The Rudolf Steiner Archive

3. Goethe's Intuitions toward the Concrete

Ethereal Concepts and Reality-Infused Mental Images Based on a Staged Adaptation of “Faust” II

Second Floor: A narrow Gothic room with a high vaulted ceiling. Laboratory

[ 1 ] One would hope that the scenes you have just seen would be received with understanding by the widest possible circles of contemporary society, for these scenes contain many seeds of the development in which the Spiritual Science movement is also engaged. One might say that Goethe, in writing these scenes based on his many years of multifaceted experience, foresaw much of what must sprout through Spiritual Science like a seed. These very scenes from the second part of Faust stand before our souls both as a cultural-historical document and as an expression of profound insight. When we approach such profound manifestations of Goethe’s spirit, we may indeed draw upon the mental images of Spiritual Science—with which we are now already familiar—to arrive at a full understanding. For in these mental images of Spiritual Science lies, formulated and brought to full consciousness, what Goethe shaped out of inner imagination using the experiences of his time.

[ 2 ] In the first of the two scenes, we initially encounter something akin to a significant cultural-historical document. When Goethe—matured by all that he had absorbed from the natural sciences on the one hand, from the deeper understanding that his mystical studies had imparted to these scientific views, and furthermore from the deeper understanding that Greek art had given him—when Goethe shaped these mental images that lived within him into figures, that was also the time when, out of boundless enthusiasm for knowledge, minds were attempting to grapple with the highest problems of existence. It is something that, especially in our circles, should not—and cannot—come as a surprise: that the striving toward the spiritual world, when it arises with great intensity, produces its own caricatures—indeed, truly produces its own caricatures. Both the mystical quest and the deeper philosophical quest for knowledge produce their own caricatures. In Goethe’s immediate vicinity, at the very time these scenes were unfolding in Goethe’s mind, a truly significant—one might say philosophical-theosophical—striving was indeed taking shape. There, Johann Gottlieb Fichte taught with tremendous enthusiasm for knowledge. You can see from the sketchy accounts in my books—both in the one on The Riddles of Philosophy as well as in my latest book, On the Riddle of Man, how Fichte strove in a fundamental way to give form to that which lives as the divine-spiritual in the innermost depths of the human soul, so that through this unfolding of the divine-spiritual within the soul, the human being becomes conscious of his own divine-spiritual origin. Fichte sought to grasp the full life of the “I”—the creative, active “I,” but also the God-filled “I”—within the human soul. In doing so, he attempted to sense the connection between inner human life and the entire cosmic life. And it was out of this enthusiasm that he spoke. It is only too understandable that precisely such a spiritual advance caused a great deal of controversy. After all, Fichte could not yet speak from the concrete realities of Spiritual Science; the time was not yet ripe for that. One might say that, through abstract, comprehensive concepts, Fichte sought to bring to life the feeling that can then be enlivened in human beings through the impressions of Spiritual Science. As a result, his language often had an abstract quality, yet it was an abstraction permeated by living feeling and vivid sensation. And it took the powerful impression that such a personality can make directly for people to take what Fichte had to say seriously at all. In print, it often seemed quite paradoxical—even more paradoxical than the paradoxes—the necessary paradoxes—of the Spiritual Science often must be, because what is true often appears merely ridiculous to people who are not accustomed to it. That is why a mind like Fichte’s, who had to express the truth even in a completely abstract form, could be found ridiculous.

[ 3 ] On the other hand, people who had already been deeply influenced by Fichte were prone to exaggerating things, just as everything in life is easily exaggerated. And so caricatures of Fichte’s philosophy emerged, as well as caricatures of others who taught in Jena at that time with a similar mindset. After all, Schelling also taught in Jena; driven by a similar aspiration as Fichte, he truly struggled his way—as I have often emphasized—to a quite profound understanding of Christianity, indeed of the mystery of Golgotha, and turned toward a kind of theosophy, which he then, admittedly without being understood by his contemporaries, in his Philosophy of Mythology and in his Philosophy of Revelation—though it was already present in that treatise he wrote, drawing on Jakob Böhme, on human freedom and other related subjects, was already present in his dialogue Bruno, or On the Divine and Natural Principles of Things, and was particularly evident in his beautiful treatise On the Deities of Samothrace, where he painted a picture of what, in his view, truly lived on in those ancient mysteries. Then there were minds such as Friedrich Schlegel, who vigorously applied to the various branches of human knowledge what these more philosophically inclined natures sought to draw out from the very center of the world order. Hegel had begun to set down his philosophy. All of this had taken place in Goethe’s immediate circle. These people sought to transcend everything relative in the world—everything that dominates human beings in everyday life—and to reach the Absolute, that which does not exist merely in relativities. Thus, Fichte sought to transcend the ordinary, everyday self and reach the absolute self, which is anchored in the divine and weaves through eternity. Thus, Schelling and Hegel sought to penetrate to absolute Being.

[ 4 ] The way in which the era received such ideas naturally varied. One can—especially today, when Spiritual Science can touch our hearts—already form a vivid mental image of the state of mind in which a man like Fichte, a man like Schelling, a man like Hegel might have found themselves when they spoke of what stood so clearly before their inner eye, while people reacted with indifference—indifference, even hostility. And then one can understand that the young Fichte, in confronting the narrow-minded people in Jena who thought they knew everything in their own way, might also have been consumed by rage at times. Fichte was often consumed by rage—not only when he was sent away from Jena, but also whenever he saw that, despite giving his very best, his words failed to reach any heart or soul, because people presumed to know everything better based on their old, traditional mental images and the knowledge they had absorbed. And so one can understand that sometimes a mind like Fichte’s, when faced with the reactionaries of Jena, might have been carried away to utter the remark that, if he had to deal with these old men, everyone over thirty should be put to death. — It was an intellectual struggle of the very highest order that flared up in Jena at that time. People also cast a negative light on what was happening in Jena back then. Kotzebue, a writer of little substance but who happened to have an audience, wrote a very interesting dramatic pamphlet that is witty—witty in that he portrayed a sort of, one might say, young bachelor of arts who had been educated in Jena and who, upon returning home to his mother, speaks in nothing but the high-flown phrases he had heard in Jena. All of these are incorporated verbatim into this pamphlet, which is titled “The Hyperborean Donkey, or The New Education.” It all comes across as very witty; yet it is nothing more than a petty denunciation of a great aspiration. Of course, we must distinguish this from what Goethe himself also sought to criticize: the caricature that emerges from the great, for we must be clear that the correspondence between Goethe and Fichte, and the correspondence between Goethe and Schelling, shows that Goethe fully understood how to appreciate these minds striving toward the Absolute. But Goethe—even if one does not find him systematically processing occult principles—was, one might say, a spirit living entirely within the aura of the occult, who knew how that which lives in the healthy progress of world development can, on the one hand, take an Ahrimanic turn, and on the other hand —even if he did not use these terms, for terms are not what matters—and that, in fact, world development is always swinging like a pendulum between the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic. And Goethe wanted to develop everything from the deepest depths, to show everywhere how, fundamentally, the striving for the highest can at the same time be a danger. How many things can become a danger! Even the very best can become a danger, of course. And it was precisely this problem—how the best can become a danger when the Ahrimanic and Luciferic forces interfere with things—that appeared so vividly before Goethe’s inner eye.

[ 5 ] He had his Faust in mind—that Faust who sought the deepest mysteries of existence, who was to embody what had always stood before Goethe’s soul: the direct perception of the spiritual and living in all things natural and historical. Goethe himself sought to return to the mysteries of spiritual existence in ancient Greece. He wanted to connect with that which existed as a creative, living force in a completed epoch—the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. He wanted to give form to this in his Faust, who strives toward the living essence of Helena. Goethe seeks the paths by which he can lead his Faust to Helena. But Goethe was aware that this entailed a danger. As justified and as noble as the aspiration inherent in this may be, it poses a danger because it can very easily lead into Luciferic waters.

[ 6 ] Goethe thus first shows us Faust straying into Luciferian waters, paralyzed by the apparition of Helena, paralyzed by his connection to the spiritual. Faust has brought Helena up from the realm of the mothers, initially perceiving her only as a spiritual force before him. He is paralyzed by what he is able to experience spiritually. Faust’s inner being is filled with what he has absorbed. He lives within the living spiritual realm, within the spiritual elements of ancient Greece, but he is paralyzed by it.

[ 7 ] And so we find him—after Mephisto has brought him back to his cell, to his laboratory—paralyzed by his exposure to the spiritual elements of the past.

Whoever Helena paralyzes,
won't come to their senses so easily...

[ 8 ] says Mephistopheles. We also see how a certain rift has developed between Faust, who has strayed into Luciferian waters, and Mephistopheles. Faust is, in a sense—whether his soul experiences what it is experiencing more or less consciously—in a different spiritual current, into which he has been led by Luciferic impulses, than the spiritual paths along which Mephistopheles walks. They are now separated from one another, as it were, by a boundary of consciousness.

[ 9 ] Faust is dreaming, as they say in everyday language. He knows nothing of his old world, in which he lives as if it were his present reality. Mephisto, however, has that world around him, and through Mephisto everything is revived in an Ahrimanic way. And so, essentially, we have the two worlds colliding head-on in this very scene—colliding in a perfectly appropriate way. It is remarkable how thoroughly Goethe is, in his own instinctively spiritual-scientific way, actually. This clash is made very clear to us by the Famulus, who is now introduced and who, unsuspecting, oscillates—one might say—back and forth between the most dangerous things taking place around him.

[ 10 ] First, we see this clueless man, who, in a sense, represents a certain type of person who is, as it were, trapped by cluelessness and inattention—for which they are often not to blame. He does not see what is going on around him. In this sense, one can also interpret the entire speech delivered by this servant.

[ 11 ] The entire milieu in which we now live is portrayed quite differently through the encounter between the former student—who has now become a bachelor of arts—and Mephistopheles. The bachelor of arts, as one can see, stands out completely from the environment I described to you earlier. But he is a caricature of it, infected by everything that Kantian, Fichtean, Schellingian, and Hegelian philosophy, as well as the Schlegel brothers’ debates, could have produced; yet he takes it all in a narrowly defined, egotistical sense. Why does he do that? Indeed, one must ask oneself this question. Why, in fact, has the Baccalaureus become what he presents himself as to us? Did Goethe perhaps intend to mock the philosophy of the Jena school—which he valued—through the Baccalaureus? Not at all. But in his own spirit, he has been sent into this philosophical current of the students, who received the following words of introduction from Mephistopheles:

You will be like God, knowing good and evil.
Just follow the old saying and my aunt, the serpent,
For surely one day your godlikeness will fill you with dread!

[ 12 ] The impetus comes from Mephistopheles’s own student, who has now earned his bachelor’s degree. Mephistopheles cannot complain that the bachelor treats him in such a way that he is forced to say:

Don't you realize, my friend, how rude you are?

[ 13 ] For he has planted all of this within himself; he has sown it in his soul. The Baccalaureus has already followed the maxim and the Aunt, the famous serpent. And at first he does not feel the least bit anxious; that will come later. He does not feel the least bit anxious in his godlikeness, which he expresses very clearly by pointing out that it is he who created the world, who shaped the world. — After all, for some people prone to caricature, this has become a staple of Kantian philosophy, and it still is in many ways today.

[ 14 ] Yes, one can indeed meet people who interpret Kant’s philosophy even more literally than this bachelor’s degree holder. We once met a man who was so infatuated with Kantian and Fichtean philosophy that he genuinely believed he had created the entire world. It had become a fixed idea in his mind that he had created the entire world. I told him at the time: “Well, yes, certainly, as a mental image—as your mental image—you have indeed created the world; but there is something more to this mental image, for you have also created the mental image of your own boots, yet the cobbler made them—these boots—and you cannot say that you made these boots, even though you created the mental image of them!” — Essentially, every genuine refutation—even of Schopenhauer’s philosophy of the “world as a mental image”—rests on this shoemaker problem; it’s just that people don’t always see these things in the right light.

[ 15 ] So the Bachelor is, in a sense, a victim of Mephisto, just as he now confronts him himself. Philosophers have striven for the Absolute. In the Bachelor, this striving for the Absolute becomes a caricature. Mephisto must say to him:

Just don't come home at all.

[ 16 ] Goethe portrays the connection to culture—to the intellectual culture of that time—in a very insightful way. That is why these scenes, because they spring from living reality, are so vivid and so extraordinarily dramatic. And time and again, Goethe strives to lead people beyond those mental images—which smell somewhat of a cellar—that one so easily hears: “Oh, let us associate only with the good; there must be nothing Ahrimanic or Luciferic; that must be avoided.” — Because Goethe does not care for these mental images that reek of a cellar, he also occasionally portrays Mephistopheles as quite likable, quite good-natured, one might say. For how delightful it is when good old Mephistopheles, as the Baccalaureus becomes far too absolute, slides down with his chair from the Baccalaureus to the—audience. Goethe thought that Mephistopheles moves toward the younger members of the audience in particular and now seeks a place among them. And Goethe has Mephistopheles say not merely devilish things, but quite apt ones, because Goethe knows how much of the Mephistophelean must be mixed into life if life is to flourish, and how unhealthy are the mental images that, in the manner suggested, reek of a cellar. And it is certainly worth taking the time to reflect on how even Goethe did not remain entirely unmoved by the coldness of the dull masses. That is why he has his Mephistopheles speak out, even with some anger, about the people whom he sees remaining cold in the face of the words of wisdom he utters. This is indeed a coldness that Goethe also wished to point out, although this coldness was by no means as severe as the attitude and mood of the soul often are today toward that which can reach humanity from the spiritual life.

[ 17 ] And then we see how a truly Ahrimanic activity unfolds in the creation of the homunculus. It was not easy for Goethe to write precisely that part of his Faust that we have just been considering. Minor poets can handle anything! Even with the great problem of bringing Faust and Helena together, a minor poet might, under certain circumstances, have dealt with it quickly. But Goethe was no minor poet; that is why writing this passage became difficult and arduous for him. Therefore, he had to find a way to truly unite Faust with Helena, with whom he lived—I might say—in a different state of consciousness, as we have seen. Goethe had to find that way. At first, he wasn’t at all sure how to find it. Initially, Faust was to be led down into the underworld and ask Proserpina for help so that Helena might come to him in the flesh. But Goethe perceived what he would have to depict—in order to retrieve Helena from Proserpina—in such a way that he could find no concepts or mental images to portray the matter. For just consider what was at stake. The point was that Faust had come so far—in the subconscious of his soul, through his imagination—that he could approach Helena; but he was to approach her with the abilities that came naturally to him in life. For this, Helena had to enter this sphere of consciousness. So Goethe had to, in a sense, bring about an embodiment of Helena. To do this, he drew upon what he knew from Paracelsus, whom he had evidently studied, namely the treatise from Paracelsus’ De generatione rerum was of great benefit to him. In it, Paracelsus describes how homunculi can be created through certain processes. It is, of course, very easy for people today to say: Well, that was just a medieval prejudice on Paracelsus’s part. — It is easy for people today to say: No one needs to believe in what Paracelsus fantasizes about there. - Certainly, as far as I’m concerned, no one needs to. But one should bear in mind that Paracelsus explicitly asserts in that treatise, De generatione rerum, that through certain processes one would be able to create something that, while it has no body—please note this! Paracelsus explicitly states: it has no physical form—but which possesses abilities similar to those of the human soul, only heightened to the point of clairvoyance. So Paracelsus had in mind certain practices that lead a person to have before them a disembodied being, which, like a human being, develops a kind of mental activity, a kind of intellectuality—indeed, even to a higher degree. Goethe drew upon this idea. He reasoned, for example: Helena intervened in Faust’s sphere of consciousness in a purely spiritual way, but she must become more concrete.

[ 18 ] He brought about this transformation into a poet through a being such as the homunculus, who, in a sense, builds a bridge between the purely mental and spiritual—since he himself is incorporeal but arises, on occasion, from physical activities—and the physical realm, so that one can say: Through the presence of the homunculus, it becomes possible to introduce the entirely spiritual Helena into the physical world in which Faust is at home.

[ 19 ] Of course, Goethe still needed a kind of misunderstanding to top it all off. And this misunderstanding is brought about, indirectly, through Wagner. Wagner, due to his materialistic outlook, is led to believe in the entirely material creation of the homunculus; he would not be able to bring about what a real homunculus is, for this requires spiritual forces that are not at Wagner’s disposal. These spiritual forces are brought about by the approach of Mephistopheles, the Ahrimanic element. For this, in turn, provides the Ahrimanic impulse that allows what Wagner is cobbling together to actually become something. Had Wagner, on his own, perhaps with the help of some forces hidden everywhere, managed to bring something into being, then he might have fared like that man who wrote to me some time ago, saying that after long efforts he had indeed created little living men in his room, but now could no longer escape; he could no longer save himself from them! He wanted advice on how to save himself from these creatures, which he had brought into being as living mechanisms. They had been pursuing him everywhere ever since. One can well form a mental image of what becomes of the minds of such people! People who experience such extraordinary things still exist today, of course, just as there are those who mock such things.

[ 20 ] By a curious coincidence—though it is, after all, just a curious coincidence—it so happened that, precisely at the time Goethe was writing this scene, Johann Jakob Wagner in Würzburg claimed that homunculi could be created, and he even provided instructions on how to do so. Of course, it is not true that Goethe took the name from him, for the name already originates from the old Faust, which existed at that time; it was written down when this Johann Jakob Wagner was still an infant.

[ 21 ] So it is once again Mephistopheles who ensures that what Wagner brings into being truly becomes the homunculus. But now it is becoming one. And he actually becomes, at the very core, just as Goethe had learned to depict the homunculus according to Paracelsus’s instructions. And the homunculus does indeed immediately become clairvoyant, for he observes Faust’s dream, describes what Faust experiences—in a sense, in a Luciferic manner, as if in a different state of consciousness—and how Faust truly arrives in the Greek world. The union of Zeus with Leda, the mother of Helen: we recognize it in the description the homunculus gives of Faust’s dream.

[ 22 ] We see, then, how Goethe places side by side what first lives spiritually within Faust and the homunculus, who knows how to interpret and comprehend it. We see how Goethe adapts this to the ordinary physical world, so that Helena can then enter the ordinary physical world. And through all the events described in the “Classical Walpurgis Night,” we see how Goethe attempts to shape the physical form out of the eternal, spiritual essence of Helena—with whom Faust has lived—by having the homunculus pass through all the realms of nature, shed his incorporeality, take on a physical form, and unite with the spiritual element of Helena. And because this journey then passes through all the realms of nature, Helena becomes, outwardly on the physical plane, the being as she appears to us in the third act of the second part of Faust. Through the homunculus and through the transformation that the homunculus can bring about with that with which Faust lives spiritually, Helena is reborn. This is what matters to Goethe. That is why he introduced the homunculus; that is why he shows the connection between what Faust, so to speak, dreams and what the homunculus perceives.

[ 23 ] In this respect, however, Goethe also comes very close to true occultism—that true occultism to which I have often referred, and from which all modes of thought that indulge only in abstractions and seek to exist solely in abstract concepts lead away. I have often pointed out how a certain one-sided interpretation of the Christian principle has led precisely to the production of insubstantial, shadowy concepts as a worldview—concepts that are incapable, so to speak, of reaching into real life. And humanity stands today amidst such concepts. On the one hand, humanity has purely mechanical knowledge of nature, which, however, is not knowledge at all, but merely a manipulation from which all life has been driven out.

Chemistry calls it “Encheiresin naturae,”
Mocks itself without knowing how,

[ 24 ] says Mephisto. On the one hand, there is that which only ever seeks to transcribe what happens externally. And on the other hand, there are the abstract concepts of some kind of spiritual reality—one that is either depicted in pantheistic terms or one that lives in some cloud-cuckoo-land of shadowy concepts, incapable of truly immersing itself in life or grasping real life.

[ 25 ] That is why I have pointed out how Spiritual Science is capable of understanding the real, immediate human being once again—for example, by saying: This human head is, on the one hand, merely what the anatomist makes of it by describing it purely from an external perspective, nor is it merely what is embodied externally by a soul sailing abstractly in the cloud-cuckoo-land of concepts; rather, this head must be understood as having emerged through metamorphosis from the body of the previous incarnation and, as I have explained in my recent lectures, as having been formed from the entire cosmos, from the sphere of the entire cosmos. — This shaping—intervening in the material world through concepts—not merely rambling on about general, abstract concepts—is the essential goal that concrete Spiritual Science must strive for. For precisely what some Christian pastors and other similar people living in the present fear most in their insubstantial abstractions of God and the Eternal is this living grasp of the world, this concrete grasp of the material, which is also a revelation of the spiritual. It is this immersion of concepts into the real world that people today do not want.

[ 26 ] But that is precisely what Goethe also wants to emphasize so strongly. Therefore, he contrasts this spirit of the homunculus—which perceives the real, concrete spiritual as it then lives in Faust’s consciousness, albeit in a different form—with the way Mephisto would like to see the world emerge from the one-sidedness of the Christian Middle Ages: the eradication of everything that approaches the human soul spiritually. That is why the homunculus sees what neither Wagner nor Mephistopheles sees. And that is why, when Mephistopheles says: “/p”

You sure have a lot to say!
As small as you are, you’re a big dreamer.
I don’t see anything—

[ 27 ] Homunkulus replies:

I believe that. You from the North,
Who came of age in the Age of Mist,
Amid the chaos of chivalry and the clergy,
Where could your gaze be free!
You are at home only in the gloom.

[ 28 ] Goethe consciously strives to grasp reality in concrete terms.

[ 29 ] I have pointed out that, naturally, at the point where the homunculus speaks to Mephistopheles, a verse is missing for some reason; for we see the rhyme throughout:

[ 30 ] I believe that. You, from the North,
Who came of age in the Age of Mist,
Amid the chaos of chivalry and the clergy,
Where could your gaze be free!
You are at home only in the gloom.

[ 31 ] The rhyme is missing in “zu Hause.”

Sun-baked rock, weathered, forbidding,
Pointed arches, the most ornate, low!

[ 32 ] So, for some reason, a line was omitted during the dictation, because the rhyme is missing—and there’s no reason why the rhyme shouldn’t be there—so a line that must have gone something like this:

But what good is this gloomy hermitage to us—

[ 33 ] so that Homunculus, having seen that Mephisto does not understand him, clearly points out to him how human beings have been distanced from the concrete spiritual world through abstraction, through the nebulous concepts that have been developed, and how they have been driven into narrow confines precisely by such activities as those from which Faust emerged—activities from which he, however, has outgrown. But Mephisto feels quite at home in his devilishness. That is why Homunculus says something like:

I believe that. You from the North,
Who came of age in the Age of Mist.

[ 34 ] This refers to the Middle Ages, but with an allusion to the ancient Niflheim:

Growing Up in the Age of Mist

[ 35 ] “Becoming young” is an old expression that is very apt. Just as one grows old physically, so does one become young spiritually when one is born. And this was an old German expression; instead of “being born,” people used to say “becoming young,” thereby demonstrating that an understanding of this concept is already inherent in the language. So:

You from the North,
Who came of age in the Age of Mist,
Amid the chaos of chivalry and the clergy,
Where could your gaze be free!
You are at home only in the gloom.
But what use is this gloomy hermitage to us?

[ 36 ] And now he looks around the gloomy cell and sees everything that is there:

Sun-baked rock, decaying, forbidding,
Pointed arches, highly ornate, low,

[ 37 ] Then:

If this one awakens us, there will be new hardship,

[ 38 ] for he must be introduced to real life, because he does not want merely abstract concepts; he does not merely want, for example, Greek culture to be depicted by showing it as humanists or philologists have done, but he wants to live vividly with this Greek culture, in that the representative of this Greek culture—Helena—is to appear before him in the flesh.

[ 39 ] Thus, throughout this scene in particular, we see Goethe’s wonderful intuition for the concrete. One could say, in fact, that in these late works of Goethe, every word is written from a deep experience of the world. And that gives these words weight—immense weight—and also grants them immortality. For how beautiful such words are, especially when spoken by Mephistopheles, which gives them their special character:

Oh, woe! Away with it! And leave me those disputes
About tyranny and slavery aside.
It bores me; for no sooner is it settled,
Than they start all over again;
And no one realizes: he’s merely being teased
By Asmodeus, who’s behind it all.

[ 40 ] About the devil of discord, with whom Mephisto feels quite a kinship.

They're arguing, so they say, over civil liberties.

[ 41 ] It almost feels as if we’ve been transported to the present day, because it also says: “They’re fighting for civil liberties!” Goethe himself replies:

When you look closely, it’s servants against servants.

[ 42 ] All in all, one might say: Oh, if only the time would come when even the poetry of such an aspiration—as revealed in this scene from Goethe—could be truly linked to contemporary Spiritual Science and anthroposophy—oh, if only what lies in the poetry of such an aspiration could move people more deeply, if only it could take root in their souls! We would truly make progress as human beings.

[ 43 ] But instead, since Goethe’s time, the abstraction of all striving has made even more infinite progress. And this is the point where precisely those who are engaged in the study of Spiritual Science should try—if you will, drawing inspiration from Goethe—to clarify for themselves the difference between concrete-spiritual striving and abstract-spiritual striving. The study of Spiritual Science provides concepts through which one truly immerses oneself in the real, in reality, and through which one learns to understand this reality. Materialism provides no real concepts at all; it provides only shadows of concepts. How can materialism possibly understand something like the distinction we have clarified between the human head and the rest of the body? Or how can materialism understand the following, for example? Let us take a concept that is infinitely important.

[ 44 ] We know that human beings have a physical body, an etheric body, an astral body, and an “I.” Animals have a physical body, an etheric body, and an astral body. We see the animal. It is interesting to observe animals when they lie there digesting after having eaten their fill in the pasture. It is interesting to observe. Why is that? Because the animal has withdrawn entirely with its astral being into its etheric body. What, then, is the animal’s soul actually doing while it is digesting? With infinite contentment, the soul participates in what is happening within the body. It lies there and watches itself digest. It watches with infinite contentment; the animal’s sense of contentment is truly immense. It is interesting, for example, to observe a cow digesting—spiritually—as it lies there, and to see how all the processes taking place within it become truly visible to it: how the nutrients are absorbed into the stomach and then transported from the stomach to the rest of the body. The animal observes this with the deepest contentment, because there is an intimate correspondence between its astral body and its etheric body. The astral body lives in what the etheric body reflects of the physical-chemical processes through which the nutrients enter the organism. This is an entire world that the cow sees! Admittedly, this world consists only of the cow and the processes taking place within her. But truly, even if everything that this astral body perceives in the cow’s etheric body consists merely of the processes within the cow’s entire sphere, all of this expands so that, for the cow’s consciousness, it becomes as vast as our human consciousness is, extending all the way to the firmament. I would have to depict the processes taking place there between the cow’s stomach and the rest of its organism as a vast sphere that unfolds and extends far out, so that at that moment, for the cow, only the cow’s cosmos—but on a gigantic scale—exists.

[ 45 ] This is no joke; it’s true. And the cow feels immensely uplifted when she sees her cosmos in this way, when she sees herself as a cosmos. Here we gain insight into the concrete nature of animals. For because human beings have an “I,” this “I” tears the astral body away from that intimate connection with the etheric body—the kind of connection that exists, for example, between the astral body and the etheric body in a cow. It is torn away. And as a result, human beings are deprived of the ability, when they are digesting their food, to survey the entire digestive process of the cosmos. All of this remains unconscious to him. In contrast, the “I,” through its activity, limits the impulses of the etheric body in such a way that they are perceived by the astral body only within the realm of the sense organs. Thus, what in the animal lives as a whole together with the astral body is concentrated in humans only within the sense organs. Consequently, however, the sensory process becomes as significant for humans as the animal process is for animals at certain moments.

[ 46 ] In a certain sense, it is an imperfection of human beings that, just as they begin their afternoon nap, they cannot watch their digestion while dreaming, for they would see an entire world. But the ego snatches the human being’s astral body away from this world and allows him to perceive as the cosmos only that which is experienced within the sense organs themselves.

[ 47 ] I wanted to cite this merely as an example. For it shows that what matters in concrete Spiritual Science is to truly descend into the essences with concepts; not to construct shadowy concepts, but concepts that plunge into reality. And all concepts in Spiritual Science should, of course, be such that they plunge into reality. But this is precisely the hallmark of the materialistic age: it spurns these concepts that plunge into reality. It does not want them. For the understanding of nature, this merely leads to the shortcoming that one recognizes nothing in reality. But for life, it leads to a far greater shortcoming. It makes it impossible for people to have a sense for concrete, meaningful concepts. Therefore, an education in materialism is at the same time an education in empty, shadowy concepts. These things go hand in hand: being unable to understand reality spiritually, viewing everything as a mechanism, and being incapable of arriving at any concepts that can truly penetrate the conditions of the world and of human beings.

[ 48 ] And it is in this regard that one must understand the present, for it is precisely here that the difficulties of the present lie. There are certainly idealistic minds in the present, but they are the idealistic minds of a materialistic age, and therefore they speak in shadowy, general terms that cannot intervene in reality—that can, at most, intervene only through the detour of passion, through the detour of puffing oneself up and trumpeting these terms as loudly as possible to the world. So while, on the one hand, with regard to the understanding of nature, one faces only the impossibility of understanding nature, on the other hand, as a necessary parallel phenomenon, one has the declamation of vague concepts. And when one speaks in this way, one is truly not speaking of anything unreal in and of itself, but of that which is connected in the worst possible way to the painful events of the present.

[ 49 ] In Goethe’s time, matters had not yet progressed that far, but today we are already confronted with many people’s inability to see any difference at all between a shadowy concept and a real one. Wagner, as Goethe describes him, also lives in shadowy concepts, and the homunculus even tries to make it clear to him how he lives in shadowy concepts—for example, through the words spoken after Wagner asks in fear:

What about me?

[ 50 ] What will become of me when the others leave?

Well then,
You stay at home to do what matters most.
Unfold the old parchments,
Gather the elements of life as instructed
And join them together with care.
Think about the “what,” but think even more about the “how”?
Meanwhile, as I wander through a little corner of the world,
I’ll surely discover the cherry on top.

[ 51 ] Whenever I read this passage, I am always reminded that it is so true to life—specifically, to the life of a scholar. For I know of a doctoral defense in which a young doctoral candidate faced a very learned gentleman who was a historian—but who, as a historian, was primarily a specialist in historical documents and served as a professor of historical science: he was the one who had been this young doctoral candidate’s principal instructor. Among the questions he asked him was this: “Well, tell me, Candidate, in which papal document does the dot above the ‘i’ first appear?”—The candidate knew right away under which pope the dot above the ‘i’ appeared in the documents: Innocent IV! - Now there was another historian sitting next to him—one who wasn’t quite like that—and he wanted to play the role of Mephistopheles a little, so he said: “Well, colleague, now that I’m the other examiner, I must also ask the candidate a question. Tell me, Mr. Candidate, when did this Innocent IV ascend to the papal throne?” — The candidate had no idea. “When did Innocent IV die, then?” — The candidate had no idea. “Well, my dear candidate, then tell me something else you know about Innocent IV, besides the fact that the dot above the ‘I’ comes first in his documents!” — He knew absolutely nothing. Then the professor of documentation, the expert on old parchments, said: “But, Mr. Candidate, it’s just as if a board had been nailed over your head today!” — Then the other one, who wanted to play the role of Mephisto, said: “Oh, my colleague, he’s your favorite student! Who nailed that board over his head?”

[ 52 ] Well, even good old Wagner, unlike the homunculus, was able to discover the icing on the cake in his parchments. But since that time, I would say, an abstract way of thinking—one that exists purely in concepts—has become universal and historical. And so we see that a spectacle truly profound in its impact on the entire course of world history can indeed unfold: that in a matter of great importance, a document is presented to the world that exists entirely in shadow concepts. One cannot imagine anything more unreal or more untrue than that note which Woodrow Wilson recently addressed to the United States Senate! Today, when it is the only sensible thing to do to try to understand the realities of the world, one sees, in a position of great prominence, the inability to grasp anything other than mere shadow concepts, conceptual shadows.

[ 53 ] One might well ask: Must this suffering continue indefinitely simply because, in the most prominent spheres of materialist culture, people are fleeing reality and can grasp nothing but conceptual shadows? - I know that when one touches upon such sad events of the present, one finds little understanding, because today very few people can even grasp the difference between conceptual shadows and reality. For those who are mere idealists—and it is, of course, always commendable to be an idealist—but who do not understand spiritual reality will even find it beautiful, infinitely beautiful, when people speak so nicely of freedom and human rights, and of international organizations and the like. People will not realize at all what the actual danger of these things lies in; in the broadest circles, they will not realize it at all.

[ 54 ] One is so little understood that one even comes to understand the words spoken by Mephisto after he turns away from the Baccalaureus. For after all, just as the bachelor speaks, so do many today who are considered great men—men who, even if they do not seek to create the entire world, nevertheless wish to rule the entire world according to the darkest, most shadow-like concept. And when it comes to understanding such things, people have absolutely no desire to make progress. They remain children forever—children who believe that the world can be governed by conceptual templates. That is why one can also understand the Mephistophelean words:

My words leave you cold,
But I’ll let it slide for you, my good children;
Remember: the devil is old,
So grow old enough to understand him!

[ 55 ] Those who believe that the world can be governed by conceptual shadows do not even understand what Goethe says through the Devil—in the very moment when the Devil speaks the truth!

[ 56 ] I would say that the homunculus scene in the second part of Goethe’s Faust can be understood as a key to grasping the real, the actual, in our time, which is dominated by conceptual templates. But one really must take these things in all seriousness. And it is especially up to us to form a very clear understanding of the difference between all the declarations that are now circulating so abundantly throughout the world, that have been circulating for decades, and that have ultimately brought about today’s situation.