These monkeys are also keenly aware of the state of the world, and the precariousness of seeking happiness and surety therein. The world, behold, is thus forever rolled, with ceaseless up and down, and lo, its hollow crown resounds like glass most apt to break. The animals that Faust so scorns warn him gravely yet mockingly that his crown will shatter, his illusion made of glass, glass like the mirror in which he first glimpses Maragareta. This sphere of clay will splinter on a day. In Goethe s Faust , both as a part of the period and a part of the plot, art and philosophy and theology are set up as achievements man accomplishes independent of God, as aspirations to celebrated for their nobility even though their limitations must ultimately be disclosed.
Culture spreads now, even to the devil.
The world may call the Evil One or the witch a fairy tale, but there they both are, and they both still have vigor and skills which complement each other s power. The witch works through potions and spells which might offend the now genteelly corrupt world, but the consequences they effect are timeless. Faust drinks a brew which excites in his heart the lust that is his undoing, and lust is one of the most time-honored ways of going down. His glass world which he built for himself, an intellectual, metaphysical world into which he tried to also incorporate the devil as he saw fit, is shattered when Mephistopheles pops the ethereal bubble and wages battle from within Faust s own flesh. Faust has a last chance at redemption when his passion for Margareta begins to metamorphose into a love that Mephistopheles had not planned for, when despite himself it flourishes and begins to grow upwards from the seed of lust planted by the witch.