Steiner's January 1919 declaration that Goetheanism, buried by the nineteenth century, lies in its grave and must rise again through the renewal of the human soul.
The Resurrection of Goetheanism in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's teaching that Goethe's way of knowing nature and the human being, which he calls Goetheanism, was laid in a grave by the nineteenth century and must now be raised to life through spiritual science. Steiner stated the thought on 12 January 1919, in the Stuttgart lecture cycle published as Goetheanism as an Impulse for Man's Transformation (GA 188), whose German title carries the word Auferstehungsgedanke, the resurrection-thought. Goetheanism, he says there, is not alive: for outer culture it still rests in the grave, and even the scholars who founded the Goethe Society at Weimar in the 1880s belonged more to the buriers than to the raisers. The resurrection he announces is not political and will look like nothing the old century expected. It begins when the renewal of the human soul through spiritual science lets Goethe's living world-outlook shape knowledge and social life again.
When Steiner speaks of the Resurrection of Goetheanism, he is naming an unfinished task rather than an accomplished fact. Goethe died in 1832; his way of seeing nature, art, and the human being never became the culture of his century. In January 1919, amid the wreckage of the war, Steiner told his Stuttgart listeners that this burial was deliberate, and that raising Goetheanism from its grave was the work now asked of them.
In Steiner's Own Words
I said yesterday and repeat today that the force bound up with the Mystery of Golgotha once united itself in a little known province of the Roman Empire with the man Jesus of Nazareth, and then with the Folk souls at central Europe after that, however, this force became inward. And out of what was weaving there inwardly in central Europe came such results as we find in Goethe and the whole of Goetheanism. But it is just the nineteenth century that has had a great share in letting Goetheanism lie in its grave. In every sphere the nineteenth Century has done everything possible to leave Goetheanism in its grave.
What it Means Today
The grave Steiner described has been reopened, and from inside the mainstream academy. In 2015 the Berlin philosopher of science Olaf Müller, who teaches at Humboldt University, published Mehr Licht: Goethe mit Newton im Streit um die Farben (S. Fischer), a book-length argument that the scientific establishment's verdict against Goethe's colour theory was premature. Müller reconstructs Goethe's prism experiments and argues that, on the symmetry between light and darkness in the spectrum, Goethe noticed something Newton's optics never settled, and he proposes experiments with inverted spectra to decide the question. This is the pattern Steiner named in January 1919: not that Goethe was refuted, but that the nineteenth century declined to test him and preferred the funeral. Where the Goethe Society of the 1880s curated the poet's remains, Müller treats him as an unfinished research programme.
Thalira synthesis: the Resurrection of Goetheanism is not a promise that a dead man's science will be vindicated line by line; it is the wager that a buried way of seeing rises wherever a soul renews its own act of knowing, so every academic rehabilitation of Goethe is a symptom, and the resurrection itself happens in the knower. Practically, the term asks a reader to take up one Goethean exercise, following a plant's metamorphosis through a season or repeating the prism observations Müller re-examined, and to treat that practice as participation in the raising rather than as historical re-enactment.
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