Goethe’s Stirb und Werde: the soul law that every higher stage of life is bought by the death of a lower one.
Dying and Becoming in Anthroposophy is the soul law Rudolf Steiner drew from Goethe’s poem Selige Sehnsucht in the West-östlicher Divan of 1819, where the German reads Stirb und Werde, die and become. Steiner expounded it in Goethe’s Standard of the Soul (GA 22, 1918), making it the interpretive key to the second part of Faust: a higher existence is never added to the lower one, it is bought by the lower one’s death. Goethe’s warning is that so long as a man is without this dying and becoming he remains only a troubled guest on the dark earth. Its prose counterpart, which Steiner quotes from Goethe’s aphorisms, is that man must give up his existence in order to exist. In Steiner’s reading only a soul that has grasped this law can descend to the Mothers, and the formula governs every threshold in the path of knowledge.
Dying and Becoming names the movement Steiner found at the centre of Goethe’s mature work: nothing higher is reached by addition, only by surrender. The lower form must be given up before the higher can appear. Steiner treats the phrase less as poetry than as a description of what actually happens when a human being crosses from ordinary consciousness into knowledge of the spirit.
In Steiner’s Own Words
The higher life is the surrender, the death of the lower, the birth of a higher existence. In his West-East Divan Goethe expresses this in the words: “And as long as thou art without this ‘dying and becoming’ thou art but an uneasy guest on the dark Earth.” We find the same thought in his prose aphorisms: “Man must give up his existence in order to exist.” Goethe is in agreement with the Mystic Herakleitos when he speaks of the Dionysian cult of the Greeks. It would have been an empty, even a dishonourable cult in his eyes if it had made sacrifices merely to the god of nature and of sense pleasure. But that was not the case. The worship was not alone directed to Dionysos, the god of the immediate sense prosperity of Life, but to Hades, the god of death as well.
What it Means Today
The Dutch psychiatrist Bernard Lievegoed (1905 to 1992) took this formula out of Goethe’s poetry and put it to work on the ordinary human biography. In 1954 he founded the NPI, the Nederlands Pedagogisch Instituut, in Zeist, and spent four decades studying how adults actually change. His conclusion, set out in Phases (Rudolf Steiner Press, 1979), was that a life does not develop by smooth accumulation. It develops through crises, and each has the same shape: a way of living that worked in the previous seven-year period stops working, and nothing new appears until the person lets the old competence go. Lievegoed argued that the crisis of the middle thirties cannot be solved with the tools that produced the first half of life: the talent that carried a person to thirty-five is exactly what has to die.
This is why biographical counsellors in the Lievegoed line do not treat a life crisis as a malfunction to be corrected. They read it as the point where Goethe’s formula is being applied whether or not the person asked for it, and the only question is whether the dying is undergone consciously or suffered blindly.
Thalira synthesis: the reason Steiner placed this phrase at the door of the Mothers rather than at the end of Faust is that dying and becoming is not a reward for the finished path, it is the toll gate at the entrance, charged again at every stage, and always in the same currency.
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