Faust, although a contemporary of Fust the printer, was a very different character.  Unfortunately, our information about him comes almost entirely from his enemies, and their accounts are by no means sparing in abuse.  Trithemius, a Benedictine abbot of Spanheim in the early part of the sixteenth century, writes of him with the most virulent contempt, as a debauched person and a criminal whose overweening vanity arrogated to itself the most preposterous supernatural powers.  It would appear that he had been some sort of travelling charlatan, whose performing horse and dog were taken for evil spirits, like Esmeralda’s goat in Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame.  Even Melanchthon and Luther seem to have shared the common view of him, and at last there was published at Frankfurt the Historie of the Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Dr. John Faustus.  The date of this work is 1587, and a translation of it appeared in London in 1592.  It is a discursive composition, founded upon reminiscences of some ancient stroller who lived very much by his wits; but it took such a hold upon the imagination of the time that, by the latter part of the sixteenth century, Faust had become the necromancer par excellence.  Into the Faust-book there drifted endless necromantic lore from the Middle Ages and earlier times.  It seems to have had some connection with Jewish legends of magicians who invoked the Satanim, or lowest grade of elemental spirits not unlike the “elementals” of modern popular spiritualism.  It was the story of a Christian selling his soul to the powers of darkness, and it had behind it one of the poems of Hrosvitha of Gandersheim which relates a similar story of an archdeacon of Cilicia of the sixth century, and also the popular tradition of Pope Sylvester the Second, who was suspected of having made the same bargain.  Yet, as Lebahn says, “The Faust-legend in its complete form was the creation of orthodox Protestantism.  Faust is the foil to Luther, who worsted the Devil with his ink-bottle when he sought to interrupt the sacred work of rendering the Bible into the vulgar tongue.”  This legend, by the way, is a peculiarly happy one, for Luther not only aimed his ink-bottle at the Devil, but most literally and effectively hit him with it, when he wrote those books that changed the face of religious Europe.

The Historie had an immense and immediate popularity, and until well into the nineteenth century it was reproduced and sold throughout Europe.  As we read it, we cannot but wonder what manner of man it really was who attracted to himself such age-long hatred and fear, and held the interest of the centuries.  In many respects, doubtless, his story was like that of Paracelsus, in whom the world has recognised the struggle of much good with almost inevitable evil, and who, if he had been born in another generation, might have figured as a commanding spiritual or scientific authority.