Redemption Of Faust

Traditionally, the story of Faust is bookended by two plot points – It begins with the doctor making a deal with a devil, and ends with him dragged to Hell as punishment. However, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s two-part masterpiece Faust breaks with the established plot when Faust is forgiven and assumed to heaven. The decision to save Faust was predicated by changes in the literary and social atmospheres throughout the late 18th and early 19th Centuries. Ultimately, the redemption of Faust in the second part of Goethe’s tragedy is the result of such disparate movements as the Enlightenment, the Sturm und Drang, Weimar Classicism, German Idealism, and Romantic natural philosophy. One of the earliest examples of the story of Faust is the 1592
When the aged and blind Faust, upon hearing the sounds of workers in a territory he has claimed for himself, cries “I might entreat the fleeting moment / O tarry yet, thou art so fair,” he loses the wager he made with Mephistopheles in the first part of the tragedy, and dies immediately. Mephistopheles summons a horde of demons and commands them to “bring up Hell’s jaws right along,” a clear allusion to the Medieval hell-mouth and the original ending. Suddenly, a chorus of angels appears, routing the demons with a hail of rose-petals. The action then switches to “Mountain Gorges,” where angels bear Faust’s Immortal Essence upward, supported by the prayers of Holy Anchorites and penitent women. Even Gretchen, Faust’s redeemed lover from Part One, joins in supplication to the Mater Gloriosa, who summons the whole assembly to “higher spheres” knowing Faust “will divine and follow.” Prostrate in adoration, the hermits and a “mystic choir” worship the “Woman Eternal [that draws] them on high” while Faust ascends to
The Sturm und Drang was a reaction against Enlightenment thought, seeking the “dissolution of artistic form, abandonment of harmonious simplicity and the desire to relinquish… limitations.” Gone were the noble, rational heroes of the Enlightenment, replaced by the “self-helper, …the original genius” at odds with the constraints of society. Johnann Gottfreid Herder, another Sturmer und Dranger, encapsulated this “morality of self” when he stated that “everyone’s actions should arise utterly from himself.” The early version of Faust Part One that Goethe wrote in this period, called Urfaust by scholars, emphasizes Faust’s pretensions to be “the image of the godhead.” In his dialogue with the Erdgeist in the first scene, Faust proclaims, “I am Faust. I am your equal.” These statements reveal Faust as the ultimate “self helper” that struggles against the laws of not only society, but also the universe. The young Goethe could not fully condemn a character that so lived up to his