The Rudolf Steiner Archive

35. From Paracelsus to Goethe

Ladies and gentlemen!

[ 1 ] The perspective from which I am to speak this evening, at the request of some local friends of the theosophical or spiritual-scientific worldview, is by no means a popular one in the world or widely recognized in broader circles. With the exception of a few—and even fewer of our contemporaries—who, through deep insight and long engagement with the subject, have gained a profound conviction in the direction of the worldview in question, this perspective encounters opposition, doubt, and misunderstanding everywhere. And anyone who speaks on such a subject for the first time in a given place naturally does not delude himself into thinking that a few remarks made in a short lecture could in any way instill conviction. Yet this evening I find myself in the somewhat precarious position of having to present various points from the theosophical worldview—points for which there is indeed ample evidence for those who delve deeper into the subject matter, but which cannot be supported by all the necessary evidence this evening.

[ 2 ] In accordance with the wishes of the local supporters of our worldview, we should draw upon a figure in the intellectual development of humanity who, in a sense, must be of interest to this part of the world, on which we find ourselves—must be of interest because she lived here in this city for a long time; and we shall also draw upon a figure who, as everyone must acknowledge, has profoundly influenced the spiritual life of our time—Goethe. Not that the aim is to show that one can find in the worldviews of Paracelsus and Goethe only a confirmation of what can emerge from spiritual science, but rather to show that figures are already present in them who, precisely in their struggles and strivings, demonstrate that what spiritual science or theosophy seeks, has been longed for and striven for by those who, as modern spiritual development approached and in our present time, sought in their own way to interpret the signs of the times and the needs of the human soul.

[ 3 ] But before we can connect with the spiritual significance of Paracelsus and Goethe and the path that development took from Paracelsus to Goethe, we must first characterize the standpoint of theosophy, as theosophy or spiritual science presents itself to us in the world today. Theosophy, or spiritual science, is by no means something that should be confused with any religious It has no intention of aligning itself with external religious creeds, much less of forming any religion or sect. That is far from its purpose, because its sources are such that it cannot in any way interfere with people’s religious creeds or religious convictions.

[ 4 ] On the other hand, the object under consideration finds its opponents notably among those who believe they stand firmly on the ground of natural science, which is also valued by researchers in the humanities. This is the greatness of the spiritual-scientific perspective: that, in terms of its mode of thinking, it stands entirely on the ground of scientific thought; yet, proceeding from this scientific thought, it seeks to lead us up to the highest realms of existence, the knowledge of which the human soul longs for. This longing arises because human beings need insights into higher worlds if they are to feel secure in their work within the outer, visible world in which they are called upon to act. Theosophy, or spiritual science, is meant to lead us up into the world of the spiritual—that world which may also be called the supersensible world. This, my esteemed audience, also indicates why it must attract an immense number of opponents in the present day; for even level-headed leading scientists today readily admit that what is achieved through the methods of ordinary science can by no means shed light on the highest forces and beings that interweave and permeate this world. It is thus widely acknowledged that a spiritual world underlies our sensory world. But even though such level-headed people of our time do not wish to adopt the stance of those who, out of materialistic thinking, assert: “Human beings know that nothing is real except what surrounds us,” they nevertheless often take the position that they say: “A supersensible world may exist behind our sensory world—but human powers of cognition are so limited that one must stop short of this spiritual world.”

[ 5 ] The fact that there is a spiritual world to which human beings belong—with their souls and with whatever lives spiritually within them—just as they belong to the external world with their physical powers, is yet another truth that spiritual science is meant to make known to the world once again. The second point is that one can penetrate this world using the very same methods as in the natural sciences. Since our time is limited, it would be good to draw attention now to how human beings can look up into the spiritual world through the methods of the natural sciences and their mode of thinking. The natural sciences penetrate what they seek to investigate through observation, but they also do so through experimentation. Research through observation, but also, to some extent, through experimentation, are also the methods of spiritual science. Here, too, it must be pointed out right away that spiritual science must, quite honestly and sincerely, stand firmly on the ground of a statement by Goethe, who foresaw the method of our science:

Mysterious in Broad Daylight
Nature cannot be stripped of its veil,
And what it chooses not to reveal to your mind,
You cannot force from it with levers and screws.

[ 6 ] What, essentially, does such a statement mean? It means: We can penetrate the external world of things and the forces underlying it using all the tools that are manufactured externally in the world. And even setting aside the new instruments of natural science, we already know that, at the elementary level, the world of the infinitely small has been explored through the microscope, and the infinitely large world—the macrocosm—through the telescope. This is how one penetrates the world of things; one cannot penetrate the world of the spirit in this way. Only the human spirit can penetrate the world of the spirit; there can be only one tool there: the human spirit itself.

[ 7 ] The fact is that this spirit within human beings has certain limits; only certain things that are bound to the intellect can be understood. You can read more about what can only be touched upon here—and what is more significant than all power and all wealth, namely, that human beings can be guided further and are capable of entering entirely different worlds—in my book: “How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?”

[ 8 ] Just as one does in a laboratory or in a clinic, one cannot prepare the human soul to enter the supersensible world. This can be achieved only through purely spiritual processes. One understands the full meaning of this spiritual process when one considers the following example, which demonstrates that one can be quite intelligent in one’s thinking, in the manner practiced in the methods of the natural sciences.

[ 9 ] If you have water, you know that this water can be understood by breaking it down into its two components: hydrogen and oxygen. That much is known. But to investigate what hydrogen is and what oxygen is, you must separate them—either the oxygen or the hydrogen—so that you can examine each one on its own.

[ 10 ] In human beings, as they exist in the world, the spirit and soul are united with the entire body, just as oxygen and hydrogen are united in water. Through the senses and the intellect, our soul-spiritual nature perceives only the external world in colors, sounds, smells, and tastes. We form a picture by discovering the laws of nature. Everything that reaches the spiritual-soul aspect does so in the same way that oxygen does when it is combined with hydrogen in water. But if we want to examine it, we must separate it from the physical just as we must separate oxygen from hydrogen if we want to examine it. Now there are means of isolating this spiritual-psychic realm: meditation and concentration. All of these are means through which something is brought about in the soul that is analogous to what the chemist brings about when he breaks water down into oxygen and hydrogen.

[ 11 ] To characterize this, we will examine the impulses of the will, hopes, and concerns that fill a person between waking and sleeping. All of these things that fill us so completely—if we look more closely, we will find [and we will see] that they do not exist without an external cause. We know that when we see red roses, we retain the image—even though we did not create that image ourselves in our soul. Similarly, this is how we discover the laws of nature through our intellect. When we look at our hopes, as well as our desires and passions, we find them stimulated by external factors. How can we say that we have acquired these through our own will? We know how this comes about through stimuli from the external world and through the unknown depths of our inner life. Our pain, our joy, our suffering, and our pleasure are brought about by the external world without any action on our part. We have not placed these inner experiences at the center of our soul. That is what the spiritual researcher must undertake. When the spiritual researcher, through pure inner will, brings such images—which he has created himself—into his soul, we call them “symbols.” Let us assume, for example, that we imagine light emanating from some celestial body. But we imagine this light to be like the body of a spiritual being, which has a body of light just as we have a physical body. If you tell me that this is a mistake, I would like to point out in particular that with such images—which we may use as spiritual instruments—we are by no means succumbing to the illusion that we thereby gain a conception of the external world. When such images are presented, they exist to be true not in the same sense as the images we otherwise form of the external world; their purpose is to serve as facts of the soul’s life. A person needs infinite patience and energy to arrive at such perceptions, for they must reject all thoughts relating to the external sensory world. They must become like a person who is asleep. When all external impressions fall silent, and even the intellect is silent, while the person is surrounded by darkness and in a state of unconsciousness, the person who has devoted years and years to inner exercises—just as a personal conception becomes a moral reality for us—will come to be, in relation to the external world and the rest of their inner life, as they are in sleep. Except that there is no loss of consciousness. Forces rise up there. Now we know that the soul is a spiritual being capable of giving itself content. The soul does not arrive at this through empty phrases, as in mysticism. Through the very same efforts of contemplation that a person makes externally using physical instruments, the soul comes to experience itself inwardly. There it arrives at an experience that is as free from corporeality and materiality as oxygen is free from hydrogen when chemically separated from it.

[ 12 ] It is certainly difficult to believe this from the outset. But believing that a person comes to know that they have acquired spiritual eyes and spiritual ears is no more difficult than believing in a new scientific discovery. A first insight that can be gained in this way is that a person becomes aware of what actually happens when we fall asleep at night. According to spiritual science, what remains in bed is that which a person has in common with the plant world—an outer physicality—while an inner spiritual-soul core emerges from this physicality. A spiritual-soul core that, from the moment of falling asleep until waking, is not within the human being’s physical being but in its own world. The human being simply cannot perceive this. However, it is perceived once the human being has acquired those spiritual eyes and ears. Then the human being knows that they are in a world in which spiritual events unfold just as they do in our sensory world. Every night, nature separates what the spiritual researcher has achieved as consciousness; only, the human being is unaware of it. Now an important finding of spiritual science comes to light: that through the methods of spiritual science one can provide proof for something that great minds have always sensed—something that is, however, regarded in the broadest circles as mere fantasy, but which will make its way through world culture, just as many other things have done that have endured despite the world’s opposition. I would like to draw attention to something similar. Not long ago, humanity believed that lower animals—small, lower animals—could develop from mere inanimate matter, lifeless matter. It was even believed that worms could develop from river mud. And until a few centuries ago, one could find descriptions in books considered scholarly of how animals developed in this way.

[ 13 ] It was a great achievement on the part of the Italian naturalist Francesco Redi to have pointed out to people that life cannot arise from non-living matter, but that only living things can give rise to other living things. In truth, there was a living germ in that river mud, originating from living organisms. The man who recognized this and was the first to speak out about it narrowly escaped the fate of Giordano Bruno.

[ 14 ] Modern humanities must apply this principle: “Life comes only from life” to human beings, it must, however, also arrive at proofs that stand just as far above the statement “Life comes only from life” as human beings stand above all living things, for in the case of human beings we are dealing with an individual, whereas all other living beings exist in groups and species. In our time, it is only natural that one must speak of the spiritual and psychological in the same way that Francesco Redi spoke of living things; that one must say: If a human being is born into life with certain predispositions and abilities—indeed, even with a certain destiny—and people then believe that this is based solely on heredity, this is based merely on inaccurate observation, just as it was based on inaccurate observation when people believed that worms could develop from river mud.

[ 15 ] Spiritual research shows, as Lessing demonstrated, that as a person grows up, their traits and abilities become increasingly defined from within, and the spiritual-soul aspect expresses itself more and more. Then we may say that it is not merely what we have inherited from our father and mother, grandfather and grandmother; rather, we must trace it back to the spiritual-soul aspect—which is ridiculed in the present but will take root just as surely as the statement: “The living can arise only from the living.” What is born with us, what shapes us from the moment of our birth or conception, comes from a previous earthly life; and with what we now carry within us as the spiritual-soul core of our being, we possess something that, when we pass through the gate of death, will live on in the spiritual world in order to form a body again in a later earthly life. Entirely in keeping with contemporary scientific thought, spiritual research arrives at the concept of multiple earthly lives, at the doctrine of reincarnation—often denounced as madness—and at the doctrine of karma, which states that what we experience, who we are, and how we relate to the world are the effects of what we have done, experienced, and felt in previous earthly lives. That what we do, experience, and feel now will be a cause for what we will do, experience, and feel in a future earthly life.

[ 16 ] Thus, the spiritual researcher divides his life between what lies between birth and death and a new birth; and in this life, he is a spiritual being. Human autonomy—the human capacity to be self-contained—is attained only through spiritual science, when one separates the spirit. Just as one cannot perceive oxygen as long as it is bound to hydrogen in water, so too can one not perceive the spirit as long as it is bound to the physical body. When one separates it from the physical body, one can perceive it. Then one also recognizes that it cannot be destroyed by the physical, that it characterizes the physical as something enduring, as something eternal.

[ 17 ] When we see this spiritual science or theosophy emerging in modern times, it should not be something that ties in with the past, something that can be picked up here and there. For example, some say: “Yes, this spiritual research, with its doctrine of reincarnation and its doctrine of karma, merely presents something we find in Buddhism.” But we can see that, in its most important and essential aspects, it differs from the doctrine of reincarnation taught by Buddhism—it is something it recognizes of its own accord through the spirit. It is a mistake to think that it is based on Buddhism; no, it stands on its own ground. It arrives at what it seeks to recognize through the investigations of those who make their own soul an instrument capable of penetrating the spiritual world.

[ 18 ] We can see how the finest of our minds, with all their yearning, were drawn toward what spiritual science today seeks to pluck as a ripe fruit from the tree of knowledge. And so one comes to turn one’s gaze toward a spirit whom one can comprehend when, as I was fortunate enough to do near Maria-Einsiedeln, spent a considerable time in the vicinity, one knows that this spirit first saw the light of day, that this is the birthplace of that spirit, that Paracelsus was born there in 1493 and lived there until he was fourteen. We find a remarkable spirit in this Paracelsus. It stirs something very special in one’s soul when one wanders through the natural surroundings of Maria-Einsiedeln. What surrounds us there in nature reminds us of how the boy grew up in these wondrous surroundings, developing into the figure whose spirit later confronts us with such grandeur. And this stirs within us the wish: May those who will be our successors be more just toward us than we have been toward our ancestors. We tend to say so casually: “Yes, Paracelsus did indeed have a rather commendable aspiration, but what he brought to light—no one can take that seriously today; after all, we have moved beyond that.” In short, in a more or less veiled sense, one is saying nothing other than that such a person is a fool. May future generations be fairer toward us, for what the botanist knows today will be characterized in the same way in a few centuries; only a short-sighted person would claim that this will last for all eternity.

[ 19 ] But Paracelsus, in contrast to what we go through when we ourselves become spiritual researchers, appears to us as a figure who seems strange to those who wish to penetrate the higher world, because he was a wiser and more characteristic expression of his time—a time that stands out precisely in this way, a time in which precisely this is the case. Paracelsus indeed appears to us as if, from his earliest youth, he had been intimately interwoven with everything that acts and weaves in nature. One cannot help but apply Goethe’s words to Paracelsus:

Nature! We are surrounded and embraced by you—unable to step out of you, and unable to penetrate deeper into you. Uninvited and without warning, she draws us into the cycle of her dance and carries us along until we grow weary and slip from her arms. She is eternally creating new forms; what is here has never been before, what was will never return—everything is new, and yet always the same.

[ 20 ] Goethe honors this intertwining of human beings with nature in a wonderful way. It was present in Paracelsus as well, except that he saw with his spirit, not merely through his eyes and intellect. Moreover, he did not require the training of the soul that has been described today. Rather, by nature, whenever he heard the rustling of the trees or felt the wind playing through the space, he perceived the spiritual forces of nature; he never perceived the elements of nature in isolation. He said: “Here a soul is expressing itself, just as in a human being who is not merely made of papier-mâché.” Thus, Paracelsus saw in nature not only the outward appearance but also signs of the spiritual beings active in nature, who exist in a supersensible world. Wherever a natural fact or a natural being presented itself to him, he therefore sought the spiritual and soulful aspect. He was, as it were, predestined for this by the way he had grown up. He therefore always said later that he was proud of the way he had remained a person of simple origins: “I did not grow up on wheat bread and figs, like those refined, sugar-fed people; I grew up on rye porridge and coarse bread.” From this deep connection with nature sprang, in Paracelsus, an inner certainty of being in communion with the spiritual world. It is also a wonderful memory of how, as a boy, he walked through nature hand in hand with his father in Maria-Einsiedeln, and how he had already had many conversations in his earliest childhood days about the mysteries of nature.

[ 21 ] And how differently it moves us when we see this man growing up, feeling so deeply this oneness with nature that he dared to set himself in opposition to everything around him. We need only adopt the perspective of the science of that time. At that time, attention was not focused on the facts of nature, but rather on ancient traditions—traditions preserved in books—that were passed down from generation to generation. People listened to what others said, to what Aristotle and Galen had taught. What I am telling you now is by no means a mere legend; I am recounting it to show how things stood in those days. It was believed—and this is what Aristotle had taught—that human nerves originate not in the head but in the heart. Galileo had a friend who was a learned gentleman. He pointed out to him that this could easily be demonstrated on a corpse, but his friend refused to believe it. So Galileo took him there and showed him on the corpse that the nerves originate in the brain, and upon seeing this, the learned gentleman said to him: “That may be true, you may be right, but when I look at nature and consult Aristotle, I’m still more inclined to believe Aristotle.”

[ 22 ] Here we can see just how immense the efforts must have been to return to the source of nature. Paracelsus did not want to learn from books. That is why we see him traveling through all sorts of distant lands: England, France, Hungary, Poland, and Turkey. If you want to know something about the world, you must not wait for it to come to you, but go to it. The world is like a great organism: it makes humanity healthy and sick. But health in France is one thing, and health in Germany is another. Paracelsus wanted to read from the great book of nature. That is why he did not shy away from listening to what the farmers and shepherds said—or even what the taskmasters said. He knew that through their elementary observations, they could uncover something that would lead to true knowledge.

[ 23 ] It was therefore not surprising that this Paracelsus, having, so to speak, set aside all the scholarly works by which others were taught, wanted to express what he had learned in words that were deeply connected to what nature spoke to him. He expressed what nature allowed to shine into his soul from its spirit: he wanted to capture it, not in Latin, as was customary at the time, but in his native language. That was what brought him into such sharp conflict with the scholarly establishment of his day. When he was appointed to Basel, he not only taught what he himself had observed, but he even dared to teach it in German. And when he further defied other customs of the time, there was no longer any place for him there. His wonderful lectures, so to speak, were his undoing. He had devised treatments highly regarded by the leading figures of his time—appreciated by Erasmus and other great minds—but he never approached his patients with the intention of charging a fee. It was the spiritual and soulful aspect of how he related to people. He never saw merely what was apparent on the outside. He said: “My chief remedy is love. I immerse myself in my patients with love and feeling; and whatever was present in the body came to life in the soul of Paracelsus.” When the image of a person’s inner illness met with Paracelsus’s own soul, the image of the plant or mineral he needed to prepare would arise in his soul, as if of its own accord. This is why he achieved such great and significant successes. Even though, in a certain sense, people might have regarded him as a vagrant, he was a great benefactor of humanity.

[ 24 ] But that did not prevent something like the following from happening. A nobleman went to Paracelsus to be cured by him. A fee of one hundred talers had been agreed upon. Paracelsus prescribed a remedy. After taking it three times, the nobleman was cured. But then he said: “Well, if I’ve recovered so quickly, it’s not worth a hundred talers.” And although Paracelsus usually didn’t place much importance on payment, this time he flew into a rage and had “malicious leaflets” printed—as they were called back then, or as we say today: pamphlets. He had them circulated. A friend then advised him to flee, and he lost his position.

[ 25 ] But that was generally how things went for him in life. Outwardly, the story of his death may seem like a legend, but the doctors had harbored such hatred toward him that it does not seem implausible that, in Salzburg, someone pushed him down a slope to his death—in the year 1541. Since Paracelsus was a man of great temperament and wholeheartedly championed everything he experienced with all his enthusiasm, one can say that there is an inner truth to this—especially when we look at the last portrait of Paracelsus, with his grief-stricken face, we are left with the feeling: He met a tragic end because the greatness that flourished in his soul was incompatible with the pettiness of his time.

[ 26 ] If we consider how he viewed time, we can say: He had not yet been able to penetrate to the teaching of repeated earthly lives, but he knew that the human being standing before him is not a being whose existence is limited to the physical realm, but rather a being with an inner nature, connected to the inner, invisible forces of a supersensible world. Indeed, he said: “Human beings can only be understood if we regard them as threefold beings. First, there is the human being who can be perceived through the physical intellect. Above this physical world, however, lies another that only the spiritual eyes can see. This human being is drawn from the astral or sidereal world, as Paracelsus also called it.” He then goes on to distinguish the highest human being, who belongs to the purely spiritual world. There, Paracelsus saw, hidden within our sensory world, two others, and the human being interwoven with these two others, and knew that the human being belongs to the spiritual-soul world.

[ 27 ] And then Paracelsus went on to say: When we observe this human being, the way he thinks and reflects must indeed reveal him as a spiritual-soul being. When he observed how a choice is made within a person’s organism regarding food, this was a sign to Paracelsus that, between the human being who thinks and investigates and the one who manifests in physicality, there is yet another presence. Thus he speaks of a spiritual body that is taken along when a person passes through the gate of death.

[ 28 ] Paracelsus calls this inner human being the “inner alchemist” because he transforms the substances of nature so that they can become the building blocks of the human being. And Paracelsus is well aware that he cannot rely solely on external remedies when he wishes to heal people; rather, supernatural forces are at work whether a person is healthy or sick. That is why he does not merely say, “A person must have undergone a test of nature,” but also that he must be a devout man. He knows that if he wants to heal people, he must penetrate to the deepest, most hidden causes of their illnesses. That is why I know that when I stand before a sick person, I have a remedy, but more than anything else, what works is when I can let something overflow from my soul: that is my hope. That in the spiritual course of events, what I have attained as a spiritual experience may also flow in, that the power flowing from my hope—of which I am completely imbued—may flow out.

[ 29 ] There is still much to be said, but one can turn one’s gaze away from Paracelsus to get to know him in yet another way—through a later, even more vivacious mind: Goethe. And there, quite strangely, the figure of Paracelsus stands alongside the contemplation of Goethe, as if Paracelsus were looking over Goethe’s shoulder—especially when one immerses oneself in the contemplation of Goethe’s life’s work, Faust. It is remarkable that, in terms of outward characteristics, Faust bears some resemblance to Paracelsus. Yet this is understandable. Goethe always had the figure of Paracelsus in mind alongside the Faust of the sixteenth century. And just as Paracelsus set aside the old Galen for a time, so we read of this Faust: He put the Bible aside for a while and became a man living in the world. Paracelsus did not, of course, set the Bible aside, but he turned away from the old medical books and sought to arrive at knowledge on his own. And when we follow Faust in this way—in everything as Goethe depicts him, how he goes out with the country folk and how they remind him of his past, how his father instructed him as a boy—the image of the young Paracelsus, holding his father’s hand, comes to mind. And one has the very same image, just as Goethe portrayed it in the walk outside the gate.

[ 30 ] But one thing is indeed most remarkable. Paracelsus lived to be 48 years old. He passed through the gates of death after a life of rich inner depth, and had he enjoyed good health, unimpeded by the limitations of his time, he too would have had to say: “There you stand alone”—which is the ideal of Faust. Can we not quite appropriately imagine Faust as old as Paracelsus was when he died? Nothing stands in our way. But while Paracelsus would have stood there, sustained by his rich, precious, and profound inner life, by his harmonious balance with all the longings of the world, Faust stands before us—at roughly the same age at which Paracelsus stands at the height of eminent fulfillment and insight—Faust stands before us in despair. Paracelsus could not have stood there with the words:

Alas, I have now studied philosophy,
law, and medicine,
and, unfortunately, theology as well
with great diligence.

[ 31 ] Paracelsus should have said: Thank God I ran away as soon as I was supposed to study all these things, and turned to nature instead. That is why his attitude toward the great wonders of nature differed from Faust’s. The Earth Spirit would never have said of him:

You are like the spirit you understand, not me!

[ 32 ] Rather, he was akin to the Spirit who

In the torrents of life, in the storm of deeds
I surge back and forth,
I sway to and fro!

[ 33 ] and from which Faust turns away in horror:

A terrible face.

[ 34 ] And so Faust, despairing of what science can offer us, yet unable to find what he seeks, turns to magic. Since time is short, we can, of course, only touch on all of this briefly.

[ 35 ] Goethe has his Faust pass through everything that a human being can attain through his own aberrations; he has him pass through all the aberrations that a human being undergoes when he does not enter the spiritual world in the proper way; and he depicts this particularly in the witches’ kitchen. The character portrayed in Faust does not arrive in a harmonious way at what Goethe himself particularly desired in his Faust. Yet Goethe delves ever deeper—especially through his travels in Italy—into what nature offers him.

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

[ 36 ] This intertwining with the spirit of nature—Faust possesses it; but he has not yet reached the point where he can recognize the spirit in its mature form. That is why Goethe must depict the recognition of the higher world in the characterization of the witches’ kitchen. But we move on and see how he—Faust—arrives at the imperial court, and how there he must entertain the emperor in all sorts of ways, and finally must bring Helena back from the underworld for him. We see how Goethe has him descend into the realm of the Mothers, that is, into the world of the soul-spiritual. There, however, he initially brings up only the image of Helena. But over time, he must bring up not only the image that resembles the spiritual Helena, but also what she truly is in the spiritual world. What is necessary for this? That he come to know the proper connection between body, soul, and spirit—namely, the physical body, the etheric body, and the astral body in the spiritual-scientific sense. Just as Faust initially fails to hold on to Helena, but must first unite body, soul, and spirit, so too must this soul first be portrayed in such a way that the body can penetrate it from one side, and the spirit—the homunculus—from the other. Here Goethe employs a curious image that people have studied at great length: ;

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

[ 37 ] And Thales advises him:

Yield to the noble desire
To begin creation anew!
Be ready to act swiftly!
There you move according to eternal laws,
Through a thousand and a thousand forms,
And you have time until you reach humanity.

[ 38 ] It is clearly stated that he—the homunculus—is to become human. Continuing:

Come with me in spirit to the damp expanse,
There you’ll live in all directions,
You may move about here as you please;
Just don’t strive for higher orders.

[ 39 ] The commentary here is taken directly from the text, because the word “Orden” was interpreted as if he had been striving to receive medals. But it’s actually quite simple. Goethe, as he often did, used his Frankfurt German, and that’s how people printed it; but it simply means “places”: “But do not strive for higher realms.” For the homunculus—who is by no means lacking in intellectual qualities—is given this advice when he enters the classical Walpurgis Night: he must pass through these realms of nature, through what natural science teaches, namely that human beings evolve upward through the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms to attain human physicality.

[ 40 ] You must begin at the very depths, at the very bottom. The journey through the greenery of the plant world is depicted to characterize what a human being experiences when going through the plant stage, and Homunculus says:

It's growling like that.

[ 41 ] And to now turn to what love brings about in human beings, we witness the end of the second act, where the Homunculus—who has developed to the point of embodying the forces of the three kingdoms of nature (as depicted through the allusion to the elements)—is shattered against Galathea’s shell. Then, when the spiritual has incarnated itself to this extent through the three kingdoms, this is presented to us as the image of Helena.

[ 42 ] Goethe then goes on to show how Faust continues to develop. It is wonderful how he illustrates how Faust comes to a deeper and deeper realization—a realization that Goethe presents as complete only at the very moment when his eyes go blind. Darkness outside, but inside the light shines. By experiencing the spiritual world, he can free himself from the external world. Goethe shows us this by having Faust experience inner vision only when the outer light goes out. And yet, Goethe must not portray Faust in the same way as Paracelsus. Faust falls into misfortune: he can attain the vision of spiritual light only by the external world dying away for him, by becoming a completely different person. Paracelsus’s enemies were able to lead him to his death.

[ 43 ] Why did such a transformation in human research and forms of knowledge occur on the path from Paracelsus to Goethe? The answer is provided by an event that took place a few years after Paracelsus had passed through the gates of death, and which was experienced as a momentous occasion on the path from Paracelsus to Goethe. The world was introduced to the Copernican worldview. People had not yet fully grasped what this meant. Until then, the Earth had been regarded as the center around which the firmament revolved; now, Nicolaus Copernicus had, so to speak, pulled the rug out from under people’s feet. Consequently, there has been no greater upheaval in the worldview. What, then, was the fruit of such a radical shift? That from this point onward, the soul could embark on a path leading to direct knowledge of the spiritual world. Until then, the highest achievement of a worldview had been to recognize only what exists in physical space—and to present it as if perceived by the senses. A sensory process was held up as the standard, and the solution to the world’s mysteries was sought in external facts.

[ 44 ] Paracelsus now faced the world, undeterred by such a materialistic solution to the world’s mysteries, and gained from it what he could discern through direct observation of nature. In his time, however, the solution to the world’s mysteries was generally sought in external facts and through sensory experiences. As a result, the power within the human soul to turn toward the spiritual was suppressed for a time.

[ 45 ] For Faust, the longing for the spiritual world finds no fulfillment. The human soul had been led to adopt different ways of thinking. Faust viewed spiritual science with despair, for the first thing that reveals itself as spirit does not speak to him—thereby making Faust a man of the eighteenth century. Through Faust, Goethe had to experience what he was to attain in the spiritual world. In this way, Goethe has also characterized our immediate present, our time.

[ 46 ] Goethe made his character Faust a tragic figure, saying: In our time, humankind has not yet reached the point where it can enter the spiritual world without losing its connection to the sensory world; thus, Faust had to lose his eye.

[ 47 ] Spiritual science, or theosophy, however, offers a kind of fulfillment of what Goethe characterized as the task of the modern age, for spiritual science seeks to strike a balance between what modern natural science has established as facts and what the spirit can be as a fact of the spiritual world. Humanity needs this, and we need no further proof of it than the correctly understood figure of Faust. Human beings need not only a theory of the development of external facts, but also an understanding of what is the bearer and shaper of the external world. And thus, another law follows on the heels of Francesco Redi’s law—that living things can arise only from living things—namely, that spiritual-soul elements in the present earthly life arise from spiritual-soul elements in previous earthly lives.

[ 48 ] Thus, the spiritual-psychic realm will appear as the entirely legitimate continuation of natural science, as it were, a reincarnation of Faust. A Faust who need not go blind, yet possesses spiritual eyes and spiritual ears, so that it will be as we read in Goethe:

Listen! Hear the storm of the Horae!
Resounding to the ears of the spirit
The new day is already dawning.
Rock gates creak and rattle,
Phoebus’ wheels roll with a crackle,

What a din the light brings!
It drums, it trumpets,
The eye blinks and the ear is astonished,
The unheard cannot be heard.

[ 49 ] Thus, Paracelsus appears as a figure we still find in ancient times, when people still possessed an ancient heritage, when the spiritual powers of clairvoyance could draw from the spiritual world. But the time came when the spiritual powers of the soul were obscured by external materialism. We now live in an age when these powers will develop once more, and the natural sciences will be invigorated and enlightened by the assurance, hope, and fulfillment of all that we strive for through our senses and thought. Thus, the natural sciences will become very useful, while spiritual science or theosophy will teach that human beings, in their innermost essence, belong to the spiritual world.