Subversive Orthodoxy
Outlaws, Revolutionaries, and Other Christians in Disguise
This is a podcast about philosophy and meaning. It is about how we as humans withstand the challenges of our cultures. It is about the general Judeo-Christian revelation of God in the world, and how the bloodiest century ever recorded couldn't kill that revelation nor the human soul.
It is also about how that revelation, tossed aside as archaic, outdated, and obsolete may be the very life-giving power we need to resist this distracted techno state we are living in, full of anxiety, depression and teenage suicide.
The deepest answers have not come from where we expected. Not from ivy league Universities nor theological seminaries nor political ideologies, but from those who suffered and saw—mystics and poets, prisoners and prophets, those who walked through fire and came out with a story to tell. Living faith resonates much deeper than theological theories.
Hosted by:
Travis Mullen and Robert "Larry" Inchausti, Professor Emeritus of English at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
Subversive Orthodoxy
Episode #6: The Gospel of Striving: Taking Action To Find the Inner Life, but Finding Grace: Goethe
What if grace isn’t something you deserve, or even understand—but something that finds you in the middle of your restless, stumbling search for meaning?
Did Faust accidentally find grace?
That’s one of the most provocative and mysterious questions at the heart of Faust. Here's a way to unpack it:
In Faust Part II, despite making a pact with Mephistopheles and engaging in a life of ambition, desire, and sometimes destruction, Faust is ultimately saved—not because of his morality or religious orthodoxy, but because of his unceasing striving. Goethe suggests that the human soul’s honest yearning—even when it errs—can be met by grace.
It’s a radical, almost scandalous vision of salvation. Faust doesn't earn grace. He doesn’t even ask for it. He just refuses to give up the quest for meaning. That’s what makes his redemption both accidental and inevitable in Goethe’s cosmos. It's grace that meets striving, not striving that discovers grace.
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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe stands as a profound voice for our digital age, offering a vision where the inner life and external world can be reconciled despite rapid technological change.
• Born in 1749, Goethe was a German polymath whose influence on Western literature and thought remains significant
• His concept of "world literature" anticipated globalization's cultural exchange
• "The Sorrows of Young Werther" became an international sensation, establishing Goethe as a literary star
• Youth coming-of-age stories represent the struggle to find meaning in a rapidly changing world
• The real coming-of-age story involves reconciling inner longings with external circumstances
• The "Storm and Stress" movement championed emotion over enlightenment rationality
• Goethe's "Faust" explores midlife crisis and the emptiness of pursuing knowledge without meaning
• Part One of Faust shows the bankruptcy of pursuing power and knowledge as life's ultimate goal
• Part Two of Faust presents a redemptive vision often overlooked by modern readers
• The inner desire for meaning, love, connection, and transcendence remains constant across generations
• Contemporary coming-of-age experiences accelerate with each passing decade due to technological change
• Goethe's work bridges the gap between scientific rationalism and spiritual transcendence
If you found this meaningful, please leave a five-star review, subscribe, and share with anyone who might resonate with this conversation.
Contact: subversiveorthodoxy@gmail.com
Instagram: @subversiveorthodoxy
Host: Travis Mullen Instagram: @manartnation
Co-Host: Robert L. Inchausti, PhD, is Professor Emeritus of English at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, and is the author of numerous books, including Subversive Orthodoxy, Thomas Merton's American Prophecy, The Spitwad Sutras, and Breaking the Cultural Trance. He is, among other things, a Thomas Merton authority, and editor of the Merton books Echoing Silence, Seeds, and The Pocket Thomas Merton. He's a lover of the literature of those who challenge the status quo in various ways, thus, he has had a lifelong fascination with the Beats.
Book by Robert L. Inchausti "Subversive Orthodoxy: Outlaws, Revolutionaries, and Other Christians in Disguise" Published 2005, authorization by the author.
Intro & Outro Music by Noah Johnson & Chavez the Fisherman, all rights reserved.
the real coming of age story that Gerta told about. How do you come to grips with a world that doesn't even acknowledge your inner life or your desire for the transcendent? That's the real question.
Speaker 2:That's so relevant now because I feel like the coming of age from 10 years to 10 years now is rapidly accelerating. Social media, digital media, ai and all that.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, just from my age I'm in my forties to a 20 year old, right now, my son's 18. Our worlds are completely different in how they're paced and how people relate. So to write, to write something now or just, not even just for literature, but just for the sake of understanding your culture now, with 10 year iterations, is insane compared to their generations, was you know, probably things were changing a lot over 50 years. That's right, and now things are changing a lot over two to five years. I don't know what to do with that.
Speaker 2:Well well how Gerhe speaks into that.
Speaker 1:Well, the good news is, the inner life isn't really changed.
Speaker 2:That's the thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's still the desire for meaning, love, connection, community, God. All those transcendent desires are as fresh with every generation.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the Subversive Orthodoxy Podcast. I'm your host, travis Mullen, and I'm excited to have you with us. This is a podcast about philosophy and meaning. It is about how we as humans withstand the challenges of our cultures. It is about the general Judeo-Christian revelation of God in the world and how the bloodiest century ever recorded couldn't kill that revelation. It's also about how that revelation, tossed aside as archaic, outdated and obsolete, may be the very life-giving power we need to resist this distracted techno state we're living in full of anxiety, depression and teenage suicide.
Speaker 3:It's great entertainment, thrilling entertainment. It's the inside story, packed with drama, today.
Speaker 2:Today we're diving into Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and, as a disclaimer, right from the outset, I do not know German, I do not know how to pronounce German, so bear with me on a few words here. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was born in 1749 and died in 1832. He was a german polymath, a poet, playwright, novelist, scientist and statesman whose influence on western thought and literature is profound. Born in frankfurt, germany, he displayed early brilliance in literature and the natural sciences, later becoming a central figure in the German storm and drawn which I did not know how to pronounce storm and stress, movement which rebelled against enlightenment, rationalism, in favor of intense emotion and individuality. His sorrows his book the sorrows of young Werther 17, made him an international literary sensation, while his magnum opus, faust, remains one of the most celebrated works in world literature.
Speaker 2:Goethe's intellectual pursuits extended beyond literature. He engaged deeply with philosophy, optics and natural sciences, often challenging prevailing scientific and theological assumptions. Sciences often challenging prevailing scientific and theological assumptions. His concept of world literature anticipated globalization's cultural exchange and his holistic approach to knowledge placed him at odds with rigid enlightenment and parasism, and later romantic escapism. In his book Subversive Orthodoxy, professor Enchasti positions Goethe alongside figures like William Blake, both of whom challenged the forces of religious dogmatism and secular materialism. Like Blake, goethe resisted a world reduced to mechanistic rationality, while also critiquing the rigid moralism of institutional religion. Instead, he sought a poetic and philosophical vision that embraced paradox, integrating the sciences with the mystical, the rational with the mythic.
Speaker 2:His book Faust, for instance, critiques both modern hubris and medieval superstition, ultimately affirming redemption beyond human striving. Nietzsche admired Faust because it dramatized the modern human condition, the relentless pursuit of knowledge, experience and power, yet the ultimate need for something transcendent. Faust's dissatisfaction mirrors Nietzsche's idea of Übermensch, the Superman, pushing beyond conventional morality and embracing the tragic beauty of existence. Beyond conventional morality and embracing the tragic beauty of existence. However, goethe's vision diverges from Nietzsche's in that Faust finds grace, suggesting that striving alone is insufficient without divine intervention. Goethe's influence remains embedded in the American worldview, particularly in the cultural ideal of self-creation and the pursuit of experience. In the cultural ideal of self-creation and the pursuit of experience, his Faustian archetype lives on in the Silicon Valley's innovators, political leaders and artists who chase progress, often at a great personal cost. His belief in world literature echoes in America's global cultural and intellectual exchanges, and his insistence on an integrated vision, one that refuses to separate science from art, reason from faith continues to challenge both materialist reductionism and rigid fundamentalism. And, with no further ado, I'd like to bring on Professor Nchasti.
Speaker 1:Hello Travis.
Speaker 2:Thank you.
Speaker 1:That's a great introduction. That's well put.
Speaker 2:A lot of tough words in there. One question right off the bat was his concept of world literature. Is that kind of predicting globalism?
Speaker 1:Yes, it's predicting globalism, but it's also a recognition of the universality of enlightenment, rationality, merely statements of nationalist values and individual pride but really a forum for universal human experience, sort of a globalist vision of humanity rather than our own tribes. Yeah, yeah, and that the literature of various nations could enter into dialogue over the fundamental experiences of human life.
Speaker 1:That's interesting, yeah, and he was the, you know, I don't know whether I guess he was sort of the first person to sort of celebrate that fact and see himself not just writing, you know, in the German tongue, for the German people, but for a world audience, essentially readers from all different nationalities, to find their sense of universal humanity confirmed. I guess that'd be the way to put it.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, to give our audience a little more context, he's a guy who wrote a book on the science of colors. He wrote a book on plants. He wrote how about the Sorrows of Young Werther? Was that considered a novel? Just prose, yes, or was it poetry too?
Speaker 1:It was a novella, a short novel, and it was written in. It was one of those epistolatory novels that were written in the form of letters. So Werder is writing the reader letters. We have the collection of his letters sent to us and the reader is his best friend, and so he's sort of pouring out his feelings and his experiences to us in a series of intimate letters, which was kind of a new thing in romantic literature. And then he also includes some other letters at the end, like it's a dossier where he has a police report at the end and he has some other letters at the end and some other points of view on what the letters are all about. So that's Werther, and it became a bestseller. It was like one of the first bestsellers.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was like an instant sensation.
Speaker 1:Instant sensation, and he became it was like an instant sensation, instant sensation, and he became kind of like a rock star. He was 24 years old.
Speaker 1:And so people started like dressing like him, because Werther kind of dressed like Goethe, with sort of beetle boots and a white floppy shirt sort of beetle boots and a white floppy shirt and he was kind of maybe one of the first hipsters I guess you could call him.
Speaker 1:And he was also sort of youth coming-of-age tragedies, about coming of age in a world that you don't fit into, which became a modern archetype for modern, a trope yes, a trope might be better A modern trope of technology and the times changing so quickly that no generation could even keep up with its own realities.
Speaker 1:So immediately upon coming of age you're bringing the old last 15 years experience to bear on a contemporary world that no longer fits your inner generations and it also causes the youthful discontent with the status quo because the old guys are profiting off the old paradigms in a new world that you can't find your place in. And so that's part of the story of what happens to Werther, because he's trying to find love and meaning and a meaningful job. That has already sort of given the girl that he's in love with to a younger man, a man that is going to take on his dad's business, and was promised to the girl when they were like 15. Was promised to the girl when they were out, um, and so that's what the story is and okay, so it's a, it's a. It's a great sort of tragic love story, uh, but it's also a uh, a our generation story, where he's talking about the new post-enlightenment romantic idealism of a generation that's finding it hard to fit into the old traditional hierarchy and it became a favorite of Napoleon.
Speaker 2:Yeah, he read it five times.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and he took it with him on his invasion of Egypt, or I guess. I don't know if you'd call it him. I guess you'd call it invasion.
Speaker 2:Why did he like it so much?
Speaker 1:his um. Why did he like it so much? Well, I think he liked it because it was the story of uh, of a guy who, you know, was kind of at odds with the old order and was was trying to establish his own place in it. And uh, and also it was. It has a tragic ending, which he might have found very moving, given that, you know, as a military guy and problems existential crises in his own quest for meaning and purpose. There's one of the letters that he's writing to us in Goethe, and they're talking about a woman who fell in love with somebody in the small town that was near where Goethe was staying during the summer it's a summer break.
Speaker 2:Do you mean Goethe, or do you mean Werther, or do you?
Speaker 1:mean Werther, I mean Werther.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:He got involved in a kind of messy engagement previous to this, and so he's spending his summer break in a small village in Germany, in the mountains, and that's where he meets Lotte, who is the girl that he falls in love with. And so he writes back to us and tells us, you know, about this relationship and what, and that when he finds out that she has a boyfriend, or actually a fiance, and so he's, he writes a letter and he says you know, we were talking about this woman who killed herself by drowning herself in a lake in a nearby village because of a failed love affair. Her fiancé was saying that that was really stupid, that nobody would ever kill themselves over a love affair and that there must have been money involved or something like that. And then Werder says and so I called him on it and I said what do you know what people experience in their lives? You're so quick to judge everything by money and by circumstance and by class. How could you put down this woman who, out of her passionate love for another human being, found her life not worth living? I can understand that. I can understand how this could happen.
Speaker 1:So it's this whole sort of punky defense of suicide, or the not so much suicide itself but the pressures that might drive someone to suicide, a sympathy for that extreme emotion within the human condition. That is something that the strong and drawn period would like to have, that defended right. Strong emotion, even though it contradicts the most basic of shared community values, basic of shared community values. Nevertheless, it's a reality that has to be acknowledged. And so when Werther admits his passion for latte, that's part of that too where she sort of tells him look, you know I'm engaged, it's not. You know I'm engaged, it's not. You know I like you, I like to go to dances with you, but I don't want you to express this because, you know, once it's expressed, then we're in deep doo-doo socially.
Speaker 2:And so we can't go there. That's part of what happens halfway through the story. So what was the not?
Speaker 1:too much time on it. But what was the storm and stress movement? Well, the storm and stress movement was a preference for a big emotion in literature, in opera and in art.
Speaker 2:And so art was getting a little more crazy then.
Speaker 1:Yes, a little louder.
Speaker 2:Like less romantic, less Disney.
Speaker 1:Yes, less Disney, Although there was still that. You know. Blake is a good example of that. You know, I'm sure if he was in Germany, some of those pictures of angels would have seemed stressful, Although, Blake, you know, none of those angels are angry and they don't seem too stormy. They seem almost like overwhelmingly beautiful.
Speaker 2:You're talking about the art of the era, you mean?
Speaker 1:uh blake's paintings oh, okay, yeah, yeah uh, the, the art of the era was more naturalist. Uh, realism, uh, you know landscapes and stuff, um, you know beautiful depictions of nature and the storm and stress, uh, became a little bit more expressionistic. We think of Germans as expressionistic anyway, and I think that was being registered by Goethe there in that early period of his life.
Speaker 2:Was that concept of Sturm und Stress? Was it a movement kind of just in general in Germany, or was it something specific to a certain discipline like art or or literature?
Speaker 1:I think it was general in Germany.
Speaker 2:Okay, it was like a general movement.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it was kind of. It was why a Gerta became kind of a pop star for people or an image of, of youthful rebellion for people or an image of of youthful rebellion because of his tragic uh story he wrote and well, yeah, coming of age and all that. Well, I'll give you an example. There's kind of like punk rock, punk rock and you know it's a yeah early punk, uh, uh lit, I guess you could call it.
Speaker 2:Tell us what you know what is. What does goethe mean to you and how did he fit into the subversive orthodoxy world and like, how is he? I mean that question, but also just what does he really mean to you, or is he just more of a? He helped invent the Western literature, canon.
Speaker 1:He's recognized, you know, as a genius and a world historical figure, but nobody really knows exactly why, other than that he wrote Faust and he had a hit coming out of the box with the Sorrows of Young Werther. But he is credited with not that he invented world literature, although that's part of it. But during this period of time, with the growth of the Enlightenment and the rise of science and rationality, literature had to kind of redefine itself as something other than just stories about rationality. You know stories about, like Samuel Johnson's Rasselas, you know stoic stories about living a rational, good life, and for Goethe it was well. No, the novel is more ambitious than that.
Speaker 1:It deals with inner experience in an external world that doesn't fit the inner experience. Modernity is a kind of alienation from the old world. And the novels the very first novel, the celebrated novel Don Quixote, is a story of a guy whose values don't fit the new commercial world. He wants to be a knight and be noble, and the new commercial world is sort of based on rationality and emerging capitalism. And so there's this clash between the inner life and the external circumstances. And so how do you navigate that? Well, you can create a delusional world of your own internal imagination and live like a knight against all of the new values. But there you run the danger of either being thought of as crazy. You run the danger of either being thought of as crazy or you just end up being this eccentric that doesn't fit in, or you could just deny your internal experience and conform to the new economic social order. But then there's this internal alienation where you feel that you're unreal and unexpressed. Or with Goethe, you can write the novel of self-development, what he called the Biltroman, the novel of development, where you make a character who's in conflict with his world and try to work out the psychological social realities by articulating his subjective experience.
Speaker 1:Is that what Faust is?
Speaker 1:That's what Faust is and that's what Goethe is, and that's what his Beltungsroman Meister's Apprentice, I think, is how it's translated in English of a guy who's trying to find how he can relate his inner life to the external modern world, inner life to the external modern world, and he decides, kind of like Goethe, to use art and literature and theater as a way of helping mediate the external forces and his internal needs and desires and experience.
Speaker 1:And so that is the beginning of the modern novel, because most modern novels, or most novels, all novels, are kind of epics of homelessness. They're not the great Greek epics of external triumph, they're stories about people who don't necessarily fit into the status quo and struggle to find their place and their meaning in spite of that. And Goethe's novels of self-development, like Sor of Young Berthier and like Faust, try to describe what are the psychological stages and crises that evolve from that. So in a world where there wasn't any psychology yet, where there wasn't any therapy, there wasn't any psychotherapy. There was at best spiritual counseling if you were lucky, or a knowledgeable uncle, like in Sorrows of Young Werther, where his uncle is kind of a career counselor who doesn't really understand the inner life of Werther, merely his external circumstances, and so the novel becomes a way of exploring these psychological dynamics. And for Goethe, you know Goethe was brilliant enough of a person that impressed Nietzsche with his introspection, and Napoleon.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean that's pretty. Good audiences yeah, it's kind of a big deal.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I don't like.
Speaker 2:You're Nietzsche and Napoleon's favorite writer.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so he probes these psychological and internal crises, like in Werther, where he has a sympathy for people who love people that don't love them back, or in the Wilhelm Meister's Apprentice he has a sympathy for artists whose work is not understood and who are trying to navigate the new world that understands new things about optics, but maybe not so much new things about the inner life, because the inner life doesn't quite fit with the new world of optics as it did before. Right, yeah. So literature, world literature becomes, you know, as the whole world undergoes these kinds of transitions into the modern. He was fascinated by that, and so he wrote Faust, Part One, which is about a midlife crisis in the face of a guy who spent his whole life seeking knowledge and power and coming up with nothing at midlife.
Speaker 2:Before we go into Faust though, because I know we're going to spend some time on Faust, for sure but one thing that I'm learning about Goethe, and you keep mentioning him in this context of literature, but I think what he was trying to do was way beyond literature. He was like trying to speak to his culture that, um, as they were, as they were becoming I'm trying to articulate the words as they were becoming. You know the old world, the, the older generation inverter. You know being being stoic and capitalistic and having all the answers of. You know the Enlightenment.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Thinking they can make life mechanistic. It seems that in every way, goethe held everything together in tension rather than having all the answers. As I look at his whole work, it seems that it seems that his genius was, as a polymath, was the ability to hold a bunch of things together. Um, he had a unique concept of evil that it wasn't static but it was dynamic and it was like evolving and it was bouncing off of the character, like in Faust. We'll get to that that he was also saying that science and art and mysticism are not separate things.
Speaker 1:They can all be integrated, which no one from the Enlightenment would have thought that, other than William Blake maybe, and they thought he was crazy, right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and then just bringing in that punk rock reality of tragedy and death and suicide. That was something from your book. I want to read this. This is like if somebody asked me why should you care about Blake? I think I mean not Blake. I'm sorry, goethe, blake. I think that I mean not Blake, I'm sorry, gerta. That it would be kind of.
Speaker 2:This is one of the concepts that I think is pretty, pretty special about him. That is kind of like the anti-Disney concept. It says, uh, it's coming off of some of the stuff from Faust, but it says what is remarkable here is that Gerta's insight into the spiritual tragedies inherent both to the romantic movement represented by verter and to the scientific technological wager represented by faust. These two sides of the modern psyche, its idealistic youthful longings for total personal fulfillment and its cynical midlife thirst for power, serve as two sides of the same cautionary tale. The sorrows of young Werther warns us not to confuse our desire for reality. However authentic they may feel, our dreams can never be fulfilled because they are a symptom of a deeper longing, not of this world. That's very anti-Disney right there. I'm going to read it again Amen.
Speaker 2:Our dreams can never be fulfilled because they are a symptom of a deeper longing, not of this world. Wow, while Faust warns us that, no matter how much power we have, no matter how infinite our resources, god's providence remains a mystery to our natural selves, these essentially religious ideas are more than moral. They are ontological assertions and existential assumptions born of a religious worldview that can neither that could be neither proven nor refuted by the scientific method. Hence their power has an enduring critique, and I put in the side notes that paragraph is an anti-disney narrative. What disney leaves out? The world's tales fall short to ultimate fulfillment and happiness. Only with the deeper longings can we find our true grounding.
Speaker 2:Um, and and I randomly I don't know if it was, I don't know if it was in relation to something I was watching for Subversive Orthodoxy or what, but somebody, oh, I think it was just a general critique of the new Snow White, snow White movie. Maybe it was something you sent me, I can't remember what it was, but something was saying that the original Snow White came from Grimm's fairy tales.
Speaker 1:That's right had.
Speaker 2:It had a lot of depth to it, it had spiritual depth to it and, um, it had grit, and then it was reduced to a woman who needed to get kissed by a prince in order to you know, it got, it got super reduced into this like one-dimensional, no conflict. No, you know, not really just a bad, just a villain that does, you know, tries to prevent love, or something yes but it seems that they they said they were critiquing disney in general saying that they strip.
Speaker 2:They strip fairy tales and myths from their, their essential truth, which is the opposite. You know, it's the exact work that, uh, that gert is doing in faust is not stripping it of its grit and that's the same as the um, the storm and stress movement was to say we're not gonna sugarcoat life, let's actually face it yeah well, that's, that's that analogy is great let's put aside rainbows and unicorns yeah and actually look at this person who committed suicide.
Speaker 1:You know, yeah, yeah, yeah and uh, that it was not something that rarely or never happened in the human condition. You know, this is interesting. I'm going to go a little bit of a tangent here. It reminds me, I think I told you I watched some of the YouTube analyses of book reviews of Faust and I think most of them the ones I saw were disappointed in this Faust. Especially, they couldn't read part two at all and they were really disappointed at the Christian dimension of the end of Faust where there was salvation of grace and redemption as being kind of a cop-out Christian sort of easy answer to a difficult problem.
Speaker 1:And having not read part two which most of or if they even read part two, they just said it was unreadable. Because part two is where all the heavy lifting comes in. As to how you reconcile this dark reality of evil with a divine creation is played out was too difficult, or it required such a different sensibility than our sensibility that they couldn't quite get what was really happening at the end and so just dismissed it. And it kind of reminded me of, like Dante's Divine Comedy. Everybody reads the Inferno, but nobody reads the Purgatorio or the Paradiso sections, because that's where the religious sensibility kicks in in terms of its relationship to all of the evil that is described in the Inferno.
Speaker 1:And it's the same with Faust. It's like everybody's okay as long as Faust is committing his sort of horrendous crimes with Hanging out with the devil, sort of horrendous crimes with hanging out with the devil. That all makes kind of punky sense. But when the wheel starts to turn and Faust realizes that the devil doesn't have all the answers, that their interest begins to fade a little, that it's moving in a different direction. And then, since part two is the reconciliation of Faust and the redemption of Mephistopheles, which is something that is almost incomprehensible in a modern setting. They kind of lose attention or lose focus and say there's nothing happening, rather than really feel challenged by Part 2, which wasn't published in Goethe's lifetime. It was only after his death that Part 2 was published. Gerda's lifetime it was only after his death that part two was published. So at the beginning of Dante's Inferno, you probably remember there's a message written over the entrance to the Inferno or hell, abandon all hope. Ye who enter here. You're familiar with that.
Speaker 2:I thought that was from Pirates of the Caribbean, yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah. I think they made it a little less extreme, but anyway they didn't have the whole printing. It's Abandon all hope ye who enter here. And then underneath it it says I too was created by eternal love. Now that's the kicker. I can get. Abandon all hope ye. He end all hair. But I too was created by eternal love yeah where is that coming from right?
Speaker 1:yeah, and part two of Faust is when Mephistopheles is is redeemed. That that is. That is the kicker in that, and because it it follows from all the crazy stuff that happens in part two, but not logically. You know, it was sort of like you were saying in your summary. You know it requires this ontological leap into a religious reality. It's almost kind of like when Kierkegaard talks about Abraham and Isaac. You know the willingness to kill his son becomes a religious act that leads to his son's salvation. It just seems so wrong to a modern sensibility and yet it's asking for a, a leap of faith.
Speaker 2:Uh, that is that that um gerta is trying to sort of work out in part two of faust if you can elevate out of your literature brain, yeah, and think like why does someone care about Goethe today? Okay, what does he bring to the modern person that's not necessarily focused on literature, because I do think there's stuff there. Okay, I'd just like to hear it from you Outside of literature. What do you think it is? What is his contribution?
Speaker 1:it is. What is this contribution? Well, this contribution is a psychological appropriation of Christianity and enlightenment, the complex conversation between Christianity and the enlightenment, between the secular worship of power and knowledge versus the interior desire for God and love and a larger connection to the universe, to nature and creation and to other people that is not mediated by knowledge and power.
Speaker 2:And so he sort of through literature, he kind of stepped in and grabbed the two and held them together rather than letting them split apart. Similar, similar to blake exactly, yeah it.
Speaker 1:It's like the. This is what elliot called the disassociation of sensibility. The inner life and the outer life are separated now and we worship the outer life and the outer life are separated now and we worship the outer life, and the inner life is ruled by whim and advertising and manipulations, have you?
Speaker 2:said that.
Speaker 1:I said that.
Speaker 2:Oh, I thought you were just quoting someone no.
Speaker 1:And so the literature that tried to bridge that gap I mean it already existed. In Don Quixote there was a sense where you could go back and find, at the beginning of modernity, stories about trying to bridge the gap between the inner and outer worlds that were. Now, every generation has a different outer world, but it has the same inner world, the inner world of longing for meaning and love and significance. But the rules of the game that they were taught when they were 10 aren't in operation by the time they're 16 or 18, or even by the time they're 21. So we have these coming-of-age stories that, in our pop culture, are about the first time you had sex, rather than the real coming-of-age story that Goethe told about. How do you come to grips with a world that doesn't even acknowledge your inner life or your desire for the transcendent? That's the real question. That coming of age is not just losing your virginity and getting your driver's license. That coming of age is where you're initiated into a culture that takes seriously your inner longings for significance, meaning longings for significance, meaning love, community, and that's the real coming-of-age story.
Speaker 1:And when in Werther, we're talking about coming of age in 1778, right, you know the very beginning of a modern world and those values are under attack by the old establishment that wasn't ready for the American Revolution or for the liberty for all or, you know, people falling in love and not giving in to arranged marriages, and so that was.
Speaker 1:So. He represented sort of the youthful coming of age, the alienated hip person, werther, who wanted to follow the dictates of his inner life and not that of the world that wasn arranging their own money and power and ownership of things, and even arranging marriages that weren't true to what people were feeling. And so he tells that story and makes it a tragedy of sorts of a person that wanted to remain true to the inner life but found it in impossible conflict with the world he was in. And that became a bestseller and you could see how that was kind of like the first rebel without a cause. Now, with Faust, it's more midlife crisis. Now, with Faust, it's more midlife crisis. I spent my whole life serving money and power and knowledge.
Speaker 2:He got to the height. People may not know anything about Faust. Yeah, faust tells a story. It's a two-part play. Right In the first part, faust is visited by a uh devil sort of character yeah called mephistopheles and he the. What I learned is you know, I haven't read it myself- yet um, but I learned he made a wager and the wager is not what you typically would think he's not saying.
Speaker 2:He's not saying like do this moral thing or immoral thing or I will take your soul. He's saying um you, I will give you, I will assist you on doing everything and anything you want to the point of total fulfillment, and the wager is like if you actually ever get satisfied, then I get your soul, or something is. Is that right? Yeah, yes, that's right, that um uh exploring like constant striving for your whole life, for knowledge and beauty and meaning.
Speaker 1:Right. And uh, uh, Faust takes the um wager because he can't imagine being contented ever, that that life is just constant, uh, unfolding of new desire, after new desire, after new desire. So why would I ever think that I would ever be contented or at peace? I think in the Faust um there's a line in a famous line where if, if you ever say the words, um, I am contented, let this last forever, I get your soul. Yeah, and so faust is knows himself as well as he can that this is never going to happen for him. So it really isn't a deal with the devil in his mind. It's just sort of well, the devil isn't as bad as people think, in the sense of he's going to just keep me striving, and that's all I ever really want to do is strive and have new desires. So you know what's there to lose. So you know what's there to lose Because I don't have an experience of my soul yet, or you know.
Speaker 2:Or what I think of as my soul is this striving part of me, and even before he makes the wager right, is he already at the height of scholarship? What's the word Scholasticism?
Speaker 1:Well, scholarship, yeah yeah, he's at the height of his career. He's at.
Speaker 2:Before the wager right Before the wager.
Speaker 1:He is sort of a guy who spent his whole life seeking knowledge and power and it hasn't really paid off the way he thought. So this is an important part of the story. So he decides that he's going to commit suicide because all of this power and knowledge, however much he's been able to obtain, doesn't strike him as satisfying or enough. And he's in this little dusty lab with Wagner, his lab assistant, and he never married, he never had family or anything, and so he decides he's going to kill himself. And then he, before he can do that, he's disturbed by music coming from the village, and it's described as Easter music because it's part of the Easter celebration.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah.
Speaker 1:It's.
Speaker 2:Easter week right now.
Speaker 1:And it's Easter week.
Speaker 2:Holy week.
Speaker 1:So it's interesting, the Werder meets Latte on spring break and Faust is pulled out of his suicide by the Easter music of the celebration in the village of Easter week. So he goes outside to see what's up and he gets outside his normal mind that is preoccupied with power and money, and he has a beer with the local laborers and he dances with a peasant girl and he enters into ordinary life and discovers you know, this is probably what I've been missing is actual life with human beings. And so he comes back to his lab and decides he's going to retranslate the Gospel of John so that it doesn't begin with in the beginning was the word, but in the beginning was the act. So now he's on like a second phase of his life, to enter into life.
Speaker 2:And what happens is Life is action rather than knowledge.
Speaker 1:Yes, life is action rather than knowledge. But it's sort of like if he had been into action he probably would have discovered that it's also knowledge, right? So it's sort of like, whatever you're dealing with in your first half of your life, you see through at middle age and now you have to develop the other side of yourself.
Speaker 1:And that's a Goethean motif is the novel of development. It's like you go too far in one direction and then life brings you up short and then opens up the other side. So now he's going to enter into the other side. But what he doesn't realize is that a black poodle snuck in when he was coming back from the festival, the Easter festival, and that black poodle was Mephistopheles, or the devil, or a demon. A servant of the devil had snuck into his lab, and so he finds the dog hiding behind the stove and he uses one of his, and he uses one of his potions that he's developed in his lab, where he can make anybody tell the truth. It's a truth-telling potion.
Speaker 2:So he compels Mephistopheles to reveal it Because Faust was a scholar and also an alchemist.
Speaker 1:Yes, yes. And so he compels the dog to say who he is. So the dog transforms into Mephistopheles and Mephistopheles says and this relates to what we said about Dante's Inferno we said about Dante's Inferno, you know, with the subtitle I also was created by eternal love. Who are you? And Mephistopheles says I am part of that force in the universe that always wells, always wells evil, but only produces good. Now, that's another one of those religious leaps of faith, like what?
Speaker 1:That's sort of like the paradox of the fortunate fall right that Adam and Eve's sin in the garden doomed us to a life of sin, but it also made it possible for us to be redeemed, and also made possible grace in a Eden that was unaware of its own beauty, truth and justice. So it put humanity on the road, for it put humanity on the road for self-discovery and self-creation, or one could call it a educational journey into fathoming the true nature of grace that was beyond simply the acquisition of power and knowledge. And so that's kind of where part one ends, where Faust is able to get everything he wants, or everything he thinks he wants. So he gets his youth back, he gets to seduce Gretchen, he gets all the money he wants, he gets all the power he wants, he gets everything that he thinks he wanted. But then Gretchen ends up pregnant, killing her baby, then killing herself, and being condemned to hell. And he realizes that he didn't want, that he didn't want the collateral damage that came with having everything he wanted, that came with having everything he wanted.
Speaker 1:And so he looks to Mephistopheles to sort of right the wrong. And Mephistopheles said well, I didn't promise you happiness, I only promised you power and knowledge, which is what you said you wanted. And if you ever get happiness, then I get your soul, because you never wanted happiness, you thought happiness was impossible. And now Gretchen is safely within my clutches in hell. And so, uh, you know, are you responsible for that or not? And then Gretchen repents of her sins and is redeemed by God. So, mephistopheles.
Speaker 2:After her death.
Speaker 1:Before her death, oh, her death. So when she dies because she's, I don't know whether she actually commits suicide or whether she's executed, but right when she is trying to kill herself or dies, the devil I don't know whether it's Mephistopheles or the actual devil says uh, now she's mine, oh, so she was.
Speaker 2:She was sentenced to be beheaded for infanticide.
Speaker 1:Okay, so, so right before she's beheaded, uh, the devil says, uh, she's mine. And then God opens up the heavens and says no, she's forgiven. Now this divine intervention is something that modern readers find cheesy, but they haven't read part two and they don't know how Grace operates in the Gertian story. He's not really offering a cheap grace at the end of Gretchen's life. He's putting it into a cosmic context that Faust himself does not yet understand. So Faust goes back to his orgy at the Walpurgisburg party with mixed emotions, because this was what he said he wanted, and yet this he didn't realize, that Gretchen would pay the price. But did Gretchen pay the price, or was she really? It sounds as if God saved her. Why would he save her? It doesn't quite make sense to me. So you know, I've made my wager.
Speaker 1:So spiritual plane because it's not as realistic a story of a person who has sold his soul to the devil and now is seeing the consequences it's more of.
Speaker 1:He enters into the spiritual world of Mephistopheles, which is this imaginative world where he can go and do anything he wants, and so he decides that he's going to go back and make love to Helen of Troy and have all of the kingdoms of the world, as well as the love of the most beautiful woman in history. And so it plays out as this kind of plays out as this kind of dream, visionary fantasy, in which a lot of the internal spiritual and psychological steps, after the fact of having seen the consequences of your fulfilling your desires on other people, what they are on other people, become reality for him and what it takes for him to turn around and give his soul to God at the end. And so that's the more probably that's the Purgatoria and Paradiso sections of Faust that, like most people who read buying comedy, don't read because they think they already know that story. But it's not the story they think they know.
Speaker 2:Yeah, obviously Goethe is using his imagination big time.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah.
Speaker 2:This is not your normal Bible story, Right right and it's kind of a dream scenario. It's kind of like it's a kind of a dream scenario. It's kind of like I I would have, I think in my rigid evangelical mindset I would have been like, oh, this is just weird and this is just.
Speaker 2:You know, maybe it's not maybe even borderline demonic and not orthodox at all. But what I think a guy like gerta or blake are doing is actually exploring, for one thing. Exploring they're thinking, thinking out loud through their literature, what I, what I've, what I've learned from. About faust it sounds like almost like goethe's imaginary autobiography of exploring his own mind and desires exactly I, I agree, totally, totally and so therefore like, and you're saying, you're saying that he kind of created that genre of having um, what do you call it, where you're writing about a life development?
Speaker 1:uh, active imagination, uh, you call it the build on, build on roman or whatever.
Speaker 2:Build on roman? Yeah, that yeah, the vibe of uh, yeah the story of uh spiritual development so to, so to gertz put this brick down, and then is that what um or he, he molded this brick, called that, and then did he basically inspire a guy like dostoevsky to then take that and build it with like 10 bricks and tell the story of a whole family.
Speaker 1:Yes, yes, I think that that's exactly what happens.
Speaker 2:So Dostoevsky was influenced, you would think.
Speaker 1:Or obviously Goethe at some point. But I'm sure there's cultural differences, because the Russians and the Germans are not known for their familiarity or their love of each other's culture, although Goethe's Faust became an opera and made its way to Russia, and Russians love opera and so the story was not lost on. Him takes literary realism, which is that idea of telling the truth about social and psychological experience as well as spiritual aspirations, and brings them together in his novels, so that you have this novel of development that tries to describe the redemption of some pretty dark characters, and usually what happens is he doesn't succeed. And so for the first I would say, like Crime and Punishment and the Idiot and the Demons, the Possessed you mean the possessed he tried to show like the redemption of a terrorist or the redemption of a in the idiot, a redemption of a sort of a person that was not really a person, who was like a perfect Christian from his idea of a perfect Christian and not a real redeemed Christian, because he couldn't imagine how that person would become a real.
Speaker 2:Christian. Are you talking about the idiot? Yeah, the idiot. That's what the idiot's about. Yeah, it's about that's cool.
Speaker 1:Yeah the idiot, yeah the idiot. That's what the idiot's about. Yeah, it's about cool, yeah so, but all of his books you know they like in uh and crime. Let's take crime and punishment. It's a good example um wait, I have a. I have a quote right now or not a quote, but like a comment on that.
Speaker 2:I found um, which is interesting because we're going to be talking about Dostoevsky at some point, there'll be an episode of just him, but it says here's how the Dostoevsky and Goethe relate. It says for Dostoevsky, the works of Goethe, werther and Faust were simply proofs of the wrong way the West had taken. Dostoevsky would use Goethe's depravity of characters to create a Faustian context for his novella the Possessed, including that of character description, which also relates to literary time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, right, and that's world literature, right. Yeah, the Russian takes from the German but improves it from his point of view, improves it from his point of view.
Speaker 1:But you know Dostoevsky, and we'll just go here because I think it's important for a subversive orthodoxy Dostoevsky is kind of like Beethoven in a way where he had a larger vision of the kind of music he wanted to make or the kind of novels he wanted to make, or the kind of novels he wanted to write the redemption of a would-be terrorist, or the example of a perfect Christian. Or the one book he never lived long enough to write was the Life of a Sinner. I think it was Life of a Redeemed Sinner or something like that, about himself actually. Well, they were all kind of about himself and he never felt that he really nailed it, really nailed it. They were kind of like unfinished masterpieces or partial masterpieces where people.
Speaker 1:You know, it would be great if Raskolnikov, actually, you know, found redemption at the end of Crime and Punishment and there is a kind of a redemption at the end, but Dostoevsky didn't think he ever really nailed it, that it wasn't realistic enough, that it didn't seem like that would really happen, and so by his own standards, these were like they say about Shakespeare's plays, you know, they start great and the characters are wonderful, but then he doesn't know how to end them, so he just has everybody get killed off or he has, you know, a happy ending Did they say that about Shakespeare.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I didn't know that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm not that well read. And one brother is going to exemplify the reconciliation of an ordinary person to God in light of the psychology of the underground which governs human striving Faustian striving right, um, and he and the what we have as brothers karamazov, which is his last novel, is what he considers his masterpiece. Uh, that brought it, that that brought it together, that that finally did. What he always wanted to do is get all the pieces in place the contrast between the person who is too much in his head versus the person who's too much in his sexual passions, versus the person who is trying to reconcile himself with God and succeeds. And that's part one and part two. He never lived to write which was going to be about the same brothers 20 years later because they're in their 20s in brothers karamazov.
Speaker 1:But brothers karamazov was going to have part two in which he showed them 20 years down the line and that's kind of similar to Goethe. You know, you start with Sorrows of Young Bertha, 20s, and then you end in the midlife crisis of Faust and probably in his 40s or 50s, and there's that same thing going on with Dostoevsky. But the great thing about Brothers Karamazov, part 1, is there are older characters in Part 1 that have navigated that midlife crisis. So you really don't really need Part 2, because you kind of have it all in part one and that'll be fun to look at.
Speaker 1:But the fact that, like Goethe, you're writing that novels are not like clever stories about guys who tried to make it in business and failed or fell in love or something. They're really about how you reconcile the inner life to the outer life, and every generation needs its novelists from Goethe's point of view to talk about the new world. You're navigating right, and so this is kind of in Werther. Werther is sort of navigating what it would be like to come of age in 1778, a new world that's moving toward democracy but hasn't caught up to itself yet, which is every generation right. You're coming of age in a world that's already obsolete and you were kind of trained for the obsolete world. But there's a new world on the horizon. How do you navigate that?
Speaker 2:Well, you can't just navigate that in a quest for power and knowledge, or you're going to end up on obsolete knowledge an obsolete little guy in his you know, uh, lab, uh, without any connection to real life that's so relevant now because I feel like the the coming of age from 10 years to 10 years now is way more rapidly accelerating oh yeah, two years social media and um social media, digital media, ai and all that oh, yeah, yeah just from just from our, just from my age I'm in my 40s to a 20 year old, right now my son's 18, our worlds are completely different in how they're paced and how people relate.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so to write, to write something now, or just, not even just for literature, but just for the sake of understanding your culture now, with 10 year iterations, is insane compared to their generations, was you know, probably? Things were changing a lot over 50 years, that's right. And now things are changing a lot over two to five years, that's right. I don't know what to do with that. Well, well how Gerda speaks into that.
Speaker 1:Well, the the good news is the inner life isn't really changed.
Speaker 2:That's the thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's still the desire for meaning, love, connection, community, god. All those transcended desires are as fresh with every generation, are as fresh with every generation. It's just that they meet up with different sources of resistance or misinterpretations, or they themselves have it harder to understand themselves if they don't have a writer or a spiritual director or somebody that can mirror for them the spiritual world that they want to bring. One of the writers that is kind of a contemporary Goethe in terms of writing Beldung's Romans was Herman Hesse, who won the Nobel Prize in 1927, I think.
Speaker 1:Development that were about a young idealistic character and the social forces allied against him that were really trying to direct him toward knowledge and power, not truth and faith and faith. And so they were all sort of like Siddhartha. His famous story about the Beldungsroman of the Buddha tries to divide the Buddha's development into sort of universal stages, stages of how you transform from a seeker to a finder, from someone who is looking for the truth in a world that doesn't seem to provide it to someone who sees the truth at a more transcendent level. And in one of the front pieces of one of the Hesse's novels is the little quote from Hesse, and it's I only tried to live in accordance with the promptings of my own heart. Why was that so difficult?
Speaker 2:And that's classic Goethe right, did you say that again?
Speaker 1:I only try to live according to the promptings of my own heart. Why was that so difficult?
Speaker 1:And so the stories are about why it's hard to live according to the promptings of your own heart, about why it's hard to live according to the promptings of your own heart, and in the Sorrows of Young Bertha it's sort of like well, because you have this transcendent idealism that doesn't fit your compromised world and that doesn't make you defective but that does make you unrealistic, basically. And after Werder came out and became really popular and everybody was dressing like Werther, but also it caused a lot of suicides, actually of young people copying Werther. What do you make of that? Well, goethe wrote later about that and he said wrote later about that. And he said you know, I thought that for me Goethe was the person I had to get rid of.
Speaker 1:Werther was the part of me, the young, idealistic, romantic, that I had to get rid of so that I could get on with the serious work of writing Faust.
Speaker 1:And so, although I don't think he mentions Faust, but that's sort of what ended up being was that he had to mature out of that youthful rebellion, that rebel without a cause, into an adult with a purpose. And he couldn't do that until he got all those feelings and all those confusions and anger and feeling of displacement and resentment at the world that made it impossible for him to have the woman that he loved out on the page. And then, once for him, he got it out on the page. It was kind of cathartic, but it didn't turn out to be cathartic for a lot of the young people that read him and that caused him a lot of. Actually, it didn't cause him as much pain and self-doubt as it would have caused me or you probably. But he was enough of aristocrat to say well, gee, I'm not responsible for the fact that people don't know how to read novels, they're not. That novel is not a model on how to live, it's a warning on how not to live.
Speaker 2:And so that's why he just attributed it to people's stupidity.
Speaker 1:Yeah, ignorance. That's why Hesse puts a little preface to his Bildungsroman. I only tried to live in accordance with my own heart. Why was that so difficult Telling you what the novel is going to be about? It's going to be about this struggle with being true to your heart. In an alien environment or a world that's so rapidly changing, it's hard to find your context and your place in it, and that this isn't your fault and it isn't something that you should beat yourself up over, but something that should invite you to a more transcendent faith and an order that transcends this world. And how you can kind of intuit that or see it in operation. That's kind of how Fowl's part one and part two work. That's kind of how Faust Part One and Part Two work. But if you just read Part One, you know you only get half the story. And if you just read the Demons or Crime and Punishment, you sort of get, you know, a very powerful critique of human psychology, but you don't get Dostoevsky's sort of mature spiritual response to.
Speaker 2:A redemptive vision.
Speaker 1:The redemptive vision as strongly or as persuasively as he thought he did in the Brothers Karamazov.
Speaker 2:Do you think Goethe was preaching at the end of Faust or do you think he didn't know how else to take it because that was his worldview?
Speaker 1:Well, that's a really good question, because I think he was demonstrating… he was proclaiming something is a kind of Greek tragedy about the modern myth of the pursuit of power and knowledge as the ultimate end of human existence.
Speaker 2:Which it bankrupts in part one.
Speaker 1:Yes, it bankrupts in part one and in part two he offers sort of like a new genre of fantasy and dream scenario epic redemption that's taking place inside his psyche and soul rather than out in the world of of power and knowledge.
Speaker 2:It's sort of like A psychedelic redemptive fantasy A psychedelic, yeah, psychedelic redemption. No, that as a category, that would be a whole new thing. Psychedelic redemptive fantasy.
Speaker 1:Yeah, before 1968. Well before 1968.
Speaker 2:And that concludes this episode. I think there may be something in here for all of you, each of you whether you're a skeptic, a believer or somewhere in between on your own deconstruction journey, we're going to be exploring what it means to live a life of deep meaning in a world that often feels fragmented and nihilistic, and this revelatory faith doesn't seem to come to us from the expected places. The prophetic voice doesn't seem to come from the pulpits or the seminaries. It's breaking through in novels, poetry, activism, art and the unexpected corners of culture. We hope you'll join us on this ongoing conversation. Until then, thank you for listening to the Subversive Orthodoxy Podcast.
Speaker 3:If you found this meaningful, please leave a five-star review subscribe and share with anyone who might resonate with this conversation. Adios. This has been a Subversive Orthodoxy podcast with Travis Mullen and Professor Inchosti, or, if I could drift through it, dancing through moonlight under nighttime skies, forgetting the world's lies. Meanwhile, I'm fine Looking through a stained glass oceanic scene. Say hi to human beings with a smile unseen, grabbing wildflowers as I slide down hills after a rain.