By Kevin D. Williamson
Tuesday, August 06, 2019
Philosophy is odious and obscure;
Both law and physic are for petty wits;
Divinity is basest of the three,
Unpleasant, harsh, contemptible, and vile.
– Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus
You know the legend of Faust. He was a man of great
learning who wanted to be a man of great power, who made a deal with the devil,
exchanging his soul for perfect worldly knowledge and the commanding position
that goes with it. The story has been treated most famously by Marlowe and
Goethe, but also has held the imagination of everyone from Paul Valéry to
Václav Havel.
It should be performed weekly in Washington, because what
Faust ultimately sought was not only knowledge and magical abilities but political
power — the ultimate end to which he meant to put his ill-gotten
capacities. Faust envisioned a new kind of government, above and separate from
the vanities and schemes of mere kings and emperors, one that would be
universal and based on science, which at the time was so closely related to
magic as to be nearly indistinguishable in the popular mind.
O, what a world of profit and
delight,
Of power, of honour, of omnipotence,
Is promis’d to the studious
artizan!
All things that move between the
quiet poles
Shall be at my command: emperors
and kings
Are but obeyed in their several
provinces . . . .
Faust had worthy political causes, too: to improve the
schools, to defeat the occupations of foreign tyrants, to Build That Wall! (a
brass one around Germany), improving the intelligence services, even reforming
taxes to offset military spending:
Shall I make spirits fetch me what
I please,
Resolve me of all ambiguities,
Perform what desperate enterprise I
will?
I’ll have them fly to India for
gold,
Ransack the ocean for orient pearl,
And search all corners of the
new-found world
For pleasant fruits and princely
delicates;
I’ll have them read me strange
philosophy,
And tell the secrets of all foreign
kings;
I’ll have them wall all Germany
with brass,
And make swift Rhine circle fair
Wertenberg;
I’ll have them fill the public
schools with silk,
Wherewith the students shall be
bravely clad;
I’ll levy soldiers with the coin
they bring,
And chase the Prince of Parma from
our land,
And reign sole king of all the
provinces.
All that, in exchange for one little soul? Faust may have
read his Scripture, but he had not seen A Man for All Seasons. It seemed
to him a worthwhile trade.
When someone makes a deal with the devil, his immediate
object, after dipping into whatever scanty pleasures were to be had from that
deal, is to convince those around him — and himself — that he made a really,
really good deal, that it was worth it, that the price was only a trifle.
Informed of the extent of his powers, an excited and gratified Faust tells
Mephistopheles that these are more than sufficient, “enough for a thousand
souls.” Being a newly minted man of the world and newly contemptuous of the
mere intellectuals and their ivory-tower thinking, Faust concludes that real
power in the here and now is worth almost any tradeoff, especially when the
cost is merely moral or metaphysical. There is, he believes, no real downside
to the exchange:
Think’st thou that Faustus is so
fond to imagine
That, after this life, there is any
pain?
Tush, these are trifles and mere
old wives’ tales.
The intellectuals always are vulnerable to the Faustian
bargain. As I write in The Smallest Minority: “Julien Benda, in The
Treason of the Intellectuals, describes the ‘desire to abase the values of
knowledge before the values of action,’ meaning ‘the teaching that says that
when a will is successful that fact alone gives it a moral value, whereas the
will which fails is for that reason alone deserving of contempt.’ He called
this the ‘cult of success.’ It is yet another variation of ‘might makes
right.’” If you have heard, e.g., Mitt Romney dismissed as a “gentlemanly
loser” by certain so-called realists and self-described practical men of the
world, then you must recognize this line of argument. In the realm of
democratic politics, it requires the apotheosis of popular opinion, which is
understood as the only source of meaningful value. Those old war propaganda
posters had it right: “I am Public Opinion! All men fear me.”
Power offers many seductions and takes many forms. In
Goethe’s Faust, the great man’s servant invites him to worship at the
political altar and find his true self in the embrace of the mob.
What feelings, great man, must thy
breast inspire,
At homage paid thee by this crowd!
Thrice blest
Who from the gifts by him possessed
Such benefit can draw! The sire
Thee to his boy with reverence
shows;
They press around, inquire,
advance,
Hush’d is the fiddle, check’d the
dance.
Where thou dost pass they stand in
rows,
And each aloft his bonnet throws.
Faust ultimately discovers what we all discover, each in
our own way: that there is no good deal to be made with the devil, that nothing
that comes of such an exchange is ever worth the cost. Those who try to
negotiate the Faustian bargain can in the end only lament that they failed to
heed the warning: “Woe unto them that call evil good . . . and justify the
wicked for reward.”
The strange thing is that these practical men of the
world cannot accept the Faustian bargain for what it is and call it what it is,
and cannot help attempting to justify themselves and convince those around them
— and that insistent little voice inside — that it was a really good deal,
after all, that only hypocrites and cloistered moralists and fussbudgets in
their ivory towers would carp and complain about it. Enough for a thousand
souls!
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