GA 273: The Problem of Faust

The Problem of Faust gathers thirteen lectures and notes that Rudolf Steiner gave between 1916 and 1919, most of them at the Goetheanum in Dornach with a single address delivered in Prague in June 1918. Published in the collected works as GA 273 and subtitled Spiritual Scientific Notes on Goethe's Faust, the cycle does not set out to interpret Goethe's drama in the manner of a literary critic. Steiner instead reads Faust as the record of a real path of soul, treating the poet's two part tragedy as a coded account of how a striving human being crosses from ordinary knowledge into spiritual experience, meets the powers that obstruct that crossing, and is at last carried beyond them.

Place in Steiner's Work

These lectures belong to the middle of Steiner's Dornach years, the period when the first Goetheanum was rising as a building dedicated to the renewal of the arts and the spirit. Scenes from Goethe's Faust were performed there, and Steiner spoke directly after several of those performances, so the cycle is rooted in living artistic practice rather than in the lecture hall alone. It sits close to his other Goethe studies, the early scientific introductions collected in volumes such as GA 1, and the wartime cycles on the threshold of the spiritual world. Where the youthful Steiner edited Goethe's natural science and defended the Goethean way of seeing, here the mature teacher turns to Goethe's greatest poem and shows that the same way of seeing reaches into questions of evil, death, and redemption. The cycle also looks forward, since its themes of the two souls in the human breast and the descent to the Mothers reappear in his later work on the threefold human being and on the figures of Lucifer and Ahriman.

For the reader exploring Steiner's account of art, GA 273 stands beside his lectures on painting and on eurythmy as proof that he regarded the highest art as a direct revelation of the spiritual world, not a decoration laid over it. Goethe becomes, in these pages, the great modern witness that creative imagination and exact spiritual knowledge can rise together without either being diminished.

Themes and Structure

The opening lecture sets the frame. Steiner places the historical Faust of the sixteenth century at the hinge between two ages, an old world whose wisdom in magic, alchemy, and the art of healing was fading, and a new world that had not yet found its footing. Goethe, he argues, felt this transition as the central question of the modern person, and built into his hero the conflict between a soul that longs for the living spirit of nature and a soul that clings to the dead letter of books. That second tendency Steiner gives a face in the pedant Wagner, the scholar content with parchments while Faust strains toward the fountain of life. The famous translation of the Gospel of John, where Faust slides from Word to Sense to Deed, is read not as Goethe's own wisdom but as the soul sinking under the spirit of confusion that has crept in with the poodle.

From there the cycle follows Goethe's drama through its great esoteric scenes. Steiner returns repeatedly to the descent to the Mothers, that region bordering the physical world where forms have not yet hardened and everything is movement and becoming, and he connects the three Mothers of Goethe with Rhea, Demeter, and Proserpina of the Greek Mysteries. He devotes several lectures to the Classical Walpurgis Night, reading the parade of Greek mythic beings as glimpses of a reality that ancient clairvoyance could still perceive. He follows the conjuring of Helena and the strange union of Faust with her as an image of the modern soul reaching back to the Greek experience of beauty. He treats the figure of the artificial man, the little being grown in the flask, as Goethe's warning against a knowledge that would manufacture life by intellect alone, and he sets against it what he calls a Goetheanism that seeks the living spirit instead. The closing addresses turn to the boundaries of thinking and willing, to the role of evil as a necessary test rather than mere temptation, and to the redemption that meets Faust at the end. A late note delivered in Prague reflects on Goethe's own relationship to his poem, arguing that the work carried more wisdom than its author could consciously formulate.

Two motifs hold the whole cycle together. The first is the doubling of the human soul, which Steiner draws straight from Goethe's own line about the two souls dwelling in the breast. One soul, the higher, reaches upward toward the spirit and toward freedom; the other clings to the senses and the appetites and would drag the seeker down. Mephistopheles, in this reading, is not given to Faust for instruction but as a test, a power that must be met and overcome. The second motif is the boundary. Steiner shows that honest thinking, pursued far enough, reaches a wall it cannot pass by thought alone, and that willing, pressed into action, runs up against a point where the seeker feels himself seized and carried beyond his own intention. As he put it in the closing lecture, "Man is a thinking and a willing being," and it is precisely at these two frontiers that the soul is tested and, if it does not flee from its disillusion, prepared for a higher world.

Throughout, Steiner is careful to say that he offers no interpretation. His aim is to teach the spiritual language in which the poem is written, so that a reader may enter and enjoy the work in the element from which it was created.

Glossary Terms from this Volume

The following Thalira glossary entries draw GA 273 as their primary source. Each one expands a theme, figure, or scene that Steiner treats in the cycle, and together they make this study guide the hub for the volume's vocabulary.

Where to Read It

Thalira offers this study guide as an original orientation to the volume. The lectures themselves belong to Rudolf Steiner, and the full text lives with the bodies that hold and publish his work. You can read the full text at the Rudolf Steiner Archive, which hosts the English translations of the GA 273 lectures online without charge. For a printed edition and for the wider Goethe and Faust titles in English, search the publisher catalogue at SteinerBooks. We summarize and frame; the primary text is theirs to study in full.

Continue Your Study

If this volume has drawn you in, a few paths open from here, and you are free to follow whichever calls to you.

  • Stay with the spiritual reading of art and the imaginative world that Goethe could enter, and explore the related figures gathered in the Thalira glossary.
  • Follow the theme of evil and its two faces, the tempter who flatters and the spirit who hardens, which Steiner develops far beyond the Mephistopheles of this cycle in his later lectures on the adversary powers.
  • Turn to the question of freedom that lies under the whole Faust drama, and read Steiner's own philosophical foundation for it in his early written work on the path of thinking and moral life.
  • Trace the Greek Mysteries that stand behind the Mothers and the Classical Walpurgis Night, and follow Steiner's accounts of ancient initiation and the older clairvoyant vision of the cosmos.
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