Goethe's Faust

John R. Williams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000761146
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

Originally published in 1987, this is a thorough and lucid introduction and commentary to the whole of Goethe's Faust. It gives the student of German and European literature valuable insights into the most important work of Germany's foremost poet. German quotations are translated or paraphrased in English and a detailed knowledge of German literature is not assumed. The book traces Goethe's work on the play over 60 years of his creative career and surveys its critical reception over the 200 years since its first appearance. Part One is analysed as a mimetic tragedy, Part Two as an historical and cultural profile of Goethe's own times. The commentary guides the reader carefully through its subtleties and multi-layered references and provides a broad and coherent structure for the overall understanding of the work. It suggests provocative interpretations of some figures and episodes in Part Two and places renewed emphasis on parts of the work that often receive relatively little attention. An appendix surveys the metres and verse forms of the play.

Part One

History, Composition and Reception

Chapter 1

The Sources and Transmission of the Faust Legend

Georg Faust, self-styled ‘Demigod from Heidelberg’, ‘Philosopher of Philosophers’, ‘Magister Georgius Sabellicus, Faustus junior, wellspring of necromancers, astrologer, second magus, chiromancer, aeromancer, second in the art of hydromancy’ - Faust, for all his evident talent for self-advertisement, had a very bad press from his own age.¹ To Abbot Trithemius of Sponheim, he was a vagabond, a braggart and a rogue; to the learned monk Conrad Mutianus Rufus, nothing but a boaster and a fool; to the scholar Joachim Camerarius, a windbag of empty superstition. The city fathers of Nuremberg labelled him ‘the great sodomite and nigromancer’, the reformer Philipp Melanchthon execrated him as a ‘vile beast’ and ‘a stinking privy of the devil’, and the Heidelberg professor Augustin Lercheimer described him as a lewd and devilish scamp, a parasite, glutton and drunkard, who lived from quackery. Even if few of these graphic indictments are based on reliable first-hand experience, and even if the more direct and apparently authentic sources are themselves coloured by prejudice, rivalry, or antipathy - it is still extraordinary that this was the historical figure who would be transmuted into Marlowe’s doomed and anguished scholar, let alone into Goethe’s restlessly striving individual who proceeds through universal experience and error towards his ultimate salvation.

So elusive a figure is the historical Faust (it was a view common in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that he never existed at all), that not only the place and date of his birth and death, not only his academic education and titles, not only his religious affiliation, but even his very names are in doubt. Johann (es), the first name of virtually all the literary Fausts up to Goethe, which was first mentioned in an edition of Melanchthon’s aphorisms by Johannes Manlius in 1562, is presumably a posthumous accretion - unless we accept Mahal’s surmise that he might have been baptized Johann Georg. Current opinion is that his name was Georg or Jörg Faust, and that the name ‘Sabellicus’ by which Trithemius knew him was an assumed ‘professional’ title designed to allude to the Sabines of Italy, a people reputed for sorcery; it is not generally accepted that this was the form of his family name Sabel or Zavel, Latinized in the humanist fashion to Sabellicus. Nor is it commonly believed that ‘Faustus’ was a similar working pseudonym; it is thought to be coincidental that the Latinized form of a common German family name was a happy choice for a future conjuror or magician - Faustus = fortunate. Nevertheless, if we accept that Sabellicus was an adopted name, we must at least allow the possibility that ‘Faustus junior’ was also part of Faust’s self-advertisement, whether by chance or design.

The general consensus is that Faust was bom in Knittlingen, a few miles north of Pforzheim, in or around 1480. Ernst Beutler’s argument that he was one Georg Helmstett(er) who studied at Heidelberg between 1483 and 1489, and was therefore born around 1465 in Helmstadt near Heidelberg, is not widely accepted, though Frank Baron has recently revived this hypothesis.² Unless we accept it, there is no evidence that Faust received any formal university education; the various ranks and titles with which he adorned himself - Magister, Doctor, Commander of the Order of Knights of St John - were surely bogus. There is no historical authority for the siting of his birthplace at Roda near Weimar in the Spies Faustbook, nor at Sondwedel (Anhalt) in Widmann and subsequent versions (see pp. 6ff.). As for Faust’s death, it is believed on the authority of the Zimmerische Chronik that he died violently and mysteriously (possibly even explosively, in the course of an unsuccessful alchemical experiment) at Staufen, a few miles southwest of Freiburg im Breisgau, around 1540.

Otherwise, the ‘facts’ of Faust’s life are meagre. He narrowly avoided a confrontation with Trithemius at Gelnhausen in 1506 - according to the abbot, he had been boasting that he knew the works of Plato and Aristotle by heart, and could perform all Christ’s miracles. He was, again on the hostile evidence of Trithemius, appointed schoolmaster in Kreuznach in 1507 through the good offices of Franz von Sickingen, but fled when charged with pederasty. He appeared as ‘Georgius Faustus, Helmitheus Hedelbergensis’, in Erfurt in 1513, and in 1520 he was paid a handsome sum, ten guilders, for casting a horoscope for the Bishop of Bamberg. He may have met the Prior of Rebdorf, Kilian Leib, in 1528; in the same year he was ordered out of Ingolstadt by the city council, and refused entry to Nuremberg in 1532. He probably knew and visited Daniel Stibar, a Würzburg councillor, prior to 1536; and he apparently cast an ominous horoscope for Philipp von Hütten’s expedition to Venezuela, which set out in 1534 - accurately enough, as it turned out, for the venture was disastrous, and Hütten was murdered in 1546. In 1539 Faust’s reputation was compared by Philipp Begardi to that of Paracelsus - which was by no means intended to flatter either party.

Virtually all the reports of Faust from before or after 1540 present an unflattering, indeed damning, picture of the man - though with such sparse evidence it would be incautious to conclude that he was therefore as great a windbag, charlatan, rogue, or pervert as the no doubt biased accounts suggest. The very fact that Faust was so well known to his contemporaries is of some significance, however they judged him; and anyone who was paid so generously for a horoscope by the Bishop of Bamberg - a tolerant and humanistic prince-bishop far removed from the ambitiously scheming prelate of Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen - must have been more than a mere charlatan or travelling quack. Hans Henning suggests that Faust might have stood midway between the uneducated tricksters and the scholars of his time;³ and Mahal has suggested a psychological profile of Faust as an autodidact of humble origins, with all the insecurity and resentment of the self-made man, the need for self-assertion and the aggressive antagonism towards established scholars. He could have had theoretical and practical knowledge of medicine, astrology and alchemy; he could have had considerable gifts of hypnosis or suggestion, and with the help of a primitive magic lantern would have been capable of putting on a show to impress a credulous public. Being of humble, even peasant, origins, he would have had neither a university education nor a fixed position, and would have joined the army of wandering self-styled scholars whose livelihood depended on their ability to attract and hold an audience with stories of travel and prodigies, with magic tricks, horoscopes, divinations and conjurations.

Nevertheless, there are no reliable contemporary judgements on Faust that cast him in a remotely favourable light, and it was no doubt his very notoriety that led, in the forty or so years after his death, to the accretion of the most sensational and scandalous anecdotes and superstitions around his name. He attracted like a powerful magnet many of the already mythical attributes of his more prominent contemporaries -Agrippa von Nettesheim, Paracelsus, Nostradamus and even, by a fine posthumous irony, through a poem of Hans Sachs, his arch-enemy Trithemius himself;⁴ his name also became associated with many crude pranks and scrapes of the sort previously attributed to figures like Till Eulenspiegel. Above all, in an age conditioned by an obsessive demon-ology, he became known as the man who, for the sake of knowledge, power, fame, riches and pleasure, had made a pact with the devil. As such Faust was, in a rough and ready way, already an ambivalent and composite figure who represented almost emblematically the contradictions and tensions of the age. He was on the one hand the Renaissance scholar, the speculative seeker for truth beyond scholastic or humanist traditions, the astrologer exploring new worlds on earth and beyond, the alchemist or magus searching for the philosophers’ stone, the talisman of the highest philosophical and scientific wisdom; on the other hand, for the Reformation above all, but also for the Counter-Reformation, he was the godless apostate whose presumption and pride had led him, like Icarus, like the Titans, like Lucifer and like Adam, to arrogate to himself powers beyond those properly given to him, to defy God and to ally himself with the devil. At the same time, as Henning suggests, the orthodox or official image of Faust as a renegade intellectual or devil-worshipper did not entirely obscure the popular figure who not only amused and entertained the common people but who, over and above that, might also have been a wish-fulfilment, a fantasy figure who represented an individual’s attempt to rise above the social misery, the cultural stagnation and the political frustrations of an age in which the reformed church had become the pillar of a reinvigorated feudalism.

The crystallization of the brew of quarter-truth, anecdote and fantasy that had accumulated from many different sources was the Historia von D. Johann Fausten, dem weitbeschreyten Zauberer und Schwartzkünstler (History of Dr Johann Faust, the Notorious Magician and Nigromancer), the creative compilation of an anonymous author published by Johann Spies in Frankfurt in 1S87, purporting to be based on Faust’s own writings and claiming to serve as a terrible example and well-meant warning to all arrogant, presumptuous and godless men - as well as a cautionary reminder to the faithful of the snares of the devil. It was the work of a fanatical Lutheran - a Lutheran, moreover, for whom not only anonymity but also the greatest caution in the presentation of his material was necessary. The dedication and preface ‘to the Christian reader’, and the text itself, are spiced with frequent quotations from and references to the Bible, Luther and Melanchthon; the reader is persistently warned against the boldness and arrogance that are themselves a cause of godlessness, and specifically against the temptation of the serpent (Genesis 3: 5), ‘eritis sicut deus’, that impels Faust to unbridled speculation and hence to damnation. Theologically, the book represents the strictest Lutheran orthodoxy; it is an exemplary story, as it were the legend of an anti-saint, seasoned with comic anecdotes, or Schwänke. For all that, the author and publisher were treading on thin ice, not least because the Historia at several points appears to contain travestied parallels to the life of Christ himself - which is why they were careful to parade their Lutheran credentials before and during the treatment of such dangerous material. Already in 1588 a student of Tübingen University, Johannes Feinaug, was punished for producing without Senate permission a rhymed version of the story; his printer, Hock, was imprisoned. And a decade after the publication of the Historia, Augustin Lercheimer wrote a diatribe against the book as a libel on Wittenberg, Luther and Melanchthon, as a collection of’vanities, lies and devil’s filth’, and deploring ‘that the fine and noble art of printing, given to us by God for good purposes, should thus be abused for evil’.⁵

The Historia became a best-seller, as indeed was unsurprising with such a potent combination of stern morality and thrilling sensationalism, theology and science, cosmic experience of heaven and hell, crude pranks, travel descriptions, and pornographic adventures in Constantinople, where the ‘well-equipped’ Faust pleasured the concubines of the Sultan’s harem masquerading as the Prophet - in papal regalia. For all the unevenness and occasional tedium of the telling, it was an edifying and entertaining tale, the success of which lay in the very ambivalence of its appeal, in its manifestly orthodox treatment of dangerous and racy material.

The historical Faust was almost totally obscured as the Historia set down many of the canonical episodes and motifs of the Faust legend -Faust’s dissatisfaction with conventional scholarship; his pact in blood with the devil, or rather with his agent Mephostophiles (sic); the demon’s admission that he, in Faust’s place, would do everything in his power to gain God’s forgiveness; the master-servant relationship, to be reversed at the expiry of the twenty-four-year term; Faust’s questioning of the spirit on theological, philosophical and scientific matters; his cosmic, terrestrial and infernal journeys; the invocation of spirits before an imperial patron; a succession of more or less crude pranks and tricks; the attempt by a pious old man to call Faust to repentance - and Faust’s reaffirmation of his pact with hell; the conjuring of a phantom army by Faust; the provision of a succubus in the form of Helen of Troy as his concubine, by whom he has a son, Justus Faustus; and finally Faust’s agony of spirit and his truly grisly and terrible end. Moreover, the Historia also laid down the basic structure of the Faust legend, a structure that is inherent in the material itself: the curve of Faust’s career from humble beginnings through arrogance and worldliness to the climax of the pact, down through an extensive series of adventures towards his ever more rapidly approaching end.

The immense popularity of the Spies Historia is attested in various ways (quite apart from the case of another Tübingen student, Leipziger, who in 1596 confessed to a pact with the devil in an attempt to relieve his debts; in spite of the fact that he had not actually received any money from the devil, he was ‘gated’ for six months and ordered to prepare himself for the Eucharist).⁶ The Spies version ran to six editions in 1587 alone, and some twenty-two altogether.⁷ It spawned a sequel in 1593, the story of Faust’s disciple Christoph Wagner and his pact with the demon Auerhahn, and even a sequel to the sequel, the D. Johann Fausti Gaukeltasche, purported to have been written by Wagner’s pupil Johann de Luna, the earliest recorded edition of which is dated 1607. More to the point of this survey, the Historia very soon appeared in a number of translations - into Danish (1588), Low German (1589), Flemish (1592), French (1598), and, some time between 1588 and 1592, English. The English translation is The Historie of the damnable life, and deserved death of Doctor Iohn Faustus etc., ‘newly imprinted . . . according to the true Copie printed at Franckfort, and translated into English by P. F. Gent . . . 1592’.⁸ It was this version that furnished Christopher Marlowe with the opportunity to transform the Reformation exemplum of Faust’s blasphemous career into the tragic dissatisfaction of a titanic, if godless, Renaissance scholar.

At this point the transmission of the Faust legend bifurcates, to merge again almost two centuries later with Goethe’s Faust. Before returning to Marlowe’s Dr Faustus, we shall resume the history of the German narrative versions of the legend. Apart from numerous editions of the Historia and its ‘sequels’, the Wagner and Johann de Luna stories, a whole substratum of publications which purported to be by Faust, or to have formed part of his library, proliferated during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries - largely rehashes of earlier cabbalistic writings like the Clavicula Salomonis, and often fraudulently bac...