(Roughly) Daily

With an excerpt from his new book, Devil’s Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain, Ed Simon on “the most important story ever told”– the story of Humanity’s transactional relationship with evil…

The legend of the Devil’s contract is the most alluring, the most provocative, the most insightful, the most important story ever told. It concerns a humanity strung between Heaven and Hell, the saintly and the satanic; how a man could trade his soul for powers omnipotent, signing a covenant with the Devil so that he could briefly live as a god before being pulled down to Hell. Frequently associated with Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, that Elizabethan play wasn’t the origin of that myth, but his is certainly a sterling example of that eternal script. Yet long before that Renaissance play and long afterwards, we can find the inky traces of Faust’s damned signature in a multitude of works both high and low, canonical and popular. More disturbing than that is the way that the Devil’s hoof-prints can be found across the wide swatch of history, in our willingness to embrace power and engage in exploitation, to summon self-interestedness and to conjure cruelty…

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… Tamburlaine the Great’s iconoclasm and The Jew of Malta’s irreverence aside, no work of sacred heresy in Marlowe’s oeuvre is as profound as Doctor Faustus. His quisling scholar selling his birthright for the pottage of trickery and illusion may be modernity’s operative metaphor, but Marlowe was hardly the originator of the myth. As you’ll read in the chapters ahead, Marlowe adapted the historical Johann Faust from German folkloric tradition, though the myth of a contract with Satan existed centuries before that unfortunate alchemist first crossed potassium nitrate with sulfur. Nor of course was Marlowe’s rendition the final word, as thousands of permutations of the basic story have been produced over the half-millennium, from Goethe to the musical Damn Yankees, Thomas Mann to the Dixie-fried pablum of the execrable Charlie Daniels Band number “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.” High culture like Franz Liszt’s Faust Symphony and Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 8; pop culture from the comic book Ghost Rider to the Jack Black flick Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny.

“The figure of Faust is—after Christ, Mary, and the Devil—the single most popular character in the history of Western Christian culture,” writes Jeffrey Burton Russell in his classic Mephistopheles: The Devil in the Modern World. And of those characters, Faust is the most fully human to us, in his arrogance and his failure, his negotiations and his capitulations, in the whole litany of abuse which the cankered soul is capable of inflicting upon itself. Russell’s contention is far from hyperbole, and amending the word “character” to “narrative,” I’d say that there are few archetypal scripts in our culture as essential as the legend of a man selling his soul to the Devil. Thousands of works of literature and film, music and art, grapple with the bargain whereby somebody trades what’s most human for power or wealth, influence or knowledge. Only the myth of Adam and Eve being cast out of Eden competes with Faust in terms of influence, and that story is arguably an early variation on the Devil’s contract…

… though it is ostensibly a history, and this narrative moves onward rather chronologically, I prefer to think of the story it tells as being about a character who is outside of time, who lives parallel to past, present, and future. An eternal story. Because what this book is concerned with are the implications— culturally, politically, theologically—of these highly symbolically charged narratives concerning the abjuration of a soul, of the ceding of what’s intrinsic to us, of the capitulations and negotiations which make up any failed life, which is to say every life. More than a history, then, Devil’s Contract is an account of what it means to be human in all of our failings.

Increasingly an account of humanity right now. For all the legend’s archaicism, the muttered Latin and the alchemical conjuration, Faust’s story has always been estimably modern, perhaps the first modern story. Unlike Adam and Eve, with their inscrutable Bronze Age story composed in an idiom so ancient and foreign that centuries of theologians have disagreed on what the implications of each facet of the tale might mean, the details in the Faust legend are inescapably of our time. This is, after all, the story of a contract. The dénouement of most versions of the Faust story involves the signing of a legally binding document, an experience foreign to the authors of Genesis but replete in our own lives, whether interacting with human resources or clicking on an agreement with our phone company. Faust’s tale may deal in the numinous and the transcendent, but it’s also about bureaucracy and paperwork, our contemporary hell and its sacrament, respectively. We recognize Faust in a manner that no character in the Bible can ever be our contemporary…

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… Marlowe staged his play at the very beginning of what is increasingly being called the Anthropocene, the geological epoch in which humanity was finally able to impose its will (in an almost occult manner) upon the earth. There are costs to any such contract, as the wisdom of the legend has it, so that it’s worth considering after five centuries of human domination of the planet that we might now be facing our own collective appointment at Deptford. We seem to finally be facing the final act, the apocalyptic tenor of our times, from climate change to nuclear brinkmanship making the continued survival of humanity an open question, our sad predicament the result of hubris, and greed, and vainglory. It may be appropriate to rechristen this age the Faustocene. Because whether or not the Devil is real, his effects in the world are. When it comes to “truth” and “facts,” the two words are not synonymous, and I wouldn’t at all be surprised if I could make out the smoke of some devilish chimera beyond the neon-line of the Rose Theater, deep within a darkness so all-encompassing that not a squib of light is capable of escaping…

“A Deal With the Devil: What the Age-Old Faustian Bargain Reveals About the Modern World” in @lithub.

See also: “You Are Equal To The Spirit You Understand,” Nathan Gardels‘ consideration of the lessons in Goethe’s Faust, in @NoemaMag.

* Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust

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As we reconsider our contracts, we might recall that it was on this date in 1834 that slavery was abolished in the British Empire, as the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 came into force (though it remained legal in the possessions of the East India Company until the passage of the Indian Slavery Act, 1843).