Flowers the angels receive from holy penitents in Goethe's Faust: earthly love that human souls have themselves changed back into heavenly love.
The Roses of the Penitents in Anthroposophy is the name Rudolf Steiner gave to the flowers that the younger angels receive from the hands of loving, holy penitent women in the closing scenes of Goethe's Faust, and then scatter against the satans who are trying to seize Faust's soul. Steiner treated the image in the Dornach lectures of September 1916, collected as Faust, the Aspiring Human (GA 272). In his reading the roses are earthly love that human souls have themselves carried back upward and changed into heavenly love. Because that substance is manufactured inside earthly life, angels cannot produce it out of their own nature and must be handed it. The roses wither at the breath of the devils, turn into flames of love, drive the satans off, and leave Mephistopheles burning with a longing he never meant to feel. The motif carries Steiner's teaching that human moral work supplies the hierarchies with something they lack.
The Roses of the Penitents answer a question Goethe left open in the last act: why do the angels win? They win with borrowed material. The penitent women, Gretchen among them, lived through earthly love and lifted it back into heaven, and the angels carry that transformed love as flowers. Steiner called this the infinitely profound thought of the final scene.
In Steiner's Own Words
Thus the angels do not raise the entelechy, the soul of Faust, through their own nature, but by receiving the roses from the loving and holy penitents, they raise it out of the human sphere, or rather out of the sphere of people who have gone through human life on earth, who have truly developed out of earthly life. Goethe derives the whole evolution from Mephisto, from the angels, to the human evolution, in that the angels do not only save the entelechy through their own power, but they save it by having received the roses from the hands of loving, holy penitent women. That is the infinitely profound thought. Goethe brings into it his conviction of the significance of continuous human development, of the significance of earthly evolution.
What it Means Today
Goethe's stage direction for this moment is a handful of words, and most theatres cut the scene. The Goetheanum in Dornach does not. Steiner had scenes from Faust performed there from 1915 onward, and the 1916 lectures gathered in GA 272 were given directly after eurythmy presentations of Midnight and the Entombment, so his listeners had just watched the roses fall before he explained them. In 1938 Marie Steiner directed the first complete uncut staging of both parts of Faust at the Goetheanum, a production measured in days rather than one evening, and the Goetheanum Stage has kept the full-length Faust in repertoire since.
That editorial decision changes the meaning of the roses. When the Entombment is cut, Faust's rescue looks arbitrary, heaven arriving from outside to overrule a lost wager. When the sequence is played whole, an audience watches the angels arrive with nothing of their own and receive their only weapon from women who earned it during a human life. Thalira synthesis: the Roses of the Penitents are Steiner's plainest statement that the moral capital of the spiritual worlds is manufactured on earth, by people, under conditions the hierarchies never had to survive. Remove the penitents and the angels have nothing to scatter, and Mephistopheles keeps the soul. Anyone testing this can read the Entombment and the mountain-gorge scene as one continuous action, watching how carefully Goethe keeps the angels dependent.
Where to Read More
- Faust, the Aspiring Human, GA 272
- Find Steiner on Goethe's Faust at SteinerBooks [THALIRA_BLOG_LINKS_PLACEHOLDER]