Skip to content
Published on

Faust — A Bargain of Knowledge and the Soul

🇰🇷KO🇺🇸EN🇯🇵JA
Split View필사 모드
Share
Authors

Opening — The Man Who Knows Everything and Is Still Empty

An aging scholar sits alone in his study.

He has studied philosophy, law, and medicine.

He has even worked his way through theology.

And yet he feels that he knows nothing of real worth.

The first monologue of Faust, Part I, begins from exactly this place.

He has given his whole life to knowledge, and that knowledge has not made him feel alive.

The feeling is not a strange one.

Anyone who has achieved a great deal and still felt hungry will recognize it.

Goethe's Faust is a story about that hunger.

In this essay we follow both the man Goethe and the work he wrote over six decades.

We look at the roots of the Faust legend, the wager with Mephistopheles, and the Gretchen tragedy.

We consider restless striving as the human condition, the vast allegory of Part II, and the final redemption.

We also weigh, in a balanced way, how the idea of a Faustian bargain still echoes in today's world of technology and ambition.

Finally, we ask how to read this long two-part poetic drama today.

1. Goethe and Weimar Classicism — A Life's Work

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was born in Frankfurt in 1749.

He died in Weimar in 1832.

He was a poet and a novelist, a playwright and a natural scientist.

He was also a statesman and an administrator.

That one person spanned so many fields is remarkable in itself.

Faust runs like a thread through that entire long life.

Goethe took up the subject as a young man.

The early manuscript of the 1770s, known as the Urfaust, already carried the seed.

Part I was published in 1808.

Part II appeared only in 1832, the year of his death.

From first idea to completion, the work took roughly sixty years.

The Stage of Weimar

Around 1775, Goethe moved to the small duchy of Weimar.

The duchy was small, but it became one of the centers of German culture.

At its heart was the friendship and collaboration of Goethe and Friedrich Schiller.

The movement the two led is often called Weimar Classicism.

It held up the harmony, balance, and restraint of ancient Greece and Rome as an ideal.

At the same time, it took the inner life and the emotions seriously.

Both of these currents flow together in Faust.

Passionate youthful feeling meets classical restraint within a single work.

2. The Faust Legend — The Story Before Goethe

Faust was not a character Goethe invented.

Its roots reach back to a real figure in sixteenth-century Germany.

Tradition tells of a wandering scholar and alchemist named Johann Georg Faust.

All sorts of rumors grew up around him.

He was said to have bargained with the devil for forbidden knowledge and power.

In 1587, a popular book gathering these legends was published.

It is known as the Faustbuch, or Faust chapbook.

In that book, Faust is largely a figure of warning.

He is drawn as a man who proudly oversteps the limits set for humankind and is destroyed for it.

Marlowe's Faust

The English playwright Christopher Marlowe also took up the subject.

His play, Doctor Faustus, was written near the end of the sixteenth century.

Marlowe's Faust, too, is dragged down to hell at the end.

In this version, the bargain ends in clear damnation.

Goethe inherited this long tradition.

But he changed the ending in a fundamental way.

Goethe's Faust moves not toward ruin but toward redemption.

That reversal is the single greatest mark of Goethe's version.

3. The Pact with Mephistopheles — An Unusual Wager

The story opens with a Prologue in Heaven.

God and the devil Mephistopheles speak together about humankind.

Mephistopheles boasts that he can lead Faust astray.

God permits the attempt.

As long as a person strives, God says, that person is bound to err.

Here Faust, like the figure in the Book of Job, is placed upon a trial.

The Terms of the Pact

Mephistopheles approaches Faust.

He offers to serve Faust in every wish here in this world.

In return, Faust is to serve him in the world beyond.

But the terms Goethe sets for the wager are unusual.

In the older stories, the pact is usually secured against a fixed number of years.

Goethe's Faust is different.

Faust wagers that he will never rest content in any single moment.

If he should ever say to a passing moment, "Stay, you are so beautiful," then he has lost.

In that instant his soul belongs to Mephistopheles.

In other words, the heart of this wager is not pleasure but stillness.

The moment Faust is satisfied and stops striving, he is defeated.

Striving and Contentment

This condition is the key to the whole work.

Mephistopheles tries to satisfy Faust.

He tries to fill him with pleasure, with love, with power.

But if the human being cannot finally be filled, the devil cannot win.

Goethe thus sets contentment and striving directly against each other.

To stop is to lose; to keep moving forward is not to lose.

Below is a simple sketch of the terms of the wager.

        Faust's Wager

  Mephistopheles -------- Faust
        |                    |
  serves in this life  serves in the next
        |                    |
        +--------------------+
                 |
         the deciding moment
                 |
   "Stay, you are so beautiful"
                 |
     if he says it  -> Faust loses
     if he never does -> Faust is saved

4. The Gretchen Tragedy — The Heart of Part I

Faust is given back his youth.

He then meets Margarete, an innocent young woman known by the pet name Gretchen.

The two fall in love.

But this love soon turns to catastrophe.

A Collapsing World

Faust enters Gretchen's life.

As a result, her world falls apart piece by piece.

Her mother dies.

Her brother Valentin is also killed by Faust's hand.

Gretchen bears Faust's child.

Left alone in despair, she drowns her newborn.

She is seized and imprisoned, awaiting execution.

A Voice of Redemption

Faust goes to the prison to save her.

But Gretchen refuses to flee.

She acknowledges her guilt and entrusts herself to God's judgment.

Mephistopheles declares that she is condemned.

But a voice from above answers that she is redeemed.

Part I ends with this scene, tragic yet leaving room for hope.

Gretchen's story shows how the pride of the learned can crush an ordinary life.

What is sacrificed here is not an abstract idea but one person's concrete existence.

5. Ceaseless Striving — The Human Condition

The core of Faust as a character is striving.

He never stays in one place.

Unsatisfied by knowledge, he presses on toward experience.

Unable to rest in love, he presses on toward a larger stage.

This endless movement is what Goethe saw as the essence of the human being.

Blessing and Curse

This striving has two faces.

On one hand, it makes the human being great.

Because it does not stop, humanity grows and creates.

On the other hand, it can also destroy what surrounds it.

Gretchen's tragedy was the price of that.

Goethe does not simply glorify striving.

The striving human errs, and in erring wounds others.

And yet Goethe sees this very striving as the ground of human dignity.

The will not to stop is what makes a person truly human.

This balanced view is what lifts Faust above a simple morality play.

6. The Allegory of Part II and Faust's Redemption

Part II is quite different in mood from Part I.

If Part I is a personal tragedy, Part II widens onto the stage of the world.

A Vast World of Symbols

In Part II, Faust enters the court of the Emperor.

He travels back through time to ancient Greece.

There he meets Helen, a woman of matchless beauty.

He is joined with Helen of Troy, the very symbol of Western beauty.

This meeting is read as a symbolic union of classical antiquity and the modern spirit.

From the two of them a child, Euphorion, is born.

But Euphorion tries to fly too high and falls.

The scene hints at the danger in the human longing for the infinite.

Part II weaves myth, history, and symbol tightly together in this way.

For that reason it is also famous for being difficult to read.

The Last Undertaking and Redemption

Toward the end, Faust throws himself into a vast project.

He seeks to hold back the sea and make new land.

He wants to build a home where countless people may live freely.

By now Faust is blind, yet he sees the vision of that future.

In that moment he at last speaks words of contentment.

On free land, among free people, he says he would tell the moment to stay.

By the terms of the wager, he now seems to have lost.

And Faust breathes his last.

Whoever Strives Shall Be Saved

Mephistopheles moves to claim the soul.

But angels descend and carry Faust's soul away.

The work sings these words.

Whoever strives on, always striving, him we can redeem.

Gretchen's soul, too, intercedes on his behalf.

Faust is at last raised on high.

Here Goethe overturns the ending of the old legend.

Faust moves not toward hell but toward grace.

Even his words of contentment do not bar redemption, for they were turned not toward himself but toward a community.

Striving itself becomes the ground of his salvation.

7. The Faustian Bargain — A Cultural Idea

The story of Faust left behind a common phrase.

That phrase is the Faustian bargain, or the Faustian pact.

It means a choice to give up something precious in exchange for greater power, knowledge, or success.

The price is often described as one's conscience, one's soul, or one's humanity.

The idea is still widely used today.

In an Age of Ambition and Technology

In modern usage, the image appears especially around ambition and technology.

Growth that knows no limit and expansion that will not stop are often called Faustian.

The phrase comes to mind before a choice to gain a new power at the cost of something lost.

Here, though, balance is needed.

Goethe's Faust is not simply a story that condemns ambition.

It is, rather, a story that in the end redeems the striving human being.

So reading the Faustian bargain as purely negative is only half a reading.

A Measured View

Technology and ambition are not evils in themselves.

The question is toward what, and at what cost, one presses forward.

Faust is redeemed at the end because his striving finally turned toward others.

The direction of holding back the sea to make a home for people mattered.

Gretchen's tragedy, by contrast, shows the price of chasing only one's own desire.

So Faust puts a question to us today.

Toward what is your striving turned?

Before that question, the Faustian bargain becomes both a warning and an encouragement.

8. Goethe's Place in World Literature

Goethe is counted among the summits of German literature.

Many regard him as a master of modern European literature.

His influence reaches far beyond the German-speaking world.

A Wide Influence

The Sorrows of Young Werther set off a wave of feeling across all of Europe.

The Wilhelm Meister novels became a model for the novel of formation, the Bildungsroman.

And Faust is the peak in which his thought and art come together.

Goethe was also the figure who did much to spread the very idea of world literature.

He held that literature should cross the borders of any one nation and become something shared by humankind.

A Legacy for Later Ages

Countless writers and thinkers after Goethe answered Faust in their own work.

In the twentieth century, Thomas Mann rewrote the theme in the novel Doctor Faustus.

In music, Gounod, Berlioz, Liszt, and Mahler, among others, drew inspiration from Faust.

Faust thus spread beyond literature into the arts as a whole.

It is rare for a single poetic drama to leave so wide an echo.

9. How to Read a Two-Part Poetic Drama Today

Faust is by no means an easy work.

Part II in particular is easy to get lost in without some background.

But a few habits of reading can bring it much closer.

Start with Part I, Leaning on the Characters

If you are reading it for the first time, begin with Part I.

Part I has a clear line in the story of Gretchen.

Following the feelings of the characters, it reads naturally.

Part II can wait; there is no harm in taking it on afterward.

Do Not Try to Solve Every Symbol

When you read Part II, you need not strain to grasp every allegory perfectly.

Holding on to the broad flow and the key scenes is enough.

The meeting with Helen, and the final land-making and redemption: hold these two axes and much comes into view.

The details can be filled in a little at a time on a later reading.

Use a Good Translation and Notes

Faust is a poetic drama written in verse.

The music of the original is hard to carry over in full.

So it helps to choose an edition that comes with a good translation and commentary.

Footnotes and introductions lower the threshold of unfamiliar myth and history.

Read with a Question in Hand

Above all, this work comes alive when you read it holding a question.

What is it that I cannot be satisfied with?

Toward whom is my own striving turned?

With such questions, a poetic drama two centuries old draws near as a story of today.

Closing — To Err Is to Be Human

Faust is the story of a human being who cannot be filled.

He knew, and was not satisfied; he possessed, and could not stop.

That endless longing sometimes brought down those around him.

Gretchen's tragedy was its heavy price.

And yet Goethe does not, in the end, abandon this erring human being.

As long as he strives, a person errs, but that very striving leads him toward redemption.

The paradox Goethe left us still holds today.

We are still unfilled, and we still press on.

What matters, perhaps, is the direction in which we press.

Faust is an old mirror that makes us ask that direction for ourselves.

Questions to Ponder

  1. At what moment would you want to say, "Stay, you are so beautiful"? Would that contentment be a blessing or a danger?

  2. Faust is redeemed at the end because his striving turned toward others. How much do you think the direction of striving changes its worth?

  3. In Gretchen's tragedy, how far does Faust's responsibility reach? In what forms does the pride of the learned appear today?

  4. The phrase Faustian bargain is often used to talk about modern technology and ambition. Is this image closer to a warning, or to an encouragement?

References

Discuss on Twitter • View on GitHub