The thing that is most difficult to understand about Christopher Marlowe's play Doctor Faustus is how Faustus could persist in condemning himself to hell when he had all the evidence of heaven's existence that he needed. The presence of the devils made it perfectly clear that heaven and hell exist and that he was bound to be damned forever. This question is raised early in the play and it is hard to see why Faustus does not repent and ask for forgiveness and salvation. The Good Angel tells him it is "never too late, if Faustus will repent" (2.2.86). The Bad Angel, of course, insists that it is "too late" (2.2.85). But there does not seem to be any reason why Faustus should believe one of them rather than the other. To say that Faustus' lack of repentance was due to the pride of a man who refuses to accept limits on human knowledge, seems like only part of the answer. Faustus' pride was greater than even this statement implies. For Faustus believed that by using sorcery he alone had discovered the key that all humanity wanted. To admit that the knowledge of God was even more important than all the things he had learned would be to admit that the system Faustus discovered was incomplete. Faustus knows that many people who had none of his brilliance would achieve much more through simple goodness than he could through the system in which he took so much pride. But even this knowledge does not cause him to repent.
Faustus represents some of the concerns of the men of the Renaissance about the line between what human beings can know and what knowledge is limited to God. The Renaissance was a period in which men began to turn away from the authoritative word of the Church and look directly at nature and at men in order to understand them. As Bronowski says in his brief biography of Leonardo da Vinci, the Church had long taught "that the universe can be understood only spiritually, as a God-given and abstract order" (228). ...