From Marlowe to Goethe: Agrippa as a model for Faust

Few Renaissance scholars have enjoyed a literary fortune comparable to that of Cornelius Agrippa. Having died in 1535, he quickly entered European literature as the figure of the sage who defies the limits of knowledge. We find him in Elizabethan theatre, in English fiction, in Goethe's Faust and even in the Gothic novel of the nineteenth century. In many cases his name is tied to that of Faust, the scholar who, according to legend, sold his soul in exchange for knowledge.

Elizabethan theatre

In Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, staged around 1590 and printed in 1604, the protagonist declares that he wishes to become as skilful as Agrippa, whose art of shadows had made all Europe honour him. Marlowe's words are: “as cunning as Agrippa was, whose shadows made all Europe honour him”. The shadows allude to the legend according to which Agrippa could summon the images of the dead.

A few years later, in 1594, Thomas Nashe published The Unfortunate Traveller, a picaresque tale in which Agrippa appears as a magician able to show Erasmus and Thomas More an apparition of Cicero. This is of course pure literary invention, but it reveals how far the name of Agrippa had by then become a byword for necromancy in Elizabethan England.

Goethe and the black poodle

The most famous case is Goethe's Faust, whose first part appeared in 1808. Scholars have often pointed to Agrippa, along with Paracelsus and the historical Faust, as one of the models for the protagonist. The opening monologue, in which Faust bitterly lists the disciplines he has studied to no avail, “Habe nun, ach! Philosophie, Juristerei und Medizin”, closely recalls the spirit of the De vanitate scientiarum, with its review of useless sciences.

Even more evident is the echo of the legend of the black dog. Mephistopheles presents himself to Faust in the form of a black poodle that follows him during a walk and reveals itself only in the study. When the spirit appears, Faust exclaims: “Das also war des Pudels Kern!”, that is, “so that was the poodle's kernel”. The expression has become proverbial in German to indicate the hidden truth of something.

Mary Shelley and the Gothic novel

In 1818 Mary Shelley published Frankenstein. Young Victor relates that at the age of thirteen, during an enforced stay at an inn near Thonon, he chanced upon a volume of the works of Cornelius Agrippa and was enthralled. His father dismissed the book as sad trash, but Victor went on reading Agrippa, Paracelsus and Albert the Great, and that reading fed his dream of discovering the secret of life.

Agrippa's literary fortune says a great deal about his public image. Writers were rarely interested in the jurist of Metz, the physician of Fribourg or the sceptical critic of the sciences. They preferred the legendary magician, master of spirits and forbidden secrets, far better suited to striking the imagination of readers. Yet Goethe himself, with Faust's monologue, also grasped Agrippa's other face: that of the sage who, having studied everything, discovers the limits of human knowledge.