THE THREE DEVILS:

LUTHER'S, MILTON'S, AND GOETHE'S.*

LUTHER, Milton, and Goethe: these are three strange names to bring together. It strikes us, however, that the effect will be interesting if we connect these three great names, as having each represented to us the Principle of Evil, and each represented him in a different way. Each of the three has left on record his conception of a great accursed being, incessantly working in human affairs, and whose function it is to produce evil. There is nothing more striking about Luther than the amazing sincerity of his belief in the existence of such an evil being, the great general enemy of mankind, and whose specific object, at that time, it was to resist Luther's movement, and, if possible, "cut his soul out of God's mercy." What Luther's exact conception of this being was, is to be gathered from his life and writings. Again, we have Milton's Satan. And, lastly, we have Goethe's Mephistopheles. Nor is it possible to confound the three, or, for a moment, to mistake the one for the other. They are as unlike as it is possible for three grand conceptions of the same thing to be. It cannot, therefore, but be interesting and profitable to make their peculiarities and their differences a subject of study. Milton's Satan, and Goethe's Mephistopheles, have indeed been frequently contrasted in a vague, antithetic way; for no writer could possibly go through a description of Goethe's Mephistopheles without saying something or other about Milton's Satan. The exposition, however, of the difference between the two has never been sufficiently elaborate; and, besides, it appears to us, that it will have the effect of giving the whole speculation greater

* FRASER'S MAGAZINE. Dec. 1844.

value and interest if, in addition to Milton's Satan and Goethe's Mephistopheles, we take in Luther's Devil. In this paper, therefore, we shall attempt to expound the difference between Luther's Devil, Milton's Satan, and Goethe's Mephistopheles; and, of course, the way to do this effectively is to expound the three in succession. It is scarcely necessary to premise that here there is to be no theological discussion. All that we propose is, to compare, as we find them, three very striking delineations of the Evil Principle, one of them experimental, the other two poetical.

These last words indicate one respect, in which, it will be perceived, at the outset, that Luther's conception of the Evil Principle on the one hand, and Milton's and Goethe's on the other, are fundamentally distinguishable. All the three, of course, are founded on the Scriptural proposition of the existence of a being whose express function it is to produce evil. Luther, firmly believing every jot and tittle of Scripture, believed the proposition about the Devil also, and so the whole of his experience of evil in himself and others was cast into the shape of a verification of that proposition. Had he started without such a preliminary conception, his experience would have had to encounter the difficulty of expressing itself in some other way; which, it is likely, would not have been nearly so effective, or so Luther-like. Milton, too, borrows the elements of his conception of Satan from Scripture. The Fallen Angel of the Bible is the hero of Paradise Lost; and one of the most striking things about this poem is, that in it we see the grand imagination of the poet blazing in the very track of the propositions of the theologian. And, though there can be no doubt that Goethe's Mephistopheles is conceived less in the spirit of Scripture than either Milton's Satan or Luther's Devil, still, even in Mephistopheles we discern the lineaments of the same traditional being. All the three, then, have this in common-that they are founded on the Scriptural proposition of the existence of an accursed being, whose function it is to produce evil, and that, more or less, they adopt the Scriptural account of that being. Still, as we have said, Luther's conception of this being belongs to

one category; Milton's and Goethe's to another. Luther's is a biographical phenomenon; Milton's and Goethe's are literary performances. Luther illustrated the Evil Being of Scripture to himself, by means of his personal experience. Whatever resistance he met with; whatever obstacle to Divine grace he found in his own heart or in external circumstances; whatever event he saw plainly cast in the way of the progress of the Gospel; whatever outbreak of a bad or unamiable spirit occurred in the Church; whatever strange phenomenon of nature wore a malevolent aspect,-out of that he obtained a clearer notion of the Devil. In this way, it might be said, that Luther was all his life gaining a deeper insight into the Devil's character. On the other hand, Milton's Satan and Goethe's Mephistopheles are poetical creations—the one epic, the other dramatic. Borrowing the elements of his conception from Scripture, Milton set himself to the task of describing the ruined archangel as he may be supposed to have existed at that epoch of the creation when he had hardly decided his own function; as yet warring with the Almighty, or, in pursuit of a gigantic scheme of revenge, travelling from star to star. Poetically assuming the device of the same Scriptural proposition, Goethe set himself to the task of representing the Spirit of Evil as he existed six thousand years later; no longer gifted with the same powers of locomotion, or struggling for admission into this part of the universe, but plying his understood function. in crowded cities and on the minds of individuals.

So far as the mere fact of Milton's making Satan the hero of his epic, or of Goethe's making Mephistopheles a character in his drama, qualifies us to speak of the theological opinions of the one or of the other, we are not entitled to say that either Milton or Goethe believed in a Devil at all, as Luther did. Or, again, it is quite conceivable that Milton might have believed in a Devil as sincerely as Luther did, and that Goethe might have believed in a Devil as sincerely as Luther did, also; and yet, that, in that case, the Devil which Milton believed in might not have been the Satan of the Paradise Lost, and the Devil which Goethe believed in might not have been the Mephistopheles of Faust. Of course, we have other

It

means of knowing whether Milton did actually believe in the existence of the great accursed being whose fall he sings. is also plain that Goethe's Mephistopheles resembles Luther's Devil more than Milton's Satan does, in this respect-that Mephistopheles is the expression of a great deal of Goethe's actual observation of life and experience in human affairs. Still, neither the fact, on the one hand, that Milton did believe in the existence of the Evil Spirit, nor the fact, on the other, that Mephistopheles is an expression for the aggregate of much profound thinking on the part of Goethe, is of force to obliterate the fundamental distinction between Luther's Devil, as a biographical reality, and Milton's Satan and Goethe's Mephistopheles as two literary performances. If we might risk summing up under the light of this preliminary distinction, perhaps the following would be near the truth :Luther had as strong a faith as ever man had in the existence and activity of the Evil Spirit of Scripture; he used to recognise the operation of this Spirit in every individual instance of evil as it occurred; he used, moreover, to conceive that this Spirit and he were personal antagonists, and so, just as one man forms to himself a distinct idea of the character of another man to whom he stands in an important relation, Luther came to form to himself a distinct idea of the Devil; and what this idea was it seems possible to find out by examining his writings. Milton, again, chose the Scripture personage, as the hero of an epic poem, and employed his grand imagination in realising the Scripture narrative: we have reason also to know that he did actually believe in the Devil's existence; and it agrees with what we know of Milton's character to suppose that the Devil thus believed in would be pretty much the same magnificent being he has described in his poem-though, on the whole, we should not say that Milton was a man likely to carry about with him, in daily affairs, any constant recognition of the Devil's presence. Lastly, Goethe, adapting, for a different literary effect, the Scriptural and traditional account of the same being, conceived his Mephistopheles. This Mephistopheles, there is no doubt, had a real allegoric meaning with Goethe; he meant him

to typify the Evil Spirit in modern civilization; but whether Goethe did actually believe in the existence of a supernatural intelligence, whose function it is to produce evil, is a question which no one will take it upon himself to answer, although, if he did, it may be unhesitatingly asserted that this supernatural intelligence cannot have been Mephistopheles.

From all this it appears, that Luther's conception of the Evil Being belongs to one category, Milton's and Goethe's to another. Let us consider, first, Milton's Satan, secondly, Goethe's Mephistopheles, and thirdly, Luther's Devil.

The difficulties which Milton had to overcome in writing his Paradise Lost were immense. The gist of these difficulties may be defined as consisting in this, that the poet had at once to represent a supernatural condition of being, and to construct a story. He had to describe the ongoings of angels, and, at the same time, to make one event naturally follow another. It was comparatively easy for Milton to sustain his conception of these superhuman beings as mere objects or phenomena— to represent them flying singly through space like huge black shadows, or standing opposite to each other in hostile battalions; but to construct a story in which these beings should be the agents, to exhibit these beings thinking, scheming, blundering, in such a way as to produce a likely succession of events, was enormously difficult. The difficulty was to make the course of events correspond with the reputation of the objects. To do this perfectly was literally impossible. It is possible for the human mind to conceive twenty-four great supernatural beings existing together at any given moment in space; but it is utterly impossible to conceive what would occur among these twenty-four beings during twenty-four hours. The value of time, the amount of history that can be transacted in a given period, depends on the nature and prowess of the beings whose volitions make the chain of events; and so a lower order of beings can have no idea at what rate things happen in a higher. The mode of causation will be different from that with which they are acquainted.

This is the difficulty with which Milton had to struggle;