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The Faust Legend and the Christian Tradition

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Arpad Steiner
Arpad Steiner*
Affiliation:
Hunter College
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Extract

Erich Schmidt's brilliant essay, Fatisi und das sechzehnte Jahrhundert, gave the final sanction to the thesis, voiced by Goethe himself, that the Faust legend is in all its attributes a product of the Reformation. Despite recurrent protests, raised before and after the publication of Schmidt's essay, the Lutheran character of the legend has come to be regarded by literary historians as a dogma. To be sure, the universally Christian ancestry of Faust, Simon Magus, Theophilus, and other Manichæan and mediæval forerunners of the sixteenth-century Devil's Disciple, was unearthed by a host of parallel hunters; still, the Lutheranism of the legend has been upheld until today. Eugen Wolff's attempt to prove that the Volksbuch was a Catholic pamphlet met with little success. Although Adolf Hauffen conceded that there must have been a Catholic Faustbook also, the “genuine Lutheran tendency” of the legend, the triumph of faith over learning, was emphatically pointed out by Wolfgang Stammler in 1927; its Humanist and Lutheran tendencies were stressed by A. Bernt in 1930; and the familiar argument was reiterated by the recent work of G. Bianquis, who declared that in its form of 1587, and in all its subsequent versions, Faust's life is a Lutheran treatise.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 54 , Issue 2 , June 1939 , pp. 391 - 404
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1939

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References

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