A Soul Hangs in the Balance
It is uncomfortable how human Faust is made out to be. He is lost, a wandering spirit, just like so many of us are, searching to find the one thing that ties everything together: the ultimate answer. This search for the ultimate answer is exemplified in the recent movie, “A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.” On a distant planet a pair of children were dubbed the “chosen ones” and built a super computer capable of calculating the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything. After waiting millions of years, the computer faithfully spouts out the answer “42.” The children were frustrated with this answer, but the computer insisted that this in fact was the answer they sought. The computer informed them that all they needed to make now was a machine that could identify the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything, which would make sense of the answer “42.” The President of the Galaxy, Zaphod Beeblebrox, along with the main characters of the film, are searching for this Ultimate Question. Faust is also searching for the Ultimate and is met with equal hardship. Faust commits entirely to each aspect of faith, doubt, and reason in his attempt to find the ultimate answer; however, the answer is found only with a balance between these three values. Moreover, faith, doubt, and reason are additionally represented by the respective characters of Gretchen, Mephistopheles, and Faust.
The farthest we see into Faust's past is his look back into his youth, reminiscing about the days when religion played a major role in his life. “There was a time/Of quiet, solemn sabbaths when heaven's kiss would fill/Me with its love's descent, when a bell's chime/Was deep mysterious music, and to pray/Was fervent ecstasy” (Goethe ll. 770-74). Even though he ends up losing it, the faith of Faust runs deeper than one might expect it; one must lose faith in order to find it. Consider Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy. Descartes loses all faith in anything; he distrusts anything sensory. The one thing that remains proven is himself; “I think therefore I am.” This single fact amidst a sea of doubt gives way to one additional truth: because he can think about an infinite being while being completely finite himself, there must be an infinite being who put that thought in his head. Faust loses his faith much like Descartes; both are tormented by a lack of knowledge about how the world works. In the end however, both men find their way back to God: Faust in Part 2, Descartes in his proving the existence of God.
Gretchen, on the other hand, is deeply rooted in her faith. When confronted with the death of Martha's husband, she replies, “I promise to pray for him with many a requiem” (ll. 2943). Hers is not a perfect faith; she strays in her enchanted love for Faust but this is not completely under her control. The enchantment on her is a strong one; she is too committed to Faust for her own good. “I look at you, dear Heinrich, and somehow/My will is yours, it's not my own will now./Already I've done so many things for you,/There's—almost nothing left to do” (ll. 3517-20). The final scene shows the true colors of Gretchen's faith: the evil she committed while enchanted has driven her mad with guilt. She cannot live with herself and therefore will not allow herself to be saved by Faust. “No,/From here to my everlasting tomb/And not one step further I'll go!” (ll. 4539-40). These are still mad ravings, however; Gretchen is still deeply bound in her enchanted love for Faust. Once she sees Mephistopheles, she snaps the enchantment and is a living rock of faith. “Oh my God, I await/Your righteous judgement!/.../Oh Father, save me, do not reject me,/I am yours! Oh holy angels, receive/Me under your wings, surround me, protect me!” (ll. 4607-13). The redemption of Gretchen even after the murder of her mother and child proves that despite her enchanted straying, she is still the epitome of faith in this story.
Faust loses his faith as he pours himself fully into his education, for as he learns more about the world through the eyes of science, he is brought to the realization of just how little he truly knows about the nature of the world. “No hell-fire or devil to worry about/Yet I take no pleasure in anything now;/For I know nothing” (ll. 369-71). This realization is what eventually spurs Faust to search for the ultimate answer through intense and fast-paced experiences. He is called Professor and Doctor, learned in Philosophy, Medicine, Law, and Theology (ll. 354-60). These, too, have failed to give Faust his ultimate answer. He gives quite a soliloquy about the shortcomings of his education: “God, how these walls still cramp my soul,/This cursed, stifling prison-hole/Where even heaven's dear light must pass/Dimly through panes of painted glass!/Hemmed in by books to left and right/Which worms have gnawed, which dust-layers choke,/And round them all, to ceiling-height,/This paper stained by candle-smoke,/These glasses, boxes, instruments,/All stuffed and cluttered anyhow,/Ancestral junk—look at it now,/Your world, this world your brain invents!” (ll. 398-409). The entire Scene 4. Night is really Faust pondering his life, reflecting upon his education and his focus on reason, while also dabbling in the realm of magic and doubt. He even begins to question his own divinity. “Am I a god? Light fills my mind;/In these pure lines and forms appear/All Nature's workings, to my inner sense made clear/.../How great a spectacle! But that, I fear,/Is all it is. Oh, endless Nature, where/Shall I embrace you?” (ll. 439-41, 454-56). This is representative of how lost Faust really is, to consider that he could be divine. He is wandering; his search for the ultimate answer continues past the realm of reason.
Even after Faust procures the devil Mephistopheles and succumbs to doubt, in Faust's heart of hearts he is still driven by reason and a yearning for a definite answer. On their Walpurgis Night trip up the Harz Mountains, Mephistopheles is pushing Faust to go to the gathering of witches, but Faust declines. “But the summit's where I'd rather be!/There's swirling smoke up there, fire from hell./The mob streams up to Satan's throne;/I'd learn things there I've never known” (ll. 4037-40). Even when encountered with this rare immersion into the realm of magic, Faust still keeps his eye on his goal of finding the ultimate answer.
Faust's abandonment of faith and reason ultimately leads him to magic. In this case, magic is the doubt of reality; the witches and demons give us a sub-culture per se that the “real world” is seemingly unaware of. Faust summons the devil Mephistopheles for one purpose: to provide him with the means to live life only in the moment, a fast-paced series of intense experiences. Faust's lack of faith results in a lack of morality. Pushing reason to the back-burner leads Faust to make the most questionable decision of all: selling his soul to the devil.
“Books sicken me, I'll learn no more./Now let us slake hot passions in/The depths of sweet and sensual sin!/Make me your magics—I'll not care to know/What lies behind their outward show./Let us plunge into the rush of things,/Of time and all its happenings!/And then let pleasure and distress,/Disappointment and success,/Succeed each other as they will;/Man cannot act if he is standing still./.../I tell you, the mere pleasure's not the point!/To dizzying, painful joy I dedicate/Myself, to refreshing frustration, loving hate!/I've purged the lust for knowledge from my soul;/Now the full range of suffering it shall face,/And in my inner self I will embrace/The experience allotted to the whole/Race of mankind; my mind will grasp the heights/And depths, my heart shall know their sorrows and delights./Thus I'll expand myself, and their self I'll be,/And perish in the end, like all humanity” (ll. 1749-59, 65-75).
Faust wants to experience all of life for every person crammed into his own single lifetime. After abandoning faith and reason, he is left with no other option than this.
Mephistopheles is the representation of doubt in this story. Faust is at his core a man of reason, so Mephistopheles must play off of Faust's doubts in order to manipulate him. When Faust tires of witchcraft as a means to reach his goal of infinite experiences, Mephistopheles offers another means, working the land and living the simplest of lives, knowing full well that Faust would never accept this as even a remote possibility. Mephistopheles sets Faust up with Gretchen by planting the jewel box in her room. Thus, Mephistopheles brings the complicated factor of love into the equation. This is a crafty move by the devil; Faust says he wants a fast-paced life from one experience to another but love seems to be his exception. Faust stays committed to Gretchen from their initial meeting, long enough for her to have a child and also to murder it; however, Mephistopheles also leads Faust away from Gretchen for an extended period of time, so that he is left with only one opportunity to save her. On Walpurgis Night, Faust seems to be wavering in his lack of commitment towards reason. He says that he wants to venture on to the top of the mountain because there are new things there for him to learn. Mephistopheles works to convince him otherwise. “And meet new mysteries as well./Let the great mad world go its way;/It's cosy here, so why not stay?/The great world, as you know, by subdivision/Turns into small worlds; it's an old tradition” (ll. 4041-45). In the final scene, Mephistopheles seems to be helping Faust save Gretchen. “Come! One moment longer and you're lost!/What's all this dallying, parleying and dithering!/My night-steeds are quivering,/The sun's nearly risen” (ll. 4597-600). Upon hearing his voice, Gretchen snaps out of her enchanted love and all but pleads to die. Instead of helping the situation, Mephistopheles is driving the wedge further between Faust and Gretchen.
Faust, Gretchen, and Mephistopheles represent the respective foci of reason, faith, and doubt. None of these characters have any sort of balance between these three belief sets, resulting in misery or failure for each of them. Gretchen lost her child, her mother, and her own life. Mephistopheles lost the soul of Gretchen he was striving to obtain. Faust lost the woman he loved and his newborn child. The worst failure of all, in my opinion, has nothing to do with the Gretchen story. Instead, I digress back to Faust's original goal: finding the ultimate answer. Despite keeping a keen eye on the prize of ultimate knowledge of life, Faust simply became a puppet in the hands of Mephistopheles, playing his part in trying to win over the soul of Gretchen. It almost worked: she murdered her own child and mother. However, the Lord saw her for what she was—enchanted and misguided—and redeemed her in the end despite Mephistopheles' best efforts. Mephistopheles twisted Faust's attention to be predominantly on Gretchen; in doing so, Faust lost focus on finding the ultimate answer and as such was left unfulfilled.
Gretchen could not have been Faust's ultimate answer for several reasons. First, her arrival in the story is due entirely to Mephistopheles, the devil. He has no motivation whatsoever to just hand Faust the answer like that. Second, I believe that Faust's ultimate answer could not involve losing all control of his life and stumbling around on autopilot while being controlled by Mephistopheles. The devil himself would not take pleasure in fulfilling someone's life; instead, Mephistopheles is much more likely to throw the speed bumps at everyone involved. Finally, as I will describe next, Faust can only find the ultimate answer if he has a balance between the values of faith, doubt, and reason. Faust has no where near that balance so it is illogical to believe that Gretchen was the ultimate answer.
It is interesting to me that while the prologue in heaven reflects that found in the book of Job and the soul in question seems to be that of Faust, the soul truly being fought over is that of Gretchen. Like Faust, she is led astray by the enchantment of Mephistopheles, but in the end she snaps out of it and is saved because of it. As previously mentioned, Faust all but stopped his quest for the ultimate answer via experiences in his pursuit of Gretchen. What is the moral of the story then? Is it that living only in the moment through fast-paced experiences does not lead to fulfillment or absolute knowledge? That is a valid point, but I see more than that. In order to be a decent, healthy, successful human being, one must have a balance between faith, doubt and reason. If any one belief set overpowers the others, life with crash and burn until balance is regained. Despite the fact Faust committed to each faith, reason, and doubt, he was never happy because he committed his whole being to one at a time; he never found balance. Faust commits serially to faith, doubt, and reason in his attempt to find the ultimate answer; however, the answer is found only with a balance between these three values.
Works Cited
Descartes, René. Meditations on first philosophy in which the existence of God and the distinction of the soul from the body are demonstrated. 3rd ed. Indianapolis: Hackett Pub. Co., 1993. Print.
Goethe, Johann. Faust, part one. Trans. David Luke. New York: Oxford UP Inc., 1987. Print.
"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005)." The Internet Movie Database (IMDb). IMDb.com Inc. Web. 04 Dec. 2009.
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