To understand fully the state of belief in which the intellect of the sixteenth century stood in regard to magic, astrology, theosophy, etc., it will be necessary to cast an eye back to the early history of Christianity and philosophy.

There can, in the first place, be no doubt that the genius of the Christian religion is completely adverse to that exaggerated and superstitious belief in the power of the Devil and Evil Spirits, which was so prevalent in the first ages of the Church, and increased to such a fearful extent in the Middle Ages. The Jewish religion, too, was founded on the great and fundamental doctrine that there is but one God, as opposed to the Hindoo and Persian notion of conflicting divinities, so universally spread over the East; and all the wild waste of doctrines concerning demons (διδασκαλίαι δαιμονίων, 1 Tim. iv. 1), with which the fertility of Rabbinical invention overran the fair garden of Mosaic theology, has been very properly relegated by German divines to its true source, the Babylonish captivity. Such, however, is the proneness of human reason to all sorts of superstition, that, though the New Testament Scriptures expressly declare[*i3] that Jesus Christ came to annihilate the power, and destroy the works of the Devil, the monotheism of primitive Christianity was, in a few centuries, magnified into a monstrous system of demonological theology, little better than Oriental Dualism. The declension to this superstition was so much the more easy, as there were not wanting certain passages of Scripture (Eph. ii. 2, and vi. 12; 2 Thess. ii. 9), which ignorant and bigoted priests could easily turn to their own purposes, in magnifying this fancied power of the great enemy of man. A man like Del Rio would find devils within the walls of the New Jerusalem; so wonderfully sharp is his Jesuitical nose to scent out even the slightest motion of infernal agency.

The Gnostic and Manichæan heresies which infested the Church during the first five or six centuries could not be without their influence in exalting the power of the principle of evil; but writers of a far more philosophical character and more sober tone than those Oriental heresiarchs cannot be exempted from the charge of having contributed fairly to the same result. Of those fathers of the Church who did not, like Arnobius and Lactantius, exclaim against all philosophy, as opposed to the simplicity of the gospel, the greater number belonged to the Alexandrian school of Neo-Platonists, who, with all their sublime idealism, are known to have cherished, with a peculiar fondness, some of the most childish and superstitious notions to which philosophic mysticism has given birth. No lover of piety and virtue springing from a high and soul-ennobling philosophy, but must love and reverence the memory of such names as Proclus, Plotinus, and Jamblichus. It cannot, however, be denied that the overstrained ideas of these pure spirits went a great way to promote the growth of the prevalent superstitions with regard to theurgy and magic. The life of Plotinus seems, from the account given by Porphyry, to have been considered by himself and his admirers as an uninterrupted intercourse with spiritual intelligences, yea, with the one original Spirit himself; and in the Enneads of this prince of philosophic mystics, we have already fully developed all that system of mutual sympathies and antipathies, of concords and discords, between the all-animated parts of that mighty animal the World, which so readily allowed themselves to be worked into a system of practical theurgy and magic. Jamblichus, again, was not only a mystical philosopher, who sought to arrive at union (ἕνωσις) with the Divine Being by intellectual contemplation, but a magician and theurgist, as his work on the Egyptian mysteries, and the many legends told of him by his biographers, sufficiently prove.

I have been thus particular in holding forth the decidedly magical and theurgic character of the Alexandrian School of Platonists, in the second and third centuries, as it is easy to perceive that the revival of the Platonic, or rather Neo-Platonic philosophy, on occasion of the restoration of learning in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, had a principal share in the formation of the theosophic and magical views of the sixteenth century, which it is my intention here to characterise. The world had become heartily sick of the eternal boom-booming of the Aristotelian bitterns.[*i4] The hungry spirit of man, aroused from its lethargic slumber, demanded some more vital nourishment than the skeleton distinctions of a thought-dissecting logic, and the vain pomposity of a learned terminology, could afford; and when such men as Dante, Petrarch, and Boccacio had taught the world to prefer the fulness of poetical life to the nakedness of scholastic speculation, no wonder that Plato, Plotinus, and Proclus, when brought into the West by the learned fugitives of Constantinople, should have received a hearty welcome, and exercised a deep-spread influence over the philosophy of the succeeding centuries. Gemistus Pletho, Bessarion, and Marsilius Ficinus, are well known as the three principal restorers of the Platonic philosophy in the fifteenth century: but it deserves especially to be remarked, that these men were far from being pure worshippers of their great master, but mixed it up with the theurgic dreamings of Jamblichus and Porphyry, nay, even went as far back as Pythagoras and Hermes Trismegistus, and held the simple Platonic doctrines as of comparatively little consequence, unless taken in connection with the mighty system which, out of such strange materials, had been built up by the Neo-Platonists.[*i5]

In connection with the revival of the Platonic philosophy in Italy, we cannot omit to mention the name of Reuchlin, whose zeal for cabbalistical studies is said to have been first excited by the famous Johannes Picus Mirandula.[*i6] Reuchlin was a German, and is the more interesting to us as the contemporary, or rather the master and instructor of Agrippa, Melancthon, and many celebrated men of the sixteenth century, whose names stand immediately connected with the story of Doctor Faust. To complete the wild dreamings of the Italian Platonists, nothing was now wanting but a revival of the Rabbinical and Talmudistic lore; and Reuchlin, whom Europe still reveres as the father of Hebrew learning in modern Theology, was precisely the man for this purpose. It was natural that the language of the sacred Book should have been considered as containing something mystical and transcendental even in its very letters; and we need not wonder that the enthusiasm of the first Hebrew scholars in Germany should have discovers the key of all the sciences in that cabbalistic lore, which we are now accustomed to use in common discourse, as a synonym for the most childish and unintelligible jargon.

Taking, thus, the prevailing theology of the Church, in connection with the impulse which the human mind had received from the revival of the Platonic philosophy, and the strong reaction, which the risings of independent thought in the breasts of men like Telesius, Campanella, and Bruno, had raised against the long-established despotism of the Aristotelian philosophy,--and all this worked up to a point by the revival of Cabbalism, through Reuchlin and other cultivators of Oriental literature,--we shall have no difficulty in perceiving at once the leading features of the age in which Faust flourished, and the causes which led to their development. We see the human intellect, in being roused into new life from the icy night of scholasticism, surrounded by the glowing but unsubstantial morning-clouds of a philosophy of feeling and imagination. Sufficiently occupied with gazing, child-like, on the hovering shapes that teemed so richly from its new-awakened being, it had no tune, no wish, to enter upon the severe task of conscious manhood, that of criticising its own powers, and defining, with cautious precision, what the mind of man can know, and what it cannot know,--and was thus destined, for a short season, to flounder through the misty regions of theosophy and magic, till it should learn, from experience, to find at once its starting-point and its goal, in the exhaustless fulness of actual Nature.

In such an age, and under the influence of opinions, religious and philosophical, so different from those now prevalent, flourished the mysterious hero of modern magic, whom the pen of Goethe has made, likewise, one of the principal heroes of modern poetry. That a good deal of obscurity should have gathered around such a character,--that the love of the marvellous should have united with the ignorance of the age, in magnifying juggling tricks into miracles of magic, and clouding with a poetical mistiness that which was clear and definite,--is not to be wondered at. But that such a character actually existed, the tradition perpetuated from age to age on its native soil, and found, with little variation, scattered over almost every country, and clothed in almost every language of Europe, is of itself sufficient evidence. Popular legends seldom spring, like the antediluvian and prelapsarian traditions of the Talmudists, or the genealogies of old Celtic families, from mere airy nothingness; and, however contradictory and inconsistent their integrant parts may appear, they have all formed themselves around a nucleus of substantial reality. Nevertheless, as there is nothing so absurd which has not been asserted by some one of the philosophers, so there have not been wanting men of learning and investigation, who have seriously set themselves to the task of proving away the personality of the renowned Doctor Faust.[*i7] But to detect a few chronological inaccuracies in the common popular legend, and to hold out to merited contempt the silliness, and even the impossibility of many things contained in it, may afford an opportunity for the display of a pedantic erudition, but can give no ground for the sweeping conclusion that the person, of whom these stories are told, did actually never exist. The monks were clever fellows; but, with all their ability, they would have found it difficult to invent such a story as Faust--so generally believed--out of mere nothing. The sceptics themselves are sensible of this; and, accordingly, Dürr, the chief of them, while he denies the personality of Faust the magician, endeavours to give a probable reason for the prevalence of the story, by throwing the whole burden upon the back of Faust the printer, father-in-law of Peter Schoeffer, and fellow-workers both of Guttenburg,--the famous trio, among whom the honour of the invention of printing is divided. The envy of the monks, acting on the ignorance of the age, here comes most opportunely into play, to explain how the inventor of such a novel art of multiplying books should have been generally accounted a magician. There can, indeed, be little doubt that he was so accounted by many ignorant people; and as this idea is sufficiently poetical, Klingemann has taken advantage of it in his tragedy of Doctor Faust.[*i8] The main objection, however, on the face of this theory, is, that all the legends of Faust agree in placing the hero of magic fully half a century later than Faust the printer, who flourished about 1440. It is true, indeed, that some of the Volksbücher (vide Dürr, ut supra) ascribe to the Emperor Maximilian, what is generally told of Charles V., viz. that Doctor Faust conjured up before him the apparitions of Alexander the Great and his queen; but the other tricks, which were played before Cardinal Campegio and Pope Adrian, agree better with the age of Charles V. than with that of Maximilian. It is quite possible, however, that Faust may have exhibited his magical skill before both these emperors, whose reigns occupied the space from 1492 to 1558, Maximilian dying in 1519; for even the date of Maximilian will never bring us back to the era when Faust the printer was in his glory.