The Rudolf Steiner Archive

34. From Paracelsus to Goethe

[ 1 ] On a beautiful September day this year, a trip took me to Zurich, and since I had the day to myself, I decided to visit Maria-Einsiedeln, which had been an important place of pilgrimage since the early Middle Ages and is situated in a picturesque setting. There was also a so-called pilgrimage taking place on that very day, and since the forecast called for beautiful, sunny weather, one could expect an exceptionally lively atmosphere in Maria-Einsiedeln, as is, of course, well known.

[ 2 ] I, too, wanted to go on a pilgrimage, for which an opportunity presented itself here; so I took a carriage to the Devil’s Bridge—a journey that takes you up and down hills—and after some time found myself there, in front of a house that had recently been built in place of an old, historically significant house, and which, in memory of the old house, bore a plaque designating it as the birthplace of the famous physician and naturalist Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus Paracelsus von Hohenheim, who was born here in 1493 and died in 1541, at the age of forty-eight. If one lingers there for a while, one truly senses the magic of that natural landscape, the kind one can find only in the Alps. All the plants that sprout there and the animals that inhabit the area speak to you with a deep feeling, in a language of the most intimate familiarity with the unspoiled essence of nature. And amidst such powerful impressions of the interconnection with this outwardly enchanting natural world, the image of the young Paracelsus arose within me—he who had spent the first nine years of his life in this striking setting. In him we see a receptive personality who, even in his childhood years, was open to learning much from such a natural world. This boy possessed an individuality that seemed literally destined to uncover, in such a unique setting, many of nature’s secrets—even if, at first, only intuitively. We can imagine how the boy always eagerly awaited his absent father—a respected, busy physician—with his questions; how he frequently accompanied his father on short outings; and how many a word was exchanged—in the form of questions and insightful explanations—about the sick, their care, and the surrounding nature. When the boy turned nine, the family moved to Villach in Carinthia, where his connection with nature and his father could continue to a greater extent.

[ 3 ] Now follow me as I take you in your mind’s eye to a house in the eastern part of Salzburg, where a plaque announces that T’heophrastus Bombastus Paracelsus von Hohenheim died here on September 23, 1541. This may bring to mind the legend associated with his death, according to which the physicians—who were extremely hostile toward him—are said to have hired someone to push him off the nearby hill. The years in question encompass a most peculiar life, and this remarkable figure at the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries appears, in the course of human development, as the twilight of a certain era that could still reveal the spiritual heavens of all that is beautiful and magnificent. Essentially, everything that can be gleaned from Paracelsus’s soul bears witness to the fact that he continually maintained an intimate connection with nature and understood the world around him. He maintained these strong connections during his extensive travels throughout the world—in the regions of his homeland, throughout Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Russia, and Turkey—everywhere quickly grasping and feeling at home with whatever presented itself to him in the most diverse forms as the mystery of existence. Thus, he amassed a rich treasure of spirit and knowledge on his travels, and how he explored the world in his own way becomes all the more clear to us when we imagine how he lived out the impressions he had brought with him from there and from his youth at the University of Basel—especially when we consider how university studies were conducted at that time, and what the state of scientific research and medical knowledge in particular was like. Everywhere, the ancient writings of Galen and Avicenna served as the foundation, and the learned scholars at the universities of that time provided a kind of commentary on these ancient authors in Latin.

[ 4 ] Paracelsus told them: “You speak of books, yet you are far removed from all that nature itself speaks to us through mighty revelations, if only we open the gates of our souls to her,” and he left that official institution of learning of the time. Some called him a vagrant back then and still call him one today, but he was only one outwardly—and only because he believed that if one wanted to learn the secrets of the world, one had to go to the spiritual beings who lived out their lives in this very world. He wanted to use his clairvoyant powers to discover how nature lives in its creative process, to eavesdrop on the world’s secrets in all the lands he wandered through. Not from books, but from the great book of nature—he wanted to step onto its individual pages, as he said, turning them as he wandered from place to place. Paracelsus believed that the spiritual lay behind the sensory and that what is perceptible externally was merely a manifestation of the spiritual. The great, all-encompassing spiritual took on various sensory forms in plants, animals, and humans across different countries and climates, even though the spiritual itself was unified—a unity he sought in its diversity, like a hidden aroma or a veiled light. It was also clear to him that these diversities included the outward configuration of present-day life, as well as that of human types and individual peoples, in both their healthy and diseased states. He conceived of disease as something mysterious, yet with a different character in Germany, Hungary, Italy, and so on. He wanted to understand what arose in his soul when he stood face to face with nature, in order to establish a healing science of medicine. When we thus see Paracelsus placed within the multifaceted world, we recognize how he found special powers in the great book of nature and in his own soul, and what he said, based on his studies and experiences, takes on a truly personal character. A very peculiar state of mind took hold of him as a result of his special relationship with nature; and without any trace of arrogance, he said that he felt powers speaking within him and through him—powers he perceived not as his own will or logic, but as if nature itself were speaking directly within him and through him. Only those capable of comprehending such a relationship—in which Paracelsus felt completely at ease and natural—will be able to understand why he could not relate to his fellow scholars and their books in any other way than he actually did, since it did not seem to him that they were striving for genuine knowledge when he said: “Let not anyone who wishes to learn and practice true medicine turn to the ancient writers, not to Galen and Avicenna, not to Bologna, Paris, and so on—not to them, not there, but to me; for mine is the Monarchei!” Thus he stood firm in himself, and his motto was: “Let no one be another’s servant who can remain alone for himself.” Thus we see Paracelsus as an upright, defiant figure among his contemporaries, as a man in whom a clairvoyant power had emerged, who knew how nature functioned in its workings and how it manifested itself in the healthy and diseased states of human beings.

[ 5 ] But just as uncomfortable as he felt as a student, so too did he feel as a professor and city physician in Basel. Although he was famous for his travels and his skill—he could help where everyone else failed—his colleagues regarded him more or less as a vagrant who had wandered about with dubious characters; and although he was now expected to behave differently as a teacher in a position of authority, he remained the same even in his university life. Consequently, he did not get along with his professional peers; even as we follow him on his travels, where he performed famous cures for the poor, princes, and distinguished individuals, he was cheated out of his fees by them—and even by those in the highest positions. Among other things, he became famous for healing a man whom we can regard as a forerunner of the age of printing, namely Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam, who, as a credible scholar, passed a judgment full of high regard and reverence for Paracelsus. In Basel, a peculiar and momentous event took place: Paracelsus cured a canon named Lichtenfels of a severe, painful ailment and had stipulated a fee of one hundred talers in the event of a cure. The sufferer took the remedies prescribed by Paracelsus three times, then recovered, but—as he saw it—did not want to pay that sum for such a simple service. Paracelsus then became quite enraged and sent out flyers all over the city. The city council, however, sent word to him that if he had not left the city within half an hour after such insults against the highly revered canon, he would be thrown into prison. Paracelsus therefore fled the city under the cover of darkness.

[ 6 ] Just as he so often clashed with those around him, so too did he clash with his colleagues, since he treated patients according to different principles. Moreover, they resented him deeply for the fact that he—without the slightest hesitation—shared the connections that were self-evident to him, which he had gleaned as secrets of nature and now applied to the healing and care of the sick, shared quite openly; that he did not believe his insights—which had been gained and were so intimately connected with his spiritual powers—could be better expressed in Latin with its sharp, abstract contours, but instead made use of the living German language, with its great flexibility and subtle nuances, rather than the dead language. His colleagues did not understand how his knowledge—which was inaccessible to them—was interwoven with innumerable imponderables, nor how, contrary to the custom of scholarly institutions, he was able to present this to his listeners in German, thereby daring to undermine the dignity of the university according to their narrow-minded views. During his travels, they sought to slander him everywhere; scholars challenged him to Latin debates, which he accepted, but in which—when technical differences arose—he would shout at them in German, thereby providing a vivid illustration of the relationship between himself and his contemporaries. It is understandable that almost everyone opposed such a man in the most hostile manner, and equally so that his life, in the midst of such a grueling struggle, could only be short. With his comprehensive, penetrating knowledge, he was unable to adapt to the outward conventions of his colleagues in the field or to wear the old-fashioned robes in which they appeared at the lectern at that time, so that they said of him: “Our colleague Paracelsus has been seen walking about in the garb of a cart driver.” It is therefore understandable that those who felt they were no match for him in knowledge and skill—and whom he openly despised for their scientific masquerade—harbored a deep hatred toward him, giving rise to the legend that emerged about the end of his life: that he was deliberately provoked to death or even thrown off a cliff near Salzburg. Thus we behold his portrait, marked by the deep traces of intellectual labor and the furrows of suffering caused by his opponents.

[ 7 ] To gain a deeper understanding of this man’s inner life, we must seek to answer the question of how Paracelsus, in his unique way, conceived of the surrounding natural world—which he needed for his medical science—and of human nature; how distinctive his spiritual perspective was. He began by setting forth the following points: One must be able to grasp the entire vast world—the macrocosm—in its manifestation and understand how the human being, as a microcosm, fits into it; how the air relates to the lungs, the light to the eye; and how the same forces act both outside and within the human being. Everything that exerts a force externally, we also find, along with its laws, within the human being. Therefore, one must investigate what can make a person healthy or sick within the macrocosm—above all, as a member of the Earth as a single great organism, of which the human being is a part. He then said: Although the human being is to be integrated into the chain of natural phenomena, he is nevertheless a self-contained being. The forces of all of nature are concentrated within human beings, yet they cannot automatically lead them to shut themselves off from the external forces and beings of nature. This, however, stems from the fact, said Paracelsus, that human beings possess within themselves a living architect, an “archaeus,” who literally tears them out of the whole of nature and gives them their unique configuration.

[ 8 ] Paracelsus sought to explore what humans absorb from external influences in order to process them internally, and he elevated such elementary insights to their highest expression. For him, the most important things are those about which little is said. For example, he said that when a person eats bread and fruit, the “archaeus” transforms these into flesh and the various organ substances within the human body—acting as an inner alchemist—and depending on how this occurs, the external substances become either healthy, useful bodily substances or poison. He then examined this transformation—the unconscious art of this being—and analyzed a certain type of disease from this perspective.

[ 9 ] He formulated his third main principle as follows: That which is integrated in this sense is organized as a whole from many groups of individual organs and is autonomous. Human beings are a whole little world, a microcosm that reflects the macrocosm.

[ 10 ] He thus came to the conclusion that out there, in the cosmic relationships of the great celestial bodies, there was something that corresponded to the microcosm of the human being. For example, just as the sun and moon relate to one another, so do the heart and the brain relate internally; one must therefore study both in their own distinct ways and in their mutual relationships and apply their effects to the human being, just as the movements, sizes, and light conditions of Saturn and Jupiter are transformed to correspond to the human liver and spleen, as their microcosmic image.

[ 11 ] Thus, he constructed an inner heaven from the human organs as a reflection of the vast outer starry sky. In this way, he conceived of the dynamically differentiated energetic forces within the human being as a unified whole; he did not regard anything as separate, but rather saw everything as existing in living interaction. It is interesting to note how he defended—in rather crude language—what appeared to him to be the effect of an inner celestial system, rather than a crude interaction of ingested food: Oh, they understand nothing, those who believe that food acts internally according to its chemical composition, as it were, merely as a continuation of its external chemical forces; for that would be roughly the same as viewing a plant as an effect of manure, compared to the living configuration of the organs active within the human being. Thus we see how the interacting organs appear to him as the dynamics of a complex clockwork mechanism, and Paracelsus says: Man can therefore be “afflicted,” depending on whether the inner alchemist produces the spiritual or the non-spiritual, through normal or abnormal interaction of the organs, even without external causes!

[ 12 ] Fourth, Paracelsus states as a fundamental principle: The soul becomes ill due to its own passions and emotional disturbances, and the organism follows suit as a consequence.

[ 13 ] Finally, the fifth point: The completeness of pharmacology is ensured by the fact that the human being, in his illness, must be regarded as someone suffering under his fate—karma—under something that transcends him spiritually, something that intervenes in the spiritual microcosm from the spiritual macrocosm, so that the former is entirely subject to the influence of the latter.

[ 14 ] Paracelsus thus synthesized a vast body of knowledge and combined it with the utmost confidence in the spiritual and soul forces of the human being, but also, at the same time, with the deepest trust in the spiritual forces of the greater world that underlies the human organism. He therefore said that through the soul we find God behind the workings of nature, through faith we find Christ, and through the imagination we find the Holy Spirit. He possessed a profound soul; his heart was imbued with the deepest piety. We see the most essential element of his clairvoyant vision in his piety; everything that accompanied his actions as a physician sprang from it. Thus it is also understandable to us that he designated love and hope as his two most important remedies, and from this, the nature of his medical treatment inevitably followed: as he did everything possible according to his five points of view with full love and devotion, and in the understanding of these connections, he cherished the hope his remedy would have the healing effect he had intuitively perceived. He was completely immersed in the illness and, indeed, in the overall condition of his patients. Using his clairvoyance and guided by his five principles, he observed what external influences had affected the person and what the “inner alchemist” had done in response. Whatever then penetrated the patient from the great spirit of all nature, he did not allow to affect him in abstract terms, but rather in such a way that it flowed back down from the patient to him and coalesced within him into what he had to prescribe as a remedy. Thus we can understand how Paracelsus was deeply imbued with the conviction that his medical practice was a continuous act of creation as an artist. He transformed substances beyond nature into effective remedies by shaping and combining them. A higher nature within nature was his art, his intention, and his alchemy; he created works of art in contrast to nature. In Paracelsus, something reminds us of Goethe’s saying:

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

[ 15 ] There is no more accurate way to describe this clairvoyant man than with these words!

[ 16 ] And when we look back across the centuries from Paracelsus to Goethe, we see that, despite all their differences, Goethe’s spirit bears a strong resemblance to that of Paracelsus. We see this in the way Goethe, as a young boy, immersed himself in nature: when, at the age of seven, he took a music stand, decorated it with all kinds of minerals from his father’s collection, along with plants and shells, crowned the whole thing with a small incense stick, and then waited for the sun to rise. He focused the sun’s rays through a magnifying glass, used them to light the incense stick, and thus offered a sacrifice to the great, almighty God before his makeshift altar. When we consider the motives that led the young Goethe to act in this way, we sense how deeply he—like Paracelsus—felt connected to nature. Paracelsus said of himself, as a country dweller raised in a harsh environment, that he had been sent out of the house in all kinds of weather, and that he had not grown up in soft beds with figs and wheat bread, but rather on sour milk and coarse oat bread.

[ 17 ] In Goethe, we find a harmony that is rarely disturbed and always quickly restored, even in his conception of nature, which is evident in many ways in his work as a natural scientist during his journey to Italy, where—like Paracelsus—he traveled through the countryside with keen observation and wrote home, for example, about the coltsfoot, noting in particular how it developed in various ways depending on changes in climate, sunlight, location, soil type, and so on; thus, he sees diversity emerging from unity, as he sought to demonstrate particularly with the “primordial plant,” from which he developed the diversity of plant phenomena. Thus, he wrote that he would like to travel on as far as India—not to discover anything new, but to explore nature in its ever-changing diversity.

[ 18 ] Thus, something came to life in Goethe that can be found in many ways in the figure of Paracelsus. And while Goethe embodied his main character in Faust, many traits are woven into this character that evoke the thought that, when conceiving Faust, Goethe had been under the influence of Paracelsus’s unique character—despite the great differences between “Faust” and the historical Paracelsus, who died before reaching his fifties but who, until then, had carried within his soul a treasure of inner, harmonious serenity that he had gained from his intimate communion with nature. The life of this spirit—who was, in himself, exceptionally happy—was brief; his research findings and his professional work connected him to the eternal principles of nature.

[ 19 ] In Goethe’s work, Faust begins where Paracelsus leaves off, but, harboring great doubts about all his extensive knowledge, Faust strives throughout the years of his life—years that Paracelsus never reached.

[ 20 ] Goethe had developed the character of Faust in such a way that he had reached the stage of spiritual development at which Paracelsus stood when he penetrated the essence of nature, just as Faust bursts out with the words:

Sublime Spirit, you gave me, gave me everything
I asked for. You did not turn
Your face toward me in the fire in vain.
You gave me the magnificent natural world as my kingdom,
The power to feel it, to enjoy it. You allow not
do you permit me only to gaze coldly and in wonder,
but you grant me a glimpse into its deep bosom,
as if into the bosom of a friend.
You led the procession of the living
past me, and teach me to recognize my brothers
in the silent thicket, in air and water.

[ 21 ] He was thus closely connected to the life and workings of nature, but Faust’s research was nonetheless different from that of Paracelsus; for Goethe shows us that Faust’s insights are not, like those of Paracelsus, always gained in direct connection with nature, but remain confined to the realm of the soul’s powers.

[ 22 ] In Mephistopheles, Goethe therefore presented—without such a contrast to the phenomena of nature—a juxtaposition of the spiritual, so that the spiritual was not seen in nature, but rather the spiritual was seen only within the spiritual.

[ 23 ] And yet we can discern a strong kinship between Faust and Paracelsus: just as Faust set the Bible “aside” for a long time and turned away from it, so too did Paracelsus turn away from the scholarly works of Galen and Avicenna; both relied on their own powers to find their own path. Thus we sense how Goethe often perceives Paracelsus in the background and, in a sense, glimpses him through Faust. For example, in the scene where Faust goes out into the spring landscape with Wagner and says:

My father was a mysterious man of honor
Who, with integrity yet in his own way,
Pondered nature and its sacred circles
With whimsical diligence;
Who, in the company of adepts,
Locked himself away in the black kitchen
And, following endless recipes,
Mixed together the contradictory elements.
Then a red lion, a bold suitor,
Was wed in the lukewarm bath of the lily,
And both were then tormented by open flames
From one bridal chamber to the next.

[ 24 ] One could almost picture Paracelsus speaking with his father. Or when we read how Faust struggles to “translate the New Testament into his beloved German”—into that language which springs from his very soul—just as Paracelsus, too, does not wish to force the wisdom of nature that he has deciphered into the foreign language of Latin, but rather to express it solely in German. Nowhere in Faust, however, does the struggle with the surrounding natural world in the pursuit of its understanding appear as it does in Paracelsus; rather, in the first part it involves moral forces, and in the second part, spiritual, intellectual powers—the homunculus.

[ 25 ] What Faust sought to achieve was, for Paracelsus, something given by nature—he who thought and acted entirely selflessly. It is only at the end, after a selfish life, when he has gone blind in old age, that Faust attains selflessness—when “a bright light shines within,” when he becomes a mystic, when he is granted insight into the innermost essence that Paracelsus had discovered throughout his life from external nature as a spirit attuned to the elements. Paracelsus was the evening glow at the turn of the fifteenth to the sixteenth century, shining clearly visible to all; in Faust, we can seek it only within, as a force acting upon the soul.

[ 26 ] Why, then, was Goethe able to portray Faust the way he did? Because between Paracelsus’s lifetime and the conception of Faust, something peculiar occurred in the development of humanity that drastically shifted the previous conditions and steered them in new directions. Paracelsus did not live to see what Copernicus and Kepler discovered; he was merely the twilight of a science that, in the dawn that followed, had moved from the sensory into the supersensory. Paracelsus penetrated through the phenomenal side of nature to the spirit, but through Copernicus and men working in his spirit, humanity has been led into the age of intellectuality, of thought—an age that, in explaining the sensory world, does not seek to penetrate its veil as in earlier times, but seeks fulfillment in the knowledge of the soul. It was therefore inevitable that a spiritual element would be chosen as the setting for the figure in whom Goethe placed his Faust—just as Copernicus, Kepler, Giordano Bruno, and Galileo worked in the same manner. As a mystic, Faust thus appropriates for himself what Paracelsus derived from the direct contemplation of nature. Goethe portrayed in Faust how modern man is dependent on his inner spiritual life. In the same way, spiritual science searches in the deep recesses of the soul for what can lead from the transitory to the infinitely eternal.

[ 27 ] According to Paracelsus, a new era dawned like the break of day, proclaiming that if we turn to the non-sensory realm, we will gain a true understanding of our world system. And so Goethe presented his Faust as the most elevated exponent of this view. Spiritual science is continuing along this path, which leads from the realm of the soul into the mysteries of nature; and just as Giordano Bruno broke through the blue firmament of the eighth sphere, so now spiritual science breaks through the boundaries of life—birth and death—by enabling us to recognize the soul as an infinite being that extends beyond space and time. Goethe thus appears as someone who points out the beginning of the right path to us by presenting us with an image in Faust—one to which the memory of Paracelsus leads us, so that we may understand him all the more clearly.

[ 28 ] In this way, individual human beings are placed within the ongoing development of the world, and so today, too, humanity must once again blaze new trails so that, through its insights, it may find harmony within its soul forces—going beyond Paracelsus and Faust. Based on such connections, one senses ever more deeply the inner kinship between Paracelsus and Goethe, especially in the latter’s words:

When the healthy nature of human beings functions as a whole, when they feel at home in the world as part of a great, beautiful, dignified, and valuable whole, when this harmonious contentment grants them a 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.

[ 29 ] Like Paracelsus, Goethe seeks and sees in human beings—as a microcosm—the entire workings of the greater world, the macrocosm.

[ 30 ] On the drive back from Paracelsus’s birthplace in Maria-Einsiedeln, one gets thoroughly jostled along the route through valleys and over hills, which makes one physically aware of Paracelsus’s rugged character; as we approached the pilgrimage church, memories of Goethe also resurfaced. It seemed to me that, in the outwardly modest-looking church of Maria-Einsiedeln, the spirit of the great man manifested itself as soon as one allowed the interior to truly sink in and learned to appreciate the tasteful interior in its own right. Goethe, too, once stood in this evocative space, in this small yet grand church, which—like a microcosm within the macrocosm—presented humanity as a reflection of the greater world to the contemplative observer. In his words, I sensed this and could imagine how Goethe, in this very place where Paracelsus had often stood, felt the fundamental sense of the correspondence between the macrocosm and the microcosm within the human being clearly come to life within himself. This is what the path from Paracelsus to Goethe shows us: The two endpoints of this path—the fading evening star and the rising sun of the new age—point to a profound similarity between the souls of these two men, a living protest against an external, non-intellectual, non-spiritual grasp of things, which Goethe—or, more significantly, Mephisto—expresses in Faust as follows:

Whoever wishes to understand and describe something living,
Must first seek to extract the spirit,
Then he holds the parts in his hand,
But, alas, the spiritual bond is missing.
Chemistry calls it “Encheiresin naturae,”
Mocks itself and does not know how.

[ 31 ] Such elements are also part of Paracelsus’s character, serving as a vivid protest against overlooking the whole when considering the parts. In an earlier draft of Faust, Goethe had written the following in place of the closing lines:

He's screwing a donkey and doesn't know how.

[ 32 ] Paracelsus, like Goethe, condemned such a view of nature; both were inspired by the opposite tendency, which—drawing on Mephisto’s words—could be paraphrased as follows:

Whoever seeks something alive,
Let him search the depths to fathom the spirit!
And once he holds the pieces in his hand,
He sees in the light of the spirit
The sole salvation in the spiritual bond,
Which holds together what otherwise cannot hold itself,
And recognizes the mysteries of the universe.