A student wrote, “By forcing myself to examine my ideas and Dr. Faustus more carefully and within the lens of my experience, I had several epiphanies that I feel were transformative both to my essay as well as to my understanding of my experience with depression.”
Today I share the story of a student making the case that Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus is a case study of a depressive.
“I think Hell is a fable,” Doctor Faustus tells Mephastophilis at one point in Marlowe’s 1593 tragedy. While many Elizabethans would have disagreed—the play terrified them precisely because they believed in a literal hell—we’re more sympathetic with the notion now. To most of us, fire and brimstone and devils with pitchforks are the stuff of […]
How do I sell my soul? Let me count the ways. I wrote in Sunday’s entry how the ego and the soul are pitted against each other in an unending battle. Just think how much better off we’d all be if humans listened to their higher selves and ego took a back seat. […]
Film Friday The baseball playoffs, which concluded with a San Francisco win over the Texas Rangers this past week, have had me thinking about the Faustus story and how many modern renditions of the story get it wrong. If this seems like a leap, let me explain. The Texas Rangers used to be the Washington […]
There was an interesting Lenten column in the New York Times Monday. Ross Douthat, a conservative in the best sense, draws on a Commonweal article by theologian Luke Timothy Johnson criticizing contemporary spiritual practice in this country. From the way Douthat quotes him, it sounds as though Johnson might take exception with my criticism of harsh […]
There’s a funny scene in the original Bedazzled (the 1967 film with Dudley Moore, not the one with Adam Sandler) where Moore, having sold his soul to the devil, is watching a particularly tawdry floor show in a seedy bar where he can’t get good service. As I recall the film, the seven deadly sins […]
Dr. Faustus, Rembrandt etching Here we are in the midst of Lent with less than a month to go until Easter. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight describes the season as follows: After Christmas there came the cold cheer of Lent, When with fish and plainer fare our flesh we reprove . . . The […]
