Goethe and Marlowe: Faust

Goethe and Marlowe, Faust

The Faust myth provides a writer with a chance to explore religious issues through the theme of damnation, while also allowing the writer to identify with the damned protagonist through a shared sense of ambition. This is palpable in both Marlowe's and Goethe's different versions of the Faust legend -- in both cases, it seems like the ambitious "striving" (to use a crucial Goethean word for Faust's essential nature) of the main character is mirrored by the author's ambition to present broad swathes of human and indeed divine experience on stage or into the reader's imagination. A comparison of the endings of these two different handlings of the Faust legend will, I think, illustrate crucial differences between not only Goethe's and Marlowe's differing literary ambitions, but also their different religious or spiritual worldviews.

In reality Marlowe's Faustus seems like Marlowe himself -- someone who is interested in gaining access to all the world's knowledge, no matter how subversive or damnable. In the explicitly Christian context of Marlowe's play, this forbidden knowledge is explicitly classical knowledge -- after all, when Faustus has his chance to request anything of Mephistophilis, his thoughts automatically turn to classical knowledge and he requests Helen of Troy be summoned up. This suggests a religious and spiritual context in which the forbidden knowledge that Faustus desires access to is essentially pre-Christian: anyone who might have beheld the beauty of Helen of Troy during her actual supposed lifetime would have been free of the strictures of Christian chastity, as Helen of Troy predates Christ by centuries. The tension between Christian and pre-Christian ideas is particularly strong at the end of Marlowe's drama. Faust awaits the hour when the devil comes to claim his soul -- before it arrives, he stands in disputation with learned theological scholars, who basically seem to be looking for a loophole in the demonic contract -- as the Second Scholar remarks "What shall we do to save Faustus?" But Faustus himself declines their help, and asks them to leave, and launches into his famous final soliloquy:

FAUSTUS. Ah, Faustus,

Now hast thou but one bare hour to live,

And then thou must be damn'd perpetually!

Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of heaven,

That time may cease, and midnight never come;

Fair Nature's eye, rise, rise again, and make

Perpetual day; or let this hour be but A year, a month, a week, a natural day,

That Faustus may repent and save his soul!

O lente, lente currite, noctis equi!

The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike,

The devil will come, and Faustus must be damn'd.

O, I'll leap up to my God! -- Who pulls me down?

See, see, where Christ's blood streams in the firmament!

One drop would save my soul, half a drop: ah, my Christ!

Ah, rend not my heart for naming of my Christ!

We may note here precisely the tension between Christian and pre-Christian ideas, as Faust begs for more time in which to repent his sins in a way that makes it clear that he has internalized those sins: the line "lente, lente currite, noctis equi" -- which literally means "run slowly, slowly, horses of the night" -- is quoted from a sexual poem by the pagan poet Ovid, where it asks for the night to be made longer so that Ovid can have more time in bed with his mistress. For Faust to use this profane allusion to cry out for more time to reconcile himself with the Christian God seems particularly ironic: but it also seems to occasion the shocking vision Faustus has, of the blood of Jesus Christ streaming down from the heavens. Despite his fear of damnation, Faustus seems incapable of adhering to the Christian theology of the scholars who had just been attending to him -- when he finally refers later in the soliloquy to a wish for "Pythagoras' metempsychosis," i.e., a belief in reincarnation so that he might come back to life as a happy beast (in a way that was endorsed by the pre-Christian Greek sage Pythagoras), we realize that whole point of his liberation from Christianity was to recreate the worldview of classical Greece and Rome.

If Marlowe's Faustus seeks his new vistas of knowledge by traveling into the past, to experience what might have been possible before the advent of Christ and the Christian religion, Goethe's Faust by contrast is all about forward movement. Although there is certainly plenty of classical allusion in Goethe's poem, particularly in the Part Two, this is not being presented as an alternative to Christianity -- instead both worldviews seem to comprise a common storehouse of numinous myth that Goethe can dip into for his own purposes. Even though Goethe's Faust ultimately seems to have a more optimistically Christian message than Marlowe's drama -- Goethe's Faust does not end up dragged to hell, but instead lifted up to heaven -- the truth is that any sort of religious theology ultimately seems irrelevant as Goethe allows the drama to take on a meaning that depends more on larger philosophic and historical categories than the conventional story of damnation or salvation. Indeed, it is not an angry masculine God or bleeding Christ who appears in the final moments of Goethe's Faust, but a "Mater Gloriosa" -- a "glorious mother," presumably the Virgin Mary, but also attended by the female saints (Mary of Egypt) and female figures from the New Testament (the woman taken in adultery, the Samaritan woman), who seem to be indicating something surprisingly different from what we expect of normative Christianity. This is apparent at the close of Goethe's drama, where the Mater Gloriosa proclaims of Faustus: "Rise, thou, to higher spheres! Conduct him, / Who, feeling thee, shall follow there!" Those who "conduct" and "follow" Faustus to an even higher realm of heaven than what might be imagined by the purification and salvation already apparent at the end of the play are a female chorus, and these elements are brought out more fully in the final "mystic chorus" of the drama: