Goethe’s Faust (1810)

Earlier literature based on the legends of Faust were written to warn people away from seeking the three things forbidden by the orthodox authority in the Middle Ages: knowledge, power, and pleasure. But at the beginning of the nineteenth century, based on Hegel and other philosophers of the past century, striving towards knowledge, power and pleasure had become not only

mankind’s natural right, but also its moral imperative. (If “power” sounds too negative, replace it with control over one’s circumstances, or “freedom”, which is what power actually affords).

Ethical discourse had moved away from the idea of a personal Satan; the Devil or principle of evil was seen by most as some kind of natural or anti-natural force. The temptation was still there, but considered as a psychological or interior impulse in man; which needed to be either resisted or embraced. Early in Goethe’s version, Faust comments on the “two souls”

within him. One wants to be happy in the moment, “forsaking its brother in grossly loving zest”;

the other strives for higher things in an unplacatable desire to know and experience (“rises

forcibly in quest of rarefied ancestral spheres” (qtd. in Treitel 29). It’s interesting that, for Goethe, both reason and passion are represented as a striving towards. Rather than the traditional

emphasis on abnegation or resistance, Faust’s conflict is between the quest for knowledge and the quest for happiness.

The story begins with Faust contemplating suicide, because after years of study, he still has so much left that he doesn’t know, and fears the impossibility of total knowledge. This lack of knowledge creates an unending dissatisfaction with life. This is noticed in Heaven, where the Lord claims this dissatisfaction will eventually lead to spiritual fruits; Mephistopheles (the devil) disagrees, seeing only an animal impulse towards pleasure and away from pain. They make a wager (similar to the story of Job)—Mephistopheles claims he can lead Faust on a downward course; the Lord claims, even in his darkest aberration, a good man will still be conscious of the right path. In symbolism that parallels Comus, when the Lady refuses the cup that represents temptation (and so death of chastity) Faust embraces his death: “Pure crystal goblet! forth I draw thee now (375). . . Let this last draught, the product of my skill, / My own free choice, be quaff'd with resolute will.” (390) This deliberate decision is described as a bold step into the abyss (the remark that “phantasy creates her own self-torturing brood” is almost certainly a direct nod to Milton’s description of Death):

Now is the time, through deeds, to show that mortals The calm sublimity of gods can feel;

To shudder not at yonder dark abyss,

Where phantasy creates her own self-torturing brood, Right onward to the yawning gulf to press,

Around whose narrow jaws rolleth hell’s fiery flood;

With glad resolve to take the fatal leap,

Though danger threaten thee, to sink in endless sleep! (366-374)

Faust is distracted by Easter bells and temporarily abstains from the potion; in the meanwhile, Mephistopheles introduces himself as a spirit that negates (“evermore denies”), and part of the power that produces good, while scheming evil. He offers Faust his abilities to conjure: “Rich

odours shall regale your smell, On choicest sweets your palate dwell, Your feelings thrill with ecstasy” (1114-16), but Faust has no desire for pleasure or wordly ambition. He curses hope, love’s dream, faith and patience, wine and pleasure. Eventually he agrees to let Faust try to tempt him with joy’s lure, and that this temptation will last until Faust is satisfied with some experience enough to want it to linger awhile longer. They sign the agreement with a drop of blood. Faust cautions Mephistopheles that he expects more than simple joy, but a total human experience (in a sense, Faust is prioritizing the Romantic pursuit of experience over the Rational pursuit of

knowledge):

I crave excitement, agonizing bliss, Enamour'd hatred, quickening vexation.

Purg’d from the love of knowledge, my vocation, The scope of all my powers henceforth be this, To bare my breast to every pang,—to know In my heart’s core all human weal and woe, To grasp in thought the lofty and the deep, Men’s various fortunes on my breast to heap, And thus to theirs dilate my individual mind,

And share at length with them the shipwreck of mankind. (1140-50)

Mephistopheles tries to get Faust to find pleasure in simple things, like drinking with friends in a tavern. There’s also a telling passage where Mephistopheles meets a witch, who doesn’t

recognize him without his hooves, tail, talons and horns—when she at last recognizes him as Satan, he tells her not to use that name, and that he’s changed his appearance to more easily deceive people.

Then Faust sees a young girl, Gretchen, and demands to possess her by midnight. Her innocence and beauty momentarily charms him, and he asks Faust for a case of jewels to impress her with. Gretchen’s mother, however, sees the gift as evil and gives it to a priest. With

persistence, however, Faust wins Gretchen’s heart (the same day) and kisses her. Once again alone, however, he notes how quickly his despression returns.

With this exalted joy,

Which lifts me near and nearer to the gods, Thou gav'st me this companion, unto whom I needs must cling, though cold and insolent, He still degrades me to myself, and turns

Thy glorious gifts to nothing, with a breath. (3003-05)

Faust also recognizes he’s destroyed Gretchen’s innocence; she was happy, but now that he’s left her, life is “the grave; and all the world to me is turned to gall.” Faust views himself as a

predatory monster:

Do I not ever feel her woe?

The outcast am I not, unhoused, unblest, Inhuman monster, without aim or rest,

Who, like the greedy surge, from rock to rock,

Sweeps down the dread abyss with desperate shock? (3010-14)

When he returns to her, she asks him if he believes in God. He answers by describing the nature’s “impenetrable agencies” and the “feeling when thou utterly art blest,”

Call it Bliss! Heart! Love! God!

I have no name for it!

‘Tis feeling all;

Name is but sound and smoke

Shrouding the glow of heaven. (3220-25)

Gretchen isn’t convinced, pointing out that he’s “not a Christian,” but admits her desire for him.

Faust gives her a potion, to put her mother to sleep so that Faust can visit at night. But the potion is too strong and the mother dies. Her neighbors begin to gossip, and her brother steps in to defend her honor, just as Faust is ready to leave her, now that he’s gotten what he wanted.

Guided by Mephistopheles, Faust kills her brother and they flee the scene on a broomstick, to attend a summit of evil and demonic powers. Faust sees a vision of Gretchen with a red line around her neck and discovers that he got her pregnant. After abandoning her with child, and killing both her mother and brother, Gretchen has drowned the newborn child in despair, and is now condemned for murder. She’s to be executed the next day. Faust tries to save her in prison but her mind is gone and she doesn’t recognize him. She suffers because of her memory of what she’s done; Faust tries to get her to forget, but she refuses.

In misery! despairing! long wandering pitifully on the face of the earth and now imprisoned! This gentle hapless creature, immured in the dungeon as a malefactor and reserved for horrid tortures! That it should come to this! To this! (4195)

Mephistopheles answers that he didn’t force make Faust do anything he didn’t want to do: “Did we force ourselves on thee, or thou on us? . . . Who was it plunged her into perdition? I or thou?”

Part One of Faust demonstrates how destructive human desire can be: lured by beauty, Faust destroys several lives to satisfy his lust.

In Part Two of Faust, however, (published in 1832), Faust becomes exempt from the devil’s clutches because of his striving, and is saved. Marlowe’s version ends with Faust’s damnation as a warning to others. “Regard his Hellish fall, Whose fiendful fortune may exhort

the wise Only to wonder at unlawful things whose deepness doth entice such forward wits To practice more than heavenly power permits” (Scene XIV). In Goethe’s version, after a lifetime doing “evil” (sins of hubris, like using technology to reclaim land from the sea), Faust finds a touch of guilt and decides to focus upon improving the lives of his subjects: that thought brings him happiness, and he dies. Mephistopheles tries to claim his soul, but angels descend and steal it away—because Faust’s last act of will was selfless, he won salvation.

He’s escaped, this noble member Of the spirit world, from evil, Whoever strives, in his endeavour, We can rescue from the devil. (1194-97)

“Whoever strives, can be saved” might indicate that dissatisfaction and the quest for knowledge and wisdom will eventually lead to goodness; as sensory pleasures are fleeting and long-lasting happiness can only be found in helping others.

Mephistopheles, however, feels cheated. “I have been robbed of costly, peerless profit, The lofty soul pledged me by solemn forfeit, They’ve spirited it slyly from my writ.” Shattuck agrees that the ending seem unsatisfying, since Faust is saved for a moment of goodwill after years of evil deeds: “It would be hard to contrive a more arbitrary and unearned ending to the lengthy drama” (101). On the other hand, Faust can be seen as a satire on the religious belief that a man can be saved on his deathbed.

Is the pursuit of knowledge evil? Is there a limit to man’s knowledge? These themes were taken up by Byron in Manfred (1816). Manfred is a philosopher and scientist, and more than that, a magician. Like Faust, he is seeking death, or “forgetfulness.” He was in love with a woman, his

Witch of the Alps, to either kill him or bring back his sister. She offers to help if he serves her, but he refuses to submit. The next day he’s visited by the Abbot of St. Maurice, who asks if the rumors are true: has he been communing with evil spirits? When Manfred dies, and a spirit comes to take his soul, he refuses the spirit, because his own guilt tortures him more than Hell ever could.

Metaphorically, you could say that Manfred and Faust’s quest for knowledge, their endless desire for more, killed the identity/subjectivity of their loves, who were beautiful and simple in faith. Manfred says he killed

Not with my hand, but heart – which broke her heart – It gazed on mine, and withered. I have shed

Blood, but not hers – and yet her blood was shed -- I saw – and could not staunch it. (2.2.125-129)

The path to knowledge is the path to death, to the obliteration of self; it necessarily leads to the death of love, the mirror that reflects your sense of self-identity. The only cure is obedience, which purges responsibility, but this is one thing Manfred cannot handle.

I will not swear – Obey! and whom? the spirits Whose presence I command, and be the slave Of those who served me – Never! (2.2.169-71)

Manfred is told he will die tomorrow, and prepares his casket. When the Abbot comes to visit him and offers to act as an intermediary, to save his soul, Manfred refuses.

I hear thee. This is my reply; whate'er

Heaven and myself. – I shall not choose a mortal To be my mediator. Have I sinn'd

Against your ordinances? prove and punish! (3.1.65-69)

When the spirit comes to claim him in death, he defies it as well. He wrestles with the spirits to his last breath; claiming, like Milton, that the mind is its own place. Unlike Faust, Manfred takes total responsibility for his own actions.

I do defy ye, though I feel my soul

Is ebbing from me, yet I do defy ye; 100 Nor will I hence, while I have earthly breath

I breathe my scorn upon ye – earthly strength (3.4.114-18) . . .

The mind which is immortal makes itself Requital for its good or evil thoughts – Is its own origin of ill and end –

And its own place and time – its innate sense. . .

Thou didst not tempt me, and thou couldst not tempt me;

I have not been thy dupe, nor am thy prey – But was my own destroyer, and will be

My own hereafter. – Back, ye baffled fiends!

The hand of death is on me – but not yours! (3.4.15-62)

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus (1818) merges two main themes; the idea of a creature rebelling against his creator, such as Satan in Paradise Lost, and the idea of a proud scientist lifting nature’s veil to understand the rules of the universe (like Faust or Manfred).

The creature in Frankenstein actually reads Paradise Lost (along with Goethe’s Sorrows of

Werther) and comments, “They produced in me an infinity of new images and feelings, that sometimes raised me to ecstasy, but more frequently sunk me into the lowest dejection.”

But Paradise Lost excited different and far deeper emotions. It moved every feeling of wonder and awe that the picture of an omnipotent God warring with his creatures was capable of exciting. Many times I considered Satan as the fitter emblem of my condition, for often, like him, when I viewed the bliss of my protectors, the bitter gall of envy rose within me. (99)

The monster identifies with Satan, for being discarded by his creator, and rages against his own maker. “Unfeeling, heartless creator! You had endowed me with perceptions and passions and then cast me abroad an object for the scorn and horror of mankind” (107) Like his maker, no matter how much good he tried to do, people immediately judged him on looks alone and treated him with violence. Unloved, he is driven to embrace evil. “There is love in me the likes of which you’ve never seen. There is rage in me the likes of which should never escape. If I am not satisfied in he one, I will indulge the other.” Like Satan, he abhors what he becomes, but feels compelled to continue.

I abhorred myself. But when I discovered that he, the author at once of my existence and of its unspeakable torments, dared to hope for happiness; that while he

accumulated wretchedness and despair upon me he sought his own enjoyment in

impotent envy and bitter indignation filled me with an insatiable thirst for

vengeance. . . I knew that I was preparing for myself a deadly torture; but I was the slave, not the master, of an impulse which I detested, yet could not disobey. . . I had cast off all feeling, subdued all anguish, to riot in the excess of my despair. Evil thenceforth became my good. Urged thus far, I had no choice but to adapt my nature to an element which I had willingly chosen. The completion of my daemoniacal design became an insatiable passion. (167-68)

In 1820, John Keats tried to create his own epic poem Hyperion, which reframed Milton’s Paradise Lost by using gods of mythology, rather than Christianity. It began with Saturn, having just been overthrown by the younger, “infant thunderer” and rebel, Jove. In the fragment that exists, Saturn is shown, like Satan, as a fallen god, and Hyperion urges readers to “strive” and take actions – “seize the arrow’s barb Before the tense string murmur.”

Keats never finished the poem. In a letter, he writes “I have given up Hyperion—There were too many Milton inversions in it” (qtd. in Leonard 98). However in a letter to his siblings, Keats confirms the Romantic view that pain and suffering is necessary for knowledge, and should be embraced rather than avoided. “Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul” (qtd. in Moton 377).

In 1820, Percy Bysshe Shelley published Prometheus Unbound. Although he claims Prometheus is a better model for poetry than Satan, he nevertheless focuses on resistance in the face of a stronger power. For this reason he resisted Æschylus’ original conclusion which ends in reconciliation between the two. “The moral interest of the fable, which is so powerfully sustained by the sufferings and endurance of Prometheus, would be annihilated if we could conceive of him as unsaying his high language and quailing before his successful and perfidious adversary.”

For Shelley’s Prometheus, like Manfred, defiance is absolute and eternal.

To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;

To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;

To defy Power, which seems omnipotent;

To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;

Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;

This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be

Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;

This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory.” (qtd. in Ferber 206)

In Essay on the Devil and Devils, Shelley describes how belief in the Devil and eternal punishment is rapidly fading from polite society:

They seem to wish to divest him of all personality. . . Hell is popularly considered as metaphorical of the torments of an evil conscience and by no means capable of being topographically ascertained. No one likes to mention the torments of the everlasting fire and the poisonous gnawing of the worm that liveth forever and ever. (qtd. in Oldridge 42)

In the Defense of Poetry, Shelley claims that the supremacy of Milton’s genius is due to the

“bold neglect of moral purpose” in Paradise Lost. Milton’s Devil, Shelley claims, has far more virtue than his God.

Implacable hate, patient cunning and a sleepless refinement of device to inflict the extremest anguish on an enemy, these things are evil; and although venial in a slave, are not to be forgiven in a tyrant; although redeemed by much that ennobles his defeat in one subdued, are marked by all that dishonours the conquest in the victor.

Milton’s Devil as a moral being is so far superior to his God, as One who perseveres

torture, is to One who in the cold security of undoubted triumph inflicts the most horrible revenge upon his enemy, not from any mistaken notion of inducing him to repent of a perseverance in enmity, but with the alleged design of exasperating him to deserve new torments. (qtd. in Lujik 72)

In 1821, Byron explored similar themes in Cain. Lucifer leads Cain on an adventure, and teaches him about the nature of Good and Evil. God and Lucifer are not in themselves Good or Evil; and things need to be judged independently on their own merits.

He as a conqueror will call the conquered Evil, but what will be the Good he gives?

Were I the victor, his works would be deemed The only evil ones. . .

Evil and Good are things in their own essence, And not made good or evil by the Giver;

Evil and Good are things in their own essence, And not made good or evil by the Giver;