Goethe's Faust: Renaissance magic as a question about the world

«Therefore I have given myself to magic»: with these words, in the opening monologue of the first part, Johann Wolfgang Goethe's Faust explains why he has turned his back on the university faculties. Two centuries after Spies's book, the figure of the Renaissance magician returns to the centre of European literature, but with a new meaning. It is no longer just a warning against curiosity, but the expression of a restlessness that concerns every human being.

The young Goethe's reading

Goethe knew the magical and alchemical tradition at first hand. In his autobiography, Poetry and Truth, he recounts that around 1768-1769, in Frankfurt, while convalescing after a serious illness, he read with his Pietist friend Susanna von Klettenberg works such as Georg von Welling's Opus mago-cabbalisticum, writings of Paracelsus and alchemical texts attributed to Basil Valentine. He also attempted a few experiments with furnaces and alembics.

Many of the drama's images derive from that reading: the sign of the macrocosm that Faust contemplates in his study, the Earth Spirit he conjures and who rejects him, the language of correspondences between heaven and earth. These motifs belong to the same vision of the cosmos described by Agrippa in De occulta philosophia, where everything is bound to everything else by hidden sympathies.

A lifelong work

Goethe worked on Faust for about sixty years, taking it up and setting it aside several times. An early version, known as the Urfaust and dating from the 1770s, was found only in 1887 in a manuscript copy made by a lady of the Weimar court. A Fragment appeared in 1790, the completed first part in 1808. The second part, finished shortly before the poet's death, was published posthumously in 1832.

In the first part Mephistopheles presents himself to Faust in the form of a poodle, a black dog that follows him during the Easter Sunday walk and then slips into his study, where it transforms and reveals its true nature. Several commentators have linked this detail to the legend of Agrippa's demonic dog, current since the sixteenth century; the connection is plausible but is not documented by Goethe himself.

From pact to redemption

The decisive difference from the Faust Book and from Marlowe is the ending. Goethe's Faust wagers with Mephistopheles that no pleasure will ever satisfy him, and at the close of the second part his soul is saved. The striving towards knowledge and action, which for the Lutherans of 1587 was sin, becomes for Goethe the very nobility of man, provided it never comes to rest.

This shift measures how much European culture had changed in two centuries. The Renaissance magician, who with Agrippa dreamed of ascending through the three worlds, elemental, celestial and intellectual, up to God, is reborn in the Romantic age as a figure of the modern individual, torn between the desire for totality and the awareness of limits. That is why Goethe's Faust is still read even by those with no interest at all in magic.