Guilt and Responsibility in "Doctor Faustus" and "Paradise

Lost"
Throughout both ‘Paradise Lost’ and ‘Doctor Faustus,’ the authors draw upon the ideas of
responsibility, free will, and blame. Marlowe, in ‘Doctor Faustus’, melds the conventional
religious ideology of the Middle Ages with the comparatively new Renaissance and Reformation
thought, thus creating an effective contrast and an element of ambiguity in who exactly causes
the fall of the protagonist: is it Faustus’s pride, Mephistopheles or God? Milton’s ‘Paradise
Lost,’ by comparison, draws upon the radicalism of the English Republic and Old Testament
fables to present the enigmatic question of who is at fault for the fall of man; some critics go so
far as to suggest Milton believes God is to blame because he gave Adam and Eve free will. In
the words of Milton’s, almost human, Satan: “Whom hast thou then or what to accuse, / But
heaven’s free love dealt equally to all? / Be then his love accursed, since love or hate, / To me
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alike, it deals eternal woe.” This self-questioning embodies the enigmatic inference, morality
and theology employed by Milton in his masterpiece.
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From the beginning, through his utilisation of the classical chorus, Marlowe takes inspiration
from the earlier Medieval ‘Mummings’ and morality plays in his use of almost overly poetic,
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bardesque, imagery: “His waxen wings did mount above his reach,/And melting heavens
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conspired his overthrow.” An assertion such as this only adds to the ambiguity of blame in
‘Doctor Faustus’: the first line of the excerpt clearly indicates an active attempt by Faustus to
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“mount above his reach”; however, a contradiction then takes place, with an Old Testament
image of a “conspiring” and vengeful God being drawn. Also, even in quotations as short as
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that above, the audience is confronted with a wholly contemporary idea: in the plays of the early
and late Tudor period, theatre was used as a powerful propaganda tool against the
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‘Machiavellian’ Papacy’s waning influence over English and religious affairs.

In excerpts such as the above, Marlowe, contemporary references aside, engenders confusion:
why does God “conspire” against Faustus? The playwright offers an explanation of sorts in
sentiments such as: “Be a physician, Faustus; heap up gold.” Greed such as this is highly
reminiscent of Chaucer’s ‘The Pardoner’s Tale’, with the character of the Olde Man, an entity
borrowed by Marlowe later in the play, resembling Faustus in this instance: “Thus seyde this
olde man; And everich of thise riotoures ran/Til he cam to that tree, and ther they founde/Of
floryns fyne of gold ycoyned rounde.” However, although this similarity lessens the moral status
of Marlowe’s protagonist, it is only a temporary lessening: “Yet art thou still but Faustus, and a
man.” Such St. Antonian humility, through seemingly heartfelt assertion, again has the effect of
incurring a sense of confusion within the audience: surely a man as learned as Faustus cannot
be capable of such immoral behaviour, of devil affiliation and of self-destruction? In fact, it is
exactly the ‘new-learning’ of Faustus which leads him into the pact with Mephistopheles:
“What God can hurt thee, Faustus? Thou art safe” proves to be almost the exact sentiments
and ‘delusions’ which Satan utters in his tempting of Eve in ‘Paradise Lost’, the latter of whom
musing: “What fear I then, rather what know to fear/Under this ignorance of good and evil/ Of
God or death, of law or penalty?” Therefore both authors, in these instances, present the fall of
both Eve and Faustus as being born of ignorance, exacerbated by the figures of Satan and
Mephistopheles accordingly: so-called ‘Aristotelian Epideictic’.

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 Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’, on the other hand, contains more entities to which the blame of death
entering the world can be attributed: Adam, Eve, God and Satan. The most obvious scapegoat,
however, comes in the form of the first woman, Eve: “Forth reaching to the fruit she plucked,
she eat:/Earth felt the wound.” This one momentous act, both in the context of religion and
literature, is, in the short term, undeniably the fault of the vanity and malleability of Eve. In terms
of the long term, Milton offers clues to a ‘chain of events’, with God and Satan at the heart,
which led to the fall, an idea which is given credence by the structure of the work: “Back to the
thicket slunk/The guilty serpent.” This seemingly insignificant passing incrimination holds vast
philosophical meaning: what does Milton mean by “guilty”? It is exactly this that adds to the
potency of the poet’s work: the mere fact that he wished to convey such a difficult argument in
such simplistic terms adds to its emphasis and importance.

Excerpts like the one above, in the words of one critic, “show that Milton does not care about
who exactly is to blame nor about whether the reader understands…only about how to present
the riddle of conveying this complexity without answering it.” This being said, Milton does graft
an element of fault upon Satan through his apostrophe: “O much deceived, much failing,
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hapless Eve,/Of thy presumed return! Event perverse!” This dramatic technique, originally
designed to reveal hidden emotion to the audience, was common at the time, for example, in
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Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’: “Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible/To feelings as to sight? Or art
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thou but/A dagger of the mind, a false creation/Proceeding from the heat oppress'd brain?”
Thus, if the original intention of apostrophe is to be taken into account, most blame can readily
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be placed on Satan: an idea possessed by many critics of ‘Paradise Lost’, with good reason
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when extracts like the following are analysed: “[Satan] towards the new-created World/ . . . with
purpose to assay/ . . . or worse,/ By some false guile pervert -- and shall pervert;/ For Man will
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hearken to his glozing lies,/ And easily transgress . . . Sole pledge of his obedience.” The
presentation of Lucifer as having such malicious intent, “purpose to assay”, is difficult to ignore.
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Certainly a case can be made that the aforementioned Is ‘to blame’ for what happens in the
work. In the words of Martin Luther, whose theology is prevalent in the puritan elements of
‘Paradise Lost’: “For where God built a church, there the Devil would also build a chapel.” This
philosophical statement runs in a rich vein through Milton’s presentation of “the arch-Fiend”:
“O Earth! How like to Heav’n if not preferred/More justly, set worthier of gods as built/With
second thoughts reforming what was old!” This attribution of human jealousy to Satan renders
him, if anything, more to blame, for he, like his victims, seemingly possesses the gift of freewill:
an idea which inevitably draws the role of God into the fore. It was perceived by both John
Milton and Christopher Marlowe that the word of God was law and, therefore, He conceivably
can do no wrong: God is thus not presented as being wholly responsible in either works,
because, ultimately, to do so would have been declared as heresy, or, in Milton’s case, non-
Puritanism or ‘anti-Republicanism’. In the words of Nikolai Gogol: “It is no use to blame the
looking glass if your face is awry.”

In conclusion, it is clear that the way the two authors allowed themselves to express and explore
the idea of blame was very much restricted by the boundaries of contemporary ideals and
theology. Despite the real attempt by both to toy with this most complex of ideas, neither
reaches a conclusion about who to place the blame on. This ambiguity is intentional; sometimes
the use of thoughtful techniques, references and inferences to explore a question is more
important – and makes for a more successful work – than coming to a forced conclusion.

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