Reading. Thinking. Confessing. Part 3.
Confessing
In the first and second essay, I brought attention to Goethe’s Faust. The academic who exchanged his soul in an attempt to go beyond his own limitations. Jaroslav Pelikan depicts Faust as a seeker.1 He is a scholar who strives and strays. There is a lack of dependence upon God in his scholarship and in his life. His study has detached him from the truth and in Part I, Faust himself makes no confession of faith in God. Early in his engagement with Margarete, she asks Faust repeatedly if he believes in God. He deflects until her persistence insists upon itself. So he replies:
“Don’t misunderstand me, lovely girl. / Who dares name him, / Dares affirm him, / Dare says he believes? / Who feeling doubt, / Ventures to say right out, / I don’t believe? / The all-embracing, / All-sustaining, / Sustains and embraces / Himself and you and me. / Overhead the great sky arches, / Firm lies the earth beneath out feat, / And the friendly shining stars, don’t they / Mount aloft eternally? / Don’t my eyes, seeking your eyes, meet? / And all that is, doesn’t it weigh / On your mind and heart, / In eternal secrecy working, / Visibly, invisibly, about you?— / Fill heart with it to overflowing / In an ecstasy of blissful feeling / Which then call what you would; / Happiness! Heart! Love! Call it God!— / I know no name for it, nor look / For one. Feeling is all, / Names noise and smoke / Dimming the heavenly fire.”2
Faust’s description of God is thoroughly Romantic and pantheistic, and therefore just as much a statement of disbelief as it is a language game expressing the Infinite.3 What we do not have here is a confession of belief in the God of Christian orthodoxy. All of his reading and thinking has not led him to confession of God’s great glory, but to obfuscating who God is. The young maiden Margarete perceives this clearly:
“It sounds fine when it’s put your way, / But something’s wrong, there’s still a question; / The truth is, you are not a Christian.”4
Yet, Goethe, the author of Faust, envisioned that in the end Faust would be vindicated. This is primarily seen through the climactic final speech in Part II. Climactic, because it returns readers to the blood oath that Faust made with Mephistopheles in Part I:
“A bet! I swear! / If ever I plead with the passing moment, / ‘Linger a while, you are so fair!’ / Then chain me up in close confinement, / Then serving me no more’s your care, / Then let the death bell toll my finish, / The unreluctantly I’ll perish, / The clock may stop, the hands fall off, / And time for me over with!”5
Which is mirrored in Part II:
“Then, then, I might say to the passing moment, / ‘Linger awhile, you are so fair! / The footprints of my earthly passage cannot / Even after eons disappear.’ / Foreseeing such scenes of unmatched contentment, / I now enjoy the highest, supreme moment.”6
Accordingly, after the Devil acquires the requisite line from Goethe’s mouth he dies. Eudo Mason, rightly asserts, how Goethe attempts to portray Faust in this final speech:
“The point is that Faust’s dying vision, humanly and ethically considered, embodies a magnanimous, altruistic programme motivated by high ideals and sense of the brotherhood of man, and that as such it shows Faust in the most favourable light.”7
In the end, Goethe intends to portray Faust as a genius, an “enlightened despot”, in the ilk of Napoleon, Frederick the Great, and Peter the Great.8 The salvation of Faust then originates out of an entirely Enlightenment dressed story and worldview. But Faust is not the only one who experiences salvation in Goethe’s story. Margarete (who, albeit in a conflation of protestant and Catholic thought) provides a more identifiable Christian narrative than Faust’s life. 9
It is not Faust, but Margarete who offers us a model of confession. Throughout Part I, she is put forth as simul iustus et peccator (simultaneously sinner and justified). In our first introduction to her as a reader she is leaving confession.10 Mephistopheles even comments, “She is the soul of innocence/And has no reason, none at all/To visit the confessional. Her kind is too much for me.”11 Later we are told her nose is “forever in a prayerbook.”12 Mephistopheles even chides Faust for allowing Margarete to put “the Doctor through his catechism.”13 To which Faust responds:
“Monster [that is Mephistopheles], lacking the least comprehension / How such a soul, so loving, pure, / Whose faith is all in all to her, / The sole means to obtain salvation, / Should be tormented by fear / The one she loves is damned forever!”14
Most importantly, after her private and public sins (uniting with Faust out of marriage, her part in the death of her brother, mother, and child) she confesses and places her dependence upon God:
“In your hands, our Father, oh save me!” / You angelic hosts, stand about me! /Draw up your ranks to protect me!”15
And it is after this that the heavens announce: “She shall be saved.” 16
This brings us to the central aim of this third essay, that of confessing. Confession commences, permeates, and is the proper end of the activity of faith seeking understanding. It is therefore the fitting end to reading and thinking. In this essay, I primarily consider confessing, as that activity, which is pregnant to faith seeking understanding. Pregnant, because faith seeking understanding must give birth to confession and is born out of the confessing individual.
On Confessing
The word confession or confessing has a plethora of meanings within protestant Christianity. It may describe the individual christians turning away from sin and toward God. As Wittgenstein once said, “A confession has to be a part of your new life.”17 In this sense, confession is a term that refers to repentance, an activity which the Christian is to be active in throughout their life.18 This is primarily the way I use confession above in reference to Faust.
In another sense, confession may refer to those symbols and creeds that define what Christians believe both personally and collectively. In other words, a confession of faith, such as the Belgic Confession or the Westminster Confession of Faith. As John Webster put it:
“A creed or confessional formula is a public and binding indication of the gospel which is set before us in the scriptural witness, through which the church affirms its allegiance to God, repudiates falsehood by which the church is threatened, and assembles around the judgment and consolation of the gospel.”19
The word confession may also refer to the personal and corporate act of praise. In what follows, I use confessing chiefly in the third sense: the thankful, public voicing of faith in the God who has spoken. It is the necessary beginning and end of reading, and thinking. Beginning because faith seeking understanding begins in Augustine’s words with: “I believe so that I may understand.”20 The end of faith seeking understanding Bavinck portrays well, that just as the individual—made in the image of God— “absorbs the thoughts of God embedded in creation” and makes them his own, he must then, “express them again in his own words.”21 The ‘I believe’ is at the beginning and end of intellectual inquiry. The appropriation of truth into the mind of the Christian, becomes as it were a part of them, and is then taken up in the activity of confessing. In other words, thinking too must come to a head. In our case, it must return to its starting position or following the idea of Romans 11:36 it must return to God. “To him be the glory. Amen.”
