Goethe’s statement to this effect occurs as early as 1820 in his reply to a letter from Karl Ernst Schubarth, a classical scholar from Breslau whom he had recently met and whose comments on the yet-to-be-completed Faust he particularly valued. The relevant passage is worth quoting more exactly:
Your sense of the ending is also correct. Mephistopheles must only half win his wager; half the blame sticks to Faust, but the good old Lord’s prerogative of mercy is exercised at the same time, giving the whole story a very happy conclusion. (Letter to Schubarth, 3 November 1820)
Unlike most of Goethe’s comments on Part Two, this one was made some years before his main work on it began, and is therefore, like his already quoted remark to Boisserée in 1815, of particular interest. Two points in it are worth noting: first, that it reflects an earlier plan (which Goethe still seems to have had in mind at this time but later abandoned, probably in 1825) to submit Faust to a divine court of judgement, rather as the question of the hero’s guilt in Aeschylus’s Oresteia is decided in the end by the goddess Athena. A brief jotting from those years (paralipomenon BA 112) alludes to this idea: ‘Heaven. Christ, his Mother, the evangelists and all the saints. Judgement on Faust.’ Evidently the ‘good old Lord [der alte Hen]’, like Athena, was to have the casting vote in this difficult case. Secondly, of course, this very Goethean statement to Schubarth about Mephistopheles is made in terms of the story of the Wager. The ending, as Schubarth rightly sensed Goethe to be envisaging it, demands that Mephistopheles shall ‘only half win his wager’. This could refer either to his wager with God in the ‘Prologue in Heaven’ (see Part One, Introd. pp. xxviii-xxxv) or to his wager with Faust in Part One, Scene 7; or to both of these, since they are essentially the same. At the end, as Goethe intends it, Mephistopheles will have made his point about Faust and about mankind, but God and Faust will have made theirs as well. The correspondence with Schubarth shows that if Goethe did retain in his mind, through the years and decades, a general schematic conception of how Faust was to be concluded, the Wager motif was meant to play some part in it. In the event, in Scene 21, Goethe reverts formally to the terms of the Faust-Mephistopheles wager (1699-1706): namely, that Faust will die if he ever reaches the state of contentment he believes to be impossible, and blesses the passing moment. Considerations of dramatic form now seem to constrain Goethe to bring the 100-year-old Faust’s life to an end on the utterance of his self-forbidden words. In the H2 (1825-6) version of his last speech, looking ahead to living with a multitude of others on his ‘true territory’, he declares (my emphasis):
[Now] to the moment I may [darf] say:
Beautiful moment, do not pass away!
In the elaborated 1831 version Goethe reformulates this with careful ambiguity, to underline his conception of a wager half won and half lost: Faust speaks the forbidden words not to the present moment but to the imaginary future moment at which his vision will be realized and he will contemplate the new land and its inhabitants:
Then to the moment I might [dürfte] say:
Beautiful moment, do not pass away!
(11581-2, my emphasis)
But since in this version he is still not saying it, it can be argued legalistically that he has not yet lost his bet, and may therefore still qualify for salvation. The verbal device is a means to Goethe’s end, a subordinate function of his general intention of ‘saving’ Faust anyway. It is entirely in keeping with his ‘half and half adjudication between Faust and the Devû (or God and the Devil), as well as with his admixture of noble and heroic and even self-critical elements into Faust’s closing speeches. Everything about his treatment of the salvation issue betokens a both ways approach, a mentality of et… et rather than aut… out. The same applies to the theological position he now also finds it convenient to adopt for purposes of the denouement of his poem: a Goethean (and if anything Catholic rather than Protestant) variant of the traditional doctrinal balancing act between ‘salvation by works’ and ‘salvation by faith’. The concept of ‘works’ he retains as ‘activity’; ‘faith’ does not come into his discussion of Faust at all, and is replaced by divine grace, which in this case seems more particularly to mean grace mediated by loving intercession, and perhaps transferred merit. At the end, she who was ‘once known as Gretchen’ will be faithful and loving enough to save Faust (12069-95), just as later (in the conscious imitation by Ibsen) Solveig will be faithful and loving enough to save Peer Gynt.
Clearly, if it had really been Goethe’s intention that Faust in the end should be seen as evil or deranged, a kind of Ceausescu figure or negative King Canute, then his ‘salvation’ would be entirely a paradoxical operation of this kind of grace, having no perceptible continuity with his nature and actions. But Goethe characteristically insists on the two-way view: neither works nor grace can be presumed to be sufficient without the other, but grace can make good what works lack. In June 1831, in the very act of finishing Faust, he clearly professes this formula to Eckermann in a much quoted conversation. Reminding him first of the words of the angels in Scene 23 (11934-41) as they ascend with Faust’s soul, to the effect that the man who never gives up striving ‘can’ be redeemed, more especially if love from on high has intervened on his behalf,* Goethe comments that this is
the key to Faust’s salvation: in Faust himself an ever higher and purer activity continuing right to the end, and from on high the eternal Love coming to his aid. This is entirely in keeping with our religious conception, according to which we are not saved by our own strength alone but by supervenient divine grace. (Conversation with Eckermann, 6 June 1831)
The ‘striving’ referred to in the text (11936) seems as always to be merely a more poetic word for what to Eckermann Goethe calls ‘activity’. As if to acknowledge, however, that to describe Faust merely as having never ceased to act would be a morally neutral truism, he adds that his activity has also been ‘ever higher and purer’.
This qualification remains one of the irreducible obscurities in Goethe’s discourse about Faust, despite the attempts of some commentators to demonstrate that the hero’s pursuit of Helen is higher and purer than his pursuit of Gretchen and that his doings in Acts IV and V are higher and purer still. We are perhaps on safer ground if we merely credit him with tireless action as such, especially in the light of two further, much quoted passages in Goethe’s conversations with Eckermann. In these, although they do not expressly refer to Faust, Goethe formulates his reasons for believing in human immortality (Unsterblichkeit) or survival (Fortdauer) after physical death; neither, of course, is quite the same thing as salvation (Erlösung).
Man should believe in immortality, he has a right to, it is natural to him, and he may rely on religious assurances … For me, the conviction of our survival is derived from the concept of activity; for if I continue unceasingly active till the end of my life, nature is under an obligation to provide me with another form of existence when my present form can no longer keep pace with my mind. (Conversation of 4 February 1829)
I have no doubt of our survival, for the entelechy is indispensable to nature; but we are not all immortal in the same way, and in order to manifest oneself as a great entelechy in that future state, it is also necessary to be one.* (Conversation of 1 September 1829)
By ‘entelechy’ (as we have already partly seen, cf. p. xxx above) Goethe meant the spiritual energy innate in the physical self, uniting itself to the elemental substance by a process both mysterious and natural; this is to all intents and purposes what more popular parlance calls the ‘soul’, a word which Goethe tends to avoid; in Scene 22, for instance, he leaves it to Mephistopheles. In a manuscript variant in Scene 23, Faust’s soul or ‘immortal part’ is called ‘Faust’s entelechy’. On Goethe’s premisses, his never ceasing activity has been the necessary and sufficient condition for his survival, though in so far as salvation is distinct from survival, grace appears to be necessary as well. Accordingly, it is under the influence of grace that in the final scene (23) Faust’s entele
chy detaches itself from its earthly substance and moves into an unknown realm of transfiguration, drawn onwards by an intervening love by which divine grace is mediated to him.
It should be noted that in so far as Goethe uses Catholic doctrines and imagery in these last scenes, they are not to be taken as indications of belief, but simply as a poetic device, impressive though the poetry may be. This is made clear by what Goethe says to Eckermann in another passage of the conversation on 6 June 1831:
You will understand that the conclusion, with the upward journey of the redeemed soul, was very difficult to write, and that in dealing with such supernatural, scarcely imaginable matters I might very well have lost my way in a nebulous void if I had not used the sharply defined figures and concepts of Christian and ecclesiastical tradition to impose on my poetic intentions the salutary limitation of a certain form and solidity.
The traditional forms are ‘used’, but what is offered is a personal and aesthetic synthesis of Christian and pagan elements. The concepts of divine grace, divine love, and earthly love are blended: from 11938 f. it is not immediately clear whose love it is that has looked down from on high to take Faust’s part. It should be remembered that ‘Mountain Gorges’ and the ‘Classical Walpurgis Night’ were written in the same year (1830) within months of each other; and it is probable (as Williams points out*) that the latter was intended as a ‘complementary mirror-image’ of the former, or more particularly of the Sea Festival with which it ends. Goethe’s greatest et… et or balancing act of all is his juxtaposition of the world of pagan sensuality, of Galatea and Helen, of ‘Eros, first cause of all [Eros, der aïles begonnen]’ (8479), with that of the purified entelechy, of the penitent female sinners, of the Mater Gloriosa and the erotic-mystical call of the Eternal Feminine (‘Eternal Womanhood’, 12110). Such synthesizing nuances belong to the world of poetry, in which, as Goethe liked to remark, there are no contradictions.
Love as a cosmic force, the divine Eros, the divine Caritas, which intervenes to save Faust and may even save the Devil, is in fact the unifying theme of the two concluding scenes which follow Faust’s death: the scherzo ‘Burial Rites’ and the mystic finale ‘Mountain Gorges’. The former (Sc. 22) is the last of the three ‘core’ scenes of 1825-6, and nearly all of it was certainly written between February and April 1825, as the manuscript fragments show; twenty lines were then added in 1831 to Mephistopheles’ last speech. It also almost certainly represents Goethe’s original conception (c.1800) of how Faust’s soul was to be rescued from Mephistopheles and the latter comically defeated (the classical years of his ‘best period’ were also those in which Goethe was most inclined to literary ribaldry). Both in ‘Burial Rites’ and in ‘Mountain Gorges’ he adopts the method he was to explain to Eckermann in the passage quoted above, and makes vivid use of medieval Christian imagery. A particular source is known to have been Lasinio’s engravings of the fourteenth-century frescoes by Orcagna in the cloister of the cemetery (the ‘Campo Santo’) next to the cathedral in Pisa; on one of these, ‘II Trionfo délia Morte’, many details of Scene 22 are based. He also takes the opportunity, however, to satirize traditional dualistic notions of the ‘soul’ as a gaseous or butterfly-like entity distinct from the body and located in some specific part of it such as the alimentary canal or the navel (11664-9). Mephistopheles’ assistant devils, summoned from a theatrical hell as reinforcements, are instructed to keep watch for it at every orifice of the dead Faust. Using old and popular stage traditions, Goethe creates in this scene a remarkable and sophisticated effect of alternation and musical dissonance, reminiscent of the first garden scene in Part One (Sc. 15) in which the two contrasting couples (Faust and Gretchen, Mephistopheles and Martha) enter by turns. The angels dramatically appear from above in a ‘flash of glory’, interrupting Mephistopheles’ sardonic drivelling monologue; the comic and lustful tone of his subsequent speeches is similarly interrupted by their metrically contrasting, unironic lyrical choruses. Mephistopheles tries to dismiss this music as epicene choirboyish stuff, which reminds him of an unsuccessful infernal plot to halt the breeding of the human race by sterilization (11689 f.), an invention which had merely made male sopranos fashionable and led to the use of castrato boys in church choirs such as that of the Sistine Chapel (11691 f.*). But what the visitants sing about is love, symbolized by roses, which also seem (on the evidence of 11942 ff. in the next scene) to represent grace mediated by the Penitent Women. The roses burn the assistant devils and put them to flight; Mephistopheles stands his ground, but the divine Eros unexpectedly and grotesquely takes possession of him, distracting him from his business as he studies and comments on the charms of the adolescent male angels and wonders whether they are devils in disguise. Recovering himself only to find that they have vanished with his supposed victim’s ‘immortal part’, he is left with his rueful reflections which end with a grudging acknowledgement: the power of this cosmic amorous folly must indeed be great, if in the end it could overcome even such a cynic as himself (11840-3). A trace, clearly, of the intention half-seriously hinted at in a conversation of 1816 recalled by Johannes Daniel Falk a passage, Goethe promises, will be found in Faust after his death in which ‘the Devil himself finds grace and mercy before God’. And that, he adds, will be something for which his German readers will not easily forgive him (conversation of ?21 June 1816).
In the last scene, Goethe drops the mock-naïve mystery-play style; ‘der alte Hen’ (as God has irretrievably become) does not make a personal anthropomorphic appearance as in the ‘Prologue in Heaven’, or in the intended Epilogue in which he was to sit in judgement over Faust and give him the benefit of the doubt. Asked by the (not wholly reliable) Friedrich Fôrster in 1828 whether that would not indeed be the right way to end the drama, Goethe is reported to have shaken his head and replied: ‘But that would be in the spirit of the Enlightenment. Faust ends as a very old man, and in old age we become mystics.’ Instinct rightly guided him to change the plan, to take us not into heaven but to the fringes of heaven, to a place both earthly and unearthly, a transitional region opening on the unknowable Otherness. This frontier is still visible at first, a landscape that will become a cloudscape: Goethe again uses the ‘salutary form and solidity’ of human art. The Pisan frescoes provided it, impressively portraying for him the first Christian hermits in their rocky desert near Egyptian Thebes (the ancient city on the site of Luxor). ‘Gli Anacoreti nella Tebaide’ showed the holy men poised between earth and sky, sitting in their caves, some with wild beasts at their feet, at different heights on the mountainside as if arranged in ascending order of spirituality. In Goethe’s version the ‘Pater Profundus’ is in the ‘lower region’, the ‘Pater Seraphicus’ higher up, and the ‘Doctor Marianus’* near the summit, ‘in the highest and purest cell’. In the course of the scene this motif is developed in terms of the cloud symbolism, like that of Faust’s Act IV soliloquy (see above, p. 1 and note), suggested to Goethe by his meteorological studies. Children who have died at birth, and are therefore innocent, rise into the ether in the form of clouds. Angels hover above the highest peak, carrying Faust’s soul, which in an earlier sketch (BA 239) for Scene 22 was also enveloped in a cloud. Before long we lose sight of the mountain landscape altogether as the ascent continues. The whole picture is in motion, from the extraordinary opening stanzas (‘Woods, hitherwavering…’) to the causal verb of motion that ends the entire poem (‘draws us on high’); a supreme object of love, like Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover, imparts movement to all things (κινε ζ ρμενον). The ‘Pater Ecstaticus’ levitates, ‘hovering up and down’, piercing himself with sensuous masochistic rapture (an experience for which words are found nowhere else in Goethe’s poetry). Nature is flooded with divine energies, even stationary things seeming to be in motion: the Pater Profundus (11866-89) contemplates the downward thrust of the rocks and water, the upward thrust of trees, the cleansing thunderstorm, all of them ‘love’s messengers’. Being nearest to the earth, he prays for release
from bodily and mental turmoil. The newly dead infants or ‘Blessed Boys’ look down on the earth for the first time through the eyes* of the Pater Seraphicus (11910-17); frightenened by what they see, they then soar away from his ‘middle region’ to the still purer air around the summit. All this indirectly expresses the purifying ascent and growth of Faust himself. His ‘immortal part’, now in a ‘chrysalid’ state (11982) already containing its further metamorphosis, is carried to the same ‘upper atmosphere’ by the angels who rescued him in Scene 22 (as they now report, 11934-53). Here he is handed over to the Blessed Boys, in whose company he will break out of his cloudy or cocoon-like integument (11985*); later (12076-83) we are told that they for their part will learn from his experience. It is interesting that the mute but still developing Faust, in his initiation process, is passed from hand to hand (the rescuing angels, the Blessed Boys, Gretchen) just as in Act II he was passed from mentor to mentor (the Homunculus, Chiron, Manto). This is one of the striking parallels between ‘Mountain Gorges’ and the ‘Classical Walpurgis Night’. The Homunculus himself, as we have seen, is paralleled to Faust in various ways: he too is passed from one mentor to another (Anaxagoras, Thales, Nereus, Proteus), and he too is conceived in terms of Goethe’s theory of the ‘entelechy’ (cf. pp. xxx and Ixxii above). But the Homunculus entelechy is pre-incarnate and strives towards incarnation, bodily Entstehung, fusion with the fecund physical life of nature; his quest is accomplished when he is irresistibly drawn to Galatea. This is a pagan mystery, presided over (as Williams has interestingly shown) by the moon-goddess Luna, whom Galatea represents.* By contrast, the Faust entelechy is engaged in a Christian mystery of redemption and transfiguration: having survived physical death, he has still to cast off completely the bonds of earthliness from which the hermit fathers also seek release (11862 f, 11885-7). The Maturer Angels describe the purifying process he must undergo (11954-65; it is in a discarded stage direction to this speech that the variant reading ‘Faust’s entelechy’ occurs). His ‘powerful spirit-energy’ (starke Geisteskrafi) has attracted the physical elements to itself (11958 ff.), forming a ‘subtle bond’ (11962, geeinte Zwienatur, literally ‘united dual nature’): this union can be unmade only by divine love (11964 f.), mediated in this case by Gretchen under the higher authority of the Mater Gloriosa. The Virgin Mother of God appears, like Galatea, only for a brief instant, at the climax of the scene, her epiphany dramatically prepared first by the ecstatic praises of the ‘Doctor Marianus’ (11989-12012), secondly by the prayers of her Penitent Women (themselves in cloud form) who recount their earthly experiences in the most moving stanzas of the scene, and thirdly by Gretchen, emerging from among the Penitents and herself interceded for by them. With her sorrow turned into joy, recalling and transforming the despairing words of her prayer in Part One (Sc. 21), she intercedes for her returning lover, asking and obtaining leave to continue his initiation (12092-5).
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