There is really nothing to add to the Goetheanum Stage’s production of Faust. As a work of art, it speaks for itself. So, instead, I’d like to suggest a change of perspective: Let’s turn our gaze from the Faust on the stage to the Faust in us, to ourselves as one who has signed the Faustian pact. Like Faust, we can no longer escape this contract. But I believe there are three important perspectives in the drama that point the way forward and up.
Each of us, as individuals, has signed this pact, but we’ve also signed it collectively, as humanity. It’s worth trying to remember the time in your life when you gave your Faustian signature, when you signed the pact with Mephisto. Individually and as a social body, we stand with Faust at the current turning point of modernity. I approach modernity as the Faustian project, as the moment when every human being stands at the apex of their personality and acts in the world from this vantage point.
On the way to this sovereign personality, we’ve crossed many milestones: the Copernican revolution, for instance. Galileo Galilei observed through his telescope (1633) that Venus, like the moon, can have a crescent shape and concluded that Venus must revolve around the sun as does the Earth. This is one of the starting points of modernity: the divinely sublime, self-contained worldview, where we humans have a clearly assigned place, transforms into a dynamic worldview. René Descartes’ statement a few years later (1637), “I think, therefore I am,” is the philosophical conclusion of this path of self-empowerment: thinking establishes existence! Similarly, Kant (1784) explains what defines this era: “The Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity.” Thinking now becomes the guide for our actions and forms the basis of ethical universalism, leading on to the formulation of human rights. This is also where Goethe’s Faust ends up when the hundred-year-old Faust wrestles fertile land from the swamp on the coast and dreams of a free land for a free people. The 25-year-old Rudolf Steiner put it similarly: “The foundation of the world has poured itself out entirely into the world . . . . The highest form in which it appears within the reality of ordinary life is thinking and, with it, the human personality.”1
The Enlightenment Is Now Completed
We are at a point in human development where the fate of the world must now be born out of us human beings. The anthroposophical view is that this is a co-creative endeavor, a creation born of humanity, of the Anthropos. This is how the Enlightenment, a path that led us to a turning point in modernity, is now being completed. As examples, I’ll cite here three contemporary authors from the fields of sociology, political science, and philosophy:
- Bruno Latour, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime (2017/18).2 At the beginning of the book, he writes, “The feeling of vertigo, almost panic, that pervades all current politics stems from the fact that the ground beneath our feet is shaking. It’s as if we feel attacked in all our habits and possessions. Do you know that feeling?” At the end, he humorously illustrates how questionable quick answers to this problem can be: “Should I throw myself into permaculture, stand at the front of the demonstration, storm the Winter Palace, follow the teachings of St. Francis, become a hacker, organize neighborhood parties, reintroduce witchcraft rituals, invest in artificial photosynthesis, or do you want me to track wolves?”
- Ingolflur Blühdorn, Unhaltbarkeit [Unsustainability] (2024).3 Blühdorn also describes the situation of modernity’s Faustian project as a dilemma. Since the 1970s and ‘80s, we have been committed to an ecological and just world, only to find that late modernity has “emancipated” itself from this narrative and that the socio-political situation is now presenting us with something completely different. Movements such as Occupy Wall Street or Fridays for Future are bringing about a brief renaissance but no breakthrough. Rather, late modern societies are facing a vacuum in terms of political action. What is the political situation in France, Austria, or the Netherlands at the moment? Our societies, with pandemics, overuse of resources, social inequality, a crisis in care and nursing, global warming, digitalization, migration, etc., are becoming ungovernable—according to Blühdorn’s analysis.
- Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity (2025).4 This New York Times bestseller describes how we, as a Faustian society, are surrendering ourselves to Mephisto to such an extent that our entire social life is becoming a machine, and everything human is being called into question. In doing so, he refers to Oswald Spengler’s book, The Decline of the West (1918/22),5 which Steiner read in 1920. What the three authors now observe was already described by Spengler at that time: this Faustian age in which we live is probably heading for decline. Steiner largely agreed with Spengler’s analysis but vehemently rejected his defeatist conclusions.
We Kill What We Love
What these authors describe resonates with our own personal experiences and draws our attention to Goethe’s Faust. Faust’s world of books has become a knowledge industry in large part thanks to the internet and now artificial intelligence. I’m convinced that this knowledge technology will not solve any of our current problems. Rather, it will lead to us having even less time. Every year, we develop new technologies to save time, and every year, we have less time. This is no longer Faustian nature; it’s Mephistophelean—“velociferian,” as Goethe called it.6 Goethe foreshadowed this frenzy in Faust.
And who is Gretchen in this Faustian project? She is young, beautiful, attractive, and religiously sheltered. She recognizes what is wrong. I suggest that Gretchen is innocent Nature, natura naturalis. Just as Faust loves Gretchen, we love nature, and just like Gretchen, nature is destroyed by our love. Gretchen dies, her child dies, her mother and brother die. It is a quadruple murder out of sheer love. And Nature—as she comes to us in all her splendor, innocence, depth, radiance, and religious feeling? We are hopelessly in love with this side of Nature, with this natura naturalis, the freshly created nature, and yet we commit quadruple murder.
We’ve entered the Anthropocene, a geological epoch shaped not by dinosaurs but by us. As Faust, we’ve become the defining force for the entire Earth. That is what “Anthropocene” means. Some authors consider July 16, 1945, when the first atomic bomb was detonated in the desert of New Mexico, USA, to be the beginning of the Anthropocene. As humans, we can now handle matter in such a way that we can destroy everything. This is part of the Faustian project. At the same time, we love our Gretchen Nature, and yet every day she stands closer to the abyss. With Gretchen comes the ecological question.
Price and Value Diverge
Just as urgent as the ecological question is the economic one. Also in Faust, the emperor proclaims, “There is a lack of money.”7 In fact, financial scarcity is a widespread problem, as can be seen in the current government crisis in France or the shutdown in the USA: gargantuan debt! It’s no longer possible to come together and reach an agreement through mutual sacrifice. This is the ungovernability that Blühdorn speaks of, the shaky ground that Latour mentions.
In the Swiss theater group, Mummenschanz, this illusory world, “money,” appears as a virtual value, reminiscent of the virtual values pumped into armaments today without any substantial backing. Bankruptcy is simply postponed. The distinction between “price” and “value” falls apart. Here’s an example: when you buy food in a store, you probably find that your shopping is a little more expensive than you’d hoped (especially if you choose biodynamic products). But the farmers who produced it are receiving less than they need. Too little money reaches the countryside. We don’t have a sustainable food industry on this Earth. We think it should be cheaper, but the reality in the countryside is that it should be more expensive. The figures are well known: if you factor in the true costs, i.e., the ecological and health damage caused by conventional, chemical agriculture, then food produced in this way should be significantly more expensive than organically produced food. Here, too, we see a masquerade, an illusory world of food production.
If we follow Faust, then Homunculus, the artificial human, a foreshadowing of our time, takes us one step further. With CRISPR/Cas, the gene splicer, the boundary between natural and artificial life becomes blurred. It’s a smart design technique that allows us to intervene in the genome. Reproductive technology, organ transplants from animals to humans, and kidneys from pigs—such things are possible now and are already being done. Of course, we’re not personally performing the experiments in the laboratories, but we’ve still signed the Faustian pact. We’re also not the ones sending the elderly couple who stand in the way of land reclamation, Philemon and Baucis, into the flames in the last act of Faust II. Faust thought about resettlement but accepted that it would mean violence and death for the new world, the new land. What are we willing to accept? Goethe’s Faust holds up a mirror to our eyes and shows us what this Mephistophelean pact leads to. In the end, it leads Faust to his great monologue:
A land like Paradise here, round about:
Up to the brink the tide may roar without,
And though it gnaw, to burst with force the limit,
By common impulse all unite to hem it.
Yes, to this thought I hold with firm persistence;
The last result of wisdom stamps it true:
He only earns his freedom and existence,
Who daily conquers them anew.
Thus here, by dangers girt, shall glide away
Of childhood, manhood, age, the vigorous day:
And such a throng I fain would see—
Stand on free soil among a people free!
Then dared I hail the Moment fleeing:
“Ah, still delay—thou art so fair!”
The traces cannot, of mine earthly being,
In aeons perish—they are there!—
In proud fore-feeling of such lofty bliss,
I now enjoy the highest Moment—this!
(FAUST dies).
When he signed the pact with Mephisto at the beginning, he said,
When thus I hail the Moment flying:
“Ah, still delay—thou art so fair!”
Then bind me in thy bonds undying,
My final ruin then declare!8
Are we going to perish? Is this the end? Goethe’s Faust doesn’t end with Faust’s death; there’s still an epilogue. Are there still opportunities before death? Or are there only well-intentioned but poorly executed end results, as in Faust? How miserably Gretchen dies in prison! Are there any breakthroughs for Faust to a source where he does not destroy what he loves, but a renewal is effected? Where are they in the project of modernity, in the Faustian project? In Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy, the great intention is for Faustian humanity not to despair but to counter decline with ascent; not to renounce our own thinking, our self-determined free action, but to achieve ascent from the freedom gained.
Gretchen asks, “How is it with thy religion, pray?”9 Faust cannot follow her professed Christianity, this canon of a self-contained ecclesiastical Christianity. Our question here today could be, “What is your position on anthroposophy?” A canonized, long-established anthroposophy will not help us in many situations in today’s life. With all due respect for the hundred years of anthroposophy that have now passed, and for all the people who have lived for this anthroposophy that has come into being, but I believe we are now at a point where we find fruitfulness and advancement through anthroposophy only when we recreate it and make it contemporary.
Three Faustian Places of Learning
Are there moments, places in Faust, from which we can learn? I see the first one when Faust has the poisoned drink at his lips and then hears the Easter bells—they save him. That’s the memory of childhood. Perhaps, we can follow this thought further. This memory is the space of origin where we as individuals and also as a community sense ourselves—a space that leads back to the prenatal, to the sphere of the unborn. Rudolf Steiner speaks of the unbornness of every child to the teachers of the first Waldorf school. Every human being is a cosmic center. Steiner developed his pedagogy from this idea. “Practice spirit-remembrance,” he wrote in the Foundation Stone Mantra. As I understand it, this means connecting with the origin, one’s own origin, our origin, and from there gaining dignity and respect for the individual and the whole.
A second moment: the walk to the Mothers. Faust wants to achieve the impossible, to conjure up Helen. So, Mephisto sends him to the Mothers, warning him: what is there is nothing, less than nothing. He conjures the image of the ocean, where wave upon wave crashes down, and there is nothing solid for him to hold on to. This is the place where everything is in the process of becoming and of passing away. We must rest entirely within ourselves; otherwise, we will not get through. In Greek terms, the Mothers are Rhea, Demeter, and Persephone, the maternal deities. Can we go to the Mothers? Can we find the place of becoming in order to accomplish this “creation out of nothing,” where the Earth—as the great Mother—becomes the substance of our destiny? The question is meant in a practical sense, because this is already happening to some extent on biodynamic farms.
A third point of light, of learning, is in Faust’s final monologue: “Stand on free soil among a people free! . . . I now enjoy the highest Moment—this!” What if this isn’t just physical, isn’t purely about gaining land in an imperialistic sense? What if the foundation being built is a human foundation, a social foundation, a cultural foundation? If we approach it this way—that the foundation being built is a social one, a new togetherness—then standing “on free soil among a people free” means building a new human land. Where is there not such a longing? Where are the first steps being taken toward this new land for a free people? Isn’t the Anthroposophical Society an attempt to bring this universal humanity into reality? We perform Faust at the Goetheanum, so that we can go through this catharsis again as Faust—so that we can look again and again at what we may not like to look at in everyday life. It’s easier to observe these turning points of the ages on stage than in the reality of everyday life. Then we can go through this catharsis and, reborn after the crisis, raise ourselves again as human beings for this path to a new ascent.
Given as a lecture at the premiere of Faust, October 10–12, 2025. Abridged version also in Anthroposophy Worldwide (November 2025).
Translation Joshua Kelberman
Images Faust 2025. Photos: Laura Pfaehler
Footnotes
- Rudolf Steiner, Goethe’s Theory of Knowledge: An Outline of the Epistemology of His Worldview, CW 2 (Great Barrington, MA: SteinerBooks, 2008), ch. 19, “Human Freedom”; first published in German, 1886.
- Bruno Latour, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime (Medford, MA: Polity, 2018); first published in French as Où atterir? Comment s’orienter en politique [Where to land? How to find your bearings in politics] (Paris: Éditions La Découverte, 2017).
- Ingolfur Blühdorn, Unhaltbarkeit: Auf dem Weg in eine andere Moderne [Unsustainability: On the path to a different modernity] (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2024).
- Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity (New York: Penguin, 2025).
- Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, two vols. (London: Arktos Media Ltd, 2021); first published in German as Der Untergang des Abendlandes [The going-under of the evening lands], 1918/1922.
- Cf. Bryan Norton, “Veloziferisch (Velociferian),” Goethe-Lexicon of Philosophical Concepts 1, no. 1 (2021): 113–20: “As a portmanteau, the neologism, which is composed of the Italian velocità and the German luziferisch, combines two central elements of the Goethean imaginary: the accelerated velocity of modern life and the ‘luciferian’ function of negation.”
- Goethe, Faust, pt. 2, act 1.2, translation by Bayard Taylor (New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1870).
- Ibid., pt. 2, act 5.6; pt. 1, scene 4.
- Ibid., pt. 1, scene 16.
