Faust: A Tragedy
Christian religion is completely adverse to that exaggerated and
superstitious belief in the power of the Devil and Evil Spirits,
which was so prevalent in the first ages of the Church, and
increased to such a fearful extent in the Middle Ages. The Jewish
religion, too, was founded on the great and fundamental doctrine
that there is but one God, as opposed to the Hindoo and Persian
notion of conflicting divinities, so universally spread over the
East; and all the wild waste of doctrines concerning demons
(διδασκαλίαι δαιμονίων, 1 Tim. iv. 1), with which the fertility of
Rabbinical invention overran the fair garden of Mosaic theology, has
been very properly relegated by German divines to its true source,
the Babylonish captivity. Such, however, is the proneness of human
reason to all sorts of superstition, that, though the New Testament
Scriptures expressly declare[*i3] that Jesus Christ came to annihilate
the power, and destroy the works of the Devil, the monotheism of
primitive Christianity was, in a few centuries, magnified into a
monstrous system of demonological theology, little better than
Oriental Dualism. The declension to this superstition was so much
the more easy, as there were not wanting certain passages of
Scripture (Eph. ii. 2, and vi. 12; 2 Thess. ii. 9), which ignorant
and bigoted priests could easily turn to their own purposes, in
magnifying this fancied power of the great enemy of man. A man like
Del Rio would find devils within the walls of the New Jerusalem; so
wonderfully sharp is his Jesuitical nose to scent out even the
slightest motion of infernal agency.
The Gnostic and Manichæan heresies which infested the Church during
the first five or six centuries could not be without their influence
in exalting the power of the principle of evil; but writers of a far
more philosophical character and more sober tone than those Oriental
heresiarchs cannot be exempted from the charge of having contributed
fairly to the same result. Of those fathers of the Church who did
not, like Arnobius and Lactantius, exclaim against all philosophy,
as opposed to the simplicity of the gospel, the greater number
belonged to the Alexandrian school of Neo-Platonists, who, with all
their sublime idealism, are known to have cherished, with a peculiar
fondness, some of the most childish and superstitious notions to
which philosophic mysticism has given birth. No lover of piety and
virtue springing from a high and soul-ennobling philosophy, but must
love and reverence the memory of such names as Proclus, Plotinus,
and Jamblichus. It cannot, however, be denied that the overstrained
ideas of these pure spirits went a great way to promote the growth
of the prevalent superstitions with regard to theurgy and magic. The
life of Plotinus seems, from the account given by Porphyry, to have
been considered by himself and his admirers as an uninterrupted
intercourse with spiritual intelligences, yea, with the one original
Spirit himself; and in the Enneads of this prince of philosophic
mystics, we have already fully developed all that system of mutual
sympathies and antipathies, of concords and discords, between the
all-animated parts of that mighty animal the World, which so readily
allowed themselves to be worked into a system of practical theurgy
and magic. Jamblichus, again, was not only a mystical philosopher,
who sought to arrive at union (ἕνωσις) with the Divine Being by
intellectual contemplation, but a magician and theurgist, as his
work on the Egyptian mysteries, and the many legends told of him by
his biographers, sufficiently prove.
I have been thus particular in holding forth the decidedly magical
and theurgic character of the Alexandrian School of Platonists, in
the second and third centuries, as it is easy to perceive that the
revival of the Platonic, or rather Neo-Platonic philosophy, on
occasion of the restoration of learning in the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries, had a principal share in the formation of the
theosophic and magical views of the sixteenth century, which it is
my intention here to characterise. The world had become heartily
sick of the eternal boom-booming of the Aristotelian bitterns.[*i4]
The hungry spirit of man, aroused from its lethargic slumber,
demanded some more vital nourishment than the skeleton distinctions
of a thought-dissecting logic, and the vain pomposity of a learned
terminology, could afford; and when such men as Dante, Petrarch, and
Boccacio had taught the world to prefer the fulness of poetical life
to the nakedness of scholastic speculation, no wonder that Plato,
Plotinus, and Proclus, when brought into the West by the learned
fugitives of Constantinople, should have received a hearty welcome,
and exercised a deep-spread influence over the philosophy of the
succeeding centuries. Gemistus Pletho, Bessarion, and Marsilius
Ficinus, are well known as the three principal restorers of the
Platonic philosophy in the fifteenth century: but it deserves
especially to be remarked, that these men were far from being pure
worshippers of their great master, but mixed it up with the theurgic
dreamings of Jamblichus and Porphyry, nay, even went as far back as
Pythagoras and Hermes Trismegistus, and held the simple Platonic
doctrines as of comparatively little consequence, unless taken in
connection with the mighty system which, out of such strange
materials, had been built up by the Neo-Platonists.[*i5]
In connection with the revival of the Platonic philosophy in Italy,
we cannot omit to mention the name of Reuchlin, whose zeal for
cabbalistical studies is said to have been first excited by the
famous Johannes Picus Mirandula.[*i6] Reuchlin was a German, and is
the more interesting to us as the contemporary, or rather the master
and instructor of Agrippa, Melancthon, and many celebrated men of
the sixteenth century, whose names stand immediately connected with
the story of Doctor Faust. To complete the wild dreamings of the
Italian Platonists, nothing was now wanting but a revival of the
Rabbinical and Talmudistic lore; and Reuchlin, whom Europe still
reveres as the father of Hebrew learning in modern Theology, was
precisely the man for this purpose. It was natural that the language
of the sacred Book should have been considered as containing
something mystical and transcendental even in its very letters; and
we need not wonder that the enthusiasm of the first Hebrew scholars
in Germany should have discovers the key of all the sciences in that
cabbalistic lore, which we are now accustomed to use in common
discourse, as a synonym for the most childish and unintelligible
jargon.
Taking, thus, the prevailing theology of the Church, in connection
with the impulse which the human mind had received from the revival
of the Platonic philosophy, and the strong reaction, which the
risings of independent thought in the breasts of men like Telesius,
Campanella, and Bruno, had raised against the long-established
despotism of the Aristotelian philosophy,--and all this worked up to
a point by the revival of Cabbalism, through Reuchlin and other
cultivators of Oriental literature,--we shall have no difficulty in
perceiving at once the leading features of the age in which Faust
flourished, and the causes which led to their development. We see
the human intellect, in being roused into new life from the icy
night of scholasticism, surrounded by the glowing but unsubstantial
morning-clouds of a philosophy of feeling and imagination.
Sufficiently occupied with gazing, child-like, on the hovering
shapes that teemed so richly from its new-awakened being, it had no
tune, no wish, to enter upon the severe task of conscious manhood,
that of criticising its own powers, and defining, with cautious
precision, what the mind of man can know, and what it cannot
know,--and was thus destined, for a short season, to flounder
through the misty regions of theosophy and magic, till it should
learn, from experience, to find at once its starting-point and its
goal, in the exhaustless fulness of actual Nature.
In such an age, and under the influence of opinions, religious and
philosophical, so different from those now prevalent, flourished the
mysterious hero of modern magic, whom the pen of Goethe has made,
likewise, one of the principal heroes of modern poetry. That a good
deal of obscurity should have gathered around such a
character,--that the love of the marvellous should have united with
the ignorance of the age, in magnifying juggling tricks into
miracles of magic, and clouding with a poetical mistiness that which
was clear and definite,--is not to be wondered at. But that such a
character actually existed, the tradition perpetuated from age to
age on its native soil, and found, with little variation, scattered
over almost every country, and clothed in almost every language of
Europe, is of itself sufficient evidence. Popular legends seldom
spring, like the antediluvian and prelapsarian traditions of the
Talmudists, or the genealogies of old Celtic families, from mere
airy nothingness; and, however contradictory and inconsistent their
integrant parts may appear, they have all formed themselves around a
nucleus of substantial reality. Nevertheless, as there is nothing so
absurd which has not been asserted by some one of the philosophers,
so there have not been wanting men of learning and investigation,
who have seriously set themselves to the task of proving away the
personality of the renowned Doctor Faust.[*i7] But to detect a few
chronological inaccuracies in the common popular legend, and to hold
out to merited contempt the silliness, and even the impossibility of
many things contained in it, may afford an opportunity for the
display of a pedantic erudition, but can give no ground for the
sweeping conclusion that the person, of whom these stories are told,
did actually never exist. The monks were clever fellows; but, with
all their ability, they would have found it difficult to invent such
a story as Faust--so generally believed--out of mere nothing. The
sceptics themselves are sensible of this; and, accordingly, Dürr,
the chief of them, while he denies the personality of Faust the
magician, endeavours to give a probable reason for the prevalence of
the story, by throwing the whole burden upon the back of Faust the
printer, father-in-law of Peter Schoeffer, and fellow-workers both
of Guttenburg,--the famous trio, among whom the honour of the
invention of printing is divided. The envy of the monks, acting on
the ignorance of the age, here comes most opportunely into play, to
explain how the inventor of such a novel art of multiplying books
should have been generally accounted a magician. There can, indeed,
be little doubt that he was so accounted by many ignorant people;
and as this idea is sufficiently poetical, Klingemann has taken
advantage of it in his tragedy of Doctor Faust.[*i8] The main
objection, however, on the face of this theory, is, that all the
legends of Faust agree in placing the hero of magic fully half a
century later than Faust the printer, who flourished about 1440. It
is true, indeed, that some of the _Volksbücher_ (_vide_ Dürr, _ut
supra_) ascribe to the Emperor Maximilian, what is generally told of
Charles V., viz. that Doctor Faust conjured up before him the
apparitions of Alexander the Great and his queen; but the other
tricks, which were played before Cardinal Campegio and Pope Adrian,
agree better with the age of Charles V. than with that of
Maximilian. It is quite possible, however, that Faust may have
exhibited his magical skill before both these emperors, whose reigns
occupied the space from 1492 to 1558, Maximilian dying in 1519; for
even the date of Maximilian will never bring us back to the era when
Faust the printer was in his glory.