Great Authors - Neoclassical and Romantic Literature - Goethe, Faust

[Music] gerta once wrote that poetry is a worldly gospel and the conflation of art and religion and the connection between art and the fundamental or most important human aspirations is articulated beautifully and as it is articulated nowhere else in gerta's faust gertas faust is one of the most remarkable productions of the human mind and it's one of the greatest achievements of the western literary tradition it was composed over the course of 60 years in other words he wrote it in his ear in his 20s and finished it in his 80s and played with it and revised it and added to it through the course of his lifetime it is a dramatic or it's usually described as a dramatic poem but it is in fact is a work of art like no other in other words it almost doesn't have a genre it is the only example of itself in some respects it's like the platonic dialogues right it's the only example of that particular genre well i'd be inclined to say that gert is faust is an artistic creation like no other if you get the opportunity to commit yourself to this poem because this poem is not it's not a quick read it's commitment it's something you have to stop and think about it will well repay your effort and time it is a poem which makes greater demands on the reader than perhaps any other work of western literature with the possible exception of joyce's ulysses and it minimally presupposes that you have some background in classical mythology it would be nice if you knew something about the history of philosophy it would also be helpful if you knew something about the history of science and it would be handy if you either had a teacher to explain this book to you or if you had some annotated edition which allowed you to understand the references particularly the second part which is often ignored by the casual reader as being essentially incomprehensible is very very much worth your time and effort but it is a commitment of time and effort and you can't miss that the first fragments of faust the first parts of it were written in the 1770s when gertrude was still a young man actually at the time that he was writing the sorrows of young verter and the fragment the fragment the first part of the faust was published in 1790 it was an instantaneous hit one of the most influential fragmentary works in the history of western literature the entirety of the first part was published in 1808 and he finally published the second part of faust in 1832 so we're moving from the 1770s to the 1830s stepping from the 18th through the 19th century covering essentially the entirety of german romanticism and one of the high points of western european culture now it's hard to know what to analogize uh faust to it's really not like other poems if you had to connect it with any kind of cultural artifact i'd be inclined to connect it to something like beethoven's ninth symphony in the sense that it does some things that you would never expect this particular form to be able to do it breaks through old barriers and having done this it fundamentally changes the way we hear music or read poetry you might want to analogize it to the work of hegel the phenomenology of spirit a work of philosophy which is so inclusive and so remarkable for its intellectual scope that it seems to fundamentally change the way we think about thinking well gurtis faust changes the way we think about poetry now there are many strange qualities to this poem in the first place it lacks much of the many of the aristotelian unities it doesn't have for example one particular theme rather its theme is everything or the entirety of human experience and not only that but at least the second part doesn't have much in the way of unity of place right the location for the second part is either heaven or hell or holland or nowhere it depends on what part of the book you're looking at and it's hard to see how you could possibly present this as a dramatic activity in other words how would you put such a thing on stage it seems to me essentially impossible perhaps it's been tried but it seems like an impossible task to me maybe something like film could handle faust because of the magical dreamlike qualities of the second part but apart from that it seems to me something that demands to be read and read carefully now the minor characters in faust are a strange collection of warriors and farm fatales and demons and monsters and witches and fairies and heroes ancient greek philosophers uh ancient greek literary figures all kinds of people are introduced in the course of this novel gert has done quite a bit of reading and all of this reading is synthesized and brought to a sort of essence in this book the main characters are among the greatest achievements of literary activity in the first place we have faust himself faust the man who has studied law theology medicine juris prudence and has absorbed all worldly knowledge is dissatisfied and miserable in other words the man of pure intellect is a man who finds the passive life of the scholar unsatisfactory who is rendered miserable by the fact that he is unable to find any real value in the world he sees the world as a collection that's heterogeneous and meaningless and is unable to derive any sort of real satisfaction from the fact that he has conquered all the branches of knowledge out of more i guess world weariness than blasphemy he ultimately makes a deal or he early in the play in the poem makes a deal with mephistopheles to sell his soul and get unusual powers and unusual experiences in the world but it's not out of a desire to assault god or to offer an affront to god he has doubts about the existence of god rather he is simply full of ennui the world of scholarship the world of contemplation as opposed to action is sterile and pointless now faust is a sort of hero but he is a conceptual hero who is trying to take control of both internal nature and external nature in the course of the play he will come to master the external world but much more importantly he will come to master himself the internal world his mind or soul or psyche and that will be the fundamental change the faust undergoes he will undergo a tremendous degradation morally and eventually be saved and saved as a consequence of his activity and his ceaseless striving faust is a universal hero of culture who represents all of human aspiration and all of human striving he touches all the human bases and then and only then does he say he has finally found value then and only then does he say stay moment stay thou art so fair so when he has finally touched all the human bases and understood that the striving after lofty goals is the loftiest of goals that the chase and the quarry are the same thing that we come to understand what the human condition is we are redeemed and ennobled by our activity we are improved and rendered whole by our ceaseless striving and this is not just within the realm of knowledge it is also within the realm of art i would say that goethe is a very faustian figure right because he himself is bringing all this together now the second and in my mind the most intriguing and entertaining figure in this pl in this poem is mephistopheles mephistopheles introduces himself beautifully he says i am the spirit which negates i am the spirit which says the opposite of affirmation of this world is mephistopheles and i think that every scholar at some point has had this in his brain it's hard to say whether we should understand mephistopheles as being entirely external to faust in some respects mephistopheles is faust alter ego he is the negative half of the scholar's activity he is composed of loveless passion pitiless skepticism nihilistic knowledge and mephistopheles is a representation of all which is most evil in human life or in the human soul he is not really external to faust in some respects he is a figment of faust's imagination he is the embodiment of all which is worse than faust himself on the other hand let me not be too hard on him he's a very witty devil i mean as funny devils go he's a great one he says all kinds of ironic humorous things and if you know the references that he makes and you have read the bible thoroughly and you're familiar with greek philosophy and things like that you can see that he's a very well-read devil i mean he's gotten to all the important books so it makes all kinds of interesting illusions why while saying entertaining and humorous things you can't expect more from you know the son of satan or something along those lines now our final character is gretchen and gretchen represents innocence represents the object of human striving right at the end of the second part we will see that uh goethe tells us that the evika vibe like which means that the eternal feminine leads us aloft a very inscrutable very difficult line to interpret but we could say that gretchen herself represents the eternal feminine she is the object of faust's desire but his desire is purified by his activity and ultimately his the evil that he does towards her because faust treats gretchen very badly she dies at the end of the first act or the first part um ends up being ennobled in other words all our sins can be forgiven but not forgiven on account of our guilt and repentance they are all our sins are ultimately forgiven on the basis of our connection to the spirit of creativity in some respects gretchen represents that she also represents the innocent and naive part of german culture she represents a great many things because this poem works on so many symbolic levels now i'd like to talk a little bit about the action of this play or poem and the difficulty here is that it's like talking about the plot of the bible and saying well we're going to wrap this up and move straight on i can only give you the sketchiest idea of what the action of the play is it should be a proper duty a kind of stimulus to you to go and look at the book itself and then make the commitment to take it seriously but it's all i can possibly do within these constraints of time the first part book one can be thought of as the microcosm he talks about german culture and gretchen as a symbol of german culture is seduced and abandoned faust has his moral fall here we can look at this as the fall of faust but also as the fall of every man world weariness the movement from one experience to another is insatiable and never ends gretchen is ultimately abandoned by faust because he will not say stay moment stay thou art so fair faust in the first book like mephistopheles throughout the book does not understand love faust by the end of the second book does understand love and mephistopheles never comes to understand love that's what ultimately defeats mephistopheles all right so in in some respects this is the most optimistic of works and that's one of the reasons why it repays reading and careful consideration on your part all right first part we get a prologue in heaven those of you who are here from my lectures on the book of job well we get god and the angels and of course satan and satan and god are chatting and it doesn't get like the book of job it doesn't explain what satan is doing there or why he has a chat with god but he does and they talk a little about faust the way they do about job and god says to satan look i know things are going to work out okay but if you want to go down mephistopheles and tempt him and cause him all kinds of difficulties we'll go and do so i'm going to kind of reference back to the old testament and we then move from this prologue in heaven to faust study where he is sitting around among his books thinking about suicide his search for knowledge has been successful and often we are as harmed by our achievements as we are by our failures faust as a hero as an epitome of human intellectual activity has found that the world is meaningless and unsatisfying he is considering suicide and he is stopped from committing suicide when he hears the easter bells it turns out fortunately for us to be easter sunday and easter bells as a symbol of christianity as a symbol of resurrection as a symbol of hope which is one of the christian virtues makes him withdraw and hold back his assistant named wagner goes out for a walk with him and they meet a dog and it's not just any dog it's mephistopheles now since faust himself dabbles in the black arts is a necromancer and knows something about sorcery he conjures the devil out of the dog and they have a nice little chat and it turns out that mephistopheles in this case is represented as a scholar later on he'll come back dressed as a nobleman he's kind of a protean fellow it turns out that mephistopheles is here for his soul and faust says to mephistopheles well that would be okay you can have my soul a i doubt that i have one b if i have one it's not very interesting or very good c i'm not worried about eternal damnation hell i'm already damned as it is now uh any hell that you can send me to couldn't be as bad as this barren desert of knowledge i live in so he sells his soul to mephistopheles and mephistopheles is quite a legalistic fellow insist that it be signed in blood faust is willing to go through that and off they go on their adventures faust is going to get a chance to touch all the human bases and the terms of their agreement is are these while in this world mephistopheles will serve faust and will do all the things that faust bids all the things that he wishes gets them all kinds of pleasure money wealth sex anything in exchange for that if faust is able to find anything valuable in this world if there's anything which he grasps and wishes to hold on to if there is any fraction of time which he is willing to say should be removed from the flux of becoming and turned into a permanent being into a final reality if he has ever driven to the point where he says stay moment stay thou art so fair then he is damned and then mephistopheles can have him his idea is that the world contains nothing valuable and the ennui has driven him to this devilish bargain now first thing they do is go to a beer cellar they see a bunch of men having drinks and all faust says while he is in this this beer cellar is let's get out of here in other words he is too cerebral too ethereal to find pleasure in drunkenness right in the kind of common pleasures that we see in the beer cellar from there they go to a witch's kitchen and because mephistopheles is in in good with the witches right he manages to have 30 years taken off faust's age and this movement back to youth is not a movement back to innocence it is a move back to passion a movement back to an openness towards a lust for life which faust is completely lost they come to a city a boy meets girl or at least in this case faust meets girl in this case gretchen and gretchen is a symbol of innocence a symbol of inexperience and she is fairly easily seduced by the crap by the the intelligent faust and the crafty and of course vistaphilian mephistopheles they he gives her some jewels gretchen's mother finds the jewels and gives them to the church and there's a great deal of kind of subtext here and overt statements that are rather anti-clerical in tone the church is a grasping kind of a cynical kind of a greedy outfit so he comes back with more jewels gretchen doesn't tell her mother they go to the house of a woman named martha who's a sort of foil to gretchen and this foil to gretchen is very crass and materialistic so mephistopheles kind of likes her and she arranges a liaison or helps the liaison along between faust and gretchen and faust is becoming more and more caught up with her but he also has some misgivings about his lust he'd like to turn his lust into love and doesn't quite know how there's a beautiful passage here that comes right after this scene sometimes called the quartet in which two couples both couples uh uh martha and mephistopheles and gretchen and faust are walking around and we only hear snatches of their conversation so if you can imagine something composed like a string quartet well we hear opposite sorts of approaches to the world the coarse cynical materialistic couple and the faust gretchen couple who represent innocence and experience or guiltiness and guilt and the opposite the absence of guilt something along those lines it is put together and it sounds in german much like a string quartet i mean you have to stop and think about it you almost wish this part was sung rather than spoken i mean there ought to be some sort of musical score here but he's not beethoven so we'll let it slide from there they go to a summer house they kiss for the first time it seems that they are both falling in love insofar as faust is able to fall in love at all remember that he's the guy that sees no value in the world and then there's a long cynical passage in which faust and mephistopheles are talking and faust is brooding in the forest saying is this the right thing to do what shall i do with this woman i'm not familiar with strong feeling i don't know what i'm supposed to do here i am 30 years younger and i'm not prepared for the emotional consequences of that well methistopheles says all kinds of cutting things about his would-be idealism says look this is physical desire and you're trying to rationalize it i mean go read the works of freud if you want to see what the real subtext of this is it says you're kidding yourself what this really is is desire and the fact she's really innocent and graceful and kind and nice just fuels your desire stop kidding yourself right a very cold and cynical interpretation from there we go back to gretchen's room where she gives the famous spinning wheel song one of the great speeches of innocent desire she's clearly in love although she will be seduced later on this seduction is not really uh imposed upon her she really wants to be seduced she has fallen in love with this mysterious stranger uh from there we go back to martha's garden and gretchen in her naivete in innocence asks faust about his religious views and of course fausta does a kind of a song and dance here he doesn't want to talk about god and jesus because he really doesn't believe that sort of stuff he says look i'm quite tolerant which is a way of saying i'm quite indifferent and he also says not only am i quite tolerant but i think of god as being a kind of creativity he's not a very dogmatic or religious god a very unorthodox religiosity insofar as it can be called religiosity at all and once we see this gretchen is made kind of uncomfortable by this because she has a if not a conventional morality she certainly believes in a sort of conventional orthodox religion and she says okay i can gloss over your lack of religiosity but they're your friend mephistopheles i have this bad feeling about him i don't like that guy and of course gretchen and mephistopheles have a definite dislike of each other innocence and you know the embodiment of sin it's hard it's easy to see why they don't get along now faust wants to go to a room have sex with her she agrees but she says look my mom lives with me we have to do something about her mephistopheles comes to hand gives gretchen a sleeping potion you pour this in your mom's coffee or whatever it is she's drinking you give this to her she goes to sleep you can have sex he won't get caught fine so they do the next uh part uh we move past the sex think of the conventions of you know of 19th century germany don't have a sex scene but clearly they have had sex gretchen is now pregnant and faust is abandoner remember stay moments stay thou art so fair he won't stay with any one experience he sees no value in the world what happens then gretchen begins to have qualms conventional morality starts to set in another girl is gossiping about some other woman that's become pregnant her lover has left her and gretchen begins to despair she thinks oh my god look what i've done look what's happened to me now her brother valentine who gets brought in and he hasn't made an appearance yet is a soldier a martial man who's heard that his sister is pregnant has lost her virtue to some mysterious stranger valentine wants to find the evil doer and even the score with him of course conveniently faust and mephistopheles come because faust wants to sleep with gretchen again they encounter valentine and they arbitrarily kill him in other words they take advan magical advantage of him and he's killed and just as he's dying he curses his sister who is of course overwrought and this is the low point in faust's moral degradation he kills this guy arbitrarily he treats gretchen very badly he has contempt for love and this is the bottom of the pit for him now after that we see gretchen in the name of a cathedral and there two things happen to her one she is pursued by an evil spirit in this case the evil spirit of guilt one of the bad parts about christianity is the fact that it form forces upon people a guilt which really does not redeem them redemption in this play comes from creative activity brooding morose guilt is the worst part about the christian religion and not only that but he's that here's a a a religious song called the ds erie in latin that means day of wrath it is a part of the traditional catholic funeral mass so the dias erie god's wrathful judgment on the souls of the damned all right begins to drive gretchen towards madness she has many similarities to ophelia in hamlet so those of you that know the hamlet will see many complementary elements in our gretchen now while she is in the cathedral mephistopheles and faust are off at the valporgus knocked a kind of witch's sabbath where spirits and fairies and witches get together for a kind of drunken sexual kind of a revel it's the inverse of the christian mass and while faust is encountering some beautiful young witch strangely enough a red mouse crawls out of her mouth now i don't know where he got this image but it's terribly arresting a red mouse i mean it's by itself it's not too horrible but you think about it the worse it gets and immediately he thinks of gretchen for reasons that are not immediately clear to me and he says we must go back and rescue gretchen and mephistopheles says no we can't go back and rescue gretchen there's a back and forth they go to a theatrical performance which doesn't have a great deal to do with the play one of the difficulties in faust is that it's enough for about 12 different works of art and this digression that into the theater is in fact that it's a digression but it's a beautiful digression digressed though they do they go back and try and rescue gretchen the difficulty they encounter is this gretchen is now crazy and wants to be punished for her sins in other words she buys into conventional christian morality at first when mephistopheles and faust show up she doesn't recognize recognize faust then she does recognize him and say oh thank god you're here now i think everything is going to be fine they say let's go we have to run because you're going to be killed gretchen incidentally has already had the child at this point and she's committed infanticide and she's going to be executed she's been driven mad by the guilt and now she wants to you know to stay and take her punishment she feels that's the only way to atone for her sins well they take off and what she says what mephistopheles says is look she's condemned there's nothing we can do about this let's go she is condemned and then a voice from heaven says is saved of course it's the voice of god saying look mephistopheles says she's condemned god's saying look i run things around here i decide who's saved and condemned she may be killed but that's not the same thing as being condemned she is ultimately going to aid in foul salvation she will go to heaven despite her sins right innocence is in some respects a mitigating circumstance perhaps from the universal perspective the idea of guilt at all is a misapprehension are there many possible romantic readings of this all right let's get right on to section two give you a sense of what's going on there now i can't give you the same level of detail that i did in section one and that's not any two details but remember this is twelve thousand lines of poetry and it is exquisitely metrical and it's rhymed right and he covers all the major uh uh literary f uh rather a metrical forms so we have hexam hexameters we have dactyls we have all different kinds of of poetic forms and the and the connection between the form uh and the content is that when he's covering ancient greece as you're going to in the second part he uses typically greek forms when he covers a tragic section he uses tragic forms in fact in one section when when he moves actually out of poetry altogether and towards prose with the idea of just shocking us into a recognition this is a special part so it's an amazing piece of work and when we move into the different kinds of meter and rhyme and the the simply formal elements of faust you know that you're in the presence of a great genius to be able to think this up requires genius by itself to be able to actually formulate this in a language that's so resistant to poetic to poetic activity as german a very difficult language to rhyme for example it's an amazing achievement no wonder it took him 60 years now part 2 starts in a pleasing landscape faust just forgot all of his ill treatment of gretchen gretchen is now dead she's been she's been executed what this suggests he's in a pleasing romantic landscape he's been given a kind of oblivion is that this forgetfulness this lack of guilt is a kind of secular absolution in other words one way of handling this is to show that faust is in a way too wise to become guilty or too wise to take guilt into the same extreme that gretchen does instead he's going to redeem himself through constructive activity our striving our attempt to create in this world is what ultimately redeems us well they find uh they are in the study of wagner uh the former assistant of faust who has now become a professor himself uh he's been wagner has been engaged in putting together homunculus a tiny little man it represents the the acme of intellectual activity also represents intellect it represents a great many things i mean the protein imagination of goethe is quite remarkable and there's a number of ironic interchanges between uh this between a student and mephistopheles and we also get an attempt to uh connect greek culture with german culture in other words if part one is mostly organized around german culture part two is organized around classical culture this is an attempt to unify the classic and the romantic to link up german culture with the culture of ancient greece and he is not guerta is not the only person to try this project think of what hegel's philosophy of history amounts to right the tradition of german idealism is clearly a reflection or an extrapolation from the tradition of greek idealism certainly hegel thought that the germans were the new greeks now um the next thing that they do they go to the classical valporgus knox now rather than burden you with what the classical valporgus knocked amounts to i would just say that it's some thousands of lines of poetry and it involves tremendous tremendous number of allusions to classical mythology classical philosophy and classical science um it's the kind of thing that you need the annotated edition to get through all right even professional scholars move very slowly through something like this the point is that we have here the unification of the classic and the romantic the third part of this uh the third section of the second part we find uh we find that uh faust is now connected to greece what has happened is something like this faust has undertaken the service of an emperor in europe and the emperor wants to see helen of troy helen of troy is produced through the agency of mephistopheles and a group of rather cryptic women or mysterious women called the mothers the eternal mothers apparently the idea is something like this now that we're going back to classical greece we're going to try and retrieve helen of troy in the classical tradition faust being a christian devil it doesn't have much efficacy there you have to go back to the mothers to some ancient classical tradition some spirit which will allow you to perform some kind of sorcery there well faust through the aid of the mothers of mephistopheles brings helen of troy into the emperor's court and of course the court here is too dumb to understand what paragons and what great epitomies of humanity helen of troy and her lover paris are but of course faust being a man of considerable cultivation does see some perfection in helen of troy and ultimately wants her as a kind of substitute for gretchen in the first case in the first book he's seduced gretchen who sort of represents german culture and then abandoned her in the second part he's going to to lust after and ultimately seduce helen of troy representative of greek culture and what we're going to do at the end is assume that the ethic of situ and sinan the eternal feminine leads us aloft leads us towards salvation but also towards loftier accomplishments well they go back to ancient greece and mephistopheles by carefully orchestrated lies helps helen of troy and the women who are with her after the trojan war go back and what happens is that they eventually have a son they have sex and their son is euphorion who is modeled on the romantic poet byron what occurs next is of course that because of the evanescent and kind of morbid element in romanticism euphorion in an attempt to fly like icarus in greek mythology dies and as a consequence helen and her grief disappears suggests to us that beauty and love are evanescent and not permanent right the be the becoming as opposed to being that faust sees everywhere is instantiated here thereafter faust and mephistopheles help the emperor defeat some rival in a campaign uh faust is given an area of land which is not very valuable but because faust is now interested in political issues introdu interested in the improvement of society begins a program of reclaiming land from the sea i guess the idea here is holland the point is something like this the sea represents nature the land represents culture and faust's ceaseless striving is to extend the realm of culture and to defeat nature we are told in towards the end of faust that if you would that we must continually and ceaselessly strive to extend our boundaries faust is touching all the human bases here he has been to ancient greece he has touched classical culture he has absorbed german culture he has engaged in all kinds of activities war and politics and nation building faust is the universal man he is now 100 years old and one of the last things he wants to do is organize his society get rid of the old gods get rid of the old kind of pious traditions and the way to do that is by making everyone in his domain surrender their land and there's a couple an old couple named philemon and baucus they still worship the old god and they still live on land that had been around before he reclaimed it from the sea as a result he says he sends some of his men an army unit in to take their house and forcibly a victim in the process philemon and baucus are killed and for the first time in this book and were 11 000 lines of poetry into it for the first time in this book faust feels responsibility he feels moral guilt he says i should not have done that i killed these harmless innocuous old people on account of my pride here we have for the first time faust becoming guilty taking moral responsibility we have here the upswing of the curve away from the end of the first part and he is for the first time assailed by certain evil spirits care and want and what are the other ones of two more the key thing he won his care that stays with him he's able to dispense with the others but care and worry is still there and care breathes on him and blinds him again think of greek tragedy where uh somebody like theresa is the blind seer now that he's now that he has finally has moral vision now we make him blind the contrast is both ironic and touching blindly we are now in the final part of the the second act or the second part there's digging going on outside devils under the influence of mephistopheles are digging faust's grave faust believed that these are his workmen reclaiming more land for this from the sea and finally he says on hearing these men digging his grave he says stay moment stay thou art so fair he has finally seen something valuable in the world extending the boundaries of human capacity doing something not merely for himself not merely in an amoral or arbitrary way actually understanding that there is value in the world and this value is by ceaseless human striving faust is a universal hero of culture any sort of striving can be represented as this any sort of achievement can be seen as valuable if you commit yourself to it fully it's both classic and romantic it brings together so many themes in western literature now while i'm on the topic and then of course faust having said stay moments day he dies and mephistopheles is rubbing his hands together he's got the devils ready to take him down and away and all of a sudden of course we get not a deus ex machina but a kind of deus in vita right in other words we get a kind of god in life itself and god comes down and says look i've been watching this all along all right i was in the prologue and i'm back and i've sent down the angels to bring faust up to heaven why because all his sins have been forgiven by the grace of god because what redeems faust is not the fact that he is sinless what redeems faust is the fact that he has taken things to the limit he is a representative of unlimited human striving so he goes up to heaven mephistopheles has not understood the context in which faust said stay moment stay thou art so fair he thinks that's a kind of resignation to damnation in fact it is his apotheosis all right it's a beautiful and very moving scene and of course one of the angels one of the celestial figures that comes and helps faust move into heaven becomes saved is gretchen who is now represented as the penitent woman in other words she has also been saved god i mean god has all the best lines in this play and i mean they're short lines like is saved right at the end of each of the acts but up up they go right and what has defeated mephistopheles is the thing that faust did not understand in the beginning but does understand at the end faust has come to understand love faust has found value in the world and mephistopheles has not and that is why he has been fooled it's the only thing apparently the mephistopheles doesn't understand before i finish i have to talk a little bit about the main themes in this and when you go back and read it on your own which you will have to do some things you ought to think about number one activity and passivity replace good and evil the usual conventional understanding of morality is reversed or changed being turns out to be the same thing as doing and heaven is not someplace else it is the end of our striving being is reconciled with becoming when the quarry is the chase uh pascal in one of his bitterest lines once says that we want the chaste not the quarry well gerter in a way rejoins to that when the chase is the quarry then and only then are we blessed then and only then can we be saved the difficulty with religion is that it turns desire towards self-destructive guilt look what it did to poor gretchen the only cure for christianity is the magic oblivion of art which we get in the beginning of the second part science produces dwarfish monsters look at homunculus a would-be human being and that's the high point of intellectual life endless labor is needed to retain the cleared ground there's a the sea is nature the land is culture the unity of germany and greece the unity of the classical and the romantic represented by helen and gretchen and salvation is possible only through inspired labor not through guilt and remorse remorse is always in some respects defective now let me just finish with this kind of an observation many people have wondered about that final line the evika vibe like situ and sinan the eternal feminine leads us upwards it leads us aloft you might want to say that our connection with the spirit of creativity is what redeems us you might want to say that every day is judgment day and that our activity in this world is the only source and the only possible salvation in other words what we have here is not an alternative to religion but an intensification of religion we need not wait for heaven in a way it's connected to the idea that tolstoy had the kingdom of god is within you don't wait for it to happen make it happen you are your activities you are not divorced from them passivity is evil resignation is evil goodness even though it may be goodness is connected with activity even occasionally sinful activity it is if it is done intensely and from the best of motives this is one of the greatest constructions of the human mind no short lecture can do justice to this great work of art you should read it it is good for your soul the difficulty is your soul needs a couple of months off right in order to absorb this right it's the kind of thing that you make a commitment to and that you take seriously it's like trying to read all the platonic dialogues or all the works of shakespeare it's all good for your soul but the contemplative life is not accessible to many people who are involved actively in the world if there is anything that you can say about faust himself is that he is not just a representative of western culture not just a representative of the artistic or creative man he is a representative of all human aspiration all the self-overcoming that we see not just in poets not just in religious figures but also in artists and saints and philosophers the sort of a morale the sort of transcendental imminence the sort of salvation in the face of immorality reminds me in many respects of hegel's idea of the world historical individual who does great evil and is yet a part of god's providential plan in other words god has the last laugh the world is bigger and more complex than we think and our puny ideas of sin should not constrict or prevent our creative activity here in the world if there is anything important about faust it seems that we ought to understand that activity is what redeems us that being and doing are the same thing and that we don't have to wait for some final deathly recompense for our lives we are recompensed every day um virtue is its own reward activity is its own compensation now if we avoid regret if we artistically fashion the world we also artistically fashion ourselves faust by conquering external nature by engaging in activity also managed to conquer internal nature by cultivating and civilizing the external world he cultivates and civilizes his own psyche faust then is the universal hero of culture he is the greatest achievement of german romanticism and one of the greatest achievements of western culture the heterogeneous qualities the odd structure of this are perhaps the only way to get across a book which wants to talk about every facet of human life which wants to connect all possible human striving in endeavor in one unified conception again think back to something like beethoven's ninth symphony at in the fourth movement he finally breaks through musical sound it has to start talking we have to think differently about uh the symphony after beethoven does this well we must think differently about poetry after gerta does this and by implication we must think differently about life now that we have been offered a new source of this worldly secular salvation our transcendence is imminent the good that we were searching for in the beginning of this poem is in fact always been before us

Channel: Michael Sugrue

Views: 8,059

Rating: 4.9326601 out of 5

Keywords: Michael Sugrue, Dr. Michael Sugrue, Lecture, History, Philosophy, Western Culture, Western Intellectual Tradition, Western Literary Tradition, Author, Literature, Great Authors, Neo-Classical, Romantic, Goethe, Faust

Id: T8YC9zhIKMA

Length: 42min 29sec (2549 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 25 2020