Rumour has it that a very young Xi Jinping committed Faust to memory. I would be fascinated to hear what China’s paramount leader makes of Goethe’s myth of tragic modernity, which begins with a throng of spirits singing: “Christ is arisen!”
This exultant line does not exactly mark the beginning of Faust — a two-part play whose beginning is, in fact, hard to identify. Part One opens with a night scene in which we see Faust, heartsick and alone, in a dimly lit Gothic room, conjuring daemons and contemplating suicide. It is here that an Easter hymn, sung by an invisible chorus, breaks in. The disillusioned professor is lifting a vial of poison to his lips, when he hears this:
“Christ is arisen!
Blest is the man of love,
He who the anguishing,
Bitter, exacting test,
Salvation bringing, passed.”
In a literal sense, Goethe’s antihero is saved by Christ — “the man of love” — in Faust’s first dramatic sequence. We will return to this scene. But before we see Faust in his gloomy chamber — and hear, with him, a Romantic Easter song — Goethe presents his readers with a trio of other introductions. First, he presents a haunting verse dedication to the play’s “dear shadows”. From there, he moves on to a cynical prelude, in which a theatre-manager tells the poet he only has one job to do: “Deliver the goods.” Then he presents an allegorical conversation set in the throne room of heaven, in which the Lord himself gives Mephisto, one of the “spirits of negation”, carte blanche to lead Faust into temptation.
There seems to be no end, then, of Faust’s beginnings. And this is by design. The motto of Faust Part One reveals that the start is the crux of Goethe’s play: “In the beginning was the Deed!” This is a brazen misstatement of the first verse of The Gospel According to John: “In the beginning was the Word.” Goethe’s huge drama turns upon Faust’s deep unhappiness with just that beginning, that Christian beginning, and his spectacular challenge to it. (Crucially, the challenge is not only his. A certain Mephisto is on the scene too.) It is only after Goethe lures us through some 400 pages of eerie verse that — in the last stanza of Part Two, and of the play itself — a mystical chorus corrects (or half-corrects) the professor’s error. “Everything transitory,” we read, “is symbolic only.”
Faust’s total veneration of the Deed is not given the final word in Goethe’s tragedy. But what are we to make of this iconic modern drama of Word and Deed — of soul-selling and demonic influence, of delusion and redemption? Whatever else we might decide, few would object to a framing statement we find in Christopher Marlowe’s great Elizabethan drama, The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus: namely that the figure of Faust in some way concerns “both Germany and the world”.
Why Germany? The historical Faustus, a Latin sobriquet meaning “fortunate one”, was Germanic. Marlowe knows this, and dubs him “the German conjurer”. According to the historian Anthony Grafton, he was probably based on Georg of Helmstadt, who took a Master of Arts from the University of Heidelberg in the 1480s. In any case, Grafton writes, the shadowy character who comes to be known as Faust made use of “expert knowledge of optics, light, and shadow” — all designed to thrill and terrify his contemporaries with images that “seemed to move”. The real Faust was a Renaissance magus, or, as we might now say, a master of simulacra.
Naturally, German artists have not forgotten Faust’s origins. The most accomplished conjuration of a specifically German Faust is probably Thomas Mann’s 1947 novel, Doctor Faustus, written in Pacific Palisades, California, in which Hitler’s Reich offers “the embrace of demons” that locks Mann’s fatherland into a nightmare of criminality and despair. Doctor Faustus is a captivating treatment of the theme, and one of the great Hollywood novels. But it still seems fair to conclude that Marlowe was right. The Faust myth is not purely national. Faust is a spiritual figure — and, as such, a civilisational one.
“The Faust myth is not purely national. Faust is a spiritual figure — and, as such, a civilisational one.”
Ironically, it is a hardcore German nationalist, Oswald Spengler, who argues most compellingly that Faust is not a German, but rather a world-historical figure. For Spengler, something like a “Faustian soul” fuelled the rise — and is now suffering the decline — not just of Germany, but of the West as a whole. The “Faustian world-feeling” is, to his mind, a decisive factor in the ever-more-rapidly unfolding world-history of modernity.
But what meaning does Spengler give to that half-mythical descriptor: “Faustian”? In Spengler’s momentous Decline of the West, written about a century ago, he claims that the Faustian life-force of the West is something like “a will-to-power over the infinite”. This formulation is virtually lifted from the pages of Nietzsche, whose late 19th-century elevation of “will-to-power” is well known. And this suggests, to me at least, that Spengler’s idea of a Faustian West might be connected, however obscurely, to the pathologically anti-Christian will that Nietzsche expresses in his final text, The Anti-Christ. We might therefore ask: Is the essence of the Faustian legacy, in a declining West, the attitude of “the anti-Christ”?
The simplicity of this question is unnerving, and Spengler would not like it. He seems to think that it is not Nietzsche’s anti-Christian spleen, but rather the redemptive finale of Goethe’s Faust, together with Richard Wagner’s Romantic-Christian opera Parsifal, which can “disclose to us in advance the shape that our spirituality will assume” in the 21st and 22nd centuries. Nevertheless, the simple question of Faust’s anti-Christianity brings us back to the curious beginning of Goethe’s play, in which it is the memory of Christ’s death and resurrection that keeps Faust from killing himself.
Spengler comments on this critical moment. He calls it, in passing, Faust’s “Easter scene”. But what I want to ask is this: What if there is not only one “Easter scene” in Goethe’s Faust? What if, rather, this whole myth of tragic modernity is framed by Easter, and by the events that Christians commemorate on that day? What if, furthermore, the real legacy of Faustian modernity is not just — as Mann and others have thought — the hellish Nazi interlude, but rather a far more enduring tendency to anti-Christianity in the West? What if, in other words, it is precisely Faust’s anti-Christian attitude which is somehow at the heart of Western malaise?
It is time to return, with these questions in mind, to the scene in which the drama of Faust’s soul begins. It is titled simply “Night”. Throughout the scene, Goethe’s unstable Herr Doktor is both citing and mis-citing the gospels — and especially The Gospel According to John. One of these echoes is decisive: Faust says that there is no book, no text, which could satisfy his “eternal thirst” (Durst auf ewig). His wording distinctly recalls a scene in John Chapter 4, in which Jesus tells a woman in Samaria: “Those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty.”
On the night before Easter, Faust is thirsty. And on the play’s fateful Easter day, when Faust first meets Mephisto, his own personal demon, Christ’s sayings in John 4, are on his mind. “You long to drink the living waters”, Faust confesses to himself, until Mephisto interrupts him. The bitter professor knows, and the play’s 19th-century readers all knew, that “living water” is what Jesus mystically offers to the woman in Samaria. It is precisely because Faust is not drinking the spiritual water he longs to drink — however we might interpret his longing, or his failure — that he signs his soul over to Mephisto, a nihilist avant la lettre, and embraces the devil’s element, fire.
I call such echoes of John 4 decisive, not only because they reveal the depth of Faust’s sickness of heart, in the first scenes of the play, but because they are still sounding in Faust’s final stanzas. Here, in the chaos of love, or the clamour of grace, that meets a half-repentant Faust in the afterlife, we encounter a radiant figure — one of Faust’s angelic intercessors, who is given by Goethe a simple Latin title: Mulier Samaritana. “The Samaritan Woman.” And Goethe tells us, in his play’s margin, so no one can miss it, where he is taking his inspiration from: “Saint John 4.” This is how the Samaritan Woman pleads for Faust’s soul:
“By the pail which, when he thirsted,
Cooled the lips of our Saviour,
By the streams of living water
Pouring out from that pure fountain
Prodigally and forever,
Flowing through all of creation –”
It is not Mephisto’s fire, but Jesus’ water — in Goethe’s unorthodox conception of it — that lives on, in this stanza, after Faust dies.
Faust’s drama, which is paschal at the beginning, is still paschal at the end. At the instant of his antihero’s death, Goethe quotes — yet again — from The Gospel According to John: “It is finished.” Though some translations obscure the biblical reference, Goethe’s German is identical to Martin Luther’s translation in John Chapter 19, where Jesus says, from the cross: “It is finished” (Es ist vollbracht). But we must, of course, ask: what is finished? Faust’s lurid drama is linked to the gospels’ paschal narrative. But how?
We might say by corruption, with an eye to Faust’s alteration of John’s canonical line. After all, “In the beginning was the Word” becomes “In the beginning was the Deed”. Or we might say by negation, since Mephisto, a cynical mystagogue, tells us, and then shows us, that he is “the spirit that says no, no”. But none of this goes far enough. Goethe’s play is in fact structured by Faust’s imprecation, and then, persecution of Christianity. He becomes, decades before Nietzsche, a partisan of “the anti-Christ”.
Faust’s rejection of “the old, the true religion” — as Mephisto dryly calls it — is part of the process. This is how deals with the devil get done. And Faust complies. “I pronounce a curse”, he says:
“Curse love on its pinnacle of bliss,
Curse faith, so false, curse all vain hope!”
It is really Saint Paul who is being cursed, here, for having the audacity to write in his First Letter to the Corinthians that “faith, hope, and love abide”. Faust is a myth of tragic modernity precisely in so far as it is determined by this conscious repudiation of the Christian beyond — in faith, hope, and love.
Yet if Faust’s curse on Christianity is a structuring moment in Part One, what do I mean by his persecution of Christianity? This comes towards the end of Part Two, in the days before Faust’s death. After he and Mephisto have provided some necromantic help to the forces of European unification, Faust settles, with Mephisto, naturally, near an undisclosed coastline. Here, he begins a new life as a visionary property developer. The venture ends badly. His final property development is — his grave.
But before Faust’s slave-labourers lower him into the pit, there is a sequence of events that confuses many commentators. Along the shoreline that Faust wants to develop is an elderly couple — “kind, pious people” — who live in a simple house, within a copse of linden trees, beside a rustic chapel. They refuse to sell their land to the man who has sold his soul. What is more, they sense that Faust’s seemingly progressive venture is in fact primitive and cruel. “Men were sacrificed,” the wife tells her husband, “I’m certain.” And what is her intuition about Faust? “Godless,” she concludes, “he imagines we’re his slaves.”
With his own death impending, Faust becomes obsessed with this poor old couple. It is not only that their recalcitrance irritates him, or that their mere existence ruins his view of a newly cleared coastline. What drives Faust to distraction is the “churchlike, tomblike” clanging of their chapel bell. This lone, liturgical act materialises — not only for them, but for him — their commitment to the “old God” that Faust — a devotee, now, only of his own will — has abandoned. “Come,” they say quietly to each other:
“We’ll walk out to the chapel,
Watch the sun sink to its rest,
Ring the bell and kneeling, pray.”
But there is more. For on the night before Easter, just as the suicidal professor begins to hear the old exultant words — “Christ is arisen!” — in Faust’s first scene, we read this in Goethe’s text: Glockenklang. “Bells peal.” Symbolically it is these Easter bells that ring — but from a harassed and isolated church, now — as Faust, long-declining, nears his denouement.
Before he dies, Faust silences the bells. Mephisto and his enforcers set fire to the old couple’s chapel — and their house. They burn to death inside. In this way, the last Christians left on Goethe’s stage are martyred. Faust is — imperfectly, briefly — repentant. He thinks back on the days before his apostasy, before he gave himself over to
“The things of darkness, cursed the world, myself,
Impiously. Now ghosts so fill the air …”
Ours too, seems to be a time when, strangely, ghosts fill the air. It was a friend of Goethe’s, Novalis, a Christian Romantic, who once said: “Where there are no gods, ghosts reign.” Perhaps there is something for us in Novalis’ dictum — and in Goethe’s drama. And, perhaps, every year, while the Easter bells still peal, we are not only being drawn into a circle of sacred memory, but being reminded to look to the future, and ask: on what venture are we embarked? And with what forces are we in league?
