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We have the testimony of Martin Luther, for example, who in the context of one of his “Table Talks” (1536–7) incidentally referred to Faust, his contemporary, as a conjurer and necromancer who was wont to refer to the devil as his brother-in-law.
In the sixteenth century, an age of great religious turmoil and fervor, the alchemist-magicians were seen as tampering with the divine order of things. They furtively took minerals, crystals, and waters out of God’s nature and carried them off into their laboratories and, by compounding, boiling, distilling, and filtrating, forced them to minister to their dark purposes. They were “speculating the elements,” illicitly prying into deeply hidden mysteries.
But the enterprise of experimenting on Nature, of teasing her into manifestations, “tempting” her, in the sense of laying bare her workings by experiment … that all this … was itself the work of the “Tempter,” was the conviction of earlier epochs. (Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus, New York, 1960, p. 17, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter)
Surely where there is temptation, the devil, or Mephistopheles, cannot be far behind.
There were the medieval legends about Virgil, the Roman poet and author of the Aeneid, whom the Middle Ages had endowed with superhuman wisdom and prophetic powers; and much entertainment was found in the rude tricks perpetrated by the arch-prankster Till Eulenspiegel.
for twenty-four years Mephistopheles would do Faust’s bidding, after which he would collect his soul to be roasted in Hell. It was a plot made to order to be a warning not to do as Faust did—not to reach for powers that lay beyond one, not to “speculate the elements,” but to rest content with the approved answers that were provided by the Scriptures and by the inspired and approved ancient philosophers.
A new pride in the grandeur of the individual, fed by a rekindled confidence in the capacity of human reason to unravel nature’s mysteries, made it possible to see in Faust not only the sinner but also a representative example of what is noble and divine in man: an unquenchable thirst for knowledge and an inborn need to explore—by spiritual as well as sensuous means—the limits of human potential.
In 1773, as a twenty-four-year-old law student at the University of Strasbourg, Goethe sketched out the first doggerel verses of the opening monologue of Faust—intentionally “bad” verse, a reminiscence of the puppet theater.
“speculation”
abeyance.
And a bit later, when we witness Faust bemoaning his painfully futile encounter with the Earth Spirit, there is a knock on the door. It is Wagner, his disciple and assistant, who had listened to his master’s outcries as they echoed through the corridors. As a devotee of traditional scholarship and loyal defender of the sanctity of venerable texts, he says upon entering the study: Excuse me, but I heard your declamation; was it a passage from Greek tragedy? I should like to profit from such elocution, (522–4)
Mephisto, the no-nonsense materialist contemptuous of poetic imagination, scoffs at Faust and recommends that he make himself over into a dramatic character—only in this manner could he hope to find fulfillment. It is a provocation directed not only at Faust but at the reader-spectator as well. And it is the Faust drama—itself a poetic battleground between poetry and anti-poetry—that continuously generates provisional answers to Mephisto’s challenge. After all, acting counter to Mephisto’s corrosive stance is our realization that Faust need not bother himself to make an “alliance with a poet.”
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To find textual confirmation for one’s own intuited image of unity in Faust is the exhilarating reward of devoted study.
What is it that keeps Faust dissatisfied, even though he has mastered all the academic disciplines of his day? Why could he not be proud of his accomplishments and have faith in human progress like his redoubtable assistant Wagner?
the answer may be found in the most concentrated symbol of Faust’s imperious need: the all-encompassing Moment, the Augenblick, that is the subject of the wager with Mephisto an...
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To experience, in a single instant, the succession of events that mark our existence in time is equivalent to eliminating time altogether; it means a...
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As temporal creatures, nervously feeding a shortening future into a lengthening past, we attribute to the gods a timeless mode of being and an existence in total simultaneity. Therefore Faust’s craving for the “highest moment” really amounts to the ultimate hubris; he is reaching for more than mere superiority among men—more than Macbeth, who would be king, and more than Oedipus, the incomparable solver of riddles who was the king and came to know it too late. Faust reaches for divinity and is “hell-bent” to burst out of his imprisonment in temporality.
are we not striving for the same with the Singularity? the quest for immortality?
The Devil and Daniel Webster
Mephisto,
“speculators of the elements”
According to the Gospel of Luke, Satan showed to Jesus “all the kingdoms of the world in an instant of time” and then offered them to him; and it is not difficult to see in this second temptation a prefiguration of the Faustian wager, a “harking forward” to late-twentieth-century technological wizardry.
1749 August 28. Johann Wolfgang Goethe born in Frankfurt, Germany.
1768 Falls seriously ill. Returns to Frankfurt. Reads Shakespeare for the first time; also books on alchemy.
“The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.”
1808 Conversation with Napoleon. Faust I appears in complete form.
The mass can only be subdued by massiveness,
Give us the piece you write in pieces!
What good is it to sweat and to create a whole? The audience will yet pick the thing to pieces.
When Nature spins with unconcern the endless thread and winds it on the spindle, when the discordant mass of living things sounds its sullen dark cacophony, who divides the flowing changeless line, infusing life, and gives it pulse and rhythm?
A complex picture without clarity, much error with a little spark of truth— that’s the recipe to brew the potion whence all the world is quenched and edified.
They weep and laugh quite easily; they honor fancy and they like their make-believe. The finished man, you know, is difficult to please; a growing mind will ever show you gratitude.
then I had nothing, yet I had enough: a yen for phantoms, and an urge for truth. Give me back my unconstrained desires, my deep and painful time of bliss, the strength of hate, the force of love, give me back my youth again!
What good is it to speak of inspiration? To him who hesitates it never comes.
What you put off today will not be done tomorrow; you should never let a day slip by. Let resolution grasp what’s possible and seize it boldly by the hair; then you will never lose your grip, 230 but labor steadily, because you must.
you must traverse the circle of creation and move along in measured haste from Heaven through the world to Hell.
spectacle
my pathos certainly would make you laugh, had you not dispensed with laughter long ago.
I waste no words on suns and planets, 280 I only see how men torment themselves. Earth’s little god remains the same and is as quaint as from the first. He would have an easier time of it had you not let him glimpse celestial light; he calls it reason and he only uses it to be more bestial than the beasts.
I pity men in all their misery and actually hate to plague the wretches.
If now he serves me only gropingly, I soon shall lead him into clarity. 310 The gardener knows that when his sapling greens
a good man in his dark and secret longings is well aware which path to go.
Of all the spirits that negate, the rogue to me is the least burdensome.
Man’s diligence is easily exhausted, he grows too fond of unremitting peace. I’m therefore pleased to give him a companion who must goad and prod and be a devil.—
propitious
How decent of so great a personage to be so human with the devil.
that I might behold the warp and the woof of the world’s inmost fabric, of its essential strength and fount and no longer dig about in words.
when spirits speak to spirit— your soul will then unfold its strength. My barren thoughts are wasted within the sight of sacred signs: Spirits, now you hover close to me; if you hear me, answer me! (He opens the book and sees the sign of the macrocosm.)
Am I a god? The light pervades me so! 440 In these pure ciphers I can see living Nature spread out before my soul.
“The world of spirits is not closed; your mind is shut, your heart is dead! Pupil, stand up and unafraid bathe your earthly breast in morning light!”
(He reluctantly turns the pages of the book and perceives the sign of the Earth Spirit.) 460 How differently this new sign works on me! You are nearer to me, spirit of the earth; even now I feel my powers rise
