Goethe’s Faust, a Parable of Modern Techno Man

Goethe’s character Faust is a potent symbol of Everyman in our modern hi-tech wonderland. If we have the money, we can have almost anything we desire delivered to our door the next day.

Does that make us happy? Does that make us good? Does that make our world safe?

This may be the most eccentric review of Goethe’s Faust ever written, as I have only read the two parts of the play over Christmas in English translations. But it stayed with me. The intensely mannered writing of this almost unperformable drama has a message for our times.

I spent Christmas in 3 German cities:

BERLIN which seemed grand scale and still a bit ugly after the wartime destruction and the Soviet occupation. But there was an exciting sense of green shoots of culture and liberal ideas  sprouting through the cracks in the concrete.

DRESDEN – which has a stark divide between historic architectural treasures lovingly rebuilt after the allied fire-bombing and the gleaming new avenues. It’s a schizophrenic city in a timewarp, almost a dream, where the competing ideologies of east and west are still unresolved, and Alternative for Deutschland offers easy answers.

And then JENA, a small university town that was the intellectual and cultural epicentre of Europe around the time of the French Revolution. I was there to visit a museum of ideas, the wonderful Romantikerhaus, in the home of the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte.

This self-made human powerhouse of modern thought boasted that he had invented the first Philosophy of Freedom. He taught that each of us constructs our own, entirely separate world picture. So there is no external reality beyond that which we choose to create by our own will.

He later announced that there was no God and lost his job as a result.

Wonderful though the gathering of talent at Jena was, bringing together Goethe and Schiller and the von Humboldts, the Schlegels, Novalis and many others, I thought Fichte was absolutely wrong: in saying that there is nothing out there, beyond our individual mind, that we can lean on and find our values in. And it struck me that the arrogance of homo sapiens claiming to be the master of all things, thanks to his mighty reason and will, was part of the cause of the tragedy of Germany and its wars in the last century.

(Someone told me later that the Nazis did indeed rediscover Fichte and used his ideas. Perhaps there’s a link to Nietzsche’s Superman.)

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Afterwards I thought about Goethe’s Faust, and how morally impressive it seems, in contrast to Fichte’s extreme Idealism. This is how Goethe treats the legend:

In PART 1, Mephistopheles bets God he can corrupt the scholar Heinrich Faust, and God takes the wager. The deciding factor is whether Faust can ever find something so fulfilling that he will give up his transient life to have this moment forever. Then the Devil will have his soul.

Now we are into an upside-down version of the Book of Job. The Devil worms his way into Faust’s confidence and restores him to youth. Then he helps him seduce the beautiful, innocent  teenager Gretchen. The ultimate cost of this romance is that Gretchen’s mother dies (given too big a sleeping draught) and her brother is killed in a brawl with Faust and Mephisto outside her house. Gretchen has a child that dies and she is accused of killing it. She is condemned to death for the murder of three people.

When Faust tries to use magic powers to rescue her from the condemned cell, she refuses to escape with him. But as she is executed, a voice is heard from above saying her soul is saved. Faust is left behind in agony.

In PART 2, there are a series of escapades with characters from classical, pagan mythology. A lot of this meandering story is told or sung by choruses of spirits in many forms of verse. This is a kind of meta-drama.

When the empire faces a financial crisis, Faust and Mephisto print reams of paper money to gain popularity, providing a short-term, bogus solution. They meet a colleague of Faust, who has  created life in a test tube, a homunculus, which must look for a body to occupy. To entertain the emperor, they bring Helen of Troy back to life. Faust is smitten again.

There are dramatic battles against revolutionaries and then a satire on the corruption of court officials, once order is restored. Later Faust acts chivalrously to protect Helen from her jealous husband Menelaus, and they have a reckless son who dies.

Finally Faust embarks on a colonial project to subdue the forces of nature and drain the sea from lowlands to create a vast new country estate. In clearing the land for the new kingdom, some villagers are burned alive by the clumsiness of Mephisto’s helpers.

Faust has a vision that in his new powerful role, he will do what he can to help his subjects live better. He wants to stay in this perfect moment forever… A good motive but also the devil’s aim.

Faust becomes blind. He believes the devils are constructing him a mansion but it is actually his grave they are digging. As the demons prepare to cart him off to hell, the voice of Gretchen is heard above, appealing for him to be saved.

A band of handsome young angels scattering rose petals descend to save Faust. Mephisto is distracted by homo-erotic desire, and when he looks down – his victim is gone. In spite of everything, Faust’s soul has been saved.

The last line of the huge work is something like “The eternal female draws us on.”

Maybe this is Goethe’s way of saying that the Mercy of God is a female quality, and the pursuit of beauty and desire are natural human traits. Perhaps the essential healing power of nature is its tendency to foster life, procreation, fertility out of conflict.

This God is simultaneously connected with Christianity, Nature and Pagan mythology. But whatever name you give it, there is a sacred power out there that can validate and preserve an imperfect human soul.

So in contrast to Fichte’s extreme individualism, Goethe offers a positive, humane and nuanced vision. His Faust is super clever but blundering and greedy. He is barely rescued by his residual idealism and a greater, benevolent force outside him, beyond his reason.

In Goethe we see the climax of the Enlightenment, the recognition of the power of science and reason to transform the world. Could this be reconciled with religion and traditional moral values? The intellectuals in Jena were looking for ways to combine the arts, science, poetry, anthropology and love of nature. They wanted a revolution in mental outlook but not the French Reign of Terror.

At this watershed, some of these ideas led on towards full blown romanticism, the triumph of the individual and more political upheaval. Goethe is at the crossroads as he tries to hold the equilibrium between the classical and romantic world view.

And what of the age-old battle between Idealists and Materialists? As well as being a creative artist, Goethe was an eminent scientist. But at the beginning of Faust Part I, he refers to Nature as a “veiled goddess”, a reference to Veiled Isis, a goddess and mother of nature:

Mysterious, even in broad daylight,
Nature won’t let her veil be raised:
What your spirit can’t bring to sight,
Won’t by screws and levers be displayed.

Which brings us back to the final words of the play, spoken by a Mystic Chorus:

All that is transient
Is parable only:
The unattainable
Here becomes reality:
The indescribable,
Here is done:
Woman, eternal
Beckons us on.

A female writer might express it differently. Sexist – or wise? I incline to the latter – and Goethe was writing in the early 1800s.

But for each of us today, that wager is still on…

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Wordsworth Editions Translated, with an Introduction and Notes by John R. Williams. £5.99 + PP