Faust, lead us

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In our world, frighteningly and superficially secularized to the point of being ready to believe anything, we no longer speak, not even in this difficult and violent hour, of the one who for millennia has been considered the true King of this world: the devil! He is what opposes the Kingdom of God, he is, par excellence, its Adversary. The Greek origin of the term brings with it many similar meanings, "generate enmity", "generate conflict", and more generally "deny", "separate", "divide". It is what keeps the coming of the Kingdom at bay, what wants to destroy by fission, not unite everything in a definitively peaceful fusion. It is a force that wants to distance in order to dominate over the rubble of what is torn to pieces, shattered. However, without separation, without division, nothing can come to be. Without conflict, without denial, of which the devil is the archetype, there is no possibility of the dynamics necessary for life, there is no action or activity. This is an essential theme of Western thought; it is enough to remember that for a thinker like Spinoza, who also claimed the unity of substance as absolute, every determination is nothing but negation.

Distinction is negation. Where there is no conflict there is no action and therefore there is no choice, which is what determines a person's identity and therefore his relationships and his place in the world. It is no coincidence that the most significant literary figure of the last centuries, Goethe's Faust, is the one who, in order to live, in order not to die of despair, had to make a pact with the devil, apparently preferring damnation to a modest life like all the others: "From the sky he demands the most beautiful stars / and from the earth the supreme pleasures, / neither near nor far things / can calm his convulsed soul". All his erudition has not brought Faust one inch closer to some satisfaction, indeed, he is now close to suicide when, first the Easter bells and shortly after the appearance of Mephistopheles, save him.

It is good to immediately clear up a great misunderstanding that we often fall into when thinking about Faust. He does not directly give his soul to the devil, but rather makes a bet with him. It is true that Mephistopheles promises to give Faust what he most desires and that in exchange Faust promises to give him his soul after death, but Faust's death will not be a simple natural death, because at the very moment of the pact Faust becomes something more than a man, or perhaps the (Western!) Man. Faust will be able to die only when his streben is appeased, when his desire to know, conquer, seduce, create, control, transform everything becomes boring to him: "When I stop, being a slave / yours or someone else's, what does it matter!". When the dynamic power, the inexhaustible desire ("To desire with all my strength / is precisely what I promise") that pushes him into the arms of the devil, is satisfied. Only when the streben, which is an irreducible dynamism that is the source of the greatest impulses, the most powerful vigor and the deepest anguish, has been appeased, then Faust can die, he will have lost his bet and will be ready to surrender his soul. Faust: “If ever I take rest on a bed of idleness / then let it be the end for me! / If you can deceive me to the point / that I am pleasing to myself, / if you can deceive me in my pleasure, / let that be my last day! / I offer you this bet”. Mephistopheles: “I accept”. Faust: “And here is my hand. / Should I say at this moment: / 'But stay! You are so beautiful!' / then throw me in chains, / then I will accept the end!”.

Faust will live a very long life, driven by his streben and accompanied by Mephistopheles in the greatest enterprises. Now very old, he looks at the works he has accomplished: “There, to see far, I would like / to build myself a stage among the branches, / to open a wide course to the gaze / to see everything I have done, / to dominate with a single glance / the masterpiece of the human spirit / that with its own ingenuity has created / this expanse habitable for the people. / In abundance, to feel what we lack, / that is the bitterest torment”. By now he is very weak and blind, but his streben does not subside, although Mephistopheles is already digging his grave and is preparing to take his soul.

But before arriving at the conclusion of the tragedy of Faust, let's give space to Mephistopheles. He is notoriously "a part of the force / that always wants evil and always does good", and in the note to this verse Franco Fortini writes: "The verse defines Mephistopheles as part of the negating force that objectively collaborates with positivity understood as good". He is the operator of destruction, that which divides, separates, and yet is totally necessary for creation as an opposing force, a negative dialectical term, so that there is something instead of nothing. Mephistopheles is in fact sent to Faust by the Lord who says: "Man errs as long as he seeks", and with this search is translated streben. So streben, which is the essence of the search, implies error that "is a condition for reaching the truth, implies the positivity of the struggle and of the effort, of the tension and of the attempt." Only the devil, with his divisive power, can be able to set in motion this circle that determines human life and the person, his identity, his action. The dialogue between the Lord and Mephistopheles announces the theme of the dispute: the soul of Faust, the essence of the human spirit.

It is essential to note that from this continuous oscillation between good and evil, from this apparent relativism, no nihilism arises but rather the mobile, changing, indeterminate, contradictory and yet absolute basis, as essential, of every action. In the acceptance of the contradiction, or rather, in its introjection, and therefore in living it, nihilism is overcome because it is not permitted, as it cannot emerge as the fruit of the failure of something fixed and given once and for all. Faust imposes on us a grandiose and tragic truth but ultimately creative of the spirit of man that is always renewed through streben and thus overcomes nihilism. The development of everything that happens human, as action, is necessarily linked to this tension that can never cease. Thus the devil is effectively master of the world: by denying and dividing, by placing in conflict, he allows life.

But Mephistopheles is still the force that always wants evil. Faust, at the end of the poem, has come with his works to wrest the land from the sea to make it cultivable "that even the putrid waters disappear, / this would be the last and highest conquest. / I would open spaces to millions and millions / of men who live there / safe not and instead active and free. […] Yes, I have given myself entirely to this idea, / here the supreme wisdom concludes: / freedom like life / is deserved only by those who every day / must conquer it. / And so, surrounded by danger, live / here the child, the man, the old, their industrious age". Imagining this extraordinary vision of a community of strong-willed individuals willing to live in a bold and industrious way, not sheltered from danger, willing to challenge and bend the powers of nature, there where he is wresting the land from the sea, Faust thinks that that would be the fatal moment at which he could say to stop. In which his streben would be quieted. And it is at that moment, in the possible quieting of his streben, that Mephistopheles prepares to take his prize. Mephistopheles says: “He who with such energy opposed me / time conquers. The old man is stretched out here / on the sand. The clock stops…” . The clock that stops is the end of time.

The end of history. The cessation of streben, the renunciation of this essential engine of human nature implies damnation, understood as an absolute end. Faust, however, is saved. He in fact hypothesizes that he can evoke that moment in which he asks everything to stop, but he does not actually do so. His streben, in reality, does not cease. Mephistopheles wins his bet only halfway. The contrast, engine of the entire poem, and of the tragic exemplary life of Faust, is not really overcome. Goethe thus shows the human spirit, alive only in the inexhaustible dynamic of conflict. In pacification, in contentment, there is stasis; the clock that stops, the end of time that can only resolve itself in a dissolution, an undifferentiated totality. Thinking of Faust, Nietzsche wrote that if man (the German) stops being Faust there is the danger that he will become a philistine and fall into the power of the devil. If man ceases to be his becoming, his will, then his spirit will become rigid, bureaucratic, destined for nihilistic fragmentation. And it is a danger inherent in the very force of the streben, in the success of its process. The death of God caused by man, or rather by his ever more luminous conscience, naturally generates nihilism, it is its inevitable and perfect birth, a ripe and almost fallen fruit of man's lucidity, of his conscience that reaches its zenith. Nietzsche tries to save himself from nihilism by sacralizing life on earth in the eternity of the eternal return: every gesture would thus have an infinite value.

The poetics and power of Nietzsche's solution has the religious and artistic force of illusion, not cognitive value. But his intuition about the irremediable Western atheism is unparalleled. An atheism, he writes in Genealogy of Morality, the child of the evolutionary process of Christian morality itself, of a will to truth, "of a two-thousand-year-old educational constraint on truth, which ends up prohibiting the lie of faith in God. [...] What, let us ask ourselves with the utmost rigor, has truly triumphed over the Christian God? [...] Christian morality itself, the concept of truthfulness taken with ever greater rigor, the subtlety of the confessor fathers of the Christian conscience, translated and sublimated in scientific conscience, in intellectual cleanliness at any price." But this atheism does not exactly make the Christian God and all his values ​​disappear, it does not generate any transvaluation of values, it does not open up unspeakable scenarios in which the superman could appear. Because it is man, what Nietzsche would call the last man, and his suffering, in the impossibility of salvation otherwise and elsewhere, becomes the only concern for man himself. The victim, whoever suffers becomes the new and absolute object of worship, of an era that seeks the Kingdom (that is, universal pacification) without wanting God and his law. The process highlighted by Nietzsche generates exactly the opposite of what he hoped for.

Nietzsche's "dead" God, in fact, does not disappear. That will to truth that the philosopher spoke of and that would naturally lead to atheism, contains within itself, as its most authentic engine, the will to salvation, the eschatological need. The God who dies therefore, in Western culture, does not disappear but sinks into the earth to try to realize here the kingdom of God understood as the definitive removal of all evil, interpreted as that which generates pain. Isn't our time's obsession with the "victim" perhaps the terrible shadow, but dressed in good intentions, of an immanent attempt at eschatological salvation, of "Paradise on Earth"? Because only there is it possible that there are no victims. Isn't the idea that even the planet, Gaia, is a victim of the negative, evil action of man, a sign of this entirely worldly eschatology? And here is the point.

If evil, as a negative dialectical term, is essential for human action, for the Faustian streben; if every determination, that is, everything that exists, is negation, that is, action; if it is the antagonist, the adversary, that generates what is insofar as it separates and divides, then removing it is impossible unless one wants to carry out the definitive and most radical action: removing man himself, the cause and end of action, to replace him with a "new man", that is, with a generic being, devoid of tension, strength, and the capacity for conflict. In the furnace of conflict, in fact, the world is generated, our world! And if the devil's greatest deception, as they say, was to make people believe he did not exist, here is his triumph. By denying it, by denying the denier (that which separates, divides, generates conflict, but also generates action, the Faustian streben), by claiming to annul action, which by its very nature is divisive, in the Edenic realm of the triumph of the victim; by denying the denier, it was said, we affirm it by leaving it free to unleash itself not as a negative term of a dialectical relationship, but as an absolute positive term (totally free). As a dissolver who triumphs in his deadly peace without creation.

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