The Rudolf Steiner Archive

2. Goethe's Spiritual Disposition, as Illustrated in Faust

These passages have been newly added to this revised edition [1918]

[ 1 ] The inner conflict that Goethe projected from his own inner life onto the character of Faust shines through with full force right at the beginning of the drama. This occurs when Faust turns away from the sign of the macrocosm and toward that of the earth spirit. What the first Faust trilogy contains up to this spiritual experience is, in essence, merely a prelude. His dissatisfaction with the sciences, and that of others with his situation as a scholar, are things that reveal much less of Goethe’s particular character than the relationship in which Faust feels himself to be with the spirit of the entire universe on the one hand and that of the earth on the other. From the sign of the macrocosm, the comprehensive harmony of the whole world is revealed to the soul:

How everything weaves itself into a whole,
How one thing works within another and lives!
How the forces of heaven rise and fall
And pass the golden buckets to one another!
With wings scented with blessing
Penetrating from heaven through the earth,
Resounding harmoniously throughout the universe!

[ 2 ] When we consider these words in conjunction with what Goethe recognized as a sign of the macrocosm, our attention is drawn to a significant experience in Faust’s soul. Before him stood a symbol of the universe: the Earth in relation to the other planets of the solar system and the Sun itself. The activity of the individual celestial bodies as a revelation of spiritual beings who direct movement and interrelationships. Not a mechanical celestial sphere, but a cosmic weaving of spiritual hierarchies, from which the life of the world appears to flow, a world into which humanity is placed. And humanity itself as the confluence of the activity of all these beings. — Yet in contemplating this universal harmony, Faust cannot feel within his soul the experience he strives for. One senses that a longing stirs in the depths of this soul: how will I become “human” in the fullest sense of the word? It wishes to experience within itself what consciously makes a human being a true human being. From the depths of his being, he cannot bring forth in the manner he envisions that very feeling through which he might appear to himself as the confluence of all that is presented to him through the sign of the macrocosm. For this is “knowledge” which, through intense inner experience, can be transformed into “self-knowledge.” But no knowledge, not even the highest, can immediately encompass the whole human being. It can only encompass a part of the human being; the human being must then carry it through life; and in interaction with life, it then extends its scope over the entire human being. Faust lacks the patience to accept knowledge for what it can initially be alone. He wishes to experience a fulfillment of the soul in the moment that can only be experienced over the course of time. And so he turns away from the revelation of the macrocosm:

[ 3 ] What a spectacle! But alas! Just a spectacle!

[ 4 ] Knowledge can be nothing more than an image of life. Faust does not want an image of life; he wants life itself. — Thus he turns to the sign of the Earth Spirit. In this sign, he sees before him a symbol of the entire infinite human being, as it is shaped by the forces of earthly activity. The symbol awakens in his soul the vision of all that humanity bears within itself as unlimited being, which, however, would have to numb him if he were to receive it not drawn out into the images of the knowledge revealed in life, but condensed into the perception of a single moment of knowledge. In the appearance of the Earth Spirit, what humanity truly is appears before Faust—yet it has a numbing effect unless it enters consciousness through the attenuated reflection of the powers of knowledge. Certainly not in philosophical form, but rather in a living sense of knowledge, was present in Goethe the spiritual anguish that overtakes a person at the thought: what will become of me if the mystery of my existence suddenly becomes vivid to me, yet I cannot master it through my understanding!

[ 5 ] In his Faust, Goethe did not merely seek to portray the disappointments of a misguided quest for knowledge; rather, he sought to depict the conflicts inherent in this quest itself, which are rooted in human nature. Human beings are at every moment of their existence more than they are permitted to reveal in order to fulfill their lives. Human beings are meant to develop from within; they are meant to unfold what they can only fully comprehend after that unfolding has taken place. Their powers of cognition are such that, even when confronted prematurely with what they are meant to master at the right time, they can be numbed by the very object of their inquiry. - Faust lives in all that is revealed in the words of the Earth Spirit. But this very essence of his own being numbs him when it appears vividly before his soul at the very moment when his life, not yet mature enough to recognize this essence, can transform it into an image.

You resemble the spirit you comprehend,
Not me!

At these words, Faust collapses. In essence, he has looked at himself; but he cannot identify with himself because he cannot fully grasp what he is. This self-contemplation has numbed the consciousness that was not yet ready for it.

[ 6 ] Faust asks the question: “Not you! Then who?”—The answer is given dramatically. Wagner enters. He himself is the answer to the “Then who?” It was spiritual arrogance that caused Faust to want to grasp the mystery of his own being in that moment. What lives within him is, at first, only the striving for this mystery; the very image of what he can recognize and comprehend about himself in that moment is Wagner. One will completely misunderstand the scene with Wagner if one focuses only on the contrast between the highly spiritual Faust and the limited Wagner. In his encounter with Wagner following the Earth Spirit scene, Faust was meant to realize that, in terms of his power of insight, he essentially stands on the same level as Wagner. Dramatically speaking, in the scene in question here, Wagner is the very image of Faust.

[ 7 ] What the Earth Spirit could not reveal to Faust in an instant had to emerge from the course of life. And Goethe felt the need not only to have Faust experience the rest of human existence in depth from the starting point of his approximately forty years of life, but also, looking back, so to speak, to allow before his soul that which he had withdrawn from in his abstract quest for knowledge. In Wagner, he stood before his own soul’s eye. The monologue that follows in the completed Faust: “How all hope does not vanish from the mind alone ...,” contains in its words only waves surging up from the depths of the subconscious soul, which ultimately culminate in the decision to commit suicide. At this moment of his experience, Faust can draw only the emotional conclusion that “all hope must vanish” for humanity. The only thing that saves his soul from this emotional conclusion is that life conjures before his spirit what had previously passed by his abstract quest for knowledge as insubstantial: the Easter celebration of the simple human heart and the Easter walk. During these experiences, which bring to his soul—at least in retrospect—the youth he did not fully experience, what he has experienced through contact with the spiritual world and through his encounter with the Earth Spirit continues to resonate within him. Through this aftereffect, he detaches himself from Wagner’s state of mind during their conversations on the Easter walk. Wagner remains in the realm of abstract scientific inquiry; Faust must carry the spiritual experiences he has had into immediate life, so that this life may give him the power to receive a different answer than Wagner to the question: “Not to you! To whom then?”

[ 8 ] Anyone who, like Faust, has been touched by the spiritual world in its reality must view life differently from those to whom only sensory existence has been revealed and whose knowledge consists solely of concepts derived from that sensory existence. What Goethe calls the “spiritual eye”: for Faust, it is opened through his experience. Life leads him to other “overcomings” besides that of the Wagnerian essence. Wagner is also a part of human nature that Faust carries within himself. He overcomes it by subsequently reviving within himself what he failed to revive in his youth. The enlivening of the biblical word that Faust seeks also belongs to the revival of what was neglected. But precisely during this enlivening, another “image” of his own being appears before Faust’s soul: Mephistopheles. He is the further, more serious answer to the “Not you! Then who?” He must overcome him through what the life experiences in his soul—touched by the spiritual world—can become. One certainly does not sin against the artistic grasp of the Faust drama if one sees in Mephistopheles a part of Faust’s own being. For one does not thereby claim that Goethe did not wish to create in Mephistopheles a fully living dramatic character, but only a symbolic figure. In life, too, it is the case that a person beholds parts of his own being in other people. One recognizes oneself in other people. I do not claim that Hans Müller is merely a symbol for me when I say: I see in him a part of my own being. The dramatic figures of Wagner and Mephistopheles are individual, living beings; what Faust experiences through them is self-contemplation.

[ 9 ] What, fundamentally, stands before the soul of the one who allows this drama to take hold of him as the Faust drama unfolds through the scene with the students? Nothing other than the way in which Faust is able to confront his students through that which is of Mephistopheles within himself. Man can reveal himself as that which in Mephistopheles confronts the student if he does not overcome the Mephistopheles within himself. It seems to me, however, that in this scene from an earlier draft of his Faust, Goethe left in something that he would likely have reworked had he been able to bring himself to undertake a complete reworking of the older parts in the spirit that the whole now displays. In the spirit of this spirit, what Mephistopheles does to the student would also have to be experienced by Faust. That is not the case. But in his earlier draft of Faust, Goethe was not concerned with shaping everything so dramatically that it would in any way appear as an experience of Faust himself. And in the final version of his poem, he simply carried over certain elements that do not fit into the spirit implied by the later dramatic structure.

[ 10 ] The author of these remarks is among those readers of Faust who return to this work time and again. On such returns, new insights into the immeasurable wisdom and life experience that Goethe poured into his Faust have always come to him as a reader. Yet he never succeeded in recognizing in Mephistopheles, despite his dramatic vitality, a unified, internally unbroken being. He eventually even found it understandable that commentators on Faust do not quite know how they should actually view Mephistopheles. The view has emerged that Mephistopheles is not a true devil, but merely a servant of the Earth Spirit. This is contradicted, however, by the fact that Mephistopheles himself once says: “/p”

I’d gladly give myself over to the devil,
if only I weren’t a devil myself!

If you take everything Mephistopheles says to heart, you’ll find you just can’t get by.

[ 11 ] As Goethe continued to work on his Faust, the poem increasingly drew closer to the deepest human experiences of mystery. The light that radiates from these experiences of mystery shines throughout the events depicted in his work. Mephistopheles embodies what the human being must overcome in the course of a deeper life experience. An inner adversary to what humanity must strive for from within its very nature stands in the figure of Mephistopheles. — But whoever fully traces the experiences that Goethe has woven into the creation of Mephistopheles does not arrive at one such spiritual adversary of human nature, but at two. One arises from the human being’s will and feeling, the other from their cognitive nature. The will and feeling strive to isolate the human being from the rest of the world, in which they have the root and source of their existence. They delude the human being into believing that they can walk their life’s path by relying entirely on their inner being. It obscures the fact that the human being is a limb of the whole world, just as a finger is a limb of the organism. That he condemns himself to spiritual death if he cuts himself off from the whole of the world, 53 just as the finger would condemn itself to physical death if it were to try to live apart from the organism. There is an elemental striving within the human being toward such severance. Wisdom is not acquired by turning a blind eye to this elemental striving, but by overcoming it in its own nature, by transforming it so that it becomes a helper of life rather than an adversary. Anyone who, like Faust, has been touched by the spiritual world must become much more consciously entangled in the struggle with this power, which is opposed to human life, than one to whom such a touch has remained foreign. When dramatized as a being, this power can be called the Luciferic adversary of humanity. [See: Rudolf Steiner, Spiritual Science and Love: Explanations on Goethe’s Faust. Volumes 1 and II. Freiburg i. Br. 1955 and 1956.] It works through the soul forces within the human being that strive to intensify egoism.

[ 12 ] The other adversary of human nature draws its strength from the illusions to which human beings, as creatures who perceive and imagine the external world, are exposed. The experience of the external world, which is based on cognition, depends on the images that human beings form of this external world according to the respective state of their soul, according to the perspective from which they view it, and according to the most diverse other preconditions. The spirit of deception takes root in the formation of these images. It distorts the relationship to truth that human beings could otherwise establish with the external world and with the rest of humanity. It is, for example, also the spirit of discord and strife between human beings. It places people in such mutual dependencies that result in remorse and pangs of conscience. One may call this spirit the Ahrimanic spirit, in reference to a figure from Persian mythology. [See note on page 53] The Persian myth ascribes to its Ahriman characteristics that justify the use of this name.

[ 13 ] The Luciferic and Ahrimanic opposites of human wisdom approach human development in very different ways. Goethe’s Mephistopheles clearly bears Ahrimanic traits; and yet the Luciferic element also lives within him. A Faust-like nature is more strongly exposed to the temptations of Ahriman as well as those of Lucifer than one that has not had spiritual experiences. One might imagine that Goethe, instead of a single Mephistopheles, might have set these two distinct beings before Faust. Faust would then have been led into one kind of his life’s labyrinths by one, and into the other by the other. Just as Goethe has characterized his Mephistopheles, Luciferic and Ahrimanic traits are inconsistently blended within him. This not only prevents the reader from forming a unified image of Mephistopheles in the imagination, but it also stood in Goethe’s own way as an obstacle whenever he sought to spin the thread of the Faust poem anew through his work. One simply feels a quite natural urge to see some of what Mephistopheles does or says as having been done or spoken by a different being. Certainly, Goethe attributed the difficulties he faced in continuing his Faust to various other factors; yet in his subconscious, the ambivalent nature of Mephistopheles made it difficult to steer the continuation of Faust’s life along paths that must lead through forces opposed to life.

[ 14 ] Comments such as these all too easily invite the admittedly facile objection that one is attempting to correct Goethe. One must accept this objection in light of the necessity of understanding Goethe’s personal relationship to his Faust poem. One need only observe how Goethe complains to friends about the waning of his creative power just as he is preparing to bring the “poem of his life” to a close. Consider that, in his old age, he needs Eckermann’s encouragement to rouse himself to work out the plan for the continuation of Faust, which he intends to incorporate as such into the third book of “Truth and Poetry.” Karl Julius Schröer is right to say ^{1Page XXX of the third edition of the second volume of his Faust edition}: “Without Eckermann, we would have nothing more than the aforementioned plan, which might have taken the form of the ‘Outline for the Continuation’ of the ‘Natural Daughter,’ which is included in the works. We know what such a plan is to the world; a subject of study for the literary historian, nothing more.”—People have attributed the stagnation of Goethe’s work on his Faust to all manner of possible and impossible causes; they have endeavored to “resolve” the contradictions perceived in the figure of Mephistopheles in one way or another. The observer of Goethe cannot easily get past either of these. Or should one really be moved to make a confession, as Jakob Minor does in his otherwise interesting book Goethe’s Faust (Vol. 2, p. 28)? “Goethe was … nearing his fiftieth year; and as far as I know, the first sigh that the thought of approaching old age elicited from him in the beautiful poem ‘Schweizeralpe’ dates from the time of his Swiss journey. Even for him, the eternally young man, who until then had been accustomed only to observing and creating, this thought now comes more to the fore as a precursor to the wisdom of old age. He schematizes, he categorizes—as a true son of his pedantic father—both on the Swiss journey and in his Faust.” One can, however, also gain the insight from contemplating life that in a work of poetry such as Goethe’s Faust, things must be depicted that can only be gained through the life experience of advanced age. If even in a Goethe of this advanced age the poetic power were to dry up: how could such a work of poetry come into being at all?

[ 15 ] As paradoxical as it may seem to some: a serious examination of Goethe’s personal relationship to his Faust and of the character of Mephistopheles seems to suggest that the latter holds an inner explanation for the difficulties Goethe felt regarding the work of his life. The ambivalence of the figure of Mephistopheles worked in the depths of his soul; it did not rise above the threshold of his consciousness. But since Faust’s experiences must contain reflections of Mephistopheles’ deeds, inhibitions always arose whenever Faust’s life story was to be continued dramatically, and the actions of this inconsistent adversary failed to provide the right impulses for such a continuation.

[ 16 ] The “Prologue in Heaven,” which now, together with the “Dedication” and the “Prelude in the Theater,” introduces the first part of Goethe’s Faust, was not written until 1797. From the discussions Goethe had with Schiller about his poem, the record of which can be found in their correspondence, it is evident that around this time he had rethought the fundamental forces whose manifestation is the life of Faust. Up to that point, everything that appears in Faust flows from the inner life of his soul, which strives for the fulfillment and expansion of life. One sees no impulses other than these inner ones. Through the “Prologue in Heaven,” Faust is placed as a striving human being within the entire context of the world. The spiritual powers that set the world in motion and sustain it reveal themselves in their unfolding; and Faust’s life is set within their interaction and opposition. Thus, at least for the consciousness of the poet and the reader, Faust’s being is transposed into the macrocosm, into which the Faust of the young Goethe, through his insight, did not wish to place himself. Mephistopheles appears among the active beings of the world “in heaven.” But it is precisely there that the ambivalent nature of Mephistopheles also comes clearly to the fore.

Of all the spirits that deny,
The mischievous one is the least of my burdens,

says the “Lord.” So there must be other spirits who “deny” in the struggle of the worlds. And how well does this fit with Mephistopheles’s efforts at the end of the second part of Faust regarding the corpse, when he speaks here “in heaven” as follows:

What I love most are those full, fresh cheeks.
I’m not at home for a corpse.

Imagine this: instead of a single Mephistopheles, a Luciferic spirit and an Ahrimanic spirit stand opposite the “Master” in the struggle for Faust. An Ahrimanic spirit must strive for the “corpse,” for it is the spirit of deception. If one traces the sources of deception, one finds that they are connected to what, as the mortal-material, is already at work in human life. The powers of cognition, which stir to the same extent that those impulses arise within a person that ultimately bring about death, are subject to Ahrimanic deception. The impulses of will and feeling work against these forces. They are connected with the sprouting, growing life. They are most powerful in childhood and youth. In old age, they appear all the more vividly to the extent that a person carries the impulses of youth over into this stage of life. They harbor the Luciferic deviation within them. Lucifer can say: I love the “full, fresh cheeks”; Ahriman must be “at home” in a corpse. And the “Lord” can say to Ahriman: “Of all the spirits that deny, the mischievous one is the least of a burden to me.” For the nature of the mischievous one is related to the nature of deception. And for the “eternal” in the human being, the Ahrimanic being that rules over the material and transitory is less significant than the other “negating” being, which is intimately linked to the core of the human being. It is not a caprice of the imagination that perceives a dual nature in Mephistopheles, but the natural sense of a dual essence in the human shaping of the world and life. Goethe must have sensed something in his subconscious that led him to foresee: I am presenting the Faust-Mephistopheles contrast before the universal shaping of life; but this does not wish to harmonize with this contrast.

[ 17 ] If what is said here were meant in the sense of the pedantically questionable claim that Goethe should have portrayed Mephistopheles differently, it could very easily be refuted. One need only point out how, in Goethe’s imagination, this figure emerged—and had to emerge—as a unified whole from the tradition of the Faust legend and from German and Norse mythology. And against the pointing out of “contradictions” in a living character, one could—apart from the fact that what is full of life must precisely contain “life with its contradictions”—adhere to Goethe’s clear words: “If things did not arise through the imagination that remain eternally problematic for the intellect, there would not be much to the imagination at all. This is what distinguishes poetry from prose.” —No, that is not what is meant here. But what Karl Julius Schröer ^{2Page XCIV of the third edition of the second part of his edition of Faust} says is indisputable: “Playing magnificently, joking with superior humor, masterfully characterizing against a constantly transparent, profound backdrop of humanity’s highest questions, the poetry finally lifts us up to the contemplation of the noblest feelings...” That is what matters: what stood before Goethe’s imagination in his Faust poem appeared to him against the “constantly transparent, profound backdrop of humanity’s highest questions.” The attitude from which Schröer presents this—based on a thorough understanding of Goethe and a noble love for Goethe’s style—cannot certainly be contested, since Schröer certainly cannot be accused of seeking to explain Goethe’s poetry in terms of an abstract development of ideas. - But because Goethe had the background of humanity’s highest questions before his soul, the traditional figure of the “Nordic devil” expanded in his mind’s eye into that ambivalent entity to which the serious observer of life and the world is inevitably led when he looks with discernment at how human existence is situated within the whole of the universe.

[ 18 ] The figure of Mephistopheles that Goethe had in mind when he began his poem was appropriate to Faust’s turning away from the meaning of the macrocosm. The inner conflicts that arose within him led to a struggle against the opposing power that grips the human being from within and has a Luciferic character. But the more Goethe approached the second part of Faust, the more he felt this necessity. And in the “Classical Walpurgis Night,” which was to lead to Faust’s actual encounter with Helena, world powers and macrocosmic events come into connection with human experiences. By intervening in this context, Mephistopheles must assume an Ahrimanic character. Through his scientific worldview, Goethe had built the bridge over which he could bring world events into human development. He did so in his “Classical Walpurgis Night.” Its poetic value will only be recognized once one fully grasps how, in this section of Faust, Goethe succeeded in artistically subduing naturalistic views to such an extent that no conceptual-abstract residue remains, but rather everything has flowed into the image, into the imaginative shaping. It is merely aesthetic superstition to accuse the “Classical Walpurgis Night” of containing an embarrassing remnant of abstract scientific theories. And perhaps to an even greater extent, the mighty final scene of the fifth act of the second part bridges the gap between the supersensory universe and human experience.

[ 19 ] There seems to be no doubt: Goethe’s mindset underwent a development over the course of his life that revealed to him, in the eye of his soul, the ambivalent nature of the world powers opposed to humanity, and he felt the need, in the course of his creation of Faust, to overcome that very beginning by having Life turn Faust toward the macrocosm, from which he had once turned away through one-sided knowledge.

What a spectacle! But alas! Just a spectacle!

[ 20 ] But the forces of the broader course of world events entered the drama. It became life, because Faust strives for goals that, through the inner struggle of life, lead him into conflict with the powers that make him appear to be struggling as a member of the whole world, yet taking up the fight.