Each in its own way adds to the ‘tragedy’ itself a further, external, relativizing frame of reference. First, the solemn Dedication not only alludes to the play’s fantastic and nebulous character, but also gives it the dimension of the poet’s personal history, and indeed might almost be said to stand as the author’s own invitation to us to interpret Faust by the genetic-biographical method. Secondly, the more lighthearted Prelude seems to offer the illusion-breaking ironic suggestion that the drama about to unfold is no more than a spectacular improvisation by a travelling theatrical company, intended merely to entertain German audiences. Thirdly, in the vast expanded perspective of the Prologue in Heaven, God and other eternal spectators contemplate the theatrum mundi, the human commedia; and Faust’s (or man’s) destiny, his tragedies and longings, his religious belief or unbelief, are all made subject in advance to a kind of cosmic irony, a relativizing overview. In these three prefaces Goethe seems to offer a symbolic threefold apologia, hinting (especially in the Prelude) that the reader or audience should not take the ensuing substantive drama with absolute seriousness. In this connection we should note yet another important letter, written only five days before his death (to Wilhelm von Humboldt, 17 March 1832), in which he fascinatingly refers to Faust as ‘these very serious jests (diese sehr ernsten Scherze)’; a similar phrase (‘these seriously intended jests’) occurs in a letter to Boisserée of 4 November 1831. Goethe was in both cases specifically referring to the still unpublished Part Two, but he would probably have regarded the description as applicable to the whole poem.

The real opening of the final version of Part One, and the real key to Goethe’s mature conception, is of course the Prologue in Heaven (Sc. 3), which was almost certainly (like the Dedication and the Prelude) written in the summer of 1797 and in any case, on manuscript evidence, not later than April 1798. Here the earlier themes—particularly that of the Earth Spirit—are not so much abandoned as put in a new and more complex perspective. Probably (but not only) because he felt that a better-known, less private symbolism was now needed, Goethe adopted biblical material: the opening of the Book of Job, in which God gives ‘the adversary’, Satan, permission to attempt to drive the representative righteous man to despair. Goethe develops the laconic biblical narrative with great impressiveness into a grandiose and yet ironically urbane summit-conference on the value of the terrestrial natural order and of human life within it. The ‘adversary’, Mephistopheles, at once reveals himself as the cynic, but the cynic with a new dimension: the cosmic mocker and spoiler, the sardonic ironist, unimpressed by the splendid solemnity of the archangels’ song in praise of the creation, contemptuous of mankind and of Faust as its exemplar. He is the destructive critic on a maximum scale, the nihilist who literally (to adapt Wilde’s definition of cynicism) knows the value of Nothing; in a word, the ‘spirit of (perpetual) negation’, as God calls him (338) and as he later (1338) calls himself. This is an entirely logical continuation of his role in the Urfaust; indeed, it must be said that of the two major characters who are carried through from the earliest to the latest version of Part One, Faust and Mephistopheles, it is the latter who shows by far the greater consistency in his function and personality (Gretchen does not come into this comparison since she is in all essentials fully developed in the Urfaust version). The difference is merely that the Mephistopheles of the Prologue, confronting ‘the Lord’ and the other angelic powers who unlike him have remained ‘authentic’ (344), has had a high-level philosophic role added to his human persona as a cross (with some Satanic overtones) between lago and Mercutio. His low and reductive view now applies not only to love but to all that exists, including apparently himself; for him the whole of creation, or certainly of earthly creation, might as well explode as the joke in poor taste which it ultimately is. He represents genuine objective despair, as distinct from the subjective despair of the basically idealistic Faust.

It is insufficiently appreciated that this is what the mature Goethe’s modernized, de-Christianized, psychologized version of ‘the Devil’ really amounts to. Weimar Classicism was, in sophisticated and non-trivial senses, idealistic and optimistic, as well as humanistic in the sense that it saw the world anthropocentrically rather than theologically, and in the sense that it took a positive, indeed Pelagian view of human nature and human potential. In Goethe’s other great symbolic drama Iphigenia, with the publication of the final version of which in 1787 Weimar Classicism can more or less be said to have begun, the same view is clearly expressed: tragedy is reversed and repudiated, and man is ‘saved’ by ‘pure humanity’ alone. The classical Goethe’s Mephistopheles is even further than the young Goethe’s from being the Satan of Christian tradition (indeed, it is even interestingly doubtful whether the visiting critic in Job has been rightly identified with that later development). He is neither Milton’s nor Marlowe’s Devil, he is de-theologized. Equally, ‘the Lord’ himself is not so much the Christian or even the Old Testament God as the impressive spokesman of the mature Goethe’s positive and life-affirming view of things. It is notable that the Prologue both begins (243–70) and ends (344–9) with the characteristically Goethean celebration of cyclic Nature and the process of eternal Becoming. Notably also, in the Lord’s interview with Mephistopheles, all reference to sin and evil or hell and damnation is studiously avoided, and even death is only mentioned as this latter-day Devil’s cue for declaring that he is not interested in whatever may happen to a man after he physically dies (318–21; the same naturalist-humanist emphasis is reiterated in the contemporaneously written ‘pact’ scene (1660–70). Goethe has thus completely surmounted the literalistic modes of belief which are presupposed by the traditional Faustus story. He gives us, not so much the drama of a human soul’s salvation or damnation, as a confrontation of opposite visions of the world. And by writing the Prologue in Heaven he also makes it quite clear that the ‘divine’ view will in the end be upheld and the Mephistophelean view confuted, the nobility of man vindicated (as in Iphigenia) and tragedy dissolved in the healing substance of hope—in other words, that ‘Faust’ will be ‘saved’. This is now Goethe’s decision on the point which the Fragment still left open.

It is also clear that with the introduction of ‘the Lord’ in 1797 Goethe was meeting his own need for a new spokesman, marking his own shift away from a youthful, more unreserved identification with his hero—or rather with the polarity of his hero and anti-hero, Faust and Mephistopheles, of whom it has always been suggested that they represented opposite aspects of his own nature. In the maturer final version of Part One we now hear a third voice: that of the divine arbiter of the Prologue, who perceives Faust’s confusion and immaturity but confidently predicts his future development (308–11), and who has ‘never hated’ Mephistopheles but regards him as in effect yet another of his servants, who is given permission to visit him when he pleases (336–43). The addition of this third voice, this higher perspective, means that Goethe’s presentation of Faust and his dealings with Mephistopheles now contains a certain element of authorial distance, as if the poet were looking back tolerantly at the ‘confusion’, the ‘mist and murk’ of his own youth.