Inward obedience, St Philip Neri, and Goethe's Faust. Eine Tragödie

Abstract

This article considers how the post-Reformation idea of Innerlichkeit operates in Goethe's Faust. Eine Tragödie. Goethe's Faust is less an early-modern, pleasure-seeking necromancer and more an anachronistic skeptic who wagers his soul on total disobedience to all outward things, material, spiritual, civic, and intellectual. Wary of the suffocating inwardness of Pietism and Empfindsamkeit that inflects the earliest versions of Faust, Goethe revisited his drama in search of a vision of the self as capable of fruitful inward obedience. Goethe's interest in the unlikely figure of St Philip Neri (his ‘favourite’ Catholic saint) offers helpful insight into how, over a lifetime, he reimagines inwardness as a dynamic, organic principle of human development. Reason and humour inform Neri's rich inwardnesses, allowing him to thrive. Neri's coreligionist, the tragic Gretchen, also exemplifies this vital, organic principle of inward obedience, which Goethe celebrates as redemptive in the enigmatic final scene of Faust II.