Talk:Faust

General

You just cannot seriously say that a tale of selling one's soul to the devil 'has some base in history' any more than 'ascending to heaven on the back of an eagle' has some basis in aerodynamics. User:Wetman

I don't the article means to suggest that the bit about diabolic soul commerce actually happened to an historical figure - it's just that Faust-the-character's roots do seem to lie in a real person, so in that sense the tale does indeed have some basis in history. --Camembert

You have to take in to consideration the time period. Nearly everything was related to heaven or hell in some way. So when you come across a man who, in societies eyes, have pledged their lives to sin and almost pride themselves in it, they would think you were in league with the devil. User:NexNecis

Actually I think the most obvious source of the "Faustus" story is in St. Augustine's Confessions, in which Augustine flirts with the religion of Manichaeism before becoming a Catholic Christian. Manichaeism is remembered most often for its belief in a "good" spiritual world at odds with an "evil" material world, a view which Christianity has both been influenced by and supposedly officially rejects as a pernicious heresy. Augustine ultimately decided that good has substance but evil has no substance of its own, and is only void. Faustus was a Manichaean bishop with whom Augustine was acquainted and ultimately disappointed. It would be difficult to overstate the influence of Augustine on Christian thought and European intellectual history in general, so "Confessions" is not some arcane piece of writing. Augustine's Faustus fits the mold of someone whom many Christians would say had been tempted and misled by a competing/corrupting body of occult knowledge; the German Faustus story obviously translated this to contemporary kinds of occult knowledge like astrology and alchemy. This casts doubt on criticisms such as that of atheist thinker Bertrand Russell (in his essay "A Free Man's Worship") that the Faustus story is specifically an attack on science and freedom of mind; certainly in Augustine's Confessions it's a matter of one religion versus another and not an attack on rationality or intellectualism in and of itself. --Elizdelphi 19:18, 19 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Star Wars Ep. III

[1] I think more than a few people have seen clear influence of the Faust tale on Anakin Skywalker's evolution into Darth Vader, and George Lucas is on record in an interview admitting as such. - knoodelhed 04:38, 29 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Discerning some Faustian element in the film is quite something else from claiming that the film interprets the Faust legend or alludes to it. What I find through Google is a handful of people who say that Palpatine plays Mephisto to Anakin's Faust (no one seems to develop this so far as to ask whether Padme is Gretchen, which speaks to a degree of superficiality in exploring or developing this thought). I went through a number of these links, and although a handful are relatively analytic, the references to Faust are themselves passing allusions. Lucas may claim inspiration from the Faust legend, but it's rather more difficult to say that Lucas actually develops or even substantiates this in the film as an allusion. Perhaps the epigraph of the film might be Mark 8:36, but the allusion to Faust seems an inference at best vis-a-vis the film. Returning to Gretchen, perhaps the allusion to Faust might be plausible if Anakin's emotional tie to Padme was written with genuine facility or if we had reason to suspect that it the means of a manipulation arcing further across the prequels. Buffyg 17:55, 29 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

It seems to me that Star Wars Ep. III is at least more acceptable than Oscar Wilde's "The Picture of Dorian Grey." As far as I can remember, there are no specifically Faustian references in that work either. He also doesn't even exchange his soul for knowledge, like Anakin. He exchanges it for eternal beauty. We should either include both or exclude both, but to prefer the Wilde over Ep. III seems like mere literary snobbery. - mrchops10 23:59, 3 Oct 2005

Reference in V for Vendetta

The comic book V for Vendetta, by Alan Moore and David Lloyd, makes reference to Faust and the "deal" he made.