Steiner's name for the moment in Goethe's Faust when pagan nature beings dissolve into the elements and return carrying the Christ impulse.
The Christianizing of the Elemental Spirits in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's reading of a hidden passage in Goethe's Faust, given in the lecture of 15 August 1915 at Dornach and printed in Faust, the Aspiring Human (GA 272). At the close of Act Three of Faust, Part Two, the twelvefold chorus that has surrounded Helena refuses to follow her back to the underworld. The chorus divides into four groups and slips into trees, rocks, water and fire, becoming the elemental beings it always secretly was. Steiner points out that the same wood and the same rock speak again in the closing Ascension scene, where the forest sways and the rocks press, only now the beings within them have received the Christ impulse. Paganism is not abolished in this reading. Its nature spirits are carried through the elements and given back changed, which is why Steiner treats the passage as Goethe's most Christian gesture.
The Christianizing of the Elemental Spirits names a single dramatic hinge that Steiner asked his Dornach audience to watch closely. Goethe lets the chorus of Helena vanish into nature rather than into death, and then lets nature give those beings back at the end of the poem. Between the two moments something has happened to them, and Steiner insists that what happened is Christian.
In Steiner's Own Words
And before us stands the broad natural existence of the physical plane, which we see, in the truly Christian sense, transformed into the elementary and truly spiritual existence. Faust is led into this after he has gone through his connection with Helena, with the ancient spiritual world. Here, too, we are confronted by spiritual beings. Helena is led up from the underworld. Faust encounters her. She is surrounded by a chorus, twelve choruses surround Helena. When Helena returns to the underworld, the chorus stands there, and at this end of the third act the chorus shows itself to us as not yet fully matured into humanity, as elemental beings.
What it Means Today
Steiner spoke these words to an audience that had just watched eurythmists perform Faust's Ascension, and the claim he was making is one that only a theatre can test. On the page, the disappearance of Helena's chorus in Act Three and the swaying wood of the final scene sit hundreds of lines apart, and in most productions several cut hours apart. Commercial stagings of Faust usually drop Part Two or trim it heavily, so the return never registers as a return.
The Goetheanum Stage in Dornach was built on the opposite premise. In 1938, under Marie Steiner von Sivers, the Goetheanum gave the first complete uncut performance of Goethe's Faust, Parts One and Two, and full-cycle Faust has remained the ensemble's signature work ever since. Sitting through the whole arc is what makes Steiner's reading checkable by ordinary perception: the ear recognises the rock and the wood when they come back, because it heard them take the elemental beings in.
Thalira synthesis: the Christianizing here is not a conversion of doctrine but a change in what nature is able to carry, which is why Steiner locates it in a stage direction rather than in a creed. The practical form of this for a reader is small and slow. Walk one treeline through a full year, or sit with one rock face across four seasons, and watch whether what comes back to meet you is what you brought. Goethe's chorus is the pattern, entering the element as one thing and emerging as another.
Where to Read More
- Faust, the Aspiring Human, GA 272
- Find Faust, the Aspiring Human at SteinerBooks [THALIRA_BLOG_LINKS_PLACEHOLDER]