Chapter 1 details the major events in Goethe’s long and varied life, from its beginning to its end, and explains their significance for his development. The scope of the account ranges from intimate details of Goethe’s life to the impact of major political events on him and his work. It follows Goethe from location to location, examines the many strands of his career and considers particularly important relationships, professional, literary, intellectual and personal. The chapter also explains the circumstances of the composition of all his most significant works.

The story of Faust has an extraordinary, abiding and increasing appeal, and for that there can be little doubt that Goethe is largely responsible. The story of Faust is a modern myth, and in Goethe's treatment it becomes a myth of modernity. His play is about what it means to be a modern human being: what is the point and value of human life in the modern world. ‘Modern’ is shown by Goethe in this work to mean, quite explicitly, post-Christian. In order to make modernity the theme of his play, and not just its precondition, Goethe made two fundamental changes to the structure of the myth that he inherited. The first change enabled him to start writing the play in the early 1770s: he introduced the story of Faust's love for Gretchen. The second enabled him, around 1800, to work out how to complete it: he changed Faust's agreement with the Devil from a pact, or contract, to a wager. By comparison with these two adaptations to the core of the myth, Goethe's most notorious change – his allowing, or apparently allowing, Faust to go to Heaven – is little more than a flourish, and not even original to him. It is through these two distinctively Goethean features, and not through a superficial embellishment of its conclusion, that Goethe's play asks and answers its deepest questions. The moment when Goethe's Faust shakes hands with the Devil is a moment of the deepest possible seriousness: in this episode everything is at issue – life and death, value and emptiness, personality and modernity. If we turn first to the origin, as far as we know, of all versions of the Faust story, the anonymous Volksbuch, or chapbook, published in Frankfurt in 1587, we find that the original Dr Faust's agreement with the devil is spread over three conversations with Mephostophiles, as he is here called. In the first conversation Mephostophiles asserts that it is beyond his power to make any agreement with Faust until he has returned to Hell to seek authority from Lucifer, his infernal master (17–19 = 1587, 11–14).

‘The approach to the Christian religion that is flourishing in our time’, the young Hegel wrote in 1795, ‘…takes reason and morality as the basis of its analysis and as an aid to elucidation calls on the spirit of the nations and the ages.’ Two figures above all must have been in his mind as representative of the two great currents that he thought were renewing Christian thinking: Kant (‘reason and morality’) and Herder (‘the spirit of the nations and the ages’). In Kant's treatise, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, published two years previously, the heritage of critical and rationalist deism had been given newly powerful expression through its fusion with a moral theory centred on human freedom and autonomy. Herder, both pupil and declared adversary of Kant, whom he surpassed both in learning and in linguistic ability, had for over two decades been attempting to synthesise the rapidly growing wealth of historical, philological and anthropological knowledge about the nations, literatures and religions of the world into a universal history that both respected human variety and explained the unique position he, as an ordained minister, attributed to Christianity. Hegel himself soon came to realise that two such potent and antagonistic thinkers could not, by a mere verbal gesture, simply be waved together into a single contemporary ‘approach to the Christian religion’. On the contrary, they represented two conflicting forces, both of which, from different, perhaps opposite directions, threatened the Bible-based, Lutheran Christianity in which he, like them, had been brought up.