The Rudolf Steiner Archive

First Lecture

[ 1 ] Tomorrow I will begin by discussing the issues I have already alluded to: the connection between the impulses of spiritual science and various unresolved challenges of the present age, and the influence that spiritual science must exert on individual—and specifically scientific—problems; and I would then like to point out, as I have already said, what I would like to call, in the sense of the fifth post-Atlantean cultural epoch, the karma of people’s professions.

[ 2 ] Today I will take as my starting point something that seems—but is only seemingly—unrelated to the subject at hand. Yet this starting point will offer the opportunity for various points of connection. For today I will attempt to show what it is in Goethe’s life that particularly characterizes him as a figure of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. Some of what I have already hinted at, especially in recent times, will certainly resurface here. Yet I would like to present to her soul a series of facts specifically related to this personality—facts that offer everyone the opportunity to discern, through immediate reality, important manifestations of the dawning fifth post-Atlantean cultural epoch. For Goethe’s life and personality are something so all-encompassing and profound with regard to the spiritual affairs of humanity that this can hardly be said of any other figure with such ease; and yet, on the other hand, one might say that, despite much of what has happened, this life and this personality of Goethe’s have remained as ineffective as possible for life right up to the present day. But this is connected to the entire peculiarity of our modern culture. One might ask: How could anyone even claim that Goethe’s life has remained ineffective? Are his works not known? Has not a Goethe edition comprising hundreds of volumes been published just recently? Was the number of Goethe’s published letters not already six to seven thousand at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century? — and today it is likely to be no fewer than ten thousand. Is there not a rich body of literature on Goethe—one might almost say, in every major language? Are his works not performed again and again? Is not the very heart of his oeuvre, Faust, constantly brought to the forefront of people’s minds?

[ 3 ] Well, I have recently cited on several occasions a remarkable error made by a prominent contemporary scholar, one that is, in fact, far more symptomatic and indicative of our present age than one might think. A great contemporary natural scientist—a leading figure in the field—wishes to speak about the significance of the scientific worldview today, presenting this scientific worldview as the most glorious not only of our time but of all human history, and he then rises to the following statement: “Even if it is difficult to prove that we live in the best of all possible worlds, it is at least certain—for the natural scientist, at any rate—that we, the people of the present, live in the best of all possible times; and one might, with Goethe, the great connoisseur of the world and of human nature, exclaim:

...it is a great delight,
To put oneself in the spirit of the times,
To see how a wise man thought before us,
And how we have ultimately come so far.

[ 4 ] And this great naturalist is mistaken in that he presents this as his innermost conviction and believes he is following in the footsteps of Goethe, the great connoisseur of the world and of humanity; but he is in fact following only in the footsteps of Wagner, whom Goethe contrasts with the figure of Faust. Yet such an error contains at least a good measure of honesty characteristic of our time, for this man speaks more truthfully than all the countless people who quote Goethe today, who speak of Faust, but do so with a genuine, unadulterated Wagnerian mindset. Let us, then, allow Goethe’s life to pass before our eyes as a spiritual phenomenon, serving as the foundation for our reflection.

[ 5 ] As you know, Goethe was born in a city and under circumstances that, if one wishes to study the connection between human life and the great questions of destiny—the questions of karma—prove to be quite significant for Goethe’s life. In the 17th century, Goethe’s paternal family immigrated to Frankfurt am Main. Goethe’s maternal family was long-established and highly respected in Frankfurt am Main—so highly respected, in fact, that—which truly speaks volumes about a family’s standing in such a city at that time—mayors of Frankfurt were elected from the Textor family, from which Goethe descended on his mother’s side. Goethe’s father was a man deeply imbued with a sense of duty, but also a man with interests that were far-reaching for his time. He had traveled to Italy himself; replicas of significant works from the Roman world hung on every wall of his patrician house in Frankfurt, and he liked to speak of the “great things.” And whatever aspects of the culture of that era—particularly the French culture that still permeated life in Frankfurt at the time—made their mark, all of this unfolded in such a way that the Goethe household took the most heartfelt interest in it. The great events of the world were already making their way into this Goethe household, and Goethe’s father was deeply interested in them. And Goethe’s mother was a woman of the most genuine human disposition, possessing—one might say—the most immediate interest in everything that human nature connects to the legendary, the fairy-tale-like, that which carries people, as if on the wings of a poetic, imaginative spirit, beyond the mundane.

[ 6 ] And more than people in our time, Goethe was able to grow up in his own era, undisturbed by those disruptions that occur far more frequently in our time than they did back then—those disruptions that arise because children are dragged off to school at a relatively early age. Goethe was not dragged off to school, but was able to develop freely in his parents’ home; under the influence of his strict but never harsh father and his poetically inclined mother, he developed in an extraordinarily free manner. And he developed in such a way that in later years he could truly look back on his boyhood and childhood with deep satisfaction, for he developed in pure humanity. Many things that one reads today in Goethe’s autobiography Poetry and Truth—with only a somewhat pedantic sense of humor—actually have a much greater significance than one might think. When Goethe himself recounts how he took piano lessons, it is certainly indicative of deep human connections that there, I would say, as if unfolding mythologically before one’s eyes, the various fingers of the hand become animated, independent figures—the fingers become Thumbelina and Index-finger—and these Thumbelina and Index-finger, I would say, without sentimentality, acquire certain mystical connections to the notes. This testifies to how Goethe, as a whole human being, was to be introduced into life. It was not to be a one-sided introduction of merely one part of this human being—as so often happens—namely the head, into human life; and then, in order to support the head, the rest of the body through all sorts of gymnastics or sports; rather, it was the spiritualized human body—the human body spiritualized right down to the fingertips—that was to enter into a relationship with the outside world.

[ 7 ] To this we must now add Goethe’s disposition and nature, which displayed a keen individuality from the very beginning. Everything points to a specific direction in his life from his earliest youth. Just as he is inclined, as he grows up, to devotedly follow his mother’s charming, inspiring fairy tales and other stories—and thereby, even as a boy, to bring his imagination to life through play—so too is he inclined, whenever possible, to slip away from the gaze of his mother and, in particular, his strict father, to sneak into the narrow alleys, and there not only to observe all manner of circumstances at an early age but even to become entangled in them, through which he experiences at an early age, with vivid sensation and feeling, many things that become part of human karma. The father is a strict man who, one might say, with a certain matter-of-factness, guides the boy toward what, according to the views of the time, alone can provide a person with stability and direction in life. The father is a lawyer, raised in the Roman tradition, imbued with Roman views, and he also instills these legal-Roman views in the boy’s mind. Yet even at an early age, the sight of images depicting Roman life—Rome’s works of art and artistic treasures—kindles within the boy’s soul a certain yearning for what has been created within Roman culture.

[ 8 ] It all boils down to placing Goethe within the life of his time in a very specific way. As a result, I would say that in the 3rd to 4th centuries of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, he becomes a personality who embodies all the impulses of the dawning fifth post-Atlantean epoch. In a sense, he becomes early on a self-reliant personality who lives from within himself: nothing of what binds people in a rigid, pedantic way to certain forms imposed on them by these or those social conditions. He comes to know social conditions in such a way that they affect him, but he is not fused with them. He always retains, so to speak, a kind of isolated platform on which he stands and from which he can relate to everything, yet he does not become so intertwined with anything as many people do from the earliest days with the conditions surrounding them. Certainly, all of this is the result of particularly favorable karma. But if we examine this karma objectively, important karmic questions and problems will be able to resolve themselves for us.

[ 9 ] Then, after his father had introduced him to the study of law, Goethe was sent to the University of Leipzig. He began his life at the University of Leipzig in 1765—that is, at a relatively early age. One must not forget how he entered this life at the University of Leipzig: not worn down and frayed by the kinds of struggles that young people in our time must endure well into their later years in order to complete high school, and then, worn out and frayed after passing the Abitur, with a longing to sweep away—or at least to a large extent sweep away—what they had learned there, to embark on university studies so they could finally enjoy life. He had not come to the University of Leipzig merely to skip classes—for those who are not entirely familiar with the German language, I should note that “schwänzen” means not attending lectures but doing something else during lecture hours—but he did, in the end, engage in this skipping of classes to a considerable extent. After all, by entering into life—into the lofty academic life, into the renowned academic life of the University of Leipzig—he entered circles that were bound to awaken a deep longing in him as long as he heard about them. He had heard, after all, that at the University of Leipzig, the great Gottsched was the dominant figure—that very Gottsched who encapsulated the education of his time in his mind and channeled it, through numerous written and oral means, into the lives of those connected to Leipzig’s cultural sphere. Although Lessing’s great influence still coexisted with Gottsched’s in Leipzig, yet for Goethe, at first, it seemed that he would be introduced by Gottsched’s sublime figure to the entire sphere of the wisdom of that time, and would be able to study there, in a comprehensive manner, law and philosophy, as well as that which theology and scholarship concerning the supernatural offer to the cosmopolitan.

[ 10 ] It was, however, a minor disappointment for Goethe—who already possessed a certain sense of aesthetics—when he paid his first visit to Gottsched. He arrived at Gottsched’s door; the servant—I don’t know if he already sensed anything at that time of what was going on inside Goethe— without taking the necessary time to properly announce Goethe’s visit to Gottsched, simply let Goethe in to see Gottsched, so that Goethe encountered Gottsched, the great man, when the latter—yes—was not wearing his wig but was standing there with a bald head. For a scholar of that time—we’re talking about the year 1765!—that was something absolutely dreadful. And now Goethe, who was, after all, easily impressed by such things, had to watch as Gottsched, with a graceful movement, quickly grabbed his wig and pulled it over his bald head, while at the same time delivering a powerful slap to his servant’s face with his other hand. So Goethe’s enthusiasm cooled off a bit after all. It cooled off even more when he realized that Gottsched’s manner was far from what he had been longing for. Nor did Gellert’s lectures on ethics offer him the broad perspectives he demanded. And so it came to pass that in Leipzig he soon turned his attention more to lectures on medicine and the natural sciences, which he experienced, in a sense, as a continuation at the home of Professor Ludwig, where he had his lunch and where such topics were frequently discussed. One cannot say that Goethe actually “studied philosophy, law, medicine, and, unfortunately, theology in depth” in Leipzig, but he had examined these subjects and, above all, had already absorbed many of the scientific ideas of the time while in Leipzig.

[ 11 ] Then—and such things must certainly be taken into account by anyone who views human life from a spiritual-scientific perspective—after he had dabbled in various fields of study, after he had also seen much of life and had become entangled in various life affairs, he contracted a terminal illness. He looked death in the face. One must bear in mind that at that time many things were stirring within Goethe’s soul, while he was truly facing death as a result of an extraordinarily severe hemorrhage that recurred several times. He was now weak, had to return home, and was only able to resume his university studies after some time. He did so in Strasbourg. And in Strasbourg, he entered the circle of a very prominent figure who meant an extraordinary great deal to him. Now, in order to assess the feelings with which Goethe approached this particular figure, one must take into account that Goethe, upon returning to Frankfurt under the influence of those most intimate spiritual experiences he had undergone in the face of death in Leipzig, had already begun—through various human connections he had encountered there—to immerse himself in mystical experiences and a mystical understanding of the world. Even back then, he was immersing himself in mystical and occult writings, attempting in his own way—still in his youth—to construct a worldview, a system of thought, based on mystical, one might say mystical-Kabbalistic, perspectives. Even back then, he was truly attempting something like this: to discern “what holds the world together at its very core,” to allow “all active forces and seeds” to take effect within him, and he did not want—as he had been forced to witness in Leipzig—“to rummage through words.”

[ 12 ] So he arrived in Strasbourg, where he was once again able to attend lectures in the natural sciences in particular, and he initially devoted himself to those. As for law—which was especially close to his father’s heart, though less so to his own—he thought: “That will work itself out somehow.” — But he felt a strong urge to understand the laws of nature. Then one day, as he was walking up a flight of stairs in Strasbourg, he came face to face with a man who, through his appearance and the inner spirit shining through his intelligent face, made an immense impression on him immediately, in an instant. The outward appearance: Well, here came a man who certainly gave off a certain priestly air, but who wore his long coat in such a way that he had tucked the long tails into his back pockets—strangely enough—yet this made a brilliant impression on Goethe. It was Herder. And now he immersed himself, on the one hand, in everything that was surging within Herder at that time. There was an extraordinary abundance of life within Herder back then. One might say: Herder carried within him an entirely new worldview. What, in essence, had never before been undertaken in this way, Herder carried within him with great insight: to trace the phenomena of the world from the simplest beginnings, from the simplest inanimate matter, through the plant and animal kingdoms, all the way up to humanity, to history, and to the divine governance of the world within history. A grand, comprehensive worldview was already alive within Herder at that time. And Herder spoke of his new ideas with enthusiasm, but also—when the occasion called for it—with indignation against all the traditional, outdated conventions. And Goethe was inspired by many of Herder’s conversations. That everything in the world is in a state of development and that a spiritual plan for the universe underlies all development: in the context in which Herder saw it at that time, no one had ever viewed it that way before. But Herder had not yet written any of this down; it was all still in the making. And Goethe received it as it was taking shape and shared in Herder’s striving, contemplation, and struggles. One might say: Beginning with a speck of dust, through all the realms of nature and up to God, Herder sought to trace the development of the world, as he then did in such a grand, comprehensive style—to the extent necessary at that time—in his incomparably great work Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Mankind. There we truly see how Herder’s spirit synthesizes everything that was known at that time regarding the facts of the natural and human realms. But all of this was synthesized into a worldview permeated by the spirit.

[ 13 ] In addition, what Spinoza had contributed to the development of modern worldviews also found its way into Goethe through Herder’s influence. And the affinity that Goethe maintained for Spinoza throughout his life first took root in Strasbourg through Herder. Furthermore, Herder was—something unheard of at the time—an enthusiastic admirer of Shakespeare. One need only imagine how this peculiar polarity of spirit between Goethe and Herder must have played out, given that Goethe arrived filled with a longing to perceive all that contemporary education could not provide him, and found in Herder, so to speak, a revolutionary spirit of the very highest order, one that challenged the prevailing cultural norms of the time. Up to that point, Goethe had come to admire the formal art found in Corneille and Racine; he had absorbed all of this just as a person absorbs things they hear are the most significant in the world. Yet he had absorbed all of this with an inner sense of indignation. And what a balm it was to his soul when, through Herder, he was introduced to Shakespeare—the poet who was free from all formalism, who created characters directly from human individuality, who possessed none of what Goethe had come to revere so highly—unity of time, unity of place, unity of action—but who had instead placed human beings at the center. And one might say: Baptized in the name of Shakespeare, an inner, culturally revolutionary mindset took root in Goethe’s soul, which can be expressed something like this: I want to get to know human beings—not how human beings are bound into the fabric of the world by formal rules and formal laws, not the web of unities of situation, time, place, and action—but I want to grasp human beings themselves.

[ 14 ] This gave him the opportunity to meet people in Strasbourg at that time who were also attempting to gain insight into the deeper, more intimate aspects of the human soul, such as the remarkable Jung-Stilling, who studied the occult aspects of human soul life and was able to describe them in such detail, After all, Jung-Stilling’s life story, and his description of what he calls the “gray man” who reigns in the earth’s underworld, is among the most beautiful accounts of occult phenomena. One might say: Goethe was introduced by Herder to that which sustains natural and historical life, as well as aesthetic life, and by Jung-Stilling to the occult aspects of human life, which he had already come to know more closely in Frankfurt through a more in-depth study of Swedenborg.

[ 15 ] All of this surged within Goethe’s soul, blending with what he had been taught about the laws of nature, while he attended the lectures on the natural sciences in Strasbourg. And that is when the great questions and problems of human life began to occupy his mind. He had looked deeply into what can be known and willed, and had looked deeply into the connections between the nature of the human soul and the nature of the universe. He had also become acquainted with Paracelsus in connection with all of this, back in Frankfurt. And so, alongside what he otherwise experienced in Strasbourg, this longing to perceive “all active forces and seeds” took root in him in a particularly profound way, especially in Strasbourg. One must not imagine that Goethe merely wasted his time in Strasbourg by—and I truly do not wish to downplay this—frequently walking to the parsonage in Sesenheim. Goethe was indeed able to unite life in the depths of human will and human knowledge with life in connection with everything immediately human and everyday, with every human destiny.

[ 16 ] Then, after defending his dissertation, he became a sort of Doctor of Jurisprudence in Strasbourg, earning both a licentiate and a doctorate in law. This also satisfied his father, and he was now able to return home. His career as a lawyer began. There was, however, a strange discord in the soul of this man, who was now to study case files at the Imperial Chamber Court in Wetzlar—files that were often literally, not symbolically, centuries old. For there, “law and rights dragged on like an eternal illness.” But one could still experience many such things in this vein in later times and in other places. You see, in a town where I grew up—allow me to add this—I was also able to witness the following: It was in the 1870s, and we heard once—I was just a boy at the time—that a man was to be imprisoned. In the 1870s! He was a respected local man who ran a business that was quite large for that town. He was imprisoned for a year and a half, I believe, because in 1848, during the revolution, he had thrown stones at an inn! The trial had actually lasted from 1848—when the man, as a young boy, had thrown stones at an inn—right up until his old age, and he was imprisoned for a year and a half around 1873. Admittedly, things may not have been quite as bad back then as they were in the days when Goethe was studying the files at the Imperial Chamber Court, but they were still bad enough. His father, however, took pleasure in it, and he contributed in various ways—offering advice and assistance—to the problems Goethe had to solve while poring over those dusty files. But one must not assume that Goethe behaved ineptly as a lawyer. That was by no means the case. Goethe certainly held his own as a lawyer, and there is no reason to keep emphasizing, time and again, that a great mind, living in the realm of ideals, must necessarily be inept in life. Goethe was by no means inept as a lawyer. And if, for example, some lawyers today point to their work and then remark that, given their extensive workload, they simply have no time to read Goethe, it should be pointed out that Goethe himself was certainly just as good a lawyer—this can still be documented today, as can many other things that point to his work— except that Goethe, in addition to being as practical as any practitioner could be, already carried within his soul at that time the “Götz von Berlichingen”—indeed, he carried within his soul the idea that had already emerged in him in Frankfurt from his studies in the natural sciences, from his acquaintance with Herder and Jung-Stilling: the idea for his “Faust.”

[ 17 ] Götz von Berlichingen — Gottfried von Berlichingen — immediately reveals, through Goethe’s transformation of him into a work of art, what Goethe’s true nature is. With Goethe’s approach, something new enters the intellectual creative work of humanity. One cannot compare Goethe as an artist or poet to Dante, nor to Homer, nor to Shakespeare. He approaches poetic creation in a different way, and this is essentially connected to the way Goethe himself, as a figure, was embedded in his entire era. That era—as it unfolded in Goethe’s immediate surroundings and in the wider world around him—did not allow a spirit such as Goethe’s to fully merge with it. The kind of organized state life that we take for granted today simply did not exist for Goethe. He lived, after all, in a region where individual territories had developed to a high degree of autonomy. The exact details of how this came about are less important, but he did not live in a large state; he lived in such a way that no overarching conformity extended over the region from which he emerged. Life had no fixed forms around him. And so he was able to grasp it everywhere within his innermost circle and allow the universal to take effect upon him within that same circle. And that is what is so distinctive.

[ 18 ] So he came across a book—a poorly written book, a rather poorly written book—that nevertheless interested him to an extraordinary degree; namely, the “Autobiography of Gottfried von Berlichingen with the Iron Hand,” that peculiar figure from the 16th century who took part in so many events of the 16th century, yet did so in a most unusual way. When one reads this life story of Gottfried von Berlichingen, one sees how, under Emperor Maximilian and under Emperor Charles V, he came into contact with all sorts of other people and took part in all manner of disputes and battles of the first half of the 16th century—but always in such a way that one actually sees: here he takes part in one event, is right in the thick of it, and really lets himself go. Then, in another event, he is involved in a completely different capacity; he is drawn into it once again, fights for a wide variety of interests, and is later taken prisoner. After he has sworn an oath to no longer take part in the conflicts and is left in peace at his castle in central southern Germany, he becomes entangled in the peasant movement when the peasants rise up in the struggle for freedom. Yet in all of this, one never sees Gottfried von Berlichingen being swept along by events; rather, one sees everywhere that what holds these disparate things together is, in fact, the personality—the character—of Gottfried von Berlichingen himself. One might say: When one reads the life story of Gottfried von Berlichingen, in the end all the events he goes through—and in which he is entangled—do not, I won’t go so far as to say, grow tiresome to the point of boredom; rather, one is simply not really interested in the individual incidents, the individual struggles that he, Gottfried von Berlichingen, endures. But despite all the boredom one feels toward the events he experiences, one is always interested in his strong and richly developed personality.

[ 19 ] But that was precisely what attracted Goethe to the figure of Gottfried von Berlichingen. And so he was able—in a way that would never have been possible otherwise—to see the essence, the aspirations, and the life of the 16th century concentrated in a single personality. That was what he needed. For him, that meant taking history into his own hands and getting to know it. The way this or that historian—“with excellent pragmatic maxims”—might have pieced together individual historical periods after rummaging through junk rooms and overturning trash barrels would certainly not have been to Goethe’s taste. But to see a person standing vividly within his own time and to see reflected in a human soul that which would otherwise hold no interest for him—that was something for Goethe. So he took this—one might even say—boring, poorly written autobiography of Gottfried von Berlichingen, read it, and actually reworked it surprisingly little. That is why he also titled the first version of this—if you will—drama: “The Story of Gottfried von Berlichingen with the Iron Hand, Dramatized.” He did not label it “Drama,” but only “dramatized.” He actually only dramatized the story of Götz von Berlichingen, but he dramatized it in such a way that the entire era lives within it—yet the era lives within a single human being. And now consider: it is the 16th century, the dawn of the fifth post-Atlantic era. Goethe viewed it through the soul of Gottfried von Berlichingen, this man who grew up in central southern Germany. Even back then, a piece of life was coursing through his soul—one that is historical, but viewed through the lens of real life, not of what is merely “historical.” It would have been quite impossible for Goethe, at that time, with all the human problems in his soul that I have hinted at, to take any figure from history and dramatize him according to history, but to dramatize the stammering autobiography of a being who moved him with all his humanity—in the way the dramatic art had opened up to him through his immersion in Shakespeare—that was what he could do. This made him known in certain circles that were interested in such things at the time, for he had brought a piece of the past into the present—into his own present—for his contemporaries, for whom this past was “a book sealed with seven seals.” For, of course, even in the widest circles at the time, people knew as little about what Goethe had uncovered through the poorly written 16th-century story of Gottfried von Berlichingen as many a pastor today knows about the supernatural life.

[ 20 ] Goethe had intervened in human life. He had been compelled to do so because the only way he could live was by becoming one with human life as it presented itself to him directly; yet, even though he remained on a pedestal of isolation, he became one with it only by being, as it were, touched by it.

[ 21 ] Goethe was to be brought into contact with life in yet another way during the same period. Today, we have little idea of what was, at that time, a profound fundamental trait of spiritual development within the so-called educated world in the widest circle around Goethe. People had become so deeply entrenched in what had developed since the sixteenth century. In outward life, laws and rights had indeed been passed down like an eternal illness, but souls were nonetheless, in a certain way, touched by the impulse we know as the impulse of the souls of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. The result was that a profound disharmony arose in the more deeply inclined natures between what the souls felt and what was taking place in their surroundings. This, of course, led to a strong sentimentality in their experience. And to be able to feel—to feel as intensely as possible—just how far reality falls short of what a genuine, warm human soul can feel, and to be able to truly emphasize this, was felt by many a soul at that time as a deep need. They turned their gaze out toward the great expanse of life. There lived the social classes; there lived people with these or those interests, but their souls often touched one another so little within this public life. Yet when these souls were alone with themselves, they sought out a special inner life that lay beyond the outer world. And to be able to say to oneself: This outward life—oh, how it contrasts with everything the soul longs for and hopes for!—to be able to say that was like a refreshment. And to truly immerse oneself in a sentimental mood became a trend of the times. People found life, as it unfolded in the public sphere, to be poor and lacking. People therefore sought out life where it was not tainted by an indifferent public, where one could truly immerse oneself in the quiet, peaceful goings-on of the world—in nature, in the peaceful lives of animals and plants. From this, a mood gradually took shape that dominated a large portion of the educated souls. Being able to weep over the world’s disharmonies provided immense satisfaction. And those writers were particularly honored whose works, on every page, gave readers cause to let tears flow from their eyes onto the pages they were reading. For many, being unhappy became a longing for their own happiness. One goes for a walk in the woods, returns home, sits quietly in one’s room, and reflects: How many, many little worms—which one did not notice and which one has crushed underfoot—has this walk cost their lives! — One weeps hot tears into one’s handkerchief over the disharmonies between nature and human life. One writes letters to beloved friends who are just as sentimental as oneself, beginning with: “My dearly beloved friend”—but even this line is streaked by a tear that falls onto the paper and, as a precious token, rushes along with the letter to the beloved friend.

[ 22 ] This way of life still permeated large parts of the educated world in the second half of the 18th century. Goethe, too, was surrounded by this, and he had a deep understanding of it, for there was indeed much truth in this sense of disharmony between what often filled the soul unconsciously and vaguely, and what the external world offered it. There was often much truth in it. Goethe could sense this. The quiet life that unfolded between souls was so very different, in those days, from what was happening in the wider world. Goethe had to go through this, for he could and should be moved by everything. But he also had to draw strength time and again from within himself to recover from his encounters with these things. And so he poured out this entire zeitgeist—which is referred to as “Siegwart fever” or “Werther fever” and had gripped a large portion of the educated class—into his coming-of-age novel The Sorrows of Young Werther. He imbued the character of Werther with everything he had experienced of this sentimental mood of the age—so deeply immersed in it that, driven by the perceived disharmonies of life, he came close to suicide himself. That is why he has Werther himself end in suicide. It is good to bear in mind how, in Goethe’s case, there exists—on the one hand—the possibility, despite his being firmly rooted in his individuality, of attuning his inner sensibilities to everything that was unfolding in the souls of those around him; yet how this, in turn, became art for him, and he wrote it out of his soul. By the time he had finished writing Werther, he had been healed of the entire Werther experience—an experience that was now taking hold of many other people for the first time, for Werther fever was rampant in the widest circles precisely because of the novel Werther. But Goethe was healed.

[ 23 ] In seeking to appreciate such things, one must not forget that Goethe truly possessed a vast range of emotional life, that he was, in a sense, capable of living in emotional polarities. He went through the “Werther sickness” and poured the “Werther sickness” from his soul into his The Sorrows of Young Werther. But it is true what he wrote in a letter to a friend at that time, in which he painted a picture of his sublime-sentimental mood, yet at the same time said that there lived another Goethe besides the one who harbored melancholic and pensive thoughts—the “suicidal Goethe”—namely, a “Carnival Goethe” who could don all manner of disguises and masks. And this Carnival Goethe truly did live artistically as well. One need only let the more or less fragmentary dramatic works—Satyros and Pater Brey, which date from the same period—sink in, and one will already be able to sense the full breadth of Goethe’s inner life: on the one hand, the sentimentality of Werther; on the other, the humor of Satyros and Pater Brey. Satyros, the deified forest devil, who on the one hand unfolds a truly grand pantheism in his tirades, wanting to return to nature in a genuinely Rousseauian manner, refusing to enjoy what culture has produced. Raw chestnuts—what a glorious feast: this is Satyros’s ideal! But Satyros is, after all, a natural philosopher who knows the secrets of nature well; hence—forgive me—he gains followers, particularly among women, is idolized, but ultimately behaves quite badly. With tremendous humor, the text mocks all the false longing for the pursuit of authority and blind faith in authority. And in Father Brey we see false prophethood, which pretends to be holy but engages in all sorts of things under the mask of holiness—not mocked with great humor, but objectively portrayed. Here, Goethe is a humorist in the liveliest sense—a down-to-earth humorist. And all of this springs from the same state of mind from which Werther also flows. This is not because Goethe was superficial, but because he was deep enough to grasp the polarities of human life.

[ 24 ] Goethe had already exerted a wide range of influence with Werther alone. Werther became very well known relatively early on, and in fact, it was Werther that sparked the Duke of Weimar’s interest in Goethe. Götz von Berlichingen made a great impression, but not on those who believed at the time that they understood culture, art, and poetry. “A detestable imitation of bad English plays, a disgusting platitude”—that is what a great man of that era said about Götz von Berlichingen.

[ 25 ] It was in 1775 that Goethe was able to move his life to a completely different setting: Weimar. The Duke of Weimar became acquainted with him and summoned Goethe to Weimar, and Goethe became—in one fell swoop, one might say—Weimar’s Minister of State.

[ 26 ] You see, today, looking back, one gets the feeling that Goethe wrote Götz von Berlichingen and The Sorrows of Young Werther, and that he had already brought a large portion of Faust with him to Weimar; in all of this, one sees the essence of Goethe’s work. He himself, in his situation at the time, did not see that as the main thing; those were the byproducts of his life. And the Duke of Weimar did not appoint him as court poet, but as Minister of State—which, of course, drove the traditionalists in Weimar into a frenzy, so that the Duke of Weimar had to issue a sort of written proclamation to his people in which he justified himself: Yes, Goethe was, in his opinion, a greater man than the traditionalists. — And the fact that, before he—well, what do I know—had become a lower councilor and upper councilor and so on, he was appointed directly to the Ministry of State—that at least required a justification on the part of the Duke. But he provided it. And Goethe was by no means a bad minister, by no means one who handled ministerial affairs as a side job; rather, he was a much better minister than many ministers who were not Goethes in this sense. And anyone who has ever personally convinced themselves—as I have; I may say this in all modesty, for that was the case with me—of how Goethe fulfilled his ministerial duties knows that Goethe was an excellent minister for the Duchy of Saxe-Weimar, one who devoted himself with full dedication to every detail of his affairs. Being a minister was the main thing for Goethe at that time, and for ten years Goethe accomplished an extraordinary amount precisely in his capacity as minister in Weimar. |

[ 27 ] He had, in fact, already brought part of Faust with him to Weimar. What now appears in his collected works under the “tasteful” title Urfaust was what he had brought with him to Weimar back then. But in this Faust was already present everything that, one might say, constituted Faust’s upward-looking gaze. And how Faust was drawn from immediate life—but now also from the life that touches every human soul! And once again, it became evident in Weimar that Goethe could not be entirely swayed by his surroundings. One very often meets people who are, more or less, merely the representatives of their official records. Goethe was not merely the representative of the records—the truly numerous records—that he had drafted as a Weimar civil servant. But alongside this, he immersed himself in all aspects of Weimar life, and even though he remained on his “stool of isolation,” he was nonetheless touched by everything human, and the immediate human experience took shape in him as art. And so we see how the character of a woman—Frau von Stein, with whom he was on friendly terms—became a life problem for him. And, fundamentally, it was the direct observation of this character that led him to dramatize the figure of “Iphigenia.” What impressed him about Frau von Stein’s character, he sought to shape artistically. For him, the myth of Iphigenia was merely a means of resolving a life problem. And the entire situation at the court of Weimar—his coexistence with Duke Karl August, who had a peculiar disposition; the sight of the Duchess’s fate; and other circumstances that played a role there—all of these became problems for him. Life itself became a question for him. He needed, once again, a subject matter through which to artistically overcome these circumstances. He took the subject matter of Tasso, but in reality it was the circumstances in Weimar that he artistically mastered. Of course, I cannot go into the many details of Goethe’s inner life, but I would nevertheless like to present this fact to your soul so that we may take it up from a spiritual-scientific perspective as an example.

[ 28 ] Even back then, in the very early days of his life in Weimar, the various circumstances in which he found himself opened up the opportunity for him to deepen his studies of nature—to do so independently. He conducted botanical studies; even back then, he began studying anatomy at the University of Jena. In everything he did, he sought to verify in detail what he had absorbed from Herder: the ideas of interconnectedness in the world. He wanted to study the interconnectedness of the entire plant world; he wanted to study what lived spiritually within the plants. He wanted to bring the kinship of all animals before his soul in order to find the path leading up to humanity. He wanted to study the idea of evolution directly through the objects of nature themselves. Consider that he had taken up Herder’s great idea: to study a unified spiritual becoming through all the stages of development of living beings. In this, he and Herder stood quite alone at that time, for those who set the tone in intellectual life thought quite differently; above all, they erected dividing walls everywhere.

[ 29 ] All intellectual activity can be seen as tending toward two poles: separation and synthesis. For Goethe and Herder, the point was to synthesize diversity and multiplicity; for others, the point was to have neat classifications, to categorize things quite neatly. And so, back then, the primary question for many was how humans differed from animals. Humans, it was said, did not have an intermediate jawbone in the upper jaw where the incisors are located, but rather a single, unified jaw; only animals have the intermediate jaw. Goethe was certainly not of a materialistic bent; he certainly did not wish to establish materialism with materialistic intent; but the idea that the inner harmony of nature might not hold true in such a detail was contrary to his sensibilities. Therefore, he set out to prove—against all scientific authority—that humans, too, possess the intermaxillary bone. And he succeeded. And so he arrived at his first significant scientific treatise, entitled: “Both Humans and Animals Possess an Intermediate Bone in the Upper Jaw.” With this, he had contributed something to intellectual development—a detail with which he opposed the entire scientific world of his time, and which today is taken for granted, something that, of course, no one doubts.

[ 30 ] Thus Goethe does not stand there as the poet of Werther, as the poet of Götz von Berlichingen and Faust, or as the one from whose mind alone Iphigenia and Tasso spring, but he stands there with a deep insight into the fabric of nature, so that he now truly studies and works as a genuine naturalist. He is not merely a researcher, a poet, or a minister in a one-sided sense; he is a complete human being, a complete human being striving in every direction.

[ 31 ] Goethe lived in Weimar for about ten years, after which he could no longer resist his longing for Italy. And so, in the second half of the 1780s, he set out on his journey to Italy, almost as if fleeing. One must not forget that it was only then that Goethe entered into circumstances that finally fulfilled a longing he had cherished since his earliest youth, and that this was actually the first time he had truly entered into a world of grandeur. For just think—Goethe had never seen any major city other than Frankfurt until then! And one must always bear in mind that the first major city through which Goethe was placed on the stage of world history was Rome. This must be properly situated within the context of Goethe’s life. And that in Rome Goethe felt the entire current of life pulsating—as it had flowed upward from the fifth post-Atlantean epoch up to his own time—and that Goethe connected what was at work within him as world history with a comprehensive worldview that was taking shape in his soul. There he carried forward the idea that had revealed itself to him through animal forms and plant forms, through the diversity of forms in plants, stones, and animals—which he compared and now traced across the Apennine Peninsula. Over a wide area, he sought to verify his idea of a primordial plant, and he succeeded. Every stone, every plant interested him; he allowed himself to be moved by the way in which diversity takes shape as unity. In doing so, he also allowed himself to be moved by the great works of art that ancient Greek culture presented to him in a faint afterglow. And just as, on the one hand, he cast an objective gaze over all the diversities of nature, so, on the other hand, he was able to feel, from the depths of his soul, all the intimacies of the great art of the Renaissance. One need only read the words he spoke upon seeing Raphael’s “Saint Cecilia” in Bologna, and how, upon beholding this work of art, he stirred within his soul all the feelings that lead human beings from the sensory world into the supersensory in a wonderfully deep and intense way. One need only look in his Italian Journey to see how, while on the one hand he was delving ever deeper into his ideas about nature, he came to realize, in relation to works of art, that human beings truly create art only when art, at the same time, springs from the depths of life. The great works of art of the Greeks, he said, are now clear to me, for: “I have a hunch that they proceeded according to the very same laws by which nature proceeds and which I am on the trail of.” — “These sublime works of art have at the same time been brought forth by human beings as the highest works of nature, in accordance with true and natural laws. Everything arbitrary and imagined falls away; there is necessity, there is God.” So he wrote to his friends in Weimar.

[ 32 ] And he absorbed something immense, and what he had previously sensed and intuited took shape for him. He now composed in Rome the scenes that are significant in his Faust. “Iphigenia,” “Tasso”—he had already sketched them out more or less in prose in Weimar, and partly completed them; now he rewrote them in verse. For he was able to find the style—which he now wished to imbue these works with as a classical style—by continually allowing classical art to influence him. What Goethe experienced in Italy was a regeneration, a true rebirth of his soul. And something peculiar now took shape within his soul: he sensed a profound contrast between what his era aspired to—what he had seen everywhere around him—and what he had come to perceive as the highest expression of the purely human.

[ 33 ] And so he returned to Weimar; and so he reentered the world in which works had been created that had once captivated everyone: Schiller’s The Robbers, Heins’s Ardinghello, and the like. To him, this seemed like barbaric stuff that ran counter to all the roots now alive in his soul. And he felt utterly alone in his inner life. After all, he had been almost forgotten. And now, little by little, a friendship with Schiller began to take shape. It had been difficult for him to approach Schiller, for nothing was more detestable to him, upon his return, than Schiller’s early works. But they found common ground, and they forged a bond of friendship that has few equals in the history of human development. And they inspired one another so deeply that Herman Grimm rightly says: “In the relationship between Goethe and Schiller, one has not merely Goethe plus Schiller, but Goethe plus Schiller and Schiller plus Goethe.” Each became something different through the other; and whatever each became different through the other, with that each enriched the other. And now great, all-encompassing problems of humanity arose in the souls of both men. What the world at that time sought to resolve politically—the great problem of humanity’s freedom—presented itself to Goethe and Schiller in a spiritual and human way. Others pondered at length how to bring about an external structure in the world that would grant people freedom in life. For Schiller, the question was: How does a person find freedom within their own soul? — And he devoted himself to this problem in the composition of his unique work, the “Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man.” How a person leads their soul beyond themselves, from the ordinary state of life to a higher state of life—that was the great question for Schiller. On the one hand, Schiller reasoned, human beings stand within sensory nature; on the other hand, they face the logical world. In neither are they free. They become free as those who aesthetically enjoy and aesthetically create, where thoughts become such that they are not subject to any logical compulsion but rather to taste and inclination, and where they are at the same time free from sensuality. Schiller called for a middle ground. These letters, “On the Aesthetic Education of Man,” rank among the most refined works ever written in the history of human development. Yet it was a question, a human enigma, that he and Goethe brought before their souls.

[ 34 ] Goethe could not approach this problem philosophically through abstract ideas, as Schiller was able to; Goethe had to tackle this problem in a vivid, concrete way. And he solved this problem in a comprehensive way, in his own style, as he presented it in the fairy tale of The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. Just as Schiller sought to demonstrate philosophically how human beings rise from ordinary life to a higher life, so Goethe sought to show—through the interplay of the spiritual forces within the human soul in the fairy tale of _The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily_—how human beings develop spiritually from everyday spiritual life to a higher spiritual life. What emerged as a philosophical abstraction in Schiller’s work, Goethe brought to life in a magnificent and vivid way in this fairy tale, which he appended to a description of external life in his novella-like, novel-style work: Conversations of German Emigrants. Truly, in the lively exchange between Goethe and Schiller, everything came to life that a person could ask of life in terms of enigmatic questions—questions that lie at the heart of longing:

Look at all the power and seeds,
And stop rummaging through words.

[ 35 ] Anyone who truly engages with what transpired between Goethe and Schiller—who engages with what lived in Schiller’s mind and in Goethe’s mind at that time—will find, in that intellectual heritage which has not yet been recognized or fully realized, a concentration of the aspirations of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch in a truly extraordinary way. Everything that moved the two of them at that time—the way Schiller sought to unravel the enigma of humanity philosophically in his “Aesthetic Letters,” in the way Goethe approached the world of colors at that time to challenge Newton, in the way Goethe presents the development of the human soul in the fairy tale of the green snake and the beautiful lily—all of these are far-reaching questions that, it seems, were destined at first to resonate only with a few. For while we have thus far sought to present the facts relating to Goethe’s life, attention must be drawn to how many people today speak of Goethe—or believe they can speak of him—yet for many, this Goethean era, as a time of the past, remains “a book with seven seals.” And one might say that, in a certain sense, it is even delightful when someone is honest in this regard. It was certainly philistine when Du Bois-Reymond, the famous naturalist, delivered his speech titled “Goethe and No End.” The very same man who outlined the “Limits of Natural Knowledge,” who made so many significant physiological discoveries—he, while serving as rector of a university, delivered his speech: “Goethe and No End.” It is philistine because it springs from the mindset: Yes, so many people talk about the man who was, after all, merely a dilettante—Goethe, who dabbled in everything: that’s who people talk about. What have we actually gained since then—things Goethe, of course, knew nothing of: cell theory, the study of electricity, advances in physiology!—All of that lay before Du Bois-Reymond’s mind. What was Goethe, by comparison! And people talk about the Faust that Goethe created, speaking as if Goethe—in Du Bois-Reymond’s view—had truly presented an ideal of humanity. And Du Bois-Reymond cannot see that Goethe presented an ideal of humanity, for he says: Wouldn’t it actually have been better to make Faust greater than Goethe made him, more useful to humanity? Goethe portrays a wretch—Du Bois-Reymond doesn’t use that exact term, but that’s roughly the gist of what he’s saying—a wretch who can’t come to terms with his own inner self. And then, he says, Faust would have been a real man; he would have honestly married Gretchen, not seduced her, invented the electrostatic machine and the air pump, and become a respectable professor of renown. He says this verbatim: that if Faust had been a decent person, he would have married Gretchen honestly, not merely seduced her; he would have invented the electrifying machine and the air pump, served humanity, and not become such a disheveled genius who got involved in all sorts of spiritualist nonsense.

[ 36 ] It is certainly philistine—the kind of speech one might have heard from a university president at the end of the 19th century—but at least it is honest. And one would like to see such honesty much more often, for it is, after all, delightful because it corresponds to the truth, whereas much of what people muster in their enthusiasm for Faust and Goethe is false, thrice false—people who are, after all, only “happy when they find earthworms.” For such quotations from Goethe, as are frequently heard today, are, after all, nothing more than intellectual earthworms, even if they are Goethe’s own words.

[ 37 ] It is precisely in the relationship of our time to a spirit such as Goethe’s that one can often study the profound untruth of our age. And many a person who does nothing more than “rummage through words” rummages through Goethe’s words as well, whereas there is something in Goethe’s worldview that leads into all that must unfold in the future development of humanity—and which, as we have already indicated, is not only connected to spiritual science but has always been connected to it by its very nature.