Faustus: The Life and Times of a Renaissance Magician

by Leo Ruickbie

  Discipline and obedience would be expected and enforced. One pastor of Nuremberg asked rhetorically ‘Is there anything on earth more precious, more dear, or more loveable than a pious, disciplined, obedient child ready to learn?’3 Magistrum metue (‘fear your teacher’), as one of Cato’s monostichs has it, was the maxim of the day and beatings were frequent and fierce.4 Luther recalled having been beaten fifteen times in one day.

  A schoolboy in Faustus’s time was not educated for the sake of it. The son of a merchant would probably leave when he reached the age of between twelve and fifteen to start in his father’s business; the son of an artisan would leave just as soon as he had acquired the minimum literacy required for guild membership. Only a few were destined for the church, law or medicine and would progress to the university to complete their education. Faustus’s recorded acquaintance with Plato and Aristotle, his use of the title magister, and his recorded status as doctor from 1520 onwards, would suggest that he was of that elite minority.

  Within the Ivory Tower

  Faustus was living through a boom in higher education. The Empire boasted only five universities in 1400, but by 1520 it had nineteen. Across Europe there were more than sixty active universities. The university of the sixteenth century was not the sprawling monster of today with its degrees in everything under the sun, but a rarer, more cloistered place filled with eager minds. Yet it was also situated in the heart of the city and its students, granted special privileges, acquired a reputation for wild living. The universities were also more specialised and more closely associated with the great teachers who lectured in them, giving rise to a reputation for a particular subject or school of thought. Oxford (founded c.1208), for example, was identified with theology, and when the new college of Corpus Christi (founded 1517) allowed Humanism to make greater inroads, there was fighting in the streets between the rival factions.

  This specialisation of universities gave rise to the wandering scholar, a familiar figure throughout the Middle Ages and into the sixteenth century. Faustus would find himself following in such heel-worn footsteps, roaming across the Empire between the great university towns.

  By modern standards they were very young to be leaving home and fending for themselves in foreign cities, but in the sixteenth century, people got on with business just as soon as they could. The remarkable Rudolphus Agricola (1443–1485) was only twelve when he went to Erfurt, and Faustus’s fellow occultist, Agrippa, was thirteen when he entered the University of Cologne. Child prodigies aside, students usually entered university when they were fourteen or fifteen years of age. Some, like Luther, were eighteen or older. We know from the record that Georg Helmstetter enrolled on 9 January 1483 at the likely age of sixteen or seventeen.

  Many of them may have been mere children, but they worked hard. Faustus’s day, like that of Felix Platter (1536–1614) at Montpellier in the 1550s, would start at six in the morning, or even as early as five, as we read in Erasmus’s Colloquies. His course of study would be determined, not by subject or theme, but according to what books were available. He might be able to choose between lecturers, but courses were usually non-elective. Despite these restrictions, learning was fervently sought and greatly cherished. When Jerome Aleander (1480–1542) lectured in Paris in 1511, 2,000 people turned up to hear him and stayed rapt for the whole two and a half hour oration. The next day all the seats had been taken two hours beforehand and when he arrived the students looked at him as if he had come down from heaven and cried ‘Vivat, vivat’.5

  In the Middle Ages university studies took between four and six years for a bachelor degree. A student would spend his first years in the faculty of arts studying the seven ‘liberal arts’ established by Alcuin of York in 800 CE. Perhaps already prepared in the basics of the trivium – grammar, rhetoric and logic – a young student like Faustus would receive a more thorough grounding in these subjects before progressing to the higher branch of learning, the quadrivium. This consisted of arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy, and completed the liberal arts curriculum. Proficiency in these subjects was tested by the Bachelor of Arts examination before the student could elect to pursue higher degrees in the faculties of law, medicine or theology. It was a rigorous system, built upon solid educational foundations, and produced a class of men who excelled at debate.

  Up to twelve additional years were necessary for a master’s degree and doctorate. The requirements for doctoral degrees included more specialised training. Those for the doctorate in theology were particularly arduous: by the end of the Middle Ages, the course for the doctorate in theology at the University of Paris was extended to twelve or thirteen years beyond the eight years required for the master’s. Their statutes forbade the awarding of the degree to anyone under the age of thirty-five and it was accordingly rare to become a doctor of theology before the age of forty.

  By Faustus’s time the period of study for the Bachelor’s degree, at least, had been reduced dramatically. It took Agrippa three years to be awarded his first degree, whilst after entering the University of Erfurt in 1501, Luther sat his Bachelor’s degree just two years later in 1503, and after another two years was awarded the Master’s degree. Minimum age requirements were still enforced: twenty or twenty-one – there was some variation between institutions – was the minimum age to be awarded the title of Master.

  As he crowded into the lecture room on his first day, who did Faustus find himself rubbing shoulders with? A terrible rabble – according to one account. The theologian and historian Jacques de Vitriaco (or Vitry, c.1180–1240) was at his most scathing when writing of the students at the University of Paris. He had been one himself, but had apparently not enjoyed the company. He complained that the other students were enthralled by novelty and denounced their desire to acquire knowledge, fame or gain. The students also constantly bickered about their different opinions and backgrounds, and stirred up ill-feeling with all manner of barbs and insults. Pope Innocent III, who had studied in Paris himself, called it ‘the oven that bakes bread for the entire world’, even if there were some who thought that bread burnt and stale.

  If de Vitriaco had been shocked by the students, he was scandalised by the lecturers. They were such practised obscurantists that ‘no one could comprehend their eloquent discourses’ and ‘not only hated one another, but by their flatteries they enticed away the students of others; each one seeking his own glory, but caring not a whit about the welfare of souls.’6

  Little seemed to have changed when Paracelsus visited the university in the sixteenth century. With his usual lack of tact he decried the Parisian doctors’ vanity and called them ignoramuses. It was one opinion he shared with Luther, who famously dismissed its great theologians as ‘the moles and bats of Paris’.7

  Paris did not hold the monopoly on student rancour. Many another university suffered the criticisms of those who visited or studied in them. Erasmus grumbled that his sojourn at Oxford, for example, was marred by the company of dull and conceited academics, as well as the foul-tasting beer they supplied.

  Students lived with a freedom that was extraordinary for the period, but even so they could scarcely ignore economics. Erasmus suffered great poverty whilst in Paris and even with a small allowance from the Bishop of Cambrai had to supplement his income by teaching. Luther, who had experienced their privations, is reported to have said that ‘no men are in greater want than the students and scholars’.8 On 23 July 1507 a concerned John Amorbach, a successful printer in Basel, wrote to his son Bruno, who was studying in Paris, to advise him to throw in his lot with some other students and share the cost of digs and a cook. Amorbach could only spare his son twenty-three or twenty-four crowns per year and at least sixteen to twenty of those would be spent on lodgings.

  At the beginning of his studies in the College of Montaigu in Paris, Erasmus stayed in the college’s Domus Pauperum. The college had revived under the efforts of its principal John Standonck, but he packed in as many students as he could at the expens
e of their welfare. Erasmus bore the consequences, complaining of being served rotten eggs and foul water.

  While Erasmus took private pupils, others supported themselves by working for printers, proof-reading, and composing flattering rhymes and prefaces. They might also turn a penny giving public ‘interpretations’, as the phrase was, of newly published books as a way of advertising a printer’s latest releases. These were uncritical reviews describing the book’s contents and best features, and would most likely take place at the printer’s office, probably with some frequency as new customers expressed interest. Others with fewer resources or opportunities turned to begging and poaching to support themselves.

  Faustus, too, might have found himself toiling over printer’s proofs and regaling groups of customers about the merits of the latest tome to roll off the presses. Whether in a Domus like Erasmus or in shared lodgings as Bruno Amorbach should have been, Faustus would have experienced a similar sort of life. The proportion of students classified as ‘poor’ was, however, low: only sixteen per cent at Cologne and nine per cent at Leipzig, for example. We do not know what they meant by ‘poor’, and we are restricted to what we see through the eyes of the likes of Platter and Erasmus. We might suppose that someone like Innocent III enjoyed an entirely different university life.

  For all the hardships, men like Platter and Erasmus pursued learning with a humbling determination and passion. In the universities they found a ladder of books, held as steady as might be by their lecturers, that led upwards out of the dark ignorance that was the lot of most of their contemporaries. With more choice in the sixteenth century than ever before, where did Faustus find his ladder?

  The popular tradition beginning with the Wolfenbüttel Manuscript of 1580, Spies 1587 and P.F.’s translation of it in 1592 all place Faustus in Wittenberg studying divinity. During the sixteenth century no fewer than thirteen people called Faust or Faustus are recorded as having studied at Wittenberg.9 Not one of them matches our magician. If Faustus had studied in Wittenberg then he would only have been able to start in 1502 when the university first opened its doors. By then he was already too old to have taken his first degree there. The historical evidence for Faustus actually having been in Wittenberg at all is slight. Only two late sources – Lercheimer, 1585, and Hogel, seventeenth century – place Faustus in Wittenberg and neither of them mentions his studying there.

  The idea that Faustus studied in Wittenberg arose sometime after his death and may represent a confusion between Faustus having stayed there and one of the other individuals called Faust or Faustus who studied there. But the choice of Wittenberg is too loaded with meaning to be dismissed as an accident.

  Locating Faustus at Wittenberg is part of the general Christian moralising and especially the specific Protestant polemic of the Faustbooks. Although today few people have heard of Wittenberg outside of Germany, in the sixteenth century it was the epicentre of the Reformation. By placing Faustus there the Faustbooks established him as Luther’s shadow, an anti-Luther. The Faustbooks also involved themselves in the Lutheran in-fighting of the late sixteenth century when Wittenberg had become a centre of the Philippists, the followers of the more moderate Melanchthon, and crypto-Calvinists, and was denigrated as a ‘hotbed of heterodoxy’ by hardliners.10 Thus the choice of Wittenberg as Faustus’s alma mater served conservative Lutheran interests.

  The first person to actually state where Faustus had been at university was Melanchthon, and he named Kraków. Kraków’s Jagiellonian University was one of the oldest and most prestigious. As early as the mid fifteenth century Kraków was the leading academic centre for the study of mathematics, astronomy, astrology, geography and law. Hartmann Schedel vaunted it in his influential Weltchronik of 1493. Around 1500 it was at the height of its fame. This reputation was a magnet for scholars: it has been estimated that in the fifteenth century around 45 per cent of students were foreigners. Both Erasmus and Melanchthon were offered chairs here.11

  More than ninety students called Georgius or Johannes (and their variants) from the southern German regions of Thuringia, Bavaria and Württemberg studied at the university in the late fifteenth century and early sixteenth century.12 None of them gave a surname or title of Faustus or Sabellicus. There were no Georgiuses, nor even Johanneses, from any of the places that have been seen as Faustus’s birthplace.13 So just how did Faustus’s name become linked to the illustrious Jagiellonian University in Kraków?

  The Kraków connection may well be a conflation of Faustus and the legend of a local magus known as Pan (‘Master’) Twardowski. According to the popular tradition this Master Twardowski also lived in the sixteenth century, also practised alchemy, also made the dead wife of a king appear before him, also visited Wittenberg and also signed a pact with the Devil. Sometimes seen as Faustus’s Polish double, Johannes or Jan Twardowski supposedly studied ‘natural sciences’, alchemy and astrology at the Jagiellonian.14 In the absence of any evidence for Faustus having been in Kraków at all, this is the most compelling explanation for why Faustus should have become an alumnus of its university.

  Was Doctor Faustus even a doctor? Did he go to university at all? No one called ‘Faustus’ did.15 He first appeared as a Magister (Master) in 1507. By 1520 he was accorded the title of Doctor in the account book of the Bishop of Bamberg and in the official records of Ingolstadt in 1528 and Nuremberg in 1532. Two chronicles – Prasser’s Waldeck Chronicle (referring to events of 1535/6) and the now lost Reichmann-Wambach Chronicle – also called him Doctor. In 1539 Begardi recorded that he signed himself ‘The philosopher of philosophers’ and Philipp von Hutten, who had consulted Faustus, called him Philosophus in 1540.

  The first recorded mention of the title of doctor is in 1520. Does this mean that Faustus acquired his title between the years 1507 and 1520? He would have been of age to be granted the title from 1501 onwards. Confusingly, it is also the case that the titles Magister, Doctor and Philosophus could refer to the same level of academic attainment.

  Today one would equate Magister with a Master of Arts or Science (MA or MSc), doctor with a Doctor of Philosophy (Philosophiae doctor or PhD) or Doctor of Medicine (Medicinae doctor or MD) and Philosophus with nothing at all. Nowadays, MA (or MSc), MD and PhD are distinct degrees – the PhD is especially distinguished by the requirement to make an original contribution to knowledge – but was that also the case in the sixteenth century?

  The conventions in Faustus’ day were different. The title of Magister would be conferred after a period of further study beyond the bachelor’s degree, much as it is now, but it would also specifically imply the study of philosophy, especially Aristotelian philosophy by the scholastic method. Hence von Hutten’s use of the title Philosophus appears entirely consistent with this. The Master’s degree was the highest possible in the study of philosophy, the degree of Doctor was generally reserved for the highest degree in law, medicine or theology. However, it was not uncommon for a Master of Philosophy to be called a Doctor. For example, Trithemius referred to his brother, who only had a Master’s degree, as ‘artium et philosophiae doctor’.16 In his monumental History of Protestantism, James Wylie says of Martin Luther after he graduated for his higher degree that he ‘became Master of Arts or Doctor of Philosophy’.17 Thus the apparently different titles given to Faustus need not be contradictory; instead they may confirm that he had received a university education to the highest level and specifically in the field of philosophy, if not also in theology.

  The tendency to interpret ‘Faustus’ as a Latinised German surname led to the magician’s misidentification with a student called ‘Johannes Faust ex Simmern’ who graduated from Heidelberg on 15 January 1509.18 But this can be easily dismissed. Trithemius’s ‘Faustus’ used the name as a nom de guerre, rather than a family name, came from Helmstadt or Heidelberg and in 1507 was reported to hold a Master’s degree, whereas this Faust from Simmern had a different first name, came from a different town and only completed his Bachelor’s in 1509.

&n
bsp; The mention of Heidelberg by Mutianus and in the Ingolstadt document, together with the Helmstet/Helmitheus connection, led Schottenloher to comb the records of Heidelberg with a very particular name in mind – and he found him. From 1483 to 1487 the student Georg Helmstetter was registered at Heidelberg in the study of philosophy. In all likelihood, this was the man who later called himself Faustus.

  ‘Georius Helmstetter’ of the Diocese of Worms enrolled at Heidelberg on 1 January 1483 and one and a half years later ‘Jorio de Helmstat’ applied to sit the bachelor examination. A meeting of the Faculty of Arts was held to consider this. It seemed that Helmstetter did not meet all of the requirements, foremost amongst them, the minimum length of study. He had arrived in the middle of the academic year and it appears that he may not have had the opportunity to attend all of the relevant classes. He was vouched for by Magister Johannes Hasse and a few days later on 12 July 1484 ‘Jeorius de Helmstat’ graduated. He had been awarded his degree in record time, but came near the bottom of his class, sixteenth out of seventeen.19

  At Heidelberg, students of philosophy had the freedom to choose between two opposing methods of interpreting the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle: the via antiqua and the via moderna, the old way and the modern way.20 Aristotle’s metaphysical teachings centred on a criticism of the theory of ideas against which he forwarded his own doctrine of universals, that when a number of individuals shared a predicate it could not be due to a relation to something the same as themselves, but to an ideal. However, differences in interpreting Aristotle amongst the so-called Schoolmen led to the medieval controversy between nominalism and realism.

  The via antiqua principally looked to the authority of Thomas Aquinas and his espousal of realism, that universal or general ideas have objective existence. On the other hand, the via moderna looked to William of Ockham for authority and his espousal of nominalism, that universal or abstract concepts are simply names without any corresponding reality, and made extensive use of the commentaries on Aristotle by the university’s first rector, Marsilius von Inghen (1340–1396). His commentaries were influential throughout Europe. It is unsurprising that in Faustus’s day it was the via moderna that was the more popular approach at Heidelberg. In 1499 its followers even published a volume that included eulogistic epigrams on von Inghen.