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Damna{;/E We, and Deserljcd Dealh 4 Dorioi' John Fallsths, the Fact That Hell11stadt, Or Some Variant Thereof

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Damna{;/E We, and Deserljcd Dealh 4 Dorioi' John Fallsths, the Fact That Hell11stadt, Or Some Variant Thereof The Historical Dr_ Faustus, c_I466-c_I537 GivL'll thL: obviously legendary or mythic quality both of Marlowe's play and of irs prlllcipal source, the prose Hisforie rf file in the university records as Georgius Helmstetter, Georio de damna{;/e We, and deserlJcd dealh 4 DOrioI' John FallStHs, the fact that Hell11stadt, or some variant thereof. He received his b,lchelor's there was a historical Doctor Faustlls may come as a surprise. Like ckgree within less than the prescribed minimum of a yCJr and Christopher Marlowe, this man was a trangn:ssor both of sexual a half of study, but took longer than most students to cam the and of ideological codes. master's degree, which he ,vas granted only in I487~having beell Until quite recently, research into the traces of this hismri­ held back, n10st probably, by a requirement that a IlwlZisrer artillm cal figure was bed,'viled by several puzzling facts. Sixteenth­ be at least twenty or twenty-one years ·old. The fact that he was century accounts give the man two different names, Georgius and one of only two students in a class of sixty-seven who gave no Johannes, leading some scholars to suppose th:lt there might have indication of a family name or patronymic suggests that he may, been two distinct magicians namL:d Faust (a COllllllon German like Erasmus, have been illegitimate. If, as the university statutes surname) or Faustus. FaustLls appears to have claimed the academ­ required, he t;)ugh[ for two years in the faculty of arts as a Master ic ritles ofMagistCf, or of Doctor-but while a Magister Georgius of Arts, he would have remained at Heidelberg until at least [he Faustus was practising various arts of divination in Gelnhausen, summer of 1489 (Baron 1978: 16-18). Wlirzburg, and Kreuznach in 1506 and 1507 (Palmer and More In addition to the scholastic learning of the nominalist liia I/flld­ 84-86), the records of German universities .rl1L:ntion only a single ('rna to which he was exposed in his formal course of studies, Johannes Faust or Fmt who entered Heidelberg in Deccmber Gcorgius Helmstetter would also have encoLlntered at Heidelberg TSOS, and received a bachelor's degree in Jalluary 1509 (Palmer both the speculative (which is to say occultist) and the philologi­ and Morc 86-87). cal sides orthe new humanist learning. During the 1480s the city However, as Frank Baron showed in Do(/or FallslHsjJ'(l/ll History was home to a number ofdistinguished hUl1lanists, who tended to to Legend (1978), the early accounts of Faustus divide under critical ally thernselves with the exponents of the I'ia /I·lodema. According analysis into twO groups: those written betweell 1507 and the mid to Heiko Oberman, one consequence of the modernists' rejec­ 1530S as immcdiate responses to his activities, and those composed tion of the universal t('nns deployed by Aquinas and the other during the half-century between his c1c;lth (c. 1537) and the publi­ theologians of the Ilia allti'll/il was "a craving to expericnce and cation in 1587 ofthe Germall FCIIlstbook. In the former texts, which apprehend the world free from the tutelage of faith "-a craving, have documentary value, his fIrst name, when it is mentioned, is however, which soon "proved irreconcilable with the platonically Georgius; ill the latter, which show llllmistakable marks of leg­ inspired humanist propensity for a sancia pltilo50phia" (Oberman end-formation, the name has becollle Johannes. Baron also sorted 3R). In the interim, though, there seems to have been a pcriod in OUt the puzzle of the uni\-ersity records: in brief, there are no the late fIfteenth century during which young German scholars, records of the magician faustus for the very good reason that th:lt perhaps especially those trained in t.he via moderna, were able to was not his nall1e-at least until some time after his graduation. find a substitute for the theological speculations challenged by In January 1483 a young Illan from the nearby village of nominalism in that syncretic compendium of Hermetic [heoso­ Hdmstadt enrolled at the University of Heidelberg in the nomi­ phy, Neoplatonic theurgy and Christian Cabala which interested nalist via /tlodema l of the arts faculty; his name appears variously speculative humanists.1 An exchange ofletter~ whose significance was first recognized Tht: arcs f.c-ul£ it.'s ill ~ lotth c;;" rn Europe a.·n uni\'~ r:;. jti\"""s in the fif(l ' l~IHh c(ntury wen: by Frank Baron ilia kes it clear that this Heidelberg graduate commonly divided bl'{\l : t'~n cxponl.'nt~ ofchc l! iJ .mtiqHo1,.1 phiJ-osn phy ofmc[:lphy...;j­ cal r(':'lii~m dC\,l:lol, ~ ("d 111 rhe thirteenth <.:,-n[ury by Albertlls MJgnu:, and ThomJ~ rmpOr£JIH lOtlldic!i. of this th,,'Il-t'r1)l'rgt'"Ot tradition indud.: thos(" of G~lrin. \)/ alkl:lT Aqullus and [h('ir- SUCCI,.'$S t,H Duns Scocus. \...·ho thought of Llnivt r:;'Jl I1lc[JphysiL';J) 1972 and 19 75. YJtl:$ 19{)4 and 11)7<). Cc..1uhano. TOll1linson .. a nd Crafton. r.:ucgorlt' S- and the rebirlon:;.hips ;unong lhnl'1 :l~ l~xistjJ1g illdt'pl:nd(,ntly ot" our ex­ pCri('I1l' l' or kno,,:Jcdg(' of tht'l1I; and Cxp~) I\Cnh of th.... !'ill HhJdcm:l. il c ri.tlc.ll _Inci sO/TII.:rimL's c Urr()~i\ i dy ~ c l'pril"JI non1inalisIl1, d('n~1 0 p e d in t!H' f~)l)rr~r.:nth C~lll\lry by DOCTOR FAUSTUS 27 \VilliJnl of()cklum. Njchol:-t~ of AUlr\.·courr Jnd J L'an Burtci:1n. practised some at least of the arts of divination which commonly and who as the supposed inventor of divination by water could interested speculative humanists. In October 1534, Dr. Petrus be regarded as a pagan prophet (Baron 1978: 32) . "Faustus" seems Seuter, a lawyer living in the city ofKempten, enclosed two doc­ also to be a humanist cognomen, chosen for its meaning ("auspi­ uments in a letter he sent to his friend Nicolaus Ellenbog, a monk cious"), and as alluding to one or more of the earlier bearers of with humanist interests in the monastery of Ottobeuren. One of the name-most probably the Manichaean bishop with whom St. these, an academic oration delivered by a Heidelberg professor Augustine debated, or the Faustus who in a widely-read patristic to the Emperor Maximilian (who reigned from April, 1487 to text, the pseudo-Clementine Recognitions, is briefly a disciple of January, 1519), may date from the period ofSeuter's own studies the Gnostic heresiarch and magician Simon Magus (Wentersdorf; at Heidelberg, which began in March, 1490. The other, a horo­ Richardson). "The second magus" may be a bow in the direction scope prepared for Seuter by "magister Georgius Helmstetter" of Zoroaster, whom Renaissance genealogies of wisdom com­ according to the judgment of the astrological, physiognomic and monly list as the first inventor of magic. But Faustus is not being chiromantic art (Baron 1989: 298), may also date from the same modest: this admission ofsecondariness puts him ahead ofHermes period: if Helmstetter remained at Heidelberg beyond the statu­ or Mercurius Trismegistus, the usual number two in accounts of tory two years after his graduation, he could have been one of the magical prisca theologia or "ancient theology" (see Walker 1975: Seuter's teachers in the Faculty ofArts. 23,93, and Yates 1964: IS, 131). Moreover, "magus secundus," in Since a doctoral degree was obtainable only in the disciplines conjunction with claims to astrological competence and primacy of law, medicine, and theology, Georgius Helmstetter's proper in necromancy, might reinforce the suggestion of an affiliation academic title was the one used by Seuter: magister. But by the with Simon Magus-who in the Recognitions is denounced as a convention of the time he would have been able, outside aca­ necromancer, and is closely associated with belief in astrology demic circles, to cail himself Doctor (Baron 1982: 17) . It seems (Recognitions II. 13-15, IX. 12 ff., X. 7 ff.). likely that he did so-and that this was the same man whose . The man, as Trithemius describes him, was clearly transgres­ public career as a diviner and magician, beginning in the early sive: a braggart, a blasphemer, and a pederast. He apparently years of the sixteenth century, made the name of Doctor Faustus boasted that if the writings and doctrines of Plato and Aristotle notorious throughout Germany. were wholly lost and forgotten, he "would be able to restore them In August 1507, the humanist Johannes Trithemius, himself a all with increased beauty," just as the prophet Ezra had restored graduate of Heidelberg, and an occult philosopher and magician the lost books of the Law (cf. 2 Esdras 14: 20-26). He claimed as well as a Benedictine abbot, wrote a long letter to his friend "that the miracles of Christ the Saviour were not so wonderful, Johannes Virdung von Hassfurt, an astrologer at Heidelberg that he himself could do all the things that Christ had done, as who had an active interest in magic and divination. In this let­ often and whenever he wished." And when in 1507 Faustus was ter Trithemius described the activities over the preceding year of appointed schoolmaster in Kreuznach, he promptly indulged "in a man who announced himself in what was probably a printed the most abominable kind of fornication with the boys," and fled sheet of self-advertisement as "Magister Georgius Sabellicus, the to escape punishment (Baron 1978: 96-97; Tille 1-3; Palmer and younger Faustus, chief of necromancers, astrologer, the second More 83-86).
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