Boy, was Professor Lemon right about The Discovery of Witchcraft by Reginald Scot! I was surprised by the rationality of his argument, how well he was able to see through many of the superstitions of his day, and how boldly he pointed out the hypocrisy of church leaders (i.e. in the Incubus/Succubus chapters). I'm surprised he didn't end up martyred at the hands of James I when the latter came to the throne, considering how much James seemed to hate Scot's message. (Or was he martyred? The back of the book only says James had all Scot's books burned.) This shockingly bold renunciation of widespread -- and church and state sanctioned -- beliefs, and the subsequent indictment of Christians who would hold such "heretical" beliefs, seems a courageous move in such a tumultuous time.
I was also impressed by the attention Scot pays to the importance of labels and names. He mentions more than once how the label "witch," once applied to a woman, is virtually impossible to remove, and how "though a theefe be not said in lawe to be infamous in any other matter than in theft; yet a witch defamed of witchcraft is said to be defiled with all maner of faults and infamies universallie, though she were not condemned; but (as I said) defamed with the name of a witch" (14). His acknowledgement of the effects of labels -- their ability to dehumanize and delegitimize subjects -- strikes me as ahead of its time. After all, the use and abuse of labels like "terrorist" or "homosexual" is still a pressing issue today.
I sadly won't be in class to discuss the fascinating texts we read this week, but I'll be reading every one's responses. Have fun!
Sorry about the preceding deletion; I was just trying to figure out how to use this blog.... Also, we'll miss you tomorrow, Trisha. I especially like your comments about Scot's use of dehumanizing and deligitimzing nouns. And, in that regard, the language is equally fascinating in Demonology (including that odd, violent intro!) Moreover, I excitedly anticipate Stefan's insights into that topic via his smart use of the online OED. And now for my post....
To begin thinking about the Scot, James, and Marlowe in relation to the course’s first third I thought to use Sedgwick as a bridge. More specifically, I returned to her notions of hyper-self-governance, deriving from her assertion that “addiction resides in the structure of a will that is somehow always insufficiently free, a choice whose voluntarity is always insufficiently pure” (132). Hence, foreign substance or context are not causal of corruption for the Christian; rather, the source of the problem is within the self, within the will, and this leads to Sedgwick’s compelling documentation of the pathologization of the addict.
Within this context, Scot can be interpreted as convergent with Sedgwick. For example, he argues that even “if all the divels in hell were dead, and all the witches in England burnt or hanged; I warrant you we should not faile to have raine, haile and tempests”(2). Of course Scot attributes these consequences to “the appointment and will of God”, but that will is imbued in the elect and absent from the rest according to Protestant theology (i.e. the Lutheran “lightning strike”). Therefore, we could interpret this syllogistically as an argument that (again, as Sedgwick proposes) the will of man has a structural insufficiency of freedom and purity due to the existence of addiction within the will.
This structural wrinkle of the will can again be seen in Marlowe, where examples abound of addiction’s existence within the structure of the will. To limit the length of my post, I’ll point merely to Faustus’s principle sinful desire: “To glut the longing of my heart’s desire” (V.I). Consequently, in grappling with this purposive desire in Faustus, which drives the play, Marlowe invokes the Good Angel and the Bad Angel, who urge prayerful recommitment to God and a pursuit of Faustus’s lust for power, respectively. In other words, within Faustus’s conscience, he is in turmoil about his decision to commit his soul to Lucifer, and that very turmoil will resurge throughout the play (in Acts IV, V.II, for example). [Of note, this interplay within the will is visible in Scot’s warning, for example, that people deliberate (mistakenly, in Scot’s perspective) over their “hunger” for gold, which they can perceive as both “Curssed [and] detestable” and “holie” (214).]
Time and again, Faustus struggles with this longing to glut his heart, and his compromised voluntarity emerges through the metaphorical/supernatural manifestation of that psychic perplexity. A second quick example of this would be Faustus’s contemplation of the “metaphysicians of magicians” as possessing “heavenly” books because the alternative, the Bible, in Faustus’s Sedgwick-like interpretation, suggests that:
If we say we have no sin, We deceive ourselves, and there is no truth in us. Why, then, belike we must sin, And so consequently die: Ay, we must die an everlasting death. What doctrine call you this: Che sera, sera: What will be, shall be? Divinity, adieu! (Act I.I)
Yet again Sedwick’s notion of structural addiction appears in Act II, Scene II, where Mephistophilis attributes his appearance in Faustus’s life as a function of Faustus himself having pronounced an interest in going against God’s word. In other words, the sin arose from within Faustus. Thus, for example, when the structurally pure and free facet of Faustus’s will admits to Mephistophilis that “When I behold the heavens, then I repent, / And curse thee, wicked Mephistophilis, Because thou hast depriv’d me of those joys”, Mephistophilis answers Faustus by reminding him that “’Twas thine own thinking, Faustus, thank thyself.” Hence, the devil arises as a consequence of Faustus’s will’s structural addiction to a lust for power and knowledge.
In an attempt to maintain brevity in my post, I’ll merely point to the struggle within Faustus’s will as he contemplates signing the pact with Lucifer in Act V. In that act, one could even claim that Faustus’s addictive will is so powerful that it deludes his rational mind to the point of his claiming hell not to exist despite his talking with a devil and having made a pact with Lucifer in exchange for already verified “black” powers.
To limit my post, I lastly will point out that this combination of Sedgwick’s notion of structural addiction to the Church of England’s notion of sin could be parsed from any of the Marlowe’s play’s scenes, tracing an downward arc of Faustus as he pursues self-degrading act after act, squandering his supernatural powers on silly trickery and antler-planting and sophistry with former classmates and Old Scholars. As a particular example, when Faustus uses his deific powers to torment the Horse-Courser by feigning sleep and allowing his leg to be ripped off to complete his swindling of the horse-dealer (“ha, ha, ha, Faustus hath his leg again, and the horse-courser a bundle of hay for his forty dollars” IV.III), Marlowe can be interpreted as offering a Puritan/Calvinist/Protestant allegory of the need for a personal relationship with god, without whom even supernatural powers (including auto-regenerative limbs!) are insufficient for man to enjoy a fruitful and meaningful spiritual life while living in the flesh.
My Penguin Classics edition of Christopher Marlowe’s Complete Plays has a note accompanying the Faustus text which says the play “seems unquestionably orthodox to some and questioningly heterodox to others. For some it is learned and theologically subtle, for others a populist, even subversive barnstormer. No interpretation which positively excludes any of these possibilities can hope to be complete.”
The note is a little confusing to me, if only because I’m not sure what exactly was orthodox at the time of Marlowe’s writing Faustus – the absence of an orthodoxy seemed to be the orthodox.
Perhaps that’s why I see no theological consistency in this play. At times I find it exceedingly Roman Catholic/Church of England, then I see it as approaching Luther. In the end, I’ve decided to call it the work of an atheist – something without a discernible direction outside of poking fun and playing on the audience’s emotions.
Seth mentioned Sedgwick and her definition of addiction as residing in “a will that is somehow always insufficiently free, a choice whose voluntarity is always insufficiently pure.”
I find Faustus exceedingly willful, which places him at the start as anti-Puritanical. He asks of Mephistopheles:
“to give me whatsoever I shall ask, to tell me whatsoever I demand, to slay my enemies and aid my friends, and always to be obedient to my will.”
In the end, however, his pleas for God’s intercession seem to suggest that he has come around to Lutheranism. He dismisses the scholars who wish to pray for him, saying it will do no good (works); and seems to look up into the firmament where Christ’s blood streams, thinking “one drop would save my soul, half a drop.” Still, he can’t call on Christ because he has named another – Lucifer – as his Christ and savior. He says the “serpent that tempted Eve may be saved, but not Faustus.”
If there is a logic to any of this, it seems to be in Pelagianism, which allows people to willfully choose between God and Devil, or Arminianism, which states that grace can be resisted by unbelievers and that is effective only in those who have faith in Jesus Christ.
“Hell strives with grace for conquest in my breast,” Faustus says. “What shall I do to shun the snares of death?”
Is he a figure at the end meant to instruct the audience? To leave it in fear of God?
To me one of the most progressive things about Scot is his equating of witchcraft with insanity. In Chapter XI of Book 3, Scot argues against prosecuting witches, citing their strange irrationality. Witches’ fantasies, he points out, are “corrupted,” and their “strange, impossible, and incredible confessions” of necromantic power are bogus (33). He concludes by pointing out that “whosoever desireth to bring to passe an impossible thing, hath a vaine, an idle, and a childish persuasion, bred by an unsound mind” (33). Scot, thus, is distinguishing sorcery—or the notion of it—from reason and knowledge.
In separating the two, Scot is way ahead of Marlowe, who seems to conflate reason and sorcery in Faustus. In Faustus, the important antinomy is that between faith and knowledge (and the things that produce knowledge, like reason and sorcery). Faustus is introduced as a doctor, a scholar, and a logician. And he retains that identity to the play’s end, despite his embrace of sorcery. At the end of his 24-year spree he cries, “O would I had never seen Wittenberg, never read a book.” It’s his pursuit of knowledge that undoes Faustus, not his acquisition of necromantic powers. Unlike Scot, Marlowe makes no discernible distinction between reason and sorcery. He seems to suggest that the two are alike insofar as both are agents of knowledge, and both stand in the way, at least in Faustus, of Christian salvation.
Is Faustus hinting at the possibility that the 16th century hysteria about witches and sorcery masks another fear: namely, the fear of scientific progress, and the exercise of reason to the exclusion of faith?
Daniel -- Good point ("It’s his pursuit of knowledge that undoes Faustus, not his acquisition of necromantic powers.") and one I meant to get at, if perhaps from a different angle. This pursuit of knowledge reminded me of the Tree of Knowledge, eating of the fruit, if only because Faustus invokes the serpent in the end.
Nice posts from both Seth and Trish. I am especially interested in the relationship between Scot and Marlowe’s Faust. I guess I will begin with Scot, whose examinations of witchcraft seemed to be driven by logical reasoning, while relying upon scripture. For example, he remarked in The Epistle Dedicatory, that “My greatest adversaries are young ignorance and old customs.” Habit and ignorance (i.e. a lack of knowledge, and therefore will) construct the prevalence of witchcraft which Scot attempts to deconstruct. In short, Scot disavows Witchcraft because it is immoral, heretical, and implausible. Immoral because of the wrath upon accused witches. Heretical, because he seems to make the argument that belief in, and therefore the “mongering” of, witchcraft favors divine presence in Satan rather than god. Illogical, as he repeatedly insists in Book 2, because it is, above all, implausible. Most interesting to me are the last two, for Scot’s logic and epistemological arguments drive him away from the numinous. In contrast, we have Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. As many of us may know, Marlowe’s plays involve a main character who succumbs to the creed: “That which Nourishes me, Destroys me.” This is evident in Tamburlaine’s quest for military might, Barabas’s thirst for social dominance and wealth, Edward II’s sexual love, and Faust’s desire for the knowledge, which consequently becomes a quest for the numinous. Faust’s desire for knowledge, for science, for philosophy is not enough to abate his thirst. The fissure between the numinous and the logical pushes him away from what is divine and holy. In short, his deal with the devil, his want to “behold the heavens” pushes him to disavow Christian reckoning. For Marlowe, the numinous removes the spirit from grace, as in Scene 7, when after Faustus cries: Ah, Christ, my Saviour/ Seek to save distressed Faustus’ soul!” To which Lucifer responds, “Christ cannot save they soul, for he is just.” Knowledge pushed Scot towards God and away from the numinous, or at least his line of reasoning appears that way, yet knowledge, in its insufficiency, pushes Dr. Faustus towards Satan. If Scot decries habit and ignorance, isn’t Marlowe’s play doing the same? How then does each author arrive at different, seemingly opposite results?
I did not take this play to possess an orthodox message, as my experience with Christopher Marlowe has always forced me to believe the opposite. Compare the treatments of Bad-King in Edward II with Shakespeare’s Richard II. Compare the cartoonish depiction of Barabas in The Jew of Malta with the more human and possibly tragic Shylock from The Merchant of Venice. It is undeniable that Marlowe influenced Shakespeare’s work, but how and why Shakespeare’s plays result as they do is a whole other issue at hand.
Moreover, in my meeting with Neil yesterday, our discussion came at an apex (Though talking with Neil produced a good many of illuminating points), when Neil highlighted Scot’s point: Witch-hunting, in a way, produces witches themselves, and certainly not the inverse. I will minimize my comment on this point, so not as to steal Neil’s thunder, as I am sure he has a great deal to say about this, but like Seth, this seems to converge upon many of the ideas brought forth by Sedgwick and like Trish, forces me to ask the question: What is the relationship between Puritanism and _________-Mongers? I am thinking in terms of Witches, Terrorists, Drugs, Communists/Reds, and any alternative “Others” that one could ad-lib in this equation of Monger-ism.
And now, a quote from Marlowe’s Play:
Was this the face that launched a thousand ships, And burnt the topless towers of Illium? Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss. Her lips suck forth my soul; see where it flies!
post from carolyn (not professor L -- i'm just pasting it for her since she sent it to me, not the group):
Carolyn O’Neill ENG 520 POST for October 4th’s Discussion Board
I am particularly interested in the way the various problems conjured by this week’s reading might begin to come together simply in Scot’s articulation of his brief list of questions given in the dedication: “What real community is betwixt a spirit and a body? May a spiritual body become temporal at his pleasure? Or may a carnal body become invisible?” Many of the issues inherent in the fundamental distinctions between materiality and immateriaty were brought to life beautifully by the metaphysical poets, and in a similar vein, I believe both Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus and Scot’s The Discovery of Witchcraft (and Demonologie as well, to some extent) explicitly struggle with the tensions inspired by the ineffable incommensurability of the material and the divine. Of much interest to me were the references to melancholia which came to bear both in Faustus and Demonology. Historically, melancholia has been conceptually linked with the “saturnine temperament” (much of which Agamben discusses in Stanzas) and, in turn, is associated with such disparate things as lead, time and earth. On the one hand, in Demonology, we are assured of the essential disparity (even opposition) between the dispositions of the melancholic and the magician [the melancholic is lonesome and earth-bound, while the demonic is social and corpulent]; yet interestingly, in Faustus, we read the lucid exposition of the ways in which the symtomology of the melancholic is synonymous with the advent of demonic possession. Furthermore, as it is in the verse of Donne and Herbert, it seems apparent throughout that it is the very nature of this strangest of relations between spiritual transcendence and earthly mortality that engender very the essence of these psychic disturbances.
Both Reginald Scot's "The Discoverie of Witchcraft" and King James' "Demonology" operate in a somewhat taxonomic fashion. In the case of Scot's treatise, this works to the division of types of purported acts of witchcraft and specific examples which are then dismantled and shown illogical or explainable in other ways.
In King James' "Demonology" however, James seeks to prove the existence of witches and witchcraft by creating an exhaustive catalogue of categories and subcategories. Throughout the early part of the treatise we read that each matter can be divided in two parts, which in turn seem to be further divided into two.
Some examples:
* "the sin against the holie Ghost hath two branches" (7) - 1. an unconscious slipping or betrayal, 2. a deliberate knowing betrayal of conscience.
* "There are principallie two sortes, wherevnto all the partes of that vnhappie arte are redacted" (7) 1. Magic & Necromancy, 2. Sorcerie & Witchcraft
* "there are two sorts of folkes, that may be entysed to this arte" (9) 1. learned, 2. unlearned
* "There are two thinges which the learned haue obserued from the beginning" (12-13) 1. Astronomy, 2. Astrology
and so on.
In such a manner, James employs a rhetoric of simple division and creates the illusion that such matters can be easily parsed. Furthermore, by moving in increasing specificity toward not just finer and finer definitions of what is or isn't "witchcraft," he is also moving toward a construction of a "witch" as one who exhibits this behaviors and espouses this views. A process which called to mind Sedgwick's "Epidemics of the Mind" article and the Foucault's account of the invention of the homosexual as a species in the 19th century.
The Scot piece in a sense critiques the prevalent constructions of a witch as an old woman, often disfigured, ugly, or otherwise unpleasant -- and points to the some of unstated underlying causes for this invention.
What occurs to me though is that in both cases these treatises become dangerous in the sense that they may well have turned from their intended purposes and become instead guides and texts for anyone was interested in pursuing witchcraft. To have ritual and spells set down clearly as Scot does, or to have the detailed taxonomy of the kinds of practitioners of the dark arts that might exist (and what they might believe) creates a space of opportunity for enactment - for the temptation to reader of putting into practice what is detailed if only to test its veracity.
Likewise, there is a strange hypocrisy in James' work which grows out of an awareness that this detailed of treatise (even if it still in large parts borrows from common lore) represents a conscious gathering together and familiarity with the same types of knowledge and texts that James condemns as heretical and worthy of punishment.
In reading Scot, I was reminded of the discussion we had in class about where to locate the cause of malady and addiction. We looked at a model of addiction which constructed an interior-exterior relationship between the addict and the foreign/alien substance. This model of addiction as a foreign invasion of the natural body can be helpful for talking about the phenomenon of the witch hunt. We can see the witch hunt as a “symptom” of a broader cultural crisis faced by the sixteenth-century English society: as the Catholic and Reformed church clash doctrinally, and as medieval and humanist customs and social structures struggle for dominance, anxiety erupts over the perceived presence of foreign/alien/unknown figures: witches. For Bodin and his ilk, witches are the foreign/alien substance which corrupts communities, hence, the need to purge them. But as Scot points out, these so-called witches are usually no more than women who are old, poor, or Catholic, in other words, people who form the “remainder” of a society. Scot also points out in some fascinating chapters on the effect of “melancholie” on women (Book 3, Ch. 9-11) that some of the so-called witches are actually women suffering from “melancholie” which “occupieng their braine, hath deprived or rather depraved their judgements.” Instead of thinking about witches using Bodin’s inside-outside paradigm, Scot makes a move which shifts the focus from the the physically embodied alien figure to the notion that malady resides within the subject. Scot’s interest in interiority and subjectivity is explored in provocative ways by Marlowe.
For me, one of the oddest moments in *Dr. Faustus* occurs in act 5, scene 1, in which Faustus conjures the spectre of Helen of Troy. As the famous line goes, “Was this the face that launched a thousand ships / And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?” Why is this scene here? What does Helen represent for the play? There are several ways to answer the questions. Perhaps Helen is an object a, whose insubstantiation and elusiveness signifies the ambition which Faustus seeks to possess, but which he never does. Perhaps the conjuring of Helen is a comment on the illusory nature of theatre. Perhaps the representation of Helen stages the Luther/Erasmus dilemma of free will vs. predestination. Did Helen really cause the destruction of Troy? Or is the act of identifying her as the “root cause” a Bodin-move, that is, an unwarranted shift from interiority to manifestation?
The question of causation has implications for how we might interpret Faustus’ tragic downfall. At several moments in the play, Faustus’ ambition for absolute knowledge is identified as his hamartia. This suggests Faustus has perfect free will to damn himself. However, at other points in the play, Faustus blames external agents for leading him astray. Faustus exclaims just before his time is up “O would I had never seen Wittenberg, never read book!” (5.1.44). He also complains of Mephistopheles “O thou bewitching fiend, ‘twas thy temptation / Hath robbed me of eternal happiness” (5.1.85-6). The contrasting impulses in the play utterly confuses any attempt to determine causation and will. When Faustus asks Mephistopheles “How comes it, then, that thou art out of hell,” the demon’s reply is stark and chilling: “Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it” (1.1.80). If all of Faustus’ actions are set in hell, then rationality and even temporality lose their meaning. If mankind, by their sinfulness, is condemned to hell-on-earth, what is the point of trying to place blame on external agents as the cause of man’s fall?
11 comments:
Boy, was Professor Lemon right about The Discovery of Witchcraft by Reginald Scot! I was surprised by the rationality of his argument, how well he was able to see through many of the superstitions of his day, and how boldly he pointed out the hypocrisy of church leaders (i.e. in the Incubus/Succubus chapters). I'm surprised he didn't end up martyred at the hands of James I when the latter came to the throne, considering how much James seemed to hate Scot's message. (Or was he martyred? The back of the book only says James had all Scot's books burned.) This shockingly bold renunciation of widespread -- and church and state sanctioned -- beliefs, and the subsequent indictment of Christians who would hold such "heretical" beliefs, seems a courageous move in such a tumultuous time.
I was also impressed by the attention Scot pays to the importance of labels and names. He mentions more than once how the label "witch," once applied to a woman, is virtually impossible to remove, and how "though a theefe be not said in lawe to be infamous in any other matter than in theft; yet a witch defamed of witchcraft is said to be defiled with all maner of faults and infamies universallie, though she were not condemned; but (as I said) defamed with the name of a witch" (14). His acknowledgement of the effects of labels -- their ability to dehumanize and delegitimize subjects -- strikes me as ahead of its time. After all, the use and abuse of labels like "terrorist" or "homosexual" is still a pressing issue today.
I sadly won't be in class to discuss the fascinating texts we read this week, but I'll be reading every one's responses. Have fun!
--Trisha
Hi All.
Sorry about the preceding deletion; I was just trying to figure out how to use this blog.... Also, we'll miss you tomorrow, Trisha. I especially like your comments about Scot's use of dehumanizing and deligitimzing nouns. And, in that regard, the language is equally fascinating in Demonology (including that odd, violent intro!) Moreover, I excitedly anticipate Stefan's insights into that topic via his smart use of the online OED. And now for my post....
To begin thinking about the Scot, James, and Marlowe in relation to the course’s first third I thought to use Sedgwick as a bridge. More specifically, I returned to her notions of hyper-self-governance, deriving from her assertion that “addiction resides in the structure of a will that is somehow always insufficiently free, a choice whose voluntarity is always insufficiently pure” (132). Hence, foreign substance or context are not causal of corruption for the Christian; rather, the source of the problem is within the self, within the will, and this leads to Sedgwick’s compelling documentation of the pathologization of the addict.
Within this context, Scot can be interpreted as convergent with Sedgwick. For example, he argues that even “if all the divels in hell were dead, and all the witches in England burnt or hanged; I warrant you we should not faile to have raine, haile and tempests”(2). Of course Scot attributes these consequences to “the appointment and will of God”, but that will is imbued in the elect and absent from the rest according to Protestant theology (i.e. the Lutheran “lightning strike”). Therefore, we could interpret this syllogistically as an argument that (again, as Sedgwick proposes) the will of man has a structural insufficiency of freedom and purity due to the existence of addiction within the will.
This structural wrinkle of the will can again be seen in Marlowe, where examples abound of addiction’s existence within the structure of the will. To limit the length of my post, I’ll point merely to Faustus’s principle sinful desire: “To glut the longing of my heart’s desire” (V.I). Consequently, in grappling with this purposive desire in Faustus, which drives the play, Marlowe invokes the Good Angel and the Bad Angel, who urge prayerful recommitment to God and a pursuit of Faustus’s lust for power, respectively. In other words, within Faustus’s conscience, he is in turmoil about his decision to commit his soul to Lucifer, and that very turmoil will resurge throughout the play (in Acts IV, V.II, for example). [Of note, this interplay within the will is visible in Scot’s warning, for example, that people deliberate (mistakenly, in Scot’s perspective) over their “hunger” for gold, which they can perceive as both “Curssed [and] detestable” and “holie” (214).]
Time and again, Faustus struggles with this longing to glut his heart, and his compromised voluntarity emerges through the metaphorical/supernatural manifestation of that psychic perplexity. A second quick example of this would be Faustus’s contemplation of the “metaphysicians of magicians” as possessing “heavenly” books because the alternative, the Bible, in Faustus’s Sedgwick-like interpretation, suggests that:
If we say we have no sin,
We deceive ourselves, and there is no truth in us.
Why, then, belike we must sin,
And so consequently die:
Ay, we must die an everlasting death.
What doctrine call you this: Che sera, sera:
What will be, shall be? Divinity, adieu! (Act I.I)
Yet again Sedwick’s notion of structural addiction appears in Act II, Scene II, where Mephistophilis attributes his appearance in Faustus’s life as a function of Faustus himself having pronounced an interest in going against God’s word. In other words, the sin arose from within Faustus. Thus, for example, when the structurally pure and free facet of Faustus’s will admits to Mephistophilis that “When I behold the heavens, then I repent, / And curse thee, wicked Mephistophilis, Because thou hast depriv’d me of those joys”, Mephistophilis answers Faustus by reminding him that “’Twas thine own thinking, Faustus, thank thyself.” Hence, the devil arises as a consequence of Faustus’s will’s structural addiction to a lust for power and knowledge.
In an attempt to maintain brevity in my post, I’ll merely point to the struggle within Faustus’s will as he contemplates signing the pact with Lucifer in Act V. In that act, one could even claim that Faustus’s addictive will is so powerful that it deludes his rational mind to the point of his claiming hell not to exist despite his talking with a devil and having made a pact with Lucifer in exchange for already verified “black” powers.
To limit my post, I lastly will point out that this combination of Sedgwick’s notion of structural addiction to the Church of England’s notion of sin could be parsed from any of the Marlowe’s play’s scenes, tracing an downward arc of Faustus as he pursues self-degrading act after act, squandering his supernatural powers on silly trickery and antler-planting and sophistry with former classmates and Old Scholars. As a particular example, when Faustus uses his deific powers to torment the Horse-Courser by feigning sleep and allowing his leg to be ripped off to complete his swindling of the horse-dealer (“ha, ha, ha, Faustus hath his leg again, and the horse-courser a bundle of hay for his forty dollars” IV.III), Marlowe can be interpreted as offering a Puritan/Calvinist/Protestant allegory of the need for a personal relationship with god, without whom even supernatural powers (including auto-regenerative limbs!) are insufficient for man to enjoy a fruitful and meaningful spiritual life while living in the flesh.
Ok. I’ll stop there. See you in class.
Wow. My post feels very anemic next to Seth's...
;)
My Penguin Classics edition of Christopher Marlowe’s Complete Plays has a note accompanying the Faustus text which says the play “seems unquestionably orthodox to some and questioningly heterodox to others. For some it is learned and theologically subtle, for others a populist, even subversive barnstormer. No interpretation which positively excludes any of these possibilities can hope to be complete.”
The note is a little confusing to me, if only because I’m not sure what exactly was orthodox at the time of Marlowe’s writing Faustus – the absence of an orthodoxy seemed to be the orthodox.
Perhaps that’s why I see no theological consistency in this play. At times I find it exceedingly Roman Catholic/Church of England, then I see it as approaching Luther. In the end, I’ve decided to call it the work of an atheist – something without a discernible direction outside of poking fun and playing on the audience’s emotions.
Seth mentioned Sedgwick and her definition of addiction as residing in “a will that is somehow always insufficiently free, a choice whose voluntarity is always insufficiently pure.”
I find Faustus exceedingly willful, which places him at the start as anti-Puritanical. He asks of Mephistopheles:
“to give me whatsoever I shall ask, to tell me whatsoever I demand, to slay my enemies and aid my friends, and always to be obedient to my will.”
In the end, however, his pleas for God’s intercession seem to suggest that he has come around to Lutheranism. He dismisses the scholars who wish to pray for him, saying it will do no good (works); and seems to look up into the firmament where Christ’s blood streams, thinking “one drop would save my soul, half a drop.” Still, he can’t call on Christ because he has named another – Lucifer – as his Christ and savior. He says the “serpent that tempted Eve may be saved, but not Faustus.”
If there is a logic to any of this, it seems to be in Pelagianism, which allows people to willfully choose between God and Devil, or Arminianism, which states that grace can be resisted by unbelievers and that is effective only in those who have faith in Jesus Christ.
“Hell strives with grace for conquest in my breast,” Faustus says. “What shall I do to shun the snares of death?”
Is he a figure at the end meant to instruct the audience? To leave it in fear of God?
To me one of the most progressive things about Scot is his equating of witchcraft with insanity. In Chapter XI of Book 3, Scot argues against prosecuting witches, citing their strange irrationality. Witches’ fantasies, he points out, are “corrupted,” and their “strange, impossible, and incredible confessions” of necromantic power are bogus (33). He concludes by pointing out that “whosoever desireth to bring to passe an impossible thing, hath a vaine, an idle, and a childish persuasion, bred by an unsound mind” (33). Scot, thus, is distinguishing sorcery—or the notion of it—from reason and knowledge.
In separating the two, Scot is way ahead of Marlowe, who seems to conflate reason and sorcery in Faustus. In Faustus, the important antinomy is that between faith and knowledge (and the things that produce knowledge, like reason and sorcery). Faustus is introduced as a doctor, a scholar, and a logician. And he retains that identity to the play’s end, despite his embrace of sorcery. At the end of his 24-year spree he cries, “O would I had never seen Wittenberg, never read a book.” It’s his pursuit of knowledge that undoes Faustus, not his acquisition of necromantic powers. Unlike Scot, Marlowe makes no discernible distinction between reason and sorcery. He seems to suggest that the two are alike insofar as both are agents of knowledge, and both stand in the way, at least in Faustus, of Christian salvation.
Is Faustus hinting at the possibility that the 16th century hysteria about witches and sorcery masks another fear: namely, the fear of scientific progress, and the exercise of reason to the exclusion of faith?
Daniel -- Good point ("It’s his pursuit of knowledge that undoes Faustus, not his acquisition of necromantic powers.") and one I meant to get at, if perhaps from a different angle. This pursuit of knowledge reminded me of the Tree of Knowledge, eating of the fruit, if only because Faustus invokes the serpent in the end.
Hey all,
Nice posts from both Seth and Trish. I am especially interested in the relationship between Scot and Marlowe’s Faust. I guess I will begin with Scot, whose examinations of witchcraft seemed to be driven by logical reasoning, while relying upon scripture. For example, he remarked in The Epistle Dedicatory, that “My greatest adversaries are young ignorance and old customs.” Habit and ignorance (i.e. a lack of knowledge, and therefore will) construct the prevalence of witchcraft which Scot attempts to deconstruct. In short, Scot disavows Witchcraft because it is immoral, heretical, and implausible. Immoral because of the wrath upon accused witches. Heretical, because he seems to make the argument that belief in, and therefore the “mongering” of, witchcraft favors divine presence in Satan rather than god. Illogical, as he repeatedly insists in Book 2, because it is, above all, implausible. Most interesting to me are the last two, for Scot’s logic and epistemological arguments drive him away from the numinous.
In contrast, we have Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. As many of us may know, Marlowe’s plays involve a main character who succumbs to the creed: “That which Nourishes me, Destroys me.” This is evident in Tamburlaine’s quest for military might, Barabas’s thirst for social dominance and wealth, Edward II’s sexual love, and Faust’s desire for the knowledge, which consequently becomes a quest for the numinous. Faust’s desire for knowledge, for science, for philosophy is not enough to abate his thirst. The fissure between the numinous and the logical pushes him away from what is divine and holy. In short, his deal with the devil, his want to “behold the heavens” pushes him to disavow Christian reckoning. For Marlowe, the numinous removes the spirit from grace, as in Scene 7, when after Faustus cries: Ah, Christ, my Saviour/ Seek to save distressed Faustus’ soul!” To which Lucifer responds, “Christ cannot save they soul, for he is just.”
Knowledge pushed Scot towards God and away from the numinous, or at least his line of reasoning appears that way, yet knowledge, in its insufficiency, pushes Dr. Faustus towards Satan. If Scot decries habit and ignorance, isn’t Marlowe’s play doing the same? How then does each author arrive at different, seemingly opposite results?
I did not take this play to possess an orthodox message, as my experience with Christopher Marlowe has always forced me to believe the opposite. Compare the treatments of Bad-King in Edward II with Shakespeare’s Richard II. Compare the cartoonish depiction of Barabas in The Jew of Malta with the more human and possibly tragic Shylock from The Merchant of Venice. It is undeniable that Marlowe influenced Shakespeare’s work, but how and why Shakespeare’s plays result as they do is a whole other issue at hand.
Moreover, in my meeting with Neil yesterday, our discussion came at an apex (Though talking with Neil produced a good many of illuminating points), when Neil highlighted Scot’s point: Witch-hunting, in a way, produces witches themselves, and certainly not the inverse. I will minimize my comment on this point, so not as to steal Neil’s thunder, as I am sure he has a great deal to say about this, but like Seth, this seems to converge upon many of the ideas brought forth by Sedgwick and like Trish, forces me to ask the question: What is the relationship between Puritanism and _________-Mongers? I am thinking in terms of Witches, Terrorists, Drugs, Communists/Reds, and any alternative “Others” that one could ad-lib in this equation of Monger-ism.
And now, a quote from Marlowe’s Play:
Was this the face that launched a thousand ships,
And burnt the topless towers of Illium?
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.
Her lips suck forth my soul; see where it flies!
post from carolyn (not professor L -- i'm just pasting it for her since she sent it to me, not the group):
Carolyn O’Neill
ENG 520
POST for October 4th’s Discussion Board
I am particularly interested in the way the various problems conjured by this week’s reading might begin to come together simply in Scot’s articulation of his brief list of questions given in the dedication: “What real community is betwixt a spirit and a body? May a spiritual body become temporal at his pleasure? Or may a carnal body become invisible?” Many of the issues inherent in the fundamental distinctions between materiality and immateriaty were brought to life beautifully by the metaphysical poets, and in a similar vein, I believe both Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus and Scot’s The Discovery of Witchcraft (and Demonologie as well, to some extent) explicitly struggle with the tensions inspired by the ineffable incommensurability of the material and the divine. Of much interest to me were the references to melancholia which came to bear both in Faustus and Demonology. Historically, melancholia has been conceptually linked with the “saturnine temperament” (much of which Agamben discusses in Stanzas) and, in turn, is associated with such disparate things as lead, time and earth. On the one hand, in Demonology, we are assured of the essential disparity (even opposition) between the dispositions of the melancholic and the magician [the melancholic is lonesome and earth-bound, while the demonic is social and corpulent]; yet interestingly, in Faustus, we read the lucid exposition of the ways in which the symtomology of the melancholic is synonymous with the advent of demonic possession. Furthermore, as it is in the verse of Donne and Herbert, it seems apparent throughout that it is the very nature of this strangest of relations between spiritual transcendence and earthly mortality that engender very the essence of these psychic disturbances.
post by Neil:
Both Reginald Scot's "The Discoverie of Witchcraft" and King James' "Demonology" operate in a somewhat taxonomic fashion. In the case of Scot's treatise, this works to the division of types of purported acts of witchcraft and specific examples which are then dismantled and shown illogical or explainable in other ways.
In King James' "Demonology" however, James seeks to prove the existence of witches and witchcraft by creating an exhaustive catalogue of categories and subcategories. Throughout the early part of the treatise we read that each matter can be divided in two parts, which in turn seem to be further divided into two.
Some examples:
* "the sin against the holie Ghost hath two branches" (7) - 1. an unconscious slipping or betrayal, 2. a deliberate knowing betrayal of conscience.
* "There are principallie two sortes, wherevnto all the partes of that vnhappie arte are redacted" (7) 1. Magic & Necromancy, 2. Sorcerie & Witchcraft
* "there are two sorts of folkes, that may be entysed to this arte" (9) 1. learned, 2. unlearned
* "There are two thinges which the learned haue obserued from the beginning" (12-13) 1. Astronomy, 2. Astrology
and so on.
In such a manner, James employs a rhetoric of simple division and creates the illusion that such matters can be easily parsed. Furthermore, by moving in increasing specificity toward not just finer and finer definitions of what is or isn't "witchcraft," he is also moving toward a construction of a "witch" as one who exhibits this behaviors and espouses this views. A process which called to mind Sedgwick's "Epidemics of the Mind" article and the Foucault's account of the invention of the homosexual as a species in the 19th century.
The Scot piece in a sense critiques the prevalent constructions of a witch as an old woman, often disfigured, ugly, or otherwise unpleasant -- and points to the some of unstated underlying causes for this invention.
What occurs to me though is that in both cases these treatises become dangerous in the sense that they may well have turned from their intended purposes and become instead guides and texts for anyone was interested in pursuing witchcraft. To have ritual and spells set down clearly as Scot does, or to have the detailed taxonomy of the kinds of practitioners of the dark arts that might exist (and what they might believe) creates a space of opportunity for enactment - for the temptation to reader of putting into practice what is detailed if only to test its veracity.
Likewise, there is a strange hypocrisy in James' work which grows out of an awareness that this detailed of treatise (even if it still in large parts borrows from common lore) represents a conscious gathering together and familiarity with the same types of knowledge and texts that James condemns as heretical and worthy of punishment.
In reading Scot, I was reminded of the discussion we had in class about where to locate the cause of malady and addiction. We looked at a model of addiction which constructed an interior-exterior relationship between the addict and the foreign/alien substance. This model of addiction as a foreign invasion of the natural body can be helpful for talking about the phenomenon of the witch hunt. We can see the witch hunt as a “symptom” of a broader cultural crisis faced by the sixteenth-century English society: as the Catholic and Reformed church clash doctrinally, and as medieval and humanist customs and social structures struggle for dominance, anxiety erupts over the perceived presence of foreign/alien/unknown figures: witches. For Bodin and his ilk, witches are the foreign/alien substance which corrupts communities, hence, the need to purge them. But as Scot points out, these so-called witches are usually no more than women who are old, poor, or Catholic, in other words, people who form the “remainder” of a society. Scot also points out in some fascinating chapters on the effect of “melancholie” on women (Book 3, Ch. 9-11) that some of the so-called witches are actually women suffering from “melancholie” which “occupieng their braine, hath deprived or rather depraved their judgements.” Instead of thinking about witches using Bodin’s inside-outside paradigm, Scot makes a move which shifts the focus from the the physically embodied alien figure to the notion that malady resides within the subject. Scot’s interest in interiority and subjectivity is explored in provocative ways by Marlowe.
For me, one of the oddest moments in *Dr. Faustus* occurs in act 5, scene 1, in which Faustus conjures the spectre of Helen of Troy. As the famous line goes, “Was this the face that launched a thousand ships / And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?” Why is this scene here? What does Helen represent for the play? There are several ways to answer the questions. Perhaps Helen is an object a, whose insubstantiation and elusiveness signifies the ambition which Faustus seeks to possess, but which he never does. Perhaps the conjuring of Helen is a comment on the illusory nature of theatre. Perhaps the representation of Helen stages the Luther/Erasmus dilemma of free will vs. predestination. Did Helen really cause the destruction of Troy? Or is the act of identifying her as the “root cause” a Bodin-move, that is, an unwarranted shift from interiority to manifestation?
The question of causation has implications for how we might interpret Faustus’ tragic downfall. At several moments in the play, Faustus’ ambition for absolute knowledge is identified as his hamartia. This suggests Faustus has perfect free will to damn himself. However, at other points in the play, Faustus blames external agents for leading him astray. Faustus exclaims just before his time is up “O would I had never seen Wittenberg, never read book!” (5.1.44). He also complains of Mephistopheles “O thou bewitching fiend, ‘twas thy temptation / Hath robbed me of eternal happiness” (5.1.85-6). The contrasting impulses in the play utterly confuses any attempt to determine causation and will. When Faustus asks Mephistopheles “How comes it, then, that thou art out of hell,” the demon’s reply is stark and chilling: “Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it” (1.1.80). If all of Faustus’ actions are set in hell, then rationality and even temporality lose their meaning. If mankind, by their sinfulness, is condemned to hell-on-earth, what is the point of trying to place blame on external agents as the cause of man’s fall?
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