THE INNER INFERNO: SHADES OF PERDITION IN MARLOWE’S DOCTOR FAUSTUS
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.69980/v8ngkb02Keywords:
Doctor Faustus, Christopher Marlowe, Renaissance, Anthropocentric, Individualism, Inferno, Psychic terrain, PerditionAbstract
Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus emerges from the late Renaissance, one of the most transformative intellectual environments in western history. The era was defined by the clash between medieval faith and the new secular humanism. This paper places Faustus’s downfall and the historical transition from a Christocentric to an anthropocentric worldview. It reflects the psychic anguish that escorts early modern individualism. How does Faustus’s ambition to “be thou on earth as Jove is in the sky…’’ mirrors the Renaissance obsession with infinite knowledge and superiority over nature? How does his downfall reveal the historical impatience of the overreaching man in a shaky moral universe? These arguments draw upon the historical context of the Protestant Reformation, the decline of scholastic theology etc. This study interprets Faustus’s anguish as the awareness of a man torn between two eras. The inferno that consumes him is the inner turmoil fabricated by historical change and it is the loss of spiritual assurance amongst amplifying intellectual skyline. Hell becomes the inner world of a mind that cannot reconcile Renaissance ambition with medieval guilt. Through this lens, this paper shows how the chasing of knowledge without spiritual balance leads to self-created perdition. Thus, Marlowe’s tragedy stands at the crossroads of history, myth, and human psyche, illuminating the inner depths of human perdition.
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