SOURCE: "Faust and the Fall," in Studies in Philology, Vol. LXXXII, No. 3, Summer, 1985, pp. 315-31.

In the following essay, Hoelzel offers an interpretation of the Faust story in general and the Historia in particular as deriving much of its archetypal power fromits relationship to the story of Adam and Eve's transgression in Genesis.

Scarcely any legend or myth has so fired the imagination of writers or so captivated their readers as the Faust legend, the story of a man who willfully risks eternal doom by trading with the devil for a limited period of superhuman knowledge and power. The literary tradition surrounding the legend that took root in the sixteenth century has developed into one of the most enduring and ubiquitous themes in Western literature. Even a casual glance at the annual reports appearing in the Faust-Blätter¹ plainly reveals the tradition's unflagging vitality, as year after year, in place after place, some form of the Faust legend surfaces, either in new expression or in the recreation, republication, or revision of a previous, familiar instance. And, of course, such instances abound. Just how abundant, and how widely they range over century, country, artistic medium, genre, and style, the inquiring mind will discover in a book like E. M. Butler's The Fortunes of Faust.² Here the author demonstrates not only Faust's own popularity through time and place, but also his close associations with other legendary or literary figures, such as Don Juan.

What accounts for this legend's remarkable endurance and vitality? Why should this story have stimulated so much creative genius? Some obvious answers immediately come to mind: the fantasy of a human being's possessing quasi-divine powers, the captivating entertainment in his adventures and magical exploits, and of course the deep fascination of trafficking with the very personification of evil. So quite naturally scholars and researchers tend to view the Faust tradition from the perspective of Teufelsliteratur or magus literature. Their searches for Faust's precursors and prototypes generally turn up magicians. For, after all, was not the historical Johann Faustus, that mysterious early sixteenth-century charlatan who wandered across Germany, exercising a "minimum of pharmaceutical knowledge" with a "maximum amount of malice,"³ himself a magician? Thus E. M. Butler, in The Myth of the Magus, links Faust with an imposing array of magicians extending back to Moses and Zoroaster and encompassing a broad range of periods, locales, and cultures. Other scholars, seeing the Faust legend primarily as a Christian story, seek Faust's predecessors in a more limited sphere. Here the consensus identifies Simon Magus as the earliest real Faust figure, not only because of Simon's own heretical and magical activities but because, according to early medieval legend, Simon had a disciple called Faustus and consorted with a woman named Helen.⁴ Between Simon Magus and Faustus the magicians most frequently cited in the research literature include Apollonius of Tyana, St. Cyprian, Theophilus of Adana, Johannes Tritheim, Agrippa von Nettesheim, and Paracelsus.⁵

The magnetic attraction in the magus aspects of the Faust tradition has drawn so much popular and scholarly attention that the true origins of another very basic and at least equally significant aspect has, for the most part, suffered unjust neglect. No doubt the enormous popular success of the Spies Chapbook (1587) derives to a large extent from its sensational qualities and its appeal to the broad masses—and that means, of course, from its magic episodes. Yet the legend's underlying religious-philosophical-existential dimension surely lends the Faust quest its real power and more profound significance. Scholars have not entirely overlooked this side of the story, but neither, I believe, have they as yet identified its true etiology. Major researchers⁶ discuss with varying degrees of attention and explicitness the significance of Faustus' obsessive and transgressive involvement with magic, but they generally limit themselves to analyzing it in the context of the age, i.e., the sixteenth century. Thus they invariably cite the intellectual, economic, and religious unrest of the period, the conflict between the long established Catholic church and its new Protestant rival, the common hostility of both to burgeoning secularism and the study of science, and so forth. But they fail to penetrate the more universal and deepest layer of significance in Faustus' behavior.

More recently, Barbara Könneker⁷ has taken an important step in that direction with a perceptive study of the Chapbook and its literary qualities. Könneker confirms the work's Protestant bias, but, more importantly, delineates the true significance of Faustus' forbidden acts. Citing in particular the Chapbook's important Vorred an den christlichen Leser, ("Preface to the Christian Reader"), Könneker argues that in committing Abgotterey und Zauberey ("idolatry and sorcery") Faustus has violated the ultimate religious taboo, at least from the perspective of that time. Competing with God and, worse, enlisting the Devil's services in the process, represents the arch-sin of sins. Faustus has violated not so much a moral code as a fundamental theological one; the true gravity of his transgression lies not in weakness of the flesh or craving for material pleasures but in his arrogant competition with God. And what does that mean essentially? As Könneker puts it:

es besteht in jenem luziferischen Machtstreben, das den Menschen, der von ihm beherrscht wird, in einen Knecht des Teufels verwandelt, da er ja damit, statt Gott zu gehorchen, die Anweisungen dessen befolgt, der ibm einst das eritis sicut deus eingeflustert hatte. Zauberei, Sünde, Abgötterei und Teufelsdienst sind hier also tatsächlich auswechselbare Begriffe, … die Zauberei ist nur ein anderer und stärkerer Ausdruck für das Wort Sünde und Faust als der Zauberer und Schwarzkünstler die Verkörperung menschlicher Sündenverfallenheit schlechthin.⁸

it constitutes that Luciferian striving for power which transforms the person thus possessed into the devil's slave, for instead of obeying God he is following thereby the directions of the one who had formerly insinuated into him the eritis sicut deus [you shall be like God]. Thus, sorcery, sin, idolatry, and devil-worship are here actually interchangeable concepts, … sorcery is just another, stronger expression for the word sin and Faust as the sorcerer and necromancer the very embodiment of the human proneness to sinning.

This characterization and analysis of Faustus' proscribed activities, which goes far to identify the essential significance of the Chapbook's religious dimension, and thus provides another reason for the work's immense popularity, finally approaches the true conceptual source of the Faust legend. But Könneker, training her sights on other issues, quickly moves on, leaving the association undeveloped.

Könneker's portrayal of the Chapbook's Faustus as the very embodiment of sin per se, because he vies with God, recalls the locus classicus of sinning man: the biblical story of the Fall. The phrase eritis sicut deus, quoted directly from that episode (Genesis 3:5), makes the link even explicit. Könneker is not the first scholar, of course, to have connected the Faust tradition with the Garden of Eden. The manifest link between Mephistopheles and Lucifer makes that connection too obvious. In relatively recent times a few perceptive critics⁹ have associated the two topics, but not in any detail, and neither they nor any of their predecessors has ever concentrated with undivided and sustained attention on the kinship to illuminate some of the wider ramifications. I believe the time for such an inquiry is long overdue, for the propinquity of the Faust tradition to the Genesis episode seems to point to a host of parallels and close associations. The remarkable congruity of these parallels raises at least the possibility of an etiological connection between the Faust legend and the biblical story of the Fall, the story of Original Sin.

The early episode in Genesis, recounting the events which eventually lead to the expulsion of Adam and Eve from their paradisical home in the Garden of Eden, surely counts as one of those parabolic Bible stories with a deceptively ingenuous surface concealing tissue upon tissue of complex and enigmatic significance—an "etiological legend," as Bible scholars say. At this point we need only recall the salient external features themselves. God provides the first human couple with a domicile in the Garden of Eden, telling them that they may eat from any tree in the garden except from the etz hada 'at tov v 'ra—the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. God proscribes the fruit of this tree on pain of death: "for on the day that you eat of it you shall surely die" (Genesis 2:17). One day a serpent approaches the woman, tempting her to eat the forbidden fruit by holding out the prospect of enlightenment—"your eyes shall be opened" (Genesis 3:5)—and even of becoming "like God, knowing good and evil."

Moreover, the serpent contradicts the dire consequences: "you shall surely not die" (Genesis 3:4). The woman, attracted by the nutritional, aesthetic, and intellectual prospects of the tree, proceeds to eat of the tree's fruit and then also gives some to her husband. As a result "the eyes of both are opened" (Genesis 3:7) to their nudity. Thereafter follows the confrontation with God, the man's confession, and God's punishment and curse on the disobedient trio. In an epilogue God admits that "man has become like one of us, by knowing good and evil" (Genesis 3:22), and takes measures to prevent the man and the woman from eating now from the Tree of Life, a tree previously not proscribed.

These are the basic elements of the Genesis account as generally and popularly understood throughout the generations. The sophisticated reader, of course, recognizes a highly problematic text fraught with difficulties. The exact meaning of the serpent's introductory comment (Genesis 3:1), whether declarative or interrogative, constitutes just one small example. The precise semantics of many crucial words in the account—what do "good" and "evil" mean in this context? what sort of knowledge is at stake here?—loom as the chief obstacle to a clear and unequivocal reading of the text. But such problems, while urgent and fundamental to the biblical scholar and exegete,¹⁰ remain peripheral to the concerns of this study, which seeks to define the conceptual link between the biblical legend and the Faust legend. For these purposes the broadly accepted version of the biblical account, as transmitted through the ages in the Western world, suffices.

Several elements of the Spies Chapbook, to take the most representative version of the Faust legend in its earliest literary development, exhibit a remarkable similarity to the biblical episode of the Fall. To begin with, the Chapbook enacts a story of religious heresy, of disobedience to God, and indeed of a direct competition with God. Admittedly the initiative in this instance, unlike the biblical analogue, rests prima facie with Faustus: he is motivated from the outset by an irrepressible hybris, by a mind, as Christopher Marlowe puts it, "swollen with cunning of a self-conceit."¹¹ Yet from the moment Mephostopheles makes his appearance, in response to Faustus' conjuration, he takes over completely. Whatever happens thereafter occurs at his behest, and so much of his sinister malevolence emerges in the way he totally dominates Faustus' life during the twenty-four years of their contract, while slyly letting Faustus believe throughout that he, Faustus, controls their relationship. (In Goethe's treatment of the Faust story even the initiative belongs at least partially to Mephisto, for the prior negotiations between himself and the Lord have already predetermined Mephisto's mission to seduce Faust.¹²) But quite apart from the issue of initiative, Faustus' resolve to challenge God, to be his equal and rival, remains closely analogous to the biblical model.

The sketchy relationship between the serpent and Eve-Adam,¹³ taking up barely five biblical verses, leaves much to the imagination. However, the serpent's unequivocal invitation to defy God's prohibition and its emphatic contradiction of the divine warning against the consequences clearly suggest a kind of conspiracy. Eve-Adam's acceptance of the serpent's invitation consummates the trio's conspiratorial treaty, so to speak, to challenge God's supremacy. Interestingly enough, evidence abounds in ancient legend, biblical exegesis, and pseudo-epigraphic-apocryphal literature, depicting the serpent as a disguised form of God's arch-enemy—be it Satan, or the Devil, or Samma'el, or Lucifer—who enlists the support of Eve-Adam in its own jealous campaign against God.¹⁴ The Mephostophiles-Faustus relationship, within the framework of Faustus' heretical challenge, bears a strong resemblance to the biblical counterpart. Mephostophiles, if not necessarily the Devil or Satan himself, issues out of the Satanic realm; he represents evil and a direct counter-force to God. Accordingly, Mephostophiles' contract with Faustus constitutes their common repudiation of God and the Good. The Chapbook—and thus Marlowe—limn in bold relief the collegial relationship between Mephostophiles and Faustus in their joint enterprise against God; in Goethe that community of purpose assumes quite a different character, since Mephisto and Faust, by the very nature of their wager, are themselves locked into a kind of adversary relationship. But even in Goethe, Mephisto unquestionably represents an anti-God spirit, who aims to convert Faust ultimately into an ally.

The challenge to God ends, predictably, in similar fashion in both instances. In Genesis, God's authority prevails as he pronounces severe punishments on each of the three conspirators, culminating in Eve-Adam's expulsion from the Garden. The Chapbook concludes with Faustus' grisly death and eternal damnation. In retrospect, his lofty aspirations have come to nought. He has managed to experience a few supernatural adventures and to perform some trivial feats of magic, but nothing in these experiences has fulfilled his original high ambitions. Here too, then, God's power remains supreme and unassailable. Goethe, of course, introduces a major shift into the Faust tradition by executing, apparently, what Lessing had already planned and never completed: a final victory for Faust. But even Goethe's conclusion requires a great deal of caution, for a careful reading reveals problems and contradictions which cast doubt on Faust's "victory."¹⁵ Even so, regardless of Faust's victory or defeat here, his failure to fulfill his original ambitions, namely, to discover was die Welt im Innersten zusammenhalt ("what holds the world together at its innermost core") remains beyond doubt. Equally unequivocal is the Lord's ultimate wisdom, as the conclusion bears out the accuracy of his early predictions and assertions in the Prologue in Heaven. So here too the Lord prevails over Mephisto.

The motive for the Faustian challenge and for the Faustian foray into forbidden realms constitutes another—and perhaps the most crucial—analogy to the story of the Fall. The serpent induces Eve to eat of the forbidden tree with the promise of knowledge. Perhaps the promise to "be like God" does not in itself possess a sufficient lure, so the serpent elaborates its offer with, apparently, the most irresistible bait of all: knowledge. Much debate continues among biblical scholars over what that knowledge represents—whether knowledge in the scientific sense, or in terms of moral discernment, or sexual enlightenment, or esoteric expertise¹⁶—but quite irrespective of its precise character, the prospect of some form of knowledge or enlightenment seduces Eve into her violation of God's instructions. The special attraction of that knowledge emerges, as if for emphasis, in Genesis 3:6, where the woman notes, apart from its nutritional and visual qualities, the tree's power to purvey wisdom. Intellectual curiosity, in sum, compels the primal couple to commit their first transgression.

The same sort of intellectual drive obsesses the Faustian spirit. While the foremost Faust characters in the tradition—especially those of the Chapbook, of Marlowe, of Goethe, and of Mann—pursue goals such as knowledge, power, magic, fame, or pleasure, the common denominator in that pursuit always remains the intellect. Whether "speculating the elements," researching was die Welt im Innersten zusammenhdlt, or obsessively pursuing a new mode of musical composition, Faust wants above all to know, to discover.

Yet another important common point impinges on the analogous reach for knowledge. God enjoins the primal couple from eating from the Tree of Knowledge on pain of death: "for on the day you eat of it you shall surely die." Eve-Adam's disobedience, therefore, scorns immortality. They willingly forego the gift of eternal life in order to attain knowledge. Both Jewish and Christian theological traditions, in interpreting Genesis 2:17, agree that Adam and Eve brought death upon themselves, and thus everlastingly upon all their descendants, through their sin.¹⁷ Faustus acts with similar recklessness. In order to satisfy his intellectual curiosity he strikes a bargain with the devil whereby he sacrifices not just his earthly life, after a limited period of time, but the eternal life of the hereafter. Like his Urancestors, Faustus barters for knowledge, using life itself as the coin of exchange.¹⁸

The willingness to surrender immortality in exchange for knowledge signifies an extraordinary sacrifice. The Western tradition, it is true, has always regarded Eve-Adam's transgression as the first tragic episode, the Original Sin. But actually this willful act of defiance retains a hint of a positive quality, something deeply human or humane, something comparable to Prometheus' theft of fire—an analogy, indeed, which some commentators have already noted.¹⁹ Eve-Adam's rash but irrepressible act reflects archetypally a universal need to know, a basic human drive that Aristotle formulates pithily in that familiar opening of his Metaphysics: "All men by nature desire to know." Mankind has always regarded knowledge not just as a Good, but as a summum bonum, a most highly prized virtue which every human being should seek to acquire. Ironically, this very virtue, this compulsive need to know, has cost mankind a permanent state of bliss, has planted, according to Jewish and Christian traditions, the original seed of all evil.

While these religious traditions have certainly emphasized the Fall's sinful aspects, they have also acknowledged, if reluctantly, the persistent undercurrent of good fortune redounding to Eve-Adam's disobedience. Maimonides (1135-1204), probably the most authoritative and influential figure for medieval and post-medieval Jewish thought, goes to considerable lengths in his Guide to the Perplexed (Part 1, Chapter 2) to deny such fortune, but his very effort to deny recognizes ipso facto the validity of positive inferences from the Genesis account. Half a century later Nachamanides (1194-1270), to this day one of the classical Jewish biblical exegetes, discusses the Fall in a strangely laconic and elliptical fashion, but recent scholarship reveals that this reticence actually screens a wholly positive view of the episode.²⁰ Still another positive interpretation of the Fall has emerged in the writings of the sixteenth-century Jewish cabbalist Isaiah Horovitz.²¹

Without entering into a gratuitous discussion of the normative Jewish view of evil, it is still important to note at this point that, quite apart from the hint of ambiguity woven into the story of the Fall, contradictory motifs with regard to evil figure prominently in classical Jewish sources. The locus classicus dealing with the problem of evil and suffering, the Book of Job, refuses to provide a definitive answer other than that evil belongs to God's grand and ineffable design lying beyond human comprehension. Satan's attack on Job occurs only with God's consent. This notion of evil as an integral feature of the divinely ordered cosmos—in contrast, say, to the dualistic views propounded in the Gnostic, Manichean, or Pelagian systems-finds explicit formulation in Isaiah 45:6-7: "I am the Lord and there is no other. I form the light and create darkness, I make peace and create evil. I am the Lord who does all these things." The very phrase in the Jewish lexicon for the motivation behind human evil, the yetzer ha 'ra (usually translated as "the evil inclination"), actually employs a verb with positive, or at least neutral, connotations: yatzor, "to fashion" or "to create," is the same word which the Bible uses in Genesis 2:7, to describe the creation of Adam.

The Christian tradition, particularly in its classical Pauline formulation, separates and juxtaposes good and evil in much more radical fashion than does Judaism. Yet even the Christian tradition, with its clearly less benign view of evil, recognizes the ambivalence attaching to the story of the Fall by celebrating the felix culpa: the paradox that Original Sin, even with all its tragic and negative implications, was not only "necessary" but even "fortunate": O certe necessarium est Adae peccatum, quod Christi morte deletum est. O felix culpa, quae talem ac tantum meruit habere redemptorem ("Oh how truly necessary is Adam's sin, which has been erased by Christ's death. Oh fortunate fault, which has gained such a grand redeemer").²² This classic formulation appears in the Easter Vigil according to the Latin rite, but it probably has gained its widest circulation through Milton's familiar reference in Paradise Lost:

O goodness infinite, goodness immense!
That all this good of evil shall produce,
And evil tum to good; more wonderful
Than that which by creation first brought forth
Light out of darkness! full of doubt I stand,
Whether I should repent me now of sin
By mee done and occasion'd, or rejoice
Much more, that much more good thereof shall spring.
(XII, 469-76)²³

Significantly enough, Milton departed radically from the traditional view of Satan as the epitome of evil, portraying him instead as a stimulus, malgre lui, to mankind's beneficent nature, a suggestion of ambivalence which Goethe seized upon and developed further in his own depiction of Mephisto.²⁴

Here, at last, the two legends—that of Faust and that of the Fall—become analogous in the most fundamental way, as they both issue out of an ambivalent matrix in which good and evil coexist symbiotically. While the similarities of action and character already discussed add up to a fairly substantial array of circumstantial external evidence, the nearly identical conceptual frameworks of the two legends, in which the pursuit of good constitutes ipso facto the pursuit of evil, lends convincing weight to the argument. Thus every age and each new instance has interpreted the Faust legend according to its own lights and according to its particular view of the good-evil interaction. The Chapbook, certainly, in its function as a religious homily, emphasizes the evil side of Faustus' career, condemning his motivations and aspirations right from the start. Yet in spite of this clear sententious and tendentious bias, the author cannot suppress—or is it even by design?—an occasional note of sympathy that almost transforms Faustus, especially near the conclusion, from a vile sinner into a tragic hero. The Chapbook unquestionably intends to provide an object lesson in intellectual brilliance gone astray. Yet a number of clearly positive characterizations—Faustus' solicitous concern for his famulus Wagner, his obvious popularity with his students, his exhortations to them never to follow his ways, his brave and proud demeanor as he approaches eternal doom—betray an admiration of Faustus which almost contradicts the author's avowed homiletic purpose. Faustus, like Eve-Adam, may have committed the arch-sin of defying God, but, like them too, his motivations issue out of an arch-virtue. The result is more than a hint of ambivalence that the author of the Spies Chapbook finds himself constrained to gloss over—literally.²⁵

This ambivalence of good and evil, perhaps more than any other feature, has ignited the imagination of the three most outstanding exponents and transmitters of the Faust tradition: Marlowe, Goethe, and Thomas Mann. Each of these writers has interpreted the coexistence of good and evil in his own fashion and according to his own particular vision, but each one has attached enough significance to this ambivalence and ambiguity as to make these the heart and soul of the whole tradition. Marlowe's dramatization of P. F.'s English translation of the Chapbook still preserves, at least according to the critical majority, much of the homiletic quality that pervades the German original, so that the sinful aspects of Faustus' quest still dominate the stage. But Marlowe, perhaps through the circumstances of his own background, has also clearly perceived the positive aspects of the German Faustus, and has seized upon and elaborated these aspects with a sublime poetic hand, transforming the German sinner into a tragic hero and victim of a profound existential dilemma. Indeed, considerable critical opinion contending that the evidence indicates, at worst, an ambiguous conclusion insists that Marlowe's Faustus evades ultimate damnation.²⁶ If so, the ambiguity of Faustus' final fate mirrors the very ambiguity of the Faustian quest itself. Goethe, as a major figure of European enlightenment, obviously agreeing with Lessing's radically different view of the Faust story (i.e., die Gottheit hat dem Menschen nicht den edelsten der Triebe gegeben, um ihn ewig ungldcklich zu machen, "the deity did not give man the noblest of drives just to make him eternally unhappy"),²⁷ then proceeds to design a Faust character who eventually gains a place in Heaven. But if in Marlowe the sinful aspects predominate over the virtuous ones, with sufficient evidence casting doubt upon the ostensibly negative conclusion, then by contrast, in Goethe, Faust's positive features overshadow his evil side, while—as indicated earlier²⁸—a substantial accumulation of evidence strongly challenges assumptions of a triumphant conclusion. The common denominator in both cases, however, remains ambivalence and ambiguity. Thomas Mann's brilliant effort to reformulate the Faust legend into a metaphor of the German national character focuses no less on ambivalence: the good and the evil in German culture that has produced, on the one hand, such enduring gifts to civilization as Lessing's Nathan der Weise and Mozart's Zauberflote and, on the other hand, has given mankind perhaps its darkest hour in the crimes of the Nazi regime. Mann, in short, translates the existential ambivalence into a concrete and historical reality.

This ambivalence of good and evil, as the very heart of the Faust tradition, relates closely to an issue, knowledge and morality, which runs through both the Fall and the Faust legend. By depicting Eve-Adam's illicit pursuit of knowledge as a transgression of God's law, the story of the Fall exposes the vanity of equating knowledge with virtue. The Faust legend, in like fashion, underscores the frustrating disparity between intellect and morality by making the arch-sin of sins in the theological catalogue, competition with God, the act of an intellectual genius. Hardly any modern instance of a Faust work exemplifies the crucial role of the knowledge-morality issue more eloquently than does Karl Shapiro's poem The Progress of Faust, which concludes:

Backwardly tolerant, Faustus was expelled
From the Third Reich in Nineteen Thirty-nine.
His exit caused the breaching of the Rhine,
Except for which the frontier might have held.
Five years unknown to enemy and friend
He hid, appearing on the sixth to pose
In an American desert at war's end
Where, at his back, a dome of atoms rose.²⁹

The proximity of important features of the Faust legend to the biblical story of the Fall, as delineated here, does not necessarily mean that the original sixteenth-century author slavishly followed the text of Genesis. However, the remarkable coincidence of the religiophilosophical thrust of both tales, based on the analogous roles of the protagonists, does suggest some sort of calculated link. That link gains further strong support from the historical context. As noted earlier, previous scholars have already revealed the socio-historical import of the sixteenth-century Faust figure and his instant popularity amidst enormous religious and social tumoil, as the once authoritative but now defensive Catholic Church faced the formidable challenge of religious reformers. But these revelations have overlooked a point which, while perhaps peripheral in the larger picture, suddenly acquires central significance for Faust and the Fall.

The controversies raging among the various religious leaders and theologians in sixteenth-century Europe revolved around the most basic tenets of Christian belief and practice, among these the doctrine of Original Sin. Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin, the major reformers, all formulated explicit positions on this crucial issue,³⁰ with Luther's quintessential view becoming finally incorporated into Article II of the so-called Augsburg Confession of 1530.³¹ The Council of Trent (1545-63), convened by the Catholic Church to respond to the Protestant challenge, spent much time and attention in reformulating its own doctrine of the Fall. In truth, the various positions of all the parties to this debate diverged only in slight detail—relatively speaking—as their truly fundamental and irreconcilable theological differences showed up in other crucial areas, such as salvation and the sacraments. On the Fall both Catholics and reformers—with the partial exception of Zwingli—reiterated, basically, the classic Augustinian doctrine according to which 1) Eve-Adam's sin brought evil into the world, 2) God's curse and punishment of the primal couple extend to all mankind thereafter, and 3) therefore, sin taints the birth of every human being, sin which only baptism can expunge. These fundamental points with regard to the Fall continue to enjoy a consensus during the period when the Faust chapbook is being written—this is what really matters for the present discussion, not the theological wrangling over nuance and detail.³² What also matters is the prominent visibility the biblical story gained in this period as a result of the theological debates.

It therefore becomes a matter of prime significance that the introduction to the Spies Chapbook (1587), the "Preface to the Christian reader," which announces the work's central purposes and generates thereby its homiletic thrust, contains a lengthy, explicit reference to the Fall. As it develops its sententious warning against the devil's insidious cunning, this preface eventually cites, as an egregious example, his seduction of Adam and Eve into a disastrous act of disobedience against God, an episode that replicates the devil's own original fall from grace. Thereby—the preface continues—the devil has engineered the temporal and eternal perdition (zeitlich und ewig Verderben) of the entire human race. Moreover, the devil continues to prey on the human race in a relentless search for new victims, as I Peter 5:8 says: "Your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour."³³ This quote from the New Testament, linked here with Original Sin, reappears at the very end of the Chapbook as a kind of epilogue or final warning and thus indicates beyond doubt the author's emphasis. For him Eve-Adam's transgression reverberates as the archetypal episode of sin, which his story of Faustus and Mephostophiles re-echoes.

The preface of the Wolfenbüttel Chapbook, more simply entitled Vorred an den Leser, also makes unmistakable, though less explicit, reference to the Fall. Thus the first paragraph's warning against the devil's predatory tactics: Da dann endtlich volget / Das sich der Mensch wider das Erste vnnd Ander Gebott Gottes vergreyfft³⁴ ("For the ultimate result is, then, that the human being violates the first and second commandment of God") includes an oblique reference to the Genesis story by calling attention to the first two of the Ten Commandments. The Wolfenbüttel preface goes on, in the third paragraph, to issue a stern warning to potential evil-doers in the form of a tale about a devilconjurer who falls prey to a grosse Alte Schlang, a "large old serpent," an unmistakable reference to the archetypal seductive serpent of the biblical Paradise story.³⁵

To summarize then: the Faust legend evokes the story of the Fall through a series of parallel features:

1. Faustus, like Eve-Adam, wants to compete with God;
2. his heretical ambition, like Eve-Adam's, leads him straight to the Devil;
3. his hybris, like Eve-Adam's, issues out of an insatiable desire to know, to discover;
4. his pact with the Devil makes him the Devil's accomplice in the latter's contest with God, much as the serpent enlists Eve-Adam in its cause against God;
5. he willingly violates religious stricture, like Eve-Adam, knowing that his disobedience will eventually cost him his life;
6. his reckless challenge ends in ignominious disaster and eternal damnation. As in Genesis, God's authority remains supreme and unassailable;
7. despite his heresy and recklessness, Faustus elicits much sympathy and admiration for his motivation of intellectual curiosity, one of the most powerful human drives;
8. his story raises fundamental questions about knowledge and morality—the very essence of the Fall story;
9. the ambivalence and ambiguity thus inherent in the Faust legend (as a result of 7 and 8) match the paradox of the Genesis story, where Eve-Adam commit a grievous sin, yet gain thereby one of mankind's noblest virtues.

The combination of these significant parallels, the prominent role of Original Sin in the religious debates of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation and the explicit allusion to the Fall in the Chapbook's preface—particularly in Spies—all point to a fundamental literary and philosophical kinship between the Faust tradition and the biblical story of the Fall. The tragedy of Faust has transported some of our most gifted writers and musicians to lofty heights of imagination and unceasingly fascinates audiences both simple and sophisticated perhaps because, above all, it re-enacts in a different and attractive guise and with heightened drama the myth of mankind's first and archetypal tragedy.

Notes

¹ The journal of the Faust-Gesellschaft, a German society, devoted to the study of the Faust tradition in all its aspects.

²The Fortunes of Faust (Cambridge, 1952).

³The Myth of the Magus (Cambridge, 1948), p. 122. For further up-to-date research into the historical Faust see: Frank Baron, Doctor Faustus from History to Legend (Muinchen, 1978), and Günther Mahal, Faust (Bern and München, 1980).

⁴ See especially Ernest C. Richardson, "Faust and the Clementine Recognitions," Papers of the American Society of Church History, VI (1894), 133-45.

⁵ See, in addition to Butler's researches, Harold G. Meek, Johann Faust: The Man and the Myth (Oxford, 1930).

⁶ In particular: Ernest Faligan, Histoire de la Legende de Faust (Paris, 1888); Carl Kiesewetter, Faust in der Geschichte und Tradition (Leipzig, 1893); Robert Petsch, ed., Das Volksbuch vom Doctor Faust (Halle, 1911); William Rose, ed., The History of the Damnable Life… (London, 1926); Philip M. Palmer and Robert P. More, The Sources of the Faust Tradition (New York, 1936); Charles Dedeyan, Le Theme de Faust dans la littérature europeenne, 4 vols. (Paris, 1954-67); Harry Haile, Das Faustbuch nach der Wolfenbüttler Handschrift (Berlin, 1963); and Hans Henning, ed., Historia von D. Johann Fausten (Halle, 1963).

⁷ "Faust-Konzeption und Teufelspakt im Volksbuch von 1587," in Festschrift Gottfried Weber, ed. Heinz 0. Burger and Klaus von See (Berlin and Zurich, 1967), pp. 159-213.

⁸ Könneker, p. 168.

⁹ Erich Heller, "The Ambiguity of Goethe's Faust," The Cambridge Journal, II (1949), 579-97; Ernst Grumach, "Prolog und Epilog im Faustplan von 1797," Jahrbuch der Goethe-Gesellschaft, XIV/XV (1952/3), 63-107; Fritz Strich, Goethes Faust (Bern and München, 1964), pp. 22-3; Heinz Politzer, "Vom Baum der Erkenntnis und der Sdnde der Wissenschaft," JDSG, IX (1965), 346-72; and Erich Kahler, "Doctor Faustus from Adam to Sartre," CompD, I (1967), 75-92; and Theodore Ziolkowski, Varieties of Literary Thematics (Princeton, 1983), pp. 197-3.

¹⁰ The wealth of biblical interpretive scholarship on the story of the Fall is much too extensive to cite here in detail, but the interested scholar can best turn to Claus Westermann's comprehensive survey of research on Genesis in Biblischer Kommentar. Altes Testament (Neukirchen-Vluyn, 1974), I/1.

¹¹Doctor Faustus, ed. John Jump (London, 1962), Prol. 20.

¹² Of course, one could argue also that Faust's frame of mind, which accounts for his interest in magic and thus his willingness to deal with Mephisto, precedes Mephisto's initiative.

¹³ From this point on I hyphenate the first biblical couple into one proto-Faustian character since both Eve and Adam, in that order, participate jointly in the primal act of disobedience.

¹⁴ See James Hastings, A Dictionary of the Bible (New York, 1902), IV, 407-12; Angelo S. Rappoport, Myth and Legend of Ancient Israel (New York, 1966), I, 56-8, 176; and Ephraim Urbach, The Sages, 2nd edn. (Jerusalem, 1976), 1, 167-70.

¹⁵ See Alfred Hoelzel, "The Conclusion of Goethe's Faust: Ambivalence and Ambiguity," GQ, LV (1982), 1-12.

¹⁶ To cite just a few representative views: Julius Wellhausen, Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels, 2nd edn. (Berlin, 1883), pp. 317-19, argues for scientific knowledge; Karl Budde, "Der Baum der Erkenntnis in der Paradiesgeschichte," ZDMG, LXXXVI (1932), 101-10, argues for moral discernment (sittliche Erkenntnis); Robert S. Gordis, in two separate articles: "The Significance of the Paradise Myth," The American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures, LII (1936), 86-94, and "The Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Old Testament and the Qumran Scrolls," Journal of Biblical Literature, LXXVI (1957), 123-38, argues for sexual enlightenment; and Theodore H. Gaster, Myth, Legend, and Custom in the Old Testament (New York, 1969), pp. 34-5, argues that the phrase "the knowledge of good and evil" signifies divine knowledge in toto.

¹⁷ See Frank R. Tennant, The Sources of the Doctrines of the Fall and Original Sin (Cambridge, 1903); Norman P. Williams, The Ideas of the Fall and Original Sin (London, 1927); Urbach, 167; and Samuel S. Cohon, "Original Sin," Hebrew Union College Annual, XXII (1949), 275-330.

¹⁸ Interestingly enough, the eminent anthropologist James Frazer interprets the biblical story of the Fall as "an attempt to explain man's mortality, to set forth how death came into the world" (Folklore in the Old Testament [London, 1919], I, 47). Frazer points out that Eve-Adam chose death over immortality by preferring the proscribed fruit—even with its lethal consequences—over the originally permissible fruit of the Tree of Life.

¹⁹ See Williams, pp. 43-4, and especially Kahler, 76-7.

²⁰ See Bezalel Safran, "Rabbi Azriel and Nachmanides: Two Views of the Fall of Man," in Rabbi Moses Nachmanides (Ramban): Explorations in his Religious and Literary Virtuosity, ed. Isadore Twersky (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), pp. 75-106.

²¹ See R. J. Z. Werblowsky, "O Felix Culpa: A Cabbalistic Version," Studies in Jewish Religious and Intellectual History, ed. Siegfried Stein and Raphael Loewe (Alabama, n.d.), pp. 355-62.

²²Lateinisch-Deutsches Altar-Messbuch (Einsiedeln, Köln, Freiburg, Basel, and Wien, 1965), II, 58-9.

²³ See in this connection A. 0. Lovejoy, "Milton and the Paradox of the Fortunate Fall," ELH, (1937), 161-79.

²⁴ The connection between Faust and Eve-Adam in Goethe extends in fact beyond purely conceptual or merely implicit associations. Mephisto alludes explicitly to the association in the "Prologue in Heaven": [referring to Faust] Staub soll er fressen und mit Lust / Wie meine Muhme, die berühmte Schlange ("He shall eat dust, and with gusto / Like my aunt, the famous snake") (334-5). Ernst Grumach, op. cit., following Goethe's clue in Book VIII of Dichtung und Wahrheit, has demonstrated persuasively the parallels between Mephisto's designs on Faust in Goethe and Lucifer's campaign against Adam in Georg von Welling's seventeenth-century pan-theosophic work, Opus Mago-Caballisticum.

²⁵ Henning, p. 132.

²⁶ See Max Bluestone, "Libido Speculandi: Doctrine and Dramaturgy in Contemporary Interpretations of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus" in Reinterpretations of Elizabethan Drama, ed. Norman Rabkin (New York and London, 1969), pp. 33-88. Bluestone mounts an impressive argument against assumptions of damnation with a massive array of contradictions and ambiguities that pervade the play from start to finish. In the final scenes these include, inter alia, the fulfillment of all the requirements of repentance in Faustus' last soliloquy; textual ambiguities—as, for example, in Faustus' exclamation "Oh spare me Lucifer" (is Lucifer vocative or dative?); the ambiguity of the stage directions after Faustus' last soliloquy; no mention, as we might expect, of "maimed rites" in the funeral preparations for Faustus, only "due burial"; and no diabolic boast from Lucifer, only silence.

²⁷ III, 386, in the Lachmann-Muncker edition of Lessing's works. See in this connection Karl S. Guthke, "Problem und Problematik von Lessing's Faust-Dichtung," ZDP, LXXIX (1960), 141-9, rptd. in Karl S. Guthke, Wege zur Literatur (Bern and Muinchen, 1967), for an interesting analysis of Lessing's difficulties with his Faust plans, difficulties arising out of the very ambiguities of the Faustian quest which I discuss here.

²⁸ See footnote 14.

²⁹ In Karl Shapiro, Collected Poems, 1940-1978 (New York, 1978), p. 98.

³⁰ See Julius Gross, Entwicklungsgeschichte der Erbsünde seit der Reformation (München and Basel, 1972). This volume, which concludes a four-volume historical survey of the doctrine of Original Sin, admirably details the various positions of these reformers.

³¹ For the precise text see Die Augsburgische Confession, 2nd edn. (Tubingen, 1961), pp. 6-7.

³² See Gross for a full accounting of these nuances and details, particularly pp. 73-83, and pp. 105-18.

³³ Henning, p. 7, for the context. The Chapbook preface quotes the verse from I Peter in German, of course. For this English translation I have cited the King James version.

³⁴ The Wolfenbüttel MS of the Chapbook, discovered just a century ago, represents another contemporaneous version—whether it in fact precedes the Spies remains a matter of debate—of the original Faust legend. The differences between the two versions are, for the purposes of this article, relatively insignificant. The fact that the Wolfenbüttel preface also makes reference to the Fall, however, lends considerable support to my thesis here.

³⁵ Haile, p. 27.