Helen Gardner

THE THEME OF DAMNATION

IN DOCTOR FAUSTUS (1948)

WEare unfortunate in possessing Marlowe's greatest play only

in an obviously mutilated form; but in spite of possible distortion
and some interpolation in the centre, the grandeur of the com-
plete reversal stands out clearly. Apart from its opening and
concluding choruses, which provide an archaic framework, and
the short closing scene in the 1616 text, where the scholars find
the mangled body of Faustus, the play begins and ends with the
hero in his study. In the first scene Faustus runs through all the
branches of human knowledge and finds them inadequate to his
desires. Logic can only teach argument; medicine stops short
where human desire is most thwarted, since it cannot defeat death;
law is a mercenary pursuit; and divinity, which he comes to last,
holds the greatest disappointment: it is grounded in the recogni-
tion of man's mortality and his fallibility. The two texts from
Jerome's Bible insult his aspiration : Stipendium peccati mors est,
and Si peccasse negamus, Jallimur, et nulla est in nobis veritas.*
He turns instead to magic because it is:
a world of profit and delight,
Of power, ofhonour, and omnipotence.
He decides to ' tire his brains to get a deity'. The sin of Faustus
here is presumption, the aspiring above his order, or the rebellion
against the law of his creation.
But when he is last seen alone in his study it is the opposite sin

* It is worth noting that Faustus does not complete the text, which
is familiar from its use as one of the Sentences. 'If we say that we have
no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us: but, if we
confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to
cleanse us from all unrighteousness.'
J. Jump (Ed.), Marlowe
© The Editor(s) 1969
 HELEN GARDNER

which delivers him to damnation: the final sin of Faustus is

despair. I However much he may call in his fear on God or Christ,
it is the power of Lucifer and the bond with Lucifer which he
really believes in. It is to Lucifer he prays: '0, spare me, Luciferl'
and 'Ah, rend not my heart for naming of my Christ!' Donne
gives presumption and despair as one of the couples which the
Schoolmen have called sins against the Holy Ghost 'because
naturally they shut out those meanes by which the Holy Ghost
might work upon ns ••• for presumption takes away the feare of
God, and desperation the love of God'.z They are the two faces
of the sin of Pride. Faustus tormented by devils is obsessed by
their power; but the Old-Man is safe from them, because of his
faith. The great reversal from the first scene of Doctor Faustus to
the last can be in different ways: from presumption to des-
pair; from doubt of the existence of hell to belief in the reality of
nothing else; from a desire to be more than man to the recogni-
tion that he has excluded himself from the promise of redemption
for all mankind in Christ; from haste to sign the bond to desire
for delay when the moment comes to honour it; from aspiration
to deity and omnipotence to longing for extinction. At the be-
ginning Faustus wished to rise above his humanity; at the close
he would sink below it, be transformed into a beast or into 'little
water-drops'. At the beginning he attempts usurpation upon
God; at the close he is an usurper upon the Devil. *
As for the reward Faustus obtains, it is difficult to argue from

* 'The greatestsin thateverwas,andthat upon whicheventheblood

of Christ Jesus hath not wrought, the sin of Angels was that Similis
ero Altissimo, to be like God. To love our selves, to be satisfied with
our selves, to finde an omnisufficiency in our selves, is an intrusion,
an usurpation upon God' (LXXX Sermons (1640) p. 156). 'Did God
ordain hell fire for us? no, but for the Devil and hisAngels. And yet
we that are vessels so broken, as that there is not a sheardleft, tofetch
water at the pit, that is, no meansin our selves, to derive one drop of
Christ's blood upon us, nor to wring out one tear of true repentance
from us; having plung'd our selves into this everlasting, and this dark
fire, which was not prepared for us: A wretched covetousness, to be
intruders upon the Devil; a wretched ambition, to be usurpers upon
damnation'(XXVI Sermons(1660) 1" %73)'