The Faustian Spirit

Faust is a restless scholar who has plumbed all of human knowledge but whose soul remains unslaked, his craving for ultimate truth unabated. Alone in his study, late at night, he gazes with a mixture of awe & desire on the sign of the Macrocosmos, and he says to himself, "Was it a god who engraved this sign which still my inner tumult and fills my heart with joy, which with a mysterious force unveils the secrets of Nature all around me? ... Where shall I grasp thee, oh infinite Nature?" But Goethe paints other aspects of his protagonist's character besides the one we have called "Faustian". It may be that a better or at least less ambiguous - adjective would be "Odyssean" or "Ulyssean", because the English poet Alfed Tennyson, in one short poem, really strikes closer to the sense of the word that we want to convey than does Goethe or any of the other writers about the Faust Legend. Tennyson's Hero's desire is to "follow knowledge like a sinking star, beyond the utmost bound of human thought. To Ulysses: the idea that the world has no boundaries & there are infinite discoveries that lay ahead. Even in old age, after a much fuller & more eventful life than ordinary men are granted, Ulysses says, "It's not too late to seek a newer world, my purpose holds, to sail beyond the sunset & the baths of all the western stars until I die." He sees himself as "made weak by time & fate, but strong in will, to strive, to seek, to find, & not to yield."