With the Reformation another spirit arose and legends took a different form. In the Protestant world the orthodox magic of the Roman Church lost its saving power and was regarded as no less diabolic than all other black art. He was irretrievably lost who had once given over his soul to magic and the devil (and the devil was at this time, as we know, a very real personage—real enough to have an inkpot hurled at his head by Luther). The revival at the Renaissance of speculation and research, combined as it was with all kinds of fantastic hopes of discovering prime matter, the 'Philosopher's stone,' and elixirs of life, bred in the popular superstition a mysterious awe and attached to almost all scientific investigation the epithet 'black,' or diabolic, as opposed to the 'white art' of holding communion with good spirits. Alchemy and astrology (words meaning merely what we call chemistry and astronomy) became words of hellish import, and he who practised these arts was in league with Satan. Thus were regarded such men as Lully, Roger Bacon, the Abbot Tritheim, and (perhaps best known of all, at least to all readers of Browning) Bombastes Paracelsus, the contemporary of Faust, born at Einsiedeln, between Brunnen and the lake of Zürich, in the year 1493.
Thus the sixteenth-century form of our legend is of the most tragic character. In the oldest Faust-legend, which first took shape in this century, there is no hint of his being saved. And another of its characteristics is its strong anti-papal tendency. The devil appears in the guise of a monk, and even as Mahomet or Antichrist in the guise of the Pope himself.
But the Renaissance (if not the Reformation) introduced another, entirely new and most important, element into the legend—one which enabled Goethe to use the sulphurous old myth as the subject for a great poem. Not only was there a renaissance of learning, but also of art—an intense longing for both Knowledge and Beauty. To know everything—to learn the inner secret of Nature—to understand, as Faust longed to understand,
The inmost force
That binds the world and guides its course—
this yearning after perfection by Knowledge was one of the fruits of the Renaissance. The other was the yearning to gain perfection by means of feeling, by the ecstatic contemplation of and communion with perfect Beauty—'to love infinitely and be loved,' as Aprile says in Browning's Paracelsus. These two impulses, the one toward Knowledge and the other toward Love, were doubtless awakened by the study of Aristotle, that 'master of those who know,' and of Plato's doctrine of the soul's love-inspired yearnings for Truth and Beauty and for communion with the Perfect and the Eternal.
I have called them two impulses, and to the mind they must ever appear distinct, nay sometimes contrary; but I need not remind you how Christianity teaches us to reconcile the ancient feud between the mind and the heart—between Knowledge and Love. You may perhaps remember how Dante, to intimate to us that there can be no true knowledge without love and no true love without knowledge, speaks of the Cherubim and the Seraphim as ideally the same, and tells us that the Seraphs, who love most, also know most.
Both these impulses are noble and awaken our sympathy.
Now, in order that tragic art may have its effect it must possess what Aristotle calls πάθοσ, so that we may be able to sympathize with the sufferer. Thus, for instance, Milton enlists our sympathies even with his Satan, and it is perhaps because we cannot sympathize in any way with Dante's Lucifer that many feel repelled by the terrible creation. But even in the oldest of the Faust-legends, and far more of course in Goethe's Faust, we are attracted by a 'pathetic' element, viz., the unsatisfied and insatiable longing of a human soul for Knowledge—for Truth—and its still intenser yearnings after ideal Beauty.
Thus, even the Faust of the older sixteenth-century legend, although he ultimately falls a victim to the devil, has noble and high impulses by which we feel strongly attracted. He is lost, not through these impulses, these yearnings for knowledge, but through his magic, and his sensual life. In spite of more than one fit of remorse he is unable to free himself from the lusts of the flesh; he is obliged to sign a second bond with Mephisto and is dragged down ever lower into the abyss, until the jaws of hell open and swallow him up—while the Faust of Goethe's poem gains strength through many an error and many a grievous fall, gradually shakes off the diabolic influence and rising on the stepping-stones of his dead self is finally rescued by God's mercy and reaches the higher spheres of another life.
How infinitely grander—how illimitable in its vistas—the subject becomes when thus treated by a great poet we all must feel. And even if we cannot with a whole heart accept as a true Gospel what (in spite of Goethe's admission that God's mercy was a necessary factor) seems to be a gospel of self-salvation, we should not forget that this picture of a man pressing on in his own strength amidst the lusts of the flesh and the errors of the mind is perhaps the noblest and grandest kind of picture that dramatic art can offer us—that of the human will in its struggle against destiny. In any case, I think, we cannot refuse our sympathy for these yearnings and searchings for truth amidst error. Do you remember what Lessing said about such longings? 'If God'—he said—'should hold Truth itself in His right hand, and in His left the longing for Truth, and should say to me Choose! I would humbly fall down before His left hand and say: Father, pure Truth is for Thee alone. Give me the longing for Truth, though it be attended with never-ending error.'