THE CONCEPT OF HELL IN "DOCTOR FAUSTUS"

THE CONCEPT OF HELL IN 

"DOCTOR FAUSTUS"

The play Doctor Faustus, by Christopher Marlowe is a perfect example that mirrored the context of Christianity during those days and delves into a topic that is at its heart: redemption from sin. Infused with an authentic and literal Christian core, Doctor Faustus can be read as a cautionary tale, as is evident in the closing chorus, to obey the commands of heaven. Scholar R.M. Dawkins famously remarked that Doctor Faustus tells “the story of a Renaissance man who had to pay the medieval price for being one.” This quotation refers to the clash between medieval world and the world of the emerging Renaissance. The medieval world placed God at the center of existence while the Renaissance changed the focus to individualism and on the scientific inquiry into the natural world.

In the opening soliloquy, Doctor Faustus considers and rejects the medieval traditional way of thinking. He resolves, in full Renaissance spirit, to accept no limits, traditions, or authorities in his quest for knowledge, wealth, and power. Since he crosses these boundaries forbidden by Christianity, and the act of doing so was categorized as sin, the unrepentant Faustus is ultimately doomed to experience Hell.

Various myths and mythologies have propounded different concepts of Hell. According to the Roman Catholic view, Jesus speaks of “Gehenna” that is the “unquenchable fire”, into which the sinners are thrown after their deeds are accounted for. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, published in 1992 and promulgated by Pope John Paul II further appends the concept of hell in the following words:

“To die in mortal sin without repenting and accepting God's merciful love means remaining separated from him forever by our own free choice. This state of definitive self-exclusion from communion with God and the blessed is called "hell.””

Therefore, there is a clear corollary that Hell can be further subdivided into a physical conventional hell and a spiritual hell, which parallels the concept in Doctor Faustus. It is befitting to say that in Doctor Faustus, spiritual hell takes precedence, by and large. This is evident in Mephistopheles’ own example. Mephistopheles states that hell is primarily a state of the spirit and he is always in hell, even when he appears on earth, because true hell is separation from God.

According to the Christian theology, the greatest sin of a man lies in his pursuit to become a God himself by rejecting God and renouncing Christianity. And for this “aspiring pride and insolence” even Lucifer, “an angel once and most dearly loved by God”, was turned out of heaven to be damned forever. Mephistopheles is one of those “unhappy spirits that fell with Lucifer” and is condemned to ever-lasting hell. When Faustus asks him how he is out of hell at that time, the reply from Mephistopheles is deep and melancholic:

“Why this is hell, nor am I out of it:

Think’st thou that I, who saw the face of God,

And tasted the eternal joys of heaven,

Am not tormented with ten thousand hells,

In being depriv’d of everlasting bliss?”

Thus Mephistopheles reveals with impact that by losing the presence of God and Heaven, he experiences a constant gnawing at his heart. Hence hell is within one’s own self. Milton’s Paradise Lost echoes these similar views in the following lines:

“The mind is its own place, and in itself,

can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.”

Faustus, in his hunger for knowledge, fails to grasp the spiritual aspect of hell and questions Mephistopheles now and then regarding the location and nature of hell, which he must have construed to be a geographical place according to the Theology he studied. Faustus’ tragic folly in prizing over knowledge rather than wisdom makes him see this in a poor light of understanding. He even goes to the extent of labeling hell as a “fable” when Mephistopheles tells him that “All places shall be hell that is not heaven.” Therefore, Faustus eventually follows in Lucifer’s own footsteps by renouncing God in order to “gain a deity”, turning a deaf ear to every warning signal of prayer, penitence and repentance available to him and rolling deep into the quagmire of sin. After the commission of his act of surrendering his soul to the Devil, Faustus becomes a prey to his own doubts and diffidence and an acute conflict between heaven and hell starts raging in his soul and lasts till his tragic end.

In the closing scene, when the path of repentance is long left behind and doom is inevitable, do Faustus comes to grasp the real essence of Hell. However, in the final scene, both the physical and the spiritual hell come into the picture. Nevertheless, the latter takes the primacy. And the most poignant soliloquy of Doctor Faustus, starting just before an hour of his final fall, reveals in a very compelling manner the deep agony of a horror-struck soul. The dim and awful prospect of a gaping hell strikes terror in his heart and just like Mephistopheles, Faustus is also tormented with thousand hells, in being deprived of everlasting bliss. The excruciating pangs and tortures of “thousand hells” find the most poignant expression in such forceful lines as:

“O God,

If thou will not have mercy on my soul,

Yet for Christ’s sake, whose blood hath ransom’d me,

Impose some end to my incessant pain.

Let Faustus live in hell a thousand years,

A hundred thousand, and at last be saved!”

To conclude, even though Heaven or Paradise or Life after Death was indoctrinated by the Christian theology to be a human’s ultimate motive and desire, Hell by itself was a powerful motivator in order to attain Heaven. This deterred people from committing acts of sins and disobeying God’s commands. Doctor Faustus as a morality cum tragedy play can be viewed as a cautionary tale to warn the people of those times from insolent acts of aspiring pride and crossing boundaries to seek knowledge and hence save themselves from sin and ultimately Hell.