Goethe: Science and Alchemy
From Faust: A Tragedy, Book I, Prologue in Heaven.
Dear Reader,
This is my second post on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s tragic play, Faust. I first encountered the play in 2018, and ever since, its scenes and quotes have frequently resurfaced in my thoughts at various moments in life.
I’ve now decided to revisit Faust with a deeper focus on its symbols, allegories, and verses, using John R. Williams’s translation for Princeton University Press as my guide.
In this post, I’ll be exploring the Prologue in Heaven in which the Lord speaks to Mephistopheles. While it contains no spoilers, I highly recommend reading these parts in full to truly grasp the profound genius of Goethe—something I can only touch upon in a single post.
Vashik Armenikus
Previous edition exploring the opening scenes of Faust 👉 (Read Here)
‘We all walk in mysteries. We do not know what is stirring in the atmosphere around us.’
~ Goethe
In 1936, the British economist John Maynard Keynes, a long admirer of Isaac Newton, purchased the unpublished manuscripts by his favourite scientist at the prestigious Sotheby’s auction. The price that he paid was low, just 9000£; nothing when we compare it to the sale of Rubens earlier in that season for 140,000£. The cost of Newton’s artefacts might have been modest, but the insights they revealed were priceless.
Keynes was surprised to discover that the manuscripts which he purchased focussed on Newton’s interest in the subject of alchemy. This led him to conclude that his intellectual hero, the man who is often labeled as the ‘father of the modern science’, ‘was not the first of the Age of Reason, but he was the last of the magicians.’1
About four decades after Keynes’s purchase, British academic circles were shaken by another divisive discovery. In the mid-1960s, Frances Yates, who was deeply read in the occult texts of the Renaissance, ‘contended that the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century grew out of magic’. As the biographer A.N. Wilson writes in his wonderful book on Goethe: ‘The more sobersides historians of science - in part, it must surely be said, stung by discovering their ignorance of many of the texts unearthed by Yates - rejected her utterly.’ 2 Others were more reserved in their criticism of Yates, yet they maintained that while the Hermetic Tradition influenced the development of modern science, its impact was not as significant as Yates suggested.
Those newly revealed texts also pointed out that even Queen Elizabeth I of England used to dip herself into occultism, alchemy and what is often called ‘Hermetic Tradition’. The Queen’s key advisor John Dee, about whose life I must write a whole separate article, was a mathematician, astronomer, teacher, astrologer, occultist and alchemist himself.
‘Yates revealed to us the extent to which the ‘Hermetic Tradition’ was widely believed and read as a sort of underground alternative to Catholic and Protestant theology of the time.’3
For centuries, spirit and science, the supernatural and natural worlds, were intertwined, each following the path of the other. The philosophers of the past thought that one could not fully appreciate the beauty of the natural world without grasping also the divine order that goes behind it. With the Age of Enlightenment, however, these paths began to diverge, as the two forces that had inhabited human nature since primordial times started to reject one another.
Goethe, who did not distinguish between different kinds of truth - scientific, spiritual, and emotional - was a witness to this seismic shift. He witnessed the birth of the ‘modern man’ who based his life on science, reason, and enlightenment - a new being who believed that they could overcome Nature itself.
This is the central theme of Goethe’s masterpiece Faust and as A.N. Wilson masterfully articulates in his biography of the great German polymath:
What is science, after all, but the harnessing of natural forces and an attempt to control or manipulate the processes of Nature?
Prologue in Heaven
The Lord, the Heavenly Host, then Mephistopheles.
For man’s activity can slacken all too fast,
He falls too soon into a slothful ease;
~ The Lord
When Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the author of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, translated Goethe’s Faust, he made the deliberate choice to omit the Prologue in Heaven entirely from the tragic play.
Coleridge found this part of the play blasphemous and unfit for an English-speaking audience. But what had the great German written that could scandalise a master of English verse so deeply?
The Prologue begins with a heavenly host of angels - Raphael, Gabriel and Michael - singing the praise of how the universe works and that they, the ‘… angels, watch with wonder. The peaceful progress of thy day.’
The world angels describe in their song where ‘mighty tempests rage unceasing, From sea to land, from land to sea,’ where ‘A furious clash of power, releasing a chain of vast causality’ - this world is familiar to us; it is the world that can be comprehended by science. It is what science also aims to do after all - to understand ‘the vast chain of causality’.
As the Heavenly angels finish their song in unison, enter no one else but Mephistopheles, the devil.
Since, Lord, you deign to visit us once more
To find out how we manage our affairs,
And since you’ve often welcomed me before,
I’ve come to join your household staff upstairs.
What is astonishing in this verse is Mephistopheles saying that the Lord, God, had often welcomed him before. We are essentially told that there is a kind of relationship between the Heavenly Lord and Mephistopheles who came to join his ‘household staff upstairs’.
Mephistopheles goes on to tell the Lord that he has no intention of singing lofty praises of the universe, the way the angels just did, as all he observes is “how people go from bad to worse.”
He hasn’t changed, your little god on earth -
He’s still peculiar as the day you gave him birth.
He’d live a better life, at least,
If you’d not given him a glimpse of heaven’s light.
That glimpse of heaven’s light is what ‘little god on earth’ calls reason and it makes him, in Mephistopheles’s words, “more bestial than any beast.”
In Boris Pasternak’s Russian translation the devil says that reason leaves man wandering on the earth like an insect (Pasternak’s version), or as a grasshopper (John R, Williams’s version), who cannot restrain himself and is not satisfied with any answers.
Furthermore, Mephistopheles expresses a kind of pity for humanity, trapped in a miserable search for truth that may forever elude them. To him, everything on earth is decaying, and if God were truly merciful, He would put an end to this perpetual suffering.
The Lord replies to him rather condescendingly and says that there still remains one man on earth who is his faithful servant. This servant is Doctor Faust.
What makes Faust unique, as even Mephistopheles concedes in agreement with the Lord, is his unyielding drive to reach beyond mortal limits; he uses his reason to “pluck from heaven the very brightest star. He roams, his restless heart returns”
The Lord answers:
Though in confusion still he seeks his way,
Yet I will lead him to the light one day.
For in the budding sapling the gardener can see
The promise of the fruit upon the full-grown tree.
What I didn’t pay close attention to upon my first reading of Goethe’s masterpiece was the fact that it was not only Faust who made a deal with Mephistopheles, but the Lord himself challenged the devil to tempt Faust while he was alive.
While he’s on earth, while he is still alive,
Then you may tempt him - that is my condition.
For man will err as long as he can strive.
The last sentence Pasternak translated as ‘Тот кто ищет вынужден блуждать’ which means ‘Those who seek must wander first’.
Faust is a magician, a scientist, and an alchemist who tries to know heavenly ways. He wanders in his search for the divine truth. Will his wandering lead him astray from the proper way? From the dialogue between the Lord and Mephistopheles, we can see that the former believes in Faust finding a proper way, but also thinks that he needs to choose that path himself.
Will Faust choose science over wisdom? Will he defy the natural and divine order? Will he pursue the desire to manipulate the world, to bend nature to his will, even if it leads to ruin?
This calls to mind Stoic wisdom: there are things that are good (virtue), things that are bad (vice), and things that are indifferent, like science. Science itself is neither good nor bad; it is how we choose to use it that determines whether it leads to virtuous ends or harmful outcomes.
In the 20th century, we, ‘the little gods on earth’, wandered off the right path and chose science over wisdom. What Goethe witnessed in his age was how the modern man was falling in love with his own reason and pride, exactly as Mephistopheles says:
Half-conscious of his folly, in his pride
On all the joys of earth he wants to feed
This is why the 20th century was the century of Mephistopheles’s triumph.
Coleridge, as I wrote at the start, omitted this part of the play in his English translation. One can speculate and say that the very idea that the Lord might be speaking to the devil was unacceptable to him, after all, Mephistopheles himself is surprised by how polite and patient God is to him. But, why?
For man’s activity can slacked all too fast,
He falls too soon into a slothful ease;
The Devil’s a companion who will tease
And spur him on, and work creatively at last.
But you, true sons of God, attend your duty:
Rejoice in rich creation’s living beauty!
… answers the Lord (Goethe).
Confide tibimet.
Proofread and edited by Lisa Statler
The previous edition exploring the opening scenes of Faust 👇
Rovelli, C, There are places in the world where rules are less important than kindness, ‘Newton the Alchemist’
A. N. Wilson, Goethe: His Faustian Life, 2024, page 57.
Ibid.
I think the idea that God converses with the Devil was not as abhorrent as the idea that God conspires with the Devil, entering into a deal, a gamble with him, using Faust as their dice.
I am loving this series, thank you so much for the hours you must put into all of this.