Man's development forseen in Goethe's Faust

in what he undertakes. From one who can describe himself intelligently he becomes someone who intends to know himself in action. In attempting to build a human community for the sake of making a new epoch in history, he becomes less self-centred and more world-centred, but never for a moment does he lose his self-awareness in what he is doing. As he goes blind, he relies more and more on his inner power of vision. But he is still the single person putting all his individual powers into a project that he has designed himself. The character of Faust, as he has become by the play’s end, is a remarkable portrait of the state of consciousness which is experienced today. In this century, each person feels himself to be on his own, whatever his surroundings may be. He learns by his own experience, he longs to see himself through what he can do. Rudolf Steiner, with his spiritual insight into the history of the human mind, has described how this type of consciousness has arisen in the present out of the development of the past. It is, historically speaking, an inevitable transition from which the human mind should pass on to a future stage.

Each time that a new stage is reached in human consciousness, there is the danger that it will turn decadent instead of developing further. Each time there is the danger that the powers of evil will seize upon it, instead of the Christian forces that could transform it. Goethe out of his poetic sense of reality, put Faust, the man with the modern mind, into the company of Mephistopheles. He then set Faust the task of rescuing himself by means of his courage to seck the Spirit. Rudolf Steiner grasped the spiritual facts of history in the forms of thought. Goethe painted the portrait of modern man, in his dilemma, as a poet. Both the scientific thinker and the poet have agreed that the modern form of consciousness gives to a man a great opportunity to find himself in himself.

The final scene of the drama is often spoken of as the Ascension of Faust. It stands by itself in relation to all the other scenes. It contains a set of quite new characters who can only in imagination be related to those seen before. It would not be unfair to suggest that Goethe found it an artistic problem to find the way for Faust to be taken at the end to Heaven. Faust being mortal has to die, a fact foreseen by Mephistopheles as something from which he

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