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The Easter Cantata and the Idea of Mediation in Goethe's Faust

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Robert Ellis Dye
Robert Ellis Dye*
Affiliation:
Macalester College, Saint Paul, Minnesota
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Abstract

Goethe's Werther and his Faust respond divergently to the Resurrection. Whereas Werther reclassifies Christ from exclusive mediator to model in order to emulate His death and rebirth, Faust is prevented by an Easter cantata from attempting self-translation. Faust's subsequent words and acts show that, although an unbeliever, he views Jesus as a mediator and has been reminded by the cantata of man's multifaceted dependence on mediation. The rainbow of “Anmutige Gegend” similarly affects a restored and newly hubristic Faust. Mediation underlies Goethe's concept of symbolism, and, like other Goethean mediators (e.g., the “Schleier” of the dedicatory poem to his collected works), the introductory symbols of Redeemer and rainbow in Faust, Parts i and ii, symbolize symbolism itself, man's essential mode of relating to ultimates. Mediation helps explain such puzzling inclusions in Faust as the quarrel between Neptunists and Vulcanists and is the central concept in the finale by the Chorus Mysticus.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 92 , Issue 5 , October 1977 , pp. 963 - 976
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1977

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References

Notes

1 Stuart Atkins, “J.C. Lavater and Goethe: Problems of Psychology and Theology in Die Leiden des Jungen Werthers” PMLA, 63 (1948), 535.

2 The Sufferings of Young Werther, trans. Harry Steinhauer (New York: Norton, 1970), p. 67. Quotations from Werther, with page' references hereafter given in the text, are from this translation. In translating Faust, I have relied heavily on Bayard Taylor, as revised by Stuart Atkins (New York: Collier, 1962) and George Madison Priest, 2nd ed. (New York: Knopf, 1941) but, mainly in shorter passages, have freely emended when this seemed desirable. Except as noted, other translations are mine. References to Goethe's writings in the original, unless otherwise noted, are to Goethes Werke: Hamburger Ausgabe, ed. Erich Trunz (Hamburg: Christian Wegner Verlag, 1949–64), henceforth abbreviated HA. I give a detailed first reference to each work cited and subsequently indicate the page or line in the text.

3 Arnold Bergsträsser, “Goethe's View of Christ,” Modern Philology, 46 (1948–49), 178.

4 Goethe und Lavater, ed. Heinrich Funck, Schriften der Goethe-Gesellschaft, 16 (Weimar: Verlag der Goethe-Gesellschaft, 1901), p. 182.

5 “Brief des Pastors zu an den neuen Pastor zu Aus dem Französischen,” HA, xii, 5th ed. (1963). This contains the advice: “Da Gott Mensch geworden ist, damit wir arme, sinnliche Kreaturen ihn möchten fassen und begreifen kônnen, so muß man sich vor nichts mehr hüten, als ihn wieder zu Gott zu machen” (p. 231).

6 Line nos. in Taylor and Priest agree with HA, iii, 7th ed. (1964), the edition here cited and/or translated.

7 Cf. Heinrich Rickert, Goethes Faust: Die dramatische Einheit der Dichtung (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1932), p. 140. See also Stuart Atkins, Goethe's Faust: A Literary Analysis (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1958), p. 32; and Steinhauer, p. 118.

8 Staiger, Goethe (Zurich: Atlantis, 1952), i, 171.

9 The most succinct formulation of this view is perhaps that of the Kommentar zu Goethes Faust, by Theodor Friedrich, rev. Lothar Scheithauer (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1959): “Nicht der Inhalt des Osterglaubens, der ja für F[aust] nicht mehr vorhanden ist, sondern die Erinnerung an die mit Ostern verbundenen beseligenden Kindheitserlebnisse Ziehen F. ins Leben zurück. In der gleichen Stimmung liegt das Entscheidende” (p. 191). See also Konrad Burdach, “Das religiöse Problem in Goethes Faust,” Euphorion, 33 (1932); rpt. in Aufsätze zu Goethes ‘Faust I,‘ ed. Werner Keller (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1974), pp. 27–28; further, Reinhard Buchwald, Führer durch Goethes Faustdichtung: Erklärung des Werkes und Geschichte seiner Entstehung (Stuttgart: Kröner, 1949), pp. 79–80; Gerhard Möbus, Die Christus-Frage in Goethes Leben und Werk (Osnabrück: A. Fromm, 1964), pp. 223–25; and Heinrich Rickert, pp. 140–41.

Unable to make sense of this episode, Eudo Mason chooses to regard it as the product of a creative lapse on Goethe's part (Goethe's Faust: Its Genesis and Purport [Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1967], pp. 290–91). Nor is there an adequate solution in Arnold Bergsträsser's summary: “The unbelieving Faust is saved from self-destruction by the Easter message, which announces the hope granted to men through the Master who met the test of pain” (p. 190). Alexander Gillies, who does ponder the significance of the cantata, seems frankly puzzled: 'The Easter bells and music call forth recollections of [Faust's] boyhood. It is not the force of religion, not faith—he has long since abandoned that—that keeps him alive. It is the thought of rebirth, of springtime, of the reawakening of all life, of the freshness and purity of youth, of the indistinctly apprehended love-impulse that now recalls him. And the reminder that he has no faith makes it illogical to think that he should try to enter the world to come, to which he had given so little attention! Religion acts in a very mysterious manner“ (Goethe's Faust: An Interpretation [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1957], p. 31). It would be strange indeed for a man of such contempt for the traditional disciplines as Faust to abandon his quest for fear of behaving illogically.

10 D.J. Enright, Commentary on Goethe's Faust, The Direction Series, No. 10 (Norfolk, Conn.: James Laughlin, 1949), p. 30.

11 Paracelsus' directions for the incubation of homunculi, with instructive commentary, may be found in Ronald D. Gray's Goethe the Alchemist (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1952), pp. 205–06.

12 In addition to several unambiguous indications within the text of Faust's eventual transmutation (e.g., ll. 11936–37; 11978–82; 12095), a Faust manuscript has, before l. 11954, “Chor der Engel (Faustens Entelechie heran bringend)” (Goethes Werke, Weimarer Ausgabe, Sec. i, Vol. xv [Weimar: Hermann Böhlau, 1888], Pt. ii, p. 165). Cf. Trunz's “Anmerkung,” HA, iii, 632–33.

13 Goethes Religion: Die Faust-Dichtung in christlicher Sicht (Tubingen: Furche-Verlag, 1949), p. 129.

14 HA, viii, 6th ed. (1964), p. 163.

15 “Die Leiden des jungen Werther: Ihr geistesgeschichtlicher Hintergrund,” Wissenschaft und Gegenwart, 12 (1938); rpt. in Schöffler, Deutscher Geist im 18. Jahrhundert, ed. Götz von Selle (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1956), pp. 155–81.

16 Trunz, by contrast, finds, “Der dogmatisch-heils-geschichtliche Inhalt ist ganz in Musik aufgelöst, so daß wir ihn über dem Klang fast vergessen” (HA, iii, 505).

17 All biblical quotations are from the Revised Standard Version.

18 Johann Casper Lavater, Ausgewählte Werke, ed. Ernst Staehelin (Zurich: Zwingli-Verlag, 1943), iii, 193. Already as a schoolboy Lavater had addressed Jesus in a poem as “O Gott und Mittler Jesu Christ!” (i, 24), and he complained to Goethe in the spring of 1774: “Wie kannst Eine Gottheit glauben, wenn du nicht an Christum glaubst? Denselben Augenblick bin ich ein Atheist, wenn ich kein Christ mehr bin…. Wenn Jesus Christus nicht mein Gott ist—so hab' ich keinen Gott mehr—u. G[oethe] u. P[fenninger] u. L[avater] sind Traumer, nicht Brüder, nicht Kinder eines Vaters—nicht unsterblich.—So ist Freundschaft nichts,—ailes Zauberspiel, keine Existenz etc.” (Goethe und Lavater, pp. 21–22).

19 In Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1951; rpt. New York: Mentor, 1961), Susanne K. Langer observes that “Belief and doubt belong essentially to [the literal stage of thought rather than the myth-making stage]; the myth-making consciousness knows only the appeal of ideas, and uses or forgets them. Only the development of literal-mindedness throws doubt upon them and raises the question of religious belief” (p. 168). Even we moderns, of course, remain open to a broader and more complex system of meaning than is encompassed by the simple dichotomy of belief and disbelief, and it is doubtful that the religious behavior of either Faust or Werther can be understood in terms of this distinction.

20 E.g., William J. Keller, in “Goethe's Faust, Part i, as a Source of Part ii,” Modern Language Notes, 33 (1918), 342–52, lists numerous parallels, mainly verbal, between the two parts and sees Part ii as dramatizing and amplifying the ideas and implications of Part i. Erich Franz, in Mensch und Dämon: Goethes Faust als menschliche Tragödie, ironische Weltschau und religiöses Mysterienspiel (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1953), takes a similar view and gives several illustrations (pp. 41–43).

21 Egil A. Wyller, “Das Vorspiel des Faust ii: Seine Funktion innerhalb der Faustdichtung,” Edda, 58 (1958), 311–20; and Franz, p. 41.

22 See original in HA, i, 7th ed. (1964), p. 152, ll. 95–96.

23 As Wilhelm Emrich elaborates, “das ‘Wahre’ soli in natiirlichen Bildern uns reizen es aufzusuchen…. Der Schleier [which both veils and reveals truth] … entwickelt eine produktiv unendliche geistige Tätigkeit” (Die Symbolik von Faust II: Sinn und Vorformen, 3rd ed. [Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum, 1964], p. 53).

24 Goethe wrote to K.F. Zelter on 19 March 1827: “Wirken wir fort bis wir, vor oder nacheinander, vom Weltgeist berufen in den Äther zurückkehren! Möge dann der ewig Lebendige uns neue Thätigkeiten, denen analog in welchen wir uns schon erprobt, nicht versagen! … Die entelechische Monade muß sich nur in rastloser Thätigkeit erhalten; wird ihr diese zur andern Natur, so kann es ihr in Ewigkeit nicht an Beschäftigung fehlen” (Goethes Werke, Weimarer Ausgabe, Sec. iv, Vol. xlii, p. 95).

25 HA, xiii, 5th ed. (1966), p. 305. And see Emrich, pp. 83–87.

26 Trunz lists several in his notes to Faust (HA, iii, 538), such as the line from Pandora proclaiming that man is “bestimmt, Erleuchtetes zu sehen, nicht das Licht!” (HA, v, 6th ed. [1964], 362, l. 958).

27 The magnificent final words of “Selige Sehnsucht” (HA, ii, 7th ed. [1965], 19).

28 See his Farbenlehre, HA, xiii, 362–437, passim.

29 This term is enlisted by Emrich (pp. 90–92) from an incident in Willielm Meisters Lelirjahre in support of his elaborate interpretation of the “farbiger Abglanz” as an objectification of the self. Emrich denies any Neoplatonist implications of the image (p. 89).

30 “Der leibhaftige Newton” is Andreas Speiser's phrase in his introduction to Goethe's Naturwissen-schaftliche Schriften, Pt. i, Gedenkausgabe der Werke, Briefe und Gespräche, ed. Ernst Beutler, xvi (Zurich: Artemis, 1949), 947.

31 J.E. Cirlot, A Dictionary of Symbols, trans. Jack Sage (New York: Philosophical Library, 1962), p. 32.

32 Cf. the poems “Regenbogen” and “Regen und Regenbogen,” the latter of which is the third of “Drei Palinodien” written in response to short poems of Friedrich Haug, epigrammatist and editor of the Cotta publication Morgenblatt. It is in the draft of a letter to Cotta of 7 Feb. 1814 regarding Haug's poems that Goethe makes the remark cited above. I quote it from the notes of Eduard von der Hellen to Goethes Sämtliche Werke, Jubiläums-Ausgabe, ii (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1906), 315–16. See also Goethe's poem “Phänomen” from the West-östlicher Divan, in notes to which Konrad Burdach remarks: “Der Regenbogen des Sonnenlichts ist Goethe nach 1. Mos. 9, 12 im Einklang mit Herder (‘Vom Geiste der ebräischen Poesie’, Suphans Ausg. Bd. 11, S. 390) Sinnbild der Poésie aïs der Brücke zwischen Himmlischem und Irdischem” (Jubiläums-Ausgabe, v [1905], 328–29). In the indicated passage Herder explicitly interprets the rainbow of Genesis ix as a bridge, as against the now generally accepted understanding of that “bow” as a weapon (see The Interpreter's Bible, i [New York: Abingdon, 1952], p. 551; also The Oxford Annotated Bible: Revised Standard Version, eds. Herbert G. May and Bruce M. Metzger [New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1962], p. 11, n. to verse 13), and as “den Abglanz seiner [i.e., of God's] Gute.” Goethe's draft to Cotta shows unambiguously that he understood the rainbow in Herder's way. Indeed, it is likely that Herder's interpretation determined the view of the entire epoch. Cf. the following tercet from Eichendorff's sonnet “Jugendandacht,” No. 8: “Gebirge dunkelblau steigt aus der Feme, / Und von den Gipfeln führt des Bundes Bogen / Als Brücke weit in unbekannte Lande” (Joseph von Eichendorff, Werke, ed. Wolfdietrich Rasch [Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1966], p. 245).

33 In Grünewald's madonna in Stuppach, a rainbow in the landscape doubles as a halo around Mary's head, its arc unnaturalistically narrowed in the interest of approximate concentricity. Possible literary sources of the suggested correspondence are discussed by Lottlisa Behling, “Neue Forschungen zu Grünewalds Stuppacher Maria,” Pantheon, 26 (1968), 11–20. In medieval icons depicting the Last Judgment rainbows frequently serve as Christ's throne, where they perhaps symbolize “the pardon and … the reconciliation given to the human race” through Christ (George Ferguson, Signs and Symbols in Christian Art [1959; rpt. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967], p. 24). Fittingly, there is no rainbow in Michelangelo's Last Judgment, in which an angry Hercules of a Christ administers merciless, almost vengeful justice.

For a general discussion of the rainbow in painting—in part from a scientific point of view—see Siegfried Rösch's “Der Regenbogen in der Malerei,” Studium Generate, 13 (1960), pp. 418–26. See also, for myth and literature, Martti Räsänen's “Regenbogen—Himmelsbrücke,” Stadia Orientalia, ed. Societas Orientalis Fennica, 14, No. 1 (1947), 3–11. I am indebted to Richard C. Clark for having put me on the trail of possible Christ-rainbow associations in the visual arts.

34 Goethe, Propyläen: Eine periodische Schrift (Tübingen: Cotta, 1798; facsimile rpt. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1965), p. 103.

35 See Trunz, HA, i, 677. A comprehensive attempt to identify mediator figures in Goethe's writings is Gertrud Reitz's Die Gestalt des Miniers in Goethes Dichtung, Frankfurter Quellen und Forschungen, No. 3 (Frankfurt am Main: Diesterweg, 1932). Reitz finds, however, “daß die Faustdichtung der Gestaltung des Mittlers wenig giinstig ist” (p. 87).

36 HA, i, 148. The translation is from Edwin H. Zeydel, Goethe, the Lyrist (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1955), p. 67.

37 René Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism: 1750–1950, i (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1955), 211.

38 See Maximen und Reflexionen, No. 749, HA, xii, 470.

39 Barry Laine instructively discusses the larger context of the Thales-Anaxagoras debate in “By Water and by Fire: The Thales-Anaxagoras Debate in Goethe's Faust,” Germanic Review, 50 (1975), 99–110. He is unconvincing, however, in his effort to establish a synthesis between the sudden and violent mode of creation represented by Anaxagoras and that of gradual but more lasting achievement according to Neptunist theory.