The Rudolf Steiner Archive

23. Theosophy, Goethe, and Hegel

I. Report from a Dutch brochure

[ 1 ] The heading above was the title of a lecture given by Rudolf Steiner in Amsterdam on Thursday evening at the “Van het Nut” building.

[ 2 ] The speaker, introduced to his audience as the Secretary-General (Chair) of the German Section of the Theosophical Society, began by describing the concept of theosophy. Theosophy aims to be a movement dedicated to deepening our spiritual life. And it is fair to say that, in our time, Theosophy represents what we perceive as a major movement throughout the entire civilized world.

[ 3 ] The speaker then points to growing internationalism and to the fact that, over the centuries, the barriers between people and people, between nations and nations, have been steadily breaking down. In the material realm, we see the banker, the industrialist, and the merchant playing an important role here. But all of these material manifestations are consequences of the existence of shared ideas—the internationalization of ideas.

[ 4 ] What we have seen in past centuries (and even now) in the religious sphere as separating one person from another and one people from another is magnificently bridged by Theosophy, and this is possible solely because the theosophical spiritual current extends to the very foundations of spiritual life.

[ 5 ] It is not the theosophical mindset that says, “How is it possible that we have come so far?” and looks back with a certain pity on the old “childlike” conception of faith.

[ 6 ] We in Theosophy have completely turned away from the delusion that we may look down upon what humanity has accomplished in earlier times.

[ 7 ] To illustrate the relationship between Goethe, the poet, and Hegel, the philosopher, to the theosophical worldview, the speaker will outline the latter in a few basic points:

[ 8 ] A first principle is that an invisible world underlies this visible world; secondly, that human beings can come to know a supersensible world beyond the sensory world. However, the supersensible world cannot be reached through ordinary sensory perception. Theosophy has nothing to do with magic, superstition, or a regression to old fantasies. Those who perceive not only the facts of the material world but also the spiritual causes behind them all will become aware of a higher capacity within themselves.

[ 9 ] Dr. Steiner then cites a favorite example of a person who was born blind and underwent surgery. A whole new world of perception opens up to him. An infinity of light and splendor of color floods into his eye, which can now see—things of which the person previously had no concept and could not even imagine. As a citizen of the lower natural kingdoms by virtue of his lower nature, the human being belongs, on the other hand, through his higher nature, to the realm of the higher worlds from which his being is composed. And so, inwardly, the human being stands between two realms.

[ 10 ] Outwardly, we see the life of the individual human being unfold between birth and death, and we see how, through perception of the outer worlds, he becomes ever richer in experience. And we ask ourselves: What is it, and where does it remain, that the human being has taken in during all this time? What we have absorbed is transformed through death into the seed of a new development. The sum of our life experiences has reached our soul, and at the moment of death, the fruit of life emerges as a seed. In a new life, in a new incarnation, this seed unfolds. We can perceive this in a person’s development from the moment of birth.

[ 11 ] What we perceive here cannot be explained by this one life alone. Just as a plant seed leads us to a previous plant, so this spiritual seed of the soul leads us to a previous spiritual life. This is what is commonly called reincarnation.

[ 12 ] Every life enriches the soul with the fruits of life, and a person enters each life enriched: Everything we possess within ourselves we have acquired in previous lives. And we also know that the thoughts that exist in this world are the fruit of humanity’s earlier development. But we see that both the ancient fairy tales and myths, as well as what we currently call our science, are merely forms of human development—and that we will later attain other, higher forms of this development.

[ 13 ] When we take a broad view of all this, we are able to build a bridge to the poet Goethe and the philosopher Hegel. From the very beginning, we find a foundation of theosophical sentiments in Goethe’s entire being. Even as a boy, Goethe sought to discover his own divine-spiritual nature through his spiritual experiences.

[ 14 ] The seven-year-old boy cannot accept the outward religious forms of his time as his own; he builds himself an altar on a reading desk and places on it stones and plants from his father’s geological collection—natural objects that he perceives as manifestations of divine life. And then he wants to light a sacrificial fire, so he focuses the first rays of the rising sun through a magnifying glass to light the sacrificial candle on the altar he has built himself.

[ 15 ] Even as an artist—for example, during his travels in Italy—he seeks nothing other than the grand life of the supernatural world. He also states explicitly that art is the most worthy interpreter of the spiritual world. One can also look to his letters to Winckelmann, where he describes his view that everything in nature—order, harmony, and proportion—is reflected in human beings, where it soars to the highest peak of perfection.

[ 16 ] Schiller writes to Goethe: “For a long time now, my most esteemed friend, I have been observing the course of your spirit, albeit from afar. — You are seeking it along a difficult path, but you will surely find it... etc.” From the very beginning, Goethe feels himself to be born of the spiritual-cosmic nature.

[ 17 ] That Goethe recognized the spiritual aspect of human beings is demonstrated not only by a poem from the 1730s, “The Mysteries,” in which he discusses the Rosicrucian symbol—the black cross with the red roses—but even more beautifully in his profession of faith in the fairy tale of the Beautiful Lily and the Green Snake and in his Faust epic. The speaker points to Goethe’s letters to Eckermann, in which he says that his Faust can be viewed from two perspectives: First, it is something for people in the theater, but it also contains something for the initiate who sees the spiritual life behind human sensory existence. Whoever lacks this—this dying and becoming—remains merely a gloomy guest on this dark earth.

[ 18 ] The speaker then points out something else—something so well known to most, yet understood by so few, not even by most Goethe commentators: the prologue, where Goethe speaks of the “harmony of the spheres” and the heavenly choirs; to the reappearance of the figure of Helena in the second part—Helena, who had, after all, already died; and finally to the homunculus, by which he intends to allude to nothing other than that part of man which passes from one incarnation to the next: the soul. It was all too readily embodied.

[ 19 ] The speaker is more brief when it comes to Hegel, primarily because the meeting is already well underway. Hegel is a contemporary of Goethe’s and, in many respects, his student. He understood everything about Goethe, except for the theosophical foundation. Hegel demonstrates how far someone can go without knowing the aforementioned foundations of theosophy.

[ 20 ] Take a glass of water: you can only draw water from it if there is any in it. And human beings can only draw wisdom from a world that is itself built upon wisdom. Hegel sought to prove this.

[ 21 ] Hegel recognizes the world of ideas as a coherent spiritual world, independent of nature, and he calls this world “pure logic.” For Hegel, “Logos” means: the great primordial plan of the world, the sum of the ideas that underlie this world.

[ 22 ] The speaker then refers to Hegel’s well-known system and traces how Hegel speaks of the three aspects of the Idea: — the Idea in itself — the Idea in nature, spread out across space and time, where it will become conscious of itself, descending into various forms, down to human beings and beyond — then the Idea, returning to its own pure essence, having become conscious of itself.

[ 23 ] Yet, says the speaker, Hegel embodies all the limitations of his time. We must not focus solely on the philosophical lines, nor regard the “world of ideas” as something absolute. (The speaker gave the impression of meaning: not as a concrete thing).

[ 24 ] For Hegel, the scientific view of the world had become something absolute, and one always has the feeling that Hegel believes that once humanity has grasped the world of ideas, it has reached its end. Hegel knew nothing of the infinity of forms through which the world of ideas gradually becomes conscious in successive lives, nor that human beings must learn to live and experience both the Logos of feeling and the Logos of the idea. A kind of materialism arose from Hegel’s philosophy.

[ 25 ] [After] speaking tirelessly for nearly two full hours with great intellectual vigor, this extraordinary orator concluded his lecture with Goethe’s most apt words:

If the eye were not like the sun,
how could the sun delight us?
If the soul were not divine,
how could the divine delight us!

II. Article in the “Algemeen Handelsblad” dated March 7, 1908

[ 26 ] Theosophy, Goethe, and Hegel.

[ 27 ] The Secretary-General of the German Section, Dr. Rudolf Steiner, spoke on the above topic last night at the “Nutsgebouw” during a well-attended public meeting convened by the Dutch Section of the Theosophical Society.

[ 28 ] The speaker—an interesting figure: a sharply defined, ascetic intellectual with deep-set, sparkling black eyes and long, matte-black hair combed back; on top of that, a highly talented orator—began his presentation with a summary of the essence of theosophy and its teachings.

[ 29 ] He spoke of [the]—for those familiar with theosophical ideas—so familiar and encouraging, yet for novices still so unsettling, imposing, not to say terrifying, possibility that human beings may outgrow the physical, sensually perceptible world that directly surrounds them and move on to develop on a supersensible plane of existence; thus elevating himself above himself; the possibility that human beings—not through magic or with the aid of all manner of superstition, but through the cultivation of the soul faculties slumbering within them—seek and find the spiritual foundations upon which their sensory existence is based.

[ 30 ] Dr. Steiner went on to speak about the doctrine of reincarnation, according to which the human soul, as it gathers life experience through successive lifetimes, grows in abilities, faculties, and aspects, unfolding again and again in a new life as an effect, a result, or a consequence of previous lives, only to withdraw once more—enriched by new experience—toward synthesis, condensation, and concentration, in order to finally struggle upward from the world of unconscious feeling—from which it was born—through the world of ideas or conscious feeling, to that plane of existence where, out of the consciousness of ideas, the unity of knowledge and will will be born, and the human soul will return to the eternal-spiritual core of existence from which the universe has emerged.

[ 31 ] Even as a boy, Goethe was already aware of this eternal, spiritual core of existence. He built himself an altar out of plants and minerals to glorify all creation, and he lit the incense candle on it by the sun, the greatest and eternal manifestation of the eternal God.

[ 32 ] Even after reaching manhood, he never ceased to seek the supernatural foundations of all that exists. While traveling in Italy and admiring ancient works of art there, he wrote to his friends in Weimar about how he had discovered “God as the Necessity of Creation.”

[ 33 ] And also: “I suspect that the ancient Greeks created works of art according to the same laws by which nature carries out its creative work—laws [that] I am trying to uncover.”

[ 34 ] And later, in his work on Winckelmann, he wrote: “Everything that nature possesses in terms of order, harmony, and proportion is embodied in human beings.”

[ 35 ] Other major fundamental ideas underlying theosophy also influenced Goethe and [are] expressed in his works.

[ 36 ] Thus, his unfinished work Die Geheimnisse (The Secrets), dating from 1780, is an apt summary of theosophical ideas, in which the doctrine of reincarnation is expressed in this beautiful image: Wisdom flows from the mouth of this pilgrim as from the lips of a child.

[ 37 ] Once again, we find recognition of this teaching and other apt interpretations of Goethe’s theosophical ideas in the fairy tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily, but especially in the second part of Faust.

[ 38 ] Without going into detail, we would be unable to follow the speaker’s arguments in his quotations. We will, however, mention his surprising explanation of the enigmatic “homunculus figure” from the second part of Faust as a human soul on its way to reincarnation.

[ 39 ] Dr. Steiner also sensed the great fundamental ideas of the world, which Goethe had “embedded as a mystery within [his] poetry,” in Hegel’s philosophy. Hegel, too, recognized God, the Logos—this word restored to its original meaning—in the “ideal primordial plan of the world”; he saw the sum total of ideas underlying sensually perceptible existence, which thus becomes an image of the “Spirit-in-itself.” And in the independent, subjective spirit of the human being, Hegel saw and honored the macrocosm reflected as a microcosm.

[ 40 ] Here, however, Hegel’s absolutism—which arose from the ideological limitations of his time—prevented him from going further. He fails to recognize the ongoing development of the human soul as a microcosm until unity with the cosmic core is once again achieved. This, however, does not detract from the greatness—the now largely misunderstood greatness—of his fundamental idea, which was purely theosophical, like Goethe’s when he wrote poetry:

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

[ 41 ] Dr. Steiner concluded his lecture—which was listened to with great interest by the large audience of ladies and gentlemen—with this quote.