The Historical Faustus

       So familiar in world literature, music and the arts, Faust is a figure whose origins are almost forgotten, if not unknown. Most popular is the argument that there really existed such a person in Germany in the early 1500's, for that seems to be what the Faust Book tells us.  It is certainly true that literary scholarship has, since its beginnings with the German Romantics, pursued its quest for an "historical Faust" within the homeland, and has valued the Faust Book (Historia von Dr. Johann Faustus, late 1500's) as a source of information about this national figure.  Such fascination is familiar to students of ancient lore, witness Arthurian romance, witness the monumental work by Robert Graves with Greek myth.  Whether you are trying to discern "authentic" parts of a tale, or using the tale to infer historical fact, you are liable to bump into your own nose, since literary and imaginative components of a tradition soar far beyond actual events.  Obviously, precisely those tales in the Faust Book which are not confirmed in German archives are the ones more likely to be authentic literary creations.

        In so far as literature is concerned (the Faust figure became famous in German lands only as a consequence of the print medium), the first surviving Faust tales turn up toward the end of the century in Nuremberg, the most important city in central Europe at that time.  In one such collection, that by Christoph Roßhirt in about 1580, Faust's tricks on peasants, moneylenders, and on the nobility, etc., differ from similar folk tales only in that Faust is a sorcerer aided by a familiar spirit.  About the same time, and probably in the same city, a gifted writer puts together a charming little novel using some of these apparently well-known Faust tales, and some more besides.  This is the manuscript which I offer here in English translation. It is also important as one of the very earliest novels in any modern language.

       Why do I call it a novel?  The Faust Book author pulls all his episodes together artistically, no small accomplishment at this early date in northern Europe.  The work has a beginning, a middle and an end, all narrated with grace and a sense of humor that sets the author apart from the tales he tells.  Yet he puts the whole story into the service of his own idea, his peculiar sense and view of the world, which is what probably directed him to the Faust legend in the first place.  Faustus was a name which meant a great deal in the religious debate at the focus of intellectual life in Europe during the 1500's.

       Nuremberg was a city still wrapped up in that great church schism begun by Martin Luther (1483-1545), and finally decided by a separate council of the Roman Church at Trent, 1545, from which the reform congregations were excluded.  But of course the reformers differed among themselves, too.  Doctrine played a central role in everyone's thinking.  It constituted the principal guide not only in private life but also for public policy and even for basic business assumptions.  In Nuremberg, where Luther's pupils (like Andreas Osiander, famous today as publisher of Copernicus' work) occupied important church offices.  The unknown author of the Faust novel need not have been a preacher, or at all connected with the church, to have been fluent in the terms of the debate.

        Modern readers, of course, are not. While the Faust figure captured creative imaginations and took on a life of its own, the old religious quarrels were eventually outdated and forgotten. Professors who delved into the Faust theme hundreds of years later no longer thought of religion as motive for writing what scholarly jargon now insisted on calling by the Romantic term Volksbuch, "folk book."  Instead, they devoted their efforts and enormous resources to unearthing an historical Faustus--and they found him, of course:  in archives, in memoirs, and  in public records several plausible individuals were attested. Probably none of them was known to the author of the Faust Book, or to the citizens of Nuremberg.  "Cutting edge" academic research has not asked.

        But a genuine historical Faustus was especially well known in Luther's century.  This Faustus had lived more than a thousand years earlier in the Roman provice of Numidia.  Martin Luther and his pupils were very familiar with him as a notorious heretic.  This was because Luther, as Augustinian monk, sought his authority, next only to the Bible, from the patron saint of his order, Aurelius Augustinus (354-430).  During the formative years of the Church Augustine had played a decisive role in setting orthodox Catholic belief off from unacceptable heresies.  Perhaps his principal opponent was the leader of the sect to which Augustine had himself once belonged, the very able debater named Faustus.  In Augustine's extensive opus, widely read in the great new edition by Desiderius Erasmus, the largest individual work comprises the treatises Against Faustus.

       This North African Faustus was a bishop among the Manichees, a sect which claimed to base everything on reason.  Its members were in fact skilled in astronomical calculations and predictions.  But Faustus made greatest pretensions to understanding good and evil.  Characteristic of Manichaeism was its incisive dualism, which saw the world as divided between powers of light and darkness.  To Augustine, this seemed tantamount to rejecting monotheism, and he preserved for us his trenchant debate against Faustus.  Lutherans of a later century found in this record support for their own insistence that the Grace of God is all inclusive, yet everywhere and always present in the world, far surpassing human understanding.  As to Faustus' faith in his own intellect, they easily understood that as the influence of the devil, and of course Luther liked to draw a parallel between the Manichees and the Church of Rome, which he charged with also dispensing and manipulating God's Grace.

       This Augustinian / Lutheran notion of an all-encompassing Grace of God seems to be the central problem in the Faust Book. Faustus simply cannot believe it.  The novel tells us over and over again that Faustus' sin is that fundamental one, condemned throughout the Old and the New Testaments, of pride in imagining that his wicked deeds surpass God's forgiveness.  We see Faustus availing himself of every means he can devise to make himself believe in the Grace of God.  His devil tells him flatly that by these very efforts he damns himself to hell.  The Faust Book's preoccupation with this problem of "justification" reflects the concerns of Protestatism toward the end of the sixteenth century.

        In the last few years of his life, Martin Luther had exerted great diplomatic effort toward presenting a united front at the anticipated Church Council.  He invited his colleagues from Switzerland, South and West Germany, even England, first to Wittenberg, then to Schmalkalden (1537), where their "Articles of Faith" were indeed formulated.  But the Church Council did not convene until the year of his death, and the Germans were not represented.  Although one of its first acts was to affirm Papal authority in matters of doctrine (rejecting Lutheran sola scriptura), the Council did also reject Pelagianism, or the heresy that man can effect his own salvation.  In subsequent decades this question, as to whether the human being cannot at least prompt the all important Grace of God, continued to be hotly disputed among Protestants.  This socalled "synergism" dispute culminated in the Book of Concord (1579-81), formulated during the same years as the Faust Book.  Should we choose to read the Faust Book in the light of those contemporary arguments, then Faust's stubborn persistance in achieving salvation on his own hook might be termed Pelagianism:  Faustus embodies the heretical notion that man can overcome original sin to achieve moral freedom and responsibility.

or read about the Faust Book                --and I would be most grateful for your comments.