The Rudolf Steiner Archive

19. Goethe's Gospel

[ 1 ] Lessing believed in reincarnation.

[ 2 ] In Herder's work On the Development of the Human Mind, we find the ideas of reincarnation.

[ 3 ] In Schiller’s work, we find them in his correspondence: Julius and Raphael (Schiller and Körner), Julius’s Theosophy, and in the Letters on the Promotion of Aesthetic Education.

[ 4 ] Novalis believed in it.

[ 5 ] Goethe depicts the development of the human being from the lower to the higher soul forces in the fairy tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. His view was this: Only those who have passed through the stages of development, who have felt drawn into the process, who have worked through their doubts—only they have attained great conviction and great faith, and have struggled their way from disharmony to harmony. His Faust is a hymn to human perfection. We need not look for it first in the “Bhagavad Gita.” We also find the great problem in Faust. He sets himself the task of unraveling the mystery of evil.

[ 6 ] Faust [Part One] Here we see the young man filled with a sense of disharmony. For Goethe, the Earth Spirit is not a symbol but a real being. He believed that there were planetary beings on the planets, and that those beings had bodies just as we have bodies of flesh.

[ 7 ] Goethe’s creed: the Earth Spirit had taught him not only to observe the unified essence of stone, plant, animal, and even human beings, but also to feel and sense it. It had taught him the brotherhood of all created things, right up to human beings, the crown of [creation]. He expressed this creed at the age of eighty in “The Mysteries”—a pilgrim journeys to the monastery; the Rose Cross is a symbol of the three kingdoms of nature; stone, plant, and animal form a cross. The rose is love.

[ 8 ] Goethe himself later said that each of the twelve personalities represented one of the great worldviews or world religions. The purpose was to seek the true inner core of the world religions.

[ 9 ] Three worlds: first, the world of dreams; second, the astral or soul world; third, the mental or spiritual world.

[ 10 ] The awakening of the inner eye first brings about profound changes in one’s dream life. As this new way of seeing—this new world—opens up, it takes on a high degree of regularity. Of course, no science can be founded on what a person experiences there.

[ 11 ] The student, or chela, must learn to carry the consciousness of the second, astral world into his waking consciousness through dreams. Later, during dreamless sleep, he will have experiences through which he perceives the spiritual, mental world. Consciousness of the astral world expresses itself in fully formed images. Consciousness of the spiritual world expresses itself in spiritual hearing. The Pythagoreans called this “sphere music.”

[ 12 ] Prologue in Heaven — the spiritual world.

[ 13 ] In Mephistopheles, Goethe created the embodiment of an ancient idea contained in all profound spiritual wisdom. He sought to unravel the mystery of evil. Evil is the sum of all those forces that stand in the way of the progress of human perfection. If truth lies in continuous development, then every obstacle is a lie. The one who corrupts through lies is called Mephistopheles.

[ 14 ] Part Two

[ 15 ] Faust had to conclude as a mystic. In Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe, Goethe says: “It will soon become apparent to the initiate that there is much depth to be found in this Faust. The main idea of Faust represents the three main elements of human nature: spirit, soul, and body.”

[ 16 ] The spirit is the eternal; it existed before birth and will continue to exist after death. The soul is the link between the spirit and the body; in its development, it first leans more toward the body, then toward the spirit, and with the spirit, toward that which endures—the eternal. The development of the spiritual eye aids in this.

[ 17 ] The Realm of the Mothers represents the source of all things; the spirit originates from it.

[ 18 ] To enter the spiritual realm—Devachan in Theosophy—one must possess moral qualifications. The aim of Theosophy is to lead people upward. A person must first make himself capable and worthy of this. When Faust leads Helena upward for the first time, he is consumed by wild passion, and with that, Helena vanishes.

[ 19 ] Helena depicts the various incarnations.

[ 20 ] The homunculus is a soul. The classic Walpurgis Night depicts how a soul comes into being. Goethe envisions a gradual development here. The homunculus is to receive a body. It must begin with the mineral kingdom; then comes the plant kingdom. Goethe’s expression: “It grumbles like that.”

[ 21 ] Faust’s blindness symbolizes that the physical world is fading away for him; now his inner vision is dawning. What a magnificent image! Who does not experience this dying and becoming ...

[ 22 ] Jakob Böhme puts it this way: “And so death is the root of all life.” And elsewhere:

Whoever does not die before he dies,
Will perish when he dies

[ 23 ] Chorus mysticus:

All that is fleeting
Is but a parable
That which is inadequate,
Here it becomes an event
That which is indescribable,
Here it is done;
The eternal feminine
Draws us upward.

[ 24 ] In all forms of mysticism, the striving human soul is described as something feminine. The union of the soul with the mystery of the world: a spiritual union expressed by mystics as the Wedding of the Lamb. Goethe explored this concept even more deeply in the aforementioned fairy tale of the green snake and the beautiful lily.

[ 25 ] Euphorion embodied poetry.

[ 26 ] Regarding the final scene in Goethe’s Faust, Goethe himself said that in the conclusion he had intended to depict Faust’s ascent in the image of Montserrat.

[ 27 ] In the poem The Mysteries, a reference is made to Parzival, the Valley Wanderer. When Faust went blind, he was given the opportunity to evolve rapidly. Thus he entered the higher regions—what we would call Devachan or Suschupti. Goethe, however, introduced Catholic ideas. Thus, he had Father Marianus appear in the most pristine cell. This signifies liberation from all that is sexual—that is, standing above man and woman. That is why he also gave him a woman’s name with a masculine ending. Now, the single-gendered replaced the dual-gendered. He had fully awakened in Budhi. Budhi, the sixth fundamental principle, had gained the upper hand over everything else.