https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/08/12/devils-contract-the-history-of-the-faustian-bargain-ed-simon-book-review Skip to main content The New Yorker * Newsletter Search * The Latest * News * Books & Culture * Fiction & Poetry * Humor & Cartoons * Magazine * Puzzles & Games * Video * Podcasts * Goings On * Festival Open Navigation Menu Find anything you save across the site in your account Close Alert The New Yorker Books Deals with the Devil Aren't What They Used to Be Tales of Faust's bargain teased and consoled an earlier culture with the lure of freedom, the promise of a wider world. But Hell is everywhere now. By James Wood August 5, 2024 * * * * * A man in a suit walking with the devil. In a new book, Ed Simon explores the history of the Faustian myth, relishing its heresies and dangers, its madcap adventures, and its reflections of the anxieties and desires of each age.Illustration by Cleon Peterson Save this story Save this story How many who piously lament the "disenchantment" of the secular world would have been able to bear ordinary life in, say, seventeenth-century Europe? We are bereft, the elegy goes, because modern knowledge has stripped us of ancient magic. We can't wander like our ancestors in the spirit-filled woods, or hear the music of the spheres, because the sacred spaces became concrete deserts. The cathedrals were displaced by malls. To "understand" the solar system, the charge continues, is to be dead to it. No longer open to the pressing torque of divinities and djinns, we moderns are closed off and shut down, buffered and buttressed, marching efficiently through our merely material world, grim-faced assassins of mystery. But consider for a moment the nature of those early modern supernaturalisms. In a classic study, "Religion and the Decline of Magic" (1971), Keith Thomas patiently restored, parish record by parish record, the old enchanted English world of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For most people, life was a business of terrifying external forces and arbitrary powers, both spiritual and legal. Credulity cut both ways: when religion was still magical, and magic was still religious, then both were supported by alarming superstition. Prayers were also placatory spells, and harmless charismatics might well be witches. The local doctor was really just a helpless conjurer, while the lazy village priest got endowed with unwarranted godlike powers. Thomas is particularly good at depicting the centrality of the Devil in ordinary life. Medieval Christianity was effectively Manichaean. Christ and his angels battled for your salvation, while the Devil and his many demonic spirits sought to trick and tempt, to pull you into their infernal kingdom. King James I called the Devil "God's hangman." Demons had no bodily presence, Thomas writes, but it was understood that they could borrow a human form. Preachers spiced up their sermons with frightening reports of abduction and deception. In England, the Protestant Reformation of the early sixteenth century did nothing to ameliorate this regime. Protestantism's obsession with human sinfulness and the arbitrariness of salvation exposed the self only more acutely to the battleground of warring deities. For Martin Luther, who famously threw his inkpot at the Devil, Satan was as elemental and omnipresent as excrement. (Luther essentially told Satan to eat shit.) Keith Thomas tells the story of an English boy who, for five or six years, "went to sleep with his hands clasped in a praying position, so that if the devils came for him they would find him prepared." This is the world brilliantly evoked in Daniel Kehlmann's novel "Tyll" (2017), set in early-seventeenth-century Germany, in which Claus, a village miller who has been dabbling in magic and necromancy, is quickly forced to confess by Jesuit inquisitors and sentenced to hang. Claus humbly accepts that he's done something wrong, though he doesn't know what it is. The local hangman reassures him that execution is much nicer than it used to be: "These are better days. In the past you were all burned to death. That takes time, it's not pleasant. But hanging is nothing. It happens quickly. You climb onto the scaffold and before you know it, you're standing before the Creator. You're incinerated afterward, but by then you're dead, it doesn't bother you at all, you'll see." "Good," the unlucky Claus replies. What We're Reading Discover notable new fiction and nonfiction. [bestbooks-] It was a logical step from this apprehension of the Devil to the suspicion that certain people had done deals and bargains with him, selling their immortal souls for worldly benefits. My favorite of the many stories that Thomas recounts involves a student at Cambridge University, who was struggling to understand one of his scholarly texts. The Devil appeared in the guise of a Master of Arts, who elucidated the text and offered the student a trip to Italy and a degree from the University of Padua. "Two days later," we learn, "the hapless student's gown was found floating in the river," the student having paid a rather steep price for a spot of academic help. These kinds of tales, as Ed Simon explores in his lively new book, " Devil's Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain" (Melville House), existed as myths that enacted both resistance and control. A cowed culture flirted with the danger of freedom and blasphemous knowledge--literally, the danger of reading the wrong things--while the shape of the Faustian tale almost always enforced the proper religious and social punishment, in the form of Faust's death and eternal damnation. Reading Simon, I was often put in mind of the English critic Tony Tanner's observation that the nineteenth-century novel of adultery wrote judgment but dreamed transgression. The Faustian tale teased and consoled an earlier culture in similar ways. In these stories, knowledge itself functions a bit like the heroine's extramarital affair in the novel of adultery. It's the lure of freedom, the understandable temptation, the promise of a wider world (Emma Bovary imagining the streets and shops of Paris). In Christopher Marlowe's play "Doctor Faustus," written at the end of the sixteenth century, the Devil gets Faustus, who has a doctorate from the University of Wittenberg and is bored with the standard academic disciplines, to sign a contract in his own blood. For twenty-four years, Faustus can have whatever he desires. He gets to dabble in magic, to meet the seven deadly sins, to make himself invisible and play tricks on the Pope's court in Rome, even to conjure up Helen of Troy. For twenty-four years, he flies high, and views the world as if he were one of God's spies (to steal a phrase from a certain rival playwright). But, when the time is up, there's only one possible outcome. He must pay for his expensive error. In the final scene, the devils arrive to cart Faustus off to Hell. Simon is especially alive to the transgressive. To begin his account, he reaches back to the Bible, and locates two early Faustian stories that shimmer with peril. Each exists on the sharp edge between orthodoxy and doubt. The first concerns Simon Magus, or Simon the Sorcerer, a trickster and Gnostic chancer who appears briefly in the New Testament's Book of Acts. Simon was a kind of rival Messiah, who had been claiming miraculous powers from God. Obsessed with the actual spiritual powers of Jesus' apostles Peter and John, Simon offered them money, in exchange for knowledge of the Holy Ghost. Scandalized, Peter and John denounced Simon's false heart, and commanded him to repent. In other, less canonical, texts of this period, stories are told in which Simon moved to Rome, where he founded a cult with his lover Helen, a reformed prostitute. Perhaps, other accounts suggest, Simon promised to levitate over the rooftops of Rome, and was brought down by Peter's furious orthodox prayers--what Ed Simon (a relation to the Magus only in his own pleasing addiction to dangerous knowledge) nicely calls a kind of "prayer battle." An angry crowd subsequently stoned the Magus to death. Ed Simon's second early tale is more canonical, but its designation as Faustian might be more controversial--it's the story of Christ's temptation in the wilderness, when the Devil comes to entice Jesus with the fruits of worldly power. If you are hungry, the Devil teases, turn these stones into bread; you surely have the magical power. Jesus, in his usual style, replies gnomically, converting material advantages into spiritual ones: man does not live on bread alone. The Devil tries again. He shows Jesus "all of the kingdoms of the world," offering him all earthly power if Jesus will bow down to him. Jesus again rejects material gain, and finally banishes the tempter: Satan is not the real God, because there is only one God; the Devil doesn't have the best tunes. In these two early stories lie most of the subsequent Faustian motifs: the temptations of knowledge and power; the bargaining away of more distant spiritual gains for nearer material ones; the almost symmetrical rivalry of good and evil forces; the taint of the commercial or contractual bond; the picaresque flights through time and space; even the odd obsession with exciting women called Helen. More interesting still is the note of blasphemous danger: in this way, these stories function like theological safety valves. The Simon Magus tale is perilously perched on the narrow base between magical faith and religious faith. As a narrative, it merely insists on the orthodoxy of the latter over the former, with all the arbitrariness of the horticulturist who denominates some alluring plant as a weed rather than a flower. Simon Magus is sometimes called the founder of Gnosticism, which was an early Christian heresy, a kind of Manichaeism that posited that the world we live in is really the creation of a rival or false god, a diabolical Demiurge. So, as Ed Simon shrewdly notes, we might see Simon Magus's desired pact as one made not with the Devil but with the Devil-in-Chief, "that equally malevolent deity known as God." Theology gathers its cassock skirts and anxiously casts Simon out as a magician or a sorcerer. But on what basis? Note that Jesus, though he banishes the Devil, does not, or cannot, vanquish him: an essentially Manichaean world continues to breathe all around the Messiah. Indeed, long before Jesus arrived on the scene, the Book of Job had depicted God flippantly agreeing to a deal with Satan, in order to test Job's righteousness, as if God and the Devil were two buddies killing time at a bar, dabbling in destruction. A story is essentially just a rather entitled hypothesis; inherently and unstably suggestive, story is always offering up the ghosts of its shadowy alternatives. This becomes very interesting when stories are at all theological. In these cases, the "What if?" is potentially blasphemous. What if Jesus had become the first Faust, by succumbing to the Devil's successful temptation? Equally, the existence of this story puts some pressure on the notion of Jesus' divinity. Humans are susceptible to temptation, and of course Jesus was also human, but shouldn't God be above or beyond such things? The Faustian tale is always a diabolically theological one, an orthodox tale with doubt, risk, and disobedience at its center. So the truly diabolical temptation might be not the one depicted in these stories but the one the story as story teases: the reader's own religious surety. Ed Simon makes the point nicely: whether you sell your soul to Satan or to God, "you've still sold your soul." The Faustian tale is one of those myths that allow a culture to project its anxieties and desires. The celebrated historian of the novel's rise, Ian Watt, counted the Faustian bargain, along with the tales of Robinson Crusoe, Don Juan, and Don Quixote, as four great "myths of modern individualism," in a book of that title published in 1996. Watt's emphasis falls on the Faustian myth as a religious culture's way of maintaining theological and social order. He makes the point that Protestantism (and, of course, Christianity generally) had a need to enforce the discipline of delayed gratification. Since "one had to make people believe that pleasure in this world must bring pain in the next," what better than a popular story that taught the ultimate dangers of sacrificing the eternal afterlife for the fleeting pleasures of this worldly existence? Ed Simon, though, tends to see the Faustian myth as more liberatory than punitive. He enjoys its heresies and dangers, its madcap adventures, the magical-realist wildness; and, since he has read extremely widely, he relishes sharing all of that narrative wealth with his lucky readers. With his help, we can make out the tale's distinct historical phases. Myths about the dangers of knowledge (Pandora, Genesis) may be as old as humanity, but the Faustian tale as such really gets going only in the early modern period, when magic, necromancy, and sorcery became intellectual options for educated humanists while remaining potentially heretical choices as far as the established church was concerned. A man with the last name of Faust seems to have existed somewhere in Germany in the late fifteenth century. Perhaps he was an alchemist or a theological student, or both; perhaps he was from Heidelberg, or Roda, or Knittlingen. Simon mentions a record from 1507, in which Faust is an itinerant monk and "the prince of necromancers." This Faust may have been sacked from a teaching position owing to "nefarious fornication." From these modest beginnings, the myth balloons. The German Lutheran reformer Philip Melanchthon told of a Faust who tried to do a Simon Magus over the rooftops of Venice, crashing to his death in a canal. In 1548, Johannes Gast wrote about a Faust who had played tricks on a group of monks by introducing a poltergeist into the monastery. The Frankfurt "Faustbuch" of 1587, a highly popular collection of themed stories which became Marlowe's source, told the story of Faust's infernal contract. These roomy tales could accommodate a lot of narrative baggage--Faust's journeying across Europe, plenty of ribald comedy, easy racism. As with most stories concerning tricksters and con men, the tales existed as ways of desiring and demonizing a marked outsider. Faust could be considered heretical (though perhaps lovably or sympathetically so), whereas the Devil's emissary or broker (ultimately named Mephistopheles) might be a "hellish prince of Orient," or--of course--a seductive Jew. Great pleasure was had in imagining Faust's inevitably sticky end: he might have been suffocated by Satan, hurled to the ground, or found with his head twisted violently backward. Gradually, the tale's strict theological obsessions were supplanted by a more general interest in the temptation of knowledge itself. Marlowe's Faustus belongs quite explicitly to an academic setting--he has students, for instance, who ask him if he can summon the apparition of Helen of Troy. (He obliges: the ultimate PowerPoint.) In Goethe's fairly incoherent verse play "Faust," written in two parts between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the protagonist is an elderly scholar, and Mephistopheles appears in the guise of a wandering student. In the second part of the play, published in 1832, Goethe jettisons the orthodox punishments of the canonical accounts and has Faust sweetly ascend to Heaven: in the nineteenth century, the old theology is becoming romantically weightless. Once the doctrinal dilemmas had been hollowed out, the tale could expand itself into the figurative, and become what it was always ready to be: not so much a story about the loss of an eternal soul as an allegory about any kind of painful exchange in which short-term gain threatens long-term security. Ed Simon, roaming far and wide with his own appealingly Faustian energies, points to the Brothers Grimm fairy tale "Rumpelstiltskin" (their version was published in 1812) as an example of this new, de-theologized Faustian fable: the eponymous imp does a deal with a miller's daughter, in which he spins straw into gold for her, and secures, in return, her promise that he can take her firstborn child. But she ultimately vanquishes the devilish fellow, and protects her progeny. Simon notes the enormous popularity of Faustian fables in the nineteenth century, characterized by something new: "the possibility of people being victorious against the cloven-hoofed one, of being more talented in the skills of wit and duplicity." Thomas Mann's great postwar novel " Doctor Faustus" (1947) takes the Faustian bargain and allegorizes the exchange into nothing less than the moral balance sheet of German history itself, as his Faust, the brilliant composer Adrian Leverkuhn, bargains away his soul for twenty-four years of musical genius. Adrian started out as a theology student, but the stakes of Mann's novel are not, at heart, theological--Adrian has a maddening case of syphilis, and that is the secular portal through which Mephistopheles makes his entry. Today, Hell is here, inside us; it is not elsewhere. We're all Faustians now. These days, Simon argues, in an excoriating, eloquent final chapter, we write our contracts not in blood but in silicon--both figuratively, insofar as we sign away our identities and privacies for all the short-term benefits of material ease, and literally, whenever we scroll rapidly through one of those unreadable online contracts, eager only to assent. Somewhere out there in the ether, the ghost in the machine hears our weak little mouse clicks and pricks up his horns. Published in the print edition of the August 12, 2024, issue, with the headline "The Devil Take It." New Yorker Favorites * As he rose in politics, Robert Moses discovered that decisions about New York City's future would not be based on democracy. * The Muslim tamale king of the Old West. * Wendy Wasserstein on the baby who arrived too soon. * An Oscar-winning filmmaker takes on the Church of Scientology. * The young stowaways thrown overboard at sea. * Fiction by Jhumpa Lahiri: "A Temporary Matter." Sign up for our daily newsletter to receive the best stories from The New Yorker. James Wood, a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2007, teaches at Harvard. His latest book is "Serious Noticing," a collection of essays. Read More J. D. Vance's Sad, Strange Politics of Family Daily Comment J. D. Vance's Sad, Strange Politics of Family J. D. Vance's Sad, Strange Politics of Family The Vice-Presidential candidate's memoir reveals the roots of his ideas about parents, children, and who should run the country. By Jessica Winter The Veterinarians Preventing the Next Pandemic Elements The Veterinarians Preventing the Next Pandemic The Veterinarians Preventing the Next Pandemic Most new diseases have their origins in animals. So why aren't we paying more attention to their health? 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