The Rudolf Steiner Archive

3. Faust's Struggle for the Christ-Imbued Fountain of Life

following the eurythmic-dramatic performance of “Easter Vigil”

[ 1 ] Among the Easter performances that have just passed before our eyes were also those depicting how a soul, on the verge of passing through the gates of death by its own decision, is brought back into the world of earthly life by the Easter message. I believe that among the many impressions the Faust epic can make on us humans, the impression of this scene must be one of the deepest. Now, I would say, after the transformation the scene that symbolizes the world and its development—now bring what you have taken into your soul as a vision within the *Faust* epic into connection with what I said here yesterday,^{1At the words “Christ is risen,” the black color of the scenery transformed into red.} so to speak, before the transformation, about that significant, real vision that can dawn upon the human soul when it stands before the symbol of Jesus Christ resting in the tomb. Let us recall that yesterday we were able to say that a corresponding spiritual contemplation or spiritual feeling evokes the vision of what is connected to human life through its earthly evolution in relation to the Luciferic and Ahrimanic worlds. Let us consider that in the poem *Faust* we have before us a soul who, right from the beginning of the poem, reveals herself to us as one who has absorbed Ahrimanic knowledge and Ahrimanic insights. And let us then look into this soul as it struggles to break free from its connection to Ahrimanic wisdom and reach toward the—as we might say from our perspective—Christ-imbued source of life: a moment of great significance that is presented to us in relation to a human soul. Let us take this human soul into our spiritual eye! There it stands before us with all the knowledge it has absorbed through observation of the outer material world and its interrelationships, with the insights it has been able to gain through the instruments by which the external natural scientist attempts to penetrate the interrelationships of nature... And what has this soul come to with all this research, which is linked to the various instruments and also to the vial containing the juices that “hastily intoxicate” earthly life? We sense how an Ahrimanic being already reigns at the side of the Faustian soul, and how this Ahrimanic being is connected to what earthly death is. Is it not as if this human soul, filled with the Ahrimanic being, were drawing the conclusion of its Ahrimanic insights? And this conclusion of insight, which Ahriman can give to human beings on Earth—that is what is summed up in the words:

I greet you, O sole vial!
Which I now bring down with reverence,
In you I revere human wit and art.
You, the very embodiment of sweet slumber’s juices,
You, the essence of all deadly subtle powers,
Show your master your favor!
I see you, and the pain is soothed,
I grasp you, and my longing is lessened,
The torrent of my spirit gradually ebbs away.
I am cast out into the vast sea,
The mirror-like waves glisten at my feet,
A new day beckons me to new shores.

[ 2 ] And already this soul has a vision of reaching the other shore, where it may be able to find what it believes it cannot find on this earth because of its Ahrimanic entanglement. It already has a vision of crossing over to the other shore:

A chariot of fire, on light wings,
Is coming toward me! I feel ready
To pierce the ether on a new path,
Toward new spheres of pure activity.
This exalted life, this divine bliss!
You, still but a worm—and you deserve this?
Yes, just turn your back resolutely
On the lovely earthly sun!
Dare to tear open the gates,
Which everyone gladly creeps past.
Now is the time to prove through deeds
That a man’s dignity does not yield to the heights of the gods,
Not to tremble before that dark cave,
In which the imagination condemns itself to its own torment,
To strive toward that passage,
Around whose narrow mouth all of hell blazes;
To resolve cheerfully to take this step
And, even if it means danger, to flow into nothingness.

[ 3 ] And now that he has taken hold of the other Ahrimanic instrument as well, he is ready to make his way into those realms which, as he learned in Ahriman’s school, are no longer perceptible to the soul as long as it is confined within the earthly body. And this soul is torn from that state of mind by the sound of the Easter bells and the chorus of Easter hymns. And once again, the Faustic soul has earthly life, so that it may now seek within the earthly body that which this human soul, as the result of its seeking, is to carry through the gate of death, so that it may carry it up into the spiritual realms where it is needed for its further development.

[ 4 ] What you heard today from the first part of Goethe’s *Faust*, and some elements pertaining to this part—to this scene from Goethe’s *Faust*—first appeared as a complete first part of the poem in 1808. But even before that, in 1790, Goethe had published “Faust, a Fragment”—a fragment that did not yet include the final Gretchen scene. Nor did this fragment contain the scene that has today brought before our own souls those events so significant for Faust’s soul. In 1790, Goethe published his fragment without this Easter scene and without the monologue that leads into the deepest depths of human spiritual experience. And at the end of the 19th century, what Goethe had completed in the 1780s—and even as early as the 1770s and 1790s—was discovered. It was then published under the tasteless title *Urfaust*. In this *Urfaust*, too, we do not have—as one might say, naturally—this Easter scene. Why do we not have it? Well, Goethe, who was a child of his time, had to mature in order to be able to portray, in his own way and in accordance with his soul, the effect of the Christ impulse on Faust’s soul; he first had to mature to that point. And Goethe was not yet mature enough for this by the year 1790. It was during the 1790s that Goethe experienced that deepening within his soul, which found its reflection in the “Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily,” with which we are all familiar. This period falls between the time when *Faust* was published without the Easter scene and the time when it was published with the Easter scene. Goethe’s soul underwent a profound and infinite deepening through what it gave form to in the “Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily.” And it was only through this experience that Goethe realized how the Easter resurrection scene might affect Faust’s soul.

[ 5 ] Well, let’s take a look inside this Faustian soul itself; let’s try to put ourselves in the shoes of the opening of Goethe’s *Faust*, which is pretty much the same across its various successive publications. We know it goes like this:

Alas, I have now studied philosophy,
law, and medicine,
and, alas, theology as well!
I have studied them thoroughly, with great effort.
And here I stand, poor fool that I am!
And I am just as wise as before;
Called a master, even a doctor,
And for nearly ten years now,
Up, down, sideways, and crooked,
I’ve been leading my students by the nose—
And I see that we can know nothing!

[ 6 ] So he has been a lecturer for ten years. Let’s assume he had entered the academic career path in the usual way; then we might think he would have become a lecturer sometime in his thirties—so, in a sense, he has been leading his students by the nose since he was thirty! Let us recall what I said yesterday. In one’s thirties, a person will stand before the image of Jupiter’s existence when that temptation I spoke of yesterday presents itself. And one has before one a vision—a prophetic vision of that temptation—when standing before Christ Jesus lying in the tomb. Do we not have that vision dramatized in *Faust*? Does he not literally stand before us before the mystery of Easter, and does he not stand, one might say, at the end of the 1930s before us before the mystery of Easter? May we not assume that what stirs within his feelings is what humanity must feel from the mystery of Easter—as a premonition of the Jupiter experience with Lucifer and Ahriman? In Goethe’s time, one could not portray this in the way one can now, but Goethe was able to portray the feeling rumbling in the heart in response to the mystery of Easter—a feeling that stirred in Faust’s soul. And is it not as if Faust felt, when Mephisto-Ahriman approaches him, how his soul has fallen prey to the Ahrimanic forces? How must he save himself from something? Yes, from what, exactly? From what must he save himself? Can we not say that Goethe sensed something of this when, as a mature person, he allowed the “Faustian” mood of his youth to take hold of him once more—that as a mature soul he sensed, just as he could in his own time, something of the Easter mood that we have been conjuring up in our souls these days, and that this gave rise to the need to insert the Easter scene into *Faust*, which had not previously included this Easter scene? *Faust* was rewritten in a Christian vein with the insertion of the Easter scene between the years 1790 and 1800.

[ 7 ] So what years did Faust have to live through? Which years of his life did he dread so much that he was even willing to reach for the vial? Well, before the second, descending phase of life—that phase of life about which we have said that when a human being stands before the vision of the Jupiter existence, he knows that he must later carry to Jupiter whatever Christ can give him as provisions for the journey, because otherwise he would lack sustenance in the second half of life. What, then, is Faust seeking? He is seeking nourishment for the soul for the second half of life. We have all been seeking it, in essence, ever since the Mystery of Golgotha passed over the evolution of our Earth. We are all seeking it, in essence. For that which will take on a physical-psychic form on Jupiter already lives within the depths of our souls, and we must all feel something of this Faustian mood. We need a power that we cannot obtain through that which, as human beings, merely gives us freedom and consequently leads us to Ahriman and Lucifer; we need a power for those impulses within us that are connected with the descending half of life. It is the Christ-force—the Christ-force that Christ possesses after he has passed through the gate of death and has not lived through the second half of human life in an earthly body. Why did he not live through it? Because this power, which must be bestowed upon human beings in the second half of life, had to flow out into the Earth’s aura so that all people might find it within themselves through the Earth’s evolution. Through the Easter Mystery, that which we need arises—so that we may journey through our entire life on Earth with our soul. And now consider this profound connection in Goethe’s *Faust*. Faust has taken into himself—Goethe knew how to take this in, for he presented it without the Easter Mystery when he published his fragment without the Easter Mystery—Faust has taken into himself what human beings can take in through their connection with Lucifer and Ahriman, which gives us the possibility of a free soul. But he, who fathoms the depths of the soul, realizes clearly that he cannot go on living with this; to continue living, he needs something else. And Goethe had matured to the point of showing how the impulse of the Easter Mystery is precisely what Faust needs. Does not the Easter Mystery stand profoundly before us in what Goethe, only as a fully mature man, made of his *Faust*—something he could not yet have contained within himself in 1790 because he did not yet understand it?

[ 8 ] How did the poetic idea for this poem—which, as you can see, takes us to such depths—come about in the young Goethe? We know that the young Goethe was deeply impressed both by the puppet play *Faust*—which he saw, and in which Faust’s fate was simply portrayed by puppets—and by the folk play *Doctor Faust*. This thoroughly folk-like work made a deep impression on Goethe’s soul. Who, then, is this Faust? And it was immediately clear to Goethe’s soul: This Faust must be the striving human being par excellence, who, through his striving, can plunge down into all the depths of the human soul and must find the path back up to the luminous heights of the spirit. The young Goethe knew that a human soul must traverse an inner path. For what, after all, is it other than a meditation that Faust experiences so intensely within his soul at the sight of the various signs? It is a meditation that ultimately leads him to the vision of the Earth Spirit flooding and surging through the earth. The meditation receives the following words in response:

In the torrents of life, in the storm of deeds
I surge back and forth,
Weaving to and fro!
Birth and grave,
An eternal sea,
A shifting weave,
A blazing life,
Thus I create at the whirring loom of time
And weave a living garment for the Deity.

[ 9 ] Meditation and counter-meditation! It leads him, Faust, into the depths of life—but how does he find his way out? How does he ascend to the spiritual heights?

[ 10 ] Now that we have considered the magnificent idea that arose in Goethe’s soul—inspired by the puppet shows and folk theater—through the striving Faust, and the form this magnificent idea took through the penetration of Goethe’s soul into the mystery of Easter, let us now ask ourselves: What, then, did Goethe make of *Faust* throughout his life? — Now that we have grasped the grandeur of what lay within Goethe’s soul through the impression of the *Faust* impulse, we may well also ask: What, then, has come of these impressions in artistic and poetic terms? — Well, one thing I just mentioned can help us in our endeavor to understand this *Faust* from an aesthetic and artistic perspective as well. Goethe published a fragment in 1790 that ends roughly with the cathedral scene. What makes *Faust* seem so magnificent to us today is not contained therein. He added it later, incorporating it while he was in Rome. In 1787, he inserted what we now know as the “Witches’ Kitchen.” He inserted other scenes at different times into the manuscript, which had originally been written and transcribed and which, by the time the later scenes were added, he himself described as a “yellowed manuscript.” And when Schiller urged Goethe, at the turn of the 18th to the 19th century, to do something to round out *Faust*, Goethe replied that it would be difficult for him to take on the old monster *Faust* once again and to supplement in an appropriate manner what had lain dormant for so long. Goethe was afraid of incorporating into his *Faust* what he had later come to understand—all that he was and all that had been published up to the year 1790.

[ 11 ] And now let’s take a look at the first part of this *Faust*. Is it not a work in which we can clearly see that it has been pieced together from material created at different times? If people were not so attached to traditional judgments, they would see in *Faust* the most magnificent poetic idea ever brought into the world with regard to the individual human being. And at the same time, they would have to admit that, from an artistic and poetic standpoint, this *Faust* is the most disjointed work—that it is thoroughly disharmonious, a work into which one could still insert many things that are not already there, a work riddled with cracks and fissures, and one that is by no means artistically complete. Goethe’s great genius could only ever complete, in a fragmentary way, what stood before his soul. And as much as we must admire the magnificent beauty of individual scenes, we cannot—if we do not merely adhere to the traditional judgment passed by literary historians, but remain impartial—hide from ourselves the fact that *Faust*, as it stands, is not a harmonious work of art in and of itself, that it is patched together in many places, yet shows cracks and fissures everywhere. Why is this so? Goethe undertook once more, in his very old age, to complete the second part of his *Faust*, for which individual scenes already existed; to these he added whatever he was able to contribute in his very old age. For example: the beginning of the classical-romantic phantasmagoria, the Helena interlude, had already been completed around the turn of the 18th to the 19th century, and some sections had been completed even earlier. And yet we have every reason not to say, as some literary historians do, that the second part of *Faust* cannot be understood, or, as a man who was by no means stupid but rather very clever once said, that *Faust* is “a cobbled-together, patched-up piece of work from old age.” It is not! On the other hand, it is a work whose scope was so vast that even Goethe’s rich life experience at the time was not sufficient to bring it to full fruition. One is certainly entitled to form one’s own judgment even regarding the greatest figures in the world. But why is that so? Well, I have already hinted at this on one occasion during a series of lectures held in The Hague: that this Faust is by no means—I would say—so extraordinarily young in terms of world history. The Faust who lived in the folk play that Goethe saw, and who lived in the puppet show, represents the human being descending into the depths of spiritual life, and he represents the human being striving to rise to the luminous heights; he portrays him in such a way that the greatest poet of modern times needed the mystery of Easter for the liberation of his soul. As he appears in the folk play, he has emerged, first and foremost, from external physical reality—from that Dr. Georg Faust who lived in the second half of the Middle Ages and wandered about like a vagabond; about whom both Trithem of Sponheim and other notable men who encountered him have reported, and who even held a certain respect for him—the respect one shows toward a remarkable personality who, through the way he expresses himself spiritually, knows many things and is capable of many things. And it was not for nothing that this real Doctor Faust was called by that name, as I once mentioned here:

[ 12 ] Magister Georgius Sabellicus Faustus Junior, fons necromanticorum, Magus Secundus, chiromancer, aeromancer, pyromancer, second in the art of hydra.

[ 13 ] That is what he called himself. It was, however, customary in those days to go around with so many titles, and one could also list a long series of titles that sound quite similar for Giordano Bruno and many other prominent thinkers of the Middle Ages. If it may seem strange today to very intelligent people that Trithem of Sponheim and others who knew of the existence of this real Faust believed him to be connected to demonic powers of the world and the earth and to possess various abilities through them, we must simply bear in mind that in Luther’s time, for example, it was nothing out of the ordinary to tell such stories. We know how Luther himself wrestled with the devil. We know that all of this was commonplace—beliefs and tales of that era. But a feeling lived within all of this that contributed to shaping the figure of Faust in the popular consciousness. There was a feeling—I say the feeling and not the concept, not the idea—that natural science was on the rise, the natural science that brings the Ahrimanic aspect of real reality before the human soul. And this gave rise to the feeling: Faust is a personality—and has, in fact, always been such a personality—who has something to do with these Ahrimanic powers. One could, as it were, perceive the secret spiritual threads connecting Faust’s soul to the Ahrimanic forces. And Faust’s fate was seen as intertwined with this inclination toward the Ahrimanic forces. People still sensed and felt, to some extent, from the remnants of ancient clairvoyance and clairvoyant knowledge, that Ahrimanic and Luciferic forces are connected to the entire development of the human soul. And so the figure of Faust became linked to this sense of humanity’s connection to the Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces. But it was also a time when this intuitive insight was already fading into twilight, when all of this was already becoming unclear. And so there arose, one might say, the feeling that the striving human being, with all his temptations and dangers to his soul, could be portrayed in the figure of Faust. But exactly how what humanity strives for is connected to Lucifer and Ahriman—that was no longer known with certainty. It had already become blurred, and from this arose that immense vagueness one senses when picking up the medieval Faust text, in which everything the folk figure is said to have experienced is described—where everything is thrown together haphazardly, like cabbage and beets, into a grotesque ragout of all manner of adventures that the human soul experiences in its striving: all manner of demonic and elemental spirits, as well as Ahriman and Lucifer. After these beings were no longer seen in their full form—after they had been shattered and ground into a stew along with all manner of elemental spirits of nature—the figure of Doctor Faust was then placed into this folk book, into this stew. It was precisely Goethe’s brilliant insight that enabled him to discern the powerful fundamental idea within this eerie stew and to elevate it to such a degree that it approached the mystery of Easter. But it is actually quite interesting to observe how, I might say, Lucifer and Ahriman have gradually been dismembered into such pieces of the stew.

[ 14 ] If we go back in time to find the figure of Faust, we can look in books that were written as popular works at that time and were in the hands of all those who were concerned with matters relating to such things. Augustine’s works were very widespread when this book was cobbled together, pieced together, and glued together. One gets the impression of a bookseller who wanted to produce the thickest possible book, rather than a work by a scholar or even a writer. But he must have known Augustine, particularly the biography of Augustine. And Augustine, indeed, presents himself to us in such a remarkable way throughout his entire development. How at first he cannot understand what Christianity is in its essence; how he gradually works his way through the inner resistance he must oppose to Christianity as his soul develops—first toward what he can now learn about Manichaean doctrine. And Augustine learns of a great, significant man within the Manichaean sect—the Manichaean bishop Faustus. And we can almost sense who this Faustus the Elder is—in contrast to the Faust I mentioned earlier, Faustus the Younger calls himself by that name. He is the one whom Augustine once encountered in ancient times, the one who, as Faustus, the Manichaean bishop, advocated aspects of Manichaean doctrine.

[ 15 ] But what aspect of Manichaean doctrine did he espouse? That aspect which has been corrupted by Ahriman—the aspect that prevents one from understanding how the human being, through his soul, is connected to the entire cosmos, to all cosmic and stellar impulses. One might say: Even in the Manichaean bishop Faustus, the thread of knowledge that leads upward to the cosmic insights—which reveal how the human soul is born out of the cosmos, and which one must know if one truly wishes to understand the mystery of Easter—has been severed. — Thus, in the person who compiled the folk tale of Doctor Faust—precisely from the figure that Augustine describes to us as the Manichaean bishop Faustus—the figure of Faustus, who had fallen prey to Ahriman, could emerge through this compiler and cobbler-of-quicksilver. But since everything had become blurred, he did not understand that this was directed against Ahriman. We therefore see fragments of Ahrimanic danger shimmering through the narratives of the folk play, but we see nothing clear shimmering through. Yet we can gain a distinct sense that Faustus is meant to be portrayed as the representative of the striving human being in such a way that danger threatens him from the Ahrimanic side. And much of what was incorporated into the Faust figure—as it had developed up to Goethe—came from that Manichaean bishop Faustus, the “Faust senior.” Some chapters of the folk tale seem almost as if they had been copied—but poorly copied—from the book in which Augustine describes his own development and his encounter with Bishop Faustus. To this extent, we can demonstrate that what is inherent in the Faust character as an Ahrimanic trait points in this direction—that is, that by the time the folk tale was written down, only the final, obscure impulse remained to portray the Ahrimanic elements of human nature precisely through the Faust character.

[ 16 ] And now, what about the Luciferic element? How were the Luciferic elements chopped up into those pieces of ragout that were then cooked into the ragout of elemental spirits and pieces of Lucifer and Ahriman, as I just said? Yes, we must indeed search if we now wish to explore Faust’s connection to Lucifer. Here, too, we can look to history; we don’t even need to go all that far—we need only go to Basel, and there we can find clues as to how Lucifer was chopped up into a ragout. For we are told how, in Basel of all places, Erasmus of Rotterdam met Faust, and how they wanted to have a meal there at the college but could not find the right food for it. And since Erasmus lacked something that would appeal to his taste, he told this to Faust, who was sitting next to him and wanted to eat with him, but they had nothing suitable. The Faust legend then tells us that Faustus was able—from somewhere, though no one knows where—to suddenly bring to the table, cooked and roasted, some very unusual birds that were not otherwise available at the market in Basel. So we see a scene between Erasmus of Rotterdam and Faust in which Faust is able to serve Erasmus such birds—which could not be bought in Basel at that time, nor anywhere in the surrounding area. What exactly is this, then? As such, it is not at all understandable in the legend—one might even say it is completely incomprehensible—but the matter becomes clearer to us when we investigate and piece together what we can glean from the writings of Erasmus of Rotterdam, who himself tells us that he made the acquaintance of a certain Faustus Andrelinus in Paris. This Faustus Andrelinus was an extraordinarily learned man, but also an extraordinarily sensual man. At first, Erasmus became so acquainted with this Faustus that he had not yet developed a true taste for the sensual aspects of this Faustus. But then again, we hear of a meal that the two are said to have shared. Well, admittedly, two learned gentlemen of that time, such as Erasmus of Rotterdam and Faustus Andrelinus—we cannot expect one to serve the other such birds, and certainly not in the manner in which Faustus of Basel is said to have served them to Erasmus. So what has been handed down to us is probably just a kind of—I would say—jocular exchange that the two had during the meal. But we do get a little beyond these playful remarks when we also hear within them that Faust—this time it is indeed Faust—declared himself not entirely satisfied with what was served to him and demanded something else. Faust now wants to eat—specifically to indulge himself—exotic birds and rabbits; yes, exotic birds and rabbits. Erasmus initially thinks that this must mean something. So he behaves just like some theosophists who ponder the meaning of things. Well, then the other one says, fine, he’ll do without the rabbits. — Erasmus thought: Couldn’t that mean flies and ants? — He’s willing to do without the rabbits. But the birds are actually flies, and he wants to indulge himself with flies in particular. — Now we’ve come a long way. Now the birds have been transformed into flies through astral metamorphosis. And in Goethe’s work, we have the god of flies in the form of Mephisto. All that is needed is the spirit that commands these beings, and it could conjure them into existence. And so we have built a bridge connecting the incomprehensible Basel legend and the strange birds to the flies, which simply come from the devil. And we need not be surprised that the devil serves flies to the one he invites to his table. But what kind of soul this Faustus Andrelinus is—what sort of soul he actually is—well, that becomes clear to us when we follow Erasmus a little further along his path in Paris. In Paris, Erasmus was not yet quite inclined to delve into this peculiarity of Faustus Andrelinus. But then he had to make a trip to London. There he writes that he has now learned—truly, Erasmus, just imagine!—to conduct himself in the salon, whereas before he had had the manners of a coarse peasant; that he has now learned to bow and even knows how to move about on the court dance floor! And—yes, Erasmus writes it—that he lives in an atmosphere where, as people come and go, they’re constantly kissing one another. From this, one can see that he wants to cater to his Parisian friend’s tastes. He writes: “Do come over here.” And if your gout prevents you too much, then come flying over on the chariot of the spirit through the air. That is right up your alley! — One sees here the connection between Faustus and the Luciferian inclination of the soul.

[ 17 ] In Goethe’s work, we then encounter how Faust carries out his seductions—by seducing Gretchen and so on. Lucifer has truly drifted so far from the context of the Faust figure that one must undertake such literary investigations if we wish to establish the connection between Faust and Lucifer in the Parisian *Faust*. But we can literally see Faust standing there, with Lucifer and Ahriman—albeit indistinctly through the murky mists of time—at his side, all boiled down into a stew in the folk tale. Should we be surprised that in folk plays and folk dramas—and even in Marlowe’s *Faust*—we find something that is a remnant of ancient beliefs, still rooted in those times when, through atavistic clairvoyance, people recognized humanity’s connection to Ahriman and Lucifer? But all of this has become blurred, and in the literary work we have been discussing, it is portrayed in a thoroughly blurred manner. Goethe sensed the deep connection. But what could Goethe not do? He could not distinguish between Lucifer and Ahriman. To him, they still merged into the hybrid figure of Mephisto, about whom one is not quite sure: is he the devil, Ahriman, or the real Mephisto? For he has also taken upon himself what Lucifer is. Goethe receives, as it were, a medley; he senses that Ahriman and Lucifer are at work there, but he cannot yet pick them apart; he merges them into the occultistically impossible figure of Mephisto, who is a hybrid born of Ahriman and Lucifer. One might call the era into which Goethe gazed as he became acquainted with the *Faust* text: the final twilight of an ancient knowledge concerning this matter, the fading twilight of the ancient knowledge of Ahriman and Lucifer. And Goethe’s *Faust* is the first dawn of the knowledge of Ahriman and Lucifer that has not yet risen—dark and confused in the figure of Mephisto, where Ahriman and Lucifer are still intermingled. But already there is the need to portray what the human soul can attain by allowing itself to be influenced by that which has flowed into the Earth’s aura through the Christ Being’s passage through the Mystery of Golgotha!

[ 18 ] The mystery of Easter itself appears to us as the dawn of a new era in humanity’s spiritual life in Goethe’s *Faust*, which, despite its grandeur, still has something confusing about it, something of a dark, misty dawn. It appears to us as something within this dark dawn that we can glimpse when we climb a mountain and see the sun rise earlier than we could see it before we stood on the mountain. As one of the greatest human beings turns his soul toward the mystery of Easter through the pursuit of renewing ancient knowledge, we feel this as we allow Goethe’s *Faust* to take effect upon us. And if we allow it to take effect upon us in the true sense, then we feel what can take place in the heart of one of the greatest human beings when that human heart has been touched by the mystery of Easter—just as Goethe himself felt at the same time; for there is something in Goethe’s premonition of the mystery of Easter that points to this: Yes, after the dawn into which the first dark-and-light rays of the mystery of Easter shine, the sun of a new spiritual insight will rise. The human soul will rise from the grave of darkened knowledge, into which it, too, must descend. The human soul itself will experience, in the course of its development, the mystery of Easter—the resurrection of that which is the Christ impulse in its deep, tomb-like depths—when it unites with the power that emanates from the contemplation of the Christ-Easter mystery.

[ 19 ] Thus, one might say, we feel Goethe’s call and, after allowing the tragedy of the Easter mystery to take effect within us, wish to transform it into the call: May the spiritual insight befitting the future arise in the hearts of humankind, in the souls of humankind! May the hearts and souls of human beings, having felt the deepest tragedy, joyfully and reverently perceive within themselves the depth of the Easter mystery and experience the Resurrection within themselves through Christ!

[ 20 ] May you, on this day as well, through the words I have taken the liberty of addressing to you, take into your souls something of the feeling that you are gathered here around our building dedicated to spiritual research, so that through the power of your souls you may carry into the future something of that impulse of resurrection which becomes so vividly apparent to us in the mystery of Easter, and toward which we could see the greatest spirits of that bygone era striving.

[ 21 ] Do you sense in *Faust* something of what the enchanting sound of Easter bells can evoke in your souls?