This exultant line does not exactly mark the beginning of Faust — a two-part play whose beginning is, in fact, hard to identify. Part One opens with a night scene in which we see Faust, heartsick and alone, in a dimly lit Gothic room, conjuring demons and contemplating suicide. It is here that an Easter hymn, sung by an invisible chorus, breaks in. The disillusioned professor is lifting a vial of poison to his lips, when he hears this:

“Christ is arisen!
Blest is the man of love,
He who the anguishing,
Bitter, exacting test,
Salvation bringing, passed.”

In a literal sense, Goethe’s antihero is saved by Christ — “the man of love” — in Faust’s first dramatic sequence. We will return to this scene. But before we see Faust in his gloomy chamber — and hear, with him, a Romantic Easter song — Goethe presents his readers with a trio of other introductions. First, he presents a haunting verse dedication to the play’s “dear shadows”. From there, he moves on to a cynical prelude, in which a theatre-manager tells the poet he only has one job to do: “Deliver the goods.” Then he presents an allegorical conversation set in the throne room of heaven, in which the Lord himself gives Mephisto, one of the “spirits of negation”, carte blanche to lead Faust into temptation.

There seems to be no end, then, of Faust’s beginnings. And this is by design. The motto of Faust Part One reveals that the start is the crux of Goethe’s play: “In the beginning was the Deed!” This is a brazen misstatement of the first verse of The Gospel According to John: “In the beginning was the Word.” Goethe’s huge drama turns upon Faust’s deep unhappiness with just that beginning, that Christian beginning, and his spectacular challenge to it. (Crucially, the challenge is not only his. A certain Mephisto is on the scene too.) It is only after Goethe lures us through some 400 pages of eerie verse that — in the last stanza of Part Two, and of the play itself — a mystical chorus corrects (or half-corrects) the professor’s error. “Everything transitory,” we read, “is symbolic only.”

Faust’s total veneration of the Deed is not given the final word in Goethe’s tragedy. But what are we to make of this iconic modern drama of Word and Deed — of soul-selling and demonic influence, of delusion and redemption? Whatever else we might decide, few would object to a framing statement we find in Christopher Marlowe’s great Elizabethan drama, The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus: namely that the figure of Faust in some way concerns “both Germany and the world”.

Why Germany? The historical Faustus, a Latin sobriquet meaning “fortunate one”, was Germanic. Marlowe knows this, and dubs him “the German conjurer”. According to the historian Anthony Grafton, he was probably based on Georg of Helmstadt, who took a Master of Arts from the University of Heidelberg in the 1480s. In any case, Grafton writes, the shadowy character who comes to be known as Faust made use of “expert knowledge of optics, light, and shadow” — all designed to thrill and terrify his contemporaries with images that “seemed to move”. The real Faust was a Renaissance magus, or, as we might now say, a master of simulacra.

Naturally, German artists have not forgotten Faust’s origins. The most accomplished conjuration of a specifically German Faust is probably Thomas Mann’s 1947 novel, Doctor Faustus, written in Pacific Palisades, California, in which Hitler’s Reich offers “the embrace of demons” that locks Mann’s fatherland into a nightmare of criminality and despair. Doctor Faustus is a captivating treatment of the theme, and one of the great Hollywood novels. But it still seems fair to conclude that Marlowe was right. The Faust myth is not purely national. Faust is a spiritual figure — and, as such, a civilizational one.

Ironically, it is a hardcore German nationalist, Oswald Spengler, who argues most compellingly that Faust is not a German, but rather a world-historical figure. For Spengler, something like a “Faustian soul” fueled the rise — and is now suffering the decline — not just of Germany, but of the West as a whole. The “Faustian world-feeling” is, to his mind, a decisive factor in the ever-more-rapidly unfolding world-history of modernity.

But what meaning does Spengler give to that half-mythical descriptor: “Faustian”? In Spengler’s momentous Decline of the West, written about a century ago, he claims that the Faustian life-force of the West is something like “a will-to-power over the infinite”. This formulation is virtually lifted from the pages of Nietzsche, whose late 19th-century elevation of “will-to-power” is well known. And this suggests, to me at least, that Spengler’s idea of a Faustian West might be connected, however obscurely, to the pathologically anti-Christian will that Nietzsche expresses in his final text, The Anti-Christ. We might therefore ask: Is the essence of the Faustian legacy, in a declining West, the attitude of “the anti-Christ”?

The simplicity of this question is unnerving, and Spengler would not like it. He seems to think that it is not Nietzsche’s anti-Christian spleen, but rather the redemptive finale of Goethe’s Faust, together with Richard Wagner’s Romantic-Christian opera Parsifal, which can “disclose to us in advance the shape that our spirituality will assume” in the 21st and 22nd centuries. Nevertheless, the simple question of Faust’s anti-Christianity brings us back to the curious beginning of Goethe’s play, in which it is the memory of Christ’s death and resurrection that keeps Faust from killing himself.

Spengler comments on this critical moment. He calls it, in passing, Faust’s “Easter scene”. But what I want to ask is this: What if there is not only one “Easter scene” in Goethe’s Faust? What if, rather, this whole myth of tragic modernity is framed by Easter, and by the events that Christians commemorate on that day? What if, furthermore, the real legacy of Faustian modernity is not just — as Mann and others have thought — the hellish Nazi interlude, but rather a far more enduring tendency to anti-Christianity in the West? What if, in other words, it is precisely Faust’s anti-Christian attitude which is somehow at the heart of Western malaise?

It is time to return, with these questions in mind, to the scene in which the drama of Faust’s soul begins. It is titled simply “Night”. Throughout the scene, Goethe’s unstable Herr Doktor is both citing and mis-citing the gospels — and especially The Gospel According to John. One of these echoes is decisive: Faust says that there is no book, no text, which could satisfy his “eternal thirst” (Durst auf ewig). His wording distinctly recalls a scene in John Chapter 4, in which Jesus tells a woman in Samaria: “Those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty.”

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On the night before Easter, Faust is thirsty. And on the play’s fateful Easter day, when Faust first meets Mephisto, his own personal demon, Christ’s sayings in John 4, are on his mind. “You long to drink the living waters”, Faust confesses to himself, until Mephisto interrupts him. The bitter professor knows, and the play’s 19th-century readers all knew, that “living water” is what Jesus mystically offers to the woman in Samaria. It is precisely because Faust is not drinking the spiritual water he longs to drink — however we might interpret his longing, or his failure — that he signs his soul over to Mephisto, a nihilist avant la lettre, and embraces the devil’s element, fire.

I call such echoes of John 4 decisive, not only because they reveal the depth of Faust’s sickness of heart, in the first scenes of the play, but because they are still sounding in Faust’s final stanzas. Here, in the chaos of love, or the clamor of grace, that meets a half-repentant Faust in the afterlife, we encounter a radiant figure — one of Faust’s angelic intercessors, who is given by Goethe a simple Latin title: Mulier Samaritana. “The Samaritan Woman.” And Goethe tells us, in his play’s margin, so no one can miss it, where he is taking his inspiration from: “Saint John 4.” This is how the Samaritan Woman pleads for Faust’s soul:

“By the pail which, when he thirsted,
Cooled the lips of our Savior,
By the streams of living water
Pouring out from that pure fountain
Prodigally and forever,
Flowing through all of creation –”

It is not Mephisto’s fire, but Jesus’ water — in Goethe’s unorthodox conception of it — that lives on, in this stanza, after Faust dies.

Faust’s drama, which is paschal at the beginning, is still paschal at the end. At the instant of his antihero’s death, Goethe quotes — yet again — from The Gospel According to John: “It is finished.” Though some translations obscure the biblical reference, Goethe’s German is identical to Martin Luther’s translation in John Chapter 19, where Jesus says, from the cross: “It is finished” (Es ist vollbracht). But we must, of course, ask: what is finished? Faust’s lurid drama is linked to the gospels’ paschal narrative. But how?

We might say by corruption, with an eye to Faust’s alteration of John’s canonical line. After all, “In the beginning was the Word” becomes “In the beginning was the Deed”. Or we might say by negation, since Mephisto, a cynical mystagogue, tells us, and then shows us, that he is “the spirit that says no, no”. But none of this goes far enough. Goethe’s play is in fact structured by Faust’s imprecation, and then, persecution of Christianity. He becomes, decades before Nietzsche, a partisan of “the anti-Christ”.

Faust’s rejection of “the old, the true religion” — as Mephisto dryly calls it — is part of the process. This is how deals with the devil get done. And Faust complies. “I pronounce a curse”, he says:

“Curse love on its pinnacle of bliss,
Curse faith, so false, curse all vain hope!”

It is really Saint Paul who is being cursed, here, for having the audacity to write in his First Letter to the Corinthians that “faith, hope, and love abide”. Faust is a myth of tragic modernity precisely in so far as it is determined by this conscious repudiation of the Christian beyond — in faith, hope, and love.

Yet if Faust’s curse on Christianity is a structuring moment in Part One, what do I mean by his persecution of Christianity? This comes towards the end of Part Two, in the days before Faust’s death. After he and Mephisto have provided some necromantic help to the forces of European unification, Faust settles, with Mephisto, naturally, near an undisclosed coastline. Here, he begins a new life as a visionary property developer. The venture ends badly. His final property development is — his grave.

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But before Faust’s slave-laborers lower him into the pit, there is a sequence of events that confuses many commentators. Along the shoreline that Faust wants to develop is an elderly couple — “kind, pious people” — who live in a simple house, within a copse of linden trees, beside a rustic chapel. They refuse to sell their land to the man who has sold his soul. What is more, they sense that Faust’s seemingly progressive venture is in fact primitive and cruel. “Men were sacrificed,” the wife tells her husband, “I’m certain.” And what is her intuition about Faust? “Godless,” she concludes, “he imagines we’re his slaves.”

With his own death impending, Faust becomes obsessed with this poor old couple. It is not only that their recalcitrance irritates him, or that their mere existence ruins his view of a newly cleared coastline. What drives Faust to distraction is the “churchlike, tomblike” clanging of their chapel bell. This lone, liturgical act materializes — not only for them, but for him — their commitment to the “old God” that Faust — a devotee, now, only of his own will — has abandoned. “Come,” they say quietly to each other:

“We’ll walk out to the chapel,
Watch the sun sink to its rest,
Ring the bell and kneeling, pray.”

But there is more. For on the night before Easter, just as the suicidal professor begins to hear the old exultant words — “Christ is arisen!” — in Faust’s first scene, we read this in Goethe’s text: Glockenklang. “Bells peal.” Symbolically it is these Easter bells that ring — but from a harassed and isolated church, now — as Faust, long-declining, nears his denouement.

Before he dies, Faust silences the bells. Mephisto and his enforcers set fire to the old couple’s chapel — and their house. They burn to death inside. In this way, the last Christians left on Goethe’s stage are martyred. Faust is — imperfectly, briefly — repentant. He thinks back on the days before his apostasy, before he gave himself over to

“The things of darkness, cursed the world, myself,
Impiously. Now ghosts so fill the air …”

Ours too, seems to be a time when, strangely, ghosts fill the air. It was a friend of Goethe’s, Novalis, a Christian Romantic, who once said: “Where there are no gods, ghosts reign.” Perhaps there is something for us in Novalis’ dictum — and in Goethe’s drama. And, perhaps, every year, while the Easter bells still peal, we are not only being drawn into a circle of sacred memory, but being reminded to look to the future, and ask: on what venture are we embarked? And with what forces are we in league?

My time living wild also means I am one of few people qualified by experience to assess the French publishing phenomenon Deer Man, Geoffroy Delorme’s account of seven “wild man” years in the Forêt de Bord, Normandy, living among a herd of roe deer. And, as it happens, I am writing this in France, next door to a 3,000-acre forest. With roe deer.

Delorme declares he adjourned to the forest following a chance meeting with a Capreolus capreolus buck. It inspired him to seek “the nobility of life in the wild” and “my true place in the order of things”. A drop-out — Delorme was home-schooled and solitary and there are darkly hinted-at problems with his family — his choice to be adopted by roe deer is instructive, a prime case of “elective affinity”. Vulnerable young man identifies with an animal species regarded as vulnerable. (I mean, consider Bambi’s childhood.)

Delorme is hardly the first to go off the civilised script. For centuries, misfitting men have been compelled to venture into the backwoods and the boondocks, starting with Enkidu in the Epic of Gilgamesh, followed by Christ in the wilderness. (Women rarely do wilding.) The imperatives are obvious: the search for self-awareness, the sense of suffocation from human rules, the belief that we are truer to our original selves in a state of nature, the concern that civilisation despoils the landscape. The Americans even constructed an original national art form from this quartet of anxieties: The Western.

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But nobility in the wild is hard to do. I nearly totalled myself by consuming a poisonous mushroom; Jimi Hendrix’s Purple Haze is fun jacked up on the party stereo, not when you are paralysed and your ability to detect colour is limited to 50 shades of mauve, and you are praying for the psychedelic madness to end.

And every day there are half-moons of dirt under the fingernails. And every day the pathetic anxiety of: “Will there be enough to eat?”

Delorme suffers bouts of hypothermia, doesn’t comb his hair and washes in rainwater trapped in a tree trunk. (Spoiler alert: this does not preclude a love interest, a woman.) Although he tries to “live of the forest” rather than “in it”, there are only so many berries and bramble leaves — the latter a roe deer staple — he can bear, and he “borrows” the food set out by hunters to tempt wild boar, and sometimes buys tins and pasta. On occasion, he nips off home for a bowl of fromage blanc, and a hot shower.

Mind you, Henry David Thoreau, the patron saint of us latter day wild men, used to go home for cookies with Mom; he just omitted to mention this in Walden. Ditto the soirees in the cabin. Imagine my surprise to find that Bear ‘Born Survivor’ Grylls avails himself of hotels when roughing it. In case you are wondering, my downfall, my apple in Eden, was a cheese and tomato sandwich; then again, I was on bedside duty, my father in intensive care following a heart attack. You don’t get much wild duck on the menu at Hereford County Hospital.

Even with cheats, Delorme finds himself changed. Forest living improves his senses, and he loses the cultured taste for carbohydrate. I lived near carb-less on my Paleo diet, and was heroin chic skinny — but never quicker in body or mind. Tested, I had faster reflexes than a striking cobra.

Seven years with the herd, and Delorme emerges from the forest an advocate for his deer “family”. His understanding of the deer mind is impressive. The book, now translated into 11 languages, is recounted in fragmentary, vivid episodes. Rightly, Delorme accords the beasts agency and personality, and tells us a great, humbling truth: despite our self-congratulatory self-labelling as homo sapiens sapiens (“doubly wise humans”) we are still animals, and the species barrier can be membrane thin. Humans and animals alike seek social contact. In a key moment, Daguet, a young buck, lies on Delorme’s lap like a dog; Daguet wants to be petted. This is not a given in the animal kingdom: the forest foxes remain aloof from Delorme’s charms.

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Understandably so. There is competition down in the woods, as well as co-operation. In my year wilding I had an intensely rivalrous relationship with a buzzard, since we both had our eyes on the rabbits. For all Delorme’s pretence of being a deer, humans are not ruminant herbivores. They are omnivores, with canine teeth for tearing meat, and have a digestive system similar to a dog’s. In other words, foxes and humans occupy the same ecological niche, and like a bit of venison on the menu.

By identifying with doe-eyed roe deer rather than going properly hunter-gatherer Paleo, Delorme comes askew on his own key question, of how to preserve the Forêt de Bord’s roe deer — and by extension, deer and wildlife elsewhere in over-populated Europe. His proposed solution is to “make these marvellous animals responsible for their own management”. This is a Pan pipe dream. Self-regulating deer, as per the pre-anthropogenic wilderness, would also require, for instance, herds of aurochs (wild cattle) to establish and maintain grassy glades. And lynx and wolves to keep the auroch and deer numbers in check.

And unfortunately, wild animals have the bad habit of not staying put, and wandering into human habitation and farmland, often wreaking havoc. Thus the wild things either need to be fenced in (resulting not in a Wilderness but a safari park.) Or culled.

Delorme’s idea for self-regulating deer, like other forms of rewilding, springs from an anti-human source. He confesses to being “disgusted by my own species”. But if you treat humans as the problem, they will be. Rewilding, which is predicated on no or little human presence in vast tracts of land, philosophically forecloses the possibility of humans living in harmony with nature.

Alas for rewilders, humans have been intertwined in the West’s ecosystems for so long that journeying back into a pristine wilderness is not an option — even in France, where the population density is 11 persons per km² (about a quarter that of England). The land is finite and the demands upon it — of economics, services, sport — are a real and growing danger. Management may be a dirty word in contemporary conservation, but without management, settling the competing claims to land for the good of all — deer included — is impossible.

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Ironically, Delorme’s Forêt de Bord has, for millennia, been managed. Formerly it was the property of the Dukes of Normandy and later it became a royal forest of the Kingdom of France.  It has been managed for timber, for houses and for fuel. Oh, and for deer-hunting.

Delorme rails against deer-hunting. Is this wise or logical? After all, deer-hunting as a form of forest-management merely inserts the human predator into the woody ecosystem rather than the lynx or the wolf. Like them, humans are born hunters, and our brains are wired to pursue game. Writing a CV, getting a job, going shopping: these are merely substitute activities for tracking a deer, and putting a spear through its heart, and taking home the flesh to the family cave.

Delorme’s eschewal of hunting means he offers only a partial experience of wild living. He is aware of the dangers of the forest, but less so of the opportunities, the constant alertness for lunch, the skill required for stalking, the atavistic satisfaction of hunting for the pot, and the realisation: Venatio, ergo sum. We are animals, and hunting — if we can still find the killer within after the diverting, sapping decades of consumer society — is truer, more honest than buying meat in shrink-wrapped plastic from Sainsbury’s.

Hunters have a vested interest in bounteous habitat, and bounding deer. You cannot kill non-existent animals. In France, where la chasse remains a way of life, the million-strong Fédération National des Chasseurs (FNC) is increasingly articulating itself as pro-conservation and anti-industrialised agriculture (the real destroyer of the countryside.) The Fédération’s current TV ad runs like a promo for Friends of the Earth.

Delorme’s anti-hunt rhetoric is, then, ultimately deer-defeating. In crowded days like these, a roe deer’s salvation could just be the ethical hunter, an echo of our prehistoric self. And if you are a deer, does it really matter whether you die by a bullet or being ripped apart by a lynx?