I might with ease be drawn out of so deep a puddle.” His sudden conversion freed him from such bondage. God’s grace literally turned Calvin around, redirecting and reshaping him: God “sodenly turned my mind (which for my yeeres was over muche hardned) and made it easie to be taught.”37 Calvin here views himself as “strictly” or, in an alternate translation, “obstinately” addicted to the pope and superstitious belief.38 By “superstition” he indicates, as Alexandra Walsham notes, devotion to relics, saints, and other material manifestations of faith: “The ease with which the populace had been deceived by these tricks was itself a just punishment from God for its gullibility and natural addiction to ‘this most perverse kinde of superstition,’ and to a carnal religion that revolved around visible, physical things.”39 Here, Walsham’s terminology draws attention to the link between religious devotion and addiction. Only with God’s help to redirect and reshape him can Calvin relinquish his obstinate attachments: God did “turn my race” the right way: he “turned my mind” away from the papacy. God turns him around, softens his heart, and frees him from earthly lures so he can dedicate himself to the divine, a more compelling and liberating addiction.40 As a result, after his conversion he “burned with so great a desire of profiting: that although I did not quite give over all other studies, yet I followed them more coldly.”41
Calvin’s English followers, including Foxe and Perkins, take up and extend his model of addiction to scripture and superstition, continuing to tease out the depravity inherent in misguided addictions even as they trumpet the joys of addictive devotion to the divine. Foxe’s Actes and monuments (after the Bible, arguably the second most popular religious book in Elizabethan England following a 1572 government order requiring copies to be placed in all cathedrals in the country) invokes the devotional aspects of addiction when he narrates the lives of Protestant martyrs such as John Frith and William Tyndale, two figures who dedicated themselves to the study of scripture. These Reformed theologians demonstrate the addictive potential celebrated by Calvin himself. Frith, Foxe writes, “began hys study at Cambridge. In whose nature had planted being but a child maruelous instructions & love unto learning, whereunto he was addict. He had also a wonderful promptnes of wit & a ready capacitie to receaue and understand any thing, in so much that he seemed not to be sent unto learning, but also borne for the same purpose.”42 Like Seneca and Faustus, Frith has a “promptness of wit” and proves “addict,” “borne for” rather than merely acquiring learning.
Tyndale, too, proves addicted to study, which he pursues at Oxford, “where he by long continuance grewe up, and increased as well in the knowledge of tounges, and other liberall Artes, as especially in the knowledge of the Scriptures: wherunto his mind was singularly addicted.”43 Foxe praises the divine pursuits of Frith and Tyndale in terms that resonate with the scholastic addiction of Seneca and especially the devotional addiction of Calvin: these religious men are “singularly” focused, “borne” with aptitude and “turned” by God. Foxe also, and indeed more frequently, illuminates the dangers of addiction as expressed in mistaken attachments, especially when the believer proves addicted not to God but to Catholic idolatry: “These which addict themselves so devoutly to ye popes learning, were never earnestly afflicted in conscience, never humbled in spirite nor broken in hart, never entred into any serious feeling of Gods judgment, nor ever felt the strength of the law & of death.”44
Foxe’s contemporary, the Calvinist William Perkins—deemed by the end of the sixteenth century to be one of England’s most popular religious writers, with seventy-six editions of his work appearing before his death in 1602—also highlights the danger of Catholic attachments over devotion to God.45 “Perceived as translating Calvin for the masses,” as Poole puts it, Perkins praises those who “addict themselves unto Diuinitie,” yet cautions against the study of exegesis over scripture.46 He writes, “Hence come dissentions and errors into the schooles of the Prophets, which cannot be avoided while men leave the text of scripture & addict themselves so much to the writings of men, for thereby hee can more cunningly conuey strange conceits into mens minds: and therfore every one that would maintain the truth in purity and syncerity must labour painfully in the text.”47 The opposition of “purity and sincerity” to “error” and “dissentions” indicates the struggle of addiction. Perkins, even more pointedly than Seneca, explores how addiction to scholarship can go awry when the object of study is inappropriate.
Embracing Reformed theology, Perkins is particularly keen to encounter scripture directly. Study and translation of “the word of God” is the scholar’s appropriate calling. “The writings of men” only detract from the truth, and “popish writers” in particular lead audiences astray. Divinity students, he writes, “within this sixe or seven yeeres, divers have addicted themselves to studie Popish writers, and Monkish discourses, despising in the meane time the writing of those famous instruments and cleere lights, whom the Lord raised up for the raising and restoring of true religion, such as Luther, [and] Calvin.”48 Religious dedication, indeed dedication to God, is no longer enough; one must turn away from the Catholic version of God to celebrate that of Martin Luther, Calvin, and their followers. Reformed writings, like scripture, ring with “true religion,” “cleere lights” and purity. The copia of Erasmus must cede to the crystalline prose of Luther.
If Catholic writings corrupt the reader, only godly conversion cures. As Perkins puts it: “Againe, after conversion it is not an idle power in them: 1. Ioh. 3.9. He that is borne of God sinneth not, that is addicteth not himselfe, nor setteth himselfe to the practise of sinne; and the reason is given, because the seed of God remaineth in him.”49 Commitment to God and interest in worldly pleasures prove mutually exclusive. Perkins writes, “The love of the trueth, and of the world, the feare of the face of man, and the feare of God can never stand together. As also howe dangerous a thing it is to be addicted to the love of the world: for it hath beene alwaies the cause of revolt.”50 This is the power of addiction—it is a singular devotion that defines us, for good or ill. If Calvin understands abandoned devotion as a source of salvation as well as reprobation, then Foxe and Perkins more explicitly praise addiction to God in contrast to errant addiction to Catholic idolatry.
Finally, Marlowe’s contemporaries warn against necromancy itself as a form of addiction. In A dialogue of witches (1575), Lambert Daneau writes of addiction to Satan in these terms: “Whosoeuer were seruisable or addicted to Satan, were called by the name which is wel knowne and commune, that is Sorcerers,” who forged an “agréement with the diuel … & to be short, have wholy addicted them selves to Satan.”51 The active “agréement with the devil” proves, however, a form of ensnarement in which the sorcerer is victimized by the devil: they “fall into the snares of Satan, and become Sorcerers, that is to say, addicted unto Satan.”52 Condemning the sorcerer, Daneau includes a spirited call for another form of addiction, for if “the serpent is more addicted or subject to Satan, then the other beastes,” humans at least have the choice to turn away.53 Here the story of a convert who embraces Christ delivers Daneau’s point: “That he was converted to the fayth of Christ, it is read of him how earnestly and diligently he was addicted to that studie [of necromancy], which afterwarde, through the great goodnesse of god, he forsooke and renounced.”54 The parallels to Faustus are evident here. The scholar’s dedication, longing, and effort, directed initially to the wrong field, shift to worship of God instead, through whose goodness the convert is saved.
Addicted to Magic
If writers from Calvin to Foxe and Perkins insist on the double-edged quality of addiction as a firm commitment that may or may not lead to grace depending on the form of the devotion, Marlowe stages both the danger of choosing the wrong field and the struggle of committing in the first place. The play’s opening acts, from the first scene to the signing of the necromantic contract, chart Faustus’s devotional struggle as he seeks the addiction lauded from Seneca to Calvin to Perkins, hoping to lose himself in a vocation by relinquishing reason, soul, and body to a higher power. The play opens with Faustus, sitting in his study, surveying a range
