“Ultima Cumæi venit jam carminis ætas;[110] Magnus ab integro Sæclorum nascitur ordo, Jam redit et Virgo,[111] redeunt Saturnia regna; Jam nova progenies cælo demittitur alto. Tu modo nascenti puero, quo ferrea primum Desinet ac toto surget gens aurea mundo, Casta fave Lucina: tuus jam regnat Apollo.
“Te duce, si qua manent sceleris vestigia nostri, Inrita perpetua solvent formidine terras. Ille deum vitam accipiet divisque videbit Permixtos heroas et ipse videbitur illis, Pacatumque reget patriis virtutibus orbem.”[112]
The turning to asceticism resulting from the general expansion of Christianity brought about a new misfortune to many: monasticism and the life of the anchorite.[113]
Faust takes the reverse course; for him the ascetic ideal means death. He struggles for freedom and wins life, at the same time giving himself over to the Evil One; but through this he becomes the bringer of death to her whom he loves most, Marguerite. He tears himself away from pain and sacrifices his life in unceasing useful work, through which he saves many lives.[114] His double mission as saviour and destroyer has already been hinted in a preliminary manner:
With what a feeling, thou great man, must thou Receive the people’s honest veneration!
Thus we, our hellish boluses compounding, Among these vales and hills surrounding, Worse than the pestilence, have passed. Thousands were done to death from poison of my giving; And I must hear, by all the living, The shameless murderers praised at last!
A parallel to this double rôle is that text in the Gospel of Matthew which has become historically significant:
“I came not to send peace, but a sword.”—_Matt._ x: 34.
Just this constitutes the deep significance of Goethe’s Faust, that he clothes in words a problem of modern man which has been turning in restless slumber since the Renaissance, just as was done by the drama of Oedipus for the Hellenic sphere of culture. What is to be the way out between the Scylla of renunciation of the world and the Charybdis of the acceptance of the world?
The hopeful tone, voiced in the “Hymn to the God of Creation,” cannot continue very long with our author. The pose simply promises, but does not fulfil. The old longing will come again, for it is a peculiarity of all complexes worked over merely in the unconscious[115] that they lose nothing of their original amount of affect. Meanwhile, their outward manifestations can change almost endlessly. One might therefore consider the first poem as an unconscious longing to solve the conflict through positive religiousness, somewhat in the same manner as they of the earlier centuries decided their conscious conflicts by opposing to them the religious standpoint. This wish does not succeed. Now with the second poem there follows a second attempt which turns out in a decidedly more material way; its thought is unequivocal. Only once “having gained one raptured glance ...” and then—to die.