The Rudolf Steiner Archive

2. The Relationship Between Goethe’s “Faust” and Goethe

[ 1 ] Since Ms. Wandrey’s illness prevented her from giving her “Faust” lectures during this gathering in Berlin, I would like to offer a few scattered and rather haphazard remarks this morning on Goethe’s “Faust.” I have lectured on *Faust* on several occasions and hope to eventually compile what was said in the various lectures into a short work. Now, the Faust theme is, on the one hand, an extraordinarily comprehensive one and, on the other hand, an extraordinarily difficult one—difficult for the reason that few works of world literature stand in such a peculiar relationship to their poet as Goethe’s *Faust* does to Goethe. We need only consider the external fact that Goethe brought with him to Weimar a kind of initial draft that had taken shape in his mind as the *Faust* poem; in Weimar, he thus merely supplemented and refined it at a relatively early stage and was then able to read it aloud. It is the character that was published at the end of the 19th century, found in a manuscript bearing the rather tasteless name of Goethe’s “Urfaust.” Thus, we actually have before us the Faust character that Goethe had very early on. Then we have a version of the Faust poem that Goethe published in 1790 out of certain feelings—a “Faust fragment.” I say, of course, “out of certain feelings,” because the fact that Goethe published it was linked to the fact that he had actually despaired of finishing this Faust poem at that time. It was therefore a matter of casting aside what he had conceived up to that point, because he saw no possibility of continuing it. Then we have the form in which “Faust” was presented to the public at the beginning of the 19th century. This corresponds roughly to our current first part, with the “Dedication,” the “Prologue in Heaven,” and so on. But that is not the end of the story, because the “Helena scene”—which today appears as the third act of the second part—was already complete at that time, so that by the time Goethe had conceived this figure of “Faust,” he already had, alive in his feelings and thoughts, a connection between the figure of Faust and that of Helena. And then, in 1824, when Goethe was seventy-five years old, he set to work with great energy to round out the second part and turn it into a complete poetic work, which he left behind as his literary testament after his death.

[ 2 ] We are thus faced with a work of poetry that not only accompanied Goethe throughout his entire life—and at which he worked throughout his entire life—but also continually changed its entire inner structure, content, form, and conception—everything, in fact—over the course of time. We must also consider that it is precisely in this *Faust* that Goethe reveals himself as one of the most authentic poets to be found in world literature. For in *Faust*, his aim was never to present something outwardly beautiful or perfect, but always to offer what he could give from the deepest, innermost sincerity—to present, unvarnished, what the soul had grasped as truth at any given moment. If we add to this the fact that Goethe’s life was, through and through, a continuous striving—that we can trace how this life developed and elevated itself from decade to decade, how Goethe conceived new ideas, gained new insights, and established connections to new worlds—then we will recognize the significance of the fact that Goethe always allowed what lived within him to flow into the *Faust* poem. Thus, it may well have been that his *Faust* seemed rather questionable to him here and there when he undertook to revise what he had written decades earlier. In the meantime, he had moved on. Now what he had created years ago was to be carried forward.

[ 3 ] One point should be considered here in order to gain a little insight into Goethe’s soul through *Faust*. Take what has now been published under the title *Urfaust*; in it you will find something you might call: It is roughly what Goethe brought with him to Weimar and refined during his early years there. It is something one might call the poetry of a young, extraordinarily gifted poet who, however, had not yet been able to draw much from his own soul—from what actually lay within it—for himself. For in this version of the *Faust* poem, all the connections are still missing that Goethe, in his later life, would have called connections to the spiritual world. In fact, there are only the external, entirely realistic human scenes, which could be captured with such youthful vigor. It goes without saying that people who wish to remain their entire lives in such a relationship to the spiritual world—and who do not want to see the becoming, the development, in Goethe—will find contradictions. Of them, Goethe said:

There they praise Faust,
And whatever else
In my writings rages
In their favor.

Good old Mick and Mack,
That makes them very happy;
The rabble thinks
They aren't what they used to be.

[ 4 ] But let us consider Goethe’s situation; let us consider the matter from the perspective of Goethe’s soul. We can pause at the time when Goethe was staying in Italy, when he was in Rome—that is, in the second half of the penultimate decade of the 18th century, from 1787 to 1788. What happened in Goethe’s soul from the time he wrote what is now united in *Urfaust* until the time he was in Italy, when he regarded the artistic form he presented in *Tasso* and *Iphigenia* as the one most suited to him? Consider what it means that it is the same individual who, on the one hand, had already written the peculiar, chaotic *Götz von Berlichingen* in its earliest form, and then gave *Tasso* and *Iphigenia* their wonderfully well-rounded forms. That is the same person. For internal reasons, it will one day be possible to demonstrate—once people no longer know that these works are by the same poet—that it is impossible for the same poet to have written these things. We can say that within Goethe himself there were already different people in the truest sense of the word. The Goethe of 1775 had been overcome within Goethe, and by 1788 it was the Goethe who wrote “The Witches’ Kitchen” at the Villa Borghese in Rome and the wonderful scene “Sublime Spirit, you gave me, gave me everything I asked for.” It is a profoundly significant fact for understanding Goethe’s soul that the images of the “Primordial Faust”—which he wrote back then in youthful titanism as a rebellion against the prevailing intellectual currents, out of the same mood from which “Götz von Berlichingen” also arose—surface before Goethe’s spirit. In Rome, Goethe himself felt compelled to bring measure and harmony into his conception, to revisit the old characters. He had to add something to *Faust* once again, honestly and sincerely, from his present perspective, and seek to carry *Faust* forward just as he himself had moved forward. That was a very difficult situation. The earlier time was no longer there, but it stood before the poet Goethe. He would have had to rewrite everything that had been written up to that point, or he faced something that stood before him as if, at the age of forty, he had before him his self at seventeen, twenty-five, thirty, and so on—as if he had all of that before him. And yet, if he had reworked the entire *Faust*, it would not have been true, for it would not have expressed the mood that was within him at the very moment he was interested in those scenes. All of this makes the *Faust* epic so immensely important and so unsuited to the philistinism we find in life. But there is still something present in Goethe when he wrote the “Witches’ Kitchen” and the scene “Sublime Spirit”—there is still something there.

[ 5 ] What, then, had preceded Goethe? Through everything that was in his soul, Goethe had drawn close to the fourth post-Atlantean cultural epoch, the Greco-Latin era. He is full of enthusiasm for this fourth post-Atlantean cultural epoch, for the Greco-Latin era. “I have a hunch,” he wrote from Italy, “that I am on the trail of the laws of Greek art. The artists proceeded according to the same laws by which nature itself proceeds.”—After having delved deeply into Spinoza in order to find God in nature, what appears to him as art—as he stood before the works of art in Italy—was what he described as: “Here is necessity; here is God.” He now felt himself confronted with what he had absorbed within himself in the North from a culture into which, in essence, had been woven what was the first dawn of the fifth post-Atlantean cultural epoch. While some of what emerged during the strange twilight hours of the Middle Ages may seem peculiar to many—the strange belief in the devil, the legends, and all that thrived from the 13th through the 17th century, which is connected to the origin of the Faust legend— it is connected to the cultural period that in turn succeeded the Greco-Latin era. And now, in this era, the perfection of the human being achieved during the Greco-Latin era stands before Goethe’s spirit in a most remarkable way. It was a perfection brought about by the fact that this cultural period—which is the midpoint of the post-Atlantean era—was preceded by three periods that, in a certain sense, would later repeat themselves; yet this fourth period is the midpoint, the focal point of the post-Atlantean era, when humanity had ventured to the very limits of the physical world. Hence the sense of completion, the serene perfection of this art. That was what made such an impression on Goethe. He felt: When you have such a work of art before you, you need not go out into space, into the external world; everything has flowed into the work of art. — It was this flowing into form, into the “how,” that particularly captivated him.

[ 6 ] In the North, he encountered what he himself—with the other side of his nature—had once loved so immensely. Take a Gothic cathedral or the art of Dürer, Holbein, and so on. There we have what prepares the way for the fifth period. The works of art are not complete in and of themselves. One must seek what lies within the work of art. A Greek temple is complete—so complete that no one needs to be there. The Gothic cathedral is not like that; it is only complete when devout people are inside it. Right up until the time of Greece’s decline, we always found the spiritual in the outer form. But in Dürer’s art, we see everywhere the striving to go deeper than what the outer form expresses. In the Greek sense, the forms are sometimes unattractive because a powerful will seeks to express itself there. In his youth, Goethe was an admirer of this art—Shakespearean art—which is the opposite of Greek art. What stands in opposition here, like two conflicting elements in Goethe’s soul, would scarcely have provoked such inner turmoil in another soul. For Goethe wanted nothing less than to find, in everything that confronted him directly in the external world, the supersensible and the spiritual at the same time. He was not one of those people who were satisfied with external form, but rather one of those who valued the external form—which he saw in Greek and Latin art—so highly precisely because the supersensible was present alongside the form. Form itself was the transcendent. What is given in nature, what otherwise confronted him in the world, was for Goethe already maya, a great illusion; maya, or great illusion, was present everywhere. But he demanded of art that it place the True—the Greek temple, the Greek god, who is the True from the transcendent standpoint—right in the midst of maya. Thus Goethe thirsted for the truth of the transcendent within the sensible world and was intoxicated by Greek and Roman art precisely because he wanted to establish a realm of truth within the realm of maya through art. All that was untrue was to be removed from art.

[ 7 ] But on the other hand, he saw how dangerous such an artistic demand is. Through Spiritual Science, we know why it is dangerous: because every art form is bound to a specific epoch and cannot reappear later. That was something characteristic of the fourth period, but not of the fifth. People had to orient themselves toward the supersensible, which cannot express itself in form. That was humanity’s destiny: to be oriented toward it. Hence the struggle in the Nordic cultures against all that is external, the grotesque perception of the spiritual in everything. As long as one—Goethe told himself—merely talks about these things—Goethe had already told himself this while sitting in the Villa Borghese—as long as one merely talks, as I too did in my youth, one is not truly authentic. —For in outward speech, the cliché is inevitable as long as it is not imbued with an inner spiritual being. To Goethe, everything he had created up to that point seemed untrue in comparison to the plan he now had: to embody the truth in art through *maya*. Thus arose within him the urge to bring into the new age that which can live on as something eternal in every epoch—to bring from the Greco-Latin epoch that which can live on. Please take this to heart. Isn’t it true that it has been carried over unconsciously, for every cultural epoch builds upon the one before it? Unconsciously, the fourth cultural epoch lived on in the fifth. All of this lived within Goethe as an urge: How can one consciously carry this over? How can one allow what lived back then and has eternal value to flow forward? What would that which lived in Greco-Roman culture look like if people could consciously bring it into their own consciousness? — This was something that lived in Goethe’s soul: What must a person have been like who had lived fully within the Greek-Latin era and who now consciously carried his consciousness over into a later time? — Thus, the entire problem of reincarnation, of re-embodiment, was raised in Goethe’s soul—truly, it could not have been raised more deeply for that time—in such a way that he asked himself: How could one achieve a conscious transfer of earlier cultural content into later cultural content? This lived within him so intensely that he did not know how to grasp it within his own soul. Lying in the subconscious was that which had transformed his own soul in such a way that, in the transition from the fourth to the fifth period, a figure as remarkable as Faust could emerge.

[ 8 ] Faust really did exist; he was enrolled in the student registry at the University of Heidelberg. What kind of figure was he, really? In a certain sense, he was a contemporary of Nostradamus. He was a person who, in a certain way, felt a longing to bring forth—more or less consciously—that which must now be retrieved from the hidden depths of the soul. The third cultural epoch is, after all, to be brought forth once more. It is Faust’s destiny to bring this third cultural epoch back to the surface. The legitimacy of such a spirit alongside the one that arose as an ideal in Goethe’s soul—the legitimacy of such a modern spirit—was always clear to Goethe. He could never doubt that this modern spirit had a rightful place alongside the ideal human being from the Greco-Roman era that dwelled in his soul. But now he said to himself: This spirit must plunge into the depths of its own soul; it must become acquainted with all that divides human beings when they enter the higher worlds. No sooner has a person approached the “Keeper of the Threshold,” Goethe felt, than a multitude of figures immediately confronts him. Thus, for Goethe, Faust became a highly questionable figure, but one he could not ignore: How is the spirit I have carried over from the fourth cultural epoch legitimately embodied in a spirit in transition to the fifth cultural epoch? — It is embodied in such a way that all the dangers a person encounters when passing the “Guardian of the Threshold” and entering the supersensible worlds must play a role in this striving. That Faust enters the supersensible worlds stems from his longing, from his emotional contemplation. Goethe was aware of this from the very beginning, but he only gradually became acquainted with the dangers that still existed at that time—dangers that no longer exist today, for they can be avoided through the teachings in *How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds*. Faust, however, still faced those dangers. The way in which Faust enters the supersensible worlds is such that the dawning of a certain imaginative insight must be accompanied by a stirring, an inflaming, and an ignition of the lower life of passion. These two things cannot be separated unless a regular spiritual path is followed. These things are inseparable; you can also read about this in Blavatsky’s writings. She says one need only observe how the karma of the person who wishes to penetrate the spiritual worlds changes, how he can bring misfortune upon those around him if he does not enter the higher worlds in a proper manner, and how he spreads throughout his entire surroundings the ripples emanating from the impulses within him. Consequently, one’s own drives and passions also intrude into the higher worlds; worlds of forms surround the human being.

[ 9 ] Goethe had to place these real seekers of the spirit before his soul, since he stood on the foundation of having within himself a sense of the absolute truth of Greco-Latin culture. He had to place this seeker of the spirit from the fifth period, with all his difficulties, before his soul. What surrounds such a person, and into what dangers is such a person drawn? In the entire sensory world, there is nothing that corresponds to what such a person experiences. One must therefore step into the spiritual world. But one must first understand how what such a person experiences differs from the sensory world. Hence the “witches’ kitchen”—because Goethe wanted to depict the entire supersensible milieu into which Faust had to enter, because it had to be shown how the supersensible worlds presented themselves in light of all the antecedents we have discussed. One must indeed regard this “witches’ kitchen” as part of the spiritual world. One must realize that Goethe was familiar with certain mysteries of the supersensible world, enabling him to depict accurately how things are actually perceived by the clairvoyant consciousness. Thus, the supersensible world is portrayed with remarkable accuracy when the entire seething of human passions is described during that entry into the spiritual world—which was still a terrifying experience at the time. Everything that occurs there in terms of seething passions is reflected in the monkeys, which bear the names Meerkatze and Meerkater, and is reflected in everything that is accurately depicted in the “Witches’ Kitchen.”

[ 10 ] But Goethe feels the urge to lead Faust toward the truth, not toward this world of falsehood. It is, admittedly, a world that is absolutely true in terms of facts, but a world that is even more of an illusion than the ordinary sensory world—maya—is to the senses. Goethe must therefore strive to approach the truth. To do so, he must depict how the external world—to which Mephistopheles belongs—surrounds the supersensible world depicted in the “Witches’ Kitchen.” Goethe wants to show that Faust can escape from the world from which Mephisto draws his inspiration. Imagine a person placed in the supersensible world, just as Faust is placed in the “witches’ kitchen”; when one can no longer find one’s way in this world, not even the ordinary laws of the number system can hold true. What matters is not a witty interpretation of the witches’ multiplication table; one must feel what it means to truly face what is written in the witches’ multiplication table:

You have to understand!
Turn one into ten,
And let two go,
And make three the same,
Then you’ll be rich.
Lose the four!
From five and six,
So says the witch,
Make seven and eight,
And it’s done:
And nine is one,
And ten is none.
That’s the witch’s multiplication table.

[ 11 ] The point is to put oneself in the shoes of a person who suddenly finds himself in this world, where everything is different, after becoming familiar with the conventional number system. If one interprets these things with more or less wit, one does a disservice to the poetry, because it then appears as though the poet himself had intended such symbolism. No, the situation stood vividly before the poet. Anyone who calls Goethe a symbolist, an abstract thinker, shows that they cannot grasp the significance and reality of this situation. What had to happen to Faust if he did not want to ruin his own karma and that of his surroundings—as, for example, in the case of Gretchen? It was a long way from this Faust to the one who, speaking from the perspective of the fourth cultural epoch, utters the words: “Oh, from the human heart spring the imaginations that weave the whole world of illusion into a web:

Sublime Spirit, you gave me—you gave me everything
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 merely allow me to be a cold, marveling visitor,
but grant me to gaze into its deep bosom
as into the bosom of a friend.
You lead the procession of the living
past me and teach me to recognize my brothers
in the silent thicket, in the air, and in the water.
And when the storm roars and creaks in the forest,
The giant spruce, crashing down, strikes neighboring branches
And crushes neighboring trunks as it sweeps downward,
And the hill thunders with a dull, hollow roar at their fall,
Then you lead me to the safe cave, show me
Myself, and within my own breast
Secret, profound wonders unfold.

[ 12 ] This is Faust, speaking to Nature as his imaginative world merges with what exists as maya or illusion—a Faust who is different from the one to whom Mephistopheles is permitted to say, so strangely:

How would you, poor son of Earth,
Have lived your life without me?
From the fidgeting of the imagination
I have, after all, cured you for long stretches of time.

[ 13 ] How did he cure him? By leading him into the supernatural world. But Faust is not to be cured of his imagination in this way; rather, he is to come to recognize the imagination as the all-encompassing Great Maya, the illusion. What is necessary for this, so that Faust can say:

And when the storm roars and creaks in the forest,
The giant spruce, toppling, sweeps down,
Crushing neighboring branches and trunks,
And the hill thunders with a dull, hollow roar at its fall,
Then you lead me to the safe cave, show me
Myself, and within my own breast
Secret, profound wonders unfold.

[ 14 ] In order for this classical tranquility of opening to occur—what must Faust do in relation to the “witches’ cauldron,” where he is bound to lose himself unless he develops something very specific—what must Faust develop? He must not proceed like a theosophical theorist; he must come to himself as a human being with a very specific experience; he must look at himself objectively. Something must confront him in the face of the “witches’ kitchen” in which he sees himself. Something of higher truth must appear in his imagination—but something that possesses a higher reality than the “witches’ kitchen.” For man, the higher self is, after all, feminine. This is depicted very realistically in the appearance of “Helena” in the “witches’ kitchen,” the appearance of the etheric body, which can only be seen from a certain distance. Faced with this figure, Mephistopheles says—because he does not understand her:

With this potion in your veins,
you will soon see Helen in every woman.

[ 15 ] This is depicted from a genuine poetic impulse that strives for what people, on the surface, will not regard for a long time as what really matters. For the people of the fifth period, a question will continue to be raised for a long time about what they need—a question that could easily be somewhat ambiguous, but if answered truthfully, it is easy to understand. How might one address the most important matter for the people of the fifth period?

What is cursed yet always welcome?
What is longed for yet always driven away?
What is constantly protected?
What is harshly scolded and accused?
Whom must you not summon?
Whose name does everyone love to hear?
What approaches the steps of your throne?
What has banished itself?

[ 16 ] Goethe greets us with a curious, enigmatic passage near the beginning of the second part. One could find enough words to solve this riddle, but for humanity, the best way to find the solution is to apply a single word to everything that is being asked. That word: Spirit. Goethe, however, did not want it to be so easy to solve the riddle; he did not want to present it in such a blunt manner. Yet the Spirit is cursed in the most manifold ways and yet is always welcome. One need only look at the spiritual development of humankind to know: What is longed for and yet constantly driven away?—One need only point to Spiritual Science, for example. Back then, the Spirit was only allowed to show itself in the form of the court jester; otherwise, it was not very welcome.

[ 17 ] That is the great question: how the fifth post-Atlantic culture should come to spirit—how it should come to spirit from what it already possesses—and how it can grasp the very essence of the world. Now, in no other cultural epoch has humanity been better suited to find the spirit, so to speak, in the form of the “I” than in our own cultural epoch. But how could one even begin to discover the true nature of the human being unless one could grasp this “I” against the backdrop of the astral body? Let us suppose that a person in the 19th or even the 16th century wanted to set out to discover what the astral body is. In outward perception, such a person does not initially possess the faculty of imagination. One should seek the astral body—that which, from the Lunar Age onward, has underlain the development of the outer “I.” Of course, because all forces can reach everywhere, a person can arrive at something even when applying the intellect to things—but what will they then bring forth from the astral body? Let us consider what emerges from the astral body when one applies to it that which fits well with external maya. One cannot express this more aptly than by calling what emerges the homunculus. The homunculus has something to do with the astral body as it organizes itself around what the “I” is. We are dealing with the supersensible, so that Goethe may coin a term here that from the outset refers to something produced in the supersensible world. Wagner says—since the philistine intellect does indeed produce the homunculus in the laboratory—:

It’s happening! The masses are stirring more clearly!
Their conviction grows truer, truer!
What we once praised as nature’s mystery,
We dare to examine rationally,
And what nature otherwise allowed to take shape,
We let it crystallize.

[ 18 ] Commentators have struggled to make sense of this phrase “conviction,” because they failed to realize that Goethe is not speaking here of conviction in the usual sense, but rather, in the same sense that he speaks of the “superman,” he is referring to a conviction. But the second part of *Faust* has, in a curious way, been commented on in such a manner that the commentators have focused on the spelling errors. For example, when Goethe dictated and the scribe wrote: “Nur strebe nicht nach höheren Orden” (“Only do not strive for higher orders”) and so on—it is truly not “Orden” that is meant here, but rather the person to whom Goethe dictated wrote “Orden” instead of “Orten.” These things we have here show us that for Goethe, after he had envisioned Faust in all his spiritual striving, the question now became particularly pressing: How can one consciously convey consciousness? — The consciousness that lived, for example, in Helena, who now appeared before his mind. That was the burning question. In this connection, I must mention—you must consider the Goethe of 1797—that the greatest transformation ever to have taken place in Goethe’s entire soul occurred at that time. At the very time when the figure of Faust within him created the necessity of conceiving him not merely as arising from processes of the inner soul—as when he had to compose the “Prologue in Heaven”—everything within him changed, so to speak. At that point, the necessity also arose for him to give an ever more definite form to this conscious transition of consciousness from the fourth to the fifth period. Hence, too, the endeavor to resolve the question in some way.

[ 19 ] I have often hinted at how Goethe seeks to resolve the question of reincarnation poetically by showing that Helena’s eternal essence rests in the spiritual world of the “Mothers.” But human beings cannot simply enter the spiritual world; otherwise, what paralyzes Faust when he gazes upon the image of Helena will occur. The spirit must first envelop itself with the soul, then with the physical body. Helena envelops herself with the soul when, in the astral realm, soul substance is made available in the form of a homunculus. In the homunculus, we find the forces of the astral body of a human being entering existence.

He does not lack intellectual qualities,
but he sorely lacks practical competence.

[ 20 ] Everything is described quite accurately, and finally, the envelopment by external nature, where we are shown how the outwardly physical is taken in. There he must pass through all the elements of nature; he begins with the mineral world and moves on through the plant world. Goethe finds the wonderful phrase there: “It murmurs so,” to suggest what can pass from the verdant plant world into human nature. And so it goes through everything. “... you have time until you reach the human being.” But then you cannot go any further.

Because once you've become human,
then it's completely over for you.

[ 21 ] This continues until the human being enters into existence through the mystery of love—a process depicted as wonderfully as the way the human being is called into existence through the mystery of love and the mystery of sexual polarity. After Goethe has depicted everything that precedes the mystery, he has the Sirens utter the miracle:

What fiery wonder do the waves reveal to us,
As they crash against one another, sparkling?
Thus it glows and sways and shines upward,
The bodies glow on their nocturnal path,
And all around, everything is surrounded by fire;
So let Eros reign, he who began it all!

[ 22 ] And man comes into being.

Hail to the gentle breezes!
Hail to the mysterious tombs!
Here you are all celebrated,
all four of you, elements!

[ 23 ] And we turn the page. Act Three: Helena is here. These things must not be handled with rough hands, nor entrusted to an external interpretation. These things can only be described by following and slipping into what is being expressed there, by dissolving them in the metamorphosing water, as in Goethe. But that is what it is all about. In Goethe lies the urge to consciously bring to the surface what has been lived unconsciously in the human being of the fourth cultural epoch, and what must come to the surface consciously.

[ 24 ] And then Goethe draws upon the moral, religious, and mystical elements of the North to show how what is right can indeed emerge from what appeared unjustifiably in the “witches’ kitchen.” He demonstrates this so magnificently in the final scene, where Spiritual Science and mystery interact so wonderfully, where everything that lived within Goethe is so wonderfully condensed in the “Chorus mysticus”—a chorus that can indeed be used as a symbol of Spiritual Science, a concept already expressed earlier through the scattered roses—and when it is then said:

All that is fleeting
Is but a parable;
What is inadequate
Here becomes fulfillment;
What is indescribable,
Here it is accomplished;
The eternal feminine
Draws us upward

[ 25 ] Thus, in just a few lines, everything we recognize as truth in Spiritual Science is expressed.