The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Dear children,¹dear boys and girls of the Waldorf School! At the beginning of this assembly, we saw some of your schoolmates give a very good performance in eurythmy. But when they performed this moving poem about fiery flames ascending to heaven, your dear teachers and I had reason to be very sad. You see, when eurythmy reveals something from the heart, we feel the content of the revelation more strongly. And now something like this always reminds us of the sorrow, the pain and the suffering that your teachers and I experienced together because of the terrible flames that destroyed the Goetheanum, our dear Goetheanum. Your teachers had often told you about this Goetheanum, and you had heard what a great pleasure, what an inspiration, what a refreshment for your teachers’ hearts each visit to the Goetheanum was.

But then, my dear children, dear boys and girls, your teachers’ hearts and souls are deeply comforted again; they can say from the very depths of their souls that when something as beautiful as today’s assembly can happen here in school, it is a certain comfort to them. It is a comfort for them to see what they have been able to plant in the hearts and souls of their dear students, for this is something that belongs to them spiritually, and even though it demands great sacrifice and devotion, hard work and attentiveness on the part of your teachers, it is something that lasts. With these spiritual belongings it is possible to conquer any raging flame that reaches out to destroy the human heart. And in painful moments and in the nights they spend working, it is not only the Waldorf School itself, it is also what lives in you, dear boys and girls, that is the greatest comfort for those who guide you. And you can make this comfort grow by doing what you have to do with hard work and attentiveness and with love for your teachers.

Once upon a time there were two people who went for a long walk one Sunday. They walked over the fields in the glorious sunshine, and finally they went into the woods, where they rested in a beautiful place in the shade of the trees and talked to each other. They were very tired and had to rest for a long time, and while they rested, they talked. And it happened quite naturally—for these people were already old—that they came to talk about the joys and work and sorrow and pain in life.

And it happened that one of them said, “Oh, life does have its pleasures, too. It gives us so much beauty. I was once in a gallery, for instance, where I saw pictures by many painters, and my heart was glad. It was so beautiful and grand, my soul opened up.”

And the other one said, “We must remember the things like that. But just think, my friend, what it would be like if you had not learned to enjoy pictures when you were in school. You would have walked right by those pictures without understanding them at all. My dear friend, we must so often think back to how school gave us what makes life pleasurable and valuable.”

And the other said, “But you know, we don't need to go back that far. On this nice walk we took today, when we saw the birds flying in the air, our hearts opened up and we had to sing songs of joy. Would we have been able to do that if we hadn't been able to prepare our hearts for singing when we were in school?”

And a thought occurred to the other one: “We could have learned that later. But when you learn something later, it doesn't come so fresh from your heart.”

And while they were lying there driving their tiredness away, one of them grew very uplifted and happy inside, and said, “Oh, Nature is so beautiful; there is so much to find in Nature. But you know, we can understand Nature better and better all the time. If we learned to imitate Nature in the poems we say, for instance.” And since he was in a mood to have fun, he recited a poem for his friend that ended in “Cock-a-doodle-doo!” And they were glad, not only because they could hear the cock crow, but because they were able to be so full of life and feel all this, having learned to identify with what was out in Nature.

When you are sad, it is a comfort to think back on your time in school. You cannot help but realize that here in the Waldorf School your teachers are making an effort to shape your lives so that later, in times of joy and sorrow, your many vivid recollections of the Waldorf School will be a great comfort to you. And then you will have serious times. You will realize that you would not be able to live if you could not work. And we would not be able to work if we had not learned anything sensible. And now think about how your teachers are working so that you will be able to work and live in the right way later on in life. The men and women who are your teachers are thinking ahead to your later years. I want you to inscribe that deeply on your heart. When we have a beautiful festive assembly like the one today, we are sure in our hearts that all of you can learn for life’s sake. And if you can say to yourselves while you are in school, “Now, we will try to learn not only what is pleasant for us, but also what is unpleasant,” then even what is unpleasant will become a pleasure and a joy for you. Later on in life, the pleasure for which you once had to work so hard will come to you.

These are all things we always have in mind. Here in this school, we are meant to prepare a good later life for you.

Our oldest students have felt this, and it was a beautiful feeling, dear students in the upper grades, to hear you express how you feel in this Waldorf School, to hear you say that you want to stay here as long as you can possibly go on learning, that you want to be taught here in same the way in which you have been taught until now, right up to the point when you step out into life.

There are great difficulties involved in this, many obstacles to overcome. We will have to experience these huge obstacles personally. We will try to overcome many different obstacles in order to achieve what ought to be achieved. This may already have inspired hearts that will strike you down for your ideals. The background for this was Emil Molts founding of this school.

Now, my dear children, dear boys and girls, here is something that I have always said to you: If you love your teachers,—and they have real love for you!—then your love for them will be the power that allows their best guidance to enter your hearts and souls. This is why I am not going to finish what I have to say. I want you to finish it. I want to ask you especially whether you will try to apply hard work and attentiveness to what you want, to your life’s goals, while you are here. If, from the bottom of your hearts, you do want to apply these things, then finish the words that I have spoken to your hearts; then say to me. .. [the children shout to Dr. Steiner that they will do it.].

• 1. The first Goetheanum, a massive wooden building, burned to the ground on New Year’s Eve of 1922-23. Rudolf Steiner wrote about this building in Wege zu einem neuen Baustil [Toward a New Style of Architecture], 5 lectures given in Dornach, 1914, publ. Stuttgart, 1957, and in Der Baugedanke des Goetheanum [“The Architectural Idea of the Goetheanum”], one lecture given in Bern, 1921, publ. Stuttgart, 1958.

Dear children, dear boys and girls! [Dr. Steiner turns to the first graders and says:] Many teachers have spoken this morning. I am sure you know what a teacher is. A teacher is a good person. But we need to know why a teacher is a good person. You have already learned from your parents what a good person is. Good people have many qualities, but there is one quality they have in particular: Good people love children. Your parents are such good people because they have loved you so much. And because they love you, they are sending you to school here, where you will have teachers who love you.

What should you do if you know that a teacher is a person who loves children? What should you do then? The ones who have already been here can tell you that, so ask the boys and girls whether they love their teachers. [The children loudly shout, “Yes!”] You see, they love their teachers.

Your teacher will be your second benefactor. Just think, you will learn what that means. Just like your parents, who have been and still are your benefactors, your teacher will also be your benefactor. The older children have already noticed something of how the teachers love them. And the further you go into the upper grades, the more certain you will become that you can grow up to be a good and capable person only if you learn something real and if you learn how to behave in life.

Dear children, many of you will not know what it means to be really good, and some of you think being bad is better than being good. Even while they are still in school, the older students are noticing that they are getting closer and closer to “real life,” as we call it, to having to find their way in life. They have a special reason to think about how you can never actually be a real proper person in life if you did not really love your teachers for being your great benefactors.

I want you to inscribe that in your understanding and your feeling, and also in your conscience. Just think of how deepseated that will be later on in life if it is inscribed in your understanding, your heart, and your conscience. You will really be able to think about what school made of you if you can inscribe it on your souls in this way.

Now, you are all coming here after a time in which each of you had to remember that there are benefactors among human beings, and that ultimately Nature is also our benefactor. But the last few days reminded you of humanity’s greatest benefactor, of the One who underwent suffering and death nearly two thousand years ago out of love for humanity, who gave the spirit to humanity through His resurrection. It was a time when you could remember this great benefactor of the earth and of humanity, the Christ. We are now entering the spring of Christ, of humanity’s greatest benefactor.

But by looking up to Him, by feeling what the Christ is, we learn what other benefactors can be. And you see, the reason why your teachers will be such good teachers for you is that they have tried hard to get to know the Christ; they have tried hard to turn their feelings toward the Christ in the right way at Easter, in the spring. But that is what you should have in mind right from the very beginning—that your teachers are filled with the strength that comes from this greatest of all humanity’s benefactors. Dear teachers, I know that I do not need to say this in any demanding way, but only as a fact: How you raise and instruct these children will really make them feel throughout their lives that the strength that enters your hearts through the Mystery of Golgotha makes it possible for you to be their benefactors.

Last of all I would like to turn to you parents, and to put it to you in a few words that you bring your children to the Waldorf School because you see something special in the being of the Waldorf School. This special character of the Waldorf School is not something to talk about now; we will do that another time. But I would like to briefly characterize the star we have chosen to guide our work, so to speak, as what is meant to flow into education and child-rearing as a result of observing the human being. This is meant to deepen the feeling of responsibility of all of those who work here in the Waldorf School.

That is why, dear parents, it should be especially emphasized today, as if we were taking a vow, that we are aware that the holiest of things has been brought here to us. We have nothing to offer in return except our deep feeling of responsibility. On one side we have what the teachers see in the parents’ decision to entrust their children to this faculty; on the teachers’ side is their intention to work devotedly, full of the responsibility and strength that is needed to make the children grow up to become what they should become in school. When we see this decision on one side and on the other the feeling of responsibility of a clear-sighted heart, we feel what this means; we see that the children who have come here are God’s gift to the earth and that they must grow up to be proper human citizens of the earth.

It is the purpose of any school to turn the children of God into citizens of earth. This will be a conscious matter for us and we will do it in the best way it can be done, out of our feeling of responsibility. I especially want to have said this to the parents.

This is the spirit we are trying to work out of, the spirit that you, my dear teachers, are trying to work out of. I would like to ask you parents to look into our school in this spirit and find out whether we are really in a position to do what you expect of us. It will be the greatest possible satisfaction for us if those who look at what we are doing with understanding are satisfied that we are striving to turn children of God into citizens of earth.

My dear children, boys and girls! It is always a pleasure for me when it is time to come see you here in school. As I was on my way here today, something strange came to me:

Once upon a time there were two children who went for a walk on Sunday. When they were on their way home, each child had a bouquet of flowers. One child said to the other, “Mybouquet is so pretty!” The other one said, “My bouquet is prettier than yours!” They each liked their own bouquet better, but one of them really did not like the other one’s bouquet. One child had a bouquet with some flowers that were full of sweet nectar, but it also had ordinary grass in it and even some ears of grain and some thistles. The other child’s bouquet had only sweet-smelling flowers in it. So the child with the sweet flowers said to the other one, “You know, I dont like your bouquet with all those kinds of things in it!” But the other child didn't like the bouquet with just sweet flowers in it, either.

Now, dear children, how do you think the story goes on? What happened was this: The child with the bouquet with the grain and the thistles had a story to tell the other one. Listen to what that child had to tell:

Once I went out walking on Sunday, and I fell asleep outside and dreamed a dream. And what did I dream? I was lying in a meadow, and all the big and little animals came and were talking with each other. There was a very strange teeny-tiny animal, and a great big animal. The teeny-tiny animal was a bee, and the big one was a calf. And the calf and the bee were talking together. The bee said, “Calf, you don't understand anything about plants, but I know all about them. I know which plants are sweet, and those are the ones I suck the honey out of. Then I take the honey to the people, and they really love the honey. If I didn't fly to all the flowers that smell nice, there would be no honey for the people.” And then the calf said, “You know, 7 couldn't live on just the flowers that smell sweet, the ones that taste so good to you. All the flowers you just fly over and ignore are the ones I have to eat, and if I didn't eat them, there would be no milk in the world. But without milk, people wouldn't be fed, and then there would be no need for honey because there wouldn't be any people around to enjoy it!”

That was how these two children talked with each other. And then the child with the bouquet of sweet flowers understood that there was something he had to learn. The other child had already learned the right thing from her dream. The child with the sweet flowers now understood that sweet flowers cannot be the only ones, that there have to be all different kinds of flowers that work together, and so now he learned to love the bouquet with all the different plants in it. And the child who had slept and dreamed could say, “Yes, that's what the calf said. There are your kinds of flowers and my kinds of flowers, but we need all of them, and that is why a bouquet that has all different kinds of plants in it is much more valuable and precious than one with only sweet flowers!”

Now, dear children, when you go to school, it is like taking a walk on a beautiful Sunday, and you are meant to get the very best that you can out of school to take with you into life. And if you can take along a bouquet of everything your dear teachers have taught you, this bouquet will give you great pleasure. But all the different flowers must be in it, not just the sweet ones! You must learn that you sometimes have to take in things that are not exactly sweet. If you work hard and learn seriously, you will notice that the bouquet you are able to take with you into your later life has not only sweet flowers in it, but all the things that are full of life, all the things your life depends on. Think about that, my dear children, and obey your teachers lovingly each time they ask you to do something difficult. Then when you leave school you will have the most beautiful bouquet to take with you into life, and you will like it best if it has all of life’s different plants in it. Each memory of your time in school will give you the strength you need in life, because when human beings grow up, they gain the most beautiful forces for their life if they take a bouquet of that sort with them when they leave school. These are life forces that last until death and even beyond.

And now let me turn to the parents. I would like to assure you, as I try to do at every such opportunity, that I am fully aware of the confidence you place in us. We will also truly try to equip your children’s bouquets with all the plants that are suitable and necessary for a healthy, hard-working and satisfying life on earth.

And to you, my dear teachers, I am heartily grateful for trying so hard to put together the bouquets for our children’s later life in the right way.

This is why I expect you, dear children, to come to meet your teachers with everything they deserve for putting in so much effort on your behalf, and for working so zealously for you. By that I mean your gratitude and love.

I would like to say one more thing to you. They have told me that in addition to working hard, you can still make noise. I remember that I myself have sometimes heard you make noise.

And now I want you to make noise; I want you to yell so loudly that this whole room echoes with your words, “We love our teachers!”

[All the children shout enthusiastically, as loudly as they can, “Yes, we love our teachers!”]

Ladies and gentlemen, dear friends! It is incumbent upon me to open this third official members’ meeting of this association for an independent school system, the Waldorf School Association. It gives me great satisfaction to be able to welcome you warmly in the name of the Board, and I would also like to express my pleasure in the fact that you intend to discuss with us the future fate of the Waldorf School Association. Before we embark on today’s official agenda, please allow me to preface the report from the Board with some remarks on the affairs of the Waldorf School and on the course of the Waldorf School movement as such, to the extent that you are involved in this process.

Just a short time ago, an extremely gratifying pedagogical and artistic conference¹ took place, at which the aspirations of the Waldorf School movement (actually, of any educational movement that does justice to the demands of the present and the near future) were graphically presented to an audience that probably included all of you as well as many other interested parties. For the moment, therefore, in speaking of the current status of the Waldorf School movement, it is only necessary to point to what came to light at this pedagogical-artistic conference.

However, I would like to still allow myself the luxury of emphasizing a few things that were important for the basic tone of this gathering. We held this last conference at a time when, as I was able to make you aware, the will of the Waldorf School movement had been able to prove itself and demonstrate its spread, as was apparent from the fact that I myself had been invited to speak on the nature of this movement on the occasion of the Shakespeare festival in Stratford in 1922. As a result of this, the Waldorf School movement became known in England, and this in turn resulted in an invitation to hold the vacation lecture series in Oxford. This put me in a position to speak at some length in England on what the Waldorf School is actually trying to accomplish. These Oxford lectures then resulted in the founding of an English school association that will focus for the time being on transforming the Kings Langley School into a Waldorf School of sorts. It will also work to disseminate the idea of the Waldorf School in England. This demonstrates, however, that ideals and impulses that are inherent in the Waldorf School movement engage current interests in a very intense way. And here, too, the fact that a number of teachers from England visited the Waldorf School over a longer period of time at the beginning of this year shows how strongly this interest has taken hold in England in particular.

A further consequence of the spread of the Waldorf School idea was the course that I held in Dornach just a short time ago for a number of Swiss teachers and educators who organized it.² In addition to the Swiss teachers, however, seventeen Czech teachers took part in the course. At this course in particular, it was evident that in the hearts of people involved in education, it is a matter of course that something such as what is being attempted by our school movement needs to come about. In everything you heard at this course in Dornach, you could really recognize the educational professionals’ deep longing for something to enter the art of education that would aim very strongly at both spiritualizing the art of education and making it truly practical.

It is also very understandable that a quite specific feeling should have come up and been expressed by the participants in this last educational course in Switzerland. Those who experience strongly what such a course attempts to accomplish come away with a feeling of consternation; they feel overwhelmed. Now, I am only recounting what was expressed to me at the course in Dornach: Someone who was stating the view of many of the attendees said that the serious-minded among them were overwhelmed to see how little they were in a position to cope in their own souls with all the pedagogically necessary impulses that assailed them over a period of just a few days.

You can see that I then had to respond to this objection, which seemed totally justified to me. A thought such as this expresses what is present in many people today. Many people of the present day know perfectly well that some incisive intervention must take place if our system of education is to be able to meet the social demands placed on it and to extricate itself from the circumstances into which it has fallen. We really do not often take stock of how necessary an incisive reform of our educational impulses is. But if we think about it, we find that in their heart of hearts, parents and teachers are half-consciously or fully consciously convinced of the need for such incisive impulses to enter the system of education. Then people hear what we have to say. In fact, at the artistic and pedagogical conference, many people reached the point of saying, in effect, “All that needs to be done? How are we going to manage that? We get such a wealth of demands dumped on us in the course of just a few days;”—excuse me for expressing it like this, but this is a feeling I have often heard—“we come here with the best of intentions and leave feeling like a poodle that has been drenched with ideals instead of water. Our first impulse is to shake off what has been dumped on us.”

As I said, this was actually expressed frequently at the last conference in Dornach. My response was, “Yes, certainly I can see that, but you need to keep in mind that people have had a long time to get used to the educational practices that are prevalent everywhere in schools today. They grew up with them and are comfortable with them. Because people always have only a few days available to devote to progressive impulses, everything we have to say to them has to be said in a few days. Under these circumstances, it is totally understandable that people feel dumped on. However, if it is possible for the suggestions that will continue to be made to arouse interest in these issues among ever broader circles, then we will also eventually be in a position to present what we have to say at a slower place. Then people would not need to feel overwhelmed.”

This is proof that very intensive work is needed so that it will eventually be possible for us to actually set the pace that most people need, it seems, in order to grasp our ideas, rather than burdening people with them in the twinkling of an eye, as it were. I must point out that if this insight is taken as a starting point, then people would give us the opportunity to express ourselves more exactly and more slowly. So everything depends on a real interest in this issue of ours developing in ever broader circles. As things stand at the moment, the situation is very strange.

You know, we must keep in mind the inner process the Waldorf School movement has gone through in the four years of its existence. Naturally, the facts need to be weighed up in the right way. We now have around seven hundred students in the Waldorf School and nearly forty teachers. Years ago we started with fewer teachers and not even two hundred fifty students. The meaning of these two numbers—two hundred or two hundred fifty students then, and seven hundred now—is something extremely characteristic of the Waldorf School movement. They indicate not only a pedagogical and methodological, but also a complete cultural and social transformation of the Waldorf School movement, a real transformation. Depending on your taste, you can say either that it has found its feet or that it has been stood on its head; it does not matter to me. What I mean is the following: When the Waldorf School was founded, the thought among our friends was a social one. The intention was to found a comprehensive school of some sort, in accordance with the social impulses that prevailed at that time and that were surfacing in people’s social thinking and feeling in 1919. The idea of the Waldorf School was conceived on the basis of social circumstances. And now neither you nor Herr Molt will take it badly if I put forth a risky hypothesis—which is of course to be taken with the famous grain of salt—of how this transformation has taken place. I will try to express it clearly.

Assume for a moment that Herr Molt had not been an anthroposophist, but simply one of the many philanthropic factory owners of that time. This was not the case, but we may suppose that it was. On the basis of the social circumstances of the times, he would still have conceived the idea to found a school, but the Waldorf School as it is today would surely not have come about. The Waldorf School as it is today came about simply because it was born out of anthroposophy—that is, out of the circumstance that someone who was not only a philanthropic factory owner, but also Herr Molt the anthroposophist, conceived the idea and turned to anthroposophy for help with the school’s instructional methodology.

These are the cultural, historical and social factors. An idea characteristic of the times was realized with the help of anthroposophy, which was to provide the instructional methodology.

Now you see, over the course of time a transformation has taken place, and now a large percentage of the students we have today are here because of the pedagogy and methods that are cultivated in the Waldorf School. That the idea of the Waldorf School has expanded within the school itself is due to this pedagogy and these methods, so the original idea has been turned inside out. The original idea attracted the pedagogy and methodology that is used here. However, the Waldorf School is what it is today—and rightly so—because of this pedagogy and methodology. They were the main reason why parents who brought their children to us later on sought out the Waldorf School. Thus, in the course of these four years, an important development has taken place: Within the Waldorf School, a pedagogy and methodology born out of anthroposophy have come into their own.

And this pedagogy and methodology were what interested the people in England, what called forth the course in Dornach and so on. There is a specific pedagogical idea that is being realized in the Waldorf School, and that is what I have recently had to emphasize ever more strongly. The seven hundred students and the general expansion of the Waldorf School are due to the pedagogy and methodology that are practiced in the school. This is also demonstrated by frequent attempts to found schools on the example of the Waldorf School.

For me, naturally, what has become a reality here was the important thing from the very beginning. From the very beginning I conceived of the task of the Waldorf School as a purely pedagogical and methodological one, and in fact it has become apparent over time that wherever people were interested in the idea of the Waldorf School, this was because of its pedagogy and methodology.

Now there was a decisive interest in these various courses on the part of teachers and educators, but I must say that it has also been demonstrated in the longings of the parents. You know, the day before yesterday a number of parents from Berlin approached me again and told me that they had started small school groups in which they had offered instruction and tried to apply Waldorf School principles, but that now the government had come and would no longer allow it, so they had to send their children to the public schools. They asked whether it would not perhaps be possible to create a means of informing people by setting up a branch of the Waldorf School in Berlin. They thought that since it is still possible here, where things are administered more liberally, to not have the government intervening in the Waldorf School, it might also be possible in Berlin if a branch Waldorf School were opened.

I told them that it would not work, and that we needed to realize from this example that carrying out the idea of the Waldorf School is not possible without outreach into the broadest possible circles on behalf of the idea, which recognizes what thousands and thousands of people, or even more than that, are unconsciously wanting. These people basically want the same thing that is wanted here and simply are afraid to admit that they want it. And I still maintain that I did the right thing in issuing the challenge to found the World School Association once the model was there. I also still maintain that our task is not to get involved in all kinds of other experiments that pop up all over the place like quackery in the field of medicine, if I might put it like that—not real quackery, of course, but what is branded as quackery—but that it is more important to spread a real understanding of Waldorf education ever further and further. It must be spread ever further, and then the other thing will happen too.

You see, the Waldorf School is actually a challenge inherent in the evolution of education and in the relationship of educational evolution to the great ideas of culture and society. Perhaps it will be of interest to you if I draw your attention to how a turn-about in human feeling has occurred over a longer period of time, and how our thoughts have not caught up with it.

In March, 1792, there was an imperial chancellor in Central Europe for whom the task of educating the populace was merely a matter to be summarized as follows: “It is incumbent upon governments as a matter of course to disseminate the riches of the spirit, and in this just as in the enjoyment of man’s other social affairs it is up to governments to form a national policing agency of a sort.” This was spoken out of the feeling of concern for educational matters that was current at the end of the eighteenth century, when it was thought that the people had to receive directives from above with regard to the enjoyment of all social and human concerns, and especially with regard to administering pedagogical and methodological affairs.

And in the nineteenth century there was a person named Fröbel³ who said already as a young man of twenty-three, “All experiments in the field of pedagogy, including those of Pestalozzi, seem to me to be something crude and merely empirical. It would be necessary to arrive at exact principles of instruction, just as natural science has exact principles.” That was what Frobel said.

These two things, the pronouncement of the imperial chancellor Rottenhahn in 1792 and the passage from the letter by young Fröbel to his friend Krause, permit us an approximate characterization of what was alive at that time. The opinion prevalent at that time, which is still prevalent and must now be overcome, was that there was no need for further ideas on issues such as education and its methods; it was a matter of course to leave such things to the state. And the other idea was the sovereignty of the natural sciences: Whoever studied them and took them as their point of departure would necessarily discover the appropriate pedagogy.

Within both the current of subordination to the state and the current of science, it has become evident that we have reached a dead end in the field of education. Of course people had the best intentions in saying that it was necessary to establish a form of state policing in the field of pedagogy. Of course they had the best in mind, but that did not prevent the development of all the things that people now feel must change.

Educators are sighing to see things change; they say that they do not know how they ought to be dealing with human beings, that they believed that the art of dealing with human beings could derive from a—I cannot call it a mishmash, since that is not how the adherents of exact science would talk, so let us call it a synthesis simply to use a different word—a synthesis of anthropology, psychology, and ethnology. More recently, psychiatry is also being included. Time has shown that what Frobel wanted is not acceptable to a deeper feeling for education. In all the people attending the courses, in the wish for a branch Waldorf School in Berlin, it was evident that people are certain that something has to happen, but when Waldorf school people talk to them about things, they are like poodles drenched with the water of ideals. It cannot work its way into their heads in a few days; nevertheless, they know that something has to happen.

We must keep clearly in mind that our efforts correspond to the desires of thousands and thousands of people, and that we must do everything we can to make the idea of the Waldorf School and all its impulses become ever more popular, so that people begin to see it as a challenge of our times. All this needs is to awaken in many people the courage to recognize and act on what they have long experienced in their heart of hearts in an indefinite way. It has still been my hope recently that this would flow into the hearts of the friends of the Waldorf School ideal who come to gatherings such as this one, because this is the most important thing we need—to have the interest spread, to have the efforts to popularize the Waldorf School spread. This is what we need.

And you know, something similar is necessary with regard to our method’s inner progress. When we founded the Waldorf School four years ago, we had eight grades. It was clearly apparent to us that we had to work out of a striving that had remained unconscious to Fröbel and his ilk, that we had to create our curricula and educational goals on the basis of a true understanding of the human being, which can only grow out of the fertile ground of anthroposophy. Then we would have a universally human school, not a school based on a particular philosophy or denomination, but a truly universally human school.

The ideal that had been hovering over people for centuries was clear to us then. Since we had to take other existing circumstances into account, we had to accept compromises, but only to a certain extent: The first three school years would have to be allowed to run their course in a way that derived its standards for instructional goals and curricula only from the teachings of human nature itself. Upon completion of grade six (at age twelve) and grade eight (at age fourteen) we would try to have the children at a point where they would be able to transfer to other schools. We wanted to create the possibility of making the Waldorf School ideal a reality for as long as possible, on the one hand, and yet still offer the children the possibility to transfer.

This is something that is actually easier to carry out with regard to the eight primary grades than it is for the expansion of the school into grades nine through twelve, which has also become necessary. To the primary school education we offer, we need to add college-preparatory and vocational high school education. People are now saying that we need to get these young ladies and gentlemen to the point where they can pass the Abiturand enter a college or university. (Although the good will is there among certain individuals to open an institution of higher learning ourselves, this is a huge illusion for the time being, and the things we cultivate must always rest on real and solid ground.)

Naturally, there are inherent difficulties in our needing to prepare the young ladies and gentlemen who graduate from this school to take the Abiturso that they will be able to attend colleges that will grant them the degrees they need in what is now called “real life.” It immediately becomes apparent that in the upper grades, it is much more difficult to cope with both the challenge of the Waldorf School ideal of deriving educational goals and curricula from human nature itself, on the one hand, and the coincidental curricula that include nothing of what human nature demands, on the other.

When these young adults are fourteen, fifteen, or sixteen years old, we would really need to be introducing them to real practical life, which means that they should understand something of what happens in real practical life. But instead of that, along comes the teacher of Greek and Latin, reproaching us for trying to incorporate real demands based on understanding the human being, for including lessons in chemical and technological subjects, in weaving and spinning—in short, in things people should know about in real life. Along comes the Latin teacher, complaining of not having enough time to prepare people for the Abitur.

This is how these unsolvable conflicts arise. On the one hand, we are trying to make the idea of the Waldorf School a reality in the best and purest way possible, and on the other hand we have to break this up with all kinds of compromises that are imposed by the fact that we are not allowed to tear the young people away from so-called real life, if you will excuse the expression. If we help them find their place in life as they should, they are rejected by so-called real life and become bohemians. (I used that word recently in the course in Switzerland and immediately had to apologize because some of the participants were from Bohemia.) The fact is, however, that we must come to the fundamental realization that we are not striving for bohemianism as an ideal, but for a really practical life, for a way of teaching and raising children that gives people a firm footing in real life. But before we can do this, an understanding of what human nature really encompasses and demands must become as widespread as possible.

Thus, we will not popularize the idea of the Waldorf School without first deciding to make understandable what I have pointed out today. In broader circles we will not popularize the idea of the Waldorf School if we speak only of abstract things, of having the children learn comfortably and through play and so on. If we present the same trivial thoughts that others also present, if we do not go into the concrete things that really lie dormant in people’s hearts, we will not succeed in popularizing the idea of the Waldorf School.

Today we are faced with the difficult task of having to do something so that in future we are not always living from hand to mouth with regard to the Waldorf School’s finances. Given the existing state of the finances, we never know whether we will be able to sustain the school for three or four months into the future; we are forced to economize with no end in sight. Of course it is true that the idea of the Waldorf School gives us such a firm footing that we can also summon the enthusiasm to go on into the unknown. On the other hand, however, responsibilities do arise. Actually, hiring each new teacher is such a responsibility that it really needs to be said for once that financing the Waldorf School, which is the point of departure of the Waldorf School movement as the first pedagogical example of how to raise and educate children according to this method, would have to rest on foundations that guarantee a certain measure of stability.

That is what I wanted to add as the necessary consequence of what I said before, so to speak. This august body would need to apply every means available to come to decisions that will make it possible to stabilize the financing of the Waldorf School at least to the extent that we know we will be able to carry the responsibility for it, and that it will never get to the point where the whole thing falls apart in a few months. We see the factors involved in taking our cause to the world in a financial sense. If this would happen, the outer framework would be there too.

Ladies and gentlemen, dear friends, I can assure you that the things we experience in courses such as the ones I gave at Oxford and in Switzerland, the things we experience as the longings of teachers and parents, show that the Waldorf School movement is a challenge that is deeply embedded in the evolution of our civilization. This is proved in practical terms today by what has gone before. On the other hand, our ways of working in the Waldorf School, the fact that there is actually something present in the college of teachers, gives evidence of something from which the entire Waldorf School impulse radiates. It demonstrates how a strong will is making itself felt in the world out of the purest possible enthusiasm, as may have become evident to you most clearly during the recent artistic and pedagogical conference. In these two aspects, I might say, the school stands on firm foundations. Please excuse me for asking you to consider ways in which these two pillars which I have particularly tried to characterize, the first pillar of the challenge of the times coming from parents and teachers and the second pillar of the sacred, expert and fully appropriate enthusiasm that lives in the Waldorf School, can be joined by the third pillar of stabilizing the school’s financial foundations.

It is sad to have to speak of this. However, the fact of the matter is that doing anything at the present time takes money, lots of money. We can be certain that if we find ways to awaken understanding for the impulse of the Waldorf School, we will also arrive at the necessary financial means. This is why we must find the way from the first part of what I presented to what I have so presumptuously—there is no other word for it in this case—added to it by way of conclusion.

Points of business followed.

• 1. In Stuttgart, April 25-29, 1923. See Rudolf Steiner’s Pädagogik und Kunst, Pädagogik und Moral [Pedagogy and Art; Pedagogy and Morality], lectures and speeches, Dornach, 1978.
• 2. April 15-22, 1923. See Die pädagogische Praxis vom Gesichtspunkte geisteswissenschaftlicher Menschenerkenntnis [Pedagogical Practice from the Perspective of Spiritual Scientific Knowledge of the Human Being], eight lectures given in Dornach in 1923, GA 306, Dornach 1975. The Child’s Changing Consciousness and Waldorf Education, Anthroposophic Press, Hudson, NY, 1996.
• 3. Friedrich Fröbel, 1782-1852.

Ladies and gentlemen! For a long time we have been aware of your active wish to have the issue of school and home, children and parents, discussed here at a parents’ evening.

It is not possible to say everything there is to say on this subject in one evening, but we will continue to organize evenings where these questions can be discussed so that the topic can be covered exhaustively. Today I will articulate the basic main points that the teachers and I have in mind.

In the field of education, parents evenings are often proposed, but many representatives, even outstanding ones, of today’s official school system do not think much of such parent’s evenings. Some excellent educators say that nothing comes of them except fruitless discussion. Now, different points of view are possible with regard to everything in practical life, including parents’ evenings, and there is some foundation for all of them. I will not dispute people’s right to think little of parents’ meetings from their particular point of view. We, however, as representatives of the idea of the Waldorf School, must see something of extraordinary significance in these parents’ evenings, because if these meetings can be conducted in the right way, they are connected to the conditions most necessary for the life of what we intend to bring about through the Waldorf School.

To be sure, teachers who have found their place in the social context that is prevalent today, who feel supported by state authorities, are at home and secure in this and are very often satisfied with it. There are plenty of people telling them what to do, so why take it from the parents, too? This is how they look at it.

This cannot be our point of view. We are not embedded in current societal circumstances in the same way. We have to work out of the guiding light of our understanding of human beings and of life, out of human science and human art as our pedagogical goal. As educators, we must draw what we need for our teaching on a daily basis from the inner strength of our hearts. For that we need, not recognition—I do not want to say that because an idea that derives as strongly as ours does from the challenges of the present and the future must be self-contained in the strength of its effectiveness and not count on recognition—but understanding; above all, the understanding of those on whom so much depends, of those who entrust their children to this school.

Without this understanding, we cannot carry out our work at all. This understanding must be general in nature at first. We cannot claim to be guided by a higher wisdom, derived from the acknowledged social order and hovering above our heads, and to need nothing more than awareness of this wisdom. We must gain leverage for the ideals of our school, and this happens when people see that what comes to light through the idea of the Waldorf School is very deeply rooted in the most important cultural demands of the present and the near future. Therefore, we must strive to present our intentions to our contemporaries in a clearly understandable form, in a form that can engender understanding. Above all, we count on the understanding of those who entrust their children to us, who therefore have a certain love for the Waldorf School. We count on them being able to grasp the thoughts, feelings, and will impulses that sustain us.

Thus, we would like first and foremost to establish a relationship between the school and the parents that does not rest on faith in authority. That is of no value for us. The only thing that is of value is having our intentions received with understanding, right down into the details. The only thing that is of value is the awareness that this school is taking a great risk in trying to use feeble human forces to recognize the scarcely decipherable demands of the twentieth century and to recast them in the form of an educational venture. I believe there is no single member of our faculty who is not trying to experience what we are involved in as some kind of solid footing in world history, in humanity’s evolution. This is what our teachers are trying to do in all modesty. As necessary as modesty may be, however, we must not be timid in what we are doing. We must be aware that what we are doing is significant, but also that this significance rests not in our own character but in what we acknowledge to be true. The significance of what we are doing must be looked at in the right way, not from an arbitrary or sympathetic standpoint, but from the standpoint of a will that stems from the consciousness of the times. This, above all else, is what we need from the parents.

We would like the parents of the Waldorf School children to say, “We are especially aware of our duty to educate human beings, and we would like to have our children make a contribution to humanity’s great tasks in the twentieth century. We want entrusting our children to the Waldorf School to be a social act of some consequence.” The more strongly this becomes a part of your whole attitude, the better.

We have to depend on your attitude above all else. We cannot think much of detailed guidelines on how teachers are meant to act toward the parents and vice versa. We cannot expect much from these guidelines, but we can expect a great deal from meetings between teachers and parents that take place with the right attitude, because we know that when people’s attitudes relate to their inmost being, the attitude turns into action, right down into the details of life. When an attitude takes hold of a person on a general level, then his or her individual actions become copies of the broad strokes of the attitude’s intentions. That is why it is more important for us to feel and understand the right thing in the right way than to lay down or follow specific guidelines.

I have emphasized how the different stages of life affect children, how children are different before the change of teeth than afterward, in the period between the change of teeth and puberty. Up until the change of teeth, children’s destinies actually keep them in very close contact with their parents and their home. If we are not totally caught up in the materialistic way of thinking that is flourishing at present, if we can see through to the spiritual context within human interactions and evolution, we know that the destined relationship between children and parents is much greater than our abstract age with its materialistic ideas often assumes. If, in addition to knowing what physical life provides, we know what is given to us by life in the spirit beyond the boundaries of birth and death, then we take the destined relationship between children, parents and siblings very seriously, and the way in which children come into elementary school from home, which is really incisive for all of education, acquires significance for us.

Although this first part of my remarks may be somewhat far from the thoughts of most of you parents, it still seems important to me to touch on this. Those of you who already have children with us may have younger children at home. You may have come to love the principles of the Waldorf School and want to send your younger children here too. For you, tonight’s subject of raising pre-school children will be important.

On entering school, children are true reflections of all the characters and circumstances in their parent’s home and in their environment as it has been until now. Up to the age of seven, children are almost entirely sense organ. They take in everything from their surroundings with incredible sensitivity—everything that is said, done and even thought. Hidden within this is a secret of human growth that is largely disregarded by today’s science: Expressions of soul in a child’s surroundings are transformed into the child’s organic, bodily constitution. Anyone who has acquired the educator’s fine feeling for a child’s appearance that a Waldorf teacher is meant to have will see by the shine in a new elementary school student’s eyes whether that child has been treated lovingly at home or has been treated unlovingly and subjected to outbursts of anger in his or her environment. What parents and siblings and so forth do, say, and think lives on in a child’s bodily constitution. If I wanted to, I could say a lot about how these expressions of soul can be observed in the processes of breathing and blood circulation and in the working of the child’s nervous system. Due to certain circumstances, the child’s father and mother may tend to have frequent outbursts of anger in dealing with the child. In such children, we notice what they have taken in and bound up with their inner being. It has turned into their bodily constitution; it is there in how their digestion works, how their muscles move, and even in how they can and cannot learn.

It is literally, not figuratively, possible to say that when a first-grader is entrusted to a teacher, the teacher receives a complete image of the parents’ home. In their health, temperament and ability to learn, children bring their home right into school. Our first intimate acquaintance with the home is through the child. This should become part of the attitude of those of us who have a real interest in schools such as the Waldorf School. Such things need only turn into an attitude to begin to affect our actions.

When you are clearly aware of something like this, you will do some individual things that you would otherwise not do and refrain from doing many things you would otherwise do. This is no abstract knowledge; it saturates your whole life. If this prerequisite is present, it will result in the will to bring parents and teachers together in the right way. When we know that what is important works in the depths of human nature, we pay less attention to what is actually said in words in five minutes, but much more to how it is said. When the attitude I indicated brings parents to school again and again to encounter their child’s teacher, the simple fact that parents and teachers are not strangers to each other but have seen each other before will start to bear fruit.

In this relationship between parents and teachers, what we need above all is for this interest in the generalities of Waldorf education to carry over to all aspects of school life, to everything that is connected to the Waldorf School through the faculty on the one hand and the parents on the other. If we know that at home there is a daily interest in what we as teachers are doing in the Waldorf School, then we can teach with a great feeling of reassurance, with a strength that gives us new incentives each day.

I do not deny the difficulty of mobilizing such interest. I am well aware that under current social conditions people have little time and energy to ask “How was it? What did you do?” when their children come home from school. I know that the children cannot expect their warm enthusiasm to elicit this question. The point is that parents should not ask this question out of a feeling of duty, but in a way that makes the children want to be asked. We should not be at all embarrassed that the children may sometimes tell us things that we ourselves have forgotten; that goes without saying and will pass unnoticed if the right enthusiasm is present on both sides. Do not underestimate this: If teachers can know that what they are doing sparks lively interest at home, if only for a few brief minutes, then they know that their work rests on a firm foundation. They can then work out of an atmosphere of soul that can have an inspiring educational effect on the children.

This is the most effective thing we can do to combat what has been termed by some of today’s outstanding educators, “the war between parents and teachers.” That is what they call it when they are speaking among themselves. This war is a subject of secret discussion among many educators. It has led to a noteworthy expression that is becoming well-known; young teachers in particular tend to use it: “We have to start by educating the parents, especially the mothers.” We here, however, have neither the ambition nor sufficient Utopian sensibilities to do that. Not that we believe that parents are not educable or refuse to be educated, but rather because we want there to be a really intimate relationship of friendship between parents and teachers, a relationship based on the matter at hand. The parents’ interest in the school can do a lot to bring this about.

While the parents’ souls have very strong effects on their child’s bodily constitution, it is only possible for teachers to work on the child’s soul through soul means. Here, in place of the imitative nature with which a child encounters his or her parents before the change of teeth begins, there appears the principle of a necessary and natural authority. This is something we must have, and teachers are especially supported in this if an interest such as I have described is present. Much of what the parents can contribute to supporting this authoritative strength, to enabling their child’s teacher to be the authority that he or she must be, can have its source in something as simple as the fact that school is taken seriously, with a certain ceremonial seriousness. A lot of sifting out goes into choosing teachers for the Waldorf School, and they are people you can have confidence in. And if you do not understand something, rather than wrinkling your nose at it right away, it is important that you trust in the great overriding principle in which you yourself believe. Then you will be supporting your child’s teacher and making use of the opportunity to bring about a relationship of trust between parents and faculty.

You know that we do not issue report cards with grades as the public schools do. Instead, we try to describe what is typical of each child and to enter into his or her individuality. First of all, if teachers sit down to formulate reports and are aware of the responsibility involved, then riddle upon riddle appears to their minds’ eye, and they weigh up every word they write down. It is a great relief to them in this process if they have actually met the child’s parents, not simply because this tells them about the hereditary circumstances, which is all materialism is concerned with today, but because it allows them to see the children’s environment, and then everything begins to appear in the right light. It is not necessary for the teachers to judge the parents themselves in any indiscrete way; they simply want to meet the parents in a friendly manner. Just as writing a letter to someone you know is different than writing to a stranger, it is also different to write the reports of students whose parents you know and those whose parents you have not met.

Secondly, the teacher should actually be able to know that such reports spark loving interest at home, and I believe that if parents would manage to write a brief response to what the teacher wrote in the report, it would be an incredible help. It would make no sense to institute this as a requirement, but it is extremely important from an educational standpoint if parents begin to feel the need to do this. Such notes are read with extreme attentiveness here in the Waldorf School. Even if they were full of mistakes, they would be much more important to us than many currently acknowledged accounts of modern culture. They would permit us to take a deep look into what we need if we are to teach, not out of abstract ideas, but out of the impulse of our times.

You must not forget that Waldorf teachers educate out of an understanding of the human being that does not come about in today’s customary ways. A powerful human understanding would flow in what the parents could communicate to the teacher in a devoted way, and I do not exaggerate at all when I say that a response to a report card would almost be more important for the teacher than the report itself is for the child.

Here too, however, I place more value on parents maintaining a lively interest in everything going on in the school than I do in this specific measure I have chosen as an example.

Thus it is my opinion that the right thing will happen in the time the children spend on vacation if the school year runs its course in the way I have indicated. We would do well to let the vacation be a vacation and not pin the children down to doing anything school-like. However, if you can make the attitude I wished for into a reality, that would mean the right kind of happiness, joy, and healthy refreshment for your child.

We are particularly dependent on an atmosphere that is steeped in this attitude, so that you realize that the Waldorf teachers are concerned about every aspect of your child, including first and foremost his or her health. We are particularly concerned about being informed in our souls of subtleties with regard to the state of health of the children who are entrusted to us. An art of education is not complete unless it extends to this degree of interest in a child. This is an area, however, in which the work we need to do will be possible only if parents and school work together in the right way. We would like to see our school met by an understanding that arises from an inner need. We would also like to see the parents turn to the school for tips on their children’s bodily well-being, diet and so forth. Above all we want to see the fundamental impulse behind our activity in the school, namely deep, inner human honesty and openness, take full effect in these details in the interaction between parents and teachers. This could lead to great results in life, and much can be done better in this regard if fathers or mothers come to the teachers and say, “My children are coming home from school tired; they get home too late. What can I work out with you to counteract that?” Working things out in this frank way can be the basis for many good things to happen.

In particular, it can help the school a lot if the parents lend their support in things in which exactitude, but not pedantry, is needed. It contributes a lot to how we can maintain order in the school and create a mood of seriousness among the children if everything about how children and parents interact in the morning makes it a matter of course that the children leave the house at the right time and therefore arrive at school at the right time, without any special commands being issued. Here, too, it is not so much the individual instances I am referring to as the consciousness that stands behind them, the attitude that school is something serious and ceremonial and that when your teacher is satisfied with your punctuality, you satisfy your parents as well. This is a moral note that the children bring from home each morning. A child’s state of mind on leaving the house in the morning is not merely a source of satisfaction or dissatisfaction to the teacher’s educated eye. Disturbing or supportive impulses find their way into the teacher’s mood, too, if the child leaves the house in one way rather than another. Such things need to become conscious. I believe it is of no small significance for the rest of your life to have heard as a small child from your father, “There are two things that need to run exactly on time, you know—the clock, and getting children to school.” Saying that now and then does not take much time, but it will have an effect on the rest of your child’s life.

We are not dependent on details, but rather on a heart-to-heart relationship between school and home. We are confident that if this real heart-to-heart relationship is present, the right thing will come of it. We long to see this attitude awakened not merely with regard to details, but in full force. Then the Waldorf School will accomplish something not only through its cultural consciousness but also through such things as we have discussed today.

We must be clear that in our times certain innovations have been necessary so that deficits in such things do not come to light too strongly. Just think of what kindergartens sometimes have to do to make up for what has been done badly at home! Our times have become such that they require surrogates for what should be experienced in the family.

What we are trying to accomplish in the Waldorf School is something that needs to be followed not only intellectually; it must also be loved. And if the parents’ attitude is steeped in this love, we will not need to raise our children in fear and in hope, which are the two worst but most used means of educating children today. The best means of educating children, however, is and always has been love, and home can be a great support for a school whose art of education is sustained by love.

Some people say that the discipline in the Waldorf School is not as good as in other schools. Time is too short to speak about this in detail now. Simply keep in mind that things have changed a lot in recent years, not only in society but also in the souls of children. We cannot apply the standards of our own youth. There is a deep gap between the young generations of today and the older ones, and when getting an educational grasp on the being of a child is at issue, we will do badly if we educate on the basis of fear of punishment and hope for good grades, but we will do well if we teach out of love. No matter what kind of wild turmoil is going on in the classrooms, if children have the right relationship to their teachers, if the children are still able to see in their teachers what they are supposed to see, then all their boisterousness will not mean what it would mean otherwise. This may be paradoxical, but it is psychologically correct. We begin to look at boisterousness in a different way: The children are getting it out of their systems so that it will not have to come out later on, which is decidedly better than the other way around. Later stages of life are based on what we foster in school, you see. If we are deeply convinced that we are educating with a whole lifetime in mind and not just for the current moment, then we also know how much we need you parents in order to move forward with the idea of the Waldorf School.

These are the points of view I wanted to present first. I want to emphasize that they contain what is most important, and that we will get very far indeed by taking hold of them honestly and thoroughly. This will also strengthen the Waldorf teacher’s sacred conviction, with which we hope you agree. We know that we will achieve our goal if the school’s intentions are understood at home and if it is made possible for us to work together intimately with the parents.

Dear children, dear boys and girls! To begin with, you will have to listen quietly for a little, because the first people I want to address are the parents who have joined us for this great celebration, both the ones who have brought very little children here to us and the ones who have accompanied their older children.

Dear parents of our students! We can certainly value and appreciate this moment in your emotional lives. Anyone who has already covered a good bit of distance in life, as is the case with parents, knows that life tests us with sorrows and joys, that it presents us with tests that bring joys as well as suffering. Your children are the most precious thing that life has given you. We who are running the Waldorf School know very well what it means to decide where to send your child to school. You do that under the influence of everything you have been through in your own life; you want your child to be able to go through life in the best way you know of.

It cannot be my task today to talk about how we try to introduce the children into life through an appropriate and humanly worthy form of instruction that takes all of life as its background. You can rest assured, however, that one result of our theory of education, our art of education, is that we know what it means that you as parents are sending your children to a particular school in order to set a lasting course for their lives, and we respect it. We have a sense of all-encompassing responsibility in taking the children out of the hands that have brought them here today, and we assure you that we really know what this means.

May we also find ways to come together in this feeling of responsibility, and may the occasion of today be repeated often. In the Waldorf School, in a school that is not yet acknowledged in broader circles, we need what we can gain from energetically working together with the parents, so I ask you to come to the school often for discussions and other purposes. What we and you want for the children will be best achieved if we can work effectively with the parents at home. We in the school will attempt to carry this out to the greatest extent possible.

Now I would like to turn to the children who are in school for the first time today. You need not understand much at all yet. What is happening today is something you already know something about, something you have already had to start learning. You have loved your parents; that is something you know how to do. Now you must also learn to love your teachers. If you love your teachers, you will be able to learn everything there is to learn, with a little help from them. This will happen very gently. You will have to learn to sit still for a while from time to time, but when the lesson is over you may run around outside again, but not too fast, so that you don' fall and hurt your head. You must also always be very friendly to each other. The main thing is to learn to sit still, to love your teachers, and to make sure that you and the others stay healthy.

Right at the beginning, as you were sitting here, from the lowest right up to the highest grades, you heard something very important from the dear lady who is the first grade teacher. You heard that these little folks have become something very different from what they were before. They have become schoolchildren. That is what she told you. You can become a schoolchild. But now, in order to connect the lowest and the highest grades, I would like to tell you that you can never leave school again.

You will leave the Waldorf School, to be sure. Some of you will leave after the eighth grade and some will leave after a few more grades. Just now we have had to send the first ones to complete the highest grade out into life. But when all that is over with, that is when you really start going to school, because the most important and meaningful school of all is the school of life, and you enter the school of life only when you have left school. It is our job to be the preparatory school for the school of life.

That is what your dear teachers are here for, and last of all I turn to them. When I look at the school like this, I have to say that the most important schoolchildren are the men and women who are the teachers! It is very important that they have come to this school, because they are learning all the time. And do you know from whom they want to learn the most? From you! They want to learn the best way for you to be able to bear sorrow and joy; they want to learn how it happens that you are healthy or sick. They have so much to learn from you so that out of the fullness of their love for you, they can teach you to be people who can stand on their own feet in life.

For this to happen, there is one thing that is more necessary than anything else. I always say this, but I would like to say it again because it cannot be said often enough. In the Waldorf School, the teachers take great inner pleasure in what they do. They know that they are working on life out there by working on what is most important in it—on the beginnings of life. When I see these happy faces on the first day of school, and among them the boys and girls who have been here longer and who have always answered me when I asked if you love your teachers—when I see you all like this, there is something I would also like to say to you today. During the vacation you were away from your teachers. Now that you are back in school things will go well only if you can again answer a certain question for me. Sometimes people forget things, but there is one thing you are not allowed to forget. You have planted love for your teachers in your souls. You have told me so again and again. Now that you have been out there for a while, I am going to ask you whether you have forgotten your love for your teachers during the vacation. If you have not forgotten, answer me with a good loud “No!” [The children shout, “No!] That is what will take you into the school year in the right way. Then you will pay attention and work hard, and everything will go well.

Dear students of the highest grade of all—that is, dear teachers! In this new school year, let us begin teaching with courage and enthusiasm to prepare these children for the school of life. Thus may the school be guided by the greatest leader of all, by the Christ Himself. May this be the case in our school. Let us go forward out of enthusiasm for what we have to do and out of love for the children; they are such a great joy to their teachers, and their teachers can help them learn so much. Let us continue our work with love and enthusiasm in the hearts of the children, with love and enthusiasm in the hearts of the teachers.

Onward, dear children and dear teachers, onward!

after eurythmy-dramatic presentations: “Dedication”, “Prelude to the Theater”, “Prologue in Heaven”

Yesterday and on other occasions, I have spoken about the fact that Goethe's Mephistopheles is fundamentally a contradictory figure. We also already know why he is a contradictory figure. One could say that Mephistophelean, that is, Ahrimanic and Luciferic character traits are combined in him in a colorful jumble. Goethe, one might say, was not yet able to distinguish these character traits. If, on the one hand, one values a work of art as highly as you have seen me do with 'Faust', then one may also draw attention to such factual things. It remains strange, however, that so little has been noted about the contradictions in the poetry itself, although it has been done in individual cases. This is also a sign of the way in which things are often received today: one does not approach them with sufficient inner participation, so as to notice the inner life and activity. For if one did, one would soon have to notice, for example, the inner contradictions in the figure of Mephistopheles.

Let us take, first of all, a contradiction that may not be complete, but is nevertheless very strong, and which might be noticed immediately when one hears Mephistopheles speak in the scene that has just passed before our soul.

I see only how people toil.
The little god of the world always remains of the same ilk,
And is as whimsical as on the first day.
He would live a little better
If you had not given him the glow of heavenly light;
He calls it reason and uses it alone,

Only to be more animalistic than any animal. What must one feel when Mephistopheles criticizes the fact that man does it this way? Now, no one would credit Mephistopheles with very deep, selfless goals. He can't, even after this first scene in “Prologue in Heaven.” For what does Mephistopheles actually want? He wants Faust, doesn't he? He wants him for himself and so basically has to approve of everything Faust does in order to get together with him, to grasp him, to take hold of him. In this case, to take hold means to seize, not to understand; it is not meant conceptually, abstractly. “Can you grasp him?” – can you seize him? Mephistopheles will want to do everything to do so. It would suit him very well if Faust had all the qualities that would bring him into the very claws of Mephistopheles!

Let us turn to a later verse, where Mephistopheles confronts Faust himself in the study, where Faust speaks of his attitude towards reason and science. Faust leaves; Mephistopheles remains in his long robe. One can imagine that he will now be honest with himself, this Mephistopheles. So he says:

Despise reason and science,
Man's highest power,
Let only in Blend- and Zauberwerken
You from the lying spirit strengthen,
So I have you already unconditional.

So that could suit him just fine, when man does not apply reason and science in the right sense, but uses them to be more animalistic than any animal. Then he will just talk the Lord into it, won't he:

If thou hadst not given him the semblance of heavenly light;
He calls it reason and uses it alone,
Only to be more animal than any animal.

I say it is not a complete contradiction, but it is a strong contradiction for the senses.

In the scene I just quoted, where Mephistopheles stands opposite Faust in the study, it is clear that he is speaking sincerely as Ahriman-Mephistopheles. But in the passage you heard today:

He calls it reason and needs it alone,
Only to be more beastly than any beast,

a Luciferian trait comes into it. Lucifer cannot approve of Faust using reason to incite the animal passions. But Ahriman would have to approve if Faust behaved as Mephisto criticizes him for doing. In this case, we have not a half-contradiction, but a three-quarters contradiction!

But what are we to make of another passage?

As long as he lives on earth,
so long do not forbid it.
Man errs, so long as he strives.

I thank you for that; for with the dead
I have never been willing to associate myself.
Most of all I love my own full, fresh cheeks.
I am not at home with a corpse;
I feel like a cat with a mouse.

If you compare that with the scene that we might also be able to perform one day, where Mephisto finally tries so hard to get the soul, in the second part, when the corpse is lying there, how are we supposed to cope at all? The devil is after souls, and here he is talking about the opposite! There are many such contradictions. I only wanted to give two examples; the first is a three-quarter contradiction that is found in the poetry itself. Such contradictions can certainly be attributed to the fact that the two character traits, the Luciferian and the Ahrimanic-Mephistophelian, get mixed up.

Now the question may arise for us: how is it that Goethe actually places Ahriman-Mephistopheles at Faust's side, directing all attention to Ahriman-Mephistopheles and, as it were, still suppressing Lucifer altogether? — That must surely be a question. For the fact that Goethe, under the influence of his time, was tempted to place Mephistopheles at Faust's side means that he has also taken on Luciferian traits and thus, so to speak, blamed Mephistopheles-Ahriman for everything that should be divided between the two. Thus there must be reasons in the time to turn more attention to Mephistopheles than to Lucifer. By treating the Faust saga, Goethe goes back to the time when the Middle Ages collided with the modern era. And he has essentially absorbed the impulses of the time that arose from this clash between the Middle Ages and the modern era. If we consider somewhat more ancient poetry, poetry that follows more ancient impulses, we find an opposite confusion. We can also talk about this some other time. But today I just want to hint at it. In Milton's 'Paradise Lost', you will find the opposite mistake made. Everything that should have been attributed to Ahriman-Mephistopheles is dumped on Lucifer, although not in such a crude way as it is done in “Faust”. As I said, we will talk about this some other time. It was more of a mistake that the Middle Ages made, to focus more on Lucifer. And the mistake that the modern era makes is to focus more on Ahriman-Mephistopheles. Now we live in a time in which the correct relationship between the two world powers, Mephistopheles and Lucifer, must be more and more recognized by people. Hence our group, our sculptural group, which is intended for the building here and which is to show the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic – Mephistopheles and Lucifer – in the right relationship to each other in pictorial form.

If you want to understand what it is actually about, you have to consider something that still seems quite paradoxical to people today, but which will one day, when people do not really reject spiritual science from their earthly existence, be deeply understood. We live in modern times under very special impulses, under which we have to live. It is right that we live under these impulses. We must only recognize these impulses. We must not mistake them. I have often explained how the Copernican world view had to arise at the beginning of modern times, how it is justified, deeply justified. We have somewhat different feelings about this Copernican world view than the external world has. For if one considers the feelings with which the external world faces the Copernican world view, one can hardly come to any other conclusion than that people say: Well, the Middle Ages and antiquity were stupid, and we have become clever, and when the Middle Ages and antiquity were stupid, they thought that the sun moved and constructed all kinds of cycles and epicycles — the Ptolemaic worldview — and then believed that, assumed the movements of the heavenly bodies according to appearances. In a certain sense, this is even true for the Middle Ages, especially for the later Middle Ages, because confusion had already crept into what had emerged as the Ptolemaic worldview. But the original Ptolemaic world view was not like that; it was part of the original ancient revelation, had come into human souls through the ancient mysteries and by no means through mere external observation, and was therefore based on revelation. With this revelation, modern times broke, and modern times asked the question: How should one look at the sky in order to get to know it and its movements? — Copernicus first did the calculations, tried to make a simple calculation of the movements of the heavenly bodies, and then showed how the positions that were calculated actually corresponded to the positions of the heavenly bodies. And so, by way of calculation, he invented his Copernican system, formulated three theorems that can be found in Copernicus' works themselves, about the movements of the heavenly bodies in relation to our Earth. Of these three propositions, however, one was left out, and that is how the present-day confused Copernican view of the world came about, which is not that of Copernicus himself. The third was inconvenient – so it was left out! Therefore, anyone who merely learns the Copernican view of the world from the usual books does not know the view of Copernicus at all. But that was bound to happen. First, Copernicus had to establish a far more correct doctrine with his three propositions. Then our teaching had to come, which is based on two of Copernicus's propositions. Only when the whole matter is thoroughly penetrated in spiritual-scientific terms will the right thing emerge.

Then came those who sought to understand the movements of the heavenly bodies and their laws in a more external way, not through calculation. The telescope came. People learned to examine the sky as they examined things on earth. And in this way modern astronomy and modern astrophysics arose, a science that arises entirely from the fact that what is observed is expressed in laws; that is, one wants to explain the sky by observing the sky. And what could be more natural than this? Modern man must think that anyone who wanted to know anything other than the heavens by observing the heavens must be a completely crazy fellow. That is quite obvious, isn't it. And yet it is not correct, but it is one of the great deceptions. It is something that will be quite different in the future. In the future, too, people will consult the heavens even more than they do now, wanting to learn about the movements that live and breathe in the heavenly bodies. They will study the heavens carefully and intently, but they will know one thing that we do not know today, that seems completely paradoxical to us when we say it out loud: You learn nothing about the heavens by observing them. The most false method of getting to know the sky and its movements is to observe it as one does today. — No, I am saying something completely twisted. But one must relate to the distortions differently than the good Christian von Ehrenfels, to whom I referred eight days ago, related to them. One will observe the sky, observe it more and more thoroughly and let it tell one its secrets. But what will these secrets reveal in the distant future? They will reveal what is happening here on earth. That is what they will reveal. People will observe the sky, but they will explain from what they recognize in the sky how plants grow on earth, how animals come into being on earth, everything that forms on earth, everything that lives and weaves on earth. The information that heaven reveals will provide enlightenment about this. It will no longer occur to anyone to ask heaven about heaven, but rather they will ask heaven in order to find enlightenment about the earth. And the most significant laws that one will learn about from heaven will be used to reveal the secrets of earthly existence. Old astrology, which is little recognized today in its original meaning and which has largely become amateurish, even charlatanistic, will be revived in a completely new form. Not only will earthly destinies be sought in the movements of the stars and in the laws of the heavens, but the laws of earthly life, that which lives and moves, will be explained in terms of the laws of the heavenly bodies. One will not know why salt crystallizes in cubes, why diamond crystallizes in octahedrons, and so on, before one explains that which has forms here on earth from the positions of the heavenly bodies. And the secret of the life of animals, plants and human beings will not be known as the secret of life until the movements of the heavenly bodies, whose effect is life, can be used to explain what lives and moves here on earth. The earth is explained from the heavens. Admittedly, what is known about heaven will take on a somewhat different form from what is claimed to be known today. The laws of the positions and movements of the heavenly bodies will be investigated. But then one will let oneself be inspired meditatively by what one investigates in order to enter into a relationship, so to speak, with the beings that live in the stars. One will let oneself be told by the beings that live there what one will need to know for life on earth.

That is a future prospect. You now know that in a similar way to how Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler, who, incidentally, still had old ideas flowing in their minds, tried to discover the laws of celestial motion by observing the heavens, and how this was continued in their spirit in more recent times, so Darwin, Lamarck and Haeckel tried to find the laws of earthly life. And what would be more natural here than to get to know the earth through the earth! You travel around, as Darwin did, you use a microscope, as Haeckel did, you rationalize, as Lamarck did, about the creatures of the earth and try to recognize the laws by which life on earth is governed. On the other hand, you can be considered a crank if you don't see it as a matter of course. The future will not see it as a matter of course at all! If you consider the straight, beautiful course of development that modern biology has taken from Darwin to Haeckel and to Haeckel's students, you will find that it has led to the formation of certain laws, especially about embryonic life. The so-called biogenetic law plays an important role, that in embryonic life, man follows the individual animal species. You know that I have often drawn attention to the biogenetic law. In order to find this, such observations were made in the hope of finding something about the life of living beings. We may say that the present time is again occupied with the dissection of these views, only that it is little noticed in lay circles. Copernican astronomy is already strongly doubted by individual more insightful people. And Haeckel's student, Oscar Hertwig, has expressed things in his last writings that are likely to call into question everything that the Darwin-Haeckel theory has brought to the surface. If you educate yourself from what is happening within the field of science, you get a different view than if you educate yourself only according to what is offered to the public in popular lectures by the usual lecturers – well, I dare not say Mauthner, how should I put it? Much is already happening in the actual specialized science, and what is given here as a future perspective is already being prepared. Only one will have to come to spiritual science, so that what is going on does not become confused, but really appropriate.

Now I must again say something that is paradoxical. By observing what is happening on earth, you do not learn anything about the earth; you will learn that one day when you read from the stars what is happening on earth. But what actually happens out there in space, that is learned through the observation of, for example, embryology and so on. One can treat this observation in turn as I have indicated before, that one observes the movements of the sky; one can enter into a relationship with the elementary beings that regulate these movements within the events on earth. Just as one will ask the heavens to explain the earth, so one will ask the earth to explain the heavens. As I said, it is still paradoxical today, but it will come, in some way it will come over this earth, that this correct view will take hold. Astronomers will establish biology by the means of their science, and biologists will establish astronomy by the means of their science. And a biology truly founded on the data of astrology will be spiritual science, and an astrology founded on the data of true embryology will be spiritual astronomy. When you consider this, you must say to yourself: Humanity does not follow a straight line of development, but moves forward, as it were, in waves, in a wavy line, up and down. And in order to prepare the right spiritual view that had to come, error had to arise, which consists in wanting to explain heaven by heaven and earth by earth in modern times. People lived under this impression.

But Goethe did not live entirely under this impression, not entirely. In a sense, Goethe had pre-Darwinized Darwinism, but his was a much more spiritual Darwinism. He did not just focus on the external sensory sequence of phenomena, but on the primal plant and the primal animal. And I have often referred to the well-known conversation between Goethe and Schiller, where Goethe, after they had seen how plants were viewed side by side at the botanist Batsch's in Jena, and Schiller found this unsatisfactory, sketched out the so-called primal plant with a few strokes. This picture by Goethe does not exist. In the introduction to Goethe's morphological writings in Kürschner's National-Literatur, which I wrote in the 1880s, I tried to trace this Goethean primal plant. You can find it there as I have traced it. Schiller, however, said: That is not reality, that is an idea. — Goethe said: Then I see my idea with eyes. He was clear about the fact that this was an intuition for him, an experience, not something thought up, something rationalized. And if you get to know Goethe that way, get to know him quite intimately, whether it is through his poetic endeavors in connection with his scientific ones, or whether it is the other way around, in his scientific endeavors in connection with his poetic ones – I have just interpretation of Goethe, one sees how Goethe does not feel quite comfortable explaining heaven by heaven and earth by earth, and how this principle of modern times is continually being broken through in his ideas. That is why it is so difficult to understand Goethe's theory of colors today, because what Goethe actually wants is an astronomical explanation of the secret of colors. And if you read Goethe's Morphology very carefully, you will see how certain things come into play that originate from the very beginnings of astronomy. This is particularly evident when you consider Goethe's essays on the spiral tendency of plants. Now, that would lead to details, which I can only draw attention to today; I just want to point them out.

Let us now raise the question: how is it that this more recent period, which we have been calculating since the clash of the Middle Ages with the modern age, since the advent of Copernicanism, Galileism, Keplerism, and which we have been following up to Darwinism, to Haeckelism, to Lamarckism, how is it that this time considers explaining the heavens by the heavens, the earth by the earth, instead of the earth by the heavens and the heavens by the earth? How is that? — It is due to a twofold seduction, in that Ahriman as well as Lucifer seduce people. In the Middle Ages, when things were being prepared, when people were heading towards Copernicanism, Darwinism, it was more of a Luciferic activity, it was Luciferic impulses that prepared that. And when Copernicanism had emerged, it was more of an Ahrimanic seduction. It is Ahriman who essentially lives in people by carrying out this reversal of people that I have spoken of. For ultimately, modern science is entirely under Ahrimanic influence. And Goethe sensed correctly when he felt that Ahriman was close to the person, to Mephistopheles, in modern times. For him it was less important to consider the relationship of Lucifer to man than that of Ahriman to man. His particular attention had to be directed towards this. The Luciferic influence was of less importance to him. For Faust is presented from the very beginning of the story as the man of modern times. The various aberrations of theology at the end of the Middle Ages stemmed from Lucifer. But Faust appears on the scene by placing the Bible under the bench and declaring himself to be a man of the world and a physician, that is, he wants to explain the earth by means of the earth and heaven by means of heaven, not as was the case with the old theologians of the late Middle Ages, who still tried, as a last atavism, to explain the wonders of the earth from the revelations of theology, that is, to explain them from heaven. In more recent times, Ahriman appeared at man's side. Those who felt this, but who were not imbued with the necessity, but only permeated with the fear of the devil, therefore blasphemed the Faust, who only followed the necessary impulse of modern times. And so the sixteenth-century Faust legend came into being, which has Faust burnt and consigned to hell because he falls prey to Ahriman. Those who still lived under the atavism of the Middle Ages gave this form to the legend, as it were. Goethe was no longer under the influence of the Middle Ages. Therefore he did not have his Faust burnt and consigned to hell. But he did pose the big question: What should actually be done?

Let us look at the matter quite specifically. What do we actually do when we explain the earth through the earth? Let us grasp it with an example that is perhaps a little removed from ordinary science and therefore perhaps closer to us. Let us take a myth or a piece of fiction and think of a commentator or an interpreter of the kind I have often criticized – you remember! Let us assume that such a commentator, an interpreter of a myth, a saga or a piece of fiction, steps before us and explains, as he says, the piece of fiction from the piece of fiction; he seeks the laws of the piece of fiction in the piece of fiction or in the myth. He can be very ingenious. There are indeed very ingenious interpreters of myths and poetry. But they all err, for one can never explain a myth or a poem by applying one's intellect to it. Oh, the things the interpreters of Hamlet have written in order to interpret “Hamlet”! And what have the interpreters of Faust written in order to interpret Faust! What have the theosophists done in order to interpret all kinds of myths! One can only get to the bottom of myths and the bottom of poetry if one knows how to direct one's gaze to where myths and poetry come from — from heaven. This again points to that future perspective. This is closer to us than to point this out in science. Myths are cited by illustrating through them, so to speak, when one has come to understand the great connections in the heavenly universe; one then allows them to be reflected through the myths, at least. And when one has insight into the cosmic laws that prevail, then one will not come to intellectual commentary skills in the face of poetry; because when one peels out of the myth and the poetry that what such intellectual commentators usually get, what actually occurs there? Yes, you can always have a certain image in front of you when a myth explainer or a poetry commentator appears in the way they do today. Something emerges, like the one who emerged in his bat form, really something bat-like and gray, in contrast to the living life that is in poetry and myth. There one also makes the acquaintance of Ahriman-Mephistopheles.

What I have just mentioned as an example could be extended to cover all the goings-on in science, although I am not criticizing science. I want to show you the necessity for it. Ahriman had to intervene for a certain length of time, otherwise the way people worked in the Middle Ages would have become one that would have allowed people to become lethargic all too easily. People like to have absolute peace, so the world admits the devil, who works and entices and, as a devil, must create - he tempts and entices and works. This intervention of Ahriman is necessary. And it is utter nonsense to have heard something about Ahriman and Lucifer and then ask: “Is this perhaps an ahrimanic influence? Is this a luciferic influence?” One must guard against this!

Goethe understood the role of Ahriman! But why did Ahriman have to play such a role in modern times? Why did Ahriman-Mephistopheles have to enter the sphere of man at all? We know that evolution proceeds in such a way that we have the so-called Lemurian time, the Atlantic time, our post-Atlantic time. We know that in the Lemurian time, the human I, that is, consciousness, was still quite inactive, still quite inactive; it is only just beginning here.

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But only gradually does man become enlightened about the I-impulse that lives and moves in him. Only gradually do people become clear about their position when the I dwells in their soul, about Lucifer and Ahriman. Only gradually do they become clear, people. If we visualize the principle that must guide the future era, it presents itself, schematically indicated, as pointing towards the earth to discover the secrets of heaven, and towards heaven to discover the secrets of the earth. If one does things the wrong way, if one does things in the sense of our time, then one does not find the secrets of the earth, but out of the earth comes, instead of the laws of heaven, instead of the secrets of heaven, which should come out, comes the Ahrimanic, which approaches man, which tries to approach man. It must be rejected, because what the earth gives must not be sought intellectually in the earth, but what it reveals for heaven. Lucifer comes from the cosmic space; he must go away. If he were to approach man, it would be that what is not found in him would be sought in the cosmic space outside: the secrets of heaven itself. This relationship must be understood.

Once upon a time, people had to understand how close Lucifer is to man. It has been made possible for people to understand this in a symbol that is much more than a symbol, in a symbol that points deep into the secrets of the spiritual world. If one wants to characterize what Lucifer means for humanity as a whole, one cannot make this more intimate than by presenting the matter in such a way that Lucifer approaches the powers of woman and, with the help of specifically female powers, influences the world, and man is then seduced by woman with the help of Lucifer. This symbol had to be presented to humanity, and it had to be there when the fourth post-Atlantean period began, when people should first understand the relationship between Lucifer and man, when they should feel it, sense it, become aware of it. There is no better way to become aware of the relationship between Lucifer and man than to study the beginning of the Bible, how the serpent approaches the woman, how the woman seizes her powers and thus begins the seduction, the temptation of the world. This significant symbol was the most effective for this fourth post-Atlantean cultural period, even though it had existed earlier. The mystery of Lucifer is contained in this symbol.

The fifth post-Atlantean period had to consciously enlighten man about the Ahrimanic-Mephistophelian mystery. Another symbol had to take its place. Just as the symbol of the Luciferic tempter of woman stands at the head of the religious book, which deals with the spiritual world, and man is thereby also seduced by the arts that Lucifer performs with the help of woman, so the counter-image had to arise in the fifth post-Atlantean period: Ahriman, who approaches man, initially seduces man, and with man's help, woman. Even if it was not so brilliantly achieved in the first part of the Faust epic, the deeply moving nature of the Gretchen tragedy is often based on the fact that just as Adam is seduced by Lucifer in a roundabout way through Eve, so Gretchen is seduced by Ahriman-Mephistopheles in a roundabout way through Faust. Necessity dictated that the World Book should be contrasted with the Book of Theology: the seduced and the seducer; the seduced and the seducer; Lucifer, Ahriman. The relation of Lucifer to woman on the one hand, and of Ahriman to man on the other. This is a deeply significant spiritual connection.

And therefore this world book of Faust, in contrast to the theology book, was really created out of an inner spiritual impulse. And the newer time is called upon to find the paths between Ahriman and Lucifer. For all the forces through which Lucifer works in the world are not the same as, but similar to, the forces through which he succeeded in seducing woman. All the forces through which Ahriman works in the world are similar to the forces with which he seduces man. And just as we correctly imagine the luciferic seduction that the Bible presents to us in the Lemurian period, so we must seek Ahriman in a place in the Bible that is no longer clear because the Ahrimanic secret in the Bible is not yet revealed in the same way as the luciferic secret. While we are placing the Luciferic mystery in the Lemurian time, we must, as I have often explained, place the Ahrimanic mystery in the Atlantean time. The Bible only hints at this, not with such a clear and radiant image as that of the temptation in Paradise. The Bible only says that the impulses that came into earthly existence caused the sons of the gods to take pleasure in the daughters of men. This is only a hint at what comes in as an Ahrimanic impulse.

Goethe's “Faust” already has a certain historical significance. And this historical significance lies in what I have tried to sketch out for you today. If we want to draw attention to what spiritual science wants to become and should become for humanity, we often have to express paradoxes today, express things that seem strange to many people. But it is true. When human beings will one day arrive at a state where their science will recall the original revelation by explaining earthly life from the secrets of heaven, when earthly science will be such that the deepest secrets of heaven can be recognized in the formation of embryonic development, then mankind will have found the right relationship to Ahriman and Lucifer, and then, in a certain way, that in humanity will be realized which is to be represented in our main group in the structure, in which the representative of humanity is placed between Ahriman and Lucifer in the right gesture.

We shall have to understand more and more deeply what is contained in Goethe's Faust. But we shall need an interpretation that is not dependent on authority. Those people who want to arrive at knowledge only by making, as a lady in our society once said, “a face all the way to their stomachs” in order to express their inner soul mood will not reach their goal. It was a lady who was not accustomed to speaking German and therefore made this linguistic error. But that is not the point; it was a correct description. She wanted to point out those people who lack any possibility of developing humor in their perception of the world. If one cannot develop humor, then under certain circumstances it can become quite dire. So it will have to be that one has to find one's way in the world in the way I have characterized it. Those people who only want to approach the things of the world in a sentimental mood will naturally prefer to be able to understand a work of art such as Goethe's 'Faust' in such a way that they can make 'a face up to their stomachs' at every line. But people who want to understand Faust will have to grasp it without authority. Then they will have to work their way through the contradictions, but working through the contradictions will offer the possibility of understanding. Something like the Prologue on High is no child's play! If one is too afraid of a certain irony and a certain humor towards the world, then one easily falls prey to the greatest humorist, who is a comrade of the one who confronts us in Goethe's Mephistopheles, who is more of a burden to the Lord than a prankster, who is a somewhat more dangerous spirit of the kind that can deny.

I would like to suggest that such things, which already occupy an exceptional position in the spiritual development of mankind, be grasped more deeply. For they are also a way of penetrating into the secrets beyond the threshold, where everything is different from this side of the threshold, where everything is such that one must already become familiar with it, that some things sound paradoxical, which are spoken out of the consciousness of those facts that lie beyond the threshold to the spiritual world. The present time does not want to know much about the secrets that lie beyond the threshold to the spiritual world. Most people today are indeed always convinced that we have come so gloriously far. Well, I don't know how far people will be able to maintain this conviction through our immediate time, which has come so gloriously far and yet only lives in the consequences of what it has believed through the centuries. But even if what is proclaimed from the other side of the threshold sounds paradoxical to many people today, more and more understanding must be formed for these mysteries of existence. And much of the beneficial development of humanity into the future depends on people finding understanding for what still sounds so paradoxical in so many ways.

It may still seem foolish to the world to say that the earth must be explained through heaven, heaven through the earth. He who looks into the compelling destiny of man, which reveals itself from beyond the threshold, knows that what appears so foolish and paradoxical to people is nevertheless wisdom in the sight of the spiritual and the world. And today it may be said without becoming immodest, because when one says it out of the consciousness of the spiritual world, one already has the necessary humility to be allowed to say it, because this humility already exists in the heart , although one may have to use strength to express what one would most like to express in a gesture of humility, in a gesture of the necessary strength, which might give the appearance of a gesture of arrogance. But only an Ahrimanic view could find fault with that, confusing humility and arrogance in this case. More about that another time.

We will soon depict the scene of the second part of Goethe's “Faust”, which precedes the final scene, which, as you know, has already been depicted. The scene begins with the holy anchorites:

Woods, they sway in,
rocks, they weigh on them,

Goethe calls it “Faust's Ascension” and the scene that now follows is usually called the “Entombment”. But we will begin where, in the broader sense, this entombment of Faust is depicted.

When one comes to the various parts of Goethe's “Faust”, one must repeatedly and repeatedly fall into a certain astonishment at the infinite depth that lies in the second part of Goethe's “Faust”, in particular, deep in that one is dealing with an objectivity in the representation of the spiritual world that can be justified by spiritual science. And it is remarkable that Goethe presented the spiritual world with such objectivity at a time when spiritual science as such did not yet exist. I do not need to dwell at length on the question that was once put to me when I gave a lecture many years ago on Goethe's “Fairytale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily”, and a theosophical authority of the old school asked me whether I thought that Goethe knew everything that was said from the spiritual science to justify the deeper secret of the poem of the green snake and the beautiful lily. I could only reply whether the person in question believed that the plant also knows exactly what the botanist makes about it in order to be able to grow in the right way according to the botanical laws. When one hears such a question, one is usually aware of how clever the questioner feels. But if one thinks such a question through to its conclusion, then one realizes how endlessly foolish people often are, who think of themselves as being so clever. So we need not concern ourselves further with the question of whether Goethe, for instance, also studied spiritual science somewhere in the way we can study it today, even if objections can very easily be made from a point of view that considers this question. We want to go straight to the matter itself.

We are presented with three types of figures in addition to those familiar to us from the rest of the Faust legend. We are presented with three types of figures that have to do with the period of time that elapses between the death of Faust and the ascent of his soul into the spiritual regions. The first type of figures presented to us are the lemurs; the second type of figures presented to us are the thick devils with short, straight horns, and the third are the scrawny devils with long, crooked horns; both types of devils are “of the old devil's grist and grain”.

Now we can ask: What spiritual instinct, what deeper wisdom, would lead us to present these three figures in the Entombment and before the Ascension of Faust? This “Entombment” is introduced in such a way that Faust has grown old in his evolution, and, as Goethe himself stated, has become a hundred years old. So, at the beginning of this scene, we are dealing with the old, hundred-year-old Faust, who is still chained to Mephistopheles, but in such a way that Faust can now believe that Mephistopheles has become his servant. Faust has made the decision to wrest a piece of land from the sea, to cultivate this piece of land, and thereby create the basis for an area that will be beneficial to humanity, where this humanity, part of humanity, can develop in peace and freedom. This land is, so to speak, because it was wrested from the sea by Faust's labor, Faust's creation. It is to be made complete by draining a swamp that is there through a ditch, so that the air will also be purified, so that the health of the people who are to develop in peace and freedom will not be endangered by the polluting vapors of the swamp. Faust now believes that Mephisto has become his overseer in this beneficial work and commands the host that is to perform the last work. Faust has already gone blind, as was shown in the previous scene. So he does not see what Mephistopheles is doing on the external physical plane, and it is understandable that he later confuses the words “digging” and “grave”. While Faust is of the opinion that a ditch should be dug to drain the swamp water into the sea in order to purify the air, Mephistopheles has the grave of Faust dug by his lemurs. As a centenarian, Faust thus still experiences the deception, becomes entangled in the web of lies of Mephistopheles, who has the grave dug and, through the similarity of names, deceives Faust into imagining that a ditch is being dug.

There are already many secrets in it. I do not want to get involved in these things today, perhaps it can be discussed another time. But I would prefer us to make ourselves clear about the nature of these three beings. Right at the beginning of the scene, which takes place in the forecourt of the palace that Faust has built for himself, Mephistopheles appears, as already mentioned, as the overseer of the workers, whom Faust believes he has assembled, while Mephistopheles calls his lemurs. Mephistopheles characterizes the lemurs not in a particular scenic remark, but in the scene itself:

Come, come! Enter, enter!
You shivering lemurs,
Made of ligaments, tendons and bones
Half-natures patched together!

So they are described to us as creatures that are held together only by the ligaments that hold the limbs of the human body together, anatomical tendons and bones. So what is not even present in the human organism in the form of muscles holds these figures together, they are patched together out of it. They are not full-natured, not whole-natured, they are half-natured, since they only have what is not blood, not muscle, not nerve, but what tendons, ligaments and bones are. They are patched together out of it. Furthermore, they are characterized by the fact that they later express themselves in chorus. And what they express indicates two things to us. First, how they actually come to do a job there under the supervision of Mephistopheles; but at the same time, this also tells us something about their nature. The lemurs express themselves in such a way that one hears in their quivering tones:

We will help you immediately,
And, as we have half heard,
There is even a wide land,
We shall get it.

So the lemurs are also deceived at first: they have half heard that they are to be given a wide country. They are to dig the grave according to Mephistopheles' plan. But they have half heard and not fully heard that they are to receive a wide country. To this end, they bring sharpened stakes to work with.

Sharpened stakes, they are there,
The long chain for measuring;
Why we were called upon,
we have forgotten.

It sounds in their half-nature, which is patched together from tendons, ligaments and bones, there is still something that sounds and rattles from a call. But what the content of the call is, what they are actually supposed to do there, they have forgotten. They are truly characterized by this. One can say that they are there, but they do not know why they are there. They know half of it, why they are there, they have heard something, but they do not know what they have heard. They have heard a call, but they have forgotten it again. So there they are in front of us, these lemurs, and Mephistopheles immediately reprimands them. He says: “This has nothing to do with the wide land you wanted; only act according to your own dimensions, according to such dimensions as are appropriate for one who consists only of legs and tendons:

The longest one lies down lengthwise.

So the one lemur has to lie down lengthwise, and now he instructs them how to dig the grave.

In the next chorus of lemurs, we are told that there is still something in them of a half-remembered memory that they were once something like human beings, that they come from something like human beings:

How young I was and live and love,
Methought it was quite sweet;
Where there was cheerful sound and merry mirth,
There moved my feet.

— That is behind them, and only half conscious.

Now the treacherous age has struck me
With his crutch;
I stumbled over the door of the grave,

Why was it open just then!

So they half-remember that they come from dead people. Mephisto first tried to come to terms with them, he needs them first.

Now I ask you to remember that I have indeed said many times that we do not carry our physical bodies with us without further ado, and that we only discard them like an empty shell. It is not only our shell, I often said, it is our tool. It contains the forces through which we are connected to the mineral earth. Now I ask you to consider the following: we are, with our physical body, formed on Saturn, Sun, Moon and Earth, with what we now have between birth and death. Let us imagine all that has been implanted in us by Saturn, Sun, Moon and Earth, I would say, summed up and suggested by everything I am drawing here, and let us imagine that which is incorporated into the earth in that we receive an ego as a tool in the earth, that this ego is incorporated as a physical tool. Let us imagine that within.

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During the time on earth, our physical body again receives what was demanded of it on Saturn, what was formed during the time of the sun and moon. But because the I works in it, what the human being has not through Saturn, Sun and Moon, but only through the development of the Earth, is incorporated. This is the external physical expression of the I. From this, the I emerges in death. What remains of Saturn, Sun and Moon has no place in earthly life; it has nothing to do with the forces of earthly development. The physical forces of the evolution of the earth would never have produced our muscles; they had to be produced by the physical forces of the evolution of the moon. But during the evolution of the earth, the impulses of the ego did indeed produce the bones, and the bones only during the Atlantean evolution, through the salt deposits in the Atlantic Ocean, the ligaments, the tendons. All this is integrated only through the forces of the earth. In this way we carry the earth within us, in our bones, tendons and ligaments. The spirit of the earth lives in them. The same forces live in them that are present in all the mineral, natural or technical domains of the earth. In the composition of our bones, tendons and ligaments, everything that can arise from the mineral-physical natural and technical effects of the earth lives. When we now go through the gate of death, we leave behind our Saturn, Sun and Moon parts. These are destroyed by the fact that they cannot exist in the earth. Bones, tendons and ligaments must destroy the forces of the earth itself, regardless of whether the person is buried or cremated; this makes no difference, the special forces of the earth must destroy them.

Thus, because Faust has died, that which is subject to the special forces of the earth is handed over to the earth, to that earth to which all dead people are also handed over, insofar as they are made of bones, tendons and ligaments. A deep spiritual insight into nature is expressed in this formulation that Goethe gave to this scene, an infinitely deep knowledge of nature! For one should not believe that one has exhausted what remains of us when one says: Well, the physical body falls away from us, and our soul — as we have always described it — continues into the spiritual worlds. — No, there are secret spiritual forces in the whole physical body that remain on the earth. The earth can only retain that which it has produced itself, but it retains only the forces from bones, tendons and ligaments. Bury the human being and let him decay, burn him - in the earthly body itself, despite decay or burning, what remains for all future is always present in the forces in bones, tendons and ligaments! We hand over our skeleton, so to speak, to the earth, and it remains there until the earth itself has reached the goal of its evolution. Our skeleton is taken up by the skeletons of all those who have died before us, and enters into the community of those who have died before us. It would be a superficial view to say: “Everything is transitory here.” Only the form is transitory. The forces that prevail in them are contained in the earth's activity. And if you take the physical forces at work on earth today, if you look straight into the earth, the forces in it that have come about because people have been buried in the earth, or because they have somehow been destroyed, their bodies have somehow been destroyed. The forces that formed the human being are now in the earth, working in the interior of the earth, they are there, they are preserved.

So we can say: Mephisto is initially faced with the task of dealing with the path of the physical body, with the path, with the paths that the physical body wants to take. - That's where he needs the lemurs, I would say, who are not ghostly, but under ghostly beings, phantom beings that are always united with the earthly body as the remains of dead people. He needs them.

Do you know what would happen if what has been ours since Atlantean times were to disappear in our bones, tendons and ligaments? Even today the earth would be close to it, and it would soon be more likely that all people would be born with so-called “English limbs,” with weak and powerless limbs. People would be born rickety, because the earth only has a certain amount of the strength that lies in our bone movements and tendon development. And what we give back in death always goes into later human bodies in a mysterious way. Otherwise, people would be born rickety. And if one is born rickety, it is a sign that one has not entered into a right relationship in one's total karma with those forces that the earth gives again and again and again, and receives back again and again from the bones, tendons and ligaments of humanity.

Thus an infinitely deep, spiritual thought of nature is expressed in the fact that Mephisto has summoned these underworldly spectres, these pure phantom beings, in whose ranks Faust's phantom also enters. We must, of course, grasp the scene quite spiritually. The interpreters of Faust always believed that there were bone men walking around. But they are only the forces that lie in the bones, tendons and ligaments, the supersensible forces. The scene is to be grasped entirely spiritually, only through spiritual vision, in the manner of spiritual vision. These lemurs have what is in man in that he has an I. But the I is outside. But the I is outside. So all the qualities that only came in through the I are gone, are only half present, only echoes. Therefore they are there and also not there. We human beings are only there when we send our I into our bones, tendons and ligaments. They no longer have that. We only understand what we have heard when we send our ego through our bones, tendons and ligaments. They only have the echo; they hear and do not know what they hear; they have heard a call and have only half heard it, have forgotten it because the memory lies in the system that is put together by bones, tendons and ligaments. So, because Mephistopheles first has to deal with the paths that Faust's physical body takes, he, who is a spirit but wants to assert his rights on earth, naturally comes into the necessity of having to deal with the lemurs, as they are meant here, because from them he could snatch the spiritual part of Faust's physical body. After all, the physical body is also based on a spiritual one. He could grasp this spiritual.

Now, to understand the whole, let us recall something we can find in the chapter of the book 'How to Know Higher Worlds?' where the Dweller of the Threshold is mentioned. There you will find that when a person undergoes higher spiritual development, the individual powers that are otherwise united in him in ordinary human knowledge, diverge. I characterized them there according to their abilities. Will, feeling and thinking go their separate ways, each becoming something in itself. Mephisto, who remained behind on the lunar evolution with his own nature, was still familiar with the lunar evolution. That is how you have to understand him. He, Mephisto, is familiar with the lunar development in his practical view of life. But even in the atavistic view of the moon, the limbs of the human being were still separate and not yet united by the ego. So if Mephisto, in his way, wants to grasp the spiritual essence of Faust, he must actually grasp it in its threefold nature. He must grasp it as the spiritual essence of the physical body; there he must deal with the lemurs. Then he must want to grasp it as the second link in the etheric body, which separates soon after death. He is familiar with that, so he must want to grasp it. And then he must want to grasp it in what passes over into the spiritual world and has detached itself from the etheric body. What has been united through the ego does not yet correspond to his realm; he is not yet at home there, Mephisto; the separateness still exists. So he must instinctively attach importance to achieving what the spiritual is of the physical body; there he must let the lemurs work. Now, because he only knows the soul in separation, he wants to catch for himself - he does not know what - the etheric body, which leaves the human being through the lower limbs. So he puts the Dickteufel there to catch the etheric body for him. Then - he does not know how it should be. Perhaps he can grasp Faust's spiritual essence at the third link, at that which wants to ascend into the spiritual world? That is where he places the Dürrteufel. And so he wants to grasp Faust's spiritual essence. But he must, I would say, with devilish instinct, bring together the threefoldness that can convey to him the physical body directly in its spirituality – etheric body, soul-spiritual –.

Etheric body - you see, physics cannot quite cope with the ether that is present because the ether has a strange property that distinguishes it from ordinary materiality. It is not heavy, it has no weight. The usual gravity of the earth cannot hold the ether. Mephisto wants to hold it. He wants to hold it through spiritual beings. Because the ether has already become spiritual, it should also be held by spiritual beings. To do this, he needs the thick devils, who, as spiritual beings, have a certain heaviness. They must therefore be thick-bellied creatures with huge, thick bodies – small, of course, because if they were towering, they would reach too far into the upper regions. They must be designed to be small and stout, their spiritual nature must be earthly, their spiritual nature must be such that it can sustain on earth that which seeks to fly spiritually.

They must therefore be small and stout, and everything in them that is the physiognomic expression of humanity must be clumsy. They must have enormous strength in their somewhat stocky bodies. Therefore, the limbs that are more spiritualized are small; in reality they would have to have small hands, stumps, arm stumps. It is difficult to portray, can only be portrayed if the actors make every effort to move only the lower part of the arms; of course, this must be practiced and learned. But the nose, too, is difficult. It is developed, the nose that has become a horn in the devils, it is difficult; so it is, together with the forehead, the heavy organ that does not connect man with the air, but that works and is formed by its own weight.

Mephisto needs such creatures to be able to hold back the etheric body, which we know takes a different path because it is not weighed down by the earth, in the rest of the earth. He must therefore hire them so that when the etheric body appears from the lower regions of Faust's body, they can grasp it. Therefore he hires them:

Fresh meat! Double your step,
You gentlemen from the straight, crooked horn,
From the old devil's grist and grain
You bring the hellish maw at the same time.
Hell has many a maw! many!
According to rank and dignity, she devours;
But in this last game, too, one will

Canines gape; from the gorge's vault
The fire stream wells up in rage,
And in the boiling smoke of the background
I see the flame city in eternal glow!

This is, of course, the same flame city that appears in Dante!

The red surf... and so on.

Here they come, the fat devils with short, straight horns! He now describes them:

Now, bloated villains with fire cheeks!

So they are in the state in which the lunar creatures still breathed fire. They are “pot-bellied villains with fire-cheeks” who “are really fat from the brimstone of hell”.

Block-like, short, never moving necks!

So everything is immobile; mobility is already semi-spiritual. They are all clumsy and awkward, all so that they force the spirit into heaviness, because they are supposed to hold the light ether. And there he posts them:

Here below lurks, whether it glistens like phosphorus:

- whether the etheric body comes out, which they are supposed to catch —

That is the little soul, Psyche with the wings,

- he sees it as the soul! —

You pluck it out, and there is a nasty worm;

So he wants the etheric body in the form of a dragon, doesn't he.

With my stamp I will seal her,
Then away with her in a fiery whirlwind!

He says very aptly now, by placing the devil's advocate there:

Pay attention to the lower regions,
you windbags, that is your duty;
Whether she likes to live there,

You can't really know.

How should he know, since he has the three members of the soul; he does not really know what to start with!

She likes to be at home in the navel,

That is the region where the etheric body must leave the person first.

Take care, for she will wipe you out there.

So there we have the fat devils with short, straight horns who want to try to shape the spiritual so that it develops earthly heaviness.

Mephisto wants to conquer the third part through the Dürrteufel. They must be very thin guys, again difficult to represent! Very thin, and all spiritual, so nose and forehead together to a horn united, which overcomes the matter as possible, in devilish way overcomes, so crooked and long, because they should achieve it, to become quite spiritual, to overcome the earth heaviness completely. Therefore, they are “Firlefanze”, as spinning tops, move quickly like spinning tops. They must now be employed to catch that which goes into the spiritual world - the third. So they are supposed to chase after the forces that develop precisely out of heaviness, so to speak. That which they are not supposed to get into the heaviness of the earth, they are supposed to develop, like a spinning top, counter to the heaviness, through their long, flexible limbs, which should actually grow out of them. That is how they should develop. That is how Mephisto sets them up:

You winged giants of Firlefanze!
Reach into the air, try without rest;
Arms straight,

— straight means long in this case, that they become thin and long.

The arms are stretched, the claws are sharply pointed,

– so long claws instead of fingers come out –

so that you can catch the fluttering, the fleeting.

– the soul that goes to the spiritual worlds –

She must feel ill at ease in the old house,
And the genius

- in contrast to the etheric body: the genius, which is always soul-spiritual -

And the genius, it wants to get out right at the top.

There you can see how, according to the way man is constituted, the function of the lemurs on the physical body, the thick devil on the etheric body, the dry devil for the spiritual-soul is sharply, clearly outlined!

Now the heavenly host is approaching, the heavenly host, that is, the beings who belong to the spiritual worlds. And the matter is presented in such a way that none of those who can serve Mephisto – the lemures, the thick- and scrawny devils – achieve anything. The heavenly host is coming:

Follow the messengers,
heavenly relatives,
slow flight;
forgiving dust,
animating dust;
to all natures
friendly traces
work in floating
its dwelling train.

These are beings that have not experienced the earthly either, but do not claim to have an effect on the earthly sphere, but only on the spiritual and mental aspects of the human being. Mephistopheles is out of place, he has remained a ghost, a moon ghost, and has an effect on the earth. They have remained in their own sphere. They must therefore appear to him as beings who have not even become human, but are still pre-human, immature, less than children.

I hear discordant notes, nasty strumming,
From above it comes with unwelcome day;
It is the mischievous, girlish banging,
As sanctimonious taste may love it.

And so on. Of course, Mephisto is well aware of the close kinship between him and the angels as spiritual beings. They have both remained spiritual beings. That is why he calls them devils in his own way, but devils in disguise.

They are devils, but in disguise.

Now the battle begins between the host of angels and the demons and goblins down there who are striving for Faust's soul. Mephisto is standing there and must take part in this battle. He instructs his devils because he senses something. What does he actually sense? Yes, he knows the trinity as a soul quality. But that is not capable of grasping the I-unity. He does not believe that in Faust the I-unity is so strong that it holds the trinity together. That is his great error. While he is actually always talking about the trinity of the soul, the unity of the soul is asserted at this moment from the spiritual world, holding everything together. If this unity, this unity of the ego, were not there, the lemures would be able to draw the soul of the physical body to themselves, without it having remained connected to the whole world, to the whole cosmos. The Dürrteufel would be able to grasp the soul, the genius. But because they are held together by the ego in the human being between birth and death, each one goes its way: the body to the earth, the etheric body to the etheric region, that which is soul to the spiritual region, but they remain destined for each other. There remains a connection. And as soon as the connection, which is brought about by the character of the ego, is there, the devil can do nothing. But he is positioning himself quite correctly.

Why do you cower and flinch? Is this the custom of hell?

— the thick-skinned and scrawny devils sense that a different element is coming.

So stand firm and let them scatter.

They scatter roses, namely, as a symbol of spiritual love coming from above.

To his place, every Gauch!
They think, with such flowerbedecking
They can snow in the hot devils;
That melts and shrivels at your breath.

Now they begin, because he commands them:

Now blow, Püstriche! —

Now they blow away the love torment that surrounds them. This is a hot glow for them, which they cannot endure. Now they blow, but they blow too hard because they cannot find the right measure. They have not been taught about what is formed through the evolution of the earth.

— Enough, enough!....

That you never know the right measure!

He also only knows them insofar as he observes them on earth; he does not know them from his own nature, the right measures. But because he was with Faust for so long and saw what Faust needed, he recognizes the measures of men again for a while.

— Enough, enough!
Before your breath the whole flight pales. —
Not so violently! Shut your mouths and nostrils!
Truly, you have blown too strongly.
That you never know the right measure!
That not only shrinks, it browns, dries, burns!
It is already floating along with poisonous clear flames;
Brace yourselves against it, press close together! The strength goes out! All courage is gone! The devils scent the flattery of strangers.

To him, love is only flattery, he turns everything into something purely selfish. And so we see how, through this struggle that unfolds here, how in the imagination – for the whole thing takes place in the imagination of Mephisto, who for a while transports himself back to his old time on the moon – how, for the imagination of Mephisto, the possibility presents itself that he could have the soul in its trinity, while it was actually snatched from him by the unity.

The interesting thing is that in this scene in particular we also find an awareness of the inner spiritual evolution of humanity. Think of what I have often said, that only a certain narrow-mindedness can believe that as far back as people go, they have always looked the same; so spiritually, one imagines the Romans, Greeks, Egyptians, all more or less the same as present-day people, while great developments have been undergone. People who only think about the last few centuries know nothing about what human beings have gone through in the course of the centuries in evolution. But spiritual beings notice this because they look at things spiritually. And so it is so wonderful that we can see from Mephisto's words here to Faust precisely what he, Mephisto, who is of course an old fellow, has gone through the whole evolution of the earth — you know how he says at one point that he once found “crystallized human race”! — yes, Mephisto sees how it has changed:

The body lies, and the spirit seeks to flee;
I quickly show it the blood-written title.

So, what does he actually want? Faust has died. He wants the soul, of which he only recognizes the trinity. We remember that Faust made a contract with Mephisto, even written in blood, a contract. What does Mephisto actually want, MephistoAhriman? What does he want? He wants to invoke his contract. If he shows the contract at the moment when the soul comes out, he believes that the soul cannot escape him. Well, I would rather not speak further on this point in view of some contemptuous words that have been spoken in this troubled time. Since our friends are already being accused of not thinking clearly about contracts, I do not want to develop a contract theory now that could be exploited in turn. Perhaps it could even be said, if I do not take the side of Mephisto in this scene, but rather the side of Faust: Faust would be a real Pan-Germanist in terms of his view of contracts! I do not want to talk further about the plight one could get into, because either one would have to take sides for Mephisto-Ahriman, or one would expose oneself to danger because Faust does not go into the blood-written title, to chalk this up to us as a pan-Germanistic view. So we prefer to remain silent about all the deeper wisdom that would have to be developed if one were to talk about Faust and Mephisto's contract. Let's leave it!

But evolution with its inner meaning comes to us in the words of Mephisto, who points out that times change and with them the impulses that are in the development of humanity. In the past, when the old times were there, he still understood quite well how to catch souls – today we call it superstition, but we know that they were somewhat clairvoyant times. Then the souls were still easily accessible in their trinity; then he could still catch the souls if the matter was well prepared – and after all, he prepared them quite well in Faust. But now, as the fifth post-Atlantic period approaches and the unity of the soul is being established through the ego, he has not yet undergone his full training.

But unfortunately we now have so many means
to withdraw souls from the devil
we come up against the old ways,
we are not recommended

The little people never sense the devil,
even when he has them by the collar.

There he is, but he is not recommended. And so he gets the helpers he needs, who he believes can help him get what he wants: the soul in its trinity. But the fact that it no longer exists in its trinity, in its original form, allows it to slip through his fingers.

It is a curious thing with this Mephisto-Ahriman. The beings that belong to the spiritual world come down into his spheres, and - yes, he actually falls in love with these beings. Goethe quite rightly describes a love scene between Mephisto and the angels. The devil has understanding. And a love affair between Mephisto and the angels is truly an absurd love affair, that is what Mephisto also calls it, it is truly an absurd love affair. But how is it that this absurd love affair can still affect him? That feelings of love arise in him at all? If he had not lived at Faust's side for so long and wanted to beguile Faust by stimulating such feelings in Faust in a particularly enticing way, they would not have crossed over to him. And so here again you have a deep wisdom, a wonderful wisdom. The devil actually has no erotic or other love in the earthly sense. He doesn't have it. Love affair is of course absurd for him, because we know that the earth is the cosmos of love. He is from the cosmos of wisdom. But he is out of place, he wanders around on earth and always wants to incorporate the earth into his realm. This means that he repeatedly finds himself in a position to incorporate into himself qualities that are developed on earth and that no longer fit his nature. In order to gain a soul, he must prepare this soul for the devil, that is, make it suitable for the qualities that Lucifer implanted at the beginning. But in doing so, he himself becomes infected by these qualities and once again makes himself incapable of keeping this soul. You see here in the big picture what happens on a small scale. Imagine that man is also capable of arousing passions, but if he develops them to a certain point, they destroy his organism at the same time. So you can only do it to a certain point. The devil must, as it were, vampirically absorb human qualities into himself so that he can arouse the passions in Faust. But in doing so, he destroys his own true devilish nature. This is how the absurd affair with the angels comes about, and he becomes inattentive and does not even realize that the angels are snatching his soul away. This darkening of consciousness, this transition of consciousness into the subconscious, had to occur in him.

Since we will have the performance today, I cannot say more. I think that enough has been said for the time being to convey a little of the understanding of the trinity inherent in this scene. I think we see, especially when we devote ourselves to such a contemplation, how infinitely deep that is of which Goethe says that he has secretly incorporated it into the second part of 'Faust'.

Those people who were able to evoke in themselves the idea that spiritual wisdom is at work through the evolution of humanity, that it has only receded somewhat in our time, that this spiritual wisdom often only a shadow in all kinds of legitimate or illegitimate occult societies, such people, as isolated individuals, always knew what profound wisdom is contained in Goethe's “Faust,” real wisdom, concrete world wisdom. That is why they have expressed themselves in this sense. And one such man dedicated a short poem to the memory of Goethe at the Feast of St. John in 1880, a poem in which he wanted to express how much he felt at one with him in spiritual wisdom, a man who, due to the erudition of the materialistic age, actually had very little of Goethe in him, very little of substance. And since spiritual science had not yet been born when this man wrote, he only had a vague feeling that this spiritual science lives in Goethe like an instinct. The Faust commentary that he wrote as a result, Oswald Marbach, did not become significant. But in the poem that he dedicated to the great mason's wisdom festival, the Manenfest, to the manes of Goethe — as one used to say in the past when speaking of the immortal part of man, the Manen, the same spirit lives that lives in the Manas – it shows that, as it were half-consciously only in lonely souls, there was always the connection with the great that lived in Goethe's poetry. And so he, who felt connected with the Manes of Goethe, with the individuality of Goethe, says at the Feast of St. John, the masonic feast in 1880:

To you, brother, father, exalted master!
To you, to whom we now, for over a century,
As a sign of our most loyal love in the alliance of free spirits,
We extend our tightly entwined hands; —
To you, the greatest of spirits and the freest of the free!
To whom we aspire to be like; —
We consecrate ourselves to you! We consecrate our sons to you,
That our building may one day be crowned with perfection!

You have striven as we have; but your striving
For self-knowledge, which leads to wisdom,
Was always inspired by the most vital life,
By strength of the creator, which proceeds to action,
To works that lift themselves up to the light,
Around which the splendor of beauty spreads eternally:
You wrestled with God like Israel,
Until you, as victor, conquered yourself!

What mysteriously unites us with you
Will not be revealed to the uninitiated by a single word;
But let it be proclaimed loudly before all the people
Through the purest love, tireless deeds,
Through clear light that ignites spirit in spirit,
Through eternal life's evergreen seeds. —
Onward, O Master! Wherever You have gone,
We follow You with the most ardent longing.

May there come a time again when such words may and can be truth!

after a eurythmic presentation of the scenes “Midnight” and “Entombment”

Once again we have allowed a piece of Goethe's 'Faust' to pass before our minds. In the last lecture here, I tried to develop some of the spiritual-scientific principles that can help us understand it when I spoke about the nature of the lemurs, the fat and scrawny devils. On such occasions, we always try not just to seek out something for the understanding of this poetry, but to gain something from the poetry in terms of general spiritual significance, to look into those true realities that Goethe tried to reach with his “Faust”.

Today I would like to tie in a few observations with what has just passed before our soul. It may seem significant to us that this scene, which we have just seen come to an end, is not the last scene of Goethe's “Faust”, but that, as we know, it is followed by that other scene that we performed here some time ago. You remember: mountain gorges, forest, rock, solitude, holy anchorites, chorus, echo, forest that staggers along and so on, where we are led through the devout meditation of the Pater ecstaticus, Pater profundus, Pater Seraphicus, through the chorus of the blessed boys , where we meet the angels again, who in the scene we saw today carry Faust's immortal into the upper regions, where we also meet the trinity of the penitent women, Doctor Marianus, and Mater gloriosa as Gretchen's guide until the final chorus, the actual mystical chorus:

All that is transitory
is but a parable.

All this follows on from the scene we have seen today, which depicts the battle of the spirits of light with the spirits of darkness for the soul of Faust.

When attempting to explain Faust, one often proceeds from scene to scene, sometimes even from sentence to sentence, without asking the questions that could be asked and that would actually shed light on this great, powerful work of literature. Today we have seen how Faust's burial took place, how Mephistopheles-Ahriman has lost his game, how the soul has been carried up into the spiritual regions. From a certain point of view, one might ask: Could the Faust epic not actually end here? Do we not now basically know everything that it is about? Do we not know that Mephistopheles has lost his wager, that all the efforts he has made throughout the lifetime of Faust, which he has been able to accompany, are lost, that Faust's soul has been accepted into the region of light, that thus the words spoken by Lessing with regard to a Faust epic vis-à-vis the spirits of darkness: “You shall not win” have been fulfilled? Could we not believe that with this everything is actually over, that the Faust epic has found its end? — The question presents itself to our soul: Why then does the conclusion known to us now follow on from what we have seen today? — And by raising this question and then dealing with its answer, one touches on significant secrets of human life in its connection with the whole world. The fact that Goethe shaped this conclusion of Faust as he did shows precisely how deeply he penetrated into the foundations of his life in an age when spiritual science had not yet come into being, and into the secrets of human existence. Much, much lies in the scene that was presented today, and even more lies in the fact that this scene is followed by other final scenes. Much of it proves that Goethe knew the deepest secrets of existence, but that he was also compelled to present the secrets of existence in such a way that they are only accessible to those who want to delve deeper into spiritual life, into its essence. Quite deliberately, Goethe expressed much of it in veiled terms, as he himself said, enwrapped in the poetry of Faust. Much of what is said in veiled terms, so to speak, triggers hatred and opposition in dull-witted people who, out of fear and laziness, do not want to approach the knowledge of the spiritual world. However, as a result, Goethe's Faust poetry has remained more or less misunderstood for eighty-four years and will only gradually, when we can live towards the future, reveal itself to humanity in its depths. Yes, it can be said that spiritual scientific knowledge will only be able to trigger those artistic perceptions that can convey an understanding of the Faust poetry.

Let us first look back at the hauntingly impressive scene in which Faust beholds the four gray women: Want, Guilt, Hardship, and Worry. Let us be clear about the fact that Faust has this experience with the four gray women at a moment when he has gone through many, many spiritual life experiences, or rather, life experiences that have evoked spiritual understanding in him. Goethe imagines his Faust in the time that is presented for Faust through this final scene, having reached the age of one hundred. Today, Faust first stood before us with all the spiritualized experiences in his soul, as he stands on the balcony of his home, which he created at a workplace from which he wanted to do work for the human future. We look at his soul in such a way that all his feelings of satisfaction, all that he has been able to achieve for humanity by wresting a free country from the sea for free men, are summarized in his soul.

The stars hide their gaze and glow,
The fire sinks and burns low;
A chilling wind fans it,
Bringing smoke and haze to me.
Offered quickly, too quickly done!

Now, seemingly before his eyes, but in reality in an inner vision, what the appearance of the four gray women forms:

What floats in the shadows?

We have to imagine that through the deepening that Faust's soul has experienced, this soul has become capable of having the vision of the four figures — of lack, of need, of worry, of guilt — from the deep inner source itself. This “scene at midnight” is an inward experience in the truest sense of the word, an inward experience as it is evoked in Faust by the soul slowly beginning to detach itself from the body. For that is the strange mystery that Goethe quite evidently intended, that from the moment the three gray women speak the words:

The clouds roll by, the stars fade away!
Back there, back there! From afar, from afar,
Here comes he, the brother, here comes he, the - death,

— that from this moment on, death already really spreads over Faust's life. And we only understand this scene correctly if we think of Faust from then on as a dying man, as one in whom the soul is slowly detaching itself from the body. And it would be wrong to think that what follows is meant to be merely realistic in terms of the external senses. It is not. As we see Faust in the room of his palace, where worry has entered, we find, as he sits there, that the soul has already loosened itself to a certain extent from the body, that the experiences of physical life merge with the experiences that the soul has when it has already loosened itself from the body. And only then do we understand the strangely interwoven sentences when we consider this interplay of the spiritual world, in which Faust is already empathizing through his loosening soul, this interplay of the spiritual world with the physical-sensual world, in which Faust is still, because the soul is loosening, has not yet detached itself. Lack, guilt, and need were powerless; they were only the heralds of death. But the consuming worry remains where the vision is transformed in such a way that it is already the vision of the soul released from the body:

Four I saw coming, three only going;
I could not understand the meaning of the speech.
It sounded as if it said - distress,
A gloomy rhyming word followed - death.
It sounded hollow, ghostly muffled.

If one knows what Goethe felt when he heard the word gespensterhaft (ghostly), he who felt much more concretely than today's dull materialists, then one does not take such a word

It sounded hollow, ghostly muffled

not light, but important and essential, and seeks the feeling that Goethe had when he put these words into the mouth of Faust. Among other things, Goethe uses a beautiful word in which he expresses the following. He says: “Sometimes life seems to me as if distant past events were entering into the present consciousness, and then everything that is distant in the past appears like a ghost that has entered the present.” Goethe had a very concrete concept of what he called ghostly. Visionarily, millennia-old times of his own life stood before him, which he often believed he saw moving into his present life like ghosts. These are not assertions that I make out of arbitrariness; this can be strictly proven from what Goethe himself expressed when he spoke intimately about the experiences of his inner life.

Now the views and thoughts that Faust has, half in the spiritual world and half still living on the physical plane, flow together. If you could imagine the interplay between these two worlds, that is what it is like for Faust. He is now experiencing something that can actually only be experienced in this interplay between the two worlds, which would not have developed if he had distanced himself more from his physical body. He still feels bound by the events of the beyond to the events of physical life:

I have not yet fought my way into the open.

And now for the remarkable speech, which to many will seem like a mere contradiction, but which becomes understandable if one understands the experience to take place between physical life and spiritual life. The spiritual world sought to reach Faust throughout his life. Spiritual science in the true sense did not exist at that time. He tried to recognize the spiritual world by means of magic inherited from the Middle Ages, the same magic that brought him into contact with Ahriman-Mephistopheles in the way we have often discussed, and also in the last lecture. This magic, by which he entered the spiritual world, cannot be separated from Mephistopheles. If you look back at what happened around Faust, you will see everywhere that Mephistopheles has set the magical actions in scene. We cannot hope that Faust wants to hold on to this magic now that he is already halfway into the spiritual world:

Could I remove magic from my path,
Unlearn spells altogether.

Those spells that he has drawn from old books and that have already become Luciferian and Ahrimanic because they have been preserved from ancient times. In this way, he now finds, when he really enters the spiritual world, that what he has achieved was not what he was looking for after all. And now he looks back. He begins to look back, as one does when one's soul is relaxed. Now he begins to look back at the life that has just passed. The moment stands vividly before him, the moment before he reached for the medieval books, before he uttered the fateful word:

That is why I devoted myself to magic.

He has been protected by good powers that have guided him mercifully in the sense of the “Prologue to Heaven” from the fruits of that magic that he would have had to pluck if these merciful workings of special powers had not passed through his path through life. Now he already sees into the spiritual world, now he knows differently. This plays a role. With the present knowledge, he would make the path different:

If I, nature! were a man alone before you,
it would be worth the effort to be a human being.

He could not say this earlier, before he had loosened his soul from his body, not in this way. Then he had to go the whole way of error. Now he looks back and sees that it was indeed the path through the darkness of Mephistopheles. He looks back first to the time in his life when Mephistopheles had not yet crossed his path:

That was I otherwise,

— a man alone

eh' I's in the dark sought,
With sacrilegious word me and the world cursed.
Now the air is so full of such spooks,
that no one knows how to avoid it.

The full weight of what has happened now weighs on his soul.

Even when a day smiles at us with clear reason,
the night entangles us in dream images;
we return joyfully from the young meadow,

— so he has spent his life, half naked in the physical world, half already - albeit in the physical body -— transferred by Mephistopheles to the spiritual world, looking into the spiritual world, but always having to return to the physical world, because Mephistopheles cannot find it, nor can he convey it, the access, because he cannot properly find the connection.

A bird caws; what does it caw? Misfortune.

Only superstition can be found on this path.

Entwined by superstition morning, noon, and night –
It lends itself, it shows itself, it warns –
And so, intimidated, we stand alone.

But the path of superstition has always mixed with the strong path that Faust was able to walk through his own strong nature. And now he has the vision that could remain with him as his soul loosens more and more: the vision of worry. And try to feel how Goethe also lets the highest in language resonate in his words here. One would like to say that the whole of world history lies on our soul when we feel the weight of these words. Worry creeps in. Is anyone there? Faust asks.

Is anyone here?

The answer sounds:

The question demands yes!

Not a simple answer: Yes! The question demands Yes! I said: The whole of world history forces its way into our soul through the arrangement of the words. For how could one think of those magnificent scenes, where before the court Christ Jesus is asked: “Is it you, the Son of God?” He does not answer simply: Yes – but: “You say it!”

Now it is not expressed in an abstract word whom Faust is now experiencing:

I am here.

But it is in him. It is basically a soliloquy. And it is a deep soliloquy. Only gradually will humanity learn, through inner experiences, the full weight of this soliloquy. With what is to be given to humanity as spiritual science, insights will also come to humanity that will be linked to deep, deep feelings and sensations about life, feelings and sensations that the dull, dull materialism dreams of, nor does the easily acquired worldview that believes that everything has been gained with sentences that characterize the physical or spiritual-real. We have such sentences. We know that they have been achieved through difficult inner experiences. We keep them in our souls, we carry them with us through life. But they are not what they can and must truly be for the human soul if they are not accompanied by all possible moods, by those moods that often make our soul life appear as if it were living over an abyss. And when we have attained spiritual knowledge, we can never lose the concern that comes over us about the relationship of spiritual knowledge to the whole reality of life. Man must feel, especially when he enters the spiritual world, that it is a platitude to speak of it in false asceticism, that this earthly life is only a low one that one would most like to cast off. Man feels the whole deep meaning of this earth-life for eternity precisely through spiritual realizations: that this earth-life must be gone through in order that that which exists can be incorporated into the impulses which we carry through death into the sphere of eternity. But how could it be otherwise than that at the end of a life of trial, just at such a moment, when the soul is loosened, man becomes aware, in serious, grave concern, of what may become of his life just experienced, when he now has to go through the spiritual world with his soul, what the fruits of this life just lived may be. Faust has struggled through much, much. But he is great because now, when he has just entered the spiritual world and is half in it and half still feeling back to his physical existence on earth, he knows in the very significant comparison that arises between the physical and the spiritual in such a life-and-death situation:

I have only run through the world;
I seized every desire by the hair,
What was not enough, I let go,
What escaped me, I let go.
I only desired and only accomplished
And wished again, and so with might
stormed through my life; first great and mighty,
but now it goes wisely, goes deliberately.

Feel the harmony that now arises in his soul: how he has passed through the small and the great world, as it says in “Faust”, and with an overall view that is just opening up, as in the moment he feels a flood of spiritual illumination in his vision, he can survey with wisdom and deliberation all that he has gone through in the rush of the floods of life. And now: what does he see? What does he begin to see? —- He begins to see what he has experienced in the circle of the earth. Think back to what we have discussed about the review that overtakes the soul, which is now slowly overtaking Faust, at the beginning of the life after death. Think of this review. He sees his life on earth. He sees it in such a way that he has to say to himself:

The circle of the earth is well enough known to me.

What he had experienced on earth, he now sees. He is already halfway into the spiritual world. You can feel the words in this mood:

The view to the other side has vanished.

That is what one can say when looking back on earthly life. This is not a philosophical confession of materialism, but an immediate experience after death has already taken hold of the soul. Dopes who have become Faust commentators have interpreted this passage as if Faust, in his old age, were once again reverting to a materialistic creed. But now, in this situation, Faust would truly be a fool if he wanted to look back on life and now, with a blink, see that spiritual world, which is often described here by those fools who build this spiritual world in such a way that they simply write about their own kind, as is done in many confessions. He wants to stand firm on the result of his life. And now words of deep significance are actually falling, before which every semblance of materialism must fade, must fade completely. The vague mystics, those dreadful mystics who always speak of wanting to merge with the universe, of wanting to grasp eternity mystically in the chaotic darkness of the universe, which they call universal light, want to wander into eternity. The one who wants to grasp the spiritual life in a concrete way grasps it where it can be grasped in its concreteness. He does not become a fool, losing himself in vague distances that actually contain nothing but emptiness and empty space, and into which the soul dreams itself away. He will not be seduced into roaming into such eternities, but will grasp knowledge concretely. That which he recognizes can be grasped:

Thus he walks along the day on earth.

Consider how wonderful this sentence becomes when one considers that it marks the beginning of the retrospective view of earthly life: the vision walks along the day on earth. Now he has arrived at the point where he can find the right relationship to those haunting ghosts to which Mephistopheles has seduced him here.

When ghosts haunt,

– now in retrospect

he goes his way;
In walking on, he finds torment and happiness,
He! unsatisfied every moment.

We have to imagine the not yet fully completed, but now incipient review, that review, which is still full of the concern, through which fruits from the experienced earth day can be carried into the spiritual world. And always like this: over, over. Spiritual experience, but because he still clings to the body, also physical experience, so we find Faust. Care still holds him to the physical body. He is meant to enter consciously into the spiritual world, made conscious precisely by the burden of care. That is why he grows into the spiritual world in such a way that, while already bearing the spiritual world in his soul, he still believes that he can command the physical world. Those people who hold the banal contemporary view that man has always been essentially as he is now, do not know that many Greeks died as Faust dies, or rather, as Goethe had Faust die. We can prove from Greek literature that this death was almost a desirable one for the Greeks, like reliving some of the physical existence, while the soul has already been released. In Sophocles you can find words that suggest how the Greeks saw something special in such a death, not a sudden death, but a slow dying, in which consciousness is already dimming for the physical world, but what enters physical consciousness as twilight is gradually illuminated to see fully into the spiritual world. And Goethe did indeed try to incorporate much of the Greek element into the second part of his Faust. We may well imagine that he wanted something of what could be characterized as if he had wanted to depict Faust as a dying Greek. Thus, what he puts into the words in terms of feeling flows over from the spiritual world, even when he is still commanding here. And we can follow this further, follow how Goethe consciously presents what I have been talking about.

You saw Faust arrive at the scene where his grave is already being dug. Again, one can say that those commentators who accuse Goethe of bad taste by having the grave dug while Faust is still alive are not very tasteful themselves! That would, of course, be mere bad taste. We see the dying Faust. Then it is not bad taste, but a wonderful imagination, when we see the grave dug not only by the dying Faust but also by those half-spiritual creatures, the lemurs, of whose nature I spoke recently. But how does Faust speak? Well, I will first pass over the words that he speaks as he gropes his way out of the palace and toward the doorpost. I will draw your attention to the words that Faust speaks when he gives the order, so to speak, to dig the ditch that will divert the polluting swamp. At first, one might think that everything is meant physically. But Goethe was well aware that Faust speaks half out of spiritual consciousness, and that is how he wants these words to be understood. And what is revealed from this physical-spiritual, spiritual-physical consciousness? First of all, a wonderful sense of well-being in Faust. Consider what Faust says:

A swamp extends along the mountains,
Polluting everything already achieved;
To strip the foul pool too,
The last would be the highest achievement.
I open spaces for many millions,
Not to dwell securely, but actively and freely.

Beautiful, but now other words follow:

Green the field, fruitful; man and herd

At once at ease on the newest earth,

Immediately settled on the strength of the hill,

Which the bustling, industrious people have rolled up.

— these words are consciously set down, consciously out of the physical-spiritual, spiritual-physical. The paradisiacal land is the play of the spiritual into physical consciousness, then back into the physical again:

There is a raging flood right up to the edge.

Of course, it also means the external situation, but the fact that the words are chosen is something that Goethe was fully aware of when he did it.

Community pride rushes to close the gap.

And now some strange words:

Yes! I am completely devoted to this idea,
That is the ultimate wisdom:
Only he deserves freedom and life
Who must conquer it daily.
And so, surrounded by danger,
Spends childhood, manhood and old age his active years.
I would see such a teeming mass, standing on free ground with a free people. For a moment I would dare to say: Stay, for thou art so fair! The trace of my days on earth cannot perish in the eons of time.

One must hear this word repeated over and over again as a beautiful word that Faust utters because he feels: You have done something for the common good, you have worked. — And now he is overcome by the tremendous feeling of how this will continue to work through eons, how he has, as it were, founded his fame in his deeds, and he surrenders to his sense of well-being. It is often quoted. I have even heard it quoted by people who wanted to say something nice to someone else and quoted these words. You can also say: “The trace of my days on earth – that is, of your days on earth – will not perish in aeons.” And yet, however much this is understood as a beautiful saying, let us be clear about it: it is a purely Luciferic saying, a feeling of well-being in fame. We feel once more how Faust's soul is completely seduced by Lucifer, not only contemplating his deeds, but also feeling his glory through the aeons in a wildly spiritual and selfish way. This egotism grows to gigantic proportions and is still sealed:

In the anticipation of such sublime bliss
I now enjoy the highest moment.

Truly, the devil is no drip. After such a Luciferian outburst, one might well think that the devil had him, for it is once again a completely Luciferian blissful feeling, a supreme eternal desire. And we must not think of the stupid devil, but of the clever Mephistopheles-Ahriman, when he now says, which is quite appropriate:

No desire satisfies him, no luck is enough for him,
So he continues to court after changing forms;
The poor man wishes to hold on to it.

The soul has completely loosened itself, but has separated from the body with a Luciferian quality. It connects quite well with the no less inwardly voluptuous words that Faust utters as he steps out of the palace and gropes his way along the doorjamb:

How the clatter of spades disgusts me!
It is the crowd that indulges me.

One should not think that it is not tempting to think again in this last moment that the crowd indulges you! The Luciferic temptation is there once more, clearly there. And Mephistopheles is not stupid if he believes that now is the moment to follow up on that conversation in which Faust signed over his soul to him. They have conversed with each other: we recall the first part, where Faust, not yet out of the half-won spiritual consciousness, but out of the physical consciousness, said the words:

First thou dost smash to ruin this world,
The other may arise thereafter.
From this earth my joys gush forth,
And this sun shines upon my sorrows;
When I can part myself from them,
Then may what will and can come to pass.
I will hear no more about it,

I have only been running around the world.

Mephistopheles says:

In this sense you can dare.
Connect yourself; you shall in these days
With joy my arts see,
I give you what no man has seen.

Faust:

What do you want, poor devil?
Was a human spirit, in its lofty striving,
Ever grasped by your kind?
But you have food that does not satisfy,
You have red gold that, without rest,
Like mercury, melts in your hand,
A game in which one never wins,
A girl who, at my breast,
With eyes already bound for the neighbor,
The beautiful gods of honor
That, like a meteor, disappear?
Show me the fruit that rots before it's broken,
And trees that turn green every day!
I'm not deterred by such a task,

Mephistopheles replies,

I can serve you with such treasures.
But, my good friend, the time is also coming
When we may feast on something good in peace.

And now the weighty words that Faust speaks:

If I can ever rest content on a lazy bed,
then let it be now around me!
If you can ever flatter me,
so that I may please myself,
you can betray me with pleasure;
that shall be the last day for me!
I offer the wager!"

Well, how is that not fulfilled? Fullest enjoyment, even in the anticipation of eternal fame, is there now.

Mephistopheles:

Top!

Faust:

And blow upon blow!
I shall say to the moment:
Stay, yet! Thou art so fair!

— Does he not say it? —

Then you may bind me in fetters,
Then I will gladly perish!
Then may the death knell toll,
Then you are free of your service,
The clock may stand still, the hands fall,
Let the time be past for me!

Mephistopheles:

Consider it well, we will not forget it.

And he does not forget it. He says it now, Mephistopheles, after Faust has enjoyed the highest moment:

No pleasure satisfies him, no luck pleases him,
So he continues to court changing forms;
The poor man wishes to hold on to the last, poor, empty moment.
He who so vigorously resisted me
Time becomes master, the old man lies here in the sand.
The clock stands still.

The situation has been completely fulfilled; for Faust says:

The clock may stand still, the hand may fall.

Mephisto:

The clock stands still –

The chorus of lemurs:

Stand still! She is silent as midnight.
The hand falls.

What was predicted when the bet was made has come to pass. Mephistopheles can accept that his work is done:

He falls, it is done.

From the mouth of Mephistopheles the words of the cross: “It is finished!” But immediately the chorus of the lemures, who give the voice of the earth:

It is past.

This fits dreadfully into the soul of Mephistopheles. He has said, “It is finished.” The chorus of lemurs answers him, “It is over.” That is the tremendous difference. Over – he does not want the word:

Over! A stupid word.
Why over?
Gone and pure nothingness, complete monotony!

These words are the key to what it is all about. Initially, Mephistopheles is talking to his lemurs; he believes it is done, but it is only over. And now he turns his attention to himself. He wants to understand the contradiction: done, over – he wants to understand it.

Gone and pure nothingness, perfect sameness!
What is the point of eternal creation!
To sweep away the created to nothing!
“There it is over!” What can be read in it?
It is as good as if it had not been,
And yet it goes in circles as if it were.
I would have loved the eternal emptiness for it.

As I said, these words contain what we are looking for. That Goethe chose such words, that he built the scene from the enjoyment of the highest moment, as it is presented, that he lets Mephistopheles converse with the lemurs in this way, testifies that Goethe was able to express something very profound, something so profound that even today it can only be touched upon, because it is this that determines why the last scene must follow. If the matter were as many commentators on Faust have supposed, that Mephisto has simply misunderstood, been tricked, then the last scene would truly be superfluous. Then the matter would be simple enough, then it would be that Faust had not thought that there could be such a high enjoyment as that which is expressed in the words:

Not in the aeons can the trace of my days on earth

Mephisto had not thought of that either; neither of them had thought of that. Neither of them had thought that Faust would ever say to the moment: “Stay, you are so beautiful.” But because it is something higher to feel the moment in this way, the stupid devil is cheated out of his wager: that is more or less how the interpreters of Faust explain it all together. — Well, then the devil would have lost the soul, the angels would have captured it — everything would be in order. We didn't need the last scene. And Goethe certainly wouldn't have written it, because he was a man of poetic economy. But you don't understand Faust if you take it so superficially. You only understand it if you fully realize: Yes, here Goethe wants to allow a Luciferian seduction, even when Death is already fully present, to approach Faust once more, a genuine Luciferian seduction. — And Lucifer is there again in the moment when Faust speaks:

In the anticipation of such supreme bliss
I now enjoy the highest moment.

Now follows the actual entombment and Mephisto's preparation to capture the soul with the demons. The angels arrive and triumph over the demons. The soul seems to be delivered and is carried away, but the poem is not over. What is actually going on? Yes, Goethe could not say what was going on there offhand. But there are many words in the poem through which he has made himself clear enough for those who want to understand. But the idea that is so easily formed of that choir of angels that is advancing to take the soul is not correct. It is not entirely incorrect that the angels who arrive are all too proud and now consider themselves the fullest spirits of light, and the devils – the fat and the scrawny devils – only despise, and now only consider themselves quite pious, so very good, so very pious. Goethe already indicated that he did not want to have the presentation just like that, by having Mephisto, who he truly does not depict as a completely stupid devil, say the words that are interspersed at one point:

The priestly mien will not dress you at all,

and especially the significant word:

They are devils, too, but in disguise.

They are also of Lucifer's race. This is not there for fun! As far as can be said at all, to what extent it is serious, we will continue to consider the matter tomorrow.

Today and tomorrow, I will attempt to say something about certain relationships between human beings and the spiritual worlds, proceeding from the Faust poem. It may be assumed by anyone who really delves into the Faust poem with the tools of spiritual science that Goethe actually wanted to say something of the deepest that he had gained through his long life on earth as his world view in these last scenes in particular. In this case, world view is also meant to imply that Goethe, as if instinctively, as if as a matter of course, wrote these scenes in such a way that one can really feel his position in them, also in relation to the development of humanity, to the impulses of the development of humanity, as far as they were accessible to his knowledge. When spiritual scientific ideas are applied to the figures that Goethe created in his Faust poem, then this must naturally be understood in a very definite way. It would be quite wrong to think that Goethe first took these ideas as a basis and then, as one hangs up clothes on a coat rack, hung up the speeches of the characters and their characteristics. That is not the case. When we speak as we now wish to speak about these figures from Goethe's Faust, we must bear in mind that Goethe knew these figures face to face, so to speak, and characterized them as he was able to, but that spiritual science can justifiably go into the matter in even greater depth. If you meet a person whom you are seeing for the first time, you will not immediately be able to discern everything that is in his soul. Nevertheless, this is in his soul. If you now describe the person after the first encounter with this person, it may be that you only describe a few sides of the person, perhaps something that is purely external. But it is still this person whom perhaps you yourself, if you have seen him often, or someone else who is able to see deeper into the soul, would then have to characterize with much deeper ideas. If I therefore begin by posing the question: What is this Mephistopheles in Goethe? — so that I may be able to express what is significant in connection with the Faust legend today and tomorrow, this is not to be imagined as if Goethe had had in his consciousness the ideas that I must develop for you when I speak of Mephistopheles. Goethe simply characterized the Mephistopheles as he knew him, but that is why the Mephistopheles remains as he really is, a definite figure, who can also be characterized by spiritual-scientific ideas; and it is precisely the significant thing that one can look deeper into the individuality of Mephistopheles or other figures in the Faustian legend through these spiritual-scientific characteristics.

In the sense of spiritual science, one must in any case imagine such a figure as Mephistopheles as, in a sense, having remained on the old moon development. That is the prerequisite, so to speak, the spiritual-scientific prerequisite, that Mephistopheles is a being that has not undergone the corresponding form of development, which it could have undergone from the moon, or perhaps from the sun to the earth, or through the moon to the earth. But even if he confronts us – admittedly in a spiritual and visionary way – even if he confronts us, this Mephistopheles, in the earthly form of a human being, we would still be mistaken if we were to interpret him as saying, for example, that he is more developed than human beings on the moon. He stands quite decidedly higher on earth, Mephistopheles, than man stands on earth, with regard, of course, to his development, not with regard to the talent for evil. You can, if you want, call it lower that Mephistopheles has this genius for evil. But he is a being, so to speak, of a higher hierarchical order than man is, that is, after all, self-evident. If we were to go back to the old moon development, we would find that man, in his moon development, is clearly below the development of Mephistopheles, the being from which Mephistopheles on earth has become. Thus we must seek a higher being in Mephistopheles, a being that has simply been left behind with higher abilities on the lunar evolution than man has ever had. How could we, I would like to say, still make it clear through an analogy how such a being is actually constituted?

Let us assume that we look at our present development on earth. We also find during our present development on earth that some people are further along in their development than others. There are people who are decidedly further along in their development than others. Indeed, during earthly development we speak of certain people who have undergone initiation, who, while this is not yet the case for the general public in the present earthly cycle, already look into the world that lies beyond the threshold. Of course, there is also a corresponding progressive development for such advanced people. But even these people can, in a sense, lag behind on the stages of their earthly development and live their lives in such a way that, when the Jupiter development becomes acute, they say: “If everything followed the path of regular world development, we would now be going through this or that on Jupiter, but we don't want that, we remain at the point we reached during our earthly development.” The point of view is perhaps a higher one than could have been attained by people during the development of the earth; the point of view is such that the Jupiter development is perhaps already anticipated during the development of the earth. But these beings – in this case they are human beings – still lag behind in terms of the stage they had reached on Earth, and so they enter the Jupiter evolution with a Jupiter evolution that they had already undergone during their time on Earth. Thus they are behind in relation to their own measurements, but not behind in relation to the general evolution. They just do not go through the evolution as people on Jupiter will go through it; they remain earthly beings, earthly people, but they already carry the Jupiter evolution within them from the Earth.

You must be quite clear about the fact that the various evolutionary processes are really quite complicated, and that such evolutionary processes as I have just characterized actually exist. And if you now transfer what I have said from Jupiter-Earth to Earth-Moon, you will get a rough idea of what Mephistopheles, who appears in Goethe's “Faust,” is like. He can be counted among the Ahrimanic hierarchies because he had already anticipated human evolution on earth during the old lunar period, but now he adjusts himself to the earth in such a way that he does not bring earthly reason, earthly understanding, earthly individuality into the earthly evolution as they are given by the earth, but as he had anticipated them on the old moon and accepted them. This is why he feels so extraordinarily superior to the man Faust in 'Prologue in Heaven'. He is superior to the man Faust, because in Goethe's sense, the man Faust is supposed to be a real earthly human being who is not only retarded in the region of the dull-witted, but who relies entirely on earthly forces, on earthly impulses, for what he has to develop in his soul. Faust is an earthly human being, an earthly fighter. Mephistopheles appears to him as a lunar man, who naturally feels vastly superior to him because he has already adopted reason and science in the spiritual regions of the moon, which otherwise only people on earth have. Therefore, of course, Mephistopheles can only be a spiritual being. If he were to take on human form like any other human being, then he would also have to adapt to the evolution of the earth. But he does not. Thus we see in Mephistopheles a being who can feel himself to be extraordinarily superior to man on earth. But since the possibility of having moral impulses only arises during earthly development - remember the lectures we have just given in these weeks -; since human-moral impulses only arise during the earthly period, namely everything that arises from the impulse of love, Mephistopheles, who has retained his lunar development, does not have these impulses of love without further ado. He simply does not have them. He is therefore a spiritual being that belongs to a hierarchy, which, because it has held back and also rose very high in earlier developmental epochs, has a certain height out of its entire being.

Let us contrast this Mephistopheles with the higher angels. Let us assume that a present-day angel were to stand beside Mephistopheles, that is to say, a being that is now an angel. What kind of being is this, that is now an angel? It is a being that has to descend during the Jupiter evolution in order to perform services for Jupiter humanity during the Jupiter evolution, which other beings - let us say, for example, archangelic beings - perform for present-day earthly humanity. So this is a being, such an angelic being, which, by its very nature, because it is spiritual, is, when it simply stands next to Mephistopheles, less advanced in evolution than Mephistopheles himself, or rather the hierarchy to which he belongs. In terms of intellectuality, the angelic beings will only be able to achieve during the Jupiter development what Mephistopheles has already achieved through his hierarchy – albeit not through himself, if we regard him as a moon man, as a moon initiate – on the moon. One could say that Mephistopheles' immediate superior is even an extraordinarily high-ranking being, albeit one that is lagging behind in evolution. This being is so highly developed that a being of the rank of, say, the archangel Michael feels himself to be beneath the immediate superior of Mephistopheles. These evolutionary processes complicate the ranking of spiritual beings. A being like Mephistopheles has developed very far during the lunar evolution. This puts it ahead of the usual angelic evolution, the normal angelic evolution. But a being like Mephistopheles has remained a spirit. Because it is a spirit, it has something in common with the usual angelic evolution. After all, angels are spirits too. So we can say: From the Mephistophelian point of view, Mephistopheles is quite right when he speaks of the angels as “immature people”. They really are immature in relation to him, a people who, in the development he values most highly, have not progressed as far as he has.

Now, of course, there are also all possible stages of evolution in the hierarchy of the angeloi. Here, too, we can assume a normal stage of evolution for the development of the angels. But we must assume - this is a fact - that certain angels have also remained behind, that they have, if I may use the expression, lost themselves in Lucifer. Certain angels fall behind in their normal development and become Luciferized. These are the ones that do not go along, but remain at earlier stages. The angels that became Luciferized in this way, or had already become Luciferized before the Lemurian Earth period, now occupy a very special position. After all, how did they achieve this, that they were able to become Luciferized back then? It was about to happen – if I am to express myself popularly, even if only approximately, because it cannot be otherwise – that the group of beings that was human was about to undergo its moon development. Now what is called the Luciferic seduction occurred through spiritual entities that had become Luciferized. This Luciferization led certain beings during the Lemurian evolution to bring about that which you know from Occult Science. Then again, the Ahrimanic evolution during the Atlantean time led to that which you also know from Occult Science and from lectures that have been given recently. So we have to say: During the ancient Lemurian period, a certain impulse emanated from the Luciferic side, in which all beings that had previously Luciferized were involved for humanity. This impulse consists in the fact that man descended further into the material during the development of the earth than he should have done in the progressive development, that his desires, instincts and passions became, one might say, entangled in the material development. A counterweight had to be provided. And this counterweight was provided by the Ahrimanic development, so that man hovers in balance between the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic development. But all this, that man thus hovers in balance between the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic development, is in a certain higher style, in a certain higher sense again the plan of progressive evolution, lies in the plan of progressive evolution.

Having recapitulated this for you, you can say to yourself: Faust, the right man for the earth, will face Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces. And the Ahrimanic forces that confront him are shown to you by Goethe particularly in the Mephistopheles whom he places at Faust's side as the representative of the Ahrimanic force. We have already discussed why Goethe refrained from clearly emphasizing how the Luciferic impulses approach Faust. But everywhere – as I have indicated – it shines through that Goethe actually placed Faust in the middle between the Mephistophelian and the Luciferic forces. I have repeatedly emphasized that Goethe, in his time, could not yet be completely clear about the relationship of the human Faust to Ahriman-Mephistopheles and to Lucifer, because spiritual science did not yet exist as it does today. But he had a certain instinctive recognition that Faust is confronted with these two types of impulse.

Now we ask ourselves: What is it that Mephistopheles himself or his relatives wanted with people? What Mephistopheles wanted with people is really nothing more than something that would have made people on earth impossible, really impossible. For what has only occurred on earth is reproduction through the sexes of man, through the male-female. Mephistopheles, as a true initiate of the moon, who is only retarded, cannot stand this at all, and that is what he actually regards as his task: to eliminate the possibility of having humanity on earth through sexual reproduction. It should not exist on earth. So let us summarize this precisely: the normal development of man on earth consists in the human race reproducing itself on earth through the sexes. But Mephistopheles wanted to remain on the lunar development. He therefore did not want love to lead to the love of the sexes on earth. Mephistopheles is the enemy of the love of the sexes on earth. He is the most determined enemy. He therefore feels – and Goethe characterizes this quite correctly – extraordinarily called upon to reduce to absurdity everything that somehow leads to sexual love. What he wants to bring about in the relationship between Faust and Gretchen — just read the Gretchen scenes carefully and you will see that he wants to prevent all sorts of things that are the duty of Ahriman-Mepbistopheles. But he does not want the love between Faust and Gretchen, the real human love on earth, to arise; he does not really want to tolerate it in either Faust or Gretchen. On the other hand, he is really present in the play when the homunculus is created in the laboratory. And you know from earlier presentations that I have given from 'Faust' that the homunculus is created in order to become a creator of a human being — Helen — out of nature, without sexual love. Mephistopheles sets himself the task, not of creating a humanity in the sense of progressive development, which on earth comes about through sexual love, but of creating a different kind of being through the powers assigned to Ahriman, a being that is not in the sense of the human race destined for the earth. Because if you think of anything other than this homunculus, think of Euphorion, think of the whole way that Helen comes up again, Mephistopheles is at play everywhere. But nowhere should anything of regular sex love come into consideration. So the role that Mephistopheles is assigned is already very well done and can be fully justified from the point of view of spiritual science. There is tremendous depth in it.

And now take the strange word that immediately follows the heavenly host:

I hear discordant notes, nasty strumming,
From above it comes with unwelcome day;
It is the mischievous, girlish bumbling,
As sanctimonious taste may love it.
You know how we, in deeply wicked hours,
Conspired to destroy the human race:

He accuses the angels of knowing that they were watching when Mephistopheles and his companions plotted the destruction of the human race. Now he says something else, adopting the language of earthly man, as it were:

The most shameful thing we have invented,

— the most shameful thing is precisely this destruction of the human race. It is called the most shameful.

In order to make progress with our understanding – it is of course extremely difficult to approach these things, because Goethe wanted to express his deepest human, spiritual feeling and perception in them – in order to make progress, we need to consider the following. You are aware, are you not, that there is — for us at least — a spiritual science, even if it is only at the beginning of its development today. You also know that there has always been something like this, even if in earlier times it was attained in a different way, as true knowledge of the world that goes beyond appearances and penetrates to reality. Now you also know that in a certain way, especially in older times, the spiritual knowledge that was preserved in the mysteries was carefully guarded and that it was based on real knowledge of the world. This spiritual knowledge was only imparted to those who showed their maturity for it. If we now ask ourselves what kind of special kind of knowledge this actually was, this special kind of spiritual knowledge that was imparted in the mysteries, it is best to compare our fifth post-Atlantic period with previous periods, the Greco-Latin, Egyptian-Chaldean and so on. And if, on the basis of this comparison, we ask ourselves how the whole conception of the world has changed through man from earlier epochs, from earlier cultural epochs into our cultural epoch, It is truly the case that something important and significant has taken place in the evolution of humanity, that it is a fable convenante if one believes that one only needs to know about the development of humanity what the trivial story, what is today called history, tells. The earlier cultural ages were quite different from how they were imagined according to ordinary history, which is a fable convenante. Just consider the depth of such a saying as I have quoted:

Oh Sun, a king of this world,
Luna receives your gender;
Mercury copulates you quickly.
Without Venus' favor, you achieve nothing,

Whatever Martian is chosen as a husband.
Jovis G'nad is not lost on you;
So that Saturnus, old and decrepit,
Proves to be many-colored.

There is an enormous depth of malapropism in such a saying, but this depth was once there. People once saw into these realities, even if only through the results of atavistic clairvoyance, which were also pointed to in such sayings, for example. The fifth post-Atlantic period emerged from this knowledge of the basis of existence. It has strayed in two directions. I have characterized one of these, so to speak, through the initiation of the fifth post-Atlantic period, which I have described through Baco von Verulam, through Lord Bacon. There we have the longing to treat everything that goes beyond the perceptible as mere idols. You know, Bacon assumed four types of idols. We have listed them: Idola tribus, Idola specus, Idola fori, Idola theatri, four types. This tendency, to base everything on knowledge gained through sensual observation and through concepts that in turn arise from sensual observation, is expressed through Bacon's spirit at the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantic period. Everything that goes beyond sensory perception is an idol, the content of which is actually exhausted in words. And we have already characterized that, so to speak, that is one current.

Now take, schematically expressed, the current that expresses itself through something like: “O Sun, a king of this world,” which still goes into the deep foundations of existence. If it only wanted to develop from the fourth into the fifth post-Atlantic period, we can say that it would go like this (see drawing). The development that leads to the idols goes down below this evolution (blue line); it does not recognize that in reality one finds a spiritual immediately, just as one finds a sensual; it excludes the spiritual and regards it only as contained in the word idols. This development is inaugurated with Bacon.

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What would be the counter-image to this? The counter-image would be an evolution that would only recognize the existence of the spiritual, of the soul-spiritual, which the physical-material does not recognize. That would be the counter-image to this. We could therefore ask: Does this development also exist? Is it also the case, as Bacon says, that only sensual reality is reality, and that everything else is mere word-idols, an expression for the fact that there is only a spiritual reality and no material-physical reality that enters into the senses? This too actually exists. George Berkeley lived a little later than Bacon, and he represents this line of development (red line). Let us take a few moments to clarify the essence of Berkeley's world view.

Berkeley's view, which essentially resulted from his theological world view – he was a bishop at the end – is that everything outside of man that is perceived by the senses is only there as long as it is perceived by the senses. So Berkeley's view is this – isn't it, perhaps the contrast is the best way to characterize it – you assume, now from a, I would say, view that is naive towards Berkeleyanism, you assume the following: When you enter, you see, let us say, Mr. Brown sitting here, but you assume that he was already sitting here before, and you see him afterwards. — As I said, there is not the slightest proof that what you see sitting in this chair was also there before you saw it. And when you go out again, you believe that the Lord remains seated here and sits there while you turn your back on him and go out. Berkeley is of the opinion that there is no proof that, let us say, what you have seen here is still sitting there. It sits there as long as you look, because that is alive, the forming in the eye, and how should the forming in the eye be there if you do not look? One can prove Bacon's view of the world to be logically complete. One can also prove Berkeley's view of the world to be logically complete, because there is no contradiction in Berkeleyanism that could arise logically. It is perfectly possible to prove it logically, even if it does not correspond to naive consciousness. Berkeley does not believe that when you go in you create the farmer and when you go out you magically make him disappear again, he certainly does not believe that, but that what you see comes only with your looking and goes away again with your looking. Esse est percipi: to be is to be perceived. And there is no being other than being perceived in the surrounding world. Therefore, as you can imagine, for Berkeley everything that is the sensory world is only in the process of becoming. You look, there it is; you look away, there it is gone, no longer there. So all this is only there in your perceptions. As I said: esse est percipi, there is nothing but perception, except the process of perception. But behind this process of perception, which is nothing but the process of perception, there is the divine spiritual being. Apart from your perception, Mr. Bauer also has to do with the God who sets him up as he wants him. And this God, when you enter, creates the image of Mr. Bauer in you from what is only in you. Then, when you leave, he lets it disappear again. So this world of the senses does not exist, only the spiritual and soul-like. All of you, as you stand here before me, are only the creature of my eyes. Besides what is the creature of my eyes, there is also the divine-spiritual, soul-spiritual world, but it receives and sustains you quite differently than you exist as the creature of my eyes.

I have only characterized this view. It is really strictly provable philosophically. But it is the one that gives, one might say, the other half of the world to Baconism. And all world views of the fifth post-Atlantic period oscillate between these two directions, between the red and the blue. Either this world view becomes entangled in the mere recognition of the sensual-real and thereby declares itself powerless to see a real spiritual in the sensual-real, or it exhausts itself in the mere recognition of the spiritual-soul, seeing only God and divine thoughts everywhere and declaring itself powerless to descend from the life in God and divine thoughts to the sensual reality. These two aberrations are very much present in the fifth post-Atlantean period. And anyone who observes spiritual life as it develops outside of esotericism will constantly find it either on one or the other, on the red or the blue line. The outer esotericism does not lie on what I have drawn here as the white line.

It can be said that in the fifth post-Atlantean period, man enters into a certain tension between these two views of the world. And Goethe felt this tension intensely. I have presented here, I would say, the theoretical, the more philosophical impulses, but it did not stay that way. All life also errs between the merely spiritual-soul and the merely sensual-material. Goethe felt this tension in the most eminent way. That he felt everything that lives in the outer world, I would like to say under the influence of the current of the blue line, you will not find wonderful, because that is how our essential development goes in the fifth post-Atlantic period, as far as possible towards the material and towards the mere recognition of the material.

But Goethe also felt the other line. He felt it deeply, only in Goethe's time it really was not yet so, I would say, precarious, to call materialism materialistic as it is today. At that time it was not as precarious to point out the aberrations of the blue line as it is today. Today spiritual science must point out the aberrations of the blue line, and it will therefore have to endure all the terrible impacts that must come, because one always only opposes with prejudice, yes, with hatred, what wants to go out into the world as knowledge. And more and more, materialism will be canonized, albeit in a worldly way. But one can still say that materialism will be canonized. How close is materialistic medicine today to declaring itself sacrosanct, how many other endeavors today are declaring themselves sacrosanct in the sense of materialism, in the sense of the aberration indicated by the blue line, the deviation from the spiritual and soul, which at the same time, however, contains as its manifestation the sensual and material, which then belongs to it, which is one with it, and which must be asserted by that which we call spiritual science. Those persecutions, which one might call inquisitorial persecutions, which have already occurred in other fields, will only come in the field of materialism, are actually only just beginning, are now beginning, are only just beginning to assert themselves, even if the forms will be different. The rebellion against the materialistic coloring of knowledge will no less fall prey to the inquisition, the inquisition of the future, which will appear in somewhat different forms than the inquisition of the past, when earlier endeavors fell prey to the corresponding inquisitions. One should not believe that everything that strays according to the blue line will not become just as intolerant as endeavors in other fields became intolerant.

The red line was not so clearly visible in the past. It only separated itself in the fifth post-Atlantic period, and even somewhat later than the blue line, but it was already included in earlier endeavors. It only really emerged in a particular form and has its most important, its greatest philosophical representative in Berkeley. But it has enough other representatives. It emerged in the fifth post-Atlantic period, but certain things remained out of the forms it already had, and that is why it was that in Goethe's time it was already difficult to talk properly about the red line, while Goethe could still talk about the blue line without difficulty. It was difficult to talk about the red line. For what is it that actually strives on the path of this red line? All those world-views strive towards it that avoid extending their view over the whole breadth of the world, and that would revel in a general spiritual-soul life, in a spiritual-soul life that wants to be powerless in the face of the manifestation of the senses. It is a world-view that wants to speak about the supersensible, but that really does not want to recognize anything. Here we have a broad field to which almost all religious denominations and all sects have gradually turned, for it is characteristic of these world views that they actually refrain from trying to understand the world and just talk about something supersensory in general and want to indulge in words. They do not want to acquire the positive, concrete power of knowledge, to really delve into the world of reality with what they attain, with what they talk about.

You will perhaps understand me better if I try to express myself in the following way. Think about how life can unfold for an average person today. He works, let us say, six days a week in a factory or in an office or wherever. He is part of a purely material mechanism that is absorbed in mere sensory observation; today, nothing spiritual is mixed into it, and less and less spiritual is mixed into it. On the contrary, anyone who wants to mix something spiritual into it is considered a real character. But in this sphere all the forces which present-day science seeks to recognize are at work. All the human interconnections which knowledge seeks to fathom are at work here. In short, all the thoughts and concepts which express themselves through the reality unfolding before our eyes are developed here. And then we assume, for his own good, that this person, who has spent the week in the office or in the factory dealing with the purely material or teaching the purely material - after all, nothing but the material is taught in ordinary schools - materially cognizable. Let us assume, out of a sense of honesty, that the person goes to church on Sunday for his own good. There he hears talk about the things that are talked about in church today, based on the evolution that has taken place over the centuries. Try, if you can, I mean, if you have been to church often enough and listened to sermons with an open mind, if you have seen with open eyes what is going on, ask yourself whether there is something in what is being said that is suitable for educating the world that is spreading around us. It is admitted that the God of whom they speak is the author of the world's ruin, but there is no mention, not a single one, of the way in which He intervenes in the world through His forces, through His impulses. There is a special Weltanschhauung for weekdays: blue line; a special Weltanschhauung for Sundays: red line. Nowhere, absolutely nowhere do we see a connection between the two, if we really look at things with insight. Just ask yourself: what does what is taught from the pulpit have to do with chemistry, physics, biology? No relationship is sought, it is even condemned.

Take, on the other hand, the humanities, and you will immediately see what is important. The humanities do not speak of the sensual-material world in the same way as ordinary physics or ordinary chemistry, but they speak of the physical-sensual world in such a way that what they say about the physical-sensual world can flow into every detail of what they say about the spiritual world. It does not have a weekday view and a Sunday view, but a view that extends over the spiritual world and flows down into the details of the physical-sensual world. It does not declare itself powerless, like Berkeleyan idealism, to grasp the world of the senses from the spiritual; it does not declare itself powerless, like Baconian materialism, to find the spirit in the world of the senses, but only to find idols. Where does that come from? Well, we have already grasped that. It is natural to the fifth post-Atlantic period that evolution, schematized by the blue line, came into being. We could, so to speak, call Bacon the inaugurator. Man had to submerge into matter at some point. I have often discussed and discussed the fact that spiritual science is by no means opposed to materialism, but understands why material development is recognized in the fifth post-Atlantic period. But it cannot be recognized without allowing oneself to be inspired by a spirit like Ahriman. And however long this materialism of the fifth post-Atlantic period continues to develop in its Ahrimanic sense, it will have to believe in turn – you can be assured of this, and you will not be because I am telling you, but because you will understand it from the whole spirit of spiritual science, he will have to hold on to this materialistic Ahrimanic sense, to which Ahriman-Mephistopheles, in his deepest hours of wickedness, had resolved to have nothing to do with the regular progress of the human race on earth. Therefore, this science, which has grown out of this materialism, will never come to a thorough understanding of the mystery of the human becoming, of the riddle of embryology and so on - never! It would be able to come to an understanding of the origin of such entities that can form on the way of the homunculus. But this science will never come to that. Now this is only one current of evolution. But much, much depends on this Ahrimanism. Knowledge is only one part of it. But this Ahrimanism runs through the whole of culture.

Goethe also felt the other current, schematized by the red line, deeply, but it was not possible for him, I would say, to present the figures for this red line as clearly, as distinctly as he presented them for the blue line. For the blue line, he created Mephistopheles and his stout and lanky demons and the lemurs. There they stand before us. He dared to do that. For those who speak of the lemurs and the stout and lanky demons will only be slandered from the present age onwards, and will be slandered more and more if they speak in the sense of spiritual science. In Goethe's time, this was still less worrying to some extent. But what was worrying was the other thing, which Goethe also saw through and saw through quite well. It was that he knew that when this red line enters our present time, when there really is a view that declares itself powerless and will declare itself more and more powerless, to come from the recognition of the spiritual and soul to the penetration of the real world, it is due to the fact that certain Luciferic spirits prevent currents that were justified in the past from progressing. Luciferic nature hinders certain trends, religious and sectarian trends, from progressing. And so they cannot penetrate the world, remain stuck in mere recognition of the spiritual-mental. Berkeleyism is just a particular expression of this. This is based on a Luciferic restraint. How does it express itself for Goethe, for example? Mephistopheles remembers himself and his brothers and sisters, those who once, in the depths of their depravity — which means something different in the language of Mephistopheles — swore destruction to the human race, that is, not wanting to know about the way humanity populates the earth. Mephistopheles remembers that it was actually part of his essence that, in the Ahrimanic period, figuratively speaking, he was in the momentous meeting of his spirits, who then decided that no human being should ever be born naturally on earth, but that the powers that exist on earth as sexual beings should be used for something completely different. These Ahrimanic entities decided in ancient times not to allow the love of the sexes to arise. But now Goethe says, not identifying himself, of course, but thinking as Mephistopheles: There are others who are not inspired by Mephistopheles, but are also inspired, well, they don't say anything about the human race on earth not reproducing in the usual human way, but they begin to pray, and find that those who do nothing in the sense of the ordinary reproduction of the human race, who refrain from it, who want nothing to do with it, those are the ascetics, the saints, who make the familiar long faces at the love of the sexes, of which we have spoken several times before. — Mephistopheles sees, looks, beholds such on the other side in the host of angels. There he sees the inspirers of these others, who, in essence, worship what Mephistopheles and his brothers and sisters have decided:

... how, in our most wicked hours,
we devised destruction for the human race.
The most shameful thing we have invented
is just right for their devotion.

That is what devotion is focused on. The Luciferian inspirers of the backward church communities, monastic communities, and sectarian movements are standing among the other crowds inside it. It is not for nothing that Mephistopheles says to the one tall fellow whom he particularly likes:

The priestly mien does not suit you at all.

Goethe has here intuitively grasped much of what he had on his mind regarding the world view that goes hand in hand with the priestly mien, regarding the Sunday world view, which he conceived as Luciferic as opposed to the Ahrimanic. Mephistopheles feels a kinship with those who have taken up into their devotions what Mephistopheles has taken up into his science and into his will.

We can talk about how we think about all these things in purely spiritual terms. But now we want to talk about these things in the Goethean sense. And what I have just said is already, if I may say so, a primeval Goethean intuition. Thus, the Ahrimanic world of lemures, dickteufel and dürrteufel is juxtaposed with something that is initially touched by Lucifer. Goethe expresses this very clearly. The Luciferic is contrasted with the Mephistophelian, as I said, in as veiled a way as possible for a personality to express it, well, a personality to whom many things are allowed: the devil. He is allowed to speak of the 'cleric's expression', of the 'dearest' boys and so on. So in the facts, these two stand in contrast to each other. On the one hand, Mephistopheles, who has, as it were, pledged Faust's soul. How is it pledged? By having driven Faust through everything earthly that goes down below the sphere that has entered into earthly becoming, and goes down below the sphere of human becoming through sexual love. He has a claim on Faust's soul because he has introduced him to everything Ahrimanic. Mephistopheles is truly not to blame for what has entered Gretchen's love through Faust, and he has sufficiently transformed it into its opposite. And afterwards things go quite Ahrimanically. Only Ahrimanic arts are used to evoke certain external phenomena of the Greek world. What can be achieved by Ahrimanic arts is first achieved in the context of the state – let us say it very softly. Then it is sought in the development of the human being, in the context of evolution, but in the context of subhuman and subanimal evolution, in the context of the mechanized homunculus, historically mechanized homunculus. Helen is brought up in a way that is not in the earthly existence of humanity. Then some earthly actions are produced, well, after all, these are not earthly figures either, who help as elves and goblins. All this is already very much mortgaged under the influence of Ahrimanic arts, and mortgaged through the only thing he can have of man's actual earthly blessing. Thus, by leading him through the shallow insignificance - for earthly existence it is only shallow insignificance, but it is therefore not something to which immense reason and science do not belong, even if it is shallow insignificance - the soul is pledged to him. Then pledged by the other, that he has of the actual earthly blessing - well, what then? Man has received his ego on earth, so first his blood. Bones, tendons, ligaments, what the patched half-nature does, Mephistopheles can have, but the actual earthly blessing, the blood, the representative, the physical-material representative of the earthly man, he would like to have that, but he cannot have that, he is left standing on the moon. From him he can only obtain the title written in blood, only that which can be brought into the abstract contract, so to speak, that which is not connected with the impulses that are in reality, but which remains in the abstract, in conformity with the contract. He can only extract that from the blood, not the impulse itself, only that can Mephistopheles extract.

The soul is pledged to him. Now, in his language, it looks as if the other host has simply smuggled it away, cunningly taken it away. But it's not that easy. Up to the point of the death we described yesterday, Mephisto still has Faust pretty much in his claws. But if you recognize death as we showed it yesterday, not just when Faust falls down, but as death gradually sets in, then what Faust experiences, and in particular experiences as the blissful feeling that I described at the end yesterday, after the soul has detached itself from the body, is something that has already been experienced in the spiritual world. There Faust's soul, or, as Goethe first wrote, Faust's entelechy (we will speak of this entelechy tomorrow), glides over into the luciferic sphere and would dissolve in the luciferic sphere. Faust would have just as little benefit from this as if he were to fall prey to Mephistopheles. Just think of what is threatening him there!

Turn to me, loving flames!
The truth will heal
those who condemn themselves;
so that they may joyfully release themselves
from evil
to be blissfully united with the All.

But this beatitude would lead to dissolution in the All, to transition into the eighth sphere! This is precisely what Faust would have: dissolution into the All, which would be identical with annihilation. And now turn to the last scene, of which I have said that it is necessarily connected with the preceding scene, that it belongs to it, that it must be there. There we see the action continuing in a completely different area. There the angels come again and bring Faust's entelechy, Faust's immortality. But in bringing this entelechy, this immortality, they say how they can bring this entelechy here. The younger angels, so it says in the last scene:

Those roses, from the hands
of loving, holy penitents,
helped us to win the victory
and to complete the great work,
capturing this treasure of the soul.

Thus the angels do not raise the entelechy, the soul of Faust, through their own nature, but by receiving the roses from the loving and holy penitents, they raise it out of the human sphere, or rather out of the sphere of people who have gone through human life on earth, who have truly developed out of earthly life. Goethe derives the whole evolution from Mephisto, from the angels, to the human evolution, in that the angels do not only save the entelechy through their own power, but they save it by having received the roses from the hands of loving, holy penitent women. That is the infinitely profound thought. Goethe brings into it his conviction of the significance of continuous human development, of the significance of earthly evolution. And so he must find something in the human being that overcomes the mere Ahrimanic-Mephistophelian. Mephistopheles stands there, commanding the lemurs, half-natures patched together out of bones, tendons and ligaments, commanding the devilish thicks and scrawnies. I have come to terms with what this means: the subhuman nature that could never produce the human being lies in all this only, nature in a basis from which man cannot grow out of, lies in there. Everything lies in there that the world view can grasp, which runs on the blue line, but what surrounds us must not be grasped in this way. From his time on the moon, Mephistopheles has only the powers at his disposal that command lemurs, thick and scrawny devils, but what they draw from nature, from the earth, is only the Mephistophelean, and something else can be drawn from it that Mephistopheles cannot know because he has not gone through the evolution of the earth in his own way. This is drawn out by seeking out the relationship with earthly powers and elements from the now real sanctification of physical nature, the ennoblement of physical nature.

Eternal bliss,
glowing bond of love,
boiling pain of the chest,
foaming divine joy.
Arrows, pierce me,
Lances, conquer me,
Maces, crush me,
Lightning, batter me;

- and so on. There you have the effervescence of nature, which belongs to the human being, which is also connected with the Luciferic, with the devilish, but goes higher. There you have this nature. And the angels have the task on earth or for the earth to take with them the care of the human race. The angels who do not stay behind, but progress to the point of caring for the human race as it should be on earth, Goethe regards as the true redeemers. Do you remember what commission the Lord gives to the actual angels:

But you, the true sons of the gods,
Rejoice in the living, rich beauty!
That which is becoming, that which is eternally working and living,
Embrace you with the sweet barriers of love.

- there they are to provide help, there they are to intervene, and they do so. Those angels truly advance in the angelic host who occupy themselves with the loving-holy penitents and take the roses from them. Just as man absorbs what is allotted to him in earthly evolution, so these angels, who do not remain on the level of lunar evolution but go along with earthly evolution, receive the forces that come from natures such as those portrayed in the last act in the loving, holy penitent women. That is what will help them to progress. Goethe is convinced that the angels develop beyond the Luciferic. As I said, I wanted to hint at Goethe's thought, at how Goethe was connected with all the great evolutionary thoughts of his kind.

We will continue our discussion tomorrow. I hope that from what we have discussed today you have seen how Goethe delves into the depths of becoming and the secrets of the world in order to create his “Faust” and how he wanted to give his verdict on the evolving currents of world view. Truly, there is much in this “Faust”, very, very much in this Faust! And it must be said: humanity could gain infinitely if it tried to find its way through all that is contained in Goethe's “Faust”, to use Goethe's own expression. But we will talk more about all this tomorrow, and about some of the connections between these Faust ideas and the ideas of spiritual science.