The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Three Devils: Luther's, Milton's, and Goethe's, by David Masson

Title: The Three Devils: Luther's, Milton's, and Goethe's

With Other Essays

Author: David Masson

Release Date: March 1, 2011 [eBook #35438]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1

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THE THREE DEVILS:
LUTHER’S, MILTON’S, AND GOETHE’S.
WITH OTHER ESSAYS.

THE THREE DEVILS:
LUTHER’S, MILTON’S, AND GOETHE’S.
WITH
OTHER ESSAYS.

BY
DAVID MASSON, M.A., LL.D.,
Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature in the University of Edinburgh.

London:
MACMILLAN AND CO.
1874.

[The Right of Translation and Reproduction is Reserved.]

LONDON:
R. CLAY, SONS, AND TAYLOR, PRINTERS,
BREAD STREET HILL.

PREFATORY NOTE.

CONTENTS.

THE THREE DEVILS:
LUTHER’S, MILTON’S, AND GOETHE’S.

THE THREE DEVILS:
LUTHER’S, MILTON’S, AND GOETHE’S.[1]

Luther, Milton, and Goethe: these are very strange names to bring together. It strikes us, however, that the effect may not be uninteresting if we connect the names of those three great men, 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, in Luther’s time, it was to resist Luther’s movement, and, if possible, “cut his soul out of God’s mercy.” What was Luther’s exact conception of this being is to be gathered from his life and writings. Again, we have Milton’s Satan. 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. May it not, then, be 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 give 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 sufficient; and it may give the whole speculation greater interest if, in addition to Milton’s Satan and Goethe’s Mephistopheles, we include Luther’s Devil. 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, 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