those fields that limit his striving. Logic, medicine, law, and divinity fail to attract his devotion because they result in a mere “end” rather than an imaginative expanse. While Aristotelian logic might have “ravish’d” him at one point, it now bores him: “Read no more: thou hast attain’d the end” of that field (1.1.6, 10). So, too, with medicine: “Why Faustus, hast thou not attain’d that end?” (1.1.18).55 These lines suggest the scholar’s desire to strive forward rather than to complete his studies. Law and divinity, too, limit his striving. Law “fits a mercenary drudge / Who aims at nothing but external trash,” while divinity, also, offers apparent certainty: “we must sin, / And so consequently die. / Ay, we must die, an everlasting death” (1.1.34–35, 45–47). If the audience might recognize divinity as offering unlimited grace (as the scriptural passage he reads goes on to promise), to Faustus its end in “everlasting death” mirrors the finality and nearsighted “aims” of other fields.
Faustus wants “to live eternally”; as Seneca writes, he wants “to be always with” the field of choice, perpetually moving forward so that, as Faustus puts it, “being dead” he might be raised “to life again” (1.1.24, 25). If these lines seem blasphemous—he desires, after all, to raise the dead in the manner of Jesus—they also speak to his desire for scholarship to offer him an unending path for life. Of course, as Genevieve Guenther argues, Faustus seems to crave a resolutely material life, seeking not everlasting salvation in heaven but instead life on earth, thereby making his comment doubly blasphemous.56 He wants to raise the dead back into their own bodies, she states, not into heavenly union. But what Guenther underplays, and what is notable in this opening soliloquy, is Faustus’s striving. His experience of embodiment is not static or fixed but mobile, for lack of curiosity or ambition is a kind of death, a mere “attain’d end” (1.1.18). By “end,” as Edward Snow argues, Faustus signals a “termination” rather than “an opening upon immanent horizons.” As a result, “having ‘attained’ [an] end means that he has arrived at the end of it, used it up, finished with it.”57 Magical texts, by contrast, allow him to imagine an unachievable, continually receding goal, a mystical form of knowledge just beyond his reach: it is “necromantic books” that “Faustus most desires,” for they are “heavenly” (1.1.51, 53, 51).58
Faustus ultimately choses necromancy because it offers not dominion but the ravishment of addiction: “’Tis magic, magic that hath ravish’d me” (1.1.111). The scholar seeks to be overcome and, as Calvin writes, “not regarding any other delightes,” to “wholy addict” himself and his “studies to the obtaining of” his goal.59 Even as Faustus wants to revel in “power,” “honor,” and “omnipotence,” he is fundamentally a “studious artisan” (1.1.55–57). Flourishing in his studies he hopes to be, as Cornelius promises, more consulted than the Delphic oracle. That is to say, he desires to be a source of knowledge that is invisible, empty, and devoid of will, reflecting instead the voice of the divine. This omphalos, or navel, of the world delivers its messages from a divine power that Faustus, too, wants to channel, “forgetting himself, and addicting himself wholy” as Calvin writes, so as to “ouercome al impediments.”60 Of course Faustus’s attraction to necromancy does not arise solely from his ambitious spiritual goals; as Luke Wilson has argued, he chooses necromancy with an expectation of its returns. He speaks of “gold,” “pearl,” “pleasant fruits,” and “princely delicates” (1.1.83–86). More specifically he seeks to command: necromancy offers servile spirits “to do whatever Faustus shall command” and to be “always obedient to my will.” “I’ll be a great emperor of the world,” he claims (1.3.37, 97, 104).
Yet scholars have tended to overlook how Faustus—perplexingly and contradictorily—seeks such power through the utter surrender of himself, releasing his own mind into a metaphysical, even divine, relationship. However much he might claim to pursue magic for material gain, his more sustained desire centers on metaphysical union. He seeks this merger through study, searching out the field that promises ravishment and then submitting himself to that field’s masters: Mephastophilis and Lucifer. Just as Calvin counsels ministers to “addict & give themselves wholly to the Church, whereto they are appointed,”61 so too does Faustus give himself: he “surrenders up to [Lucifer] his soul” (1.3.90). As with Calvin, Marlowe stages the complex exercise of the human will: Faustus strives and seeks, he labors in his field, but he must also surrender himself to it. Even as he proves eager to see if devils will obey him, and even as he celebrates his own skill in conjuring (“who would not be proficient in this art? / How pliant is this Mephastophilis, / Full of obedience and humility, such is the force of magic and my spells!”), ultimately Faustus “dedicates,” “surrenders,” and “give[s]” himself (1.3.28–31, 90, 103). On finding that Mephastophilis serves not himself but Lucifer, Faustus dedicates himself to Lucifer too; on finding his conjuration was per accidens rather than a sign of necromantic skill, Faustus responds not with disappointment but by pledging himself further: “There is no chief but only Beelzebub, / To whom Faustus doth dedicate himself” (1.3.58–59).
Faustus’s embrace of metaphysical merger appears in two ways: first, in his willingness to forego the logic he has mastered at the opening of the play, and second, in his signing of the contract.62 In choosing necromancy and binding himself to its masters, he exhibits the single-minded, exclusive attachment to his calling typical of the lauded addict: he follows faith (however dubious it might be). Aristotle’s logic and Ramus’s methods celebrate reasoning and critical thinking, but Faustus, despite his proficiency in logic and rhetoric, ignores such skills. Instead Faustus wants a “miracle,” he seeks to “be eterniz’d,” and to revel in “heavenly” books (1.1.9,15). This is not the ambition of a logician or lawyer. Imagination, emotion, hope, and faith, not logic, fuel his desires, arguably mirroring the devotion of the Christian faithful whose addiction to God defies earthly reason: “mine owne fantasy, / … will receive no object, for my head / But ruminates on necromantic skill” (1.1.104–6). A. N. Okerlund writes of these lines: “Faustus is telling us his mind is made up and not to be confused by critical analysis…. Distinguishing the valid from the invalid statement is the problem here—the problem to which Aristotle, Ramus, and their scholarly followers devoted their lives. But Faustus apparently cares not at all about the irreconcilable meanings of the Angels’ statements and hears only the words which excite his desires.” As Okerlund concludes, “Marlowe intends to call our attention to Faustus’s deliberate violation of formal logic.”63 While such a failure of logic might seem foolhardy, and indeed damnable, when viewed from the vantage point of addictive dedication Faustus’s illogical willingness to embrace magic appears as a sign of his faith: he refuses to be swayed from his path, in a manner Perkins himself might praise, by the writings of men. “We must no more,” Calvin writes, “be addicted to our selves, but be wholly dedicated.”64
If Faustus’s language of dedication, surrender, and ravishment—the language of addiction—expresses his scholarly ambition to lose himself in his studies, in surprising contrast (and throwing into high relief the scholar’s addictive devotion) Mephastophilis proves a cautious, reasoned, and even logical partner in magic. One finds reason and logic, for example, both in Mephastophilis’s answer to Faustus’s queries (he is, as many critics have noted, disarmingly straightforward in his answers) and in his effort to draw up the contract. Mephastophilis twice demands a “deed of gift” from Faustus (2.1.35, 60). The precision of Mephastophilis’s “deed of gift” is Marlowe’s addition to his source. In the English Faust Book, the term is “covenant,” which has greater resonance with biblical than English or continental law.65 Deploying a category of contract in the highly legal phrase “deed of gift” and emphasizing Mephastophilis’s logic rather than obfuscation, Marlowe creates a figure more sympathetic than the trickster of medieval mystery plays. At the same time, Marlowe draws heightened attention to Faustus’s failure—his inability to deduce or even hear the patently evident error of his choice.
Yet, Marlowe reveals, Faustus’s failure is also a triumph, for it exposes further his desire to addict himself to his field of choice precisely as Seneca and Calvin counsel. He embraces
