SOURCE: "Panurge and the Faustian Dilemma," in Stanford Literature Review, Vol. 2, No. 2, Fall, 1985, pp. 147-63.

As Christopher Marlowe's Tragical History of Dr. Faustus begins, the protagonist is discovered in his study lamenting his failure, through ordinary means, to satisfy the boundless desires of his intellect and will and so turning as a last resort to magic. The insatiable hunger of this dramatic character for impossibly attainable knowledge, power, and self-gratification has entered our modern mythology as the Faustian dilemma.

What can a creature, limited in capacity yet infinitely aspiring, do to exceed the limitations of our nature and achieve things inaccessible to ordinary mortals? And does making the effort to seize the absolute, "to gain a deity," inevitably lead to disillusionment, despair, and damnation? The attempt to go beyond the legitimately human has become depicted in literature and art through commerce with the occult or the demonic after a rejection of all that has been, or might be, gained through traversing the normal paths to knowledge and dominance. Often, as in Marlowe's play, these acceptable approaches have been symbolized by the four traditional faculties of early universities—philosophy, medicine, law, and theology.

In the opening lines of Goethe's Faust, for example, the disillusioned polymath complains,

Habe nun, ach! Philosophie,
Juristerei und Medicin,
Und leider auch Theologie!
Durchaus studirt, mit heisem Bemuhn.
Da steh' ich nun, ich armer Thor!
Und bin so klug als wie zuvor;

Drum hab' ich mich der Magie ergeben …

Since Goethe, rejection of the conventional approaches to learning followed by search through forbidden ways for certain knowledge of, and superhuman power over, the secrets of creation—typically involving conjuration and a compact with the infernal—has been repeated in a number of other fictional, dramatic, and even graphic works based on the legend of Faust. In the earlier nineteenth century, Friedrich Maximilian Klinger, in a satiric narrative treatment of the story, describes, just before the hero summons up Mephistopheles, an "allegorical ballet" in which are paraded before the lords of hell figures representing the four faculties, each accompanied by the several vices that it engenders in human beings.¹ More recently, in Valery's "Mon Faust," the doctor's disciple of one brief evening is shown all the books of the world—works of poetry, history, philosophy, theology, and natural science—by Mephistopheles, who, calling them all utterly useless, tempts the youth to ignore them and simply to be (etre), like himself and Faust. The disciple remarks (aside), "Cet etre me donne envie de fuir ou de l'etrangler," and then, asking his tempter whether or not it was at this point "que Faust a declame des mots fameux que tout le monde sait par coeur?" proceeds to quote the well-known verses from Goethe's tragedy.²

Thomas Mann and Dorothy Sayers do not quite repeat the rejection of all four faculties, though Adrian Leverkühn, the demonically possessed composer of Mann's novel Dr. Faustus, had studied in several of them, including theology, before his (perhaps) hallucinated compact with the diabolical. In Sayers' drama The Devil to Pay, the idealistic protagonist, lamenting that "The end of all our knowledge is to learn how helpless we are," finds "Divinity, philosophy, astrology … Physic" but a "barren desert of doctrine" which can afford no "comfort" to humankind. Therefore her Faust turns to magic, hoping that it may enable him "to resolve the mystery of wickedness, lay bare the putrefying sore at the heart of creation, break and remake the pattern of the inexorable stars …"³

A most enigmatic artistic treatment of the uselessness of traditional learning to solve the Faustian dilemma of how to liberate oneself from the constraints on human thought and activity is Max Klinger's aquatint Die Fakult?ten (1914). The print depicts Sisyphus striving mightily to push upward a great rock on which are seated four women garbed in costumes representing the four major disciplines. In the air to the right of this scene of profitless struggle is a dirigible (at the time a recent invention), apparently symbolizing, through its untrammeled flight, a magical new way of escaping human limitations.⁴

Thus, the opening lines to Marlowe's tragedy have provided modern literature and art with a topos for imaging the agonizing dilemma of being caught between the infiniteness of human aspirations and the finitude of the capacity for gratifying them. Yet if the later influence of Faustus' spurning the four faculties and his resort to magic in his desperation can be clearly traced, suggestions of possible inspiration for its dramatization by Marlowe have not included what is, if not its source, at least its closest analogue; namely, the Tiers Livre of Frangois Rabelais's Gargantua et Pantagruel.

Neither the German Faustbuch, nor the free English translation of it (1592) on which Marlowe's play is based, for instance, makes the doctor who turns in frustration to forbidden magic a disgruntled polymath. He is simply a discontented theologian who sometimes "would throw the Scriptures from him as though he had no care of his former profession … in so much that hee could not abide to bee called Doctor of Diuinitie, but waxed a worldly man, and named himself an Astrologian, and a Mathematician: and for a shadow sometimes a Phisitian …⁵ I There had been, of course, well-known earlier sixteenth-century attacks on the pretensions and ineptitude of the various professions, including the traditional university faculties. Erasmus' Folly has her say about them in the Encomium Moriae (Paris, 1511), and they are all taken to task in Henry Cornelius Agrippa's De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum et artium (1526). Both works were available to Marlowe in English, the Erasmian satire as rendered by Sir Thomas Chaloner (London, 1549) and Agrippa's treatise in a recent version by James Sandford (London, 1569, 1575). Faustus, it is true, as he resolves to become a magus, does remark that he aspires to "be as cunning as Agrippa was, / Whose shadows made all Europe honour him."⁶ Still in neither of these earlier works does rejection of what can be learned from the four faculties and a turning to magic as well appear as a distinctive unit.⁷

Where such treatment of the disciplines of philosophy, medicine, law, and divinity, along with an excursus on magic, does occur is in Rabelais's Tiers Livre. It does so, moreover, in a manner similar to, if much more expansively and ambiguously than in, Marlowe's work.⁸ Panurge, having felt "la pusse than en in, l'aureille" to get married, faces what for him seems an unresolvable dilemma. If he should wed, will he, or will he not, become a cuckold and be beaten and robbed by his wife? Granted that his problem may not seem, at least superficially, so cosmic as Faustus', close comparison of the Elizabethan play with this portion of the French romance reveals suggestive resemblances between them. This is especially true if one keeps in mind that cuckolding is not the main issue, though it may appear so to him, in Panurge's quest for certainty about his future. Rather, as in Dr. Faustus too, it is really how one should live in an unpredictable and mysterious universe that is nevertheless ruled by divine providence.

Direct influence cannot be proved here, for although numerous editions of Gargantua et Pantagruel that include the third book were available to Marlowe, nowhere in his writings does he mention Rabelais or allude to any of the Rabelaisian characters.⁹ Still, in no other earlier work are the predicament and personal characteristics of the central figure so much like those of Faustus as they are in the Panurge of the Tiers Livre.

More than four-fifths of this book is occupied with Panurge's dilemma about marrying. In order to determine whether or not his cuckoldry is inevitable, besides seeking advice from Pantagruel and his other friends, he considers first various forms of divination and then consults the Sibyl of Panzoust, a mute named Nazdecabre, "ung vieil Poete Francois nomme Raminagrobis," the fool Triboulet, and the magician Her Trippa. After Panurge, disgusted with Her Trippa's offer to prove his inescapable cuckoldry through a variety of "-mancies," angrily dismisses him as the "sorcier au Diable, enchanteur de l'Antichrist," Pantagruel proposes that they seek the counsel "d'un Theologien, d'un Medicin, d'un Legiste et d'un Philosophe." His reason for calling upon the first three is that

Tout ce que sommes et qu'avons consiste en trois -conservation de chascun des trois respectivement sont aujourd'huy destinees trois maniers de gens: les Theologiens a l'ame, les Medicins au corps, les Jurisconsultes aux biens.¹⁰

In order to complete the mystical "tetrade Pythagoricque" and to benefit from the wisdom of all the learned faculties, he also suggests that they invite to their banquet Trouillogan, "le Philosophe perfaict," because he always "respond assertivement de tous doubtes proposez" (ch. 29, p. 206).

An intervening conversation with Frere Jan aside, the "consultations" with Her Trippa and the four savants constitute a distinct narrative unit in the Tiers Livre and reveal traits of character in Panurge that remind one of several in Marlowe's Faustus. Panurge is skeptical about the worth of what any of these representatives of learning can tell him that might help to resolve his dilemma. The fact that none of their answers satisfies him may be taken in two differing ways. Although Pantagruel has assured him that all of these men are "bons" in their metiers, in each episode there is nonetheless a trace of satire on the ineffectuality of the discipline concerned. With the theologian Hippothadee the touch of ridicule is slightest: he informs Panurge merely that he will escape cuckoldry "si Dieu plaist" (ch. 30, p. 211) and that the best insurance against the disgrace is to marry a virtuous, God-fearing woman. With typical professional pedantry, the physician Rondibillis explains the "natural" causes of cuckoldry and recounts a comic myth about how to avoid it. Trouillogan, the philosopher, instead of responding "assertivement" as Pantagruel had promised, when asked whether Panurge should wed or not will only answer equivocally "Tous les deux" and "Ne l'un ne l'autre" (ch. 35, p. 242). Finally, Bridoye, the judge who decides all cases by casting dice, seems such a simple fool that Panurge never asks him the burning question at all.¹¹

Still, the fault lies less in the inadequacy or inappropriateness of their replies than within Panurge himself. A number of recent scholars have seen in him the sot who cannot discern the truth and come to a decision because he does not "know himself."¹² Blinded by his own lasciviousness and self-love, he has been, as Pantagruel tells him, "seduyt" by "L'esprit maling" (ch. 19, p. 139). As a consequence, in his exchange with Hippothadee he fails to see that the solution lies in faith in God and trust in Holy Writ; he is insensitive to Rondibillis' response about human nature as the cause of cuckoldry, cannot see in the apparently two-handed replies of Trouillogan that in a puzzling case one must make up his own mind, and does not recognize the profound truth underlying Bridoye's naive confidence that in difficult judicial rulings the hand of God guides the dice.

In these episodes, therefore, while they undoubtedly involve a certain amount of ridicule of the ineffectuality of those who profess expertise, the four "bons" periti do speak a kind of wisdom that Panurge should heed in a world in which one must rest content with some uncertainty and, as best he can, act out his destiny, over which no one can ever hope to secure absolute control.¹³ Unlike the last person to whom Pantagruel advises him to turn for help, Triboulet the "fol de nature" who humbly accepts his limitations and consequently speaks and acts with a kind of Erasmian wise foolishness, the self-centered and morally myopic Panurge cannot make up his mind to act at all.¹⁴ Only those persons are capable of foresight and behaving wisely, says Pantagruel, who can "se oublier soymesmes, vuider ses sens de toute terrienne affection, purger son esprit de toute humaine sollicitude et mettre tout en non chaloir, ce que vulgairement est imputé à follie" (ch. 37, pp. 257-58).

As Pantagruel makes clear, Panurge is incapable of sound judgment and of self-knowledge because he is misl d by philautia (self-love): "Philautie et amour de soy vous decoit" (ch. 29, p. 204). Nor can he profit from the counsel of others: "Ni les oracles ni les sages n'ont pu faire sortir de sa perplexité … Il est trop engagé, trop domine par sa philautie."¹⁵ Unable to accept the "foolish wisdom" that might enable him to escape the prison of the self, and having exhausted all other external resources, Panurge finally will seek the resolution of his perplexity in "le mot de la [Dive] Bouteille" (ch. 47, p. 313), the journey to which oracle occupies the Fourth and the (uncertainly Rabelaisian) Fifth Books of Gargantua et Pantagruel.

The Tiers Livre thus incorporates matter more serious and profound than Panurge's mere dread of being cuckolded. Rather than this superficial farcical theme, the deeper concern of the book is the search for the truth about oneself that makes it possible to live successfully within the bounds marked out for human existence.¹⁶ It is this serious element, moreover, along with the scorning by the self-deluded Panurge of all the means to render that solution possible, which establishes an affinity, if not a connection by influence, between this part of Rabelais's comic romance and Marlowe's tragedy.

For Faustus, too, is so blinded by philautia that he cannot know himself. As is true of Panurge, it is his arrogant self-centeredness and willful self-delusion through misordered desires that make him succumb to stultitia and render himself incapable of benefiting from the guidance available in the sciences which he casts aside after claiming to have mastered them so thoroughly.

Like Panurge, Faustus is contemptuous of, and hence impervious to, whatever might be learned from the disciplines of philosophy, medicine, law, and theology. Marlowe's handling of the soliloquy in which his protagonist rejects them one by one is, however, different from the way Rabelais deals with them in the corresponding episodes in the Tiers Livre. First, Faustus "consults" the four faculties, not through human representatives; instead, alone in his study, he leafs over his books, standard texts of each of the branches of learning. Thus, from the outset he is already revealed symbolically as separated from the rest of humanity in his effort to "get a deity." Of this deliberately chosen isolation that continues throughout the play there can be no consequence but tragedy. In contrast Panurge, however stubbornly he resists all proferred advice, seeks it always from other human beings, in convivial circumstances among his circle of friends. In that difference, though within the Tiers Livre itself he achieves no salvation, lies hope, as will be shown later, for a happy resolution to his dilemma.

Secondly, the order in which Faustus in his soliloquy turns to the four disciplines and to magic differs from and more patently develops to a climax than does the sequence in Rabelais's work. In the Tiers Livre, Her Trippa appears first (ch. 25), followed by the theologian (ch. 30-31), the physician (ch. 31-34), the philosopher (ch. 35-36), and the episode of the judge Bridoye (ch. 39-43). There is, no doubt, a certain logic to the arrangement of Panurge's consultations, a descent in the hierarchical scale of human concerns from the more to the less important. After his failure to fathom the secrets of the universe through the arts of divination or the occult lore of Her Trippa, he is advised to consult those, as Pantagruel has explained, who concern themselves with the welfare of our souls, bodies, and goods—in turn, the theologian, the physician, and the lawyer. The one anomaly seems to be the placing of the interview with the philosopher who should properly, being concerned with the good of the intellect, rank next after the theologian, rather than the physician. But it is clear that the movement is generally downward in the scale of values. It also seems significant that the encounter with Triboulet should come after all the others. Since neither the "responses des saiges" nor Her Trippa's divinations can satisfy Panurge, perhaps he may be reached by someone who is "sage et presage par aspiration divine," someone who has been able to escape the self; namely, the fool.

Faustus impatiently dismisses in turn philosophy, medicine, civil law, and theology before resorting to magic and making his compact with Mephistopheles. The sequence of his rejections follows the traditional pattern of university education and, in ascending order, the hierarchy of the professional faculties. One first proceeded through the curriculum of the faculty of arts, or philosophy, the core of which was the study of logic, requisite for admission to the higher schools. Hence Faustus, seeking to "level at the end of every art" (i, 4), claims already to have attained the principal aim of logic, which is simply, he reads in his book, "to dispute well." Abandoning philosophy therefore in favor of a "greater subject," medicine, he asserts that he has also achieved everything of which this art is capable. Yet because it cannot teach one how to "make men to live eternally / Or being dead raise them to life again" (11. 24-25), he likewise forsakes "physic." The law, in his view, consists of nothing but cases of "paltry legacies," and only

           fits a mercenary drudge
Who aims at nothing but external trash,
Too servile and illiberal for me.
(11. 34-36)

Taking up next his Vulgate Bible, because the acknowledged queen of the sciences is theology, Faustus finds in Romans 6:23 that "The reward of sin is death" and in the first epistle of John 1:8 that "If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and there is no truth in us" (11. 39-43). Considering the two passages as the major and minor premises of a syllogism, he concludes that if sin in human beings is inevitable, obviously "we must die an everlasting death" (1. 45). Since damnation must come—"Che sarà, sarà" (1. 46)—he resolves to give over all other studies, abandon God, and turn to "necromantic books" (1. 49), hoping that through his conjuring he may indeed "get a deity," become "a demigod.¹⁷

What Faustus has done in his soliloquy is to reject every legitimate branch of learning, starting with the most elementary and proceeding in order through those intellectual disciplines which benefit the body and the social order to that which provides for the most important good of all, the salvation of the soul. He has done so because he is already possessed, not by desire for true knowledge but by his lust to command "a world of profit and delight, / Of power, of honour, of omnipotence" (11. 52-53). His inordinate appetite for sensual gratification, knowledge, and power, to be "on earth as Jove is in the sky, / Lord and commander of these elements!" (11. 75-76), has even blinded him to the genuine ends of the sciences that he so cavalierly dismisses.

When he leaves off considering "on kai me on" (1. 12), being and non-being, the central issue of metaphysics, the highest branch of philosophy, he loses the capacity to distinguish between reality and illusion and surrenders himself to a world of shadows and phantoms. With medicine he is discontented because he mistakes its legitimate goal, which is preservation of health but not the immortality of the body. Despite his reputation for almost miraculous cures, moreover, his purpose in effecting them has not been to benefit his neighbors, but selfishly to "heap up gold" (1. 14). In the Justinian code he can find only trivial statutes regarding the disposition of property; yet the intent of the civil law is not merely to regulate the shifting of material goods from one person to another, but to order human society justly. Further, it seems ironic that in order to rationalize his abandonment of legal studies he should quote from the Institutes the phrase "Exhereditare filium non potest pater, nisi—a father cannot disinherit his son unless …" (1. 31). Those words should have been a hint to him, just before taking the fatal step of abjuring God, that he could not have been deprived of his inheritance of paradise unless he had chosen recklessly to forsake it.¹⁸

The supreme irony is that Faustus has even failed to profit from his most basic studies, his training in formal logic. For, as Virgil K. Whitaker has pointed out, he deliberately ensnares himself into perverting the revealed word of the New Testament about salvation, by fashioning an invalid syllogism. Both of the scriptural verses he uses to justify his despairing conclusion he takes out of context. The sequel to the first is "but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord"; to the second, "But if we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness."¹⁹ Because he has already made up his mind to find excuses for giving himself over to necromancy and other forbidden arts, he is impervious to the truth and wisdom offered him by the legitimate sciences. His philautia and lust for wrongful knowledge and pleasures have corrupted his heart and mind and prepared him for diabolical seduction. As Pantagruel had warned Panurge, "hors aequité par l'esprit maling est l'affection depravée" (ch. 7, p. 66). Hence, Mephistopheles gloatingly tells Faustus just before his death, "when thou took'st the book / To view the scriptures, then I turn'd the leaves / And led thine eye" (xix, 94-96).

Both Panurge and Faustus, then, are fools whose spiritual blindness is self-inflicted and has rendered them incapable of knowing themselves. As Gargantua had written in his famous epistle to Pantagruel when the latter was engaged in his youthful studies at Paris, "science sans conscience n'est que ruine de l'âme."²⁰ Panurge, of course, has neither knowledge (science) nor self-knowledge (conscience). Faustus, the pretended polymath, may also have neither, but in any event it is his lack of true self-awareness that renders his vaunted learning useless to him. For both characters, moreover, though for different reasons, the resort to magic to solve their difficulties is the beginning of their downfall.²¹ This is evident, even if sequentially Panurge's visit to Her Trippa precedes the conferences with the "bons" savants while Faustus' taking up the "necromantic books" and his rendezvous with the conjurers Valdes and Cornelius come after his renunciation of all other means to knowledge.

Actually, as M. A. Screech has pointed out, Her Trippa's conclusions through divination that a promiscuous, self-loving fool like Panurge is bound to be cuckolded are just as sound as the answers he receives i the subsequent episodes. While the reader rightly laughs at the magician as "the butt of the comedy," ironically he is less foolish than Panurge, who "takes the ultimate step of the man blinded by philautia: he accuses Her Trippa of his own blinding vice!"²² From this point onward, Panurge will listen to no counsel whatsoever with an open mind, but willfully misinterprets every response that he receives in his own favor. At length he cannot even penetrate "the wisdom of folly … Having failed to become the wise fool, he regresses to become a more foolish fool than he had ever been before."²³

Faustus likewise becomes an increasingly "foolish fool" as, in conjuring up Mephistopheles, he gains nothing but phantasms as the reward of conveying his soul to the devil. In the central scenes of the tragedy he employs his infernally assisted powers, not for the loftier deeds that he had envisioned performing early in the play, but in such trivial pranks that some critics have doubted whether Marlowe was responsible for dramatizing them. Yet they are appropriate to a character whose deliberately induced intellectual and spiritual corruption had led him into a bonding with unreality that can only drag him downward in the scale of being to a state of disordered folly. These farcical episodes in the tragedy, though obviously derived from the Faustbuch, suggest yet another parallel between Faustus and Panurge, particularly as we first encounter the latter in the book of Pantagruel. Again like Panurge, Marlowe's protagonist follows his own inordinate impulses rather than the path of moderation, the path insisted upon by the humanistic Rabelais. He becomes mainly a clownish perpetrator of practical jokes upon unsuspecting victims.²⁴ He who had aspired to be capable of doing everything becomes, except in his agonized moments of regret over his ill-considered bargain, a wanton trickster like Panurge, whose name in Greek (panourgos) means a clever knave, ready to do anything, especially anything wicked.²⁵

Besides both being immoderately self-indulgent fools who deliberately ignore God's grace and thus allow "L'esprit maling" to seduce them, who waste their wits in devising ridiculous pranks, in certain other respects Panurge and Faustus are similar in character. Among the resemblances are their disordered attitudes toward wealth and their lasciviousness. Properly used, both riches and sexuality make life more worthwhile and can enhance human character. But Panurge is a wastrel who defends his prodigality against Pantagruel's championing of careful husbandry with a wittily sophistic oration "a la louange des presteurs et debteurs" (chs. 3-4). And Valdes promises the avid Faustus, who craves to "heap up gold" without measure, that the spirits he raises through his conjuring will bring him the contents of Venetian argosies "And from America the golden fleece / That yearly stuffs old Philip's treasury" (i, 130-31), the wealth with which Faustus dreams of doing world-shaking deeds that he never accomplishes.

Both he and Panurge also have the urge to marry, but with neither of them is it for the appropriate reasons, nor does either succeed in achieving the wedded state. Fear of the stigma of cuckoldry inhibits Panurge, despite his itching lust, from deciding to take the step, while one of the first things that Faustus demands of Mephistopheles is a wife. He would have "the fairest maid in Germany / For I am wanton and lascivious / And cannot live without a wife" (v, 141-43). But since marriage is a sacrament and confers divine graces, the devil can scarcely allow him to wed. After Presenting him, instead, with "a woman devil," Mephistopheles promises to find him "the fairest courtesans / And bring them every morning to thy bed" (11. 153-54). Since Faustus simply wishes to gratify his lust, he accepts this promise and, ironically, is granted as his last phantom pleasure upon earth the embraces of the mere shade of Helen of Troy.²⁶

Most strikingly of all, Panurge and Faustus resemble each other in their degeneration from extreme self-confidence in their earliest appearances to indecisiveness and inability to make choices as their histories unfold. In Book Two Panurge comes on as boastfully self-assured, bold in asserting and demonstrating his independence and resourcefulness. Throughout the Tiers Livre, however, his fears about the risks in marriage render him less and less certain about acting, and in the voyages of the Fourth Book his cowardice increases comically to the point where he is barely recognizable as the sometime swaggerer of Book Two. Faustus, in turn, who would do things on a divine scale as the tragedy begins and who boasts of infinite self-reliance, can rashly forswear "the joys of heaven" then and, in his ignorance, tell the devil himself to learn from him "manly fortitude / And scorn those joys thou never shalt possess" (iii, 87-88). Yet amid the dubious pleasures supplied him in the ensuing scenes, whenever he tries to break with Mephistopheles and Lucifer he finds himself less and less capable of doing so. At last, in his great final soliloquy, he who had confidently abjured God in order to strive for divinity itself is unable to accept the Lord's mercy and can only beg whimperingly for annihilation as he desperately struggles to avoid an eternity in hell.

In the Tiers Livre Panurge, and in Marlowe's tragedy Faustus, thus fail to resolve the dilemma of the incompatibility between longing for absolutely certain knowledge, the fulfillment of inordinate desires, and the limitations of the human condition. Acceptance of that condition would have enabled both to come to terms with themselves and with the realities of their worlds. But where for Faustus, even with a last-minute chance to grasp at redemption, the end must be despair and damnation, for his Rabelaisian counterpart there is a promise of hope for resolution. Not in the Third Book, for there he remains the fool blinded by self-love and his appetites who cannot find the answer he seeks even though it is continually being set before him. But the voyage to "la Dive Bouteille" that he undertakes in Books Four and Five does end in his chance for, perhaps actually in, his enlightenment. The oracular answer, "TRINCH," is only what was already within himself and also what Pantagruel had been placing before him throughout the Tiers Livre:

Il se y convient mettre à l'aventure, les oeilz bandez, baissant la teste, baisant la terre e se recommandant à Dieu au demourant, puys qu'une foys l'on se y veult mettre. (ch. 10, p. 81)

The revelation having been made in a single cryptic word, Bacbuc then explains how one must conduct the quest for truth and self-understanding in this life:

Car tous philosophes et saiges anticques, [pour] bien suirement et plaisamment parfaire le chemin de congnoissance divine et chasse de sapience, ont estime deux choses necessaires: guyde de Dieu et compaignye d'homme.²⁷

Faustus unfortunately had abandoned both of these necessary things, had isolated himself from God and his fellow human beings to live with phantoms and illusions in a pact with nothingness. Hence he could never attain the knowledge and the wisdom that he had pursued along forbidden pathways. But Panurge, though remaining a fool throughout his quest, is finally freed from his doubts and hesitation by the command of the oracle, and with his good companions will return to the "navires au port" which are waiting to bear the voyagers back to the just and life-fulfilling Rabelaisian kingdom of Utopia.²⁸

While it is true, then, that no direct connection between Gargantua et Pantagruel and The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus can be established and that Marlowe could have derived almost everything in his play from the Faustbuch and the writings and legendary reputation of Agrippa, it is evident nevertheless that Panurge and Faustus, in a number of characteristics and in their inability to remain content with the limitations on knowledge and action imposed by their human condition, are more than superficially akin. The Faustian dilemma seems to have been anticipated in Rabelais's Tiers Livre (or, given the priority of its composition, should one rather speak of the "Panurgean dilemma" experienced a generation later by Marlowe's protagonist?). Whether by mere coincidence or not, in two of the most seminal works of early modern literature remarkable similarities exist in the treatment of this dilemma of trying to master one's destiny absolutely while most imperfectly knowing and mastering the self.

Notes

¹Fausts Leben, Taten, und Hollenfahrt (Frankfurt am Main, 1964), pp. 24-27.

² Paul Valery, "Mon Faust" (ebauches) (Paris, 1946), pp. 164-74.

³ Dorothy L. Sayers, The Devil to Pay (New York, 1939), pp. 27-28.

⁴ Tipped into an issue devoted to Klinger of the Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst, n.s. 2 (November 1915).

⁵The Sources of the Faust Tradition, ed. Philip Mason Palmer and Robert Pattison More (New York, 1936), p. 136. The original German says that Faust "hat die Haylig Schrift ein weil hinder die Thur / vnnd vnder die Bannckh gesteckht / Das wortt Gottes nit Lieb gehalten /… Wolt sich hernach kein Theologum mehr nennen lassen / ward ein Weltmensch / Nennt sich ein Doctor Medicinae, ward ein Astrologus vnnd Mathematicus / nvvd zum glimpffen ward Er ein Arzt /…" (Das Faustbuch nach der Wolfenbüttler Handschrift, ed. H. G. Haile [Berlin, 1963], p. 32).

⁶ Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, ed. John D. Jump (London, 1962), scene i, 11. 116-17. All quotations will be from this edition and honceforth will be cited within the text by scene and line numbers within parentheses.

Faustus is thinking of Agrippa here, perhaps as the author not of De vanitate, but rather of his earlier De occulta philosophia (1510), a compendium of magic on which, in part, his dubious reputation as a magician was based.

Association of, and confusion between, Faust and Agrippa began in the sixteenth century, particularly as players of cheap tricks on unsuspecting victims, and the connection remained long in the popular mind. Thus, the playwright and poet Thomas Heywood could write:

Of Faustus and Agrippa it is told,
That in their trauels they bare seeming gold,
Which would abide the touch; and by the way,
In all their Hostries they would freely pay.
But parted thence, myne host thinking to finde,
Those glorious Pieces they had left behinde,
Safe in his bag, sees nothing, saue together
Round scutes of home, and pieces of old leather.
(The Hierarchy of the blessed Angells [London, 1635], p. 574)

Catherine M. Dunn has remarked that "Agrippa's anguished doubts in De vanitate, as well as in the De occulta, helped to mold the legend of Faust, which in many ways symbolizes the intellectual crisis of the sixteenth century." She notes the similarity of "Agrippa's attitudes" to those of both Marlowe's and Goethe's heroes (Introduction to Sandford's translation Of the Vanitie and Vncertaintie of Artes and Sciences [Northridge, Calif., 1974], pp. xxxii-xxxiii). Charles G. Nauert, Jr., also observes that "Like Agrippa, Goethe's Faust mastered and came to loathe all four faculties of university learning … Faust's opening speech sounds almost like a summary of De vanitate" (Agrippa and the Crisis of Renaissance Thought [Urbana, 1965], p. 331).

⁷ In his edition of Dr. Faustus (p. 6 n.), Jump does suggest that "In this earlier part of Faustus' soliloquy, Marlowe seems to owe something to Lyly's Euphues." There the hero, having been disillusioned in love, resolves that "Philosophie, Phisicke, Diuinitie shal be my studie. O ye hidden secrets of Nature, the expresse image of morall vertues, the equall ballaunce of Iustice, the medicines to heale all diseases, how they beginne to delyght me. The Axiomaes of Aristotle, the Maxims of lustinian, the Aphorismes of Galen, haue sodaynelye made such a breache into my minde that I seeme onely to desire them which did onely earst detest them" (The Complete Works of John Lyly, ed. R. Warwick Bond, 2 vols. [Oxford, 1902], I, 241).

It is clear that in the passage quoted all four faculties are mentioned. Still, in this speech Euphues is forswearing the life of self-indulgence for that of the mind and speaks favorably of all these branches of learning, unlike Faustus, who scorns them. Marlowe, of course, could have been making Faustus invert the sentiment if his intention was to parody the passage in Lyly's romance.

⁸ A number of years ago I suggested the possibility to Judith Weil of a connection between Panurge's "consultations" and Faustus' opening soliloquy. In her Christopher Marlowe: Merlin's Prophet (Cambridge, 1977), Weil has remarked that "Both Erasmus and Rabelais had already used the four professions to exemplify learned folly" (59), but without pursuing further any comparison with Marlowe's play. John Cowper Powys did call Rabelais "in the fullest Spenglerian sense a Faustian writer" but linked him only with Goethe's drama and with Goethe's own "meddling with the occult" in his youth (Robelais [London, 1948], p. 70).

⁹ Before Dr. Faustus could have been written, the Tiers Livre had appeared in at least twenty-eight editions of Rabelais, half of these during Marlowe's own lifetime. In 1588, for example, in time for him to have seen it before writing his play, the complete Gargantua et Pantagruel, including the possibly spurious Fifth Book, was published at Lyon by Jean Martin. That Marlowe ever read the Rabelaisian romance, however, cannot be established. Further, except for the anonymous writer of the anti-Martin Marprelate pamphlet An Almand for a Parrat (1589), the few Elizabethan authors who did mention or apparently allude to the work, such as Gabriel Harvey and Sir Philip Sidney, did so in writings that were not published until after Marlowe's death (Huntington Brown, Rabelais in English Literature [Cambridge, Mass., 1933], pp. 34-35).

¹⁰Le Tiers Livre, ed. M.A. Scheech (Geneva; Paris, 1964), ch. 29, pp. 204-05. All quotations of the Third Book are taken from this edition. In subsequent citations only the chapter and page numbers will be given, in parentheses, following the passage quoted.

¹¹ V.L. Saulnier has argued that it is impossible for any of these persons to give true advice to Panurge since they are mere "techniciens" who can provide answers only in their own fields and since, like Panurge, none of them knows himself. Some are seen as immediately ridiculous. "D'autres introduissent dans leurs reponses d'utiles conseils, mais sans repondre plus resolument. Au total, tout est toujours plus ou moins science sans conscience" (Le Dessein de Rabelais [Paris, 1957], p. 112).

¹² Besides Saulnier, others who have seen Panurge in this light include Edwin M. Duval, "Panurge, Perplexity, and the Ironic Design of Rabelais's Tiers Livre," Renaissance Quarterly 35 (1982), 392-93; Walter Kaiser, Praisers of Folly: Erasmus. Rabelais. Shakespeare (Cambridge, Mass., 1963), pp. 105, 172-81; and M. A. Screech, Rabelais (Ithaca, New York, 1979), pp. 235-38.

¹³ "Panurge's borrowed sarcasms against the three professions are rejected by Pantagruel: we are to get the advice of a truly Christian theologian, a good prophylactic doctor and a selfless lawyer. A philosopher is thrown in for good measure … Rabelais is aided in his artistic and philosophical aims both by his comic insight, which can find subjects for laughter in the most arid of Renaissance treatises, and by his gift for condensing complex ideas into a few meaningful words" (Screech, Rabelais, pp. 245-46).

¹⁴ Kaiser, pp. 172-74. Kaiser sums up his analysis by observing that "it is because Panurge is incapable of becoming the perfect fool and because in his imperfect folly 'the malign spirit misleads, beguileth and seduceth him' that he cannot make up his mind. Therefore he cannot act. The answer to his question can never be found in the repositories of worldly wisdom; it can only be found within himself (181).

¹⁵ Screech, Introduction to Le Tiers Livre, pp. xvii-xviii. Further, notes Screech, "pour les humanistes chretiens du xvie siecle, la philautie etait le pire des vices: le malorum omnium fons de Platon, une perversion diabolique de l' ôüðç chrétienne" (p. xv).

¹⁶ Kaiser, p. 125.

¹⁷ "Demi-god" (1. 61) is the reading in the 1616 quarto, on which Jump bases his edition. In the quarto of 1604, the phrase is "mighty god," an even more inordinate aspiration.

¹⁸ In The Overreacher (Boston, 1964), p. 113, Harry Levin appears to have this same probability in mind when he observes that "the Roman statute that Faustus cites at random does not seem to be wholly irrelevant; it has to do with the ways and means whereby a father may disinherit a son."

¹⁹Shakespeare's Use of Learning (San Marino, 1953), pp. 241-42. Earlier M. M. Mahood had noticed in Faustus the same faulty reasoning based on willful ignorance or deliberate suppression of parts of the quotations (Poetry and Humanism [New Haven, 1950], p. 69).

²⁰ The full text of Gargantua's sentence makes the phrase even more applicable to the condition of both Panurge and Faustus: "Mais, parce que selon le saige Salomon sapience n'entre poinot en ame malivole et science sans conscience n'est que ruine de l'ame, il te convient servir, aymer et craindre Dieu, et en luy mettre toutes les pensees et tout ton espoir, et par foy formne de charite, estre a luy adjoinct en sorte que jamais n'en soys desampare par peche" (Rabelais, Oeuvres completes, ed. Jacques Boulenger [Paris, 1951], p. 228). Levin has also cited this passage in treating Faustus' lack of self-awareness (108).

²¹ Duval considers the interview with "the Faustian diviner Her Trippa" the "centerpiece" of and the "key to understanding the Tiers Livre" because the magician promises the impossible and is "the only malign and vindictive one in a long series of charitable or innocuous consultants" (388-90).

²²Rabelais, p. 236. Screech goes on to say that "The inevitable product of self-love is moral, philosophical and spiritual blindness. A man who loves himself can get nothing straight; he certainly cannot both love himself with philautia and know himself (238).

²³ Kaiser, p. 178.

²⁴ What Florence M. Weinberg has written of the excesses of Panurge applies equally to Faustus: "Panurge chooses to serve his appetites rather than God, subjecting his higher nature to his baser impulses … Once he has deviated from the golden mean, he is out of balance, a state which may lead to any sort of disorder, including wickedness …" (The Wine & the Will: Rabelais's Bacchic Christianity [Detroit, 1972], pp. 138-39).

²⁵ The term panourgos, observes Screech, is "applied, rarely in a good sense, to a man ready to do anything … Anybody who knew Greek in any of its forms would have 'placed' Panurge at once: a trickster ready for anything. Not perhaps a trickster, but the Trickster: craftiness personified" (Rabelais, p. 70). Screech also calls him "a darker and more disturbing fool as diabolical madness takes over his mind. His folly is always laughable, but, progressively, far from merely laughable" (225).

Both Panurge and Faustus indulge in the kind of carnivalesque pranks—Faustus with his beating of the clergy at the pope's banquet, placing the cuckold's horns on the knight who had scoffed at his powers, tricking the hostler, etc.—that Mikhail Bakhtin has dealt with so illuminatingly in Rabelais and His World, tr. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge, Mass., 1968). Bakhtin notes, too (244), that the theme of the Tiers Livre "is closely connected" with such carnivalesque features as "uncrowning (cuckoldry), thrashing, and mockery" and, further, that "looking into the future hazards of matrimony is a grotesque debasement of higher level sooth-saying" (as, one might add, the conjuring of Faustus also becomes).

²⁶ In the chapter of the Faustbuch on which this passage in the play is based, it is likewise fear that keeps the protagonist from marrying. He is terrified out of his request for a wife by an infernal whirlwind that throws him down fiercely and nearly destroys his house. That Helen, incidentally, is not simply a ghost, but rather a demon in woman's form, has been suggested nicely in productions of Dr. Faustus where, as in his delusion Faustus admires her "face that launched a thousand ships," the figure unmasks itself for the audience and turns out to be Mephistopheles!

²⁷ "Cinquieme Livre," Oeuvres compltes, ch. 47, p. 911.

²⁸ Abel Lefranc believed that the oracle of the bottle "nous devoile l'enigme de la destinee humaine, dont Rabelais place la solution dans un determinisme peu compatible avec la liberte" (Rabelais, Etudes sur Gargantua, Pantagruel, le Tiers Livre [Paris, 1953], p. 309). Weinberg, on the contrary, insists that in Rabelais's work, men's wills are free, though "at times, caught in a dilemma, they need divine help … All mankind (and the more foolish the better) can be saved in the end. Rabelais's circular structure begins and ends with the exhortation to Everyman, the thirsty seeker, 'Boozers … Trinch!'" (150). She regards the oracular message as having been given to Panurge, rather than to his companions, because he is "an illustrious boozer, a sincere seeker driven by his desire to know the truth. His philautia blinds him to the truth when he is shown it; he must be granted a special gift of grace before his eyes can be opened" (145).