Words fascinate me. They always have, and more since I came to realize they exist. I mean that literally. The difference between description and being is both vast and bizarre. It is possible that language is the greatest hindrance to belief that exists to humanity.
Faustus faces a dilemma in that he realizes the futility of words yet cannot bring himself to believe in anything that cannot be verbalized. He is, after all, an educated man, and scholarly education tends to direct our focus to language and semantics. I do not say that this is wrong, but it is possible to examine a thing so closely that it loses its shape. Repeat the same word enough times, and it withers to mere sound. Circle the same topic for long enough, and the very act of questioning becomes irrelevant. Words can carry us so far and no further.
Perhaps it is because and not in spite of his knowledge that Faustus' thinking remains stagnant. He wishes to expand his knowledge yet cannot comprehend a new way to go about it. He can neither recognize that which defies language nor find solace in language alone; his quest is doomed from the start. His first demand of Mephastophilis is a description of "the place men call hell," but to Faustus, hell is nothing but a word, as is the soul he signs away. Then he asks for books, books on spells, plants, and heavenly bodies. With such supposed power at his fingertips, he can ask only for more descriptions.
We as a species depend upon verbal communication. Words divide the natural and the supernatural. The natural fits into a given vocabulary, while the supernatural relies upon metaphor and "almost as if"s." Why should we doubt the existence of the supernatural, except that several thousand years of linguistic developments has not awarded us a supernatural vocabulary? If a thing is real, should we not be able to voice it?
Of course, our vocabulary has expanded tremendously with our understanding of scientific concepts. Perhaps increased understanding, or at least definition, of the supernatural will be the next step. I am of the opinion that there is no real division between the natural and supernatural (the scientific and spiritual, if you prefer), but that our perception is merely limited due to physical constraints. Just as we see only a tiny fraction of the spectrum of light, so we experience only a tiny fraction of the spectrum of reality. But this is pure speculation.
I think it is not strange, given his verbal mindset, that Faustus should turn to Satan rather than God to increase his understanding. Lucifer can be named; God cannot. A God who in essence defines existence is not likely absent from Faustus' story, but when I read it, His surest signs are matters of being, concepts that overwhelm the story without necessarily being forced into words, how things are rather than what things sound like. But He is less vocal than His adversaries, and Faustus is one who listens but does not comprehend.
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I love this post! This is something that I have often thought about as well. In my psychology classes we have been talking about the development of language in infants, and the speculations about how that miraculous event takes place. We take reading and writing and talking for granted. Because our minds were not organized into meaningful chunks of information before our own development of language, we have no understandable memories before this time. I truly marvel over the fact that we were able to inherently learn an entire way of communicating without the intense studies that we would now have to undertake to learn a new language.
Another thing that I will not delve too deeply into is, how does one read? How, by looking at these funny little symbols on a page, can our mind visualize them, process them into meaningful images, which in turn is taken to be processed into meaningful words and phrases, that can be heard and fully understood within the mind? I cannot fathom it... it is simply one of the great mysteries of communication, which could spurn another rant, one of which I will spare you.
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