The Rudolf Steiner Archive

6. Faust’s Journey Through the World and His Rebirth from German Spiritual Life

[ 1 ] Although I have already referred to Goethe’s *Faust* in this column this winter when discussing Goethe’s worldview in connection with German idealism, I will nevertheless take the liberty of presenting you today with another reflection on Goethe’s *Faust* as a sort of introduction to the six lectures I have announced. For I believe that, in connection with Goethe’s *Faust*, so many perspectives arise—particularly for the worldview I am representing here—that they will shed light on what will be discussed here in the coming weeks. However, even today I will only be able to offer aphoristic remarks on the topic I have set for myself, for this topic is so rich in itself that one can never get further than highlighting this or that perspective from among a multitude of them. And, of course, it follows that any such consideration of Goethe’s *Faust* is bound to be one-sided. But that is a trade-off one must accept.

[ 2 ] After a study of Goethe’s *Faust*—which, one might say, had taken more than half a century—my old friend and teacher Karl Julius Schröer concluded the third edition of his *Faust* edition in 1892 with a preface containing the following words: “Only the German way of thinking was destined to solve the Faust problem.” And it is essentially these words that I would like to take as the starting point for my reflections today.

[ 3 ] According to a view certainly worth considering—that of Herman Grimm, who was so deeply immersed in all that Goethe had strived for and experienced—the “Faust problem” will, throughout the centuries, indeed millennia, serve as the starting point for recurring reflections on Goethe’s *Faust*, which will undoubtedly differ significantly from one another as time goes on. It was precisely in this regard that Herman Grimm made a very significant statement as early as the 1870s, which I would now like to quote by way of introduction. Herman Grimm said at the time: “We are still too deeply immersed today in the world that Goethe sought to portray allegorically and symbolically in the second part of the play; here, too, later generations will be the ones to gain the proper perspective.” One might say that the perspective Herman Grimm takes here is as humble as it is lofty; for he speaks entirely from a deep awareness of everything that has actually been poured into this “Faust” epic, which Goethe gave to the world. And Herman Grimm goes on to say: “We would be doing Goethe’s Faust an injustice if we took it only for what its richly varied experiences make it appear to be, and a time will yet come when the interpreters of this poem will concern themselves more with what lies within it than with what merely attaches to it.”

[ 4 ] Certainly, such statements must still hold true in many respects today. Nevertheless, decades have passed since Herman Grimm wrote these words, and today we may perhaps already harbor the hope—based on the various ways in which intellectual life has deepened—that we can gain a deeper understanding than was possible back then of what lies within *Faust*, as opposed to what is attached to *Faust*, as Herman Grimm puts it.

[ 5 ] And so today I would like to direct your thoughts primarily to how that journey through the world took shape—the journey that Faust, one might say, sets out on from his study into the world in which people more or less live, and how, through this journey through the world, he gradually rises to the perspectives of a worldview in the broadest sense of the word—one that represents a kind of rebirth of Faust from German intellectual life, insofar as Goethe himself participated in this German intellectual life. I believe that one can only arrive at a full understanding of the character of Faust and his significance for life if one seeks from the outset to delve into what is actually alive in Faust’s soul at that very moment when we encounter him as a poetic figure at the beginning of the *Faust* poem, as it was ultimately completed by Goethe. In a profoundly significant way, what lives within Faust is expressed right from the opening monologue: “I have now, alas, philosophy...” and so on. But one must, in turn, by delving into all that unfolds later in the course of the events depicted in the *Faust* epic, shed a kind of light on what is alive in Faust’s soul at the very moment the epic presents to us at its beginning. Faust stands there facing the sciences, which he lists as the sciences of the four faculties, and we see quite clearly from what he says just how dissatisfied he is with the sciences that have thus far influenced his soul. We may ask: What does Faust actually want? And perhaps this question can only be adequately answered if, as the first monologue progresses, we take into account that Faust—despite having absorbed the sciences of the four faculties—has devoted himself to magic, that is, to what he has come to know as traditional, conventional, historical magic from the various writings on the subject.

[ 6 ] I would like to point out right away that a misunderstanding regarding the first Faust monologue can easily arise from the belief that the moment in which Faust surrenders to magic coincides with the moment in which he delivers this monologue, and that Faust had not yet surrendered to magic before those feelings—which come to life in this monologue—passed through his soul. That would be a misunderstanding and would make it extremely difficult to understand Faust’s entire state of mind. Rather, one must assume that, even at the very moment he expresses his feelings in that monologue, Faust is already deeply immersed in what he refers to as magic; that he has conducted extensive studies of this magic. And we can demonstrate this from the *Faust* poem itself. When later the poodle, which accompanies Faust on his Easter walk, takes on various forms and Faust does not know what lies within this poodle, Faust reaches for a book on magic and the occult and now knows exactly—at least in his own opinion—how he can uncover the secret of this poodle through all manner of incantations found in these books, and how he should behave in the presence of this spiritual apparition that he believes he is facing. One must therefore assume that Faust has, in a sense, already become well-versed in these matters.

[ 7 ] Now we learn that Faust takes a magical book and that he intends to address his dissatisfaction by first turning to the spirit of the greater world—the spirit of the macrocosm, as he puts it. What does he actually want? Perhaps one can only discern what he wants by delving a little into Goethe’s own soul, which, after all, imbued the character of Faust with its own feelings—at least during the period when the first Faust monologue and the first parts of *Faust* were written.

[ 8 ] What kind of world and worldview did Goethe actually face? Goethe was confronted by a worldview that could be built upon what had been discovered about the natural and spiritual life. He was right in the midst of a worldview that fully took into account the scientific revelations as presented by Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and so on. Goethe was confronted with what one might call, in the spirit of Kant, the worldview of the Enlightenment—the penetration into the mysteries of nature through the intellect, which synthesizes both sensory experience and the lessons of history. Goethe was surrounded by a worldview consisting of the ideas that arise in the human soul—ideas which, as we say today, are grasped in a sound manner by normal reason and which go beyond what normal sensory experience can discern. How could he, with his own needs, immerse himself in the worldview that such a philosophy of life could offer? He could not fully immerse himself in such a worldview; for what Goethe ceaselessly sought—and what he now has his Faust seek—is a direct fusion of the innermost soul with that which interweaves and permeates the world outside, a fusion of the soul itself with the mysteries of the world, with the deeper revelations, and with the forces and beings of the world that are revealing themselves.

[ 9 ] Now Goethe’s Faust stood in such a way toward the Enlightenment’s view of nature and the spirit of the world that what could result in a worldview of the kind just described seemed to him far removed from being able to grasp the essences that govern the world—essences he sought to grasp with the innermost powers of his soul, with which he wished to live in harmony. For what this worldview—based on the science of the time—could offer him was, at most, knowledge: something that filled the head and the intellect, but which could not identify so closely with inner human experience that one could truly, through this inner experience, enter into the forces that live and weave within nature and the spirit world. “I must seek,” says Goethe’s Faust, “to approach the innermost forces and beings of the world in such a way that, as I grasp them, my soul is immersed in the spiritual-natural weaving and life of the world; But if I grasp only what is comprehensible according to the current standpoint of a scientific worldview, then I grasp, as it were, only in a dry, sober way—through knowledge—these mysterious interconnections of the world, that which moves the world at its very core. And this knowledge can never give me the richness that lies in grasping that which allows me to live in harmony with the mysteries of the world.

[ 10 ] And so Goethe’s Faust seeks to immerse himself in a different way in that which permeates and animates the world—in the world of nature and the spirit. And since Goethe certainly never held the view—which many people hold today and have held throughout history—that whatever is alive and has been achieved in their own time is absolutely correct—in contrast to which one might say, “How wonderfully far we have come!”—Goethe seeks to build upon what has gone before, from which the present has, after all, developed. And so he also has his Faust build upon the worldview from which the worldview surrounding him took shape—a worldview that, admittedly, held the belief that through what it had achieved, one could enter into a shared experience of the mysteries of existence. What kind of worldview was that?

[ 11 ] Well, one need only pick up something like the works of Agrippa von Nettesheim or any other similar medieval philosopher to gain an insight into what Goethe’s Faust actually means by invoking the spirit of the macrocosm. Such concepts, such ideas as those that surrounded Faust in the philosophy of the Enlightenment—I mean Goethe’s Faust, not the Faust of the sixteenth century—did not yet exist at the time when, for example, Agrippa von Nettesheim was writing. Back then, people did not yet form a picture of the world in such abstract terms as they did in the Age of Enlightenment; rather, they lived by developing philosophical worldviews—I would say—through images and imaginings. But people also lived in the belief that they could bring about something through which the natural world and the spiritual world would intimately reveal what they actually are. And the worldview that emerged was interwoven with the soul’s feelings and sensibilities; in a certain sense, it was one and the same with what the soul experienced within itself. Today one would say: It was very anthropomorphic. Certainly, it was; it was the case that in what people abstracted from the world, they sensed forces that were akin to the forces of their own soul. People spoke of the sympathies and antipathies of things and similar forces in the natural world, just as they experienced them in their own inner life. But furthermore: In that era, when Agrippa von Nettesheim was writing, people had little faith in what a human being can achieve through his or her own efforts—what a human being can achieve simply by refining the forces of his or her soul life, by developing the powers of cognition in order to give them a higher form than the one the human being possesses by nature. People did not believe in the investigative power of the human soul itself; rather, they believed that through all manner of external activities—this or that experiment (though not experiments in our modern sense)—one could, as it were, give the spiritual forces weaving through nature an opportunity to reveal how they live within the facts of nature. Through all manner of rituals, people believed they could uncover the mysteries of nature. They did not believe that consciousness could penetrate nature directly through powers it acquires. It was believed that one had to perform this or that activity, carry out this or that experiment, in order—as it were, by performing magic—to make nature speak in such a way that it expresses its spirit. People sought to do this apart from human consciousness itself. People wanted to do something out there in the external world through which nature would reveal its secrets and finally articulate how the forces in nature are arranged—forces from which human beings themselves are then built up out of nature and the spiritual world. So this is precisely what people sought—what Goethe’s Faust yearns for: to live in harmony with the weaving and essence of nature itself; and they believed they could achieve this.

[ 12 ] What thus stood before humanity as the natural and spiritual world was imbued with spirit. And the development necessitated by the world had to replace it with an external view of nature—namely, the view of nature held by Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo, or what emerged from it: a view of nature from which precisely that which these medieval philosophers sought to extract from nature has been removed. In this worldview of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo—and what emerged from it—it was precisely those ideas that were the defining, decisive, and legitimate ones—the ones that Goethe’s *Faust* did not consider poetic enough, not inwardly full enough, to face the world with them in such a way that one could fully experience this world within one’s own soul.

[ 13 ] And so, at the very moment to which the first monologue transports us, there lives within Faust’s soul the urge to experience the mysteries of the world through that ancient magic—to connect the laws of the world and the essence of the world with his own spiritual experiences. And he believed he could achieve this by immersing himself in the formulas and images that, drawn from the book he takes in his hand, are meant to represent the macrocosm.

[ 14 ] But Faust—Goethe’s Faust, not the one from the sixteenth century—I emphasize this explicitly—is precisely the human being, the personality of his time. Humanity is indeed advancing in its organization, even if this is not apparent to a superficial observer. In this era, it was no longer possible to uncover the mysteries of existence in the same way as, say, Agrippa von Nettesheim. One could no longer indulge in the belief that what one attained—whether through imagination, external influence, or magical experimentation—had anything to do with what truly moves the world at its core. And so Faust finally finds himself confronted with the realization: Yes, I am trying, just as those ancients did, to connect myself with the spiritual and natural forces of existence—but what does that give me? Does it truly lead me into what lives and weaves in the natural and spiritual worlds? No, it gives me a spectacle—what a spectacle! But alas, only a spectacle!

[ 15 ] And in this sense, Goethe’s *Faust* truly represents the Goethean era. It has become impossible to reach the sources of existence in this way, to grasp infinite nature—not merely to penetrate it intellectually with ideas or natural laws, but to experience it. He cannot succeed, because the time has passed when one could believe that a true understanding of nature and the spiritual world could be attained in this way. What a spectacle! And he turns away from what the contemplation of the signs of the macrocosm can offer him. He turns to the microcosm, to the Earth Spirit.

[ 16 ] What is this Earth Spirit? Well, if one considers the entirety of what is presented in Goethe’s *Faust* in connection with the appearance of the Earth Spirit, one finds that this Earth Spirit is the representative of everything that, in the course of historical development, flows across the Earth to the greatest extent—that which acts in such a way that it flows out from it into our soul, into our hearts, into our very innermost being—that which lies in our deepest drives, that which, as it were, circles the Earth and places us humans, with our innermost selves, within its currents. Goethe himself, in a sketch he later made for his *Faust*, described the idea of this Earth Spirit, as it were, in summary terms as the “genius of the world and of action.” This reminds us once again that what Goethe addresses in his poetry as the Earth Spirit is, in fact, something that lives within the course of historical development, something that works its way into our soul insofar as we are children of a particular age, insofar as certain impulses live within us, and insofar as a certain form of that which can be attained in existence in one way or another lives within us. But this depends on how we, in a particular epoch, are situated within what flows forth from the Earth Spirit that reigns throughout all earthly ages. Thus, as it is written in *Faust*, this Earth Spirit may say:

... in the storm of deeds
I surge back and forth,
Wheeling this way and that!
Birth and grave,
An eternal sea,
A shifting weave,
A blazing life,
Thus I toil at the whirring loom of time
And weave a living garment for the Deity.

[ 17 ] Now let us consider a line—I would say, a more concrete one—spoken in *Faust* that actually often leads us astray, in contrast to the overly simplistic explanations offered of it. I do not wish to fall into the error—one into which many all too easily fall—of reading all sorts of things into a poem such as *Faust*. And I know full well that almost any interpretation one can spin fits—if one twists it skillfully enough—almost anything. I would like to try to draw everything I have to say directly from *Faust* itself. I am referring right now, at this very moment, to the phrase:

Two souls dwell, alas! within my breast,
One wants to part from the other ...

[ 18 ] One characterizes Faust as if he were immersed in all the passions of this earthly life. Of the other soul, he explicitly says that it seeks to rise from the dust of earthly life to the realms of the noble ancestors. Now, I think it is a simplistic explanation to simply say: this is the lower and that is the higher human nature. Certainly, with such abstractions one always comes close to the truth. One cannot go wrong at all, for the more abstract one is, the more accurately one will generally express oneself. But in a work of poetry such as *Faust*, what matters is capturing precisely and concretely the feelings embodied in the poem. And it does indeed seem to me that when Faust speaks of his two souls, one soul is the one that, above all else, experiences what the human inner life is—the one into which the forces and impulses of the Earth Spirit flow; the soul that perceives how impulses rise from the deep depths of human existence to fill the soul life of the individual human being. The other soul, it seems to me, is precisely the one that has been active in the pursuit of what the spirit of the macrocosm is meant to reveal—the one that seeks to rise from the mere dust of earthly existence to the realms of the high ancestors, that is, to all that is spiritual in the natural and spiritual worlds, and from which humanity has emerged not only as a historical being but as a total, as a whole being—a being of nature and history—has emerged: to the universe as it has gradually taken shape over the course of centuries, millennia, and millions of years, into which the spirits of centuries, millennia, and millions of years have imbued their impulses. This soul, then, seeks to rise up to the universe—to the spiritual ancestors from whom this human being on Earth has emerged. Certainly, as soon as one expresses such things in such sharply defined terms as I have just done, one makes the meaning somewhat one-sided again. That, too, is by no means to be denied. Nevertheless, I believe that the two directions of feeling that live in Faust’s soul—and which he describes as his two souls—are these: One of them reaches out toward the macrocosm, toward the universe, and encompasses spiritual beings as a whole, as something vast, and nature at the same time—the entire cosmos—insofar as the human being is grounded in this cosmos as a microcosm. And in the other direction of feeling, I believe I must recognize that which flows into the human soul from the current of historical becoming and makes the human being a member, a child, of a very specific time; so that, with the Earth Spirit as the antithesis of the Spirit of the great world, we are simultaneously led to that which stirs within our own soul as the striving to encompass the whole human being—in contrast to the individual manifestations that, after all, must always remain limited to the life of the individual human being. Faust believes he can identify with this spirit—which makes a human being a complete human being, specifically as a historical being—by standing face to face with the Earth Spirit. But the Earth Spirit rejects him. It refers him to the spirit he understands. And at the same time, it makes it clear to him how he is not equal to the Earth Spirit itself. What, in fact, lies at the root of this?

[ 19 ] Well, one might perhaps discern what underlies this by considering the further course of Goethe’s *Faust*. Where does Faust find himself immediately after being rejected by the Earth Spirit? He finds himself confronted by Wagner! And one may indeed find so much of the noblest humor in Goethe’s epic that one might, in a sense, be inclined to think: By rejecting Faust and pointing him toward the spirit he understands, the Earth Spirit—in a certain sense—truly directs him toward the spirit of Wagner, whom Faust indeed encounters in the very next moment. So what the Earth Spirit is actually trying to tell Faust is: First become aware of how similar what lives within you—what has been bestowed upon you from the Spirit of the Earth—is to the entire formation of Wagner’s soul!—And what emerges from this Wagnerian soul in the overall course of Goethe’s poem? Indeed, we see how Wagner continues to live on throughout the poem until a certain point, which is precisely marked for us in the second part of Goethe’s *Faust* during the classic Walpurgis Night, where that which Wagner has brought forth from his worldview, the homunculus, must dissolve into the weaving and unfolding of the entire course of world events, as Goethe characterizes it in the various figures of the classical Walpurgis Night. And so we are led, I would say, to the ideal, to the ultimate goal of Wagner’s striving. We may surely describe this bringing forth of the homunculus as such.

[ 20 ] What, then, is this homunculus? Certainly, Goethe’s *Faust*—and this is what makes it incomparably great—portrays in a magnificent, dramatic way those things that are otherwise often merely the subject of abstract philosophical contemplation. But that is precisely what makes it so great: that it succeeded, for once in the world, in truly transforming into a poetic, genuinely artistic creation that which other people can only approach through philosophical ideas. What, then, is this homunculus, this idea of the homunculus, when we set before us Goethe’s worldview, interwoven with his artistic sensibility? Wagner is immersed in precisely that worldview that had developed up to the time into which the young Goethe feels himself transported—a worldview that, in a sense, relies solely on a mechanistic view of nature and history, which emerged as an initial product of what—certainly out of necessity—Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler had to create from the old worldview. In place of the living, the organic—which in the pre-Copernican worldview was woven into the human conception of the world, into the philosophers’ conception of the world—there now arises a worldview that, more and more—and this has indeed developed to the highest degree right up to our own time—weaves together only concepts and ideas that portray the world as a mechanical entity. And so Wagner was still able to cling to the notion that an understanding of the human form must arise from the world as a whole, from the cosmos as a whole. This led him to the view that, through a correspondingly complex mechanistic interweaving of what, as mechanical laws, permeates and animates the world, human beings, too, must be created. And this creation of humanity—which introduces into the image, the conception of humanity, and into what one can sense, perceive, and experience about humanity, only that which flows from the mechanistic worldview—we see this in what represents Wagner’s ideal: the homunculus.

[ 21 ] The Earth Spirit thus clearly points out to Faust where he would actually end up if he were to remain at the level of worldview where he currently stands. He points this out clearly, and one might say: Do we not see—if we wish to delve deeper into the sensations and feelings that underlie the Faust poem—that if Faust were to remain where he stands before his journey through the world, he would end up where Wagner ends up: to conceive of human beings as a mechanism that is viable—even as an idea—only if it can be absorbed into what the world itself experiences and surges through—and toward which Faust’s soul is precisely striving to pour itself, toward a higher, experiential understanding, in contrast to the understanding that Wagner can attain, who is entirely immersed in the Enlightenment worldview.

[ 22 ] Now one must look a little into Goethe’s own soul if one wants to understand what the Homunculus’s role actually is in the entire *Faust*. If we have explored Goethe’s worldview to some extent, we know how Goethe sought knowledge in his own way and how he sought to get beyond the phenomena of nature. Over the course of many years, in the introductions to my edition of Goethe’s scientific writings and also in my book *Goethe’s Worldview*, I have attempted to describe how Goethe worked in this direction. Goethe sought, in his own way, to gain insight into what lives within the processes and entities of external nature. And, in a certain contrast to what surrounded him as “science,” he developed his theory of metamorphosis, his ideas of the primordial plant, the primordial animal, and the primordial phenomenon. What, then, was he actually aiming for with this? What he sought to achieve is intimately connected with what he wanted to pour into his *Faust*, and with what so clearly shows how Goethe strove from an entirely different epistemological perspective than the science around him. A passage from a letter, in which Goethe seeks to describe what revealed itself to him on his journey through Italy regarding the primordial plant—that spiritual image he sought in every plant and which was meant to explain to him both all plant life and every individual plant form—reads: If one has this primordial plant, if one has truly grasped what this primordial plant is supposed to be, then one has something from which one could even invent individual plant forms that could thrive quite well. — This points deeply into the heart of Goethe’s scientific endeavors. Through his scientific pursuits, Goethe did not seek to arrive at ideas like those of the Enlightenment worldview that surrounded him. Goethe sought to arrive at ideas that, in a sense, merely represent within the soul and activate the very same forces that we ourselves possess out there in the plants, in the animals, and in all of nature. Goethe wanted thereby to bring together what grows and happens within the plant, and he did not want an idea that merely appears as an abstraction in relation to what weaves and lives out there in nature; he wanted an idea about which one can say: it lives in the imagination as something that is of the same nature as what lives out there in the plant. Goethe, then, did not want to arrive at ideas of which one could say they merely represent what exists out there in the world, whereas in reality what exists out there is entirely different. Goethe wanted to arrive at ideas through which what lives out there in a natural way would come to life in the soul in a manner appropriate to the soul. That was his entire endeavor. Goethe thus sought a form of knowledge that could be described as living knowledge, as a coexistence with nature. That is to say, he wanted to be able to move through nature and its forms with the ideas he held, in such a way that these ideas would behave in a manner that represents the independent life of nature and its forms. Just as the forms of nature transform, so too should that which lives in the soul transform. Nothing should live in the soul that the soul has merely abstracted from nature; rather, the soul should have merged with nature, having lived in harmony with it. Goethe strove for a form of knowledge that he truly portrays in a wondrous and artistic way in the fate of the homunculus in the classic “Walpurgis Night.” The homunculus, in relation to human beings, is an abstracted idea, which must therefore remain confined to mere mechanism, to mere abstraction. Since Goethe’s ideas—his metamorphic ideas—are not meant to be such ideas, but rather to represent the forces and vitality inherent in nature itself, so this Homunculus—instructed by a view of nature that was even closer to nature than the one that surrounded Goethe, instructed by the natural ideas of the ancient Greek philosophers, Thales and Anaxagoras, but also instructed by the shapeshifting being Proteus—must dissolve. Just as Goethe’s metamorphic ideas were meant to unite with nature itself, so too must the homunculus unite with the events of the world. He cannot live as he emerged from Wagner’s conceptions. There, he is an abstract idea, a mere thought. He must connect with existence. When the homunculus is embraced by the living, Wagner’s role is played out.

[ 23 ] Faust must embark on a journey through the world that takes him beyond what he could ever have achieved—a journey that must unfold in the same way that Wagner’s role played out with the creation of the homunculus. And to this end, Goethe shows us how Faust does not develop as his powers of cognition those forces that lead him to the macrocosm in the sense that the macrocosm can be grasped solely in the Copernican, Keplerian, and Galilean manner; rather, Goethe shows us how Faust now desires precisely that which the Earth Spirit can bring forth from the realm of the innermost, one might also say, the lowest powers of soul-life. With the powers that can arise from this, Faust is to begin his journey through the worlds. And now we see Faust undergoing this journey through the worlds in the events depicted initially in the first part of Goethe’s *Faust*. There we see how Mephistopheles confronts Faust. I do not wish to delve here into all possible explanations of what this Mephistopheles actually is; but I do wish to address what reveals to us the necessity for Goethe to go beyond what is depicted in the first part of *Faust*. According to what we have just considered, Goethe initially portrayed Faust, so to speak, as powerless in the face of the spirit of the macrocosm. But he does not immediately portray him as equally powerless in the face of the spirit of the earth. Yet Faust—and this must be strongly emphasized—initially remains anchored in what a bygone era, from which humanity had since emerged with a more developed worldview, still regarded as something true or at least as something possible. I do not wish to go into what Mephistopheles becomes psychologically in his relationship to Faust, nor into the extent to which Mephistopheles is more or less a realistic figure or more or less a mythological one. I merely wish to draw attention to what happens to Faust under the influence of Mephistopheles.

[ 24 ] On the one hand, in ancient times, people sought to uncover the secrets of nature through magic, the power of the imagination, or external rituals. Faust cannot keep up with this—we’ll see that in a moment. On the other hand, however, there was something else connected to what I would call the search for the mysteries of the world in ancient times—something that has survived into our own era: the belief that one can fathom something of the mysteries at work within human beings by, as it were, numbing the human being’s healthy soul power—we will speak in particular tomorrow about this healthy soul power in its connection to spiritual research—and that one can bring something out of the human being that is lesser than this healthy soul power, which we might perhaps improperly, but using a term that is nevertheless understandable to us at this moment, call the normal soul power. One need only recall terms such as hypnotism, somnambulism, and all the forms of superstitious clairvoyance, and one has the entire vast realm into which we are led—perhaps in a way that is not immediately transparent—by the events of the first part of Goethe’s *Faust*. And Mephisto is simply, I would say, such an emissary of the Earth Spirit who leads Faust for a time to truly become like the medieval Faust—be it the real historical Faust, who received his doctorate in Heidelberg in 1509 and is indeed a historical figure, or the Faust of the folk tale, or one of the other numerous characters, including the Faust of the puppet play that Goethe had encountered. This Faust of the puppet play, this Faust of the sixteenth century—as he has lived on through the centuries—cannot be understood at all without taking into account the unhealthy, pathological forces of the human soul, as we must call them today—those forces of the human soul that are brought about by a dampening, dulling of human consciousness as it exists in normal life. Whether one reads the life story of Faust—the Faust who received his doctorate in Heidelberg in 1509—or delves into the *Faust* book published in 1589— one finds, on the one hand, a real personality and, on the other, a poetic one, which is, to the highest degree, what we today call—with a more or less apt word—“mediumistic,” mediumistic with all the pathological, abnormal phenomena associated with mediumship.

[ 25 ] It is not immediately apparent that Goethe intended for Faust to appear, so to speak, as a medium—from the appearance of the Earth Spirit onward until the end of the first part of his *Faust*—but what unfolds truly leads us into this realm. And one might describe Mephistopheles as the spirit who evokes within Faust’s nature a worldview that leads people to believe it unravels the deeper mysteries of existence—namely, those people who have little real confidence in full human consciousness and therefore surrender to the belief that one must first dull this consciousness, to get to the bottom of the mysteries of existence. In a book that is certainly one-sided but by no means without merit, Kiesewetter has portrayed Mephistopheles as a kind of second self of Faust’s, but not as a higher self, rather as the self one recognizes when one looks beyond that which is expressed in a person’s normal, higher spiritual life and descends into the realms of the soul where the instinctual nature—where, I might say, the sub-sensory—by no means the supersensory!—is expressed. In a way that is certainly not immediately apparent on the surface, but which nevertheless becomes quite clear to anyone who follows the events in the first part of *Faust* with understanding, it now becomes apparent that Faust, on his journey through the worlds, truly comes to recognize all that one might believe is attained through such an abnormal, subdued, depressed, somnambulistic, or—in the ordinary, trivial sense—Hellescherian consciousness. But something else is also made clear to us—something that is extraordinarily essential both for understanding the human soul and for understanding the *Faust* epic. While Faust is now immersing himself in all that can certainly be recognized through deeper, yet merely sub-sensory driving forces—which then finds expression in the witches’ kitchen, on Walpurgis Night, and so on—he is at the same time, we might say, becoming engrossed in tragic-moral aberrations, in the reign of unbridled instincts. Certainly, what we encounter, for example, in the “Gretchen” passages belongs to the finest blossoms of world literature. But perhaps it belongs to the finest blossoms of world literature precisely because the poet succeeded in portraying the tragedy that flows from human drives which are not purified by what can be called higher human nature in the true sense of the word. And Mephisto brings together for Faust a certain understanding of the world—a satisfaction derived from knowledge—with this emergence of blind instinctual nature from the depths of the soul, where human beings simply surrender to their nature without accompanying their way of life with a moral judgment of the world. This is portrayed in a grand, magnificently tragic way in Goethe’s poetry. But at the same time, it shows us how everything that plays out in the realm of what is so often called clairvoyance—we will speak more precisely about these things again tomorrow —what might be called somnambulistic clairvoyance, which arises when consciousness is dampened to a pathological state, so that the physical nature of the human being is altered and utilized in this, albeit subtle, transformation alongside the powers of cognition; how everything achieved in this realm stands precisely on the same level of human nature as the blind nature of instincts and passions. This conclusion—which many people find cruel—arises from the way Goethe depicts how the aforementioned clairvoyance, somnambulism, arises when one transforms into cognitive powers that which lives in human instincts—those instincts that have not yet been elevated to normal human cognitive capacity, the blind, unconscious instincts that, while following impulses, but not impulses interwoven with the realm of moral judgment. And Goethe seeks to show that such a view of the world, as expressed in the witches’ kitchen on Walpurgis Night, is merely the antithesis of the blind reign of the instincts, where human beings are ruled by their pathological inner life. This intimate connection between the lower human life of instinct and what is often regarded as clairvoyance—which is believed to lead to higher insights into human nature because one has no trust in normal human nature—is characterized in a dramatically magnificent way in the first part of *Faust*. And it is stated with sufficient clarity that the one who attains such clairvoyance by no means rises above the ordinary human being, but sinks below what constitutes ordinary scientific powers of cognition, sinking into the very regions of human existence where blind instincts reign. If one wishes to study the physiology of the blind instincts in greater detail, one can delve into the manifestations of somnambulists, hypnotized individuals, and mediums. But if one wishes—and we shall speak of this in more detail tomorrow—to penetrate the true higher mysteries of existence, one must know precisely that such clairvoyance does not elevate one above ordinary human beings, but rather sinks one below them, — a form of clairvoyance that Goethe, seeking not to preach morality but to portray it artistically, dramatically weaves into the aberrations of the human subconscious nature. This is what Faust had to endure during that journey through the worlds depicted in the first part.

[ 26 ] And now we see how Goethe, in a remarkable way, right at the beginning of the second part, contrasts Faust with the life of nature and the spirit. He indicates this very clearly—I would say, magnificently clearly—not, of course, with abstract philosophical words, but through the power of imagination. We shall not concern ourselves today with the question—which has indeed been raised by certain interpreters of *Faust*—as to whether a personality such as Faust can truly recover from the grave crimes he has committed in the events depicted in the first part, when, as has been said, he ventures out into the vastness of nature and experiences what is portrayed right at the beginning of the second part. We shall not dwell today on the extent to which the guilt he has brought upon himself continues to reign in Faust’s soul. It can certainly continue to reign there. What Goethe intends to depict, however, is how Faust rises above his entanglement in the sub-spiritual realm of humanity. And there, at the beginning of the second part, we see Faust placed within nature—I would say—in the healthiest way possible, and we see the spiritual world acting upon him in the healthiest way possible. For what Goethe depicts—by having the chorus of spirits act upon Faust—is really nothing more than an external dramatic representation of a process that can be described, with a more or less accurate term, as an inner process that unfolds in exactly the same way as the process unfolds when genius seizes the poet—where nothing magically acts upon the human being in the external sense, where human consciousness is not dampened, as in some somnambulistic vision, but rather where something flows into human consciousness—something that is indeed a spiritual influence, yet does not flow into a subdued or dimmed consciousness, but into that consciousness which engages with nature and the historical life of humanity in the healthiest possible way. And has Faust now, on his journey through the world, progressed further than he was, say, when he gazed upon the sign of the macrocosm and spoke of the world as a spectacle? Yes, Faust has progressed—quite considerably further! And Goethe wishes to show that Faust’s healthy nature has indeed weathered the trials that Mephistopheles has thus far brought upon him—trials that consisted in Mephistopheles’ attempt to drag him down into the sub-sensible realm, into that which dwells within human beings when instinctual forces, rather than elevated powers of insight, are directed toward any worldview. At the moment depicted at the beginning of the first part, Faust has opened the book of Nostradamus. The symbol of the macrocosm appears before his soul. He attempts to immerse himself in what could be represented to him through the words and symbols of this macrocosm. “What a spectacle! But alas! Only a spectacle!” At this moment, Faust is drawn, one might say, into a kind of pathological state of mind, in which he indeed remains—even if the word “pathological” must not be understood here in the philistine sense.

[ 27 ] Now that Faust has been placed within a healthy experience of nature and the spirit, and the spirit has taken effect on his normal consciousness, he utters another phrase—a parallel phrase, I might say, to the phrase “What a spectacle! But alas! Only a spectacle!” Faust faces the phenomena brought forth by the sunshine; but he turns away and turns toward the waterfall, which reflects in colors what the sun is capable of. “So let the sun remain behind me,” says Faust. He wants to gaze upon the reflection of what the sun brings forth. “In the colorful reflection we have life” — a marvelous intensification of the first line: “What a spectacle! But alas! Merely a spectacle!” Now Faust can grasp how what truly lives in the spiritual realm is present in what he encounters as nature, because he knows how to approach what lives in nature in the true sense of the word—the sense with which the second part of *Faust* concludes: “All that is transitory is but a parable”—comprehending through the parable what lives spiritually in nature. And so we see how, at the beginning of the second part of “Faust,” through an influence of the spiritual world upon ordinary consciousness, Faust is brought to a healthy attitude toward the world; how he now truly no longer, I might say, is no longer ensnared by the belief that one can achieve anything by returning to the old magic, and how he has now also learned that one can achieve nothing through false clairvoyance or somnambulism. He now faces the world as a healthy human being. Yet he can attain life in its colorful reflection—that is, attain what lies beyond the world of nature and history.

[ 28 ] And indeed, we now see how Faust develops more and more into what Goethe himself wanted to become. Of course, when we look at the development of Goethe’s worldview, everything appears to us—I would say—in a more abstract, philosophical form. But that is precisely, as I have already said, the magnificent thing that Goethe succeeded in expressing dramatically on the outside—something that other people can only aspire to in philosophy. And so we see that Faust is now able to place himself within the world of historical becoming, that he is capable of discerning from this historical becoming that which is eternally significant, the spiritual reality. For this, however, it is necessary that Faust now truly experience an elevation of his powers of cognition within his soul. Through what he experienced with Mephistopheles, he did not experience an enhancement but rather a dampening of his powers of cognition; he is not seeing—he has been blinded. Now, drawing from this historical unfolding, he longs to have a figure like Helena once again brought to life before him. How can he achieve this? Precisely by developing something within himself, something so beautifully and profoundly portrayed in the scene depicting the “Journey to the Mothers.” Goethe himself confessed to Eckermann that he was inspired to incorporate this “Mothers” scene into the second part of *Faust* by reading Plutarch, where it is described how a figure from antiquity, in a difficult situation, ran about as if mad and spoke to the “Mothers”—those mothers who had been designated as goddesses and were worshipped deep within the hidden realm of ancient mysteries. Why, then, should Faust descend to these mothers? Goethe expresses himself to Eckermann in a strangely mysterious way. He says that, with regard to this scene, he would have revealed the very least. We may well assume that Goethe did not articulate in full, clear, abstract terms what actually lived in his soul with full, clear awareness as his journey to the Mothers. I have spoken often about this journey to the Mothers; today I would simply like to suggest the following: When we immerse ourselves in the ancient worldview—into which Goethe places Faust—into the classical era of Greek civilization, into which he has already transported us earlier when Faust encounters Helen, —if we immerse ourselves in this ancient world, into which Faust is now also to plunge, we find that this ancient world brought forth from within itself something through the powers that were still characteristic of the people of antiquity: powers of cognition that, one might say, penetrate more deeply into the events of the world, because they were even more deeply connected to the nature of existence than the powers of cognition of the souls of the time in which Goethe lived—souls that had already become more separated from direct life in harmony with nature and had to find their way back to that natural existence. But it has also already been suggested that when a person delves into their inner life, they can find something that is not quite the same as what was previously described as the sub-sensory driving forces—those impulses that leave a person blind, yet still act as impulses; but rather that a person can dive down with full consciousness into the depths of their soul life, using nothing other than their normal consciousness, which simply delves deeper into their soul. Then, through this immersion in his deeper soul forces, he attains something entirely different from the sub-sensory soul forces of somnambulism or hypnotism—or similar phenomena of human life—that have just been described. He gains the ability to descend so deeply into his soul that he truly brings forth powers that are just as conscious and that he controls just as well as the powers of normal consciousness—powers to which he is not a slave, as he is in somnambulism or ordinary mediumship. And the fact that Faust descends to the mothers, after he has recovered to the extent described, is precisely the dramatic depiction of this descent into those soul forces which, when we grasp them within our soul, bring an inner, higher human being into contact with the outer world, so that we may perceive more in the outer world than what the mere senses or the intellect bound to the senses can see.

[ 29 ] And now we see how Faust can continue his journey through the worlds in his ascent by consciously delving into the depths of the soul’s life; and how, in contrast, Wagner is now juxtaposed with his *Homunculus*, who arrives only at the abstract idea of humanity—an idea that must blossom in life, that cannot sustain itself, and that shatters in the face of a realization that seeks to take root in the world, if it remains merely mechanistic. This is set against what Faust achieves in the ascent of his journey through the worlds. But there is something else as well! We are also clearly shown how Mephistopheles has indeed brought those forces to Faust that lie beyond the sensory realm—for although Mephistopheles does not yet come to an end, one might say, comes to a moral end—if the word may be applied here—on the classic Walpurgis Night, when he unites with the Phorkyads, those beings born of darkness and the abyss, that very abyss which represents lower human nature. This becomes quite clear and distinct to us when we truly delve into what Goethe, in his own words, has woven into *Faust*. The forces that Mephistopheles now feels a kinship with on the classic Walpurgis Night are not superhuman; they are subhuman. One cannot, through those powers of cognition that go beyond ordinary cognitive powers, arrive at a different view of the world other than one that elevates and enriches what one possesses through ordinary cognitive powers. But through the sub-sensory powers of cognition, one arrives at something that is, in essence, poorer than normal human life. And it cannot be emphasized often enough—as was also stated in *Faust*—that the life attained through a dimming of human consciousness, whether through somnambulism or mediumship, is poorer than that which a person attains in relation to the world through their normal consciousness. When a person looks at the world with their normal consciousness, they have two eyes through which to look out into the world. This represents a certain richness in relation to the sensory world. Where Mephistopheles is among the spirits of darkness, they share a single eye and must pass it back and forth between themselves. They are poorer. Mephistopheles belongs to a world—or at least feels an affinity for this world—that is poorer than the normal human world. This world can no longer really offer Faust anything, now that he himself has set out down the path to the “mothers”—that is, to the conscious, deeper forces of the human soul—to which Mephistopheles can still hand him the key, but into which Mephistopheles himself cannot introduce him at all.

[ 30 ] And now we see how Goethe, at a higher stage of Faust’s journey through the worlds, is able to properly position him in relation to the real, truly enduring spirit of the past. Indeed, Goethe has the following written next to the title of the third act of the second part: “Classical-Romantic Phantasmagoria.” It does not emerge as reality, but rather has its life “in a colorful reflection.” He grasps it with the deeper, yet conscious, powers of the human soul and then casts it off again, as depicted in the fourth act of the second part. And so, if time permitted, we could add much more that would make clear to us how Goethe has his Faust undergo a journey through the world, out of the delusions that arise when one has no trust in normal human consciousness. The ancient magic to which Faust is initially in danger of succumbing—and to which he has surrendered—has no trust in what consciousness is capable of providing, and separates from consciousness the events that are supposed to unfold out there in a magical manner through all manner of ceremonies. What takes place outside of full consciousness in a weaving and working of the spirits is said to reveal the spiritual world; but it is not what occurs in normal consciousness, but rather what takes place in the subconscious, in the dark drives, that is said to explain what surges through the world as a mystery. From this, Goethe had to lead his Faust toward what can be recognized as the spiritual world—not by impairing normal consciousness in any way, but by further developing it. This, it seems to me, is very clear—if not as an idea (as Goethe himself stated), but as an impulse that is entirely artistically shaped—and is truly embodied in Goethe’s *Faust* among many other things. From this point of view, it seems—if I may use the trivial word—truly fitting for the role of Goethe’s Faust when, having thus found the deepening of normal consciousness, has truly come to the point of rejecting all false seeking along a false, magical, somnambulistic path, and wishes to stand before the world as a human being who seeks to recognize the higher realm solely through an elevation of the soul’s powers.

[ 31 ] In the second part of *Faust*, we read:

Wretched ghosts! This is how you treat
the human race a thousand times over;
You transform even the most mundane days
into a dreadful tangle of entangled torments.
Demons, I know, are hard to shake off,
For the spiritually binding bond cannot be severed ...

And further: I have not yet fought my way into the open.
If I could remove magic from my path,
Unlearn the spells entirely,
I would stand, Nature! before you as a man alone,
Then it would be worth the trouble to be human.

[ 32 ] A human being who wishes to be Faust is one who faces the world of the spirit neither through external magic nor through an inner clouding of consciousness, and who, from this consciousness, is also able to introduce this world of the spirit into social human life, into the life of “action.” And this is portrayed toward the end of the second part of *Faust* in such a marvelous, such a magnificent way. Thus, Goethe sought in his own way to depict how a human being can truly penetrate the mysteries of existence through the development of the powers lying within him, while also clearly and dramatically portraying the errors that stand in the way of humanity.

[ 33 ] One might say that the person who seeks, through human powers alone, to enter into communion with the spiritual world truly took on a Faustian form—not because his name is Faust, but truly in a Faustian form —even in relation to Augustine, who, after all, attributes to the Manichaean bishop Faustus the ability to draw near to the mysteries of the world through an inner elevation of the human powers of cognition. As Goethe allowed the medieval Faust to take hold of him, he found a world that had, in essence, already passed judgment on this kind of Faust. The verdict had been rendered: such a person—who sought to reach the mysteries of existence solely through his own powers—must be cast off as a corrupt element from the stream of humanity. Goethe simply could not agree with this view. Goethe was clear that a human being can only truly be a whole human being if he is capable of realizing the Faustian striving—albeit not in the old way in which the Faust of the folk tale or that of the sixteenth century sought to realize it. And Goethe was able to arrive at this view because he was deeply intertwined with what, as I have already said here on several occasions, can be called idealism—worldview idealism—in the development of the German spirit.

[ 34 ] In these lectures, I attempted to portray figures such as Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel in their—albeit purely philosophical—striving to grasp the spiritual world. I have also made it abundantly clear that one need not be a dogmatic adherent of any form of Fichteanism, Schellingianism, or Hegelianism in order to truly let the full greatness of these figures—who are actively engaged in the struggle within German idealism—sink in. One should regard them as seekers of knowledge, as human beings with a specific kind of inner life. Let us look entirely beyond the specific content of their worldview. Yet they are engaged in a quest for a worldview that is intimately related to Goethe’s quest for a worldview and that, for those who can perceive the deeper connections, ultimately reveals itself as the German quest for a worldview from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—a quest destined to continue to influence German development.

[ 35 ] We know that Kant developed a worldview distinct from Goethe’s. I have also pointed this out on several occasions. I cannot elaborate on it here; I merely wish to mention it. Kant came to the view that human beings, fundamentally speaking, cannot peer into the deeper sources of natural and spiritual existence. And he stated that if human beings were to truly immerse themselves with their ideas into the fabric of worldly existence, they would need a capacity for knowledge entirely different from that which is actually granted to them. Then, their knowledge would have to be informed not merely by concepts and ideas that represent things, but by the living stream of existence itself. One can surmise that Goethe sensed this, for example, in his idea of metamorphosis with the primordial plant and the primordial animal—elements that Kant excluded from human cognitive capacity. And Kant said: Anyone who wished to embrace the belief—I am quoting imprecisely, but it corresponds roughly to the wording—that he truly looks into the sources of existence would have to embark on an adventure of reason, a kind of intuitive judgment; he would have to not only comprehend, but also contemplate through inner experience and experience through contemplation the flow of worldly existence itself.

[ 36 ] In his lovely little essay on “Intuitive Judgment,” Goethe elaborates on this Kantian idea and states explicitly: If one can rise to a higher realm with regard to the ideas of freedom and immortality—why should one not also boldly and courageously face the adventure of reason with whatever else the human soul can experience in nature and within itself?! — What, then, does Goethe actually want? This means nothing other than: Goethe wants to awaken within himself a kind of insight that enables him, with what he possesses in his soul, to truly immerse himself in the living reality of the world—not merely to know this reality, but to experience it firsthand. Goethe himself strove for such insight and for such a stance toward worldly phenomena as he dramatically embodies in his *Faust*. And Goethe had developed within himself the conviction that human beings can not only acquire knowledge that reflects a world external to them, but that they can awaken within themselves a world of imagination that shares in the flow of worldly existence; but that this is possible only if one undertakes what Kant still described as an “adventure of reason”: to draw upon the deeper powers of the soul, which are capable of perceiving more than the mere senses and the intellect limited to the senses. And what is truly remarkable is that Goethe regarded what he considered the nerve center of his own cognitive faculty as a vital impulse at the same time; that he felt compelled to solve the problem of knowledge not merely philosophically, but as a living human being; that for him, the question of what one can know about the world and with what one can act within the world of deeds—what one can hold within one’s soul as the content of knowledge and as an impulse for action in the world of deeds—becomes a problem of life itself. This is what is great and significant: that for him, the happiness and downfall of humanity depend on it; that the fulfillment of a longing that concerns the whole human being depends on it. Consequently, however, the problem of knowledge was able to become for Goethe an artistic, a dramatic, and a life problem in the broadest sense of the word. And because Goethe conceived of knowledge as something that truly leads into life, Faust in his portrayal became real—in that he, so to speak, grew together with Goethe’s worldview itself—and was satisfied in what he sought. For, did not his soul, at the very core, seek from the very beginning to live in harmony with that which is spiritually spread out in nature? In *Faust*, it is a quest from the very beginning. To realize it within himself to some extent, he needed his journey through the worlds. When he is still in his own world, in that “cursed, dreary cell”—what kind of longing does he have there?

Oh, if only you could see, bathed in moonlight,
For the last time, my torment,
Which I have watched over so many a midnight
At this desk:
Then, amid books and paper,
You appeared to me, my melancholy friend!
Ah! If only I could walk upon mountain heights
In your dear light,
Hover around mountain caves with spirits,
Weave through meadows in your twilight,
Freed from all the torment of knowledge,
Bathe myself healthily in your dew!

[ 37 ] He longs to set his soul free, to unite with all that lives in nature. He has arrived there; after his journey through the worlds, he has been reborn into what Goethe embodies and lives through as what might be called the highest, most beautiful flowering of German spiritual life.

[ 38 ] That is why one can say that Goethe truly enshrined in his *Faust* what he himself had achieved through a life of struggle for knowledge and engagement with the world—and indeed throughout his entire life, for *Faust* accompanied him throughout his entire life. There are still many mysteries in this *Faust*. But it is also part of the story that Faust, on his journey through the world, progresses to the point where—through the experiences of his own life—he matures enough to take in what Goethe himself had acquired, not as an adventure of reason, but as something one can attain by descending to the “mothers,” that is, by striving in a healthy way within one’s soul to develop the normal spiritual powers that are already present. Neither the sub-sensory nor the extra-sensory, but rather the truly supersensory is found in this way. And the fact that a work such as “Faust” has become possible within the development of the German spirit characterizes this entire German spiritual development; it determines the position that this German spiritual development must hold within the development of the world as a whole.

[ 39 ] There has always been an awareness that *Faust* encompasses more than merely what lived within Goethe. Certainly, there have always been Mephisto-like characters in the outside world; they cannot comprehend something like what lives in Goethe’s *Faust*. And in closing, I would simply like to draw your attention to one such Mephisto-like character from the outside world. To conclude, I would like to read aloud a critique of Goethe’s *Faust* written in 1822, from which you can see that *Faust* has also been judged differently than by those who try to immerse themselves selflessly in this *Faust*. One might say it is a critique that offers comfort in the face of the fact that, all too often, the Mephistophelean natures in the world stand in opposition to what seeks, in an honest and convincing manner, the sources and reasons for existence. After all, natures such as that of the person who wrote about *Faust* in 1822 are not so rare in the present day. Now that I have attempted to guide you through the journey that Faust undertook, let us also hear something of the response that *Faust* elicited from a Mephistopheles-like character. I will omit those passages that are unsuitable for a public lecture because they are too cynical. Even the prologue in heaven, where the Lord discusses Faust’s nature with Mephisto, reveals the following to this man, after he has determined “that Mr. von Goethe is a very poor versifier”:

[ 40 ] “This prologue is a true example of how not to write in verse.”

[ 41 ] And now the critic continues—in 1822, ladies and gentlemen! —:

[ 42 ] “Past ages have nothing to show that, in terms of presumptuous wretchedness, could be compared to this prologue... But I must be brief, for I have undertaken a long and, alas, tedious task. I am to prove to the reader that the notorious Faust enjoys a usurped and undeserved fame, owing it solely to the corrupt collective spirit of an *Associatio obscurorum vivorum* ... I am not motivated by any rivalry for fame in pouring the lye of strict criticism over Mr. von Goethe’s *Faust*. I do not follow in his footsteps to Parnassus and would be delighted if he had enriched our German language with a masterpiece... My voice may well be drowned out among the crowd of cheerers, but it is enough for me to have done my very best; and if I succeed in converting even a single reader and turning him away from the worship of this monstrosity, then I shall not regret my thankless effort. .. Poor Faust speaks in completely incomprehensible gibberish, in the worst rhyming drivel ever versified in quatrains by any student. My tutor would have flunked me if I had written verses as bad as the following:

Oh, if you could see, bathed in moonlight,
For the very last time, my torment,
Which I have kept watch over
At this desk so many a midnight.

[ 43 ] I will say no more here about the coarseness of the diction or the wretchedness of the versification; what the reader has seen provides ample proof that, when it comes to versification, the author cannot even measure up to the mediocre poets of the old school...

[ 44 ] Mephistopheles himself recognizes that Faust was already possessed by a devil even before the contract. We, however, believe that he belongs not in hell but in the madhouse, along with everything that is his—namely, his hands and feet, his head, and so on. Many poets have provided us with examples of sublime gibberish—nonsense expressed in high-sounding words—but I would like to call Goethe’s gibberish a “genre nouveau,” or popular gibberish, because it is delivered in the most vulgar and crude language ...

[ 45 ] The more I think about this long litany of nonsense, the more it seems likely to me I’d be willing to bet that if a famous man were to come up with the flattest, most boring nonsense, there would still be a legion of silly writers and gullible readers who would know how to find and expound upon profound wisdom and great beauty in this shallow nonsense.”

[ 46 ] And so it goes on. Finally, he says:

[ 47 ] “In short, a wretched devil who could take lessons from Lessing’s Marinelli. Following his example, I hereby overturn, in the name of common sense, Mrs. von Sta&l’s verdict in favor of the aforementioned Faust and do not condemn him to hell—which could not even cool this icy creation, since even the devil feels a winter chill in his bones—but rather to be cast into the Cloacam parnassi. By right of law.”

[ 48 ] The world looks beyond such judgments. And the world will see in *Faust* one of the deepest attempts by the human spirit not only to present the problem of knowledge and humanity in the broadest sense to people—not merely philosophically, but dramatically and in a truly vivid way—but also to explore it in the first place. And there has always been an awareness that Goethe succeeded not only in expressing, in a one-sided way, the Goethean worldview and Goethean sensibilities in his *Faust*, but—as Herman Grimm so beautifully puts it—the entire worldview of the entire century. And that is surely a statement that Herman Grimm was right to make. “We have,” he says, “a literature of our own whose purpose is to demonstrate in *Faust* not only Goethe’s credo, but the credo of his entire century.”

[ 49 ] I might also point out how deeply rooted Faust’s rebirth after his journey through the worlds is in the entire German intellectual life. The depth that German intellectual life itself has undergone is evident in the fact that the full richness of this intellectual striving could find expression in a work such as Goethe’s *Faust*, and Herman Grimm’s words are surely true: not merely Goethe’s worldview, but the worldview of the entire century. And a worldview that will live on into the coming centuries in the broadest sense has found expression in Goethe’s *Faust*. That German intellectual life was able to produce this work will remain a fact for all future generations—one that, in the face of all prejudices against German intellectual life, will be acknowledged by those who can grasp this German intellectual life impartially and objectively. By expressing, through Goethe in *Faust*, the deepest aspirations of the German spirit in such a magnificent way, this German spirit has spoken an imperishable word of insight into human life—in being, in free will, and in action—to all people throughout the future course of earthly development; a word that will remain, just as the true, profound fruits of German intellectual life will remain. Among these deepest, truest, and imperishable fruits will be what we can find in *Faust*. And so one may say: One comes to know a part of the imperishable nature of the German spirit itself by immersing oneself in Goethe’s *Faust*. And this German spirit has spoken to the whole world by being able to express that which is now hidden in *Faust*—to use Goethe’s own words again—in an “obvious mystery”: obvious, if one only seeks it. One may also apply Goethe’s own words to *Faust* itself: “All that is transitory is but a parable.” But one may expand upon this statement: In works that, emerging from the transitory, incline toward the eternal as much as Goethe’s *Faust* does, the imperishable speaks at the same time, in an eternal manner, to the eternity of human existence.