Dr Faustus Goethe

[Vannessa Rataj]

Wouldnt rather be just the "Western" scholastic (indeed theistic)definition of God as "actus purus"?

So you were right to think that it was not the German word Wort he was objecting to, but indeed the Λόγος of the Gospel. After all, his Christianity is very much in doubt. There is much nonsense in the doctrines of the Church, Church history was "a mixture of error and violence" he used to say. He was a Free Mason, a Rosicrucian, a Hermetist, tinged with a smattering of Kabbalah, a pantheist, a man of the Enlightenment. A precursor of the turgid German philosophy which evolved in Marxism.

In the words of John Whiton (professor in the department of Germanic and Slavic Languages at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada): "Goethe's Faust is traditionally seen as a paean to and the epitome of German Idealism. According to this reading, Faust is the archetypal Modern Western Man who, by dint of his ceaseless striving, creates himself and his world by an act of sheer will, thereby attaining the highest goal of mankind, realizing the purpose or end of all human activity, which is seen as the self-achievement of individual perfection, the cultivation to an ultimate degree of all one's latent potential. Thus Faust becomes an absolute, so it is said, whose will is sovereign, a law unto himself, a modern Prometheus." Prometheus was the idol of Marx too (therefore of Trotzky). Whiton tried to turn around this characterization and read Goethe in Catholic key, which is possible in view of the Catholic origin of the "actus purus" @ -goethes-faust-from-a-catholic-perspective.html

Oh, I'm perfectly open to such a reading (the German Idealist, Promethean one), but I hesitate to speak dogmatically about it, and even more so about Whiton's connection to actus purus. I'm a rank amateur reader of Goethe. Actually, I'd really like to get hold of Pelikan's 'Faust the Theologian', and see what he has to say.

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