in this development of humanity that is also not properly understood. But at the moment when one begins to understand it correctly, one is led precisely through this understanding to a deeper feeling for the Christ event. You know, of course, that six hundred years after the Christ impulse entered into the evolution of mankind, a prophet arose in a certain community who initially rejected what had entered into the evolution of mankind through the Christ impulse: Mohammed. Today we must no longer profess the superstition of the 19th century, which, out of rationalism, seeks to explain in a belittling way what must be explained out of spiritual insight. And it must appear ridiculous to anyone who really wants to penetrate into spiritual science when a particularly learned and clever man says of Mohammed: Yes, he claims that the angel who whispered in his ear what he wrote in the Koran approached him in the form of doves! But Mohammed - so the rationalist scholar says - was a mere juggler. He put some grains, which doves like to eat, into his ear, so the doves flew up and took the grains, but flew away again when they had had them! Yes, there have been such explanations, within and outside of Christianity, in the very clever 19th century.

There will come a time when such explanations will really only be laughed at, even though they are fully capable of satisfying materialism. We have to take Muhammad more deeply; we have to be clear that what lived in his soul was really such intercourse with the spiritual world as Goethe sought for his Faust. But what did Muhammad feel? What did he find? Today I can only hint at it, another time I will explain it more precisely. What did Mohammed find? Well, you know, Mohammed first strove for a world for which he had an expression, it is only one word: God. The world becomes a monism, a monistic expression of God. This world has nothing of the essence of Christianity, of course. But Mohammed does look into the spiritual world; he enters the elementary world of which I have spoken today. He promises his believers that they will enter, when they have gone through the gate of death, into this spiritual world. But he can only tell them about the spiritual world that he has come to know. What kind of spiritual world is this? This spiritual world, of which Mohammed tells his believers, is the Luciferian world, which he regards as paradise, the world that is to be aspired to. And when one passes from the abstract to the real, and adds, by way of interpretation, the meaning of Islam's striving in the spiritual world, one recognizes what spiritual science also proclaims. But this spiritual world is the world in which Lucifer rules; reinterpreted, the Luciferian world becomes a paradise, the world that people are just beginning to strive for.

I believe that it must make a deep impression on our souls if we can delve into the essence of historical development in such a way, through a very important phenomenon. It must give us pause when we learn in the progression of religious life how a great prophet emerged with the error that the Luciferic world is paradise. I do not want you to take this in just as abstract truths, I believe it can shake the soul if you let it affect you. But what does the Muslim do to enter his spiritual world? Perhaps we could later have a note handed in at the door from each of our dear friends here who has read the entire Koran. It would be interesting to count the slips of paper of those who have read it. But it is not easy to read the Koran completely, with its endless repetitions, which Westerners find so endlessly boring to read. But among Muslims, there are people who claim to have read it from beginning to end seventy thousand times in their lives. That means: to have brought a word that was given to the soul in such a way that this word has become alive in the soul! Even if we cannot learn anything in terms of content from such a religious community with regard to Christianity, we can still learn that within that community of people, even spiritual error is treated quite differently than what we are called to recognize as spiritual truths. At most, a European might read Faust, then, when he has forgotten it, read it again, and when he has forgotten it again, read it once more. But those who have read Faust a hundred times will also be sought after. It is also understandable within the context of Western education to date. How could anyone read everything that is printed in the West seventy thousand times? It is quite understandable. But we should still acquire something, that it is one thing to simply inform oneself about a content that is meaningful for the soul's life, and something else to live with it, again and again, so that one becomes completely one with it, completely one. It is something that one must first gain an understanding of, something that one cannot even understand according to the thinking habits of our national community. But we should reflect on such things. Not just to tell you something, but to stimulate your reflection, words are spoken as they are in this reflection. To increase our sense of responsibility towards ourselves and towards the world, with regard to what spiritual science can and should be for us.

We live in difficult times in many respects. The very difficult external events that surround us at present are only the outward sign of our very difficult times. It is not good to look at these very difficult times as if they were an illness, as we often call an illness an illness, because an illness is often a healing process, the true illness has preceded the physically apparent illness. So also what is now going through the world as mourning events has been preceded by something pathological, and we are to see into much deeper things than humanity is inclined to see into. Oh, a great pain can be deposited on the soul of the one who looks at the present time with the tasks it has, and with the little understanding that so many people have for these tasks. When one sees how people judge, think, feel and perceive the world today, and how these thoughts, feelings and perceptions lead to external events, and how people learn so little from these external events, then an infinitely meaningful pain is deposited on the soul. It is this feeling of pain that must now often come over the soul. If one can really look back over the past months of trial, to mention only the most recent, and turn one's gaze to what people have learned through these months of trial, to what judgment confronts one in relation to what confronted one eight months ago: it is the same kind of judgment, the same kind of feeling. What made people believe they were right eight months ago, they still think so, they even want the sad events to have occurred in order to prove them right in what they believed was right eight months ago.

I cannot express how infinite the pain is that one feels at the small way in which human souls have changed in recent months according to the assumptions that had to be made for this change, so that our time really would be a time of trial, a time of learning. But of those who stand within spiritual science, one would wish that they absorb much of what can be learned when such considerations as these are undertaken in connection with Faust. Again and again one would like to point out to souls the deep seriousness and the sacred striving for truth that must be connected with our spiritual-scientific view. And in such a movement there must be retribution for everything that does not arise out of deep sincerity and a deep sense of truth. We must really try to overcome everything that can make one say to the one who utters it: Forgive me, I hear you declaiming!

Is it not strange, when we see the stage traditions according to Wagner often on the stage today, and when scholars, when rationalists and intellectuals deride what Wagner is, instead of them knocking on their hearts and seeing themselves in the Wagner. This Wagner sits on the chairs everywhere, in the laboratories, and our scientific literature, our philosophical literature, would contain a deep truth if the majority of the authors chose the pseudonym “Wagner”. For they are written by Wagner, these philosophies of the present.

I am quite sure that many a person who lives in the ranks of spiritual science also has sufficient reason to beat their breasts, to examine themselves in self-knowledge, to see how much of their soul is mere self-promotion and how much arises from absolute honesty, from an absolute sense of truth! With this admonition to your hearts, to the deepest powers of your soul, I close this reflection.

following a eurythmy presentation of the first scene of the second part of “Faust”

It will be understood that it is hardly possible to give a Whitsun lecture in the usual sense this year, especially at this time, namely at Whitsun itself. Let us consider what characterizes the time of Whitsun in the document of Christianity, the New Testament. We will find that the significant characteristic of the Pentecost is that the Spirit is poured out on those who are called apostles. And the consequence of the outpouring of the spirit is, as we see from the second chapter of Acts, that the people of the most diverse languages, who are gathered together at the Feast of Pentecost, ten days after the so-called Ascension, each hears what is to be proclaimed to them in a way that sounds familiar to him, even though each one expressly emphasizes that he is only capable of his mother tongue.

And so the outpouring of the spirit at the Feast of Pentecost appears like the outpouring of the spirit of love, of unity, of harmony among those who speak the most diverse languages across the globe. Or, to put it better, to match the wording of the Bible, the matter could be put in the following way. One could say: In the Pentecost proclamation, something is given that resonates so powerfully with the human mind that everyone can understand it, even though they only understand their mother tongue.

Almost everyone feels that it contradicts what surrounds us at this year's Pentecost festival if only one interpretation of what this Pentecost proclamation can mean is given. We need only consider that nineteen centuries after this Pentecostal proclamation, the world has managed to follow this Pentecostal proclamation in such a way that this Pentecost now sees thirty-four different speaking peoples fighting with each other, in a sense completely contradicting the meaning of Pentecost. Perhaps this language of fact will at least lead a certain number of people to realize that the Pentecost message has not yet spread throughout the world in a far-reaching way, that it has not yet sufficiently taken hold of people's minds and that it must speak to the minds of men in a new form, more urgently, more meaningfully than it has spoken up to now, so that it can be understood in the future in the way in which it must be understood.

And so this year, as a Whitsun reflection, a general point of view will be taken, so to speak, a point of view that can bring us closer to the new Whitsun proclamation from a certain side, which we mean by spiritual science. For we must regard what has just been explained in the lectures that we have completed here as a Pentecostal proclamation to humanity; we must understand this spiritual science as a Pentecostal proclamation.

Let us take what we know about the Mystery of Golgotha and let it enter our soul. What is the essence of this Mystery of Golgotha? This essence of the Mystery of Golgotha consists in the fact that a spiritual entity, which we know to belong to the cosmic spheres, descended and underwent earthly destinies, earthly suffering in a physical human body, that the Christ-entity lived for three years in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. Through what the Christ-being experienced in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, this Christ-being has been united since the Mystery of Golgotha with what we can call the spirit of the earth, what we can call the auric of the earth. So that for us the entire evolution of the earth breaks down into a time before the Mystery of Golgotha, when that which the Christ-spirit is can only be hinted at when man rises through initiation out of the earthly sphere, in order to perceive not that which lies within the earthly sphere, but that which the earth has no part in, which is only predetermined for it for a later future, and in the time after the Mystery of Golgotha. Since the Mystery of Golgotha, we know that the human being, with his spiritual soul, does not need to flee from the earth, but can remain within the earthly sphere and can perceive within this earthly sphere the impulses contained in the Christ-being.

Now we must realize that for centuries until our time, a part of humanity has become aware that the Christ Impulse is connected with earthly existence. Something has changed in the collective consciousness of those human beings who have felt and sensed something of the Christ Impulse. Something has changed in the overall consciousness of these people. The belief has entered the soul that the Christ is with man, that the human mind can unite with the Christ, that the human mind can experience something within earthly existence that is vividly imbued with the Christ impulse. But an understanding of what the Christ impulse is in the entire earthly existence in the development of humanity must first really penetrate into human souls through spiritual science. And for this it is necessary to recognize how this Christ impulse works in the human soul in such a way that two other spiritual impulses are, as it were, kept in balance.

This is what our sculpture, which we are erecting in the east of our building, will have to depict. There we will place the representative of humanity, the representative of the human being insofar as this human being can experience the deepest things in himself, insofar as this human being can experience what one experiences when one has taken up the Christ impulse as a living impulse in one's soul. For my sake, the main figure in the building in the east can be called the Christ; he can also be called the representative of the internalized human being in general. But one will have to see this spirit, which speaks through a human body, in connection with two other spiritual entities, with Lucifer and Ahriman. The representative of humanity will have to express his relationship to Lucifer and Ahriman while standing upright. Everything about this figure must be purely characteristic. Above all, you will notice later, when this figure has just been set up, that the gesture of the raised left hand and the gesture of the lowered right hand are very special. This gesture of the hands will be understood when one sees how, above, on the rock toward whose summit the left hand of the Representative of Humanity is raised, the left arm rises, just as above, on this rocky summit, Lucifer falls from the reason that he breaks his wings.

Now one can easily believe that this breaking of the wings would be caused by the power emanating from the arm of the representative of humanity, as if, as it were, this power radiated out to Lucifer and broke his wings. That would be a false conception. And hopefully we will succeed in preventing this false conception from arising through the vivid description. For it is not a matter of something emanating from the fully Christianized human being that breaks Lucifer's wings, but rather that Lucifer experiences something within himself when he senses the proximity of the Christ, which leads to the breaking of his wings. Because he cannot bear the Christ-power, the Christ-impulse, he breaks his wings. It is a process that is not brought about by a battle between Christ and Lucifer, but it is a process within Lucifer himself, something that Lucifer must experience within himself, and there must be no doubt for a moment that it would be impossible for Christ to feel hatred or feelings of struggle against Lucifer. Christ is Christ and only fills the world-being with positive things, does not fight any power in the world! But it must fight against the power that now comes into its proximity as the power of Lucifer. Therefore, the hand raised on the left must not work aggressively, nor must the left half of the face work aggressively with this peculiar gesture. Rather, it is as if it is pointing out that, in the context of the world, Christ has something to do with Lucifer. But it is not a fight. The fight arises only in the soul of Lucifer himself. He breaks his own wings, they are not broken by Christ.

And it is the same with Ahriman, who crouches in a rocky cave under the right side of the thoroughly Christianized human being, under which the earth is driven upwards: the material that is driven into people, but which cannot gain strength and weakens because the power of Christ is near it.

In turn, the power of Christ, flowing through the arm into the hand, must betray nothing of hatred against Ahriman. It is Ahriman himself who weakens and who, through what is going on in his soul, wraps the hidden gold in the veins of the earth around him like fetters, so that he makes fetters out of the gold of the earth and forges them for himself. He is not forged by Christ, he forges himself on by feeling the proximity of Christ.

But this only lays bare, I might say, the primal relationship, which must be recognized so that what the Christ impulse is can really be understood by human souls.

A simple parable can be used to explain this Christ impulse in abstract terms. Imagine a pendulum. The pendulum swings to one side, then falls to the lowest point under its own gravity and swings to the other side, and so on until there is a point on this other side that we call the point of equilibrium. This point would be a dead point, a stationary point, if the pendulum did not now swing to the other side. There is life in the pendulum in that it swings to both sides and has a resting point in the middle.

Since the Mystery of Golgotha, we can imagine the evolution of the Earth in the following way: a pendulum swing to one side, to the Luciferic side, and a pendulum swing to the other side, to the Ahrimanic side. And the point of equilibrium is the Christ in the middle.

That this must first be recognized may be seen from a significant historical fact. We all admire the painting that Michelangelo called 'The Last Judgment'. You know it from reproductions of the original, which is in the Sistine Chapel. We see there, painted with magnificent mastery by Michelangelo, Christ, sending some to hell, triumphantly, to the evil spirits, and sending the others, the good, to heaven. And if we look into the face of this Christ, we see the wrath of the world in him. And if we have taken in spiritual science, if we have truly united in love with our minds everything that we have been able to take in of spiritual science so far, then today, despite our admiration for what Michelangelo created, we say: This is not Christ, because the Christ does not judge! People judge themselves, as Lucifer and Ahriman experience their own processes, not what is brought about by any kind of struggle of the Christ against them.

When Michelangelo created his Christ, the time had not yet come to recognize the Christ in true perfection. I might say that a lack of clarity still prevailed in people. In Christ Himself, something was seen of which we know today that it must be attributed to Lucifer or Ahriman. And we can understand something of it today when people have found something of Lucifer or Ahriman in the Michelangelo Christ, for He is not yet free, as Michelangelo portrays Him, from that of which the Christ is completely free.

If we take a good look at ourselves, we can see that from the perspective that gave birth to Michelangelo, it was impossible to create an image of Christ that corresponded to a true understanding of the mystery of Golgotha, because the one thing that had to be known was still unresolved: the relationship between Christ, Lucifer and Ahriman.

How often has it been emphasized in our circles that it is a false sentiment to point to Lucifer and say, “I want to flee from him,” or to point to Ahriman and say, “I want to flee from him.” That would only mean wanting to make a pact with weakness, would mean advising the pendulum to remain in a state of equilibrium, not to swing to the left or to the right, but always to remain at rest. We cannot escape the world forces that we call Lucifer and Ahriman; we just have to find the right relationship with them. And we find this right relationship when we understand the Christ impulse in the right way, when we see in the Christ Being the guide who can place us in the right relationship with the Luciferic and Ahrimanic powers, which must one day be the powers of the world.

Let us consider everything that Lucifer brings into human life. He brings into it everything that is connected with perception, with the passions, with the life of feeling and of the emotions. Life would be dry, sober, abstract if it were not for the living sensation and feeling that permeate it. If we look at the development of history, we see what passion, often called the noble passion — and rightly so, the noble passion — has achieved in history, what feeling and sensation have achieved. But we are never able to cultivate feelings and sensations at all without entering the sphere of Lucifer. It is only because we never enter this sphere without the guidance of the Christ impulse.

And on the other hand, we see how necessary it has become, especially in more recent times, to understand the world more and more, to develop science, to master the external forces of nature. Ahriman is the master of that which is external science, of that which lives in the external forces of nature. And we would remain foolish and stupid if we wanted to flee the Ahrimanic element. It is not a matter of fleeing the Ahrimanic element, but of entering, under the guidance of the Christ Impulse, into that sphere in which Ahriman rules in the world. And thus not indolently seeking merely the point of rest, but to witness the living movement of the world pendulum, to experience it in such a way that we do not take a step without the guidance of the Christ Impulse. Knowledge of Christ is only possible when the relationship of the Christ impulse to the Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces of the human soul has become clear. Therefore, the proclamation of the Luciferic and Ahrimanic side of the world is part of what our spiritual scientific movement had to take up, since it was aware that it had to place itself on the ground of the Christ impulse. And that is why you cannot find anything in the non-Christian theosophical teaching about the Ahrimanic and Luciferic elements, because this Luciferic and Ahrimanic element had to arise at the moment when the spiritual scientific movement had to reckon with the Christ impulse in a serious way.

I think it is something extraordinarily important for the human soul to feel how spiritual science has the task of really bringing something new into human consciousness, something so new that we ourselves may measure it against such great creations of humanity as the Michelangelesque Christ of the “Last Judgment”. And what we have in mind through spiritual science must appear to us as the new Pentecostal proclamation in the true sense of the word.

Around Easter time, we saw how one of the great minds of modern times, Goethe, wrestled with the question of how to relate the one he presented as the representative of humanity, Faust, to the Christ impulse. And we have seen how Goethe was not yet able to do this in his youth, but only in his mature years. And so, in many ways, spiritual life, as it has developed up to the present day, appears to us as a struggle, as an unceasing struggle. It truly appears to us in such a way that we must become extremely modest when we see how the most exquisite spirits of humanity have labored to gain insights and perceptions of what the Christ Impulse signifies. We realize how modest we must be in our human striving for this knowledge of the Christ Impulse.

Goethe – as we have seen – was initially concerned with allowing what works around people as a Luciferic and Ahrimanic element to really take a back seat to his representative of humanity, to Faust. And we have seen how Goethe mixed up the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic element so that it is not easy to distinguish them in the figure of Mephistopheles. We have shown in the Easter lectures how the Luciferic and Ahrimanic elements are mixed together in the figure of Mephistopheles, because Goethe was not yet able to have a clear insight. Basically, Goethe felt throughout his life the striving within him to come to a clear understanding of the relationship between man and Lucifer and Ahriman. When, at the end of the 18th century, he was asked by Schiller, as a mature man, to continue his “Faust” and saw again what he had written in his youth, he called what he had put together at different times a tragelaph – half animal and half human; that is how his “Faust” appeared to him. And he called his “Faust,” to indicate the difficulty of continuing it now, “a barbaric composition,” so that we have the judgment of Goethe, who must have known more about his “Faust” than those who are not Goethe, that the “Faust” is a tragelaph, “half animal and half human,” that it is a “barbaric composition”! What I wanted to present at Easter, and what can so easily be misunderstood, ultimately leads back to a judgment of Goethe's own. Yes, of course, very clever people see in “Faust” a perfect work of art, see in “Faust” that which cannot be surpassed. It was not Goethe's opinion and must not be our opinion either. Even if we see in Faust a rise to the highest, we must realize that this Faust suffers above all in its inner composition from the fact that in his figure of Mephistopheles, Lucifer and Ahriman are mixed together in a completely inorganic way.

But despite all this intermingling, Goethe felt darkly: Lucifer and Ahriman should have appeared together. Goethe just mixed everything together and called it all “Mephistopheles”, so that in the individual scenes in “Faust” Lucifer is often Lucifer, in other parts Mephistopheles or Ahriman. But this was quite clear to Goethe: something is happening in the human being that is taking place under the influence of Lucifer and Ahriman, of Lucifer and Mephistopheles. Such things happen in people.

Now let us look at the end of the first part of Goethe's “Faust”. How does it end? Faust has incurred the most terrible guilt imaginable, has a human life on his conscience, has betrayed a person, incurred the terrible guilt, towards himself and towards the other person. And the last word of the first part of “Faust” is: “Her zu mir!” (To me!), at the same moment as, only through a voice as if from heaven, resounding: “Heinrich, Heinrich!” (Henry, Henry!) We therefore know from this end of the first part where Faust has come. He has come to Mephistopheles. Mephistopheles has him. There is no doubt about that.

And now we see the beginning of the second part. This beginning of the second part presents us with a charming scene: “Faust, tired, restless, lying on a flowery meadow, seeking sleep.” Ghosts appear. And from what they say, we get the impression: we are dealing with nature, yes really, with nature – we just need to go out at this time of year – and we have this nature. Whitsun nature, for example! Whitsun mood, for example! This Whitsun mood has an effect on Faust. And afterwards he continues on his journey through life.

A scholar made a comment about what Goethe had done, which, it can be said, has something to it, even though the remark is philistine and pedantic. The scholar said: When you have incurred a grave guilt, as Faust did towards Gretchen, then go to a charming region, to a flowery meadow, perhaps go on a mountain expedition, and your soul will be cured and capable of further deeds. One could say that, realistically Ahrimanically conceived, this saying of the scholar Rieger has much to be said for it. For it should actually be unbearable for all people who, in the usual sense of today, have a purely materialistic world view, to let the second part of “Faust” have an effect on them, after the great, powerful guilt that Faust has taken upon himself is characterized in the first part. But unfortunately, when it comes to the human and personal, we do not take humanity's greatest work of literature – for that is “Faust”, despite being a barbaric composition and a tragicomedy in its first part – we do not take it literally enough. If we took it literally enough, we would know that the line “Her zu mir!” (“To me!”) is true... Mephistopheles has Faust. As he has him, Faust is now lying on a flowery meadow, restlessly seeking sleep. We must not think of Faust as being separate from the infernal powers at the beginning of the second part. But Goethe was striving for true spiritual knowledge. How close Goethe was to spiritual knowledge may be seen from a passage in a letter that Goethe once wrote to his friend, the musician Zelter. It is a significant passage! Goethe writes: “Consider that with every breath an etheric Lethestrom permeates our entire being, so that we remember the joy only moderately, the suffering hardly.” With every breath, our inner being is indeed permeated by an etheric life stream, but that means nothing other than: Goethe knew very well about the etheric body that humans have. Of course, in his time he only brought this up in his circle of friends.

How Goethe stood by the entire human being, how he, looking at this human being, said to himself: This human being can become guilty, because something dwells in him that is under Mephistophelian influence, that belongs to Mephistopheles belongs. As Goethe looked at this human being, who belongs to this sphere, it was clear to him at the same time that something lives in human nature that can never fall prey to this influence, that can be protected from the Ahrimanic-Luciferic influence. And it is this element in Faust that can be protected from the influence of Ahriman and Lucifer that we are dealing with at the beginning of the second part. Faust, who was capable of guilt, who allowed himself to be drawn by Mephistopheles into the most trivial, most banal pleasures of life, who then tempted Gretchen, has become guilty. In our spiritual language we would say: This part of Faust must wait until the next incarnation.

But there is something in the nature of man that is his higher self, that remains in relationship to the spiritual powers of the world. Therefore, the spiritual powers of the world confront this eternal in Faust. We must not imagine the Faust that we see at the beginning of the second part in the realistic sense as Faust who has become so and so much older, but he is really only the representative of the higher self in Faust. He still wears the same form. But this form is the representative of something that could not have been guilty in Faust. This, which could not have been guilty in Faust, now enters into a relationship with the servants of the Earth Spirit.

From his youth, Goethe longed to gain an insight into the nature of human guilt, of evil in the world, and yet to know that something hovered over all that must have a balancing effect on guilt and evil. And so Goethe ventured, since he had to surrender, so to speak, Faust's one nature to Mephisto – “Come to me!” And we must be quite clear about this: now, at the beginning of the second part, it is not the same Faust that speaks as we know from the first part, but a different, a second nature that only externally bears Faust's form and that can enter into that which, as a spiritual being, permeates the external world. But what has no immediate connection with Faust's outer physical body must find its way into it. For the physical body naturally retains, as long as we remain in the same incarnation, all the signs of the guilt into which we have fallen. Only that in us which frees itself from the physical body can truly connect with what the higher self is. And so Faust must undergo this transformation, which we can call the transformation of guilt into higher knowledge.

He will carry what he bears as guilt into his next incarnation. For this incarnation, he bears the guilt as the source of a higher knowledge that opens up to him, a more precise knowledge of life. And so, despite bearing the most monstrous guilt on his soul, the possibility opens up for Faust that his higher self will be brought into connection with what pervades, lives through and interweaves the world as spiritual.

Faust's higher self comes into contact with a spirit of the earth aura. Goethe wanted to show, so to speak, that what is highest in man could not be grasped by Mephistopheles, we would say: Lucifer-Ahriman, — that must have been preserved, that must be able to enter into other spheres. And so Goethe is quite sincere when he says that this higher self in Faust now enters into a relationship with what the elemental world contains as spiritual beings.

We shall see later how this is connected with what has already been said here in the Easter lectures. But now let us consider how these spiritual beings, which are under the guidance of the air spirit, for such is Ariel, how these spirits, which we can thus call air spirits, are connected with the outer processes of nature, but how they reveal themselves as that which is another spiritual world, in contrast to the self that is not exposed to the influence of Lucifer and Ahriman in the supermundane nature:

When the blossoms of spring rain
Over all, floating sinks,
When the fields of green blessing
All earth-borns flashes,

— so when nature sprouts and sprouts in the spring-whitsun time, then the elemental spirits come out. They are small for the external material, they are great as spirits, for they are exalted above that which in the human heart can fall prey to good or evil.

Small elf spirit size
Hasten where it can help;
Whether it be holy or evil...

— this is left to the next incarnation, it is not the concern of these spirits —

Whether he is holy or evil,
The man of sorrows laments...

The spirits are dealing with his higher self, which is preserved from what has to play out in karma or incarnation. But these spirits can only work in their own element, in which the human being is with his essence when he has left the outer bodily shells as a spiritual soul. And now Goethe explains what these elves, with their greatness as spirits, have to achieve:

You who hover around this head in airy circles,
Show yourselves here in a noble elfin way,
Calm the grim bouquet of your hearts;
Remove the glowing, bitter arrows of reproach,
His innermost being cleansed of the horror he has experienced.

This cannot happen to Faust, who is exposed to Ahriman-Lucifer. This purification is called: Bring out Faust's higher self, present it purely. - And now something that proceeds like an initiation with Faust, who is outside of his body, is taken seriously:

There are four pauses in the night,

— from six o'clock in the evening until six o'clock in the morning the elves fulfill their duty by connecting the soul from falling asleep to waking up with what spiritually permeates and interweaves earthly existence.

Now without delay, she fills it kindly.

— the four pauses that the soul experiences from falling asleep to waking up.

First sinks his head upon the cool pillow,
Then bathes him in the dew from Lethes flood;
Joints soon are the cramp-frozen limbs,
When he strengthened towards the day rests;

- when he has taken in what the spirit that permeates the world has to offer, when this spirit has entered into that which is preserved in Faust's being as a higher self.

The elves' most beautiful duty perform,
Give him back to the holy light.

What happens externally between falling asleep and waking up are real, actual processes, similar to an initiation. And now we see what happens in each of the three hours from six to nine, from nine to twelve, from twelve to three and from three to six. First, there is the break from six to nine:

When the air is gently warmed
Around the green-bordered square,
Sweet scents, veiled in mist
Dawn descends;
She softly whispers sweet peace,
Lulls the heart to child-like calm,
And to the eyes of this weary one,
Locks the day's gate shut!

The soul is gone, separated from the body.

The second part:

Night has already fallen,
Star joins star in holy union;
Great lights, little sparks
Glitter near and shine afar;
Glitter here in the lake, reflecting,
Shine above the clear night,
Sealing the deepest rest,
The moon's full splendor reigns.

The harmony and wisdom of the spheres are absorbed by the great lights, the small sparks. And the secrets of the moon, all that we absorb in spiritual science from the secrets of the spheres, is sunk into Faust's higher self.

The third part of sleeping:

The hours have already faded away,
Pain and joy have vanished away;
Feel it first! You will recover;
Trust the new day's view.
Valleys green, hills swell,
Bushes to shadowy rest;
And in swaying silver waves
The seed of the harvest undulates.

Inwardly connecting with the existence of nature; we have also spoken of this before. Read the last Hague cycle, how the human soul, when it rises from the body, becomes one with the surging and weaving of external existence. But it also means the becoming in the soul of Faust:

And in surging silver waves
The seed - the soul of Faust - surges towards the harvest.

And do you remember how I said that during sleep, man desires to re-enter the body? That is the last part of the night.

Desire to fulfill desires.
Look at the brightness there!

The sun can already be sensed.

You are gently embraced,
Sleep is a shell, throw it away!

An important sentence! A great poet does not write empty phrases! What does it mean: Sleep is a shell, throw it away!? — For someone who sleeps through an ordinary sleep, sleep is not a shell; for someone for whom this time from falling asleep to waking up becomes an absorption for the secrets of the world, sleep is a shell.

Do not delay to take heart,
When the crowd hesitantly roams;
Everything can be achieved by the noble,
Who understands and quickly seizes.

And now the tremendous roar that announces the approach of the sun, reminding us of what Goethe said in the “Prologue in Heaven” in the first part of “Faust” about this sounding of the sun:

The sun sounds in the old way
In brotherly spheres of singing,
And its prescribed journey
It completes with a thunderclap.
Its sight gives strength to the angels,
When no one can fathom it;
Its incomprehensibly high works
Are glorious, as on the first day.

When the sun comes up and the light pours over the physical plane, the soul, when it is outside the body, hears this approach of the sun as music of the spheres, as a special element in the music of the spheres. Spirits hear it naturally. Man does not hear it because he must hear through his physical body. But that is incorporated in the physical plane, and when the sun is in the physical plane, that is the time when man can be awake. Therefore spirits must withdraw. What Ariel, the spirit of the air, now says to his servants, that is suggestive of the approach of the music of the spheres. The spirits can hear it. He who is outside of his body can hear it. Faust can still hear it, this rising of the music of the spheres. Then he returns to his body. Then Ariel has the task of disappearing. Ariel instructs his servants what they have to do: they have to disappear from the physical plane. Because when the sun, which they can only find as a sounding sun, strikes them with its light, they go deaf from it. They go deaf from the light, while they can easily bear the sounding sun, in whose tones they themselves live.

Hark! Hear the storm of the hours!
The new day is already born
for the ears of the spirit.
The gates of rock creak and clatter,
Phoebus' wheels roll and clatter;
What a roar brings the light!
It trumpets, it trompets,
The eye blinks and the ear is amazed,
Unheard-of things cannot be heard.
Slip to the flower corollas,
Deeper, deeper, to dwell in silence,
In the rocks, under the foliage;
If it strikes you, then you are deaf.

And now the elves disappear. Faust returns to his body. But Faust remains unconscious of his guilt. He does not stand before us. He has descended deep into Faust's subconscious and remains there until the next incarnation. Faust, who has just experienced being with the whole spiritual cosmos, must now realize how what he has experienced relates to the four breaks of sleep-life, to how he now perceives the world. He now lives as a higher self in his body.

A person who, after sleeping one night and not having everything within himself that Faust has within himself, a person who then, after waking up in the morning, would say: You, Earth, were also constant this night – would be a fool, because no one expects anything other than that the Earth was also constant this night. But indeed, if one has gone through what Faust experienced as an initiation with the spirits of the earth, then one has experienced something through which one could indeed believe that the whole earth had been transformed. Then it is justified to say that one has become a new person, or rather, that the new person has been awakened in one: “You, Earth, were also constant this night - despite what I have experienced. Then the world appears completely new, because it is indeed given to a new person.

Life's pulses beat freshly alive,
Gently welcoming ethereal dawn;
You, Earth, were also constant this night
And breathe newly refreshed at my feet,
You are already beginning to surround me with joy,
You stir and move a strong resolve,
To strive for the highest existence forever. —

Even now, when the mind has freed itself from what must be stored for the next incarnation!

In the twilight the world is already revealed,
The forest resounds with a thousand-voiced life,
Valley after valley a strip of mist has poured out;
But heavenly clarity descends into the depths,
And twigs and branches, freshly refreshed, have sprung
from the fragrant abyss where they slept submerged.
And color after color is released from the ground,
where flowers and leaves drip with dew,
A paradise is all around me.

This is what a person sees when he, I am not saying, undergoes the initiation, but when he lives the initiation. And he has reason to see the world anew. He would not utter the words he now speaks if only the person who had become guilty and who would live under the impression of this guilt in this incarnation were in him.

Look up! The mountain peaks
already announce the most solemn hour;
They may enjoy the eternal light early,
Which later turns down to us.
Now to the green meadows of the alp
new splendor and clarity is bestowed,
And step by step it has succeeded; –
She steps forward! – namely, the sun – and unfortunately already blinded,
I turn away, pierced through by eye pain.

The higher self is now unable to see what the senses were able to see, the sun. Nevertheless, Faust has learned so much that the sun is now something essentially different for him. And now something stirs within him that is connected with human knowledge:

So it is when a yearning hope
The highest wish,
Finds wings spread open at the gates of fulfillment.

What fulfillment gates? Only those that have become close to him during his sleep. But even the ordinary world now appears to him as if it were breaking like a blaze of flames from eternal reasons:

But now from those eternal depths
A blaze of fire breaks out, we stand amazed;
We wanted to light the torch of life,
A sea of fire embraces us, what a fire!
Is it love? Is it hate?...

We know this from the past, but what we are experiencing now is more than love and hate.

Is it love? Is it hate? The feelings that burn within us,
Alternating between pain and joy,
So that we look down at the earth again,
To hide ourselves in the most youthful veil.

He cannot look at the sun now; he looks at the waterfall, in which the sun is reflected, and which shows him the colors of the rainbow in an arc. He turns away from the sun. He becomes a world observer, just as this world shines in as a reflection of spiritual life – this world of which one can say: All that is transitory is only a parable of the eternal.

So let the sun remain behind me!

He has looked at it before. Now he turns to the waterfall.

The waterfall, breaking through the rock,
I look at it with growing delight.
From fall to fall it now rolls in a thousand,
Then again in a thousand streams,
Foam rushing high into the air.
But how wonderful it is to benefit from this storm,
The colorful arch of changing duration arches...

- which reflects in seven colors what is in unity in the sun.

Sometimes drawn in, sometimes dissolving into thin air,
spreading cool, fragrant showers around.
It reflects human endeavor.
Contemplate it, and you understand more precisely:
We have life in its colored reflection.

We have life in its colored reflection! – This is how far Faust has come after this night: he no longer wants to plunge into life as Faust did in the first part, when he was thrown into guilt and evil, but instead turns to its colored reflection. It is the same colored reflection that we call spiritual science, which appears to him only as a colored reflection, and through which we gradually ascend to experience reality.

What now follows, the second part, is the colored reflection of life at first. It is nonsense to understand this second part merely realistically. We have Faust, who, with his higher self, contemplates life through the physical body in its colorful reflection; he now carries this physical body through life as something he is preserving, so that everything in him can develop that, as his higher self, preserves him from that which comes in later incarnations.

It was quite difficult for Goethe to continue his “Faust” after Mephistopheles' word had been spoken: “Come to me!” But we see how Goethe strives to penetrate the secrets that we today recognize as the secrets of spiritual science. How he approaches them. And then follow this second part, how Mephistopheles really has Faust at first, how Mephistopheles is everywhere in what happens at the “imperial court” and so on. And how, through the after-effects of the initiation living in him, Faust gradually breaks away from Mephistopheles in the course of the action of the second part. But these are further secrets of the second part. Goethe himself said that he had mysteriously included much in this second part! — People have not taken the word seriously enough. Through spiritual science, they will now gradually learn to take such words more and more seriously.

But there is one thing you will have gathered from today's reflections, and that is that Goethe, in his “Faust”, strives to go further in this respect than in the first part, to express something in his “Faust” of the mood that is really symbolically hinted at here in the course of the seasons.

When Pentecost approaches, and when the spirits of the elemental world draw near to men in such wise that it may be said of them:

When the blossoms' spring rain
Over all, floating sinks,
When the fields' green blessing
All earthly born,
Little elves, size of a ghost,
Hurry, where they can help,
Whether holy or evil,
The unfortunate man laments them.

Pentecostal mood! Outpouring of the spirit in the next sentences, which the choir speaks, in the four times of sleep from falling asleep to waking up!

Thus we also show through this Faust from a certain point of view the necessity that humanity be handed down little by little what spiritual science wants to proclaim to it as a new Pentecost message. Faust is so well suited to show us how complicated that is, which exists down there at the bottom of human nature. It lives down there in human nature, which is constantly exposed to the Ahrimanic-Luciferic powers of the world, and there lives that which man can find when he places himself in the guidance of the Christ impulse.

Why do we speak of a threshold? Why do we speak of a guardian of the threshold? We speak of it because, as if by a grace of the wisdom-filled steering of the world, what struggles and rumbles and wages war in our everyday lives was initially withdrawn from the human soul, down there on the deep underground of the human soul. It is as if there were a surface, and below it rumbles and fights and wages war in our everyday life. And even what we live through in our everyday life is a continuous victory. Only it must be fought for again and again. And in the future it will only be fought for again if people will know that which has unconsciously guided them up to now, a benevolent, wisdom-filled world guidance. In the depths of the soul we must really find that which is not known in ordinary everyday life, but which the spiritual can experience. In those human depths where the human being is connected with those powers of the world that transcend good and evil with their spiritual magnitude.

I would like to express this with a Whitsun saying, in which I have combined how man, at the bottom of his soul, has elemental powers that oppose each other, and how that which lives in his consciousness is victory over that which wages war down there in the depths of his soul.

We will speak tomorrow, or perhaps the day after tomorrow, about how these things relate to the context of human life. Today, however, I would like to conclude with this Whitsun saying, which basically expresses what always lives as the innermost nerve in our spiritual science, and to which we have also referred today:

Where sense knowledge ends,
There stands the gate,
Which reveals the realities of life
To the soul's existence;
The soul creates the key,
When she grows strong within herself
In the struggle that world powers
on their own ground
with human forces,
When they banish through themselves
the sleep that envelops the powers of knowledge
at the boundaries of their senses
with a spiritual night.

If you combine the reflections I presented here yesterday with the other lectures I gave here a week ago, you will, to a certain extent, gain an important key to much of spiritual science. I will only mention the main thoughts that we need for our further considerations, so that we can orient ourselves. About a week ago I pointed out the significance of the processes that, from the point of view of the physical world, are called processes of destruction. I pointed out that, from the point of view of the physical world, one actually only sees the real in what arises, what, as it were, emerges from nothingness and comes into noticeable existence. Thus, one speaks of the real when the plant struggles up from the root, developing leaf by leaf until it blossoms, and so forth. But one does not speak of the real in the same way when one looks at the processes of destruction, at the gradual withering, the gradual fading, the ultimate flowing away, one might say, to nothingness. But for anyone who wants to understand the world, it is eminently necessary that he also looks at the so-called destruction, at the processes of dissolution, at that which ultimately results for the physical world like flowing into nothingness. For consciousness can never develop in the physical world where mere sprouting and sprouting processes are taking place, but consciousness begins only where that which has sprouted in the physical world is in turn worn away and destroyed.

I have pointed out how those processes that life evokes in us must be destroyed by the soul-spiritual if consciousness is to arise in the physical world. It is indeed the case that when we perceive anything external, our soul-spiritual must instigate processes of destruction in our nervous system, and these processes of destruction then mediate consciousness. Every time we become aware of something, the processes of consciousness must arise out of processes of destruction. And I have indicated how the most significant process of destruction, the process of death, is precisely the creator of consciousness for the time we spend after death. Through the fact that our soul and spirit experiences the complete dissolution and detachment of the physical and etheric bodies, the absorption of the physical and etheric bodies into the general physical and etheric world, our soul and spirit draws the strength – from the process of death our soul and spirit draws the strength to be able to have processes of perception between death and a new birth. The saying of Jakob Böhme: 'Thus, then, death is the root of all life' acquires through this a higher significance for the whole context of world phenomena.

Now you will often have asked yourselves: What actually is the time that passes for the human soul between death and a new birth? It has often been pointed out that for the normal human life this time is a long one in relation to the time we spend here in the physical body between birth and death. It is short only for those people who use their lives in a way that is contrary to the world, who, I will say, come to do only that which in a real and true sense can be called criminal. Then there is a short lapse of time between death and a new birth. But for people who have not fallen prey to selfishness alone, but live their lives in a normal way between birth and death, there is usually a relatively long period of time between death and a new birth.

But the question must, I would say, burn in our souls: What determines whether a human soul returns to a new physical embodiment at all? The answer to this question is intimately connected with everything that can be known about the significance of the destructive processes I have mentioned. Just think that when we enter physical existence with our souls, we are born into very specific circumstances. We are born into a certain age, driven to certain people. So we are born into very specific circumstances. You must realize very thoroughly that the content of our life between birth and death is actually filled with everything we are born into. What we think, what we feel, what we sense, in short, the whole content of our life depends on the time into which we are born.

But now you will also easily be able to understand that what surrounds us when we are born into physical existence depends on the preceding causes, on what has happened before. Suppose, if I am to draw this schematically, we are born at a certain point in time and walk through life between birth and death. (It was drawn.) If you add what surrounds you, you do not stand there in isolation, but are the effect of what has gone before. What I mean is: you are brought together with what has gone before, with people. These people are children of other people, who in turn are children of other people, and so on. If we consider only these physical relationships of succession in generations, you will say: When I enter into physical existence I take something on from the people around me; during my education I take on much from the people around me. But these people, in turn, have also taken on very much from their ancestors, from the acquaintances and relatives of their ancestors, and so on. You could say that people have to search ever higher up to find the causes of what they themselves are.

If you then let your thoughts go further, you can say that you can follow a certain current upwards through your birth. This current has, as it were, brought with it everything that surrounds us in the life between birth and death. And if we continue to follow this current upwards, we would then come to a point in time where our previous incarnation lay. So by following the time upwards, before our birth, we would have a long time in which we dwelled in the spiritual world. During this time, many things have happened on earth. But what has happened has brought with it the conditions in which we live, into which we are born. And then, in the spiritual world, we finally come to the time when we were on earth in a previous incarnation. When we talk about these circumstances, we are definitely talking about average circumstances. Of course, there are many exceptions, but they all lie, I would say, in the line I indicated earlier for natures that come to earthly embodiment more quickly.

What determines whether we are born here again after a period of time has passed? Well, if we look at our previous embodiments, we were also surrounded by circumstances during our time on earth, and these circumstances had their effects. We were surrounded by people, these people had children, and passed on to the children their feelings and ideas. But if you follow the course of historical life, you will say to yourself: there will come a time in the course of evolution when you will no longer be able to recognize anything truly the same or even similar in the descendants as in the ancestors. All this is transferred, but the basic character that is present at a particular time appears in the children in a weakened form, in the grandchildren even more weakened and so on, until a time approaches when there is nothing left of the basic character of the environment in which one was in the previous incarnation. So that the stream of time works to destroy what the basic character of the environment once was. We watch this destruction in the time between death and a new birth. And when the character of the earlier age has been erased, when there is nothing left of it, when what it was like in an earlier incarnation has been destroyed, then the time comes when we enter earthly existence again. Just as the second half of our life is actually a kind of wearing down of our physical existence, so between death and a new birth there must be a kind of wearing down of earthly conditions, a destruction, a annihilation. And new conditions, new surroundings, into which we are born, must be there. So we are reborn when all that for the sake of which we were born before has been destroyed. So this idea of destruction is connected with the successive return of our incarnation on earth. And what our consciousness creates at the moment of death, when we see the body fall away from our spiritual and mental self, is strengthened at this moment of death, at this contemplation of destruction for the contemplation of the process of destruction that must take place in the circumstances on earth between our death and a new birth.

Now you will also understand that someone who has no interest at all in what surrounds him on earth, who basically is not interested in any person or any being, but is only interested in what is good for himself, and simply steals from one day to the next, that he is not very strongly connected to the conditions and things on earth. He is also not interested in following their slow erosion, but comes very soon to repair them, to really live with the conditions with which he must live, so that he learns to understand their gradual destruction. He who has never lived with earthly conditions does not understand their destruction, their dissolution. Therefore, those who have lived very intensely in the basic character of any age, have absorbed themselves in the basic character of any age, will, above all, tend, if nothing else intervenes, to bring about the destruction of that into which they were born, and to reappear when a completely new one has emerged. Of course, I would say that there are exceptions at the top. And these exceptions are particularly important for us to consider.

Let us assume that one lives one's way into such a movement, as the spiritual-scientific movement is now, at this point in time, where it does not agree with everything that is in the surrounding world, where it is something completely alien to the surrounding world. In this sense, the spiritual-scientific movement is not something we are born into, but something we have to work on, something we want to enter into the spiritual cultural development of the earth. In this case it is a matter of living with conditions that are contrary to spiritual science and then reappearing on earth when the earth has changed so much that the spiritual-scientific conditions can truly take hold of cultural life. So here we have the exception to the upside. There are exceptions downwards and upwards. Certainly, the most earnest co-workers of spiritual science today are preparing to reappear in an earthly existence as soon as possible, by working at the same time during this earthly existence to eliminate the conditions into which they were born. So you see, when you take the last thought, that you are helping, so to speak, the spiritual beings to direct the world by devoting yourself to what lies in the intentions of the spiritual beings.

If we consider the conditions of the times today, we have to say: on the one hand, we have something that is heading towards decadence and decline. Those who have a heart and soul for spiritual science have been placed in this age, so to speak, to see how it is ripe for decline. Here on earth they are introduced to that with which one can only become acquainted on earth, but they carry this up into the spiritual worlds, now see the decline of the age and will return when that is to bring about a new age, which lies precisely in the innermost impulses of spiritual striving. Thus the plans of the spiritual guides, the spiritual leaders of earthly evolution, are effectively furthered by what such people, who occupy themselves with something that is, so to speak, not the culture of the time, absorb into themselves.

You are perhaps familiar with the accusations that are very often made by people of today to those who profess spiritual science, namely that they deal with something that often appears to be outwardly unfruitful, that does not outwardly intervene in the conditions of the time. Yes, there is really a necessity for people in earthly existence to occupy themselves with that which is of significance for further development, but not immediately for the time. If anyone objects to this, then he should just consider the following. Imagine that these were consecutive years:

We could then go further. Suppose these were consecutive years and that these were the grain crops w w of the consecutive years. And what I am drawing here would always be the mouths > that consume these grains of grain. Now someone may come and say: Only the arrow that goes from the grains of grain to the mouths > is important, because that sustains the people of the following years. And he can say: Whoever thinks realistically only looks at these arrows going from the grain to the mouth. But the grain cares little about this arrow. It does not care at all, but has only the tendency to develop each grain of wheat into the next year. The grain kernels only care about this arrow; they don't care at all about being eaten. That is a side effect, something that arises along the way. Each grain kernel has, if I may say so, the will, the impulse to go over into the next year to become a grain kernel again. And it is good for the mouths that the grains follow this arrow direction, because if all the grains followed this arrow direction, then the mouths here would have nothing more to eat next year! If the grains from the year 1913 had all followed this arrow, then the mouths from the year 1914 would have nothing more to eat. If someone wanted to carry out materialistic thinking consistently, he would examine the grains of corn to see how they are chemically composed so that they produce the best possible food products. But that would not be a good observation; because this tendency does not lie in the grains of corn at all, but in the grains of corn lies the tendency to ensure further development and to develop over into next year's grain of corn.

But it is the same with the end of the world. Those truly follow the course of the world who ensure that evolution continues, and those who become materialists follow the mouths that only look at this arrow here. But those who ensure that the course of the world continues need not be deterred in their striving to prepare the next following times, any more than the grains of corn are deterred from preparing those of the following year, even if the mouths here long for the completely different arrows.

I pointed this out at the end of Riddles of Philosophy, pointing out that what we call materialistic knowledge can be compared to eating grain seeds, that what happens in world events really happens in the world, can be compared to reproduction, to what happens from one grain seed to the next year's. Therefore, what is called scientific knowledge is just as insignificant for the inner nature of things as eating is without inner significance for the growth of grain fruits. And today's science, which is only concerned with the way in which what can be known about things is received by the human mind, is doing exactly the same as the man who uses the grain for food, because what the grains of corn are when we eat them has nothing to do with the inner nature of the grains of corn, just as the outer knowledge has nothing to do with what develops inside the things.

In this way, I tried to throw a thought into the hustle and bustle of philosophy, and it will be interesting to see whether it will be understood or whether such a very plausible thought will be met again and again with the foolish objection: “Yes, but Kant has already proved that knowledge cannot approach things.” He proved it only from the point of view of knowledge, which can be compared to the consumption of grains of wheat, and not from the point of view of knowledge that arises with the progressive development that is in things. But we must familiarize ourselves with the fact that we have to repeat again and again to our age and to the age to come, in all possible forms, only not in hasty forms and not in agitative forms, not in fanatical forms, what the principle and essence of spiritual science is, until it is drummed into us. For it is precisely the characteristic of our age that Ahriman has made the skulls so hard and thick, and that they can only be softened slowly. So no one should shrink, I would say, from the necessity of emphasizing again and again, in all possible forms, what the essence and impulse of spiritual science is.

But now let us turn to another conclusion that was drawn here yesterday in connection with a number of assumptions: the conclusion that reverence for the truth must grow in our time, reverence for knowledge, not for authoritative knowledge, but for the knowledge that one acquires. There must be a growing realization that one should not judge out of nothing, but out of one's acquired knowledge of the workings of the world.

Now, by being born into a particular age, we are dependent on our environment, completely dependent on what is in our environment. But, as we have seen, this is connected with the whole stream of development, with the whole striving that leads upwards, so that we are born into circumstances that depend on the preceding circumstances. Just consider how we are placed into them. Of course we are placed in it by our karma, but we are still placed in that which surrounds us as something quite definite, as something that has a certain character. And now consider how we thereby become dependent in our judgment. This is not always clearly evident to us, but it is really so. So that we have to ask ourselves, even if it is related to our karma: What if we had not been born at a certain point in time and in a certain place, but fifty years earlier in a different place? How would it be then? Wouldn't we have received the form and inner direction of our judgments from the different circumstances of our environment, just as we have received them from where we were born?

So that on closer self-examination we really come to the conclusion that we are born into a certain milieu, into a certain environment, that we are dependent on this milieu in our judgments and in our feelings, that this milieu reappears, as it were, when we judge. Just think how it would be different, I just want to say, if Luther had been born in the 19th century and in a completely different place! So even with a personality who has an enormous influence on their surroundings, we can see how they incorporate into their own judgments that which is characteristic of the age, whereby the personality actually reflects the impulses of the age. And this is the case for every person, except that those for whom it is most the case are the least aware of it. Those who most closely reflect the impulses of their environment, into which they were born, are usually the ones who speak the most about their freedom, their independent judgment, their lack of prejudice, and so on. On the other hand, when we see people who are not as thoroughly dependent as most people are on their environment, we see that it is precisely such people who are most aware of what makes them dependent on their environment.

And one of those who never got rid of the idea of dependence on their environment is the great spirit, of whom we have now seen another piece pass before our eyes, is Goethe. He knew in the most eminent sense that he would not be as he was if he had not been born in 1749 in Frankfurt am Main and so on. He knew that, in a sense, his age speaks through him. This moved and warmed his behavior in an extraordinary way. He knew that by seeing certain times and circumstances in his father's house, he formed his judgment. By spending his student days in Leipzig, he formed his judgment. By coming to Strasbourg, he formed his judgment. That is why he wanted to get out of these circumstances and into completely different ones, so that in the 1880s, one might say, he suddenly disappeared into the night and fog and only told his friends about his disappearance when he was already far away, after he could not be brought back under the circumstances at the time. He wanted to break out so that something else could speak through him. And if you take many of Goethe's utterances from his developmental period, you will notice this feeling, this sense of dependence on the environment everywhere.

Yes, but what would Goethe have had to strive for if, at the moment when he had truly come to realize that one is actually completely dependent on one's environment, if he had connected his feelings, his perceptions of this dependence with the thoughts we have expressed today? He would have had to say: Yes, my environment is dependent on the whole stream of evolution right back to my ancestors. I will always remain dependent. I would have to transport myself back in thought, in soul experience, to a time when today's conditions did not yet exist, when completely different conditions prevailed. Then, if I could transport myself into these conditions, I would come to an independent judgment, not just judging as my time judges about my time, but judging as I judge when I completely transcend my time.

Of course, it is not necessary for such a person, who perceives this as a necessity, to place himself in his own previous incarnation. But essentially he must place himself at a point in time that is connected with an earlier incarnation, where he lived in completely different circumstances. And when he now transfers himself back into this incarnation, he will not be dependent as before, because the circumstances have become quite different, the earlier circumstances have since been destroyed, perished. It is, of course, different if I now transfer myself back to a time when the whole environment, the whole milieu has disappeared. What do you actually have then? Yes, one must say: before, one lives in life, one enjoys life; one is interwoven with life. One can no longer be interwoven with the life that has perished, with the life of an earlier time; one can only relive this life spiritually and mentally. Then one would be able to say: “We have life in its colorful reflection.”

Yes, but what would have to happen if such a person, feeling this, wanted to depict this emergence from the circumstances of the present and the coming to an objective judgment from a point of view that is not possible today? He would have to describe it in such a way that he would be transported back into completely different circumstances. Whether this is exactly the previous incarnation or not is not important, but rather the circumstances on earth were completely different. And he would have to strive to fill his soul with the impulses that were there at that time. He would have to, as it were, place himself in a kind of phantasmagoria, identify with this phantasmagoria and live in it, live in a kind of phantasmagoria that represents an earlier time.

But that is what Goethe strives for by continuing his “Faust” in the second part. Consider that he has initially brought his Faust into the circumstances of the present. There he lets him experience everything that can be experienced in the present. But in spite of all this, he has a deep inner feeling: “This cannot lead to any kind of true judgment, because I am always inspired by what is around me; I have to go out, I have to go back to a time when the circumstances have been completely changed up to our time, and so they cannot affect the judgment.” Goethe therefore allows Faust to go all the way back to classical Greek times and to enter, to come together with the classical Walpurgis Night.

That which he can experience in the deepest sense in the present has been depicted in the Nordic Walpurgis Night. Now he must go back to the classical Walpurgis Night, because from the Nordic Walpurgis Night to the classical Walpurgis Night, all conditions have changed. What was essential in the classical Walpurgis Night has disappeared, and new conditions have arisen, which are symbolized by the Nordic Walpurgis Night. There you have the justification for Faust's return to Greek times. The whole of the second part of “Faust” is the realization of what one can call: “In the colored reflection we have life.”

First, there is still a passage through the conditions of the present, but those conditions that are already preparing destruction. We will see what is developing at the “imperial court,” where the devil takes the place of the fool and so on.

We see through the creation of the homunculus how the emergence from the present is sought, and how in the third act of “Faust” the classical scene now occurs. Goethe had already written the beginning around the turn of the 18th century; the most important scenes were not added until 1825, but the Helena scene was already written (800) and Goethe calls it a “classical phantasmagoria” to suggest through the words that he means a return to conditions that are not the physical, real conditions of the present.

That is the significant thing about Goethe's Faust poetry, that it is, I would say, a work of striving, a work of wrestling. I have really emphasized clearly enough in recent times that it would be nonsense to regard Goethe's Faust poetry as a completed work of art. I have done enough to show that it cannot be considered a finished work of art. But as a work of striving, as a work of wrestling, this Faust epic is so significant. Only then can one understand what Goethe intuitively achieved when one opens oneself to the light that can fall from our spiritual science on such a composition and sees how Faust looks into the classical period, into the milieu of Greek culture, where within the fourth post-Atlantic period very different conditions existed than in our fifth post-Atlantic period. One is truly filled with the greatest reverence for this struggle when one sees how Goethe began to work on this Faust in his early youth, how he abandoned himself to everything that was accessible to him at the time, without really understanding it very well. Truly, when approaching Faust, one must apply this point of view of spiritual science, for the judgments that the outer world sometimes brings are too foolish in relation to Faust.

How could it escape the attention of the spiritual scientist when, time and again, people who think they are particularly clever approach and point out how magnificently the creed is expressed by this Faust, and say: Yes, compared to what so many people say about some confession of faith, one would have to remember more and more the conversation between Faust and Gretchen:

...feeling is everything;
name is sound and smoke,
fogging up heavenly glow.

Well, you know what Faust is discussing with Gretchen, and what is always mentioned when someone thinks they have to emphasize what should not be seen as religious reflection and what should be seen as religious sentiment. But what is not considered is that in this case, Faust was formulating his religious creed for the sixteen-year-old Gretchen, and that all the clever professors are then demanding that people never progress beyond the Gretchen point of view in their religious understanding. The moment you present that confession of Faust to Gretchen as something particularly sublime, you demand that humanity never rise above the Gretchen point of view. That is actually easy and convenient to achieve. It is also very easy to boast that everything is feeling and so on, but you don't realize that it is the Gretchen point of view.

Goethe, for his part, strove quite differently to make his Faust the bearer of an ongoing struggle, as I have now indicated again with reference to this placing himself in a completely earlier age in order to get at the truth. Perhaps at the same time or a little earlier when Goethe wrote this “classical-romantic phantasmagoria”, this placing of Faust in the world of the Greeks, he wanted to make clear to himself once again how his “Faust” should actually proceed, what he wanted to present in “Faust”. And so Goethe wrote down a scheme. At that time, there was a version of his “Faust” available: a foundation, a number of scenes from the first part and probably also the Helena scene. Goethe wrote down:

“Ideal pursuit of influence and empathy in all of nature.”

So, as the century drew to a close, Goethe took up, as he said, “the old thread, the barbaric composition”, at Schiller's suggestion. That is how he rightly described his “Faust” at the end of the century, because it was written scene by scene. Now he said to himself: What have I actually done there? And he stood before the soul of this striving Faust: out of erudition, closer to nature.

He wrote down: “I wanted to set forth

1. Ideal striving for influence and empathy in all of nature.

2. Appearance of the spirit as a world and deed genius.

This is how he sketches the appearance of the earth spirit.

Now I have shown you how, according to the appearance of the earth spirit, it is actually the Wagner who appears, and who is only a means to the self-knowledge of Faust, which is in Faust himself, a part of Faust. What is arguing in Faust? What is Faust doing now that something is arguing in him? He realizes: Until now you have only lived in your environment, in what the outer world has offered you. He can see this most clearly in the part that is within him, in Wagner, who is quite content. Faust is in the process of attaining something in order to free himself from what he is born into, but Wagner wants to remain entirely as he is, to remain in what he is on the outside. What is it that lives out itself outwardly in the world from generation to generation, from epoch to epoch? It is the form into which human striving is molded. The spirits of form work outside in that which we are to live in. But man must always, if he does not want to die in the form, if he really wants to progress, strive beyond this form. “Struggle between form and formlessness,“ Goethe also writes.

”3. Struggle between form and formlessness."

But now Faust looks at the form: the Faust in Wagner in there. He wants to be free of this form. This is a striving for the content of this form, a new content that can arise from within.

We could also have looked at all possible forms and studied all possible styles and then built a new building, as many architects of the 19th century did, as we find it everywhere outside. We would not have created anything new from the form that has come about in the evolution of the world: Wagner nature. But we preferred to take the 'formless content'. We have sought to take the spiritual science that is vividly experienced from what is initially formless, what is only content, and to pour it into new forms.

This is what Faust does by rejecting Wagner:

Let him not be a shallow
Let him not be a foolish fool!
With little art, reason and right sense

“4. Preference for formless content,” Goethe also writes.

And that is the scene he has written, in which Faust rejects Wagner:

“Preference for formless content over empty form.”

But over time, the form becomes empty. If, after a hundred years, someone were to perform a play exactly as we are performing it today, it would again be an empty form. That is what we must take into account. That is why Goethe writes:

“5. Content brings form with it.”

That is what I want us to experience! That is what we want to achieve with our building: form brings content with it. And, as Goethe writes, “Form is never without content.” Of course it is never without content, but Wagnerian natures do not see the content in it, which is why they only accept the empty form. The form is as justified as it can possibly be. But the point is to make progress, to overcome the old form with the new content.

“6. Form is never without content.”

1. Ideal striving for influence and empathy in all of nature.
2. Appearance of the spirit as a world and deed genius.
3. Conflict between form and formlessness.
4. Preference for formless content over empty form.
5. Content brings form with it.
6. Form is never without content.

And now a sentence that Goethe writes down to give his “Faust”, so to speak, the impulse, a highly characteristic sentence. For the Wagnerian natures, they think about it: Yes, form, content - how can I concoct that - how can I bring it together? — You can very well imagine a person in the present day who wants to be an artist and who says to himself: Well, spiritual science, all right. But it's none of my business what these tricky minds come up with as spiritual science. But they want to build a house that, I believe, contains Greek, Renaissance, Gothic styles; and there I see what they are thinking in the house they are building, how the content corresponds to the form. One could imagine that this will come. It must come, if people think about eradicating contradictions, while the world is precisely composed of contradictions, and it is important that you can put the contradictions next to each other. So Goethe writes:

"7. These contradictions, instead of uniting them, are to be made more disparate.

That is, he wants to present them in his “Faust” in such a way that they emerge as strongly as possible: “These contradictions, instead of uniting them, make them more disparate.” And to do that, he juxtaposes two figures again, where one lives entirely in form and is satisfied when he adheres to form, greedily digs for treasures of knowledge and is happy when he finds earthworms. In our time, we could say: greedily striving for the secret of becoming human and glad when he finds out, for example, that the human being has emerged from an animal species similar to our hedgehogs and rabbits. Edinger, one of the most important philosophers of the present day, recently gave a lecture on the emergence of the human being from a primal form similar to our hedgehog and rabbit. The theory that the human race descended from apes, prosimians, and so on, is no longer accepted by science; we have to go further back, to an earlier point of divergence between the animal species. Once upon a time there were ancestors that resembled the hedgehog and the rabbit, and on the other hand we have man as our ancestor. It is not true that because man is most similar to the rabbit and the hedgehog in certain things in terms of his brain formation, he must have descended from something similar. These animal species have survived, everything else has of course died out. So dig greedily for treasures and be glad if you find rabbits and hedgehogs. That is one striving, striving only in form. Goethe wanted to place it in Wagner, and he knows well that it is a clever striving; people are not stupid, they are clever. Goethe calls it: “Bright, cold, scientific striving.” “Wagner,” he adds.

“8. Bright, cold, scientific striving: Wagner.”

The other, the disparate, is what one wants to work out with all the fibers of the soul from within, after not finding it in the forms within. Goethe calls it “dull, warm, scientific striving”; he contrasts it with the other and adds “student” to it. Now that Wagner has been confronted with Faust, the student also confronts him. Faust remembers how he used to be a student, what he took in as philosophy, law, medicine and, unfortunately, theology. What he said to himself when he was still like the student: “All of this makes me feel as stupid as if a mill wheel were turning in my head.” But that's over. He can no longer put himself back in that position. But it all had an effect on him. So:

“9. Dull, warm, scientific striving: schoolboy.”

And so it continues. From this point onwards, we actually see Faust becoming a schoolboy and then once again delving into everything that allows one to grasp the present.

Goethe now calls the rest of Part One, insofar as it was already finished and was still to be finished:

“10. The enjoyment of life as seen from the outside; in dullness and passion, first part.”

Goethe is clear about what he has created. Now he wants to say: how should Faust really come out of this enjoyment of life into an objective worldview? — He must come to the form, but he must now grasp the form with his whole being. And we have seen how far he must go back, to where completely different conditions exist. There the form then meets him as a reflection. There the form meets him in such a way that he now absorbs it by becoming one with the truth that was justified at that time, and discards everything that had to happen at that time. In other words, he tries to put himself in the position of the time insofar as it was not permeated by Lucifer. He tries to go back to the divine point of view of ancient Greece.

And when you immerse yourself in the outside world in such a way that you enter it with your whole being, but take nothing from the circumstances into which you have grown, then you arrive at what Goethe describes as beauty in the highest sense. That is why he says: “Enjoyment of the deed”. Now no longer: enjoyment of the person, enjoyment of life. Enjoyment of the deed, going out, gradually moving away from oneself. Settling into the world is enjoyment of the deed outwards and enjoyment with consciousness. “ii. Enjoyment of the deed outwards and enjoyment with consciousness: beauty, second part.”

What Goethe was no longer able to achieve in his struggle because his time was not yet the time of spiritual science, he sketches out for himself at the turn of the 18th to the 19th century. For Goethe has very significant words at the end of this sketch, which he wrote there, and which was a recapitulation of what he had done in the first part. He had already planned to write a kind of third part to his “Faust”; but it only became the two parts, which do not express everything Goethe wanted, because he would have needed spiritual science to do so.

What Goethe wanted to depict here is the experience of the whole of creation outside, when one has emerged from one's personal life. This whole experience of Creation outside, in objectivity in the world outside, so that Creation is experienced from within, by carrying what is truly within outwards, that is sketched out by Goethe, I would say, stammering with the words: 'Enjoyment of Creation from within' - that is, not from his standpoint, by stepping out of himself.

“12. Enjoyment of Creation from Within.”

With this “Enjoyment of Creation from Within,” Faust had now entered not only the classical world, but the world of the spiritual.

Then there is something else at the end, a very strange sentence that points to the scene that Goethe wanted to do, did not do, but did want to do, that he would have done if he had already lived in our time, but that shone before him. He wrote:

"13. Epilogue in Chaos on the Way to Hell.

I have heard very clever people discuss what this last sentence: “Epilogue in Chaos on the Way to Hell” means. People said: So, in 1800, Goethe really still had the idea that Faust goes to hell and delivers an epilogue in the chaos before entering hell? So it was only much, much later that he came up with the idea of not letting Faust go to hell! I have heard many, many very learned discussions about this, as well as many other discussions! It means that in 1800 Goethe was not yet free from the idea of letting Faust go to hell after all. But they did not think about the fact that it is not Faust who delivers the epilogue, but of course Mephistopheles, after Faust has escaped him in heaven!

The epilogue would be, as we would say today, Lucifer and Ahriman on their way to hell; on their way to hell, they would discuss what they had experienced with the striving Faust.

I wanted to draw your attention to this recapitulation and to this exposition by Goethe once again because it shows us in the most eminent sense how Goethe, with all that he was able to gain in his time, strove towards the path that leads straight up into the realm of spiritual science.

We shall only be able to view Faust aright if we ask ourselves: Why has Faust, in its innermost core, remained an incomplete work of literature, despite being the greatest work of striving in the world, and why is Faust the representative of all humanity in that he strives out of his environment and is even carried into an earlier age? Why has this Faust nevertheless remained an unsatisfactory work of literature? Because it represents the striving for what spiritual science should incorporate into human cultural development.

It is good to focus attention on this fact: that at the turn of the 18th to the 19th century, a work of literature was created in which the figure of Faust, who forms the center of this work, was to be lifted out of all the restrictive limitations that must surround human beings, by having him go through his life in repeated lives on earth. The significance of Faust lies in the fact that, however intensely he has outgrown his nationality, he has nevertheless outgrown nationality and grown into the universal human condition. Faust has nothing of the narrow limitations of nationality, but strives upward to the general humanity, so that we find him not only as the Faust of modern times, but in the second part as a Faust who stands as a Greek among Greeks. It is a tremendous setback in our time, when in the course of the 19th century people began to place the greatest emphasis on the limits of human development again, and even see in the “national idea” an idea that could somehow still be a cultural force for our era. Mankind could wonderfully rise to an understanding of what spiritual science should become, if one wanted to understand something like what is secretly contained in “Faust”.

It was not for nothing that Goethe said to Eckermann, when he was writing the second part of his “Faust”, that he had secretly included in the “Faust” much that would only come out little by little.

But anyone who wants to understand the present must judge this present from a higher vantage point than this present itself is.

That is what I have tried to put into your souls as a feeling in these days, a feeling that I have tried to show you follows from a truly inner, living understanding of spiritual science, and how it has been striven for by the greatest minds of the past, of whom Goethe is one.

Only by not merely absorbing what arises in our soul in these contemplations as something theoretical, but by assimilating it in our souls and letting it live in our soul's meditations, does it become living spiritual science. May we hold it so with this, with much, indeed with all that passes through our soul as spiritual science.

Tomorrow we will attempt to present the final scene of Goethe's “Faust” in eurythmy. It will be apparent that my reflections today and tomorrow will be linked to the end of the second part of Goethe's Faust. We are, of course, dealing with one of the greatest poetic attempts in world evolution, with regard to the entire second part of Goethe's Faust, but especially with regard to the final scene, which is based on the most significant spiritual truths. Nevertheless, as true as it is that Goethe's “Faust” allows for different degrees and levels of understanding, it is also true that one can always go further and further in terms of seeking out what has flowed from Goethe's infinitely rich spiritual life into “Faust” and especially into the second part of “Faust”.

Furthermore, we shall see that the very end of the second part has so many occult truths to reveal to us, if we go to the subtleties in the presentation of the same, as hardly any other writer in the world has tried to reveal so far. And we shall see that these truths are enshrined by Goethe in the second part of “Faust” with a wonderful—to use an apparently pedantic expression—occult-appropriate science.

Now I must frankly admit to you that I would not dare to speak about Faust in the way I want to, if I did not have a Faust and Goethe problem that has never been dormant since 1884. Therefore, perhaps I may be permitted to hint at many things in aphorisms, which would require much more detailed substantiation for anyone who does not start from spiritual science. Nevertheless, I must confess that I do not approach the subject without a certain shyness, especially when it comes to linking occult observations to Goethe's “Faust” or to any other work of literature. For then all the lamentable things that have been done by occultists and non-occultists in the interpretation of poetry arise before my eyes.

One must really be somewhat appalled at the occultistic discussion of poetry when one considers what has been done in the world with regard to such interpretations, whether from the side of science or from so-called theosophists! And so please allow me to send a kind of introduction in advance, from which you can see how little inclined I myself am to dream occult truths, occult insights, into any kind of poetry of the spiritual development of humanity, and how hard I try to present only what can really be considered absolutely established.

Now, it is my custom when I have to talk about a subject to first immerse myself in the subject in a broader sense. When taking occult considerations seriously, it is necessary to immerse oneself in the whole atmosphere in which the subject is placed. And so I endeavored to immerse myself in Goetheanism once again.

For this purpose, I had to procure a great deal of literary material that I had studied decades ago. So I took up Goethe's “Prophecies of Bakis” again. These are thirty-two sayings clothed in enigmatic form, so to speak thirty-two riddles. Now you can imagine that an enormous amount has been written about what Goethe called “prophecies” and over which he poured, so to speak, oriental wisdom – it is a particular food for literary historians. Thus, in the thirty-two riddle verses, the most diverse people have seen the most colossal secrets.

I will give you a characteristic example in a moment. It is the twenty-ninth and thirty-third riddle verse that Goethe coined. It is quite good that we delve into these types of riddle verses before we go to the last scene of “Faust”.

One thing I know and revere, even worship at its feet;
Placed on the crown of the head, it is cursed by everyone.
I know one thing, and it firmly presses the lip shut;
But in the next moment it is the loathing of the world.

It must be said: it sounds quite mysterious! And the thirtieth riddle is:

This is the highest, and at the same time the basest!
Now the most beautiful, and at once the most hideous too.
Drink it up, and taste no deeper:
Beneath the enticing foam the dregs sink to the bottom.

Before we imagine how a theosophist might “interpret” these mysterious verses, let us look at an exoteric. We will not be able to make sense of what he says, but that does not matter; it shows us what is meant by “science”: “A most remarkable turn! Goethe chose this form to conceal and at the same time reveal his meaning.” Another Goethe interpreter has referred to these verses as “Freedom and Love”. The good man is at a loss and now wants to point out an explanation himself. “The highest, and at the same time the most abominable.” That should be: youth. That is both the highest and the most abominable. He says: That solves the mystery by itself.

That is an exoteric! An esoteric could say: You have to go much deeper than that!

One I know and venerate, yes, worship at its feet;
Placed on the crown of the head, it is cursed by everyone.
One I know, and it firmly presses the lips together;
But in the next moment it is the loathing of the world.

This refers to the plant, one could say, which represents the inverted human being. It can be associated with the Logos and Lucifer, or with white and black magic, and so on! Such explanations are widespread in the theosophical literature by the thousands.

Now, the art of familiarizing oneself with spiritual science does not consist in knowing how to apply what one has absorbed in spiritual science to anything at all, but in knowing how to relate to it in the right way – in our case, for example, to Goethe. Spiritual science should not lead us to all kinds of craziness, but should take us to where truth flows. And then one finds that the first two lines of the first verse mean — a slipper, and the last two, a cigar. Goethe hated cigar smoke. Yes, that is the truth, it is not profound, but it is as Goethe meant it. And the solution of the second verse is: spirit. As the spirit it is the highest, in alcohol as intoxication it is the most abominable. It is quite good to demonstrate such a process once, because you really should not be blinded by the art of interpretation and all sorts of profound arts, but you should be guided to where the truth is.

Goethe has also been made into a national chauvinist. But he was not at all. Take the fifth verse:

Two I see! The great one! I see the greater one! The two
rubbing with hostile power, one upon the other. Here are rocks and land, there are rocks and waves!
Which is the greater one, the fate speaks only.

This was taken to refer to the struggle between France and England for control of the continent. However, the commentator quoted above rejects this and says that the French Revolution and the German people are meant. This is quite foolish! What is really meant is life and death!

Now, this matter must be taken very seriously indeed. Just because something can be proved, that is absolutely no proof that the matter is right.

I wanted to say this in advance so that you do not think that I want to fall into the same error when explaining the final scene of 'Faust'. This final scene presents us with what could be called 'Faust's Ascension'. As is well known, Faust has gone through severe aberration, and also through all the possible madness and confusion of the wider, larger world. This is how it should be shown: Faust is to be led under the influence of Ahriman-Mephistopheles through the aberrations of the world, but the deepest thing that is embodied as the eternal in the human breast should not be able to be corroded by that which comes from Mephisto-Ahriman. In the end, Faust should still be able to be absorbed by the good spiritual worlds. That is what Goethe set out to achieve with his Faust epic.

Anyone who has learned something about the spiritual worlds through spiritual science and has little artistic sense within them can generally form an idea of how they would imagine it. For Goethe, who was an artist in the most intimate and highest sense, it was not so easy. He could not simply depict how Faust ascends to heaven and turn it all into an abstract, allegorical construct. For him, that would have been symbolism, a straw he was not willing to use. He wanted art. He wanted something that would endure and be secure in the face of true reality. That is what he wanted to be there. And so it occurred to him: How should I now present this on the stage, so that Faust is led into heaven? One can only place objects of the physical plane into it, they can only hint at something symbolic, but that would be straw, that would be no art! Even with all kinds of machinery one could only represent straw. Goethe first had to seek the means through which Faust can penetrate as a soul into the spiritual worlds. One cannot penetrate into the spiritual worlds through the air, one cannot penetrate through the external physical elements. Where is something real that can provide the means by which Faust can penetrate? That can only be what the spiritual represents on earth. Yes, where is that on earth? That is the consciousness that receives the spiritual! That is, Goethe first had to create a reality of consciousness that would receive the spiritual. He does this by placing people in his scenes, people in whose consciousness the spiritual can be said to live: monks, anchorites, and he layers them on top of each other. And one can say that a soul's ascent into the spiritual worlds is a real process. To present a spiritual process before an ordinary parquet floor would not be real, it is not rooted there; but it is rooted in the souls that Goethe presents. So he first tried to depict the consciousnesses that observe the spiritual process. So he presents the choir and the echo, which can perceive the elementary world of the spirit in the sensual-physical. They have prepared themselves not only to see the outer physical nature, but also within the physical plan the spiritual world into which the soul of Faust must enter.

And now it is described in such a way that only these monks can feel it. For just take the words, they are really not descriptions of physical processes:

Forest, it sways along.

It is as if one feels the elemental world emerging from natural things.

Woods, they sway towards it.
Rocks, they press against it.
Roots, they cling to it.
Trunk close to trunk up to it.
Wave after wave splashes against it.
Cave, the deepest, protects it.
Lions, they slink silently –
friendly around us,
a place consecrated to honor,
a holy love-nest.

There is an echo to this chorus. This is not without significance. It is meant to suggest to us how truly all-encompassing that which comes from elementary nature is.

Now we are led at the same time to something that becomes a wonderful intensification in Goethe. We are presented with three advanced anchorites, the Pater ecstaticus, the Pater profundus and the Pater Seraphicus, three who have attained higher levels than the others, who as anchorites only describe the processes just described. But there is a wonderful progression from the Pater ecstaticus through the Pater profundus to the Pater Seraphicus.

The Pater Ecstaticus is concerned with the lower stages of perfection, with sensory experiences, with being within oneself. The Pater Profundus has already progressed to the point of going from within outwards, of experiencing that which nature lives through as spirit and which is at the same time human spirit. Seen from the spiritual point of view, he stands higher than the Pater Ecstaticus. We can say: the Pater Profundus sees the spirit in the cosmos, which for him simultaneously becomes spirit in man. The Pater Seraphicus sees directly into the world of the spirit; for him it does not reveal itself through nature, but he deals directly with the spirit.

Hence the mysticization of the Pater ecstaticus through inner development. What is said now means nothing but inner states:

Eternal bliss,
glowing bond of love,
boiling pain of the chest,
foaming divine joy.
Arrows, pierce me,
Lances, vanquish me,
Maces, crush me,
Lightning, batter me;
That the vain
All evaporate,
Shine the permanent star,
Eternal love's core.

We have already covered the Pater profundus, which leads to the stage of feeling the spirit through nature.

Like the rocky abyss at my feet
It weighs heavily on the deep abyss,
Like a thousand streams that flow radiantly
To the horror of the foam of the flood,
How straight, with its own powerful drive,
The trunk carries itself into the air:
So it is the almighty love
That forms and nurtures everything.
There is a wild roar around me,
As if the forest and rocky ground were surging!
And yet, lovingly in the roar,
The water rushes to the gorge,
Called to water the valley;
The lightning, which struck down in flames,
To improve the atmosphere,
Which carried poison and haze in its bosom:
Are messengers of love, they announce
What surrounds us eternally,
My innermost being may also ignite it,
Where the mind, confused, cold,
Tormented in dull senses,
A crowd of locked chains of pain.
Oh God! Soothe the thoughts,
Enlighten my needy heart.

Now, in the Pater Seraphicus, there comes an immediate grasp of the spiritual world into which Faust is to be accepted, that is, of the spirits in whose midst Faust is now to enter. For this, a consciousness must first be presented: that is the Pater Seraphicus; he provides the medium through which the blessed boys can appear. And now, again, wonderfully, I would say expertly and appropriately observed:

What a morning cloud floats
Through the firs' swaying hair!
Do I sense what lives within?
It is a young ghostly host.

Goethe has children appear who died immediately after they were born; in the vernacular, they are called midnight babies.

Faust is to join the company of such midnight babies first; they know nothing of the world, their consciousness of the past has been clouded by their birth, and they know nothing of the new world yet. This belongs together with the ascension of Faust. As in the physical world there is no lightning without thunder, so in the spiritual world such an ascension of Faust is not without the blessed boy's realization of himself.

That a lover is present,
Do you feel, so just approach;
But from rugged earthly ways,
Happy ones! you have no trace.

Spiritual beings can only see the physical plane through our eyes and ears, otherwise they see the spiritual. When a ghost sees a hand, it sees the will that moves the hand and the form; if it wants to see the physical of the hand, it must use a physical eye.

Descend into my eyes
world and earthy organ,
You can use them as yours,
Look at this area!
(He takes it in.)
These are trees, these are rocks,
waterfall that crashes
And with tremendous rolling
Shortens the steep path.

The blessed boys are now inside with Father Seraphicus. He gives them so much of his spiritual strength that they can ascend to higher spheres. This shows once again the connection between the spiritual and physical worlds. When we meditate, the spirits also benefit, which is why we should read to the dead. In this way, Pater Seraphicus gives the fruit of his meditation to the boys, and through this they ascend.

Rise to higher spheres,
Always grow unnoticed,
As, according to an eternally pure way,
Strengthen God's presence.
For that is the food of the spirits,
Which in the freest ether reign:
Eternal Love's revelation,
That to bliss unfolds.

To know the “Faust” as here in Goethe a deepest occult truth of a world poem has been incorporated, means to be closer to the occult than any number of “occult” explanations can give.

Now the boys are in their own territory. They have crossed over from the realm of the spirits of form into the realm of the spirits of movement.

Now come the angels, bringing Faust's entelechy, that is, his immortality. They have snatched this member of the spirit world from Mephistopheles and bring it up with the words:

The noble limb
Of the spirit world is saved from evil:
Whoever strives for it,
We can redeem him;
And if he has received love
From above,
The blessed host meets him
With a warm welcome.

The younger angels:

Those roses, from the hands
Of loving, holy penitents,
Helped us win the victory
And complete the great work,
To gain this treasure of souls.
Evil retreated when we scattered,
devils fled when we struck.
Instead of the usual punishments of hell
the spirits felt the torment of love;
even the old master of Satan
was permeated with acute pain.

It is an occult sentence: to Mephisto-Ahriman, love is a consuming fire and a terrible gift of darkness.

Rejoice! It is accomplished.

Now the more perfect angels:

We are left with a remnant of earth
to bear,
And if it were made of asbestos,
It is not clean.
When strong spiritual power
The elements
Gathered up in itself....

What kind of earthly remnant is this? Our soul, when it lives on earth, absorbs through its perceptions, ideas and feelings what is going on on earth, and in so doing, the soul, as it were, draws to itself what lives in the elements of the physical plane. This cannot be separated immediately. Just as corpses used to be wrapped in a fabric made of asbestos to hold the ashes together, Faust's soul has a remnant of the material world that is not pure, even if it is like the asbestos that withstands fire.

No angel parted
The united dual nature
Of the two intimate ones,
Only eternal love
Can separate them.

The angels cover their faces before the incarnation. This is a secret that can only be seen by those entities that can descend deeper than angels who have not experienced the incarnation. Only love can separate this.

Now the angels become aware of the blessed boys. The blessed boys receive what is being led up:

Release the flakes.

Here Goethe again draws on physical processes to characterize spiritual processes. When the Benedictine monks die, they are wrapped in a special garment, the “flocca”, which is brown in color; all Benedictines are buried in the same flocca, hence the word “flakes”.

Here I have tried to take a liberty with respect to what is actually there in Faust. I have said: all this must be revealed to us through consciousness. Up to now, everything passes through the consciousness of the choir, the anchorites. Now Faust himself must ascend through consciousness, but he must ascend through full consciousness, he must fill a new consciousness completely, a new consciousness that is, however, identical with him, for he ascends as a fully developed human being.

Much in Faust is still unfinished, and certainly unfinished is the Pater Marianus, whom Goethe later called Doctor Marianus. This Doctor Marianus is there so that Faust may appear through his consciousness, so I simply let Doctor Marianus be Faust himself. The anchorite Doctor Marianus is at the same time Doctor Marianus and Faust.

Now it is a matter of the profound mystery of love, as permeating the world in the fully Christian sense.

Faust, speaking in a profane sense, has seduced Gretchen, Gretchen has even been executed, she has become innocently guilty, in her there is that innocence which rests enclosed in the mystery of man, and her love is an “eternal, enduring star”. If one wants to express this in an image, one comes to the Mater Dolorosa Gloriosa. She brings with her three penitents, she does not look at the guilt of these three, but at what is innocently guilty in them. To Doctor Marianus this secret is revealed.

Here the view is unobstructed,
The spirit is uplifted.
There women pass by,
Floating upwards;
The glorious one in the middle
In a wreath of stars,
The Queen of Heaven,
I see it in the radiance.
(Enraptured)
Supreme ruler of the world!
Let me in the blue
Stretched out celestial vault
See your secret.
Appreciate what moves the man's chest
Seriously and tenderly
And with holy love
Towards you carry.

Our courage is unconquerable
When you command us,
Suddenly the heat subsides
As you pacify us.
Maiden, pure in the most beautiful sense,
Mother, worthy of honor,
Our chosen queen,
Equal to the gods.

Around her,
light clouds swirl.

Goethe quite appropriately allows the soul to emerge first from the nebulous clouds, and then to solidify into a finished form.

The chorus of penitents follows. It is magnificent that Goethe has taken, I would almost say, love in its sensual form and here has given it a religious transfiguration – for the second time; the Bible has already done so for the first time. Mary Magdalene has loved much in the real sense, but she has simply loved, and Christ sees only love, not sin, and so she also belongs to Christ. Then there is Maria Aegyptiaca and Una Poenitentium, otherwise known as Gretchen. It could also be called Doctor Marianus, otherwise known as Faust.

The blessed boys accept Faust into their circle. Faust seeks to find something of Mary in Gretchen through the Queen of Heaven, so a mystic choir may express what has taken place. This mystic choir contains great, succinct words:

All that is transitory
Is but a parable,
The inadequate,
Here it becomes reality;
The indescribable,
Here it is done;
The eternal feminine
Draws us on.

With this skeleton, I wanted to show you that Goethe really did depict this last scene appropriately, based on spiritual insight, and that he knew how to create the real foundations everywhere: the foundations of consciousness.

As one who is familiar with the subject knows, really understands, so has Goethe described. However, one must immerse oneself in what Goethe wanted. One must be in his intentions, as it were, have the dead Goethe standing before you as a living being. Because some things are not so easy to understand.

after a eurythmy presentation of Faust's Ascension

We tried to give eurythmy performances related to Goethe's “Faust” at Easter and Whitsun and at the Feast of the Assumption. In a way, we felt the need to have these performances ready by the Feast of the Assumption. You will recall that, in connection with the previous descriptions from Goethe's Faust, I tried to show how the way in which Goethe went through his spiritual development can be highly effective as a model because we can see in him can see how the great personality, in particular, slowly and gradually acquires and slowly and gradually works through the process of arriving at a point of view regarding a matter that can then satisfy him. How many people believe that they are good Christians and understand Christianity. We had to point out that at the time when Goethe wrote the first scenes of his Faust, he basically had, if not an anti-Christian, then, one might say, an un-Christian way of feeling. Just take a look at what has been preserved as the – forgive me for using the distasteful title, but it has become common – so-called “Urfaust” (the “Primal Faust”), and then what was published under the better title “Faust, a Fragment”.

We can see from this that Goethe had to grow quite old before he was able to insert a Christian element into these things in the meaningful way of expressing the most secret impulses of his soul. This soul needed infinite deepening in world knowledge and world feeling. And when the fragment of Faust appeared in 1790, it did not yet contain the scene that Goethe could only write at a much more mature age, the scene where Faust is stopped from taking the step he wants to take, from suicide, by the Easter bells. It was only at a mature age that Goethe felt compelled to introduce this Christian element into the first part of his Faust. A genius must live through and experience much, much more before he feels ripe in his own way, whereas many others feel ripe so soon. And we see that Goethe really felt this way, so that he added something Christian, something of Christianity, to “Faust,” which he had begun in his youth – but also already in his later youth – and had carried out in certain scenes.

It is now characteristic that Goethe, so to speak, needed a new approach to work his way through his way of feeling and the inner workings of his feelings towards the world – I would say through a realm from which the Christian impulses have been torn – before he could approach Christianity in a new way, in a way that would satisfy his later age, and also in a poetic way.

Yesterday I already pointed out to you how appropriate and professional, to use the pedantic expression, the whole structure of the last scene of the Ascension of Faust is. But we look even deeper into the matter when we realize something else from the spiritual considerations.

Let us imagine: in a particularly suitable natural setting – a wilderness, mountain gorge, rocks and everything possible that makes an impression corresponding to mysticism – a choir, we can imagine a monks' choir, approaches and absorbs what is happening in its consciousness. We have heard why this choir of monks is there. To put it on a real footing, Goethe needed this consciousness outside as a medium to absorb the events associated with Faust's soul ascending into the spiritual world. What is happening? The choir first points out to us what is going on. We can say: this choir senses that which is otherwise dormant as movement. The world of the spirits of form is slowly beginning to merge into the world of the spirits of movement. It spiritualizes as it begins to be moved, that which confronts us elementarily – everything initially in motion:

The forest sways,
the rocks press against it,
roots cling to it,
trunk close to trunk,
wave after wave splashes...

Why is that? Yes, that is because we are to be shown how a soul is to rise from this earthly existence, the physical plane, up into the spiritual world. A soul is to be wrested from the physical plane – the physical plane is also nature – a soul is to be wrested from nature. We now know that nature is permeated by the elemental world, that at the moment we pass from the rigid existence of nature to the elemental existence, everything is truly in motion. We cannot imagine that we can conjure up before our soul the idea of the soul of Faust ascending into the spiritual worlds if we cannot vividly visualize for ourselves the coming to life of nature and the release from the life of nature in relation to the soul of Faust. For it must be said: in the face of so much that is unhealthy, especially in mystical and occult movements, we have, in all that is allowed to tie in with Goethe's occultism, something thoroughly healthy, rooted in the solid ground of world reality. Goethe would not be able to present the spiritual world to us in any other way than by linking it to what confronts man on the physical plane, to nature, by showing, as it were, how nature spiritualizes itself before the healthy senses. And Goethe would never have said yes to an occultism that was not intimately connected with a real love of knowledge and of penetrating nature.

We can do an enormous amount to heal our spiritual science by striving to understand the secrets of nature. This is difficult in our time because, as was shown yesterday for research into the wisdom of the bakis or other things that arise before the soul's eyes in spiritual development, nature is approached in such a foolish way. And how is it? Just as those seemingly infinitely profound explanations of Goethe's eight lines, which are supposed to refer to everything possible, while they refer to slippers and cigars, so it is in reality with much of what is said today by science about nature. You see how much of what passes today as natural science bears just as little relation to the truth as what was communicated to you yesterday bears to philological science, and how Goethe's wisdom bears to what it actually refers to. That is why it is difficult in our time to gain from science the relationship to nature that Goethe actually has. But we must strive unceasingly to make our occultism thoroughly healthy. And there is no better, no more dignified starting point for our time than what Goethe has contributed to occultism.

We see how in the consciousness of the choir – whereby this now really enters into the impersonal of nature, in that the echo resonates – the spiritual of nature breaks free. And we can now hope that the same consciousness, which is capable of seeing through nature in such a way that everything comes from deep within nature, can also see the ascending soul. By first seeing it at all, the soul that is ascending in spirit sees it, completely placed in real life. But how do you get to see this spiritual world? I already mentioned yesterday: it is presented to us in a dignified way in three stages, in that the consciousness of the choir, which has a general awareness that spiritual essence is hidden within nature, the consciousness of the Pater ecstaticus, the consciousness of the Pater profundus, the consciousness of the Pater Seraphicus: these are successive stages of soul development. How the mystical development rises from self-absorption and the self to the realization of a further spirituality of nature, than the choir can see through, is shown to us in the transition from Pater ecstaticus to Pater profundus , and then in the transition from Pater profundus to Pater Seraphicus, how the soul can develop healthily, can truly develop into the spiritual world, so that it can see the spiritual world in its depths. Goethe had received guidance on this early in his youth, when he learned of the kind of contact Swedenborg had with the spirit world. We know that we should not overestimate this, but for Goethe it was a powerful stimulus. Swedenborg recounts that he associated with spiritual beings in such a way that they came very close to his mind, that they took possession of his sense organs, that they, guided by his eyes, saw the world and, of course, were able to communicate what they had seen and heard quite differently than the human soul. Thus Swedenborg experiences the spiritual world through those English beings who enter his sense organ. This made a great impression on Goethe, this entering of spirits into the human organism. So that in a certain respect it had become quite familiar to him how such a spirit deals with the spiritual world. These things were quite familiar to Goethe in general. What we have not yet been able to present here - we will do so later when our building is finished - is the fact that the Pater ecstaticus floats up and down. On May 26, 1787, Goethe wrote about Filippo Neri: “In the course of his life, the highest gifts of religious enthusiasm developed in him: the gift of tears, of ecstasy, and finally even of rising from the ground and floating above it, which is considered by all to be the highest.”

I want to emphasize this because I must tell you that Goethe did not write this unconsciously or as a mere fantasy, but because he was very well versed in these things, he knew them, knew them deeply. So he doesn't just let Pater ecstaticus float up and down because it occurs to him; we have to bear in mind that Goethe was a man who spoke of Filippo Neri in this way. This deepens the feeling tremendously. What is needed much less in these matters are clever explanations, and much more the ability to immerse oneself in Goethe's soul, to see how deeply he was connected in his soul with this ascent of the human being on this path of mystical knowledge. And then we see, the Pater ecstaticus shows us how the soul inwardly, in the manner of Meister Eckart or Johannes Tauler or Suso, takes in the divine reign, so that the soul comes to the point of confessing with Meister Eckart: “Not I, but the God in me wills and thinks and feels.” For if the soul continues to ascend, it will perceive spiritual revelation in nature from the elemental world, as we see in the Pater Profundus, whose inner being expands throughout the whole, all-encompassing nature.

Then the human soul, having undergone this, ascends to direct communication with the spiritual world, as we see in the case of Pater Seraphicus, who now really comes to perceive such spirits , such as the blessed boys, the midnight-born, who live as spiritual entities in all the spiritual activity and life that develops here between the dwellings of the anchorites and monks.

Thus, what comes to us most vividly – and it is the presentation of this living reality that is important – is that Goethe guides Faust's soul up into the spiritual world, but that he needs a spiritual setting to do so. We can guess how nature is set in motion, how elemental life rises out of nature, how nature's beings then develop into consciousnesses, which are ever higher, with the soul developing into the embrace of spiritual beings, as is the case with the blessed boys, and how it can then be the souls of penitents and also the soul of Faust himself. The entire spiritual scene contains this. And then there are wonderful increases right up to the end, where the Chorus mysticus expresses the mystery of the world, where we see how our spiritual eye is lifted up into a spiritual world. We make the ascent from standing in nature and on the firm ground of the physical plane to the spiritual worlds, into which the soul of Faust is taken.

During Goethe's lifetime, only the first part of Faust had been published, as we now have it. Then the scene: “Charming Area”, Faust bedded on flowery grass. Then individual parts of the scene at the “Imperial Court” from the first act of the second part. In it, a transition to the “Classical Walpurgis Night”, but not the Walpurgis Night itself, and then the “Helena Scene”.

Even during Goethe's lifetime, many people had thoughts about how Faust could be completed. If you follow these thoughts – and some of them were even printed – you will find that people already knew that Faust's soul must be redeemed, must ascend into the spiritual world. But all the ideas that people have come up with have something - there is no other way to put it - abstractly vague, something extraordinarily vague about them. Goethe once said to Eckermann that he had to call on Christian imagery to help him move from the vague to what he wanted to present as a spiritual reality.

And so, in his very old age, we are once again confronted with this wonder. Consider that Goethe wrote the whole pagan part, the whole pre-Christian part: Faust's connection with Helen. Then again something that is certainly not anti-Christian: the fourth act of “Faust”, that only after he has once more plunged into that in which not directly Christian impulses are at work, after he has once more wriggled through there, he is again to present the riddle of Faust in the highest sense, that only in his very old age, out of all pagan cult, he must plant Christianity in “Faust”. Goethe had to live to be eighty years old so that he could say to himself that he is able to use the Christian ideas in such a way that they are a garment for the path that the soul of Faust has to go.

It was Goethe who really paved the way for us to understand the Christ impulse more and more, a path we refer to in spiritual science. And the beginnings of this understanding, which we have now been able to experience, will be followed by many others in the future, when we are no longer able to be present or can only be present in subsequent incarnations. Goethe was the first to do this through spiritual science: to connect the penetration of reality with what flows in our soul through the Christ impulse. And Goethe has presented this in tremendous depth, but in such a way that it is always vivid and always appropriate.

Nature stands before us. The choir of monks, who initially appear before us pointing to the spiritual, see the elements emerging from nature, and spiritual-soul entities join the elements, that comes out of nature. Goethe already perceived this as a specifically Christian view. Christianity is not about always saying: Christ, Christ and Christ again! Christianity is not about always repeating Christian dogmas. It is a way of feeling, of relating to the world. And this feeling, this relating to the world, comes across in a wonderful way in the way Goethe presents it. The way this feeling lives through and permeates the last scenes of Faust is eminently Christian, and its Christianity is particularly evident to us in that the whole of Faust — despite the fact that some fragments and some parts remain unfinished — is so artistically great and so powerfully conceived that one only gradually comes to understand the tremendous artistic conception.

And before us stands the broad natural existence of the physical plane, which we see, in the truly Christian sense, transformed into the elementary and truly spiritual existence. Faust is led into this after he has gone through his connection with Helena, with the ancient spiritual world. Here, too, we are confronted by spiritual beings. Helena is led up from the underworld. Faust encounters her. She is surrounded by a chorus, twelve choruses surround Helena. When Helena returns to the underworld, the chorus stands there, and at this end of the third act the chorus shows itself to us as not yet fully matured into humanity, as elemental beings. And how does the chorus disappear in the third act of the second part of Goethe's 'Faust'? That is very interesting! There we are also dealing with elemental beings. And when Helen disappears, the chorus of these elemental beings also disappears. The chorus divides into four parts. What happens to one quarter of the chorus? Well, three members of the chorus describe how they disappear: they disappear into nature. Where Goethe presents paganism, he shows us the elemental beings who, as the twelve-voice chorus, surround Helen. They now disappear and merge with nature. Feel how the first part of the choir enters into nature:

We, in this thousand branches whispering tremors, purring floats,
Attracting prancing, luring softly, root of the life sources
After the branches; soon with leaves, sometimes with flowers exuberantly
we adorn the fluttering hairs freely to airy prosperity.

That is, these beings of the choir become trees, become nature. They may then approach us, out of the Christian impulses, when they approach us again as a

wood, it sways towards us.

The pagan elemental spirits disappear into nature, and they emerge again where the Christ impulse has come alive on the earth. Oh, how wonderfully this chorus disappears with Helena, and then - we know it from the last scene - when the beings, who have received the Christ impulse as blessed boys, emerge from nature. And take the other part of the chorus:

We, on this rock wall, smooth as a mirror,
nestle, moving in gentle waves, caressing;
listening to every sound, birdsong, flutes of the wind.

Truly, these are the same rocks into which these elemental beings have slipped, and then “cling”, and from which the beings of the spiritual world later emerge, after they have received the Christ impulse.

You can see how deeply felt this Faust poem is, how there are other connections in it than those usually observed. And it is these connections that are so important. Goethe was aware of this. That he was aware of this is clear from a very specific suggestion that Goethe wanted to make when he was not quite finished with the third act of the second part of Faust. He had completed it roughly up to the disappearance of Helena and up to the “going out into nature” of these elemental choruses, just up to this scene, roughly as far as I have read now. Then he wanted to do what he did in a sense at the end of the third act, to let Mephisto arise from Phorkyas, and now Mephisto was supposed to express what Goethe actually wanted with this Faust at the conclusion of his “Faust.” That he let it be spoken through the mouth of Mephisto was for reasons of performance, because Mephisto is, so to speak, the one who brings about the third act after all. The third act is incorporated into “Faust” as a classical-romantic phantasmagoria. Mephisto is, so to speak, the one who introduces the third act with a kind of spiritualistic laboratory magic, he is supposed to say what Goethe actually wants by continuing “Faust”. At a time when Goethe already realizes that he must incorporate the Christ impulse into his work, he wants to say through Mephistopheles: “Certainly, there have always been times when people have recognized that at the bottom of sensual existence there is spiritual existence. We can go back to the mysticism of ancient India and ancient Egypt, where it was known and described that at the basis of natural existence there is something spiritual. But it does not befit us, Goethe wanted to say, to understand this spiritual reality today in the same way as it was understood in these ancient mystical systems. The Christ Impulse has brought into the world something completely new in relation to all ancient mysticism and all ancient wisdom. The old can no longer serve us. That is what Goethe wanted to say. And I am not just asserting that he wanted to say it, but the passage has been preserved. It is not in 'Faust' now, but the passage has been preserved, conceived by Goethe, with corrections added by his scribe, as indicated by Goethe. At the end of the third act, it is said how he demands the newer Christ impulse for his “Faust”, how he does not want some ancient wisdom, but something completely new in the sense of the Christ impulse. For Mephisto, when he is to appear before the audience, should speak the following words:

Enough, you see him,

- Euphorion is meant –

though much worse
than on the British stage, where a little child
gradually grows up to become a hero.
Here it is even more fantastic. No sooner is he conceived
than he is also born,
he jumps, dances and speaks a delicate word.
Many criticize this,
others think that this is not so straightforward
and that it is to be understood roughly, that there is something behind it.
One can well sense mysteries, perhaps even
mystifications, Indian and also
Egyptian elements, and anyone who likes to put it all together,
brew it up, etymologically back and forth
is the right man.

Goethe already senses something of those teachings that have come and have etymologically concocted everything, but he wants nothing to do with any of them, because he says here:

We also say it, and our deep meaning will be a faithful student of newer symbolism.

Goethe says: not Egyptian, not Indian, but “to be a faithful disciple of newer symbolism”!

Then he came to incorporate the Christ impulse into his “Faust” in this way – not just by adding a Christian element here or there, but by enshrining the entire way in which the soul presents itself in the flow of his creation. And as we can see, he does that. We see how he really does know the development of mysticism in the progression of the three fathers, and on the other hand, we find how he wonderfully separates the initially unified choir of angels into two groups: the choir of younger angels and the choir of more mature angels. And when you read what the younger angels say and what the more mature angels say, we again find something quite remarkable. Take what the younger angels say first:

Those roses, from the hands
of loving, holy penitents

- one must remember the previous scene –

helped us to win the victory
and to complete the high work,
This treasure of the soul to win.
Evil fled as we scattered,
Devils fled as we struck.
Instead of the usual punishments of hell
The spirits felt the agony of love;
Even the old master of Satan
Was pierced with acute pain.
Rejoice! It has been accomplished.

But the angels can already be perceived in the previous scenes. These are now the younger angels. It is impossible to say how deeply one is touched when one lets the appropriateness of such a representation take effect on one. The younger angels – why that, the younger angels? That means: they are younger, they do not yet have so much connection with the earthly world.

In pre-Christian times, angels are the beings who cover their faces at all before the Incarnation on earth, who do not mix in the pre-Christian times with what is happening down below on earth. They remain at the very top in spiritual spheres.

Now think how characteristic these younger angels are, who have not yet found their way into the Christian sphere, but who are up there, who have not yet descended during the Christian sphere. Consider how the Elohim are characterized at the creation of the world. After the creation is presented to us from day to day, we are then told at the end: “And they saw that it was good,” or “beautiful.” The word that is used is difficult to translate. It means that the Elohim are such spiritual beings that they first make things and then see that it was beautiful. That is what matters. These are the other kind of entities that have attained perfection on the old moon and are now transitioning spiritually into earthly existence, doing first and then seeing and perceiving that it has been successful. These younger angels must have the perception of these spiritual entities; they must first say what they have done. Now they realize that they have strewn roses from the hands of the penitent, that they themselves have caused pain to the old Satan master.

So appropriately, Goethe writes that he knows: beings that have not come into contact with the Christian world only recognize the beauty and goodness of what has been done afterwards:

Those roses, from the hands
of loving, holy penitents,
helped us win the victory...

That the victory was won comes afterwards. You see, I'm not delirious!

Fogging around the rocky heights,
I just feel,
A ghostly life stirring in the
Nearby.
The clouds become clear;
I see a moving crowd
Of blessed boys,
Free from the pressure of the earth,
In a circle,
They refresh themselves
With the new spring and adornment
the upper world.
Be it from the very beginning
Increasing full profit
These joined!

The blessed boys are there long ago, and they have something to do with the appearance of these angels, but the angels only realize that they are there when the whole scene is set. Goethe is fully aware of all this. They do not carry that which is connected with the earth in the soul of Faust; that must be borne by those who have become a little older, more perfect, who have descended through the Mystery of Golgotha and come into contact with the earthly.

A remnant of the earth remains for us,

say the more mature angels, not the younger ones.

To bear it would be embarrassing,
and even if it were made of asbestos,
it is not clean.

And then they explain that through the Mystery of Golgotha they have now attained an insight for which the other angels veil their faces, how spiritual power connects with the elements that are mixed with the nature of earthly life. It is something quite tremendous to perceive how Goethe describes it, so expertly and appropriately, and how he knows how to characterize the individual members of the spiritual world correctly. When one compares the colorful, characterless stuff that others, who also wanted to represent spirits, concoct, it sometimes looks as if someone wanted to describe the external nature and would say: Oh, I went through the forest and meadow and saw such wonderful blue roses and such wonderful yellow chicory and such beautiful red and yellow violets and the like in the meadows – which is all wrong. Those who know the spiritual world find some descriptions to be extremely inept because everything is wrong. With Goethe, everything is right! That is the essential thing, to perceive not a crazy interpretation, but to perceive how this soul is rooted in the spiritual world at the moment when it decides to describe a spiritual event from within itself, as is the ascent of Faust into the spiritual world. And in doing so, the artistic, artistic compositional element in the spiritual!

I once tried to show you how, quite apart from what the Gospel of John actually is, there is something in the mood of the Gospel of John that makes it one of the greatest works of art. Remember the Kassel cycle on the Gospel of John! Truly, artistic endeavors of this kind, striving for artistic perfection in the spiritual, we find everywhere in Faust, but in such a way that the artistic in it is really, in being artistic, at the same time spiritually right. That is the significant thing. For it is essential that the world should more and more recognize that what is really recognized and experienced out of the spirit is the right thing, even when it is placed in the world. What is spun out of the spiritual usually looks like a house of cards in the world. But what is recognized out of the spiritual can be placed in the world.

This was the aim in the architecture of our building, that it should be truly created out of the spiritual. Therefore everything is feasible. It makes one all the less scrupulous when here and there people come and say: they don't like this and they don't like that. There are people like that who find fault with this or that in our building. But if you know the world a little and know that or to what extent people belong to the choir of those who interpret Goethe in the same way as that gentleman I told you about, you don't care about all the criticism, because that gentleman, for example, who was mentioned, could say whatever he wants about our construction and our way of thinking and so on, you wouldn't need to be impressed. And such is the spirit of the people after all. You just have to know life a little. But that which is born of the spiritual is possible because it is spirit and artistry at the same time.

And today I would like to point out at least one more thing. Three penitent women, together with the penitent woman otherwise called Gretchen, come to meet us. Yes, the artist never does that – the real, true artist – he never says: Now, I will have three penitent women appear. Where can you find three penitent women? – Of course, you can meet all kinds of people in life. There are people, really, such people, who take a rhyming dictionary and make up poetry according to it, you can start at the alphabet – whatever rhymes with that – and then comes the second line and so on. I knew people like that too. But a true poet, an artist, doesn't even do that. He doesn't just take three penitent women in any old way. Instead, as is particularly characteristic of Goethe, he brings us another of those wonderful intensifications, a case of wonderful inner composition that is both factually accurate and correct. What are the three penitent women supposed to be? First Mary Magdalene, then the Samaritan woman at the well, and then Mary of Egypt. Well, I have already hinted at it. They are meant to show us that there is something eternal in the female nature - “an eternal star of love” - that, as it were, cannot be eroded, Goethe wants to say, when it unites with the female soul, even with guilt. The love, the love that Christ brought, despite the fact that in their outer life they were by no means model human beings, but their souls were such that they could understand love. If we think about this correctly, we must say: Yes, something like the Christ impulse spreading throughout the world first seizes what is nearest, then it seizes what is further, then it seizes what is furthest. And it would be wonderful if the Christ's impulse of love spread like a wave, if it also took hold of the guilty and outshone the guilty, drawing ever wider circles. So, Mary Magdalene, the Jewish, the Hebrew woman, directly from the land that was intimately connected with Christ Jesus in Judaism: the closest environment is taken hold of by Christian love. Then He goes beyond the realm of Judaism, but still into the neighboring region, to the Samaritans, who have no ethnic community with the Jews: the second circle. And then He comes to the third circle. You know that what is presented as being very far removed from Christianity is presented as Egyptian: the Egyptian Mary. She comes from what is even more foreign out there in the pagan world, which is now grasped in a distant way, pushed back as if by an invisible hand because of the sin of touching the cross, and only atoning for the guilt through a forty-year penance: how far the waves of love reach out there!

We really see them, the waves of love, as they spread, and we understand something of what gradually crystallizes in Goethe's imagination as that which he then finally describes as the “eternal feminine”, in whose conception every trace of inferiority must be removed.

And the outpouring of love corresponds exactly, I might say, to the tone, the whole manner in which Goethe put the words into his mouth. Just try to find that wonderful intensification which now lies in the peculiar feeling, the rhythmic formation of the words:

By the love that made
of thy Son, transfigured with God,

We feel something like a trickling nearby.

At the well to which
Abram used to lead his flock,
At the bucket that was allowed to touch the Savior's cool lip;
At the pure, abundant spring,
Which now flows forth from thence,
Abundant, eternally bright,
Through all the worlds it flows —

Imagine how it expands! With this whole presentation, we are actually in the immediate vicinity of the person of Christ. Then whole worlds are included in the presentation of nature. And then, as we come to the Egyptian Mary:

At the hallowed spot,
Where they laid the Lord;
At the arm that from the. gate
Warned me, repelled me back;

The invisible, the spiritual, is directly addressed. Once again, an intensification! It is not the case that one first needs to intellectually ascertain that these three circles really exist. One must feel them by pronouncing the words. That is the significant thing.

And now let us consider the following. Through years of reflection, we have come to understand that before our evolution on Earth, there was a Saturnian era, then a solar era, then a lunar era, and that we are now at the Earth era. In a sense, the human being has gone through everything that has gone through these stages of development. Where, then, can we read the essence of these stages of development? It lies in the fact that these times were once there and then passed away again, and that the Earth time has emerged. But before the Earth time, man went through the Saturn, Sun and Moon time, and he carries the effect of these times within him. If we now examine modern man with the means of spiritual science, we find that the physical body, having acquired its first disposition on Saturn, then develops further through the sun, through the moon, to the earth, where it has once again connected with cosmic powers in order to take on something new. What the human being's physical body has gone through in these three stages – and here we touch the edge of a momentous mystery – in that the physical body has gone through it, has been most clearly expressed in the constitution of the inner female organs on Earth. The interior of the female organism, both the physical body and everything that is expressed as soul in connection with the physical body, bears the effects of Saturn, the Sun and the Moon in the most eminent sense. It is not without reason that the Bible relates how the Elohim took the dust, that is to say, that which was added to the earth only, like air and water – one thinks of the earthly element when one says 'dust' – to form Adam, the man. From the cosmos, the macrocosm, which the woman carries over from Saturn, Sun and Moon, is first joined with the male principle. There is a profound mystery about what confronts each other on earth as male and female. Of course, what has just been said refers only to what the male and female express in the organization of the human being. And this mystery is connected with the whole earth, is connected with the abilities that are proper to woman only as woman during earthly development, with the fact that the macrocosmic of Saturn, Sun and Moon development is carried over into woman's inner being and is taken up into woman's microcosm, while the macrocosm of the just preceding earthly development is taken up into man's microcosm. In a very special way, the feminine and the masculine carry the whole cosmos within them. And if I have often stated here that the human being carries the whole macrocosm within him, the feminine and the masculine organization carry it within them in a different way.

A cosmic thought dawns on Goethe as he brings the penitentesses close to the Mater gloriosa. For what is the Mater gloriosa to him? She who has most purely carried over into earthly time the eternal effects of the time of Saturn, the time of the sun and the time of the moon, leaving them untouched by the earthly and connecting with the macrocosm by being allowed to prepare the Christ of the earth. The macrocosmic, the eternal aspect of the feminine draws upward. What draws upward? How could we still answer this question? By repeating the mystic chorus.

That is what Goethe meant – only he does not want to use a general term – that is what Goethe meant.

All that is transient
Is but a parable;
The inadequate,
Here it becomes attainable;
The indescribable,
Here it is done;
The gloriosa Mater
Draws us on.

That which has been done, that which has taken place before us, at the same time draws the entire spiritual world upward.

Goethe's poem of life ends with a deeply Christian sentiment. We shall take up these aphoristic remarks (for that is what they should be) again in the following.

Let us look back at an earlier scene from the second part of Goethe's Faust, the scene in which I have often mentioned how it was made possible for Faust to unite with Helena. How is this possibility of Faust's union with Helena presented within the whole of the Faustian legend?

We know that in order to be united with Helena, Faust must first go to the region where even Mephistopheles cannot enter, to the realm called “the realm of the Mothers”. We have emphasized several times that Mephistopheles-Ahriman is only able to give Faust the key to the realm of the “unentered, unenterable”. We have also mentioned how in this realm of the Mothers we can find the eternal aspect of Helen of Troy, and we have mentioned how Goethe tried to solve the mystery of Helen's re-entry into the world. We have found that Goethe expressed this secret by allowing the homunculus to come into being, by allowing the homunculus to pass through the evolution of the earth's development, to catch up with this evolution of the earth's development, as it were, and that the homunculus, by dissolving itself dissolves in the elements, passes over into the elementary spiritual world, so that, by uniting with the archetype of Helen, which Faust brings from the mothers, he, as it were, “gives the re-embodiment with which Faust can now unite. Faust has, as it were, been elevated to the great arena of history; he seeks Helena. What does he need to seek Helena? Helena, the type of Greek beauty; Helena, the woman who brought so much ruin to the Greek world, but whom Goethe nevertheless presents to us in such a way that she also appears to us — and here I am referring to Gretchen — as being innocently guilty in the Greek sense. For thus Helen appears at the beginning of the third act: innocently guilty. Much guilt has been caused by her act. But Goethe seeks the eternal in every human nature and cannot reckon with guilt where he wants to present the evolution of humanity in the higher sense, but he can only reckon with the necessity of

If we now ask ourselves how Faust is put in a position to ascend to those spiritual realms where he can find Helena, we are confronted with the answer:

It is the mothers!
Mothers!

And Mephistopheles hands him the key to the Mothers. In a very characteristic way, we are shown that Faust is to descend to the Mothers; one could just as easily say ascend, because in this realm it is not important to distinguish between going up and going down in the physical sense.

The Mothers! Mothers! - it sounds so strange!

We hear the word from “Faust”. And when we recall how this realm of the Mothers is described, how they sit around the golden tripod, when we envision the entire scene of the realm of the Mothers, how could this journey of Faust into the realm of the Mothers be expressed? What are they, the Mothers, who reign eternally, but who are depicted as feminine and represent the forces from which Faust has brought forth the eternal, the immortal of Helen? If one wanted to express the whole fact at the point where Faust is sent to Helena, one would have to say: Faust will have to express his urge to Helena and to the Mothers by saying: The eternal feminine pulls us up or down – it does not matter now. We might just as well apply this last motive, which confronts us at the end of Faust, to the point where Faust descends to the Mothers. But with Faust on his journey to the Mothers and to Helen, we are standing on the soil of the old pagan world, the pre-Christian world, the world that preceded the Mystery of Golgotha. And at the end of Faust? We are confronted with a similar journey by Faust, the journey of the loving Faust, who wants to approach Gretchen's soul, but we are now with him on the ground of evolution after the mystery of Golgotha. And what does he strive for now? Still for the mothers? Not for the threesome of mothers. To the one mother, to the Mater gloriosa, who is to pave the way for him into the untrodden, the un-treadable, where Gretchen's soul dwells. The mothers, the eternal feminine too, are in the plural. The mother, the Mater gloriosa, is in the singular. And the striving towards the Mothers, in that it transports us into the time of evolution before the Mystery of Golgotha, and the striving towards the Mother, towards the gloriously magnificent Matter, in that it transports us into the evolution after the Mystery of Golgotha — does it not show us in a wonderful way, poetically magnificent, overwhelmingly magnificent, that which the Mystery of Golgotha has brought to humanity? From the threefold nature of still astral thinking, feeling and willing, humanity in Faust strives upwards towards the threefold nature of the eternal feminine. We have often described how the unity of the human soul in the I has come to humanity through the Mystery of Golgotha. The three Mothers become the one Mother, the Mater gloriosa, through the fact that the human being has progressed in the way we know to an inner interpenetration with the I.

The entire secret of humanity's transition before the Mystery of Golgotha is embodied in the Faust legend. And this transition from the eternal feminine of the trinity to the eternal feminine of unity is one of the greatest, most wonderful, most beautiful intensifications in the artistic realization that is found in this second part of “Faust”. But however deeply we penetrate the secrets of Faust, we find everywhere what I have said pedantically, but not meant pedantically, in that I have said: Everything sounds so appropriate and professional.

I have already pointed out that if we want to fully understand the human context, we must point out that the human being is first of all connected to the macrocosm as a whole human being, just as the macrocosm is reflected in the human being as the microcosm. We must only remember that man's development on earth remains incomprehensible if we do not know that man bears within him that which is initially transitory for this earthly development, but which is permanent for man's development, and which has developed into human nature through the old Saturn, Sun and Moon developments. We know that the human physical body was already formed in the first stage during the old Saturn evolution. We know that it then continued to develop through the sun and moon evolution up to the earth evolution. As I have already pointed out, what united with man in the three preliminary stages of evolution, the pre-earthly evolution, has now entered into the outer earthly formation of man in various ways.

I could only briefly hint at what was said about the matter earlier, and it must remain a brief hint. I have said: We touch here on a momentous mystery. — And it is only natural that these things can only be hinted at. He who wishes to follow them up must undertake a meditation on what has been suggested. He will then find what he still desires, even if it takes a little time.

We must realize, however, that man, by completing the lunar evolution, has begun the terrestrial evolution, and has, as it were, passed through a kind of dissolution, spiritualization, a world night, in this transition from the lunar evolution to the terrestrial evolution, and only now has he emerged again into the material. Certainly, the tendencies he formed through the evolution of Saturn, Sun and Moon remained with him, including the tendencies towards the physical body. But he also absorbed them into the spiritual and then developed them out of the spiritual again, so that we have to think of a time during the evolution of the earth when man was not yet physical.

If we disregard everything else that contributed to the development of the fact that man forms himself physically and sexually in his earthly existence, we can say in general: Just as man entered in the first place as an ethereal human being, so too did he enter as an etheric human being. To be sure, in this ethereal human being the tendencies towards the physical human being, which developed during the Saturn, Sun and Moon periods, were already present, but nevertheless they were formed in the etheric. I have already indicated this more precisely in Occult Science. And the physical must first develop out of the etheric. But Lucifer and Ahriman have their part in this whole process of development. For Lucifer and Ahriman intervene even before this, although their influence is repeated during the development of the earth, during the development of the moon and already during the development towards the moon in the whole development of mankind.

Now I have something to say here that is difficult to understand – not so much for the human intellect as for the entire human soul, I believe – but which really must be understood one day. Let us imagine: Man was once in the course of the earth before he gradually formed physically since the Lemurian and Atlantean times, ethereally, and - I will suggest this schematically - out of this ethereal, his physical gradually formed. Thus man was ethereal. Now we know that the etheric is a fourfold entity. We know the ether as a four-fold entity, so to speak. As we ascend from below, we know the ether as: heat ether; light ether; the ether with a material nature or also chemical ether, which, however, has its material nature in that the substance still fills the tone inwardly, the world harmony, the harmony of the spheres, for substances are substances because they are an expression of the world harmony. First of all, we have to imagine the world harmoniously. One tone, as it resonates through the world, causes, let us say, gold; the other tone causes silver; the third tone causes copper, and so on. Every substance is the expression of a certain tone, so that we can, of course, also speak of tone-ether. However, we must not represent the ether as it is perceptible on earth, but as a tone that fades away in the ether-spiritual sphere. And the last ether is the ether of life. So that man, if we still imagine him as ethereal, is formed ethereally by these four types of ether interlocking. We can therefore say: Man appears where the evolution of the earth is preparing to gradually allow the etheric human being to emerge from the etheric human being, as an etheric organism before becoming physical, where there is a mixed organization of warmth ether, light ether, material or tone ether, and life ether.

Now Lucifer and Ahriman are part of this whole process of the human becoming physical. They are always there. They take part in this whole evolution. They exert their influence. Of course there are special points where they exert this influence quite strongly, but they are always there, these special points, as you will find emphasized in “Occult Science”. Just as, I might say, the whole vegetative power is always in the plant, but asserts itself now as green foliage, now as a flower, so too have Lucifer and Ahriman always been present while man has developed through the various epochs of the earth's evolution, they are, so to speak, present in everything.

If you now disregard everything else (you can't always list everything), you can imagine this physical aspect of the human being, which arises from the etheric organization, in such a way (including everything else that I have described in 'Occult Science' and elsewhere, of course) that female and male forms arise. We are now disregarding everything else that contributes to this, but female and male forms arise. If Lucifer and Ahriman had not been involved, then the female and male forms would not have come into being, but rather what I once described in Munich: a middle form. So that we can truly say: it is due to Lucifer and Ahriman that the human form on earth was differentiated into a male and female form. And this is when we now imagine the state of approaching the earth, which is gradually solidifying through the mineral kingdom, when we also imagine that the earth is forming, physically solidifying, that in the earth's orbit there is also , we can imagine that the human being develops out of the ether of the whole earth and thus his character also approaches the physical of the earth, that in him, as it were, the etheric-mineral-physical meets with the mineral-physical of the earth. But Lucifer and Ahriman are at work, are truly at work. They have many means of exerting their influence on the evolution of mankind. And they use these various means for these or those processes, which they evoke.

Above all, Lucifer tends to develop the spirit of the ethereal; he actually does not want to let man become truly earthly, does not want to let him descend completely to earth. Lucifer is, after all, left behind in the development of the moon, and he wants to win man for himself, not letting him enter into the development of the earth. He seeks to achieve this by first of all seizing control of the forces of the heat and light ethers. He uses these forces in his own way in the processes that are now taking place as man becomes physical. Lucifer has power mainly over the heat and light ethers, and these he rules preferentially. He has already prepared himself well for this during the development of the moon, which he organizes in his own way. In this way he can influence the human becoming in a different way. By allowing man to become physical out of the ether, he can bring about the human form in a different way than would otherwise have happened, by taking hold of the warmth and light ether and exerting his power in a different way than would otherwise have happened. Just as he now rules and weaves in the warmth-light ether, it is not the human being that would otherwise come into being through this rule and weaving, but the female form of the human being. The female form of the human being would never have come about without Lucifer. It is already the expression of the emergence from the ether, in that Lucifer has just taken possession of the warmth-light ether.

Ahriman, in particular, has power over the ether of sound and life. Ahriman is at the same time the spirit of gravity. Ahriman endeavors to counteract Lucifer. In a certain way, this essentially brings about balance, in that the wise, progressive gods of luciferic power, who want to lift man above the earthly, oppose the ahrimanic power. Ahriman now actually wants to pull man down into the physical. He wants to make him more physical than he would otherwise be as a human being. Ahriman is prepared for this by the fact that he has particular power over the ether of sound and of life. And Ahriman works and weaves in the ether of sound and of life. And so the human physical form, as it emerges out of the ether into the physical, becomes physical in a different way from the way it would have become through the mere progressing gods, becoming the male form. Without the influence of Ahriman, the male form would be inconceivable, impossible. Thus we may say that the female form is woven out of the warmth and light of the ether by Lucifer, who instills in this form a certain upward striving. The male form is shaped by Ahriman in such a way that a certain striving towards the earth is implanted in it.

We can observe this, which is now so willed out of the macrocosmic world evolution, in a truly spiritual scientific way in the human being. If we take the female form, schematically drawn, we must say: Lucifer's warmth and light are woven into it in his own way. — Thus the physical female form is so woven that not only have the steadily progressing gods developed their forces in the light and warmth ether, but that Luciferic forces are also woven into this female etheric body. Let us now assume that in this female etheric body, that which the earth has given particularly, the consciousness of self, the consciousness that holds together, is tuned downwards; let a kind of tuned-down consciousness enter, which some people already call “clairvoyance”, a kind of dream-like, tr Then, in such a case, that which Lucifer has woven into light and heat ether emerges in a kind of aura, so that when female visionaries are in their visionary states, they are surrounded by an aura that has luciferic powers within it, namely that of heat and light ether. Now the point is that this aura, which now surrounds the female body when visionary states occur in a mediumistic way, is not seen as such. Because of course, when the female body is now in the midst of this aura (it is drawn), then the female organism sees into this aura and projects around it what it sees in this aura. It sees what is in its own aura. The objective observer sees something that he can name: the human being radiates imaginations, he has an aura that is formed from imaginations. This is an objective process that does not harm the observer. That is to say, when this imaginative aura is observed from the outside, by another person, it is simply an aura seen objectively, as something else is seen; but when this aura is seen from within, by the visionary herself, she sees only what Lucifer spreads within herself. There is a great difference between seeing something oneself and having it seen by others. An enormous difference!

This is why there is a great danger for a woman when visionary clairvoyance sets in if this visionary clairvoyance takes the form of imaginations. In this case, the woman needs to be especially careful. And it must always be assumed that the development must be taken firmly in hand, that it is a healthy one. Not to stop at all that one sees, not true, because that can simply be the actually luciferic aura, viewed from the inside, which was necessary to form the female body. And much of what female visionaries describe is interesting for a completely different reason than the reason why the female visionaries consider it interesting. If they describe or view it as if it were an interesting objective world, then they are quite wrong, then they are quite in error. But if this corresponding aura is seen from the outside, then it is what the ether has made possible for the female form in the development of the earth. So that we can say: A woman must take particular care when her visionary, imaginative clairvoyance begins to develop or manifests itself, because danger can very easily lurk there, the danger of falling into error.

The male organism is different. When we consider the male organism, Ahriman has woven his power into its aura, but now into the tone and life ether. And just as it is primarily the warmth ether in the case of woman, so it is primarily the life ether in the case of man. In woman it is primarily the warmth ether in which Lucifer works, and in man the life ether in which Ahriman works. When the man comes out of his consciousness, when the cohesion that expresses itself in him as ego consciousness is dampened, when a kind of passive state occurs in the man, then it is the case that one can see again how the aura asserts itself around him, the aura in which Ahriman has its power.

But now it is an aura that primarily contains the life ether and the tone ether. There is vibrating tone in it, so that one does not actually see this aura of the man so directly imaginatively. It is not an imaginative aura, but something of vibrating spiritual tone that surrounds the man. All this has to do with the form, not with the soul, of course; it has to do with the man in so far as he is physical. So that the one who looks at this form from the outside can see: the human being radiates — one can now say intuitions. These are the same intuitions from which his form was actually formed, through which he is there as the man in the world. There is a living, vibrant sound around you. Therefore, there is another danger for man when consciousness is dulled to passivity, the danger of only hearing this own aura, hearing inwardly. Man must be especially careful not to let himself go when he hears this own aura spiritually, for then he hears the Ahriman within him. For he must be there.

You see now how there would be no masculine and feminine in humanity on earth if Lucifer and Ahriman had not been at work. I would like to know how woman could escape Lucifer, how man could escape Ahriman! The sermon: one should flee from them, these powers – I have often emphasized this – is quite foolish, because they belong to that which lives in evolution, since evolution is already as it is.

But we can now say: Yes, by standing on earth as a man, in a male incarnation, he goes through his life, and what he is as a man, what he can experience as a man, what is the male experience, he has of it that this sounding life ether is in him, that he always has, so to speak, in himself, albeit mixed with Ahriman, chords of life that actually build up his male form. He has chords of life around him, in him, which only become visible and audible around him when he becomes medial.

Now let us assume that we are dealing with people who died at birth and want to express that they did not become “men” here during their incarnation. What would they say? They would say that this did not work at their birth, that they had the potential to become men in this incarnation, but that which makes a man a man did not work. They have been removed from what would have made them men in physical incarnation. In short, they will say:

We were removed early
From Lebechören.

That's what the blessed boys say.

We were removed early
From living choirs;
But this one has learned,

that is to say: he has gone through the experience, Faust. He has gone through the long life, through the long life on earth. He can convey something to us about this life on earth.

He will teach us.

So, in a sense, we have to look into the deepest depths of occult knowledge if we want to understand why a particular word is used in this particular poem. The commentator then comes along and says: Well, the poet chooses such a word: Lebechöre and so on. - Anything is fine with him, as long as he does not have to subject himself to the inconvenience of learning something. Through such things I would like to point out to you how appropriate and professional this Goethean poetry is in terms of the spiritual world view, what actually rests in this Goethean poetry.

Now, I may have made it difficult for you to understand something that is difficult for the human mind to grasp, in one direction or another, by pointing out characteristic points where Ahriman and Lucifer work in the world in such a way that we cannot escape them. For, however we may arrange it, when we prepare for an incarnation — for we must prepare for a male or female incarnation — if it is not Lucifer, then it is Ahriman. So it really is not possible to carry things so far as to say: one must escape both. — Not true, I have, so to speak, also made your heart heavy by showing you that there is a certain danger in observing one's own aura, as it were, looking into one's own aura. But therein lies the infinite wisdom of the world, that life is not like that, that it is a resting pendulum, but that it swings. And just as the pendulum swings to the right and to the left, so the life not only of humanity, but of the whole world swings to the Ahrimanic and Luciferic side. And only because life swings back and forth between Ahrimanic and Luciferic influences, maintaining its balance in between, is life possible. Therefore, something is set against what I have now described as dangerous. If it is a Luciferic influence, it is opposed by the Ahrimanic. If it is Ahrimanic, it is opposed by the Luciferic.

So let us take the female organism again. It radiates, as it were, a Luciferic aura. But by radiating it, it pushes back the life or tone ether, thus forming a kind of Ahrimanic aura around the female organism, so that the female organism then has the Luciferic aura in the middle, and further out the Ahrimanic aura. But this female organism can now, if it is not so inactive that it remains with its own aura, develop further. And that is precisely what is important: not to remain in an unhealthy way with the first imaginations that arise, but to apply all one's will power to penetrate through these imaginations. For one must ultimately bring it so far that one's own aura does not appear, but that it appears as if reflected back from a mirror plate, which is now an Ahrimanic aura. One must not look into one's own aura, but one must have what is in one's own aura reflected back from the outer aura. Thus you see, it is the case for the female organism that it receives the Luciferic mirrored back from the Ahrimanic and is thereby neutralized, thereby brought precisely into balance. Thus it is now neither Ahrimanic nor Luciferic, but it is defeminized, it becomes universally human. Truly, it becomes universally human.

I only ask you to feel this as it really is, how man, by ascending into the spiritual, by escaping the luciferic or ahrimanic power of his own aura, does not look into the luciferic or ahrimanic, but lets the one be reflected and thereby receives it back, asexually, without it being male or female. The feminine is neutralized into the masculine in the Ahrimanic, the masculine is neutralized into the feminine in the Luciferic. For just as the feminine-Luciferic aura surrounds itself with the Ahrimanic aura, so the masculine-Ahrimanic aura surrounds itself with the Luciferic aura, and there, just as in the case of the feminine, what one has within oneself is reflected back. You see it as a mirror image.

Now let us assume that someone wanted to describe this process. When would they be able to describe it? Well, what happens during clairvoyance also happens after death. The person is in the same situation. During clairvoyance, the feminine must neutralize itself into the masculine, the masculine into the feminine. This is also the case after death. What kind of images must arise then? Well, let us assume that a soul that was in a female organism has died, it would have to go through a lot after death, which is supposed to be a form of compensation for earthly guilt. Such a soul will then slowly strive towards neutralization from what it was bound to on earth. It will, as it were, strive towards the masculine after neutralization through the feminine. This neutralization should be such that striving towards the highest masculine is a release for it. If we find penitents after death, then it must be characteristic of them that in the spiritual world their yearning is to strive towards the masculine, the balancing element. The three penitents – the Magna peccatrix, the Mulier Samaritana, the Maria Aegyptiaca – are indeed in the wake of the Mater gloriosa, but they should strive for neutralization, for compensation. Therefore, the Mater gloriosa does work in the aura; it is very clearly expressed to us that the Mater gloriosa can work in her aura, has her own aura. Just listen:

Around them swirl
light clouds,
They are penitents,
a delicate folk,
around your knees
sipping the ether,
needing mercy.

You, the untouchables,
Do not find it strange
That the easily seduced
Come to you in confidence.

But they become aware of this only as a consciousness. It does not confront them as something that resounds like the heights of life. What resounds for them is what they are to experience in connection with the Mater gloriosa through the Christ. Therefore, we see the speeches of the three penitent women directed towards the masculine, Christ:

By the love that was at the feet
of Thy Son glorified by God...

And with the Samaritan woman, Mary:

By the well to which already of old
Abram led his flock...

And here it is spiritualized:

At the pure, abundant spring
That now flows forth from there....

The Christ calls Himself to the Samaritan woman: the true water.

And with Mary of Egypt we are already dealing with the Entombment:

At the most hallowed place,
Where they laid the Lord to rest....

We see how, in these three, that which lives in the aura wants to go out to that which neutralizes itself.

And if we ask what the man finds as that which neutralizes him, which lifts him out of masculinity, then it is the longing for the feminine that pervades the world.

Here the view is unobstructed,
the spirit uplifted.
There women pass by,
floating upwards;
the glorious center
in a halo of stars,
the Queen of Heaven,
I see it in the radiance.

He is not attracted directly by the Christ-male, as the penitents are, but he is first attracted by that which, as the female, belongs to the Christ. And that leads him in turn to the karmically connected Gretchen soul, again to the woman. There you see delicately interwoven into the poetry this deep mystery of man's relationship to the spiritual world. For how could it not, I would like to say, be felt with dismay when the occult facts are revealed to us: the disembodied soul, which still has the elements within it - nature, which must first be separated - which must neutralize itself through the feminine. And we see how, in the striving towards neutralization, because we are dealing with the masculine, Faust, the feminine must assert itself as “pulling towards”. Something quite wonderful is presented in this poem. And it is clearly and distinctly suggested to us that it should be so. Thus, through the mouth of Doctor Marianus, Faust will strive towards the feminine, that is, the spiritual eternal feminine, but the secret, the mystery. When he spiritually beholds the gloriosa mater, he says:

Supreme Ruler of the world!
Let me in the blue,
stretched out heavenly canopy
see your secret.

Now let us imagine: Faust striving for the spiritual world, longing to see the secret of the feminine in the Mater gloriosa. How can this be? Well, it will be possible for the light to be neutralized by its counter-radiation, that is, the female aura of light and warmth will appear, but radiated in the opposite direction, not as it flows directly. This must be neutralized, must be connected with the fact that this light has a counter-radiation. In the stretched-out canopy of heaven, the secret is seen: the woman with the aura, with the sun. When the light is reflected back from the moon: the woman standing on the moon. You know this image, at least you should be familiar with it. Thus we see Faust bearing desire, in the stretched-out canopy of heaven, to finally see the mystery: Maria, the woman clothed with the sun, the moon at her feet, reflecting back. And together with this secret, with this mystery in the expansive heavenly canopy, what he otherwise knows of the Mater gloriosa then forms the emotional and sensory content of the Chorus mysticus. For even that which is still human form in the Mater gloriosa is a parable, for that is the transitory thing about her human form, and all that is a parable. That which is inadequate, that is to say, that which is inadequate in human longing, only becomes adequate here. Here one receives the vision of the aura radiation in a sun-like way, the light of which reflects back from the moon, shines back: the ineffable, here it is done. That which cannot be grasped in physical life – that is sought, that which radiates out of the self in selfless return: here it is done. – Then, according to feeling, the whole thing said out of the mouth of man or said for the ears of man:

The eternal feminine draws us up.

One must say: to let 'Faust' take effect on oneself really means, with regard to many parties of 'Faust', directly entering into an occult atmosphere. - And if I wanted to tell you everything that could be said about 'Faust' in occult terms, we would have to stay up late for a long time. You would have to attend many lectures on it. But that is not necessary at all for the time being, because it is not so much a matter of absorbing as many concepts and ideas as possible, but rather, for us, it is really very important that our feelings deepen. And if we deepen our feelings and perceptions of this world literature to such an extent that we have a deep reverence for the working of genius on earth, in whose actions and creations the occult is truly present, then we will do the world and ourselves a great service. If we can feel the greatness of the spirit in the right reverent way, then this is a meaningful path to the gate of spiritual science.

Once again, it is less about raving and more about deepening our feelings. —- And I would give little to be able to tell you, for example, that the blessed boys' saying about being carried away from Lebechören leads to such occult depths; I would give little for the sake of these mere ideas if I could only know that your heart, your soul, your inner being is so touched when you express such a truth that you feel something of the sacred, profound forces that live in the world and pour into human creativity when that creativity is truly connected to the secrets of the world. If one can tremble at the fact that such depths can lie in a work of art, then this shuddering, which our soul, our mind, our heart has once experienced, is worth much more than the mere knowledge that the blessed boys say they are not united with living creatures. It is not the joy at the spiritual depth of the idea that should move us, but the joy that the world is so interwoven from the spiritual, that the reign of the spirit in the human heart has such an effect that such creativity can live in the spiritual development of humanity.

after eurythmy-dramatic presentations of the “Dedication” and the “Prologue in Heaven”

In the last few weeks, we have spoken of the three great, highest ideals of humanity and have described these three ideals as they have been described for a long time: the ideal of wisdom, the ideal of beauty and the ideal of kindness.

Now, in more recent times, these three highest ideals of humanity have always been associated with the three human soul powers that we know and have considered in the most diverse ways. The ideal of wisdom has been associated with thinking or imagining, the ideal of beauty with feeling, and the ideal of kindness with willing.

Wisdom can only be acquired by man through clear perceptions, through clear thinking. That which is the object of art, the beautiful, cannot be grasped in this way. Feeling is the soul power that is primarily concerned with beauty, as psychologists have long since discovered. And that which is realized as good in the world is connected with the will. It seems that what the psychologists and soul experts have said about the relationship between the three great ideals of humanity and the various soul powers is quite plausible. In a sense, we can add a kind of supplement: that Kant wrote three critiques, one of which, the “Critique of Pure Reason”, is supposed to serve wisdom because it seeks to criticize the power of imagination. Kant called another critique the “Critique of Judgment,” and it is divided into two parts: the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment” and the “Critique of Teleological Judgment.” Basically, when Kant speaks of judgment here, he means what is contained in the knowledge of feeling, through which one affirms that something is beautiful or ugly, useful or harmful. So we could say – as a subsection, precisely in this Kantian sense, and others have retained the terminology – that the power of judgment, whereby we are thinking not only of the imaginative judgment, but also of the fact that the judgment comes from the heart, is related to the perception of beauty. And a third of Kant's criticisms is the “critique of practical reason,” which refers to the will, to the pursuit of the good.

Now, we can find what I have just said in all psychologists, except for one psychologist who emerged in the second half of the 19th century and found that this whole division of the human soul does not work, does not correspond to the unbiased observation of the human soul. And the assignment of humanity's great ideals to the various powers of the soul – imagination, feeling and will – is just as wrong. Imagination is assigned wisdom as its highest ideal, feeling is assigned beauty, and will is assigned goodness. The psychologist I am referring to, Franz Brentano, thought that he would have to overturn the whole doctrine that I have now outlined and, one might say, fundamentally change the way the human soul is structured. He assigns imagination to beauty, let us assume. You see, while everyone else assigns feeling, or rather judgment, aesthetic judgment, or judgment in general, to beauty, Brentano assigns imagination to beauty. Brentano assigns judgment to wisdom, insofar as it is something that man acquires; he does not say imagination, but judgment. And curiously enough, he even blunts the will by not focusing on the development of the will, on the impulse of the will, but on what underlies the impulse of the will: sympathy and antipathy. — There is much to be said for looking at things this way. Language itself sometimes leads us to associate the volitional impulse with sympathy and antipathy. For example, when we say: to have repugnance for something! We do not want anything, but we have an antipathy for something. And so Brentano, as it were, blunts the will to sympathy and antipathy and assigns to the will this sympathy and antipathy to say yes or no to something. He does not go as far as the volitional impulse, but only to what underlies the will: saying yes or no to something, affirming or denying a thing.

Through imagining, Brentano argues, one never arrives at a true, that is, a wisdom-filled, view, but only at a view. He says that one imagines, for example, a winged horse. There is nothing wrong with imagining a winged horse. But it is not — we must bear in mind that Brentano is living in the age of materialism — it is not full of wisdom to imagine a winged horse, because a winged horse has no reality. Something must be added when we form an idea. But that is, the recognition or non-recognition of the idea by the power of judgment must be added, and only then does wisdom come out.

We may ask ourselves, what is it, so to speak, that underlies such a complete reversal of the powers of the soul? What has led Brentano to distribute the soul powers quite differently from the other psychologists, namely, into beauty, goodness, and wisdom? If we inquire into the reason why Brentano has arrived at this different grouping of the soul life, we can get no answer except by taking into account Brentano's own personal development. The other psychologists of modern times are people who have mostly emerged from the more recent development of world views. It is a peculiarity of modern philosophers, of all philosophers, that they know Greek philosophy relatively well - in their own way, of course - and then philosophy basically begins with Kant. And the modern philosophers do not know much of what lies between Greek philosophy and Kant. Kant himself knew little more about the period between Greek philosophy and himself than what he had read in Aume and Berkeley; he knew nothing of the development of medieval philosophy. Kant was completely ignorant of what is called the scholasticism of the Middle Ages. And those who, in their complacency, exaggerate everything in their own way, find just that much cause, because Kant knew nothing of scholasticism, to regard scholasticism as a bundle of pedantic follies and not to study it further. The fact that Kant knew nothing of scholasticism does not prevent him from also knowing nothing of Greek philosophy. Others knew more than he did in this area. Brentano, on the other hand, was a profound expert on scholasticism, a profound expert on medieval philosophy and, in addition, a profound expert on Aristotle. As for those who see the world of philosophy as beginning with Kant, they are not scholars, not genuine scholars of Aristotle, for Aristotle, the great Greek, was most grievously mistreated in the developmental history of the newer intellectual life. Brentano was a profound scholar of Aristotle and scholasticism, but not in the merely historical sense, not in the sense of someone who knew what Aristotle wrote and what the scholastics wrote, for with regard to such knowledge one can . make one's own thoughts when going through the history of philosophy! Brentano was a man who had become familiar with the philosophy of Aristotle and with scholastic philosophy, with the solitary thinking that went on for centuries in the cells of monasteries, with the thinking that worked with a thorough technique of the conceptual world, with that thorough technique of the conceptual world that has been completely lost to more recent thinking. Those who therefore heard psychology in the seventies and eighties from Brentano, basically heard a completely different tone of human thinking than has been or is heard from other philosophers of modern times. Something really did live in Brentano as an undertone of what spoke from the soul of the scholastics. And that is significant because he made this different classification out of this different thinking. So that we can say: there is the peculiar fact that all the newer thinkers, for whom scholasticism was and is merely a web of concepts, present the human soul and its relationship to wisdom, beauty and goodness in this way:

Wisdom: Imagining
Beauty: Feeling
Goodness: Wanting.

In Brentano, all the feelings and inner impulses that were in a scholastic heart lived, as far as something like that is possible in the present. He had to think in this way, had to structure the human soul differently in its powers and relate it to the great ideals of humanity. Where does that come from?

If you had been able to ask the angels on the stage – and in particular the three archangels – how they organize the soul and how they relate it to the great ideals, they would have answered you, albeit in a much more perfect way than Brentano could, with an answer similar to the one Brentano gave. Raphael, Gabriel and Michael would not understand this classification, but they would easily find their way into it, only to transform it more completely into the classification that Brentano gave. We are touching here on a significant fact in the spiritual development of mankind. However far we may be today from the thinking of the scholastic Middle Ages, there was something underlying this way of thinking that can be presented in the following way. The scholastic did not try to stop when speaking of the highest things, with what is happening directly on the physical plane, but the scholastic first tried to prepare his soul so that the spiritual entities of the higher world could speak out of it. In many respects this will be a stammering of the human soul, because it is self-evident that the human soul will only ever be able to imperfectly express the language of the higher spirits that are superior to man. But that is how the scholastics wanted to speak to a certain extent about the spiritual affairs of man, as a soul must speak that surrenders to what supersensible spirits have to say.

We are getting used to forming our agreement or disagreement with what makes an idea a valid one, a wise one, according to the external physical world, here on the physical plane, since the time of materialism is the actual time of humanity. We say that a winged horse is not a valid concept because we have never seen a winged horse. Materialism regards a concept as a wise concept if it agrees with what the external world dictates.

Brentano, so to speak, provided the last abstract imitation of the language of angels. Angels would say: That which is in accordance with the context of the messages of the beings that are beyond the threshold of the spiritual worlds is full of wisdom. It is not enough to form a concept; rather, this concept must be in harmony with what the spiritual beings reveal beyond the threshold. So mere imagining cannot serve wisdom beyond the threshold. What then can it serve? It can serve appearance, in which beauty lives. If one applies imagination to reality without further ado, then one does not arrive at the right imagination. But one may apply it to the appearance in which beauty lives and works. Brentano was quite right when he related imagination to beauty. For the angels, when they want to imagine, will always ask themselves: What kind of images may we form? Never ugly ones, but always beautiful images. But these images, which they form and which they form according to the ideal of beauty, will not correspond to reality if they do not correspond to the revelations of other entities that they encounter in the spiritual world. Imagining is really only to be assigned to beauty. Angels have the ideal of imagining in such a way that their entire world of imagination is permeated and illuminated by the ideal of beauty. And you need only read the chapter of my Theosophy that deals with the soul world, and there study the two forces in the form in which they are found beyond the threshold to the spiritual world, the two forces of sympathy and antipathy, and you will find that the relationship between sympathy and antipathy underlies the impulses of will. So that coincides again to a certain extent. But it must be related to the life of the soul, as this life, from the subconscious, still arises from the soul world in today's human soul. There you see how a modern philosopher, because he has, so to speak, atavistically preserved the scholasticism of the Middle Ages in his heart, tries to speak in the terminology of angels, albeit in the imperfect language of modern materialism. It is an extraordinarily interesting fact. Otherwise, one cannot understand how Brentano opposed the whole of modern psychology in such a way that he distinguished the powers of the soul quite differently from other psychologists and assigned them to the highest ideals of humanity in a different way.

But take what is said in this way in all its consequences. Note all the consequences. When we cross the threshold to the spiritual world, then we live in a world of beings, I said, insofar as we speak of the real. So we cannot form abstract concepts in the same sense as we do here in the physical world when we speak of the real. We have to have entities. So when we speak of the real, we have to say: It cannot be that wisdom, beauty and goodness have the same meaning in the spiritual world over there as they do here in the physical world. There they would be abstract concepts again, as we can apply them here in the physical world. There must be entities over there. — So, as soon as we speak in terms of wisdom itself, that is, seek a reality, entities must exist over there, not just what is designated in abstracto by wisdom, beauty, goodness. When one speaks of beauty in the spiritual world, one cannot say: Beauty is there as maya, as appearance in the spiritual world. Just as beauty and wisdom are imprinted in the physical world, for example, when we depict wisdom-filled beauty in drama or in other works of art, or when we depict goodness in beauty in drama or in other works of art, and how all this is interrelated, so wisdom, beauty and goodness are at work in the realm of beauty beyond the threshold. But we must not speak of them as concepts; we must not apply what is over there as we apply it here. So let us assume that someone wants to speak from over there, and he wants to speak from over there with the power of the soul, which corresponds to our imagination, so he should not say: wisdom, beauty, strength, because these are abstract ideas, he would have to cite entities. Wisdom would have to appear as an entity on the other side.

In the language of the ancient mysteries, what I am now explaining was well known, and therefore terms were introduced that could express this, that did not point to mere abstract ideas, but to entities. On the other side, beyond the threshold, there must be a Being, which here is Wisdom, a Being. If you reflect a little, you will easily find that a Being, which we call God-vision, the God-visionary, could be such a Being, corresponding to Wisdom on the other side: God-vision.

A being that corresponds to beauty, our abstract idea of beauty for the physical plane, would have to reveal itself. Beauty reveals itself, it is the appearance, the appearing, that which appears. At the moment one crosses the threshold, that which is much more alive than here on the physical plane emerges. When the beautiful is spoken of, the essentially beautiful, something so mute or merely living in human, physical hearing or speech abstractions, it is not spoken of as it is here on the physical plane. It is all revelation, living revelation. And if you combine what I am saying now with what I said earlier, you will understand that the ancient mysteries coined a word for what corresponds to it on the other side, beyond the threshold of Beauty, which can be described as the proclamation of God. God's Word, God-proclaimer, for example. You could also say the Word of God.

Likewise, there must be a being for the volition: the God-willing. Not the abstract, as we have it in our soul as volition, but a being must be on the other side of the threshold for the will. God-willer - if we may form the word. Why should we only form words that are already in use, since we are entering realms for which words have not been coined at all! God's volition, as it were. If we take God as a collective name for the spiritual beings of the higher hierarchies, then God has within Himself not only a volition, as we have in our souls, but a volitioner: this is essential. What in us are only the three soul powers: imagination, feeling, volition, are in God's being: the God-breather, the God-proclaimer, the God-willing. And if one takes the old Hebrew expressions, they correspond completely to the words that I have tried to coin here. Of course, you will not find the translation of these words in any Hebrew dictionary, but if you immerse yourself in what was meant, you would actually translate the old Hebrew words with these words today, and in such a way that Gottschauer means exactly the same in our language as Michael; Gottverkünder means exactly the same as Gabriel; Gottwoller means exactly the same as Raphael. While we work in the physical world through our three soul powers, the beings of the higher hierarchies work through their own entities. Just as we work through imagination, feeling and will, so a God works through Michael, Gabriel and Raphael. And that means the same for a God: I work through Michael, Gabriel, Raphael – which for our soul means: I work through thinking, feeling and willing. This translation: I work through thinking, feeling and willing - into: I work through Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, is simply the translation from the language of men into the language that should be spoken - if one speaks the real language that prevails there - beyond the threshold to the spiritual world. If you open yourself to some of the descriptions in the Bible, you will be able to feel everywhere – if you feel appropriately and not in a way that corresponds to today's interpretation of the Bible, which is a misinterpretation in many respects – you will be able to feel how this really must be intended for Michael, Gabriel and Raphael.

Wisdom: power of judgment – Godshower; Michael
Revelation of Essence

Beauty: imagination – God-announcer: Gabriel
Power of Judgment

Goodness: sympathy, affirmation / antipathy, negation –
God-willing: Raphael

Now, bearing this in mind, think back to the way Gabriel, Michael and Raphael speak in Goethe's “Prologue to Heaven”. One can only say that one is deeply shaken by the instinctive certainty with which this “Prologue in Heaven” suggests how the willing essence of the Godhead, through Raphael, the seeing essence of the Godhead, through Michael, and the beautifully revealing essence of the Godhead, the revealing, proclaiming essence of the Godhead, through Gabriel, is manifested. The volition of the Godhead lies in the harmony of the spheres, in that which expresses itself in the great movements of the heavenly bodies and in that which happens while the heavenly bodies move:

The sun sounds in the ancient manner
In the singing contest of the spheres,
And its prescribed journey
It completes with a thunderclap.
The sight of it gives strength to the angels,

— one could also say: goodness, the strength of the super-moral life beyond the threshold. Therefore, some also refer to the three soul powers of wisdom, beauty, goodness as wisdom, beauty, strength.

When none can fathom them;

— you will bite your teeth out if you try to hold on to the Faust commentators on this line: “If no one can fathom it.” Most say: Oh yes, Goethe just meant, even though, or although, or although no one can fathom it. But that is not how a truly great poet speaks – I have often mentioned this to Goethe – that is not how a great poet speaks. Fathoming belongs to wisdom as it lives within the human physical world. Beyond the threshold, everything is a becoming acquainted with spiritual beings, whom one approaches as one approaches people here, who must also keep an inner being, who cannot be completely fathomed. This fathoming in the sense in which it occurs here on earth does not exist for the angels at all. They have the spiritual reality before them; they do not fathom; they look, because something of the power of Michael's vision has also been given to each one. Each has something of the other power, just as each soul power has something of the other, for example, imagining has something of wanting, because if we could not want when imagining, we would only dream and so on. So Raphael also has something of Michael and Gabriel in himself, of course.

The incomprehensibly high works

Are glorious as on the first day.

Try to feel these two lines with all the sensations that you can have from spiritual science!

The incomprehensibly high works

— which are described there

Are glorious as on the first day.

What does that mean? They are not glorious as on that day, glorious as on the first day. Just as they appeared glorious to the angels at that time, that is, expressing themselves, revealing themselves, they are still - luciferic. Because what has remained behind is, after all, luciferic. One must really apply the perceptions that one acquires through spiritual science. The stars shine as luciferically as on the first day. They have not progressed; they retain their original character – again a reason why the angels do not fathom them, but behold them. For angels, the luciferic is visible. It does not make the angels bad. I have often described the luciferic as a necessity in the evolution of the world. Here it is presented to you as something that the angels behold: Lucifer – not as he reigns for people – but as he gloriously maintains the indescribably high works as they were on the first day. And we are led to it in exalted language, so that we are shown how the Luciferic lives out in the universe, and the angels may look at it as on the first day. There it is justified. It should not descend into the physical world to man in the ordinary way, but live above in the world that is beyond the threshold. And the world that is pervaded and thundered through by the will of the world is first proclaimed on earth. Up there it should remain unfathomable, it should not be fathomed. Here on earth, with the powers that are given to man, it is there so that what is unfathomable for angels

be fathomed through human wisdom. But Gabriel, the proclaimer of God, the Word of God, can only hint at this as he sees it from outside the earth. Do you remember the profound Bible verse: “Before the mystery of the Incarnation they veiled their faces.” In this profound Bible verse lies the whole of the unfathomable for the angels of the worlds that are accessible to man through the wisdom that is developed on earth. And here angelic language is spoken in the 'Prologue to Heaven', which is why Gabriel, the proclaimer of God, characterizes from the outside that which reveals itself on earth as wisdom.

And fast and incomprehensibly fast
The earth's splendor revolves;
Paradise's brightness changes
With deep, shudder-filled night;

This is how it appears from the outside: the world in which we live here, which we try to unravel, and which affects us in the sphere of our senses. Out there it is the wonderful change of day and night.

The sea foams in broad rivers

Human weal and woe depend on it; out there it reveals itself only as that which, in its foaming, composes the spherical earth.

At the deep bottom of the rocks,
And rock and sea are torn away
In an eternally fast spherical course.

In which our whole earthly destiny, bound to our sensory life, is bound. The God-announcer draws it from outside the earth.

And how is the meaning of the earth revealed? By looking not only at that which is valid for the human sense realm, but also at that which sends its effect out into the universe. Gabriel describes the earth as it appears from the outside, but he describes what is significant for man in the sense realm. Michael, the God-shower, describes that which radiates out into the universe and also has its significance for the earth's surroundings, for the entire celestial sphere. Therefore, he begins with the surroundings, not below, where the sea flows, where the rivers flow, but with

the surroundings. He looks at the surroundings.

And storms roar in competition,

A deep word!

From sea to land, from land to sea,
And furiously form a chain
Of the deepest impact all around.

Just imagine, seen from the outside, let's say, the trade winds that blow out there in regular currents. Our limited natural science describes all this, what goes on in these atmospheric phenomena, but it is limited, this natural science. When one examines the regularities in atmospheric phenomena, one comes across a deep connection between these regular atmospheric phenomena and the phases of the moon, the phenomena of the moon, but not because the moon causes what happens in the atmosphere, but because, in the same measure, in parallel, the old lunar laws still govern the moon today, and the atmospheric phenomena also still remain from the old lunar laws. Not that the moon rules the atmospheric phenomena and the tides, but both are ruled by causes that go back much further, ruled in parallel. What happens in the atmosphere is therefore not only significant for that which affects people in the sphere of the senses, but it also has significance for that which happens out there in the universe. We look up at the lightning, we hear the thunder. But the Gods also see the lightning and hear the thunder from the other side. And for them it means something quite different - of which we can speak another time - than for us human beings here, who do not understand lightning and thunder. But the God-shower Michael understands from the earth precisely that which is lived out on the other side in lightning and thunder, which has been described here by me — remember the first lecture I gave here this summer — as the subterranean of the human soul, as the thunderstorms of the human soul, which I have described to you in terms of the character of Weininger, who died young. What corresponds to these thunderstorms in the human soul, in the atmosphere, has an effect. And just as the soul storms in us are harmonized and mitigated when we pour our higher soul forces over them, so for the world outside, what is stormy and thundering here in our atmosphere and is irregular in meteorology becomes regular and harmonious in the universe. Just as we, as we develop, do not remain in the storms, but progress to the harmony of the soul life. Down there, lightning and thunder

But your messengers,

- the angels -

Lord,
we honor the gentle walking of your day.

Everything falls into place, gently and harmoniously, as seen from the sphere of the angels outside.

The sight gives the angels strength,

- that is, it strengthens their volition

Since no one can fathom you,

– it is not a matter of fathoming, but of beholding!

And all your lofty works
Are glorious as on the first day.

That means: they are Luciferian, they are there for angels, they should only not have the same effect on people. Lucifer is the unjustified in the world of man, insofar as he transfers his justified sphere outside into the world of man for the spiritual world and applies the same laws there that he should only apply outside in the spiritual world.

And do you remember how I dealt with it in other lectures, based on Goethe's “Faust”, the ambiguity that still remained in Goethe when he wrote “Faust”. I told you at the time that Goethe did not yet properly distinguish between Lucifer and Ahriman. Mephistopheles is actually Ahriman, who has only been left behind in a different way than Lucifer. But this distinction is only given by the newer spiritual science. Goethe constantly confuses Lucifer and Ahriman, throws them together, so that his Mephistopheles is really a confused figure in this respect, has Luciferic and Ahrimanic traits. If Goethe had already had spiritual science, this terrible confusion with regard to the character of Mephistopheles would certainly not occur. I have already said at the time: I ask not to be accused of not sufficiently venerating Goethe or of criticizing him in a mean, philistine way because of what I say. By telling the truth, one's veneration of some genius is truly no less than if one merely praises it. I believe that no one can accuse me of having a low opinion of Goethe after what I have written and said about him. But I must always emphasize that his Mephistopheles is a confused spiritual character when I speak from the impulse of spiritual science. If Goethe had known exactly the right thing to say after the verse:

And all your lofty works
Are glorious as on the first day

first appeared Lucifer, the one who works through the appearance of the world of the spheres, through the beauty of the world of the spheres. Lucifer would stand there. And because Lucifer has as his companion Ahriman, Mephistopheles – which is the same as Ahriman – Mephistopheles would then step in, or Lucifer would step down and Mephistopheles would step up. That is what Goethe would have done if he had had spiritual science in its present form. We would have seen a red Lucifer first, and only then the gray-black Ahriman, the gray-black Mephistopheles. But Goethe did not get that far. Therefore, he only lets Mephistopheles appear, who in his own way also combines the retarded qualities that should work in the spiritual world and not work in a human way into human life. Goethe felt that, felt it correctly. That is why not everything about this Mephistopheles is quite right, although it is right. The feeling here seems much more certain than Goethe's intuition has already worked. Much of what Faust encounters as temptation really comes from Mephistopheles, but other things cannot properly be attributed to Mephistopheles. That Faust should be tempted by base passions cannot really come from Ahriman, it can only come from Lucifer. And when Ahriman-Mephistopheles says this, Goethe remembers, subconsciously, that it is not quite right. Mephistopheles should actually have Lucifer at his side. That is why Mephistopheles says: “Dust shall he eat,” that is, he shall live in lower passions, “like my aunt, the famous snake.” That is Lucifer. Then he reminds us of his aunt, the good Aunt Lucifer!' There you have the reminiscence of Lucifer, who is actually supposed to be there.

You see, there are tremendously deep secrets of the world in this “Prologue in Heaven”, by which I do not mean to say that Goethe wanted to present them as we feel them today in spiritual science. But instinctive wisdom is often much deeper than the apparent one. And in ancient times there was only instinctive wisdom, and that was truly a higher wisdom than that which is produced today by limited natural science.

Thus Mephistopheles-Ahriman entered the physical world, where he should not be. There is also a poor fit between what he has to say and the physical world and the intentions of the Deity in the physical world. He wants to rule in the world, but he finds everything “very bad”. He must be different from the others, from the genuine sons of the gods, for he is to be here in the physical world, where works are to be fathomed. Since Mephistopheles enters the physical world at all, the saying that he should not fathom the world does not apply to him; he must fathom it. He is only a half-nature on earth; as a spiritual being he does not really belong. He would have to fathom it, but cannot fathom it. That is why he finds everything “very bad”. We will talk about the extent to which he is here for creation tomorrow in connection with other teachings of spiritual science. Today we just want to say this.

So this Ahriman-Mephistopheles is different here in the physical world from the true sons of the gods. He really must be used for something else here. He must work on what is real in the physical world, unlike the true sons of the gods. They do not need to have the earthly real in their imaginations. They must delight in the “vividly rich beauty”, the beauty in their imaginations. There is a discrepancy between the angels, the true sons of the gods, and Ahriman, the Mephistopheles. For them, the angels cannot do it like Mephistopheles, they delight in the lively, rich beauty.

That which is becoming, that which is eternally working and living,
embraces you with the sweet barriers of love.

This is about as profound as the prologue gets. Remember what we said about the cosmos of wisdom and the cosmos of love? And remember the words: They veiled their faces from the mystery of the Incarnation. — Love does not live the same way for the Sons of God of Wisdom as it does for humans: they are beings within wisdom; there are limits for the true Sons of God. And by living in the great Maja, in the glory of the Luciferic world, they weave the “permanent thoughts” that are in turn beings, not abstract ideas, that are forces, not mere thoughts.

It is truly remarkable how this “Prologue in Heaven” was written in 1797, one might say, not in the language of men, but in the language of the gods, and how humanity will take a long time to fathom all the depths of this prologue. I think it is possible to get a sense of the feelings that lived in Goethe when, spurred on by Schiller, he set about continuing Faust in 1797, which he had started years ago. It began there: “Have now, alas, studied philosophy, law” and so on. Then the three parts are missing: “Dedication”, “Prelude to the Theater”, “Prologue in Heaven”. Then the whole Easter walk was missing. Some scenes were then written during the Italian journey in 1787, and under Schiller's encouragement, Goethe went back to it. He may well have thought back to the time when he had not taken Faust so deeply, when he had only taken it, albeit very deeply, as one who strives out of the world of physical reality, over the threshold, into the spiritual world, to the earth spirit and so on. But he could not take it then, he, the twenty-year-old Goethe, as he took it now at the end of the century, in 1797, when he himself felt that he really did not understand in an abstract way much of what he had to express in the “Prologue in Heaven”. For there the language of angels prevails. Those who heard the first songs of Faust would have had to develop with Goethe in the way that Goethe himself developed if they had wanted to understand what had become of the whole rich world of Faust in Goethe's soul by 1797. Something different had become of it. What he had created as a young man appeared to him in a higher sphere. He must have had some sense of the view from the spiritual sphere beyond the threshold down to the earthly world in which Faust also walked, who says: “Have now, alas, philosophy, jurisprudence...” and so on. “... studied with hot endeavor.” Goethe could say that he and his companions enjoyed something different back then than what has now become his. And he might have sensed something of how little he would be understood. For Goethe sensed already, from the end of the 1790s, that something must come like a spiritual science if what he instinctively sensed and felt as world-wisdom and world-beauty and world-strength was to be fully understood.

They will not hear the following songs,
The souls to whom I sang the first;
The friendly throng has been scattered,
Alas! the first echo has faded.

Echo from the souls to whom he read the first scenes of “Faust,” which he wrote when he was twenty years old: the first echo. But understanding at that time – for even that time is now already gone in the time of materialism – understanding, however, for crossing the threshold with a character like Faust, understanding for appealing to the earth spirit, which “weaves and lives in the tides of life, in the storm of deeds”. But a stopping at this understanding, an inability to ascend to what Goethe had to struggle to achieve. Therefore - now that the language of angels prevails and the whole is viewed from a different point of view - no longer the old resonance. Faded away, alas! - that old resonance! Scattered the souls for whom he sang the first songs. That suffering that everyone goes through who really wants to look at the spiritual world, Goethe knew it and knew that he was alone with this suffering in his time.

My suffering is heard by the unknown multitude.

This is not much different today, when one could be frightened by the applause that people give to “Faust”. For what do people today still hear of the deep wisdom that prevails in “Faust”, much more than external appearances!?

But Goethe might say, if he now felt that he had to lift up his song, the song of his suffering, into the realm of the spirit: What used to be reality to me floats far into the distance, and what used to disappear becomes reality — the silent, earnest spiritual kingdom, which one approaches with that awe that one feels when one has a presentiment of the completely different form that the world takes on the other side of the threshold and on this side of the threshold. This 'dedication' also arose from Goethe's deep sense of the possibilities of the future. If spiritual science could also deepen human hearts in such cases, so that they are really able to take what must be taken deeply, then spiritual science would fulfill one of its tasks. For the saying that I quoted here only recently is true, deeply true: “The world is deep, and deeper than the day conceived,” that is, than the day that shows us only the physical, sensual world. The world is deep as it is revealed to us by that night which, compared to physical day, is indeed night and darkness, but into which we carry that light which we kindle in our own soul as a lamp and which we then have to illuminate ourselves. The world is deep and must be fathomed by a light that we first kindle through our spiritual striving so that it may shine in the spiritual world. Then it will shine as the light does in the eternal becoming, which works and lives and in which the beings of the higher world have to dwell, so that it may be revealed to them what they need to fortify with lasting thoughts that which floats in fluctuating appearance.

From this point we will then continue our meditation tomorrow.

I would just like to ask our friends from Basel not to bring any children with them tomorrow. We have to make this exception because the presence of the personality from hell presented to you today makes this scene unsuitable for children's fantasies and dreams. So, as an exception, we ask that anyone under fifteen or sixteen years of age not be brought tomorrow.

after eurythmy-dramatic presentations: “Dedication”, “Prelude to the Theater”, “Prologue in Heaven”

Yesterday and on other occasions, I have spoken about the fact that Goethe's Mephistopheles is fundamentally a contradictory figure. We also already know why he is a contradictory figure. One could say that Mephistophelean, that is, Ahrimanic and Luciferic character traits are combined in him in a colorful jumble. Goethe, one might say, was not yet able to distinguish these character traits. If, on the one hand, one values a work of art as highly as you have seen me do with 'Faust', then one may also draw attention to such factual things. It remains strange, however, that so little has been noted about the contradictions in the poetry itself, although it has been done in individual cases. This is also a sign of the way in which things are often received today: one does not approach them with sufficient inner participation, so as to notice the inner life and activity. For if one did, one would soon have to notice, for example, the inner contradictions in the figure of Mephistopheles.

Let us take, first of all, a contradiction that may not be complete, but is nevertheless very strong, and which might be noticed immediately when one hears Mephistopheles speak in the scene that has just passed before our soul.

I see only how people toil.
The little god of the world always remains of the same ilk,
And is as whimsical as on the first day.
He would live a little better
If you had not given him the glow of heavenly light;
He calls it reason and uses it alone,

Only to be more animalistic than any animal. What must one feel when Mephistopheles criticizes the fact that man does it this way? Now, no one would credit Mephistopheles with very deep, selfless goals. He can't, even after this first scene in “Prologue in Heaven.” For what does Mephistopheles actually want? He wants Faust, doesn't he? He wants him for himself and so basically has to approve of everything Faust does in order to get together with him, to grasp him, to take hold of him. In this case, to take hold means to seize, not to understand; it is not meant conceptually, abstractly. “Can you grasp him?” – can you seize him? Mephistopheles will want to do everything to do so. It would suit him very well if Faust had all the qualities that would bring him into the very claws of Mephistopheles!

Let us turn to a later verse, where Mephistopheles confronts Faust himself in the study, where Faust speaks of his attitude towards reason and science. Faust leaves; Mephistopheles remains in his long robe. One can imagine that he will now be honest with himself, this Mephistopheles. So he says:

Despise reason and science,
Man's highest power,
Let only in Blend- and Zauberwerken
You from the lying spirit strengthen,
So I have you already unconditional.

So that could suit him just fine, when man does not apply reason and science in the right sense, but uses them to be more animalistic than any animal. Then he will just talk the Lord into it, won't he:

If thou hadst not given him the semblance of heavenly light;
He calls it reason and uses it alone,
Only to be more animal than any animal.

I say it is not a complete contradiction, but it is a strong contradiction for the senses.

In the scene I just quoted, where Mephistopheles stands opposite Faust in the study, it is clear that he is speaking sincerely as Ahriman-Mephistopheles. But in the passage you heard today:

He calls it reason and needs it alone,
Only to be more beastly than any beast,

a Luciferian trait comes into it. Lucifer cannot approve of Faust using reason to incite the animal passions. But Ahriman would have to approve if Faust behaved as Mephisto criticizes him for doing. In this case, we have not a half-contradiction, but a three-quarters contradiction!

But what are we to make of another passage?

As long as he lives on earth,
so long do not forbid it.
Man errs, so long as he strives.

I thank you for that; for with the dead
I have never been willing to associate myself.
Most of all I love my own full, fresh cheeks.
I am not at home with a corpse;
I feel like a cat with a mouse.

If you compare that with the scene that we might also be able to perform one day, where Mephisto finally tries so hard to get the soul, in the second part, when the corpse is lying there, how are we supposed to cope at all? The devil is after souls, and here he is talking about the opposite! There are many such contradictions. I only wanted to give two examples; the first is a three-quarter contradiction that is found in the poetry itself. Such contradictions can certainly be attributed to the fact that the two character traits, the Luciferian and the Ahrimanic-Mephistophelian, get mixed up.

Now the question may arise for us: how is it that Goethe actually places Ahriman-Mephistopheles at Faust's side, directing all attention to Ahriman-Mephistopheles and, as it were, still suppressing Lucifer altogether? — That must surely be a question. For the fact that Goethe, under the influence of his time, was tempted to place Mephistopheles at Faust's side means that he has also taken on Luciferian traits and thus, so to speak, blamed Mephistopheles-Ahriman for everything that should be divided between the two. Thus there must be reasons in the time to turn more attention to Mephistopheles than to Lucifer. By treating the Faust saga, Goethe goes back to the time when the Middle Ages collided with the modern era. And he has essentially absorbed the impulses of the time that arose from this clash between the Middle Ages and the modern era. If we consider somewhat more ancient poetry, poetry that follows more ancient impulses, we find an opposite confusion. We can also talk about this some other time. But today I just want to hint at it. In Milton's 'Paradise Lost', you will find the opposite mistake made. Everything that should have been attributed to Ahriman-Mephistopheles is dumped on Lucifer, although not in such a crude way as it is done in “Faust”. As I said, we will talk about this some other time. It was more of a mistake that the Middle Ages made, to focus more on Lucifer. And the mistake that the modern era makes is to focus more on Ahriman-Mephistopheles. Now we live in a time in which the correct relationship between the two world powers, Mephistopheles and Lucifer, must be more and more recognized by people. Hence our group, our sculptural group, which is intended for the building here and which is to show the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic – Mephistopheles and Lucifer – in the right relationship to each other in pictorial form.

If you want to understand what it is actually about, you have to consider something that still seems quite paradoxical to people today, but which will one day, when people do not really reject spiritual science from their earthly existence, be deeply understood. We live in modern times under very special impulses, under which we have to live. It is right that we live under these impulses. We must only recognize these impulses. We must not mistake them. I have often explained how the Copernican world view had to arise at the beginning of modern times, how it is justified, deeply justified. We have somewhat different feelings about this Copernican world view than the external world has. For if one considers the feelings with which the external world faces the Copernican world view, one can hardly come to any other conclusion than that people say: Well, the Middle Ages and antiquity were stupid, and we have become clever, and when the Middle Ages and antiquity were stupid, they thought that the sun moved and constructed all kinds of cycles and epicycles — the Ptolemaic worldview — and then believed that, assumed the movements of the heavenly bodies according to appearances. In a certain sense, this is even true for the Middle Ages, especially for the later Middle Ages, because confusion had already crept into what had emerged as the Ptolemaic worldview. But the original Ptolemaic world view was not like that; it was part of the original ancient revelation, had come into human souls through the ancient mysteries and by no means through mere external observation, and was therefore based on revelation. With this revelation, modern times broke, and modern times asked the question: How should one look at the sky in order to get to know it and its movements? — Copernicus first did the calculations, tried to make a simple calculation of the movements of the heavenly bodies, and then showed how the positions that were calculated actually corresponded to the positions of the heavenly bodies. And so, by way of calculation, he invented his Copernican system, formulated three theorems that can be found in Copernicus' works themselves, about the movements of the heavenly bodies in relation to our Earth. Of these three propositions, however, one was left out, and that is how the present-day confused Copernican view of the world came about, which is not that of Copernicus himself. The third was inconvenient – so it was left out! Therefore, anyone who merely learns the Copernican view of the world from the usual books does not know the view of Copernicus at all. But that was bound to happen. First, Copernicus had to establish a far more correct doctrine with his three propositions. Then our teaching had to come, which is based on two of Copernicus's propositions. Only when the whole matter is thoroughly penetrated in spiritual-scientific terms will the right thing emerge.

Then came those who sought to understand the movements of the heavenly bodies and their laws in a more external way, not through calculation. The telescope came. People learned to examine the sky as they examined things on earth. And in this way modern astronomy and modern astrophysics arose, a science that arises entirely from the fact that what is observed is expressed in laws; that is, one wants to explain the sky by observing the sky. And what could be more natural than this? Modern man must think that anyone who wanted to know anything other than the heavens by observing the heavens must be a completely crazy fellow. That is quite obvious, isn't it. And yet it is not correct, but it is one of the great deceptions. It is something that will be quite different in the future. In the future, too, people will consult the heavens even more than they do now, wanting to learn about the movements that live and breathe in the heavenly bodies. They will study the heavens carefully and intently, but they will know one thing that we do not know today, that seems completely paradoxical to us when we say it out loud: You learn nothing about the heavens by observing them. The most false method of getting to know the sky and its movements is to observe it as one does today. — No, I am saying something completely twisted. But one must relate to the distortions differently than the good Christian von Ehrenfels, to whom I referred eight days ago, related to them. One will observe the sky, observe it more and more thoroughly and let it tell one its secrets. But what will these secrets reveal in the distant future? They will reveal what is happening here on earth. That is what they will reveal. People will observe the sky, but they will explain from what they recognize in the sky how plants grow on earth, how animals come into being on earth, everything that forms on earth, everything that lives and weaves on earth. The information that heaven reveals will provide enlightenment about this. It will no longer occur to anyone to ask heaven about heaven, but rather they will ask heaven in order to find enlightenment about the earth. And the most significant laws that one will learn about from heaven will be used to reveal the secrets of earthly existence. Old astrology, which is little recognized today in its original meaning and which has largely become amateurish, even charlatanistic, will be revived in a completely new form. Not only will earthly destinies be sought in the movements of the stars and in the laws of the heavens, but the laws of earthly life, that which lives and moves, will be explained in terms of the laws of the heavenly bodies. One will not know why salt crystallizes in cubes, why diamond crystallizes in octahedrons, and so on, before one explains that which has forms here on earth from the positions of the heavenly bodies. And the secret of the life of animals, plants and human beings will not be known as the secret of life until the movements of the heavenly bodies, whose effect is life, can be used to explain what lives and moves here on earth. The earth is explained from the heavens. Admittedly, what is known about heaven will take on a somewhat different form from what is claimed to be known today. The laws of the positions and movements of the heavenly bodies will be investigated. But then one will let oneself be inspired meditatively by what one investigates in order to enter into a relationship, so to speak, with the beings that live in the stars. One will let oneself be told by the beings that live there what one will need to know for life on earth.

That is a future prospect. You now know that in a similar way to how Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler, who, incidentally, still had old ideas flowing in their minds, tried to discover the laws of celestial motion by observing the heavens, and how this was continued in their spirit in more recent times, so Darwin, Lamarck and Haeckel tried to find the laws of earthly life. And what would be more natural here than to get to know the earth through the earth! You travel around, as Darwin did, you use a microscope, as Haeckel did, you rationalize, as Lamarck did, about the creatures of the earth and try to recognize the laws by which life on earth is governed. On the other hand, you can be considered a crank if you don't see it as a matter of course. The future will not see it as a matter of course at all! If you consider the straight, beautiful course of development that modern biology has taken from Darwin to Haeckel and to Haeckel's students, you will find that it has led to the formation of certain laws, especially about embryonic life. The so-called biogenetic law plays an important role, that in embryonic life, man follows the individual animal species. You know that I have often drawn attention to the biogenetic law. In order to find this, such observations were made in the hope of finding something about the life of living beings. We may say that the present time is again occupied with the dissection of these views, only that it is little noticed in lay circles. Copernican astronomy is already strongly doubted by individual more insightful people. And Haeckel's student, Oscar Hertwig, has expressed things in his last writings that are likely to call into question everything that the Darwin-Haeckel theory has brought to the surface. If you educate yourself from what is happening within the field of science, you get a different view than if you educate yourself only according to what is offered to the public in popular lectures by the usual lecturers – well, I dare not say Mauthner, how should I put it? Much is already happening in the actual specialized science, and what is given here as a future perspective is already being prepared. Only one will have to come to spiritual science, so that what is going on does not become confused, but really appropriate.

Now I must again say something that is paradoxical. By observing what is happening on earth, you do not learn anything about the earth; you will learn that one day when you read from the stars what is happening on earth. But what actually happens out there in space, that is learned through the observation of, for example, embryology and so on. One can treat this observation in turn as I have indicated before, that one observes the movements of the sky; one can enter into a relationship with the elementary beings that regulate these movements within the events on earth. Just as one will ask the heavens to explain the earth, so one will ask the earth to explain the heavens. As I said, it is still paradoxical today, but it will come, in some way it will come over this earth, that this correct view will take hold. Astronomers will establish biology by the means of their science, and biologists will establish astronomy by the means of their science. And a biology truly founded on the data of astrology will be spiritual science, and an astrology founded on the data of true embryology will be spiritual astronomy. When you consider this, you must say to yourself: Humanity does not follow a straight line of development, but moves forward, as it were, in waves, in a wavy line, up and down. And in order to prepare the right spiritual view that had to come, error had to arise, which consists in wanting to explain heaven by heaven and earth by earth in modern times. People lived under this impression.

But Goethe did not live entirely under this impression, not entirely. In a sense, Goethe had pre-Darwinized Darwinism, but his was a much more spiritual Darwinism. He did not just focus on the external sensory sequence of phenomena, but on the primal plant and the primal animal. And I have often referred to the well-known conversation between Goethe and Schiller, where Goethe, after they had seen how plants were viewed side by side at the botanist Batsch's in Jena, and Schiller found this unsatisfactory, sketched out the so-called primal plant with a few strokes. This picture by Goethe does not exist. In the introduction to Goethe's morphological writings in Kürschner's National-Literatur, which I wrote in the 1880s, I tried to trace this Goethean primal plant. You can find it there as I have traced it. Schiller, however, said: That is not reality, that is an idea. — Goethe said: Then I see my idea with eyes. He was clear about the fact that this was an intuition for him, an experience, not something thought up, something rationalized. And if you get to know Goethe that way, get to know him quite intimately, whether it is through his poetic endeavors in connection with his scientific ones, or whether it is the other way around, in his scientific endeavors in connection with his poetic ones – I have just interpretation of Goethe, one sees how Goethe does not feel quite comfortable explaining heaven by heaven and earth by earth, and how this principle of modern times is continually being broken through in his ideas. That is why it is so difficult to understand Goethe's theory of colors today, because what Goethe actually wants is an astronomical explanation of the secret of colors. And if you read Goethe's Morphology very carefully, you will see how certain things come into play that originate from the very beginnings of astronomy. This is particularly evident when you consider Goethe's essays on the spiral tendency of plants. Now, that would lead to details, which I can only draw attention to today; I just want to point them out.

Let us now raise the question: how is it that this more recent period, which we have been calculating since the clash of the Middle Ages with the modern age, since the advent of Copernicanism, Galileism, Keplerism, and which we have been following up to Darwinism, to Haeckelism, to Lamarckism, how is it that this time considers explaining the heavens by the heavens, the earth by the earth, instead of the earth by the heavens and the heavens by the earth? How is that? — It is due to a twofold seduction, in that Ahriman as well as Lucifer seduce people. In the Middle Ages, when things were being prepared, when people were heading towards Copernicanism, Darwinism, it was more of a Luciferic activity, it was Luciferic impulses that prepared that. And when Copernicanism had emerged, it was more of an Ahrimanic seduction. It is Ahriman who essentially lives in people by carrying out this reversal of people that I have spoken of. For ultimately, modern science is entirely under Ahrimanic influence. And Goethe sensed correctly when he felt that Ahriman was close to the person, to Mephistopheles, in modern times. For him it was less important to consider the relationship of Lucifer to man than that of Ahriman to man. His particular attention had to be directed towards this. The Luciferic influence was of less importance to him. For Faust is presented from the very beginning of the story as the man of modern times. The various aberrations of theology at the end of the Middle Ages stemmed from Lucifer. But Faust appears on the scene by placing the Bible under the bench and declaring himself to be a man of the world and a physician, that is, he wants to explain the earth by means of the earth and heaven by means of heaven, not as was the case with the old theologians of the late Middle Ages, who still tried, as a last atavism, to explain the wonders of the earth from the revelations of theology, that is, to explain them from heaven. In more recent times, Ahriman appeared at man's side. Those who felt this, but who were not imbued with the necessity, but only permeated with the fear of the devil, therefore blasphemed the Faust, who only followed the necessary impulse of modern times. And so the sixteenth-century Faust legend came into being, which has Faust burnt and consigned to hell because he falls prey to Ahriman. Those who still lived under the atavism of the Middle Ages gave this form to the legend, as it were. Goethe was no longer under the influence of the Middle Ages. Therefore he did not have his Faust burnt and consigned to hell. But he did pose the big question: What should actually be done?

Let us look at the matter quite specifically. What do we actually do when we explain the earth through the earth? Let us grasp it with an example that is perhaps a little removed from ordinary science and therefore perhaps closer to us. Let us take a myth or a piece of fiction and think of a commentator or an interpreter of the kind I have often criticized – you remember! Let us assume that such a commentator, an interpreter of a myth, a saga or a piece of fiction, steps before us and explains, as he says, the piece of fiction from the piece of fiction; he seeks the laws of the piece of fiction in the piece of fiction or in the myth. He can be very ingenious. There are indeed very ingenious interpreters of myths and poetry. But they all err, for one can never explain a myth or a poem by applying one's intellect to it. Oh, the things the interpreters of Hamlet have written in order to interpret “Hamlet”! And what have the interpreters of Faust written in order to interpret Faust! What have the theosophists done in order to interpret all kinds of myths! One can only get to the bottom of myths and the bottom of poetry if one knows how to direct one's gaze to where myths and poetry come from — from heaven. This again points to that future perspective. This is closer to us than to point this out in science. Myths are cited by illustrating through them, so to speak, when one has come to understand the great connections in the heavenly universe; one then allows them to be reflected through the myths, at least. And when one has insight into the cosmic laws that prevail, then one will not come to intellectual commentary skills in the face of poetry; because when one peels out of the myth and the poetry that what such intellectual commentators usually get, what actually occurs there? Yes, you can always have a certain image in front of you when a myth explainer or a poetry commentator appears in the way they do today. Something emerges, like the one who emerged in his bat form, really something bat-like and gray, in contrast to the living life that is in poetry and myth. There one also makes the acquaintance of Ahriman-Mephistopheles.

What I have just mentioned as an example could be extended to cover all the goings-on in science, although I am not criticizing science. I want to show you the necessity for it. Ahriman had to intervene for a certain length of time, otherwise the way people worked in the Middle Ages would have become one that would have allowed people to become lethargic all too easily. People like to have absolute peace, so the world admits the devil, who works and entices and, as a devil, must create - he tempts and entices and works. This intervention of Ahriman is necessary. And it is utter nonsense to have heard something about Ahriman and Lucifer and then ask: “Is this perhaps an ahrimanic influence? Is this a luciferic influence?” One must guard against this!

Goethe understood the role of Ahriman! But why did Ahriman have to play such a role in modern times? Why did Ahriman-Mephistopheles have to enter the sphere of man at all? We know that evolution proceeds in such a way that we have the so-called Lemurian time, the Atlantic time, our post-Atlantic time. We know that in the Lemurian time, the human I, that is, consciousness, was still quite inactive, still quite inactive; it is only just beginning here.

But only gradually does man become enlightened about the I-impulse that lives and moves in him. Only gradually do people become clear about their position when the I dwells in their soul, about Lucifer and Ahriman. Only gradually do they become clear, people. If we visualize the principle that must guide the future era, it presents itself, schematically indicated, as pointing towards the earth to discover the secrets of heaven, and towards heaven to discover the secrets of the earth. If one does things the wrong way, if one does things in the sense of our time, then one does not find the secrets of the earth, but out of the earth comes, instead of the laws of heaven, instead of the secrets of heaven, which should come out, comes the Ahrimanic, which approaches man, which tries to approach man. It must be rejected, because what the earth gives must not be sought intellectually in the earth, but what it reveals for heaven. Lucifer comes from the cosmic space; he must go away. If he were to approach man, it would be that what is not found in him would be sought in the cosmic space outside: the secrets of heaven itself. This relationship must be understood.

Once upon a time, people had to understand how close Lucifer is to man. It has been made possible for people to understand this in a symbol that is much more than a symbol, in a symbol that points deep into the secrets of the spiritual world. If one wants to characterize what Lucifer means for humanity as a whole, one cannot make this more intimate than by presenting the matter in such a way that Lucifer approaches the powers of woman and, with the help of specifically female powers, influences the world, and man is then seduced by woman with the help of Lucifer. This symbol had to be presented to humanity, and it had to be there when the fourth post-Atlantean period began, when people should first understand the relationship between Lucifer and man, when they should feel it, sense it, become aware of it. There is no better way to become aware of the relationship between Lucifer and man than to study the beginning of the Bible, how the serpent approaches the woman, how the woman seizes her powers and thus begins the seduction, the temptation of the world. This significant symbol was the most effective for this fourth post-Atlantean cultural period, even though it had existed earlier. The mystery of Lucifer is contained in this symbol.

The fifth post-Atlantean period had to consciously enlighten man about the Ahrimanic-Mephistophelian mystery. Another symbol had to take its place. Just as the symbol of the Luciferic tempter of woman stands at the head of the religious book, which deals with the spiritual world, and man is thereby also seduced by the arts that Lucifer performs with the help of woman, so the counter-image had to arise in the fifth post-Atlantean period: Ahriman, who approaches man, initially seduces man, and with man's help, woman. Even if it was not so brilliantly achieved in the first part of the Faust epic, the deeply moving nature of the Gretchen tragedy is often based on the fact that just as Adam is seduced by Lucifer in a roundabout way through Eve, so Gretchen is seduced by Ahriman-Mephistopheles in a roundabout way through Faust. Necessity dictated that the World Book should be contrasted with the Book of Theology: the seduced and the seducer; the seduced and the seducer; Lucifer, Ahriman. The relation of Lucifer to woman on the one hand, and of Ahriman to man on the other. This is a deeply significant spiritual connection.

And therefore this world book of Faust, in contrast to the theology book, was really created out of an inner spiritual impulse. And the newer time is called upon to find the paths between Ahriman and Lucifer. For all the forces through which Lucifer works in the world are not the same as, but similar to, the forces through which he succeeded in seducing woman. All the forces through which Ahriman works in the world are similar to the forces with which he seduces man. And just as we correctly imagine the luciferic seduction that the Bible presents to us in the Lemurian period, so we must seek Ahriman in a place in the Bible that is no longer clear because the Ahrimanic secret in the Bible is not yet revealed in the same way as the luciferic secret. While we are placing the Luciferic mystery in the Lemurian time, we must, as I have often explained, place the Ahrimanic mystery in the Atlantean time. The Bible only hints at this, not with such a clear and radiant image as that of the temptation in Paradise. The Bible only says that the impulses that came into earthly existence caused the sons of the gods to take pleasure in the daughters of men. This is only a hint at what comes in as an Ahrimanic impulse.

Goethe's “Faust” already has a certain historical significance. And this historical significance lies in what I have tried to sketch out for you today. If we want to draw attention to what spiritual science wants to become and should become for humanity, we often have to express paradoxes today, express things that seem strange to many people. But it is true. When human beings will one day arrive at a state where their science will recall the original revelation by explaining earthly life from the secrets of heaven, when earthly science will be such that the deepest secrets of heaven can be recognized in the formation of embryonic development, then mankind will have found the right relationship to Ahriman and Lucifer, and then, in a certain way, that in humanity will be realized which is to be represented in our main group in the structure, in which the representative of humanity is placed between Ahriman and Lucifer in the right gesture.

We shall have to understand more and more deeply what is contained in Goethe's Faust. But we shall need an interpretation that is not dependent on authority. Those people who want to arrive at knowledge only by making, as a lady in our society once said, “a face all the way to their stomachs” in order to express their inner soul mood will not reach their goal. It was a lady who was not accustomed to speaking German and therefore made this linguistic error. But that is not the point; it was a correct description. She wanted to point out those people who lack any possibility of developing humor in their perception of the world. If one cannot develop humor, then under certain circumstances it can become quite dire. So it will have to be that one has to find one's way in the world in the way I have characterized it. Those people who only want to approach the things of the world in a sentimental mood will naturally prefer to be able to understand a work of art such as Goethe's 'Faust' in such a way that they can make 'a face up to their stomachs' at every line. But people who want to understand Faust will have to grasp it without authority. Then they will have to work their way through the contradictions, but working through the contradictions will offer the possibility of understanding. Something like the Prologue on High is no child's play! If one is too afraid of a certain irony and a certain humor towards the world, then one easily falls prey to the greatest humorist, who is a comrade of the one who confronts us in Goethe's Mephistopheles, who is more of a burden to the Lord than a prankster, who is a somewhat more dangerous spirit of the kind that can deny.

I would like to suggest that such things, which already occupy an exceptional position in the spiritual development of mankind, be grasped more deeply. For they are also a way of penetrating into the secrets beyond the threshold, where everything is different from this side of the threshold, where everything is such that one must already become familiar with it, that some things sound paradoxical, which are spoken out of the consciousness of those facts that lie beyond the threshold to the spiritual world. The present time does not want to know much about the secrets that lie beyond the threshold to the spiritual world. Most people today are indeed always convinced that we have come so gloriously far. Well, I don't know how far people will be able to maintain this conviction through our immediate time, which has come so gloriously far and yet only lives in the consequences of what it has believed through the centuries. But even if what is proclaimed from the other side of the threshold sounds paradoxical to many people today, more and more understanding must be formed for these mysteries of existence. And much of the beneficial development of humanity into the future depends on people finding understanding for what still sounds so paradoxical in so many ways.

It may still seem foolish to the world to say that the earth must be explained through heaven, heaven through the earth. He who looks into the compelling destiny of man, which reveals itself from beyond the threshold, knows that what appears so foolish and paradoxical to people is nevertheless wisdom in the sight of the spiritual and the world. And today it may be said without becoming immodest, because when one says it out of the consciousness of the spiritual world, one already has the necessary humility to be allowed to say it, because this humility already exists in the heart , although one may have to use strength to express what one would most like to express in a gesture of humility, in a gesture of the necessary strength, which might give the appearance of a gesture of arrogance. But only an Ahrimanic view could find fault with that, confusing humility and arrogance in this case. More about that another time.