The Blessed Boys are the souls of children who died just after birth, the first company Faust's soul meets on its ascent.
The Blessed Boys in Anthroposophy is the term for the souls of children who died immediately after birth, called Mitternachtsgeborene, the midnight-born, in German folk speech. Rudolf Steiner treated them at length in the Faust lectures collected as GA 272, above all in the lecture of 14 August 1915 at Dornach, where he read the closing Mountain Gorges scene of Goethe's Faust as an accurate description of a soul's ascent. Because these children never took up earthly perception, they carry no memory of the world and no sense organs of their own. They must borrow the eyes of a living seer, Pater Seraphicus, in order to see trees, rocks and the falling water. Having borrowed them, they rise out of the sphere of the Spirits of Form into the sphere of the Spirits of Movement, and they are the first company Faust's own soul joins on its way upward. The Goetheanum stage in Dornach has performed the scene since 1938.
The Blessed Boys stand at the threshold of Goethe's last scene, a young company of souls who never opened their eyes on earth. Steiner refused to read them as sentiment. They are, he said, a precise picture of what a soul without earthly experience actually is, and of how such a soul learns to see: by receiving the sense organs of someone who has lived.
In Steiner's Own Words
Goethe has children appear who died immediately after they were born; in the vernacular, they are called midnight babies. Faust is to join the company of such midnight babies first; they know nothing of the world, their consciousness of the past has been clouded by their birth, and they know nothing of the new world yet. This belongs together with the ascension of Faust. As in the physical world there is no lightning without thunder, so in the spiritual world such an ascension of Faust is not without the blessed boy's realization of himself.
What it Means Today
Goethe's closing scene is not read in Anthroposophy so much as performed. Since 1938, when Marie Steiner mounted the first unabridged staging of both parts of Faust anywhere in the world, the Goetheanum stage in Dornach has kept the whole nine-hour work in repertoire. The Blessed Boys arrive near the end of it, in the Mountain Gorges, and in July 2026 audiences watched the hundredth performance of that complete cycle under director Andrea Pfaehler, with Rafael Tavares directing the eurythmy since 2025. Carrying the scene in eurythmy rather than in speech alone is the whole argument. Eurythmy makes the movement of a soul visible, and the Blessed Boys are a soul-condition with nothing else to show: no biography, no earthly memory, no organ of sight. What an actor cannot say, a moving form can hold.
Thalira synthesis: the Blessed Boys are Steiner's clearest picture of a spiritual being that is real but not yet perceptive, and the borrowing of Pater Seraphicus's eyes turns the ordinary religious instinct on its head, because here the living human gives the dead a world rather than the dead instructing the living. That reversal is why Steiner told his Dornach listeners to read aloud to those who have died. Attention paid on earth is the one organ the newly dead do not have. The scene stages an exchange, and both parties gain by it.
Where to Read More
- Faust, the Aspiring Human, GA 272
- Find Steiner on Goethe's Faust at SteinerBooks [THALIRA_BLOG_LINKS_PLACEHOLDER]