even have the satisfaction of full, spiritual devotion to necromancy—it is his appetite that governed him, he claims, nothing else.
Finally Faustus calls out to God, in direct defiance of his contract: “Ah Christ, my Saviour, / Seek to save distressed Faustus’ soul!” (2.3.83–84). Having questioned faith but yearning for God, Faustus here proves a more complex and sympathetic character than the static scholars who fail him. Here he is not merely wavering—he wavers toward the divine, and in doing so admits the challenge of true faith. His prick of conscience, like the potential intervention of God in the form of the Good Angel or Old Man, teases the audience with hope for Faustus’s salvation. Indeed, for a Christian audience Faustus’s wavering toward repentance, while unrealized, is admirable, even heroic. The audience’s strong desire for Faustus’s conversion is modeled both by characters internal to the play and by the Chorus. Scholars cry, “God forbid!” (5.2.35) on learning of the contract, asking, “O what shall we do to save Faustus?” (5.2.46) and lamenting that the doctor had not turned to them earlier: “Why did not Faustus tell us of this before, that divines might have prayed for thee?” (5.2.40–41). The Good Angel, the Old Man, and the Scholars unite in attempting to sway Faustus back to salvation and devotion to God. They counsel Faustus, “Call on God” (5.2.26) even as the scholar understands it is too late.
Such wavering might demonstrate Faustus’s residual faith. Indeed, his necromantic addiction will always, one might argue, be compromised by his awareness—from his studies of theology and his emersion in Christian Wittenberg—of God’s divinity. Yet, at least to the extent Marlowe engages with Calvin’s theology, such mixing and mingling of Faustus’s devotions is as much troubling as hopeful. “No man shal ever go forward constantly in this office,” Calvin writes, “save he, in whose heart the love of Christ shal so reigne, that forgetting himself, and addicting himself wholy unto him, he may ouercome al impediments.”82 Calvin’s emphasis on exclusivity—the believer is constant, overcome, and subjected, while his love of Christ is entire, whole, and unfailing—precludes wavering. The faithful might be tempted, certainly: “The faythfull them selves are never so wholly addicted to obey God, but that they are ofte withdrawn with sinfull lustes of the flesh.”83 But Calvin clarifies that “ofte withdrawn” signifies not recantation but instead mere temptation, as the faithful remain steady in their dedicated service to God. For Calvin, all humans struggle with addiction: “By reason of the grossenes of nature, we are always addicted unto earthly thinges.” Nevertheless divine intervention might “correct that disease which is ingendered in us,” turning earthly into godly addiction.84 Marlowe, by contrast, depicts not conversion from one addiction to another but the incompleteness of attachment itself, whether to necromancy or to God.
If Calvin’s writings affirm the power of addiction to overcome the believer entirely, Marlowe instead stages—in his gnarled, questioning universe—a believer with an incomplete addiction. The play’s central conflict thus concerns Faustus’s attempt but ultimate inability to addict himself to supernatural forces. As he claims, “I do repent, and yet I do despair” (5.1.63). For even as Marlowe depicts the potential heroism of striving toward Christian conversion, he equally challenges it, by making repentance on Faustus’s part a form of spiritual and legal betrayal. For Faustus to reject the very path he surrenders to, by taking alternate advice and rejecting magic when its outcomes are insecure, would be to signal his infidelity to faith more generally, be it to the magic he embraces or to the God he does not. Tragically, then, even as Faustus’s wavering might be read as a sign of his potential for salvation, it nevertheless betrays his failed devotion not just to Mephastophilis and Lucifer but to anything: God, necromancy, friendship, or study of any kind. Staging the gap between the desire for addiction and its realization, the play illuminates how a character allegedly predestined for hell, overcome by desire for magic, and contractually bound to necromantic masters still cannot achieve addiction.
Yet in staging Faustus’s failure, Marlowe depicts not the depressing or powerless spectacle of the damned but the monumental difficulties of the addiction Calvin trumpets. Addiction, it turns out, is hard. If, as Rasmussen writes, “the central problem with most orthodox interpretations of Doctor Faustus is that they often verge on lack of sympathy, even open hostility,” viewing Faustus as a failed addict instead illuminates his wavering not as a sign of weakness but as indicative of the challenge of his task.85 Calvin sidesteps the effort necessary to achieve total surrender. Is addiction to faith really as simple as he makes it sound? Indeed, is addiction to sin that easy? Even as Calvin notes the ways in which the elect might stray from their addiction to God, he also describes addiction as effortless; it is simply a question of which addiction one might follow. Calvin’s theory, which is evident in his conversion story and his theory of election, seems to promise that addiction is everywhere—and more potently, that God is everywhere, as seen in all one’s addictive predispositions.86 But, Marlowe reveals, this theory of God’s dominant will falls short. If humans are so passive before this all-powerful God, then where is He? Mephastophilis works throughout the play to secure the soul of a character who is all too eager to give it away; God, by contrast, may or may not speak through the conscience, the Good Angel, or the Old Man.
It is perhaps perverse, then, that despite his inadequacies as a devotee, and despite his wavering, Faustus nevertheless reaches the promised end. He achieves final integration into Lucifer’s kingdom, and he does so not because of his own devotion but because of Mephastophilis’s extraordinary efforts. Again and again Lucifer and Mephastophilis counsel Faustus toward right belief, toward the kind of behavior expected of their “faithful.” Toward the end of the play, as Faustus tries to repent, Marlowe stages a divine figure literally holding the tongue and hands of the devotee, prohibiting him from straying: Faustus cries, “The devil draws in my tears…. O, he stays my tongue! I would lift up my hands, but see, they hold ’em, they hold ’em” (5.2.59–63). This staging of Faustus’s damnation, even as it shocks viewers, also arguably appeals to them.87 The fantasy of God accompanying the faithful through every hour of the day, staying their hands, holding their tongues, and distracting them with spectacles when they think of straying—this God exists only in reverse fantasy, in Marlowe’s play in the form of Lucifer. If even Faustus fails as an addict, despite receiving both direct encouragement from Mephastophilis and tangible material benefits from magic, imagine the challenges facing the godly. Tormented by popish regimes, ridiculed for restrained living, besieged by existential melancholy, and plagued by mortal questions, the godly must endure worldly troubles without a divine Mephastophilis by their side.
Conclusion
Marlowe’s play stages a supernatural universe in which even the unfaithful, weak, and wavering subject might meet his desired end. Understanding how Faustus’s addiction falls short illuminates the treacherous illusion of free will in the play. An attempt to exercise free will in defiance of his contract—indeed, the need to bind himself in a contract in the first place—reveals Faustus’s failure to lose himself in his devotional pursuit. The resulting opposition between free will (as it might allow him to turn from necromancy) and devotion (as it might demonstrate the fidelity of his commitments) is thus a Catch-22. Even as the evocation of free will might seem to dramatize Faustus’s potential to turn from sin, it also—to the degree that he successfully turns—demonstrates his propensity to infidelity and inconstancy, regardless of the devotional field. It is Faustus’s problematic inconstancy that signals his fall, as much as his failed exercise of what one might or might not take to be free will. Indeed, one might argue that Faustus should express even more commitment to Mephastophilis than he does, for only through this full exercise of addiction might he reveal his predisposition for true faith.
Rather than viewing the play as hinging on the tension between faith and free will—a tension that casts Faustus as either predetermined in his damnation or capable of saving himself—the study of addiction in Faustus illuminates instead the drama of his attempted devotion and his failed surrender. His desire to release his will to Mephastophilis indicates a predisposition to precisely the kind of radical faith required of the righteous believer; but his failure to achieve the form of commitment he trumpets
