When the rejuvenated scholar Faust has slept with Helen of Troy, via the black magic arts of Mephistopheles, the vision fades and he finds himself on a high rugged peak. He marvels at the spectacle of sun-irradiated clouds, and imagines a luscious female form on softest bedding:
“I see it! It is like Juno, Leda, Helena…”
(from the excellent verse translation Goethe’s Faust by David Luke.)
Then he spots a smaller wisp of cloud and is reminded of Gretchen, his first love:
“That first look, quickly sensed and hardly understood:
No precious jewel could have outshone it, had I held
It fast. Oh lovely growth, Oh spiritual form.
Still undissolving, it floats skywards on and up,
And draws my best and inmost soul to follow it.”
A moment later Mephistopheles arrives with his cynical wit and the rhapsody is broken.
It is not only the memory of his first love that protects Faust from his self-destructive desires. When he comes to himself after the disasters of Faust Part 1, where Gretchen has been executed as an unintended result of Faust’s seduction and trickery, it is nature which restores his optimism. He watches the dawn:
“The forest sings with myriad voiced insistence,
Through vale and dale the morning mists have curled,
But heaven’s radiance pierces them, descending,
And branch and bough appear, revived, unfurled,
From the vaporous chasm, their slumber ending;
Now deep-down colours grow distinct as flower
And leaf gleam moistly, tremulous pearls suspending…”
Then Faust’s gaze moves to the mountain peaks lit by the rising sun:
“Each giant summit-height
Proclaims already this most solemn hour:
They are the first to taste the eternal light,
As we shall, when its downward course is ended.
Now the green-slanting meadow-slopes are bright
Again, each detail new and clear and splendid…”
And then another particular element of Faust’s delight in nature is seen:
“I will turn from the sun’s rays.
At that rock-riving torrent, with increasing
Ecstasy at that waterfall I gaze:
From cliff to cliff it pours down never-ceasing,
It foams and streams a thousand thousandfold,
Spray upon spray high in the air releasing.
But from this tumult, marvellous to behold,
The rainbow blooms, changing yet ever still…”
It is in fact Faust’s sheer pleasure in the contemplation of natural beauty which lifts his soul from the physical lures offered by Mephistopheles. Higher pleasures trump the lower addictive ones. Often it seems that water is at the heart of a natural and sensual paradise. One recurring image in the work is of a goddess bathing in a pool with her nymphs. Then the myth is evoked of Aphrodite’s sister Leda who is seduced by the chief of the gods in the shape of a dazzling white swan. The naked woman, the pale breast, the fluffy white feathers. The reptilian shape of the bird’s neck. There is something a little kinky in this vision but also something charming.
In the strange buddy relationship between Faust and Mephistopheles there is both attraction and repulsion. Faust is an impulsive, learned man of intelligence and fine feeling. Mephistopheles is witty, imaginative and with the cynicism born of real experience. He has watched how human beings behave and how their grand designs wither through apathy and neglect. And crucially the Devil is just concerned with the nuts and bolts, the material means by which an older man might seduce a young virgin or gain another trophy. Faust is intermittently focused on the spirit of things, how an event is experienced in the minds of the actors, the poetry of life.
At the point when Faust is able to offer a castle and wealth and protection to Helen of Troy, he describes the natural beauties of her Greek homeland where they will live:
“The jagged summits on this mountain ridge
Suffer the sun’s cold arrows sharp and clear;
But rocks blush green with scanty pasturage
And nibbling goats can seek their nurture here…
“Here in the quiet shade a lamb, a child,
Sucks warm maternal milk with eager lips;
Here in the plains the fruit grows ripe and wild
And from the hollow tree-trunk honey drips…”
“Apollo lived with shepherds so, and passed
For one, and all were beautiful:
For where the laws of purest Nature rule,
All separate worlds unite at last.”
The great comic narrative of Goethe’s Faust Part 2 has a happy ending. The foolhardy and often greedy Faust is saved at the end not by his own cleverness. And certainly not according to the strict religious commands of the Christian church. He would never get through the eye of a needle or win the promised reward of the meek and humble!
With his fiery curiosity and limitless ambition, Faust seemed doomed even before he wrote his name in blood on a document offered by Mephistopheles.
What saves him is his memory of the sensation of first love, and his physical desire for the teenage Gretchen – which triggered her love in return. Even though she lost her life as a result of Faust’s seduction, her soul is saved and she pleads for his soul at the end to the “Virgin and Mother.”
“He whom I loved – oh see.
He is undarkened,
Comes back to me!”
The Mater Gloriosa replies to Gretchen:
“Come! Into higher spheres outreach him!
He must sense you to find the way.”
This is not the traditional Christianity, based purely on abstinence and self-sacrifice. It is a glorious post-Renaissance amalgam of Christianity, paganism and nature-worship. And it is arguably a more credible basis of human morality in our natural eco system than that offered by the monotheist religions.
The natural beauty that Faust pursues and which redeems him is a prolific interweaving of cruelty and compassion, ferocious competition and maternal care. With its echoes of the Book of Job, Goethe’s divine principle has far more of the eternal female life force than the exacting God the Father of the Old Testament.
If we are ever to create a sustainable human life on our planet, we are going to need the combined talents of Faust and Gretchen and Leda and even sometimes Mephistopheles, as he plays his game of dare against God.
(Goethe’s Faust Parts 1 and 2, translated by David Luke, in Oxford World’s Classics. A warning to readers – Goethe’s knowledge of classical polytheist myths and folklore is vast, so it’s worth keeping a bookmark in the notes section, to explain his layers of cultural meaning.)