Steiner's term, taken from Goethe's Faust, for meeting life through its rainbow image rather than plunging into it: spiritual science itself.
What is the Colored Reflection?
The Colored Reflection in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's name for the indirect, image-bearing way a person knows spiritual life once the wish to plunge straight into experience has been surrendered. He takes the phrase from the opening scene of Goethe's Faust, Part Two, where Faust turns from the sun he cannot look at, watches the waterfall throw a rainbow, and says that we have life in its colored reflection. Steiner unfolded this on 22 May 1915 at Dornach, in the Whitsun lecture printed in Faust, the Aspiring Human (GA 272), and there he identifies the colored reflection with spiritual science itself. The rainbow spreads into seven colors what the sun holds in unity, and an eye that cannot bear the source can bear the arc. As method the term means this: approach the spiritual through images first, then climb through those images toward the reality they carry.
The colored reflection is what Faust turns to after his Whitsun night among the elemental spirits. He no longer throws himself into life, as he did in Part One and fell into guilt. He stands with the sun at his back and reads the rainbow in the waterfall. Steiner calls that turn the gesture of spiritual science.
In Steiner's Own Words
This is how far Faust has come after this night: he no longer wants to plunge into life as Faust did in the first part, when he was thrown into guilt and evil, but instead turns to its colored reflection. It is the same colored reflection that we call spiritual science, which appears to him only as a colored reflection, and through which we gradually ascend to experience reality. What now follows, the second part, is the colored reflection of life at first. It is nonsense to understand this second part merely realistically. We have Faust, who, with his higher self, contemplates life through the physical body in its colorful reflection; he now carries this physical body through life as something he is preserving, so that everything in him can develop that, as his higher self, preserves him from that which comes in later incarnations.
What it Means Today
Goethe's Faust is almost never played whole. Theatres cut Part Two or drop it, because it refuses to behave like realistic drama, which is precisely Steiner's point here. One stage decided otherwise. On 22 May 1915 the Dornach audience heard this lecture directly after a eurythmy presentation of the opening scene of Part Two, the waterfall scene itself. Steiner rehearsed individual Faust scenes in eurythmy at Dornach between 1915 and 1922, and in 1938 Marie Steiner used that work as the foundation for the world premiere of the complete, unabridged Faust, both parts, at the Goetheanum. Every Goetheanum production up to 1999 followed her staging, and the eurythmic passages still rest on Steiner's scene rehearsals.
What Dornach preserved is the thing the colored reflection names. A cut Faust keeps the plunge and throws away the arc. Playing Part Two unabridged makes an audience sit for days with images that never resolve into plot: the Mothers, the Classical Walpurgis Night, Helen, the final ascent. Thalira synthesis: the unabridged Goetheanum Faust works as a rehearsal room for the root discipline this term describes, because the physical body is asked to stay seated, warm, and awake in front of images instead of seizing a meaning and leaving. A reader can practice a smaller version: read the opening scene of Part Two aloud, sun at your back, and let the seven colors stand.
Where to Read More
- Faust, the Aspiring Human, GA 272
- Find Steiner on Goethe's Faust at SteinerBooks [THALIRA_BLOG_LINKS_PLACEHOLDER]