My computer’s slow demise during this Lenten season has afforded the opportunity for some unanticipated reading. I’m working my way through Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as told by a Friend. Hard to explain why, but the Faust story has long fascinated me. My favorite telling is The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe:

See, see, where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament! –
One drop would save my soul – half a drop! ah, my Christ!

But I love the story even when Disney does it, as in The Little Mermaid. Twice since college I’ve failed to get all the way through Mann’s Dr. Faustus. This time I’m going to make it. It’s such a great story.

Thomas Mann had a special understanding, I think, of the challenge of faith for people whose societies have tried to banish the God-question. In Dr. Faustus, Mann spins a familiar yarn: “For what are you willing to sell your soul?” He does so, however, in a most arresting way. The lead character’s goal is a transcendent, game-changing way of composing music (for what it’s worth, his model is Arnold Schoenberg’s 12-tone serial music). Mann sets the story against the backdrop of the demonic sway Nazism gained over the Germany he loved and had to leave. How could such evil take hold of one of Europe’s most refined cultures and “developed” societies?

Knowing that the demonic is eventually to take over Adrian Leverkühn’s character, I shudder at the realization that his last intellectual stop along the way before choosing a career in music is theology, my own profession. Adrian’s narrator friend realizes there’s a problem. Adrian’s teachers realize there’s a problem.

Adrian is brilliant, and knows it. He turns to theology, but not to be mastered by its Lord. Adrian wishes – so intuit those who know him – to use theology as a weapon to force philosophy, the so-called “queen of the sciences,” into submission to his will.

Theology as will to power.

Bad idea.

What Adrian is after is “theology enthroned” – and himself along with it. To the contrary, precisely because theology is “the apex of all thinking,” muses Adrian’s friend, it must

be pursued in the profoundest humility, because in the words of the Scriptures it is “higher than all reason” and the human spirit thereby enters into a more pious, trusting bond than that which any other of the learned professions lays upon it. …

But I did not believe in my friend’s humility. I believed in his pride.

Goose pimples. For a theologian, pride of intellect is an occupational hazard – a plaguing and persistent occupational hazard. Though there are all kind of idols, none is more sinister, none more primal, than pride. It was through pride, as C. S. Lewis notes in Mere Christianity, that the devil became the devil. “Better to reign in hell, than serve in heav’n,” pronounces Milton’s Lucifer.

One of the glories of Lent is the opportunity to ponder – even to enter into – Jesus’s vicarious faith. The Architect of the universe has to go out into the wilderness to trust and obey and depend. Presented with the second of the great Faustian propositions in the human story, Jesus, “the son of Adam, the son of God” (Luke 3:38), humbly demurs. Instead of succumbing to Lucifer’s lies, Jesus, “the Second Man” (1 Cor. 15:47), believes in his Father’s provision, obeys his Father’s plan, and trusts his Father’s timing. As the writer to the Hebrews says of him: “And again (Jesus said), ‘I will put my trust in Him’” (Heb. 2:13). Of the many wonderful things Jesus did for me, here is one of the most splendid: he believed, he obeyed, he trusted for me.

Praise be, he believes God where Adam – who lost out at the first Faustian proffer – had not. Praise be, He obeys God where I do not. Praise be, the Son of God stands firm in the wilderness and unseats pride with a simple, “It is written.”