The Rudolf Steiner Archive

I

The remains of the Goetheanum now cover the Dornach hill. Its construction was the result of an initiative by members of the Anthroposophical Society. Anthroposophy is the name I used when, twenty years ago in Berlin, I gave a lecture cycle on the world view that I believe is a direct continuation of Goethe's way of thinking. I chose the name in memory of a book by the Herbartian Robert Zimmermann, “Umriß einer Anthroposophie” (Outline of an Anthroposophy), which appeared decades ago. The content of this book, however, has nothing to do with what I presented as “anthroposophy”. It was modified Herbartian philosophy in the most abstract form. I wanted to use the word to express a world view that, through the application of the spiritual organs of perception of the human being, brings about the same knowledge of the spiritual world as natural science brings about through the sensory organs of perception of the physical.

About a year and a half before the lecture cycle mentioned above, I had already given lectures on another area of this anthroposophical world view at the invitation of Countess and Count Brockdorff in the “Theosophical Library” in Berlin at the time. The content of these lectures is published in my book “Mysticism in the Dawn of Modern Spiritual Life”. As a result of these lectures I was invited to join the Theosophical Society. I accepted this invitation with the intention of never advocating anything but the content of what had presented itself to me as the anthroposophical world view. It was always my view that I should lecture to all people who wanted to hear me, regardless of the name of the party under which they had joined together in any group, or whether they came to my lectures without any such preconception.

At the same time that I was invited to join the Theosophical Society, a number of members of that society founded a German section of it. I was invited to become its General Secretary. Despite serious misgivings, I accepted. I did not change my intention to present the Anthroposophical worldview to the world. What I myself call “Theosophy” is clearly evident from my book “Theosophy”, which I wrote shortly afterwards. This Theosophy emerges as a special field of Anthroposophy.

At the same time that the members of the Theosophical Society were inaugurating the German section in Berlin with speeches by Annie Besant, I was giving the series of lectures on anthroposophy that I have just mentioned.

I was now invited to give lectures to members of the Theosophical Society quite often. But basically, from the very beginning of this activity, I was opposed by those members of the Theosophical Society who were dogmatically attached to the teachings of some of the older leaders of that society. The circle of those personalities who found something in the Anthroposophical worldview increasingly formed itself as an independent one. In 1913, these leaders expelled them from the Theosophical Society when I called the consequences drawn from the teachings of these leaders and presented to the world absurd and declared that I did not want to have anything to do with such absurdities.

The Anthroposophical Society was founded in 1912 under the influence of these events. With the help of those personalities who later held leading positions in the Society, I was able to add the performance of “mysteries” to my lecturing activities even before that. As early as 1907, the anthroposophically oriented members in Munich performed Schuré's adaptation of the Eleusinian mystery at the Theosophical Congress. In 1909, he presented the play “Children of Lucifer” by the same author, which was followed by the presentation of “The Children of Lucifer” by the same author in Munich in 1909. As a result, in the following years, 1910-1913, my four own, very modern mystery dramas were performed for the members of the anthroposophical circle, also in Munich.

This expansion of anthroposophical activity into the field of art was a natural consequence of the nature of anthroposophy. The reasons for this have been frequently presented in this weekly publication.

Meanwhile, the circle that had become the Anthroposophical Society had grown so much that the leading figures within it were able to build Anthroposophy a home of its own. Munich was chosen as the location for this, because most of the supporters of the building intention were located there and had developed a particularly dedicated activity at that time.

I myself saw myself only as the representative of these supporters of the building intention. I believed that I had to concentrate my efforts on the inner spiritual work of Anthroposophy and gratefully accepted the initiative to create a place of work for it. But at the moment when the initiative was realized, the artistic design was for me a matter of inner spiritual work. I had to devote myself to this design. I asserted that if the building was to truly frame the anthroposophical world view, then the same principles from which the thoughts of anthroposophy arise must also give rise to the artistic forms of the building. The fact that this should not be done in the manner of a straw-and-stone allegory of building forms or of a symbolism tainted by thought is inherent in the nature of anthroposophy, which, in my opinion, leads to real art.

The idea of building the structure in Munich could not be carried out because influential artistic circles there objected to the forms. Whether these objections would have been overcome later is not worth discussing. The supporters of the building intention did not want the delay and therefore gratefully accepted the gift of Dr. Emil Grossheintz, who had already purchased a piece of land on the Dornach hill for the building.

So the foundation stone was laid in 1913 and work began immediately.

The supporters of the building project named the building the “Johannesbau” in reference to a character in my mystery dramas named Johannes Thomasius. During the years of construction, I often said that I started from the study of Goethean forms of thought in the construction of the anthroposophical worldview many years ago, and that for me their home is a “Goetheanum”. As a result, non-German members of the Anthroposophical Society in particular decided to continue to give the building the name “Goetheanum”.

Since anthroposophy, at the time when the building was started, had already found members with academic training and experience in the most diverse fields, and therefore stood in prospect of applying spiritual scientific methods in the individual sciences, I was allowed to suggest adding to the name of the building: “Freie Hochschule für Geisteswissenschaft” (Free University for Spiritual Science).

Friends of anthroposophy have been working on this building for almost ten years. Difficult material sacrifices came from many sides: artists, technicians and scientists worked together in the most dedicated way. Anyone in the anthroposophical circle who had the opportunity to work on the project did so. The most difficult tasks were willingly taken on. The spirit of the anthroposophical world view worked through enthusiastic hearts on the “Goetheanum”. To my great joy, the construction workers, who at first were at least indifferent to anthroposophy, have been of the opinion since 1922 that the misgivings about anthroposophy that were expressed in such wide circles are unfounded.

My colleagues and I had turned our thoughts to the continuation of our work. We had planned a science course for the end of December and the beginning of January. Friends of the anthroposophical cause from many countries were present again.

In addition to the artistic activities, eurythmy and declamation had been added years ago, under the direction of Mrs. Marie Steiner, who has made this one of her many fields of work. On New Year's Eve, we had a eurythmy performance from 5 to 7 p.m. My lecture began at 8 p.m. and ended half an hour after 9 p.m. I had spoken about the connection between human beings and the phenomena of the course of the year in an anthroposophical way. Shortly thereafter, the Goetheanum went up in flames; by New Year's morning 1923 it had burned down to the concrete substructure.

II

When I had the honor of inaugurating the first course of lectures held at the Goetheanum in September and October 1920, it seemed to me to be of primary importance to point out how spiritual-scientific knowledge, artistic form and religious inwardness are sought from a single source in anthroposophy. In the opening speech I briefly pointed this out, and in lectures on the building idea in Dornach I wanted to show how art in the Goetheanum was drawn from the same spirituality that seeks to reveal itself in ideas when anthroposophy appears in the form of knowledge.

In this respect, the attempt that was made with the Goetheanum has been misunderstood by many. It has been said that the work here is done in symbolism. Those who have spoken in this way always seemed to me to be people who had visited the Goetheanum but had not really looked at it. They thought: a particular world view is presented here. The people who produce it want to create symbols of what they teach in the building forms and in the rest of the artistic work that they add inside and out. With this dogma, one often visited the Goetheanum and found it confirmed, because one did not look at it and because one judged the matter as if anthroposophy were nothing more than a rational science. Such a science, however, if it wants to express itself artistically, will usually achieve nothing more than symbolism or allegory.

But at the Goetheanum, no abstract ideas were embodied. The shaping of ideas was completely forgotten when form was created from artistic perception, line from line and surface from surface. When colors were used on the wall to depict what was also seen directly in the color picture.

When I occasionally had the opportunity to personally show visitors around the Goetheanum, I said that I actually dislike “explaining” the forms and images, because the artistic should not be suggested by thoughts, but should be accepted in direct contemplation and perception.

Art that arises from the same soil as the ideas of true anthroposophy can become real art. For the soul forces that shape these ideas penetrate into the spiritual realm from which artistic creativity can also come. What one forms in thought out of anthroposophical knowledge stands for itself. There is no need to express it symbolically in a semi-artistic way. On the other hand, through the experience of the reality that anthroposophy reveals, one has the need to live artistically in forms and colors. And these colors and forms live for themselves again. They do not express any ideas. No more or no less than a lily or a lion expresses an idea.

Because this is related to the essence of anthroposophical life, anyone who used their eyes and not their dogmatizing minds when visiting Dornach will not have become aware of symbols and allegories, but of real artistic attempts.

But there was one thing I always had to mention when speaking of the architectural idea of the Goetheanum. When the time came to carry out this building, one could not turn to an artist who was supposed to create a home for Anthroposophy in the antique, Renaissance or Gothic style. If anthroposophy were mere science, mere content of ideas, then it could have been so. But anthroposophy is life, it is the grasping of the universal human and the world in and through man.

The initiative of the friends of this world view to build the Goetheanum could only be realized if this building, down to the last detail of its design, was created out of the same living spirit from which anthroposophy itself springs. I have often used an image: look at a nut and the nutshell. The shell is certainly not a symbol of the nut. But it is formed out of the same laws as the nut. Thus the structure can only be the shell, which artistically proclaims in its forms and images the spirit that lives in the word when Anthroposophy speaks through ideas.

In this way, every style of art is born out of a spirit that has also revealed itself ideationally in a world view.

And in a purely artistic sense, a style of building has been created for the Goetheanum that had to move from symmetry, repetition and so on to that which breathes in the forms of organic life. The auditorium, for example, had seven columns on either side. Only one on the left and right had capitals of the same shape. In contrast, each following capital was the metamorphic development of the previous one. All this resulted from artistic intuition; not from a rational element. It was not possible to repeat typical motifs in different places; rather, each structure was individually designed in its place, just as the smallest link in an organism is individual and yet designed in such a way that it necessarily appears in its formation in the place where it is. Some people have taken the number seven of the columns as an expression of something mystical. This too is a mistake. It is precisely a result of artistic perception. By allowing one capital form to arise artistically from the other, one arrived at the seventh with a form that could not be exceeded without falling back on the motif of the first.

It may be said, without indulging in illusions, that the building at the Goetheanum was not the only one to be confronted with the prejudices just mentioned. Gradually, quite a number of people came forward who wanted to look with unprejudiced eyes at what had arisen from unprejudiced perception.

Goethe speaks from his artistic feeling the words: “He to whom nature begins to reveal her secret, feels an irresistible longing for her most worthy interpreter, art,” and “Beauty is a manifestation of secret natural laws that would have remained hidden forever if it had not appeared.” According to the forms that the human concept of knowledge has taken in modern times, it is believed that the essence of natural things and natural processes can only be expressed by formulating laws (natural laws) in a conceptual way. But what if there were an artistic basis to nature's creative activity? Then the person who starts from the prejudice that it can only be expressed intellectually would not come close to the full essence of nature. And so it is. When one has penetrated to the secrets of nature through the realm of ideas, full of the life of the world, then one experiences: there is still something that does not yield to thought, that one can only reach when one tunes the soul into the realm of ideas through artistic contemplation. Goethe felt this when he wrote the sentences quoted. And the Goetheanum was shaped out of such a feeling. Anyone who sees a sect in people who practice anthroposophy will easily explain the symbolism of a sectarian view into the architectural forms of the Goetheanum. But anthroposophy is the opposite of all sectarianism. It strives for the purely human in full impartiality.

The small domed room of the Goetheanum was painted in such a way that it was not started from an ideational figurative, to which colors were glued, but rather a color experience was there first; and from this the figurative was born. In devotion to the essence of the color, the soul's creative power is strengthened to the figurative that the experienced colors demand. When painting, one feels as if there were nothing in the world but living, weaving colors, which are creative and generate essence out of themselves.

When one has to speak about the intentions behind the creation of the Goetheanum, one feels the pain of its loss, for which words are not there. For the whole essence of this building was geared towards contemplation. The memory hurts unspeakably. For one remembers soul experiences that urge towards contemplation. But the possibility of contemplation has been taken away since that New Year's Eve.

III

At the Goetheanum, an artistic sense could lead one to the insight that anthroposophy is not a sect or a religion. You can't build a church or a temple in this style. Two cylinder casings, with different sized bases, interlocked on the sides where they were cut out. They were closed at the top by a larger and a smaller dome. The domes were hemispherical and also interlocked, with sectors cut out where they touched.

The small domed room was to serve as a stage for mystery plays when it was completely finished. But it had not yet been set up for that purpose. Until now, only eurhythmy performances had taken place in this room. — The larger domed room enclosed the rows of spectators and listeners. There was nothing that would have given this two-part room the character of a temple or cult building.

The bases of the twelve columns around the small domed room had been converted into twelve chairs. One could recognize a meeting room for a limited number of participants; but not something church-like. Between the columns there was to be a sculptured group in the center of which was to be a figure in which one could recognize Christ. It was to be the emblem that genuine spiritual knowledge leads to Christ, thus uniting with the content of religion.

Those who entered through the main portal should be addressed by the whole in an artistic way: “Recognize the true human being.” The building was designed to be a home of knowledge, not a “temple.

The two rooms were separated by a curtain. In front of the curtain was a lectern that could be lowered when the stage area was used.

One need only look at the shape of this lectern to see how little was thought of it in terms of a church. All these forms were artistically drawn from the overall design of the building and from the meeting of the designs that led to the place where the speaker stood.

These forms were not an architectural and sculptural temple interior, but the framing of a place of spiritual knowledge. Anyone who wanted to see something else in them had to first interpret artistic untruth into them. But it was always satisfying for me when I was allowed to hear from those who were authorized to say: these forms speak in the true way of what they want to be. And that I was able to hear such words, that happened several times.

But it should not be denied that some things about the building must have been strange to those who approached it with familiar ideas about architecture. But that was in its essence; and it could not be otherwise.

When people become acquainted with anthroposophy, some of them also experience something of this kind of alienation. It initially appears as knowledge of the human being. But as it develops its knowledge of the human being, it expands into knowledge of the world. The human being recognizes his own nature; but this grasping is a merging with the content of the world.

When you entered the Goetheanum, you were surrounded by walls. But the treatment of the wall in its sculptural design had something that contradicted the character of the wall. We are accustomed to seeing the wall treated in such a way that it closes off a space from the outside. Such a wall is artistically opaque. The walls of the Goetheanum, with their protruding column forms and the designs that were supported by these columns, were intended to be artistically transparent. They were not meant to shut out the world, but to catch the eye with their artistic formations in such a way that the observer felt connected to the vastness of the universe. If one could not immediately focus one's attention on this peculiarity, these forms appeared as if one suddenly became aware of an incomprehensible window where one had expected an opaque blackboard.

The glass windows set into the outer wall were also adapted to this character of the wall. These were visible between two columns. They were made of monochrome glass, into which the artistic motifs were engraved. It was a kind of glass etching. The image was created by the different thicknesses that the monochrome glass acquired through the etching. It could only be seen as an image in strong sunlight. Thus, what had been artistically conceived in terms of form for the rest of the wall was also physically achieved in these windows. The image was only there when the wall interacted with the outside world. Two windows on the left and right were the same color. The windows from the entrance to the beginning of the stage were different colors, arranged in such a way that the colors in their sequence created a color harmony.

At first, what was seen in the windows might have been incomprehensible. But for those who had absorbed the anthroposophical world view, the strangeness would have been revealed purely through contemplation, not through intellectual or symbolic interpretation. And the whole was a home for those who sought anthroposophy. Anyone who claimed to understand these pictures without an anthroposophically oriented view resembled someone who wanted to enjoy a poem in a language artistically without first understanding the language.

The same applied to the pictorial motifs that covered the inner two dome surfaces. But it is wrong to say that one should first have a worldview in order to understand the images and forms. One did not need to read books or listen to lectures in order to have an anthroposophical orientation for these images, but one could also gain this orientation without the preceding word by simply looking into the images. But one had to come to it. If one did not want to, one stood before it, as – without, of course, even remotely suggesting an artistic comparison of values – before Raphael's Disputa, if one did not want to orient oneself to the mystery of the Trinity.

The auditorium was designed for nine hundred to one thousand people. At the western end of the auditorium, there was a raised space for the built-in organ and other musical instruments.

This entire wooden structure stood on a concrete substructure that was larger in plan, so that there was a raised terrace around the outside of the auditorium. In this substructure, under the auditorium, were the places for depositing clothes, and under the stage area were machines. It must have seemed amusing to those who had seen the contents of this concrete substructure when they heard that opponents of the anthroposophical worldview were talking about all sorts of mysterious things, even about underground meeting places in this concrete building. The Goetheanum had goals that truly did not require dark, mysterious meeting places or magic instruments. Such things would not have fitted into the architectural concept of the whole. They would have been artistically unmotivated.

The domes were covered with Nordic slate from the Voß slate quarries. The bluish-grey sheen in the sunlight combined with the color of the wood to create a whole that many a person who has made their way up the Dornach hill to the Goetheanum on a bright summer's day has welcomed with sympathy.

Now they encounter a pile of rubble with a low concrete ruin rising up out of it.

IV

The art of eurythmy seemed to come into its own at the Goetheanum. It is visible speech or singing. The individual performs movements with his limbs, especially the most expressive movements of the arms and hands, or groups of people move or take up positions in relation to each other. These movements are like gestures. But they are not gestures in the usual sense. These relate to what is presented in eurythmy as the child's babbling to the developed language.

When a person reveals himself through language or song, then he is there with his whole being. He is, so to speak, in the system through his whole body in motion. But he does not express this system. He captures this movement in the making and concentrates it on the speech or sound organs. Now, through sensual-supersensible observation – to use this Goethean expression – one can recognize which movement of the whole physical human being underlies a tone, a speech sound, a harmony, a melody, or a formed speech structure. In this way, individuals or groups of people can be made to perform movements that express the musical or linguistic element in a visible way, just as the speech and singing organs express it aurally. The whole person, or groups of people, become the larynx; the movements speak or sing as the larynx sounds.

Just as in speech or song, nothing in eurythmy is arbitrary. But it makes just as little sense to say that momentary gestures are preferable in eurythmy as it does to say that an arbitrary tone or sound is better than those that lie within the lawful formation of speech or sound.

But eurythmy is not to be confused with dance either. Musical elements that sound simultaneously can be eurythmized. In this case, one is not dancing to music but visibly singing it.

Eurythmic movements are derived from the human organism as a whole in the same orderly way as speech or song.

When poetry is eurythmized, the visible language of eurythmy is revealed on stage and at the same time the poetry is heard through recitation or declamation. One cannot recite or declaim to the eurythmy as one often likes to do, by merely pointing out the prose content of the poetry. One must really treat the language artistically as language. Meter, rhythm, melodious motifs and so on, or even the imaginative aspect of sound formation, must be worked out. For every true poetry is based on a hidden (invisible) eurythmy. Mrs. Marie Steiner has tried to develop this kind of recitation and declamation, which goes hand in hand with the eurythmic presentation. It seems as if a kind of orchestral interaction of the spoken and visibly presented word has really been achieved.

It turns out to be inartistic for one person to recite and perform eurythmy at the same time. These tasks must be performed by different people. The image of a person who wanted to reveal both in themselves would fall apart for the immediate impression.

The development of the art of eurythmy is based on insight into the expressive possibilities of the human body, insight that draws on both the senses and the supersensory. As far as I know, there is only scant evidence of this insight from earlier times. These were times when the soul and spirit were still able to shine through the human body to a greater extent than they are today. This scant tradition, which incidentally points to quite different intentions than those present in eurythmy, was of course used. But it had to be independently developed and transformed, and above all, it had to be completely reshaped into an artistic form. I am not aware of any tradition in the formal movement of groups of people that we have gradually developed in eurythmy.

When this eurythmic art appeared on the stage of the Goetheanum, one should have the feeling that the static forms of the interior design and the sculpture related to the moving human beings in a completely natural way. The former should, so to speak, accept the latter pleasantly. The building and the eurythmic movement should merge into a single whole. This impression could be heightened by accompanying the sequence of eurythmic creations with lighting effects that flooded the stage in harmonious radiance and sequence. What is attempted here is light eurythmy.

And if the forms of the stage took up the eurythmic designs as something belonging to them, so did those of the auditorium take up the recitation or declamation that occurred in parallel with the eurythmy, which sounded from a seat on the side of the stage, where it meets the auditorium, through Marie Steiner. Perhaps it is not inappropriate to say that the listener should feel in the building itself a comrade in the understanding of the word or tone heard. If one does not want to claim more than that such a unity of building form and word or music was striven for, then what has been said will not sound too immodest. For no one can be more convinced that all this has been achieved only in a highly imperfect way than I myself. But I have tried to shape it in such a way that one could feel how the movement of the word naturally ran along the forms of the capitals and architraves.

I would only like to suggest what can be tried for such a building: that its forms do not merely enclose what is depicted in them on the outside, but contain it in a living unity in themselves in the most direct impression.

And if I were to express my opinion on this, I would hold back. But I have heard what has been said from others.

I also know that I have shaped the forms of the building sensitively, out of the state of mind from which the eurythmy images also come.

The fact that the forms of eurythmy were continuously shaped in the experience of what could be experienced in the creation of the building forms will not be perceived as a contradiction of what has been said. For the harmony between the two was not achieved by intellectual intention, but arose out of a homogeneous artistic impulse. Probably eurythmy could not have been found without the work on building. Before the building idea, it existed only in its first beginnings.

The instructions for the soul-based shaping of the moving speech forms were first given to the students in the hall built into the south wing of the Goetheanum. The interior architecture of this hall in particular was intended to be a resting eurythmy, just as the eurythmic movements within it were moving plastic forms, shaped by the same spirit as these resting forms themselves.

It was in this hall that the smoke was first detected on December 31, which came from the fire that destroyed the entire Goetheanum when it grew up. One feels, when one has been lovingly connected with the building, the merciless flames painfully penetrating through the sensations that poured into the resting forms and into the work attempted within them.

V

Of course, some objections can be raised against the stylistic forms of the Goetheanum. I have always described them as a first attempt to undertake something artistic in the direction characterized in the preceding remarks.

Those who refuse to accept any transition from the cognitive representation of the nature of the world and of world processes through ideas to pictorial artistic embodiment must reject these forms of expression. But what is it ultimately based on, this desire to visualize something of the world's content through knowledge in the soul? But only because in the experience of the ideas of knowledge one becomes aware of something in which one knows the outer world to be continuously active within oneself. Through knowledge the world speaks in the human soul. He who merely imagines that he has formed his own ideas about the world, he who does not feel the world pulsating within him when he lives in ideas, should not speak of knowledge. The soul is the arena in which the world reveals its secrets.

But anyone who thinks of knowledge in such a realistic way must ultimately come to the conclusion that his thinking must pass over into artistic creation if he wants to experience the content of the world in certain areas within himself. One can close one's mind to such a view. One can demand that science must stay away from artistic visualization and express itself only in the formation of ideas that are demanded by logical laws. But such a demand would be mere subjective arbitrariness if the creative process of nature were such that it could only be grasped artistically in certain areas. If nature proceeds as an artist, then man must resort to artistic forms in order to express it.

But it is also an experience of knowledge that in order to follow nature in its creative work, the transition of logically formed ideas into artistic images is necessary.

For example, up to a certain point it is possible to express the human physique through logical thinking. But from this point onwards, one must allow the process to enter into artistic forms if one does not want a mere ghostly image of the human being, but rather the human being in his or her living reality. And one will be able to feel that in the soul, by experiencing the form of the body in artistic and pictorial terms, the reality of the world is revealed in the same way as in the logically formed ideas.

I believed I was presenting Goethe's view of the world correctly when, at the end of the 1980s, I described his relationship to art and science as follows: “Our time believes it is doing the right thing when it keeps art and science as far apart as possible. They are said to be two completely opposite poles in the cultural development of humanity. Science should, so it is thought, sketch out for us a world view that is as objective as possible; it should show us reality in a mirror or, in other words, it should adhere purely to what is given, divesting itself of all subjective arbitrariness. The objective world is decisive for its laws; it must submit to it. It should take the standard of truth and falsity entirely from the objects of experience. The two creations of art are to be completely different. The self-creative power of the human mind gives them their laws. For science, any interference by human subjectivity would be a falsification of reality, a transgression of experience; art, on the other hand, grows on the field of ingenious subjectivity. Its creations are the product of human imagination, not reflections of the outside world. Outside of us, in objective being, lies the origin of scientific laws; in us, in our individuality, that of aesthetic ones. Therefore, the latter have not the slightest cognitive value; they create illusions without the slightest reality factor. Anyone who understands the matter in this way will never gain clarity about the relationship between Goethean poetry and Goethean science. But this means that both are misunderstood. The world-historical significance of Goethe lies precisely in the fact that his art flows from the source of being, that it contains nothing illusory, nothing subjective, but appears as the herald of the lawfulness that the poet has overheard in the depths of natural activity to the world spirit. At this level, art becomes the interpreter of the secrets of the world, as science is in another sense. This is how Goethe always understood art. For him, it was a revelation of the primal law of the world; science was the other. For him, art and science arose from the same source. While the scientist delves into the depths of reality to express the driving forces of reality in the form of thoughts, the artist seeks to incorporate these same driving forces into his material. Goethe himself puts it this way: “I think that science could be called knowledge of the general, abstract knowledge; art, on the other hand, would be science applied to action. Science would be reason and art its mechanism, which is why it could also be called practical science. And so, finally, science would be the theorem, art the problem.” And Goethe expresses something similar with the words: ”Style rests on the deepest foundations of knowledge, on the essence of things, insofar as we are allowed to recognize it in visible and tangible forms.” (See my introduction to Goethe's scientific writings, which will soon be published as an independent book by the Stuttgarter Kommenden Tag-Verlag.)

What I meant at the time: that Goethe is right when he thinks of the relationship between art and science in this way; that seems right to me today too. That is why what was expressed in his work in the form of knowledge could be presented in artistic form at the Goetheanum.

Anthroposophy has the supersensible content of the world for its representation, insofar as it is accessible to human contemplation. One feels that every expression of this content through logically formed ideas is only a kind of thought-gesture that points to this content. And the artistic form appears as the other gesture through which the spiritual world responds to the thought-gesture; or perhaps the other way around, the world reveals the idea in response when one asks it through the artistic image.

The stylistic forms of the Goetheanum could not, therefore, be a naturalistic imitation of any inanimate or animate object in the world around us. The experience of what is happening in the spiritual world had to guide the hand that formed the sculpture and applied the paint to the surface. The spiritual content of the world had to be allowed to flow into the lines and reveal itself in the color.

No matter how many objections are raised against these stylistic forms of the Goetheanum, the attempt that was made was to create an artistic home for a striving for knowledge in the sense of Goethe's intentions, a home that was from the same spiritual source as the knowledge cultivated in it. The attempt may have been imperfectly successful; it was there as such: and the Goetheanum was built in the spirit of Goethe's view of art.

Thus one came to feel that the Goetheanum was the home of Anthroposophy; but after the disaster of December 31, after the one side, one also feels, with Anthroposophy, homeless. Sympathetic visitors came to the scene of the fire on January 1st, saying: we want to keep alive in our hearts what we have experienced in this building.

VI

The Goetheanum has only experienced nine major events. In September and October 1920, lecture series took place over three weeks on a wide range of scientific topics. The impetus for this came from the circle of scientists working in the Anthroposophical Society. The entire organization of the lecture cycles was also in their hands. Teachers from the Free Waldorf School and other personalities with training in various fields of knowledge — including artists — were involved. The idea behind the event was to show how the individual scientific fields can be illuminated by the anthroposophical method of research.

It struck me at the time, as I witnessed these cycles, that not everything appeared as if it had been born out of the spirit of the Goetheanum. When individual insights into nature or history were illuminated out of the spirit of anthroposophical concepts as a whole, one felt harmony between the structure and the presentation of knowledge. When individual questions were discussed, this was not the case.

I had to think of how, during the construction, the anthroposophical work had grown beyond the stage it was at when construction began. In 1913, the idea of those personalities who had decided to build it was to create a place for the anthroposophical work in the narrower sense and for those artistic performances that had grown out of the anthroposophical perception. At that time, the individual scientific fields were only included in the anthroposophical work of knowledge to the extent that they naturally integrated into the broader presentations of spiritual scientific observation.

The building was conceived as an artistic vessel for this spiritual content. This relationship was the basis for the design of the building. It was allowed to be so. For it was important to express artistically how anthroposophy should be placed in the context of human life as a whole. If the treatment of individual scientific fields was considered later, this should be done in separate extensions.

A different approach is needed for the reconstruction of the Goetheanum. The construction of a central place for anthroposophy in the narrower sense was obvious because it was the will of the personalities who advocated its construction to build this place out of wood. Such a central place can be artistically imbued with this material. Another material would then have been considered for the extensions. A second wooden structure is out of the question. Before the Goetheanum was tackled, I told the leading personalities what artistic feelings for wood and for another material would be considered. They decided on wood because at that time they took the view that they should proceed as idealistically as possible. This idealism bore the beautiful fruit that understanding souls had before them, at least for a short time, a home for anthroposophy that could not have been built in another material with such verve in the lines and such expressiveness in the forms. Today, this fruit is a tragic memory. There are no words for the pain of loss. The idealism of those who commissioned me to build in wood must therefore be given all possible credit.

The building is closely connected with the fate of anthroposophical development in recent years, precisely because of the lack of the marked harmony at the first event. The first series of lectures as a whole reveals itself as something that did not grow quite organically out of the same idea as the building itself. It was as if something had been carried into the purely anthroposophical building. In the outer reality of human coexistence, things do not always follow the path demanded by the inner workings of a spiritual context. Anthroposophy is absolutely predisposed to extend its developmental tendencies to where they also lead into the most specialized fields of knowledge. But that is not how it happened in the Anthroposophical Society. A different path has been taken. Scientifically educated personalities have become members of the Society. Science was their way of life and their education. Anthroposophy has become a matter of the heart for them. They have allowed themselves to be inspired by it for their science. Thus we have received scientific explanations from anthroposophically minded personalities before the individual fields of knowledge were born out of anthroposophy itself. Much has been achieved by the fact that, when the need arose, lecture cycles were held in front of small groups from the most diverse fields of knowledge, inspired by the anthroposophical spirit. What came out of this is not to be presented here as something that was hasty or the like. But just as, for example, in the pedagogical field, educational methods have emerged directly from anthroposophy, as is the case in the artistic field with eurhythmics, so it has not been destined by fate for the Anthroposophical Society to do so in other fields. In certain areas, a faster pace was demanded of anthroposophy out of a well-seen contemporary necessity. This requires that individual scientific fields that are already being worked on and anthroposophical development must first grow into each other.

This was also expressed in the disharmony of the first event in 1920, as described. If a reconstruction comes about, it will be able to contain - in a different material - individual rooms - for example on the first floor - for scientific events and artistic work, and thus the space for the anthroposophical in the narrower sense. On the one hand, such a building will correspond to its material, and on the other hand to the development that anthroposophical endeavors have taken in recent years.

The disharmony was only an expression of the endeavor to create a home for anthroposophy in the narrower sense that was artistically appropriate to its stage of development up to 1918. Perhaps I may cite this as proof of how Anthroposophy as a spiritual content and its home as an artistic unity were felt during the elaboration of the latter.

But today, in a strange harmony with this architectural idea of the Goetheanum, I feel what was then in me, when the first event was set up in it, to open the Goetheanum itself in a festive manner. The program of that series of lectures could not be taken as the occasion for such a celebration. It should only take place when an event had become possible whose whole would be in complete harmony with the original building idea. It did not come to that. The Goetheanum died away before then. In the hearts of those who loved it, there was a lasting funeral service.

The next essay will deal with the further events that could still take place in the dear building.

VII

Even if it was not possible for us to reveal the opening ceremony, the building idea and the event of the Goetheanum in full harmony, we were still able to make attempts in various directions over the course of more than two years to bring the anthroposophical spirit to bear.

The first three-weekly lecture cycle was followed by a second one-weekly cycle in April 1921. The aim was to show how the individual fields of human knowledge can be significantly expanded if their paths of research are continued into the spiritual realm.

On this occasion, it gave me particular satisfaction to be able to point out such a possible expansion for a number of fields of knowledge through my own lectures.

During these events, I was also always given the task of showing visitors around the building and talking about the artistic aspects of the Goetheanum. On the one hand, I was reluctant to say anything theoretical about art. Art is meant to be looked at. But these tours had another side to them. One could avoid wanting to 'explain' art in an unartistic way. I did that too, as far as it seemed permissible to me from those who were looking at the building. But there were plenty of opportunities to talk about anthroposophical matters in a free, fragmentary, aphoristic way, linking it to the forms and images that could be seen. And the lectures could then be woven into a whole with what was said during the tour. Then one felt very intimately how good the anthroposophically oriented word was when spoken at a pillar or under a picture that came from the same spirit as the word itself.

These events always included eurythmy performances. They made it clear how the building demanded that the insights presented in it had to be shaped into a whole by artistic means. The inner space of the Goetheanum seemed to brook no lecture cycle that was not rounded off by artistic elements. I believe it was felt to be a necessity when Marie Steiner added her art of recitation and declamation to the lecture events from the organ room.

We also had the joy of hearing Mrs. Werbeck-Svärdström unfold her wonderful art from this organ room, sometimes together with her three sisters. What the participants were able to hear there will certainly be unforgettable.

Personally, it always gave me the greatest joy to hear Albert Steffen speak from the Goetheanum podium. What he says is always meant to be felt in plastic forms. He is like a sculptor of language; a sculptor who carves in wood. I perceived a harmony between the building forms and his language sculptures, which he placed in the building at once deliberately and confidently.

In August 1921, we were able to hold an event that was thanks to the English painter Baron von Rosenkrantz. This event felt particularly at home in the building. The band stepped before the soul's eye, connecting spiritual-scientific research and spirit-revealing art. It is understandable that attention was drawn to what the building was intended to be an experiment for, on this occasion in particular.

At the end of September and the beginning of October, a number of German theologians who carried the impulse for a Christian religious renewal gathered at the Goetheanum. What was worked out here came to a conclusion in September 1922. I myself must count among the festivals of my life what I experienced with these theologians in September 1922 in the small hall of the south wing where the fire was later discovered. Here, with a group of nobly enthusiastic people, it was possible to follow the path that leads spiritual knowledge into religious experience.

At the end of December and beginning of January 1922, a group of English teachers gathered at the Goetheanum. That this was possible was due to the dedicated efforts of Prof. M. Mackenzie. She and Prof. Mackenzie had taken part in the course organized by Baron von Rosenkrantz in August. On this occasion, the distinguished English educationalist decided to invite English teachers to visit the Goetheanum during the Christmas holidays. Together with a number of teachers from the Stuttgart Waldorf School, I was invited to speak again in the hall of the south wing about pedagogy, education and teaching practice. The English educators were joined by others from Scandinavia, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Germany and so on.

In September 1922, I was invited to give ten lectures on “Cosmology, Philosophy and Religion from the Point of View of Anthroposophy”. Once again, the cycle of my lectures was rounded off by teachers from the Waldorf School and other personalities from the Anthroposophical Movement, through their lectures and the discussions they held with the participants. I went to each of my lectures and came away from them with a deep sense of gratitude to those who initiated the building of the Goetheanum. For it was precisely in these lectures, in which I had to cover a wide range of knowledge from an anthroposophical point of view, that I had to feel the benefit of being able to express ideas that had been given artistic form in the building.

Events such as the “Dramatic Course”, given by Marie Steiner in July 1922, and a National Economic Course, which I myself held in July and August 1922, did not take place within the rooms that were lost to us on New Year's Eve. But they belong to the circle of what the Goetheanum has inspired.

Eurythmy performances have been taking place at the Goetheanum for many years. I have tried to describe their close connection with the nature of the building in an earlier article.

A cycle of lectures on natural science was planned for the end of December and beginning of January 1922 to 1923. Once again, personalities working in the field of anthroposophy were to give lectures and hold discussions with me. I added other lectures on purely anthroposophical subjects to the lectures on knowledge of nature. Only the first part of this event could still take place at the Goetheanum. After the eurythmy performance and my lecture on New Year's Eve, the flames took the building in which we would have liked to continue working.

The lectures had to be continued in an adjoining room, while outside the flames consumed the last remains of the Goetheanum, which we loved so much.

Anyone who has studied the forms that make up the living structure of the Goetheanum could see how Goethe's ideas on metamorphosis were incorporated into the architectural ideas. These metamorphosis ideas became clear to Goethe when he wanted to embrace the diversity of the plant world in spiritual unity. To achieve this goal, he searched for the archetypal plant. This was to be an idealized plant form. In it, one organ could be developed to particular size and perfection, while others could be small and unattractive. In this way, one could also devise an immense number of special forms from the ideal original plant; and then one could let one's gaze wander over the external forms of the plant world. One found this realized in one form, that in the other, derived from the original plant. The whole plant world was, so to speak, one plant in the most diverse forms.

But with this, Goethe assumed that a formative principle prevails in the diversity of organizations, which is recreated by man in the inward mobility of thought forces. He thus ascribed something to human knowledge whereby it is not merely an external observation of world beings and world processes, but grows together with them into a unity.

Goethe had applied the same principle to the understanding of individual plants. In the simplest way, he saw an entire plant in the leaf. And in the multiform plant he saw a leaf developed in a complicated way; so to speak, many leaf-plants combined again according to the leaf principle into a unity. — Likewise, the various organs of animal formation were transformations of a basic organ for him; and the whole animal kingdom the most diverse forms of an ideal “primordial animal”.

Goethe did not develop the idea in all its aspects. His conscientiousness led him to stop on unfinished paths, especially in relation to the animal world. He did not allow himself to go too far in the mere formation of thoughts without repeatedly having the ideational confirmed by the sensuous facts.

One can have a twofold relationship to these Goethean metamorphoses of ideas. One can regard them as an interesting peculiarity of the Goethean spirit and leave it at that.

But one can also attempt to bring one's own activity of ideas in the Goethean direction. Then one will find that in fact secrets of nature are revealed, to which one cannot gain access in any other way.

More than forty years ago, I believed I had realized this (in my introductions to Goethe's scientific writings in Kürschner's Deutsche National-Literatur) and called Goethe the Copernicus and Kepler of the science of the organic. I proceeded from the view that for the inanimate, the Copernican act consists in noticing a material connection independent of man; but that the corresponding act for the animate lies in discovering the right mental activity by which the organic can be grasped by the human mind in its living mobility.

Goethe accomplished this Copernican feat by introducing the spiritual activity through which he worked artistically into knowledge. He sought the path from artist to knower and found it. The anthropologist Heinroth therefore called Goethe's thinking a representational one. Goethe spoke with deep satisfaction about this. He took up the word and also called his poetry a concrete one. He thus expressed how close the artistic and cognitive activities were in his soul.

Immersing oneself in Goethe's spiritual world could give courage to lead the view of the metamorphoses back to the artistic. This helped to develop the architectural idea of the Goetheanum. Wherever nature unfolds in living activity, she creates forms that grow out of each other. One can come close to nature's creative activity through artistic-sculptural work, if one lovingly and empathetically grasps how she lives in metamorphoses.

It is now possible to call a building the “Goetheanum” which has been created in such a way, both architecturally and sculpturally, that the assimilation of Goethe's metamorphic view of life has dared to attempt to be realized in its forms.

And in the same way, anthroposophy itself is also the direct further development of Goethe's views. Anyone who embraces the idea of the transformation not only of the sensory forms – in which Goethe, in accordance with his particular soul character, remained – but also of what can be grasped in soul and spirit, has arrived at anthroposophy. This is only a very elementary observation. In the human soul, we see thinking, feeling and willing at work. Anyone who is only able to see these three forms of soul life side by side or in their interaction cannot penetrate deeper into the essence of the soul. But anyone who gains clarity about how thinking is a metamorphosis of feeling and willing, feeling a metamorphosis of thinking and willing, and willing a transformation of thinking and feeling, connects themselves with the essence of the soul. If Goethe, who wanted to be oriented towards the sensually descriptive, was highly satisfied to hear that his thinking was called objective, then a spiritual researcher can find a similar satisfaction when he realizes how his thinking becomes “spiritually animated” through the metamorphosis view. Thinking is “representational” when it can become so entwined with the essence of sense perceptions that this essence is experienced as resonating within it. Thinking becomes “spirit-animated” when it is able to absorb the spirit into its own currents and movements. Then thinking becomes spirit-bearing, just as perception, directed to the sense world, becomes color- or sound-bearing. Then thinking metamorphoses into intuition.

With this metamorphosis, however, thinking has been freed from the body. For the body can imbue thinking only with sense-perceptible content.

One conquers the living through the contemplation of metamorphosis. One thereby enlivens one's own thinking. It is transformed from a dead to a living one. But in this way it becomes capable of absorbing the life of the spirit by contemplation. Anyone who, on the basis of what Goethe's writings contain, wants to form the judgment that Goethe himself would have rejected anthroposophy may be able to cite external reasons for doing so. And one may concede that Goethe would have been very cautious in such a case, because he himself would have felt uncomfortable pursuing the metamorphosis into areas where it lacks the control of sensory phenomena. But Goethe's world view merges with anthroposophy without artifice.

Therefore, that which rests securely on Goethe's world view could be cultivated in a building that bore the name Goetheanum in memory of Goethe.

Upon those who admire the writings of Albert Steffen he has bestowed a lyric gift. We must say a “gift,” for whoever has found in this poet the earnest searcher into the riddles of human destinies who wills, through striving formative power, to reveal mysteries of the world in the nature of the soul, had a longing for this most personal communication. He must be grateful for the gift.

The booklet is small in the number of its pages. The gift is great. For cut of a fullness of heart and soul one here bestows gifts who has much to say of such a nature as enriches the life which receives it. It is good for all who receive it, but one alone could give it just as it is—Albert Steffen. For that which everyone. should behold he beholds with an utterly personal artist's eye.

The first impression may be strange. For Steffen really lives in realms of feeling which are his own wholly personal possession. But one can quickly come to feel at home in these realms. For the dwelling place in which the poet Steffen molds the world in his special way is permeated through and through with warmth of heart and is filled with genuine goodness. Steffen's images are often brought up from very deep mines, but they have been shaped by a man who never loses his living artistic sense in the depths of his thinking.

Steffen often confronts world problems in whose presence others become philosophers. He remains the artist. Others draw all sorts of rounded lines. Steffen makes a few strokes and creates many angles. The whole is then more pictorial than the rounded forms of the others. Many remain on the surface lest they should become lyric brooders. Steffen frequently descends to a great depth below the surface, but there he can speak with such penetration that all brooding vanishes for the listener.

Steffen's compositions arise from that region of the soul where one beholds cosmic mysteries and feels human riddles. But the spirit who there ventures often into abysmal depths in vision and in feeling, and often soars aloft to the stars, remains the molder of images, the creator of tones, is never misled into the coldness of mere ideas. Steffen paints in words. The words have colors. And the colors work like those of paintings which have outlived the centuries and still remain.

Steffen strides through nature likewise seeing and feeling. And nature reveals through him her spirit beings. In this revelation there is wisdom—tragic wisdom, wisdom filled with goodness, wisdom that wakens love, wisdom that is unveiled to the interpreter of riddles who, while interpreting, is wholly filled with the power of the poet, and in molding forms is wholly sustained by the artist's serene enthusiasm.

Steffen descends into the depths of the soul. He brings up pictures which are like copies of the beings of nature—of a nature not seen with the eyes and without whose accessibility to fantasy the world seen with the eyes would be a deception. These pictures of spirit-nature are sharply outlined, but their outlines are drawn, not by the intellect, but by the human heart.

In the presence of these images, one often has the feeling that an unknown power in the poet has compelled nature to yield them, and that, once this power had set them there, Steffen drew their forms.

Steffen, the poet, never stands alone. He is always surrounded by a world. He does not utter only his own feelings. When he expresses his own feelings, he causes one to sense always an immeasurable world around him. His images often give the impression at first of having been taken out of empty space; then, when one has fully understood the images, they acquire a background. Then they reveal a world, whereas at first, they seemed to manifest only themselves. Frequently they are like human beings who are at first very reserved but later emanate a love-bestowing warmth. It will sometimes seem as if a poem of Steffen's were an assertion of defiant willfulness, and this seeming willfulness holds one fast. But one then finds that the seeming willfulness is a veil concealing devotion to truth such as can be attained only through purification of soul.

Steffen's lyrics frequently have their source in the mountains; but, as offspring of the mountains, they have wandered through the plains, like brooks that become rivers. They still bear within them their mountain birth, but on the plain, which gives them stillness, they mirror the sun and they magically create there also for the soul of one who enjoys them the reflected moonlight and the stars. They whisper riddles of nature, and the whisper becomes to the ear a familiar language.

A tender poem, Felicitas, penetrates to the heart as if awaking emotions which stream out into cosmic space. One is in the quiet chamber and yet in the expanse of the universe; a child of man with his suffering and yet a creature of the starry worlds.

Oft, wenn ich in der Nacht
von bangem Traumgesicht
emporgeschreckt, betracht,
wie leicht der Leib zerbricht,
wenn immer schwerer lasten Angst und Wahn,
ich weinen muss ob meiner dunklen Bahn:

Lauf ich zum Fenster schnell,
die Sterne anzuschaun,
wie scheinen sie so hell,
dann darf ich doch vertraun,
ich weis es ja, dass mich an Kindesstatt
der Sternenhimmel angenommen hat.

Oft when I in the night,
By fearful vision waked,
Reflect with doleful fright
How fragile bodies break,
My heart o'erburdened with the dream and fear
I must bewail my road of life so drear.

To open window then
I run the stars to view,
How brightly they do shine,
And so, with faith renewed,
I know in truth that they have taken me,
The starry heavens, as their own child to be.

And how deep the reverent devotion that speaks from Steffen's lyrics! It is a reverence that dares to brood because, in brooding, it never loses touch with the heart. It is a piety that dares to give form to that which evokes the deepest reverence, because in molding this into form it preserves always the inner quality of prayer.

Ich geh durch rote Aecker:
es schläft der Keim.
Ich geh durch grüne Saaten:
es sprosst der Halm.
Ich geh durch goldne Felder:
es reift der Korn.
Ich find den Müller
und der Müller spricht:
Die Erde is der Angesicht
des Menschensohnes.
Und “wer mein Brot verzehrt,
der setzt den Fuss auf mich.”
Ich knie nieder,
und er reicht der Speise,
dass ich mich sättige
auf meiner Erden-Reise.

I walk through brown-red acres:
The germ still sleeps.
I walk through greening earth:
The shoots appear.
I walk through golden fields:
The grain grows ripe.
I find the miller
And the miller speaks:
The earth is the countenance
Of the Son of Man.
And “he who eats my bread
He sets his foot on me.”
I kneel me down,
And he hands me food,
That I be sated
On my earthly road.

Such is the mood which fills the heart with experiences drawn from the realm of the eternal in the human soul. The personal is elevated to the level of the impersonal, not to be lost in this but to find itself in its truth and its essential being. And this finding has its reflection in Steffen's lyric poetry itself. The poet feels himself to be in the stream of cosmic being, and he says:

Die Sprache formt Schicksal,
gemäss den Lauten,
streng oder milde.
Näh oder Ferne vom ewigen Urwort Bestimmt meine Freiheit und Not.

Speech forms destiny,
In accord with the sounds,
Stern or mild.
Nearness or farness from primordial Word
Determines my freedom and need.

One who hears such words from the poet soul of Steffen senses that in him destiny searches for the secrets of language in order to shape life's need as “stern or mild,” and in the freedom of the spirit to give meaning to existence.

When Steffen carries his pain to “bush or tree” in order to make the trees his teachers in peace of soul, his feeling is then revealed in the strictness of the sonnet form, and one has the feeling that what is said can be revealed in this form alone. The compositions of this kind in Weg-Zehrung (Bread of Life) are like the receiving of the form by the poet, who finds peace in this for his emotion, which, without this form, would tend to strive outward into the infinite.

The fact, however, that in Steffen emotion also can bear its own measure within itself is evident when, in soaring upward from the personal to participation in the experience of the World Being, he expresses himself in the form of the hymn, and likewise when he finds the possibility of imparting himself in such a way that silence, while the heart is full, is forborne only to the very least degree.

Du blickst so irr,
so hoffnungsleer
warum, warum?
O sag's, o deut's.

Thou seem'st so lost,
So void of hope,
But why, but why?
Oh tell me, explain!

Christus in mir—
Ist es so schwer.
Er geht herum:
Ich bin sein Kreuz.

To Christ in me—
It is so hard.
He moves about:
I am His Cross.

Part II of VII in a series of articles written for Das Goetheanum (Vol. 2, 21 January 1923) celebrating ten years of the Goetheanum. This translation was originally published in Anthroposophy Vol. 2, No. 1-2, January/February 1923, pages 4-7. Translation revised for Anthroposophy Today, No. 9, Spring 1990.

The first course at the Goetheanum was held in September and October 1920. In my opening address I felt that more than anything it was necessary to point out that in anthroposophy we go to one and the same source for knowledge of the science of the spirit, artistic form and religious depth of inner life. In my opening address I made only brief reference to this; in my lectures on the underlying concept of the building at Dornach I tried to show how the art of the Goetheanum was drawn from the same spiritual source as the ideas that come to the fore when anthroposophy takes the form of a science.

The attempt that was made in creating the Goetheanum has been widely misinterpreted in this respect. People have said that it was intended to be symbolic. It has always seemed to me that the people who said such things cannot have used their eyes and really looked at the Goetheanum when they visited it. They came with the fixed idea that the building represented a certain philosophy and that creators of that philosophy wanted to use architectural design and other means to represent their teachings in symbolic form. They found their ideas confirmed because they did not see the building for what it was. In their view anthroposophy was the same as any other intellectual discipline, and it is true that if such a discipline wants to find expression in art it will usually get no further than symbolism and allegory.

But the Goetheanum did not portray abstract ideas. Nothing was further from the minds of those who let the shape of the building arise out of artistic feeling, letting line follow line, surface follow surface out of artistic sensibility, and presented in colour on the walls and cupolas their direct vision of images that were in colour.

Occasionally, when I had the opportunity to show visitors around the building, I would say that I felt it would be wrong to ‘explain’ the forms and colours, for art should not be brought home to people by presenting thoughts about it; art is there to be looked at, to let our feelings respond to it.

Art that springs from the same ground as the ideas that make up true anthroposophy can become genuine art. The powers of soul that give form to these ideas that make up anthroposophy penetrate to the spiritual source that can also produce the impulse to be creative as an artist. Thoughts formed on the basis of anthroposophical insight exist in their own right and one simply does not have the desire to give them symbolic form in some kind of half-baked art. On the other hand when we experience the reality that anthroposophy reveals, the desire arises to let it come alive in colour and form. Those colours and forms exist in their own right and do not represent ideas; they do so just as little, or as much, as a lily or a lion represent an idea.

This is of the very essence of anthroposophical life and anyone visiting the Goetheanum and using their eyes rather than their dogmatic intellect will have found genuine attempts in artistic expression rather than symbols or allegories.

Something I had to say over and over again in speaking of the design concept of the Goetheanum is that it would be quite impossible to engage an artist who would create a home for anthroposophy in the Classical, Gothic or Renaissance style. We could have done so if anthroposophy were no more than a body of knowledge, of ideas. Anthroposophy is a way of life, however; it means taking hold, both in and through the human being, of all that is human and of the world.

The initiative to build the Goetheanum, taken by friends of anthroposophy, could only be brought to realisation by letting the design, down to the smallest detail, arise from the same living spirit that is the source spring of anthroposophy itself. I have sometimes used the metaphor of a nut in its shell. The shell certainly cannot be called a symbol of the nut. It has however been formed out of the same laws and principles as the nut. In the same way the building can only be a shell the form and images of which reveal in art the spirit that lives in the word when anthroposophy uses the language of ideas. Every style in art has in fact been born out of a spirit that also came to expression in the ideas of a philosophy.

The style of architecture that developed for the Goetheanum arose entirely in the sphere of art; symmetry, repetition and so on had to give way to living organic form principles. The auditorium for instance had seven columns on either side. Only corresponding columns on the left and the right had matching capitals. Apart from that, every succeeding capital was an evolution in metamorphosis from the preceding one. The whole had arisen out of artistic feeling; the element of thought had not come into it. It simply had not been possible to repeat the same design for different places; every form was individually created in its particular place, just as the smallest part of an organism has its own individual and necessary form for its own particular place.

The mystical significance that has been attached to the fact that there are seven columns does not exist. The number of columns is entirely the result of artistic feeling. As the form of one capital developed out of another, artistic feeling had taken us to a point with the seventh column where we could go no further without returning to the motif of the first column.

I think we are not deceiving ourselves if we say that not everyone looked at the building with prejudiced eyes. There have been many people over the years who were prepared to look with open and unbiased eyes, aesthetically, at something that had arisen from open and unbiased feeling.

Goethe spoke out of his own feeling for art when he said that when nature begins to reveal her open secret, those to whom it is revealed feel an irresistible longing for her most worthy exponent, which is art. He also said that beauty manifested the hidden laws of nature, laws that would have remained hidden for ever if beauty did not exist.¹ The notion has come up in our modern age that true knowledge of the things of nature can only be presented by developing theories as to the laws of nature. But what if nature were creating those things out of an artistic impulse? This would mean that anyone caught up in the prejudice that nature can only be presented in terms of rational thought would be unable to grasp the whole of it. And that is indeed the case. Having penetrated the secrets of nature in our ideas in a way that is truly alive, we find that something remains that cannot be reached by means of thought; it can only be reached if we change from the thoughtful to the artistic approach in heart and mind. That was how Goethe felt when he wrote the lines referred to above. The Goetheanum was created out of that kind of feeling.

Anyone who considers anthroposophists to be a sect will find it easy to see the symbolism of sectarian ideas in the architectural design of the Goetheanum. But anthroposophy is anything but sectarian. It seeks to be wholly and completely human in all it does, without prejudice.

The inside of the small cupola was painted not by starting from figurative ideas and applying colour; instead, colour was first experienced and the figurative aspect developed out of this. If we give ourselves up to colour, the creative powers of the soul are enhanced until the forms and figures are actually demanded by the colours themselves. As you paint you come to feel – in the moments of creative work – as if nothing else existed in the world but living, weaving colours, colours that are creative in themselves and beget realities of being.

Man in his inner being does not belong to the earth;
he is of another world and therefore needs forms that
belong to him in his character as a native of that world.

—Rudolf Steiner, The Arts and Their Mission, p. 21, from a lecture given in Oslo in 1923.

• 1. J. W. Goethe, Sprüche in Prosa.

When Goethe in ripe old age looked back upon the whole development of his life, he named three men who had had most influence upon him; Linné, the Naturalist, Spinoza, the Philosopher, and Shakespeare, the Poet.

To Linné he placed himself in opposition and through this reached his own point of view regarding the forms of plants and animals. From Spinoza he borrowed a mode of expression which enabled him to give out his ideas in a thoughtful language which was deeper and richer than that of Philosophers. In Shakespeare he found a spirit that fired his own poetic gift according to the inmost demands of his own being.

Anyone who can gain an insight to the soul strivings of Goethe as these comes to light in his Götz and Werther, where he reveals what he had gone through inwardly, can also see what took place in him when first he absorbed himself in Hamlet.

A vivid impression of this is to be obtained from his statement that Shakespeare is an interpreter of the World-spirit itself. Goethe holds that Shakespeare's genius openly reveals what the World-spirit hides within Nature's activities. His whole attitude towards Shakespeare is expressed in this statement.

It is only within the last five hundred years that what we to-day call Intellectualism has taken possession of our soul life. In the outlook which obtained earlier the soul of humanity was active in a different way. Understanding through thinking played a secondary part.

A battle against the overlordship of thought is visible in Goethe's soul. He still wishes to experience the world inwardly with different soul forces. But the mental life which surrounds him makes thought the basic element in the activities of the soul. So Goethe asks himself: Can one get into intimate touch with the surrounding world through thought? Such a possibility stirs him deeply and out of the overwhelming effect it has upon his soul, his Faust is born.

Goethe presents Faust to us as a teacher who had worked for ten years in a period which saw the advent of Intellectualism. As yet however Intellectualism had only a slight hold upon human nature, and in Philosophy, Jurisprudence, Medicine and Theology Faust does not as yet recognize it as a power which could carry conviction. He could, as a man of science, fall back upon the understanding of an earlier time when men realized spirit in Nature without the intermediary of intellectuality. He wishes to obtain direct vision of spirit. What Faust went through in vacillation between thinking experience and spiritual vision became for the young Goethe an inner battle.

Hamlet and other Shakespeare characters arose before Goethe's soul as he passed through this inner battle. Hamlet, who obtains his life's tasks through soul experiences which appear to him as expressive of relationship to the Spiritual world and who not only is thrown through doubt into inaction, but also through the power of his intellect. The deep abyss of the soul life is contained in Hamlet's words:

The native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought.

The youthful Goethe had often looked into this abyss and the glimpses he had caught of it intensified his sympathy with Hamlet's character.

By following the soul life of Goethe one is led from the Hamlet frame of mind to that of Faust and thus one can experience a bit of Goethe biography. It has not got to be proved through documents, neither need it be historic in the ordinary sense of the term. And yet it will reflect history better than what is usually so named.

One gains a picture of Faust as he lived in Goethe, as the teacher born out of a soul condition which oscillates between intellectualism and spiritual vision. During ten years Faust instructs his pupils under these conditions of wavering and one can well imagine to oneself Hamlet as one of these pupils; not the Hamlet of the Danish Saga but Shakespeare's Hamlet. For Goethe has represented in his Faust the teacher who could have Hamlet's 'native hue of resolution sickled o'er with the pale cast of thought.' In this light Shakespeare is the poet who has before his soul a character born out of the waning of consciousness of the Middle Ages and a New Age. Goethe is the one who wants to penetrate into that world outlook in which such characters develop fully.

In many Shakesperian characters Goethe could feel the reflection of this waning consciousness. This brought Shakespeare so near to him, for it was connected with his feelings for Art. Into this feeling for Art Spinoza's intellectualism penetrated and in Spinoza there existed already that mental activity which gives the thought life of modern humanity its soul bearings.

This 'Spinoza-ism' became tolerable to Goethe only when he came to stand before Italian works of art and could feel in these works as an artist that necessity of material creating which Spinoza could clothe only in pure thought.

Together with Herder he had adopted Spinoza's philosophy but only in Italy could he write from the aspect of art what was impossible through reading Spinoza; 'There is necessity, there is God.'

In order to feel on sure ground in Art, Goethe realized the need of an outlook upon the world, but this outlook would have to include Art as one of its most important elements and not relegate it to an inferior place. The creative spirit in the world revealed itself to Goethe in Nature but he found in Shakespeare the artist who revealed the Spirit in his own creation.

Goethe felt deeply how from his inmost being man must strive toward scientific knowledge, but he felt no less deeply how in this striving thought can wander away in error. He felt himself thus in danger with Spinoza. With Shakespeare he felt himself within the world of direct, artistic outlook. Goethe has himself spoken of his relation to Shakespeare in these words: 'A necessity which excludes more or less or entirely all freedom, as with the ancients, is no longer endurable to our way of thinking; Shakespeare came near this however, for he made necessity moral and thus joined the old world to the new world to our joyful astonishment.'

In his youth Goethe found the way to the 'New World' through Shakespeare because Shakespeare understood in his dramatic characters how to hold the balance between the impelling necessity of Nature's activities in man and his freedom in his thought life. The mutual relationship of these two elements must be experienced to-day if we do not want to loose hold of reality through our life of thought.

NOTE BY EDITOR: In the last lecture of the recent course on dramatic art¹ Dr. Steiner put before us an interesting point of view regarding the representation of Hamlet's character on the stage.

It has always been the custom to make of Hamlet a deeply philosophic character and in rendering the great soliloquies this side of his being has always been brought into evidence. But Dr. Steiner in a reading which he gave of the 'To be or not to be' soliloquy, showed a new aspect of the Hamlet mind which amplifies what he has written in the above article. Hamlet's mental penetration was not that of a New World philosopher. He did not 'reason out' as a modern thinker does. His thoughts oscillate as do his feelings and it is an error to attribute ponderous weight to the statements in this particular speech where the man himself was merely reflecting his passing, changing feelings and ideas. A modern thinker would never have spoken of death as 'the undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveller returns,' when but a few moments previously he had encountered and spoken with his dead Father.

Hamlet is typical of a transition state when the ascendancy of logical reasoning over inner feeling as a perceptive faculty was not established as it became in times nearer our own.

Dr. Steiner's rendering of the speech in what one might name a 'homely' way would probably offend such actors who only see the philosopher in Hamlet, but it is true to the historic aspect of human development in which Hamlet stands as a remarkably complete symbol.

The full significance and true aspect of Hamlet's outlook therefore can be grasped through Anthroposophy.

• 1. Speech and Drama, 19 lectures, Dornach, 5th to 23rd September, 1924.

Men could not reject a spiritual knowledge such as Anthroposophy, if they would but observe with the necessary attention the everyday phenomena of their own mental life. For these phenomena are eloquent witnesses to its reality.

On the one side, looking towards the inner life of man, there stands the fact of Memory. In memory, the experiences man has with the things of the world are preserved in the soul. On the other side is external Perception, behind which the thoughtful human soul feels irresistibly impelled to surmise and seek the inner secrets of the World of Nature.

In both directions, the conscious experience of man comes up against a 'nothingness.'

That which comes to us in memory is no longer there in the outer world. External perception can indeed stimulate, but it cannot bring forth the memories of past experience. On the other hand, careful observation will shew that for the experience of memory man is in every case dependent on his own bodily nature. We feel the memory rising up into consciousness from an exercise of our bodily nature. Science can indeed confirm this, but the feeling is sufficiently certain even without it. Science will shew for instance how memory is impaired by a diseased condition of certain parts of the body. These proofs however only corroborate what is directly evident to the naïve consciousness of man,—provided this be combined with accuracy of observation, which may very well be the case, for the naïve feeling need not be superficial; it is quite able to perceive deeply and truly. Thus in the act of memory man feels how there arise out of his body the forces which—as though with unseen spiritual hands take hold of facts which are no longer there in the world of external Nature. This experience is certainly more delicate, less tangible than others which we have through the immediate sense of life. Yet in its way its evidence is no less certain than that of pains or pleasures, for example, where we know with the sureness of a direct experience that their source is in the body.

On the other side we have our perceptions of the outer world. The life of the soul comes up against these perceptions; it cannot penetrate through them to that which they reveal. Impelled as it is to surmise that something is there revealing itself,—with its own activity it can go no further. Here it has reached its 'nothingness.' It cannot but surmise that it stands at the frontier of a world full of inner content, and yet, as it seeks to penetrate through the perceptions, it feels itself—spiritually—reaching out into the void.

We need only take one more step in this reflection. Behind Memory there begins the region where our own body—for the ordinary consciousness—vanishes into the unknown. Behind Perception, external Nature does the same. The relations of these two to the conscious inner experience of man are of the same kind. Now in Memory, with its foundation in a bodily activity, there arises Thought. For it is in thought that our memories of past experience come forth into conscious life. But thought is also kindled by outward Perception. That which manifests itself to us from without, is brought home to our inner consciousness in thought. Thus do the inner life of Man and the external world of Nature meet in the element of Thought.

And is not this a meeting as it were of old acquaintances? With what a happy sense of kinship does the soul contrive to understand new things perceived in the light of old experience remembered. The strongest sense of the reality of life comes to the soul when it can do this. The inner life of memory, the outer world in perception, meet not as strangers but as friends, who have something to tell one another upon a common subject.

Now the inner force which lives in memory can be intensified. By working upon his soul, man can strengthen the force that shews itself in memory. This possibility, and the way in which it can be realised, are subjects which have frequently been dealt with in these columns.

In doing this, man strikes and penetrates into his bodily nature more deeply than in the process of ordinary consciousness. With the deepened, strengthened force of memory he now perceives himself to be discovering those bodily activities which—as we saw—are always involved in the normal memory process. Indeed, lie not only approaches but penetrates right into them. Vet it is nothing of a bodily nature which comes before the soul at this point. We must picture it as follows. It is as though a shadow-figure, seen against a wall, were suddenly to come to life and step towards us. It is familiar to its because thought is familiar. For it stands there in the soul in just the same way as a thought in ordinary consciousness. But while a thought is not alive, this is alive. It is an 'Imagination.' Like a thought, it is justified by its relationship to a reality. It is therefore not in the least what we should ordinarily call a fancy or imagination. For we perceive at once that it relates to a reality,—in the very same way as the thought in which we hold a memory relates to a reality.

But there is this difference. The thought refers to a reality which was once there in our experience and is now no longer there. The Imagination—though in the very same manner—brings before our soul a reality which in the ordinary experience of life has never yet occurred to us. We have in fact entered a sphere of spiritual perception.

We have penetrated into our own body, yet it is not' Body' but 'Spirit' which we have struck here. It is indeed the Spirit which underlies the Body. We take hold of it 'with spiritual hands,' in the same way as we take hold of past experiences when they arise in ordinary memory.

And as in Thought external Nature meets the inner life of Man, so in Imagination the Spirit of Nature meets the human Spirit. The Spirit that is in Man, taken hold of in Imagination, goes out to meet the Spirit that is in Nature, and this Spirit too reveals itself now in Imagination. To the ordinary consciousness, Thought arises in the act of Memory and kindled by Perceptions from the outer world. To the strengthened consciousness, Imagination arises in the living inner experience of the soul itself, and kindled by a no less living experience of the outer world.

All this can be achieved in the full light of consciousness, where self-deception, suggestion, auto-suggestion and the like are quite impossible. Anyone who reaches true Imagination, lives in it as he lives in the most certain thought, the reference of which to a reality is unmistakable. When we have ceased to allow the slightest vagueness or unconscious element in our experience of the relation of our thoughts to reality, we shall certainly not fall into illusions in our experience of Imagination.

Herein lies the reason why the man who has attained true 'Imaginative Experiences' can speak of them to one who has not yet done so, while the latter can accept his statements with full conviction without giving himself up to any blind belief in authority. In effect, he who tells of Imaginations is only speaking of what is there in the listener himself—beneath the level of his memories—as his own reality of Spirit. In every-day life when a memory is recalled to a man, not by his own thought alone but by another man in conversation with him, he will say to himself, 'I certainly did have that experience in the course of my life, in my ordinary consciousness.' So when he listens to a statement of Imaginative Experience he can say, 'That is I myself in my spiritual perceptions, hitherto unknown to my ordinary consciousness. The man who tells of true Imaginations has only helped me to call up into consciousness what my consciousness had not yet called up for itself. My relation to him is of the same kind as my every-day relation to a man who might remind me of something that had slipped my memory.'

The World of the Spirit, in effect, is simply a thing 'forgotten' by the ordinary consciousness, which—strengthened and intensified—can rediscover it like a returning memory of past experience.

This article was written in 1923 and is included in the volume Der Goetheanum-Gedanke inmitten der Kulturkrisis der Gegenwart.

In the article published in Das Goetheanum weekly on October 7, 1923, in which I discussed Michael's fight with the Dragon, I was obliged to draw attention to the constitution of the human soul in the comparatively recent past. I pointed out that in the XVIII century certain ideas were still current which were regarded as a basis of knowledge. Today they are relegated to the realm of fantasy.

Goethe's Weltanschauung will only appear as a living reality in the eyes of our contemporaries if this fact is given due consideration. The seventies and eighties of the XVIII century were the years in Goethe's life when his Weltanschauung took the direction which determined its future fruitful development. By infusing scientific knowledge into his mode of thinking Goethe provided that inner impulse which is so characteristic of his thought. It was not by rejecting a genuine study of nature, but by working in harmony with nature, that he wished to reach the heights of a spiritual conception of the universe. We shall only understand this inner impulse aright if we follow the movement of ideas in his epoch, and if we realise that within this cultural environment Goethe's aims and ideas met with no response. Many phenomena confirm this; the following is perhaps not the least important.

In the year 1782 there appeared the translation of the book ‘Des Erreurs et de la Vérité’ by the worthy Matthias Claudius. It was the work of Saint-Martin, the so-called Unknown Philosopher, and describes the attempt to arrive at a satisfactory Weltanschauung by returning to the primordial traditional wisdom of mankind. It showed at the same time that those who thought along these lines saw no possibility, from the conclusions derived from scientific thinking, of arriving at a form of cognition that was inwardly satisfying. It was Goethe's heartfelt wish to attain this knowledge.

The fact that Goethe's contemporaries could feel a need for the ideas adumbrated by Saint-Martin is a circumstance or phenomenon which may be of particular interest today.

The scientific mode of thinking strove for a conception of the world which totally excluded moral impulses as irrelevant for the purpose of true knowledge. In the eyes of natural science moral ideas are simply something that dawns in the human soul independently of the ideas of nature. In accordance with its character the physical evolution of the world to which man directs his attention must be envisaged, both in respect to its origin and its end, without the impact of moral ideas. In the cosmic nebulae from which worlds emerge and which in their turn ultimately give birth to man, no moral impulses are at work.

There could still be found amongst Goethe's circle those who rejected this conception of nature, but who hankered after something akin to what Matthias Claudius wanted to give through his translation of Saint-Martin's work. Goethe however was wholly committed to a scientific approach to nature. Others wanted to unite the knowledge of man and moral world order independently of the kingdom of nature; Goethe wanted to find this union within the realm of nature.

Saint-Martin speaks of a serious primordial dereliction, of an original sin. Man had originally been fashioned in his true being by a supersensible world. This no longer applies, he is no longer the same being: he shows he has now become another being. He has lost his original innocence and has clothed himself with the substances of the sensible world in a manner unbefitting his original being. This fall from grace extends even to the different manifestations of life—one of these manifestations is language, for example. The kind of language now spoken in the different countries of the world no longer suffices to express by means of words the fundamental nature of things. Man is obliged to confine himself to their external aspect. To pre-lapsarian man was assigned original language which was integrated with the creative forces acting in world events.

In these ideas the natural order is associated with the moral order. In a world where natural law reigns there is no place for this moral order.

For the followers of Saint-Martin all knowledge consisted fundamentally in acquiring once again man's original disposition of soul by actively developing the inner life.

It is this desire, this tendency which pervades the books of Saint-Martin. They could only satisfy those who saw in scientific knowledge an aberration, a consequence of man's fall. His disciples could not choose but think that this knowledge was the product of original sin; true understanding, they felt, can only be acquired independently of natural science, of a scientific perception of nature.

This attitude of mind lends to his works something which is alien to our modern mentality. And Goethe must have felt the same. How far he was familiar with the work of Saint-Martin is not important; what matters is that in Goethe's day there were men whose spiritual needs could be satisfied by a predilection for Saint-Martin. This characterises the state of mind of many of Goethe's contemporaries whose opinions he was obliged inwardly to disavow.

Goethe himself was unable to stand aloof from the scientific observation of nature. He could only arrive at an understanding of the spirit if observation of natural phenomena revealed this spirit to him. For Goethe, man has not lost his state of innocence, he still bears it within him, though at first he is not aware of it. But it is precisely because he is unaware of it in early life that man is able to acquire by his own persistent efforts an understanding of his true being. Insight into nature for Goethe is not the consequence of man's fall but the means of self-realisation which is possible at every moment. In this way Goethe has incorporated in his Weltanschauung the true idea of inner freedom. It is nowhere explicitly stated in his works, but it is implicit in them. He who seeks will find it if he opens himself to the Goethean way of thinking. We shall only see Goethe today in the right perspective if we are aware of this. In the eighties he felt an irresistible longing to escape from his cultural environment. In Italy, it was not Italy he sought. As a result of his experiences there he found himself, his true being. If we follow Goethe during his Italian journey, we see the progressive development of the Goethe to whom the world owes so much.

It is in man's true and sincere striving that the element of freedom is to be found. In Goethe we see the new outlook, the new horizon that mankind owes to his influence. And it is this also which unites him within the Michael impulse. He was unable to achieve this union in an environment which was alien to him, but he found it, however, by a form of contemplation which was peculiarly his own.

For this reason Goethe is so near today to those who are seeking knowledge of the spirit. He often felt himself a stranger to his age; every seeker after the spirit feels himself perfectly at home with him today.

Anyone knowing Benedetto Croce's Aesthetic as Science of Expression will look forward with eager anticipation to the study on Goethe by this distinguished man, published first in 1918 and available since 1920 in the delightful German rendering by Julius Schlosser.¹

The perusal of this book may perhaps be described as an experience of a dramatic nature. We pass from the Author's Preface through the chapters on 'Moral and Intellectual Life' and 'The Life of the Poet and Artist,' and come to the description of Werther. Throughout this portion of the book we are filled with expectation. Every page seems fraught with the promise: there will arise before us a highly individual and attractive picture of Goethe, conceived with open-hearted sympathy, portrayed with artistic skill.

The opening words already raise our hopes:—'During the sad days of the world war I re-read Goethe's works and gained deeper consolation and greater courage from him than I could have gained perhaps in equal measure from any other poet. This inspired me with a desire to write down certain critical ideas which suggested themselves again during my reading of his works and which had always led me to a true understanding of them.'

Croce would like to enter into Goethe without that heavy burden with which, alas, inartistic learning has so long encumbered him. How few among our Goethe students seem to be aware that he too has the right to be seen in the picture which emerges from his Works—from the real gift of his spirit to the world. In the prevailing Goethe literature the Works are too often eclipsed behind the Life, with all the mass of biographical detail which is available in his case. In this matter Croce preserves his clarity of vision. 'He who said that if Goethe had not been a great poet in verse, he would yet have been a great artist in life, made a statement which cannot be defended in the strict sense of the word, as it is impossible to imagine the life he lived without the poetry which he produced.' Croce recognises that in Goethe above all the Work of the poet and his Life must be seen as one; for Goethe himself incessantly brings life and freshness, from a deep self-observation, to his great vision of the World. 'Nevertheless,' continues Croce, 'the author of the statement has traced in a rather picturesque manner the relation of Goethe's life to his poetry, a relation which is like that of a whole to one of its parts, a very conspicuous part. For is it not true that the greater number of volumes of Goethe's works (even omitting his letters and his "conversations ") consist of reminiscences, annals, diaries, accounts of his travels, and that several other volumes contain autobiographical matter interspersed or concealed, to which critics are still endeavouring to discover the keys?'

By the splendid clearness with which he sees this twofold aspect, Croce is enabled to place the picture of Goethe in such a light that we feel at first: Here we have Goethe's position in the history of culture most pregnantly expressed. 'His own biography, together with his works, offer us a complete and classic course in noble humanity, per exempla et praecepta. It is a treasure which in these days deserves to be used to a much greater extent by educators, and by those who would educate themselves.'

Croce would eliminate from his portrait of Goethe the 'wildness of genius' which is read into him by the fertile imaginations of some people.

For they, wishing to 'live' as they conceive it, scorn the 'banality' of real life—which, as it happens, cannot be without gravity and earnestness. '… the personality of Wolfgang Goethe consists of calm virtue, earnest goodness and justice, wisdom, balance, good sense, sanity, and, in a word, all those qualities which are generally laughed at as being "bourgeois." . . . He was deep but not "abysmal," as some critics of to-day would wish to consider him. He was a man of genius, but not diabolical.'

The fulness of an all-round human nature, to which Goethe in his whole life and work inclined, is powerfully stressed by Croce:—'And what, in substance, did he teach? To be above all, whatever else one may be, thoroughly and wholly human, ever working with all one's faculties in harmony, never separating feeling and thought, never working on externals or as a pedant; a task which, in the turbulent years of youth and fascinated by eccentric minds like Hamann, Goethe may have conceived in a somewhat material or fanciful sense, but which he immediately deepened, and therefore made clearer and corrected, rendering concrete its mystical and ineffable totality by determining it more closely.'

Goethe in Croce's description comes before us as the man who would educate himself 'not to desire and to dream, but to will and to act.' And as Goethe stands before him in this light, Croce is able to place Werther, in a masterly way, both in relation to Art and Life. The life which Werther lives is far removed from that of the poet who creates him. Werther is ill. Goethe feels how possible it is for the Werther illness to take hold on life. For him it becomes a question of feeling the illness truly, and of truly describing it. It is as a healthy man that he undertakes the task. Croce calls Werther, in relation to Goethe's own state of soul, 'a vaccination fever rather than a real malady.' With clear discrimination Goethe's own inner condition is removed from all that drives Werther into the calamity. 'This explains the childishness which makes us smile and almost feel embarrassed when we read the account of, and the documents concerning, the relations of young Goethe with Charlotte Buff and with her betrothed and husband, excellent, patient Kestner. These are matters which biographers and anecdote-writers have in truth emphasized in much too gossiping a fashion, usually misunderstanding their psychological meaning and yielding to the bad advice of immersing again and drowning the work of art in biographical material, by exaggerating and perverting the legitimate ethical interest which Goethe's person arouses. . .

In Croce's eyes the creation of Werther takes place in Goethe's life as an artistic, ethical catharsis. Goethe wished to make the Werther fever an inner artistic experience, so that he might by this very means thoroughly cure himself of all attacks. 'Werther—"unhappy Werther"—was not an ideal for the poet as he was for his contemporaries. Goethe immortalises in Werther neither the right to passion nor nature versus society, nor suicide, nor the other ideas we have just mentioned; that is to say, he does not depict them as mental conditions which, at that moment, predominate in him. But he depicts the "sorrows," as the title expresses it, the sufferings and, finally, the death of young Werther; and just because he looks upon Werther's fate as sorrow, barren sorrow, and its unfolding calculated to lead not to the joy and delight of feeling oneself superior to and rising high above others, but to self-destruction, the book is a liberation or a catharsis…'

Unlike so many others, Croce will not see in Werther 'a sublime legend of love.' On the contrary, to him it is 'a book of malady,' and the Werther way of loving is 'an aspect or an acute manifestation of the malady.' When his mother and his friends urge him to bestir himself and take up fruitful work, Werther replies, 'But am I too not active now? And after all is it not all the same whether I count peas or lentils?' It is the answer of a man given to 'idling, day-dreaming, nay to passionate raving.' Goethe—as Croce very properly remarks—confronts this 'hero' of his book, not as one having ought in common with him, but as a calm and clear observer seeking the cure for a disease. Werther is 'the work of one who knows, of one who understands, and who, without being Werther, discerns Werther completely, and, without raving with him, feels his heart throb with his.'

When we have read thus far in Croce's book, our experience in thought has been not unlike the opening of a drama. With anticipation growing more tense from page to page, we ask ourselves, what will the author eventually have to say on Goethe?

Then comes the chapter 'Wagner the Pedant'—a real surprise, quite in keeping with the quality of drama. For Croce comes forward with a kind of vindication of Wagner's character in Faust. It is as though he had been annoyed once too often by the literary pedants who mock at Wagner in the words of Faust, and feel themselves, no doubt, with quite a touch of genius, nay of the Faust-nature, as they do so. Against these pedants wearing the mask of 'the Free,' Croce comes out with a kind of apologia for Wagner. 'I confess that I cherish a certain tender feeling for Wagner, the famulus, Dr. Faust's assistant. I like his sincere and boundless faith in knowledge, his honest ideal of a serious student, his simple straightforwardness, his unaffected modesty, the reverence which he shews … towards his great master.'

Indeed, a strange antithesis shines through in Croce's description. Faust with his whims and worries, his fancies, his indeterminate spiritual longing, seems like a half-unsteady dreamer and complainer beside the sterling Wagner who steers straight forward to the certain goal of his scholarship. And a curious touch of thought suggests itself to Croce:—'Be careful what you do, when you resolve to take a wife: lest, if you do not happen to choose one of those timid silent creatures, such as Jean Paul frequently places beside his erudite maniacs, but there fall to your lot as a companion a Faust in petticoats, a female Titan, a Valkyrie, you receive no longer merely biting philosophical lashes, but find yourself the object (and this you hardly deserve) of aversion, hatred and nausea…'

Croce does not wish the tenderly loved Wagner so terrible a fate. 'For Wagner's ideal is neither more nor less than the humanistic ideal … the admiring study of ancient histories in order to deduce from them prudential maxims and rules, … and the search for the laws of Nature in order to turn them to social utility.'

Is this 'vindication' of Wagner no more than a dramatic interlude; will it but serve to reveal Goethe's Faust in his real greatness?—The reader feels impelled to ask the question. Great is the tension at this point.

The thickening of the plot—and the catastrophe—these I would describe in the next number.

• 1. English Version: Goethe, by Benedetto Croce, with an Introduction by Douglas Ainslie, Methuen, 1923.—The passages which we take from this translation do not always convey quite the same shade of thought as in the rendering from which Dr. Steiner quotes.

Having found in Croce's 'Goethe' the clear and penetrating thoughts about Werther, and reading on, we come to the chapters where he deals with Faust. At this point our deep enjoyment of the book first turns into confused astonishment. Portrayed in Croce's thought, the earlier scenes still have the charm of Goethe's living poetry. But his further creations in Faust appear like abstract schemes of thought in Croce's description. We lose our breath, in our artistic feeling, as we follow it.

Croce's peculiar insight, which he applied so well to Werther, still guides him through the scenes of Faust written by Goethe in his youth. He says: 'Goethe, when he presented Faust in the manner in which he presents him in these early scenes, had not yet become a conscious critic of "Faustism," but rather agreed with it; and for this part, too, his true and effective criticism (if it may be called criticism) is entirely poetical, similar to that which we have already noticed in the case of Werther and Wagner, consisting, namely, in the very sincerity and fulness of the representation.'

But all that flowed from Goethe's spirit into Faust when he lifted his humanity stage by stage to an all-embracing outlook on the world,—all this, for Croce's way of thought, loses its life and inner substance. Discerning as he is, this escapes him and falls away into a realm of lifeless, threadbare concepts.

Goethe himself, when he left the spheres of existence accessible to outer experience, did not fall into kingdoms of cold allegory or remote symbolism. His sure and certain instinct carried him into the real spiritual world, wherein alone Man in his full and true manifestation is to be found. He succeeded in portraying with poetic vitality and substance not only the external life, but the inner world of Man. When he did this, the result was no shadowy phantom-world of ideas, but the creative reality of the Spirit—able to make manifest even in the outer picture the fulness of its inner content. Such was Goethe's power. His poetic genius did not desert him when he ascended into spiritual realms. Thus his Faust remained alive and real, when—time after time as he returned to this work—he raised him one stage higher into that World which is revealed to seership alone.

Into these high regions Croce will not follow Goethe. So the full life in Goethe's Faust creation eludes his grasp. He sees cold allegories where Goethe presents living reality of Spirit. To Croce, only the part of Faust composed in Goethe's youth is a vital work; not so the portions created by the poet in his later life. This alone makes it possible for him to say: 'The sublime Faust of titanic strivings is quite forgotten in the new character, and hardly the identity of the name is sufficient to call him to mind. We might call him "Heinrich," as. poor Gretchen called him, some kind of Heinrich or Franz. And such he is and had to be for the greater unifying force of the tragedy which he causes, but of which he is not the protagonist.'

We are driven to ask, why is it that Croce's Goethe leads us to this dramatic entanglement in thought. It is that Croce lacks the power to penetrate to a full grasp of Goethe's nature. How did Goethe himself rise to the height of what Poetry—and all Art—was to him?—He carried his search for knowledge in the realm of Natural Science to the point where he could exclaim: Art is a making manifest of hidden Laws of Nature—Laws which would remain unmanifest for ever, but for the creative work of the Artist. By this perception, Goethe became the founder of a Science of Nature worthy of spiritual standards. True, this brought him into conflict with the 'recognised' Science which has become established in the last three or four centuries. Yet it was this his insight into Nature which carried him into lofty spheres of creation, where the Poet freely lives and moves in the World of the Spirit.

Here Croce does not follow Goethe. Wherever he meets him as scientist, in his researches into Nature, he finds him wanting. Croce is still entangled in the commonly accepted view of Nature. In this respect he says of Goethe: 'It may be (or rather it is certain) that in his idea of a Science of Nature which in the various species of phenomena should search for the primitive phenomenon (Urphänomen), which is an idea that can be thought and seen at the same time, he was wrong and did little honour to either science or poetry, as was the case, moreover, with all contemporary "natural philosophers." It may be (and it certainly is) that he was much mistaken in his bitter criticism of Newton, and in rejecting the use of mathematics in physical sciences The man who speaks thus cannot really fathom the depths of understanding where Goethe leads his Faust. Indeed from these passages we begin to understand why Croce feels 'a certain tenderness' for Wagner the famulus, while he inclines to criticise the character of Faust so harshly.

The sureness of touch which Croce shews in his treatment of Werther leaves him already when he comes to Goetz von Berlichingen. 'When dealing with Goetz too,' he says, 'it is necessary to set aside the prejudices handed down to us by the passionate utterances of Goethe's contemporaries… Goetz is very different from the Räuber of Schiller. Goethe could not breathe into his work the thrill of political passion and rebellion which he always lacked even when he was young and enthusiastic. He read the autobiography of this small feudatory and soldier who lived in the time of the Reformation, became fascinated by the events and customs described in it, and set himself to reproduce them by a process of condensation and dramatisation, following the method used by Shakespeare in the latter's historical English dramas.'

Croce fails to see that in dramatising the life-story of Gottfried von Berlichingen Goethe was striving for a dramatic style according to his own vision of the world. Indeed, the wrestling for adequate forms of style in Goethe's creation remains a hidden world to Croce. Hence he fails to do the poet justice where with all the power of his striving Goethe cannot bring his work to full formal perfection,—as in the case of Wilhelm Meister. To anyone who really enters into Goethe's nature, his efforts in form are all the more significant where for their very greatness the aims he sets himself are unattained. But to appreciate so 'Faustian' a striving in the poet, Croce has after all too much tenderness for Wagner the famulus.

If we were thus thrown into dramatic perplexity of thought while reading the middle parts of Croce's 'Goethe,' we find ourselves in the very catastrophe of the tragedy when we come to the chapter on the Second Part of Faust. Be it granted unreservedly:—Croce maintains throughout the book his greatness of style, which makes it a certain pleasure in the reading even where he drives us to exasperation. But our annoyance however gracefully evoked may none the less grow strong, when the scenes, where in the ripeness of old age Goethe leads his Faust on to the loftiest heights of humanity, are thus described: -' What was this? The play of imagination of an old artist, … master of innumerable figures and situations drawn from reality and from literature, who is glad to make them pass through his mind again, toying with them; and the wisdom of the mail, experienced in the world and human thought, who has already witnessed so many mental and moral vicissitudes, and without for this reason becoming sceptical or callous, has rather saved for himself a strong faith of his own. He is no longer roused to excessive enthusiasm or to violent contempt. His wisdom is often softened by a smile. Even his faith he expresses discreetly, sometimes borrowing a jesting tone… Neither must we think that there is, on the other hand, great philosophical depth in Faust II…' And from this height of his criticism, Croce recommends us thus to read the Second Part of Faust: 'After having gained some familiarity with Faust II, by means of a first reading, which should partake of the nature of a study of the text, it is advisable, when re-reading it, not to read it from beginning to end, as one does in the case of Werther or the story of Gretchen, but to open it here and there, in order to witness a phantasmagoria, to enjoy a little picture, to smile at a satirical description…'

I on the other hand would say: Having read Croce's book to the end, turn to Eckermann's 'Conversations with Goethe,' that you may bear the calamity.

Anyone looking beyond the immediate interests of the day feels that mankind is confronted by tasks such as have appeared only at important turning points in historical evolution. These tasks concern all people and touch all spheres of life. There are persons in the world who are inclined to perceive the seeds of decay and death everywhere in spiritual life, and who see a possibility of progress only in a rebirth of spiritual forces. To others, the decay proceeds only from the fact that there are widely extended groups of people who have turned away from well-tested traditions. But these are convinced that the old will have to seek new paths in order to lay hold of the heart and mind of man.

Social conditions have assumed a form which has led to shocking catastrophes and which conceals germs leading to new and overwhelming calamities. In consequence, for millions of people a material distress has resulted which words are powerless to describe, and only those who believe in the possibility of new methods in world economy can hope for alleviation.

A great conflict between the Occidental world and the world of the Orient is imminent. Many individuals are looking with anxious eyes at the possible consequences of the significant call sounding forth from America. How will that country, how will England, play the leading roles which have devolved upon them? How will the summons of these western powers be answered by what is to them the mystically dark Asiatic soul of the Japanese?

These are problems upon the solution of which depend, in the nearest future, the weal and woe of mankind; problems which involve the most commonplace every day experiences as well as the highest spiritual interests.

What is stated here contains something many people feel to be true. Confronting this, however, stands something else. Although we confess that a great deal ought to happen, a great weariness has invaded human souls; a lack of faith in human fortitude.

Much is being proposed from many sides; a belief that something might alleviate the great distress of the times gives no solution. In many quarters, indeed, people believe they know quite well what is needed; but such certainties have no effect upon the wills of human beings.

Before the great European catastrophe overtook the world, what eulogies could be heard about the spiritual and material progress of mankind! In view of the chaos which has engulfed the civilized world, how powerless does all that once lived in this progress now appear!

This experience might bring about a painful disillusionment, and yet we would doubt the human being himself if we halted before such a disillusionment. Indeed, many of the eulogists of the progress of the modern age have believed in the power of the spirit, since faith in the power of the human spirit lives even in materialism. Those who consider materialism the only sane thing believe that they have attained to their viewpoint through the power of the spirit.

We should feel in its full significance the fact that the materialistic paths travelled by this power of the spirit have led to a precipitous downfall of civilization; that world happenings have taken a course and brought results with which human beings cannot cope. It is only a step from the correct perception of this fact to a recognition of the necessity for this human spiritual power to seek other paths, paths leading deeper into reality.

Anyone who talks in this way encounters, as a matter of course, strong opposition. “What do you hope for now,” someone asks, “from a revolution in the spiritual life? Tell us how the world is to be relieved of her economic distress? First of all, people need bread; when this is provided, the way to the spirit will be found.”

Such a remark appears self-evident; and, on account of its “apparent” self-evidence, it evokes considerable applause. Yet it is only an illusion, not reality. For all economic conditions in human life are, in the final analysis, the result of spirit- borne human work. If the consequences are bad, the blame rests upon a spirit unequal to its tasks.

We shall understand this truth in its present significance only when, in spite of the turmoil of the age, we refuse to indulge in a blind criticism rejecting modern spiritual progress; that is, only when we recognize the good in modern progress. It is thus that we shall arrive at a direct insight into the reasons why this human progress is, in certain spheres, not commensurate with the course of cosmic progress.

Human progress is evident largely in the sphere of nature knowledge, and in the mechanical and technical sciences controlled by nature. Humanity has acquired sufficient power of thinking to engage in a study of mechanics, botany, archaeology, and so forth. The justification of this thinking power then operating in its own proper sphere should not be denied. But it uses the human spirit in order to master what lies outside the spirit. It comprehends nature through the spirit, while forgetting the spirit itself. Thus, science never grows weary of emphasizing that it presents nature to the human being the more faithfully the less it encourages him to color his ideas about nature with his spirit. It is not possible here to speak of the value of a knowledge of nature gained this way. But a humanity which educates itself largely by means of this soul activity is not able to produce ideas which have the sustaining force of the will. Will works in the human being by means of the spiritual force pulsating through it. And a spirit which is directed only to the unspiritual loses the sustaining power of its own being. The spirit which busies itself with nature can be strengthened in its own power, but cannot, in this manner, give itself a sustaining content.

Those who wish to place an independent spiritual conception on a par with a conception of nature believe themselves compelled to take this equality as a starting point. They do not mean by this a spiritual conception which continues to spin out what has been acquired from nature, but a spiritual knowledge which recognizes the spirit and its world as a living world, just as eyes, ears, and an intellect based upon them recognize nature as an unspiritual reality.

But the present-day world is able to speak of the living spirit only because of the traditions of the past. In bygone ages people were convinced that not only visible beings walk this earth and fashion the world's historical existence, but they were aware of the presence of active invisible spiritual beings in this world. They were aware by direct experience not only of living in a world of nature, but of living in a world of spirit. The modern human being has substituted an unreal thought experience for this spiritual experience. He is aware only of a world of thought; he is no longer directly conscious of the living events of the spirit. Indeed, the human being who has been educated in natural science rejects all knowledge of the spirit, and thus is dependent solely upon what of spiritual knowledge has been handed down from bygone ages. That, however, gradually fades away, loses its sustaining power in the human soul.

The spiritual science of Anthroposophy believes itself capable of acquiring a knowledge of the living spirit. It speaks of a spirit which lives in the human being, and not solely of thoughts which lead a picture existence in him. The fact that spirit reveals itself in the human being is for this spiritual science a result, just as in present natural science that which the intellect understands, based upon sense perception, is a result. This spiritual science does not speak of a nebulous spirit into which only the abstract intellect is interjected, but of a real spirit world with individual beings and facts; just as natural science speaks of individual plants, individual rivers, and other individual facts of nature.

This spiritual science believes that it may approach present- day tasks from two sides.

One approach is the cognition that spiritual science is knowledge and can be felt as such by all who permit themselves, through a healthy power of judgment, to be stimulated toward a satisfactory human relationship with the world and life; that, consequently, spiritual science does not bear the character of those methods of modern science which lead into this or that branch of knowledge, without the possibility of the human being gaining from that particular branch thoughts about his own nature and destination, or of his coming to a vigorous unfolding of his will. Spiritual science believes itself able to illumine thoughts, shape feelings full of devotion, and fashion a will filled with spirit. It speaks to the soul of every individual human being without considering the difference in degree of his education, because it seeks, indeed, its source in the pure spirit of science. Moreover, it reaches results to which every soul can respond with appreciation, out of a healthy judgment of human nature.

The other approach is fruitful for various fields of science and art, and for the religiously and socially inclined life.

The various sciences have, through their mode of research, arrived at a point where they need to be permeated by a living spiritual essence. The arts have their naturalistic epoch behind them; only out of the spirit can they again acquire a content which is not merely a superfluous imitation of nature. In the practical consequences of the Marxian mode of thought, social mass impulses have proved themselves impossible. They need the social forces which the individual human being discovers on his path to the spiritual life. Spiritual science will open the soul depths to religious experience, which otherwise would wither. By its very nature, spiritual science cannot itself create religion. We misunderstand spiritual science if we ascribe to it such intentions. But to the human being who can no longer discover religion in ancient spiritual movements, it will prove again that religion is the wellspring of a true humanness.

Spiritual science would give humanity what it needs, in order that ideas should again follow the course of world events. With such thoughts we shall certainly expose ourselves today to the easy reproach that we wish to say: Whoever would find his way into the needs encompassing all present-day people and life conditions has only to ask the Anthroposophists; they know how to solve all problems. Anyone who really knows how to live in the spirit of Anthroposophy, in the way intended by those who live at the Goetheanum [At Dornach, Switzerland], really does not suffer from megalomania, nor even from a lack of modesty; but would, quite modestly, point to what is lacking in the activity of modern mankind, and what must be sought in order that spiritual force, imbuing not only the head but the whole human being with soul force, may contribute to the great tasks now felt by many to be urgent. To be sure, such a mode of thought leads to something different from what is still expected by many people who place these tasks before their soul. Thus, the Occident and the Orient will come to a proper understanding only out of a spirit-imbued life, and not upon the bases upon which men build today. Nor will economic needs be alleviated until the right spirit points our direction.