The Rudolf Steiner Archive

5. Goethe and the Present

I. Article in the “Deutsche Warte — Daily Newspaper for Politics and Society, Intellectual and Economic Life” dated August 29, 1899

[ 1 ] On Monday evening, the Freie Volksbühne held a Goethe celebration at Keller’s Ballroom, located at Koppenstraße 29, which was attended by a large number of members and guests. Dr. Rudolf Steiner spoke on the topic: “Goethe and the Present.” The speaker portrayed Goethe as a child of the 18th century, yet at the same time as a visionary who placed science above all other things. Even as a boy, he had instinctively sensed the scientific worldview of the future; he had opposed the prevailing worldview of his time from an early age, and as early as the age of six—on the occasion of the great earthquake in Lisbon, which claimed thousands of lives—he had rejected the idea of an all-benevolent God and created his own nature-based religion. These same ideas had guided him during his student years in Leipzig, where he attended lectures on the natural sciences with enthusiasm but stayed away from philosophy seminars. Thus, he had come to the conviction that human beings are a product of nature, like any other, and have not received any special moral qualities from a higher being; and he expressed this conviction in the following words: “Let man be noble, helpful, and good, for that alone distinguishes him from all beings we know.” A new conception of God then dawned on him upon seeing Greek works of art in Italy, as he expressed in his “Hymn to Nature”: “She, Nature, has brought me in; she will lead me out—I trust her.” The speaker then turned to how this colossal titan of the mind had set out to embody the entire workings of the world in a single idea handed down from the sixteenth century, in Faust, the figure who stands in contrast to Luther. In Faust, Goethe had sought to show how a person attains fulfillment through his own actions; yet he was unable to carry out his work in this way, since he himself was not a man of action but rather an artistically contemplative soul; this truth also becomes evident when considering his personal life—Goethe was an experimenter with life. This was followed by a detailed discussion of Faust as it came to be, along with a description of the individual phases of the “Olympian’s” life and the influence these had on his work.

II. Article in the “Freie Volksbühne” from October 1899

[ 2 ] In accordance with the resolution passed at the last general meeting, the association’s board had organized a Goethe celebration on August 28, 1899, in Keller’s banquet halls. Dr. Rudolf Steiner had been invited to speak that evening. In a lively lecture that captivated his audience, he presented the following ideas:

[ 3 ] One does not show proper reverence for a mind like Goethe by engaging in a blind cult of personality, but rather by distinguishing the enduring elements of his works from the fleeting trappings in which he reveals himself merely as a child of his time. Goethe is the forerunner of the scientific worldview that is bearing fruit in the present, and at the same time the son of the eighteenth century. Despite its Enlightenment, that century could not rise above the prejudice that human beings are a special, higher being compared to other creatures of nature; it could not come to the realization that nature produces human beings according to the same eternal and necessary laws as the simplest animal or plant life form. People clung to the assumption of a creative God outside and above nature. From his earliest youth, Goethe revered nature as the sole, gradually unfolding creative entity. He sought insight into the course of world events not through supernatural truths, but through immersion in the natural sciences. Even in the work of artists, he saw only higher laws of nature at work. When he saw the Greek works of art in Italy, he became convinced that they were formed according to the same laws by which nature itself operates. “Where there is necessity, there is God”—he wrote these words after beholding these works of art. At the height of his creative powers, Goethe’s work was a service to nature. Goethe offered his strongest rejection of all supernatural deities in his *Prometheus*. Everything that a human being can be and become, he should strive for from within himself, not by looking toward a world beyond. He originally intended to express this idea in his “Faust” as well. The aim was to show that a human being, by developing his own powers, can attain a fulfilling existence. Nothing of heaven and hell, of God and the devil, was included in the plan for *Faust* that Goethe had in mind in Frankfurt in the early 1870s. Instead of the later God, there was at that time the Earth Spirit, who is merely a personification of the forces of nature; and Mephistopheles was not conceived as the devil, but as the embodiment of evil; he was not an emissary of God, but of the Earth Spirit. When, toward the end of the 1890s, Goethe was encouraged by Schiller to continue *Faust*, a rupture had already occurred in his worldview. He had interwoven his earlier ideas—through which he had become the prophet of the nineteenth century—with the ideas of a dying age. He could no longer bring *Faust* to a conclusion in the same way he had begun it. He introduces God and the Devil into the poem. These now become the main characters, fighting over Faust’s soul. Faust, once a great character and the embodiment of striving humanity, became a pawn in the hands of the heavenly and hellish powers. Thus it came to pass that in the first part of the poem, Faust says of the Earth Spirit:

You lead the procession of the living
Past me and teach me to recognize my brothers
In the quiet thicket,
In the air and water,

[ 4 ] just as a Darwinian views nature and humankind together as one great unity—and that in the second part, Faust himself is redeemed not by his own power but by the blessed host, because “love from above” has taken part in him. The Goethe who conceived the initial plan for *Faust* continues to influence our views and feelings to this day; the Goethe who completed *Faust* belongs to the eighteenth century. The speaker was met with enthusiastic applause.