In Steiner's reading of Goethe's Faust, the two angel choirs of the final scene, divided by whether they have passed through the Mystery of Golgotha and descended into earthly life.
The Younger and More Perfect Angels in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's reading of the two angel choirs in the closing scene of Goethe's Faust, Part Two: a differentiation inside one spiritual hierarchy according to each group's relation to the Mystery of Golgotha. In Faust, the Aspiring Human (GA 272, lecture of 15 August 1915, Dornach), Steiner explains that the younger angels have not yet descended into the Christian sphere of earthly evolution. Like the Elohim of Genesis, they act first and only afterwards perceive that what they did was good. The more perfect angels have passed through the Mystery of Golgotha, know the earthly from within, and alone can bear the remnant of earth that clings to Faust's immortal entelechy. On the Goetheanum stage in Dornach, where the complete Faust has been performed since 1938, the two choirs still appear as distinct beings.
When Faust's soul rises at the end of Goethe's drama, the younger and more perfect angels divide the work of salvation between them. Steiner heard in this division an exact piece of spiritual science: Goethe separates one angelic choir into those who stayed above the earthly and those who, through the Mystery of Golgotha, learned to carry what earth leaves behind in a human soul.
In Steiner's Own Words
The blessed boys are there long ago, and they have something to do with the appearance of these angels, but the angels only realize that they are there when the whole scene is set. Goethe is fully aware of all this. They do not carry that which is connected with the earth in the soul of Faust; that must be borne by those who have become a little older, more perfect, who have descended through the Mystery of Golgotha and come into contact with the earthly.
What it Means Today
Steiner gave this lecture on 15 August 1915 in Dornach, immediately after a eurythmy presentation of Faust's Ascension, and his reading of the two choirs has stayed bound to the stage ever since. In 1938 Marie Steiner directed the world premiere of the complete, uncut Faust, both parts, at the Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland, the building Rudolf Steiner designed as the home of the anthroposophical movement. The Goetheanum stage has restaged the complete drama repeatedly since that premiere, and it treats Goethe's own choir labels, die jüngeren Engel and die vollendeteren Engel, as exact spiritual stage directions rather than poetic decoration. In the mountain-gorges scene the two choirs cannot be merged into one angelic mass: one sings of victory only after the roses of the penitent women have done their work, the other steps forward to accept the remnant of earth that no younger being can touch.
Thalira synthesis: the two choirs mark the moment a hierarchy acquires a biography, for these angels are divided not by rank but by what they have lived through, and the Mystery of Golgotha is the event that divides them. A visitor watching the closing scene at the Goetheanum today is watching angelology performed in time rather than described in doctrine, which is what Steiner meant when he told his Dornach audience that with Goethe everything in the spiritual world is right.
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