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Faust pact
The Devil, fighting with God
for the possession of mankind, was supposed to have a special passion for
catching souls. Being the prince of the world he could easily grant even the
most extravagant wishes, and was sometimes willing to pay a high price when a
man promised to be his for time and eternity. Thus originated the idea of
making compacts with the Devil; and it is worthy of note that in these
compacts the Devil is very careful to establish his title to the soul of man
by a faultless legal document. He has, as we shall learn, sufficient reason to
distrust all promises made him by men and saints. Following the authority of
the old legends, we find that even the good Lord frequently lends his
assistance to cheating the Devil out of his own. He is always duped and the
vilest tricks are resorted to to cheat him. While thus the Devil, having
profited by experience, always insists upon having his rights insured by an
unequivocal instrument (which in later centuries is signed with blood); he, in
his turn, is fearlessly trusted to keep his promise, and this is a fact which
must be mentioned to his honor, for although he is said to be a liar from the
beginning, not one case is known, in all devil-lore in which the Devil
attempts to cheat his stipulators. Thus he appears as the most unfairly
maligned person, and as a martyr of simple-minded honesty.
The oldest story of a devil-contract is the legend of Theophilus, first told
by Eutychian, who declares he had witnessed the whole affair with his own
eyes.
The most famous, most significant, and the profoundest story among the legends
of devil-contracts is the saga of Dr. Johannes Faustus. Whether the hero of
the Faust legend derives his name from the Latin faustus, i. e., the favored
one, or from the well-known Mayence goldsmith Fust, the companion of
Gensfleisch vom Gutenberg, the inventor of printing, or whether he was no
historical personality at all, is an open question. Certain it is that all the
stories of the great naturalists and thinkers whom the people at the time
regarded as wizards were by and by attributed to him, and the figure of Dr.
Faustus became the centre of an extensive circle of traditions.
The tales about Albertus Magnus, Johannes Teutonicus (Deutsch), Trithemius,
Abbot of Sponheim, Agrippa of Nettesheim, Theophrastus, and Paracelsus, were
retold of Faust, and Faust became a poetical personification of the great
revolutionary aspirations in the time immediately preceding and following the
Reformation.
The original form of the Faust-legend represents the Roman Catholic
standpoint. Faust allies himself with the Devil, works his miracles by the
black art, and pays for its practice with his soul. He begins, his career in
Wittenberg, the university at which Luther taught, and is the embodiment of
natural science, of historical investigation, of the Renaissance, and of
modern discoveries and inventions. As such he subdues nature, restores to life
the heroes of ancient Greece, gathers knowledge about distant lands, and
revives Helen, the ideal of classic beauty.
As the fall of the Devil is, according to Biblical authority, attributed to
pride and ambition, so progress and the spirit of investigation were denounced
as Satan's work, and all inquiry into the mysteries of nature was regarded as
magic. Think only of Roger Bacon, that studious, noble monk, and a greater
scientist than his more famous namesake, Lord Bacon! In the thirties of the
thirteenth century, at the University of Paris, when Roger Bacon, making some
experiments with light, made the rainbow-colors appear on a screen, the
audience ran away from him terrified, and his life was endangered because he
was suspected of practising the black art.
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