GA 272 gathers Rudolf Steiner's lecture commentary on Goethe's Faust under the title Faust, the Aspiring Human: A Spiritual-Scientific Explanation of Goethe's Faust. It is a lecture collection rather than a written book, the first of two volumes in Steiner's complete works devoted to the Faust drama. The fourteen lectures studied here were delivered between 1910 and 1916, opening with a public address in Strasbourg in January 1910 and continuing through cycles given in Dornach in 1915 and 1916, during the years when the first Goetheanum was rising on the hill above the village. The core subject is a single sustained claim: Goethe's Faust is not merely a literary masterpiece but a document of inner development, and the strange figures of its final scenes, the Lemurs, the devils, the anchorite fathers, the Blessed Boys, become intelligible when read with the concepts of spiritual science. Steiner treats the drama scene by scene, always asking what Goethe perceived, or intuited, about the destiny of the human soul after death and the powers that contend for it.
Place in Steiner's Work
Goethe stands at the root of Steiner's whole career. Steiner's first professional work, beginning in the 1880s, was editing Goethe's scientific writings for the Kuerschner edition, and his early philosophical books grew out of that engagement. GA 272 shows the mature spiritual teacher returning to the author who formed him, now armed with the full vocabulary of anthroposophy: etheric and astral bodies, Lucifer and Ahriman, life between death and rebirth. The volume pairs with GA 273, the second Faust volume, and stands beside GA 271, Art and Knowledge of Art, in the section of the complete works devoted to aesthetics and artistic creation. Within that section it is the most sustained single act of literary interpretation Steiner ever undertook, a book length reading of one poem carried out over six years.
The dating matters. Most of these lectures were given in Dornach while members were rehearsing scenes from Faust for performance at the Goetheanum, including the first full staging of the notoriously difficult closing scene of Part Two. Steiner was not lecturing about a book on a shelf; he was preparing a community to perform the drama as a living mystery play. That performance context gives the volume its practical, workshop character. He also returns here to a lifelong conviction, first argued in his Goethe editions, that Goethe worked from genuine spiritual perception even though he lacked a science of the spirit to explain his own images. One formulation from the opening Strasbourg lecture carries the whole program: "The spiritual and soul can only arise from the spiritual and soul." Faust, for Steiner, is Goethe's fifty year effort to give that truth dramatic flesh.
Themes and Structure
The collection opens with two early public lectures, given in Strasbourg in 1910 and treating Faust as the portrait of the aspiring human being. Steiner traces Goethe's own biography, the boyhood altar built to the god of nature, the Frankfurt encounter with alchemical symbolism, the Italian journey, and shows how each stage of Goethe's ripening changed the poem. The young Goethe could depict Faust's longing for the spirit; only the old Goethe could depict its fulfillment.
The Dornach lectures of 1915 then turn to close reading. Steiner examines the Easter scene and Faust's rescue from suicide, the opening of Part Two where the wounded Faust is healed through sleep, and the famous line about living in the colored reflection, which Steiner reads as Goethe's confession that we reach reality through its mirrored images rather than by staring into the source. A lecture on the Whitsun mood connects Faust's renewal to the four pauses of the night, four stages the soul passes through between falling asleep and waking, and to the elemental beings who work on the sleeping human being.
The August 1915 and 1916 lectures walk through the end of the drama: Faust's death, the Entombment, and the Ascension. Here Steiner is at his most detailed. The blind, hundred year old Faust believes his workers are digging a drainage ditch while Mephistopheles has grave diggers at work; the pun on digging and grave becomes, in Steiner's reading, a final image of Ahrimanic deception. Steiner then classifies the three kinds of beings who contend for Faust's soul: the Lemurs, assembled from residues of human form; the fat devils with short straight horns, who grasp at the soul through earthly heaviness; and the scrawny devils with long crooked horns, their agile counterparts. Against them descends the heavenly host, and the drama passes to the anchorite fathers, the penitent women, and the Mater Gloriosa. Throughout, Steiner insists that Goethe observed these processes with objectivity, the way a botanist observes a plant that grows lawfully without knowing botany.
The closing 1916 lectures widen the lens again: the historical Faust figure and the folk legend, Goethe's insights into the secrets of human existence, and the question of what survives death. Steiner distinguishes the soul from the entelechy, the individual spiritual kernel the angels carry upward, and describes the double danger Faust escapes, dissolution in the Luciferic sphere on one side and capture by Mephistopheles Ahriman on the other. The volume closes with Goethe's search for the depths of becoming, returning the reader to the image in the title: the human being defined not by achievement but by unending striving.
Glossary Terms from this Volume
Twelve entries in the Thalira glossary draw directly on GA 272, most of them illuminating the closing scenes of Faust Part Two:
- The Lemurs, the half formed beings Mephistopheles summons to dig Faust's grave.
- The Fat and Scrawny Devils, the two devil types who try to seize the departing soul.
- Entelechy, Goethe's word for the immortal kernel the angels rescue.
- The Younger and More Perfect Angels, the hosts who carry Faust's entelechy upward.
- The Blessed Boys, souls who died in early childhood and receive Faust into their circle.
- Pater Seraphicus, the anchorite whose consciousness becomes a dwelling for the Blessed Boys.
- Doctor Marianus, the contemplative to whom the mystery of the Mater Gloriosa is revealed.
- The Three Penitent Women, the biblical and legendary penitents who plead for Gretchen.
- The Roses of the Penitents, the love borne blossoms that burn Mephistopheles.
- The Colored Reflection, Faust's turn from blinding source to mirrored image.
- The Four Pauses of the Night, the soul's stations between sleeping and waking.
- The Christianizing of the Elemental Spirits, the pagan nature beings' passage into the sphere of the Christ impulse.
Where to Read It
You can read the full text at the Rudolf Steiner Archive at rsarchive.org, where the lectures of GA 272 are available in English translation. For print editions of Steiner's Faust commentary, search the SteinerBooks catalog at steinerbooks.org. Reading the lectures alongside a good translation of Goethe's Faust, especially the final act of Part Two, rewards the effort many times over.
Continue Your Study
This guide is one branch of a larger study system. To go further:
- Browse the complete Thalira Glossary for hundreds of concise entries on Steiner's terminology, including all twelve terms above.
- Explore the GA Work Library for study guides to other volumes of the complete works.
- Start with Entelechy if you want the single concept that unlocks the ending of Faust, then follow its links outward.