The overwhelming ambition and pride of Faustus in Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus1 is frequently highlighted as one of the work’s central themes, and rightfully so. However, our students might connect equally, if not more, with the scholar’s response to profound despair. During a class discussion, we examined one of the final scenes in the play– the moment when Faustus reaches the end of the 24 years he received from Lucifer in exchange for his soul. It is Faustus’s final day, his final hour. He has distributed his goods, rejected pleas for repentance from mortals and immortals, and now waits in hopeless desperation for Lucifer to claim his soul.
Faustus is aware that if he even thinks about repenting, Lucifer will tear him apart, so Faustus believes he has to stop thinking; however, thinking might have helped him realize that Lucifer’s threats, even realized ones, are so fantastically finite compared to the infinite. Unfortunately, Faustus in being granted the ability to appease his every desire and want immediately for 24 years, in exchange for his soul, has become incapable or lost the courage to think beyond the immediate.
The primary focus of the class discussion was what Faustus chooses to do in his most desperate hour. In this moment, he calls on his personal demon, Mephistopheles, to conjure a personal audience with Helen of Greece, the one whom Faustus describes in that memorable line as the “face that launched a thousand ships.”2 Faustus calls for her so that in her embrace she “may extinguish clean / those thoughts that dissuade me from my vow / and keep mine oath that I made to Lucifer.”3 With one hour of life left, Faustus falls back to what he has always fallen back to escape the despair of his soul – meaningless pleasure. Unable to deal with the reality that his soul is headed to eternal torment, the character creates a delusional reality in which to lose himself. So delusional is this conjured reality that even the Helen that Mephistopheles conjures up for Faustus is nothing more than a minor demon who was probably lingering in the prop room of hell waiting for his senior demons to yell out, “We need a Helen!”
Upon seeing Helen, Faustus proclaims: “Here will I dwell, for heaven in these lips/ And all is dross that is not Helena/I will be Paris, and for love of thee,/ Instead of Troy, shall Wertenberg be sack’d;/ And I will combat with weak Menelaus,/ and wear thy colours on my plumed crest; Yea, I will wound Achilles in the heel, / and then return to Helen for a kiss”4 As angels from both sides battle for his soul and his colleagues tremble at what awaits him, Faustus escapes into a virtual world of sorts, assumes the persona of Paris—or in more modern terms, takes on the skin of Paris—selects his battlefield (Wittenberg and not Troy), further falsifying an already false world, and prepares for a battle in the name of the most beautiful woman in the world.
Interestingly, Faustus’s fantasy world includes the sacking of “Wertenberg” or Wittenberg, the center of Christian theology at the time. In projecting the destruction of Wittenberg into his ideal world, Faustus conveys a desire to exist outside of the Christian paradigm, beyond the framework in which a soul is accountable before God. Such a world exists only in self-created delusions, not in reality.
If given a few more hours to live, Faustus might have asked Mephistopheles to bring him forms of Menelaus and Achilles and thus created the first multiplayer battle—a 17th-century prototype of Fortnite. Faustus is a brilliant scholar, not some adult child sitting in his parent’s basement playing video games and refusing to get a job, but the brilliant are as prone to despair and deception as the not so brilliant.
Faustus is able to fully engage in a conjured virtual world even as his real world stands, quite literally, on the brink of damnation. I remind students that none of us is too far from the tendencies of Faustus. In the comedic spirit that is sprinkled throughout Marlowe’s play, I also tell them that while they might not have souls that are about to enter hell in an hour, they certainly have papers that are headed in that direction in an hour as they take on skins of Paris or Renegade Raider and fight make-believe battles.
Marlowe’s intentions with this play are complex and open to interpretation. While it’s unlikely Marlowe was writing to warn us about the dangers of virtual games, his repeated use of deceptive pleasures to escape from deep despair is a topic worthy of discussion. We in the twenty-first century may consider ourselves far more sophisticated and progressive than the poor souls of the seventeenth century who were busy chanting incantations and making ridiculous deals with the devil; however, for all our supposed sophistication and technological progression, our tendency and ability to retreat into delusional worlds to escape the despair of our souls have only increased, arguably making us more desperate souls than our seventeenth-century counterparts.
Perhaps the demons have progressed along with us, and they no longer need incantations or deeds written in congealed blood to enter into a bargain for the destiny of our souls. Perhaps they have retired Mephistopheles since games and platforms from Fortnite and Assassin’s Creed to Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and many other forms of endless entertainment can do the job better than Mephistopheles ever did, and that on a much larger scale.
Marlowe’s Faustus has echoed through the centuries because his existential crisis is a universal experience on many levels. However, his seventeenth-century methods of escaping that crisis have probably never been more relevant and relatable than they are today, given the multitude of delusional worlds available to us at our fingertips. Acknowledging the despair of the soul and realizing that the solution to that despair is found in Christ alone is the first step toward redemption. Creating and hiding in false realities to numb the despair that has the potential to drive us to God did not work out so well for Faustus, and it will not work out well for us either. The study of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus remains as relevant as ever in our classrooms.
Thank you for this reflection.