Tony Kline on Mephistopheles“Mephistopheles can be regarded legitimately as that aspect of Faust that denies: the aspect that undermines human activity, and declares it worthless, since the results of all human effort are doomed to vanish. Gretchen, Galatea, Helen, and the Virgin represent the aspect of Faust that aspires and is drawn towards the higher. God in the Prologue in Heaven is a mock-serious personification of the Creative forces of the universe that Goethe identifies with Love. Nature is a backcloth throughout representing the fundamentally beneficent aspects of reality. “Pasted from <http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/German/TheRestlessSpiritPartII.htm>
The legend of Faust from the Renaissance times. The end of civilization.