Faust

There was a real Doctor Faust — Johann Georg Faust, a wandering alchemist, astrologer and magician in early sixteenth-century Germany, reputed to have made a pact with the devil. His legend, printed in the German Faustbuch of 1587, became the story of the scholar who sells his soul for knowledge and power — told by Christopher Marlowe in Doctor Faustus (c. 1592), where Faustus is damned, and performed for two centuries in German puppet shows. Goethe saw those puppet plays as a boy, and spent almost sixty years turning the legend into the greatest work of German literature.

His Faust changes the story’s meaning. The scholar no longer wants mere power or pleasure; he wants to experience everything — all knowledge, all feeling, the whole of human life — and he wagers his soul that nothing will ever satisfy him. In the end, against all tradition, he is saved. Faust became the myth of modern humanity: restless, striving, never content, capable of both creation and destruction.

Composition

Goethe began Faust in his twenties (the “Urfaust”, c. 1772–75, rediscovered in 1887), published Faust: A Fragment in 1790, Faust: Part One in 1808, and finished Faust: Part Two in 1831, a few months before his death; it appeared posthumously in 1832. The two parts are very different: Part One is a drama of individual passion — the scholar’s despair and the love tragedy of Gretchen; Part Two is a vast, allegorical, symbolic pageant through politics, economics, classical mythology, war and land reclamation, in nearly every verse form known to European poetry.

Synopsis

The prologues

After a “Dedication” (the old poet recalling the friends of his youth) and a “Prelude on the Stage” (a theatre director, a poet and a comic actor argue about what a play should be), the drama begins in heaven, echoing the Book of Job. In the “Prologue in Heaven”, the archangels praise creation; Mephistopheles, a devil, cynical and witty, complains that humans are miserable — reason makes them “more bestial than any beast”. The Lord asks if he knows Faust, “my servant”. Mephistopheles wagers he can lead him astray. The Lord permits it: “Man errs, as long as he strives” (Es irrt der Mensch, solang er strebt) — but “a good man, in his dark striving, is well aware of the right way”.

Faust’s despair

In his cramped Gothic study, at night, the old scholar Faust delivers his famous opening monologue: he has studied philosophy, law, medicine and, alas, theology, “and here I stand, poor fool, no wiser than before”. He knows nothing that matters. He turns to magic, summons the Earth Spirit, and is crushed by its contemptuous reply — “You are like the spirit you comprehend, not me!” His dull assistant Wagner, content with book-learning, interrupts. Alone, Faust raises a cup of poison to his lips — and is stopped by the Easter bells and choirs, recalling his childhood faith. “The message I hear well; but I lack the faith.”

On Easter Sunday he walks with Wagner among the townspeople celebrating spring, and confesses: “Two souls, alas, dwell in my breast, each wants to separate from the other: one clings to the world in coarse desire; the other rises to the realms of the high ancestors.” A black poodle follows them home. In his study, Faust begins to translate the opening of John’s Gospel — “In the beginning was the Word” — no, “the Mind” — no, “the Power” — and finally: “In the beginning was the Deed” (Im Anfang war die Tat). The poodle swells into a monster and becomes Mephistopheles, dressed as a travelling scholar. Asked who he is: “Part of that power which always wills evil and always works good… I am the spirit that always denies.”

The wager

Mephistopheles returns as a dashing young nobleman and offers his services. Faust, cursing every comfort of life — hope, faith, patience — proposes not a pact but a wager:

If ever I lie down on a bed of ease, then let me perish… If ever I say to the passing moment: “Stay a while! you are so beautiful!” (Verweile doch! du bist so schön!), then you may put me in chains; then I will gladly go to ruin.

He signs in blood. He does not want pleasure, he says, but to experience in himself everything allotted to humanity — its heights and depths, its joy and grief — and so to expand his self to the self of humanity, and like it, be shattered at the last.

Before they leave, Mephistopheles, in Faust’s academic robe, mocks a nervous new student with satirical advice on the faculties — and writes in his album Eritis sicut Deus, scientes bonum et malum (“You will be like God, knowing good and evil” — the serpent’s words in Eden): “Grey, dear friend, is all theory, and green the golden tree of life.”

Auerbach’s cellar and the witch’s kitchen

Mephistopheles takes Faust first to Auerbach’s cellar in Leipzig, where drunken students sing; Mephistopheles conjures wine from the table and makes them see visions — Faust is bored. Then to a witch’s kitchen, where a potion makes Faust young again; in a magic mirror he sees the image of a beautiful woman, and desire awakens.

Gretchen

In a street, Faust sees Margarete (Gretchen), a poor, pious girl of fourteen or fifteen, coming from confession, and demands that Mephistopheles get her for him. Mephistopheles says she is too innocent; he has no power over her. Faust insists. They leave a casket of jewels in her room; her mother gives it to the priest; they leave another; Gretchen shows it to her neighbour Martha, a worldly widow, through whom Mephistopheles arranges a meeting in Martha’s garden. As Mephistopheles flirts grotesquely with Martha, Faust and Gretchen fall in love. She plucks the petals of a daisy: “He loves me — loves me not… He loves me!”

At her spinning wheel, alone, Gretchen sings: “My peace is gone, my heart is heavy; I shall never find it again” (Meine Ruh ist hin) — set by Schubert as Gretchen am Spinnrade. In Martha’s garden she asks Faust the famous question: “Tell me, how do you stand on religion?” (Wie hast du’s mit der Religion?) Faust answers with a pantheist hymn — “Feeling is all; name is sound and smoke” — that she half-accepts.

To be alone with him at night, Gretchen gives her mother a sleeping draught Faust has obtained from Mephistopheles. The mother never wakes. Gretchen becomes pregnant. Her brother Valentin, a soldier, returns, hears the gossip, and confronts Faust under her window; Mephistopheles guides Faust’s sword, and Valentin dies, cursing his sister as a whore in front of the town. In the cathedral, during a requiem, an evil spirit torments Gretchen with guilt as the choir sings the Dies irae; she faints.

Mephistopheles takes Faust to the Walpurgis Night revels of witches on the Brocken mountain, a carnival of the grotesque and obscene. There Faust sees a vision of a pale girl with a red line around her neck, like Gretchen. He learns the truth: abandoned, Gretchen drowned their baby, and is in prison, condemned to death.

The prison

Faust, furious with Mephistopheles, forces him to help free her. They break into the dungeon at night. Gretchen, gone mad, thinks Faust is the executioner; she sings a ballad of a murdered child; then she recognizes him, and for a moment is joyful. But she will not flee. She describes where to bury her mother, her brother, and the child. Mephistopheles appears: dawn is coming. Gretchen sees him, recoils, and gives herself to God’s judgement: “Heinrich, I am afraid of you!” Mephistopheles declares: “She is judged!” (Sie ist gerichtet!). A voice from above: “She is saved!” (Ist gerettet!). Mephistopheles drags Faust away. From within, Gretchen’s voice fades: “Heinrich! Heinrich!” So ends Part One.

Part Two

Part Two begins with Faust waking in a beautiful landscape, healed by spirits of nature, his guilt washed away, and resolving to strive toward the highest existence. Its five acts are a panorama of human history and civilization:

• The emperor’s court — Faust and Mephistopheles save the bankrupt Holy Roman Emperor by inventing paper money, backed by buried treasure not yet dug up (Goethe, a finance minister, satirizes inflation and credit). At a masquerade, Faust conjures the shades of Paris and Helen of Troy; seized by love for Helen, he touches the phantom, and it explodes.
• The classical Walpurgis Night — Wagner, now a famous scientist, has created a tiny artificial man in a glass vial, the Homunculus, who longs for a real body; he leads Faust and Mephistopheles to ancient Greece, a vast festival of mythological creatures — sphinxes, sirens, philosophers (Thales and Anaxagoras arguing about whether the earth was formed by water or fire), sea-gods. Homunculus shatters his glass against the chariot of Galatea and merges with the sea of life.
• Helen — Faust wins Helen — the ideal of classical beauty — and they live in Arcadia; they have a son, Euphorion, a spirit of poetry (a portrait of Byron), who flies too high and falls to his death. Helen vanishes, leaving only her veil and robe. The union of the modern (Faust, northern, striving) and the classical (Helen, perfect form) cannot last.
• War — Faust helps the Emperor win a war with Mephistopheles’ magic, and is rewarded with a strip of coastline.
• The land — Faust, now a hundred years old, has become a great entrepreneur, reclaiming land from the sea with dikes and canals. But an old couple, Philemon and Baucis, refuse to sell their cottage and chapel, which spoil his view. He orders them moved; Mephistopheles and his men burn the cottage, killing them. Care (Sorge) breathes on Faust and blinds him. Blind, he hears the sound of spades — he thinks it is his workers building his dike; it is the lemurs digging his grave. In a vision of a free people living on land won from the sea, working and fighting together, he says:

To such a throng I would like to say: “Stay a while, you are so beautiful!”… In anticipation of such high happiness, I now enjoy the highest moment.

He dies. Mephistopheles claims his soul — Faust has spoken the words of the wager. But angels descend, scattering roses that burn the devils; Mephistopheles, distracted by lust for the angels, lets Faust’s immortal part be carried away. The angels sing: “Whoever strives with all his might, him we can redeem” (Wer immer strebend sich bemüht, den können wir erlösen). In a mountain landscape of hermits and holy saints, Faust’s soul rises through ranks of penitents, among them Gretchen — “one who was once called Gretchen” — who intercedes for him. The final Chorus Mysticus ends:

All that is transitory is only a likeness; the inadequate here becomes event; the indescribable here is accomplished; the Eternal Feminine draws us upward. (Das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan.)

Characters

• Faust — an ageing scholar who has mastered all the sciences and found them empty; passionate, restless, ruthless, magnificent.
• Mephistopheles — the devil: witty, cynical, sophisticated, the “spirit that always denies” — and the play’s best talker.
• Gretchen (Margarete) — a poor, pious young girl whom Faust seduces and destroys; the moral heart of Part One.
• Wagner — Faust’s pedantic assistant, the satisfied scholar.
• Martha — Gretchen’s worldly neighbour; Valentin — her soldier brother.
• The Lord — God, who allows the wager.
• Helen of Troy — classical beauty; Euphorion — their son; Homunculus — Wagner’s artificial man.
• Philemon and Baucis — the old couple destroyed by Faust’s development scheme.

Themes

Striving

“Man errs as long as he strives.” Faust’s restless dissatisfaction — never content, always wanting more knowledge, experience, power — is both his greatness and his guilt. Oswald Spengler called modern Western civilization “Faustian”: infinitely striving, expanding, conquering space and nature. See the Great Question What Is the Meaning of Life?.

Knowledge and its limits

The play opens with the despair of a man who has learned everything and knows nothing that matters — the Faustian version of Socrates‘s ignorance and of Immanuel Kant‘s limits of reason. “Grey is all theory.” Faust turns from words to deeds: “In the beginning was the Deed.” See Knowledge and What Are the Limits of the Human Mind?.

Good and evil

Mephistopheles is “part of that power which always wills evil and always works good”. Evil serves the divine plan by provoking human striving — a theodicy closer to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel‘s cunning of reason than to Christian orthodoxy.

Desire and destruction

Faust’s desire destroys everyone it touches: Gretchen, her mother, her brother and child; Philemon and Baucis. The Gretchen tragedy is one of the most painful love stories in literature; the land-reclamation episode, an early parable of the human and ecological costs of “development”.

The two souls

“Two souls, alas, dwell in my breast” — earthly desire and spiritual aspiration. The divided self of Faust anticipates Fyodor Dostoevsky‘s doubles and Freud’s conflicted psyche. See The Self.

Salvation

Marlowe’s Faustus is damned. Goethe’s Faust, against all logic of the wager, is saved — by divine love, by Gretchen’s intercession, and because he never stopped striving. Is this grace, or a modern secular faith in endless effort? Critics have argued both.

Interpretations

• Romantic and Hegelian — Faust as the human spirit in its development (Hegel admired the play; Schelling called it the “absolute philosophical tragedy”).
• Spengler (The Decline of the West, 1918) — “Faustian man” as the soul of Western civilization, infinite striving.
• Marxist (Georg Lukács, Marshall Berman’s All That Is Solid Melts into Air, 1982) — Faust as the tragedy of the developer: modernization’s creative destruction, from paper money to land reclamation.
• Ecological — Philemon and Baucis as the victims of progress.
• Theological — is the ending Christian, pantheist, or Goethe’s own religion of nature?

Legacy

Faust became one of the great myths of the modern West: Gounod’s opera Faust (1859), Berlioz’s The Damnation of Faust, Liszt’s Faust Symphony, Mahler’s Eighth Symphony, Schubert’s songs; Murnau’s silent film Faust (1926); Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus (1947), in which a composer sells his soul for genius as Germany sells its soul to Nazism; Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, whose devil Woland takes his epigraph from Faust (“part of that power which eternally wills evil and eternally works good”). “Faustian bargain” is in every language.

Lines to carry

• “Man errs as long as he strives.” (Prologue in Heaven, 317)
• “Two souls, alas, dwell in my breast.” (1112)
• “In the beginning was the Deed.” (1237)
• “I am the spirit that always denies.” (1338)
• “Stay a while, you are so beautiful!” (1700)
• “Grey, dear friend, is all theory, and green the golden tree of life.” (2038–39)
• “Whoever strives with all his might, him we can redeem.” (11936–37)
• “The Eternal Feminine draws us upward.” (12110–11)

Keywords

The wager

Faust's bet with Mephistopheles that no moment will ever satisfy him.

Faustian bargain

Trading one's soul or deepest values for knowledge, power or pleasure.

Faustian man

Spengler's term for restless, infinitely striving Western humanity.

Gretchen tragedy

The seduction and destruction of Margarete in Part One.

Homunculus

The tiny artificial human Wagner creates in a vial.

Das Ewig-Weibliche

"The Eternal Feminine" — the principle of love that draws the soul upward.

Using Faust in conversation

• On ambition and its costs: a Faustian bargain.
• On restlessness: “Stay a while, you are so beautiful” — the moment Faust swore he would never feel.
• On inner conflict: “Two souls, alas, dwell in my breast.”
• On theory vs. practice: “Grey is all theory.”