ABSTRACT
The Faust tradition, which finds in Goethe’s drama its loftiest and perhaps its final expression, owes its widespread interest to the fact that it became the vehicle of certain fundamental religious and philosophical problems which have ever fascinated and tormented mankind: the relationship between man and the powers of good and evil; man’s revolt against human limitations; the thirst for knowledge beyond mere information; the puzzling disparity between the sublimity and the misery of human life. These problems are by no means the exclusive property of the Faust legend for they form, individually or collectively, the background of much of the world’s greatest literature. It was the good fortune of the Faust tradition that in its evolution it combined these elements in a peculiarly happy way and that it attracted and inspired the genius of one of the world’s greatest poets.
