Literature does not merely depict reality but shapes what society deems permissible to believe and discuss. It serves as a window and a stage, weaving a tapestry of the mind that imprints dreamlike worlds onto the psychology of an age. By reworking fragments of reality, literature creates narratives that act upon the world, much like simulacra, since these emerge and evolve into distinct hyperrealities. New experiences of the real that are the inferences and evaluations of mind, therefore, real but not necessarily true. It takes the threads of humanity—our striving, victories, and defeats—and recontextualises them in new settings, to experience being human as new. Yet, in hindsight, the human drama remains familiar and the tale is as old as time, a humanity wrestling with its existence, purpose, and destiny. Goethe’s Faust exemplifies this, using its narrative to explore the profound tensions of the human condition.
In Faust, the meeting between God and Mephistopheles reimagines the dialogue from Job Chapter 1, portraying opposing forces: divine harmony and the spirit of negation. God exists as a community of being, alive in relational unity, while Mephistopheles embodies disobedience and negation. This cosmic tension mirrors the human condition on earth in suggesting that both harmony (heaven) and negation (earth) are necessary contrasts for human salvation. The Lord’s confidence in humanity’s potential, despite its flaws, is evident in the prologue:
A good man, in his groping intuition,
Is well aware of what’s his proper course (328–329).
This acknowledgement of a moral law existing with humankind sets the stage for Faust’s internal struggle.
Faust articulates his inner conflict, declaring:
Two souls, alas! Reside within my breast,
And each is eager for separation (1112–1113).
These “two souls” represent the material universe and divine light, wrestling within him. He hears the “celestial tones” of the heavenly chorus but rejects them, admitting, “Although I hear your gospel, I lack your faith” (765). Faust, rejecting this line of transcendence, seeks to master the earth through magic—a corruption of nature and time—yet he fears its consequences, its power, only to be rejected and alienated through his own frustration. This restlessness, as Mephistopheles notes, leaves him unsatisfied:
But nothing near and nothing far away
Can satisfy a heart so deeply agitated (306–307).
The Lord responds with hope:
Though now he only serves me blindly and ineptly,
I soon shall lead him into clarity (308–309).
This echoes St. Augustine’s insight: “My heart is restless until it rests in you.” St. Augustine defines sin as a “caving in on the self,” a turning inward that Faust embodies in his pursuit of self-satisfaction over a common, relational purpose.
Before the written word was the sound of it. The spoken word, carried upon a breeze like a spirit, a spirit that reveals something about us and what shapes our reality, directing action and motion. They [words] are not merely objects but emerge from a mind grasping with what exists and giving form as a sign of something beyond itself. Scripture underscores the creative power of words: “The tongue has the power of life and death, and those who love it will eat its fruit” (Proverbs 18:21).
In Faust, the pursuit of knowledge—science, philosophy, or theology—lacks meaning for him because it is not directed toward a common purpose. Our knowing, when aimed at a public good, creates and shapes, giving life and meaning through its teleological end. Life, love, wisdom, and justice are inherently relational; to sever these connections is to break the natural order. Faust’s desire for escape from this responsibility, driven by a perceived lack evident through his restless striving, reflects a soul “caved in,” seeking private, disconnected satisfaction rather than purposeful connection.
The Bible contrasts two fires: one purifies, as seen in heaven’s burning coals that cleanse Isaiah’s lips (Isaiah 6:6–7), and another which destroys, as in the “lake of fire” that erases the memory of all evil (Revelation 20:15). God’s “anger” is not a change in His nature but a call to turn back to Him, for He remains the unchanging Love. Anger alerts us to the need for change, for it is human to err. This aligns with the view that suffering is not God’s purpose but a mystery through which sin is removed, pointing to the triumph of love.
Friedrich Schelling’s view of evil contrasts with Christian theology. He posits evil as a potential within a primordial chaos, ordered by God’s light but not fully controlled, suggesting a limited deity by implying that evil is a structural possibility within God’s nature. Grounding evil in God, in His substance, introduces a duality, deviating from the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo that everything created out of God was called good and has intelligibility. Schelling adds a potentiality to God that is not necessary for movement because God is triune, a community of being, who as ipsum esse, is the sheer act of to be itself, with absolute sovereignty. Potentiality grounded in substance is dependent on time, and our freedom to be ourselves, because a thing’s potential is concealed from [finite] mind until it becomes actualised. Yet if God is omniscient and eternal, existing in and beyond time; to Him, nothing can be potential, for He sees all things at once, so to Him, all is actual.
In Faust, Mephistopheles takes material form as a poodle, aligning with Schelling’s tangible evil but missing the biblical truth: “God is light; in Him there is no darkness” (1 John 1:5).
St. Aquinas addresses the simplicity of God in his Summa Theologica, Prima Pars, Q3, a.1-8.
St. Augustine, states that evil is not a substance but an absence of good, a privation arising from misdirected free will. Schelling’s pantheistic leanings obscure the personal God, who is both transcendent and immanent; the God who is everywhere and the cause of our being. His notion of evil as a necessary opposite within God contradicts the unchanging, indivisible nature of the Creator, who exists within and beyond spacetime. As St. Thomas Aquinas asserts, God is actus purus—pure act, sovereign, and the sole source of reality.
Mephistopheles declares himself “a part of that force which, always willing evil, always produces good” (1335–1336), yet he laments his failure to disrupt creation:
In spite of tempest, earthquake, wave, and fire,
Ocean and land are unperturbed! (1367–68).
Similarly, our resistance to a change of heart and mind is demonstrated in Exodus, which leads us mysteriously on to the necessity of purification from sin through the redemptive suffering of Christ’s cross (Psalm 18). This paradox aligns with St. Augustine’s view that God can bring good from evil, akin to creatio ex nihilo. Evil, as an absence of good, when done to us, is a taking away—a theft, a loss, a grief, wounds that leave a mark. This is evident in the demise of Gretchen’s innocence toward her corruption, wrestling with conscience and facing final judgment:
Mephistopheles: She is judged!
Voice (from above): She is saved! (4611–4612)
Jesus promises, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted” (Matthew 5:4). Perfection is not a material ideal of completeness in form but a relational wholeness: “Be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:48). Love, goodness, and perfection are synonymous, working across all scales of existence. As Kant suggests, we act as ends in ourselves, belonging to one another in unity. Jesus’ prayer— “I in them and you in me—so that they may be perfectly united” (John 17:23)—reveals love’s power to transcend all division. Faust, in his fleshly despair, clings to worldly absence, holding on to his tempter’s materialism.
The concept of substance is complex, defined not by simple material form but by relational essence. Language struggles to capture the whole except through a name. To explain or describe a thing requires breaking it into parts. Yet, a human, for instance, cannot be reduced to DNA or physical structure, and carbon’s varied forms remain united in the word “carbon.” Composites like symphonies or pizzas show that even spaces between notes or variations in recipes hold meaning. Essence, then, embraces all potential and actual being within a species. Humans have the potential to be chefs or musicians, shaped by nature, nurture, and free will.
The human spirit creates and shapes its own space and time, existing discretely yet continuously through shared material relations, like DNA or social behaviours. The word—naming a thing—holds its essence and being together, concealing all possibilities of its “whatness.” Hegel’s “concept” operates similarly; a name, such as “Laura,” acts as a sign for individuality. The name helps us grasp the concrete whole, sublated into a unified individual. A name is not simply a label but a way of grasping the dialectical unity of the universal (the concept of a human) and the particular (specific qualities) in a concrete, singular being where individuality is part of a dynamic process that realises itself in the world. Truth emerges when definitions align with reality—the real that exists independently of the mind and is agreed upon by community. In the Holy Trinity, all possibilities exist as pure act, per Aquinas. Absence arises from refusing relation with God, countered only by love’s interdependence.
Evil stems from the misuse of freedom, choices contingent on desire. Lawlessness removes all freedom, to say persons can act in any way without bounds is to bind all peoples. As social creatures who have a great need for cooperation through effective altruism, or love. Love, as all things working together with and for each other, protects the freedom of another – so that for the individual [who is free in his being], an intention or act ought to have a direction toward the end which respects the freedom of the other. In this way liberty exists as both an end and a mode, that is in the self and the other, the individual and collective. Genesis 1:3— “Let there be light”—marks God’s creation ex nihilo, separating light from darkness to enable free will. Without freedom, our love cannot be true. We love not for what we ever hope the other to be in relation to ourselves, the essence of enframing, but love because of the unconcealment of their own particularity. A revelation of love in their freedom. So being as love, is perhaps an image of the Creator Himself, something beyond our grasp like death and time.
Evil, having no substance, is a spiritual defect, like sloth or perverse intent, persisting and passed on through habits and corruption, akin to original sin. Original sin perverted reason and wisdom, opening the “eyes” of the mind to evil, corrupting both body and soul in its desire to possess.
Love therefore never possesses, for we can take only memories with us, so the freedom to be and move with and for the other is a coming of heaven to earth, a gathering through two lines of transcendence. Earth to sky, and in Jesus fully mortal fully Divine we move towards His image in the other.
Gretchen senses the presence of Mephistopheles and perhaps his spirit working through Faust when she finds him cold:
Your lips are terribly cold,
They do not speak.
What has become
Of the love you had?
Who’s stolen it from me! (4493–4497)
Faust leaves Gretchen in prison to her final and particular judgment. To our natural experience, death is the end, our eyes closing to an eternal sleep, yet in Christian theology, death and life are brought together. A natural death is not evil in-itself but an intended transformation, a continuation of life from one place to the next, originally free of sadness because heaven and earth were united (Genesis 3:8), and the body, without the stain of sin, could be assumed into heaven. This aligns with the dogma of the Assumption of Mary, Mother of God. The Fall of Adam and Eve introduced spiritual uncertainty, a problem resolved by the resurrection of Christ, fully God and fully man. God’s foreknowledge predestined Christ’s cross (Genesis 3:24), which does not negate our free will; instead, love, gentle and patient (Galatians 5:22–23), invites participation in our salvation. The parable of the lost sheep (Luke 15:3–7) affirms each soul’s infinite value, all equal in God’s eyes.
To conclude, Faust illuminates the human struggle with evil as a restless turning from divine light. Schelling’s material grounding of evil falters against the biblical truth of God’s omnipotence and transcendence. Evil, as St. Augustine teaches, is the absence of good, overcome by love’s presence. God’s grace, through Christ, calls us to “choose life” (Deuteronomy 30:19), filling fear’s void with love (1 John 4:18). The human mind derives meaning from connectedness, constructing a life of relatedness where love is the foundation of truth and wisdom.