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Prologue: The Satanic Pact
- Duquesne University Press
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xi PROLOGUE The Satanic Pact The central and initiating event of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus is an exchange. The episodic plot achieves narrative unity in following “the form of Faustus’ fortunes, good or bad,” as the prologue to the play promises us, through the 24 years of his contract with Lucifer.1 The play opens with his determination to enter into the pact and ends with its consummation as devils drag him down to Hell. Practically everybody who has heard of the play, let alone those who have viewed or read it, knows that it depicts the story of a man who enters into a pact with the devil. According to David Hawkes, the Faust myth, as presented by Marlowe and others, dramatizes our own postmodern fascination with signification. “Faustus’s basic sin is semiotic,” Hawkes declares. The protagonist’s confusion of representations with reality closely parallels our own era’s “philosophy, psychology, linguistics and, above all, its economics.” Hawkes therefore finds it “impossible to avoid the conclusion that the Western world has sold its soul to Satan.” Rather than arguing, like Hawkes, that the play shows a general fear of representation including theater as a form of witchcraft,2 I read the play as a dramatization of the xii Forgiving the Gift sixteenth century’s—and our own—fascination with exchange. The pact represents a particular type of signification, which is marked as diabolical in that it signifies an exchange that is the logical and moral opposite of the gift of grace. The definition of damnation established by the play indeed applies to our postmodern world, because the notion of exchange bewitches us as well as Faustus. The play and the story it dramatizes arose in a particular moment in religious history, when Saint Augustine of Hippo’s doctrine of salvation by grace attracted renewed interest throughout western Christendom.3 Several of its most eloquent exponents remained staunch Roman Catholics; however, the doctrine attained explosive force in the powerful and sin-tormented mind of the Augustinian monk, Martin Luther. His insistence that justification cannot be earned exceeded even Augustine’s own, because in Luther’s theology, justification remains external to the sinner even after its receipt.4 The sale of indulgences implied, on the contrary, that grace could be retailed. Luther therefore responded to an aggressive marketing campaign by making increasingly angry denunciations, which catalyzed the European Reformation, to the surprise of Luther and everyone else.5 As both Michael Keefer and Hawkes show at some length, the Faust myth originated in Lutheran Germany. Luther even mentioned Faustus in his table talk. In one early version of the story, Faustus debates Philipp Melanchthon, Luther’s colleague.6 Luther’s insistence that grace can only be received from without led him and, more famously, John Calvin to a doctrine of predestination. Keefer follows Jonathan Dollimore in declaring that the play interrogates this doctrine.7 My point is neither that the play expounds a consistent doctrine of predestination nor that it illustrates a consistently Lutheran suspicion of the sign, as Hawkes argues, but that it dramatizes in Faustus’s career an extreme alternative to the gift of salvation by faith alone. For a period heavily invested in this doctrine, the pact appears exemplary of the demonic. Faustus does not merely reject gratuitous grace but substitutes its opposite: [54.167.199.134] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 10:33 GMT) Prologue xiii reciprocal exchange. If our world has sold its soul, it is because we too reject the possibility of a gift, for which grace furnishes the exemplary theological expression. Dollimore reads the play as “an exploration of subversion through transgression” in which the doctrine of predestination is called into doubt by its own dramatization. More generally, it exposes the Calvinist God as, in words Dollimore quotes from Michael Walzer, “an arbitrary and wilful, omnipotent and universal tyrant,” who holds man responsible for his damnation, while withdrawing from the reprobate the power of working their own redemption.”8 As Keefer argues, “A Calvinist orthodoxy may appear to win out at the end of this play, but it does so at the cost of being exposed, in the moment of its triumph, as intolerable.”9 Such a collapse of a theological paradox into a straightforward contradiction, Dollimore concludes, anticipates the demystification of tyrannous power in Jacobean tragedy.10 However, Lucifer rather than God appears in terms closely approximating a secular ruler. Dollimore asks, as many...