In this free essay I have attempted an analysis of the terrible nemesis that the magician faces. I compare and contrast this with the opening scene and anaysise the scene in terms of the whole dramatic action: “It was a saying of Zoroaster,” in his Oration Pico Della Mirandola recalls, “that the soul is winged and that when the wings drop off she falls again into the body, and then after his wings have grown again sufficiently, she flies back to heaven.” Towards the end, after his headlong fall into the body, Faustus’s wings seem to grow again. But the body proves too heavy for the wings, with his pride and failure to repent, to lift him up to heaven. He has lived out his twenty four years of “prophit and delight/of power, of honour, of omnipotence” in exchange of his soul to Lucifer. Now, the circle in which he conjures has shrunk into the smallest circle in a series of gradual degradation—from astronomy through cosmography and statecraft to finally his private chamber. Yet he is provided with good counselling of the good Angel and the Old Man. But he is trapped by the metaphor of Lucifer as “sovereign Lord” with Mephistophilis as emissary empowered to punish a traitor. He can only conceive presumption as an offence against the tyranny of pride and it is his own pride that commits him to “proud Lucifer”. The same pride moves his address to Helen with its presumption of immortality and magnificence; it would be admirable were it not a last vain bid to escape from the human condition as the Old Man represents it. At this stage Faustus and the Old Man illustrate the paradoxical truth that St. Augustine speaks of in Confession, and thus dramatizing the spiritual loss in a world of knowledge and speculation:
“The unlearned start up and take heaven by force, and with our learning, and without heart, lo, where we wallow in flesh and blood...”.