The Rudolf Steiner Archive

2. Women in the Light of Goethe’s Worldview: A Contribution to the Women’s Issue

[ 1 ] If I have taken the liberty today of drawing your attention to a question that is currently stirring strong emotions in everyone and seems to demand an urgent answer, and if I have set myself the goal of examining this question in the light of Goethe’s worldview, I do so by no means with the intention of delivering a lecture on literary history; rather, I hope that my remarks will awaken in you the conviction—deeply rooted in me for years—that this question can only be properly appreciated from this standpoint, from the standpoint of Goethe’s worldview. We Germans have a twofold task with regard to Goethe. One of them was once described by Berthold Auerbach, the much-loved teller of village tales, with the witty phrase: “We must be ready for Goethe.” That is to say, we must be able to immerse ourselves completely in the lofty sphere of ideas and the incomparably intimate emotional depth of Germany’s greatest genius. We must empathize with what he felt and reflect on what he thought. But that is only one aspect of the tasks we have toward Goethe. For Goethe marks the beginning of an entirely new cultural epoch in the West. A new light shines from him across the entire European cultural landscape. He has opened up new senses for us and taught us new ways of perceiving the world. These senses must soon take root within us; we must rise to these perspectives ourselves in order to continue working on our nation’s cultural development in the direction—to the extent, of course, that this lies within the power of each and every one of us—that Goethe has set forth. Anyone who does not see in Goethe this cultural beginning—from which everyone who wishes to engage in any way with contemporary culture must start—simply does not understand his own time. And I must, unfortunately, admit to you that your brothers in the heart of Europe—particularly as far as the younger generation is concerned—have long failed to grasp their responsibility toward Goethe. On the contrary, a certain frivolous mindset is gaining ground, one that turns up its nose at Goethe and believes it has long since moved beyond him, when in fact it is still far from the point where it would fully comprehend him. Goethe is dismissed as an old man who is no longer relevant to our new age. A new generation believes it possesses new ideals. Unfortunately, upon closer inspection, these ideals mostly turn out to be quite immature products, miles away from the true needs of the times, even though they seem to have been born precisely out of those times. And our time, our living present, is—more than one might believe upon superficial observation—a child of Goethe, a child of our classical spirits. Our time is the time in which the individual asserts in every direction the original sovereign rights placed within his soul by divine power. Human beings no longer wish to be treated as children; no, they wish to rely entirely on themselves, on their own insight, on their own will. They no longer seek the sacred, the divine Self in the external world, but instead plunge into the depths of their own hearts to draw God from there, to draw the strength and courage of life from there.

[ 2 ] From this urge of the individual to cast off all shackles and assert their inalienable rights of sovereignty springs the very movement I placed at the forefront of my remarks today: the question of women’s liberation from the supposed shackles that, according to the beliefs of certain people, a prejudiced world has hitherto imposed upon their gender. Women no longer wish to be confined to the family home or the household; they want to step out into the open arena of the world and stand on equal footing with men in every endeavor. They want to compete with the male world for their place in life; they demand a profession, just as men have one. It is an undeniable fact that, up to now, the German people have participated the least in the far-reaching efforts toward women’s emancipation. While in Russia, Switzerland, England, and France—but especially in America—hundreds upon hundreds of women have already found their way into academic professions, the German people still stubbornly keep the doors to higher academic professions closed to women. Is this merely stubbornness, or is it the conservative spirit so characteristic of the Germans—a spirit that has always been averse to any violent revolution because it refused to admit that something so unreasonable could arise in history that it would have to be overthrown all at once? Or does it perhaps even lie in the higher insight—albeit entirely unconscious for many—that full equality for women does not even require complete equivalence, and that the latter contradicts the role and nature of womanhood? That is the great question: Are we faced with a prejudice that must be eradicated over time, or are we faced with a justified insight that has a right to resist this movement among the other peoples of Europe? Let us now make Goethe our guiding star! He will surely lead us; for in him, all the depth of the German spirit is embodied in a single individual. Whatever is noble and great in the German people has emerged in Goethe as a personal unity; the more “Goethian” we are, the more truly German we are. Wherever we need light, we look to him with confidence. The turbulent life of the present day sows disharmony in our hearts; dark moods overcome us; whole multitudes of our contemporaries succumb to the gloomy worldview of pessimism; we find deliverance from all this only in the blissful peace of Goethe’s harmonious worldview. And what a deeply satisfying awareness lies in this immersion in the world of ideas and will of our greatest national figure, when we consider it in the spirit of Schiller’s saying: “And if you yourself cannot be a whole, then join yourself to a whole!” For man is nothing but an individual; his entire strength is rooted in the people from whom he comes, in the era to which he belongs.

Those who give in to loneliness will soon feel alone,

[ 3 ] as Goethe himself says. We might add: He is bound to succumb to an early intellectual death in his sad, isolated intellectual wasteland. Think with your people, with your time! This is what we must call out to every person. And we think in the most harmonious way with our people when we think and feel with Goethe, the embodiment and epitome of all the vitality of our people and our time. We have no right to complain that we thereby forfeit our independence in order to submit completely to a foreign authority; for a person can only be free when he rises to the higher ideals of culture, where the light of education alone is to be found. For only then does he consciously participate in the course of his species’ development; only then does he independently set his own goal in accordance with the great ideals, whereas otherwise he merely stumbles blindly about below and is swept along with the others, a subservient—and all the more unfree—member of the body of humanity.

[ 4 ] Only when we seek Goethe’s vision of human perfection and, where we find it, align ourselves with it, do we work toward our great work of liberation. We can become free only together with our people and our time, not as individuals. Submitting to Goethe’s authority, once we have recognized its greatness, is not servitude, but rather Goethe’s form of freedom. And it is precisely through Goethe’s unique character that we can best advance this great work of liberation. For, on a grand scale, Goethe represents for humanity nothing less than a modern process of purification and liberation from self-imposed shackles. What were these shackles? They were the shackles of unnaturalness, of the compulsion to imitate the foreign, of the unfree, overly delicate sensibility under which the Germans languished before his time. He strives back toward nature, toward immediate feeling and thinking. For human beings have a tendency to distance themselves further and further from nature. We know that the only truly naive and natural people in Europe were the Greeks. When Goethe encountered their magnificent works of art in Italy, he fell into a kind of rapture. For these immortal creations struck him as the magnificent works of nature itself. In them, he saw the world spirit at work directly. The Greeks, as he vividly sensed here, had overheard from the Creator of the world the laws by which He had fashioned the magnificent, sublime works of nature, and had shaped their works of art in a human way, in this Goethean sense. The Romans, however, did not understand how to penetrate the mysterious gates of the divine workshop of the world, and they simply imitated the Greeks. This represents a distancing from nature, which grew ever worse as humanity continued to develop. One might say that, when Goethe appeared on the scene in Germany, very little of what prevailed in poetry—indeed, in the emotional and intellectual life—among the Germans bore the stamp of original, naive truth. Everything was artificial, everything contrived, everything mere rhetoric. Goethe was the first to seek once again a direct connection with the spirit of the world. And therein lies the greatness of his mission. But he owes this greatness to a circumstance that we must take into account if we are to properly appreciate his relationship with women and his connection to the feminine nature. This is his deeply ingrained religious trait, a trait that manifests itself in him through an idealistic belief in the divine in all that is natural and human. From his youth onward, he was dominated by a fundamental trait that is innate only to deeper minds: the belief in the supernatural in nature, the sense of something higher, which later developed into a quest for the idea, for the spirit in all things. The mysterious—that true child of both science and religion—was what always drew him in. In everything he encountered in life and history, he sought the point where he could perceive the workings of a higher power. And that is what he always sought in women as well, and often found. A man distances himself from nature, from the immediacy of feeling, when he must exhaust his spirit in a one-sided life’s work: he becomes dry, pedantic, unnatural. He loses that freshness and originality from which all the magic of an immediate nature emanates. But these are precisely the qualities that a woman retains—of course, only where she remains fully a woman and does not strive to be like a man. In her, no single quality of mind or body takes center stage; rather, they all develop in beautiful harmony and remain fully intact. Thus, nature appears purer, fuller, and more divine in a woman than in a man who has been made one-sided by nature. Thus, women stand before us as true messengers of God, in whom man finds what he himself has lost. And herein lies what man seeks; he must seek it with particular longing because he lacks it in himself and can only with great difficulty do without it.

[ 5 ] And this is what Goethe seeks above all else. For him, spending time with a woman always means a spiritual rejuvenation, a renewed communion with nature that time and again revives and stirs his poetic power. Immersing himself in feminine values and the feminine essence consistently generates renewed artistic vitality within him. When he seems to distance himself from nature in a typically masculine way, when the full force of naturalness appears to be fading from his heart, it is always love that once again envelops him with that mysterious magic, enabling him to create anew. In the face of this trait in Goethe’s nature, all the reservations that arise time and again against the purity and nobility of Goethe’s treatment of the feminine essence must fade away. Unfortunately, these reservations are still encountered frequently enough. People make an unnatural distinction between the poet and the man, acknowledging only the former, while all too readily attributing one or the other to Goethe the man. But in this spirit, everything exists in inseparable unity. Goethe’s poetic mission is directly linked to his human mission. And his poems are nothing other than direct revelations of his innermost and purest human nature. Yes, here and there one can find individual cynical, seemingly frivolous verses in Goethe’s work. But this speaks to nothing other than the infinite love of truth that always governed him. He never wanted to appear as an angel, but always as a human being—indeed, as a human being with all his flaws. An open confession before the whole world was what he preferred. But that is not the point. The main thing is that in his love there is never a trace of frivolity or vulgarity, nothing of the bon vivant. It always springs from the spirit, and it is always linked to a deep appreciation of true feminine worth. His love never demeans a woman. He always looks up reverently to feminine worth. And that is the true Germanic way. We know from Tacitus that even our ancestors in ancient times revered in women something that foreshadowed the future, and that they worshipped wise women at springs and in groves. That is precisely the essence of a truly religious feeling: that it always commands reverence from its bearer. And Goethe lay in adoration in the dust before the divine in woman. Women, above all, must recognize this. And then the gloomy shadows that still cling to Goethe’s noble personality will dissipate.

[ 6 ] Goethe’s imagination is powerfully stirred whenever a new female figure enters his circle. His rich inner world then envelops the object of his adoration with all the magic his vivid imagination is capable of. To him, his beloved is then more than any other mortal can perceive in her, because the imagination sees more deeply than reason. It is a kind of halo with which she envelops the poet’s imagination. Thus, an idealized figure always emerges from reality. Love becomes a sublime intoxication, and a new poem breaks free from Goethe’s heart. So it was with Friederike in Sesenheim, with Lili in Frankfurt, with Frau von Stein, with Christiane, his wife, and finally with the women who entered his life later on: Marianne Willemer and Ulrike von Levetzow. Everywhere it is the love of the noble, idealistic person, not that of a bon vivant. My esteemed and beloved teacher, Professor Karl Julius Schröer in Vienna, rightly says:

It is, once again, a devout form of love, as with the Greeks, and as such, it is free from frivolity. If that de-divinized love is selfish, then this love, which is based on devotion, is the only passion that is free from selfishness.

[ 7 ] To understand the truly spiritual nature of Goethe’s love, one need only consider his relationship with Frau von Stein, which has so often been criticized. How did he perceive this woman, who led a life of self-denial, who did not want anyone to take notice of her, who demanded nothing for herself, but who bestowed kindness in all directions? He writes of her that she appeared to him

Like a goddess soaring toward the heavens. It is in vain that a man stretches out his arms toward her, that his eyes plead for a glance. She soars, lost in the heavenly radiance that surrounds her, toward the heavens.

[ 8 ] And when we see the calming, blissful effect this woman has on the young man who enters Weimar’s life brimming with the fiercest passions, full of exuberance and unbridled joy, we can surely understand his devotion to her sublime femininity. Who is not familiar with the follies, the reckless pranks that both Goethe and his ducal friend committed in Weimar? But who is not also aware of the deep need both of them felt to rise above this recklessness and attain a higher life! It was in such moods that verses like the following were born in Goethe:

What is the meaning of all this pain and pleasure? Sweet peace, come, oh come into my heart!

[ 9 ] “The Soother,” as he called von Stein's wife, brought him sweet peace. Goethe’s relationship with Christiane was also pure and noble. How tender is this gesture: When he once found her asleep in her room, he sat down very quietly beside her, placed a piece of fruit and a flower before her, and was delighted at the thought that when she awoke, her gaze would immediately fall upon these things placed there by his loving hand. And how deeply his words resonate in our hearts, the words he spoke when his beloved was torn from him by death: “The sole reward of my life is now to mourn her death.”

[ 10 ] Marianne Willemer is the figure to whom we owe the most magnificent songs in the Diwan. Once again, we see here the poetic mood stirred by the power of love. Even in his eighties, he composed his “Elegy” in the “Trilogy of Passion” from the fervor of passion and an imagination refreshed by the spring of sacred love—a poem that contains, so to speak, an apotheosis of love in the true Goethean sense. If we understand this magnificent poem addressed to Ulrike von Levetzow, then we are given the key to Goethe’s love life as a whole. Ulrike von Levetzow was at that time a young woman staying with her mother in Marienbad, where the poet himself was also staying. He was enchanted by her grace. Once more would he experience all the bliss of love, all the sorrow of love; once more would the earth’s joy and the earth’s sorrow be heaped upon his breast. The elegy contains the following: The poet has said his farewell; the bliss of the last kiss still lingers in his heart, so he finds the parting difficult; he gazes into the heavens, from which even the day’s star, the sun, has already taken its leave. He sees clouds drifting by; in his imagination, they take on the forms—the shifting forms—of his beloved. He wants to hold onto them for a moment; but soon he realizes that the true image of his beloved can only be in his heart. And now he brings this image to life.

[ 11 ] The estrangement from nature, as it occurs—and must occur—in human beings, can lead to bitter degenerations. What he has lost continues to slumber within him as an insatiable longing, like a homeland we have lost. Only love can bridge this longing; only love can reconcile the conflict within nature. If this love does not arise, then man remains a fallen being throughout his life—a being who has become estranged from his primal power and wanders a misguided path through life. Blind, selfish passions will then take the place of love. The one who is initially consumed by longing will seek to numb himself in the frenzy of degrading sensual pleasure. He will never be able to perceive the sublime, for, as Schiller put it, there is only one power that stands against the sublime: love. Thus you have derived the necessity of love from human nature. If we do away with love, we have banished the divine self from the world; or, since we cannot do that, we have turned our backs on the divine. But we bring about this apostasy when we alienate women from the very essence of womanhood, when we deprive them of their destiny to be the mediators of the divine, of nature as it appears in its immediate, unadulterated form. It is no coincidence that the efforts toward emancipation first emerge in those European countries where love in the noble sense—as understood by the Germanic peoples—has never taken root. Where a woman knows that she must contribute her share to the whole of human development in a way that corresponds to her feminine nature—and not to the masculine—and where she knows that she is recognized and revered by the male world for this work of hers, there she does not strive beyond what has been assigned to her in the plan of the world. It is a higher outlook that seeks satisfaction in the harmony of diverse forces at work, and a lower one that seeks to make everything the same. It is primarily the ideal side of culture that women embody and perpetuate. What reasons could there be to push women out of their present position, beyond the boundaries that history has set for them?

[ 12 ] First: the urge not to lag behind men in intellectual development and insight. Second: the urge not to be indebted to men for what provides her with the actual means of subsistence.

[ 13 ] When I consider that it was so often wise, imaginative mothers who stood at the cradle of great men, when I look at the elderly Mrs. Rat herself, Goethe’s mother, who first stirred the young Wolfgang’s poetic sensibility through her fairy-tale stories, it seems to me that this could easily be explained by that conception of women’s nature which I have just developed. If the divine primal force of nature manifests itself more purely and unclouded in women’s nature than in men’s, then it is surely evident that a mother’s living influence must have the most enriching effect on a person at that age when everything is still nature, everything is naivety, when a person is still all heart and not yet at all head, when the spirit has not yet torn itself away from its source—from nature—when the separation of idea and reality has not yet taken place; in a word: in childhood. Herein lies the magnificent cultural influence that women exert on the course of human development—an influence that is worth more than any she could ever exert as a doctor, a civil servant, or a writer.