Goethe's "two souls dwell in my breast": one soul holding to earth through the will, one reaching for spirit through thought, in the one divided modern human.
Faust and the Two Souls in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's esoteric reading of Goethe's famous line, Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach! in meiner Brust, spoken by Faust before the city gate at Easter as he watches the sun set over the walk with Wagner. In his 1916 to 1919 Faust lectures (The Problem of Faust, GA 273), Steiner treats the two souls not as a poetic aside but as the signature of the modern human being. One soul clings to the earth and the sense-world through the will, where the human loses himself in his own deeds. The other soul lifts toward the spirit through thinking, where the human cannot reach his own being. Steiner names this earthly creature a dual being, not a monad, forever oscillating between losing the self and never quite reaching it. The work of such a being is to win an inner balance that holds both poles at once.
In Steiner's Own Words
Therefore, one never correctly represents the human being if one represents him 'merely as a monad, but only if one tries to represent him as a middle state between not being able to reach oneself and losing oneself. And when one feels both simultaneously with full intensity, then one feels truly like an earthly human being. When one feels a kind of oscillation between not being able to reach oneself and losing oneself, then one feels like an earthly human being. And what one must achieve, despite being caught up in such oscillation, is the tranquility of existence. The tranquility of existence is achieved in the physical realm of the pendulum, it achieves balance. In the spiritual-moral realm, human beings must be able to achieve the same thing that the pendulum achieves in its state of rest.
What it Means Today
Goethe gives Faust the words at a precise hour. The scholar has walked out among the townsfolk at Easter, the sun is going down, and the longing rises in him to follow it into the sky while his feet stay rooted in the field. That is where the line belongs: not in abstract metaphysics, but in the felt pull of a single afternoon. Steiner asks his Dornach listeners to read the confession as a diagram of the modern soul. The soul that grips the earth is the soul of willing, and in willing the human pours himself out into his deeds until he can no longer find himself in them. The soul that strains upward is the soul of thinking, and in pure thought the human reaches toward his own being and never closes the last gap. Faust is honest enough to feel both at full strength, and that honesty is what makes him modern.
The practical question this raises is studied at the Goetheanum School of Spiritual Science in Dornach, founded by Steiner in 1923. Where a one-sided mystic would silence the earthly soul and a one-sided materialist would deny the heavenly one, the Goethean path keeps both in play and seeks the resting-point of the pendulum, the equilibrium that is not stillness but a living poise. A reader can test this against an ordinary day: notice where you lose yourself in busy doing, notice where your thinking floats free of any deed, and look for the heart-warm middle where the two souls of Faust meet without cancelling each other.
Where to Read More