Just as, in the treatment of the supernatural order, Marlowe seems to waver between a rather leaden-footed literalism and real imaginative insight, so in the characterisation of the sin for which Faustus is ultimately damned, he seems uncertain of his ground. At times it is seen homiletically as mere presumptuous pride, "a devilish exercise." At times (as it acquires a real dramatic weight and body) it is seen, less simply, as a legitimate aspiration somehow tainted at its source. And at times it is simply endorsed with a kind of naïve enthusiasm which is very like the wide-eyed wonderment of the Faustbook.

It is this uncertainty, I think, that has encouraged critics like Professor Ellis-Fermor to see Faustus's sin as a harmless variety of humanist aspiration (for her, Marlowe the humanist is obliged to damn his hero only because he has been guilty of intellectual apostasy in the face of a menacing orthodoxy). This is to respond to something which is certainly present in the play; but it is something of which the play is not, so to speak, aware.

We have seen already [elsewhere] how Faustus's exploratory urges could be taken to symbolise the intellectual expansionism of the Renaissance; and it is true that many even of his power fantasies are connected with the widening geographical and mental horizons of that period: true for instance that he proposes to "search all corners of the new-found world." But for what? "For pleasant fruits and princely delicates" (1.83).

Helen may be the paradigm of classical beauty, the resuscitated body of antique learning, but she is raised in order to become Faustus's paramour, and to "extinguish clear / Those thoughts that do dissuade me from my vow" (18.94). Indeed, most of Faustus's "humanist" impulses, closely scrutinised, resolve themselves into a familiar and explicit form of hedonism and epicurean self-indulgence. There is no doubt that Marlowe sets out to place very firmly the damnable nature of Faustus's ambition; and if we are to allow any force at all to Ellis-Fermor's mitigating contentions, we must do so by positing a Marlowe divided against himself, here as elsewhere. In fact, I believe, he was. But it is necessary, first of all, to see how hard he worked to show us the dangers of the Faustian path.

When one considers Faustus's motives for taking up the magical arts, it becomes clear that Marlowe wants us to detect a serious moral weakness at the root of the decision. There is, for instance, his contempt for the laborious particularity of the academic disciplines—"too servile and illiberal for me": the revealing stress on the personal pronoun ("Thou art too ugly to attend on me") is the dramatic embodiment of the psychological state which Marlowe sees to be attendant on such an intellectual attitude. Faustus prefers the grandiose cult of universals: he will "level at the end of every art." But there must be no hard work: the drudgery is to be deputed to his "servile spirits" (1.96). The irksome burden of unanswered questions can be shrugged off, for the spirits will "resolve me of all ambiguities" (1.79); and it's a desire for the fruits of knowledge without its pains which makes him long to "see hell and return again safe" (6.172). He shares that perennial human conviction that there's a short cut of knowledge, some formula that makes it unnecessary to go about and about the hill of truth—a conviction that is aptly symbolised in the delusions of magic. The art into which the two infamous magicians initiate him is one of those reassuring skills which demand exactly the knowledge one possesses—astrology, tongues, mineralogy (1.137)—yet promise immediate and infallible results. Cornelius and Valdes are the direct ancestors of our Pelmanists and Scientologists, and Faustus has plainly been reading their illustrated brochure when he remarks,

Their conference will be a greater help to me
Than all my labours, plod I ne'er so fast.
(1.67)

It is plain, then, in the opening scenes, that Marlowe is giving us a portrait of an egocentric abuse of knowledge; Faustus belongs to that class of scholars who are, in Nashe's words,

ambitious, haughty, and proud, nor do they loue vertue for it selfe any whit, but because they would ouerquell and outstrip others with the vaineglorious ostentation of it. A humour of monarchising and nothing els it is, which makes them affect rare quallified studies.

It is certainly a desire for "vaineglorious ostentation" which makes Faustus aspire to the status of an Agrippa, "whose shadows made all Europe honour him" (1.116). "Be a physician Faustus," he advises himself, "and be eterniz'd for some wondrous cure" (1.14—the vaguely indefinite "some" is an index of the extent to which aspiration is divorced from reality, while "eterniz'd" reminds us how constantly Faustus makes his felicity reside in the mouths of men). For such an academic megalomaniac, the triumphant university disputation is the most delectable of memories:

I … have with concise syllogisms
Gravell'd the pastors of the German church,
And made the flowering pride of Wittenberg
Swarm to my problems as the infernal spirits
On sweet Musaeus when he came to hell.
(1.111)

It is with such relish that he finds himself able to equate Wittenberg's "flowering pride" with a swarm of infernal bees! And the relish is there because he has set all his pleasure upon the subjugation of other beings to his personal gratification. But this is an appetite which reasserts itself at the very moment of its satisfaction; for, once subjugated, the divines of Wittenberg can no longer minister to his sense of power, and he must go in search of increasingly larger spheres in which to exercise his passion for domination. Which is the plot of the play.

If there is one key motif in the scenes leading up to the signing of the pact, it is this "humour of monarchising," an obsessive preoccupation with power: power over the grand forces of nature—winds, storms (1.57), the Rhine (1.88), the ocean (3.41), the air (3.107); power over national and international destinies ("The Emperor shall not live but by my leave, / Nor any potentate of Germany"—3.112 and cf. 1.86, 91-95); power over the storehouses of nature ("I'll have them fly to India for gold, / Ransack the ocean for orient pearl"—1.81 and cf. 1.74, 143-46), over the plate-fleets of Spain (1.130); even the disposition of the continental landmasses (3.109-10) and the movements of the celestial bodies (3.40) are to be at his command. Those of his dreams which are not merely anarchistic nihilism—as the ocean overwhelming the world, the moon dropping from her sphere (3.40-41) or the petty prosecution of private revenge (3.98)—are simply variations on a single theme: "I'll be great emperor of the world" (3.106). His mind, like Epicure Mammon's, thrown into near delirium at the prospect, casts up this strange farrago of preposterous fantasies in the future tense ("I'll … I'll … I'll …"). Like Mammon, too, Faustus earns our contempt by assuming that the beings of superior power with whom he traffics exist merely to gratify his whims.

Such ambitions are not only damnable, they are laughable, and in terms of the chosen peripateia they are clearly to be regarded as arrant folly and presumption. But Marlowe, we recall, is the author of Tamburlaine (Tamburlaine the indulgence ad absurdum of the "humour of monarchising," not the moral fable critics have made out of it). And the more I look at the verse in which Faustus's grandiose visions are expounded the less certain I am that Marlowe has wholly dissociated himself from his hero—any more than the anonymous author of the Faustbook had done. In both the play and its source book, there are long stretches where a naive wonder at the subtleties of the witch completely submerges the moral condemnation of witchcraft—an ambiguity which results from the shallowness of the initial condemnation. At such points in the play (and I would include nearly all the central section, scenes 8-17, under this heading) the verse is strangely neutral morally—Mammon's foamings at the mouth provide an instructive contrast—has no clearly placed tone, only a shallow fluency and prolixity that suggest it came a trifle too easily to its author. It is neither the clear moral evaluation of a diseased mind, nor the enactment of a kindling imagination, but the indulgence of an abiding mood or mode in Marlowe's rhetorical poetic.

This becomes clear if we consider one passage where we do get a genuine presentation of the quickened pulse and soaring imagination of a man awestruck before a new universe of meaning and potentiality:

O, what a world of profit and delight
Of power, of honour, of omnipotence,
Is promis'd to the studious artisan!
All things that move between the quiet poles
Shall be at my command: emperors and kings
Are but obey'd in their several provinces,
Nor can they raise the wind or rend the clouds; But his dominion that exceeds in this
Stretcheth as far as doth the mind of man.
(1.52)

By charting so subtly the accumulating emotion behind the words, this masterfully articulated crescendo gives to the word "dominion" a richer and more human meaning than it has elsewhere. "Power" in these terms is not merely a presumptuous aspiration beyond the human condition, but a very nearly legitimate ambition closely, though ambiguously, related to the passion for mastery that leads to knowledge and "truth." If this vein had been more diligently uncovered in the rest of the play, we might have had a tragedy. But even this fine passage is immediately followed by a piece of rant in the Tamburlaine vein, which tips the delicate balance between an imaginative sympathy which is itself a judgment, and a top-heavy moral censure:

A sound magician is a demi-god;
Here tire, my brains, to get a deity!

The overstrain in the verse—expressing itself here in a syntactical incoherence—is not, I suggest, a dramatisation of Faustus's mental state. It is too imprecise and too hectic to be that. Rather it is Marlowe forcing an insurrectionary line of thought to discredit itself by overprotestation. Again, awareness of a tormenting ambivalence at the heart of all speculation, unsatiable or otherwise, has given way to flat homiletic demonstration.

The element of demonstration is strong in Faustus—most notably in the rejection of learning which opens the action. Faustus here indulges in a conventional, if not an academic, exercise: the "Dispraise of Learning." But both his methods and his conclusions are strikingly different from the Christianised pyrrhonism of his models. Faustus does not, in the traditional manner, indicate the shortcomings of human wit by showing how far each science falls short of its own avowed aims, and how far of divine omniscience; nor does he conclude with an exhortation to study only to know oneself and God. Instead he refers all learning to his private satisfaction, and finishes by rejecting "divinity" along with the rest.

The startlingly egocentric nature of his rejection can be estimated by comparing a contemporary survey of the same area—Cornelius Agrippa's De Incertitudine et Vanitate Scientarum. Agrippa, like Faustus, has bidden on kai me on farewell; but for what reasons? Because the philosophers "striue and disagree emong themselues in all things," one sect subverting another; because their reason "cannot perswade no constant or certaine thinge, but doth alwayes wauer in mutable opinions"; because Logic, the philosopher's tool, is "nothinge els, but a skilfulnes of contention and darknesse, by the whiche al other sciences are made more obscure, and harder to learne"; because their conclusions ground themselves upon authority where they should build upon experience. Here is Faustus surveying the same territory:

Is to dispute well logic's chiefest end?
Affords this art no greater miracle?
Then read no more, thou hast attain'd that end;
A greater subject fitteth Faustus' wit.
Bid on kai me on farewell.
(1.8)

The shifty way in which one section of philosophy (Logic) is equated with all of Aristotle, and then used to discredit philosophy itself, makes one doubt that there was ever a serious intellectual objection here at all.

Again, Agrippa has no time for Physic, which he finds to be "a certaine Arte of manslaughter … aboue the knowledge of the lawe," because it cannot predict what it claims to control, yet, unperturbed by this technological breakdown, makes increasingly extravagant claims for its efficacy. Faustus:

The end of physic is our body's health. Why, Faustus, hast thou not attain'd that end?
Is not thy common talk sound aphorisms?
Are not thy bills hung up as monuments,
Whereby whole cities have escap'd the plague
And thousand desperate maladies been cured?
Yet art thou still but Faustus, and a man.
(1.17)

Of "the Lawe and Statutes" Agrippa complains that they are merely a compound of men's uncertain opinions, "altered at euerye chaunge of time, of the State, of the Prince," and cannot, consequently, represent any real principle of justice. For Faustus the disiilusionment expounds itself in words like "petty" and "paltry." The failure of Law to realise in the temporal sphere the justice that humanity demands of the divine order is far from his mind:

This study fits a mercenary drudge
Who aims at nothing but external trash,
Too servile and illiberal for me.
(1.34)

In each of these cases, the rewards of learning are conceived entirely in terms of the recognition and acclaim which are accorded to the practitioner. Where Agrippa refers a science to the principles which it is supposed to embody, and finds it wanting, Faustus refers the whole body of human learning to his private satisfaction—"The god thou serv'st is thine own appetite"—and when he discovers, either that the offered satisfaction is already available to him, or that it is one he does not covet, he passes on. Agrippa is by no means a profound thinker: but beside Faustus's glib superficiality, Agrippa's carefree a priori pyrrhonism seems eminently sane.

Now it may be that we have here Faustus's mental history in a conventionalised form; but if so, it is the mental history of a shallow mind—a sophist's mind: and the telescoping of time (if that is what it is) has the dramatic effect of heightening the sense of shallowness. It is important to realise that the investigation is no more than a facade (note the tone of pert self-congratulation and the glib transitions—as if the books were all ready with the markers at the relevant pages), and that the real decision has been taken in the first four lines, where Faustus exhorts himself to "be a divine in show / Yet level at the end of every art." Divinity, of course, was the science which claimed to do just this, and Faustus has already made the "end of every art" antithetical to the study of God.

There is a peremptory haste about the whole sequence, punctuated as it is by the clap of shut books and the breathless snatching of the next ("Galen come … Where is Justinian? …"), and as a result, when the abrupt slackening of pace does come, it is doubly arresting:

These metaphysics of magicians
And necromantic books are heavenly;
Lines, circles, letters, characters:
Ay, these are those that Faustus most desires.
1.48—B text)

At once the factitious clouds of sophistry disperse, and, gloating over his symbolic hieroglyphs in irrational fascination, Faustus finds his true tone. The seriousness of his commitment to a thorough-going rationalism is indicated here by the interesting, though not surprising, fact that he does not apply the same rational canons to the "arte magick": it is enough that "these are those that Faustus most desires."

Faustus's condemnation is thus writ large (too large, as I see it) in the opening scene. In order to regard him as a premature Promethean hero of the Enlightenment, one must either regard all enlightened Prometheans as damnable (this is roughly Miss Mahood's position), or admit that, judged by enlightened criteria, he is a decidedly damp squib. In anybody's book the attitudes he adopts are unworthy.

And yet there is here that same absence of moral orientation of the energies of the verse, however loudly the attitudes expressed may call out for censure. As with the presentation of Faustus's power fantasies, there is an emotional indirection making it almost impossible to be sure that Marlowe has not gone a-whoring after the strange gods he appears to abominate. To a dangerous degree Faustus is Marlowe, and the play is a vehement attempt to impose order on a realm of consciousness which is still in insurrection.

Perhaps this is why Marlowe overdoes the condemnation. This frivolous academic opportunist, who has clearly learned very little from his encyclopedic education, cannot engage our sympathies very deeply. The narrow moral categories of the Prologue seem entirely adequate to encompass the significance of such a presumptuous fool:

   swollen with cunning of a self-conceit,
His waxen wings did mount above his reach,
And, melting, heavens conspir'd his overthrow.
(Prologue, 20)

This is the tone and manner of homiletic demonstration, not of tragic paradox, and it is in harmony with the Faustus of the early scenes.

On the one hand, then, we have a conscious and studied rejection of Faustus's position, which phrases itself in explicit moral comment and in an only slightly less explicit ironic exposure of his dubious motivation. On the other hand, there is an unrecognised hankering after the pleasures of magic, which turn, as the play progresses, into something very like the pleasures of the senses—"all voluptuousness." This split in sensibility, between the conscious design and the subconscious desire, is a familiar strait of the Puritan imagination—which finds its illicit Comuses and Bowers of Bliss too powerfully attractive to be dealt with on any but a moralistic level. Yet the moralisation which promises to free the mind from the tyranny of the sensory, this theoretical world-negation, simply hides the secret appetites from sight, and sharpens them as it prohibits their gratification. Thus it gives rise simultaneously to moralistic excess, and to a hectic and unwholesome obsession with the lost joys of mere sensuality. As we shall see, it is a peculiarly protestant dilemma in more ways than one.

If there were no more than this in Doctor Faustus, it would not exercise the kind of fascination it does. But there is also a desperate fatalism about Marlowe's vision, a sense that all the most desirable and ravishing things, man's fulfilment itself, are subject to a cosmic veto. A tragic rift yawns between the things man desires as man, and the things he must be content with, as sinner. And it is partly against this dark fatality that Faustus mobilises his doomed revolt.

I have described the rejection of learning as peremptory and wilful. But there is one significant moment where Faustus is brought up short for a moment, darkly brooding over one of his texts; and because the subject of his contemplation introduces one of the most impressive movements in the play, it is worth examining the passage carefully.

Stipendium peccati, mors est: ha, stipendium, etc.
The reward of sin is death? that's hard:
Si pecasse negamus, fallimur, & nulla est in nobis veritas:
If we say that we have no sin
We deceive ourselves, and there is no truth in us.
Why then belike we must sin,
And so consequently die,
Ay, we must die, an everlasting death.
What doctrine call you this? Che sara, sara:
What will be, shall be; Divinity adieu.
(1.39—B text punctuation and lineation)

Scholars have provided the biblically unlearned with the second halves of Faustus's texts—"but the gift of God is eternal life," and "if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins"—and we have been made aware that Faustus's argument only holds good in the absence of Grace. Paul Kocher has even unearthed an example of this precise syllogism, duly refuted by a theologian. Any member of Marlowe's audience, we gather, could have given this crude sophistry its logical quietus. And so he might; but whether he would thereby have been rid of the problem is another question.

For as the sixteenth century became the seventeenth, and as a distorted Calvinist theology grew increasingly vocal in English pulpits, the possibility of reprobation without appeal became one of the most earnestly discussed topics of English theology. In the year Marlowe took his B.A., the debate flared up as a Cambridge graduate and future archbishop, Samuel Harsnett, denounced the preachers of a reprobation which had, he claimed, "grown high and monstrous, and like a Goliath, and men do shake and tremble at it." Series of manuals offering to satisfy the reader about his election or otherwise were printed and reprinted. Cases of conscience like the famous one of Francis Spira, which may have influenced Faustus, encouraged unholy and obsessive speculation about one's eternal destiny. There was a distinct feeling in the air that, though damnation was a certainty unless steps were taken to avert it, salvation was a problematical and tricky business. And there is plenty of evidence to suggest that Marlowe at Cambridge was thoroughly exposed to this opinion and the debates it provoked.

It doesn't require much imagination to see how this kind of thinking, robed with all the grandeur of theological authority, might prey upon a mind already open to suggestions of guilt and worthlessness. Those who thought it necessary to preach against the doctrine were certainly aware of the savage self-contempt which it reinforced in unstable personalities.

But Faustus's syllogism is not simply a theological curiosity, nor is it a position to be rebutted and then forgotten. It has an alarming kind of internal and experiential logic which survives refutation. The predestinarian crux is the basilisk eye of Christianity. It proposes the desperate and totally destructive possibility, to which, in his blacker moments, man is prone to yield. Faustus is a little chirpy about it at first—"Why then belike we must sin, and so consequently die"—but he immediately feels the dark compulsion of the idea: "Ay, we must die, an everlasting death." It is the siren song of annihilation, inviting the guilt which is an inescapable component of personality to rise and engulf the whole being. Faustus reacts vigorously and, as I have said, peremptorily: "What doctrine call you this? … Divinity adieu." But in that brief brooding pause we have seen his rebellion from an angle which reveals it as, in some sense, a revolt for life, not against life. Magic is at least one way of escaping the gloomy pessimism of this doomed view of human existence. The essential pessimism of Marlowe's vision lies in the fact that magic is also, for the play, delusion.

It is, I suppose, fairly obvious that the deity of Doctor Faustus is not the God of Love, the Good Shepherd, but either the avenging Jehovah of the Old Testament, or his Christian offshoot, the Calvinist tyrant of mass reprobation. This God, in less troubled days, had been Tamburlaine's patron and protector:

There is a God, full of revenging wrath,
From whom the thunder and the lightning breaks,
Whose scourge I am, and him will I obey.
(2 Tam. 5.1.182)

In Tamburlaine this deity was transparently a theological "front" for a bloody-minded aggressiveness in the Scythian general, if not in Marlowe himself. But in the period between Tamburlaine and Faustus, complacent identification with this appalling God has given way to torment and horror before it. In a very real sense, Faustus is an unsuccessful attempt to evade the fatal embrace of this murderous and irresistible deity—Marlowe's attempt as well as Faustus's.

The escape route is remarkably congruent with what we know of Marlowe's own revolt, for Faustus's rebellion takes the shape of a flirtation with a kind of free-thought that was fairly widely disseminated in Renaissance Europe. He questions the immortality of the soul (3.64); he asks, and apparently wants to be informed, about the origins of the world (though the form of this question labels him an incurable theist—6.69); he wonders whether hell exists, or if it does whether it has anything like the horrors depicted by the theologians (3.61-63; 5.116-40), and his scepticism has the characteristic Epicurean tinge that tended, in the sixteenth century, to go with the release of the "advanced thinker" from the oppression of threatened punishment—he wants to spend his "four-and-twenty years of liberty" "in all voluptuousness" (3.94 and 8.61).

But like that of most of the "atheist" rebels of this period, Faustus's free-thought is far from being untroubled. It is deeply involved with personal pressures, and still joined, by the umbilical cord of a terror-which-is-still-faith, to the theism it purports to reject.

Faustus's learned discussions with Mephostophilis, for instance, have a persistent and revealing tendency to finger the wound in his own consciousness—and this despite the fact that he is, ostensibly, searching for the new and startling truths which his liberation from old dogma should have freed him to contemplate:

Are all celestial bodies but one globe
As is the substance of this centric earth?
(6.36)

When Mephostophilis proves to be stonily orthodox, he is not content, and raises the problem of the eccentric motion of the planets:

        But have they all
One motion, both situ et tempore?

But again he is disappointed, for Mephostophilis merely falls back upon the hypothesis of the poles of the zodiac. His impatience is clear: "These slender questions Wagner can decide: / Hath Mephostophilis no greater skill? … These are freshman's suppositions." And again he circles nearer his objective:

But, tell me, hath every sphere a dominion or intelligentia?

asking in effect, How true is the spiritual order allegedly governing the material universe? Here Mephostophilis is again reactionary, for the intelligences had already been expounded as metaphors for behaviour according to rational laws, yet he asserts their objective existence. (It is one of the play's most telling ironies that the new diabolic knowledge, for which Faustus sells his soul, should prove to be nothing more than the old scholastic cosmos which he has contemptuously rejected in its favour.)

There is a little more elementary astronomical catechising, which Mephostophilis answers conservatively, whereat Faustus concedes, "Well, I am answered," in a voice that implies he is not; then, precipitately, he rushes on to his true question:

Now tell me who made the world.

This is his real point of attack; for it is the divinely created, providentially ordered universe that he is so reluctant to accept. the answer he receives is presented with tremendous dramatic force as an upheaval in hell. Mephostophilis refuses to answer, and his sullen recalcitrance grows into a menacing anger, so menacing that Faustus sees, for the first time since his original encounter with the demonic world, the repellent face of evil:

Ay, go, accursed spirit, to ugly hell!

The fiend's abrupt departure and his subsequent return with Lucifer and Beelzebub at precisely the moment when Faustus calls upon Christ is, as James Smith points out, an apt representation of the emotional upheaval which the very asking of the question provokes in Faustus's consciousness. For his particular form of scepticism is accompanied by, perhaps derived from a profound emotional involvement with the ideas he rejects; and if his atheism is superficial, it is superficial because his theism is ineradicable.

The same tension between attraction and repulsion is discernible in the exaggerated gestures with which he dismisses the "vain trifles of men's souls" (3.64), and the "old wives' tales" of an after-life (5.136), but especially in the ambiguous attitudes that he adopts towards hell itself. It is interesting to note that on this issue (the existence of hell) he also employs the same wary catechising technique, pouncing on discrepancies, and driving home with the question which he hopes will extort the desired information. When Mephostophilis declares himself to be "for ever damn'd with Lucifer," Faustus is immediately on the alert:

  Where are you damn'd?
MEPHOSTOPHILIS:     In hell.
FAUSTUS: How comes it then that thou art out of hell?
(3.76)

The fiend's answer has gone down in the annals of theatrical history, but its revelation of a hell that is coextensive with the existence of mind is precisely the reverse of what Faustus was seeking: it was not hell, but the power of the sound magician, that was to stretch "as far as doth the mind of man." Yet Faustus is not answered: his view of hell continues to fluctuate wildly throughout the play.

That hell is "a fable" (5.128) is only one of the positions he adopts: if it is "sleeping, eating, walking and disputing," as Mephostophilis suggests, then he'll "willingly be damn'd" (5.139-40). On the one hand, he "confounds hell in Elysium"—meaning, I take it, that the two are a single state, the classical Hades where his ghost will be "with the old philosophers" (3.62-63); on the other hand, Mephostophilis is exhorted to "scorn those joys thou never shalt possess" (3.88) and Faustus acknowledges that he has "incurr'd eternal death" (3.90). It is only after he has asked for and received a description of hell from a being to whom he is talking only because he believes him to have come from hell, that Faustus declares hell to be a fable. Yet, a few scenes later, Lucifer's genial assurance that "in hell is all manner of delight" (6.171) sends him grovelling for a sight of the fabulous place.

But there's a deep consistency here. Hell is a fable only as long as it's a place "where we are tortur'd and remain forever." If it affords "all manner of delight," he believes in it. He'll scorn the joys he'll never possess only because he does not believe them to be joys. He'll willingly be damned provided he can have damnation on his own terms—"sleeping, eating, walking and disputing." The consistency resides in his determination to submit all moral categories to his personal convenience; and the ultimate failure of such an enterprise is figured in the continual presence of the melancholy fiend who knows better than to attempt it. On Mephostophilis's terms—being in hell and knowing it—one can be damned and preserve one's dignity; on Faustus's—being in hell and pretending it's heaven—one can only prevaricate and rationalise, writhing on the pin which holds one fast to an inexorably moral universe.

Moral systems can only be overthrown on moral grounds. What revolutions in morality humanity has seen, have all been conducted in the interests of some higher principle which has hitherto been overlooked. Faustus's reorganisation of morality can make no such claim; it aims merely at making the universe more convenient to live in—"if I may haue my desire while I liue, I am satisfied, let me shift after death as I may," as Robert Greene put it. It lacks even the Utilitarian grace of considering the convenience of mankind as a whole. It is Faustus's private revolution, the objectives of which would be utterly subverted if all men were to participate in its benefits. Marlowe draws with perception and firmness the disastrous blindness implicit in this epicurean individualism. One sees, in the scenes depicting Faustus's accommodation to damnation and the creed of hell, the kind of meaning that could be given to his rejection of the traditional wisdom: it is a rejection of the "communal" element in human endeavour; and one immediate result is a dangerous isolation which Marlowe dramatises in the long midnight colloquies with the nonhuman Mephostophilis.

Very often of course it is necessary to cut oneself off from the assumptions that come most easily; but equally often, the severing of bonds is succeeded by a servile commitment to the party that promises emancipation. In Faustus's case the commitment is to the nonhuman and for the greater part of the play he is shown trying to be "a spirit in form and substance," to the consequent atrophy of his specifically human potentialities. "He is not well with being over-solitary."

This is why his eleventh-hour return to the domestic limitations of the scholar's life, and his poignant reaching out for human contact, are so extraordinarily moving—at last his estranged and suppressed humanity has risen to demand its due. When the First Scholar regrets that Faustus has given his friends no opportunity to pray for him (19.69-70), he is speaking not only of the loss of divine grace, but also of the communal human support which men can give each other, from which Faustus, by his "singularity," has cut himself off.

It is when this doomed attempt at autarchy and self-signification collides with the demands of a nature still fundamentally religious, that the play again moves into a region of tragic potential:

GOOD ANGEL: Faustus, repent; yet God will pity thee.
BAD ANGEL: Thou art a spirit; God cannot pity thee.
FAUSTUS: Who buzzeth in mine ears I am a spirit?
Be I a devil, yet God may pity me;
Yea, God will pity me if I repent.

BAD ANGEL: Ay, but Faustus never shall repent.
(6.12)

The Angels withdraw, leaving Faustus to the bottomless solitude of moral responsibility:

My heart is harden'd, I cannot repent.
Scare can I name salvation, faith, or heaven,
But fearful echoes thunders in mine ears,
'Faustus, thou art damn'd!' Then guns and knives,
Swords, poison, halters, and envenom'd steel
Are laid before me to dispatch myself;
And long ere this I should have done the deed
Had not sweet pleasure conquer'd deep despair.
(6.18)

Beneath the rhetorical symmetries of the Angels' speech lies the tragic paradox of a consciousness ruinously divided against itself—a consciousness powerfully drawn by "salvation, faith and heaven," yet deafened by the "fearful echoes" that thunder in his ears when he names them, by those magnified reverberations of his own despairing self-accusation. The sense of imprisonment within the self is so overwhelming that he can only frame it in terms of external coercion—"My heart is harden'd." To ask whether he is in fact coerced, or whether he only imagines he is, is meaningless. Unless we blind ourselves with a drastically oversimplified view of volition, we must recognise in Faustus's predicament a perennial human impasse.

The situation is given added depth as he goes on to specify the "sweet pleasure" in a way that transcends mere "voluptuousness" and becomes a passionate love of beauty:

Have not I made blind Homer sing to me
Of Alexander's love and Oenon's death?
And hath not he, that built the walls of Thebes
With ravishing sound of his melodious harp,
Made music with my Mephostophilis?
Why should I die, then, or basely despair?

Why indeed? The music is so entirely present in the lyric cadence of these lines that it becomes more than an infernal palliative. And the mention of Mephostophilis does not so much ironically discredit the vision, as transform the fiend into a sweet musician in consort with all the singers of antiquity. Faustus's religious consciousness, his desperate self-rejection, and his love of beautiful things, are here locked in internecine conflict, none prevailing yet none yielding. It is one of the finest moments in the play.

If one had to select a single scene as the imaginative heart of the action, I think it would be this one (scene 6), with its appalling and giddy oscillation between the profundities of despair and the escapist frivolities of the Pageant of the Sins; with its superb dramatisation of Faustus's love-hate relation with God, when he calls on Christ and is confronted by Lucifer. If he is torn more violently than this by his divided nature, he cannot survive.

But increasingly, from this point onwards, the hardness of heart, and the corresponding stiffness of mind, provide him with an assured resting place—"Now Faustus must / Thou needs be damn'd … Despair in God, and trust in Beelzebub" (5.1-5). He resolves the agonies of choice by falling back on an assumed external fate; and though he wavers and has to exhort himself to "be resolute," his resolution never takes cognizance of the contrary impulse towards repentance. The two are absolutely dissevered. He seems to prefer damnation; for, as a reprobate, he is in a position to exercise that limited variety of "manly fortitude" which consists in scorning the joys he never shall possess. His is the kind of mind which prefers consistency to integrity. He is stiff to maintain any purpose. And in that stiffness he goes to hell.

I have called this movement in the play (the movement concerned with Faustus's desperate attempt to defy a reality of his own nature) tragic, because it leads us beyond the homiletic framework of the opening scenes, and asks us to conceive of a conflict between immovable conviction and irresistible doubt on the battleground of the individual consciousness. At such moments, the evaluation of Faustus's moral condition is no longer possible in terms like the Chorus's "swollen with cunning of a self-conceit." Marlowe's attempt to impose order on his rebellion moves out of the sphere of moralistic abstraction into a world where the felt reality of the heavenly values constitutes their sole claim to serious attention.

And it is a basic element in Faustus's damnation that salvation and the means to it should never seem more than "illusions, fruits of lunacy." Although that salvation is a continual theoretical possibility, there is a blockage in Faustus's consciousness which makes "contrition, prayer, repentance" appear always to be unreal alternatives. And the blockage is Marlowe's too. Why else can it be that the heavenly can only be represented in the faint efflorescence of the Good Angel's utterances, or in the Old Man's appeal to a "faith" which claims will triumph over "vile hell" (18.124), but which is imprisoned within its own theological concepts? There is a crippling generality about the salvation the Old Man offers:

I see an angel hovers o'er thy head
And with a vial full of precious grace
Offers to pour the same into the soul:
Then call for mercy, and avoid despair.
(18.61)

As spiritual counsel this is hopelessly inadequate, and the reply Marlowe gives Faustus—"I feel / Thy words to comfort my distressed soul"—seems forced and unconvincing.

The final declaration of Marlowe's failure to give body to the heavenly order is the creaking machinery of the descending "throne" in scene 19. The only face of God that we see—and see with frightening immediacy—is one from which Faustus recoils in horror:

           See where God
Stretcheth out his arms and bends his ireful brows.
Mountains and hills, come, come, and fall on me,
And hide me from the heavy wrath of God!
No, no.
(19.150)

The conception of divine justice which prevails is Lucifer's—"Christ cannot save thy soul, for he is just" (6.87). Justice expresses itself in the total rejection and annihilation of "distressed Faustus."

Under the species of the nature of God, a man figures to himself the friendliness or hostility of the universe, and the possibilities of his existence within it. Marlowe's view of the matter appears to be black in the extreme. The play is permeated with a strong sense of man's alienation from the order of things, a deeply felt "sense of sin," which seems to dominate its vision. As J. B. Steane points out, the "lurking sense of damnation precedes the invocation" of hell.

It is in the sense that the world of the play is hostile to the only values that can redeem it that Faustus's damnation may be said to be imposed from above. Yet there is an urgency and a personal heat behind this terrible paradox which, though it defeats the synthesising activity of Marlowe's art, commands attention and, indeed, a regretful respect. Though the play's grasp of reality is sporadic, its reach is tremendous. We are watching a man, I suggest, locked in a death embrace with the agonising God he can neither reject nor love. It is the final consummation of the Puritan imagination.

Yet, though this may be the tragedy of Christopher Marlowe, it is not The Tragicall History of Doctor Faustus. The tragic dilemma we sense behind the play is behind it. It is not officially recognised as a powerful and autonomous insight of revolutionary import. Instead Marlowe tries to accommodate it, by means of the psychomachia form, to the old frontiers and boundaries of moralised experience. And it refuses to submit.

The apotheosis of Helen, for instance, which is supposed to be firmly placed as a narcotic which "may extinguish clear / Those thoughts that do dissuade" Faustus from his vow, nevertheless overflows the moral banks Marlowe is constructing.

O, thou art fairer than the evening's air
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars,
Brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter
When he appear'd to hapless Semele,
More lovely than the monarch of the sky
In wanton Arethusa's azur'd arms,
And none but thou shalt be my paramour.
(18.112)

Up to this point, the image's sensual potency has been qualified by the destruction with which it is associated—"burnt," "sack'd," "combat," "wound"; but here the flame of passion flares up so fiercely that is transfigures even so moral an epithet as "wanton." The conflict is sharp in this scene, for these lines are immediately succeeded by the Old Man's

Accursed Faustus, miserable man,
That from thy soul exclud'st the grace of heaven
And fliest the throne of his tribunal seat!
(18.119)

It is clear that this comment cannot contain the Helen vision; but equally clear that Marlowe expects it to. The "humanist" and the moralist in him are again at war.

Thus Marlowe comes within hailing distance of that internalisation of moral sanctions by which drama can lead into wisdom instead of pointing at it, only to abandon it for easier simplifications:

Faustus is gone: regard his hellish fall,
Whose fiendful fortune may exhort the wise.

This, cheek by jowl with Faustus's last moments, is the critical paradox of the play at its most acute. I suppose it might be argued that the Epilogue merely condenses, into conventional and manageable form, a dramatic experience too vast and chaotic to be left unformulated; but I am inclined to think that the effect is simply bathetic.