From
Paracelsus to Goethe
Berlin, 16 November 1911
During a nice September day of this year, I
drove with some friends from Zurich to the neighbouring town
Einsiedeln. There a Benedictine Abbey was founded in the early
Middle Ages and acquired a certain notoriety through diverse
circumstances. At that day, just a pilgrimage day took place.
Einsiedeln was prepared to welcome many pilgrims. At that time,
I myself also wanted to do a kind of pilgrimage, but not
directly to that place Einsiedeln, but from there to an
adjacent site. A car was taken to drive to the so-called
“Devil's Bridge.” Finally, on a quite rough
way, uphill and downhill, we arrived there and found a quite
modern inn that was built relatively short time ago. In this
inn, a board is found: “Natal site of the doctor and
naturalist Philippus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim,
called Paracelsus, 1493–1541.”
This was the goal of my pilgrimage at
first: the birthplace of the famous, in many respects also
infamous, Theophrastus Bombastus Paracelsus von Hohenheim. At
first one saw meadows with many flowers and grazing cows all
around in a strange place where many ways crossed. One could
feel something particular by the peculiar of nature as you can
hardly find it in Europe anywhere but in the Alpine regions.
Nature has something there, as if the plants have an own
language, as if they wanted to say anything, as if they could
become rather talkative. This site is also suitable to grow
together with that which the spirit of nature can tell
you.
There the picture of a boy emerged before
my soul who grew up during the first nine years of his life in
that nature who really had his birthplace in a house which
stood once there, and which was replaced with the new one.
Since the old doctor Bombast von Hohenheim lived in the
fifteenth century at this place, and his little son was the
future Paracelsus. I tried to put myself in the situation of
that boy about whom I knew that he had grown together with the
whole nature already from his earliest childhood. I tried to
imagine this boy in this nature talking intimately with the
plants. In a certain respect, the outer configuration
definitely shows what that boy Paracelsus let speak to himself
from the early morning to the late evening, except those times
in which he went with his father on the ways that this
undertook to the adjacent places. One can consider as sure that
the father could exchange some interesting thoughts about the
interesting questions with the little boy in the midst of
nature at that time, questions that that child could already
put about what the experience of nature directly shows.
Something that matured in that boy that we may come to know in
the life of Paracelsus faces us in a childlike figure if we
have the picture of the old honest-good, but very expert
licentiate, the old Bombastus von Hohenheim taking the
inquisitive boy by the hand.
While this picture emerged in my soul, I
remembered another picture which I already had many years ago
when I stood in Salzburg in front of a house where a board
displayed that in this modest house Theophrastus Bombastus
Paracelsus von Hohenheim died at the age of 48 years. Between
these two pictures this eventful,
this unique life is enclosed to me.
If we look a little closer at his life, we
find, indeed, still completely with the character of the
fifteenth, sixteenth centuries, a deep knowledge of nature
arising which became then medical science and philosophy,
theosophy. A knowledge of nature, which originates from deeper
clairvoyant soul forces whose true figure I have already
suggested in the talks of this cycle. What waked up these
deeper soul forces and enabled Paracelsus to look within nature
behind that what the outer senses and the outer intellect can
recognise only, was really caused by the intimately adherence
with nature, by feeling his soul forces related to that what
germinates, sprouts and blossoms in nature. When the
nine-year-old boy moved with his father to Carinthia into a
similar nature, he could also feel related with the spirit of
nature.
Paracelsus growing up in such a way
advanced further and further just in an individual, in a quite
peculiar and personal view of nature. How could this be
different? Everything was connected that took root in his mind
with the forces peculiar to him and with the abilities, with
the way as he stood to the things how they were talking to him.
Hence, he also especially appreciated throughout his life to
have grown together so intimately with nature. If he wanted to
stress to his enemies that his inside was related to nature, he
often pointed to it later. These were his words: “Give
ear how I justify myself: I am not spun subtly by nature, it is
also not the habit of my country that one attains something
with silk spinning. We are brought up neither with figs, nor
with mead, nor with wheat bread; but with cheese, milk, and oat
bread, this cannot make subtle fellows. Those are educated in
soft clothes and in women's rooms, and we who grew up in pine
cones do not understand each other well. This is why someone
can even be considered as rude who believes to be subtle and
gracious. The same applies to me what I regard as silk, the
other call it drill.” He is of such a type, he thinks, as
the human beings are who have not completely separated
themselves from the topsoil of natural existence but are
intimately connected with it. He takes his power and wisdom
from this connection. That is why his motto was throughout his
life: “Let no man belong to another who can belong to
himself.” This penetrated his whole character; it shows
us this man mental-plastically. Hence, we can understand that
when he came to the university later he could not familiarise
himself with the way how he should continue scholarly now what
he knew about medical science naturally, only encouraged by the
conversations with nature and with his father. He could not
cope with this at first actually.
In order to realise what he had to
withstand there, we have to look at how at that time medicine
was done. There it was authoritative above all what one could
have in the old traditions and
documents of the old doctors Galen (131-~200 AD), Avicenna
(AbÅ« AlÄ« al-Husain ibn AbdullÄh ibn
SÄ«nÄ, ~980–1037) and others. The lecturers
dealt preferably with commenting and interpreting what one
could read in the books. This was
deeply antipathetic to the young Philippus Theophrastus
Bombastus von Hohenheim, and he probably thought above all that
a big distance was between that which one could get directly
and intuitively from the spiritual work of nature and what had
gone away so far from it as scholarship, as mere intellectual
concepts and ideas. Hence, he wanted to go through another
school. He went through this other school thoroughly. We soon
see Paracelsus leaving the university and wandering about in
Germany, Austria, Western and Southern Europe, Poland, Holland,
Lithuania, and Scandinavia, with the intention to get to know
something from the way everywhere — to speak with
Goethe — “how nature lives in creating.” Since he
had the thought in mind, actually: indeed, the whole
nature is a uniform, but she speaks in many languages, and just
because one learns to recognise how one and the same thing
changes its form in the different regions, one advances to the
being of the inner unity, to that what underlies as something
spiritual everything only sensorily discernible. However, he
wanted to get to know not only how any ore, any metal directly
results from the configuration of the mountains and of its
source to get such a picture how nature lives in creating, he
wanted to get to know not only how the plants assume other
shapes depending on the climate and the environment, but he had
something else still in mind. He said to
himself: with its surroundings, the whole human organism is
connected. One cannot understand the human body and soul as the
same everywhere; at least one does not recognise the human
being if one looks at him only at one place.
Therefore, he wandered through the
different regions that were accessible to him to recognise with
his look deeply penetrating into the spiritual how the human
being is related with nature, depending on the different
influence of climate and region. Not before one experiences
this different influence everywhere, one gets to that what
informs us about the nature of health and illness in the sense
of Paracelsus. Hence, he was never satisfied to get to know any
illness only at one place, but he said to himself, the
fine substances are different which compose the human organism,
depending on whether the human being lives, for example, in
Hungary, in Spain or in Italy, and nobody recognises the human
being who cannot pursue the finer substances with penetrating
look.
When one reproached him that his
“high school” was vagrancy, he referred to the fact
that the divine spirit does not come to anybody who is sitting
on the fireside bench. He realised that the human being has to
go where the divine spirit works in the different shapes of
nature. A clairvoyant knowledge developed in him that he could
have only because of his connection with nature.
However, Paracelsus also felt that this
knowledge had so intimately grown together with his soul that
he became more and more aware that, actually, one could bring
to mind only by an intimate way of pronouncing what he had
learnt directly on the high school of nature. He called nature
his “book” and the various areas of the earth the
“single pages” of this book which one reads walking
on them. He despised those increasingly who studied the old
Galen, Avicenna and others only and removed from the book that
spreads out with its various pages as the “book of
nature” in front of him. However, he also felt that that
what he could learn in such a way in his high school could be
put only intimately into words. Hence, he wanted to use another
language than Latin that had become foreign, actually, to the
immediate soul life, which was used in those days only at the
universities. Since he believed that he could not succeed in
bending the words and in formulating so that they could
immediately express what flowed out of all being. Therefore, he
felt the urge to express in his mother tongue what he wanted to
express. Two things resulted from that. Once, that he had a
high self-confidence of the value of his knowledge not because
of boasting or arrogance, for he was a humble nature strictly
speaking. That is why he said that one could not learn anything
from medical science, actually, but one must approach nature
directly again while renewing medical science.
— Hence,
his proud words: “Who wants to follow the truth has to go
to my kingdom. Follow me, you Galen, Avicenna
(AbÅ« AlÄ« al-Husain ibn AbdullÄh ibn
SÄ«nÄ, ~980–1037, Persian polymath), Rhazes (AbÅ« Bakr Muhammad ibn
ZakarÄ«yÄ ar-RÄzÄ«, 854–927,
Persian polymath), Montagnana (Bartolomeo
da M., ~1380–1452) and Mesue (YÅ«hannÄ
ibn MÄsawayh, ~777–857, Assyrian physician), I do not follow you. You
from Paris, you from Montpellier, you from Swabia, you from
Meissen, you from Cologne, you from Vienna, and from the
regions of the Danube and Rhine rivers, you from the islands,
you from Italy, you from Dalmatia, you from Sarmatia, you from
Athens, you Greeks, you Arabs, you Israelites. Follow me and I
do not follow you ... I become the king, and the kingdom will
be mine, I lead the empire and gird your loins!” Not from
arrogance and haughtiness, but from the consciousness that
nature speaks out of him, he said, the kingdom is mine.
— With it,
he meant the kingdom of scientific and medical knowledge of his
time.
The second thing that resulted was that he
was soon by such a disposition and such a knowledge an opponent
of the official representatives of his discipline. First, they
could not stand at all that he expressed himself in German what
they regarded only as possible to express in Latin language. He
was a complete innovator of that. They could also not
understand that he walked through the lands and wanted to
learn. They could not at all believe that someone who was
connected with the whole nature had a living sensation of the
fact that the human soul-life is everywhere a fruit of natural
existence in the region and that one
has not only to observe the plants blossoming and the animals
thriving there. Hence, Paracelsus appreciated farmers,
shepherds, even knackers who worked in and with nature. He was
convinced that in their simple knowledge something would be
included of a real knowledge of nature from which he might
learn something, so that he learnt as it were as a vagrant from
vagrants. Hence, he says about himself: “I followed the
art at the risk of my life and was not ashamed of learning from
vagrants, headsmen, and barbers. My teaching was tested sharper
than silver in poverty, fear, war and misery.”
— One
could not forgive him this. When he was appointed later at the
university of Basel —
as it were like by an error of the
representatives of his discipline —, one of the scholars
noticed with horror that Paracelsus walked in the street not in
the costume of the professors, but like a vagrant, like a
carter. This was not acceptable; this violated the reputation
of the entire profession.
Therefore, it happened then that he
encountered the contradiction of his colleagues where he wanted
to apply what he had learnt from the big book of nature, and
experienced what those have to experience who have to
experience envy and opposition the worst. However, what one
could least forgive him was that he was successful with his
deep insights into nature where others had no success where
they had applied everything that was in their power and could
reach nothing. It is true if one offered resistance to him
there or there he was not sparing with rude words, but if one
considers the conditions with which he worked, one knows that
it was completely justified. Where he was urged to discuss this
or that medical problem with these or those colleagues, the
debates became heated. There, for example, the others talked in
Latin that he understood rather well, then he shouted back
towards them in German what he regarded as proofs, they
regarded, as follies. A picture of the whole way resulted how
he collided with his contemporaries.
We can briefly explain in the following way
what he gained as insight. He said: the human being, as he
faces us as a healthy and ill being, is not a single entity, a
single species, but he is placed in the big nature. One can
assess health and illness in a certain respect only if one
knows all effects that originate from the big world, from the
macrocosm to pull the human being into their circles. — Thus,
the human being appeared to him at first like a single entity
in the macrocosm. This was one direction as he looked at the
human being. Then he said to himself: someone must attain an
intimate knowledge of all events in the big nature outdoors who
wants to assess how all phenomena which happen, otherwise,
outdoors in wind and weather, in rising and setting of stars
and so on flow through the human nature as it were, work into
them. — Because Paracelsus did not confine himself to the
special knowledge of the human being, but let the clairvoyant
gaze wander over the whole macrocosm, over physics, astronomy,
chemistry, and collected everything that he could get hold of,
the human being was a part of the macrocosm for him.
However, besides the human being appeared
to him as a being independent largely, while he processes the
substances of the macrocosm and by the way, in which he
processes them, he lives either in connection or in opposition
with the macrocosm. As far as the human being is a part of the
macrocosm, Paracelsus looks at him as the lowest, most
primitive, purely physical-bodily human being. But as far as
the human being receives a certain circulation of substances
and forces in his organisation and develops independently, is
active independently in them, Paracelsus saw something included
in the human being that he calls the “archaeus”
that was to him like an inner master builder whom he also
called the “inner alchemist.”
He draws the attention to this inner
alchemist who transforms the outer substances which do not
resemble what the human being needs as material inside as he
changes milk and bread into meat and blood. This was to him a
big riddle. In it expressed itself what he saw working as the
inner alchemist who adapts himself harmoniously in the universe
or opposes it. This was to him the human being in a second
direction who can have such an inner alchemist in himself who
transforms the substances into poisons destroying the organism,
or into those means furthering and developing the
organism.
Then he distinguished a third one: that
what is the human being apart from the outer world. There
Paracelsus realised that the human organisation is so designed
that in the cooperation of the forces and organs a little
world, a microcosm, an image of the big world exists. Notabene:
this is something different from the first viewpoint of
Paracelsus. After the first viewpoint, the human being is a
part of nature. As far as with his third viewpoint the single
parts of nature co-operate, he finds a likeness of the mutual
relation of sun and moon in blood and heart, in the nervous and
cerebral systems and in the interactions of them. In the other
organs, he finds an inner kingdom of heaven, an inner world
edifice. The outer world edifice is to him like a big symbol
that recurs in the human being like a little world. In a mess
that can originate in this little world, he sees the third way
in which the human being can become ill.
He saw the fourth viewpoint in the passions
and desires, which exceed a certain measure, for example, rage
and fury. They react then again on the physical
organisation.
Finally, he still saw the fifth viewpoint
that is by no means admitted today, in the way, how the human
being is integrated into the course of the world, and how to
him from the whole spiritual development the causes of illness
can result.
Paracelsus developed five viewpoints this
way which he demanded not theoretically, but which he realised
from the nature of the human being in immediate view of the
relation of the human being to nature. Because he saw the human
being placed in nature, and did not intellectually but
clairvoyantly consider the way in which the single parts
co-operate Paracelsus could position himself in a particular
way to the sick human being. Strangely enough, he related not
with one, but with all soul forces to the whole world. Hence,
his nice sentence: with the mind we learn to recognise God the
Father in the world; by faith we learn to recognise Christ, the
Son; and by imagination, we learn to recognise the
Spirit.
As the knowledge of the healthy and sick
human being results from these three aspects, he wanted to put
the human being before his soul. However, he wanted to look not
only at the human being, but he wanted to observe how the
single things are related in nature with each other and with
the human being. Something peculiar could thereby happen: if he
faced a sick person, he beheld how nature worked under the just
cited viewpoints; the irregularity of the substances and of the
organs resulted to his intuitive sight. He had the whole human
being before himself.
He could not dress in abstract words what
he experienced in front of the sick person, he could not
formulate it; but he settled in the sick person. He needed no
name of the illness, but while he was like submerged in the
illness, he realised something quite new: how he had to combine
the substances that he knew in nature, so that he could find
means against this illness. However, it was also not only the
mental in which he submerged, but also the moral, the
intellectual and spiritual. Call him a vagrant if you want, as
one did; maybe call charlatanism what he did. Nevertheless,
stress also that he was bared of all means that he had to run
up debts and so on. But then do not forget that he unselfishly
became completely one with the illness he faced.
Hence, one could say, if he used everything
that nature gave him for the sick person, the most important
remedy would be love above all. Not the substances heal, he
said, but love. —
Love also worked from him onto the sick
person, because he completely saw himself transported in the
nature of the other human being. The second what had to arise
from him by his especially intimate relation to nature was that
he beheld the effective means in any single case that he
applied; he beheld it developing its forces in the human
organism. From it, the second arose to him: confident hope. He
calls love and hope his best healing powers, and he never set
himself to work without love and hope. The man who walked
around as a vagrant was completely filled with the most
unselfish love. However, he often had weird experiences. His
love went so far that he cured those free of charge who had no
money. However, he also had to live on something. Some people
often cheated him out of his fee; then he went on and did not
care. However, also collisions happened with the surroundings.
Thus, the following occurred to him, for example.
When he was in Basel, because he was later
appointed city doctor, also like by a kind of error, he
accomplished some famous cures. Once he was called to a Canon
Lichtenfels who had an illness that nobody could cure.
Paracelsus had stipulated a fee of hundred thalers if he cured
him; the canon agreed. Then Paracelsus gave him the
remedy, and after three or four times the
illness was cured.
There the canon meant if this was done so
easily, he also does not pay the hundred thalers,
— and
Paracelsus was left with nothing. He sued the canon to set an
example; but he did not win his case at the Basel court:
he should keep to his rate. Then he distributed, as one said,
bad flyers against the court and especially against the canon.
This bred bad blood. A friend drew his attention to the fact
that his stay was no longer safe in Basel. Then he fled in the
dead of night from Basel. Had he gone half an hour later, he
would have been imprisoned.
Someone who knows the peculiar life of this
person understands the impression deeply penetrating into our
hearts originating from the picture that comes from Paracelsus'
last years: a picture that shows a face in which a lot of
spiritual is expressed. He experienced a lot, but at the same
time, the life badgered this soul and this body badly. On one
side, you notice the suffering, relatively young man with the
old features, wrinkles, and baldness and which struggle and
striving which essence of the whole time evolution were in
Paracelsus and on the other side, how he had to experience the
tragic of a human being who confronted his time this way. Even
if it is a legend, what should have happened in Salzburg that
the Salzburg doctors would have decided once to incite one of
his servants to precipitate Paracelsus from a rock who thereby
met his death and was carried to his house. Even if that is not
true, the life of Paracelsus was already in such a way that one
must not split his skull; one worried his life out so that we
understand his early death completely.
Such a man like Paracelsus made a deep
impression on all who searched the way to the spiritual worlds
in the next time. Someone who knows Goethe's life feels that
Paracelsus whom Goethe got to know soon made a deep impression
on him. Goethe had grown together like Paracelsus as it were
with the surrounding nature. On another occasion, I have
already told that Goethe showed this emotional attachment as a
seven-year-old boy while he built an altar, rejecting
everything that he has as religious explanations about nature
from his surroundings. He took a music stand, laid minerals of
his father's collection and plants on it, waited for the sun
rise in the morning, collected the sun beams with a burning
glass and lighted a little aromatic candle, which he had put on
top, to light a sacrificial fire which was kindled in nature
itself, and offered a sacrifice to the God of the big nature
that way. This affinity to nature appears with Goethe so early
and develops later into the great, also clairvoyant ideas about
nature. We see in Goethe who is already in Weimar this way of
thinking working on in the prose hymn To Nature:
“Nature! We are surrounded and embraced by her, we are
unable to escape her, and unable to penetrate deeper into her.
Uninvited and unwarned she takes us along in the circulation of
her dance until we are tired and fall from her arms
...”
Also in another way, we see a lot of
resemblance between Goethe and Paracelsus. He becomes a true
student of nature in botany and zoology. We realise how he
tries to recognise the being of the objects of nature on his
Italian Journey spiritually observing how the single appears in
its variety. It is nice as he sees the innocent coltsfoot
transformed which he knows from Germany. There he learns how
the outer forms can express the same being in various way. Thus
we realise that he wanted to recognise — everywhere searching
the unity in the variety — the uniform as the
spirit. It is significant what he writes from Rome to his
friend Knebel (Karl Ludwig von K., 1744–1834) in Weimar on 18
August 1787: “After I have seen many plants and fish near
Naples and in Sicily, I would be tempted if I were ten years younger to travel to India,
not to discover anything new, but to look at the discovered in
my way.” He wants to behold intuitively spiritually what
spreads out in the sensory world. Paracelsus headed for the
spirit in nature, Goethe headed for the spirit.
No wonder, hence, that Paracelsus' life
appeared beside Faust's life vividly in Goethe's soul. If we
open ourselves to Goethe's life especially, his Faust stands
not only as the Faust of the sixteenth century before us who
was a kind of contemporary of Paracelsus in a certain respect,
but Paracelsus himself stands before us as he worked on Goethe.
We have something in the Faust figure in which Paracelsus
played a part. Why did Goethe resort to Faust?
— One
tells in the legend of Faust that he laid the Bible behind the
bank for a while, became a doctor of medicine, and wanted to
study the forces of nature.
Indeed, we realise that Paracelsus
remained loyal to the Bible and was even a Bible-expert, but we
see him laying the old medical authorities, Galen, Avicenna and
others “behind the bank,” even burnt them once and
went directly to the book of nature. This trait did a big
impression on Goethe. And further: do we not see a similar
trait when Faust translates the Bible into his “beloved
German,” so that that which comes from it can directly
flow into his soul, and when Paracelsus translates that into
his beloved German which natural science is to him? We could
state some other traits that would show that in Goethe something
of the reappeared Paracelsus lived when he created the Faust
figure. Yes, one would like to say, one sees in the
Faust — Goethe translates it only into the ideal
— what often happened between Paracelsus and his honest
father when they were together, where Faust tells how he had
contact with his father. Briefly, we can look at Paracelsus if
Faust works as a figure of the Goethean creating on us.
While we have both figures beside
ourselves, something faces us that shows in peculiar way how
Goethe could make something quite different from the Faust
figure as from the Paracelsus figure of the sixteenth century.
If we look at the Goethean Faust, he is dissatisfied about what
the different sciences, medicine, theology and so on can give
him. However, Goethe can present this Faust not in such a way
that we see the immediate settling in nature. Goethe could do
it, but there had to be something for him, why he did not do
it. Why did he not do it?
There it is remarkable at
first, what is not only an outer fact that Paracelsus died
with a harmonious soul that has grown together with the spirit
of nature in the years in which we can imagine Faust saying the
words:
I've studied now, to my regret,
Philosophy, Law, Medicine,
and — what is worse — Theology
from end to end with diligence ...
(Verses 355–357)
What now Faust further experiences, he
experiences it in an age which Paracelsus did not reach in the
physical world. Therefore, Goethe presents a kind of Paracelsus
as it were from the age on in which Paracelsus died, but a
Paracelsus who could not settle in the living spirit of
nature.
How does he present him? Although he shows
that Faust found a deep understanding of nature, also a kind of
feeling related with nature, it is different than it was with
Paracelsus. We feel this, when Faust speaks to the spirit of
nature:
Spirit sublime, all that for which I prayed,
all that you now have granted me
you showed your face to me, but not in vain.
You gave me for my realm all Nature's splendour,
with power to feel and to enjoy it. You grant
not only awed, aloof acquaintanceship,
you let me look deep down into her heart
as if it were the bosom of a friend.
You lead the ranks of living beings past me,
and teach me thus to know my fellow creatures
in air and water and in silent wood.
(Verses 3217–3227)
Faust grows together with her in a way,
because he was separated from nature before. Nevertheless,
Goethe cannot show that Faust penetrates so vividly into the
details of nature as Paracelsus penetrated; he cannot show that
this happens at once, while he speaks to the sublime spirit of
nature. Goethe cannot show how Faust would grow together with
nature, but he must show an inner soul development. Faust has
to go through a merely mental-spiritual development to reach
the depths of the creating of nature and world. Thus, we
realise with this way of Faust, although he often reminds of
Paracelsus, that everything that Faust experiences is
experienced in the moral, in the intellectual, in the emotional
life, and not like with Paracelsus with whom as it were the
feelers reach nature. It had really to happen that Faust could
ascend to unselfishness, to the intimate love of the spiritual
at the end of the second part, not while he grows together with
nature, but goes even farther away from her. Goethe lets Faust
go blind:
The darkness seems to press about me more
and more,
But in my inner being there is radiant light.
(Verses 11,499#8211;11,500)
Faust becomes a mystic, he develops the
soul in all directions, and he faces the resisting
Mephistophelean forces. Briefly, Faust must develop purely
inside his soul, has to raise the spirit in his soul. When this
spirit is raised inside, the manifest to the senses is
destroyed even with Faust because he goes blind: “But in
my inner being there is radiant light.”
Faust realises — we recognise this at
the end of the drama —
that the spirit working in nature forces up
the inner soul forces if the human being develops them. If this
spirit is developed enough, the human being directly attains
what penetrates as something spiritual the human being and
nature.
Thus, Goethe let his Faust experience an
inner soul path so that his Faust comes to the same goal to
which Paracelsus came. If one thinks about what induced it, one
realises that the powers of time cause the successive epochs of
development, the historical life.
One recognises then what it means that the
year of Paracelsus' death is something before that big
revolution which the work of Copernicus caused for the outer
natural science. Paracelsus' life still falls into the time in
which it was right that the earth was stationary in the
universe that the sun walks around it, and so on; this still
worked beyond Paracelsus. Only after his death, the quite
different kind of the view of the solar system and the world
system prevailed. People literally lost the ground. Someone who
regards the Copernican world system as a matter of course today
gets no idea of that storm which broke out when the earth
“was set in motion.” One can say, the ground under
the feet faltered literally. But that also caused that the
spirit did no longer stream immediately like an aroma into the
soul as with Paracelsus. If Copernicus had confined himself to
that which the senses perceive, he would never have put up his
world system. Because he did not trust in the senses, he could
put up his world system, while he exceeded the sensory
appearance with intellect and reason. The course of development
was this way. The human being had to develop his mind and his
reason immediately. The times since the sixteenth century have
passed not without effect.
While Goethe had to lift his Faust out of a
Paracelsus figure of the sixteenth century to a Faust figure of
the eighteenth, he had to consider that the human being could
no longer be connected with nature in such an immediate and
primitive way as Paracelsus was. Hence, Faust became a figure
that could not discover the forces of existence, the sense of
being by the immediate connection with nature but by the hidden
forces from the depths of the soul.
However, at the same time the essentials
appear that in the human being the stream of existence does not
pass by insignificantly. Paracelsus is a son of his time as a
great, superior figure. Goethe created a figure in his
Faust poetically, which he made the son of his time in a
certain direction which learnt to use reason and intellect in
the natural sciences of his time, and which could work out the
mystic. Hence, one has to say, because Goethe felt pressured
into presenting not a Paracelsus figure but another figure, the
deep caesura appears in the development of the European
humanity in this period. The importance of such a caesura even
appears in the greatest geniuses, and in the difference between
these both figures. It is interesting for someone who wants to
get to know Goethe to the highest degree to look at his
creating in the Faust figure, because his Faust informs us
about Goethe more than his other figures.
If we look at spiritual science from these
observations, it can feel intimately related with Goethe, but
can also feel intimately related with Paracelsus in another
way. How with Paracelsus? Paracelsus could receive the deepest
insights into nature from the developed forces of his soul by
immediate contact with nature. However, this time in which one
was able to do this is past since Copernicus, Galilei, Giordano
Bruno and Kepler. Another time has begun. In his Faust Goethe
showed the type of this time in which one has to work with the
hidden soul forces, so that higher sensory forces come into
being from the depths of the soul. As the eyes see the colours
as the ears hear the tones, these higher senses perceive the
spirit in the surroundings and that which one cannot behold as
spirit with the usual senses.
Thus, the modern human being has to
experience the deeper soul forces, while he does not grow
together with nature as Paracelsus did but while he turns away
from her. However, if he gets around to bringing up the deeper
forces from his soul, to developing an understanding also of
what lives invisibly as a spiritual and supersensible behind
the visible, behind the sensory nature, if the human being
works out the Faustian from himself, then the Faustian becomes
the clairvoyant insight into nature. In a way any human being
can experience developing the inner spirit that he can say
indeed — even if he cannot believe to have solved the riddles of
the world by what his eyes and outer senses teach him:
“But in my inner being there is radiant light.”
This can lead us to the spirit that prevails in
everything.
Thus, the way from Paracelsus to Goethe is
extremely interesting if one sees reviving in the Faust figure
from Goethe's soul what for Paracelsus what also for Faust is
the essentials is: the fact that the human being can penetrate
into the depths of the world and into the laws with which the
everlasting immortal spirit of the human being is related not
by the outer senses, but only by an immediate connection with
nature, as with Paracelsus, or by a development of higher
senses, as Goethe poetically
indicated in the continuation of the Faust figure of the
sixteenth century. That is why for Paracelsus that became more
and more a principle that then Goethe stressed for his Faust with
the words:
Nature, mysterious in day's clear light,
lets none remove her veil,
and what she won't reveal to your mind,
you can't extort from her with levers and with screws.
(Verses 671–674)
With it one does not mean — neither in the sense of
Paracelsus nor in that of Goethe — that one
could not investigate the spirit of nature, but that the spirit
reveals itself in nature, indeed, to the spirit woken in the
soul, but not to the instruments which we have in the
laboratory, not to the levers and the screws. Hence, Goethe
says: “What she won't reveal to your mind, you can't
extort from her with levers and with screws.” But to the
spirit she can reveal it. This is the right interpretation of
this Goethean word. Since Goethe agreed absolutely with
Paracelsus, while he created a reflection of Paracelsus in
his Faust, and Paracelsus together with Goethe would have
regarded the spirited words as valid:
to understand some living thing and to describe it,
the student starts by ridding it of its spirit;
he then holds all its parts within his hand,
except, alas! For the spirit that bound them together.
Goethe adds, namely, when he conceived
his Faust first, because he himself was still in high spirits in
a juvenile way and did not belong to the “extremely clean
and superfine” people in the sense of
Paracelsus:
which chemists, unaware they're being ridiculous,
denominate encheiresin naturae.
(Verses 1936–1941)
However, this wants to say that nobody who
wants to approach nature without developed higher cognitive
forces can recognise the primal grounds of nature and cannot
recognise how the immortal spirit of the human being is
connected with nature, or to speak with Jacob Böhme
where it comes into being (German: urständet).
If one covers the way from Paracelsus to
Goethe as we have tried to outline it today, then you realise
that Paracelsus and Goethe are living confessors of the other
principle, not of the principle of those views of nature and
world which they wanted to meet with the Goethean
saying:
To understand some living thing and to describe it,
The student starts by ridding it of its spirit;
He then holds all its parts within his hand,
Except, alas! For the spirit that bound them together.
No! Paracelsus and Goethe approach nature and the human being in
such a way that for them counts:
Who wants to recognise and understand some living thing,
looks for the spiritual light in primal grounds.
There he holds all its parts within his hand,
And never will he misjudge
The truth of the things within the spiritual tie.
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