by Leo Ruickbie
The Devil’s Brother-in-Law
The fantastical stories gathering about Faustus even penetrated Luther’s religious cocoon. In 1537 Antonius Lauterbach made a record of a conversation he and others had had with Luther:
Mention was made of magicians and the magic art, and how Satan blinded men. Much was said about Faustus, who called the Devil his brother-in-law, and the remark was made: ‘If I, Martin Luther, had given him even my hand, he would have destroyed me; but I would not have been afraid of him, – with God as my protector, I would have given him my hand in the name of the Lord.’23
A sense of fear is tangible in Luther’s words. If he had given Faustus his hand, by which he may mean to imply agreement rather than simply physical contact, then he believed that he would have been ‘destroyed’ (vorterbet). This confession immediately led him to state that he would not have been afraid, suggesting either that he was indeed afraid (by a counter-intuitive psychological reading of this passage), or was concerned that his remark would be interpreted in that way. Luther then changed his tack and asserted that he would have given Faustus his hand because God would have protected him from anything that Faustus could throw at him, including association with the forces of darkness. He acknowledged that the likes of Faustus possessed some power – in this case the power to destroy Luther – and struggled to assert that his God-given authority was greater.
Wierus told a story with a similar element. Continuing his beard theme after recounting the story of Dorstenius, Wierus wrote of ‘another acquaintance of mine, whose beard was black and whose face was rather dark and showed signs of melancholy (for he was splenetic)’ who ‘approached Faustus’. On seeing this foreboding individual, Faustus hailed him, ‘I surely thought you were my brother-in-law and therefore I looked to your feet to see whether long curved claws projected from them’. Wierus took care to explain to his readers that Faustus was ‘comparing him to the Devil, whom he thought to be entering and whom he used to call his brother-in-law.’24 It sounds more like a joke at the expense of Faustus’s wife – the reference to an in-law would suggest that he had one – or perhaps a sixteenth-century mother-in-law joke. It hardly deserves the sinister connotations that Wierus gave it, making it look as though he is grasping at straws.
Luther and Wierus would certainly have been aware of a similar line from the Bible. During Jesus’s disputation on the Mount of Olives, he insulted his opponents by saying ‘Ye are of your father the Devil’ (John, 8:44). By reporting that Faustus himself called the Devil his brother-in-law, a similar form of rhetorical device was being employed to blacken his image. The implication is that Faustus was so thoroughly aligned with the Power of Darkness that he was in effect related to it.
However, the exact wording used by Luther is open to another interpretation. When Luther said ‘welcher den Teufel seinen schwoger hies’ he could also have meant that the Devil was Faustus’s coach-driver, meaning that he was the one who led him on. The word Schwoger – usually Schwager – can mean either ‘brother-in-law’ as it is everywhere translated, or ‘coach-driver’, especially the driver of a post coach, in old fashioned usage. To be driven by the Devil makes much more sense in this context, but Wierus had evidently heard ‘brother-in-law’ stories and wrote about them in less ambiguous Latin.
The death of clients and possibly patrons like Georg III and von Sickingen and the multiplication of religious zealots like Trithemius, Mutianus and Dr Klinge might account for the changing attitude towards Faustus. The Humanists were being overwhelmed by the bigots. Where once Reuchlin had faced the Inquisition because of his promotion of Hebrew, Luther would grow frothy mouthed with his venom against the Jews. The Reformation was slowly strangling the Renaissance.
The developing Protestant antagonism towards Faustus could also account for his apparent migration southwards. Curiously, it had always been Catholic prelates, like Georg III and possibly von Wied and von Waldeck, or Humanist nobles, like von Sickingen and Philipp von Hutten, who had sought his services. It is a tentative suggestion; after all, Basel was no stranger to Reformation thought and yet apparently Faustus received some degree of welcome there, if we are to believe Gast. The Klosterordnung had destroyed his onetime haven at Maulbronn and the Lixheim story suggests that he was still using the services provided by the monasteries. Later references would indicate that he found his final refuge in Swabia, deep in the vast tracts of the Black Forest.
19
The Wages of Sin (1537–1538?)
It is a common proverb in Germany, that although a Conjurer have all things at commandment, the day will come that he shall not be worth a penny: so is it like to fall out with Doctor Faustus, in promising the Devil so largely.
– P.F.1
As the end drew near, the Faustus of legend turned to women for comfort, and to one woman in particular. His lusts unsated by those devilish concubines, there was still one woman yet who could outdo them all. According to the Faustbook, in the twenty-third year of his pact, Faustus invoked Helen of Troy and made her his wife. What were the wages of sin for Faustus? He had wealth and women, and the most beautiful woman of all. The wages of sin were the same as they are for all of us: death (Romans, 6:23).
The male view of womankind in the sixteenth century was a witch’s cauldron of fear and desire heated to boiling point. This was nowhere more obvious than in the art of the period. When Hieronymous Bosch (1450–1516) depicted the creation of woman, he saw it as part of a continuum from the fall of Lucifer and the rebel angels from heaven to the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden: Lucifer fell because of man and man fell because of woman. Hans Baldung Grien (c.1484–1545) wove the contradictions of longing and loathing together in his paintings The Three Ages of Woman and Death completed in 1510 – the same year he executed his famous The Witches’ Sabbath woodcut – Eve, the Serpent, and Death (c.1520–1525) and Death and the Maiden (1518–20). These works contain a moralising message of vanitas, of the transience of life, that challenges female beauty with the death mask we all must wear.
There are no contemporary references to Faustus having a wife or mistresses, except that curious remark he is reported to have made about the Devil being his brother-in-law, which scarcely balances the oft-made accusation of sodomy. Both are as trivial and as false as the other, culled from the sixteenth-century repertoire of insults. The legend has its own answers. Marlowe’s Faustus demands of his spirit ‘let me have a wife, the fairest maid in Germany, for I am wanton and lascivious, and cannot live without a wife.’2 In the Faustbook he cannot marry, is forbidden to do so by the monkish Mephistopheles, because ‘wedlock is a chief institution ordained of God’ and Faustus has contracted to defy God.3
Religious rhetoric is at work again. In the lines of the Faustbook we read an inversion of the Lutheran directive that every man should marry and a deliberate attack on the Catholic ideal of a celibate (unmarried) clergy. The barb against Rome was made all the more obvious coming out of the mouth of a devil in the form of a monk. Faustus must have heard such things in his own day. He may have read Johann Eberlin von Günzburg’s (1465–1530) pamphlet published in 1522 with the long-winded explanatory title ‘How very dangerous it is, if a Priest has no Spouse. How Unchristian and Harmful to the general well-being those People are, who prevent Priests from attaining the State of Matrimony’. Or he may have been subjected to such diatribes from someone like the Nuremberg preacher Osiander who put the Reformist position forcefully when accosting a young audience in 1533: ‘Thus, my dear little children, you must not think that it is up to your own free will whether to marry or not … For God has commanded that we should all marry.’4
That Mephistopheles appears as a monk in the Faustbook amplifies this critique of Catholicism. The Reformer Urbanus Rhegius (1489–1541) told anyone who would listen that ‘every monk is a whorer either in secret or in public.’5 The Holy See was itself the Whore of Babylon. Even the enlightened Erasmus advocated marriage in no uncertain but clearly polemical terms
: marriage was divinely ordained but contradicted by monastic vows.
However, it was not just a Lutheran perspective that praised wedlock. Looking at a wide range of sixteenth century pamphlets produced in Germany, we find that both Protestant and Catholic writers saw marriage and the family as the bedrock of social order, and consequently attributed both religious and political crises to the breakdown of marriage and the family.6 Thus Faustus’s unmarried status is a further challenge to the social order. It reinforces his threat as an outsider. It is a threat that is also amplified in his choice of mistress. After wallowing in the pleasures of a harem of devilish concubines, the Faustus of legend desires something even more delectable: ‘he had a great desire to lie with fair Helena of Greece.’7
Mephistopheles was obliging – now that the tricky question of marriage was behind them – and Faustus was smitten: ‘Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss’ (Marlowe, v. 1.104). Helen of Troy, as we know her now, seems to have reciprocated and, as the Faustbook puts it, ‘in time she was with child’.8 A miraculous son was born with the gifts of prophecy and divination, and Faustus named him ‘Justus Faustus’.
Helen is a classical Eve, ‘the face that launched a thousand ships’, as Marlowe put it so well, whose actions wrought the destruction of the heroes Hector and Achilles – ‘And burnt the topless towers of Ilium’ (Marlowe, v.1.102, 103) – engulfing the Greek world in war. She is also the epitome of the breakdown of marriage. Married to Menelaus, King of Sparta, she was seduced by Paris, son of the King of Troy, and eloped with him. The motif of the apple even occurred at the beginning of the myth when Paris was commanded to judge which of the goddesses Hera, Athene and Aphrodite was the most beautiful and present the winner with a golden apple.
The relationship between Helen and Faustus little occupied the attention of the Faustbook. She appeared, they (or Faustus at any rate) fell in love, a son was born – that is the sum of it. Yet she was the crowning glory. When Faustus had all the world’s knowledge, all the riches he desired, Helen was his final trophy. Goethe’s humble Gretchen is a poor substitute for this exotic, classical queen. Through the German association of death and women in the sixteenth century, Helen also becomes a sign of the end. Where the maiden is, there also is death.
As the hour of doom approached in the legend, Faustus called for ‘a Notary and certain masters’ and set down his will, making everything over to his faithful Wagner. The spurious document listed a house and garden, a farm, 1,600 ‘gilders’, a gold chain, plate and ‘other household stuff’.9 As a reward for his loyal service, Faustus granted Wagner a final wish. Wagner asked for Faustus’s ‘cunning’. Faustus granted it, along with all of his books, on the condition that he ‘love and peruse my books well’. Faustus also added a familiar spirit for Wagner, called Auerhanen in the Wolfenbüttel Manuscript, but later changed to Akercocke by P.F. He placed another condition upon his servant, that he ‘publish my cunning, and my merry conceits, with all that I have done (when I am dead) in an history.’10 It was an ingenious device of the Faustbook. Added to the first-person pacts it gave the legend the greater appearance of reality. An incautious sixteenth-century reader would have been entirely gulled by the subterfuge. Even the publisher himself may have truly believed that he was bringing Faustus’s own account of his life to the public.
If Faustus had anything to bequeath to another in his last days, then nothing of it remains. The tools of his esoteric trade, like the ephemerides he must have used to prepare his predictions for the Bishop of Bamberg and Philipp von Hutten, are no longer to be found. Such curiosities as have turned up over the years in the Knittlingen Fausthaus cannot be proven to have belonged to Faustus himself. The mundane stuff of his life has all been lost through neglect, wilful or not.
Helen and Justus were not to outlive him. As suddenly and strangely as they had come, so they vanished, leaving the world of men as the last breath left the body of Faustus. Where Spies was silent in 1587, Widmann felt compelled to add more in 1599 and had Justus make a parting address as if by way of explanation: ‘I must hasten away, for my father is dead, and therefore my mother can have no abiding-place here, and must hie away too.’11 Perhaps it was Widmann’s explanation why that for all the thousands bearing the surname Faust or Faustus there is not to be found one legitimate descendent of Georgius Sabellicus Faustus.
For all its subtle tricks, the Faustbook cannot persuade us of the truth of Helen and little Justus, or of the will. In reality, like so much else of Faustus’s life, we know little of his last days.
The Trial of Dr Faustus
There is something that did not happen to Faustus that by its absence becomes more meaningful. Faustus was never tried in a court of law, ecclesiastical or secular, for practising the magical art. Magic implied a pact with the Devil because the learnéd theologians refuted the fact that the magician could be independently powerful. The pact was also implied in all cases of witchcraft and the trial records are full of instances of accused witches confessing (usually under torture) how they had bound themselves to the Devil. Faustus practised magic, as he himself seems to have admitted, therefore Faustus must have made a pact with the Devil in support of which are his alleged additional and whimsical references to the Devil as his brother-in-law. Having formed a pact with the Devil, Faustus was as guilty as the witches of having fallen into heresy, even apostasy; why then did he not meet their fate?
One suggestion is that the Inquisition – and presumably everyone else – were too afraid to prosecute Faustus because of his close association with the Devil.12 However, fear was what usually started the Inquisition lighting the faggots in the first place. We have seen how the reaction of some his contemporaries led them to call for extreme punishment. Thrown out of Ingolstadt, incarcerated at Batenburg and narrowly avoiding the authorities at Wittenberg, it was not fear that kept Faustus from the stake or the hangman’s noose.
As a doctor, Faustus was of the patrician class, as a commander of the Knights of St John, he was a nobleman, and we know that he moved in aristocratic circles (von Sickingen, von Hutten, the Bishop of Bamberg), so could this association with the powerful have sheltered him from accusations of witchcraft? The historical record shows that witchcraft accusations have been made against popes, kings, queens and their courtiers, so the lords whether spiritual or temporal were not exempt and this would have been all the more certain for someone lower on the feudal scale. Social class was not protection enough, even in an age when most witches were drawn from the ranks of the poor.
However, holding the title of doctor, whether he was or not, may have conferred professional immunity upon Faustus. Writing in 1983, Leland Estes was astounded that he could find no evidence of a university-trained medical man having been executed for witchcraft in Europe. Christina Larner’s close inspection of the record of witch-hunting in Scotland revealed that whilst almost every other occupation group and social category produced accused witches, there was not one physician, surgeon or apothecary on the list. It was not the title of doctor alone that had this special effect. For example, a doctor of theology in 1453 and a doctor of law in 1589 were both tried for witchcraft. It was being a doctor of medicine, or being involved in the officially sanctioned medical treatment of others that was the deciding factor. Medical professionals enjoyed a level of immunity that not even those higher in the feudal hierarchy benefited from: professional status was more important than social class.
Although he was described by Begardi as having claimed great skill in medicine, so far as we can deduce from the contemporary records, Faustus was not a doctor of medicine but of philosophy, if he was a doctor at all. Undoubtedly this meant that he enjoyed less shelter under the aegis of the profession. It could be the case that Faustus simply eluded capture. More than once we read of his making a hasty departure and in one case there is definite reference to an attempt to arrest him. Unfortunately, we do not know on what charges. Then there is the more or less legendary account of his imprisonment at Baten
burg. Similarly, the perception of Faustus as a nigromancer and sodomite was enough to keep the gates of Nuremberg barred against him in 1532.
Another factor closely allied to this is Faustus’s itinerant career. Most accusations of witchcraft are made by acquaintances and neighbours of the accused within relatively small social groups as a reprisal for misfortune or as part of a repertoire of female verbal violence and are usually only subsequently extended by the torture of the accused. As a scholar wandering between university and court, Faustus played no role in the petty squabbles of village politics (even when they were enacted in larger towns). The gender bias amongst those accused tends to reflect concerns over socially marginal and especially economically unproductive women, and were usually expressed by women themselves. Being a man made it statistically less likely to be accused of witchcraft, but far from impossible. Of far more importance is the fact that Faustus appears to have operated almost entirely outside of this social process of community conflict resolution. No fishwife or washerwoman held enough of a grudge against Faustus to denounce him. Instead such accusations as were made and have survived occurred within Faustus’s own sphere of academia and Humanism.
Faustus was not an exception. Agrippa, Paracelsus, even Trithemius himself, all had reputations that could easily have given rise to accusations of witchcraft. Even as Trithemius was casting his aspersions he was defending himself against the rumours of black magic started by the alchemist and numerologist Carolus Bovillus and others, yet despite that, he was consulted by the Emperor on theological and magical matters. Court astrologers like Virdung were common; astrology was fashionable. Alchemy was also of interest to lordlings with cash flow problems and impoverished scholars looking to turn their knowledge into hard currency. Like Faustus, Agrippa and Paracelsus were wandering scholars, and Trithemius was safely cloistered for most of his life. They were not likely to be accused of having curdled a neighbour’s milk.
