Johann Wolfgang von Goethe started writing Faust when he was in his twenties. He finished it in his eighties, weeks before he died. Sixty years with the same story. Sixty years trying to answer a question he had asked himself as a young man: what would you sell your soul for? He never quite answered it. That might be the point.

He Was the Last Person Who Knew Everything

Goethe was a poet, novelist, playwright, scientist, politician, theater director, art collector, and mineral enthusiast. He wrote the novel that created the Romantic movement. He developed a theory of color that directly challenged Newton. He served as a government minister in Weimar for a decade. He discovered the intermaxillary bone in humans, contributing to evolutionary anatomy decades before Darwin. Scholars at the Goethe-Institut have described him as the last European polymath, the last person who could move between the sciences and the arts without being told he was trespassing. He wrote about botany with the same attention he brought to poetry. He studied optics and anatomy not as hobbies but as extensions of the same impulse that drove him to write: the desire to understand how things are put together. The Sorrows of Young Werther, published in 1774 when Goethe was twenty-four, triggered a cultural phenomenon across Europe. Young men dressed like the protagonist. Some of them killed themselves like the protagonist. Goethe was horrified and spent the rest of his life trying to write something that would offer life instead of death. Faust was that something.

Faust Was Not About the Devil

Everyone thinks Faust is about a man who sells his soul to the devil. It is not. It is about a man who makes a bet with the devil. The terms of the bet are precise: Mephistopheles will serve Faust and give him anything he wants. The moment Faust is satisfied, the moment he says to a passing moment stay, you are so beautiful, Mephistopheles wins his soul. Faust spends two plays and twelve thousand lines refusing to be satisfied. He pursues knowledge, love, power, beauty, classical antiquity, and land reclamation. Nothing is enough. Nothing is ever enough. This is, literary scholars at the University of Heidelberg have argued, Goethe's central insight about human nature: the thing that makes us dangerous is the same thing that makes us magnificent. We cannot stop wanting. In the end, Faust says the fatal words. He sees a vision of a free people on free land and says the moment is beautiful. Mephistopheles thinks he has won. But angels descend and carry Faust's soul to heaven, arguing that whoever strives ceaselessly can be redeemed. The devil is cheated. The bet is voided. The man who could not stop wanting is saved by the fact that he could not stop wanting. Goethe sealed the final manuscript and told his servants not to open it until after his death. His last words, according to tradition, were more light. He had spent his life looking for it.