“Faust” (post 1) by Goethe (post 3): Play dedicated to spirits and ghosts, author’s “reality”; God gives Mephistopheles “carte blanche”; Faust’s “two souls” 

“Dedication”

This play, written in verse, begins with an author’s “Dedication” to the spectral spirits he has enjoyed since childhood:

“Come back, have you, you figures shifting, spectral,

Who first appeared to me when I was young?…

“What lively scenes you bring back, days how happy,

Beloved shadows come again to life;…

“And a yearning, unfelt, unroused for so long,

For that solemn spirit world, seizes me,…

“And vanished ghosts are my reality” (1, lines 1-32).

“Prologue in Heaven”

“The Lord,” in a meeting with “Mephistopheles,” gives his “full consent” for Mephistopheles to work with Faust in the “cat’s way with a mouse,” since, God says, “A good man always knows the way that’s right.” To which Mephistopheles replies, “Yet I’ll seduce him from it soon enough.” The Lord replies “…you have carte blanche. I’ve never hated your likes much, I find of all the spirits of denial, You jeerers not my severest trial…So I’m glad to give him a devil—for his own good, To prod and poke and incite him as a devil should” (lines 330-354).

Faust’s “two souls”

Faust, a scholar, says:

“Two souls live in me, alas,

Irreconcilable with one another.

One, lusting for the world with all its might,

Grapples it close, greedy for all its pleasures,

The other rises up, up from the dirt,

Up to the blest fields where dwell our great forbears” (lines 1138-1143).

Comment

The author’s spirits and ghosts—to the extent that they are imaginary, personified beings, experienced as having minds of their own—are alternate personalities, as are Faust’s two souls. Goethe’s relationship between God and Mephistopheles is intriguing enough to mention, but beyond my scope, unless you want to argue that they are alternate personalities, which I don’t.

1. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Faust: A Tragedy, Parts One [1806/1829] & Two [1831], Fully Revised. Translated from the German by Martin Greenberg. New Haven, Yale University Press, 2014.