Topic:-The
tragic theology of Dr.Faustus.
Paper:-1
M.A
sem-1
M.K.
Bhavnagar University.
Dr.Faustus was written as a time of
religious conflate and controversy in England Marlowe, trough his work as a
government agent was well acquainted with the nature of the conflict. The main
anxiety was that after the reformation of the English church under Henry His
eldest daughter’s brief return to Catholicism and the consolidation of
Protestantism in the long reign of Elizabeth.
The play is full of references to grace and
damnation .Faustus practice of black magic and his pact with Maphistophilis, the
agent of God’s enemy Satan condemns him to damonation and eternal punishment in
hell. The conflict between good and evil and the God and Devil lies at the
heart of the play and the battleground is Faustus soul.
Faustus ‘s play is tragedy in Christian
term because he gives into temptation and is damned to hell .His principal sin
in his great pride and ambition which Christian virtue of humility by letting
this traits rule his life, Faustus allows his soul to be claimed by Christian
cosmologies prince of devils Lucifer. Faustus struggles endlessly against his unknowing,
the struggle which indicates nothing but the incompleteness that makes
existence tragic.
In
marlowe’s play as in his source,the hero’s blasphemous choice of black magic is
a splendid beginning his final moments of dread and despair are a powerful
conclusion .But between these two plots of spirituals crisis falls on the
astonishing adventures in sorcery which can be for more easily talked about
sustain the essential drama of the hero’s progress towards damnation.
The opening scene shows Faustus struggling
to know what it cannot will kinds of knowledge .He is acting on a decision he
has long considered his mood abruptly shifts on theology and its central
teaching “We must die on everlasting death”, followed by a sudden feeling of
discouragement .The inevitability of death is not banished with confidence and
that’s why he turns to magic.
In
this play as in Greek mythology, man’s primal disobedience is a promethean
impulse .It is the questioning mind, not unruly passion that threatens the
divinely established order for with knowledge enough man .Even aods.
The very desire to fathom supernal
masteries becomes ,in Christian apologetics , a symptom answer to a job is ad
hominems in the largest sense what right has man to question, the argument of
‘Paradise Lost’ is similarly ad homonem Milton does not realize the edict
against tasting moral knowledge. He insists rather that the edict is one which
only the egotistical , undisciplined or self conceited would wish to over step
.In fact the limitations seems arbitrary by Satan or make a God of their own
appetites.
In Dr.Faustus he anatomizes the vice,
he would be super man who spurns splendid accomplishments because they do not
satisfy on ignoble egotism .Faustus practice medicine without compassion for
human suffering ,and worse still he would abandon his studies because his fame
is already established and the conquest of death eludes him .He despises the petty quiddities of the law but
he is not inspired by a nobler ideal of justice.
Faustus’s tragic career is more
paradoxical because even as his grand illusions fade and his intellectual
dissipate in petty shows and sensuality, his moral awareness grows .By strict Christiansen,
Faustus may be more innocent at the beginning of the play than at the close to
an audience, however he is most arrogant most contemptuous of other men .Most
scornful of religion before he falls .His fall is a moral education and
discovery during which he is humanized not degraded.
Faustus claims that his doom was sold
by his blasphemous defiance of God. Theology denies his claim on the ground
that no trespass has irrevocable consequences and no human act is beyond divine
pardon.Yet even theology admits that were irrevocably changed. Knowing good and
evil he forfeited the paradise of innocence and entered the world of moral and
mortal experience from which only grace might redeem him.
Grace is grace, say the reprobates
Measure for Measure despite all controversy .But grace in Dr.Faustus is
problematical because Marlowe would have it so. He could have shown in the last
scene a Faustus who is tormented by the
legions and the prospect of hell as he reaches toward a glorious heaven beyond
his grasp .Marlowe chose instead to make Lucifer merely a spectator to the
final agony of his victim, who shrinks more from the wrath God than from the terror of hell .Mephistopheles
may define hell as the absence of God, but Faustus finds the presence of God
unbearable because he sees not the loving father but the wrathful Jehovah who
cast the rebellious angels down to hell.
In Dr.Faustus his quarrel with Christianity
continues .The church is still for him a place of superstitious of the divine
is the universe itself in which God’s apollonian creativity is manifest. Marlowe
could imagine his heroic creator exacting a fearful sacrifice as the prince of
man’s pardon .But he could not imagine nor does he imply in Dr.Faustus that is
supreme and universal power ever assumed man’s inferior shape weakness and
morality.
Marlowe shows Renaissance spirit ideas in
his Dr.Faustus. His enthusiasm liberty and trust of knowledge are also
representation of contemporary era. Dr.Faustus is though Christian play, but it
represents Marlowe’s atheism towards Christianity and its beliefs. Robert
Ornstein also presents it very beautifully and philosophically in his essay to
convince us easily. Dr.Faustus as cosmic tragedy, it is necessary to relate its
particular view of Man and God to other works of Marlowe and to the athletic
doctrines attributed to him by his contemporaries.
Dr.Faustus as an orthodox homily is
tragic grandeur and metaphysical terror to view it however as Marlowe’s ultimate religious and cosmological
statement as his turning upon his ideal of transcendence is to grasp the full meaning
of Faustus despair and to grasp also the final congruence of Marlowe’s art and
life.
“Bell, Book and candle” as a
parody of Catholicism. is also one of Faustus’s own condition of being caught
in endless loop of his thoughts. His interactions with the devils re-enacts
pattern of avoidance that Luther call the fundamental condition of morality.
The pact is an emblem of human state either coming from studies of divinity or
concourse with devils.
Thus, Dr.Faustus has element of
Christian morality. It creates some question in our mind about Christian
superstitions and Marlowe’s intentions. But Dr.Faustus can truly present Marlowe’s
atheism nihilism and internal struggle of Christian and its God. And also it
take place in an explicitly Christian cosmos God sides on high as the judge of
world and every soul goes either to hell or to heaven.
"To evaluate my assignment, click here"
"To evaluate my assignment, click here"
No comments:
Post a Comment