Dr. Faust and Laoza. When Dr. Faust insulted the Tao, the devil emerged.
A German necromancer flourished for a little while during the Protestant Reformation. We only know a little about him. Heck, we aren't even sure when he died. It's like 1538, 1540, no one seems to know for sure.
He was supposedly a boastful man, sometimes gained influence and powerful ecclesiastical and worldly courts. But after his death, rumors about his supernatural gifts and evil living circulated. The rumors grew into legend. Legend grew into shrouded history and Johann's pieces, the history of Dr.
Faustis, the notorious magician and master of the Black art. Shrotted history then grew into drama in the work of the greatest play right before Shakespeare, Christopher Marlow, and his Tragical History of Dr. Faustis. Many historical literary artistic and musical accounts on the Faust's Legend followed Marlow's account.
And then a young Johann Gouta, or as I pronounce it, goth, G-O-E-T-A-G, saw Faust's puppet show on the puppet show featuring Dr. Faust and the devil. It started Gouta's lifelong interest in the Faust's Legend. This interest climax 1808 with the publication of Faust, the first part of the tragedy.
A work that Gouta started in 1770 and was still working out when he died in 1832. It was like his lifelong obsession or something interesting in his entire life. All right, so let's summarize. Gouta's Faust.
Excuse me. It tells the story of an old scholar who yearns to comprehend all. The play begins with him in his study where he is in despair because his intellectual efforts haven't been able to penetrate the secrets of the universe. He turns to the occult.
Mephistopheles, a demon, though not necessarily Satan himself, Gouta keeps it vague. Anyway, Mephistopheles appears and brings those occult powers. Faust suggests that two-part bad were exchanged. He agrees to give his soul to Mephistopheles in exchange for those occult powers.
But if he uses those occult powers solely to pursue knowledge and not to become a reprobate, he doesn't lose his soul. So he's not going to use it to, you know, get a bunch of girls and bang them and get really rich in this, you know, lose living. Instead, he's going to use those occult powers and comprehend all. Mephistopheles has agreed and got a bat, and the powers are given.
And Faust starts to get tempted. He seduces a girl, Gretchen, and impregnates her. She gives birth, goes mad, drowns her baby, and is an ex-keetive for the crime. If Faust is shaken, his lust for Gretchen had transformed into love, which opens his pedantic scholarly heart to tenderness and compassion.
Faust arguably loses the bat because he uses the powers for carnal purposes and not his studies like he's supposed to or like he said he would. But in this ordeal, Faust discovers compassion for others. Love always wins. Mephistopheles loses.
Angels bear fouls to heaven. Mephistopheles watches and fantasizes about sodomizing the boyish look at angels. That's a great story. It's at the standard for modern literary representations of the devil.
So whenever I can film, if you watch the movie, you can see the devil that's Urbain or witty or otherwise it simplifies appealing characteristics, it's Gutas Mephistopheles. And I think of like, um, how is that film with down and drawing behind the devil's advocate with cantoreves? They're the devil's Urbain and kind of sophisticated lawyer. Anyway, what really interests me in Gutas' version is Faust's last attempt to comprehend all before Mephistopheles appears.
Faust is sitting in a study and learning, quote, to reach Revelations Brink, unquote. He says to himself that it quote burns in the New Testament, unquote. He decides to rewrite it. He starts with the Gospel of John.
He writes, in the beginning was the thought. That didn't quite get it. So then he writes, in the beginning was the power. That wasn't quite right either.
And then he writes, in the beginning was the deed. At that, a black dog that had followed him into a study starts to gulp and then starts to shift shapes within a mist. As the mist subsides, a wandering scholar emerges. It's Mephistopheles.
And I think it makes sense that Faust's last attempt to master reality would conclude with him writing, quote, in the beginning was the deed, unquote. Such a statement inverts the real or the ontological order of things. I think y'all know this, but the Gospel of John starts with the words, quote, in the beginning was the word capital W. Word doesn't mean language here.
Rather, it refers to greatest ontological existential truth. Or what I've been referring to in these podcast, podcast episodes as the left side of the reality spectrum. So again, on the far left side, you have active existence slash dao. And then you go on the other side of the door, you have essence slash accident, along with being slash substance.
Now, Saint John's quote unquote word, in other words, refers to the dao, which is why the famous Catholic convert, John Wu, a Chinese man translated the Gospel of John and wrote, quote, in the beginning was the dao. And the dao was with God. And the dao was God. Faust's rewriting was blasphemous at the deepest level.
It denied the dao. It said that the left side of the reality spectrum isn't prior to the right sides. In fact, the left side doesn't even exist. All is essence, accident, being a substance, things we can define, things we can touch, things we can reach with logic and reason, things we can classify and control, things we can use, things we can act upon, things that work and allow us to carry out deeds like earthly improvements and earning money.
Faust's rewriting was, in other words, deeply modern. It embraced and uttered the heart and soul of modernity. There is no dao. And then came the devil.
I am just gonna give a real brief history, like 150 years after Faust's first part of the story appeared 1808. See, things are looking pretty good for Western civilization. Indeed, things went well for the next hundred years. There were hiccups like Napoleonic Wars that were raging at the time, Gouda wrote the first part.
And in the US Civil War, which featured history's first quote unquote total war, which was no holds barred, all traditional norms of combat be damned. But by 1900, my journey was proceeding well, at least from the vantage point of the birthplace of modernity, Western Europe. And with its history, with its tradition and British empiricism and the Continental idealism, which were like the leading philosophies of the past couple hundred years, Western Europe was killing it. Advances of the scientific revolution and industrial revolution allowed the Spanish, Portuguese, British, French, Dutch, and Germans to conquer the globe.
Life expectancy was rising, wealth was growing. At the same time, the Continental philosophical tradition was leading to a fierce subjectivism that freed people from the constraints of dogma, giving them a new type of liberty, whether in the form of a looser personal morality or merely liberty to trust that dictates other own mind. Everything was fun. Everything was great.
You had the gay 90s, referring to 1890s. The first 15 years, the 20th century, were remembered as the beautiful epoch or the banquet years. Optimism was surging. And then came the Great War, where what we subsequently knew was World War I.
It was brutal. It was deadly. And it was a shock. I mean, everything was looking so great.
And then things got so freaking bad. It was such a terrible war. It led to Hemingway in the last generation. In the 1920s, Elliot's Royce Land, the Weimar, Germany, and the Bolsheviks.
And then came Hitler's Stalin and Mao. All men of the deed.