The Cry for Myth (27 page)
Authors: Rollo May
Marlowe has the remarkable insight of a great poet when he asks whether his body is “unwilling” that he sign away his soul. And Mephistopheles shows this complementary character: he, the agent of evil, argues
against
Faustus’ signing the document! We are also amazed at Marlowe’s astuteness later in having the good angels battle the bad angels. An old man (whom we may take to be the therapist) also tries to bring Faustus back to his original human destiny as only a man. But Faustus brushes aside these cautions, even this congealing of his own blood, and acts out the longing of everyone in that period: “I want to be wanton and lascivious.”
Faustus then asks Mephistopheles, “Tell me, where is the place that men call hell?” The devil answers,
Within the bowels of these elements,
Hell hath no limits,…
… for where we are is hell
And where hell is, there must we ever be.
This reminds us of Sartre in the twentieth century, “Hell is other people.”
But Faustus brushes these questions aside by sexuality. He demands,
The fairest maid in Germany,
For I am wanton and lascivious.
He then asks Mephistopheles for a book of magic,
… Wherein I might behold all spells and
incantations, that I might raise up spirits
when I please.
When Mephistopheles gives that to him, he requests another,
a book where I might see all characters and
planets of the heavens, that I might know their
motions and dispositions.
*
Even the angels join in the psychological and spiritual struggle for this human soul. Faustus is not evil in our sense; he does not kill anyone as Goethe’s Faust does, or participate in tragic cruelty (as Goethe’s Faust does with Gretchen), or cause the burning to death of two aged persons because he wants to see the view of his accomplishments from their cottage site (again as Goethe’s Faust did). Marlowe presents on the stage only those longings the persons in the audience have been struggling with in their own breasts. He pictures the psychological and spiritual doubt, dismay, conflict which all these human beings had felt in their own lives as citizens in the Renaissance with its great opportunities and great evils.
It is the fact of Faustus’ denial of God, his setting himself up as opposed to God, that constitutes the tragedy. It is similar to Thomas Mann’s later interpretation of the myth; Faustus is damned by his thoughts, by his very wish for godlike control, not simply by his actions. This is why the crowds were so responsive, for everyone has such desires, deep-down evil fantasies, wicked daydreams. Wishes, rather than actions, are the
cause of neurosis, as Freud would later assure us.
We have already seen how Mephistopheles himself has implored Faustus not to go through with the signing of the compact. And throughout there are not only bad angels but good angels who implore Faustus to repent while there is still time. This spiritual struggle is seen from a different angle when Faustus rationalizes his predicament and accuses Mephistopheles of having seduced him:
When I behold the heavens then I repent
And curse thee, wicked Mephistopheles,
Because thou has deprived me of those joys.
*
But Mephistopheles rightly answers, “Twas thine own seeking, Faustus, thank thyself.” Then the devil goes on to question the idea that heaven is so wonderful; he takes his stand, curiously enough,
with human beings!
I tell thee Faustus, it [heaven] is not half so fair
As thou or any man that breathes on earth.
This reveals the great humanism of the Renaissance. One felt good to be alive and to look about the world with joy, which Giotto had shown in his painting and Brueghel was even then showing when he covered his canvases with the joys of gathering wheat, skating, and just being alive. These Faustus myths have an obligation to try to find the best of human life at the same time as they envy the divine. Humanism lies in the terrible struggle in that period, between the free inquiring of science and the powerful remnant of absolute ecclesiastical authority.
The good angel begs Faustus again to repent, while the bad angel argues that Faustus must remain with his bargain; Cod cannot pity him. And Faustus answers,
My heart is hardened;
I cannot repent.
*
This “hardened heart” is a heart that cannot love. It expresses the patriarchal side of the energy sought by these men of the Renaissance who were concerned with power, ambition, self-assertion.
Again and again the good angel and the bad angel return; Faustus is never actually hardened. Shall he,
can
he, repent and throw himself upon God’s mercy? That this issue remains vital all through the drama contributes to its great power over the audience.
Mephistopheles then takes Faustus on a trip in which to demonstrate his magical prowess. But the much-sought-after power has become trivialized. Faustus plays pranks on the Pope, whose nose he tweaks; he steals the wine from in front of the Pope at table while he, Faustus, is invisible.
All the while Faustus is aware that his time of death draws nearer. He ruminates:
What art thou, Faustus, but a man condemned to die?
Thy fatal time draws to a final end;
Despair doth drive distrust into my thoughts.
An old man enters, pleading, “O gentle Faustus, leave this damned art, This magic that will charm thy soul to hell.”
I see an angel hovers over thy head
And with a vial full of precious grace
Offers to pour the same into thy soul;
Then call for mercy and avoid despair.
This old man seems to be playing the role of the therapist.
Faustus makes his last demand; he pleads with Mephistopheles to let him make love to Helen of Troy.
†
One thing, good servant, let me crave of thee
To glut the longing of my heart’s desire
That I might have unto my paramour
That heavenly Helen which I saw of late,
Whose sweet embracings may extinguish clear
Those thoughts that do dissuade me from my vow,
And keep mine oath I made to Lucifer.
*
“Heavenly Helen” is the customary phantasy of contemporary men as an escape from difficult decisions. Many a man has fantasized, “if I could only have a beautiful woman!” But the very patriarchal nature of Faustus’ power precludes that solution. For how can one love authentically when the motive is actually not love but power? To love we need grace.
Helen also is the touchstone for great poetry. Marlowe is inspired to go even beyond his previous scenes to write in these oft-quoted and much loved lines:
Was this the face that launched a thousand ships?
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss,
Her lip sucks forth my soul—see where it flies!
Come, Helen, give me my soul again.
Here will I dwell, for heaven is in these lips
And all is dross that is not Helena.
Oh thou art fairer than the evening air
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars!
†
The Old Man, whom we met a moment ago, stands nearby and watches. He then pronounces what all these watchers of the morality play knew, namely, that if one makes love to a demon, that person is automatically excluded from heaven. Helen now represents a spirit from the dead, which is a demon.
How different is the use of sex and love in the sixteenth century from what it was in the Middle Ages of Dante! Here it is a tool, an instrument to use Helen in order to give him his
soul again. Sexual love is allied with power. In all of the Faust myths sexual love is a mechanism by which one avoids one’s guilt and sorrow. But in Dante love was grace; Beatrice was always related to paradise. In Dante love is beatified.
As the end nears, the sad friends of Faustus gather on the last day to say good-by. Even his good angel must leave him, for, “The jaws of hell are open to receive thee.”
*
The audience must indeed have gasped, for hell is now pictured and reproduced openly on the stage in this miracle play;
But yet all these are nothing, thou shalt see
Ten thousand tortures that more horrid be.
And all Faustus can say is, “O, I have seen enough to torture me!”
The clock strikes eleven, and Faustus is in great spiritual agony presented in poetry which is so magnificent it can only be quoted:
The stars move still, time runs, the clock will
strike,
The devil will come, and Faustus must be damned.
O I’ll leap up to my God! Who pulls me down?
See, see, where Christ’s blood streams in the
firmament!—
Rend not my heart for naming of my Christ;
Yet will I call on him—O spare me, Lucifer! …
Where is it now? Tis gone, and see where God
Stretcheth out his arm and bends his ireful brows.
Mountains and hills, come, come, and fall on me
And hide me from the heavy wrath of God,
No, no—
Then will I headlong run into the earth;
Earth, gape! O no, it will not harbor me.
We can only imagine how powerful is the drama as the myth is played out to the end, and must indeed have deeply grasped every observer;
(The clock strikes twelve)
It strikes, it strikes! Now, body, turn to air …
(Thunder and lightning)
O soul, be changed to little water drops
And fall into the ocean, never to be found.
My God, my God, look not so fierce on me!
The devils come and bear Faustus away to the adders and serpents of ugly hell. Faustus cries out as his last words, “I’ll burn my books—ah Mephistopheles!”
The issue is the secrets gotten from books! The struggle between the free inquiring of science and the remnants of the dictatorial power of the Church is still alive and active. This final begging promise of Faustus is indeed a reference to the lust for learning that, in those days, was a considerable part of evil. The Renaissance was inebriated with this lust to such an extent that the burning of the books was deemed the most important element in giving up Renaissance power.
The chorus, taking its cue from the Greek myths, cries:
Cut is the branch that might have grown full
straight,
And burned is Apollo’s bough
That sometime grew within this learned man
The evil shown in this version of the myth of Faust is that man tries to be omnipotent, to usurp the position of Cod. It is a situation of hubris, the unseemly pride, the negation of humility and repentence. The crime is
the refusal to accept the human role
(which, we recall, Mephistopheles said he valued more than heaven!). It is instead the demand that one’s self be God. The Greeks put this sin above all: Agamemnon, we recall, is met by the chorus when he returns from Troy with a warning not to commit hubris over his victory. Socrates repeats time and again the need for acceptance of one’s limitations. But Renaissance man, having tasted the joys of knowledge, has not yet learned to transmit it into wisdom.
Faustus cries twice in this drama that he could not accept the fact that he was “
only
a man,”
Yet art thou still but Faustus and a man.
What art thou, Faustus, but a man condemned to die?
*
It requires Mephistopheles, the devil’s emissary, to appreciate the stage of humankind. It is a strange result of the development of consciousness that along with the fact that we can see ourselves, that we are self-conscious of our own status, there comes the presence in consciousness of the sin of pride. This is the problem particularly of great men and women; they most of all are in danger of hubris and most often commit this sin. Faustus was guilty of this from the beginning; hence there is little suspense in the story, for we know to start with how it will end. It carries us along by the great power of the myth and Marlowe’s dramatic vision and beautiful poetry.
This myth gives us rich opportunity to imagine the effect Faustus’ death in the drama would have upon the audience. The strong physical and emotional experience would give the people who watch it a sense that they too are personally going through the same experience vicariously. They will feel the same quality of emotion, if not in the same degree, as Faustus felt on the stage. Each will get an emotional and moral release; each will feel his own desires to sell his soul for magic and power, and his own punishment for such, as each of us sells our soul along with the bargain Faustus made.
In myths, which means in the psychic world that surrounds us all, we experience catharsis by identifying with the performers on the stage. Having made the vicarious descent into the underworld the people in the audience felt purified. This is the
openness of the myth: it spreads its arms, and all whom it takes in gain some of the power of the catharsis. There is also in the catharsis the social effect, the cleansing of the community. We have shared an “id” experience; there is now a bond among us.
The cathartic experience of the myth cleanses us from our own need to do the things Faustus did. He did it
for
us. The experience of Christ on the Cross is built upon this expression of the myth; Christ died for each of us, we are told, meaning his crucifixion has an inward power for each of us. Faustus in this drama has a similar mythic effect on the people who watched. Faustus has done it for them, and his doing it wipes away our own drive to do it. This implies a community, and a communicative power in the myth.
The people who watched Faustus dragged into the horrors of the serpents and adders, the burning and the other tortures of hell, would not only feel scared; they would go away
relieved
. All of this inner activity is on a deeper level than morality. This underlying experience is the cathartic power of the myth.