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Faust: My First 50 Years
We know Faust in popular culture from Gounod’s Opera Faust and from Goethe’s two volume poem organized as a play that is often printed as Faust Book 1 and Faust Book 2. The opera is drawn from Faust Book 1. Goethe drew his Faust from Marlowe’s play Doctor Faustus written in Elizabethan England. Marlowe’s play was drawn from an anonymous chapbook published during the Renaissance that circulated throughout Europe.
The Faust legend tells us that for a long time there has been a conflict between knowledge and faith. Knowledge obtained by reason assumes that nature has its own laws that humans can discover. Faith depends on revelation and tradition that have been canonized or accepted as true. Sometimes the newly discovered knowledge contradicts the beliefs contained in revealed knowledge (such as the Old or New Testaments) or religious doctrine. This often leads to heresy and schisms.
The Middle Ages in Europe was dominated by Roman Catholic theology. The Renaissance introduced two major upheavals. One was the Protestant revolution lead by Martin Luther. The second was the secularization of society through the invention of the printing press, the rise of nation states over baronetcies, the establishment of robust trade, the exploration of little-known continents and their countries, and the rise of humanism in the arts, sciences, and humanities.
My novel explores these changes as the medieval world shifted into the Renaissance. I use Johann Faust as the fictional grandson of Gutenberg’s financial backer. I follow the first fifty years of his life (1475-1525) to show the ferment taking place in Europe. My Faust is the anti-hero of the Faust of Goethe and Marlowe. He is educated in Germany and Italy and becomes a scholar and teaches in the emerging universities of Germany. He helps his father by collecting manuscripts and visits Columbus in Spain; Machiavelli, Fracastoro, and DaVinci in Italy; Copernicus in Poland; Durer in Munich, and Erasmus in Geneva. When he teaches in Wittenberg, Luther is his student. He is the humanist Faust, hoping to use reason and nature to interpret the universe. Unfortunately, his teachings and work are interpreted as diabolical, magic, or heretical and he and his student, Wagner, are forced to move.
The Faust legend tells us that for a long time there has been a conflict between knowledge and faith. Knowledge obtained by reason assumes that nature has its own laws that humans can discover. Faith depends on revelation and tradition that have been canonized or accepted as true. Sometimes the newly discovered knowledge contradicts the beliefs contained in revealed knowledge (such as the Old or New Testaments) or religious doctrine. This often leads to heresy and schisms.
The Middle Ages in Europe was dominated by Roman Catholic theology. The Renaissance introduced two major upheavals. One was the Protestant revolution lead by Martin Luther. The second was the secularization of society through the invention of the printing press, the rise of nation states over baronetcies, the establishment of robust trade, the exploration of little-known continents and their countries, and the rise of humanism in the arts, sciences, and humanities.
My novel explores these changes as the medieval world shifted into the Renaissance. I use Johann Faust as the fictional grandson of Gutenberg’s financial backer. I follow the first fifty years of his life (1475-1525) to show the ferment taking place in Europe. My Faust is the anti-hero of the Faust of Goethe and Marlowe. He is educated in Germany and Italy and becomes a scholar and teaches in the emerging universities of Germany. He helps his father by collecting manuscripts and visits Columbus in Spain; Machiavelli, Fracastoro, and DaVinci in Italy; Copernicus in Poland; Durer in Munich, and Erasmus in Geneva. When he teaches in Wittenberg, Luther is his student. He is the humanist Faust, hoping to use reason and nature to interpret the universe. Unfortunately, his teachings and work are interpreted as diabolical, magic, or heretical and he and his student, Wagner, are forced to move.
197 pages, Kindle Edition
Published January 20, 2023
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