ABSTRACT
Faust, a cosmic drama with epic qualities, is the great epic of the Enlightenment. It turns on the problem of theodicy or vindicating divine goodness. Does Faust, in view of his crimes, deserve to be saved? In particular, the deaths of Philemon and Baucis, victims of the engineering works carried out in Faust II, Act v, have been condemned by critics, as has Faust’s project of founding a free society. In reply, it is argued that Faust is modelled on Enlightenment despots who engaged in land reclamation, often at human cost, for their subjects’ ultimate betterment. Faust’s ascent to heaven does not imply his exoneration, but initiates a process of purification, for which Goethe was indebted to the theologian Origen mediated via Gottfried Arnold.
Faust is a work not only of German, but of world literature. Among its admirers is the current President of China, Xi Jinping, who professes to know it by heart; he told Angela Merkel that when in his youth he was sent to a remote part of China for re-education, the only book for many miles around was Faust, which he read again and again.Footnote2 (Whether this was Part One, or both parts, totalling over 12,000 lines, is not recorded.)
Although Faust is formally a drama, it has a gigantic sweep which invites the term ‘epic’. The events are spanned between the ‘Prologue in Heaven’, modelled on the Old Testament Book of Job, and the final scene of Part Two, ‘Bergschluchten’, in which an earthly setting appears to merge imperceptibly into a heavenly one and copious though baffling use is made of what Goethe, admiring Baroque paintings in Italy in 1786, called ‘katholische Mythologie’.Footnote3 In the perspective of world literature, Faust stands beside those other cosmic epics, the Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost. While Dante’s poem elaborates the world-view of medieval Catholicism, and Milton’s that of seventeenth-century Protestantism (albeit with touches of heresy), Goethe explores and develops the world-view of the Enlightenment.
To associate Goethe with the Enlightenment is even today unusual in German studies. The nationalist historiography of the Wilhelmine Empire preferred to regard the Enlightenment as mainly a French and thus alien phenomenon, and to counter it by inflating the importance of the Sturm und Drang, supposedly an authentically German movement, and by deifying Weimar Classicism. This conception still determines the structure of the volume on the eighteenth century in the de Boor-Newald Geschichte der deutschen Literatur (though written by three distinguished Danish Germanists), and it lingers even in Steffen Martus’s recent Aufklärung, which discusses Werther as an example of late-Enlightenment sympathy but finds no space for such quintessentially Enlightenment texts by Goethe as ‘Prometheus’ and Iphigenie auf Tauris.Footnote4
Yet, as my predecessor in the Taylor Chair, Jim Reed, has shown many times, Goethe was fundamentally a man of the Enlightenment.Footnote5 Throughout his writings Goethe, rather than deferring to authorities, shows the independence of mind that Kant advocated in ‘Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?’ (1784). His scepticism towards Christianity emerges most dramatically from the poem ‘Prometheus’, where Zeus stands for Christian conceptions of the divinity, and more indirectly from Iphigenie, in which humanity, personified by the heroine, gains autonomy from the capricious and perhaps even malicious gods. In his studies of the natural world Goethe appealed to empirical evidence: he may have been mistaken in rejecting Newton’s colour theory, but at least he did so on the grounds that he had tried and failed to replicate Newton’s experiment. He is remote from the starry-eyed belief in inevitable progress proclaimed by some French Enlightenment thinkers, and closer to the more realistic notion of progress as lurching from one error to its opposite, and eventually achieving balance, formulated by Herder. His most ambitious narratives, Faust and Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, rest on a concept of maturation which includes not only error but wrongdoing as unavoidable parts of a learning process.Footnote6
To associate Goethe with a body of Enlightenment thought, however, raises the question of the relation between poetry and ideas. A proper appreciation of Faust requires some understanding of its intellectual framework. But that framework, like the theology in Dante and Milton, is constantly disappearing further into the past. The Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost survive as poems although their intellectual content is antiquated and needs to be reconstructed. The Enlightenment which shaped Goethe’s thinking is by now a past historical period: one from which we can still learn an immeasurable amount, but one separated from us by deep historical divisions.Footnote7 One of these divisions is the French Revolution, which for its contemporaries was an event without precedent, and for Goethe ‘das schrecklichste aller Ereignisse’.Footnote8 Another was the discovery of deep time, initiated by Georges Cuvier’s argument that fossils were the remains of extinct creatures destroyed by past cataclysms, in contrast to the assumption, held by natural philosophers for most of Goethe’s lifetime, that the earth could be no more than one hundred thousand years old at the very most, and that species could not become extinct. Goethe, rejecting ‘Vulcanist’ or ‘Plutonian’ theories of cataclysms, opposed upheavals in geology as much as in history.
A poem such as Faust, the Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost survives after its intellectual apparatus has become obsolete. The poetry outlives the ideas. There may even be a tension between the ideas and the poetry. The poem may be seen as an experiment, in which the poet implicitly asks how a set of ideas looks when it is embodied in action and in imagined characters.
To take two brief examples. The inscription on the gate of hell in Dante’s Inferno affirms that hell is the creation of divine power, supreme wisdom, and primal love (iii. 5–6). Evidently the divine wisdom has devoted sadistic ingenuity to ensuring, like the Mikado, that the punishment fits the crime. Not only does one’s humanity revolt against this concept, but Dante the poet does not carry it through. The characters whom Dante interviews in hell are supposed to be enduring unimaginable agonies, but instead of screaming with pain, they engage in prolonged rational discourse, as though nothing were the matter. Dante the poet thus shows that the idea of eternal punishment is not only revolting but absurd.
Again, in Paradise Lost, God the Father is introduced in person to justify the harsh treatment of Adam and Eve, but he sounds like a testy old man indulging in theological quibbles to show that it wasn’t his fault. Alexander Pope said of him: ‘God the Father turns a School-Divine’.Footnote9 On the other hand, the Fall elicits from Adam the touching declaration that he cannot bear to live without Eve:
Without Eve, the Garden of Eden would be mere ‘wild woods’. Thus a human and humanist moment emerges despite the theological apparatus. The doctrinal structure has dated, and is for most readers only of historical interest, but the poem survives. Shelley, who was expelled from Oxford for atheism, in 1813 looked forward to a future when Christianity would be as obsolete as the belief in Jupiter is now, and ‘Milton’s poem alone will give permanence to the remembrance of its absurdities’.Footnote10
Turning to Faust, Goethe addresses the problem of theodicy — of justifying, in Milton’s words, the ways of God to man. Now it is notoriously difficult to say what Goethe’s religious beliefs may have been. Goethe does not proclaim doctrines but works with intuitions, hints, and ambiguities. He would not be pinned down to one religious outlook:
Ich für mich kann, bei den mannigfaltigen Richtungen meines Wesens, nicht an einer Denkweise genug haben; als Dichter und Künstler bin ich Polytheist, Pantheist hingegen als Naturforscher, und eins so entschieden als das andere. Bedarf ich eines Gottes für meine Persönlichkeit, als sittlicher Mensch, so ist dafür auch gesorgt.Footnote11
At the core of theodicy is the problem of evil and how to reconcile it with the conviction that God or nature is good.Footnote13 Attempts at reconciliation founder on the contradictions formulated by Philo, the sceptical speaker in Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion: ‘Epicurus’s old Questions are yet unanswered. Is he willing to prevent Evil, but not able? then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is Evil?’Footnote14
The Enlightenment’s most thoroughgoing attempt at vindicating God’s goodness was Leibniz’s Theodicy (1710). Leibniz’s basic argument is simple and logically compelling. God was able to contemplate an infinite number of possible worlds before deciding which one to actualize. Since he is supremely powerful, wise, and good, the world he chose to bring into being must be the best of all possible worlds. We may think that a world devoid of suffering, a world in which Adam and Eve had never fallen but stayed in Paradise, would have been better. But such a world would actually be much less good than ours. Leibniz alludes to the well-known paradox of the felix culpa, the fortunate Fall. The Fall of Man with the arrival of sin was a fortunate event in that it necessitated a supreme display of goodness, Christ’s voluntary sacrifice of himself for the whole of humanity. An unfallen world, where no such event took place, would thus be inferior in goodness.Footnote15 Moreover, our fallen world requires us to make continual efforts to resist our fallen natures. A life worthy of humanity has to be strenuous.
Here Leibniz joins hands with Kant, who at the other end of the century argues that humanity progresses and realizes its potential only through conflict, thanks to humanity’s unsocial sociability.Footnote16 In the 1790s Kant had an argument with Herder about colonial conquest. Both disapproved of it, as Enlightenment thinkers generally did (most emphatically in that wonderful and too little read book by Raynal and Diderot, the Histoire des Deux Indes). But Kant does not share Herder’s view that the Tahitians ought to have been left alone.
Meint der Herr Verfasser wohl: daß, wenn die glücklichen Einwohner von Otaheite, niemals von gesitteten Nationen besucht, in ihrer ruhigen Indolenz auch Tausende von Jahrhunderten durch zu leben bestimmt wären, man eine befriedigende Antwort auf die Frage geben könnte, warum sie denn gar existieren, und ob es nicht eben so gut gewesen wäre, daß diese Insel mit glücklichen Schafen und Rindern, als mit im bloßen Genusse glücklichen Menschen besetzt gewesen wäre.Footnote17
Theodicy has to account for both aspects of the problem of evil: for physical evil and moral evil. Physical evil takes such forms as disasters, earthquakes, and pandemics. Strangely, these worried people in the Enlightenment much less than they should have. Contrary to widespread belief, the Lisbon earthquake did not cause widespread questioning of the Creator’s goodness: Goethe’s sceptical reaction, recorded in Book i of Dichtung und Wahrheit, is hardly that of a contemporary, since it was written down fifty-five years later.Footnote18 Nor did people worry about the fact that existence depends on a food chain in which creatures live by eating one another and thus giving pain to one another. The concept of the food chain was first formulated by Linnaeus, who Goethe said was one of the three writers of greatest importance to him (the others being Shakespeare and Spinoza).Footnote19 For Linnaeus it was part of ‘the Œconomy of Nature’, meaning ‘the all-wise disposition of the Creator in relation to natural things, by which they are fitted to produce general ends, and reciprocal uses’.Footnote20 Only in the following century would the spectacle of ‘Nature, red in tooth and claw’, in Tennyson’s famous phrase, seem to pose a problem for Christian belief.
Goethe inclined to a more ambivalent view of Nature. Rejecting the claim by the philosopher Johann Georg Sulzer that the creation makes ‘angenehme Eindrücke’ on the senses, Goethe wrote in 1772: ‘Was wir von Natur sehn, ist Kraft, die Kraft verschlingt[,] nichts gegenwärtig alles vorübergehend, tausend Keime zertreten jeden Augenblick tausend geboren, groß und bedeutend, mannigfaltig ins Unendliche; schön und häßlich, gut und bös, alles mit gleichem Recht nebeneinander existierend.’Footnote21 And in 1815 he compared Nature to ‘eine Orgel, auf der unser Herr-Gott spielt, und der Teufel tritt die Bälge dazu’.Footnote22 In Faust, such a twofold conception is expressed in the verses uttered by the Archangel Michael in the ‘Prolog im Himmel’, assuring the Lord that thunder and lightning are all part of ‘Das sanfte Wandeln deines Tags’.Footnote23
In Goethe’s world-view, as we shall see presently, physical and moral evil are ultimately not distinct. However, the question of moral evil forms the central problem of Faust and the principal difficulty in accepting Faust’s redemption. Debates about humanity’s propensity to evil have of course been going on for millennia.Footnote24 Even in the Old Testament, on the whole rather an upbeat work, the Lord opines that ‘the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth’ (Genesis 8. 21). The Rabbis spoke of the yetser ha-ra or evil impulse. Christianity elaborated the myth of the Fall. Although some early Christian theologians, notably Origen (of whom more later), took a more optimistic view, St Augustine gave Christianity the doctrine of original sin. And Kant declared in 1793 that humanity’s natural inclination to evil should be called ‘ein radikales, angebornes (nichts destoweniger aber uns von uns selbst zugezogenes) Böse in der menschlichen Natur’.Footnote25 This conception aroused Goethe’s ire. He claimed that by formulating it, Kant had befouled his philosophical cloak, merely in order to earn the respect of Christians:
Dagegen hat aber auch Kant seinen philosophischen Mantel, nachdem er ein langes Menschen Leben gebraucht hat ihn von mancherl. sudelhaften Vorurtheilen zu reinigen, freventl. mit dem Schandfleck des radicalen Bösen beschlabbert damit doch auch Christen herbey gelockt werden den Saum zu küssen.Footnote26
In Faust, Goethe’s sunny view of human nature is put to the test. The play is not to be seen as proclaiming a doctrine, but as testing the doctrine against reality — seeing how it might play out in human life. The proposition to be tested is the one affirmed by the Lord in the ‘Prologue’: ‘Ein guter Mensch in seinem dunklen Drange | Ist sich des rechten Weges wohl bewußt’ (328–29). Yet to see Faust as a good man is notoriously difficult. The charge sheet against him is long and serious. In his love affair with Gretchen, he gets her pregnant and abandons her, whereupon she in desperation drowns her child and goes mad: at the end of the First Part, she is clearly about to be executed, as the infanticide Susanna Brandt was, quite probably in Goethe’s presence, in Frankfurt in 1772. Along the way, Faust has killed Gretchen’s brother and connived at the death of her mother from a sleeping draught. Late in Part Two his activities become far more ambitious. With the help of Mephisto’s magic, he enables the Emperor to defeat a rival. As a reward he is given a tract of land along the coast. He sets in motion great engineering works to reclaim more land from the sea. His motives appear to be self-aggrandizement: he hopes for dominion and property — ‘Herrschaft gewinn’ ich, Eigentum!’ (10187). This project, also carried out apparently by magical means, takes a heavy toll in human lives: ‘Menschenopfer mußten bluten, | Nachts erscholl des Jammers Qual’ (11127–28).
The wrongdoing involved in Faust’s great engineering works is focused on the episode of Philemon and Baucis. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, these are the names of an old couple who give hospitality to the gods and are rewarded by being transformed after their deaths into an intertwined pair of trees. In Faust, they are the occupants of a cottage which, to Faust’s annoyance, is not part of his possessions. He has no reason for wanting it except greed; the story in i Kings 21, of how King Ahab coveted Naboth’s vineyard, is recalled (11287). Faust wishes to evict the old couple and has set aside a small estate for them elsewhere. Impatient with their refusal to move, he tells his agent Mephisto: ‘So geht und schafft sie mir zur Seite!’ (11275). Mephisto, obeying the letter rather than the spirit of Faust’s order to get rid of them, burns down the cottage with the old couple and a visitor in it. And so, just as Ahab was denounced for his crime by Elijah, Faust has been denounced by a long series of Goethe commentators.
Even apart from this incident, however, Faust’s scheme of reclaiming land from the sea and draining a swamp may be dubious. A long tradition of interpretation, which has given the adjective ‘Faustian’ a bad name, saw Faust as an exemplary figure of indomitable, restless energy, a model for Western and particularly German humanity.Footnote27 The mirror-image of this interpretation is the Marxist one, represented by Georg Lukács, in which Faust’s destructive activities are justified as necessary aspects of the historical process and the individual tragedies along the way are objectively necessary: ‘So entsteht für Goethe […] der unaufhaltsame Fortschritt der Menschengattung aus einer Kette von individuellen Tragödien.’Footnote28 This is a secular theodicy in which history replaces God. I do not wish to revive either of these, and it is perhaps fortunate that the pendulum has swung the other way. In recent decades Faust has been seen as a large-scale capitalist, industrial magnate, or developer, destroying large numbers of little people in his insatiable drive for wealth and progress. Heinz Schlaffer, in a short and highly influential book, has interpreted Faust II as a proleptic allegory of nineteenth-century capitalism, virtually a companion piece to the work of Karl Marx.Footnote29 Independently of Schlaffer, Marshall Berman has compared Faust to the developer Robert Moses who had many New York neighbourhoods razed to the ground to make way for the freeway system, and finds here
the modern romance of construction at its best — the romance celebrated by Goethe’s Faust, by Carlyle and Marx, by the constructivists of the 1920s, by the Soviet construction films of the Five-Year Plan period, and the TVA and FSA documentaries and WPA murals of the later 1930s.Footnote30
Two recent critics, Jochen Schmidt and Michael Jaeger, have been particularly hard on Faust.Footnote31 They see him as embodying Goethe’s fears about industrialization and revolution. Many of Goethe’s recorded utterances are quoted in support of this interpretation, especially his fear of revolution and his blunt rejection of the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham, whom Goethe, according to his friend Frédéric Soret, dismissed on 3 February 1830 as ‘ce fou de Bentham’ (BHG, iii, 557). Faust is now a technocrat who fails to perceive reality and instead subordinates it to his abstract planning. Acts iv and v are thus a bitter prophetic satire on what is commonly called modernity. And since Faust employs Mephisto in his enterprises, it would follow that modernity is the work of the Devil.
However, there is another side to Faust and his enterprises. In his final speech he has a vision of a future free society, too familiar to need quoting, in which he will ‘Auf freiem Grund mit freiem Volke stehen’ (11580). Faust’s detractors find fault even with this vision. Schmidt complains that it is an unrealizable utopia. Jaeger thinks that even if it could be realized it would be horrible: the population of Faust’s colony, enclosed by earthworks on one side and mountains on the other, would be compelled to toil ceaselessly for bare survival. On the other hand, in one of the best studies of Faust, Eudo Mason, former professor of German at Edinburgh University — he died in 1969, the year before I began studying there — argues that ‘Faust’s dying vision, humanly and ethically considered, embodies a magnanimous, altruistic programme motivated by high ideals and a sense of the brotherhood of man’.Footnote32
At present, Mason’s interpretation has few followers. The Schmidt-Jaeger interpretation appears to be dominant. But there are many grounds for questioning it. First, this speech is the climax of the play. Are we to think that Goethe so planned the play as to culminate in showing Faust to be not only physically blind, but also totally deluded? It is climactic partly because it contains the fulfilment of the wager Faust made, thousands of lines back and many years earlier, challenging Mephisto to show him an experience that would make him say to the passing moment: ‘Verweile doch! du bist so schön!’ (1700). Now Faust does utter these words, but as it were in reported speech: ‘Zum Augenblicke dürft’ ich sagen: | “Verweile doch, du bist so schön!”’ (11581–82). That Faust does not just say it, but quotes it as something he might say, has been called a quibble.Footnote33 But the following lines reveal it as far more than a quibble: ‘Im Vorgefühl von solchem hohen Glück | Genieß’ ich jetzt den höchsten Augenblick’ (11585–86). The fulfilled moment, the kairos, has come, but it is only fulfilled because it anticipates the future. That distinguishes it from another moment, in Act iii, which has been claimed as really fulfilling the wager: Faust marries Helena in an Arcadian setting, and they say:
The Schmidt-Jaeger interpretation therefore mistakes the artistry of the play. But it is vulnerable on other grounds. It does not correspond to Goethe’s numerous statements about his intentions. Unless one believes in the ‘intentional fallacy’ (which, as commonly understood, is itself a fallacy), these cannot be set aside. Goethe told Eckermann in 1831 that Faust would owe his salvation in part to ‘eine immer höhere und reinere Tätigkeit bis ans Ende’.Footnote35 That certainly seems a euphemistic description of Faust’s engineering works. But nowhere does Goethe say that his hero would fall ever further into tyranny and self-delusion.
Moreover, Goethe was not uniformly negative about technology. On 21 February 1827 he talked enthusiastically to Eckermann about possible engineering projects: about building canals through the isthmuses of Panama and Suez, and linking the rivers Rhine and Danube by a canal. He concluded: ‘Diese drei großen Dinge möchte ich erleben, und es wäre wohl der Mühe wert, ihnen zuliebe es noch einige fünfzig Jahre auszuhalten.’Footnote36 In practice he would have needed more than fifty years: the Panama Canal was opened only in 1914, the present Rhine-Main-Danube Canal only in 1992. Jaeger’s image of Goethe the grouchy technophobe is the product of highly selective quotation.
Instead of interpreting Faust II with reference to future capitalists and developers, I suggest we think about figures from the past who presented possible models for Faust. One who comes to mind is Napoleon. Goethe’s admiration for Napoleon is well known. His audience with Napoleon in Erfurt on 2 October 1808 was one of the great moments of his life. On 11 March 1828 Goethe described Napoleon to Eckermann as a superhuman figure: ‘Sein Leben war das Schreiten eines Halbgottes von Schlacht zu Schlacht und von Sieg zu Sieg.’Footnote37 Admittedly, we might wonder if we can trust Eckermann here. This is the conversation, covering some ten pages, which he wrote up fourteen years later, on the basis of only four words he had noted down at the time: ‘productivity, genius, Napoleon, Prussia’.Footnote38 But it is supported by other utterances such as this recorded by Friedrich Wilhelm Riemer: ‘Außerordentliche Menschen, wie Napoleon, treten aus der Moralität heraus. Sie wirken zuletzt wie physische Ursachen wie Feuer und Wasser.’Footnote39 Goethe seems untroubled by Napoleon’s huge sacrifice of human lives in his battles, by his reversal of much progressive legislation, by his crowning himself Emperor. An exceptional person, we infer, can get away with such things. Indeed, Napoleon appears less as an individual than as an elemental force of nature, comparable to fire and water. Here, therefore, the distinction between moral and physical evil breaks down: Napoleon’s actions are to be equated, not with moral or immoral actions, but with the creative and destructive energies of storms and floods.
Napoleon could be seen as the last of the enlightened despots. Goethe was a man of the Enlightenment also in this respect, that he expected political reforms to be handed down from above, not won by popular let alone revolutionary action. The Enlightenment had no interest in anything resembling what we call democracy. Hence Voltaire’s fascination with Frederick the Great, and that of Diderot with Catherine the Great. Enlightened rulers, seeking to benefit their subjects, sometimes carried out great programmes of land reclamation. In a pioneering work of ecological history, David Blackbourn has recounted how successive rulers of Prussia, beginning with the Great Elector, drained the Oderbruch and other wetlands, thereby creating new agricultural land.Footnote40 Peter the Great drained a huge area of marshland on the shore of the Gulf of Finland to create a site for his new capital St Petersburg. Voltaire, in his history of Peter’s antagonist Charles XII of Sweden, estimates that the building of St Petersburg cost 200,000 lives.Footnote41 In the long conversation reconstructed by Eckermann, Goethe gave three examples of political genius: Frederick the Great, Napoleon, and Peter the Great.Footnote42
I want to claim, therefore, that the aged Faust is an enlightened despot, modelled particularly on Peter the Great. We may find this rather chilling. But we do not have to like, or accept, what Goethe presents us with. The life of the poem, after all, lies in challenging us and encouraging us to challenge it, especially by the tensions and contradictions revealed between its intellectual structure and the attempt to embody that structure in characters and action. We may think, for example, that even if the play glorifies autocracy in the person of Faust, it provides a counterbalance in his vision of a free society.
Yet how can a society be free if brought into being by an autocrat? The American philosopher George Santayana said: ‘After Greece, Faust has a vision of Holland’, implying that this was a sad comedown.Footnote43 In Goethe’s day the Netherlands were the pre-eminent example of a free republic which had successfully fought for its liberty. Dutch freedom in Egmont, however, is the freedom to go about one’s business untroubled by politics. Egmont and his antagonist Alba agree on this principle. Quelling a tumult, Egmont says to the crowd: ‘Ein ordentlicher Bürger, der sich ehrlich und fleißig nährt, hat überall so viel Freiheit als er braucht’ (FA, v, 486–87). This is remarkably similar to Alba’s later declaration: ‘Was ist des Freiesten Freiheit? Recht zu tun! Und daran wird ihn der König nicht hindern’ (FA, v, 525). Similarly, the aged Goethe told Eckermann: ‘Hat einer nur so viel Freiheit, um gesund zu leben und sein Gewerbe zu treiben, so hat er genug, und so viel hat leicht ein jeder.’Footnote44 After all, the only character in Egmont who appears in a modern sense politically conscious, the scribe Vansen, is represented as a scoundrel and as an impertinent barrack-room lawyer. The future free society will emphatically not be a modern democracy.
But if Faust really is to be seen as the founder of a free society, what are we to think about Philemon and Baucis? A Marxist like Lukács might claim their deaths are objectively necessary, but the play makes clear that their deaths are not necessary, and invites us to see them as deplorable. The destruction is carried out by Faust’s unruly assistants, not by Faust himself, but that scarcely exonerates him. There is a parallel with Pushkin’s almost contemporary poem The Bronze Horseman (1833). Pushkin begins by celebrating the modern city brought into being by the will of Tsar Peter. Then, by telling the sad story of a young man’s fate after the River Neva has flooded, he alludes indirectly to the loss of life that Peter’s project involved. Edmund Wilson says of it: ‘The poem deals with the tragic contrast between the right to peace and happiness of the ordinary man and the right to constructive domination of the state.’Footnote45 That might apply also to the fate of Philemon and Baucis. It does not mean that either St Petersburg or Faust’s future utopia is less than worthwhile. But in both cases we are given a reminder of the human cost. The deaths of Philemon, Baucis, and their guest may fairly be described as tragic.
Moreover, Faust’s exceptional status is repeatedly in tension with his failure to transcend his limitations as a human being.Footnote46 In Part One he claims to be the equal of the Earth Spirit, and is humiliatingly rebuffed. The sight of Gretchen in prison makes him wish he had never been born. His son with Helena, Euphorion, tries to fly too high, like Icarus, and falls crashing to earth. And when the aged and now blind Faust thinks he hears the spades of his workmen, what he hears is in fact spirits obedient to Mephisto digging his grave.
Even so, Faust’s immortal part is carried by the angels up to heaven. There he again meets Gretchen, who it seems has interceded for him. The Faustian heaven has many sources, among them Dante. Goethe, to the embarrassment of some commentators, was not enthusiastic about Dante. In Italy he had a conversation about Dante which he reports as follows: ‘ich sagte: […] ich habe nie begreifen können, wie man sich mit diesen Gedichten beschäftigen möge. Mir komme die Hölle ganz abscheulich vor, das Fegefeuer zweideutig und das Paradies langweilig.’Footnote47 Presumably Goethe found the Dante enthusiast somewhat irritating and was winding him up. In 1826, however, he read the new translation of Dante by Karl Streckfuss and seems to have been reconciled. The enraptured prayers uttered by Doctor Marianus in ‘Bergschluchten’ certainly resemble the invocation of the Virgin by St Bernard in Canto xxxii of the Paradiso.Footnote48
However, the Faustian heaven does not exactly correspond to any version of the Christian heaven. The female figure who dominates heaven is not quite the Virgin Mary, just as the Lord in the ‘Prologue’ was not quite the Christian God. She is called the Mater Gloriosa, but also a goddess (‘Göttin’, 12103). She represents the ever-receding goal towards which the blessed spirits are striving. Earlier conceptions of heaven were static. It was thought that the blessed would spend eternity rapt in contemplation of the Beatific Vision.Footnote49 In the late eighteenth century, however, various more dynamic conceptions of the afterlife were put forward. Goethe knew at least those published by Johann Caspar Lavater and Emanuel Swedenborg, who imagine heaven and hell in vivid and minute topographical detail.Footnote50 He himself, though convinced of our survival after death, conceived it at various times in diverse, sometimes bizarre ways, and thought there was little point in speculating about what could not as yet be known. Crucially, however, Goethe’s heaven as envisaged in Faust II is in motion. The striving which qualified Faust to enter it continues there. And this effort is particularly directed towards purification.
One of the versions of eternal life which has been suggested as a source for Goethe is the mind-boggling conception of the early theologian Origen (c. 185–c. 254). Origen was a universalist. He put forward the doctrine of ‘apocatastasis’, or the restitution of all things, whereby all beings who proceed from God will ultimately, after innumerable aeons, be again gathered into God. This conception implies that in the very long run everyone will be saved, even the Devil — a daring idea that leads a subterranean life throughout the Christian centuries.Footnote51
Goethe would have known Origen through the account of him in a book whose importance for him is attested in Dichtung und Wahrheit: Gottfried Arnold’s Kirchen- und Ketzergeschichte (1699–1700).Footnote52 Arnold encouraged a tolerance of diverse religious views which finds an attractive expression in Goethe’s ‘Brief des Pastors zu *** an den neuen Pastor zu ***’ (1773). Albrecht Schöne and others have argued that the closing scene of Faust is to be understood in the light of Origen’s apocatastasis, mediated by Arnold. However, neither Goethe’s text nor his recorded utterances make it likely that the Faustian heaven is intended for everyone. ‘Wir sind nicht auf gleiche Weise unsterblich,’ Goethe once said to Eckermann.Footnote53
What Goethe does seem to take from Origen, via Arnold, is the idea of purification. Origen emphasizes that all beings, even the angels, still need to be purified:
daß uns nach der zeit (also erst nach dem irdischen Leben) eine wahre reinigung begegnen werde. Ich meyne, daß wir auch nach der aufferstehung ein Geheimniß bedürfen, das uns reinige und wasche, denn keiner wird ohne flecken aufferstehen können, und ist keine seele wol zu finden, die alsbald von allen gebrechen frey sey.Footnote54
The idea of purgation after death, absent from the Gospels, is found in St Augustine, who says that some people after death will suffer pains and ‘receive forgiveness in the world to come for what is not forgiven in this […] that they may not be punished with the eternal chastisement of the world to come’.Footnote56 It was hugely elaborated during the Middle Ages, and rejected by the Protestant reformers. Although Purgatory was not Hell, its pains were generally thought to be equally severe. Hamlet’s father, visiting from Purgatory, tells his son that he must return to ‘sulph’rous and tormenting flames’, and that ‘the secrets of my prison-house’ are too dreadful for a mortal to endure hearing about (Hamlet, i. 5. 3, 14). Dante makes the doctrine more tolerable by removing Purgatory from Hell and imagining it as a mountain in the Southern Ocean, diametrically opposite to Jerusalem. The souls suffering in his Purgatory do so joyfully because they know they are on the way to salvation. And the mountain which the souls ascend anticipates the motif of ascent in the Faustian heaven. An important difference, however, is that in ‘Bergschluchten’ there is no suggestion that purgation is painful. As they gradually shed their earthly remains, the souls here are encouraged not only by the distant prospect of salvation, as in Dante, but by actually beholding the Mater Gloriosa, the ‘Ewig-Weibliche’ (12110) which draws them onward and upward.
To conclude: Faust ends with the redemption and apotheosis of an enlightened despot; the Enlightenment ideal of progress is transposed to another sphere which combines purgation with salvation. We may well find this conception idiosyncratic, and may want to criticize or reject it. After all, it is too much to expect that Goethe’s theodicy, taken as an intellectual construction, should succeed where other theodicies have necessarily failed. But it is not the business of scholarship to defend or justify a past intellectual system, only to explain it; it is the business of us all as readers to appreciate the sublime poetry that it makes possible.
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Ritchie Robertson
Ritchie Robertson retired in 2021 as Schwarz-Taylor Professor of German at Oxford. His publications include Goethe: A Very Short Introduction (2016) and The Enlightenment: The Pursuit of Happiness, 1680–1790 (2020).
Notes
2 Edward Luttwak, ‘Goethe in China’, London Review of Books, 3 June 2021 (https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n11/edward-luttwak/goethe-in-china, accessed 1 July 2021).
3 See the diary Goethe kept for Charlotte von Stein during his first weeks in Italy, entry dated 17 October 1786 (FA, xv, 724).
4 See Sven-Aage Jörgensen, Klaus Bohnen, and Per Øhrgaard, Aufklärung, Sturm und Drang, frühe Klassik (Munich: Beck, 1990); Steffen Martus, Aufklärung: Das deutsche 18. Jahrhundert. Ein Epochenbild (Berlin: Rowohlt, 2015).
5 See his pioneering article: T. J. Reed, ‘Goethe and Enlightenment’, in Enlightenment Essays in Memory of Robert Shackleton, ed. by Giles Barber and C. P. Courtney (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1988), pp. 257–70, and most recently T. J. Reed, Light in Germany: Scenes from an Unknown Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).
6 See such paeans to progress as Nicolas de Condorcet, Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain (written 1793). Contrast Herder: ‘Wie unser Gang ein beständiges Fallen ist zur Rechten und zur Linken und dennoch kommen wir mit jedem Schritt weiter: so ist der Fortschritt der Kultur in Menschengeschlechtern und in ganzen Völkern’ (Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (1784), in Johann Gottfried Herder, Werke, ed. by Günter Arnold and others, 10 vols (Frankfurt/Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985–2000), VI (1989): Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, ed. by Martin Bollacher, p. 655.
7 See Ritchie Robertson, The Enlightenment: The Pursuit of Happiness, 1680–1790 (London: Allen Lane, 2020).
8 ‘Bedeutende Fördernis durch ein einziges geistreiches Wort’ (1823), FA, xxiv, 597.
9 ‘Imitations of Horace: Ep. II i’, in The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. by John Butt (London: Methuen, 1963), p. 639.
10 ‘Notes to Queen Mab’, in The Complete Poetical Works of Shelley, ed. by Thomas Hutchinson (London: Oxford University Press, 1934), p. 821.
11 Letter to Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, 6 January 1813, FA, xxxiv, 147.
12 Johann Peter Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens, 6 June 1831, FA, xxxix, 489.
13 For a study of this theme in philosophy from Leibniz to Schopenhauer, see now Mara van der Lugt, Dark Matters: Pessimism and the Problem of Suffering (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021).
14 David Hume, The Natural History of Religion, ed. by A. Wayne Colver (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), and Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, ed. by John Valdimir Price (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), pp. 226–27. The Dialogues were published in 1779, after Hume’s death; it has not been established when he wrote them.
15 See G. W. Leibniz, Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil, trans. by E. M. Huggard (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951).
16 See especially ‘Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht’, in Immanuel Kant, Werke, ed. by Wilhelm Weischedel, 6 vols (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1956–1964), VI (1964): Schriften zur Anthropologie, Geschichtsphilosophie, Politik und Pädagogik, pp. 33–50.
17 ‘Rezension zu Johann Gottfried Herders Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit’, in Kant, Werke, vi, 779–806 (p. 805).
18 See The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755: Representation and Reaction, ed. by Theodore E. D. Braun and John B. Radner (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2005); Das Erdbeben von Lissabon und der Katastrophendiskurs im 18. Jahrhundert, ed. by Gerhard Lauer and Thorsten Unger (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2008).
19 Letter to Karl Friedrich Zelter, 7 November 1816, FA, xxxv, p. 58.
20 [Carl von Linné], ‘The Œconomy of Nature, by Isaac Biberg’, in Miscellaneous Tracts Relating to Natural History, Husbandry, and Physick, trans. by Benjamin Stillingfleet, 2nd edn (London: Dodsley, Baker, and Payne, 1762), pp. 37–130 (p. 39). This was a doctoral dissertation which Linnaeus, following the Swedish practice of the time, dictated to his student Biberg, who then translated it into Latin and published it in 1747.
21 Review of Johann Georg Sulzer’s Die schönen Künste in ihrem Ursprung […] betrachtet, in Frankfurter gelehrte Anzeigen, FA, xviii, 99.
22 Letter to Sulpiz Boisserée, 8 September 1815, FA, xxxiv, 506.
23 Faust, 266; FA, vii/1, 25. Future references to Faust will be given in the text by line number only.
24 See the classic study by N. P. Williams, The Ideas of the Fall and of Original Sin: A Historical and Critical Study (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1927).
25 Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft (1793), in Kant, Werke, IV (1963), 680.
26 Letter to Johann Gottfried and Caroline Herder, 7 June 1793, in Goethe, Briefe HKA, ix/1, 158.
27 Hans Schwerte, Faust und das Faustische: Ein Kapitel deutscher Ideologie (Stuttgart: Klett, 1962).
28 Georg Lukács, Faust und Faustus: Vom Drama der Menschengattung zur Tragödie der modernen Kunst (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1967), p. 149.
29 Heinz Schlaffer, Faust Zweiter Teil: Die Allegorie des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1981).
30 Marshall Berman, All that is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (London: Verso, 1983), p. 300.
31 Jochen Schmidt, Goethes ‘Faust’, Erster und Zweiter Teil: Grundlagen – Werk – Wirkung (Munich: Beck, 1999); Michael Jaeger, Fausts Kolonie: Goethes kritische Phänomenologie der Moderne (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2004).
32 Eudo C. Mason, Goethe’s ‘Faust’: Its Genesis and Purport (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), p. 343. Similarly John R. Williams, The Life of Goethe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), p. 209.
33 T. J. Reed, Genesis: The Making of Literary Works from Homer to Christa Wolf (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2020), p. 124.
34 Cf. Reed, Genesis, pp. 121–22.
35 Eckermann, 6 June 1831, FA, xxxix, 488–89.
36 Eckermann, 21 February 1827, FA, xxxix, 581.
37 Eckermann, 11 March 1828, FA, xxxix, 651.
38 Johann Peter Eckermann to Heinrich Laube, 5 March 1844, quoted in Eckermann, FA, xxxix, 918–19; cf. ibid., pp. 650–60.
39 Extract from Friedrich Wilhelm Riemer, Mittheilungen über Goethe (Berlin, 1841), 3 February 1807, FA, xxxiii, 167.
40 David Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape and the Making of Modern Germany (London: Cape, 2006); Robertson, p. 425.
41 Histoire de Charles XII, roi de Suède, in Voltaire, Œuvres historiques, ed. by René Pomeau (Paris: Gallimard, 1957), pp. 125–26.
42 Eckermann, 11 March 1828, FA, xxxix, 653.
43 George Santayana, Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933), p. 182.
44 Eckermann, 18 January 1827, FA, xxxix, 212–13.
45 Edmund Wilson, ‘In Honour of Pushkin’, in his The Triple Thinkers (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962), pp. 40–71 (p. 58).
46 Cf. the poem ‘Grenzen der Menschheit’, FA, i, 332–33.
47 Italienische Reise, FA, xv/1, 407–08.
48 See Willi Hirdt, ‘Goethe und Dante’, Deutsches Dante-Jahrbuch, 68/69 (1993/94), 31–80.
49 See Bernhard Lang and Colleen McDannell, Heaven: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988).
50 See Goethe’s review of Lavater’s Aussichten in die Ewigkeit, vol. iii, FA, xviii, 90–93; for Swedenborg, the conversation recorded by J. D. Falk, FA, xxxiv, 170–78 (p. 173).
51 See C. A. Patrides, ‘The Salvation of Satan’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 28 (1967), 467–78.
52 Dichtung und Wahrheit, ii. 8; FA, xiv, 382.
53 Eckermann, 1 September 1829, FA, xxxix, 361. Schöne’s interpretation is convincingly questioned in Dieter Bremer, ‘“Wenn starke Geisteskraft […]”: Traditionsvermittlungen in der Schlußszene von Goethes Faust’, GJb, 112 (1995), 287–307. Bremer points out that the divine love celebrated in ‘Bergschluchten’ is markedly Neoplatonic.
54 Gottfrid Arnolds Unparteyische Kirchen- und Ketzer-Historie / von Anfang des Neuen Testaments biß auff das Jahr Christi 1688, 2 vols (Frankfurt/Main: Fritsch, 1699 and 1700), ii (1699), 359, quoted in Schöne’s commentary, FA, vii/2, 790.
55 Charlotte Lee, The Very Late Goethe: Self-Consciousness and the Art of Ageing (Cambridge: Legenda, 2014), pp. 124–29.
56 St Augustine, Concerning the City of God against the Pagans, trans. by Henry Bettenson (London: Penguin, 1984), pp. 990–91 (Book xxi, Chapter 13).