Goethe I: Faust, Part One
“Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach! in meiner Brust.”
“Two souls, alas, dwell in my breast.”
A scholar stands at the city gate on Easter morning, watching the crowds pour out into the spring, and finds himself unable to be one of them.
He has mastered philosophy, law, medicine, theology. He has read everything. And he has reached the dead end of mastery, the place where the more you know, the more you discover you do not know what you actually wanted.
He says it himself, in the opening monologue:
Und sehe, daß wir nichts wissen können.
And I see that we can know nothing.
This is not the speech of an ignorant man. It is the exhaustion of a man who has gone as far as learning can carry him and arrived nowhere he wanted to go.
Faust is the most dangerous kind of human being: the intelligent person who has learned the limits of intelligence and cannot accept them.
Into this moment, Mephistopheles arrives.
The legend Goethe inherited
Faust as a figure is older than Goethe by three centuries.
The historical Faust, if he existed at all, was a 16th-century alchemist and self-promoter, dismissed by serious men including Philip Melanchthon.
The legend grew from him: a scholar who made a pact with the devil, enjoyed twenty-four years of supernatural power, and was torn apart by demons when the bill came due.
The Historia von D. Johann Fausten (1587) gave this story its first canonical form. The moral was unambiguous: pride destroys, intellect overreaches, stay within your place.
Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (composed around 1592) followed the structure exactly. Faustus sells his soul, enjoys his pleasures, repents too late, is damned.
For two and a half centuries, the Faust legend was a Christian warning against intellectual overreach.
Goethe inverted it.
He spent sixty years on his Faust. The early sketches go back to the 1770s. Part One was published in 1808. Part Two was completed in the last year of his life (1832) and published only after his death.
In Goethe’s hands the legend became something its earlier tellers would have found heretical:
Faust is not damned. Faust is saved.
Not because he repents. Not because he renounces the devil. But because, in Goethe’s reading, he never stops striving.
The very quality that condemned Faust in the older legend, the insatiable hunger that breaks all human limits, is the quality that, in Goethe, redeems him.
This first essay is about Part One, where the inversion is set up and the price is paid by someone else.
The wager in heaven
The work does not begin with Faust. It begins, audaciously, in heaven, with a bet.
Mephistopheles, like Satan in the Book of Job, comes before God and proposes a wager. He believes he can lead the scholar Faust into ruin.
God accepts.
But Goethe’s God is not the God of Job. This God is serene, almost amused, and, crucially, not threatened.
Des Menschen Tätigkeit kann allzuleicht erschlaffen, Er liebt sich bald die unbedingte Ruh; Drum geb ich gern ihm den Gesellen zu…
Man’s activity can all too easily slacken; he quickly loves unconditional rest. So I gladly give him a companion…
In this framing, Mephistopheles is not the enemy of the divine order. He is its agent.
He is the force that prevents stagnation, that keeps human beings from settling into the comfort that would kill their development.
The devil, in Goethe, is the principle of restlessness.
This is not orthodox Christianity. It is Goethe’s mature philosophy of nature dressed up in theological clothing.
He believed that everything alive is held in motion by polarity, by two opposing forces in dynamic tension. Light and dark. Expansion and contraction. Attraction and repulsion. The devil is the negation that makes the affirmation possible.
When Mephistopheles describes himself, he names this directly:
Ein Teil von jener Kraft, Die stets das Böse will und stets das Gute schafft.
A part of that force which always wills evil and always creates good.
The devil wills evil and produces good. He cannot help it. He is the friction in the system.
The terms of the pact
The pact between Faust and Mephistopheles is the most misunderstood part of the work.
It is not a straight sale: I give you my soul, you give me power and pleasure.
It is a wager, and the terms are set by Faust himself.
Werd ich zum Augenblicke sagen: Verweile doch! du bist so schön! Dann magst du mich in Fesseln schlagen, Dann will ich gern zugrunde gehn.
If ever I say to the passing moment, “Stay a while! You are so beautiful!” then you may cast me into chains. Then I will gladly go to my ruin.
Faust bets that no moment will ever satisfy him. He bets that the desire for more will always exceed the pleasure of the present.
He is not selling his soul for power. He is wagering his soul on his own insatiability.
This changes everything. Faust does not need Mephistopheles to give him anything in particular. He needs Mephistopheles to test whether he is, in fact, the kind of being he believes himself to be: the one who cannot rest, the one for whom every horizon shows another horizon, the one whose hunger has no object that can fill it.
He is betting on his own humanity, as he understands humanity.
Gretchen
What he gets, instead of the worthy adversary the wager seems to call for, is a girl.
Margarete, Gretchen, is young, religious, uncomplicated, and good.
She represents nothing Faust has been searching for. She represents, in fact, the world that his restlessness has placed beyond his reach: ordinary life, ordinary faith, ordinary love.
He wants her anyway. Or wants the projection of her, which is not the same thing.
Mephistopheles supplies the means.
The consequences arrive one after another, and the catalog is hard to read even now, two centuries on.
Gretchen’s mother dies, poisoned by the sleeping draught Faust gives so that he can meet her daughter undisturbed. Her brother Valentin is killed by Faust in a duel. Gretchen is seduced. She is abandoned. She gives birth to Faust’s child. She kills the child. She is imprisoned and condemned to death.
In the dungeon scene, one of the most devastating in German literature, Faust finds her in the straw, deranged, and offers to take her away. She refuses. She will accept her punishment.
A voice from heaven, on the last page of Part One:
Ist gerettet.
She is saved.
Faust escapes with Mephistopheles. Part One ends without resolution. The question of Faust’s guilt, if there is one, is deferred to the work Goethe will not complete for another twenty-four years.
The reader is left with the wreckage and the unanswered question: is the salvation of the girl a moral counterweight to the damage Faust has done, or is the book asking us to swallow something it has not made digestible?
Mephistopheles
The devil deserves his own section.
He is not the devil of tradition. He is not horrifying. He is not seductive in the simple sense.
The thing Goethe does with him that no one had done before is this: he is funny.
Mephistopheles is witty, sardonic, and exhaustively realistic about human nature. He sees through everything. He believes in nothing. He finds human aspiration absurd, and he is often correct.
His contempt is not cruelty; it is the exhaustion of an intelligence that has spent too long observing what people actually do as opposed to what they say they will do.
He does not deceive Faust with false promises. This is important. He delivers exactly what he promises. The corruption is not in the getting; it is in the wanting.
Goethe’s deepest insight into how evil actually works in the world is this: the devil is not the tempter who lies. The devil is the accommodator who says yes when wisdom would say no. He removes the obstacles that would otherwise force you to stop and think.
He is the spirit of why not, and why not turns out to be one of the most dangerous questions a human being can ask.
If you read Mephistopheles closely, you start to suspect that Goethe loved him. He is by a long way the most psychologically alive character in the work. He has the best lines. He has the only sustained sense of humor. He sees what Faust cannot let himself see.
This is part of what makes the book so disquieting. The devil is on the side of clear-eyed observation, and Faust, the supposed hero, is the one trapped in the inflated language of his own striving.
On the German
A note before the personal section.
Faust is in some final sense untranslatable.
The work shifts between rhymed couplets that echo medieval German poetry, blank verse, Madrigal verse, Greek meters, prose. Each register tells you what kind of world you are in.
The density of the German, the assonance, the rhythm, the weight of one consonant against another, is not portable.
Grau, teurer Freund, ist alle Theorie, Und grün des Lebens goldner Baum.
Grey, dear friend, is all theory, and green the golden tree of life.
Grey, green, gold. Three colors at once, two of them already in tension, the third reconciling them. The German does this in two lines. No English translation does it without paraphrase.
If you cannot read German, read it in German anyway, alongside a translation. Let the sound do some of the work even where the meaning escapes you.
(The best English versions are David Luke’s, for the first-time reader; Martin Greenberg’s, for tone; Stuart Atkins’s, for fidelity to the verse forms. Walter Kaufmann’s older translation, for Part One only, takes liberties but earns them.)
A warning
If you are young, and you have decided to give your life to ideas, to science, to philosophy, to the long quiet work of trying to understand something, read this book.
Read it before you forget that you are not the first to do this. Read it before you become Faust by accident.
The book is a warning, but not the warning everyone takes it to be. The warning is not that the devil exists. It is that the devil is what saves you.
Faust is granted Mephistopheles. He is granted a voice in his life that contradicts him, that punctures his self-importance, that finds his cleverness funny, that knows what he is doing and tells him.
The devil he gets is a gift. Most people never get one.
Most of us walk through our intellectual lives without anyone telling us, you sound ridiculous right now, or, the cleverness you are doing is hurting someone, or, this is not wisdom; this is appetite with a vocabulary.
We pile up our knowledge. We admire our own trajectories. The green-gold tree darkens into theory and there is no one in the room to say no.
Faust had Mephistopheles. He did not always listen, but the voice was there.
If you are very lucky, you will meet someone who plays this role for you, a teacher, a friend, an editor, a person who refuses to let you mistake your ambition for your vocation.
If you do not meet such a person, you may become Faust without ever knowing it.
This is why I think the book should be read early by anyone who plans a life of ideas. Not because anyone will be tempted by the devil. Because they may not be lucky enough to meet him.
The danger is not damnation. The danger is sleepwalking, with our heads full of beautiful sentences, toward the wreckage we cannot quite see.
Part Two follows. Goethe spent twenty-four more years writing it. In it, Faust is saved. The dead are not.
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