Reading Faustus's God

The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus has afforded a marvelous interpretive challenge to Christian humanists who feel they should discover Marlowe to be endorsing a nice, decent kind of god."^[44] However, my argument thus far should suggest another plausible Christian reading. Elizabethan orthodoxy would make Faustus's damnation more challenging than most modern readers might expect, by denying that Faustus had a choice anyway: it would regard Faustus, not as damned because he makes a pact with the devil, but as making a pact with the devil because he is already damned. "Before the foundations of the world were laid," it says in the seventeenth of the Thirty-nine Articles, "he hath constantly decreed by his counsel secret to us, to deliver from curse and damnation those whom he hath chosen." And Faustus, an Elizabethan might infer from his blasphemous, dissolute, and finally desperate behavior, exemplifies the fate of the reprobate. The article continues: "So, for curious and carnal persons, lacking the Spirit of Christ, to have continually before their eyes the sentence of

God's predestination is a most dangerous downfall, whereby the devil doth thrust them either into desperation, or into wretchlessness of most unclean living, no less perilous than desperation." In Kyd's The First Part of Hieronimo (c. 1585), the villainous Lazarotto declares himself just such a person:

                 Dare I? Ha! ha!
I have no hope of everlasting height;
My soul's a Moor, you know, salvation's white.
What dare I not enact, then? Tush, he dies.^[45]

That Faustus might be in such a condition is supported by Mephostophilis's claim:

'Twas I that, when thou were't i' the way to heaven,
Damm'd up thy passage; when thou took'st the book
To view the scriptures, then I turn'd the leaves
And led thine eye.
(5.2.86-89)

If Faustus was guided by Mephostophilis, the decision was God's. For protestant thought could not tolerate devils wandering round the world at whim: God does not just allow their activities, he contracts out tasks to them. They are "God's hang-men," King James wrote, "to execute such turns as he employs them in."^[46] However, Calvin says, it is only the reprobate who are ultimately subject to them—God "does not allow Satan to have dominion over the souls of believers, but only gives over to his sway the impious and unbelieving, whom he deigns not to number among his flock" (Institutes 1.14.18). So Mephostophilis's intervention would be part of Faustus's punishment within the divine predetermination.

The issue is focused in Faustus's first speech when he juxtaposes two texts: "The reward of sin is death," and "If we say that we have no sin we deceive ourselves, and there is no truth in us." It appears that it has been arranged who shall sin and die; Faustus concludes:

Why then, belike we must sin, and so consequently die.
Ay, we must die an everlasting death.
What doctrine call you this? Che sera, sera.
What will be, shall be.
(1.1.40–46)

Christians who wish usually manage to evade this discouraging thought. Douglas Cole says Faustus's texts are "glaring half-truths, for each of the propositions he cites from the Bible is drawn from contexts and passages which unite the helplessness of the sinner with

the redeeming grace of God"; Cole's implication is that Faustus is so eager to damn himself that he disregards God's generous offers.^[47] To be sure, "the wages of sin is death" continues: "but the gift of God is eternal life"; and the second quotation, about everyone sinning and dying, continues: "If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness." But Calvin uses the first text—all of it—to emphasize that salvation is entirely God's decision: the desert of all is death but some receive eternal life through "the gift of God" (Institutes 3.14.2 1). And Tyndale in his Exposition of the First Epistle of St John (1531) uses the second text to demonstrate that we have no say in the success of our confession: "our nature cannot but sin, if occasions be given, except that God of his especial grace keep us back: which pronity to sin is damnable sin in the law of God."^[48] So God may indeed forgive us our sins if we repent, but some at least will be damned for sins to which they have, in their nature, a "pronity." Faustus's summary, "What will be, shall be," may be irreverent, but it is in the mainstream of Reformation thought. If he draws not comfort but blasphemy from his reading, that will perhaps be for the reason given by Tyndale in a rubric in the Prologue to the first edition of his Exposition of. . . John : "If God lighten not our hearts, we read the scripture in vain."^[49]

If Faustus is damned from before the start (to pursue the hypothesis), what then of his efforts to repent? For modern readers and audiences who do not already know the story, there is a question: will he change or not? For Elizabethan orthodoxy the answer was the same again: repentance is not something for the individual to achieve, but a divine gift. "It is not in our powers to repent when we will. It is the Lord that giveth the gift, when, where, and to whom it pleaseth him," Phillip Stubbes declares.^[50] So if Faustus does not have it, there is nothing he can do. Yet there are the injunctions of the Good Angel, which appear to represent, like the personifications in a morality play, a choice open to Faustus:

Good Angel:     Faustus, repent; yet God will pity thee.

Bad Angel:       Thou art a spirit [sc. devil]; 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.
                        Exeunt  Angels .

Faustus:           My heart's so harden'd I cannot repent.
(2.2.12–18)

If Faustus's heart is hardened and he cannot repent, who has hardened it? This was a key question in the theology of election and reprobation. In Exodus (chapters 7–14) it is stated repeatedly that God hardens Pharoah's heart against the Israelites, so that he refuses to let them go despite divine smiting of the Egyptians with diverse plagues. This was taken as a paradigm of the way God treats the reprobate. Paul alludes to it when he confronts the question in the Epistle to the Romans: "Therefore hath he mercy on whom he will have mercy, and whom he will he hardeneth" (Rom. 9:18). Luther stressed this text, and Erasmus was obliged to admit that it appears to leave nothing to human choice.^[51] For Calvin it was plain: "When God is said to visit in mercy or harden whom he will, men are reminded that they are not to seek for any cause beyond his will" (Institutes 3.22.11). Hence Donne's lines: "grace, if thou repent, thou canst not lack; / But who shall give thee that grace to begin?" (Holy Sonnet 4). And that is why Faustus can speak repentant words and it makes no difference. He actually calls upon Jesus: "Ah, Christ my saviour, my saviour, / Help to save distressed Faustus' soul." But the response is the entrance of Lucifer, Belzebub, and Mephostophilis: "Christ cannot save thy soul, for he is just," says Lucifer (2.2.83–85). Is this a devilish manipulation or a theological commonplace? It may be both—as Banquo says, instruments of darkness may tell us truths; it is the argument offered by Lawne's apologist for the Institutes .

Why then the appeals of the Good Angel? "What purpose, then, is served by exhortations?" Calvin asks himself. It is this: "As the wicked, with obstinate heart, despise them, they will be a testimony against them when they stand at the judgment-seat of God; nay, they even now strike and lash their consciences" (Institutes 2.5.5). On this argument, the role of the Good Angel is to tell Faustus what he ought to do but cannot, so that he will be unable to claim ignorance when God taxes him with his wickedness. This may well seem perverse to the modern reader, but is quite characteristic of the strategies by which the orthodox deity was said to maneuver himself into the right and humankind into the wrong. Perkins declares:

Now the commandment of believing and applying the Gospel, is by God given to all within the Church; but not in the same manner to all. It is given to the Elect, that by believing they might indeed be saved; God inabling them to do that which he commands. To the rest, whom God in justice will refuse, the same commandment is given not for the same cause, but to another end, that they might see how they could not believe, and by this means be bereft of all excuse in the day of judgment.^[52]

Such doctrine was preached from almost every pulpit.

Faustus is amenable at every point, I think, to a determined orthodox reading. Yet the play might do more to promote anxiety about such doctrine than to reinforce it. For although I have felt it necessary to argue for the Reformation reading, Faustus is in my view entirely ambiguous —altogether open to the more usual, modern, free-will reading. The theological implications of Faustus are radically and provocatively indeterminate.

A good deal might depend on which version is being used, for many of the exchanges added in the B text seem to sharpen the theological polarity. They include the lines where Lucifer, Belzebub, and Mephostophilis gloat over Faustus (5.2.1–19), and the speeches where Mephostophilis says he led Faustus's eye when he read the Bible and where the Good and Bad Angels vaunt over Faustus (5.2.80–125). These additions enhance the impression that the Reformation god is at work; William Empson argues that they were demanded by the censor, who wanted it clear that Faustus must suffer and be damned for his conjuring. Empson calls them "the sadistic additions," finding their "petty, spiteful, cosy and intensely self-righteous hatred" untypical of Marlowe.^[53] Given the intermittent nature of the evidence, Empson's theory must be regarded as a stimulating indication of the awkward status of orthodoxy in the play, rather than as right or wrong. In any event, what Empson does not quite take on board is that the B text adds also two major passages that are more sympathetic to Faustus: the kind and gentle exhortation of the Old Man (5.1.36–52), and the scene after Faustus's removal to hell in which the Scholars resolve to mourn and give him due burial (5.3). These passages plant in the play a moral perspective alternative to God's. The Old Man and the Scholars pray for Faustus right up to the end, though theologians like Tyndale say we should not pray for apostates—except for their destruction, "as Paul prayed for Alexander the coppersmith (the ii Timothy, the last), 'that God would reward him according to his works."'^[54] The Old Man speaks

not in wrath,
Or envy of thee, but in tender love,
And pity of thy future misery.
(5.1.48–50)

Unlike in the A text at this point, the Old Man is far gentler than the Good Angel, who anyway has not visited Faustus for nine hundred lines and has only reproaches left to contribute (5.2.92–108; B text

only). The Scholars, in the face of the horrific evidence of Faustus's destruction ("See, here are Faustus' limbs, / All torn asunder by the hand of death" [5.3.6–7]), agree to hold a noble funeral. It is rather like the endings of Euripides' Hippolytus and Bacchae , where the gods stand aside after their disastrous intrusions upon human affairs and the people draw together in sorrow and compassion.

This is why I say the B text sharpens the theological polarity, whereas Empson says it is only more sadistic: both the Reformation god and a more genial alternative are presented more vividly. This produces the possibility, which would also fit the sense most readers have of Marlowe as an author, that at some stage at least the play was written to embarrass protestant doctrine. Richard Baines alleged that in order to persuade men to atheism, Marlowe "quoted a number of contrarieties out of the scripture,"^[55] and the strenuous efforts of Christian humanist critics to tame the play to their kind of order suffice to make it worth considering whether Faustus dwells provocatively upon such contrarieties. However, as I have argued in earlier chapters, there need not have been a precise intention in either direction, and no version of the play may represent, or ever have represented, a single coherent point of view. Substantial texts are in principle likely to be written across ideological faultlines because that is the most interesting kind of writing; they may well not be susceptible to any decisive reading. Their cultural power was partly in their indeterminacy—they spoke to and facilitated debate. But whoever rewrote parts of Faustus , and from whatever motive, the revisions indicate an unease with Reformation theology and help to make plain the extent to which any extended treatment cannot but allow contradictions to be heard—by those situated to hear them.

A similar confusion appears in the text of Nathaniel Woodes's The Conflict of Conscience (1581), a play usually adduced to set off Marlowe's superior verse and humanity. It is based on the story of one Francesco Spiera, which was translated in 1550 and reissued in 1569–70 with a preface by Calvin. In Woodes's play, Philologus, despite good protestant beginnings, is tempted and indulges in worldly delights, and concludes that he is "reprobate" and cannot be saved: "I am secluded clean from grace, my heart is hardened quite."^[56] But the play appeared in print in 1581 in two issues of the same quarto edition, and with two contrasting endings. In the first Philologus kills himself and is indeed damned; in the second, a joyful messenger reports that he renounced his blasphemies at the last moment. (Both versions are headed on the title page "An excellent new Commedie.")

Evidently someone involved in the publication was worried. The two endings of The Conflict of Conscience correspond to the main alternatives in the Christian dilemma: either God must know who is to be damned and therefore, since he created everyone, must be responsible for people going to hell; or God has set the world going but has left it to myriad individual people to decide how it will all turn out. In the former version it is hard to discern his goodness; in the latter, he may be good but is disconcertingly impotent (perhaps rather than paring his fingernails, as James Joyce has it, he is gnawing them in suspense). Historically, each of these two theologies has fed on the inadequacy of the other. And so with the predestinarian and free-will readings of Faustus . In Marlowe's play they are, in effect, simultaneously present, but they cannot be read simultaneously; instead they obstruct, entangle, and choke each other. In performance, one or the other may be closed down, but the texts as we have them offer to nudge audiences first this way then that, not allowing interpretation to settle. Faustus exacerbates contrarieties in the protestant god so that divine purposes appear not just mysterious but incoherent.

Even critics who believe Faustus is able to choose freely do not thereby prevent the play from provoking embarrassment about God. They cannot settle the point at which Faustus is irrevocably committed, and this is related to God's goodness—the later the decision, the more chance Faustus seems to have. Many theologians have held apostasy to be irrevocable—the "sin against the Holy Ghost," the one that cannot be forgiven. The homily "Of Repentance" declares, "they that do utterly forsake the known truth do hate Christ and his word, they do crucify and mock him (but to their utter destruction), and therefore fall into desperation, and cannot repent." Richard Hooker said the same.^[57] If this is so, Faustus's fate is settled very early, and most of the play shows God denying him further chance to repent; the effect is quite close to a predestinarian reading. No doubt this is why others have maintained that Faustus's situation becomes irretrievable when he conjures; or when he signs; or when he rejects the Good Angel; or when he visits hell; or when he despairs; or when he consorts with Helen; or not until the last hour. Such interpretive scope hardly makes for a persuasive theology. It may lead to the thought that there is no coherent or consistent answer because we are on an ideological faultline where the churches have had to struggle to render their notions adequate. It may suggest not only that Faustus is caught in a cat-and-mouse game played by God at the expense of people, but also that God makes up the rules as he goes along.

Finally, Faustus disrupts any complacent view of orthodox theology through its very nature as a dramatic performance. Even for an audience that finds Faustus's blasphemy horrifying, an actor might very well establish a sufficient empathic human presence to make eternal damnation seem unfair. Faustus himself manifests at one point a morality provocatively superior to God's. Anticipating the terror of his last hour, he refuses the support of the Scholars: "Gentlemen, away, lest you perish with me" (there is no knowing what God might do)—"Talk not of me, but save yourselves and depart" (5.2.67–70). At this moment, when human companionship might be most desired, Faustus puts first his friends' safety. As with the Old Man and the Scholars, a generous concern for others is shown persisting in people beyond the point (whenever that is) where the Reformation god has decided that eternal punishment is the only proper outcome. It is one thing to argue in principle that the reprobate are destined for everlasting torment, but when Faustus is shown wriggling on the pin and panic-stricken in his last hour, members of an audience may think again. If this is what happened, for some at least, then there are two traps in the play. One is set by God for Dr. Faustus; the other is set by Marlowe, for God.