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Goethe's Faust
Now we get to the LitCrit of Goethe's Faust. It is impossible to exaggerate how peculiar Faust is. It was Goethe's intention that the work should be a puzzle and he said little about its meaning (before he died shortly after completing it). Every critic finds something different in the poem/play and much of what they write is far more interesting than the original -- at least for me, given the English translation of Faust I've read.
The difference, perhaps, is that the critics are trying to make very specific points -- based on their particular hobby-horse or the dog they brought to some academic fight -- and they are trying to make their interpretation comprehensible to their readers. It's a pity that only a fraction of the people who read Faust read the LitCrit.
"Survey of the Faust Theme" by Stuart Atkins
p 573 - 1507 - "Magister Georgius Sabellicus, Faustus junior..."
"... he was appointed schoolmaster at Kreuznach because of his vaunted academical learning, but had to flee when his debauchery of his pupils was discovered."
1532 - "Dr. Faust, the great sodomite and necromancer."
p 574 - "...died in 1540 or 1541 at a village in Wurttemberg."
"Popular interest in Faust thus coincided almost exactly with the heyday of general belief in witchcraft as a punishable heresy [1587-1726]."
p 575 - "...he quickly became the protagonist of a modern magus myth -- its hero insofar as he represented the thirst of an age of geographical and scientific discovery for new knowledge and power, its villain insofar as these threatened accepted religious and theological assumptions. For although some men thought of magic as applied science... (H.C. Agrippa... 'Natural magic is... nothing but the chief power of all the natural sciences... -- perfection of Natural Philosophy and... the active part of the same';... Giordano Bruno... 'A magician signifies a man of wisdom with the power to act'), science itself seemed frightening for many more, so that even the most reputable alchemist or other scientist could arouse ambivalent feelings."
"...As oriental religions permeated the Greco-Roman world, however, and their exponents vied for influence, a literature of theological propaganda developed in which rival magics occupied a central place. The most important of these religions was Christianity, which claimed exclusive rightness of its own magic, labeling all other 'illicit' (Augustine, [De Civitate Dei ...)."
"Like the theologians of Faust's century, that of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, the early Church Fathers used great learning and subtlety to demonstrate either the illusory or the evil nature of alien divinities, and there were soon many stories vividly illustrating the greater efficacy of the true faith..." Discussion of Simon Magus and possible confusion with Simon the Gnostic. "Gnosticism, moreover, introduced forms of dualistic thought that continued into Manichaeism, a still greater threat to Christian orthodoxy, and various Saints' legends illustrate the dangers of regarding any power of darkness as the equal of the one God..." Stories about Cyprian. "There were also legends of another Cyprian (of Antioch -- later confused with the Carthaginian martyr) who repents his vain use of illicit magic to achieve knowledge and love and later dies a bishop-martyr...."
p 576 - ..."Until after the Reformation... the repentant mortal regularly found redemption through contrition, penance, and good works even if he had signed away his soul in blood (a motif introduced in the thirteenth century) and even though, from Saint Thomas Aquinas on, witchcraft was more and more often officially considered heresy."
"If Faust was less fortunate than his precursors, the blame must be placed not on him but on the religious schism that began with Luther. For those who obdurately clung to 'false' doctrine there was now no alternative to eternal damnation. Copernican astronomy cast doubts on a traditional cosmogony, humanism glorified pagan moral philosophers and much morally dubious pagan literature, Neo-Platonic and Pansophic mysticisms taught 'natural' revelation and even the possibility of man's unaided achievement of salvation, Trinitarianism was openly repudiated -- leaders of the Unitarian movement were Laelius Socinus and his nephew Faustus (1539-1604) [“Unitarianism is a theological movement, named for its understanding of God as one person, in direct contrast to Trinitarianism, which defines God as three persons coexisting consubstantially as one being. Unitarians maintain that Jesus is in some sense the "son" of God, but not the one God. Unitarianism is also known for the rejection of several other conventional Christian doctrines, including the soteriological doctrines of original sin and predestination, and, in more recent history, biblical inerrancy.” - Source It appears that there are currently 5 competing organizations of Unitarian congregation in the U.S.: UCC USA, UUCF, ICUU (International), AUC, UCMI] -- and advocates of libertinism and atheism were beginning to be less cautious than in the late Middle Ages. With so many rival beliefs urging irreconcilable claims, witchcraft could exert a more powerful spell than ever before over the minds of persons of all social and intellectual classes. The Council of Trent might reaffirm 'Saint Thomas' doctrine that neither charms nor conjuring can have affect on the free will, but Protestants accepted Luther's denial of absolute human freedom at the very time they were deprived of all effective external intercession with their God. For them, Faust's eternal damnation was only too real a possibility: significantly, sixteenth century legend associated Faust with Wittenberg, where Luther had taught the reality of the Devil and where Giordano Bruno was allowed to lecture...
Beginning in 1593, Bruno was tried for heresy by the Roman Inquisition on charges including denial of several core Catholic doctrines (including the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, the virginity of Mary, and Transubstantiation). Bruno's pantheism was also a matter of grave concern. The Inquisition found him guilty, and in 1600 he was burned at the stake in Rome's Campo de' Fiori. After his death he gained considerable fame, particularly among 19th- and early 20th-century commentators who regarded him as a martyr for science...”
- Source. ]
...after having been denied that privilege at the theologically stricter university of Marburg. Faust represented many things that were anathema to good Christians, but above all a new and challenging secular intellectualism... [Faust's identification with Fust, Gutenberg's collaborator, shows an unconscious recognition of the importance of printing in the dissemination of new ideas.]
"In the Historia, although he is an 'Epicurean' or sensual materialist, Faust's greatest fault is 'speculation' -- scientific theorizing and skeptical philosophizing that make him intellectually and spiritually incapable of faith; he may fear Hell (Catholic-theological attrito) but will prove incapable of contrition as preached by Luther..."
Mann certainly played with this in Doctor Faustus. Ours would be a world of magic to anyone from that time, or from Goethe's. And you can say we have largely given up our claim to everlasting life in exchange -- that we've exchanged one magic for another that pays off sooner.
p 578 - "In the age of Enlightenment... damnation was no longer a matter of wide vital concern. Evil, for Luther the instrument of God, had become an obscuring of truth by passion (Descartes) or even, with Leibniz, a sensed deprival of perfection grounded in awareness of a discrepancy between any part of the whole. (Ugliness and incongruity were to be integral to the visual and literary arts in G.E. Lessing's aesthetics, and the essential function of dissonance had long been recognized by musical theorists.) To relativistic and materialistic thinkers, evil was but a necessary concomitant of the good; an obdurate sinner like the traditional Faust no longer seemed to have serious human significance."
p 579 - "... He replaced the traditional -- and theologically unsound -- pact with Hell by a challenge: if Faust, who regarded himself as representative of all men, is ever satisfied by shallow pleasures or by a sense of having achieved all he would and could, he will gladly renounce this life, the only meaningful existence he can conceive of... The Lord (God, the Good) is also anticipatorily defined -- in terms that reflect the historical-genetic interests of the Enlightenment and the increasing importance of evolutionary biology in the later eighteenth century (Buffon; Lamarck; Goethe's own theories of metamorphosis) -- as creativity, becoming (Werden), and love, the potentialities of self-realization on every level of being to which man has access by virtue of his innate impulse to strive and aspire...."
That this work is based on contemporary science relating to biology and light/color, is worth keeping in mind. Are there similar works now that deal in an artistic way with quantum physics or string theory? Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Brave New World, and even Cat's Cradle (ice 9) also have contemporary scientific foundations to some extent.
p 580-581 - "...His irritation is momentarily directed against pious Christian neighbors, whose destruction he causes by his impatient eagerness to resettle them elsewhere; although not directly guilty of their death -- the agents of his will are Mephistopheles and (men of) violence -- he now abjures further recourse to supernatural assistance and again accepts human mortality...."
I don't think I had noticed before how important this passage is. As Wendell Berry has pointed out, we are all of us guilty for the crimes committed in our interest by proxies, when we consume products without any concern for their production. We are happy to have the blessing of our Mephistophelean world and would rather not know (as with sausage) what goes into it.
A more obvious parallel would be with the people in San Francisco today losing their homes -- and conceivably in some cases their lives -- to make way for larger scale, and upscale, development. I would say this change is positive and inevitable, but the consequences are very real and something we would rather not dwell on. We are happy to let the "men of violence" do what has to be done.
"...Faust... still hopes to complete his grandiose reclamation project, but he dies even as he envisions its benefits enjoyed by future generations of self-reliant men, like himself free from subservience to a purely speculative-transcendental or a merely primitive-magical system of belief. His formation of a social-religious humanistic faith is his supreme insight, but the conclusion of the drama insists that it be recognized as an expression of faith (rooted in the feeling that men can know the divine only as immanence)..."
Wow. I seem to have missed a LOT here.
"In its cautious optimism Goethe's Faust is still a work of the late Enlightenment, but in its communication of the sense of the unfathomable complexity of human experience it is also an expression of European romanticism. Goethe was not, however, consciously a romantic, and so he sought to represent a totality of critical, emotional, aesthetic, and ethical experiences not as a romantic infinitude, but as a symbolically comprehensive finitude (German Classicism)... If Goethe presents Faust sympathetically as an aspiring idealist, he also makes clear that idealism and aspiration can be the expression of dangerous subjectivity, of alienation from reality: only Faust's insight into his own finiteness, his recognition that lofty intentions do not guarantee the avoidance of error, seems to be represented without dramatic -- or other ironical -- ambivalence. Man is redeemed by insight, not by achievement, and only through consciously directed activity, wise or foolish, successful or unsuccessful, can this insight be gained."
Not sure about most of this but I really like that last sentence.
p 583-4 - "...'Faustian' could thus variously mean 'Promethean,' 'superhuman' (Herman Hesse lectured on 'Faust and Zarathustra' in 1909), ' dualistically torn between (or simultaneously impelled by) pleasure principle and cognitive desire,' 'mystically monistic,' 'socialistically progressive' ... as well as 'German in its best -- or, at the height of World War I, worst -- sense.'"
"With the publication of Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West (1918 and 1922) 'Faustian' acquires a new meaning. In his morphology of civilizations (Kulturen) Spengler opposed the Faustian culture-soul of the West to the Apollonian (or Euclidean) and Magical souls of Greco-Roman and Arabian culture. His Faustian soul knows the lure of infinitude and transcendence, has an ethic of instinct or voluntarism rather than of reason, and its heroes are men of action with Nietzsche's morality of masters... Although the importance that Spengler's concept of the Faustian attributes to practical achievement is that of later historicism and scientism, romantic elements predominate in his thought, which is thus more German than Western...."
p 584 - "Simultaneous with the explanation of history in symbolic and mythic terms was an ever more frequent reading -- and even creating (Thomas Mann) -- of literary works as forms of symbolic and mythic expression. Beginning with his Psycologische Typen (1921), C. G. Jung encouraged the interpretation of Goethe's Faust as a visionary work, i.e., not as mere poetic invention, but as the expression of archetypal truths (Faust variously as hysteric, as magus-magician, as savior-sage, and -- after World War II -- as sub-humanly ignorant of ethical emotion, the protagonist of a work revealing a characteristically 'German' alienation from all concrete realities)...."
p 585 - "...Leverkuhn's [in Mann's Doctor Faustus] pact with the devil is his fantasy that syphilitic infection is the price of heightened creative powers. (Mann had long thought to discern a connection between disease and artistic creativity, and had first conceived in 1901 the idea of portraying a syphilitic artist as a Faust figure.) [Doctor Faustus repudiates nationalistic and nihilistic interpretations of Faust and the Faustian; parallels in it to recent developments in historical, philosophical, theological, psychological, and scientific speculation insists that the cultivation of musical abstraction by its coldly intellectual hero also symbolizes a general alienation from humane values that only a spiritual breakthrough may possibly overcome."
"... Some theologically-minded critics, still reading it [Goethe's Faust] as a glorification of ruthless activity, condemn it as an expression of humanistic amoralism, while others interpreted it as a morality play warning against the destructive consequences of human effort unredeemed by theological grace. Although Marxists largely continued to see in it a paean to progress and secular human values... Goethe, however, interpreted the Faust story in a tragedy, not in a morality play, and the lasting significance of the Faust legend will surely again be recognized as deriving not from the theme of existential despair (which it shares with many other tales and myths), but from the paradox of self-limiting and even self-destroying aspiration which, as Goethe knew, the legend symbolizes with apparently unique distinction."
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