Faustus Loses Us. Hell No!

Western society is sometimes regarded as Faustian but there are fundamentally different interpretations of Faust related not least to changing ideas of moral consequence.

Christopher Marlowe to Goethe and the Myth of Salvation

“O, what a world of profit and delight,

Of power, of honour, of omnipotence,

Is promis’d to the studious artizan!

All things that move between the quiet poles

Shall be at my command:  emperors and kings

Are but obeyed in their several provinces,

Nor can they raise the wind, or rend the clouds;

But his dominion that exceeds in this,

Stretcheth as far as doth the mind of man;

A sound magician is a mighty god:”

The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus (1604) Christopher Marlowe

The popularity of many emergent spiritual traditions is inversely proportional to their propositions or proposal of moral consequences. The less demanded - the more popular, especially if you can feel good with sensations that escape from the dull, moral universe. Psychic postures that enable you to adapt to an immoral world are especially relevant. That’s where Faust comes in.

The variety of renditions of Faust or Faustus represents a tapestry of great speculative diversity. We have a story possibly based on true circumstances, an old folktale, an old myth, archetype of a magus or a combination of all refracted through various particular artists. Some current definitions indicate that ‘Faustian’ means striving for worldly things over spiritual matters. The recurrent sense however is of seeking magical powers as a trade for one’s eternal soul. It is not a denial of spirituality but a rejection of humility, powerlessness and the long-term perspective of divine light in favour of hubris, power and the short-term lure before darkness.

Goethe’s version is an incredible artistic achievement. But the artistic context obscures a deeper moral, ethical or religious question. Goethe’s ambivalent artistic achievement obfuscates moral choices associated with the Otherworld or Underworld. Other versions of Faust such as by Spengler, make the Faustian disposition different to the original or more traditional sense by generalising the choice. We could also consider Mann and Murnau, film and many operatic versions. However the divergence refers back to artistic choices about what happens to Faust. Is he damned or does he get off or is the end left ambiguous? Marlowe versus Goethe is the most revealing contrast of emphasis. One could say that the latter reflected a new zeitgeist much less convinced of moral clarity as technical and philosophical knowledge grew.

The story from Christopher Marlowe of Faustus is much less morally ambiguous than the version of Faust by Goethe. In the former you make a deal with the devil and you take responsibility, you go to hell. The bargain is plain. You give your soul with the scroll. With Goethe, you are saved at the end. Maybe this was because the enlightened could not take seriously the prospect of damnation. More likely they wanted to assuage their conscience. Marlowe has been accused of many things, atheism, libel, sedition, counterfeiting, espionage, sexual deviance and even of becoming Shakespeare. The theory that Marlowe was not killed and went on to write plays ironically sounds like the damnation-avoidance twist of Goethe.

What Marlowe did not do was sugar the pill. You may say it was merely constructed for tragic, dramatic purposes. But he did not invent that end for that was a long-standing notion and it was one he was keenly aware of. He did not shy away from consequences of a deal with Mephistopheles on behalf of Lucifer. There was to be no metempsychosis, only the devils coming to collect him for Lucifer. He knew who Lucifer was despite the constant contemporary efforts to change his identity. In that he seems to show more respect for both God and the Devil. Marlowe is not the sort Jesus says He will spit out of his mouth for being lukewarm, neither hot nor cold. Whether Marlowe was a consistently transgressive character or not he reveals clarity in his play which is refreshing in its honesty if not horror. Even if Marlowe was all of these negative things he demonstrates an awareness that the heavens may appreciate. The robber or revolutionary on the cross was promised paradise through acknowledgement despite his past. Although written in a Protestant context, Marlowe’s play is also consistent with Catholic theology. We see free will, temptation, mortal sin and rejection of grace. He may have been criticising Elizabethan religion and emphasising other European religious trends. Versions of the play betray various Protestant emphases. Marlowe’s demons are mocking Catholicism and serving us with scientific and magic rituals instead of sacred ones but giving damnation instead. He may be reflecting a societal concern about the shift away from Rome. Maybe the Pope was still the antithesis of the dark side despite the split. That Faust and Luther were in Wittenberg is noteworthy. Maybe Marlowe saw around him the rise of institutional magic. But the message is clear. Make a deal with the devil for worldly or magic power you go straight to hell. No doubt.

Goethe introduces ambiguity that goes with a retreat from moral certainty and objective value. The adventurism of Faust is essentially forgiven in the enlightened, poetic, relativist approach that rejects absolutes for gradations. Faust does not repent but gets lucky. Hence the value of his actions is vindicated without the necessity for reconciliation or confession. Accordingly, Western society itself has been regarded as Faustian. However, they may mean Faustusian really. Goethe’s Faust lost the ‘us’ and lost us in that.

Goethe presents Mephistopheles as a trickster without the Luciferian element. Rudolf Steiner thought Goethe was wrong. He said this at Dornach on Nov.21 1919 when lecturing about the Archangel Michael.

“If Goethe, in his day, had had a clear view of these matters, he would not have presented the Mephistophelean power as the only opponent of Faust who drags Faust down, but he would have contrasted this Mephistophelean power-of whom we know that it is identical with the Ahrimanic power-with the Luciferic power, and Lucifer and Mephistopheles would appear in Faust as two opposing forces.”

Though Steiner was closer to Goethe and edited his writings, he acknowledged that Marlowe was closer to the tradition. He however saw Mephistopheles not as an emissary but as an opposing force. He was talking from his own awareness of spirituality. Steiner saw hell less as a place than a state based on choosing between good and evil. The eternality of damnation however for many was not the way.

The Smugness of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice

We are happy to believe our science will save us. We are happy to believe in our knowledge and magic. We are happy to dismiss tales of hell as mythic, horror and fantasy. We are happy to smudge moral clarity. We are happy to dispense with morality with our dispensaries. We are happy in our moral relativism. The reprobate, scoundrel warns us more honestly. For that Marlowe may have a greater chance of heaven. That is why Jesus said the prostitute and tax collector will enter heaven before you and the prodigal son is welcomed home. The prodigal son that does not come home nor the robber on the cross that demands proof from divinity is in a different position.

Making a pact with the devil can occur in much less dramatic and crystallised form. It may involve attachment to material matters and matter as all that matters. It may involve the sacrifice of love, compassion, mercy and truth for power and mundane glory. It is certainly involved in the transhumanist, posthumanist, technocratic society. Let us be plain. They are inherently calculated to reject God and embrace the dark forces, even if you do not want to believe in them. In fact the devils work through creating illusions of delight in the mind to distract and to focus on the hellish and not the heavenly. You may say all that stuff is merely childish guff. But Marlowe, a tough, tragic figure himself was at least being more truthful than the get-out-of-hell free card play of Goethe and other versions.

Even if all is a metaphor, a projection of the psyche of Faustus, the message remains the same. Attachment to short-term non-divine illusion in defiance of the long-term divine or potential divine leads to eternal disaster and damnation. The conceit of Goethe is that the romantic enlightenment disposition somehow justifies its own salvation without ultimate costs and thus effectively denies the need for the humility the romantic has eschewed while obtaining the benefits of the bargain. This redemption in Goethe also occurs in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. The Apprentice unleashes spirits he cannot control but is saved by the Master. The presumption of redemption again mitigates the consequences of moral choice and dangers of reckless experimentation with the unseen for power. The tale goes back before Christ. But the saving of the error somehow justifies the enterprise, vindicating the greater depth of magic of the Master. Unlike Icarus, the apprentice does not suffer the consequences of hubris or ignorance.

Marlowe said supposedly strange and terrible things about Jesus. What can be trusted as source is contested. Anthony Burgess has him as a spy supported by the authorities. Then it is difficult to interpret what is true or not. Marlowe was killed in Deptford in London at a meal. He had a quarrel with three villains there. Maybe Marlowe had a role in someone being executed. The young poet died perhaps before he could repent. Maybe his experience in a kingdom of lies made him aware of how truth was real. Marlowe did not preach but presented a vision which was one that had informed those islands for a thousand years in morality plays, religious writing and folklore. But the future would dilute that dogma, dishonestly it seems. Marlowe might be a heretical monster but he at least would have known he was if he was and what the consequences would be. Better maybe an honest rogue than a dishonest gentleman.

The left brain of doubt is like the thief on the cross that demands Jesus prove to him, at that point the lowest of the low, who He is. The thief that could represent our right hemisphere intuits that Jesus is what He says and will end in paradise. Being humiliated is not the same as humility of being. The thief realised Jesus had done nothing wrong. When Oscar Wilde was in jail, he was moved when one of the other prisoners doing hard labour acknowledged that it had to have been much harder for Wilde to bear. In his tragic position, Wilde wrote that he was only interested in the mystical Christ. The reality of consequences may provide a contrast that enables the light be perceived more easily by those that were acquainted with the shadows. Some people know what they are talking about and some can romanticise to fit reality into the Procrustean bed of their prior beliefs without having to adapt.

But the more modern version of Faust is to apply it collectively, to a whole society. That has merit but raises the same question. If it follows Goethe, our society may be saved by its striving. But there is a more fundamental issue. If the Faustian idea is made collective, we hardly have the individual choice necessary. The individual moral responsibility and autonomy is already lost. In that version the special, deliberate intention of an individual is foregone. That would also seem to defeat the idea in the story. The collective Faust still must depend on individual assent. Maybe it is the assent by a thousand consents that we miss. Morality tales require a superstructure of morality which is objective in order to make sense. Otherwise they become sociological commentary about recurrent traits without ultimate meaning. With technology we are the apprentices of the sorcerer making bonds with our soul but being unlikely to be saved.

Conclusion: Telling Us What We Want to Hear to Avoid Fear

The desire and dedication to cultivate the avoidance of fear is a false comprehension of what it purports to replace. The fear in the sense of ‘God-fearing’ was from a much richer etymological context more like the true meaning of the word ‘awe’ that became awful before awesome again. As the fear of God was over-simplified and diluted, so too was any idea of awesome powers, choices and their consequences. The belief in a supernatural force was replaced with the naturalistic and empirical perception and sensation of the Romantic sublime instead confusing two categories. Accountability in cosmic terms became hypothecated to systems of pursuit and instantiation of knowledge. The immortal spirit and revelation in a mysterious invisible hierarchy was mortgaged in esoteric and elite systems and visible hierarchy for scientism, mortal gain and sensation. This shift was related to the earlier Protestant reduction of belief by the ideas of the Elect and grace and the belief that Eden could be recovered through the knowledge that had been lost through divine punishment. Sacramental mystery was deconstructed but reassembled in Freemasonry and Western Magic and the illusion of control by technique of the invisible world without attendant consequences. Just as Eden could be made through colonial plantation and Babel reconstructed by finding a universal language, so could the very idea of moral consequences for human choices be circumvented entirely. A new covenant of control extended even into the heavens and hell to replace communion. Simulated spirituality reduced moral choice to institutional adherence.

Marlowe may not have believed in the world he was depicting. Alternatively Marlowe may have concluded that he himself was lost, from either a Protestant, Catholic or traditional folklore perspective. You can call it existential realism if you want. But the damnation is refreshing for not queering the pitch of individual responsibility. Choices are grave and have grave consequences and we will have our own. In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the master’s mind there are few, as the saying goes. There is a certain type of person who becomes trapped in a supposed loophole of their own or other’s construction that allows them to believe they can escape from legal consequences. It operates in politics. People are surprised when the person they have invested in does exactly what they said they would not. Our gullibility enables us be beguiled. You can also be beguiled with bewildering obfuscation. This also operates in terms of spiritual contexts. Intoxicated with reckless pleasure-seeking we experience a failure of comprehension of risk in the vehicle of our soul. We postpone the reckoning. Mephistopheles tells us we will hit the wall. Modern spirituality often says to enjoy the joyride and if you are engaging in the wider world do so in political terms which may perpetuate the conditions which promote your pre-existing position.

The doors to heaven and hell are indeed adjacent and identical. There is something of false friendship in the Enlightened New Age movement. It seems to want to tell you what you want to hear. It tells you that it does not matter what you do. It misrepresents unitive consciousness as inevitable physics rather that the narrower individual experience it really means. It purports to guarantee you that your soul will blend into the cosmic ocean just like your physical form. It borrows Oriental philosophy to depersonalise. It seems certain that your coherence will not be maintained post-mortem and thus all becomes a meaningless game with relative morality without consequence. It even replaces devilish compacts with a consumerist type of pre-birth contract which appears to have the effect of justifying any weird consequence in this world. It abhors dull ‘dogma’ which means any restraining moral rules or limitations of freedom or rather licence.

Thank God for the supposedly godless Marlowe. You pays your money and takes your chances. Marlowe implies that you must own your choices and they own you. Many New Age approaches imply that you are owed happiness, peace and a simple explanation of your world that justifies anything you want subjectively without objective reference. In an ironic inversion of the criticised practices of indulgences, there are no nasty places you can go to save those with a remedy you can always pay for. The boundless optimism emerging in pseudo-science and pseudo-spirituality may be merely the infantile intoxication of a sense of power initiated by a sense of possibility and potential without reciprocal obligation or indeed comprehension of the wider structure of meaning. I have said it before. You may not have believed in devils and hell before, but your likelihood of experiencing that reality now is increasing.

The mitigation that some make of hell and its transformation into a tempering and more temporary place does not deny the essential causality related to conditions of the psyche and even external spiritual forces. Some argue that it cannot go on forever. Even in Christianity, there are distinct theological post-mortem states that do not amount to hell and are not eternal. Some like Swedenborg saw hell as a state by choice made. But many such spiritual writers and experiencers are not denying a state of hell. Later, that hell may have dwindled into a self-improvement club for some.

Hell has a number of different dimensions independently of any belief systems, revelation and ontological reality. These reflections come from alienation and torturing the psyche and experience of the individual and collective to their projection onto society, some of its awful systems and out beyond our mortality. Indeed reality can look awfully like former depictions of hell at times as can our internal mental state unrelieved by higher inputs. Marlowe warns us by his clarity to take responsibility. If you make choices about heavenly or hellish things or dimensions, then you must pragmatically accept the consequences and your denial will not prevent predictable consequences from those principalities you do not care to believe in, for the short-term at least. That people psychologically get into a state that they believe they cannot get out of or end up in a place on this earth that they actually cannot escape from or that endure horrendous circumstances instantiated by others is surely not hard to imagine. Likewise, birds of a feather flock together. The spirits that are destructive may merely be assembling post-mortem with their own and that may not be as pleasant without the good guys to balance the brew.

There are none so blind as those that will not see. Those who have eyes and ears may hear and see but choose not to. The spiritual eyes and heart can remain closed deliberately. But failing to believe in hell may be exactly that which creates, recreates and sustains it. You may say that your Party has the right view, that you have outsourced your moral sense, donated to good causes, but what you do is critical. Faustus suggests hell is a fable. Mephistopheles tells him that Faustus will think so till experience changes his mind. That is a good way of putting it. Better the divil you know…