A Question of Attribution

I give testament to a refutation of Faustianism, ie a spiritual or intellectual dissatisfaction combined with a desire for power or material advantage. After Johann Faust (c 1480 - c 1538), a German scholar portrayed by Marlowe and Goethe. Faust is the protagonist of a classic German legend. He is a scholar who is highly successful yet dissatisfied with his life, so he makes a pact with the Devil, exchanging his soul for unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasures. The Faust legend has been the basis for many literary, artistic, cinematic and musical works that have reinterpreted it through the ages. Faust and the adjective "Faustian" imply a situation in which an ambitious person surrenders moral integrity in order to achieve power and success for a delimited term. This is something, as a Christian, I explicitly reject. My critics on The Faustian Circle blog, however, clearly do not.

What makes them the way they are? Obsession combined with dissatisfaction leading to resentment. In the case of David Farrant I would go even further and identify him as a prime candidate in the sense of making a Faustian Pact at the core of his being, ie his soul, if not actually signing something in his own blood. Farrant says he does not believe in the Devil' existence, but he does believe in (and admits to worshipping on the CD The Devil's Fool) Lucifer. This is semantics because for the Christian they, along with Satan, are all the same evil spirit. Devil is a name commonly given to the fallen angels, who are also known as demons. Lucifer is their chief, as in Matthew 25: 41, "the Devil and his angels." It may be said of this name, as St Gregory says of the word angel, "nomen est officii, non naturæ"- the designation of an office, not of a nature. For the Greek word (from diaballein, "to traduce") means a slanderer, or accuser, and in this sense it is applied to him of whom it is written "the accuser of our brethren is cast forth, who accused them before our God day and night" (Apocalypse 12: 10). It thus answers to the Hebrew name Satan which signifies an adversary, or an accuser.

The authoritative teaching of the Church on this topic is set forth in the decrees of the Fourth Lateran Council (Firmiter credimus), wherein, after saying that God in the beginning had created together two creatures, the spiritual and the corporeal, that is to say the angelic and the earthly, and lastly man, who was made of both spirit and body, the council continues:

"Diabolus enim et alii dæmones a Deo quidem naturâ creati sunt boni, sed ipsi per se facti sunt mali." ("The Devil and the other demons were created by God good in their nature but they by themselves have made themselves evil.")

Here it is clearly taught that the Devil and the other demons are spiritual or angelic creatures created by God in a state of innocence, and that they became evil by their own act. It is added that man sinned by the suggestion of the Devil, and that in the next world the wicked shall suffer perpetual punishment with the Devil.

I establish the above by way of explanation of my own  total refutation of Faustianism.

The so-called Faustian Cross.