The Rudolf Steiner Archive

24. Goethe, Hegel, and Theosophy

[ 1 ] Surely many who read Goethe’s Faust feel that something of the utmost significance for every human soul and every human heart resounds from the poet’s words, which depict how Faust—this embodiment of humanity’s highest aspirations—how this Faust, after having gone through everything that can be attained in the various branches of our science, stands there at a loss, struggling for a realization that means more than the satisfaction of the intellect’s theoretical needs—a realization that encompasses everything a person needs, especially in the most difficult hours, for comfort and the uplifting of life, for the strength to exist, and for creative work in reality. And when the poet’s words point us to a possibility of rising, beyond mere intellectual theory, into the realm of the spiritual world—when they point out that there is something higher to be gained than theory and intellectual wisdom— then—even as we take an interest in what is today to be incorporated into modern spiritual paths under the name of Theosophy—we may well feel compelled to consider, precisely from this perspective, what has flowed into German cultural life through Goethe. We may feel compelled to take a closer look at what actually lies behind that emotional expression of Goethe’s, who, when Faust sees the sign of the macrocosm before his eyes, says that he now knows what the sage meant by the words:

The spirit world is not closed off,
Your mind is closed, your heart is dead!
Come, bathe, disciple, undaunted
Your earthly breast in the morning glow!

[ 2 ] In a sense, this is a call arising from Goethe’s own body of work to view it from the perspective of spiritual science itself. Such an examination of the works of great figures who have had a profound impact on cultural life lies very much within the realm of spiritual science, for this science can never fall into the error of other schools of thought that claim everything truly valuable in terms of human knowledge was created only through them. Humanity would have little confidence in a insight that were to appear with the claim: “As if shot from a pistol, it has only now come into being.” Ever since human thought and striving have existed, people have sought the truth. Should all those who preceded the truth-seekers in question have searched in vain, having been caught up only in error?

[ 3 ] How does it befit us, in the face of a worthy perspective, to keep repeating how wonderfully far we have come precisely through our wisdom? Theosophy does not make such a claim. It seeks nothing other than to give a specific form and shape to the ancient wisdom that has always flowed into the hearts of those who have sought truth and wisdom; this wisdom is to be given a new form appropriate to present-day life. Therefore, it is part of theosophy’s task to investigate, through the great minds of the past, how their endeavors relate to what we are exploring today through our spiritual science.

[ 4 ] Let us choose someone who has accomplished something so significant—Goethe—and if we place alongside him someone who is somewhat unknown today and has remained so throughout the ages, unknown not by name but in terms of what he intended and taught, Hegel, then today’s reflections may show us how theosophical life in particular enables us to appreciate anew many who have been misunderstood, because theosophy is an instrument for discovering and recognizing depths that would not come to light in any other way. If we first immerse ourselves in Goethe, it will truly not be difficult for us to find in his essence, in his nature, that fundamental trait of spiritual-scientific will and cognition which is characterized by seeing the invisible of the spiritual world in all that is visible.

[ 5 ] In everything visible, we see the outward physiognomy of something spiritual, the outward expression of something supernatural, just as we see in the human countenance the expression of what lives in the spirit and in the soul. But we must not view Goethe as some of the complacent do—by saying that Goethe possessed that which all of humanity longs for, that which he did not wish to write in clear words, that which he could not constrain into very specific forms of expression, and that he sought to express it here by wallowing in more obscure, misty feelings. Even the Swabian Vischer, the author of Auch Einer, railed against the notion that one might wish to find Goethe’s creed in the passage where Faust says to Gretchen: “/p”

Feeling is everything;
A name is mere smoke and mirrors,
Obscuring the sky's glow.

[ 6 ] As true as that was in the conversation with Gretchen, it is otherwise hardly true, for not everyone who has a serious pursuit wants a “Gretchen-like wisdom”—even though, in many cases, it is precisely such a “Gretchen-like wisdom” that is sought. But something quite different had been alive in Goethe from his youth onward, even from his boyhood. If we trace him back to his boyhood, we do not find any kind of spiritual-scientific insight, but rather the same emotional formation of the soul, the entire mindset of a theosophically minded person. There we see the seven-year-old boy, unsatisfied by all manner of emotional experiences derived from the external religious forms flowing to him from his surroundings; yet he can vaguely sense and feel a higher spiritual reality. He searches through his father’s botanical collection for all kinds of plants, selects various mineral objects, and places them on a music stand—that is his altar. And to the great God of Nature—as he later calls him in clear words—he already wishes, even in his boyhood and with his yearning child’s soul, to offer a sacrifice; to the God who is conjured forth by what happens in the world, he wishes to bring Him so mysteriously before his soul. He takes a small incense candle, places it on top, and focuses the first rays of the morning sun through a magnifying glass so that they ignite the candle. Thus, with a candle lit by the very forces of nature itself, he performs his sacrifice. Even as a boy, he contemplates what lies enchanted and hidden behind the face of nature. And this has remained in his soul throughout his entire life. It sounds marvelous to us when we hear his prose hymn—which he dictated to a scribe as an expression of what nature means to him shortly after his arrival in Weimar—the hymn “Nature”:

Nature! We are surrounded and embraced by her—unable to step out of her, and unable to enter deeper into her. Uninvited and without warning, she draws us into the circle of her dance and carries us along until we grow weary and slip from her arms.

[ 7 ] Or when we think of those grand words: “Everything is nature.” Nature invented death in order to have abundant life. And so it goes on. Goethe himself later admitted that the poem was based on the idea that a spirit is inherent in all natural processes, just as a spirit underlies everything personal. He seeks the physiognomy of spiritual life; this is what drives him to view nature in its interconnections. We cannot delve into his role as a natural scientist here, but we may point out that he consistently goes beyond the scope of what was to become his field of study. Everywhere we see in him the aspiration—and this was already evident during his student years—that individual natural objects should reveal to him the interconnections in life. To this end, he continued his studies later in Weimar; he took courses with Loder in osteology, comparative anatomy, and so on. He did not wish merely to focus on the fragmented parts of nature; we can see this from what he wrote during his trip to Italy: “After everything I have seen here in terms of plants and animals, I would very much like to take a trip to India—not to explore the new, but to view the old in my own way.” His way of looking, however, is to see in everything a text that mysteriously expresses the spiritual life lying behind it. That Goethe certainly had this in mind becomes particularly clear to us when we see how he brings all of life under a single point of view, under a single perspective. In Italy, he gained his first understanding of what Greek art could mean to his great mind. Before that, he had discussed many things with Herder. Through Spinoza’s thought, he developed a conception of a divine-creative entity behind appearances; but he was not satisfied with this. He wanted to recognize a divine-spiritual essence in human beings themselves. Writing to his friends from Italy, after standing before the work of art that had revealed to him the secret of Greek art, he wrote: “There is necessity; there is God. I have the feeling that the Greeks proceeded according to the same laws by which nature operates, and I am on their trail.”

[ 8 ] Thus, for him, art is the continuation of nature’s creative work. The artist should immerse himself in the laws of the world and then continue nature’s work; what nature accomplishes at a lower level—transitioning from the supersensible to the sensible—the artist should accomplish at a higher level. In his book on Winckelmann, he says:

When the healthy nature of human beings functions as a whole, when they feel at home in the world as part of a vast, beautiful, magnificent, and valuable whole, when harmonious contentment grants them pure, free delight—then the universe, if it could perceive itself, would exult at having reached its goal and admire the pinnacle of its own becoming and being.

[ 9 ] For Goethe, the human spirit is that which already lives in the robust forces of nature—in rocks and plants; what evolves upward through the animal kingdom becomes conscious within the innermost being of the human being, and when the human being pours out his spirit into forms, he creates—as a higher form of nature—beyond himself. But it was as if it were innate to him to see the spirit in everything he observed; it came naturally to him—so naturally, in fact, that the significant conversation between Goethe and Schiller could take place after a lecture by Batsch in Jena. Schiller remarked afterward that there was always something bleak about considering nature only in its individual parts and never as a whole. Goethe replied that one could also proceed differently; one could also move from the whole to the parts and base the actual observation on the spiritual. He then drew a symbolic image of a plant and said that it was the primordial plant, containing all others within itself; with it, one could shape and invent new plants in any way one wished—plants possessing the potential for life and reality—from the lowest to the highest forms of vegetation. Schiller, who at that time could not yet rise to such heights, soon worked his way toward this view himself. But now he replied to Goethe that what he had sketched there was not an experience, but an idea. Goethe did not understand this at all; rather, he believed that if this were an idea, then he saw his idea with his eyes. Here, two worldviews stand in stark contrast to one another. Schiller believed in grasping the spiritual first through abstractions; Goethe, through beholding the idea with spiritual eyes. Goethe was fully aware that the spirit lives in everything, that creative spirits reign beneath the sensory realm, and Goethe not only developed this worldview in a theoretical manner but also wove it into his works; he incorporated it into everything he created poetically. This becomes particularly evident when we seek to grasp the depth of the second part of Faust.

[ 10 ] Such a worldview was by no means limited to Goethe at that time, nor was it found only among a few; rather, it was an intellectual atmosphere in which Germany’s greatest minds lived at the time, and Hegel, too, emerged from this philosophy of the spirit. Of course, for many who have only heard something in passing about Hegel, he is a dismissed philosopher, one of the great propagators of error from the past. When people encounter great minds, they behave quite strangely. There is a fine essay by a Russian scholar, Chwolson: Hegel, Haeckel, and the Twelfth Commandment. In it, a good characterization is provided, in a certain sense. The author is an excellent physicist; he is adept at drawing the conclusions that can rightly be drawn from our contemporary worldview. His twelfth commandment is actually quite self-evident; yet many fail to understand it. It reads: “You shall never write about anything you do not understand!” Anyone well-versed in intellectual life knows that Chwolson understands nothing of Hegel; thus, he himself is a striking example of his own commandment. It is easy to mock when things are taken out of context. One must know the entire context. Hegel was a mind that was mature—truly mature—but who stepped onto the stage with his own views for the first time. Born in Stuttgart as early as 1770, he did not publish his first work—which may seem quite incomprehensible today to those who are superficial in matters of the spirit—until he was quite old. But this work was to be profoundly significant for anyone who wishes to ascend to the heights of spiritual life. It is the Phenomenology of Spirit. Even from the way it came into being, it must appear to us as if it sprang from spiritual life itself.

[ 11 ] He demonstrated that, through the utmost concentration, he was able to detach himself from the things of the external world. It required an immense intensity of mental power to write these subtle works; the final pages were written while the cannons thundered during the Battle of Jena. It was then that this work, intended to introduce us to the spiritual world, was completed. And he always took his time; his Logic appeared nearly a decade later, and we also have his Encyclopedia and his work on jurisprudence. Most of his works emerged from the posthumous collection of his lectures, compiled by his students. It is difficult to convey even a brief picture of the meaning and spirit of Hegel’s doctrine in just a few words, but it may nevertheless be possible to provide a general overview. There has been much mockery of the fact that Hegel wanted to construct the entire world—all objective being—out of the spirit, out of the idea, because he initially builds a world consisting entirely of concepts, a world of ideas that can be grasped only through the human intellect; which is why it is said that he did not investigate through experience, but rather sought to derive from the spirit everything that can only be experienced here by examining nature. The greatest error in the assessment of Hegel lies precisely there; it is entirely incorrect to say that Hegel sought to spin the entire world a priori out of his own head. He was fully aware that reality extended out there in space, but he also knew that behind this objective reality there are spiritual connections that human beings grasp in the images of ideas. It was not his fault that he saw the idea in things. He explored the world through experience, but he simply saw more than others did. Nature also provided him with ideas beyond coarse, sensory materiality, just as it did for Goethe. Could Goethe and Hegel help it that others could not find these ideas? Those who cannot find them then believe that Hegel conjured them up out of thin air. Lichtenberg, the great German humorist, once spoke of a book and a human mind and said: When a book and a human mind clash, and it sounds hollow, it is not always the book’s fault. And when the human mind and nature resonate together, and the mind remains empty because it cannot find any ideas, it is certainly not nature’s fault. Hegel made it his task to erect, within the vast edifice of ideas he calls his Logic, that which extends throughout space. That fabric of ideas, of which he figuratively says that it is God as He was before the creation of nature. To him, this was more than a metaphor. From abstract being to absolute being, one faces something akin to a creative process. He says: The diamond-like web of concepts and ideas is something into which the things of nature are woven. This web became for him a mirror image, from which nature nevertheless appears to confront him once more. He traces nature through all its stages to show how it is the Idea—the creative thought—that lives in all things. He examines the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms, then humanity; he shows how the human spirit gradually becomes more and more perfect until it rises, through intellect and reason, to the perception of the Spirit in the external world. It is a colossal edifice that rises before us, even if it is flawed in its details. It is an edifice that anyone can construct, and at the same time it serves as a good exercise, since one concept necessarily emerges from another, and every set of concepts must fit into the ideas that are being created. We find a similar necessity, at most, only where the human spirit delves into the interrelationships provided by mathematics. A time will come again when people will ascend once more to this significant spiritual training.

[ 12 ] When we try to sense how spirit and nature are brought together in Goethe and Hegel, do we not feel the spirit of theosophical sensibility? Yes, we do. There is only one thing the spiritual scientist will miss in Hegel that he finds in Goethe in the words of “Faust,” which Goethe calls the “Chorus mysticus”:

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

[ 13 ] Let us consider the first three lines. Before us lies nature, as it comes into being and passes away in its individual parts; everything that must pass through birth and death is, for him, a parable of the eternal, the transcendent, of all that lies beyond. In this, Hegel is a kindred spirit to Goethe; he, the philosopher, expresses the same idea in intellectual terms: Everything transitory in nature is a parable for the eternally creative world of ideas. Then follows something that the poet might have strived for, but which was lost on the philosopher:

The Inadequate,
Here it becomes an event;
The Indescribable,
Here it is done.

[ 14 ] If we truly grasp the meaning of these words, we realize here where Hegel’s purely logical explanation of the world falls short. We can certainly apply stricter discipline in this ascent toward the network of concepts and ideas that lies behind the transitory. But there is something in this web of ideas that is inadequate, something that cannot become an event through rational contemplation alone. Hegel says: In this logical framework, I have God before me, before He has entered into His manifestation. But we must feel: Yes, you have something of the God who could have appeared to you as a grand plan of the worlds, into which everything is incorporated. But this web of ideas lacks life, and Hegel sensed this.

[ 15 ] Neither the philosopher nor the mere logician can penetrate to the supersensible life. Here, his mind—geared primarily toward logic—could not penetrate. Every idea is inadequate when it comes to allowing its content to flow forth. Reality shines forth from the realm of shadows when life enters the structure of ideas. That life can only be found if human beings do not merely stop at what presents itself to their intellect, but instead set out on the path toward the stages of higher knowledge. Human beings must begin to allow the spirit to live within themselves. This requires a form of cognition that does not dwell solely in sharply defined concepts, but in what we have often referred to here—the pictorial, the imaginations—which represent a form of cognition that reaches beyond all conceptual understanding. Behind everything ideal lies a world of creative principles that is richer than all ideas. This is the element that cannot be fully captured by an idea—it must and can be experienced only when one goes beyond the idea to the image that the poet possesses, or to the supersensible reality, to the spiritual. That is why Goethe, as a poet, was able to approach what Hegel lacked.

[ 16 ] In the second part of Faust, Goethe comes as close as possible to what we today call the theosophical worldview. He strives for nothing less than to make that which connects human beings to the great spiritual realm—which he sensed as a boy, sought as a man, and expressed in the fairy tale of the green snake and the beautiful lily—the very essence of humanity’s highest spiritual culture. He truly wishes to bring before his soul those mysteries of the spiritual and the sensual-physical in human beings. In the second part of Faust as well, he seeks to do the same; but we must approach it with different eyes than scholars usually do. We must accept something that will strike many of today’s interpreters of Faust as quite crazy; but we will find that what Goethe says to Eckermann is true: “I have worked in such a way that those who wanted something merely for their outward curiosity are very much satisfied, but for esotericists I have hidden many a mystery within.”

[ 17 ] First, Faust is guided through the small world. After he has experienced sensual bliss and sensual misery, we see how he is to be admitted into a realm of ideas, where the greatest mysteries of the nature of the world will be revealed to him. He is introduced into the great world. Faust longs to unite with the Greek Helen, who has long since passed away. She is to unite with Faust as a woman in the flesh. For Faust and Goethe, Helen means something quite different than she does for most people. For them, she represents the people and the creativity that Goethe admired in the Greeks, of whom he said they had fathomed the mystery of all natural creation and hinted at it in their works of art.

[ 18 ] But only when properly prepared can a person experience the mystery that the eternal, the imperishable aspect of the human being can appear before us in a new incarnation; it is nothing less than the enigma of incarnations that confronts us here. Faust longs for Helena—he touches her, and at first there is an explosion, because he has not yet been purified inwardly, and he must first grasp the mysteries of incarnation, which are revealed to Faust step by step. For Goethe, the human being also consists of the physical human, which represents the outer corporeality of the human being—that which he shares with all the surrounding minerals. Then, in Goethe’s view, there is also a second element: the soul, the astral body, the bearer of desires and so on. For Goethe, too, the highest is the spirit, which represents what is truly eternal, rushing from embodiment to embodiment, undergoing incarnation after incarnation. And Faust is to experience how spirit, soul, and body come together to form this sensory world. To do so, he must first recognize where the eternal is to be found when it is not physically embodied on earth. The eternal resides in a purely spiritual realm. That is why Faust must be led down into the spiritual realm, into that kingdom where the “Mothers”—the primordial mothers of all that is spiritual—reside. Mephisto stands at Faust’s side with the key to the realm of the Mothers, which he hands to Faust. Mephisto can do this; he can also describe the outer realm; but he cannot enter it. He is the representative of the purely intellectual human being; he even describes the realm as nothingness. Therefore, he is the representative of realism, of monism. One must reach the gateway to spiritual life; the most rigorous science holds the key, but it leads only as far as the door. Anyone whose experience is based solely on the senses still clearly echoes Mephisto’s words today, claiming that there is nothingness in the spiritual realm. Faust, however, responds with what should still be said today:

In your nothingness, I hope to find the universe!

[ 19 ] And Faust descends into the realm of the mothers and brings up the living, eternal spirit of Helena—that which passes from one incarnation to the next. Anyone who follows and understands the description of the “realm of the mothers” will recognize Goethe, the sage, in every word.

Then sink! I could also say: Rise!

[ 20 ] In this realm, it is the same—our concepts of space no longer suffice. The mothers sit upon a glowing tripod. This is the symbolic representation of what is truly eternal in human beings, which is divided into: Manas, Budhi, Atma, or the spiritual self, the life spirit, and the spiritual human. This symbol of the tripod, surrounded by the eternally creative mothers, conveys enough meaning in such a significant context. The spirit that Faust thus summons must be enveloped by the astral and physical bodies, and that is what happens. Goethe depicts that which stands right in the middle between the spirit and the physical body—the astral world—in the Homunculus. That which has nothing to do with anything belonging to the physical world, which is created separately from Helena’s spirit but is later to unite with it—that is the astral in the human being, that which dwells within the human physical body. Goethe does everything he can to point out that in the Homunculus we have the astral in the human being. If the astral could be separate from the physical, it would have to be clairvoyant—it would have to gaze into the astral world with clairvoyance. In the physical body, it is no longer clairvoyant. And Goethe portrays the Homunculus as clairvoyant. As soon as he appears, he sees what Faust dreams; he sees the entire world of ideas in Faust. And if we go further—is it not clearly stated to us:

He does not lack intellectual qualities,
but he is sorely lacking in practical competence.

[ 21 ] — after all, he lacks a physical form. The homunculus is a soul that seeks to incarnate itself. In every word that is spoken there, one can discern Goethe’s view in the direction indicated. But Goethe’s words must also be understood in their proper sense.

It’s happening! The masses are stirring with greater clarity
Their conviction grows truer and truer.

[ 22 ] We even find this in commentaries on Faust: in Wagner, the conviction of the true stirs—but what is meant is that the astral nature manifests in a way that transcends human procreation. It is a conviction—like that of the Übermensch. People find it difficult to understand Goethe in this regard, where he is esoteric. Even during his lifetime, he had to endure people constantly pointing out what he had poured into his work from the full abundance of his youthful nature and his poetic sensibility—things that do not require much to understand. He dealt with such people quite effectively. A note was found among his papers:

There they praise Faust
And whatever else
Rages in my works
In their favor.
Old Mick and Mack
Are very pleased;
They think the rabble
Wouldn’t be there anymore!

[ 23 ] This is also the belief of the spiritual researcher. Goethe points out throughout that in Homunculus he intends to characterize this second aspect of the human being—that this soul aspect, before it can receive the spirit, must unite with everything that exists in the lower realms of nature. We see how the astral passes through all the realms of nature up to the human being. He therefore leads us, through Faust, Mephisto, and Homunculus, to the classic Walpurgis Night. This is an important chapter that tells us what Homunculus actually seeks there. There are the creative forces in nature; there, Homunculus wants to discover the secret of how, as an astral being, one structures the physical shell around oneself—how, beginning with the mineral realm, starting in the lowest kingdom, one lays shell upon shell around oneself—you have time all the way up to the human being. — In describing the transition from the mineral to the plant kingdom, Goethe finds the beautiful expression: “It murmurs thus.” It is then shown how he continues onward upward, until he is ready to create a physical shell for himself out of the elements. There Eros appears—love. When a human being wishes to step out of the spiritual into the sensory realm, then, according to the great mysteries, spirit, soul, and body must unite. When the three unite, then the human being can appear before us in accordance with the senses and the spirit. Helena is compliant; the eternal Spirit has ascended from the realm of the mothers. The homunculus has surrounded himself with physical matter, united with the Spirit, and Helena stands before us. The poet could not have portrayed this incarnation any other way. In the third act, the mystery of becoming is revealed.

The Inadequate—Here It Becomes an Event,

[ 24 ] In summary, he states what he intends to express based on this review. Where we ascend the higher path of knowledge toward higher forms, there the Spirit reveals itself as creative and alive; there it is set before our soul in living form. And we see what the spirit must also possess if it is not to be a mere specter of eternal ideas—it must have will. He suggests that it must have more than just thoughts and concepts. The indescribable, that which must be done—that is the will. It confronts us as a faculty of cognition where we feel the innermost source of supreme knowledge flowing within us. When we turn away from all that is sensory and physical. Human beings can reach this level, and Faust has reached it. Goethe shows us this symbolically once again by having Faust go blind at the highest level, so that he cannot see the physical world.

Only inside does a bright light shine.

[ 25 ] There we find ourselves immersed in the deeds of the spiritual world:

The indescribable—here it is,

[ 26 ] that which cannot be described with words from the sensory world. We see how the living, logical, willful spirit can flow into us. And this fertilizes what, in the highest sense, is regarded as the feminine: the soul. Thus we understand what Goethe means by the final words of Faust, when we realize that the soul is always portrayed as something feminine that must be fertilized and that draws us toward everything that becomes action. This is what Goethe seeks to convey to us.

[ 27 ] I have been able to cite only a few broad strokes. What has been said about Hegel will show you that Hegel was on the path of theosophy. He went as far as he could. With tremendous energy, he explored nature, seeking and finding connections. Goethe, the poet, went even further. In his poetic images, he sought to expand the rigid contours of conceptual images—that which is to become wisdom and science in life—by grasping the living spirit. Thus, through his Faust, Goethe so rightly affirmed that what he emphasized at the outset of his scientific writings—that we see the external things of the physical world because our senses are created for external sensory things—was a profound truth for him. The external image presents itself in accordance with the nature of our eyes:

If the eye were not like the sun,
It could never behold the sun;
If God’s own power did not dwell within us,
How could the divine delight us!

[ 28 ] Just as the physical sun is seen through the physical eye, so the Spirit is the creator of the spiritual eye within human beings, and is seen in its activity through the spiritual eye. These words stem from his worldview. This is how he understands the Spirit that permeates the world, and this is how, through his own strength, he has risen to a level of insight that few attain. At the very end of his life, he himself says to one of his friends: “The most important things I have written are not intended for the wider world, but for the few who can seek the same along spiritual paths.”

[ 29 ] What he has achieved for a few must become a common heritage for many; it must not remain a theoretical worldview, but must capture the heart and will. And so it is precisely those who approach the worldviews of Goethe and Hegel from the perspective of the humanities who must come to the realization of how much theosophy can be found in both of them. This conviction is summed up in the words that the sage is said to have spoken:

The spirit world is not closed off,
Your mind is closed, your heart is dead!
Come, bathe, disciple, undaunted
Your earthly breast in the morning glow!