When Faust translates the bible, from “In the beginning was the Word” to “In the beginning was the Act!” I believe, what this ultimately means is, the “act” posits freedom. So, the “act” is the first act of freedom first expressed, which also embodies freedom for others. This is the divine’s ultimate purpose, an ever-creating act of freedom that universalizes what itself does. I could be wrong, but the climax of the saga ends on a high note for the idea of freedom.
Also, Germany was a center for the intellectual idea of freedom. It’s a sad irony that Nazism arose from Germany, but before that, the idea of freedom was in the minds of German intellectuals. Kant believed, we have freedom when we are in rational domain, in control of our reasons. Goethe’s Friend, Friedrich Schiller, looked at the French Revolution and concluded, In his The Aesthetic Education of Man, that man won’t obtain freedom from politics, rather its from the realm of aesthetics that man will know freedom, this echoes Shelley’s, “Poets are the unacknowledged legislatures of the world.” And let’s not forget that a contemporary of Faust was Martin Luther who wrote a revision of Doctrine in his translation of the bible, so this echoes something deep.
Stephen C. Pedersen 