Man's development forseen in Goethe's Faust

The name is traditional, taken from the old legend which had become a public play. The name itself has a strange history, since it belonged in early Christian times to the Manichaean teacher of St. Augustine. He it was who imparted to the young Augustine the teaching about the world-drama of good and evil which was esseptial to the Manichaean theology. Augustine revolted against it when later on he became a Christian in Rome. It has ranked as one of the great heresies of history. Nevertheless its essential reality has come back into modern thought in literature through Goethe’s Faust, but the world-drama has become that of the individual human soul.

The first appearance of Faust in Goethe’s play represents a man left completely on his own but by his own will. This first scene is preceded by the prologue in Heaven in which a dialogue takes place between God and the devil about the soul of man on the lines of the Book of Job in the Old Testament. This must have been meant to indicate that the drama of himself which Faust experiences is played before an audience in the Divine World, whether or not the hero intends it. It would seem from the first scene that Faust indeed believes himself to be managing his affairs entirely on his own. He appears to be the most lonely of mortals. He is isolated from those around him by his master-mind. He is separated from God by the sense of his cleverness. He has the sum of modern knowledge in himself and has even begun to dabble in the arts of magic in order to find something still beyond his powers. But his great intellectual attainments have made him an onlooker. Intellectually the world is at his feet, but he has no living relationship to it. Intellectually, he can comprehend his own human nature, but he has ceased to live a human life. The modern human soul, alone with his selfconsciousness, has never been more powerfully and thoroughly portrayed.

But what is such a person to do with himself? The more he understands intellectually, the less he can live and create. At the beginning of the play, the hero Faust finds that the logical conclusion of his condition is to seek death. He decides to destroy himself. He draws back of course at the last minute, otherwise the long drama would never have been written. But what holds him back from the logical step towards self-destruction?

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