The geographical horizon of the Faustbuch is marked out in Faust’s three worldwide journeys, two of which are airborne and allow a bird’s eye view from a great altitude. These two journeys whet his appetite for the third, a downright touristy grand tour with his feet this time firmly on the ground (Chapters 25 and 26). These journeys of exploration are thoroughly misunderstood, if they are simply and quickly discussed as Faust’s “adventures and magic tricks” and for that reason disqualified as skylarking. According to Barbara Könneker, they cannot be interpreted from the vantage point of “the Faust-concept as delineated in the ‘Foreword’ and so carefully developed in the first section.” They are consequently “extraneous to the analysis of the Faust-concept in the Volksbuch.”12 Indeed, the worldwide journeys (so goes the reasoning) are a kind of pretense: set into motion by Faust’s wish to see paradise and therefore without “any intrinsic value or intrinsic meaning” (K 200). One can only form such an opinion by assuming a theologically
12 “von der Faustkonzeption her, wie sie in der Vorrede entworfen und im 1.
Handlungsabschnitt so sorgfältig entwickelt wurde, keinesfalls [zu] deuten”;
“für die Analyse der Faustkonzeption im Volksbuch […] ohne Belang” (Barbara Könneker, “Faustkonzeption und Teufelspakt im Faustbuch von 1587,” Festschrift Gottfried Weber, eds. Heinz Otto Burger and Klaus von See [Bad Homburg, 1967], 199). Subsequent references to this work appear parenthetically in the text abbreviated as K with page numbers. It is often cited with respect, but it has had no real following except in Gerald Strauss’s “How to Read a Volksbuch: The Faust Book of 1587,” Faust Through Four Centuries, eds. Peter Boerner and Sidney Johnson (Tübingen, 1989), 27–39.
reductive view of Faust’s motivation, that is, if one sees it exclusively from the perspective of a radically Lutheran concept of original sin. In such a view, Faust, abetted by the devil’s seductive cunning, attempts to become an apostate, indeed, to take God’s place himself and to usurp his power. In this way, Faust becomes “the embodiment of human enslavement to sin per se” (K 168), the story of his life the “representative and valid statement about the human being and his situation between God and devil” (K 211). With such an assessment of what propels and plagues Faust, “nothing remains of his titanic will to know” (K 179).
His sin is accordingly not “the forbidden thirst for knowledge and the ambition of the researcher,” “not the quest for understanding and knowledge, but the pursuit of power” in competition with the Almighty who according to the Lutheran understanding demands the “complete subjugation of the human being” (K 170, 167, 177). That is supposedly what the Faustbuch is about. It follows from such reasoning that the author was “indifferent” to the “actual Faust material” (K 199). As this view is advanced, “in contrast to the prevailing scholarly opinion” (K 211), Faust’s thirst for knowledge, generally considered the pivotal theme, is downplayed. In the language of the time and of the Faustbuch itself, that is his “Fürwitz” (impertinent curiosity) or “curiositas.” In other words, precisely that attitude is downplayed which leads to the pact and then, in the execution of the pact, to the journeys of discovery.
The Faustbuch makes this perfectly clear:
Wie obgemeldt worden / stunde D. Fausti Datum dahin / das zulieben / das nicht zu lieben war / dem trachtet er Tag vnd Nacht nach / name an sich Adlers Flügel / wolte alle Gründ am Himmel vnd Erden erforschen / dann sein Fürwitz / Freyheit vnd Leichtfertigkeit stache vnnd reitzte jhn also / daß er auff eine zeit etliche zäuberische vocabula / figuras / characteres vnd coniurationes / damit er den Teufel vor sich möchte fordern / ins Werck zusetzen / vnd zu probiern jm fürname. (F 15)
As reported above, Doctor Faust’s desire was to love that which was not to be loved. For that, he strove day and night. He took on eagle’s wings, wanted to fathom all the foundations of heaven and earth. For his curiosity, license, and flippancy pricked and tantalized him so much that he undertook for a time to set to work and try various magical words, figures, characters, and conjurations, so that he could command the devil to appear before him.
These oft-quoted words about the exploration of heaven and earth precede the pact and motivate Faust. They cannot be interpreted sophistically so that “in fact” they become a mere strategy to achieve the goal of summoning the devil in order to make him compliant, to acquire his power and dark arts, and ultimately to become a devil oneself (K 178–181). In this way, what constitutes Faust’s intellectual signature, his intellectual curiosity — which delivers him unto the devil and about which the author of the Faustbuch never grows tired of warning — is relegated entirely to the shadows. Indeed, it is suppressed. This curiosity is Faust’s Renaissance striving after autonomous, as opposed to Biblically transmitted (and Biblically restricted), experiential and cognitive knowledge of the world, a striving suspect already for Augustine and then Lutheranism at the dawn of a new era. Only when this striving for “Nachforschen” (“researching”) — something the devil reading Faust’s mind perceives and exploits to push him into the pact (F 35) — is downplayed, can the travel chapters be trivialized as “extraneous”
and thematically irrelevant (K 201). But that will not do. After all, the passage just quoted is by no means the only one to address Faust’s urge to know, his “curiosity” (“Fürwitz”), his propensity to “Forschen”
(“seek out knowledge”).13 In the other passages — from the title page to the terms of the pact to the conclusion of Faust’s life — “curiosity,” the urge to know, is precisely not the means to the end of summoning the devil, just as it was not in the passage just cited. Such passages, educated contemporaries would readily have recognized, were definitely all about a nascent intellectual titanism or scientific interest in knowing, just as historians familiar with the zeitgeist of the transition from medieval to modern ways of thinking do today. Sixteenth-century readers were conscious of such matters thanks to contemporary natural historians and adherents of “natural” magic (also advocated in the Wagnerbuch) such as Paracelsus, Trithemius, Agrippa, and others, even if they were somewhat muddleheaded precursors of the empirical study of nature and Baconian Advancement of Learning (1605) developing at the time alongside the emancipation from theological sanctions.
Recent studies have come to see more clearly how close the chapbook Faust is to such efforts to acquire scientific knowledge — at first by
13 Cp. F, title page, 5, 12, 18, 22, 35, 52, 57, 114, 121, 123.
magic, but later by approaching empirical research.14 Others have drawn attention to the way the Faustbuch has recourse to a gnostic exploration of the creation which rebels against the divine prohibition of knowledge in Genesis and in effect aims at nothing less than “enlightenment.”15 Precisely this defining thematic aspect of Faust (even though much demonized in the text itself) might be partly responsible for the success of the Faustbuch among all those who were interested in more than scurrilous drolleries and were fascinated by Faust’s intellectual rebellion with its haut goût of wickedness — although it was perhaps not so very wicked. After all, in the first sentence of his Metaphysics, the
14 See Frank Baron, Faustus: Geschichte, Sage, Dichtung (München, 1982), 76–77 and 86–89: the “novelty” of the Faustbuch is that it replaces greed for money with a theologically anathemized thirst for knowledge as motivation in accord with the altered world view at the time during the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance (76), which raises Faust above the commonplace “magicians” or necromancers (cp. 90); F in the Nachwort, 333–334: curiosity (curiositas), the desire to know for its own sake, is Faust’s only motivation for the pact whereby curiositas becomes the general principle of early modern science; the natural sciences require an autonomous human will to know; Alfred Hoelzel in The Paradoxical Quest: A Study of Faustian Vicissitudes (New York, 1988) speaks of “intellectual curiosity”(38) and of how Faust is “more bent on knowledge and information than on anything else” (30). Above all, cp. Jan-Dirk Müller, “Curiositas und erfarung der Welt im frühen deutschen Prosaroman,” Literatur und Laienbildung im Spätmittelalter und in der Reformationszeit, eds. Ludger Grenzmann and Karl Stackmann (Stuttgart, 1984), 252–271: curiosity about the world as the watchword for the rise of the early modern age from the medieval order of thought and life; curiositas and Fürwitz are symptoms of a change in the relation to empirical reality (252); delight in things wonderful, far away, and foreign in the age of discovery (254); Faust’s words about researching the foundations of heaven and earth (“aller Gründ am Himmel und Erden”) reflect a program of investigation of space (260), an ideal emancipated from theological bounds (264). Müller criticizes Könneker in n.s 32 and 56. See also Martin Ehrenfeuchter, “‘Es ward Wagner zu wissen gethan…’:
Wissen und Wissensvermittlung im ‘Wagnerbuch’ von 1593,” Als das wissend die meister wol: Beiträge zur Darstellung und Vermittlung von Wissen in Fachliteratur und Dichtung des Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit, eds. Ehrenfeuchter and Thomas Ehlen (Frankfurt, 2000), 362–363: inasmuch as the thirst for knowledge leads to lack of reverence for God, it becomes an “archetype of sin.” Cp. Theodore Ziolkowski, The Sin of Knowledge: Ancient Themes and Modern Variations (Princeton, NJ, 2000), 56: “It is this new theme of sinful knowledge that sets the Historia apart from all previous accounts of the historical Faust. In earlier stories […] there was nothing about his desire for knowledge.” About a certain fluctuation in the articulation of the curiosity motif, see Marina Münkler, “‘Allzeit den Spekulierer genennet’:
Curiositas als identitäres Merkmal in den Faustbüchern zwischen Renaissance und Aufklärung,” Faust-Jahrbuch, II (2005–2006), 61–81.
15 Christa K. King, Faustus and the Promises of the New Science, c. 1580–1730 (Farnham, 2008), 53–55; also Baron, 88–89.
theologically respectable Aristotle had assured his readers that it was natural to strive for knowledge. As for Faust’s journeys of exploration, these enact a particular curiositas that had become valorized at the time, in spite of all theological warnings, both Lutheran and Patristic. It is important to remember that throughout the entire sixteenth century, German humanists (with the exception of Sebastian Brant!) approved of the journeys of discovery so typical of the time. In their opinion, those journeys afforded experience and knowledge gained not from vana, but digna curiositas (not from trivial but from worthy curiosity). More recently, they have even been referred to as an “early form of the maxim
‘sapere aude.’”16
By reminding us of “vnsere ersten Eltern” (“our first parents,” F 9), the “Vorred an den Christlichen Leser” (“Foreword to the Christian Reader”) certainly suggests that Faust’s life be understood as a paradigm of the Fall per se; as such, he is stylized into a kind of Christian Everyman. Even so, one should not forget that it was a striving after knowledge instigated by the serpent, namely the devil himself (F 34) that caused Adam and Eve to transgress the divine commandment in the expectation of becoming “like god, knowing good and evil” (“bonum et malum scientes sicut deus,” Genesis 3: 5).17