was no whit less superstitious than most people of his time,
evidently believed it to be so. According to him, among other
marvels, Faust was killed by the devil wringing his neck. While
he lived he had taken about with him a dog, which was really
a devil. A similar opinion would seem to have been held of
Faust by Luther also, who in Widmann’s Faust-book is mentioned
as having declared that, by God’s help, he had been able
to ward off the evils which Faust with his sorceries had sought to
put upon him. The passage, with the omission of Faust’s name,
occurs word for word in Luther’s Table-talk (ed. C. E. Förstemann,
vol. i. p. 50). It is not improbable, then, that Widmann, in
supplying the name of the necromancer omitted in the Table-talk,
may be giving a fuller account of the conversation.
Bullinger also, in his Theatrum de beneficiis (Frankf., 1569)
mentions Faust as one of those “of whom the Scriptures speak,
in various places, calling them magi.” Lastly Johann Weiher,
Wierus or Piscinarius (1515–1588)—a pupil of Cornelius Agrippa,
body physician to the duke of Cleves and a man of enlightenment,
who opposed the persecution of witches—in his De praestigiis
daemonum (Basel, 1563, &c.), speaks of Faust as a drunken
vagabond who had studied magic at Cracow, and before 1540
had practised “this beautiful art shamelessly up and down
Germany, with unspeakable deceit, many lies and great effect.”
He goes on to tell how the magician had revenged himself on
an unhappy parish priest, who had refused to supply him any
longer with drink, by giving him a depilatory which removed
not only the beard but the skin, and further, how he had insulted
a poor wretch, for no better reason than that he had a black
beard, by greeting him as his cousin the devil. Of his superhuman
powers Weiher evidently believes nothing, but he tells
the tale of his being found dead with his neck wrung, after the
whole house had been shaken by a terrific din.
The sources above mentioned, which were but the first of numerous works on Faust, of more or less value, appearing throughout the next two centuries, give a sufficient picture of the man as he appeared to his contemporaries: a wandering charlatan who lived by his wits, cheiromantist, astrologer, diviner, spiritualist medium, alchemist, or, to the more credulous, a necromancer whose supernatural gifts were the outcome of a foul pact with the enemy of mankind. Whatever his character, his efforts to secure a widespread notoriety had, by the time of his death, certainly succeeded. By the latter part of the 16th century he had become the necromancer par excellence, and all that legend had to tell about the great wizards of the middle ages, Virgil, Pope Silvester, Roger Bacon, Michael Scot, or the mythic Klingsor, had become for ever associated with his name. When in 1587, the oldest Faust-book was published, the Faust legend was, in all essential particulars, already complete.
The origin of the main elements of the legend must be sought far back in the middle ages and beyond. The idea of a compact with the devil, for the purpose of obtaining superhuman power or knowledge, is of Jewish origin, dating from the centuries immediately before and after the Christian era which produced the Talmud, the Kabbalah and such magical books as that of Enoch. In the mystical rites—in which blood, as the seat of life, played a great part—that accompanied the incantations with which the Jewish magicians evoked the Satanim—the lowest grade of those elemental spirits (shedim) who have their existence beyond the dimensions of time and space—we have the prototypes and originals of all the ceremonies which occupy the books of magic down to the various versions of the Höllenzwang ascribed to Faust. The other principle underlying the Faust legend, the belief in the essentially evil character of purely human learning, has existed ever since the triumph of Christianity set divine revelation above human science. The legend of Theophilus—a Cilician archdeacon of the 6th century, who sold his soul to Satan for no better reason than to clear himself of a false charge brought against him by his bishop—was immensely popular throughout the middle ages, and in the 8th century formed the theme of a poem in Latin hexameters by the nun Hroswitha of Gandersheim, who, especially in her description of the ritual of Satan’s court, displays a sufficiently lively and original imagination. Equally widespread were the legends which gathered round the great name of Gerbert (Pope Silvester II.). Gerbert’s vast erudition, like Roger Bacon’s so far in advance of his age, naturally cast upon him the suspicion of traffic with the infernal powers; and in due course the suspicion developed into the tale, embellished with circumstantial and harrowing details, of a compact with the arch-fiend, by which the scholar had obtained the summit of earthly ambition at the cost of his immortal soul. These are but the two most notable of many similar stories,[1] and, in an age when the belief in witchcraft and the ubiquitous activity of devils was still universal, it is natural that they should have been retold in all good faith of a notorious wizard who was himself at no pains to deny their essential truth. The Faust legend, however, owes something of its peculiar significance also to the special conditions of the age which gave it birth: the age of the Renaissance and the Reformation. The opinion that the religious reformers were the champions of liberty of thought against the obscurantism of Rome is the outgrowth of later experience. To themselves they were the protagonists of “the pure Word of God” against the corruptions of a church defiled by the world and the devil, and the sceptical spirit of Italian humanism was as abhorrent to them as to the Catholic reactionaries by whom it was again trampled under foot. If then, in Goethe’s drama, Faust ultimately develops into the type of the unsatisfied yearning of the human intellect for “more than earthly meat and drink,” this was because the great German humanist deliberately infused into the old story a spirit absolutely opposed to that by which it had originally been inspired. The Faust of the early Faust-books, of the ballads, the dramas and the puppet-plays innumerable which grew out of them, is irrevocably damned because he deliberately prefers human to “divine” knowledge; “he laid the Holy Scriptures behind the door and under the bench, refused to be called doctor of Theology, but preferred to be styled doctor of Medicine.” The orthodox moral of the earliest versions is preserved to the last in the puppet-plays. The Voice to the right cries: “Faust! Faust! desist from this proposal! Go on with the study of Theology, and you will be the happiest of mortals.” The Voice to the left answers: “Faust! Faust! leave the study of Theology. Betake you to Necromancy, and you will be the happiest of mortals!” The Faust legend was, in fact, the creation of orthodox Protestantism; its moral, the inevitable doom which follows the wilful revolt of the intellect against divine authority as represented by the Holy Scriptures and its accredited interpreters. Faust, the contemner of Holy Writ, is set up as a foil to Luther, the champion of the new orthodoxy, who with well-directed inkpot worsted the devil when he sought to interrupt the sacred work of rendering the Bible into the vulgar tongue.
It was doubtless this orthodox and Protestant character of the Faust story which contributed to its immense and immediate popularity in the Protestant countries. The first edition of the Historia von D. Johann Fausten, by an unknown compiler, published by Johann Spies at Frankfort in 1587, sold out at once. Though only placed on the market in the autumn, before the year was out it had been reprinted in four pirated editions. In the following year a rhymed version was printed at Tübingen, a second edition was published by Spies at Frankfort and a version in low German by J. J. Balhorn at Lübeck. Reprints and amended versions continued to appear in Germany every year, till they culminated in the pedantic compilation of Georg Rudolf Widmann, who obscured the dramatic interest of the story by an excessive display of erudition and by his well-meant efforts to elaborate the orthodox moral. Widmann’s version of 1599 formed the basis of that of Johann Nicholaus Pfitzer, published at Nuremberg in 1674, which passed through six editions, the last appearing in 1726. Like Widmann, Pfitzer was more zealous for imparting information than for perfecting a work of art, though he had the good taste to restore the episode of the evocation of Helen, which Widmann had expunged as unfit for Christian readers. Lastly there appeared, about
- ↑ Many are given in Kiesewetter’s Faust, p. 112, &c.
