by Leo Ruickbie
Another case of a pact-making student came to light on 11 December 1596 when the Senate of Tübingen University called before it the student David Lipsius (Leipziger), whom we met earlier, to examine the charge that he had signed a contract with the Devil. The student confessed his sins and pleaded that it was his first offence – he blamed a fellow student and his reading of Spies’s Historia. The Senate judged him leniently – at least they thought so – and Lipsius was sentenced to be incarcerated only until Christmas Day and thereafter bound for six months to keep to his lodgings, attending only university and church. Almost immediately Lipsius was out carousing the local inns and pocketing some expensive cutlery and silver goblets on the way. Report of his new transgressions reached the Senate on 8 January 1597 and they threw him out of the city. Lipsius went on to take a degree at Heidelberg and successfully pursued a medical career in Erfurt.15
More cases might be named, but the point has been made. Supposed pacts with the Devil were not so very rare and Faustus was not alone in having been thought to have made such a deal. Not all of these pacts were legendary; to be sure, the evidence is often weak, but there are apparently genuine cases of individuals having entered into some sort of agreement with supernatural agents of evil. Every age it seems has had its share of daring souls willing to risk eternal damnation against a deal with the Devil – or who have been ignobly denounced as having done so by their enemies. It is, therefore, all the more strange that Faustus has come to be represented as the pact-maker par excellence.
His Damnable Practices
According to the Faustbook, Faustus’s pact was discovered in his house after ‘his most lamentable end’ together with ‘all the rest of his damnable practises used in his whole life’, which is a neat literary device to explain how the pact could be reprinted in the Faustbook.16 If someone called Faustus ever made a pact, it has not survived nor has any contemporary reference to it.
The legend here runs against the grain of actual practice. The Renaissance magus would not have condescended to enter into a pact with hell. Such unbecoming behaviour was for students like Glöckner and Lipsius, mere tyros in the art. The magus set out to storm hell and subdue its monstrous spirits, to seat himself like Trithemius’s magus-king on Lucifer’s throne. With hell at his feet, the magus extracted wealth, power and knowledge as tribute from the conquered demons. In 1597 James VI of Scotland expressed this in his Demonologie: ‘Witches are servants only, and slave to the Devil; but the Necromancers are his masters and commanders’ (Bk I, Ch. III). It was only the interpretation of those like von Kaysersberg, de Castagena and the anonymous author of the 1587 Faustbook, who wanted to explain away and delimit magic, that ascribed magic’s sole means of operation to the intercession of Satanic powers. How the theologians saw the necromancer and how the necromancer saw himself are irreconcilable opposites. We are generally only left with the theologians’ view because they have destroyed and suppressed the writings of those they disagreed with.
In all the wonderful and incredible claims recorded by his contemporaries and attributed to Faustus, there is no mention of a pact with the Devil. Even the spurious Harrowing of Hell is careful to point out that the magician should not enter into a pact with the spirits invoked. It is only the Church that believed a pact with hell must be involved because for complicated theological reasons they had to deny that any person was capable of invoking and controlling supernatural forces.
The pact may have become a central element in the legend of Faustus. It may have entered into our language as a ‘Faustian bargain’. But it is false to the tradition of magic, whilst being only true to the Church’s idea of what magic must entail. It also presents a logical problem. If a magician has struck a deal with the Devil to provide him with anything and everything he should desire, then that magician has no need to broadcast his skill in necromancy, astrology, alchemy and divination, since all of these magical techniques rest on the interpretation or manipulation of intermediary phenomena to achieve their desired goal. It could be argued that Faustus made his bargain after already practising magic for some time, trading in his magical circles, astrolabes and alchemical retorts for a direct, diabolical line to the satisfaction of every desire. However, it cannot be denied that, given the widespread attribution of pacts with the Devil, they cannot be taken seriously. Has anyone sat down and tried to analyse the evidence concerning Luther’s supposed contract with hell? Do we really believe that all those popes said to have had truck with Satan actually set it out in writing? The pact is another typical motif attached to persons who are viewed with suspicion by others. Like Trithemius’s sexual slanders, commerce with the powers of evil is a standard calumny intended to insult the victim and damage his reputation. It is only interesting that Trithemius, who could allege so much and so vociferously, should not also have thrown this taunt at Faustus.
We see that, whilst the contemporary references were bereft of pact-making, later stories about Faustus from as early as 1580 were beginning to attribute his supposed magical feats to the power of the Devil and that alleged agreement between them, in line with Christian tradition. Peculiarly Protestant elements inform the legend of Faustus: besides the many points of agreement with Luther’s own writing, Faustus, most significantly, is dragged off to hell at the end. Even the craven Theophilus, regarded as the common point of origin for pact stories, manages to escape eternal damnation through his descent into religious hysteria. There is no such reprieve offered Faustus. The message of the Protestant Faustbook is that anyone who practices magic is in league with Satan and utterly doomed, and from the sixteenth-century Protestant viewpoint this encompassed not only necromancers like Faustus, but Jews, Catholics and indeed everyone else they disagreed with.
The legend that grew up around Faustus and in particular the pact and the consequences of his making it, become a retrospective trial and interrogation of him. Having escaped the punishment his enemies would have gladly inflicted upon him – ‘let the theologians rise up against him’ as Mutianus demanded – the legend becomes the vehicle of retribution. The anonymous authors of the Wolfenbüttel Manuscript and Spies’s Historia rewrite history in the way in which they would have liked it to happen. Faustus thus meets the same fate as the black magician of Erfurt and the good burghers can rest easy in their beds, the smell of another sinner’s burnt flesh in their nostrils and the smoking ashes warming the cockles of their hearts. As such it reflects a high level of anxiety around the apparent fact that Faustus could flagrantly practice necromancy and other magic arts and not be struck down by a thunderbolt hurled from the Christian heaven, nor be apprehended by God’s servants on earth.
The power of Faustus also becomes a cause of concern. It is not just his blasphemous existence, but also the fact that he can accomplish so many marvels that are beyond the ability of mere Christians to achieve that exacerbates the deep-seated dread of magic felt by the non-magician. Throw into this mix intellectual curiosity and sexual promiscuity, and all the horrors of the sixteenth-century Christian mind are made flesh in Faustus. Where Trithemius’s insults and distortions were so palpably obvious, in the Faustbook they become more subtly woven into the story. The Devil in the Faustbook thus comes to act like Satan in Job: the strong-arm of God sent to punish. The author of the Faustbook and other writers make the Devil into their own instrument and have their revenge upon Faustus. In effect, the legend of Faustus is one long Protestant sermon. But not so the life.
It is a central element of Christianity that if one should abjure all other faiths and follow God exclusively and to the letter of His commandments, then the believer will be rewarded in heaven. The pact with the Devil is an inverted form of the covenant with God that all Christians enter into. The idea of the pact with the Devil is an outpouring of the suppressed fear concerning this pact lying at the heart of Christianity. Something for something, the basis of all economic exchange, except this is what we might call religious exchange: unquestioning belief for everlasting bliss. Inde
ed, this is not so very different from all religious belief systems. However, it is also a source of guilt and anxiety. What if I cannot (or will not) keep my part of the bargain? What if God does not keep His part of the bargain? It is a central element of the pact with the Devil that both parties seek to defraud the other. In the same way the Christian or other believer attempts to live life the way he or she wants to, whilst at the same time trying to justify this in religious terms.
One thing in all of this appears more and more certain: Faustus’s signing of the pact appears only after he is dead. He is conflated with the Wittenberg student and others who confessed under duress to having concluded deals with the Devil, and comes to serve the interests of the late sixteenth-century religious propagandists. Where Lercheimer related the story of Faustus’s pact with the Devil, he also told the story of Valerius Glöckner, but in the Faustbook these two become one. The writers of that age used history in a cavalier fashion, concerned more with the moral value of a tale than its accuracy. Spies’s false biography of Faustus in 1587 was in fact a fictional subterfuge, enhancing the spectacular to increase its entertainment value as well as its moral purpose. Another thing is also certain: despite refuting the authenticity of Faustus’s pact, people will still believe that he signed it. The story has more momentum than historical accuracy alone can stop. If we are to rescue the real Faustus from the clutches of the Protestant myth-makers, we must reject this central theme in their damnation of the magician.
10
The Philosophers’ Stone (1516)
Driven out of Erfurt sometime after 1513 – the only dated reference to him being there – Faustus resurfaced closer to home sometime in 1516. The intervening years were ones of change and warfare – dangerous times to be wandering the highways and byways of the Empire. François I had been crowned King of France in 1515 and resumed the Italian game with a victory at the Battle of Marignano (Melegnano) to regain control of Milan. Social dissent was widespread. The Gypsies were expelled from Burgundy and more than five hundred people were said to have been executed for the crime of witchcraft in the city of Geneva in the course of just three months. On a more personal scale, von Sickingen’s wife had died giving birth to what would have been their seventh child. Perhaps Faustus had been sent for to intercede with astrological medicine or seek out her shade with necromancy.
Ferdinand II of Aragon had died and was succeeded by Charles (later Emperor Charles V), although he did not arrive to collect his new crown until 1517. In 1516 Maximilian I was back in Italy, invading the Milanese. He lasted a single day in Milan before he ran out of money and his mercenaries deserted. The Ottomans were more successful in conquering Syria. The Fifth Lateran Council tried to control heresy and prophecy in preaching as Erasmus published his new edition of the New Testament.
Faustus, meanwhile, according to local legends, was given sanctuary in the monastery of Maulbronn by Abbot Johannes Entenfuß of ‘Evisheim’, now Unteröwisheim (d.1525).1 Maulbronn is quite unexpected. It is not a ruined monastery lying forlorn amidst the brambles as one comes to expect of such places, but is little short of a walled city, protected by a defensive ditch and entered across a drawbridge. Once through the narrow gate the interior expands into a large central court divided in two by a more recent group of buildings dating from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Around the inside are ranged modern businesses as well as Maulbronn’s town hall. Lying across the courtyard directly in front of the visitor is the church and cloister. When Faustus arrived in 1516 he would have had to go through three gates, not the one surviving today, and his view across the courtyard would have been blocked by a large barn, since demolished.
The monastery was begun in 1147 after the monks in nearby Eckenweiher realised that they had chosen a poor site and relocated to the narrow valley of Salzach. The old Roman road had run through the valley and when the monks arrived it was still an important imperial route (Reichsstraße). According to the legend, it was Walter von Lomersheim, leading his mule laden with a sack of gold in search of a good place for a monastery, who found the present location. Mules being as they are, this one suddenly and stubbornly stopped, threw its load and stamped on the ground, bringing forth a spring. Von Lomersheim dropped to his knees and praised God for the sign and founded the monastery on the spot. The name Maulbronn comes from, or is humorously associated with, the German for mule, Maultier, and bronn (Brunnen) meaning a spring.
The monks’ religious directive to undertake hard manual work soon had them producing a surplus, which, when traded on the market, brought in wealth. Maulbronn expanded through land purchase and building programmes into a sprawling Gothic fortress on a Romanesque foundation. Maulbronn had become a rich prize, and still is. In 1993 the monastery was made a UNESCO World Cultural Heritage site. When Faustus arrived it was in the hands of Duke Ulrich von Württemberg. During an aggressive campaign to expand his duchy at the expense of the Palatinate in 1504, Ulrich had successfully besieged the monastery, as well as capturing nearby Knittlingen.
There is the faint possibility that Entenfuß and Faustus were old school friends – a seventeenth-century source called Entenfuß Faustus’s ‘Collega’.2 Legend has it that Faustus won over the abbot by promising him an abundance of alchemically produced gold.3 Entenfuß was in need of it; he had an expensive mania for building.
In the six short years of his abbacy he built the Herrenhaus (1512–1514) with rooms fit for the best guests, an imposing festival hall to receive them and a delightful oriel window from which to survey his domain. He also added the spiral staircase leading from the Herrenhaus to the locutory (a long hall where the monks were allowed to converse), the bathhouse, winter refectory, and completed the jewel of the cloister – the fountain house. In the vault spandrels of the monks’ refectory he had delicate red chalk paintings executed, it is thought, by Jörg Ratgeb – one of which is considered to be a portrait of Ulrich von Württemberg.
Entenfuß wanted to make his mark on history, but it would not be for his ambitious building programme that he would be best remembered. Local tradition certainly remembers Faustus: it has named a tower on the monastery’s old wall, the Faustturm, a Faustküche (‘Faust’s Kitchen’), and, when I visited, Entenfuß’s modern successor showed me a secret room known as the Faustloch (‘Faust’s Hole’). Rumour also had it that there was a secret passage leading out of the monastery, much used by Faustus on clandestine drinking binges.4
Received into the Festhalle of the Herrenhaus (today’s Ephorat) on the far side of the monastery complex, Faustus would have found himself gazing down two rows of stone pillars holding up a wooden beamed ceiling. The heraldic device of Entenfuß could be seen carved on the first pillar to the right as he entered, but his gaze would have been drawn to the man seated at the end of the hall.
The Festhalle is where Entenfuß would have received secular visitors and conducted his business. Here Faustus would have presented his card, the infamous card that caught Virdung’s interest and drew Trithemius’s bitter scorn. Entenfuß had no doubt heard of these arts, perhaps even had some of those rare and forbidden manuscripts in his library. Faustus surely repeated the claims he had, according to Trithemius, made in Bad Kreuznach: ‘that in alchemy he was the most learned man of all times and … could do whatever anyone might wish.’5 Here was a man an abbot with an ambitious building programme could use.
Entenfuß must have known that alchemy had a bad reputation and worse still was under the censure of the Church. Pope John XXII had forbidden the practice of alchemy in his bull Spondent pariter (1317). The authors of the Malleus Maleficarum added their disapproval: ‘Writers on Alchemy know that there is no hope of any real transmutation.’6 Nor was it just the Church that expressed its opprobrium; alchemists despaired of those who dragged their profession into disrepute. In the Compound of Alchymy, his treatise on producing the Philosophers’ Stone, George Ripley (d.c.1490), included a long satire on charlatans and would-be alchemists, warning the apprentice to bewa
re the ragged ‘multipliers’ with corroded fingers and red-rimmed eyes. Even Paracelsus bemoaned that the art had ‘fallen into contempt’.7
Amongst the crowd of threadbare charlatans, real alchemists walked. Two kings of England, Henry VI and Charles II, James IV, King of Scotland, Marie de’ Medici, the Queen consort of Henri IV, King of France, and princes of the Empire, such as Wilhelm IV (1493–1550), Duke of Bavaria, and the Elector Palatine Ottheinrich (d.1559), had all been known to employ alchemists. Entenfuß was in good company and the glitter of gold was enough to blind anyone to the disreputable side of alchemy.
The Laboratory
If Entenfuß expected Faustus to produce gold, he would have to furnish him with a suitable laboratorium. Hidden from curious monks, the secret room would have provided an excellent location, but for want of a chimney he would have been forced to use the window to vent his furnace – an obvious giveaway. Did he sequester himself here under the vaulted ceiling with a thin shaft of light to pierce the fug of his experiments? The isolated Faustturm was another good location, far enough away from the main buildings in case of fire or explosion and far enough away from the working heart of the monastery not to attract too much suspicion, yet easily accessible from the Abbot’s personal quarters in the Herrenhaus. The choice of venue was the least of Faustus’s worries: just how was he to go about making gold?
Faustus may have been working with the latest theories and practices drawn from such works as the Pretiosissimum Donum Dei, ‘the most precious gift of God’. There exist today over sixty manuscripts versions of this important alchemical treatise in Latin, German, French, Italian and English, the earliest dating from the fifteenth century.8 Several of these manuscripts are ascribed to Georgius Aurach de Argentina (also Anrach) and dated 1475. There is in addition a manuscript said to come from the hand of a nobleman of Trier in Germany. Written in 1453, it claims to be The most excellent and true booke of the ph’ers stone.9