FAUST Explained: Goethe’s eulogy of the Enlightenment & its philosophical influence

Goethe's Faust is a story about happiness and about the pursuit of happiness, and it remains deeply relatable and moving even today, hundreds of years after it was written. We tend to take it for granted that we all want happiness, but what does that mean? What does it mean to pursue happiness?

And here, we're obviously not talking about happiness in the sense of mere physical pleasure or fleeting good feelings, because emotions have two senses in which we speak about them. You know, you can be angry in a moment, in the sense that you could say, "He said something rude to me, and I got angry." But you could also make a statement such as, "I've been angry at my father for the past 25 years." We understand that the long-term sense of anger doesn't indicate being angry in the short-term sense 24/7 for 25 years. You weren't constantly feeling that intense, fleeting type of anger that arises when something irritates you, uh, or obstructs you, or insults you in the present moment, right?

And it's the same with happiness. You can say, "When you brought me flowers, that made me happy." But the word can also refer to a long-term type of happiness, a deeper, non-fleeting kind of happiness that can lace your whole life across multiple moments, right? In the sense that one talks about when you say, for example, "These days, I'm pretty happy."

We have other words that we could use, maybe not exactly analogous, but related. We could draw upon the word "fulfillment," a state where you have all the elements of your life aligned in the right place. Even if some unexpected or tragic eventuality happens in the future, you can, for the present moment, rest easily that you've done everything correctly, so to speak, or you've done everything you wanted to do, or everything according to your own moral code, or the moral code that you follow. We could also call this eudaimonia, the ancient Greek concept. But I think if we clarify all these aspects of what we're talking about, we still, it all fits into the word that we use, uh, happiness. You know, when we're talking about a more profound, long-term happiness, a state of being and a way of life, not a fleeting emotion.

Now, of course, the Buddhists would argue, alongside philosophers like Arthur Schopenhauer, there is something wrong with this picture. So long as we're not taking into account that happiness can't exist as a final state. You know, if our goal is to achieve, um, a state of what we might call fulfillment, we make an error if we imagine that such fulfillment is anything other than temporary. Which, if we admit that, that would seem to deprive us of the very thing we thought we were looking for, right?

This is because fulfillment is a state of being satiated in our desires by striving in the world and seeking to attain our desires. Um, you know, Schopenhauer and the Buddhists would say, well, you might temporarily gain a state of fulfillment. You know, in many cases, desires go unfulfilled, and then we suffer out of want, right? But even supposing we do fulfill our desires, that doesn't put a stop to the desiring process. What arises when we're totally satiated, in Schopenhauer's view, is not contentment, but boredom. Become bored with satiety and begin to look elsewhere. As soon as our last goal is attained, happiness slips out of our fingers and then beckons us forward to some new desire, some new project.

And indeed, we can draw on support from modern psychology as evidence for this view that human beings actually do not gain happiness in a state of passivity or in a sedentary or just passive existence. Rather, happiness is something found when one is pursuing a goal. It's the pursuit of the goal that gives the happiness, which is not so well described then as contentment, but, uh, as Nietzsche described it, happiness, the feeling of using one's power, of enjoying overcoming resistance or challenges. This is why when people finish, you know, their PhD, for example, you know, many report feeling a sense of sadness or, you know, emptiness, listlessness. Or why elderly people who retire can sometimes deteriorate, you know, mentally and physically, or die within a few years or months. I mean, people flourish when they have a purpose, um, when they have a goal they're trying to attain. Fulfillment is therefore always a temporary thing, and there's no final rest. So long as we're alive, the only rest is in the grave. Which is why, according to Schopenhauer, lasting fulfillment is impossible. The only reprieve is in not playing. The reprieve is in giving up on fulfilling one's.

These themes, sketched here in broad philosophical terms, are the central struggle of the protagonist of Goethe's Faust. Faust is a character with an existential crisis. He's realized there's no state of lasting fulfillment to be found on earth. He has no faith in the church or in God either, though he's followed the pursuit of knowledge to the highest zenith of education available to him, having mastered all the faculties of the university. And yet, he does not find that sense of finality, the sense of lasting contentment. He's found all the knowledge in the world, but this knowledge doesn't account for the world, right? For the world itself, for its existence, or its, uh, its purpose. And thus, unsatisfied with worldly knowledge, Faust turns to magic. And as most of you probably know, if you know anything about the Faust story, so what happens next is an encounter with the devil.

The devil, in Faust's play, uh, sorry, in Goethe's play about Faust, goes by the name Mephistopheles. He arrives to offer Faust a wager, with his soul as collateral. Mephisto will give him all the experiences the world has on offer, all the secret knowledge, all the veil-penetrating magic. And so long as Faust lives on and continues striving, seeking fulfillment after fulfillment, but never satisfied, Mephistopheles shall be his servant on earth. But the agreement they draw is that if Faust should ever say, "Abide, moment, you are so fair," if you should ever find true fulfillment, true happiness on earth, and not bored with the moment, no longer restless, you know, after the latest conquest, if thou should ever wish for the moment to last, Mephistopheles will take his soul down to hell. Faust agrees to the deal, and he agrees to it because he believes that such a moment is impossible for, for him, right? And, um, we might say the degree to which Faust is relatable is if we take the Schopenhauer or Buddhist view of desiring seriously, that on this plane, governed by insatiable desires, it can never happen.

The story of Faust is one of the most famous in all of Western folklore. It does not originate with Goethe, but begins as a folk tale about a figure that may have actually existed. This was Dr. Johann Faustus. He's a contemporary of Martin Luther. The historical Dr. Faustus was an alchemist, possibly a charlatan, who was known for peddling magical, alchemical services, you know, in exchange for for money or payment. Uh, he would travel from town to town, performing magic for people or giving them medicinal cures, and then he would leave that town, sometimes to escape the consequences of, you know, being a snake oil salesman.

The story goes that this Faust, the historical Faust, the stories around him were that he had made a pact with the devil in exchange for magical power. And it was said he eventually died in an alchemical explosion. And Martin Luther actually mentions Faust twice, I believe, in the written record, and in order to denounce him, right, as an example of, uh, an evil person. And, uh, in the literature, in the decades and centuries that followed after Faust's life, the real Faust, he's always portrayed as a totally evil figure. His story becomes a morality play about the soul-endangering hubris of man. He is like Nimrod from the Tower of Babel story, a human who attempted to surpass God through use of man's, you know, ingenuity and intellect, thinking that makes you equal to God. And Faust, you know, he tries to game the rules of reality by sidestepping them with the use of magic. This is a man who, in his arrogance, sold his soul to the devil. You know, he only cares for earthly pleasures and achievements and thinks nothing of the, you know, mortal soul or of, uh, you know, morality or anything. And so, of course, in the Christian worldview, there's only one end to that story, and Faust is accordingly taken to hell. Those are his just desserts as a sorcerer and a charlatan, somebody who lived for the flesh and neglected the spirit. The essential end to the story, and therefore the sort of the point of the Faust story as it appeared in literature, was therefore, all the way up to the time of Goethe, the point of the story was to condemn Faust, as to designate his type as evil. And this is true in Christopher Marlowe's telling of the Faust story as well, which is, uh, probably the most famous and the best adaptation of Faust before Goethe's was published.

The influence of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe on Western civilization, it, it's really almost impossible to understate it. Uh, because he, he's such an underrated, uh, figure. Um, I mean, really everywhere outside of Germany, I'd say he's underrated. He's born in 1749 and lived until 1832. He was famous during his lifetime, and he would go on to become the defining literary figure of Germany. And at one time, Goethe would have been considered on par with the likes of Shakespeare. Now, the name of Shakespeare, it's much more famous among, you know, English speakers as well as non-English speakers, I'd say. I mean, it's partially because Shakespeare, he is the apex of playwriting in the English canon, whereas Goethe is sort of like the apex of the German canon. But, um, Goethe, well, of centrality to German culture, tends to receive much less attention among readers outside of Germany, where Shakespeare has kind of transcended that, right? But in his day, Goethe was the supreme, you know, Renaissance man of Germany. He's a literary colossus.

George Bernard Shaw, in his preface to *Three Plays for Puritans*, describes exactly, uh, who Goethe was. I found this quotation originally, um, through R. J. Hollingdale, who also invoked it to describe the cultural effect of Goethe. So here is Shaw: "There can be no new drama without a new philosophy, to which I may add, there can be no Shakespeare or Goethe without one either, nor two Shakespeares in one philosophic epoch, since, as I have said, the first great comer in that epoch reaps the whole harvest and reduces those who come after to the rank of mere gleaners, or worse than that, fools who go laboriously through all the motions of the reaper and binder in an empty field. What is the use of writing plays or painting frescoes if you have nothing more to say or show than was said and shown by Shakespeare, Michelangelo, and Raphael?" End quote.

So, Hollingdale, uh, uses this quotation of Shaw's, and I'm, I wanted to use it not only because Goethe's mentioned in the quote as on par with the level of Shakespeare, but also because this is exactly the way that Shaw describes it is what his career was like. And Hollingdale sort of riffs on Shaw's quotation: "In due course, the harvest appeared, and Goethe reaped it all in every category of literature as usually understood. He supplied the model instance. *Wilhelm Meister* was the model novel. The first part of *Faust*, the model play. *Dichtung und Wahrheit*, the model autobiography. *Italian Journey*, the model travel book. And *Eckermann's Conversations with Goethe*, 'the best German book,' in Nietzsche's opinion, is the German equivalent of Boswell's Johnson. The collected letters, which number over 13,000, is incomparably the greatest collection of its kind. And in poetry, the comprehensiveness and size of his achievement threatened to literally exhaust the capacities of the German language, leaving nothing more to be done." End quote.

And so, you know, Goethe is one of the most productive artists of all time. He conquered every type of literary form, and he also made scientific discoveries. You know, he wrote treatises on topics in the sciences, such as color. He studied botany, um, and so I think we non-German speakers could all stand to gain in understanding Goethe and his contribution to the Western canon. Uh, but I, of course, would rather do that by focusing on a single work rather than trying to do a drive-by of his whole canon. So *Faust* remains the most important work by Goethe, with good reason. And there's probably no other work, if Goethe, more quoted by philosophers. Actually, I would say definitely, Goethe's *Faust* is indispensable for understanding the European mind, I would argue, in this one work, albeit a work that took Goethe his entire life to complete. So it's a life-spanning work. But in this one work, Goethe affects a profound moral revaluation. He reverses the perspective on the old Faust folktale and provides an image of the Zeitgeist that started at the advent of the Enlightenment. In a sense, Goethe here eulogizes the Enlightenment, both in the sense of speaking in praiseworthy terms about it, um, and he does this by giving us a relatable main character who is himself the image of the Enlightenment intellectual, which is Dr. Faust himself. But also, in the sense that Goethe is giving a eulogy, in the way one would say talk about giving a eulogy at a funeral, you know, Goethe's *Faust* heralds the end of the Enlightenment. It's a criticism of the Enlightenment in artistic terms. And the Enlightenment, as after all, anchored by the faith in mankind's reason, the Enlightenment, you know, and the revolutions in science, philosophy, and politics that constituted the Enlightenment. This is all premised on the idea that we should, you know, in some sense, trust in the human faculty for reason, and that anyone has access to reason, at least to some capacity, right? So rather than trusting in superstitions or the authority of institutions or archaic class relationships, we're going to instead trust in the intellect. And we might still trust in the old things to some degree, but in some sense, the story of the Enlightenment, you know, thought is science can be a challenge and ultimately overcome all of those social forces, generation by generation. Um, you know, more so over time. And so Goethe's *Faust* is the image of the Renaissance man. He's the person whom Goethe himself was, in some sense. He's a man of letters, an intellectual, a scholar, and Faust is the conqueror of all the domains of knowledge. He's the embodiment of this, this spirit of striving for more, uh, knowledge and more achievement.

Now, Nietzsche argued that this attitude towards reason first emerges with Socrates, and, um, you know, then is codified in the work of Plato. Socrates sort of sows the seeds of the Enlightenment attitude towards reason as the means of finding truth, and the pursuit of truth is the highest value. This attitude towards truth was carried on then through Christianity, which Nietzsche called "the people's Platonism." You know, Christianity makes an innovation insofar as rather than truth being the reserve of the wise and virtuous men, the philosophers, the truth becomes the common property of all. Truth is, uh, the highest value in Christianity still, as well as speaking of true words, exemplified by Jesus, and indicated by the association of God with the Logos, such as in the Gospel of John. The same spirit continues through to the Enlightenment, beginning with Descartes' desire to apprehend the truth directly and to gain certainty in what he knows through his methodology of doubt. And so, and Descartes also a scientist, an early Renaissance man. So we can see how Descartes' methodology of doubt directly descends from the Socratic method. How this faith in the individual using his intellect, using reason to pursue the truth, flowers in the Enlightenment. But it existed in many forms before that, and, um, that's the form that the Enlightenment takes, uh, in the modern scientific, you know, method, right? And so that's why Nietzsche writes in *The Gay Science*, 344: "It is still a metaphysical faith upon which our faith in science rests, that even we seekers after knowledge today, we godless anti-metaphysicians, still take our fire from the flame lit by a faith that is thousands of years old, that Christian faith, which was also the faith of Plato, that God is truth and that truth is divine." End quote.

And so the character of Faust, some, in some sense, he's the representation of that aspect of the Western psyche, the truth-seeking aspect. Oh, Faust is the man of knowledge, right? And because no amount of knowledge seems to suffice, and true certainty is never obtained, or the quest always ends with the destruction of previous certainties, Faust has this, uh, ruminating, dissatisfied quality. The pursuit of knowledge, like the pursuit of any and all desires, never leads to a final state of rest. But just because he's reached the limit, doesn't mean that Faust can stop. He can't stop at the, any of the boundaries, the boundaries of morality, the boundaries of decency or convention. He continues to seek the truth restlessly, for the truth is divine, even if he must practice black magic and endanger his soul to seek it. That's one way we could look at the Faust story.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe became one of the most famous authors in Germany at a very young age, and that was because of the success, um, after the publication of his, uh, breakout hit novel, *The Sorrows of Young Werther*. It's a short novel about an intense, doomed romance between two young people, told primarily through letters, which ends in the suicide of the main character. The story was immediately, you know, immediately had immense popularity and an air of danger around the book, as the cause of suicides in real life. But Goethe then went on to have this highly productive career that we've talked about. And, uh, he wrote an early version of *Faust*, commonly called the *Ur-Faust*, in the 1770s when he was 26 years old. Some have praised this condensed version of Goethe's *Faust* for its vision, but ultimately, he was not done with the Faust story, and he continued to work on a longer version of the drama. It wasn't until 1790 that the first part of *Faust* was published in its entirety. But Goethe was still not finished, and he worked on the second part through the last years of his life, and he finished the work just before dying in 1832, at the age of 82 years old. So *Faust* is quite literally a life-spanning work, as we mentioned. While he's off making anatomical discoveries, writing poetry to fill 143 volumes, and politicking in Weimar, and, you know, he directed a theater for 26 years, *Faust* was a work in progress throughout that entire time. Goethe wrote a year before he died to Zelter that his *Faust* was more or less finished, but said, "It is no trifle to put forth in one's 82nd year what one conceived in one's twentieth and clothed such an internal living skeleton with ligaments, flesh, and skin, and on top of that, to wrap a few mantle folds around the finished product, that it may altogether remain an evident riddle, delight men on and on, and give them something to work on." End quote.

*Faust* does have all those elements. It's entertaining as well as deep. Although I do want to note that Goethe was famously a bit amused by the attempts to read deep interpretations into every last nook and cranny of his play, and that there, you know, there's scenes that he'd included for the sake of comedy, or lines which were simply included as like jokes that were then spun into elaborate theories about like an esoteric meaning. Like so Kaufman argues in his tran-, his introduction to his translation, that *Faust* is supposed to be presented in down-to-earth language, or, you know, he doesn't want to have any of these, uh, vows in here, right? Um, it's supposed to be, it is very poetic at times, but it's supposed to be comprehensible to, uh, the average person. And that, in spite of being a tragedy, the play is actually very comedic at times. For some, designating Goethe as *Faust* as a tragedy might be controversial, because from a certain perspective, it's not very tragic. This is something that Nietzsche criticized in the book *Wanderer and His Shadow*. Nietzsche makes reference to the fact that Goethe, you know, he admitted that his soul was too conciliatory to write a true tragedy. And Nietzsche argues the actual content of *Faust* does not constitute a tragedy, and that's because he did something that was different from all the other authors who had presented the Faust story. And Goethe's *Faust*, the devil does not win. He does not take Faust's soul. Faust is saved. If there's a tragic figure in the first part of the story, it's actually Faust's girlfriend, Gretchen. She basically has her life ruined. But in the end, it's a redemptive story. And Walter Kaufman argues in favor of a little charity with the label tragedy, you know, as we might consider Dante's *Divine Comedy*. It's not exactly a comedy in the modern sense of the word either. But I should also say, Nietzsche did not make this criticism of Goethe's *Faust* because he disliked the play. On the contrary, Nietzsche considered Goethe a great man, and many of Nietzsche's own ideas were inspired by content that could be found in *Faust*.

*Faust*, at least in part, is a confrontation with a problem, uh, that's is the same problem that Nietzsche confronted in his philosophy. In his early philosophy, um, what Nietzsche called "the problem of science." He says in his 1886 preface to *The Birth of Tragedy*, it's a problem he recognized in the figure of Socrates, because Socrates is that original embodiment of the truth seeker. And in that book, Nietzsche contrasts Socrates with Faust. Both are men of knowledge, but Socrates stands at the beginning of the Enlightenment project, or he's like a prophet of this project, which has not yet dawned. Whereas for Socrates, knowledge is a promise. It's a thing to reach for. It's a distant star. It's a goal to inspire people, right? Whereas for Faust, knowledge has been exhausted. It's now, for him, a failed promise. He's reached for it as no man has reached for it, and what has he reached but the edge of rationality, the end of any sensible truth-seeking activity? Um, you know, that's the meaning of Faust, and he, he stares out over a wide abyss, only beholding meaninglessness. He wishes for a shore. And the wide oceans of knowledge and experience, as Nietzsche puts it.

Goethe's *Faust* is therefore more like a reflection of ourselves as the children and the inheritors of the Enlightenment. Unlike previous versions of the character, in which he's portrayed as simply an evil person, in Goethe's work, Faust is us. And rather than feeling guilt for being like Faust, feeling guilty for possessing this insatiable truth drive, Goethe elevates Faust. The moral of the old story is inverted because Faust is saved and not punished. Goethe's work asserts that within this endless striving, there's something divine, which God loves. Um, it's the only way to go about reframing our perspective on this world of desires, which are never satisfied, is to say that in the seeking, there is the virtue and there is the meaning. Since life is a restless seeking, if we celebrate life, we must celebrate seeking. So this radical revaluation, from the way Socrates might have seen the pursuit of knowledge, the, the redemption found in the pursuit of truth, that we get from Goethe's *Faust*, is not an emphasis on truth as being of the highest value, as Socrates might have had it, so much as on pursuit as being of the highest value. So this is one way in which Goethe's *Faust* is different from the other versions of the story. Faust is saved rather than condemned, and therefore the fundamental meaning and moral of the tale is reversed.

There's a second change that Goethe makes, the second major one. The Dr. Faust of the old folk tales effectively sells his soul to the devil in exchange for worldly power for a set period of time, and there's no ambiguity in this exchange. And presumably, when it comes to the devil, all sales are final, meaning it's irrevocable, and there is therefore never any question in the narrative as to whether the main character will be taken by the devil. But in Goethe's *Faust*, the arrangement between Faust and Mephisto is a wager. It's not an outright sale. Mephistopheles gets to take Faust's soul if and only if Faust's striving ceases and he wishes for rest.

Furthermore, Goethe does something brilliant in that he begins the play with a framing device, and he starts us up a level from the affairs going on down in the mortal world. The prologue begins in heaven, begins with a bet between God and Mephistopheles over the soul of Faust, which means that the wager between Faust and Mephistopheles is playing out against the backdrop of a wager of God versus Satan. So notice what Goethe does. He reframes the story, and he, he places it within a frame that's already familiar by appealing to a narrative that is the oldest in the Old Testament canon, an allusion which virtually everyone reading *Faust* ought to be expected to know: the Book of Job. The Book of Job begins with a meeting between God and Satan.

So I'll read from the beginning of the Book of Job. This is from the New International Version: "One day the angels came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan also came with them. The Lord said to Satan, 'Where have you come from?' Satan answered the Lord, 'From roaming throughout the earth, going back and forth on it.' Then the Lord said to Satan, 'Have you considered my servant Job? There was no one on earth like him; he is blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil.' 'Does Job fear God for nothing?' Satan replied, 'Have you not put a hedge around him and his household and everything he has? You have blessed the work of his hands, so that his flocks and herds are spread throughout the land. But now stretch out your hand and strike everything he has, and he will surely curse you to your face.'" End quote.

So, of course, in the story, God says, "Go ahead, do your worst to Job." Then, and they effectively have a wager as to whether Job will maintain his faith even when his virtue is rewarded with nothing but torment. Um, so in this Bible story, uh, Satan and God can seemingly be relatively civil to one another. And since this is one of the earliest books of the Bible, um, if not the earliest, some have considered that maybe the Satan we're seeing in the story was not yet associated with Lucifer as he's later understood, right? Or even maybe not even yet associated with the snake in the garden. The meaning of Satan was God's accuser. And so on this account, Carl Jung, in his psychoanalytical approach to studying the Book of Job, says that Satan constitutes the Lord's doubting thought. Satan is a doubting thought in the mind of God, or if you like, he, he's the advocate in the court of the King, right? For the opposing position. He's the skeptic, he's the negator, the one who argues against, argues the negative, the adversary, right? And when this was written, I'm not even really convinced myself that Satan is supposed to be the enemy in the way, like Ahura Mazda and Ahriman are enemies in Zoroastrianism, as the struggle between good and evil. The tone I get from this passage is that Satan is part of God's host, and he's required in order for God to have true knowledge. Doubt is required for knowledge. This may be, you know, a strange idea to entertain in light of our ideas about God, which we now, you know, that God is omniscient and all-knowing. The Book of Job presents this, um, very strange notion that God might have to test things, that the, it's through an adversarial process that we discover the truth.

And so, as we've probably all heard, in the story, God first allows Satan to destroy Job's property, then to kill his children, then to afflict Job himself with sores and horrible diseases. Job doesn't waver in his faith, and there's an appearance by God at the end where he both relieves Job's suffering, and but he also shuts down any questions from Job about why God would do such a thing. Um, and, uh, you know, there's a famous line where God's, you know, "Where were you when I set, you know, the foundations of, like, existence?" Right? Like, "Who are you to question me?" as the, the vibe there. Um, in the end, Satan loses that bet with God in the Book of Job.

So in Faust's *Prologue in Heaven*, we have the same situation. We have Mephisto approaching God in order to make a wager with him for the soul of Faust. And just as in the Book of Job, where God says, you know, "Yeah, have you considered my, my servant Job?" Uh, it's the same structure here. God is the one to bring up Faust. He said, you know, he calls Faust his servant, says, "Have you considered my servant Faust?" I don't, it's not exactly worded that way, but he asks if Mephistopheles knows of him. And Mephistopheles says he does know of Faust, but he says, "Well, if he's your servant, he serves the Lord in a rather peculiar way. His nourishment is not earthly food or drink, but this endless pursuit of knowledge and this absorption and ceaseless activity." And so Mephistopheles says of Faust, quote, "Nothing will soothe the upheaval in his breast." End quote. So this would seem to be a very tempting target for the devil. That sounds exactly like the kind of soul that the devil could, uh, you know, try to seduce.

Goethe highlights the inherent humorous element to this, existence in Christianity is at the most fundamental level a battle for the souls of humanity between God and Satan. But we would really wonder, like, how could the devil ever oppose what God, the outcome that God wanted to create? Right? And, um, you know, how could God actually learn anything from the wager if he's actually omniscient? You know, again, perhaps God and the devil are just amusing themselves as much as anything else. Um, but anyway, Mephistopheles says, in so many words, "Are you sure you want to make a bet over Faust? He's assuredly mine." And God says, "No, he's mine. He may serve me confusedly now, but I'll lead him on to clarity. Just trust me." The devil says, "You're on, but you have to let me do as I like on earth to lead Faust astray." Again, it's an exact parallel with the Book of Job. Although rather than God letting, uh, Satan do any number of inflict any amount of suffering on Faust, like he does to Job, he's authorizing Satan to offer Faust all sorts of pleasures and knowledge and experiences, good, good things, true, beautiful, good things, right? And so it's a very interesting reversal on that story of the Book of Job. And I think anyone who is, uh, religious should actually ask themselves, like, which, which would be worse for trying to lead a moral lifestyle, uh, having a lot of suffering, or being given a lot of pleasures? And so we might, you know, you might say, well, Faust is getting off easy if that's way better than the bet God had over Job of like, how horrible can you make Job's life? Um, you know, here they're betting like, well, how much, how much pleasure can you lavish on Faust? But the, I think anyone could see that, uh, it might actually be harder if we're, if we're looking at the goal of life as to live a virtuous or moral life, it might actually be quite a bit harder when you have the devil offering you every pleasure to lead a virtuous moral life. I think that much is, is obvious. So it's all a matter of perspective, right? Um, and so God says, "Do whatever you like," quote, "as long as he may be alive. So long you shall not be prevented. Man errs as long as he will strive." End quote.

This is, of course, just human fallibility or original sin, for speaking in Christian terms. People are always going to miss the mark. And in some sense, if we want to look at it from an ascetic point of view, Schopenhauer or Buddhist point of view, or even a Christian ascetic point of view, um, any kind of striving after worldly pleasure is in some sense an error that is in some sense making the mark, right? But as we'll find, uh, the point of the play is sort of to bless that because striving is inherent to living, in spite of the fact that it leads to error. And so if we're going to bless man, we have to bless man's faults. But God still says, in confidence, "Faust will be redeemed." And he continues in the dialogue with Mephisto. God says, quote, "A good man, in his darkling aspiration, remembers the right road for his quest." End quote. So there will be a direction that Faust will discover, even though his ambition has an inherently dark element to it. Mephisto, of course, is overly confident as well, and he's dismissive of the possibility of Faust's redemption.

Mephistopheles is, as he later describes himself in the play, he is the one who negates. And so he's like Satan in the Book of Job, God's accuser. He's a prosecutor against the crimes of existence, the injustices of reality. And so he even goes so far as to present himself as an advocate for mankind, because he's the voice speaking against the suffering that they have to endure while on earth. Accordingly, God says to him, quote, "Do you come only to accuse? Does nothing on earth seem right?" End quote. Mephisto replies, quote, "No, Lord, I find it a rather sorry sight. Man moves me to compassion; so wretched is his plight. I have no wish to cause him further woe." End quote.

So we might, uh, question how honest Mephisto is being here. But just like in the Book of Job, this is a wager in which both divine parties want to prove something to the other. Mephisto is in the negative position when it comes to assessing the value of existence, the value of life. There's even a sense in which he can imagine Mephistopheles might believe that by crushing Faust, he's doing a service for mankind. He is, like Schopenhauer, telling mankind, striving only leads to suffering. There's no salvation in someone like Faust. There is no quest with redemptive power that redeems the world. It's all just an empty pursuit of hollow pleasures. And so, and by doing so, if he is able to characterize life that way, he could disprove God's axiom that his creation is in any way justified.

There's a section from, uh, Arthur Koestler's novel *Darkness at Noon*, which has an interesting kind of, it's like a metaphorical description of Satan in a way. It gets across the nuances of what we see in this Faustian portrayal of the figure. This could also apply, perhaps, to Satan in Milton's *Paradise Lost*. Satan as the dark side of the intellectual faculty of man, the intellectual faculty when turned pessimistic and turned against existence. But Koestler writes: "Satan is thin, ascetic, and a fanatical devotee of logic. He reads Machiavelli, Ignatius of Loyola, Marx, and Hegel. He is cold and unmerciful to mankind out of a kind of mathematical mercifulness. He is damned always to do that which is most repugnant to him: to become a slaughterer in order to abolish slaughtering; to sacrifice lambs so that no more lambs may be slaughtered; to whip people with knots so that they may learn not to let themselves be whipped; to strip himself of every scruple in the name of a higher scrupulousness, and to challenge the hatred of mankind because of his love for it—an abstract and geometric love." End quote.

So that's a description that we might apply to Mephisto and Faust, if we wanted to be charitable. His is an abstract, geometric love, as he describes it, a tortured, contrived affinity for mankind, but out of the desire to negate mankind so that they can be free of the pain of existence. He could also be interpreted as the voice for that dark aspect of the intellect within Faust himself. You know, once Mephistopheles and Faust join up, they're inseparable, and Mephisto seems almost to be an aspect of Faust at times. It almost is like they're sharing the same body. In any case, after the *Prologue in Heaven*, we get the first scene with Faust himself.

Faust is in his study and he's listless, as always, having reached the end of his quest for scholarly attainment but feeling no sense of fulfillment. And thus he begins by saying: "I have, alas! studied philosophy, jurisprudence, and medicine too, and worst of all, theology, with keen endeavor, through and through! And here I am, for all my lore, the wretched fool I was before! Called Master of Arts and Doctor to boot—for ten years almost I've feud and up and down wherever it goes I drag my students by the nose, and see that for all our science and art, we can know nothing. It burns my heart!" End quote.

What immediately comes to mind here is the purported Socrates quote, "I only know I can know nothing." Now, it's not totally accurate, but I don't think it's an entirely incorrect summary of Socrates' attitude, at least in some aspect. Socrates, he's definitely known for negating propositions more than for asserting them. And when asked what made him different from other men, what it was that he knew that others didn't, Socrates said that it was his awareness of his own ignorance. You know, Socrates does not regard this ignorance as a tragic thing, but opening a field of possibilities. We might say, once we demolish all those naive certainties that we once held to but had no real reason to believe in, that opens the way for real knowledge. But for Faust, look at the conclusion he comes to: "For all our science and art, we can know nothing." And rather than seeing this as a blessing, he feels it as a pain, because Faust has reached what he believes to be the limits. He's become desensitized. He feels as though he's been flattened out. He has access to all knowledge there is, but cannot construe a meaning from it. He doesn't get the same pleasure he used to derive from the quest. He says: "No scruple or doubt could make me ill; I am not afraid of the devil in hell. But therefore, I also lack all delight." End quote.

So, you know, it's through the contrasting experiences of pain and pleasure, happiness and boredom, fulfillment and craving, that we're able to define those experiences. And it's only for the fact that we experience want that we can then experience pleasure from the release from want. Again, this is a very Schopenhauerian analysis of the human condition. But so this flattening of sensations is because Faust has nowhere else to go. Um, he's stagnated, but he's still filled with the same restlessness, and it's unbearable. And so he pulls out a tome of Nostradamus. He says: "In this book full of mystery, and Nostradamus' hand, is it not ample company?" End quote.

And so Faust is now moving beyond the realm of science, beyond the realm of the respectable, and entering the domain of mysticism, divination, magic. So, Faust continues: "Hence I have yielded to magic, to see whether the spirit's mouth and might would bring some mysteries to light, that I need not with work and woe go on to say what I don't know. That I might see what secret force hides in the world and rules its course, envisage the creative blazes instead of rummaging in phrases." End quote.

And so Faust has the same aspirations as Socrates: not to go on saying what he does not know. But having studied and mastered all of the faculties of the university and having not found a solid foundation for knowledge, this desire to not go on saying what he doesn't know becomes deeply painful to him because he doesn't know if he's ever going to get there. He's not found any knowledge which isn't contingent, or which does not come to us through the senses. He wants to know what is that world beyond the senses, what is the creative force, the secret force that hides behind the phenomenal world and directs the course of the world. And so he's willing to delve into superstition, or into violating the laws of science, the laws of nature, in order to gain this knowledge. And so he pulls out the tome of Nostradamus, which features the symbol of, he flips to a page that has the symbol of the Macrocosm. This is an alchemical symbol of the entirety of existence. It's an esoteric representation of the whole of reality. He remarks: "What jubilation bursts out of the sight into my senses! Now I feel it flowing, youthful, a sacred fountain of delight through every sense! My veins are glowing!" End quote. Further down, he continues: "All weaves itself into the whole, each living in the other soul. How heaven's powers climb up and descend!" End quote.

So the, you know, the alchemist had a saying: "As above, so below." The symbol of the Macrocosm shows this interconnectedness of all things, and the interconnectedness of the planes of heaven with the affairs of earth. But as Faust continues to contemplate the symbol, he comes to reject it. He eventually says, somewhat bitterly: "What play? Yes, but a play, however vast, where boundless nature can I hold you fast?" End quote. And he turns the page in disgust. Um, and so he despairs that this representation of reality, but beautiful as it is, as being false, but a play, simply a presentation, you know, a, a condensation, or an illusion, you know, like all human symbols, um, incapable of actually capturing boundless nature. So I think Faust's disgust is for the attempt to bound the boundless, right? This kind of representation, to dare to present the entirety of existence within a symbol, is sort of indicative of the pretensions to knowledge of the scholars, which Faust has come to despise. But so instead, he turns to a page containing the symbol of the Earth Spirit. And so he rejects this metaphysical, boundless picture of reality. He fixes his vision to the earth, to earthly pursuits, earthly, earthly things, right?

So Faust cannot claim to understand boundless nature, but, uh, he does understand the ways of the world. He says: "How different is the power of this sign! You spirit of the earth seem close to mine! I look and feel my powers growing, as if I drunk new wine! I'm glowing! I feel a sudden courage, and should dare to plunge into the world, to bear all earthly grief, all earthly joy, compare with gales my strength, face shipwreck without care!" End quote. So it's a yearning for all life and all its profundity and totality. The contemplation of all the earth has to offer, both good and bad. So he rejects the interconnectedness of the Macrocosm, uh, and instead contemplates the Earth symbol, and he invokes the spirits and uses magic to summon the Earth Spirit. The Earth Spirit actually shows up, and he answers Faust, but Faust is terrified when he sees the apparition flame into existence. And this prompts the Earth Spirit to goad and make fun of Faust, saying: "You have implored me to appear, make known my voice and reveal my face. Your soul's entreaty won my grace. Here I am! What abject fear grasps you, superman!" End quote.

Um, and so, yes, in the original German, the Earth Spirit is derisively or sarcastically calling Faust an Übermensch. Spirit is saying, "Is this the one who sees himself as having surpassed humanity? Is he now shrinking from the startling truth when it appears before him?" You know, the, the Earth Spirit rejects Faust's attempt to then converse as equals, and he compares Faust, rather, to an insignificant worm, and then he vanishes. Faust is even more deeply distraught after this experience, after the Earth Spirit rejects him, you know, as being no peer to those of the world beyond. And so he begins to sink deeper into depression. Even his pursuit of magic is not yielding results.

Then Wagner arrives and enters Faust's study. Wagner is a scholar and he's Dr. Faust's assistant. This character believes in the power of reason and of art and science. He does not have the same perception of the limits of knowledge that Faust has gained. Wagner is still very much in this Socratic mindset that, you know, the pursuing knowledge is the most valuable thing in the world, because a mortal life arises and then passes away in the blink of an eye. But that only lends more importance to the domains of philosophy and art, and like having a legacy, right? Because that's the creative offspring of one's mind, and these things can endure long after one's passed away and be carried on by other minds. So that's the faith of Wagner. He's very much a, uh, in favor of scientific optimism, we might say. But also, he, he's not like a completely naive character. He expresses an awareness of the limitations of mortality, right? So, like a quote from Wagner: "Oh, God, art is forever, and our life is brief. I fear that with my critical endeavor, my head and heart may come to grief. How hard the scholar's means are to array, with which one works up to the source, before we have traversed but half the course, we wrested devil's pass away." End quote.

Now, Faust's response to this is indicative of exactly which archetype he represents, and that we've discussed throughout. He has a witty rejoinder to Wagner's faith in scholarship and art as a form of immortal accomplishment. Faust replies: "Parchment is that the sacred fount from which you drink to steal your thirst forever? If your refreshment does not mount from your own soul, you gain it never." End quote. So the great works of mankind and all the pretty.

words ever written. You know all these great stories and, uh, idealized characters and cautionary tales. These are all wonderful treasures, but you can't just gather up these erudite references to just adorn yourself with. What matters is, like, a transformation inside of you, the extent to which the wisdom is incorporated in your own being.

Wagner then leaves, and Faust's monologue, more the appearance of the spirit, has made Faust despondent. He says, "To dream of eternal truth was within reach, exalting on the heavens' brilliant breach." And he goes on to say how he felt both so great and so small simultaneously. Great because he's brought forth this thing which, like, crosses the boundaries between worlds, but also the awareness of his own insignificance on the cosmic scale.

But now, after that, he's just back to the dreadful tedium and sorrow of being a human being again. With its disappearance, the spirit took these feelings with it. "You cruel one, have pushed me back into uncertain human fate." And so Faust speaks about the inescapable angst which colors human life and the pointlessness that comes from this eventual destruction, decomposition of everything, and how our awareness of this fact spoils everything for us. And how he's now plunged back, this, this promise of magic offering a bridge beyond these limitations of humanity, have gone unfulfilled. And now he's plunged back into contemplating this again.

And, um, I, again, I'm just reading a lot of the sort of, what would you say, almost Chiron-asked philosophical reflections of Faust that happen in these first parts of the play because I do find them very fascinating from a philosophical angle. So, "Deep in the heart there dwells restless care, and secretly infects us with despair. Restless, she sways and poisons peace and joy. She always finds new masks she can't employ. She may appear as house and home, as child and wife, as fire, water, poison, knife. What does not strike still makes you quail, and what you never lose, for that you always will."

I find that a very, it's a relatable description of anxiety, actually. That, that which you have torments your mind, as it becomes that which you fear to lose. Um, you know, part, part of our restless mind is that it infects everything, right? The, the being, the restless driver of modernity is that you have this restless mind that, you know, ruins otherwise peaceful moments. Um, and so they're, you know, it's obviously, uh, calamitous to lose things, but it's that which you never lose that you still fret over all the time.

And so, um, it's another, what Faust is describing, it's just interesting because it's another way of talking about this problem of happiness, that when you get the thing that you have, it doesn't bring you fulfillment, it brings you anxiety. Or when you get the thing you, when you finally possess the thing you want, it brings you anxiety. Um, and so Faust here then considers suicide. And he has truly sort of reached the end of his rope here at the beginning of the play. He sees no direction in which his life can proceed further. So he reaches for a vial of poison. He says it's quite deadly. "You essence from all slumber-bringing flowers, you extract of all subtly fatal powers."

Faust then holds it up to his lips, but then the time is midnight, as it happens, and the bells chime and the choral songs begin. As it happens, it's Easter Sunday. And so just when Faust was thinking that he could no longer go on, that his endless striving can go no further, he's saved by the beautiful music emanating from the church. Remember, Faust no longer has faith in God. And as he says, he doesn't fear the devil or hell. The sound of the music and celebration of Easter stirs him back to life. He's resurrected, so to speak.

Faust wishes to live again, um, to renew, at least for another day, his search for higher knowledge and, you know, new experiences and new things. So the musical beauty coaxes him into living again. And we have in this passage, sort of, I think, a declaration of Goethe's artistic intent. I think, in so far as Goethe is using themes and characters and aspects of Christianity, but in a way which goes beyond the dogma or doctrines of Christianity. Goethe is willing to do things like save Faust in spite of Faust's eventual devotion to the devil, which we'll get to in this part of the episode. But Faust is to experience a mini death and rebirth, a little mini redemption here in the first scene, as a foretaste of the content of the drama. It's not because of the redemptive power of Christian belief or scripture in this scene, but the sensuous beauty contained in the Christian celebration.

So Faust waxes poetic here, and I'll read some of his monologue in an abridged form. "What deeply humming strokes, what brilliant tone, draws from my lips the crystal bowl of power? Has the time come, deep bells, when you make known the Easter holidays' first holy hour? Why would you, heaven's tones, compel me to gently rise from my dust? Resound where tender-hearted people dwell. Although I hear the message, I lack all faith and trust."

Um, and so the beautiful tones draw his lips away from the crystal containing this deadly, incredibly powerful poison, even though he's a faithless man, as we've said. So in the next scene, Faust and Wagner walk through town, and Faust is, you know, he's known for his accomplishments and is admired by the villagers. He says, like, a toast of gratitude, a toast of gratitude to God, with some peasants who invite him over. They're like, "Hey, will you give a toast?" He says, "Sure."

And as the two walk, we learn that Faust has spent hours in nature, ruminating, praying, and fasting, wishing for the attention of the divine. He feels alienated from the spiritual world. He wants desperately to make some connection with it. And so he attempts it through immersing himself in nature. Whereas for Wagner's part, he says he's not comforted by nature, but by words and books.

Faust goes on to say he feels two internal pulls, two wills pulling against each other within himself that are threatening to tear him apart. Faust says, "Two souls, alas, are dwelling in my breast, and one is striving to forsake its brother unto the world in grossly loving zest. With clinging tendrils one adheres, the other rises forcibly in quest of a rarefied ancestral sphere."

It's a view of this human condition, or the human psyche, we could say, that's common to esoteric religions. I would say that there's two poles or centers within man, that's one is earthly and the other is divine. Faust's longing aims in both directions. He just as much wants to ascend into the world beyond mankind as he longs to seek out new knowledges and experiences of the material world. As Faust says in a later monologue, "One longs for life, and one would seek its rivers and, last, its source." So he longs for life, but he also longs for the source of all life.

Faust and Wagner then, out while they're walking about, encounter a strange dog, a poodle. The poodle takes a liking to Faust, it seems, and starts, uh, following Faust and follows him all the way back to his study. Faust says his goodbyes to Wagner, and he lets the dog in. He says, "Okay, I guess I've got a dog now," and he gives him a little mat to lay on next to a stove. And he continues his depressive ruminations.

And what follows, it's an extraordinarily interesting scene to me because it involves Faust making a literary criticism of the Bible, specifically the book of John, which begins, as I referenced before, with the quote, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. All things were made by it, and without it was not anything made that was made."

What follows is Faust, both perhaps suggesting, uh, that this conception of the world is foreign to the German mind, but also to his own temperament. Uh, it's foreign to the Faustian mindset, which is consumed with activity. Um, this passage, it's sort of a little digression, actually, from the character development for Faust in the imminent meeting with Satan. But Goethe's work is full of little gems like this one. And so this is, uh, a blasphemous little section for Faust's critique of God's description of how the universe is fundamentally constituted. But in doing so, uh, Faust reveals something to us by point of contrast.

So Faust picks up the New Testament, marveling at how this simple document has provided some ease and comfort and a promise of contentment for, you know, people to find peace within. And just how strange and foreign to Faust it is that they could find that fulfillment that he's looking for in this simple little book. And so he says, "We long for the light of revelation, which is nowhere more magnificent than in our New Testament. I would for once like to determine, because I am sincerely perplexed, how the sacred original text could be translated into my beloved German."

He opens the New Testament, begins to read it. Says, "In the beginning was the Word." Already I am stopped. Seems absurd. The Word does not deserve the highest prize. I must translate it otherwise, if I am well inspired and not blind. It says, "In the beginning was the Mind." Ponder that first line. Wait and see, lest you should write too hastily. Is the mind the all-creating source? It ought to say, "In the beginning there was Force." Yet something warns me as I grasp the pen that my translation must be changed again. The Spirit helps me now. It is exact. I write, "In the beginning was the Act."

So Faust's intuition tells him, or perhaps you might say his German-shaped intuition tells him, it's not the rational, discursive intellect that begins creation, but action, movement. Right? We can see this in this scene. We have a transition in Faust's focus. Uh, I think what's interesting is that it's kind of showing, it's showing the progression of where Faust is focused on in his life. So in it, and how he keeps revising his translation of the line, he's moving from what did he talk about? The word, to seeking knowledge or truth in a more abstract sense, you could say mind. Now he's seeking the secret force behind all the world, right? And now Faust has finally figured out that what is common to all these things is the seeking, the activity, the act is primary. And so there is a parallel, I think, with Nietzsche's idea of will to power and how he believes that that's what, uh, constitutes any sort of human action or human morality.

Now, shortly after this blasphemous revision of biblical wisdom, something strange begins to happen. The black hound, the poodle, transforms, taking on a shadowy aspect, and it reaches up like a rising fog. Faust calls it a "hippopotamus of foam with fiery eyes. How his teeth shine!" Faust realizes then that the sigil placed over his doorway, a pentagram, which is used as a magical means of trapping spirits through witchcraft, has snared this demonic presence within, uh, Faust's study. Well, he learns this because spirits who are just sort of, I guess, hanging out in the liminal space around Faust now, spirits cry out to him that a devil has been caught inside. And they do warn him, "We're actually on, uh, this entity's side, but just so you know, you've trapped him here."

Faust then attempts to use spells to ensnare the beast into his power. His less powerful spells don't work. So Faust declares, "Now listen well to a stronger spell. If you should be hell's progeny, then see this symbol before which tremble the cohorts of hell. Already it bristles and starts to swell."

So Faust's magic proves to be effective. And as it turns out, as we all know, he's not ensnared just any devil, but the devil Mephistopheles. Trapped as he is by this unfortunate oversight on his part, then heeds Faust and transfigures himself from the swelling cloud into a man. This is quoting from the play. "Mephisto steps forward from behind the stove, dressed as a traveling scholar, while the mist clears away. Mephisto: Why all the noise, good sir? What is your pleasure?"

Faust demands the name of this being before him. But Mephisto is a bit cagey about it. He doesn't immediately come out and say, "I'm the devil." But Faust is not stupid, and he surmises that this is the "liar, destroyer, god of flies." But Mephisto doesn't still really directly admit it. Finally, prompts Faust to ask more forcefully. "Enough, who are you then?"

Mephisto: "Part of the force which would do evil evermore, and yet increases the good."

Faust: "What is it that this puzzle indicates?"

Mephisto: "I am the spirit that negates, and rightly so. For all that comes to be deserves to perish wretchedly, to where better nothing would begin. Thus everything that your terms sin, destruction, evil, represent, that is my proper element."

So this conception of the devil, we've already kind of discussed in some detail. But notice that again, Mephisto's starting proposition, his first principle, is that "all that comes to me deserves to perish." Um, you know, I've mentioned, uh, how influential Goethe's Faust was on Nietzsche, and how much Faust has just been quoted by philosophers. Apparently, that particular quote was a favorite of Karl Marx's. Take that for what you will. In any case, uh, it's sort of the sentiment, "It would have been better if we had never been born," and shows up in Howard's language, you know, what he says in the essay on the suffering of the world, "Would have been better if life were no more," easily called upon earth as on the moon.

The dialogue between Mephisto and Faust continues, further fleshing out Mephisto's role in the cosmos. "Mephisto: I am part of the part that was once everything, part of the darkness which gave birth to light. That haughty light which envies mother night her ancient rank and place, and would be king. Yet it does not succeed. However it contend, it sticks to bodies in the end. It streams from bodies, it lends bodies beauty. A body won't let it progress, so it will not take long, I guess, and with the bodies it will perish too."

Faust: "I understand your noble duty, too weak for great destruction you attempted on a minor scale."

Mephisto: "And I admit it is of slight avail. What stands opposed to are not the sum, your wretched world. For aught that I have so far undertaken, and it stands unruffled and unshaken, and that accursed lot, the brood of beasts and men, one cannot hurt them anyhow. How many I have buried now, yet always fresh new blood will circulate again. Thus it goes on. I could rage and despair from water, earth, and even air. A thousand seeds have ever grown in warmth and cold, and drought and mire. If I had not reserved myself the fire, I should have nothing of my own."

Faust: "And thus I see you would resist the ever-live creative power by clinching your cold devil's fist resentfully. In vain you glower, try something new and unrelated. Oh, you peculiar son of chaos!"

So without Faust's criticism of the devil at the end there, he recognizes the inherent futility in what Mephisto does, and that it's just driven by revenge. His accusation against creation is a non-starter because creation is already here and can't be annulled. And no amount of micro-cosmic destruction, no amount of culling the individual things of creation, can ever eliminate the whole of it. Killing an organism doesn't matter so much as the species is still around. And Mephisto, it seems, cannot kill the whole species. Life is simply too powerful. Creative force is too powerful. God is too powerful. That's why Faust says, "Why don't you try something new?" The devil is, in some sense, stuck in resentment and pessimism.

Mephisto then asks that he be allowed to leave. "Yes, if Faust can do him a favor and remove that pentagram, or he calls it the witch's foot, on the threshold of the door because it's preventing his escape." And the reason why it has to do with the angle of the door, which Mephisto sort of, he says it's not complicated, but, um, it seems like there are some intricacies of magical arithmetic, or what we learned later is called the witch's arithmetic, that are not fully explained to the audience. But it seems like that the angle allowed entry, but not exit. I mean, so Mephisto says, "The poodle never noticed when he first jumped in here, but now it is another case. The devil cannot leave this place."

Faust does not initially try to hold Mephisto there. He even points out, he's like, "Well, there's a window, you can escape through." But Mephisto says, "The devils and demons have a law, where they slipped in, they must always withdraw. The first time we are free, the second constrained."

Now, interestingly about that, Faust is delighted to discover that hell has laws. Faust: "For hell, two laws have been ordained. Superb! Then one could surely make a pact, and one of you might enter my employ." The existence of laws in hell, you know, means they could have things like contracts. And if there's some constraint on the behavior of demons and devils, maybe they could make a deal that they'd be obligated to uphold. That way, Faust might be able to conjure up some sort of demonic servant and actually have control over them.

So the deal with the devil, I should note, is therefore first proposed by Faust. He arrives at this independently. This isn't despite the fact that the devil was already planning to ensnare Faust's soul. So Mephisto expresses an interest in making an agreement, but he says, "Well, that's not rush things. He says, 'First let me go.' He really does not want to be caught in Faust's study." So even though Mephisto has declared his intentions, uh, to God in the prologue to steal Faust's soul, he doesn't take this opportunity to do just that at this moment. He says, "Let me go, I'll come back, and we'll make a pact later."

Faust, understandably, says, "No one doesn't trap the devil twice. I have you in my power now. I'm not letting you go." But Mephisto's unwilling to make any agree, any like agreement with Faust in which the asymmetry of power does not skew in his own favor, I think is the way to explain this. And so the spirits who earlier warned Faust that he had snared the devil, and also told him they're on Mephisto's side, um, after Faust says to Mephisto, "No, you're going to stay a while with me," Mephisto says, "Okay, have it your way." But then the spirits begin serenading Faust with a song full of shimmering, beautiful imagery, you know, lots of romantic style imagery of idyllic nature and virtue, you know, verses about rapturous bliss, being born up into the mountains in the shining heavens. And Faust is serenaded to sleep. And Mephisto thanks the spirits and tells them, "Go dazzle him with dream shapes sweet and vast, plunge him in an ocean of untruth."

That, uh, gives Mephisto the time and the freedom to go secure what he needs to break the threshold hex, which is a rat's sharp tooth, which he can use to, I think, dislodge it. He then wishes Faust sweet dreams and leaves. So what just happened? I mean, Faust and Mephisto are both eager to make some sort of agreement, and both are looking to outmaneuver the other. And when they meet, Faust has the advantage, and he thinks that therefore he can control the devil. Instead, the devil easily outmaneuvers him. And this represents why you shouldn't attempt to outwit the devil. The devil's usually one or two steps ahead of you, even when he seems at a disadvantage. And he's also smart enough not to get taken advantage of when there's a power imbalance that doesn't benefit him. He'll wait to strike the contract when he feels the, uh, scenario's more to his own advantage. And after all, people are changeable, and we have these, you know, temporary emotional and mental states that come and go and affect how gullible we are, how willing we are to believe certain things, and how we behave, whether we're in, feel that we're on the top of the hierarchy, on the bottom. Mephisto doesn't have any of those disadvantages, right? He always has the same fundamental nature.

In the next scene, there's a knock at the door of Faust's, Faust's study. And this is supposedly sometime later. Mephisto says, uh, "You know, it's me, here to make our agreement." Faust says, "Come in." And Mephisto makes Faust ask him to come in a total of three times. You have to want this. You have to really want to invite the devil inside. Maybe inviting in the devil one time could be an accident or a lapse in judgment, but Mephisto makes him prove, you know, by saying, "Come in three times," that there's no plausible deniability any longer. And the imagery of how Mephisto is described as somewhat famous, he enters dressed as a fine nobleman with a red, fine red coat and a cox feather in his cap.

And here, from Faust, we get another beautiful expression of his ruminating, dissatisfied attitude towards life. And I'll read from this monologue also in an abridged form. "I am too old to be content with play, too young to be without desire. What wonders could the world reveal? You must renounce, you want to yield. That is the never-ending drone which we must are lifelong here, which hoarsely all hours in tone and grind into our weary ears. Though all is still, no rest is mine. As dreams enmesh my mind in dread, the god that dwells within my heart can stir my depths, I cannot hide. Rules all my powers with relentless art, but cannot move the world outside. And thus existence is for me, await. Death is desirable, in life I hate."

And Mephisto responds to this. "And yet, when death approaches, the welcome is not great." So he taunts Faust that when he had the opportunity to free himself from this endless rumination that he claims to hate, he did not take it. And Mephisto says, "You know, when the time came, he didn't drain a certain bowl. You know, you had the bowl of poison in front of you, but you refused to drink it and let yourself be brought back and seduced back into life again." So, you know, this is the paradoxical nature of Faust's yearning. You know, he can't be, he can't stand to be dissatisfied with life anymore, but he can't be satisfied with the prospect of death either. And so often, if Mephisto is sort of the, if we interpret Mephisto symbolically as like the pessimistic, you know, negating power of the intellect, he will always point out the contradictions in Faust's, you know, because people are complicated and have these contradictory, paradoxical natures. And he will always point those out to Faust.

And, uh, anyway, Faust says that in his terrifying reeling, he heard chimes that reminded him of the simple bliss of childhood. And reflecting on this, Faust becomes even more embittered, and eventually he's calling down curses on the things of life that have seduced him to live as he has, which bring enticement but never satisfaction. "Cursed be illusion, fraud, and dream, that flatter our guileless sense. Cursed be the pleasing make-believe of fame and long posthumous life. Cursed be possessions that deceive, as slave and plough, child and wife. Cursed be Mammon, when with treasures he spurs us onto daring feats, or lures us into slothful pleasures."

More than this, he concludes the rant by calling a curse down on hope, and on faith, and most of all, on patience. So there's a real sense in which Faust is a sort of melodramatic character. And Kaufman points out that Mephisto's role in the dialogue is often to deflate the lofty, high-flying verses of Faust with something sarcastic or vulgar. You know, Mephisto is simple, direct, and glib. Faust, on the other hand, waxes poetic. You know, they both represent, you know, Faust is the intellectual man, perhaps there's something of Mephisto that is, um, inherently intellectual as well, but they're different aspects. Mephisto is cynical, and Faust is more romantic. It's another way to look at it.

But Mephisto tells him, "You know, come on, stop playing with your melancholy. You're just human like the rest. You know, you, you think your pains or your longing is so much greater, but your pains and yearnings aren't all that different from any other man's. I know what makes you tick, and I can offer you a path that will lead you to all sorts of worldly pleasures that will leave you delighted." And so it is here, the devil proposes the wager.

Mephisto: "I shall be your servant or your slave."

Faust: "And in return, what do you hope to take?"

Mephisto: "There's so much time, so why insist?"

Faust: "No, no, the devil is an egoist and would not just for heaven's sake turn into a philanthropist. Make your conditions very clear. Where such a servant lives, danger is near."

Mephisto: "Here you shall be the master, I be bond, and at your nod all work incessantly. But when we meet again beyond, then you shall do the same for me."

Faust: "Of the beyond I have no thought. When you reduce this world to naught, the other one may have its turn. My joys come from this earth, and there that sun has burnt on my despair. Once I have left those, I don't care."

And so, even though the story is framed in the prologue as this cosmic drama, a battle for Faust's soul between these two adversarial views of what humanity is and what humanity's worth is, what existence is worth is, is sort of what's on trial here. Faust himself is totally fixated on the earth. He rejects the earth spirit, remember. So he can't live in this world because he sought all there is to seek, but he can't part with his world either. He only cares what happens here in the phenomenal world, in the world of the senses.

So now comes the wager. Mephisto dares Faust to accept the bargain. Faust counters, arguing that Mephisto cannot really give him anything new, cannot actually cure his ennui. Faust says, "What would you wretched devil offer? Was ever a man's spirit in its noble striving grasped by your life, devilish scoffer?" And he asks Mephisto to show him all sorts of things that have never been seen or experienced on earth. Um, he's sort of saying, you know, are you really sure you want to be my servant? And Mephisto says that such a task doesn't frighten him. He's up to the challenge. He argues that eventually, "Worthy friend, the time comes, and we would recline in peace and feast on something good."

And so Faust replies to that. Um, this is the section that's very, very famous in the play. Faust: "If ever I recline, calmed on a bed of sloth, you may destroy me then and there. If ever flattering you should wile me that in myself I find delight, if with enjoyment you beguile me, then break on me eternal night. This bet I offer."

Mephisto: "I accept it."

Faust: "Right. If for a moment I should say, 'Abide, you are so fair,' put me in fetters. That day I wish to perish, I swear."

So now, having set the terms of the bet, Mephisto insists upon drawing up a contract. And, uh, Faust is sort of like, "Do we really need this formality? We just can't we just shake on it?" And Mephisto says, "No, we need a contract, and it must be signed in blood, for blood is a very special juice," as Mephisto remarks. So Faust says, "Final humor. You and the wager is formalized. Mephisto becomes Faust's servant." The devilish aspect of the intellect has come into the possession of the endlessly striving Western man, having reached the limits of knowledge and still wanting more. And having been sort of metaphorically resurrected, as he has, or given a new, uh, direction in life, Faust then resolves to leave the university and go traveling with Mephisto. He says, "The lofty spirit spurned me coldly, and nature hides from me her face. Torn is the subtle thread of thought. I loathe the knowledge I once sought. In sensuality's abysmal land, let our passions drink their fill, and magic veils not pierced by skill. Let every wonder be at hand."

Mephisto: "You are not bound by goal or measure. If you would nibble everything, or snatch up something on the wing, you're welcome to what gives you pleasure. But help yourself, and don't be coy."

Faust: "Do you not hear? I have no thought of joy. The reeling world I seek, the most painful excess, enamored hate, and quickening distress. Cursed from the craving to know all, my mind shall not henceforth be closed to any pain. And what is portioned out to all mankind, I shall enjoy deep in myself, contain within my spirit summit and abyss. Pile on my breast agony and bliss, and thus let my own grow into theirs, unfettered, till as they are at last, I too am shattered."

So we have a very important clarification of what Faust now wants, and what he means by, uh, immersing himself in the activity of life means both agony and bliss, the totality of human experience, as we've talked about. And what this really means is piling up extremes, both good and bad. He wants to experience tragedy and calamity and pain. He wants to have his fill of that. The ordinary seductions of the devil will not work for him. What Faust has determined in his knowledge is that, as we begin the episode saying, it's the pursuit that matters, not the knowledge. Faust wants to throw himself into that restless activity of pursuit. It's the only place where we find happiness, but as, as the human condition goes, it's, um, it's always mingled with pain. It's an essentially painful thing to be part of this world of willing and suffering. So Faust says, "Very well, give me suffering, because I want the heights of life and the depths."

And Mephisto is actually unable to help himself from admiring this attitude and praising it as bold. It's one of the reasons why he has this bet with God in the first place, because both, as Mephisto says, this is sort of towards the very end of the play, in the last part, in Part Two, that Faust is this like rarest specimen that really does represent something essentially and admirably human. So even he sort of admires Faust, but he doubts that Faust will actually be able to keep himself from getting lost in the bliss of the moment. Nevertheless, in fact, he's literally betting against it. And so, in any case, they're now off to take on the world. Mephisto says he'll arrange for the horses, and that the two of them can simply disappear. The world is their oyster.

Mephisto: "Come on, let your reflections rest."

Faust: "And plunge into the world with zest."

So that is where we're going to end for Part One. And we're only at the beginning of the Faust story. But I wanted to really take our time in introducing the story and the characters and the premise and the background of the work. And also the way we've kind of gone over the opening scenes of the drama, they really have a lot of wonderful lines that are very rich philosophically. So, uh, and and and are very relatable to me as a modern person who I feel, you know, just as much consumed in the haste of modernity and the restlessness of it all, and this like ruminating dissatisfaction that Faust has. I feel all those things. And so Faust, even though, again, he's a character from hundreds of years ago, speaks to me. And that, for me, is the pinnacle of great art, relatability across ages, you know, timeless communication between the artist and those who engage with their art, even once they're long dead. And so, and Faust, I feel I've glimpsed something really beautiful about, uh, Goethe, and that the struggles of his character can kind of inform my own. But in any case, so we looked, we took a hard look, or an in-depth look, of these opening scenes. We're going to go at a bit of a faster clip as the narrative of the story starts to get going, um, and just to cover all of the material, which is Faust is, as many people say, almost impossible to summarize. And so even though we're going to have to rely on some glossing and some summaries as we keep going, um, I want, you know, I wanted to at least dive deeply into many of the scenes and lines that show why I really love this play so much. All right, so we'll finish next week when we discuss the Gretchen tragedy, which ends, uh, Faust Part 1, and then we'll talk about, in that same episode, Faust Part 2. This is Keegan signing off.

Previously on Faust, we were introduced to our protagonist, Dr. Faust, a man who has sought all the knowledge that human beings can seek in the world and has reached the end of what human beings can know. So Faust turns to magic, but, uh, failing even here, he becomes depressed, you know, suicidal, doesn't want to go on living, but unable to bring himself to end his own life. And it's in that state of emotional turmoil that he meets Mephistopheles, the devil, who has arrived to offer Faust a wager. And that's what we ended on last time. Their wager, of course, is that so long as they're on earth, Mephisto shall serve Faust, and Faust has to go on as he's been doing, engaging in ceaseless activity and striving. But if he ever wishes for the moment to abide, if he ever wishes for the moment to stay and not pass on, in that day, Faust agrees that Mephisto can take him to hell, where he will then serve Mephisto. And Faust agrees to this because he does not believe that the state of rest can ever happen, that it's not possible for him. Um, and Mephisto, on the other hand, believes that he can seduce Faust with every worldly pleasure that he has, you know, uh, to offer him. So the two, uh, leave the academy together to travel the world.

All of the traditional elements of the Faust story are now set in motion with the Goethean innovations that the contract with the devil is a wager, not a sale of Faust's soul, and that Faust is also a somewhat sympathetic character, in spite of his many, many flaws. We can identify with Faust to some extent, which is not something we would really say about the Faust figure in the folk tales. But nevertheless, the Faust story has up until now played out as we might have expected it to play out, given the source material of the folk tales. Now, in the latter part of Faust Part 1, and even more so in Part 2, story elements are introduced that are purely out of Goethe's mind, which transcend the source material of the folk tale. The most important of these is the character of Gretchen and her tragedy. Gretchen and her character has been interpreted many different ways. In some sense, she stands for the German culture, but she's also, in addition to being a female character, she's a representative of the archetype of the feminine as such. Gretchen carries with her this transformative aspect, uh, that Goethe uses to an even greater effect in the second part of the story. It's sort of like the redemptive power of the eternal feminine. The eternal feminine is associated with salvation in the final scene of the drama. And of course, it's a tragic story, and Gretchen must suffer. It's not that Faust is really the tragic subject, it's Gretchen.

And I should warn the audience that even though Goethe has humanized Faust in the scenes that we've began with last week, he's about to become a much more unlikable character in many respects. And no one ever said Faust is without flaws. In fact, it's it's incredible how many flaws he has while still remaining the hero of the story. And so in that respect, he's like many of the protagonists of ancient Greek drama or even some modern-day anti-heroes. He can be callous, careless, and willing to use others. Faust does seem to learn from his mistakes, but, um, I mean, it's another central message underlying the work of Faust, that this series of experiences is not simply a chaotic world of sensation and activity, or just, you know, it's just a series of pleasures and pains, of peaks and valleys. I think the message of Faust, as we get into the part of the stories we're talking about today, is that there is a deeper meaning that one can come to recognize which gives a narrative and gives a coherence to the full picture of life's story, and therefore a sort of value to it. And that, like Emerson says, the purpose of our existence is for education, you know, to reveal something that could not be experienced without the pain and contradiction and striving of being alive. Life is not all just sound and fury signifying nothing.

So remember at the start of the drama, Faust is more or less of the mindset that life has no meaning. And this is something Mephisto agrees with him on. But in terms of temperament and how the two deal with the meaninglessness of existence, the two could not be more different, which is why they play off of one another so well. But anyway, in the course of learning, if that's, you know, the point of our existence, mistakes are made, people are hurt, and Faust has his own share of pains and regrets.

So before Mephisto and Faust leave the university, Faust, you know, he goes to get his things ready. And while Faust is gone, Mephistopheles starts going through Faust's clothes and decides to play dress-up. And then a student comes looking for the legendary scholar, whose study this is, and he mistakes Mephisto for being a scholar because obviously Mephisto is wearing a scholar's outfit. What follows is, I find to be, an amusing and insightful conversation with the student. He asks Mephisto about all the main faculties of the German university system, you know, the higher faculties of theology, jurisprudence, medicine, and philosophy. This scene, it has one of my favorite lines in it, where Mephisto says, "The laws and customs of a country are like an inherited disease." That's his way of talking to the student about the discipline jurisprudence. And, you know, Mephisto is nothing but to stain for it. It just cracks me up.

But Mephisto does everything he can to confuse and mislead the student, who has come to him. And the student still looks at Mephisto with reverence by the end of the talk because he's too ignorant to know better. And anyway, the scene ends with the student asking Mephisto to basically to sign his yearbook. And Mephisto does. He writes on it a phrase in Latin which translates to, "And you should become equal with God and have the knowledge of good and evil."

And so the, the student thanks him and leaves. I think that this is something subversive here in what Goethe is saying about scholars, um, or about the institutions of scholarship. Um, you know, because the main character is a scholar, right? And Faust is somewhat sympathetic because of his zest for life, you know, his endless search for, you know, meaning or happiness or whatever. But the other scholars in the institutions of scholarship are portrayed in a more questionable light in the play, um, especially when Faust and Mephisto come back to the university in Faust Part 2. Um, perhaps a way of explaining how Faust is different from the average scholar in a sense, you know, we were talking about his faults earlier. In a sense, it's because of his faults, you know, Faust's his sense of dividedness within himself, his longing, these are all aspects which give him humanity. But, you know, without humanity, the will to truth becomes a devilish thing.

So after this scene, Mephisto and Faust depart, and they visit a tavern together. It's the sort of the start of their travels. Mephisto does some magic tricks for the locals and drinking in the tavern. And Faust has almost no lines in this section. It's a fun scene, but it's a digression, doesn't move the plot along much, so we'll just gloss over it.

The first thing Mephisto does for Faust in terms of providing him with some sort of like magical services to fulfill his bargain is to reverse Faust's aging, to make him younger. And so the next scene is in a witch's kitchen, where, you know, it's described as there's a giant cauldron in the room, like glowing with a fiery glow, all these like, uh, this family of monkeys, those pet monkeys for the witch, or maybe it's the familiars, are like in charge of, uh, stirring and, you know, making sure that it doesn't over, over boil. And there's the strangest implements of, uh, witchcraft in every shelf, right? And, um, so Mephisto is going to use his connection with the witch to get Faust the youth potion. And there's a rather funny exchange in the, to arrive at the witch's house, the witch is out and about, so the two of them are there alone in her house, just waiting for, hanging out with the monkeys who are tending the fire and stirring the cauldron. And while they're waiting in the witch's kitchen, Faust and Mephisto have the following exchange.

Faust: "How I detest this crazy sorcery! I should get well, you promised me, in this mad frenzy of a mess. Do I need the advice of hag for cures? And should this quickish sordidness reduce my age by 30 years? I'm lost if that's all you could find. My hope is drowned in sudden qualm. Has neither nature nor some noble mind invented or contrived a wholesome balm?"

Mephisto: "My friend, that was nice oratory indeed. To make you young, there is one way, that's after. But I regret, that is another story and forms quite an interesting chapter."

Faust: "I want to know it."

Mephisto: "All right. You need no sorcery and no physician and no dough. Just go into the fields and see what fun it is to dig and hoe. Live simply and keep all your thoughts on a few simple objects glued. Restrict yourself and eat the plainest food. Live with the beasts, a beast it is. No thievery to dress the fields you work with your own dung. That is the surest remedy. At 80 you would still be young."

Faust: "I am not used to that and can't, I'm afraid, start now to work with hoe and spade. For me, a narrow life like that's too small."

Mephisto: "We need the witch, then, after all."

So, you know, Faust asks, you know, isn't there some other way to do this? And Mephisto replies, "Oh, you want a potion of youth? Yeah, it's called diet and exercise, fresh air." If Faust is like, "Yeah, that's not what I meant. I want a quick fix, an easy way out." Well, then the only option is to use black magic, to violate the laws of nature. Um, and Faust asks, "Well, can't you just make it happen, you know, like with magic or something? Just make me younger?" And Mephisto says, "No, he says this is a type of magic. It requires a long, involved process, and it would be a waste of time for him. So this is what they're doing. It's what you ask for. Stop, stop complaining, right?" So they wait for the witch to return. And there's some scenes of monkeys having shenanigans with Mephistopheles.

Meanwhile, Faust is lost in thought, staring at the witch's mirror, where he gets a glimpse of the eternal feminine, or a prefiguration and image of it. "The fairest image of a woman indeed! Could woman be so fair? Or is this body which I see reclining heaven's quintessence from another sphere? Is so much beauty found on earth?"

While Faust is staring at the mirror, there's, you know, the monkeys get distracted from their task by Mephisto, and they let the cauldron boil over. And that's just at the moment when the witch returns. The cauldron flames up and singes her, and she gets angry. And then seeing the intruders, you know, two strangers standing in her kitchen, she splashes the fiery liquid of the cauldron at Faust and Mephisto. She recognizes her mistake as soon as Mephisto begins raging at her and breaking all the glasses and pots.

Mephisto: "Does not the scarlet coat reveal his grace? Do you not know the rooster's feather, ma'am? Did I perchance conceal my face, or must I tell you who I am?"

And the witch answers: "Forgive the uncouth greeting. Though you have no cloven feet, you know. And you're two ravens, where are they?"

Mephisto answers, even though he can't get rid of the cloven hooves like other men of his time, he prefers to cover his legs and feet. But when it comes from, you know, to the issue of the two ravens, Mephisto says, "Gone is the Nordic phantom, former Aegis saw." Which implies that Mephisto was in fact Odin, or Wotan, you know, the, the wandering wizard, Odin, the one-eyed of Norse mythology. So for all the glory attributed to that Norse god, he was simply Satan in disguise. That's an association that Goethe makes here that I would say I disagree with, but in any case, it's in there. The witch does a little dance to celebrate that the

Devils come back and ask what they need. And Mephisto says they're here for, "A good glass of the famous juice, my dear." So the witch, he goes to get her most powerful potion for Dr. Faust. And, uh, Faust is still kind of irritated with all of this, but Mephisto prods and cajoles him to go along with all their crazy sorcery, as Faust puts it, and gets him to get into the magic circle while the witch casts a spell.

The witch says a bunch of nonsense word, or, you know, nonsense numerical verses. And Goethe so much as tells us that it's nonsense. There's a sort of meta-joke about people interpreting hidden meanings into things that simply aren't there. Mephisto explains, uh, quite straightforwardly, "A perfect contradiction intrigues not only fools but also sages. This art is old and new, forsooth. It was the custom in all ages to spread illusion and not truth. With three in one and one in three, they teach it, twittering like birds. With fools, there is no intervening. Men usually believe, if only they hear words, that there must also be some meaning."

I know the entire thrust of this simply that, you know, people read too much into things and or they're gullible when it comes to these speculative theories. But the way he puts it, I think, is just so true. There's no statement so vague or cryptic within the texts of, say, world religions or even like within popular fiction that people will not endlessly interpret whatever they want into it.

So, it, Faust drinks the potion. And as he does so, it blazes with a magical flame. And Mephisto encourages him to keep drinking. You know, he says, in so many words, "Come on, you're, you know, you're up here of demons and devils now. You can handle a little fire. Drinking a little fire." Then, upon completion of the spell, the witch breaks the magic circle, and Faust steps out. Mephisto is upon him immediately and tells Faust he mustn't rest. In order for the potion to have full effect, Faust needs to plunge himself into activity so that it will work its way through his system. He promises that now, with his regained youth, Faust will find the paragon of womanhood. And every young maid, uh, Mephisto wants to sink Faust into the most seductive of all the earthly pleasures, right? The pursuit of lust and sexuality. For obvious reasons, so he knows Faust was yearning after this sort of mysterious feminine image in the witch's mirror. So he sees his vulnerability. And, you know, as we all know, sex can obsess people. And also, on the other side of that coin, when people indulge in a bunch of meaningless sex, it can easily become devalued and just like leave you feeling empty. So I think this is why Mephisto is so eager to get Faust to absorb himself in like sexual promiscuity because it's like an easy, it's an easy path, uh, for him losing the wager.

And so they leave the witch's house. Mephisto tells her, you know, "Thanks for the favor. If you need anything next, Val, Fergus, knocked, you let me know." And they hit the streets, uh, quite literally. The next scene takes place on the street, and this is where Gretchen and Faust first meet. The character's name is Margaret, but in German, Gretchen can be a nickname for Margaret. And Goethe calls her both Margaret and Gretchen, which I just think would be needlessly confusing. So we're going to stick with Gretchen throughout.

Their first scene together is not really a meet-cute. I mean, Faust passes Gretchen on the street. He offers her his arm as an escort, and she tells him that she doesn't need his help and just sort of breezes right past him. And so Faust is eager to use his newfound relationship with the devil to get a date. And so he tells Mephisto, "Give me that girl, and don't ask why." Mephisto is particularly intrigued because the girl that he has singled out, the priest has just pronounced to be free of sin. "She's so completely blemishless that there was nothing to confess over her. I don't have any power." So Mephisto can't just force her to fall in love with Faust or something like that.

But Faust says he doesn't care. He'll settle for no one else. He's become taken with her. Um, I mean, maybe Faust feels that if he's going to have the devil in his employ, he'd better get what he wants when he wants it, or else he isn't getting the most out of the deal, right? He's getting a, a very raw deal. Now, we should note that Gretchen is likely a teenager. This is a time when the marriage age is 14 years old. We don't know exactly how old she is, but Faust says she's well above marriage age. So for modern audiences, we can just imagine she's in her 20s. Um, Gretchen is not from a glamorous family. She's worked for most of her life. And in the society she lives in, perhaps the fact of her being well over marriage age indicates she might be a little late to marry. Um, Faust is in fact confident that he can seduce her, and he's dismissive of the devil's protests that this is the wrong girl. You know, Mephisto is sort of trying to get Faust, you know, "You should just find someone else. Why, why is this the one?" But Faust isn't having this. And the more Mephisto pushes, the more Faust, uh, digs in. He says, "I tell you, if you don't comply, and this sweet young blood doesn't lie between my arms this very night at midnight, we'll have parted ways."

And so Mephisto's like, "All right, calm down." You know, he tries to talk him down from this ultimatum and says it'll take much longer than that for him to arrange circumstances so that Faust can even meet Gretchen. There's no way he's going to have her in his arms tonight. But he tells Faust to be patient. And if you remember at the end of the last episode, just, you know, called down a curse on patience, so that's not one of his virtues. But Mephisto says, "I beg you, don't be annoyed. What have you got? Once it's enjoyed, the fun is not nearly so great as when you bit by bit imbibe it." Mephisto, I think, somewhat helpfully here, is trying to remind Faust of the, um, demonic nature of human desires. How happiness is in the seeking and not the getting. Just by drawing something out, something drawing out a romantic affair, you get more enjoyment out of it. Learning to be patient allows you to take, uh, you know, greater pleasure in things. But Faust hates patience, so he only, he only grudgingly obliges Mephisto here. He agrees to let the devil do his thing. Uh, and so Faust asks that Mephisto provide a gift to give Gretchen. Mephisto says this is no problem. He remembers many treasures that were buried long ago in the region nearby, and he can go dig them up.

In the following scene, Mephisto and Faust go to leave the box of treasure, you know, jewels and gemstones that Mephisto has acquired, to leave them in Gretchen's room. This requires that they sneak in. And while they're in her room unattended, Faust has one of his little sort of reveries and begins to tell us of how he feels a sense of calm come over him here in the simple poverty of Gretchen's room. How he can feel Gretchen's presence there. He begins to wonder what's happened to him. Faust says, "Faust, I do not know you anymore." Um, you know, so he's doubting himself and his own intentions. He continues a little further to say, "Do magic spells surround me here? Immediate pleasure was my bent, but now in dreams of love, I'm all but spent. Are we mere puppets of the atmosphere?" Um, so it's the age-old question of what effect the environment has on your mental state. Um, and, uh, I think there is good evidence that the environment and the current stimulus that you're having, you know, shaping your state of mind, which is going to affect how, you know, all your decision-making and executive function. But, um, it's just an interesting moment of self-reflection here. He's wondering about his own drives and motives and where they come from, and how it could be that he wanted one thing, now he finds himself driven in another direction entirely.

And so, in some sense, Mephisto's plan is backfiring. Rather than Faust simply wanting to use Gretchen and be done with her and move on to the next girl, he's already falling in love with her. So the two hurry up and they hide the jewels before Gretchen returns. When she gets there, she discovers the treasure. She's awed by this amazing amount of wealth in her hands, while she's never seen. She reflects on how much difference in life that wealth makes and cannot really believe that the jewelry is hers. You know, she holds the earrings up to her ears and looks at herself in the mirror and says, "If only they were mine."

But in any case, when Gretchen's mother gets a hold of the jewels, she immediately knows that they're ill-gotten. And Mephisto finds out about this. He tells Faust about it the next day. He says that Gretchen's good mother has a keen sense of smell for spiritual matters. She can sniff out whether things are evil, uh, and sinful, or whether they're good and godly, right? And so she could sniff out that no blessing would come from accepting this treasure, which is true, by the way, once we learn the direction that the story goes in. Um, you know, this is like the first event in a chain of, uh, tragic events. Um, and so who gets the treasure in the end? It's the priests. Gretchen's mother goes and gives the treasure to the church. Mephisto, telling Faust what has transpired, he says that the priest, "Picked up a clasp, a necklace, and rings like toadstools or some worthless things, and did not thank them more nor less, then as if it were nuts or some such mess, and promised them plenty after they died, and they were duly edified."

So there's a subtext here of Goethe's antipathy towards the church, which you can see throughout the play. Um, you know, Gretchen reflects upon the fact that everything in the world depends on gold. She declares, you know, "Woe to us poor." Mephisto's, uh, treasure would not, it wouldn't really be a big deal for the church, right? That's sort of what he's, uh, saying to Faust here, and discussed. But it would be a big deal for Gretchen, her family. Um, you know, the church as an institution just gobbles up wealth on a scale that the average person can't even really imagine. And the treasure is just nothing to them. And this may be a very worldly way of looking at things. It's not one that is really endorsed by Christianity. In fact, Christianity is often criticizing it in its parables. But wealth holds real value. And wealth can be used in a story as sort of like a measurement of vitality. Like it's not just economic value, it symbolizes the ability to act and to enact your will in the world. Money is self-sufficiency. It's, uh, independence and freedom and power. Um, we don't really, and so vitality, right? Um, it allows you to live more effectively. We tend to look at money only as the corrupting influence of it, which is certainly there. I mean, you've all heard me make those criticisms. But, um, I guess what I'm saying is, like, by the church hoovering up the wealth out of society, it's also sucking out the vitality. It's sucking out power. And it's obscene because it's like a tick that's already fat, sucking out more and more. Um, and what do they promise you? Plenty after you die, though, right? So the average Christian mindset, it's almost like the opposite of a Faustian worldly longing. It's to be happy with what you have and give what you earn away and expect nothing in return from this world. You wait for the recompense later, after your death. So it's very much Faust's inversion from the conventional morality that we see. And this conventional morality applies to Gretchen's family in spades.

So Faust then gives Mephisto orders to, "Okay, go get another treasure. Get some new jewelry." And he tells him to hurry up and be quick about it. And Mephisto kind of, you know, complains a little bit. But Faust is getting frustrated with the devil. And, and to be honest, Faust is kind of a, a bit of a dick to Mephisto in the scene. Um, because you can tell Mephisto's like, "I just did this. I have to do it again." But anyway, their challenge, um, essentially is this: getting Faust, a strange man, uh, you know, a stranger to the community, an introduction to Gretchen. This is something which things are far more tightly controlled by one's family and this society and culture. You know, in these, in this cultural context, people didn't really typically want someone consorting with weird strangers, right? So Mephisto's solution is to find a go-between, someone who knows Gretchen, someone with a house they can use to meet that is not Gretchen's mother's house.

So Mephisto finds the mark, uh, in Gretchen's neighbor, Martha. Martha, in the following scene, starts out having a conversation with Gretchen. She worries about her wayward husband. Martha's husband, you know, ran out on her. He went to go gamble and drink and hang out in other countries. And she's heard he died or suspects that he died. Um, but his death has not officially been certified, and thus she's still bound in marriage. Um, meanwhile, Gretchen shows Martha the second collection of gemstones and jewels and such. And Martha exclaims how lucky Gretchen is to have such a secret suitor.

It's at this moment that Mephistopheles comes knocking at their door. And he convinces Martha that he's a messenger here to inform her of her husband's death. And he says he is a witness that will allow him to get the death certificate. And that, of course, he's going to volunteer Faust for this task. But he first tells Martha that her, with her husband's dying breath, asked for his wife's forgiveness for all that he's done, and that he died as a good Christian. You know, everyone's like, "Oh, you know, how wonderful to hear, Martha and Gretchen." Um, but of course, Mephisto has to keep going and take things too far. And he tells her, "But, you know, you probably don't need to mourn the man all that much. You can probably cut the normal mourning period a little bit short." And she's like, "Why?" And he starts going on about her husband's affairs and infidelities and his adventures abroad, and how he had, you know, this, uh, extramarital relationship with the Sicilian girl. And the fun thing here in the scene is we have no idea whether Mephisto is telling the truth or not. He could be just making things up, or he could be using a hard truth to his own advantage. There are some dry but funny lines here, like when Martha asks if Mephistopheles can really certify her husband's death. He says, "Yes, lady, what is testified by two is everywhere known to be true."

So, uh, even though the knowledge of her husband's behavior makes Martha curse him, Mephisto is betting that it'll make her a little more pliable when met with a suave, charming gentleman like himself. So Mephisto's plan is that this will be their end with Gretchen. They'll do this favor for the neighbor. She'll take a liking to Mephisto, and then he'll be able to use her house for Faust's courtship. So Mephisto tells Faust, "Soon Gretchen will still your desire. At Martha's, you may see her later this afternoon. That woman seems expressly made to play the pimp's and gypsy's trade." And Faust answers somewhat cluelessly here, I mean, or perhaps he's simply tone-deaf of how Mephisto is characterizing this as a pimping and what that says about his, you know, the woman of his affections. But Faust simply says, "Oh, good." So maybe he's just used to Mephisto's humor at this point.

But in what Mephisto said, he let the mask slip. As inconvenient as this development initially seemed for Mephisto and his agenda, he now realizes this might be a way to bring about Faust's downfall. The wager means he has to facilitate all of Faust's wishes while on Earth. But if Faust is successful here, um, it could mean leading to Faust losing the wager. If Gretchen stills Faust's desires, then Faust loses. And so, in some sense, Faust is in sort of a strange place because the object of his desires might threaten to end him. Um, and he doesn't like Mephisto's plan, by the way, of having to go lie to the authorities and sign his name as a witness, something he didn't witness. But Mephisto counters, "Is this not the first time in your life that you have testified what is not true?"

And so here, I find it funny because the devil is employing the logic that some Christians have used, you know, when evangelizing to people by pointing out, for example, you know, "You think you're a good person, but let's look at the Ten Commandments." That's a relatively simple set of moral precepts, and you can't even follow that. You know, for example, lying, "Thou shalt not bear false witness." That's exactly what Faust is doing here. He's literally bearing false witness. But the devil says, "Yeah, so what? You never lied? Of course you have. Lying, something everyone does. No one can say they've never told a lie." So the point of that kind of perspective, when it's used by Christians in the act of evangelizing, is usually to like, try and emphasize the universal sinfulness of mankind, the fact that no one's good enough to be saved on their own merit. But notice how the devil uses it. He, he uses the same idea, basically, to say, "Well, you know what's a little more evil? Everyone's already evil. What's a little more evil, when you've done this kind of evil before and you're going to do it again? What does it matter if there's a little more evil in the world? I thought the whole world was evil." We can see this intellectual term, this very clever inversion of what might be a well-meaning perspective into just a justification for doing whatever you want, as often what our own devilish intellect does.

And also notice, the devil, aside from getting the youth potion from the witch, has not really done anything terribly supernatural. And eating Faust, you know, I like that element to the drama. You know, the devil's not simply conjuring gold out of thin air. He has to go dig it up. Um, he can't just, uh, control Gretchen and her family. He has to contrive matters to Faust's advantage, which involves things like having to get Faust to go sign his name to false testimony. So, in any case, he convinces Faust. Uh, calls the devil a sophist and a liar, to which Mephisto responds, in so many words, "Yeah, like, don't we know each other well enough now to get past the basics here?"

Faust. The next scene takes place in a garden where Faust and Gretchen finally meet formally, and they're introduced by Martha. Um, Martha is walking arm-in-arm with Mephisto, whereas Faust is walking arm-in-arm with Gretchen, and they're sort of walking about the garden separately but in couples. And so Mephisto is playing wingman for Faust to some extent. Gretchen sees Faust's apparent wealth and imagines him to be a respectable, noble individual. And Gretchen is a bit embarrassed about her relative poverty and can't really believe that Faust is attracted to her. She says that it must just be because of his good manners, you know, as a well-traveled man, he must have very good manners, and that's the only reason why he's putting up with her.

Faust kisses her hand and says, "One glance from you, one word, gives far more pleasure than all the wisdom in the world." Gretchen says in response that, you know, her hands are so ugly and rough from a life of working with her hands. She can't believe a man like him would kiss them. Faust's flirting could be read as a bit cheesy, and perhaps it is. But if we consider what he said to her, it's funny to think about the fact that it's actually true in Faust's case, right? Faust already has, as far as he's concerned, uh, coming to the possession of all the wisdom in the world, and that no longer interests Faust. So all the wisdom in the world is actually a little bar from him, for him, right? Uh, I also wonder, since beauty is sort of in the eye of the beholder, is Gretchen's beauty simply in the eye of Faust? You know, we later learn Gretchen's brother is sort of resentful because he considers his sister the most beautiful and the most chaste and most sinless, and thinks she deserves to be married off to a respectable man. And yet, as Faust says, she's well above the marriageable age. Why hasn't she been married? It's interesting that Goethe chooses not to make Gretchen this, you know, gorgeous princess or something like that. If Faust wanted a princess, he probably could have accomplished that more easily with Mephisto's help, since we know how depraved most royal families are. So surely Mephisto would have an easy end with most of them. But it's just interesting that he wants Gretchen, who is a character that's described in terms which are always sort of emphasizing the ways in which she is lower class, and a somebody who works with her hands, and who has had a life of hardship to some extent. So, and Faust still has treated her like an object. This is in spite of the fact that he's now falling for her.

Gretchen's lines in this exchange, meanwhile, show sort of what's where she's coming from in her own inner experience. She's constantly repeating this theme of self-deprecation. For example, she says, in so many words, that she feels like she's not clever enough for him. And Faust always has a witty response for all of her self-deprecating remarks. You know, Faust replies that, well, what people call clever is usually not real cleverness, um, and that he's grown to appreciate those who are innocent and simple and humble. Um, and that's also, we can see how that could be true for Faust. So I don't think we're supposed to take Faust's flirting as just being completely disingenuous. He's telling the truth in his way, right?

As they walk, Gretchen tells us of her story and her life is a bit sad even before meeting Faust. Gretchen says, "My father left a tidy sum to mother, a house and garden near the city gate. But now my days are rather plain. A soldier is my brother, my little sister dead. So was while she was living the troubled life I led. But I would gladly go through it all of it again. She was so dear to me." She describes how she more or less raised her little sister during this time. Her life was endlessly stressful and full of dire responsibility. You know, it was many hours of distress, she said, nursing the child, waking up in the night to comfort her, washing before the sun would rise so she could attend to her daily tasks after not much of a night's sleep. But she's saying all of this somewhat wistfully. She's like longing for those days, hard as they were, because her sister's passed away now. And this is all a happy memory that's been Gretchen's life up until now. And in light of all this, she concludes, "Tomorrow, as today, always the same. Once spirits, sir, are not always the best, but one can relish meals and relish rest."

So Gretchen is sought by Faust in some sense because she represents the thing he truly wants, meaning he does not have it, right? He has a want of something which he does not have, and so it's become something mysterious to him and something that he's infatuated with. Gretchen is that sweet simplicity in the abiding moment. Having lived a life of laboring, Gretchen finds life's appreciation not in activity, but in rest. She finds life's meaning in simple, universal things: family, and love of one's family, and simple personal virtue. On some level, as we mentioned before, Gretchen is Lutheran, industrious Germany. Look for a more universal meaning, however. We could say that Goethe gives Faust a love who stands for the ordinary life and is an opposite kind of personality from the one that Faust is.

And so Gretchen then picks up a flower and plays that old game of "He loves me" versus "He loves me not," and ends on "He loves me." And after this afternoon together, off in the garden bower, they kiss. And Gretchen tells him, "Dearest man, I love you from my heart." But before things can get any more heated, Mephisto shows up. And he tells Faust, "It's time for us to leave. Night is falling." And Martha is worried about the neighbors spying on them. And so Faust and Mephisto depart. And panicking about the feelings that he's experiencing, Faust gets cold feet. Having just won Gretchen's affection, Faust leaves. He leaves town. And, uh, he doesn't want to be around anyone. He doesn't tell anyone where he's going. He doesn't even really want to be around Mephisto. But Mephisto still follows him everywhere because that's the way it goes.

Now, but so in the next scene, they've run off to a cave in the woods. Faust, struggling still with this problem of happiness, speaks to the exalted spirit and says that he's gotten everything he ever asked for, but now, driven mad by all these pleasures, he, he needs nature to recover. And he's been given strength in the past by his immersion in nature. And so there he returns. And as this convention, even today, Faust refers to nature with female pronouns, saying, "Let me penetrate into her heart, as into a close friend." And so with this kind of sexual language about nature, he begins to give thanks for this bliss that he feels, talking about how the secret wonders of his breast are opened when the pure moon rises, and how in the song, somber cliffs, he sees the silver shapes of a foreign age. It's very romantic verse from Faust.

And he laments being tied to Mephistopheles. He's their eternal companion, and he's frankly fed up with the devil and his antics. And as things stand now, he blames Mephisto for being the thing that keeps him from stopping and resting in this enjoyment of nature, or the thing that's holding, holding over his head, stopping him from abiding in the moment of Gretchen, right? Um, speaking of Mephisto, Faust says, "He makes me small in my own eyes, and changes your gifts to nothing with a few words. Breath he kindles in my breast to savage fire, and keeps me thirsting after that fair image. Thus I reel from desire to enjoyment, and in enjoyment languish for desire." Um, oh, and when he's saying in that passage, "your gifts to nothing," you know, uh, he's talking to this exalted spirit of nature. But again, it's a Schopenhauer look on human desires. But he is blaming Mephisto here. Perhaps we should ask, what was stopping Faust from resting in the enjoyment of nature before he met Mephisto? If we recall, just before meeting Mephisto, he told Wagner that he'd often tried to seek solace in nature, but on had found himself unable to. And so this fact, plus that line that Mephisto, "makes me small in my own eyes," it really makes me think there is something to the idea of there being a layered meaning here. And Mephisto is sort of part of Faust's personality.

Mephisto shows up in the cave accordingly, shortly after all of this. He comes and goes. Faust into going to chase some more desires. And Faust tells him, so many words, to piss off. Mephistopheles counters, "You don't want that. You don't want me to leave. Remember who got you where you are now." And Faust says, "How this sojourn in the wilderness renews my vital force, you cannot guess." And Mephisto's response is to satirize this very romantic style of speaking, or, you know, poetic writing that Faust just engaged in. And I find it hilarious. Mephisto says, "A supernatural delight to lie on mountains in the dew and night, embracing earth and sky, and raptured, reeling to swell into a god in one's own feeling, to probe earth's marrow with vague divination. Since in your breast the whole work of creation, with haughty strength and joy, I know not what, then overflow into all things with love so hot. Gone is all earthly inhibition, and then the noble intuition, with a gesture of need, I say of what a mission."

So in modern terms, basically, he makes a lewd, just, he's making a jerk-off motion in the air. Gone is all earthly, and he's sort of like mimicking the style of this romantic nature poetry. And it's getting more and more sexual until he says he makes a jerk-off motion in the air and says, "Do I need to say what kind of emission I'm talking about?" So this romantic poetry about nature, it's just intellectual masturbation. And it's also a weird sexualization of something, um, impersonal. Turning it into, I mean, it's just a weird link. I've often thought about the overlap of nature imagery and sexual imagery and poetry, and especially in the work of the Romantics. And so maybe there's something weird and psychosexual going on that actually exists.

But anyway, since Faust has run off into the woods after courting Gretchen, Mephisto tells him that she is now more distraught than ever in his absence. And she's wondering why he left her. "Once she may be cheerful, most of the time sad. Once she is spent in tears, then she is calm, it appears, and always loves you like mad." And so the two of them have an argument back and forth. But Faust eventually responds by saying, "I am near her, however far I be. Shall never be forgotten and ignored. Indeed, I am consumed with jealousy that her lips touch the body of the Lord."

So speaking within the language of sexual jealousy, um, but referring now to the communion sacrament, and the fact that Gretchen is a devout Christian and Faust is not. Um, he also has the sense that he is bringing about her doom by continuing to pursue her. He's guilty that he's had to undermine her peace. He's done so by introducing sin into Gretchen's life because pursuing her secretly and trying to have extramarital sex with her, that's a sin in this cultural context, right? In, in, in disputed movie, eventually, whether because of Mephisto or in spite of him, Faust decides he's going to go back to her. Mephisto gets in another dig at Faust by saying that at some times Faust puts on airs like one on Mephisto's level. You know, "At times you have the devil's airs." But then Mephisto says, "In all the world, there's nothing more absurd than a devil who despairs."

Then there's a scene of Gretchen and her spinning wheel. She sings songs and waits for Faust's return. A lot of the songs Gretchen sings, they're very simple, but they're beautiful. But we're going to skip over all that. Faust then returns. The sense of the passing of time is not so clear at all points in the play. So we're not exactly sure how much time it's been. I think this works to the play's advantage. It's left up to the imagination.

So Faust and Gretchen then are once again, once again, they're together. And they walk arm-in-arm in Martha's garden. And she tells him, "Uh, Heinrich promised me, uh, in." Actually, that's another thing we find, uh, in this scene. Faust's first name, which is exciting to me. So he's Dr. Heinrich Faust. Um, which is interesting that Johann Goethe didn't go with Johann Faust, because that was the historical Faust's first name, as I recall. But anyway, maybe he didn't, maybe he's not supposed to be a self-insert character. Um, but in any case, she, what does she want him to promise her? Well, she wants him to promise to be truthful to her and tell her what his religion is, what his beliefs are. And she's respectful and asking, but she's persistent. And eventually Faust has to admit he doesn't really have a conventional Christian view of God. He says he believes in the all-encompassing, the all-sustaining. But he says, "Him who may name and who proclaim, I believe in him." He is essentially appealing to the supreme mystery of God and the mystery of the nature of God by saying, "I believe in some sort of higher power, but I'm not going to name or establish these superstitions or do anything like that." "Call it bliss, heart, love, God, I do not have a name for this feeling. Is all names but sound and smoke, be fogging heaven's bliss."

And then a little further down, Gretchen responds saying, "Those are fair, those are very fair and noble phrases. The priest says something too, like what you spoke, only his words are not quite so." And ultimately, Gretchen sees through him. She eventually says, "You have no Christianity." And furthermore, she knows something wrong with Mephistopheles as well. She wishes that he wasn't around all the time. She says he fills her with this secret anguish. That Mephisto has these repulsive eyes, and whenever he's around, "I feel I do not love you anymore, and where he is, I cannot pray. It eats into my heart. Oh, you dear Heinrich, must feel that way too."

So it's another tragic element to the story. These two fall genuinely in love, but the decisions Faust has made in order to bring himself here, to put himself in this moment, have now created an insurmountable obstacle to that love. Ultimately, Gretchen wants someone who is devoted to the same spiritual understanding as her, but Faust is not like her, and he can't be like her. Can't turn off his rational, skeptical brain, you know, with its postmodern concerns about whether the linguistic concept can contain the idea of God. He can't suspend that, and he can't embrace the kind of simple faith that Gretchen has.

Before they part ways that night, though, Faust tries to sleep with Gretchen. And she says she can't because, you know, her mother is a light sleeper. Faust says, "Well, I have a potion for that." And Gretchen says she doesn't know why she keeps doing Faust's will, but she simply can't help herself. And so she takes the potion and agrees to give three drops to her mother. And it's left a bit ambiguous in the, uh, scene, but in so many words, we can take it that they've had sex. Mom's knocked out. Can finally consummate the relationship. But it's pretty much immediately after this that things start to go very badly. That's why this part of Faust is known as the Gretchen tragedy. Gretchen is the center of the calamities that rain down on the rest of Part One.

She's with a friend in the next scene, and they're talking about other people in town. Her friend is sort of criticizing this other woman for not being a paragon of virtue. And Gretchen realizes, "I'm not a paragon of virtue now either, am I? Not according to Christianity." Uh, she thinks to herself, "Of all the times she used to scold along with the other scolds, 'How for another person's shame, I found not enough words of blame.'" But now Gretchen feels that she's a sinner, and feelings of guilt begin to plague her.

Then her mother dies. It turns out that those three drops that Faust gave her, they were a little more powerful than he believed. There's not an indication that Faust lied, or that he knew that was going to kill Gretchen's mother. It seems like the opposite of what he would want. Maybe he simply put in the wrong amount, or, or mixed a bad potion, or maybe Gretchen made a mistake. We don't know. But now Gretchen can only pray and make offerings to the Mother of Grief at her altar carved into the city wall. Um, you know, Gretchen is just despondent.

Then things really come to a head. It's night time on the street outside Gretchen's house. Faust doesn't know what's transpired yet, and he comes back to try and court Gretchen yet again. Gretchen's brother, Valentine, who is a soldier, catches Faust coming up to Gretchen's window. And Valentine knows what has happened. He thinks that everyone once regarded his sister as this fair, respectable maiden, and now look at what this suspicious stranger has done to her reputation and to her family. And Valentine feels it's his job to stop Faust. So while Faust plays the zither and sings for Gretchen, Valentine runs up on him and smashes the zither. He challenges Faust to fight him. Mephisto then offers to duel on behalf of Faust. And the way the scene is written, logically, it almost seems as if Faust and Mephisto are fighting as one person. Um, or again, you know, that Mephisto's part of Faust.

So, "Valentine says, 'Now let's try splitting skulls. Beware, Mephisto, to Faust, don't withdraw, doctor, quick, don't tarry. Stick close to me, I'll lead the way. Unsheathe your toothpick, don't delay. Thrust out at him, and I shall parry.' Valentine then parries that Mephisto, of course. Valentine and that Mephisto. All right." So the fight goes on for a while. And then, uh, oh, Valentine says, "I think the devil must be in this fight. What could that be? My hand is getting lame." And then Mephisto calls out, "Thrust home!" And Faust stabs Valentine, presumably in the torso. And Valentine's calls out, "Oh God!" And Mephisto says, "The rogue is tame now. Hurry hence, for we must disappear. A murderous clamor rises instantly, and while the police does not trouble me, the blood ban is the thing I fear."

So Faust and Mephisto leave town again. Uh, Martha and Gretchen run down to see Valentine, who's been stabbed. He's mortally wounded. The Faust has effectively killed her mother and her brother. And Valentine does not forgive Gretchen for this. With his dying words, he chooses to denounce his sister publicly, denounce her in front of the crowd of bystanders that's now gathered around him. Since, "After all, you are a [ __ ] be one with all your might." Um, and, you know, Gretchen says, "My brother, you know, what a frightful shame." Twitchy replies, "Leave the Lord God out of this game. You started secretly with one. Soon more will come to join the fun. And once a dozen lays you down, you might as well invite the town."

So he goes on to say that he hopes even if God should at last forgive her, that she be cursed for the rest of her life. That when she acted so dishonorably, she pierced his heart more terribly than Faust's sword. And with that, Valentine dies. This destroys whatever there was of Gretchen's self-image or self-respect. And she begins to lose her mind. And the next scene, she's in church, trying to repent, but she's haunted by an evil spirit. And the spirit is very clearly the voice of her grief, of her anxiety and guilt. Even in a holy place, the church, where Gretchen once found comfort, the evil spirit does not give her reprieve. As the choir recites verses in Latin about the last judgment on mankind, the sense of guilt and fear heightens until it reaches a paroxysm, and Gretchen faints in the middle of the service.

Faust, meanwhile, is not around to take any responsibility for what's happened or what's happening with Gretchen, or for the murder of Valentine, for that matter. Instead, Faust has fled again to avoid those charges, right? Since he can't return, he and Mephisto just start touring the world again. And then the next scene, they're going to a party. And it's a special party. It's one that only happens once a year. It's Walpurgis Night. This is the night of April 30th, lasting until the sunrise of May 1st, called Walpurgisnacht in Germany. It's one of the witches' Sabbaths that we discussed some to some detail in the, uh, episode we did on Halloween of last year. The center of witchcraft in Germany is in the Harz Mountains. Um, it's Blocksberg, the Hexentanzplatz, or Witch's Dance Floor.

And the scene that unfolds there is almost psychedelic. You know, Mephisto summons the will-o'-the-wisps to light their way and lead them up the mountain. And then Mephisto and Faust pass whole companies and groups of witches and wizards and like a half-witch and all sorts of like, just creatures and ghosts, were all climbing up to the top of the mountain. So climbing the mountain is, you know, sort of the metaphor that Goethe is playing with here to great poetic effect. It's the goal of mystical experience, the real interaction with the, the with some phenomenon that pierces the veil, right? Um, and so reaching the top of the mountain, in the literal sense, it's this eruption of the supernatural. There's witches flying around on broomsticks and on top of goats. There's ghosts and spirits and the fires of Mammon, which light the event. Unusual as this witch festival is, it is a social event. And there are even witches there trying to sell their wares. And it sounds to some extent like a music festival in many respects. You know, there's people hawking merch, and there's music, and there's dancing, maybe there's even food trucks, right? The only difference between an ordinary music festival and the banger that is Walpurgis Night is the ghosts and the magic and the people flying around on broomsticks.

And so Mephisto gets Faust to unwind and start dancing with a young, attractive witch. And we can see why Mephisto would take Faust to this event, you know, that he's trying to lure him into, uh, chasing the next pleasure again. But this event, for most people, would be the most amazing, like awesome thing to ever experience in their lives, right? Like this is what everyone who grew up reading Harry Potter must have dreamed about, like going to a witch dance, dance party. And I don't know, I mean, depending on what your threshold is, for some people, this might be the moment for, like, the abide moment that aren't so fair. So, you know, things are ruined with Gretchen, and Faust is probably not going to have that moment with her at this point. So Mephisto might as well try to get him to move on from his ex, and the best way to do that is to party.

But Faust ultimately cannot immerse himself in the festival because his thoughts turn to Gretchen. He stops dancing with the young fair witch that Mephisto has partnered him up with. He sees a vision of Gretchen walking with her feet chained together. But Mephisto tells him not to think about it. It's just a ghostly apparition, you can ignore it. But Faust actually can't ignore it. "I cannot leave her. I cannot flee."

And so after this, um, scene, there's a scene called the Walpurgis Night's Dream. Presumably a dream Faust is having on Walpurgis Night, or, you know, well, it's like a Midsummer Night's Dream. Is that there's heavy references to it. But it's beautiful literature. It's not something I want to try and summarize here, and it doesn't advance the plot.

So Faust and go back. And there's a scene in a field on a dismal day where Faust rages at Mephistopheles. He's learned that Gretchen has been incarcerated in the dungeon after all. So his vision was true. And he rants and raves about his misery and about her misery and all the horrible things that have happened. And here, the structure of verse or poetry is completely absent. Faust's lines are written in paragraphs, as are Mephisto's lines. The beautiful dream world of poetry that we were in up to this point is shattered in this scene.

So Faust shouts at Mephistopheles, "Imprisoned in irreparable misery, handed over to evil spirits, and judging unfeeling mankind. And meanwhile, you soothe me with insipid diversions, hide her growing grief from me, and let her perish helplessly." Mephisto replies, "She's not the only one." Uh, Faust does not like that very much, and he rages some more. He finally concludes with, "The misery of this one woman surges through my heart and marrow, and you grin imperturbed over the fate of thousands. Mephisto, now we're once again at our wit's end where your human minds snap. Why do you seek fellowship with us if you can't go through with it? You would fly, but get dizzy. Did we impose on you, or you on us?"

Um, you know, Faust invokes the fact that Mephisto's supposed to be a servant on Earth. He demands that he helps him save her. And Mephisto says, "Look, I can't loosen her bonds or open her bolts." And here he poses the question once again as to whether it was Mephisto who plunged Gretchen into ruin, or whether it was Faust. And we might say, um, when Faust said what he wanted, when this whole affair got started with Mephisto, he said he wanted the totality of life's experiences. He said he wanted pain, calamity, and tragedy. And Mephisto admired his bravery in seeking such things. But notice, it's also where Mephisto chastises Faust the most. It's where he's like, sort of going back on this, um, because Faust often can't follow through. And so now he's reaping exactly what he's sown, and he wants to get out of the consequences again and blame Mephisto for his problems.

So regardless, uh, action must be taken to save Gretchen. And Faust insists, in spite of the danger, that they have to go, even though being

Caught means certain death for Faust. So Mephisto says, "Fine, I'll make the jailers' senses a bit foggy, and then you can slip inside to spring Gretchen out of prison." And all goes according to plan. Faust finds his way into the dungeon, and he finds Gretchen's cell. But when Faust gets there, he finds that Gretchen has descended completely into insanity. She at first does not even recognize Faust. She believes he's her executioner. And in a way, Faust is her executioner, right? He's the one who set her down this path causally. She's to be hanged in the morning for drowning her child, which we can take to be Faust's child. The father of the man who impregnated her, killed her brother, and led to her accidentally killing her own mother, and then he fled, leaving her all alone. And so Gretchen lost all hope and had a crisis of faith, and in this downward spiral, lost her mind and killed the child. And so, believing Faust is the hangman, she says, "Quote: 'I am still so young, so very young, and I must already die. I was beautiful too, and that was why near was the friend. Now he is away. Torn lies the wreath, the flowers decay.' End quote."

Faust unlocks her chains and tries to get her to come away with him. But she won't go. She cannot see who it is who has come to get her and won't leave the cell. There are moments in the speech where she forgets what happened and asks, "Quote: 'Only let me nurse the baby again.' End quote." But eventually, she goes on to say, "Quote: 'They took it from me to give me pain, and now they say I put it away.' End quote."

Faced with her rising insanity, Faust throws himself on the ground, and he collapses. He begs her to recognize him. Instead, Gretchen throws herself on the ground next to him, thinking that he is prostrating himself in prayer. She says, "Quote: 'Ah, let us kneel, send to saints, send to the saints our prayers.' End quote." She goes on to say that beneath the ground, "Quote: 'There seethes hell, the devil makes a thundering noise with his angry revel.' End quote." So it's like she feels the presence of the hellfire that's waiting to snatch her up.

Faust is at his breaking point, and he cries out Gretchen's name. And finally, she recognizes his voice and calls out for him too. "Quote: 'Gretchen! Heinrich! Faust! It is I! Gretchen! It is you! Oh, do say it again! She seizes him. It is he! It is he! Where then is all my pain? Where the fear of the dungeon, the chain? It is you come to save me! I am saved now! I see the road again too, where for the first time I laid eyes on you, and the garden, and the gate, where I and Martha stand and wait. Faust: Come on, come on! Gretchen: Oh, stay, because I'm so happy where you are staying.' She caresses him. End quote."

So Faust tries as he will to get her to leave, but Gretchen will not go. And Faust knows he has a very short time limit before the guards return, and that would mean his own arrest and likely death. So he's in a hurry. But Gretchen doesn't get it. She seems at first to slip back into a naive innocence. You know, she wants to be held and kissed. And when Faust does not show her affection, she grabs him and kisses him. And she finds that now his lips are cold to her. She asks where his loving air has gone. And in spite of the fact that I think Faust still loves Gretchen, it's been corrupted by what's happened. He can't look at her the same way, not without guilt for himself or judgment for her, right? And nevertheless, he doesn't want her to suffer, and he feels guilt at causing her suffering. And that's why he wants to rescue her. But not only does Gretchen insist on staying, she begs Faust to stay with her. She's so damaged by what has happened that she's made her peace with death. And in my view, she may want Faust to stay so that he can die with her. She might be aware of that on some level. You know, she has her own guilt and her own lucid moments where she knows that she must face justice. And so she says, as you know, Faust steps out of the cell begging her, pleading her to come, she says, "Quote: 'You're leaving now? Oh, Heinrich, that I could go! Faust: You can, if only you would. Open stands the door. Gretchen: I may not go, for there is no hope anymore. What good to flee? They lie and wait for me to have to go. Begging is a misery, and to have a bad conscience too.' End quote."

Gretchen has an obvious point. You know, Faust might be able to rescue her from the jail cell or from the immediate prospect of execution, but he's ruined her life. He ruined her conscience, right? It's destroyed any hope of a future she might have had. So the damage is done, and Faust can't redeem her. He can't undo the harm he caused just by freeing her from a jail cell. And strangely, in spite of all this, she still loves him. And her pleading suggests that if he truly loved her back, what she thinks he would do is he would stay with her and die with her, accept the responsibility for what has happened as she is doing, and walk with your loved one off into the afterlife. But Faust can't do this. Not only because it would probably constitute losing the game with Mephisto, but it's not who Faust is. And because of this, maybe he cannot truly love Gretchen, in so far as he's not really willing to make the necessary sacrifices in the name of love. But the pain of what he's done to her, which he now realizes, tears through him. And she doesn't even allow him to forcefully remove her. He tries to, and she says, "Quote: 'Leave me! No, I shall suffer no force. Do not grip me so murderously. After all, I did everything else you asked.' End quote." And she has a point with that.

With that, the day begins to dawn, and Faust wishes in that moment that he'd never been born. Mephisto arrives to rush Faust away for his own safety. It's time to mount the horses and get the hell out of here. When Gretchen sees Mephisto, she loses it. She immediately recognizes him as the devil. She thinks he's there to collect her soul. But Faust tells her, naively, "No, no, you shall live." He's shouting this as he's rushed off by Mephisto. As they leave her, Gretchen cries out, "Quote: 'Judgment of God! I abandoned myself to you!' End quote." And Mephisto, as they exit, declares that Gretchen is judged. But then a voice from above, as if to complete the thought, adds, "Is saved." As Mephisto and Faust flee, part one of the tragedy ends with Gretchen's voice fading away inside the cell as they grow further and further from it. "Heinrich! Heinrich!"

The ending of Faust Part 1 is a bit of a downer. But as we talked about last time, Part 2 was written and released much later. You know, we're talking about the late 1700s versus Part 2 not coming out until 1832, I think, is when it's published. So the audience had to wait decades before seeing how things concluded. And but that was with the cliffhanger of the ending we just experienced. And so, if we consider that plot of Faust Part 1 in its totality, the story so far is a sad story. And you know, the ending of a tale changes the meaning of the beginning and of the entire thing, right? The ending changes the meaning of all the previous events that have happened, or it defines the meaning. And so before we move on, I think we should sit with this and at least imagine to ourselves what effect the end of the story would have on us if this was all that had been written, if you didn't know there was a Faust Part 2 or what would be in it. How would one feel at the end of the Gretchen tragedy? And I think it's pretty terrible. I mean, to really take it seriously, if we take the story up to this point as its own complete story, I think it is very much within the bounds of tragedy, in spite of what Nietzsche had to say. You know, Nietzsche's allegation, as I've mentioned, was that Faust is not truly a tragedy because, as Nietzsche writes in *Wanderer and His Shadow*, "Quote: 'A little seamstress is seduced and made unhappy. A great scholar in all four branches of learning is the evil-doer. Surely that could not have happened without supernatural interference? No, of course not. Without the aid of the incarnate devil, the great scholar could never have accomplished this. Should this really be the greatest German tragic idea, as is said among the Germans?' End quote."

And so we can understand Nietzsche's criticism here, I think, as an attempt to draw out the vast gulf between Greek tragedy, which was the affirmation of life even when life involves, you know, Oedipus gouging out his eyes, and what Germany considered the supreme tragedy, which is found in Faust. And remember, this is a very popular play, even in Nietzsche's time. And Nietzsche is someone who is by temperament untimely, or rather unfashionable. And so he's not predisposed to approve of Faust, even though he loves Goethe. And he, Nietzsche still finds great value in Faust and makes reference to the play many times. But you know, I think his attitude is, if it's this popular, there must be something wrong with it. But that, I think, should point us to something with Nietzsche, in so far as he had nothing but admiration for Goethe. And Goethe seems to be one of the closest things to Nietzsche's great people. I think because Goethe is in many respects like Faust. And Kaufman points out in another work, for example, that Goethe's relationship to one of his girlfriends, Friederike Brion, is in essence the origin of the Gretchen story. Friederike was a parson's daughter who lived in the rural countryside, and Goethe was an educated man, a respected man, who he, you know, he met her when he came to ride and explore out in the country. And they had a short but intense love affair. And Goethe stayed with her family many times. He wrote her poems and he gave her gifts and lavished her with affection. And she believed, you know, that they were going to get married. And then suddenly he broke off the affair. And the letter that Friederike sent to Goethe after he broke up with her, he writes that, "Quote: 'It rent my heart.' End quote." And that, you know, in reading it, he finally, for the first time, felt the depths of Friederike's pain. And he writes that even though he's been in other relationships that have ended, yet also tragically, for the first time, he was the guilty party. And so I think the tragedy here, the Gretchen tragedy, comes out of Goethe's life. It's a transmutation of his own pain at the ending of his own relationship and the feeling that he'd ruined someone else. You know, Friederike never married, by the way. She was courted by a few others, but for whatever reason, she never left the family home, and she lived and died there. So the play, Goethe's Faust, elevates the same story into a cosmic drama. But basically, in essence, it's just the story of an ambitious, driven intellectual who, rather than checking his strong desires, which he knows act on a whim and never lead him to want to stay or be sated, he knows this about himself, he still gives in to his desires. And he, when this desire is love, he cannot follow through with the sacrifices necessary when you really love someone. And so in the end, he feels guilt over it. That, for me, is not only sufficiently tragic, but it's a tragedy many of us can relate to. Although I think we might give Nietzsche his due, in so far as upon looking at the events of Goethe's life, Nietzsche is totally right. Goethe didn't need the devil incarnate in order to do what Faust did. Obviously, he didn't. Not as bad as what Faust did. But you know, of course, Mephisto, if you haven't noticed, is not really necessary for Faust's striving to cause collateral damage, as Mephisto himself has already pointed out. And Mephisto is primarily, in terms of what he brings to the dialogue, he's like a cynical, nihilistic, but witty character. And he actually, his function is to lace every scene with comedy. And so Mephisto is not supposed to be the reason why the play is tragic. If anything, Mephisto's presence makes the play more comic. It makes Faust a tragicomedy. But anyway, that's, I digress.

I guess Part 1 cannot really remain as a self-contained story, though, because the ending brings no closure unless it is to be a simple morality play, yet again, denouncing a Faust in his archetype with the warning that even if you succeed in life as the Faustian man and suck the marrow out of life, in the words of the Dead Poets Society and all, you know, all that jazz, you may meanwhile be hurting and destroying the people you love. And that's almost a worse punishment than actual punishment being visited on you directly. So, and after the events that have happened, it may be difficult to see how Faust could be redeemed or how he could recover from the trauma of knowing what his little adventures and quest has caused. That's led to Faust becoming a liar, a corrupter, an adulterer, and a killer. And it caused the death of his love. Now Faust is back where he started. The old problem of happiness still eludes him. And yet again, he has nothing, and he is nothing. He's nothing except his devilish intellect, right?

Part 2 of Faust covers the rest of Faust's entire life. Faust Part 1 is written by a young man and expresses the longing, sorrows, and guilt of a young guy. And Faust Part 2 is written by an old man, and it expresses a more mature kind of longing. It expresses a perspective which is not so much caught up in, like, the storm and stress of youth, but which is reflective and life-surveying and world-surveying. It's the perspective of an older soul. And so Part 2 takes us into world-traversing territory. Faust begins to delve into history, into past ages, into Greek myths, into politics and civil engineering, and all sorts of other projects. And if that sounds disjointed, it sounds that way because it's almost impossible to give a summary of what happens in Part 2 of Faust. As many have said, we're going to try, albeit not in as much detail as we did with looking at the Gretchen tragedy. In some sense, we have to gloss over many things. But that's because if we were to look at every part of this play in total depth, this episode would be like six parts long. It would be as long as a Hardcore History series on, like, World War I, right? And we're just not gonna go that down that road, I think. So we're gonna gloss over the events of Part 2, as many do, and as Kaufman does in his abridged translation. And I think it's acceptable, though, for many reasons. The events of Part 2 do not follow a linear narrative structure the way that Part 1 does. I mean, there are storylines within Part 2, but it's broken up into five acts with settings ranging across time and space, and the events do not build upon each other, at least in terms of an overarching plot. I mean, the plot is more episodic, is the way to put it in modern terms. Faust does a series of things, has a series of experiences. They're significant poetically or metaphorically, and sometimes makes sense, you can make a sort of poetic sense out of the sequence, right? But they don't like form a coherent literary narrative. And that's okay. That's not the kind of ride you're in for in Part 2 of Goethe's play. And the best way to experience it, I would say, would not be through the podcast. You should definitely, if you're interested in this, it'll give you more. There's so much in Part 2 to find.

So, but in any case, we're going to go over the short version of the significant philosophical ideas in Part 2 that relate to what we've talked about so far, leading up to the final scenes of Faust's death and the settling of the wager.

First, Faust is reclining in a beautiful field, and nature spirits swirl around him to heal his heart and soothe the burning memories and the sting of guilt over Gretchen's fate that still plagues him. And this, I think, to modern readers, probably would seem a bit too convenient for Faust to simply have his tormenting memories soothed away by magic. But this is a play which is telling the story of what happens across Faust's whole life. So after all of his adventures as a young man, you know, Goethe writing this is much older man. If you think about, you know, maybe our only our older audience members will understand this. And I'm not terribly old myself, but I'm when you think back on a terribly tragic relationship you had, once it gets to be like 10 or 20 years ago, or even imagine 30, 40 years ago, you eventually just accept what happens and move on. And it doesn't have the same, you know, time heals all wounds, I guess, explaining the very basic concept of time heals all wounds. But I guess what I'm saying is that it doesn't, we have to bring Goethe has to bring Faust into his mindset as a more mature soul, right? And it doesn't do to have whole scenes or acts of just Faust brooding, sitting around brooding. We've already actually gotten plenty of that already at the very beginning of the play. And so it's a literary device. I don't think it's meant to excuse or make this easier. It's Faust within the healing power of nature over an indeterminate span of time is able to get over and accept what happens so he can continue in his quest. It's another death and rebirth for Faust, is how Act 1 begins.

Faust then goes to join the court of the Emperor. The empire is having financial problems. There's not enough gold in the treasury. But Mephisto tells the Emperor that there's plenty of gold underground, buried beneath his kingdom. Mephisto seems, this is one of his special powers, you see. You know, knowing where treasure is buried in the earth. It's one of his most consistent abilities. So Faust comes up with a solution for the empire's problem. It's the invention of paper money. Faust creates paper notes which are worth a thousand crowns, backed by the buried gold. So he invents paper money. The Emperor then, you know, that makes Faust part of the court, a respected member of the court. He then demands of Faust, the Emperor does, he wants to see Helen of Troy and Paris, the famous figures from ancient Greece, from, you know, the Iliad. This kind of role for Faust as a conjurer of tricks for the nobility, it's very similar to the stories around the pseudo-historical Faust. So in Goethe's play, Faust also, in accord with the folk tales, becomes this famous sorcerer who is part of public life and known to nobility and is a famous person. Faust goes and he delivers this command of the Emperor's to Mephisto. They have to jump through a couple magical hoops that we won't go into in order to do this, but they conjure up Helen of Troy and Paris. Mephisto can't directly conjure them because they come from an earlier time, you know, they're in the underworld of ancient Greece, not the Christian hell. Mephisto has to go through this intermediary set of deities called the Mothers in order to do this. And so when they summon Helen of Troy and Paris before the court, the reaction of the nobility is not what we might expect. So the male nobility find Paris unimpressive, although the women like him. And the consensus is that Helen is not all that beautiful. And I think this is some sort of comment on the cultural superficiality of Goethe's contemporaries, or we could say more broadly, it's the disconnect between modernity and the age of the Greeks, that we simply are different people than they are, and that there is a sort of different collective psyche or psychic sort of wide gulf between the mindset of pre-modern people and modern people. But in spite of the nobility not taking a liking to these ancient figures, Faust himself is smitten with Helen. And when Paris tries to carry her off, Faust is stricken by jealousy. And he sort of forgets that this is just a magical display, right? And so he gets caught up in his jealousy over witnessing an image that's actually what it is, it's Helen and Paris are merely illusions. It seems. And when Faust interferes with the spell, there's an explosion, and the figures disappear in a puff of smoke.

Helen comes to symbolize the eternal feminine in this part of Faust. At first, she appears as simply an image, an illusion, just as the eternal feminine appeared in the witch's mirror in Part 1. So this is a parallel to the first part, and how the eternal feminine first appears. After the explosion, Faust plummets into unconscious darkness, and then we pick up with him again in the next act. He's back in his old study at the university. Mephisto has, you know, taken them there too, so Faust can recover. Faust is still sleeping off the explosion. And while he's doing so, Mephisto dresses up in Faust's clothes again, and he has another humorous exchange with a student. And then we catch up with Wagner years later. This is Faust's old assistant, if you'll remember from the beginning of the play. And Wagner has made a homunculus, which is an alchemically created human being. "Quote: 'Wagner: A glorious product! You shall soon be seeing! Mephisto: What will it be? Wagner: We make a human being! Mephisto: A human? And what pair and passion have you locked in the chimney pipe? Wagner: Forbid! While procreation used to be the fashion, we think of that, pardon, as tripe.' End quote." So we have another critical look at the scholarly knowledge-seeking drive. When unrestrained by respect for human nature, sciences will eventually look to discard our biological and physiological limitations in the name of more and more power over the external world. Wagner's words about procreation reveal this sort of antipathy that the purely scientific mind has for these limitations. To liberate ourselves from nature, the truth-seeking drive, you know, wants to be set free entirely and be without humanity, which is just at the end of the day, it's a set of limitations. That's what the human condition is. That's what always defines, it's what defines anything is its limitations. And so after this, we're transported to ancient Greece for the classical Walpurgis Night. It's even more hard to describe than the first one. Faust's first words in this section are, "Quote: 'Where is she?' End quote." The ambiguity signaling he's talking about the eternal feminine, I think. But the fact that he's transported back to classical antiquity again clues us into the fact the new object of his desire is sort of embodied by Helen of Troy.

At this classical Walpurgis Night, there are sirens and sphinxes and creatures from Greek mythology. Ancient philosophers show up, mythic figures appear. You know, we get a scene of Thales and Anaximander debating whether the world is fundamentally fire or fundamentally water. There's just too much here to recount again. This wild scene ends with the homunculus that Wagner created being shattered against the shell of Galatea. So Galatea, she's a Nereid, which is a water spirit in Greek mythology. Her shell is pulled by dolphins like a chariot. Galatea, you know, in the Greek myth, she destroys the Cyclops Polyphemus for killing her lover. So she's this beautiful symbol of pure nature, which all these very Greek things, but she's also this retributive force, right? She's a lover, but also she is in the myths displayed as a force of vengeance. So the homunculus, a creation from Faust's time, right, is brought into this world of deities and demigods and classical antiquity. The time periods are being blurred together. And in this image, I think we have this conflict between two opposing drives: a longing which is rooted in the human condition versus the desire to alter or erase that condition. So Faust's quest for the eternal feminine through ceaseless striving, represented here by Galatea, is elevated above the cold rationalist quest to scientifically dominate nature. She crushes it under her chariot. And I think that is indicative of sort of the two sides of the same coin of, we could say, Wagner and Faust, or the difference between the scholarly pure will to truth-based driving and the Faustian striving.

In Act 3, we're in ancient Greece again. This is where scenes begin to shift in an almost psychedelic way. The first scene is Helen in Greece, and all the lines are in a form of verse that is, as they say, Hellenized, as in the verses don't rhyme. And Helen speaks in dialogue with a chorus. This is a form of poetry common to Hellenic Greece. But then the next scene shifts to the courtyard, and Faust is there, and he meets Helen of Troy and speaks with her. And as she speaks with the characters from Faust who speak in rhyme, she begins to finish their sentences or rhyme off of their rhymes. So Faust brings the spirit of Greek culture, this feminine spirit of Greek culture, into contemporary Germany, and then has her speak in the language of contemporary poetry rather than antiquity. She transitions from one to the other. But then we learn Menelaus and his soldiers are coming to reclaim Helen, and Faust uses magic in order to escape with her. I think the overall thrust of what's changed about Faust in Part 2 and the nature of his adventures, Faust's striving has become more idealized than physical, more abstract than physical. He's trying to dredge up the spirit of a past age, which is what Goethe is trying to do through this play, right? It's what Faust's pursuit has become, a more spiritualized version of this never-ending quest. It's like, rather than trying to simply chase women for physical romance, it's a more mature spiritual quest, reflected in the writings of a more mature Goethe. And Helen and Faust eventually have a child together, Euphorion. Euphorion is, get tribute by Byron, he's a poet who also tried to revive the spirit of the Greeks. And Faust spends again an indeterminate amount of time with her, with his ancient Greek family. But eventually Helen and Euphorion both disappear. In Helen's case, she embraces Faust, and then she vanishes, leaving only her clothes. And then her clothes dissolve into clouds, which lift Faust up and drift away with him.

Faust then returns to Europe. By now, he's come to better understand the ideal of the feminine through his relationship with Helen of Troy, symbolic of the elevation that one feels by bringing such a past, the spirit of a past age, to their life, right? It's about, we can just say this is as simple as the feeling that one gets when they sincerely engage with the classics, which you can do today, where you feel like you're touching a mind or you're touching a soul or communing with something that is should be long dead, but now it's somehow alive within you.

In the next act, Faust advises the military, or he advises the Emperor in his military campaigning. And then Faust goes on to have a long, successful career in politics. He begins this vast project of civil engineering, for which we have historical precedent in the real world in the Netherlands. Faust draws up these ambitious plans, and he organizes thousands of men. He gives people a purpose, he gives them a job. He orders the will of the of society, right? And through these projects of creating dikes and dams, they reclaim land from the ocean and create more land within the empire. And by expanding fertile farmlands, the people are able to flourish. I mean, remember what land means for people at this time. It's self-sufficiency. It's like the ability, it's equity, right? The way we talk about it today, of equity in an economic sense, by the way. And like having some sort of assets that generate can generate wealth for you so you can get by. And so Faust sees these successes, and he begins to craft a vision of a great society of free people living safely and peacefully on land which they've taken back from the chaotic ocean and made habitable and bountiful and prosperous. And although the work never seems finished, and there can always be more improvements to be made, he feels a sense of triumph, right? His work of reclaiming for the land from the ocean, it's representative of conquering what is chaotic and bringing it into order. You could, I mean, it's a very general metaphor, but I think we should take it actually somewhat literally, and that Faust undertakes this continuous process of improving the environment that he actually lives in, right? He's gone on his quest for romantic fulfillment, and then he's like journeyed into the world of the classics and like gotten this intellectual spiritual fulfillment, and he's done politicking and, you know, military campaigning. But it's like this is where the striving becomes focused and concrete and focused intensely on the world around him and the people around him. He's doing this with an eye for the flourishing of all.

So by the time we get to the end of Act 5, the final act, Faust is very old, and he can't see too well now. He's basically blind. He's, you know, feeling his hand along the wall, walking. And he begins to hear digging and work going on outside the palace, and the noise is disturbing him. So, you know, he kind of stirs and starts to go on his way to go call to the foreman. He naturally assumes that it's a team working on one of his projects to improve the land. But he's wrong about that. It's demons digging his grave with Mephisto as the foreman. Faust steps out of the palace, he gropes along the doorstep, he says, "Quote: 'How the spade's lusty clanking gives me mirth! It is the throng that slaves for me and brings back to the to itself the earth, setting the waves a boundary, putting a bound around the ocean!' End quote." Faust shouts, "Overseer!" And Mephisto answers, "Here!" It's so very funny that I don't know, I like that Mephisto's willing to just, he doesn't say, "No, it's me, Faust, it's your old friend Mephisto, you don't remember me." He's willing to play a trick on the old blind man. So Faust tells him, in so many words, you know, he's like, "Guys, keep up the good work. We're we're doing a great thing. Let's build more canals and dams. You guys are hard at work. I like what I'm hearing." And Mephisto has some wings and nods with the audience, telling us, "Yeah, he doesn't know it's really his grave." You know. So Faust monologues as he has done since he was a young Faust back in his study. But the tone is much different now. "Quote: 'Green are the meadows, fertile and in mirth, both men and herd live on this newest earth, settled along the edges of the hill that has been raised by bold men's zealous will. A veritable paradise inside! Then let the dams be licked by the raging tide, and as it nibbles to rush in with force, a common will fills its gaps and checks its course.' End quote."

And so, if you just sort of say it in a reductive or overall descriptive manner, or how would you say, like the way Nietzsche talks about Part 1 of the tragedy, right? To just say, "Oh yeah, Faust's highest accomplishment is is it land reclamation? That's what did it for you, Faust? It was civil engineering. It wasn't that was the worldly pleasure that did you in." But we can see here, it's symbolic of something deeper. As as we've talked about, I mean, Faust is striving to continuously improve the lot of men and beasts on earth. Remember, I mean, Mephisto says he hates all men and beasts and wishes to negate everything that was born. Born deserves to perish wretchedly, right? While Faust once shared Mephisto's cynicism that nothing in life really matters, he's now directed his striving towards flourishing instead of destruction. Not that he was ever really aimed at destruction, but he didn't really have a name before. And it's not by social engineering, I should say, but by technological advancement and by civil engineering, as we said, by using his talents and all the faculties, his wisdom from all his worldly travels, his great intellect to turn the place around him into a functional, happy place, as much for others as for himself. He has a purpose. He's given a purpose to many others. A common will checks the rushing in of chaos from the raging sea. The Faust has tamed it, right? The people have been organized, they've gained power to shape the external world. And so now, as a very old man, living out what he feels to be his supreme accomplishments, now Faust gives his final lines, his final speech. "Quote: 'This is the highest wisdom that I own, the best that mankind ever knew: Freedom and life are earned by those alone who conquer them each day anew. Surrounded by such danger, each one thrives; childhood, manhood, and age lead active lives. At such a throng I would fain stare, with free men on free ground their freedom share. Then to the moment I say: Abide! You are so fair! The traces of my earthly day no eons can impair. As I presage a happiness so high, I now enjoy the highest moment!' End quote."

Faust then sinks back and is caught by the demons, who then lay him on the ground. Faust is dead. And it would seem, in his last moment, he lost. And thinking of all his accomplishments and reflecting in the last moments on earth, the last moments of his life, he decides, "I'm happy. I like what I've done with my life." And look at all these people, all straining and striving, and I just wish I could stay here in this moment. And thus, in that moment, he loses. And Mephisto's commentary, I think, is very illuminating here. He says, "Quote: 'No pleasure sated him, no great bestowment. He reeled from form to form; it did not last. The final wretched, empty moment the poor man wishes to hold fast.' End quote." So it's sort of his, it's the reason why it's illuminating is because, so from an intellectual standpoint, Mephisto, you can call, can tell, is sort of, he's looking at this like he can't really understand it. How could someone in their dying days only then wish for the moment to abide? Only then, after rushing from place to place, dissatisfied their whole life, presented with every pleasure they can have, now a hundred years old, blind, morally stained in a thousand ways, with all these experiences behind him instead of a head, Faust now wants to hold on to the moment. I think we can all understand that, actually. And it's something I don't think really even bears logical explanation. It's simply, it's a very human thing. And Mephisto can't understand it. I mean, he's ultimately not human.

Mephisto also, he has an interesting line about death at the end here, which I think could have come from Binatar or Schopenhauer, which would seem to contradict the hell idea. What Mephisto's about to say. And I think that points to the fact that whether Faust goes to hell or heaven may not so much be about a literal personal immortality of Faust, but of the veneration or desecration of his archetype, right? But so, in any case, Mephisto says, "Quote: 'Why have eternally creation, when all is subject to annihilation? Now it is over. What meaning can one see? It is as if it had not come to be. And yet it circulates as if it were. I should prefer eternal emptiness.' End quote." So whatever meaning your life had in the emptying of consciousness at death, it becomes irrelevant. It all goes away. It might as well not have happened. Better to have never been born. That's the thought that Faust had in one of his own darker moments. "I wish I was never born." And so Mephisto is asserting that in light of how things have turned out, it wouldn't have even mattered whether Faust did all the things he did and felt love and felt guilt and felt grief and underwent this profound transformation again and again, or whether he just, Faust might as well have just been a naively optimistic scholar like Wagner or one of the townsfolk drinking in the tavern at least Leipzig, you know. That's Mephisto's taunt. Is in the end, none of it mattered. It was all just sound and fury. And Mephisto is now relishing in his conquest. Faust's soul is ready to be taken. The demons are ready to cast him down into hell.

In one of the final scenes of the play, now the jaws of hell open up, and it's very much like Dante's Inferno. Inferno, in a sense, it's like this burning, glowing city that you can see below, and the screams of the damned trying desperately to claw their way up and escape. But the hyena's jaws of the hell mouth always mash them up again. You know, and all these gruesome tortures, burning and being hacked and smashed and all sorts of things. And so Mephisto orders to grab for Faust's soul and take it down to the mouth of hell. And even now, a Faust's soul strives upwards. But Mephisto yells at the demons, "Grab at that fugitive! Hold him fast!" You know, "Demons of the straight horn, demons of the curved horn," he's describing all these demonic legions he's calling up that are all required to hold Faust down. But then we hear a strumming sound, a strumming of, you know, heavenly strings, plucking of heavenly strings, which Mephisto is repulsed by. He hears these peaceful tones and he's like, "What is this discordant, you know, drivel?" In fact, it's the host of heaven. The angels descend, and they surround Faust. They easily defeat the demons. They descend in, like, it's the opposite imagery of like this, like sort of like tense, furious, like angry thing clawing up from the ground, and then the angels sort of descend in like leisurely flight. They just kind of glide down. And the verses, like the way that Mephisto speaks, his style verse, versus these very sort of like, and the imagery he's conjuring up, versus these simple, sort of like, very easy, leisurely, like little, like forward lines of rhymes. As the heavens host descends, they're singing of their task to redeem sinners. And the angels throw rose petals at the demons, which they say are, they're really a symbol of heavenly love. And the hellfire of the demons is no match for this. Even as Mephisto screams for the demons to defend his claim, there's nothing that the forces of hell can do to stop the angels from claiming Faust. I mean, God said, as long as Faust lives, Mephisto would not be prevented from doing anything to him. But now that he's dead, God still gets his soul, just as God said he would. The angels surround Faust and bear up his immortal part upward towards the heavens. And the angels chastise the devil. "Quote: 'What is not part of your sphere, you may not share. What fills you with fear, you cannot bear. If the attack succeeds, we must do valiant deeds. Love alone leads loving ones there.' End quote."

And in response to all this, Mephisto actually compares himself to Job. Which, you remember at the very beginning of the play, in the prologue, he, Faust is the Job figure, right? And the way that God and Satan are talking about him. But now Mephisto at the end is like, "I've been unfairly punished." On all this, you know, he, in the same way that we might say that Job might have questioned the Lord of like, "How can you do this? Like, what?" And there's no, you know, it's the same situation. Mephisto's like, "I'm sitting here with all these boils, just like Faust, or just like Job sat there with his covered in boils and disease. And this is like the worst thing that's ever happened to me." You know, he laments, there's no higher authority to which to appeal his claim to Faust's soul. There's no way to mitigate this grave injustice that's been done to him. "Quote: 'A peerless treasure stolen shamefully!' End quote," is how the devil regards the situation. But in the end, even he recognizes that he was foolish to oppose the will of heaven to begin with. I mean, how did he expect this to end? God told him what would happen.

The final scene of the play is a heavenly chorus with all these like doctors of the faith, these like famous saints are there. And there's this chorus singing that's set up in the mountains, glowing with heavenly light, as Faust's immortal part is carried upward from the peaks into heaven. Faust is no longer striving of his own power. He's being carried now, and he ascends into higher spheres of beings, sailing up closer and closer to the divine. And that the angels, as they carry his immortal part, declare, "Quote: 'Saved is the spirit kingdom's flower, from evil in the grave. Whoever strives with all his power, we are allowed to save.' End quote." And then another angel who comes up, or among the angels bearing him up into heaven, is the woman formerly called Gretchen, now an angel herself, who tells Faust, "Quote: 'Incline, incline, thou art divine, thou that dost shine thy face in grace to my sweet ecstasy. He whom I loved in pain, now returns free from stain, comes back to me.' End quote." So there's a redemption for Gretchen and for Faust, both of them, from the guilt they were saddled with while on earth. And as Faust is borne up into eternity, Gretchen announces he's been reborn in eternal youthful vigor, but that all earthly ties have now been peeled away, and Faust is now part of the heavenly host.

The final lines of the entire play are from the mystical chorus, who end it by singing, "Quote: 'What is destructible is but a parable. What fails ineluctably, the undeclarable. Here it was seen, here it was action. The eternal feminine lures to perfection.' End quote."

At the end, I'll keep my final thoughts on Faust as brief as I can, because I feel I've given my interpretation throughout, and there's little more to say here. I've been talking about it for a long time. So I think the rest is best left to you to reflect on. And I encourage everyone to go read the play. To emphasize the last sentiment Goethe offers us, we can see a parallel in the work of Nietzsche again, you know, or a maybe an influence on Nietzsche. Nietzsche's idea that truth is a woman and loves only a warrior, right? Or his idealization of Ariadne, the human lover of Dionysus, the woman who finds her way through the maze. The sort of feminine spirit of Nietzsche's philosophy, I think those both touch on the eternal feminine. The eternal feminine here, it's an artistic metaphor. It's not a philosophical concept. So it does the very opposite of what we do in philosophy. Rather than making a distinction, it conflates things. Art finds associations between concepts, figures, images, and represents them. It represents these correspondences, sometimes in ways we don't consciously comprehend. And so the eternal feminine, I think, is the Greek conflation of the good, the beautiful, and the true. It's feminine because, I mean, what's beautiful for Goethe must be represented as feminine, right? And there is thus a transfiguration of the physical sense of desire into something higher, more akin to Eros, and the way Socrates speaks of Eros. This is the same way that Gretchen is transformed from a physical woman whom Faust physically desires into a spiritual entity, and who seems to love him in a transcendent way that perhaps we can't even comprehend or put into words. And so the feminine puts desire by calling it the feminine, we're putting desire into very concrete terms that we can all understand, albeit gendered, because that's Goethe's perspective. But the desire for the eternal feminine is a heightened, more spiritualized pursuit of desire than the pursuit of physical desire, search for something deeper, the longing for something deeper beyond that superficial kind of happiness occurring from fleeting pleasures, to something that can only be described in terms of love, true love. And so Faust learns to love life, to not feel dissatisfied in his striving, but to love the striving that characterizes life, and to dedicate himself to it wholeheartedly and sublimate his whims and passions to a project that is greater than himself. And that's his journey from a tortured, uncertain state of striving to accepting that striving and living in a state in which that he can be happy doing so. And that's the moment that hell gets to take him, as of his agreement, but simultaneously the moment in which heaven was allowed to save him.

We may see some of Faust's "Abide! You are so fair!" in Nietzsche's eternal return as well. Nietzsche's justification for life is in some sense those moments of saying, "Abide moment, don't just slip away. I want this to last. I don't want this to slip into the past." You know, Zarathustra asks us, "Have you ever said yes to a single joy? And if you did, then you said yes to all sorrow, to all eternity." We can see the sentiment of Faust in that. And more than all this, Goethe's Faust is itself a revaluation of values, which Nietzsche appreciated, even if he criticized it for not being truly tragic, which now, in light of the true ending, the final ending, the ending of Part 2, it really is not in the traditional sense. And so Goethe reevaluates human life. He gives a new perspective to it over the course of this play that spans his entire life writing. He gives a new perspective to experiment and temptation and sin and making mistakes and violating boundaries, doing things that make you guilty, that these are all part of a process by which you grow and become a real person. And the play, that's why it's laced with these attacks on the pathological aspects of Christianity that wants to say that's all sin, and if you flirt with it, the devil take you, you will go to hell. Goethe is saying, "No, we're here to live life. And if you live earnestly and you love fully, you will find the right road." It's not, we shouldn't have this pathological guilt and sin attitude. And so in a sense, even though this is a revaluation of Christianity, it is Christian in its own way. Goethe is very insightful in his vision of Christianity in so far as he's crafting a story in which he understands everything's ultimately in God's hands. In the end, Mephisto has no power. Christianity and Faust is a story of absolute redemption from sin through grace. And may it not be construed into a religion that teaches us to live as though we're already dead for fear of sin. And so some may consider that blasphemous or a bad lesson to teach. But I think, as I said at the beginning here, in the West, we're all Faust. We are products of modernity. We're children of the Enlightenment. We're ravenous for new knowledge and new experience, and we're never satisfied. We're gripped with this modern restlessness and haste. It's the hustle and grind of modernity, the Faustian grindset, as it were. And so we're all a little bit Faustian. And so by redeeming Faust, Goethe redeems us. He attacks the heirs of modern thought, but he also blesses our errors as holy.

Okay, that's it on Faust, everyone. So, I think I already rambled for too long. My thoughts on it, but I could say so much more. But this is now officially the longest episode of the Nietzsche podcast. So there's that. And as of when this is coming out, this is the one-year anniversary of me doing the Nietzsche podcast. And it's grown so much since then. And so I just wanted to say at the end here, that's just a final thought. Thank you, everyone. And let's do it for another year. All right, signing off.

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