The Spirit of the Age in the Faust Story
The spirit of that age speaks in the story of Faust. The name of Georg Faust first appears in 1507 in a letter by Johannes Trithemius, who called him a wandering charlatan. In 1513 Mutianus Rufus mentioned him in terms hardly more flattering. In 1539 Philipp Begardi, a physician, wrote that in recent years a remarkable man had traveled through nearly every province, principality and kingdom, boasting of his great skill not only in medicine but also in palm reading, physiognomy, crystal gazing and similar arts, and that he did not deny that his name was Faustus, meaning "fortunate" (the source's description of Begardi's specialty is garbled). According to Melanchthon, the historical Faust seems to have died in 1539, supposedly at the hand of the devil. Four years later the legend of Faust's pact with the devil appeared for the first time in the Convivial Sermons of Johannes Gast, a Protestant pastor at Basel.
Two old ideas joined to turn the historical charlatan into a hero of legend, drama and art: first, that a man could gain magical powers by allying himself with the devil; second, that worldly knowledge is a presumptuous delusion that leads a person to hell. In one respect the legend seemed a Catholic jab at Luther; at a deeper level it expressed the view that religion rejected secular learning as contrary to humble acceptance of the letter of Scripture, which alone holds enough knowledge and truth. Goethe rejected this religious condemnation and allowed the human need for knowledge to redeem itself through service to the common good.
Agrippa: The Young Student of the Occult
The Faust legend found a bitter counterpart in the life of Henricus Cornelius Agrippa. Born at Cologne in 1487 into a respected family, he made his way to Paris and was drawn there into a circle of adepts, or charlatans, who claimed to hold secret knowledge of the occult sciences. Thirsty for learning and fame, the newcomer took up alchemy and the Kabbalah of the Jews, and came to believe in a realm of revelation beyond the reach of ordinary reason. He sent the manuscript of his On Occult Philosophy to Trithemius with a letter. In it he wrote that he was astonished, indeed indignant, that no one had yet risen to defend so noble and sacred a subject from the stain of the charge of impiety; so he himself resolved to undertake a philosophical defense, hoping to produce a work not lacking in merit, provided he could show that ancient magic had always been studied by the learned, was free from the errors of impiety, and rested on principles of reason of its own.
Trithemius answered with advice: speak of common things to the common crowd, and keep the lofty and hidden matters for your highest and most discreet friends, for hay suits the ox and sugar the parrot; take this to heart, lest you too be trampled by oxen like so many others.
Soldier, Scholar, Courtier
Whether from need or for lack of a publisher, Agrippa held back his book from the press for twenty years. Emperor Maximilian summoned him to the war in Italy, where he showed much merit; he also lectured on Plato at the University of Pisa and earned degrees in law and medicine at Pavia. In 1518 he became chief magistrate of Metz, but when he defended a young woman arrested for witchcraft and obtained her release from the Inquisition, he had to change his post and home (1519). For two years he served as private physician to Louise of Savoy, but he entangled himself in so many quarrels that she cut off his salary. He moved with his second wife and children to Antwerp, where he was appointed historiographer and librarian at the court of the regent, Margaret of Austria, and was able to make a living. There he wrote his most important work, On the Uncertainty and Vanity of the Sciences, published in 1530. Then, unexpectedly, he published the work left from his youth, On Occult Philosophy, with a preface in which he disowned his earlier belief in the nonsense described in the book. Together the two books left the learned world in confusion.
The Occult Philosophy
In On Occult Philosophy he had maintained that just as the human soul pervades and governs the body, a "world soul" pervades and governs the entire material universe, and that this vast reservoir of spiritual power can be mastered by a mind morally refined and patiently trained in the ways of magic. A mind that draws on this source can discover the hidden properties of things, numbers, letters and words, learn the secrets of the stars, and command the powers of the earth and the spirits of the heavens. The book was widely read, and repeated editions after the author's death spread legends about Agrippa himself: that he was in league with the devil, that the devil followed him everywhere in the form of a dog and enabled him to fly over the earth and sleep on the moon.
The Vanity of the Sciences
Changes in his life reduced Agrippa's claims to experience beyond the senses. He soon learned that no magic or alchemy could rescue his family from hunger or himself from his creditors' prison. In anger and disillusionment he turned against every kind of knowledge, and at thirty-nine, as the source has it (a number that does not fit the 1530 date), he wrote On the Vanity of the Sciences, which until Montaigne held the title of the most skeptical work of the sixteenth century. In his preface he says he feels what a bloody battle lies ahead: first the wretched grammarians will rise against him, then touchy poets, second-hand historians, boastful orators, stubborn logicians, ill-omened astrologers, monstrous magicians and quarrelsome philosophers. Every science is discredited and every learning futile, and "to know nothing is the happiest life." Knowledge ended the happiness of Adam and Eve, while Socrates' confession of ignorance brought him contentment and honor. All the sciences, he says, are only opinions devised by the human mind, as harmful as useful, as corrupting as healing, as bad as good, and nowhere perfect but doubtful and full of error and contradiction.
He begins his demolition with the alphabet and blames it for the bewildering uncertainty of pronunciation. He laughs at grammarians whose exceptions outnumber their rules and whose opinions are always in the minority against popular usage. Poets he calls madmen, none of whom could write verse "in full possession of his senses." Most history is invention, not "a fable agreed upon," as Voltaire mistakenly called it, but a tale forever being changed, remade by each historian and each generation. Oratory is the art of deceiving the mind through glib speech. Belief in the occult is a lie, and he now declares of his own book that it was "an error, or if you like, fabrication"; if he had once dealt in astrology, magic, divination, alchemy and such "non-sciences," it was largely because clients pressed him for secret knowledge and paid for it. The Kabbalah is nothing but "corrupting superstition." The philosophers' contradictory and quarrelsome ideas drive them off the path of reason, and it is best to leave them to refute one another. Philosophy tries to ground ethics in reason, yet the irreconcilable differences of morals across time and place prove it futile: what was a vice at one time counts as a virtue at another, and what is virtue in one place is reckoned vice in another. The arts and trades are just as full of pretense and falsehood; commerce is trickery; treasurers are thieves with sticky hands and hooked fingers; war is mass killing for the amusement of a few; medicine is "a refined art of killing," and the danger often lies more in physician and drug than in the disease.
What follows from all this? If science is a passing opinion and philosophy a pointless dispute of obsessive minds about the infinite, what can a person live by? Only the word of God as revealed in Scripture. This was the old note of the Bible, and indeed, in the midst of Agrippa's doubts one finds scattered thoughts that supported the Reformation. He rejected the temporal power of the popes, and even their spiritual authority when they departed from Scripture. He condemned the Inquisition for bringing people to the faith by threat of "fire and faggot" rather than by reason and Scripture, and he wished the Church would spend less on chapels and more on relief of the poor. But when he admits that the authors of both the Old and New Testaments were fallible, he steps beyond the leaders of the Reformation: only Christ is the eternal embodiment of truth, in him alone should we trust, and in him seek the last refuge of reason and spirit.
The Cost of Dissent
Agrippa enjoyed the fire of anger raised by his provocative call, but he paid for it with the remaining years of his life. Charles V demanded that he retract his criticism of the Church, and when he refused, cut off his salary. When mounting debts landed him in prison, he blamed the emperor for being late in paying the court historiographer. Cardinal Campeggio and the bishop of Liege won his release by intercession, but Charles V expelled him from his realm (1531). Agrippa went to Lyon where, as is commonly said, he was once again jailed for debt. After release he moved to Grenoble and died there at forty-eight. He probably contributed much to the growth of skepticism in Montaigne's mind, yet his only well-known book was On Occult Philosophy, which he himself later disowned. The occult sciences remained prosperous in thought and practice to the end of the century.