The Cry for Myth (26 page)

Today we simply no longer know what a myth is; for it is no mere aesthetically pleasing mode of representing something to one’s self, but a piece of the most lively actuality that mines every comer of the waking consciousness and shakes the innermost structure of being. … [Myths] were about one all the time. They were glimpsed without being seen. They were believed in with a faith that felt the very thought of proof as a desecration. … In the old days men did not “enjoy myth.” Behind it stood Death.

Oswald Spengler,
The Decline of the West
, vol. 2

T
HE POWERFUL MYTH
of Faust fit the deep psychological and spiritual needs of Europeans in the radical transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance and Reformation. Faust became the mythic narration for the Northern peoples. A number of versions of the myth were written: Marlowe’s
The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus
, published in 1591; Goethe’s
Faust
, the first half published when Goethe was forty and the second when he was eighty, in 1832.
During World War II, Thomas Mann wrote his version,
Dr. Faustus
, published in 1947. In addition the myth has been spread far and wide through opera, philosophy, and creative writings of all sorts. Mozart’s
Don Giovanni
is a musical rendition of the Faust legend.
The Great Gatsby
is itself a Faust-like novel. Benet’s
The Devil and Daniel Webster
is another example, as is
The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant
, which became the musical
Damn Yankees
.

“It is depressing,” writes Rene Dubos, in his contemporary book
The God Within
, “that the only myth the modern age has contributed to civilization is that of Faust.”
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But the most powerful contemporary demonstration of the significance of the Faust dramas is given by Oswald Spengler in his classical work
The Decline of the West
, published in 1918, the year World War I ended. With his encyclopedic mind, Spengler compares other cultures, such as the Persian and Arabic, with our modem Western culture, using the contrast of
Apollonian
and
Faustian
as his categories. Coming from the Greek myth of Apollo, the Apollonian stands for cultures characterized by reason, harmony, balance, and justice. The symbol for Apollonianism is the
circle
.

The symbol for Faustianism, on the contrary, is the
straight line
, always moving ahead in progress, which is our contemporary belief. But our dilemma is that progress applies only to technical things—we invent better automobiles, electric dishwashers, and nuclear bombs. The concept of progress does not hold in spiritual and aesthetic realms, such as religion, philosophy, art, and literature, all of which thrive in the classical Apollonian ages. Spengler argued that the West (meaning chiefly Europe and America) is Faustian in our great love of competition and our overweaning materialism.

Spengler’s book was greeted with immediate horror and rebuttals on all sides. But if he had lived through World War II, the dropping of the atom bomb, and the use of the nuclear
bomb to obliterate Nagasaki, he would have made his Faustian emphasis in the West even more emphatic!

Our existence in the nuclear age, with our arsenals filled with nuclear warheads, makes ours a Faustian age in the extreme. Where previous ages have only knocked on the door of the mystery, we have broken into the building itself. Will our ending be self-chosen destruction like Marlowe’s
Faust?
Or will we experience some
deus ex machina
, like Goethe’s
Faust
, and be given the chance to repent before the fatal bell tolls at midnight?

Nuclear physicists are well aware of the dangers that they have helped to discover. Dr. Hans Bethe at Cornell has talked of the catastrophic Faustian danger we face. When the director of the nuclear laboratory in Los Alamos, Dr. Alvin Weinberg, needed to find a term to describe the dangers of our predicament with respect to nuclear arms, he seized upon the myth of Faust. Pondering our warheads and the dismal fact that we are able to blow up most of the globe in one hour, or cause a perpetual nuclear winter, plus the great difficulty in the disposal of nuclear waste, which threatens to contaminate much of our land for future generations, Dr. Weinberg pondered Faust’s experience. His article, “Our Faustian Bargain,” comes to the conclusion that our only possible answer is “eternal vigilance.”
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We can indeed understand what Spengler means when he says that “behind the myth stands death.”

THE FAUST STORY

Some changes of great psychological and spiritual significance occurred in the fifteenth century, which marked the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Renaissance. We can see this most vividly by comparing Dante’s
Divine Comedy
with the myth which was to come in the Renaissance, namely, Faust. Dante wrote his
Divine Comedy
as an expression of the struggle through hell, purgatory, and finally to paradise to achieve ultimate blessedness in the peak of Divine Love. There is in Dante’s writing a serenity, a sense of faith, divine blessing, and pure love. All these are mediated by Beatrice, a figure who reconciled these great capacities with what had been taught by the Church at its best.

In medieval times the Church held women in high esteem. Mary, the Mother of God, made up the triangle with God and the Christ and was adored in the Middle Ages in countless assignments of “Hail Mary’s.” Cathedrals like Notre Dame were named after women.

But in the Reformation in Germany and in England the trinity was changed to “God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit.” And the luscious, colorful, even if sometimes gaudy Catholic churches were exchanged for the masculine severity—though still often beautiful—Protestant churches of the Reformation. It was a new world and the peasantry and burghers were filled with fright at this world and cried out for a new dominant myth.

Renaissance people were told by Mirandella that they as individuals had the power to make themselves into whatever they chose. And they had been instructed by Nicolaus Cusanos early in the fifteenth century that each person had the center of the universe in himself. Many other spokesmen lauded the individual power of Renaissance individuals. Calvin and Luther were to tell them that they were free in religion, and Kepler, Copernicus, and Galileo were showing them the movement of the stars. No wonder they felt spiritually uprooted and needed a new myth!

The myth which fit these excited people of the Renaissance was the narration of Faust. This was a man who was born in that spiritual and psychological maelstrom and who partook of that lust for knowledge to be gained by magic, since the new discoveries on every side seemed to the ordinary person to be
magical. This mythic Faust would live out his lust for knowledge and his twenty-four years of voluptuous power on this earth, but he would do this by selling his immortal soul to Lucifer, after which he would suffer the tortures of hell for eternity. The myth must show this figure representing the hopes and fears of these citizens as Faust succeeds in his great aim to partake of divine power. The myth then must furnish a catharsis to assuage the citizen’s fears and guilt in Faust’s punishment at the conclusion of the twenty-four years of magical power.

The Faust myth began as the story of the exploits of a certain John Faustus, who actually lived in northern Germany in the mid-sixteenth century and spent his life in continual magical pranks on his fellow men. Some of his life was spent in jail, and he was reputed to have gone to hell when he died and there suffered eternal fire and brimstone. A pamphlet published in Germany in 1587, called the “Chapbook,” detailed the sins of this Faustus, including his alleged sexual intercourse with Helen of Troy, which was believed to doom a man forever to hell. Entitled “The Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Dr. John Faustus,” this booklet caught on like wildfire at the end of the Middle Ages and was made into a traveling morality play. It united the yearning for new knowledge (which often seemed magical in reality) with guilt, punishment, and the dreaded fires of hell and eternal torture.

Regardless of their not understanding the language of the pamphlet, the people of Holland and Belgium could see the burning fires of hell and smell the flesh burning. They could experience the sense of doom and the catharsis they so desperately needed. They had seen copies of Bosch’s paintings of hell and damnation and those of Grunewald of the punishments of the dying. To watch this myth enacted and to hear the groans of the damned in eternal punishment was to experience their own conscious and subconscious fears. These fears were allayed by the catharsis of observing Faustus writhing and agonizing in his punishment. The vivid myth gave them a sense of vicarious
penance. Faustus suffered before them and they were thus freed to accept what they perceived as the magic of their new age.

MARLOWE’S FAUST—GRANDEUR AND TRAGEDY

Christopher Marlowe, a Renaissance man in his own right, had a checkered career. He was born the same year as Shakespeare, 1564, studied for some time at Oxford, and was killed in a brawl when he was twenty-eight. But he wrote several dramas of great power, any one of which would have assured him of immortality. His
The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus
is written, as one critic states, with “terrifying beauty.”

As the drama opens we see Dr. Faustus, a respected professor, ruminating in his study on the great boredom of his life. Though he has degrees in medicine, philosophy, and theology, he is overpowered by his lust for vast, new,
magical
knowledge, a lust which was common in the Renaissance.

Faustus especially castigates the subject that was most important in the Middle Ages, divinity, which is called “harsh, contemptible, and vile.” Like Icarus, writes Marlowe, is Faustus;

It is a myth of conscience, springing from the pride, greed, lust, and despair of a man which commit him to Eternal Darkness. He strives against the faith, against repentance or belief in God’s mercy and love, all of the things which give a person grace.

Faustus cries out as he plans to give himself up to Lucifer:

Faustus cannot accept being a mere man. He demands that he be like God, indeed that he
be
God.

So Faustus gives up his human status and tries to be God. He summons Mephistopheles and tells him of his decision to join the forces of Lucifer. In answer to Faustus’ question about his life before he was thrown into hell, Mephistopheles—the representative of the devil—answers with one of the most haunting passages of the drama:

In this strange reversal of roles, the
devil pleads with Faustus to forgo his plans to join Lucifer
, the chief of the underworld. But Faustus is adamant and tells Mephistopheles to go back and “bear these tidings to great Lucifer,” so that Faustus, for “four and twenty years, will

How great he will be!

Thus Faustus will dominate both nature and man.

The hundreds of people who flocked to see this morality play, into which Marlowe’s myth was made, quivered at these words, aware on some level of consciousness that this was their secret desire as well. This new sense of power, control, omnipotence, the very rival of divinity, this vast power to change the boundaries of the world, gave them a fright along with a great sense of their power. For they were living in the new world of Copernicus and Galileo, and this lust for knowledge gave them new freedoms on every side. Living “in all voluptuousness” was profoundly tempting, and the height of evil at the same time.

The drama gives a continuous picture of Faustus struggling with the decision, shall he or shall he not? He then stabs his arm for blood to sign away his soul to Lucifer, but his body does not follow his aims—the blood is blocked: “My blood congeals and I can write no more.” And he rightly sees this as a psychosomatic sign,

The myth hinges on this phenomenon, which we see in therapy and in ourselves, that the conscious mind and the unconsciousness
have a
complementary
relation to each other. Carl Jung saw this clearly: when a person is overcome with joy, there comes a warning and an opposite tendency in one’s unconsciousness. A patient who was a theological student and a homosexual in the days when homosexuality was strictly taboo was ordained at a big service in his church, which service he greatly appreciated. But the same night after the service he went directly to Central Park to pick up a stranger for a homosexual fling. The next day in therapy he was full of guilt and horrified about the risk he had taken of being found out. It is not unusual for a much appreciated event like this man’s ordination to be followed by some act which is considered to be just the opposite.
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