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521 - Faust the Theologian |
Faust the Theologian
By Jaroslav Pelikan
New Haven, Yale University Press, 1995. 145 pp. $20.00.
Jaroslav Pelikan turns out academic works the way most other scholars produce footnotes, spinning off small masterpieces that are sometimes more useful than his magnum opus, the five-volume history of doctrine entitled The Christian Tradition. Nor has Pelikan restricted his minor labors to strictly theological matters. In addition to books on Byzantine icons and the Reformation use of Scripture, on twentieth-century Ukrainian Cardinal Slipyj and fourth-century Saint Macrina the Younger, Pelikan has also written Bach among the Theologians, Eternal Feminines: Three Theological Allegories in Dante's "Paradiso, " and now Faust the Theologian. The Sterling Professor of History at Yale University is surely our polymath without peer, a Christian intellectual who regards his parish as the entire world of art and thought and culture as they have been marked by Christian faith in both the East and the West.
A longtime lover of Goethe who confesses that he has committed much of Faust to memory, Pelikan seeks to make theological sense of a classic whose almost unmanageable multiplicity is usually made the sign of its pagan character. This gargantuan five-act, twelve-thousand-line poem-which Goethe began as early as 1775 and did not finish until near the end of his life in 1831 at age 82-is a work of such Protean variousness that it does not submit easily to patterning, much less to theological unity. Yet Pelikan has located two Goethean declarations that may give religious order and coherence to the many-sidedness of Faust.
The first clue lies in Goethe's contention that comedy and humor are not alien to the deep things of the spirit but wondrously germane to them. Hence Goethe's repeated description of his epic work as a set of seriously intended jests-ernst gemeinten Scherze. Pelikan finds a second key in this aphorism from a letter Goethe wrote to Fritz Jacobi in 1831: "For my part, I cannot be satisfied, amid the manifold directions of my being, with only one way of thinking. As a poet and an artist, I am a polytheist; on the other hand, I am a pantheist as a natural scientist-and one of these decisively as the other. And if I have need for God for my personality as a moral man, that, too, is provided for." Pelikan discerns a tripartite scheme lurking in this latter epigram, and he makes it his means for uncovering the Dantesque seriousness of Goethe's often jaunty comedy.
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522 - Faust the Theologian |
Doctor Faustus' labors as a scientist, Pelikan contends, reveal him to be a
devout pantheist. With his multiple doctorates, the medieval scholar wants to
penetrate the veil of nature in order to reveal its numinous glory. The earth
is our divine Mother, Faust argues, and spring is the holiest of seasons; wonder
the truest of emotions. "The capacity for awe," Faust explains to
the nihilistic Mephistopheles, "is the best feature of humanity."
Yet because nature does not yield its powers and secrets entirely to human knowing,
Faust must also become a polytheist in his work as poet-priest. He is not content
to explore the given order of things but determined to make magical worlds of
his own. Hence Faust's worship of the divinity inherent in the manifold powers
of human creativity, including the dark arts of witchcraft. Yet the ever-striving
Faust cannot find satisfaction in the amoral world of the aesthetic and the
occult. He is also a man seeking moral redemption for the sins he has committed,
and here he discloses himself to be a monotheist relying o the divine grace
inherent in the Eternal Feminine.
So crude a summary cannot do justice to Pelikan's elegant little book, much
less to his mastery of the massive Faust bibliography. But it should reveal
the link between this treatise and an earlier work entitled Jesus through the
Centuries. There, Pelikan argues that Christians have portrayed their savior
largely in accord with the dominant concerns of their culture., So does Pelikan
the Christian scholar working in the secular academy also seek to interpret
Faust in ways that will appeal to believers and doubters alike. He argues, therefore,
that Faust does not progress from pantheism through polytheism to monotheism
by shedding one faith for the sake of another. Faust's final salvation as moral
monotheist enables him, in Pelikan's view, to transcend his labors as scientific
pantheist and poetic polytheist without negating these other vocations. Pelikan
the Christian humanist thus reads the poem's protagonist as fusing his Christian
and pagan convictions into a sublime synthesis.
Both!: scholarly and amateur readers of Faust the Theologian will be finely
instructed by Pelikan's subtle treatment of the West's most ambiguous epic.
Yet they may also be left wondering, with this reviewer, whether Goethe's great
poem can be made so splendidly all-accommodating, or whether there are vocations
and theologies that remain intractably incommensurate.
RALPH C. WOOD
Wake Forest University
Winston-Salem, NC