The Rudolf Steiner Archive

23. Goethe's Esoteric Answer to the Riddles of the World

Article in “Svenska Dagbladet”, No. 88, March 31, 1908

[ 1 ] Goethe’s Answer to the Riddle of the Universe. On Monday evening, in the beautiful hall of the Swedish Medical Society on Klara Östra Kyrkogata, Dr. Rudolf Steiner began his series of lectures here with the topic “Goethe’s Answer to the Riddle of the Universe.”

[ 2 ] The title may not have been entirely appropriate, since the presentation was more of an exploration of the similarities between Goethe’s worldview and modern theosophy. As is well known, this mystical view holds that human knowledge is not limited to what the senses and the intellectual faculties dependent on them have at their disposal, but that human beings are capable of training the spiritual senses that exist on the spiritual plane to a level of perfection corresponding to that possessed by the physical senses on the physical plane. For Goethe, this was a self-evident truth; from birth he possessed the faculty that enables human beings to enter into intimate communion with the divine Spirit that flows through the universe. Through this gift, which manifested itself in him from earliest childhood, he became not only the great poet but also the great naturalist. He feels at one with nature, “which creates a thousand tongues and languages through which it speaks.”

[ 3 ] The foundation of Goethe’s study of nature is Linnaeus, who, according to Goethe’s own account, exerted the greatest influence on his development, along with Spinoza and Shakespeare. It was particularly during his early years in Weimar that Goethe was deeply influenced by his studies of Linnaeus. The great Swedish researcher provided him with a manifold array of images of individual natural objects, and from these Goethe sought to find a spiritual unity. From this he derived the idea of the primordial plant and the primordial animal, for this concept became an idea for him—not a unique, sensually perceptible being—and he found that “nature had to pass through many, many stages before it rose to the level of human beings.”

[ 4 ] For him, nature becomes a mirror of the divine, and art, in its order, invents nothing other than another language of true (spiritual) truth—a higher language of nature. “There is necessity in works of art—there God is,” he writes from Italy; and in another context, he says: “I suppose the Greeks created their works of art according to the same laws as the Creator created His work.”

[ 5 ] Goethe perceived the ideas behind these things through his inner sense. For him, they were not in contrast to experience, but were experience itself, and in their light he sought the various stages of the spirit’s development leading up to humanity. In the bosom of nature, he feels as if he were with a friend.

[ 6 ] In *Faust* in particular, the great spiritual reality shines through the surface of the physical world. These sections consist mainly of elements added later during the work’s creation. Through a multitude of examples, primarily from the second part of *Faust*, Dr. Steiner sought to show how Goethe was one of the “initiates” and that many of the images he employs—as every true mystic does— symbolize realities that do not exist for the general consciousness but are recognized as such by theosophical knowledge, including the doctrine of reincarnation (the Helena episode).

[ 7 ] “Everywhere,” the speaker concluded, "Goethe leads us into a worldview that sees true reality in the spiritual realm and asserts that human beings possess the ability to come into contact with the divine, since they themselves are a drop ii of the ocean. Goethe’s life motto could also be that of theosophy.

If the eye were not like the sun,
how could we see the light?
If God’s power did not dwell within us,
how could the divine delight us?

[ 8 ] The lecture, which was listened to with rapt attention, was met with applause from the packed auditorium, which consisted largely of members of the German colony.