Marlowe, Goethe, and the Faust Legend

The Faust legend has held the imagination of Western culture for many years. Variants of the story have appeared as stage works, poems, novels, and even instrumental music. The man who makes a deal with the Devil sometimes achieves redemption and sometimes is dragged down to Hell. Audiences are horrified by his dealing with infernal powers yet sympathize with his efforts to break the pact.

The story isn’t as old as some people think. It dates from the sixteenth century, the time of the witch mania, when it was widely believed that people entered agreements with the Devil. A real man, a German alchemist named Johann Georg Faust, was the basis of the legends, though little is known about him. He was the subject of fantastic stories before Christopher Marlowe put his tale into a more enduring form.

At the end of the play, after the devils take Doctor Faustus away, the narrator tells the audience, “Faustus is gone:  regard his hellish fall, Whose fiendful fortune may exhort the wise, Only to wonder at unlawful things, Whose deepness doth entice such forward wits To practice more than heavenly power permits.”

This is the premise the legend was built on: Faust acquires knowledge and abilities beyond those that humans should have. Their origin must be diabolical. People should avoid pursuing them. Elsewhere the narrator compares him to Icarus: “His waxen wings did mount above his reach.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe changed the story into a tale of striving and ultimate redemption. At the end of Part II, completed late in Goethe’s life, Faust escapes the pact with Mephistopheles not through any single great act, but through unremitting efforts to reach something better. He agrees he will be lost if he ever tells any moment, “Remain, you are so beautiful!” When he says those words at last, he is addressing a vision of what humanity might be, and the words do not damn him but release him.

Marlowe’s play, written around 1593, represents a post-Reformation but pre-Enlightenment viewpoint. Some challenges to traditional ideas had become acceptable, but there were strict limits on acceptable thought. Marlowe has Mephistophilis (as he spells the name) say, “Therefore the shortest cut for conjuring Is stoutly to abjure the Trinity, And pray devoutly to the prince of Hell.” So much for Unitarians.

Goethe, in contrast, eagerly embraced the Enlightenment. At the outset of his story, Faust complains that all his studies have failed to make him any wiser. Mephistopheles is “the spirit that denies,” cynicism incarnate. Faust renounces the life of reason for the hedonistic existence Mephistopheles offers. At the end of Part I he hits his low point, abandoning the woman he loves to her death.

Part II, after many twists and obscure allusions, leads to Faust’s conducting a land reclamation project. One couple, with the mythological names of Baucis and Philemon, will not move. He sends soldiers to remove them, but they exceed their instructions and kill the couple. Faust feels intense remorse. Spirits come to drive him to despair, but he answers that “Only he deserves freedom as well as life, who conquers them daily.” He dies, and Mephistopheles thinks he has won, but angels come and drive him back. Faust ascends to Heaven.

In Marlowe, a Good Angel and an Evil Angel appear at key moments, offering Doctor Faustus conflicting advice. In Goethe, Faust has no independent guidance; he must decide on his own. The angels represent the pre-Enlightenment idea that people must choose between good and bad authority. Ordinary people might follow Luther’s ideas or the Catholic Church’s, but working out their own path was out of the question.

Most subsequent adaptations of the legend, including Gounod’s opera and Murnau’s silent film, have followed Goethe’s version. Whether the Faust figure achieves redemption or not, he follows a course of his own making. These treatments of the tale reflect the view that people can shape their destiny, even after making a disastrous choice.