h.

Returning now to our main point, the comparison of Marlowe's play with
Goethe's, let us first of all contrast the temptations in the two.
Marlowe's play is purely theological. Jusserand finely describes the
underlying tragedy of it. "Faust, like Tamburlaine, and like all the
heroes of Marlowe, lives in thought, beyond the limit of the possible.
He thirsts for a knowledge of the secrets of the universe, as the other
thirsted for domination over the world." Both are Titanic figures
exactly in the pagan sense, but the form of Faustus' Titanism is the
revolt against theology. From the early days of the Christian
persecutions, there had been a tendency to divorce the sacred from the
secular, and to regard all that was secular as being of the flesh and
essentially evil. The mediaeval views of celibacy, hermitage, and the
monastic life, had intensified this divorce; and while many of the monks
were interested in human secular learning, yet there was a feeling,
which in many cases became a kind of conscience, that only the divine
learning was either legitimate or safe for a man's eternal well-being.
The Faust of Marlowe is the Prometheus of his own day. The new knowledge
of the Renaissance had spread like fire across Europe, and those who saw
in it a resurrection of the older gods and their secrets, unhesitatingly
condemned it. The doctrine of immortality had entirely supplanted the
old Greek ideal of a complete earthly life for man, and all that was
sensuous had come to be regarded as intrinsically sinful. Thus we have
for background a divided universe, in which there is a great gulf fixed
between this world and the next, and a hopeless cleavage between the
life of body and that of spirit.

In this connection we may also consider the women of the two plays.
Charles Lamb has asked, "What has Margaret to do with Faust?" and has
asserted that she does not belong to the legend at all. Literally, this
is true, in so far as there is no Margaret in the earlier form of the
play, whose interest was, as we have seen, essentially theological. Yet
Margaret belongs to the essential story and cannot be taken out of it.
She is the "eternal feminine," in which the battle between the spirit
and the flesh, between idealism and paganism, will always make its last
stand. Even Marlowe has to introduce a woman. His Helen is, indeed, a
mere incident, for the real bride of the soul must be either theological
or secular science; and yet so essent