The Rudolf Steiner Archive

13. Goethe's Personal Relationship with His “Faust”

[ 1 ] Goethe’s Faust is undoubtedly one of those works of world literature to which one can always—I would say, from decade to decade of one’s own life—return in such a way that one finds something new in them, that one can believe one gains far more from them than one did before. And this is true of Goethe’s Faust not because one has matured—for one can always find something new in other works of world literature for that very reason—but because with Goethe’s Faust one has the sense that it is necessary to have ever-new life experiences, such as those offered by advancing age, in order to fully absorb certain mysteries, inner depths found in this work. Now, however, when one delves into Goethe’s Faust again and again, one feels, as a result of the work itself, the most urgent need to turn to Goethe’s life, to get to know his life anew, because through the contemplation of Goethe’s Faust one can know for oneself that only in this way do the true rays of light fall upon this work. One might, of course, object that there is an imperfection in such a relationship between a poet and a work. One might say that a work of art, as it is, must be understood independently of the creator’s personality. But one can also set aside all such more or less pedantic objections and, by considering Goethe’s relationship to his work, recognize that such an abundance of power must appear to us as something higher, more significant than even any individual impression or the like. These are the thoughts from which the topic of today’s lecture has emerged.

[ 2 ] I would like to speak specifically about Goethe’s personal relationship to his Faust—not, however, about his closest personal ties, but rather about the relationship between Goethe’s spiritual personality and his Faust. One might easily think that, when considering these relationships between Goethe’s spiritual personality and his Faust, it would be particularly helpful to study what Goethe said about himself, about his life, about his aspirations, and about the way he approached knowledge and the question of art. Yet as one draws ever closer to Goethe’s life, one realizes that this is not actually the case. And it is precisely here that the difficulties of reflecting on Goethe’s spiritual personality lie. On the other hand, there is something that leads one deep not only into Goethe’s idiosyncrasies but into the inner life of the human being itself. One comes to the conclusion that Goethe’s statements, as formulated by him in letters addressed to one person or another, are of no use for the aforementioned examination. One finds, when considering Goethe’s own confessions, that one cannot really gain any meaningful insight from them—especially regarding Goethe’s deepest and most significant work, Faust. If one wishes to correctly answer a riddle thus clearly posed by examining Goethe’s works and reflecting on his life, it becomes apparent that what lived in Goethe’s soul as he created his works—and especially his Faust— what always was something so great, so powerful, so all-encompassing, and so radiant that Goethe himself, in his personal consciousness and understanding, could not fully grasp what was actually at work in his soul. If the terms “unconscious—subconscious” had not been so widely misused in recent decades, I would like to apply them to Goethe in the most eminent sense, for what one finds in Goethe’s work gradually radiates into one’s own soul in such a way that it becomes greater than anything Goethe himself could say about it in prose.

[ 3 ] What I am about to say applies in a very special way to Goethe’s relationship to his Faust. Due to time constraints, I cannot go into detail about the inspiration Goethe drew from folk tradition—specifically from phenomena such as “puppet shows” and the like. I would like to limit myself to discussing Goethe’s relationship to his Faust itself. Above all, it is necessary to approach Faust as impartially as possible. It is precisely from this Faust itself that an understanding of Goethe’s relationship to his Faust emerges. What is so admirable about Goethe in this work—that which one discovers in it through prolonged contemplation of Goethe? What is the “Goethian” quality of “Faust”? When one first considers “Faust”—setting aside the prologue and the affection, which were not present at the outset—and begins one’s examination of “Faust” with the monologue “Habe nun, ach, Philosophie …” —then one usually begins to tell oneself: here lies Goethe’s rebellion against external knowledge, against the external pursuit of science. One sees the greatness in the fact that Goethe has his Faust despair of the power of all four faculties and so on; one then sees how Faust, despairing of the power of all four faculties, turns to magic and so on. But if one engages with Faust for a longer time, one does not have the feeling that this monologue already places one within Goethe’s specific ideas. That only begins at a certain point. That rebellion against the four faculties, that turning to magic—these were elements that Goethe encountered from the Faust tradition; they were not what Goethe’s soul intended to reveal in Faust in the eminent sense. That in which Goethe’s soul reveals itself for the first time in Faust in the most profound sense comes to meet us there where Faust, after opening the book of Nostradamus, turns away from the sign of the macrocosm and turns toward the sign that leads him to invoke the Earth Spirit. When Goethe wrote this scene in his Faust, what prevailed was that which lived in Goethe’s soul quite particularly as his form of the mystery of the world. But what is that? Goethe has his Faust open the sign of the macrocosm from a book of magic—he calls it the Book of Nostradamus—which expresses the connection between human beings and the all-ruling powers of the world. The sign of the macrocosm expresses that the world is divided into three parts, that earthly and heavenly phenomena are divided into three parts, and that in this tripartite world, the tripartite human being—divided into spirit, body, and soul—stands in a secret connection with it.

[ 4 ] And for a fleeting moment in his life, this connection was what mattered most to Goethe. It mattered so much to him that he had Faust strive to have the connection between humanity and the entire universe revealed to him through the images of this symbol. At that time, however, Goethe was not inclined to regard what can be gained in this way for one’s spiritual understanding as something satisfying. And we hear with profound poignancy the words with which Goethe turns away from the sign of the macrocosm: “What a spectacle! But alas! Only a spectacle!” Herein lies the full extent of Goethe’s retreat, in the 1770s, from whatever can be recognized or revealed at all regarding humanity’s connection to the entire world, to the universe. Goethe believed he had come to realize that everything one can bring into one’s mental image or into an idea is nothing more than a reflection of reality. Therefore, Faust turns away from this sign and its revelation toward another sign, which leads him to summon the Earth Spirit before him. One must now look into the very depths of Goethe’s being if one is to understand this turning away from the macrocosm and toward the microcosm. Goethe belongs to those minds for whom it was not, in the ordinary sense, a matter of attaining a specific body of knowledge consisting of a sum of ideas about the laws of nature and humanity. No, in fact, Goethe does not strive for knowledge in this sense, but rather he strives for knowledge insofar as the result of that knowledge permeates the human soul, so that the human being develops within himself everything that leads to a life worthy of humanity. Goethe also belongs to those minds who, in a certain sense—I would say, so as not to be misunderstood—harbor a certain anxiety, a fear of taking ideas of knowledge into the soul. What this means is: Anyone who has truly wrestled with an idea of knowledge—an idea through which they seek to penetrate the reality of the world—knows how unsatisfied one is that, despite this idea, one has not expressed everything that can be revealed upon penetrating the depths. Whenever one has gained an insight, one always wants to say to oneself: Yes, you have brought this or that into thought, but you know that what lies deep within the soul—what reveals itself from the depths of the soul’s world—has only partially flowed into this idea. — One fears that something has been lost along the path from life to insight. And there is yet another oppressive feeling associated with this whole matter. Once one has brought an idea of insight to the surface, one has deprived oneself of the possibility of later bringing back into the mind that which was lost in the process. Once an idea has taken shape, one must despair of ever bringing back to life that which it has failed to express. This anxiety lay in Goethe’s soul. That is why he always strove to present the mysteries of the world as pure and powerful mysteries rather than to be satisfied with flimsy solutions. He had a sense of awe and reverence for knowledge. Yet he tells himself: What you can present to the human soul as knowledge can only be a reflection, a spectacle... but alas, merely a spectacle! — That is why Goethe turns to that which need not remain a spectacle; he has Faust turn away from what the universe can reveal, and has him turn toward the sign that does not reveal itself from the universe, but rises from the depths of the human soul itself.

[ 5 ] Thus Goethe has his Faust despair at the fact that reality is revealed in the vastness of the universe, and has him turn instead to the revelation from the depths. Goethe’s Faust encounters the Earth Spirit in such a way that he finds it in the form in which it is encountered by the person who descends deeper into the depths of the human soul than is otherwise the case. If we draw near to the universe, we can arrive at the spirit of revelation; if we draw near to what lives in the depths of the soul, we also arrive at spiritual revelation. At this very moment, however, we discover the danger into which we venture with all our knowledge. These dangers of human striving in the experience of one’s own soul life confronted Goethe, and he enshrined them as mysteries within his Faust. Now, through immediate revelation, Goethe’s Faust is vividly confronted with his own inner self. Faust must turn away. That which lives in consciousness, that which finds clear expression in Faust’s soul, cannot grasp what lies in the depths of his own soul. Numb with fear, Faust recoils before the greatness of the human being—the unknown human being, that which lies within us and which we cannot readily recognize. He must turn away. “Not to you? To whom, then? I, the image of the deity! And not even to you!” The Spirit had previously called out to him: “You resemble the Spirit you comprehend, not me!” Who, then, is the Spirit that Faust comprehends? To whom must Faust turn at this moment?

[ 6 ] Well, here is one of the most dramatic moments in Goethe’s Faust. One must simply set aside all the ideological revelations that one usually seeks to interpret in Faust; one must focus on the drama itself, the artistry, the artistic rendering. If one surrenders to it without commenting, explaining, or providing context, one encounters a truly powerful element at this very point. Faust is dazed. He does not resemble the spirit; he cannot understand himself. Who does he resemble? Then there is a knock, and Wagner enters. “You resemble the spirit...” Which spirit? He resembles Wagner. That is the dramatic crux. One must not rely on the traditional interpretation, which is always offered, where Faust is portrayed as the ambitious man, the intellectual idealist, and Wagner is made to hobble onto the stage as an insignificant figure, behaving in a somewhat Faustian manner. One would like to have Wagner appear in the guise of Faust himself, for it is self-knowledge that Goethe seeks to portray: You are no more than what lies within Wagner as a soul. — Anyone who delves deeply into the dialogue between the two will indeed find a certain philistine air about Wagner, but he is a complete personality, a personality who has brought a certain spiritual quest to its conclusion. One need only take a somewhat more unbiased look at what Faust says to Wagner in this very scene, at what he expresses when he says that he is not looking for earthworms and the like. In this scene—if one interprets it dramatically and artistically, rather than philistinely—Faust’s self-knowledge comes to the fore. So what was it from which Goethe had his Faust turn away, and toward what did he have him turn?

[ 7 ] At the time Goethe wrote this scene, in the 1770s, his mind was gripped by a duality that I would like to describe as “knowledge of the world” and “self-knowledge.” Faust turns away from knowledge of the world as if from the sign of the macrocosm. Goethe is not yet ready for knowledge of the world. He believes he can draw from self-knowledge everything that leads a person to a life worthy of humanity. Hence, the initial focus is on self-knowledge. And in this scene from Faust by Wagner, we are particularly confronted with Goethe’s aspiration to express and bring to light human perfection through self-knowledge. If we now consider both impulses—knowledge of the world and self-knowledge—we can only point out that certain human dangers are associated with both.

[ 8 ] Knowledge of the World: If one tries to delve ever deeper into knowledge of the world, to strain the human imagination, to penetrate to what exists spiritually beneath sensory perception, then one arrives at something in this knowledge that can be called the “temptation of illusion.” It is a fact of human culture—and Goethe senses this—that knowledge of the world, through the diversity of what it presents and the intertwining of its laws, leads us into illusion, into what the Indians call maya, which is always the companion of our lives insofar as it compels life to place the individual within the greater world. In seeking our relationship to things, we are subject to illusion. Only by exerting all our strength against this force to preserve our consciousness—never falling into a stupor like Faust after conjuring the Earth Spirit—only in this way can we struggle through the illusion. It can appear before the soul of the profound knower in the form that Goethe later described as the Mephistophelean power. The danger in this understanding of the world lies in the fact that, in a mysterious way—precisely because human beings cannot perceive it—emotional elements that do not even originate from ourselves become intermingled in all our thinking about the world and in all our shared experiences, even as we believe we are living in mere mental images. Closer examination reveals that what intermingles in this emotional way does not come from ourselves, but from other forces. What can be summarized in the illusion as a Mephistophelean danger arises from the fact that elements of feeling, will, and desire intermingle with this external knowledge. We often believe we possess objective knowledge, but we have it only when we do not succumb to the illusion that what has just been described intermingles with all external cognition. But when we try to expel from our knowledge everything that comes from feeling, volition, passions, and emotions, what remains is what Goethe has his Faust call: “A spectacle!” But alas, merely a spectacle!—And one must take other paths to arrive at reality. For what is made to seem real to us is permeated by illusion. When Faust stands before the sign that seeks to awaken in his soul such a view of the world—one from which all elements of will and feeling have been cast out—he stands before the spectacle. He does not want that. He wants to immerse himself in self-knowledge. He believes he can lead humanity down to the very core of the world.

[ 9 ] There lies another danger. While the threat of illusion looms in our understanding of the world, the danger in descending into the depths of the soul is that we may find there not only desires, feelings, and emotions—not only insights that lead to the mysteries of the world—but that we may not be able to separate these from the realm of desire and will. In connection with this, there also arises what pertains to our very constitution. Through a false mysticism, we seek the eternal within ourselves and find only the most temporal—though, admittedly, mingled with the eternal in an unclear way. If we recognize this, we know that at every moment when we seek by delving into our own inner being, we stand before a vision that deceives us into believing in something unreal—something that seems to be more than mere fantasy, yet which leads us only into the wildest error. Goethe was well acquainted with this mystery of human existence: that if one does not continually correct oneself with reason, one can, upon plunging into the mystical—which once again impairs one’s depth—fall into visions. One need not become pathologically visionary, but one enters into a life that becomes a visionary life when it turns pathological.

[ 10 ] Yet these two elements that enter human life stand in opposition to one another in yet another way. Goethe did not express this explicitly. But it was present in his soul when we consider all that lies in the realm of illusion within our understanding of the world. If one views these things in a philistine, pedantic way, what is the purpose of this illusion? Why does it constantly drive us away from reality? This illusion is connected to everything that profoundly influences our development—our entirely normal development. If the danger of illusion did not constantly reach into our soul life, we could not undergo the kind of development that does not lead us to growth, sprouting, and flourishing—not to childhood development—but to mature development. But this is connected to what the descending phase of human existence signifies from the age of thirty-five onward. This backward-directed development is precisely connected to everything that lives within our soul. We cannot become wise, intelligent, or experienced in life unless we develop from birth onward what then emerges in the descending phase of development as a distinct existence. Human beings live by the forces that actually lead to their death, not by the forces of growth. Human beings die from the moment of birth, and at the moment of death, everything that has been at work throughout their entire life is brought together. It works in such a way that, by holding back further development, it brings precisely our soul life to the fore. Were it not for the Mephistophelean element—the life of illusion embedded in our understanding of the world—we could not achieve human development; the descending forces could not live within us. Thus, illusion is connected to everything that draws us humans into the destructive world, that leads individual human beings to decline, and that is linked to the downward tuning of our forces.

[ 11 ] The situation is different with everything that arises from self-knowledge. By delving into our inner selves, we do, however, reach the spiritual part of our being. We come to understand ourselves at our very core, which is connected to the core of the world and to the powerful forces of subconscious will and desire that live within us. Through this, we gain a certain influence over the world around us—an influence that is well known in life, though it is rarely studied properly. What can have a destructive effect on our fellow human beings as we live among them—what can impair them—actually stems from descending into forces that we can only cope with if we grasp them in a proper, spiritual way. These forces are the Luciferic forces. What is remarkable is that Goethe, in his feelings, had this duality before him: the Ahrimanic-Mephistophelean and the Luciferic. However, drawing from Western spiritual development and its tradition, he had not internalized a sharp distinction between the Mephistophelean and the Luciferic. Therefore, Goethe unfortunately portrayed Mephisto as a single, unified figure. And while commentators have often emphasized that Mephisto is portrayed as a unified figure, Goethe nevertheless sensed in his subconscious that Mephisto should be depicted as a duality—as both Ahrimanic and Luciferic. It therefore follows naturally that at the very moment when Faust must turn away from the Earth Spirit—when he proves no match for it with the knowledge that resides within himself and within the human soul in general—Mephisto then approaches Faust as Lucifer. This results in the fusion of that which arises from the depths with desires, feelings, and passions. In other words, this gives rise to the utterly wonderful, magnificently compelling tragedy of Gretchen. There is also the possibility that Faust must enter into everything connected with desires and volition; this constitutes a large part of what we experience in the first part of Goethe’s Faust. There we experience everything that arises through the Luciferic element. But all of this stems from the fact that Goethe actually conceived his Faust in the 1870s and 1880s as a vehicle for human insight, and that Goethe wanted nothing to do with the connection between humanity and the greater world. Yet the feeling that there must be a way out always lives within him.

[ 12 ] It is interesting that everything that must turn toward the Luciferic element turns out in an unsatisfactory way. A person can only find satisfaction by attempting to strike a balance between the Luciferic on the one hand and the Ahrimanic on the other—the Mephistophelean, which arises from an understanding of the world. It is interesting that Goethe initially left the union of Mephisto and Faust completely undeveloped. He sensed that there must be something deeper at work in what brings Mephisto and Faust together, but he was not aware of it in his everyday consciousness. Later, he even wanted to depict this in a scene of disputation. This is the Ahrimanic character that lives within Mephisto and comes to expression when Mephisto stands up and disputes the mysteries of the world. For it is precisely in this disputation that the illusion lies. Thus, Goethe wanted to introduce something that would have brought this other element before the mind’s eye.

[ 13 ] Now we see something curious in Goethe’s personal development. He had treated Mephisto as a character of his own creation and brought Faust to poetic maturity. In 1790, he published Faust as a fragment. Schiller encouraged him to expand on it, and it is remarkable how resistant Goethe was to this idea. He regarded it as old and outdated, and could not quite bring himself to continue. What had actually happened there?—Goethe’s personal relationship to his “Faust” took on an entirely different character.

[ 14 ] One can only understand what happened there by gaining insight into the worldview Goethe had developed during the 1890s. What was the purpose of this understanding of nature? Much has been said about it, and it has been done justice here and there, but little attention has been paid to the crux of the matter. What really matters is that, through his understanding of nature, Goethe sought to build a bridge between self-knowledge and knowledge of the world. When one considers the distinctive nature of Goethe’s view of nature, one finds that the individual events of this research and his discoveries are not the main point at all. What mattered was the way in which he conceived of development. What was it like? It was such that Goethe sought concepts and ideas entirely different from those to which we are accustomed. If one does not turn one’s attention to this point, one will never understand Goethe’s view of nature. Even when it comes to his theory of colors, one cannot understand Goethe unless one grasps what Goethe intended. With his metaphysical teaching, he sought to arrive at concepts that do not proceed in a superficial manner from one mental image to another, from one concept to another, but rather he wanted one to immerse oneself in reality itself, so that the idea is developed through self-experience—an experience that is, however, selfless enough to be, at the same time, an experience of the world. With this view of nature, he sought to achieve that which truly immerses itself in reality: he sought to unite self-knowledge and knowledge of the world. Goethe could not, by immersing himself in what he encountered scientifically, create a view of nature that satisfied him; he had to arrive at a worldview from within his own being; he had to earn it honestly, and only then was he given the opportunity to link self-knowledge to knowledge of the world. He used to believe that one could achieve something through self-knowledge. But only when this self-knowledge delves so deeply that, in the depths, it grasps the world with ideas of the soul—such as Goethe’s ideas of nature—is the bridge built to discover the illusory element of the world.

[ 15 ] Goethe was then inspired by Schiller to resume work on Faust. Up to that point, self-knowledge alone had come into its own. Now, however, it had become one-sided and needed to be linked with knowledge of the world—with the macrocosm. Faust must turn once more toward the sign of the macrocosm, from which he had previously turned away. The forces of good and evil must be placed within the cosmos. The forces moving forward and backward must, within the realm of knowledge of the world, embrace Faust’s striving. This was what presented itself to him as a necessity. Mephisto had to take on the Ahrimanic character. That is why Goethe developed his Mephisto more and more in this sense. Hence the contradiction in this figure. Goethe now places Faust within the cosmos by setting the prologue in heaven. The forces of good and evil are in conflict, and Faust stands right in the middle of it all.

[ 16 ] The development of Spiritual Science had not yet reached a point where this would have become clear to Goethe. He could not turn the single figure of Mephisto into two distinct characters. Yet they lived on in his subconscious. This is what troubled Goethe in the 1890s. It is what makes Faust so difficult. The second part of Faust has often been misunderstood, namely by searching for allegories in it. If one truly delves into it, there is nothing more full of life, nothing more immediate, nothing more vivid than all these characters! But why do they appear allegorical? Because when we, as individual human beings, step out into the world with our life’s work and our individual mental images, we are compelled to cast aside certain aspects of reality—what do we choose to disregard from this reality as an abstraction?—something people today should truly learn! We live in a present in which we ought to reflect on the nature of humanity’s relationship to reality, yet we succumb to the most terrible illusions. It is precisely in the ideas we hold in the social and political spheres that abstractions and allegories thrive. But we live with them. It is the way in which the Mephistophelean element approaches our own lives through our shared experience of the world. This is vividly demonstrated with infinite humor in the Emperor scene of the second part, where the external connections between realities and their illusions are portrayed with magnificent humor. Foolishness and wisdom, as they manifest in our experience of the world. They come before us in a wonderfully vivid way. We then see how Faust, having been so thoroughly placed within a reality of the wider world—where illusory elements thrive and combine with foolishness—is compelled to descend once more into the depths of his own soul.

[ 17 ] Now self-knowledge is developed in an even higher sense. This is where Faust descends to the mothers. “The mothers! Mothers! — It sounds so strange!” It does sound strange indeed when we descend into our own inner being, just as Faust is now descending! Now Goethe is compelled—because Mephisto embodies two figures within himself—Lucifer and Mephisto—to assign a sort of supporting role to Mephisto. Faust descends into those realms where Lucifer’s power seizes a person in solitude, so that he may truly understand him. What he has experienced down there in the depths of the soul, he lives out in a dream, and he lives it out in such a way that we see: what he has brought up from the depths of his soul strives to transform itself from self-knowledge into knowledge of the world. There ought to be some form of science that focuses on human self-understanding. What we have found in the depths of the soul numbs us and leaves us merely dreaming if we cannot bring it to the surface.

[ 18 ] Did people in Goethe’s time—and do we in our own time—have the opportunity to develop such spiritual insight? What Faust drew from the mothers—no, that was not available! What passed for knowledge of human nature was an artificial construct that viewed people as mere mechanisms. No homunculus springs from living reality. And now comes that which Goethe strove for in the depths of his soul. That which has become our understanding of the world is to unite with self-knowledge. They are to be fused in such a way that they become one. Goethe achieved this by regarding his marvelous understanding of nature—including his knowledge of biological and other forms of metamorphosis—as a link, so to speak, between what Faust brings with him from his mothers and what the external knowledge of the world in his own age could offer him. Through this, Goethe is led into the age of Greek civilization. This is what Goethe strives for. Not for a one-sided abstraction of the spirit or of life—Goethe strives for the perfection of the soul. Something like what existed in the Greek soul cannot return, but something must be regained that is similar to Greek culture yet can be experienced anew in the modern era. In Italy, Goethe himself experienced what he had seen in Greek art. He saw the Greek artists as those who had eavesdropped on nature’s secrets. By looking to Greek culture, perfection was given to him. In his own time, it was not yet present; it was still divided into knowledge of the world and self-knowledge. By being introduced to Greek culture, Faust was to gain the strength to unite self-knowledge and knowledge of the world. Now, at the end of the second part of Faust, Goethe attempted—as much as possible in a modern style appropriate to his age—to lead Faust from what he had brought from his mothers to what the great world, the universe, has revealed to humankind. Precisely because what lay in the depths of his soul had not become divided in his consciousness, Goethe was compelled—as he later justifies in his own way—to adopt traditional forms. He adopted the traditional form of ecclesiastical Christianity in order to introduce Faust—after he had brought forth the deep elements of his own soul from his mothers—into that from which he had turned away at the beginning, namely, what the sign of the macrocosm was meant to reveal. And at the end, we see Goethe overcoming what he had rejected as a young man: one-sided self-knowledge. Faust is introduced into the entire universe, into the currents of the universe, into the mysteries where the Ahtimanic world coincides with the physical world.

[ 19 ] This is the grand scene at the end of Faust, where Goethe seeks to introduce Faust to the macrocosm. One cannot understand Goethe’s Faust unless one realizes that this work, which accompanied Goethe for nearly sixty years of his life, shared in the vicissitudes of his own soul—but in a higher form than is commonly assumed. As a young man, Goethe had turned one-sidedly toward mere self-knowledge and did not want it to lead to an understanding of the world. His struggle with natural phenomena and the forces of nature—which finds expression in his view of nature—led him to introduce Faust into the wider world. In the end, Faust stands there, saying: “A spectacle—but alas, not merely a spectacle—rather, an element that human beings experience, into which, through their own human lives, all the currents that flow through the macrocosm, the universe, pour!”—Faust turns back once more to what the sign of the macrocosm had sought to reveal to him in a one-sided way.

[ 20 ] It is a bad thing when people always quote Faust in one way or another. One must acknowledge that Goethe overcame what he had internalized in his early youth. I do not believe that Goethe, by contradicting this to some extent in his later years, diminished what he had created in Faust during his youth. It is precisely this that makes him great—because he was so honest in his personal relationship to Faust, because he shows how he struggled and strove along the path from self-knowledge to knowledge of the world. And anyone who goes through the individual stages, who truly delves into the individual elements that live within Faust, will judge it differently.

[ 21 ] To delve into his own soul, Faust turns once again to translating the Bible at a certain stage. He does not stop at the traditional belief—“In the beginning was the Word”—but instead attempts: “Meaning, power, deed.” “In the beginning was the deed!” It is precisely this translation that Mephisto introduces. It is a reduction of the merely external, in that Faust, at this point—at this stage of his development—departs from the profound “In the beginning was the Word” for the trivial “In the beginning was the deed.” But precisely because Faust immerses himself in all the illusions of worldly knowledge, he is able to overcome Mephisto. Every line in Faust could be used to substantiate what I have only been able to hint at. It does not diminish the work’s stature in world literature to view it in this way, through one’s personal perspective.

[ 22 ] “Faust” has become nothing less than a masterpiece. It is all the more perfect precisely because its greatest power flows from the author’s own soul—because a man of the highest order strives and wrestles with the intellectual mysteries of humanity. Thus, I do believe that Goethe’s Faust stands before humanity as a work to which humanity must return again and again.

[ 23 ] It made a peculiar impression on me when I read a work by a Spaniard—written in English and translated into French—that offers criticism, harsh criticism, even of Goethe’s Faust, and portrays it as the starting point for everything that must be combated in the Central European character. I believe that one can acknowledge all the weaknesses, everything that fails to resonate with one, no matter where one stands; yet in Goethe’s Faust, a work has emerged for this Central European character—and not only for this character, but for the whole world—that takes on a certain meaning: not merely what should be given to humanity, but what humanity is constantly seeking. Yet we may hope that Goethe’s Faust will take root in the human soul in ever-renewed forms, precisely because with it humanity has been given not merely a work, but something it seeks. And because Goethe’s own search is so intimately connected with humanity’s search, I also believe that through his Faust, Goethe can bestow upon humanity something most precious, for the most precious goods are those that humanity must attain, because, if it truly understands itself, it must ceaselessly seek these goods.