Thee heaven appears in ‹Faust› three times: at the beginning, when God and Mephisto negotiate the soul of Faust, at the end when Faust ascends, and in the middle when Gretchen calls the heavenly ones to herself in the dungeon. It is the way from the fatherly, ordering heaven to the benevolent, feminine reason, the Earth, Mater, becomes the new heaven.
If at the beginning the Lord has the word, at the end the Mater has it. In between lies the dungeon, the abandonment of God, the loneliness, and the terrible insight of being abandoned by oneself. «But in the mute silence, one matures,» Rudolf Steiner writes about this inner dungeon, the language we learn to speak there. In Christianity, the cross is the big picture. Not at the top, as the golden top of the Egyptian pyramids promises, not where every church tower, every minaret makes you believe it, not there is the sky, but where the lines meet in the cross, in the center. Three times now at the Goetheanum – for the time being for the last time – we perform ‹Faust› three times in the Goetheanum the path that Goethe shows, from the old to his own, new heaven. Gretchen receives in the new heaven because she has lived and suffered through her own. The new female heaven is born in the dungeon.
Photo: Lucia Hunziker – Translation: Monika Werner
