ABSTRACT
One could argue that between two dramatic tragedies, Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (1592) and Freemason Wolfgang Goethe’s Faust (1808), an extraordinary turn occurred in European thought: the possibility of new knowledge unlocking the secret key to the universe. Both these Fausts make a pact with the Devil (alias Mephistophilis/eles) as the original late-medieval magician, alchemist, necromancer, and kabbalist by that name was alleged to do. Marlowe’s Faust is still “ravished” by “magic, magic” as the panacea of knowing to replace the inadequacy of philosophy, law, medicine, or theology, and has to face hell for practicing “more than heavenly power permits” (Doctor Faustus I.i: 100–4; V.iii, finis). Goethe’s Faust is equally dissatisfied with the same disciplines, wanting to uncover “Nature’s secret seal … like a god” and “bestride the whole Creation’s prospect” or Makrokosmos with ease and pleasure, not by time-wasting pains of study (Faust I. Vorspiel; Nacht). Like Job, however, experiencing all the “witchcraft of life” – “scouring the whole world … even what is barred from human ken” – and resisting it enough, this later Faust attains a blissful sense that All will be Well (Vorgefühl) that “no flight of aeons (Äonen) can impair,” and so by Grace he can “shake off the earthly flakes” for “ether’s raiment” to rejoin Gretchen, the lover he has wronged, in heaven (II.5). The Gnostic touches play with revelations of extraordinary new knowledge that Goethe saw unfolding in a Spirale (as with a shell) in the complex course of thought (Materialen zur Geschichte der Farbenlehre (1808) [Bentler: 247]).
