Goethe II: Faust, Part Two
Part Two of Faust took Goethe another twenty-four years to write. He completed it in the last year of his life, sealed the manuscript, and died weeks later.
The two parts share a title, a protagonist, and a devil. They are otherwise barely the same book.
Part One is drama. Part Two is dream. Part One has a plot you can follow. Part Two is a sequence of allegorical tableaux, the Emperor’s court, ancient Greece, the alchemist creating life in a flask, the engineer reclaiming land from the sea, that you can only inhabit, not summarize.
The work was written for an audience Goethe knew did not yet exist. Most of its first readers gave up. Many of its readers since have, too.
The previous essay ended where Part One ends, in the wreckage. This one is about what Goethe spent twenty-four more years trying to make of it.
(One sentence to summarize Part Two: an old scholar continues his life, fails to find what he was looking for, dies, and is carried to heaven anyway. Everything that matters is in how Goethe gets him there.)
Helena, briefly
The center of Part Two is the Helena Act.
Faust marries Helen of Troy, summoned out of the underworld at the command of the Emperor’s court.
Goethe puts the most beautiful woman of the classical world in bed with the most restless intellect of the modern, and lets their union briefly exist.
Their son is Euphorion. He is romantic energy embodied. Goethe had Byron specifically in mind: Byron the man whose poetic ambition exceeded his life, who flew higher than his body could sustain.
Euphorion cannot stop rising. He reaches for the sky. He falls. He dies.
With Euphorion’s death, Helena dissolves back into the classical past.
The marriage of North and South, Romantic longing and Classical form, is possible only briefly. The energy of the modern cannot sustain the calm of the ancient. The classical world has too much patience for the world that has discovered the steam engine.
This is, depending on how you read it, either a philosophical observation about literary history or a love poem to a dead son. Goethe had lost his own son August during the writing of Part Two. He kept writing.
The land and the dead
In old age, Faust undertakes a final project. He will reclaim land from the sea. He will create new territory for a new people.
The image is industrial, modern, almost utopian: the engineer-magician building space for civilization out of nothing.
In the middle of his project is a small piece of land that does not belong to him.
An old couple, Philemon and Baucis, live there in a cottage next to a chapel. They have a few trees. They are kind to travelers. They will not sell.
Faust wants them moved. He does not say kill them. He says, in the way that powerful men have always said it, deal with this.
Mephistopheles deals with it. The cottage is burned. The old couple die in the fire.
Philemon and Baucis, the same Philemon and Baucis from Ovid, the couple whose hospitality the gods once rewarded, are killed by Faust’s striving, offstage, while he plans his utopia.
He is upset when he learns. He had not, he insists, intended this. It is the same defense Mephistopheles has been giving him for sixty years.
Then, near the end, in his old age, in the moment when he imagines the free people he will have created on his reclaimed land, Faust speaks the nearest approach to the fatal words:
Zum Augenblicke dürft ich sagen: Verweile doch, du bist so schön.
To this moment I might say: stay a while, you are so beautiful.
Note the verb. Dürft ich sagen. Might say. The conditional. The subjunctive.
He does not say it. He imagines saying it. The wager turns on a grammatical mood.
Faust dies. Mephistopheles believes he has won and begins preparing the grave. Then the angels come. They scatter rose petals, which burn Mephistopheles and arouse him at once (Goethe gave the devil a homoerotic weakness for angel boys, and meant it).
In the confusion, the angels take Faust’s soul and carry it upward. The devil, who has played by the rules, loses on a technicality involving roses.
Faust is saved.
The dead are not.
Striving
Goethe believed in two principles for which Faust is the longest argument.
The first is polarity. Every living thing is held in motion by opposing forces in tension. Light and dark. Expansion and contraction. The earthly soul and the soul that reaches for the infinite.
The work of life is not to resolve these into one but to hold them in motion. The resolution of polarity into a single pole is what Goethe meant by death.
The second is Steigerung, intensification. Life does not just repeat. It spirals. It returns to similar configurations but at higher levels of complexity. Each cycle of desire and failure leaves the spiral further along than where it started. The error is part of the climb.
These two principles produce the theological claim Faust rests on:
Wer immer strebend sich bemüht, Den können wir erlösen.
Whoever strives with all his might, that man we can redeem.
Not faith. Not works. Not repentance. Streben, striving, the forward motion that refuses both rest and satisfaction.
This is neither Lutheran nor Catholic. It is Goethean, a secular theology of effort that places the value of a human life not in what it achieves but in what it refuses to stop wanting.
God himself, in the Prologue, had already conceded the price:
Es irrt der Mensch, solang er strebt.
Man errs as long as he strives.
Error is the price of striving. Striving is the condition of redemption. Error and redemption are the same process.
Goethe knew this. He spent sixty years building the case.
He was 82 when he completed Part Two. He had been working on the Faust material since his early twenties. He had outlived most of the people he loved: Schiller, Herder, his son August.
He was, by then, less the man writing Faust than the man Faust had been waiting for.
He sealed the manuscript and died within weeks. The most famous writer in Europe finished the longest argument of his life and stopped.
You cannot read Faust without reading Goethe through it. He wrote himself into the work over the entire arc of his adult life.
His Storm and Stress youth is in Part One. His Italian Classicism is in the Helena Act. His old administrative Weimar self, the manager of mines and roads, is in the land reclamation.
He was the universal man trying to write a play about the universal man and not quite forgiving himself for what that meant.
Faust now
Why does this 19th-century play about a 16th-century scholar still speak to the 21st century? Because the problem it diagnoses has not been solved.
The modern world was built on the Faustian premise: that more is better, that limits are obstacles, that the proper response to any boundary is to push through it.
More knowledge. More technology. More wealth. More speed. More scale.
The Faustian drive produced the industrial revolution, modern medicine, the digital world, the entire apparatus of contemporary civilization, and produced, in the same gesture, climate change, the destruction of ecosystems, nuclear weapons, the exhaustion of the only planet we have.
The Faustian deal is unlimited power in exchange for the capacity to say enough. The contemporary version of the deal does not even bother with the devil. It signs itself.
Goethe saw this in 1808. He saw it in the figure of his scholar who wanted everything and therefore destroyed everything he touched.
He left the question open: is redemption-through-striving a moral vision or a self-serving fantasy of the relentlessly ambitious?
The angels carry Faust’s soul because he never stops striving. Philemon and Baucis are dead. Gretchen went mad.
The striving redeems the striver. The people in the striver’s path are not redeemed.
Goethe does not resolve this. He lets it stand. The work ends with Faust saved and the dead unresurrected.
The reader has to decide what to do with it.
What it costs
I love this book. I cannot quite forgive it. Both of those are true.
The argument is brilliant, and the argument is also a defense.
Goethe wrote a sixty-year case for the proposition that the kind of mind that cannot rest, the mind that breaks the lives of the people closest to it in pursuit of something it can never quite name, is redeemed by the not-naming.
That is a beautiful argument. It is also exactly the argument that this kind of mind would write about itself.
I keep noticing the dead.
Gretchen, who loved Faust, killed her child, and lost her mind.
Her mother, poisoned by the sleeping draught Faust gave so he could meet her undisturbed.
Her brother, run through by Faust’s sword.
Philemon and Baucis, old and harmless and in the way, burned in their cottage while Faust planned his utopia.
Faust strives. The angels carry him. The voice from heaven calls Gretchen gerettet, saved, and we are meant to feel that her faith covers the rest.
Faust is redeemed by a quality of soul that did not, in any visible way, ever consider her.
Some minds were not made for peace. But that does not make them innocent.
This is the thing about Steigerung. The spiral does move upward. It also leaves things behind.
It leaves people behind. It leaves the version of you that you would have been if you had stayed in the smaller life, and it leaves the people who were attached to that version of you, and it leaves them to figure out what to do with the absence.
Goethe knew this. He had outlived his closest friends and his son and was 82 and finishing the play in which he forgave himself.
I do not entirely accept the forgiveness. I do not entirely reject it either.
The honest reading of Faust, I think, is that Goethe gave us the case for striving and the case against and refused to choose, and that this refusal is what makes the book great and not merely comforting.
A book that asks you to be moved by Faust’s striving while standing over Gretchen’s body is asking you to do a difficult thing.
It is asking you to hold two contradictory truths at the same time: that striving is the condition of being human, and that the people who pay for the striving are also human, and equally so, and not less real for having been narratively forgiven.
Goethe did not give us the apology. He did not let Faust feel guilty in any deep way. He let him be carried upward, on the strength of an unresolved tension the angels were apparently willing to overlook.
That is what makes the book honest. It is also what makes me unable to finish it without anger.
Coda
Das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan.
The eternal feminine draws us upward.
The last line of Faust.
A choir of angels, blessed women, penitents, and the soul of Gretchen draws Faust’s soul upward.
The eternal feminine, in Goethe, is not simply women. It is the principle of love and grace and the beyond, the force that pulls the striving soul toward what is higher than any specific achievement.
It is what Faust was always reaching for. Not the power. Not the knowledge. Not the pleasure. The thing beyond all of them. The thing that cannot be named or possessed or stopped.
The thing that the wager, stay a while, you are so beautiful, would have stopped.
Faust never named it. He never stopped reaching for it. He was saved by not finding it.
This is Goethe’s most impossible idea: that the not-arriving is itself the destination. That the desire that cannot be satisfied is not a curse but a grace. That the two souls in the breast, the one that clings to the earth and the one that reaches for the infinite, are not enemies. They are the condition of being human. Both of them. Together. Always in tension. Never resolved.
Verweile doch.
Stay a while.
But do not stop.
I read it and I think: yes.
And also: at what cost.
Further reading:
Goethe, Faust (trans. David Luke, Oxford World’s Classics, the best starting point; or trans. Martin Greenberg, Yale University Press, the most literary).
Goethe, Conversations with Eckermann (1836). Goethe on Faust, art, science, and life. Indispensable.
Goethe, Italian Journey (1816). Essential context for Part Two.
Stuart Atkins, Goethe’s Faust: A Literary Analysis (Harvard University Press, 1958).
Jane Brown, Goethe’s Faust: The German Tragedy (Cornell University Press, 1986).
Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air (1982). On Faust and modernity. Essential.
Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation. Faust’s problem, philosophically systematized.
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