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when the believer proves addicted not to God but to Catholic idolatry: “These which addict themselves so devoutly to ye popes learning, were never earnestly afflicted in conscience, never humbled in spirite nor broken in hart, never entred into any serious feeling of Gods judgment, nor ever felt the strength of the law & of death.”44
Foxe’s contemporary, the Calvinist William Perkins—deemed by the end of the sixteenth century to be one of England’s most popular religious writers, with seventy-six editions of his work appearing before his death in 1602—also highlights the danger of Catholic attachments over devotion to God.45 “Perceived as translating Calvin for the masses,” as Poole puts it, Perkins praises those who “addict themselves unto Diuinitie,” yet cautions against the study of exegesis over scripture.46 He writes, “Hence come dissentions and errors into the schooles of the Prophets, which cannot be avoided while men leave the text of scripture & addict themselves so much to the writings of men, for thereby hee can more cunningly conuey strange conceits into mens minds: and therfore every one that would maintain the truth in purity and syncerity must labour painfully in the text.”47 The opposition of “purity and sincerity” to “error” and “dissentions” indicates the struggle of addiction. Perkins, even more pointedly than Seneca, explores how addiction to scholarship can go awry when the object of study is inappropriate.
Embracing Reformed theology, Perkins is particularly keen to encounter scripture directly. Study and translation of “the word of God” is the scholar’s appropriate calling. “The writings of men” only detract from the truth, and “popish writers” in particular lead audiences astray. Divinity students, he writes, “within this sixe or seven yeeres, divers have addicted themselves to studie Popish writers, and Monkish discourses, despising in the meane time the writing of those famous instruments and cleere lights, whom the Lord raised up for the raising and restoring of true religion, such as Luther, [and] Calvin.”48 Religious dedication, indeed dedication to God, is no longer enough; one must turn away from the Catholic version of God to celebrate that of Martin Luther, Calvin, and their followers. Reformed writings, like scripture, ring with “true religion,” “cleere lights” and purity. The copia of Erasmus must cede to the crystalline prose of Luther.
If Catholic writings corrupt the reader, only godly conversion cures. As Perkins puts it: “Againe, after conversion it is not an idle power in them: 1. Ioh. 3.9. He that is borne of God sinneth not, that is addicteth not himselfe, nor setteth himselfe to the practise of sinne; and the reason is given, because the seed of God remaineth in him.”49 Commitment to God and interest in worldly pleasures prove mutually exclusive. Perkins writes, “The love of the trueth, and of the world, the feare of the face of man, and the feare of God can never stand together. As also howe dangerous a thing it is to be addicted to the love of the world: for it hath beene alwaies the cause of revolt.”50 This is the power of addiction—it is a singular devotion that defines us, for good or ill. If Calvin understands abandoned devotion as a source of salvation as well as reprobation, then Foxe and Perkins more explicitly praise addiction to God in contrast to errant addiction to Catholic idolatry.
Finally, Marlowe’s contemporaries warn against necromancy itself as a form of addiction. In A dialogue of witches (1575), Lambert Daneau writes of addiction to Satan in these terms: “Whosoeuer were seruisable or addicted to Satan, were called by the name which is wel knowne and commune, that is Sorcerers,” who forged an “agréement with the diuel … & to be short, have wholy addicted them selves to Satan.”51 The active “agréement with the devil” proves, however, a form of ensnarement in which the sorcerer is victimized by the devil: they “fall into the snares of Satan, and become Sorcerers, that is to say, addicted unto Satan.”52 Condemning the sorcerer, Daneau includes a spirited call for another form of addiction, for if “the serpent is more addicted or subject to Satan, then the other beastes,” humans at least have the choice to turn away.53 Here the story of a convert who embraces Christ delivers Daneau’s point: “That he was converted to the fayth of Christ, it is read of him how earnestly and diligently he was addicted to that studie [of necromancy], which afterwarde, through the great goodnesse of god, he forsooke and renounced.”54 The parallels to Faustus are evident here. The scholar’s dedication, longing, and effort, directed initially to the wrong field, shift to worship of God instead, through whose goodness the convert is saved.
Addicted to Magic
If writers from Calvin to Foxe and Perkins insist on the double-edged quality of addiction as a firm commitment that may or may not lead to grace depending on the form of the devotion, Marlowe stages both the danger of choosing the wrong field and the struggle of committing in the first place. The play’s opening acts, from the first scene to the signing of the necromantic contract, chart Faustus’s devotional struggle as he seeks the addiction lauded from Seneca to Calvin to Perkins, hoping to lose himself in a vocation by relinquishing reason, soul, and body to a higher power. The play opens with Faustus, sitting in his study, surveying a range of scholastic pursuits and famously dismissing them all as inadequate to his purposes. In doing so he illuminates the challenge before him as he pursues a field of limitless endeavor. He wants to “level at the end of every art” (1.1.4, emphasis added), namely, aim at—but never reach—an end. Thus he condemns those fields that limit his striving. Logic, medicine, law, and divinity fail to attract his devotion because they result in a mere “end” rather than an imaginative expanse. While Aristotelian logic might have “ravish’d” him at one point, it now bores him: “Read no more: thou hast attain’d the end” of that field (1.1.6, 10). So, too, with medicine: “Why Faustus, hast thou not attain’d that end?” (1.1.18).55 These lines suggest the scholar’s desire to strive forward rather than to complete his studies. Law and divinity, too, limit his striving. Law “fits a mercenary drudge / Who aims at nothing but external trash,” while divinity, also, offers apparent certainty: “we must sin, / And so consequently die. / Ay, we must die, an everlasting death” (1.1.34–35, 45–47). If the audience might recognize divinity as offering unlimited grace (as the scriptural passage he reads goes on to promise), to Faustus its end in “everlasting death” mirrors the finality and nearsighted “aims” of other fields.
Faustus wants “to live eternally”; as Seneca writes, he wants “to be always with” the field of choice, perpetually moving forward so that, as Faustus puts it, “being dead” he might be raised “to life again” (1.1.24, 25). If these lines seem blasphemous—he desires, after all, to raise the dead in the manner of Jesus—they also speak to his desire for scholarship to offer him an unending path for life. Of course, as Genevieve Guenther argues, Faustus seems to crave a resolutely material life, seeking not everlasting salvation in heaven but instead life on earth, thereby making his comment doubly blasphemous.56 He wants to raise the dead back into their own bodies, she states, not into heavenly union. But what Guenther underplays, and what is notable in this opening soliloquy, is Faustus’s striving. His experience of embodiment is not static or fixed but mobile, for lack of curiosity or ambition is a kind of death, a mere “attain’d end” (1.1.18). By “end,” as Edward Snow argues, Faustus signals a “termination” rather than “an opening upon immanent horizons.” As a result, “having ‘attained’ [an] end means that he has arrived at the end of it, used it up, finished with it.”57 Magical texts, by contrast, allow him to imagine an unachievable, continually receding goal, a mystical form of knowledge just beyond his reach: it is “necromantic books” that “Faustus most desires,” for they are “heavenly” (1.1.51, 53, 51).58
Faustus ultimately choses necromancy because it offers not dominion but the ravishment of addiction: “’Tis magic, magic that hath ravish’d me” (1.1.111). The scholar seeks to be overcome and, as Calvin writes, “not regarding any other delightes,” to “wholy addict” himself and his “studies to the obtaining of” his goal.59 Even as Faustus wants to revel in “power,” “honor,” and “omnipotence,” he is fundamentally a “studious artisan” (1.1.55–57). Flourishing in his studies he hopes to be, as Cornelius promises, more consulted than the Delphic oracle. That is to say, he desires to be a source of knowledge that is invisible, empty, and devoid of will, reflecting instead the voice of the