The Rudolf Steiner Archive

4. From Paracelsus to Goethe

[ 1 ] It was on a beautiful September day this year that my work took me to Zurich. And since I had a day off between workdays, I traveled with some friends to Einsiedeln, a town near Zurich. This is a Benedictine abbey that was founded in the early Middle Ages and has attained a certain fame due to various circumstances. On that September day, it happened to be what is known in Catholic regions as a pilgrimage day, a pilgrimage festival. Einsiedeln was prepared to receive a large number of pilgrims and was gearing up for the bustling activity typical of Catholic pilgrimage sites. I, too, wanted to make a sort of pilgrimage at that time, but not directly to Einsiedeln itself, rather from there to a neighboring site. We took a carriage, and we said we wanted to go to the “Devil’s Bridge.” On a rather bumpy road, going up and down hills, we finally arrived there and found a fairly modern inn that had been built only a relatively short time ago. At this inn there is a plaque that reads: “Birthplace of the physician and naturalist Philippus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, known as Paracelsus, 1493–1541.”

[ 2 ] That was initially the destination of my pilgrimage: the birthplace of the famous—or, one might say, in many respects infamous—Theophrastus Bombastus Paracelsus von Hohenheim. At first, one saw a remarkable spot where many paths crossed, surrounded by a truly lush field of plants and abundant flowers; and at the very moment we were there, the place was also particularly teeming with the herds of livestock that are still so commonly encountered in Switzerland. One could sense something quite special in the uniqueness of nature, the kind that can hardly be found anywhere else in Europe except in Alpine regions. Nature there has a quality as if the plants were speaking their own language, as if they wanted to tell you something, as if they could become quite talkative. The place itself is also so well suited to becoming one with what the spirit of nature has to say.

[ 3 ] And the image of a boy arose before my mind’s eye—a boy who had grown up in that natural setting during the first nine years of his life, who had in fact been born in a house that once stood there and was later replaced by the new one mentioned above. For in the fifteenth century, the old physician Bombast von Hohenheim lived at that very site, and the young son of that Bombast von Hohenheim was none other than the future Paracelsus. One could truly imagine oneself in the place of that boy, about whom one knows how intimately he had been at one with all of nature from his earliest childhood. One could picture the boy in this natural setting, could imagine him engaged in his intimate, childlike conversations with the plants. In a certain sense, the outward configuration certainly still reflects what that boy, Paracelsus, must have said to himself countless times from early morning until late evening—except during those times when he accompanied his father on the walks the latter undertook to neighboring towns. And it can certainly be taken as a given that even with the little boy in the midst of the nature of that time, his father was able to exchange many interesting thoughts on the certainly intriguing questions that the child was already capable of asking about what nature reveals directly through experience. Much of what later matured in that boy—as we can see in the life of Paracelsus—appears to us in a childlike form when we consider the image of the old, staid yet highly knowledgeable licentiate, the old Bombast von Hohenheim, leading by the hand the inquisitive boy, intoxicated by nature.

[ 4 ] As this image arose in my mind, I was reminded of another image—one I had, however, already had many years ago, when I stood in Salzburg in front of a house where a plaque indicated that Theophrastus Bombastus Paracelsus von Hohenheim had died in that modest house at the age of forty-eight. Between these two images, this eventful, truly unique life unfolded before me.

[ 5 ] If we take a closer look at Paracelsus’s life, we find—though still very much in keeping with the spirit of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries—a profound understanding of nature arising within his soul, which then developed into the science of medicine, philosophy, and theosophy. A profound understanding of nature that cannot be measured against what is given to us today in terms of external knowledge of nature through experimentation, reason, and intellect, but rather stems from the deeper powers of the soul—clairvoyant powers of the soul—whose true nature we have already been able to hint at in the lectures previously given in this series. But what awakened these deeper powers of the soul in Paracelsus and enabled him to look beyond what only the external senses and the external mind can perceive within nature was, in fact, brought about by his intimate fusion with nature, by the feeling of kinship between all his soul powers and that which germinates, blooms, and sprouts in nature. Even when the nine-year-old boy moved with his father to Carinthia and found himself immersed in a similarly burgeoning natural world, he was able to feel a kinship with all that lives as spirit within nature. And as Paracelsus grew up in this way, he progressed further and further toward a uniquely individual, entirely distinctive, and personal view of nature. How could it be otherwise! After all, everything that took root in his spirit was intimately connected with his unique powers and abilities, with the way he related to things, and with the way they spoke to him. That is why, throughout his life, he placed such special value on being so deeply intertwined with nature. And when he wanted to emphasize to those who became his enemies how closely his inner self was connected to nature, he often pointed this out later on. These are his words: “Take note of how I defend myself: I am not finely woven by nature, nor is it the way of my country to achieve anything with silkworms. Nor are we raised on figs, nor on mead, nor on wheat bread; but on cheese, milk, and oat bread—that is not the stuff of refined folk. Those in soft garments and those raised in women’s chambers, and we who have grown up on pine cones—we do not understand one another well. That is why even one who considers himself to be quite refined and charming may be judged to be coarse. Thus, what I regard as silk, others call “Zwillich” and “Trillich.”” He is of such a nature, he says, as are those people who have not severed their entire being from the mother soil of natural existence, but who are intimately connected to this mother soil, and from this connection he draws his strength and his wisdom. Hence, it could become his motto throughout his life: “Let no one be another’s servant who can remain alone for himself.” This permeated his entire way of being; it reveals this man to us in a vivid and soulful way. We can therefore understand that, when he later entered the university, he could not at all come to terms with the way in which the teaching was to continue—that is, what he knew about the science of medicine, which had come to him so naturally, inspired only by his conversations with nature and with his father. At first, he really could not come to terms with it.

[ 6 ] To understand what he had to endure, we must take a look at how medicine was practiced back then. Above all, what was written in the ancient traditions and texts of the early physicians Galen, Avicenna, and others was decisive. Lecturers focused primarily on commenting on and interpreting what was written in the books. This was deeply repugnant to the young Philippus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, and he felt, above all, that there was a vast gulf between the spiritual workings and creations that can be intuitively perceived directly from nature, and that which had strayed so far from it—namely, scholarly concepts and ideas. Therefore, he wanted to undergo a different kind of education. And he thoroughly underwent this different kind of education. We see Paracelsus soon leaving the university system entirely and wandering throughout all the countries of Europe—not only through all the German and Austrian lands, Transylvania, Poland, Hungary, Italy, Spain, and Portugal, but also through France, England, Holland, Prussia, Lithuania, and on to Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, with the intention of learning something everywhere he went about the way in which—to quote Goethe—“Nature lives in creation.” For what he actually had in mind was the idea: Although all of nature is a unified whole, it speaks many different languages, and it is precisely by learning to recognize how one and the same thing changes form and takes on different shapes in the most diverse regions and environments that one penetrates to the essence of its inner unity—to that which, in contrast to everything that is merely perceptible to the senses, is the underlying spiritual reality.

[ 7 ] But he did not merely want to learn how every ore, every metal, immediately after the formation of the mountains and depending on where it is found, stands out from its surroundings—in order to gain an understanding of how nature lives in its creative process—nor did he merely want to learn how plants take on different forms depending on the climate and environment; he also had something else in mind. He told himself: The entire human organism is interconnected with its environment. What a human being is—physically and spiritually—cannot be understood as the same essence everywhere; at the very least, one cannot truly understand a human being by observing them in just one place. — That is why Paracelsus traveled through the most diverse regions of the earth that were accessible to him, so that everywhere, with his gaze penetrating deeply into the spiritual realm, he could discern how human beings are related to nature, depending on how they allow the influences of the most varied climatic and geographical conditions to affect them. And only by surveying these universal differences does one arrive at an understanding of the healthy and diseased nature of human beings, as Paracelsus conceived it. For this reason, he was never satisfied with learning about any form of illness in just one place; rather, he told himself: After all, the subtle substances that make up the human organism differ depending on whether a person lives, for example, in Hungary, Spain, or Italy, and no one truly understands human beings unless they can trace these subtle substances with a gaze that penetrates to the very depths of the matter. — And when he was reproached for what he called his “high school”—what others called his vagrancy—he replied that the divine does not come to those who sit on the stove bench. He was well aware that a person must go where the divine spirit weaves and works in the most diverse forms of nature. Thus, a form of knowledge developed within him that, in the highest and most beautiful sense, can truly be called clairvoyant and individual—a knowledge he could possess only through his deep connection with nature.

[ 8 ] But Paracelsus also felt that this knowledge was so intimately intertwined with the very essence of his own inner being that he became increasingly aware that what he had learned directly from the great school of nature could truly be made clear only through an intimate manner of expression. He called nature his “book” and the various regions of the earth the “individual pages” of this book, which one reads by walking upon them. And he gradually came to regard with utter contempt those who studied only the old Galen, Avicenna, and so on, and who, through the books written by humans, distanced themselves from the book that lay spread out before him in its myriad pages as the “Book of Nature.” But he also felt that what he had been able to learn in this, his “high school,” could only be intimately clothed in words. Therefore, he felt the need not to express himself in a language that had actually become alien to the immediate life of the soul—Latin, the language in which, at that time, everything related to university studies was presented, as has just been indicated. He did not feel the need to express himself in this language, which—like the scholarship that made use of it—was alien to immediate nature; for he believed that in it he would not be able to bend and formulate the words in such a way that they could directly express what flowed forth from all being. That is why he felt a deep need to express in his mother tongue what he wanted to express. These things entailed two things. First, he did not, out of a desire for renown or out of arrogance, have a high opinion of the value of what he knew, for he was, at heart, a humble soul with regard to what arose in his soul from the great natural world. Thus, because what spoke from nature dawned upon him in his soul as in a mirror, he said: One can actually learn nothing from all other branches of medical science, but must, in the renewal of medical science, once again approach nature directly. — Hence his proud words: “Whoever seeks the truth must enter my Monarchey. Follow me, not I you; you follow me—Avicenna, Galen, Rhazes, Montagnana, Mesu&—follow me, and not I you. You of Paris, you of Montpellier, you of Swabia, you of Meissen, you of Cologne, you of Vienna, and all who lie along the Danube and the Rhine, you islands in the sea: you, Italy; you, Dalmatia; you, Sarmatia; you, Athens; you, Greeks; you, Arabs; you, Israelites. Follow me, and I will not follow you... I shall become monarch, and the monarchy shall be mine, and I shall lead the monarchy and gird your loins!”

[ 9 ] Not out of exuberance or arrogance, but out of an awareness of how nature speaks through him, he said: “The monarchy is mine!” — By this he meant the monarchy of the scientific and medical knowledge of his time.

[ 10 ] Another consequence of this was that, due to his mindset and knowledge, he soon found himself at odds with those who were the official representatives of his field at the time. First of all, they could not stand the fact that he expressed himself in German, whereas they believed it was only possible to express such ideas in Latin. In this respect, he was a complete innovator. Furthermore, they could not comprehend that he traveled through the countryside seeking to learn. Above all, they could not fathom that someone like him—who was so deeply intertwined with the very essence and workings of nature—had a vivid sense of how human beings, wherever one goes, in the development of their souls and even in the prime of their physical development, is everywhere a blossom, a fruit of natural existence in the region in question, and that one must not only observe how plants bloom and how animals thrive, but also how, in human beings who are directly interwoven and intertwined with nature, what flows in from the rest of existence finds expression in the soul. That is why Paracelsus held in high regard people who, as farmers, shepherds, and even skinners, dealt more directly with and within nature. He was convinced that what found its way into their simple knowledge contained something of a true understanding of nature from which he could learn, so that he, as it were, learned from the vagabonds as a vagabond himself. That is why he says of himself: “I have pursued the art at the risk of my life and have not been ashamed to learn from travelers, messengers, and shearers. My teaching was tested more rigorously than silver in poverty, fears, wars, and hardships.” — That was something he could not be forgiven for. And when he was later appointed to the University of Basel—as it were, by mistake on the part of the representatives of his field—one of the guild scholars noted with horror that Paracelsus did not walk the streets in the manner and attire of professors, as was customary for them, but rather like the vagabonds, like a cart driver! That was unacceptable; it brought disgrace upon the entire profession.

[ 11 ] And so it came to pass that, just when he wanted to apply what he had learned from the great book of nature, he encountered opposition from his colleagues and endured what those who face the worst envy and resistance must endure. But what was least forgivable was that, thanks to his profound insights into nature, he succeeded where others could not even imagine success, or where they had done everything in their power and still achieved nothing. It is true that when he encountered resistance here and there, he did not hold back from using the harshest words out of his proud conviction; but when one considers the circumstances under which he worked, one realizes that it was amply deserved. Whenever he was pressed to discuss one medical issue or another with this or that colleague, things got quite heated. For example, the others would speak in Latin, which he understood quite well, and then he would shout back at them in German what he considered evidence, but which they regarded as folly. And this is emblematic of the entire manner in which he clashed with his contemporaries.

[ 12 ] What he gained in insight can be summarized, if we wish to briefly outline it, in the following way. He said: Human beings, as they stand before us as healthy and sick beings, are not individual beings or a single species, but are embedded within the whole of nature. And what occurs in human beings as a healthy or diseased phenomenon can, in a certain sense, only be judged if one is aware of all the influences emanating from the great world—from the macrocosm—that draw human beings into their orbit. — Thus, human beings initially appeared to him as individual beings within the entire vast world, within the macrocosm. That was one perspective from which he viewed human beings. And he went on to say to himself: Anyone who wishes to assess how all the phenomena that otherwise unfold out there in wind and weather, in the rising and setting of the stars, and so on—how these, as it were, flow through human nature and play a part in it—must acquire an intimate understanding of everything that takes place out there in the great natural world. - Because Paracelsus did not limit himself to specialized knowledge of human beings, but rather let his clairvoyant gaze roam over the entire macrocosm—encompassing physics, astronomy, chemistry, and everything else he could lay his hands on—he regarded human beings as part of the macrocosm.

[ 13 ] At the same time, however, human beings appeared to him as highly autonomous beings, in that they process the substances of the macrocosm and, through the way they process them, live either in harmony with or in opposition to the macrocosm. Insofar as human beings are part of the macrocosm, Paracelsus regards them as the lowest, most primitive, purely physical beings. But insofar as human beings do receive a certain sum, a certain cycle of substances and forces into their organism and develop independently, acting autonomously within them, Paracelsus saw in human beings, as it were, something he called the “Archaeus”—which was to him like an inner architect and builder—and which he also called the “inner alchemist.” And he draws attention to something that we may no longer perceive as particularly significant today, but which he recognized as deeply mysterious and enlightening: how this inner architect, this inner alchemist, transforms external substances that bear no resemblance whatsoever to what human beings need as substance within themselves—how he transforms milk and bread into flesh and blood. This struck him as a great mystery. It expressed what he saw as the work of the inner alchemist, who either blends harmoniously into the universe or places himself in opposition to it. To him, this represented humanity in a second sense—a humanity capable of harboring within itself such an inner alchemist, who can either transform substances into poisons that destroy the organism or into those agents that develop the organism in an appropriate manner and bring it to full flowering.

[ 14 ] Then he distinguished a third aspect: that which constitutes the human being, apart from the entire external world. Here, Paracelsus discovered something that could already be hinted at here: that human beings, in their entire constitution, are such that the interplay of forces and organs constitutes a small world, a microcosm, an image of the greater world. It should be noted that, for Paracelsus, this is distinct from the first perspective. According to the first perspective, the human being is, insofar as the currents of nature flow through him, a part of nature. Insofar as, in his third perspective, the individual parts of nature interact, he finds in the blood and heart systems, the nervous and brain systems, and the interplay between the blood and heart and between the nervous and brain systems, a reflection of what is depicted figuratively in nature through the mutual relationship between the sun and the moon. And in the other organs, he finds an inner kingdom of heaven, an inner structure of the world. To him, the outer structure of the world is like a great symbol that is repeated within the human being as a small world. And in a disorder that can arise in this small world, he sees a third way in which a person can become ill. He saw a fourth perspective in what is present in passions, emotional stirrings, desires, and drives that exceed a certain measure—for example, in anger and rage—which then in turn affects the physical constitution. And finally, he saw a fifth aspect—one that is hardly acknowledged today—in the way human beings are integrated into the course of the world, and how the causes of illness can arise for them from the entire course of spiritual development.

[ 15 ] Thus, Paracelsus developed five perspectives that did not arise from a theoretical approach, but rather from what he saw as human nature—insights that emerged from his direct observation of the relationship between human beings and nature. By focusing, on the one hand, on how human beings are situated within nature and on the way the individual parts interact—not through intellectual reasoning but by allowing them to take effect upon him through his clairvoyant gaze—Paracelsus was able to relate to the sick person in a very special way. What was unique about him was that he related to the whole world not with just one, but with all the powers of the soul. Hence his beautiful saying: “Through the mind we come to know God the Father in the world; through faith we come to know Christ, the Son; and through the imagination we come to know the Spirit.”

[ 16 ] Just as our understanding of healthy and sick human beings emerges from these three perspectives, so he wanted to place human beings before his soul. But he did not want to look merely at human beings; rather, he wanted to observe how the individual things in nature are related to one another and, in turn, to human beings. Through this, the distinctive nature of the situation became clear to him: When he stood before a sick person, he saw how nature was at work from the perspectives just mentioned; his intuitive gaze, rising from the depths of his soul, revealed to him the irregularities of the substances and the irregularities of the organs. He had the whole human being before him. He could not clothe in abstract words what arose before him, what he experienced in the presence of the sick person; he could not reduce it to a formula; but he immersed himself in the other, in the sick person. He did not need a name for the illness; rather, as he immersed himself in it, something entirely new opened up to his gaze: how he should combine the substances, how he had to assemble the materials he knew from nature so that he could find a remedy for this illness. But it was not only the psychological realm into which he immersed himself, but also the moral, intellectual, and spiritual realms. Call him, if you will, a vagrant; regard what he did, perhaps, as charlatanism; emphasize all of that—how he was stripped of all resources, how he had to go into debt, and so on. But let us not forget how he also possessed the selflessness to become completely one with the disease he was confronting.

[ 17 ] Paracelsus was therefore able to say: Even if he used everything that nature provided him for the sick person, the most important remedy would be, first and foremost, love. It is not substances that heal, he said; it is love that heals. - And love also flowed from him to the sick person, for he saw himself completely transported into the nature of the other person. The second thing that necessarily arose from his particularly intimate relationship with nature was that, in every single case, he saw the remedies he applied as effective; he saw their powers unfold within the human organism. From this came the second: confident hope. He called love and hope his greatest healing powers, and he never set to work without love and hope. He was the man who wandered about as a vagrant, completely imbued with the most selfless love. In doing so, however, he often had strange experiences. His love went so far that he healed those who had no money free of charge to the greatest extent. But he also had to make a living. Some people often cheated him out of his fee; well, then he simply moved on, not making a big deal of it. However, this also led to conflicts with those around him. For example, the following incident occurred. While he was in Basel—for he was later appointed, as if by some mistake, as the city physician there—he had performed many famous cures. On one occasion, he was summoned to see a canon named Lichtenfels, who suffered from an illness that no one could cure. Paracelsus had stipulated a fee of one hundred talers if he were to cure him; the canon agreed to this. Paracelsus then gave him the appropriate remedy, and after three or four treatments, the illness was cured. The canon then said that if it had been that easy, he would not pay the one hundred talers—and Paracelsus was left empty-handed. To set an example, he even sued the canon, but the Basel court ruled against him: he was ordered to honor his fee agreement. After that, as the story goes, he had malicious leaflets distributed against the court and especially against the canon. This caused a rift. Then a friend pointed out to him that his stay in Basel was no longer safe. And so he fled Basel under cover of night. Had he walked out of the city gates even half an hour later, he would have ended up in prison.

[ 18 ] Anyone familiar with this man’s extraordinary life will understand the deeply moving impression conveyed by the portrait from Paracelsus’s final years: a portrait that reveals a face in which much of his spiritual nature is expressed. Much has been lived and much has been experienced, yet at the same time, life has dealt this soul and this body a harsh blow. In this suffering, relatively young man—with his aged features, wrinkles, and baldness—one can see, on the one hand, the struggle and striving, the very essence of the entire course of human evolution, that lay within Paracelsus; and on the other hand, the tragedy he had to endure as a man who stood so firmly in opposition to his time. And even if it is only a legend, even if what is said to have happened in Salzburg—that the Salzburg physicians once decided to incite one of his servants to push Paracelsus off a height, causing his death, after which his body was carried into his house—is not to be taken literally, —even if it is not true, one must still say: Paracelsus’s life was such that there was no need to split his skull open; they made his life so miserable, so bitter, that we can fully understand his early death. — If we wanted to picture him more vividly, he would have to be described in many more details and nuances.

[ 19 ] A man like Paracelsus made a deep impression on all those who sought the path to the spiritual worlds in the period that followed. And anyone familiar with Goethe’s life can sense that Paracelsus—whom Goethe came to know at an early age—also left a profound impression on him. For there was something in Goethe—as there was in Paracelsus—that one might call a deep intertwining with the surrounding nature. On another occasion, I have already emphasized how Goethe, as a seven-year-old boy, demonstrated his intertwining with nature by rejecting all the religious explanations about nature he had heard from those around him and building his own altar. He took his father’s music stand, placed stones from his father’s collection and plants on it, waited for the morning sun to rise, focused the sun’s rays with a magnifying glass, placed a small incense stick on top, and lit it with the magnifying glass to kindle a sacrificial fire ignited by nature itself, and thus offers a sacrifice to the God of great Nature. This oneness with Nature emerges so early in Goethe and later unfolds into the great, even clairvoyant ideas about Nature. And we see this way of thinking continue to take effect in the Goethe who is already in Weimar, in the prose hymn “To Nature”: “Nature! We are surrounded and embraced by her—unable to step out of her, and unable to penetrate deeper into her. Uninvited and without warning, she draws us into the circle of her dance and carries us along until we are weary and slip from her arms... .”

[ 20 ] We also see many similarities between Goethe and Paracelsus in other ways. For example, we see how he becomes a true student of nature in botany and zoology, how, on his journey through Italy, he seeks to intellectually grasp the essence of natural objects by observing how the individual manifests itself in its diversity. It is beautiful to see how he observes the innocent coltsfoot—which he knows from Germany—as it appears transformed. There he learns how external forms can express the same essence in the most diverse ways. “Thus we see how he—seeking unity in diversity everywhere—sought to recognize the One as the Spirit.” And significant is the statement Goethe sent from Rome to Knebel in Weimar on August 18, 1787: “Based on what I have seen of plants and fish near Naples and in Sicily, if I were ten years younger, I would be very tempted to make a journey to India—not to discover anything new, but to view what has already been discovered in my own way.” He sought to intuitively and spiritually perceive, in the proper way, what unfolds in the sensory world. Paracelsus focused on the spirit in nature; Goethe focused on the spirit.

[ 21 ] No wonder, then, that when he became acquainted with the life of Paracelsus, this life of Paracelsus came to life in Goethe’s soul alongside the life of Faust. When we allow Goethe’s life to make a particular impression on us, then his Faust stands before us—not merely as the Faust of the sixteenth century, who in a certain sense is a kind of contemporary of Paracelsus—but Paracelsus himself stands before us, just as he influenced Goethe. In the figure of Faust, we have something to which Paracelsus contributed. Let us just consider the answer to the question: Why did Goethe become fascinated by Faust?—We are told in the legend of Faust that he set the Bible aside for a while, became a doctor of medicine, and wanted to study the forces of nature. In Paracelsus, we see that he remained faithful to the Bible and was even a scholar of the Scriptures, yet we also see how he “set aside” the ancient medical authorities—Galen, Avicenna, and so on—even burning them at one point, and turned directly to the Book of Nature. This was a trait that made a great impression on Goethe. And furthermore: Do we not see a similar trait when Faust translates the Bible into his “beloved German” so that what comes from it can flow directly into his soul, and when Paracelsus translates what he considers to be natural science into his beloved German? And we could cite many other examples that would show how something of the resurrected Paracelsus lived on in Goethe when he created the character of Faust. Indeed, one might say: In Faust, —Goethe merely transposed it into the ideal realm—what often took place between Paracelsus and his staid father when they went out together, in the passages where Faust recounts how he used to spend time with his father. In short, Paracelsus can come to life before our eyes when Faust, as a figure of Goethe’s creative work and Goethe’s art, makes an impression on us.

[ 22 ] With these two figures side by side, we are confronted with something that demonstrates, in a no less peculiar way, how Goethe was able to create something entirely different from both the Faust character and the sixteenth-century figure of Paracelsus. Let us consider Goethe’s Faust: he is dissatisfied with what the various sciences—medicine, theology, and so on—can offer him. Yet Goethe cannot portray this Faust in such a way that we see that immediate immersion in nature before us. It is not that Goethe could not have done so, but there must have been a reason why he did not. Why did he not do so?

[ 23 ] What is immediately striking—and this is not merely an external circumstance or fact—is that Paracelsus, a man whose soul was inwardly harmonious and at one with the spirit of nature, died around the same time that we can imagine Faust uttering the words:

[ 24 ] Alas, I have now studied philosophy,
law, and medicine,
and, unfortunately, theology as well!
I have studied them all with great diligence ...

[ 25 ] And whatever Faust experiences from this point on, he experiences at an age that Paracelsus never reached in the physical world. Thus, Goerhe presents us, as it were, with a kind of Paracelsus starting from the age at which Paracelsus died—but a Paracelsus who was unable to grow into the living spirit of nature.

[ 26 ] And how does he present this to us? Although he shows that Faust has gained a deep understanding of nature—and even a sense of kinship with it—it is different from how it was with Paracelsus. We sense this when Faust addresses the spirit of nature with these words:

Sublime Spirit, you gave me, gave me everything,
That I asked for. You did not in vain
Turn your face toward me in the fire.
You gave me the magnificent natural world as my kingdom,
The power to feel it, to enjoy it. You do not
do you permit me only to gaze coldly and in wonder,
but you grant me to look into its deep bosom
as into the bosom of a friend.
You lead the procession of the living
past me, and teach me to know my brothers
in the silent bush, in air and water.

[ 27 ] In a certain sense, Faust grows together with nature, since he was previously separated from it. But it cannot be shown that Faust penetrates the details of nature as vividly as Paracelsus did; it cannot be shown that this also occurs directly as he addresses the sublime spirit of nature in this way. Goethe cannot show us how Faust would become one with nature; rather, he must show us a purely inner development of the soul. Faust must undergo a purely soul-spiritual development in order to thereby reach the depths of the creation of nature and the universe. Thus, in Faust’s journey—even though it often recalls Paracelsus—we see that everything Faust experiences is lived through in the moral, the intellectual, and the life of emotional stirrings, and not as with Paracelsus, in whom the sensory threads, as it were, reach directly out into nature. And it must come to this: that Faust can rise to selflessness and a deep love for the spiritual at the end of the second part—not by merging with nature, but by, as it were, distancing himself even further from it. Goethe has Faust go blind:

The night seems to penetrate ever deeper,
But inside, a bright light shines.

[ 28 ] Faust becomes a mystic, a figure who develops the soul in every direction, who finds in the forces of Mephisto the very antithesis of all the soul’s resistances. In short, Faust must develop purely within his soul; he must awaken the spirit within his soul. Then, when this spirit is awakened from within—not, as with Paracelsus, through direct communion with nature—even in Faust, the sensory realm is destroyed to the extent that he goes blind and can no longer see physically:

Only inside does a bright light shine.

[ 29 ] Faust comes to realize—as we see from the poem’s conclusion—that when a person develops their inner soul forces, the spirit that reigns in nature also stirs these inner soul forces. And when this spirit is sufficiently developed, then human beings attain direct access to that which, as the spiritual, permeates both humanity and nature. So says Faust at the end.

[ 30 ] Thus, in order to lead his Faust to the same goal that Paracelsus reaches, Goethe has Faust undergo an inner spiritual journey. When one reflects on what prompts this, one comes to realize how the forces of time determine the successive epochs of development—that is, historical life. One then comes to recognize the significance of the fact that the year of Paracelsus’s death lies shortly before that great upheaval brought about in the external natural sciences by the work of Copernicus. Paracelsus’s life still fell within the era when it was considered correct that the Earth stood still in the universe, that the Sun revolved around it, and so on; this view still influenced Paracelsus himself. It was only after his death that a completely different way of viewing the solar and cosmic systems emerged. The ground was literally pulled out from under people’s feet. Anyone today who takes the Copernican model of the universe for granted has no concept whatsoever of the upheaval that ensued when the Earth was “set in motion.” One might say that the ground beneath people’s feet literally shook. But this also meant that, for those at the height of their education, the spirit no longer flowed into the soul in its immediate form—like a fragrance—as it had with Paracelsus. Had Copernicus remained limited to what the senses perceive, he would never have established his cosmological system. Because he did not trust the senses, he was able to establish his world system by going beyond sensory appearances through intellect and reason. Such was the course of development. Human beings had to develop their spirit and reason directly. And the times since the sixteenth century have not passed without effect.

[ 31 ] Since Goethe had to elevate his Faust from a sixteenth-century Paracelsus-like figure to an eighteenth-century Faust-like figure, he had to take into account that human beings can no longer relate to nature in such a direct and primitive way as Paracelsus did. Consequently, Faust became a figure who could not discover the forces of existence or the meaning of being through a direct, organic connection with nature, but rather through the hidden forces from the depths of the soul. Yet at the same time, the essential truth becomes clear to us: that the flow of existence does not pass human beings by without meaning. Paracelsus, as a great, towering figure, is a son of his time. And in Faust, Goethe poetically created an image, a figure, whom he shaped in a certain direction to be a son of his time—one who learned to apply reason and intellect to the natural sciences of his era, and who was also able to bring out the mystical. Therefore, it must be said: The fact that Goethe felt compelled to present not a Paracelsus-like figure but a different one reveals the entire turning point in the development of European humanity from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. The significance of such a turning point is evident even in the greatest geniuses, and therein lies the difference between these two figures. And for anyone who wishes to get to know Goethe, it is of the utmost interest to examine his work through the character of Faust, for his Faust reveals more about him than any of his other characters.

[ 32 ] If we consider spiritual science or anthroposophy in light of these observations, it can feel a deep kinship with Goethe, but in a different way, it can also feel a deep kinship with Paracelsus. How so with Paracelsus? Paracelsus was able to gain the deepest insights into nature through the developed powers of the soul by direct engagement with nature. But the era in which one who progresses with development can reach the foundations of existence as Paracelsus did has been over since Copernicus, Galileo, Giordano Bruno, and Kepler. A new era has dawned. In Faust, Goethe portrayed the archetype of this era, in which one must work with the hidden powers of the soul so that higher sensory powers may arise from the depths of the soul. Just as the eyes see colors and the ears hear sounds, so will these higher senses perceive what exists as spirit in the environment—and what cannot be perceived as spirit by the ordinary senses. Thus, modern humanity must experience the deeper powers of the soul not through a fusion with nature, as was the case with Paracelsus, but by turning away from nature. But when he reaches the point where he draws these deeper powers up from within his soul, where he can develop an understanding even for that which, as the spiritual and supersensible, lives and weaves invisibly behind the visible, behind the sensory realm of nature—when human beings work the Faustian out of themselves—then the Faustian ultimately becomes a clairvoyant insight into nature. And in a certain sense, as the inner spirit unfolds, every human being can experience—without having to go blind, of course—that even if they cannot believe they have solved the mysteries of the world through what their eyes and external senses teach them, they can nevertheless say: “A bright light shines within!” And this is something that can bring us closer to the Spirit that reigns in all things.

[ 33 ] Thus, the path from Paracelsus to Goethe is of the utmost interest when one sees, in the figure of Faust, what emerges from Goethe’s soul—that which is essential for Paracelsus and also for Faust: that human beings cannot penetrate the depths of the world and the laws with which the eternal, immortal human spirit is connected cannot be penetrated through the external senses, but only through a direct oneness with nature, as in Paracelsus, or through the development of the higher senses, as Goethe—albeit only poetically—suggested in his continuation of the sixteenth-century Faust figure. Thus, what Goethe later emphasized for his Faust with the words increasingly became a guiding principle for Paracelsus as well:

Mysterious in Broad Daylight
Nature cannot be stripped of its veil,
And what it chooses not to reveal to your mind,
You cannot force from it with levers and screws.

[ 34 ] This does not mean—neither in the Paracelsian nor in the Goethean sense—that one cannot explore the spirit of nature, but rather that the spirit in nature reveals itself to the spirit awakened in the soul, yet not to the instruments we fashion in the laboratory, not to levers and screws. That is why Goethe says: “What nature may not reveal to your spirit, you cannot force from her with levers and screws.” But it can reveal it to the spirit. That is the correct interpretation of this statement by Goethe. For Goethe, in creating a reflection of Paracelsus in Faust, was in complete agreement with Paracelsus, and Paracelsus must have accepted Goethe’s insightful words as valid:

Whoever wishes to recognize and describe something living,
Must first seek to drive out the spirit,
Then he holds the parts in his hand,
But, alas, the spiritual bond is missing.

[ 35 ] And Goethe adds—specifically when he first conceived of Faust, at a time when he himself was still youthfully impetuous and, in the spirit of Paracelsus, did not belong to the “cat-clean and super-refined”:

Chemistry is called the “Encheiresin naturae,”
It drills a hole in itself and doesn't know how.

[ 36 ] He later changed that to:

Mocks herself and doesn't know how,

[ 37 ] as we find it now in Faust. This means, however, that no one who approaches nature without having developed higher powers of cognition can discern the principles of nature, nor can they understand how the immortal spirit of man is connected to nature, how it resembles nature, or, to use Jakob Böhme’s words, where it “originates.”

[ 38 ] If one traces the path from Paracelsus to Goethe, as we have attempted to sketch it today in a few strokes, one finds that Paracelsus and Goethe are both ardent proponents of the other principle—not the principle of those views of nature and the world that they sought to refute with Goethe’s maxim:

Whoever wishes to recognize and describe something living,
Must first seek to drive out the spirit,
Then he holds the parts in his hand,
But, alas, the spiritual bond is missing.

[ 39 ] No! Paracelsus and Goethe approach nature and the human being in such a way that the following applies to them:

Whoever wishes to recognize and understand that which is alive,
Must seek to find the light of the spirit in the very essence of things.
Then he holds the pieces in his hand,
And he will never fail to recognize
The truth of things in their spiritual bond.