Recently I read both Goethe’s and Marlowe’s Faust plays–the Faust leg­end has been a major influ­ence on many gen­er­a­tions of com­posers and authors. I found them exceed­ingly dull, except that the Mar­lowe made me think about chang­ing Eng­lish syn­tax in rela­tion to the other ger­manic lan­guages. And in the case of Goethe, I was curi­ous about the psy­chol­ogy that would lead some­one to tor­ment over this story for one’s entire career.

What they made me real­ize though, is that ideas of the value and endurance of art are tied to our world views. The Faust leg­end has very lit­tle appeal to some­one who believes that Chris­tian­ity is only one among many com­pet­ing super­sti­tious ways of under­stand­ing the world. After you take out the strug­gle between Chris­t­ian sin and virtue, the story become non­sen­si­cal. This is espe­cially so when you con­sider that many of the vices that damn the char­ac­ters in both ver­sions became pil­lars of West­ern civ­i­liza­tion over the past 150 years.

Even the core con­cept behind the myth seems prob­lem­atic to me, because it is inher­ently moral­is­tic. The basic premise is that of over-extending and being pun­ished for it. In the case of Faust, the over-extension is in terms of Chris­t­ian moral­ity: deal­ing with the devil and so forth. The clos­est recent par­al­lel I could find is the sub-prime mort­gage fiasco in the US. That seems a ques­tion of over-extension, the hedge fund spec­u­la­tors hav­ing dealt with the devil of ques­tion­able invest­ments. In our case, how­ever, there’s a lot less gnash­ing of teeth and a lot more peo­ple try­ing to solve the prob­lem. Pun­ish­ment, more­over, is largely absent from any dis­cus­sion I’ve seen, since it would be ludi­crously unpro­duc­tive. (Granted, Goethe starts hint­ing at the pun­ish­ment prob­lem in the end of Part 2 when the angels steal Faust’s soul away from Mephistophe­les at the last minute. But Part 2 leaves the core of the myth behind any­way, and Goethe refused to have it pub­lished dur­ing his life­time, so…)

The value of the Faust myth to art has become his­tor­i­cal at best. Increas­ingly, I think all art fol­lows this path. Faust as an idea served a pur­pose. It was use­ful to a Chris­t­ian soci­ety try­ing to come to grips with the prob­lems in its beliefs. But what would a Con­fu­cian­ist scholar con­tem­po­rary with Goethe have thought of it? Or would it have made any sense framed by Bud­dhist moral­ity? Would it have sur­vived in a non-Western lit­er­ary canon? Even for Chris­tians liv­ing today, is it par­tic­u­larly inspiring?

When we make art, per­haps we should keep this speci­ficity of pur­pose in mind. After all, when art does seem to last, the real­ity is that it’s been rein­vented: the music Mozart wrote for his patrons’ par­ties is not really the same as the Mozart that is now part of the Top 100 Relax­ing Clas­si­cal Hits col­lec­tion in your car CD player. The rea­sons it has sur­vived have noth­ing to do with why it was suc­cess­ful dur­ing Mozart’s lifetime.

So let’s for­get about immor­tal­ity and last­ing art. Sure, I’d like peo­ple to keep on enjoy­ing what I make long after my death. But that’s not some­thing any­one can con­trol; it’s purely at the whim of his­tor­i­cal fancy. And given the expo­nen­tial increases in the amount of art being made, our abil­i­ties to store it, and its acces­si­bil­ity, it seems to me this vision of cre­at­ing last­ing art is becom­ing increas­ingly prob­lem­atic. Art becomes more dis­pos­able, more indi­vid­ual, more sub­jec­tive by the minute. That, in the end, is what Faust really has to say to us today.