Mephisto Mocks the Hollow Mask of Academic Learning

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · Mystic Verse and Insights Series · 11 pages

Eleven pages built around a single passage of Faust — the Collegium Logicum, lines 1908 to 1941, in Albert G. Latham's translation — followed by etymological notes on the name Mephistopheles and a short gathering of material on the Devil. A table of contents opens it. Tischbein's Goethe in der römischen Campagna of 1787 is reproduced partway through, with the painter's own motto beneath it: who is the happiest of men? He who values the merits of others, and in their pleasure takes joy, even as though it were his own.

The verse is Mephistopheles speaking while disguised as Faust, advising a new student how to study, and the advice is a sustained joke at the expense of method. Begin with logic, he says, and the mind will be drilled and braced, in Spanish boots be tightly laced, taught henceforth to shuffle along the path of thought and not zigzag as the wind may blow — so that what a man once did as freely as eating and drinking must now be done with one, two, three. The image the passage turns on is the weaver's: thought has warp and weft like a masterpiece of the loom, one tread and a thousand threads flit, one stroke and a thousand knots are knit — and then the philosopher comes along and proves learnedly that so the thing must be, the first was so, the second so, therefore the third and fourth. All scholars praise it, the passage ends, but it hasn't yet made weavers of them. A second fragment makes the complaint directly: he who would study some living thing drives first the spirit out of the body, and is then left holding the parts with the spiritual band missing — Encheiresis Naturæ, chemistry calls it, mocking itself and not knowing what befalls it. The etymological notes that follow give three readings of the name, and the editor makes no choice between them: Karl Julius Schröer's, from Hebrew mephitz, destroyer, and tophel, liar; Denton Jaques Snider's, from the Greek negative μή and φίλος, loving; and Paul Bishop's, from μή and φῶς, light, so not a friend of light. The closing pages set Éliphas Lévi's Lucifer — not a cursed and thunderstruck angel but the one who illuminates and regenerates by burning — beside the observation that the Devil is the patron genius of theological Christianity: no Devil, no Christ.

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