"Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships, And burned the topless towers of Ilium? Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.
O, thou art fairer than the evening air, Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars."
Still, Marlowe's _motif_ is not sex but theology. The former heretics whom we named had been saved--Theophilus by the intervention of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and Pope Sylvester snatched from the very jaws of hell--by a return to orthodoxy. That was in the Roman Catholic days, but the savage antithesis between earth and heaven had been taken over by the conscience of Protestantism, making a duality which rendered life always intellectually anxious and almost impossible. It is this condition in which Marlowe finds himself. The good and the evil angels stand to right and left of his Faustus, pleading with him for and against secular science on the one side and theological knowledge on the other. For that is the implication behind the contest between magic and Christianity. "The Faust of the earlier Faust-books and ballads, dramas, puppet shows, which grew out of them, is damned because he prefers the human to the divine knowledge. He laid the Holy Scriptures behind the door and under the bench, refused to be called Doctor of Theology, but preferred to be called Doctor of Medicine." Obviously here we find ourselves in a very lamentable _cul-de-sac_. Idealism has floated apart from the earth and all its life, and everything else than theology is condemned as paganism.
Goethe changes all that. In the earlier _Weltschmerz_ passages some traces of it still linger, where Faust renounces theology; but even there it is not theology alone that he renounces, but philosophy, medicine, and jurisprudence as well, so that his renunciation is entirely different from that of Marlowe's Faustus. In Goethe it is no longer one doctrine or one point of view against another doctrine or another point of view. It is life, vitality in all its forms, against all mere doctrine whatsoever.
"Grey, dearest friend, is every theory, But golden-green is the tree of life."
Thus the times had passed into a sense of the limits of theology such as has been well expressed in Rossetti's lines--
"Let lore of all theology Be to thee all it can be, But know,--the power that fashions man Measured not out thy little span For thee to take the meting-rod In turn and so approve on God."