Salvation Through Constant Striving
This is perhaps the most dominant theme of Faust. The Prologue in Heaven explicitly sets the groundwork for this theme throughout the rest of the play by implicitly comparing Goethe’s conception of the universe in Faust to that of the Old Testament’s in Job. The latter’s view of creation does not allow for deviation from the prescribed path and commands a blind acceptance of one’s fate, but Goethe’s suggests that humans are free to err and that error, in fact, is inevitable for one who strives toward...
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