Faust has in some respects a better right to be compared with Job than Paradise Lost. Not so much indeed in the Prologue, though Goethe deserves credit for detecting the humorous element in the Hebrew poet's Satan, an element which he has transferred, though with much exaggeration, to his own Mephistopheles. Neither the Satan nor Mephistopheles (a remote descendant of the Hebrew[1] mastema, from the root satam=satan) is the Origin of Evil in a personal form,[2] but the Hebrew poet would never have accepted the description in Faust of the peculiar work of the 'denying spirit.' But in the body of the poem there is this marked similarity to the Book of Job—that the problem treated of is a purely moral and spiritual one; the hero first loses and then recovers his peace of mind; it is the counterpart in pantheistic humanism of what St. Paul terms working out one's own salvation. Still there are great and most instructive divergences between the two writers. Observe, first, the complete want of sympathy with positive religion—with the religion from which Faust wanders—on the part of the modern poet. Next, a striking difference in the characteristics of Job and Faust respectively. Faust succumbs to his boundless love of knowledge, alternating with an unbridled sensual lust; Job is on the verge of spiritual ruin through his demand for such an absolute correspondence of circumstances to character as can only be realised in another world. The greatness of Faust lies in his intellect; that of Job (who in chap. xxviii. directly discourages speculation) in his virtue. Hence, finally, Faust requires (even from a pantheistic point of view) to be pardoned, while Job stands so high in the divine favour that others are pardoned on his account.
A third great poem which deserves to be compared with= Mastema in the Book of Jubilees). Comp. Dies, Roman. Wörterbuch, i. pp. xxv., xxvi.]
- ↑ Mr. Sutherland Edwards (Fortnightly Review, Nov. 1885, p. 687) states that Hebrew etymologies have proved failures. But the steps of the change from mastema to Mephistopheles are all proved, beginning with the name Mastiphat, for the prince of the demons, in the chronographers Syncellus and Georg. Cedrenus (comp. [Greek: Mastiphar
- ↑ Turner and Morshead, Faust (1882), pp. 307-8.
