[See Part 4 here, or go back and read the series from the beginning.]

I have compared Faust’s utopia to the American dream, although admittedly the notion of social solidarity in the face of disaster hits a sour note from that perspective. What makes it feel so American to me is that it is so profoundly capitalist. It presupposes that life demands constant labor and striving, that true freedom requires exposure to danger, that nature’s power is wasted unless it is conquered and redirected by human interests. This connection is far from hypothetical. Long passages of Part 2 revolve around Mephistopheles’s plot to introduce paper money into the German empire, and as Marshall Berman notes in All That is Solid Melts Into Air, Goethe himself was fascinated by vast world-shaping projects like the Panama Canal, which finally assert humanity’s mastery over nature.

In our current moment, it is ironically this very triumph of modern developmentalism that appears most naïve and even retrograde in Goethe’s Faust. Capitalist domination over nature has proven more profoundly world-shaping than Goethe ever could have anticipated—delivering potentially every nation on earth to the condition of Faust’s ocean-threatened utopia. If Goethe expected Faust’s project to evoke something like the Panama Canal, to me it seems anachronistically to evoke science fiction images like the half-flooded city of Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 or the vast flood walls around New York City in the dystopian future of The Expanse. From this perspective, it feels like no accident that the most recent major adaptation of Faust, Life and Trust, is precisely about the collapse of capitalism. Even more telling is the fact that in this immersive theater experience, the Great Crash does not open out onto the future of the New Deal and postwar economic miracle, but promises only a return to a lost past that is, if anything, even more riven by hierarchies of race, class, gender, and sexuality than the present.

Perhaps even more than the promise of freedom and abundance through capitalist development, Faust’s goal of seizing state power to build a better society for everyone is likely to strike the contemporary reader as sinister than redemptive. Of course, it doesn’t help that Goethe decided at the last minute to insert the story of the poor old couple whose humble abode is spoiling Faust’s perfect view. Even if Faust did not intend for them to die, his order to Mephistopheles to remove them is both callous and reckless—surely by now Faust must understand who he is dealing with.

I would suggest that Goethe may have added this unsavory episode precisely so that Faust would have something to be redeemed from. Certainly his seduction of Gretchen turned out to be destructive, but at that point he was as naïve about Mephistopheles’s motives as Gretchen was about Faust’s. All the most fatal moves (the poisoning of Gretchen’s mother, the stabbing of her brother, the escape to Walpurgis Night) were at Mephistopheles’s initiative rather than his. With the old couple, there is still a small sliver of plausible deniability insofar as he did not explicitly tell Mephistopheles to kill them—but his motives are also much more purely selfish, even petty. With Gretchen, he was a rejuvenated man in love for the very first time. One can imagine behaving irresponsibly in that situation. With the old couple, however, even if he did not directly wish them to die, he is still acting like a tyrant who values his own idle whims over the wellbeing of others.

I previously emphasized Goethe’s free adaptation of Christian materials in the conclusion. There I think he more or less succeeds in using those materials to craft his own idiosyncratic theology in a way that is not finally shaped or predetermined by Christianity. But if I am right about his motivation for inserting the death of the old couple, the denoeument of Part 2 is nonetheless profoundly determined by Christianity—specifically the Christian notion of the felix culpa, the happy fault. The phrase comes from the Easter Vigil liturgy: “O felix culpa quae talem et tantum meruit habere redemptorem” (“O happy fault that merited such and so great a Redeemer”). The notion here is that the sin of Adam and Eve, with all the vast suffering it unleashed, is nonetheless a net positive because it enabled the even greater event of redemption.

With this idea of the felix culpa in mind, we can see that the transition from Marlowe to Goethe is not, as it initially appeared, a transition from entrapment in the Christian framework to an escape from it. Rather, it is a shift from a more simplistic to a more sophisticated theology. In Marlowe, Faust’s sin is simply useless and meaningless within the Christian framework, petering out into pointless pranks. In Goethe, by contrast, Faust’s sin is a necessary step toward a greater redemption—not only for himself, but on a social, economic, and political level. This is not orthodox Christianity—insofar as Faust seems to fuse the first and second Adam, the sinner and the redeemer—but its moral economy does grow out of a profoundly Christian impulse.

Now, at last, it is time for me to justify my title. If we limit the “man” or anthropos of the Anthropocene to modern man in specific, and if I am right that Faust is in some sense the myth of modernity, that it supplies a stage on which modernity can enact its deepest tensions and contradictions, the connection between the Faust legend and the Anthropocene dilemma become much more profound than the kind of easy parallels I threw out and dismissed at the beginning of my lecture. The Anthropocene is the Faustocene—it is the dilemma of a modernity that remains profoundly shaped by Christianity at its foundations, and in particular in its moral instincts. Think, for instance, of the primary complaint about the term “Anthropocene,” namely that it attributes blame incorrectly, implicitly grouping in the largely innocent Global South nations with the real culprits. Better to call it the Capitalocene, blaming the specific system that caused the destruction rather than indulging in clichés about “human nature” in general. These observations are all correct as far as they go, but why is the most important priority to attribute blame? What will be changed by the sheer fact of knowing whose fault it is? One also thinks of the tendency to say that “we” are all to blame for environmental degradation and therefore “we” all deserve the punishment. Either case represents what we might call Marlowe’s Faustocene—a moral vision in which using the illicit powers unleashed by modernity leads to an inevitable punishment.

More profound and more insidious are the patterns of thought that we could characterize as Goethe’s Faustocene—the notion that environmental destruction is a felix culpa, a necessary step to development as such. Think of how often we hear that it is unfair that poorer nations should be deprived of the opportunity to destroy the environment themselves, as that is presumably the only path to prosperity. Think, too, of how often we on the left gesture toward the notion that the environmental crisis will finally force everyone to abandon capitalism as unsustainable and create a more holistic and communitarian way of life.

The Anthropocene is also the Faustocene in another sense, insofar as it represents a profound crisis of all the distinctively modern forms of authority. Science seems to betray its promise of ever-greater abundance and mastery, instead warning us that we must restrain ourself in the face of forces we can never fully control. Law—along with the liberal democratic institutions that generate and legitimize it—seems increasingly disconnected from reality, as even the most environmentally savvy nations are enacting what amounts to de facto climate change denial. The promise of the modern professions to guide and empower state instutitions with accredited knowledge is shattered—all the moreso in the wake of the pandemic, which has discredited the medical establishment and the entire enterprise of public health in the eyes of many (even if for mutually contradictory reasons depending on who you ask).

I will admit that it’s very unclear to me what we are supposed to do about this situation. It should be clear that I think the Faust legend probably has more resources for thinking about how we got where we are than how to move forward. But it may be worth pondering what it would look like if we reimagined a contemporary Faust who is trying to escape from the Faustian dilemma itself. And my first suggestion along these lines would be that such a Faust-beyond-Faust would give up the gestures of subversion, resistance, and even rebellion in favor of an affirmative creation.

[Continue on to the Coda.]