At certain important points in the new 1797–1801 scenes this authorial irony shows itself.

The Earth Spirit is nowhere mentioned in the Prologue, and it is often said that this new scene represents a change of plan which left two incompatible conceptions side by side in the 1808 text. The Earth Spirit was inherent, as we have seen, in the Urfaust and Fragment material which Goethe had published in 1790 and which he clearly had no wish to repudiate or rewrite. He now seems simply to leave it to the reader to integrate, as best he may, this earlier theme into the new and expanded frame of reference. Arguably, however, there is no irreducible inconsistency, in that we need not assume authorial commitment either to the theism of the Prologue or to the kind of Nature-mysticism which the Earth Spirit seems to represent. The latter may be seen as relativized, rather than contradicted, by the cosmic perspective of the present (later) scheme. Faust himself does not appear to believe in the God of the Prologue or to be aware of this transcendent dimension. His quest for God, whether he recognizes it as such or not, is through the earth, through earthly Nature and earthly experience; the Earth Spirit, we may assume, is the disguise under which ‘the Lord’ encourages Faust to be aware of him. And when God, like the God of Job, now permits Mephistopheles to try his experiment with Faust (323) and indeed ‘gives’ him to Faust (342 f., literally ‘I give him the companion’), we may with hindsight see this as the higher objective correlative of Faust’s belief that Mephistopheles has been ‘given’ (3241 ff., literally) or ‘chained’ to him (Sc. 26, <37> ff.) by the Earth Spirit. In any case, the difference between the Earth Spirit and the God of the Prologue is not radical. The latter is at most biblical but not really Christian; and although in the other scenes written in the 1797–1801 phase Christian symbolism in the narrower sense is deliberately introduced by the use of New Testament material (especially in 737–807 at the end of Sc. 4) the specifically Christian theme of salvific intervention by the incarnate and therefore suffering Creator, is, as always in Goethe, absent or at most peripheral: the new passage in Sc. 4 about Christ’s resurrection has an altogether different emphasis. A Christology presupposing man’s radical sinfulness and helplessness which only a once-for-all divine act can remedy, seems to have been quite alien to Goethe’s mind. Although the idea of salvific divine grace or at least guidance (309) does occur in the Prologue, it seems that Faust is above all to be saved by the organic development of his own rightmindedness (310 f.), combined with an unfailing refusal to relapse into inactive complacency. On such a road, we might suppose, the Earth Spirit and the God of Job would be equally suitable guides. But the essential difference between them, and sufficient reason for replacing the former by the latter, is perhaps the fact that the maturer Goethe wished to expand the perspective, to provide a sovereign arbiter more cosmic and ‘celestial’ than the Earth Spirit can be: a remoter overlord who can represent the slightly ironic detachment with which he himself, in the late 1790s, had now come to view his hero.

There are in fact two quite crucial and characteristic features of the ‘third phase’ additions by which Part One was completed: one is this new ‘divine’ perspective, and the other is the new emphasis on ‘activity’ as the saving Faustian virtue. The three most important of the 1797–1801 scenes are undoubtedly the Prologue (Sc. 3), the scene of Faust’s first encounter with Mephistopheles (Sc. 6), and the newly written part (1530–769 in Sc. 7) of their second dialogue. In all three, the motif of activity or striving (Tätigkeit, Streben) recurs with significant frequency (317, 340 f., 1237, 1692–7, 1754–9). Here, too, it seems that we may without too much difficulty integrate an earlier conception with the final one, if we say that the Earth Spirit of the Urfaust, to which Faust seemed to commit himself, represented the principle of active energy (cf. Note 14), as contrasted with that of contemplation which was associated with the ‘Macrocosm’. The Earth Spirit and Mephistopheles, whom Faust believed to be its servant (as indeed in the new perspective he perhaps still believes) can now both appear to the reader to be servants of ‘the Lord’. In other words activity, to which in the earlier scenario the Earth Spirit lent a certain ‘diabolic’ colouring, has now become a more unambiguously positive value. In a note which Goethe made in 1797, moreover, the Earth Spirit itself is now referred to as ‘world-spirit and spirit of activity (Welt- und Tatengenius)’: the ‘earthy’ associations seem to have faded. This theme of the paramount value of activity, together with the suggestion of a new synthesis of the active and contemplative principles, is now central to Goethe’s final conception as represented by the Prologue in Heaven. There has been a maturing, a modification, an integration of the earlier theme. Hand in hand with this goes the characteristic suggestion of the Prologue that it is the Devil’s function, by means of ironic criticism and cynical comment, to stimulate and goad man into constantly renewed active endeavour (340 f.), and thus despite himself perform for him an educative, indeed salvific role.