Changing European Visions of Disaster and Development. Vanessa Pupavac
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belief in human mastery of nature. His 1605 Of the Proficience and Advancement of Learning, Divine and Human gave new dignity to the pursuit of knowledge. He claimed commanding knowledge was superior to commanding populations as it commanded people’s noblest faculties of mind (Bacon 2000 [1605]: 51). Bacon pioneered the modern scientific method based on experimentation and observation. He invited a ‘fresh examination’ of the world, and new deeds against the fetters of ancient scholasticism and the tricks of magicians. He was sceptical about alchemy, astrology, and natural magic as vain, erroneous, and full of superstition, although their endeavours could inadvertently contribute to other discoveries (Bacon 2000 [1605]: 27). Through knowing how nature operated, humanity could recover its dominion over nature, lost after its fall from Eden. Humanity would leave behind barbarism, and civilisation would flourish. His New Atlantis, posthumously published in 1627, depicted a utopian kingdom founded on scientific principles. At the heart of its government was Salomon’s House, its centre of wisdom ‘The end of our foundation is the knowledge of causes, and secret motion of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire to the effecting of all things possible’ (Bacon 2002 [1627]: 481).
The new age required active invention, galvanising its expanding knowledge and imitating divine creation. Bacon compared the role of natural philosophy to a bee gathering nectar and turning it into honey:
The men of experiment are like the ant, they only collect and use; the reasoners resemble spiders, who make cobwebs out of their own substance. But the bee takes the middle course: it gathers its material from the flowers of the garden and field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its own. (Bacon 2000 [1620]: I: XCV: 79)
Less benignly, scientific examination of nature was akin to rigorous legal inquiry or heroic trials of labour, even if he did not go as far as advocating torturing nature to reveal her secrets as he is said to have done (Pesic 1999: 82; 2008).
His science was not simply for contemplation but for founding new worlds as well. Just as he wanted humanity to master nature, he supported European pioneers colonising new territory, and was instrumental in drafting documents setting up the British colonies in the Americas, notably Virginia and Newfoundland. Thus King James’ court could also host an impia curiostas where discoveries accorded with monarchical interests amid its suspicions of demonic curiosity.
Tales of Faust increasingly circulated cross Europe in the later decades of the sixteenth century. The first surviving German Faustbuch dates from 1587 and was published by Johann Spies in Frankfurt, the birthplace of Goethe (Watt 1996: 19–22). Frankfurt was ruled as a free imperial city of the Holy Roman Empire until its dissolution in 1805/1806 and was the city where the emperor was traditionally crowned. Frankfurt was a major commercial centre, with its trading fairs and imperial privileges, and critically one of the early centres of the new printing industry. Even into the eighteenth century, feudal customs persisted, and the city gates would be locked at night, and activities were restricted within its walls (Lewes 1908 [1864]: 20; Piper 2010: 11). The Faust legend might be traceable to a real Faust. There are sketchy records of a Georg Faust born in the 1470s in Knittingen, a southern German town on the postal service route established by the Holy Roman Emperor Maximillian I. This historical Faust is described as a conjuror, whose magic arts transgressed into forbidden demonic territory (Watt 1996: 3–4). Luther’s Tabletalk briefly referred to Faust as a sorcerer (Watt 1996: 15). By the time of Spies’ Faustbuch, elaborate myths had grown up around Faust. Tales of demonic contracts selling his soul vied with necromancy and his conjuring up Helen of Troy. Faust folk stories purported to be cautionary moral tales warning against human hubris. But fascination with Faust betrayed another illicit tale of human ambitions amid their formal moral framing. Appropriately the very name Faust means fist or fortune in German and has associations with the Faustrecht, or the law of the fist, and the right of arms and unfettered individualism as the writer Walter Scott highlighted (Piper 2010: 20; in Goethe 1850: 401–2).
Faust was elevated to tragic status in The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus by the English playwright Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593). The 1592 tragedy appeared soon after the first English Faust book and influenced the Faust plays of northern Europe (Marlowe 2005). The tragedy presented the seven deadly sins from the old medieval morality plays. They were secondary though to the daring personality of Marlowe’s Dr Faustus, who not only scorns God but overshadowed Lucifer and his evil familiars. His Faustus mocked Mephistophilis as weak and lacking the courage to endure his fate: ‘Learn thou of Faustus manly fortitude, /And scorn those joys thou never shalt possess’ (Marlowe 2005 [1592/1604] Act I Scene 3: 17). The horrors of damnation were merely old wives tales or gullible ‘freshmen’s suppositions’, Faustus declared (Act II Scene 3: 29).
Marlowe’s tragedy invited the audience to look beyond individual sinfulness to social evils. His Faustian pact paralleled the oppressive nature of existing social bonds of service. Faustus’ servant Wagner jested with a clown Robin how poverty and hunger would induce the poor to sell their souls for a cut of meat, observing, ‘The villain is bare and out of service’. The Clown in mock indignation jested back: ‘My soul to the devil for a shoulder of mutton, though ‘twere blood-raw! Not so, good friend: by’r lady, I had need have it well roasted, and good sauce to it, if I pay so dear’ (Act I Scene 4: 18).
The threatened torments of the devil and his familiars meant little to the clown. The lice were already ‘too familiar’ and ‘bold’ with his flesh (Act I Scene 4: 19). What hold could hell’s terrors have over people whose lives were marked by brutality, hunger, and disease? Faustus sought demonic powers to ‘Resolve me of all ambiguities’ (Act I Scene 1: 10). He was praised for having eased a ‘thousand desperate maladies’ and ensured ‘whole cities … escap’d the plague’. Yet he would do more than eradicate plagues and build bridges between continents. These ambitions did not satisfy the infinite scope of his imagination. He was frustrated to be ‘still but Faustus, and a man’ (Act I Scene 1: 8). Faustus wanted his imagination to command reality so that ‘his dominion … [s]tretcheth as far as doth the mind of man’ (Marlowe 2005 [1592/1604] Act I Scene 1: 9). Or, in Paracelsus’ words, ‘it is right that … the stars should obey and follow him, not he the stars’ (Paracelsus 1990 [1537]: 186). As a magician with necromantic arts, Faustus would be like a deity or at least a ‘demigod’ and escape ‘servile and illiberal service’ to church or institute (Act 1 Scene 1: 7–12). But his unbounded imagination could not escape his death and damnation. The tragedy ends with Faustus cursing that he was not a beast and his soul simply dissolve into nothingness (Act V Scene 2: 52). Devils dragged him away, while the chorus warned against human ambition going beyond heavenly authority and divine precepts.
Marlowe’s Dr Faustus and Shakespeare’s Prospero in The Tempest, the Faust chapbooks, and Faust puppets were all characters challenging the limits of custom and learned piety and displaying unholy inquisitiveness into forbidden spheres of knowledge. Bacon was among the new figures inspiring Shakespeare’s Prospero and island kingdom, whose inhabitants Ariel and Caliban he enslaved, exploited, and was ready to torture (Shakespeare 1999 [1611]). In Shakespeare’s romance, Caliban too would uncover nature’s secrets, steal Prospero’s knowledge, and turn this knowledge against his oppressor.
Though damned, Faust was a popular folk anti-hero, speaking for suppressed longings for freedom, and suppressed hostility and rebellion against the existing order. Goethe’s Faust, begun two centuries after Marlowe, took up the Enlightenment daring to know and daring to act, and Romantic history-making (Kant AWE 1996a [1784]; Hegel 1975 [1830]). His Faust was an enlightened-progressive text, seeking to justify the contradictory ways of humanity to humanity. In Goethe’s narrative, human deeds superseded the divine word of the earlier chapbooks. Europe’s civil wars showed the dangers of religious conflicts. State rulers were looking to ground social order and their legitimacy in progressive development improving the material security of their subjects. Goethe provided a vision of collective self-determination under enlightened despotism and a more tolerant forgiving religious framework (Berman 1988 [1982]: 40–77; Watt 1996: 206). On the question of faith and good works, a central contention of the Reformation, Goethe’s Faust answered both. Salvation depended on human strivings, surrender to God, and the forgiveness of others to save the soul (Kaufmann 1960: 61–76). He subverted the Lutheran and Calvinist