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 mediæval 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 essential and so poignant is the question of woman to the great drama, that the passage in which the incident of Helen is introduced far surpasses anything else in Marlowe's play, and indeed is one of the grandest and most beautiful in all literature.