Allusions Of Atheism

5 Pages 1214 Words

Allusions of Atheism
“Faustus is the only ‘fantasy’ Marlow wrote, a fantasy set in a world surrounded and interpenetrated by a heaven and a hell, a devil and an incarnated Christian God (man love 77).” Don’t allow this “magical” world to be misleading. Although “no one will deny that Dr. Faustus works within an implicit Christian framework (Birje - Patil 17),” Dr. Faustus is all too unchristian. The religious turmoil in the time of Christopher Marlowe lead to a questioning of religious beliefs. Marlowe eventually succumbs to all of the chaos and rejects all of the popularly held beliefs. His play, Dr. Faustus subtly hints at those things that he cannot come out and say. The play reflects the religious mayhem of the time and leans towards renouncing religion altogether.

During the fourteenth and fifteenth century, the British beliefs were in constant disarray and the works of the era reflect the unrest of the general population. Gerald M. Pinciss points out, in his book Forbidden Matter: Religion in the Drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, that in the time of Marlowe “disagreements in matters of religion were, of course, nothing new to the English (24).” He states that “many felt bewildered, estranged from their God (24).” They were searching for a better understanding and many new beliefs emerged from their search.

In fact, according to Mike Pimcombe in his book Elizabethan Humanism: Literature and Learning in the later Sixteenth Century, a new philosophy was born from their uncertainty; humanism, as it is called (3-10) “should be understood to include […] the two great divisions of knowledge: ‘humanity’- as opposed to ‘divinity’ - was the entire corpus of secular arts and sciences ( Pincombe 11).” Pincombe goes on to state that humanism “at it’s most intellectually elevated, aspires to the status of a philosophy of life, in which moral behaviour is predicated on an ...