The Theological Complexity of the Will and Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus
Understanding Marlowe’s concept of the will is central to interpreting the theological complexity of Doctor Faustus. Expanding upon classical philosophy on the subject, Marlowe and his contemporaries developed a new understanding of the will within the Christian religious context of the Elizabethan era. Saint Augustine’s Christian further adaptation of this philosophical inquiry gives Marlowe a theological premise for Doctor Faustus: the diametric opposition of the human will to God and his divine law. Responsible for his earthly desires and subject to a God that he refuses to recognize, Faustus chooses to abide by his erring will — and falls into eternal ruin. Marlowe’s Faustus demonstrates that like God’s will, man’s will also critically influences the act of salvation.
Marlowe and his contemporaries derived their understanding of the will from Greek and Roman thought. Almost two millennia before Marlowe’s time, Plato, in his dialogue Gorgias, “use[d] the verb ‘boulesthai’ to say that what we really want is… pleasure, not good” from our lives (Sorabji). Admonishing the pursuit of such willful delectation, he taught his pupils that no man shall ever gain satisfaction from earthly pleasure — a concept that Faustus encounters towards the end of his earthly joyride. Therefore, it was quite fitting for Aristotle, a student of Plato, to describe man’s potential “rational desire for the good” with another term: “boulēsis” (Sorabji).
Three centuries later, the Epicurean Lucretius coined the term “free will” and its evolving definition inspired Seneca and the stoics’ later writings. These stoics claimed that since man has an independent will, it is his responsibility to regulate it. Passions like “anger can be put to flight by wise maxims,” advises Seneca in his treatise On Anger, “for it is a voluntary defect of the mind” (Book II, par. 2). Shakespeare also inserts these same stoic ideas into Julius Caesar. Brutus, a stoic and champion of reason, merely bids his wife “farewell” after hearing of her suicide; he claims that he has “the patience to endure” her passing because he knows that in the end, all men “must die,” an eerie explanation for his lack of emotion (IV. ii. 240, 242). Just as he repressed his love for Caesar, he forcibly represses his love for his dead wife for the sake of reason. Surprisingly, Brutus’ counterpart Cassius, a stoic himself, responds: “my nature could not bear it so” (IV. ii. 247). In relation to Marlowe’s Faustus, Seneca warns that passions — in the form of Faustus’ earthly desires — “will in no wise permit themselves to be weakened or abridged” once man chooses them over reason (Book II, par. 7). If man takes responsibility for his freedom of choice, Seneca proposes that he can use reason to conquer his will.
A critic of these classical propositions, Saint Augustine, an early Christian theologian, argues that man’s will cannot be tamed by man alone. He testifies in his Confessions that “the body obey[s] the slightest inclination of the soul to move… at its pleasure more easily than the soul obey[s] itself,” reasoning that even if man attempts to regulate his will, the fallibility of the human body will always lead to passion and sin (VIII. vii (20)). Faustus’ will is directly tied to this pursuit of pleasure — at the price of his soul. Sustaining that man is a willful creation that “does not deservedly rise to [truth]” but instead “is weighed down by habit,” Augustine recognizes that the human will is in constant conflict with the Divine (VIII. vii (21)). This Christian Orthodox belief requires the individual will to submit to the Divine Will — and Marlowe’s Faustus ultimately rebels against this doctrine.
In Act I, Faustus takes full advantage of man’s agency to follow his will over God’s. With a head “swoll’n with…self-conceit,” Faustus is intent on pursuing personal deification and boundless pleasure on earth instead of being subservient to God in both life and death (Prologue. 21). After he demonstrates his great intellect in subjects of logic, medicine, and law, Faustus attempts to demonstrate his power over God in interpreting scripture. Inaccurately paraphrasing 1 John 1:8 on lines 74 and 75, Faustus concludes that man “must sin/And so consequently die” (I. i. 74–75). Here, Faustus’ selective reading of scripture demonstrates his futile attempt to justify his will’s desires and its consequences in God’s word. Confident that humanity is already condemned to an “everlasting death,” his will directly rejects the Divine proposal of salvation (I. i. 76). Faustus refuses to recognize that God “will pity [him]” if he repents, as the Good Angel proposes, for he is unwilling to surrender his will and its intrinsic relation to worldly pleasure (II. iii. 641).
Faustus’ unwillingness to repent of his fallible human will drives him even further from God’s salvation. The narrator of The English Faust Book warns that no man can “serve two masters” and therefore Faustus must repent of his will and admit his ineptitude in God’s eyes to be saved (69). However, Faustus still chooses to “tempt the Lord” with his impertinent pursuit of “his worldly pleasure [over] the joys to come,” and ignores the truth that such disregard for the Divine does not come without retribution (Gent 69). Flagrantly unrepentant of his will, Faustus sells his soul to Mephistopheles and chases after his worldly passions in royal courts, in bed and abroad. Dreaming of being “esteemed” for being able to “raise [the dead] to life again,” Faustus descends into the dark arts, a wretched slave to the desires of his twisted will(I. i. 55).
As his contracted period time on earth dwindles, Faustus recognizes that his only hope of receiving God’s salvation is God’s will in the form of grace; he needs to fully repent of his will in order to avoid eternal damnation. Like Saint Augustine, Faustus has recognized the perversion of the human body before in Act I, when he laments that he is “still but Faustus, and a man,” one who is subject to his own mortality (I. i. 64, 65). However, Faustus has never truly considered the perversion of the human will in the eyes of God until his last moments on earth. He cries out “Accursèd Faustus, where is mercy now?/I do repent, and yet I do despair,” longing for some way to “shun the snares of death (V. i. 1330–1331).” Dr. Stegner attests to the fact that even though Marlowe’s juxtaposition of “heavenly and demonic mediating figures present[s] sin and grace as mutually exclusive, Faustus’s admission… reveals the breakdown of these discrete categories” (Stegner). Scholar Kristen Poole addresses a similar thought when she asks “Are human beings agents in their salvation, or is the notion that people can affect their afterlife an “illusion” and “lunacy”?” in her essay “Dr. Faustus and Reformation Theology,” addressing the theological complexity of Marlowe’s answer in Doctor Faustus. Poole aptly argues that “[t]he play’s answer is a frustrating “yes” — to both questions” (Poole).
As Augustine writes, “[t]here is no monstrous split between willing and not willing… there are two wills” (VIII. vii (21)). Wrongfully claiming his will’s omniscience and omnipotence over God’s will, Faustus brings eternal damnation upon himself. Marlowe promises a similar ending for audience members who choose to act like Faustus. Leaving us to wrestle with our incompetencies in the face of God’s holiness, Marlowe nudges his readers to acknowledge the omnipresence of divine grace and God’s will to save — a reality that Faustus, a slave to his wayward will, never chose to accept.
Works Cited
Augustine. Confessions. Translated by Henry Chadwick, Oxford University Press, 2008.
Gent, P. F. The English Faust Book. Edited by David Wootton, Hackett Publishing Co, Inc, 2005.
Marlowe, Christopher. Doctor Faustus. Edited by David Wootton, Hackett Publishing Co, Inc, 2005.
Poole, Kristen. “Dr. Faustus and Reformation Theology.” Early Modern English Drama: A Critical Companion. Edited by Garrett A. Sullivan, Oxford University Press, 2006.
Seneca. On Anger. SophiaOmni Press, Sophia Project, 1999, www.sophia-project.org/uploads/1/3/9/5/13955288/seneca_anger.pdf. Accessed 21 Feb. 2020.
Sorabji, Richard. “The Concept Of Will.” Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation, 2002, doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199256600.001.0001. Accessed 21 Feb. 2020.
Stegner, Paul D. Confession and Memory in Early Modern English Literature: Penitential Remains. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
