The Cry for Myth (30 page)

THE SALVATION OF FAUST

Faust sinks backward and the devil gathers up his body with the speech,

The “ghastly jaws of hell open at left,” says the stage direction.

But to our great surprise the devil’s plans are thwarted by a chorus of young angels, messengers of grace, who arrive with roses, which they strew in front of Mephistopheles, while singing,

Mephistopheles is not only confused by the rose petals floating all about, but—of all things—he becomes sexually attracted to the young angels. It is indeed a comic and enchanting scene—the devil caught in his own trap of sexual desire! Goethe must have had a good chuckle as he wrote this; for the devil tries to hold the angels off to no avail because of his own uncontrollable sexual yearnings; “They seem so very lovely all at once.” The angels continue to sing,

Mephistopheles must break down and admit,

He forgets Faust as he, now the lovesick lad, loses his senses over bare sex in these young angels. He cries,

In this strange confusion, erotic and beautiful at the same time, Faust’s immortal essence is born up to heaven in a scene
made up not only of angels but the “Chorus of the Blessed Boys,” amid Church Father galore. It is as though God himself now takes a hand in having Faust born off to heaven! But Goethe, caught in his own paradox, must again get in his lauding of the active man,

At the end, Goethe comes back to the central emotional and psychological theme, namely, the significance of Woman, now in the form of the Virgin. From the “highest, purest cell,” there comes the song,

This scene, the highest level of spiritual perfection attainable for human beings, is a radiant contrast to Dr. Faustus’ dreary and dark study at the very beginning of the drama. Goethe is saved by Dante, in this ending: Gretchen imitates the intercession of Beatrice on behalf of Dante in
The Divine Comedy
. These two great poets unite in this wonderful ending finally published by Goethe when he was eighty years old. Gretchen, now from the celestial vantage point of the Saved, takes part in the singing that welcomes Faust into blessedness. Goethe now lists the four kinds of women that one should serve: Holy Virgin, Mother, Queen, and Goddess. The drama ends with a verse which lauds action again, but now the final words again sing out the saving quality of the eternal feminine,

At this ending we are immediately struck by the fact that Marlowe’s Faust was thrown into hell, while in Goethe’s myth Faust is carried away into heaven! How shall we explain this conflicting interpretation of the same myth? Indeed, in Goethe’s version it is more than merely a “happy ending.” It is a delightful scene with Gretchen symbolizing the forgiving love for Faust, gay humor in Mephistopheles’ uncontrollable sexual desire for the “sweet, lovely things,” and everyone surrounded by a charming ballet of the dancing angels.

Each myth in human history is interpreted according to the needs of the society which it reflects
. Marlowe’s Renaissance needed an opening of hell to represent the audience’s own guilt; they would experience the abreaction they so much needed only by Marlowe’s bringing literal hell into the picture. But Goethe’s Enlightenment needed a quite different abreaction. The people then needed to leave the theater with the feeling that God was on their side in the form of Providence, that their culture was a great step in advance, that progress was a holy thing, that the highest calling is, in Goethe’s words,

This made sense because the Enlightenment was a greatly expanding economy and a time of the expression of noble ideas, as we recall in the American Declaration of Independence and the Rights of Man.

We have said that the divine element of the forgiveness of Faust is in the last two lines of the drama,

One of Goethe’s purposes in writing this great drama was to explore the myths of the life of humanism, to search out every way to help human beings discover and live by their greatest callings. He is said to have died with this last word on his lips, “Progress.” Progress for him did not mean simply mechanical achievements or achieving wealth. It meant human beings learning to be conscious of their richest unique capacities, and thus have “life and have it more abundantly.” Hence he begins his myth of Faust with a description of Easter, the time of the rising of Christ.

There is in Goethe’s writing an element of eternity, a sense of the true use of myth. He stretches up toward the divine; he seems always related to transcendent being. This becomes explicit in his last sentence, “Woman eternal/Draws us on high.” We have said the principle of forgiving love is present in the person of Gretchen. This is embodied in the “eternal feminine,” a force which is an expression of the
deus ex machina
. This brings us back again to Mephistopheles’ statement in his first encounter with Faust: his evil acts are changed to good. The devil is duped, betrayed by his own powers. The motif of the “betrayed Satan” or the “duped devil” has been present in Western theology and philosophy for many centuries, all the way back to Origen. Here it turns up specifically in the ending of Goethe’s
Faust
. Thus Mephistopheles is at least partly right when he says that he “does evil out of which there comes good.”

Germany … was reeling then at the height of her dissolute triumphs…. Today, clung round by demons, a hand over one eye, with the other staring into horrors, down she flings from despair to despair. When will she reach the bottom of the abyss? When, out of uttermost hopelessness—a miracle beyond the power of belief—will the light of hope dawn? A lonely man folds his hands and speaks, “Cod be merciful to thy poor souls, my friends, my Fatherland!”

Thomas Mann,
Doctor Faustus
, 1948

I
T REMAINED FOR THOMAS MANN,
the great novelist of the first half of the twentieth century, to describe the destructive power and despair present in the myths of Faust. Nobel laureate, Mann had already chronicled the bourgeois culture of his Germany in
Buddenbrooks
, writing with special sensitivity of the challenges and dilemmas of modem Western society. He had pictured the sickness of Europe in
The Magic Mountain
in the 1920s. But with the advent of Hitler and World War II, Thomas Mann, humanist in the best sense of the term, was thrown into a deep convulsion as he experienced the destruction of his country and the West. He found the ultimate
form of the myth of Faust in the context of World War II, the greatest destructiveness our Western world has yet known.

I was made especially aware of the depth of the ambivalence and grief that affected such Germans because of my close friendship with Paul Tillich, a man of similar honors and, like Mann, a refugee from Hitler’s Germany. One night in the early 1940s when World War II was in full tilt, Hannah Tillich, Paul, and I had gone to the cinema to see some long-forgotten movie. Preceding the picture a newsreel was shown which turned out to be photographs of the bombing of Dresden, the city which had been the center of creativity in Germany. Now its great buildings and many art museums came crashing down in the fire and smoke of complete destruction. Paul and Hannah burst into tears in such complete agony of the heart that I thought their tears would never stop. I had never seen such deep-felt agony of spirit.

Thomas Mann endured a similar agony. Mann’s wife was Jewish; he escaped with her into Switzerland and then ultimately to the United States and Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study. He could observe the conflagration from the quiet of Princeton, but this made the contrast even sharper. What was happening to his native land?

There never was the slightest question of the loyalty of these Germans to America. Tillich had been the first Christian exile under Hitler, and Mann had been Europe’s foremost novelist in the first half of the twentieth century. Yet Germany was where their relatives were, and Germany had given them a profound education in the humanities, music, and art. Now Germany’s great symbol of humanism was being ground into dust by that bombing of Dresden.

Humanistic to the core, Thomas Mann desperately grasped for a myth that might give some meaning, if not a release from sorrow, some sense of community in the long history of human self-destruction. Hitlerism was no longer simply an illness; it was a cancer of the German soul. Had not Germany sold its
birthright to the devil in permitting and embracing the degradation of all culture in Hitlerism? Mann was thus irresistibly drawn toward the myth of Faust.

No one can open Mann’s
Dr. Faustus
and read a few sentences without realizing that great convulsions were occurring in the author’s soul. He rewrote the myth of Faust, emphasizing what did not concern Marlowe and Goethe, namely, the cultural destruction of the Western world. Indeed, Mann was so caught up in his portrayal of this cancer of the soul that he himself became ill in the process of writing and had to spend time in the hospital in Chicago.

The story, or what there is of narration in Mann’s
Dr. Faustus
, is about Adrian Leverkuhn, a talented musical composer and the inventor of the twelve-tone scale.
*
The narrator of the myth, Serenus Zeitblom, is an old friend from childhood, perhaps the only friend Adrian had, who himself was a good German. Zeitblom was a classical scholar, professor at the university, happily married; he speaks of his wife as “my good Helen.” He is greatly distressed when his sons support Hitler, and he resigns from his professor’s chair when he is told that he is required to teach Nazi doctrine.

The narrator, Zeitblom, tells us that Adrian’s hell begins when he loses the only human being he had ever truly loved, a sweet and innocent child of five, son of his sister. The little boy dies in the agonies of cerebral spinal meningitis. Thereafter Adrian can love no other human being. He lives as a recluse.

In his early twenties Adrian had been tricked into going to a brothel, and in his embarrassment he had walked over to the piano and struck a chord from Weber’s
Freischutz
. This was the same chord that Nietzsche had played on the piano when he also was brought to a brothel. Here Adrian has his only sexual experience in his life, with a prostitute named Esmeralda. She warns him that she is infected, but he nevertheless
has intercourse with her and contracts syphilis. This makes the story parallel in this regard with the life of Nietzsche, who also contracted syphilis in his early twenties in a brothel.

Some students of Thomas Mann, such as Professor Richard Wiseman, believe that Mann’s book,
Dr. Faustus, is
about Nietzsche all the way through. This may be so, especially when we consider that Nietzsche was the ultimate nay-sayer, the philosopher, in his writings like the
Death of God
, who makes it clear that the modern epoch is at its end.

Mann seems to feel that, had European culture listened to Nietzsche, its collapse could have been avoided or at least mitigated. For Nietzsche was one writer who predicted what would later happen to Europe if it continued on its ambivalent course.

CONVERSATION WITH THE DEVIL

The mark of Cain—or the equivalent in our society—is on Adrian’s forehead, placed there by the devil in the most fascinating chapter of the book, a dialogue between Adrian and the devil.
*
The bargain Adrian signs with his blood is stated by Satan at the end of this chapter and then the devil adds: