Tags
Bulgakov, Christ, Christianity, Faith, Faust, Goethe, Historical Jesus, Jesus, Literary Criticism, The Master and Margarita, Theology
One of the classes I teach as a newly-minted college professor is a general humanities course, which attempts to cover the absurdly gigantic spread of modern history and civilization (1400-present) by looking at it through the lens of the Don Juan and Faust mythic traditions. There’s a lot to these stories, and a lot of writers have taken a hand at interpreting them for their time: in the course of the semester I teach Marlowe, Milton, Moliere, Mozart, and many other writers whose names do not begin with ‘M’. And I have always been a little bit uncomfortable teaching these stories about devils and temptations and the gradual transformation of Christianity from the dominant civilizing force in Europe to an eccentric and comical historical footnote. So I often asked myself last fall: Is it wrong to be a Christian and spend this much time thinking about or studying the devil?