Twenty years later, the prominent British dramatist Christopher Marlowe published The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus, and the story finally entered into the Western psyche in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s closet drama, Faust. Let us consider the story of western science—and modern science in general—to be parallel to the story of Faustus.

Dr. Faustus, a scientist and alchemist, was deceived by the Devil, but he never sold his soul to Satan. He eventually experienced different stages of torture and learned moral lessons through his torment. The deceived man returned to the domain of the soul after a long and painful journey to finally find righteousness through service to others—so much so that the angels praised him and took his soul to heaven. The Devil, whose power was manifested in his cunning and magic, was defeated by the majesty and grace of God.

By the end of the nineteenth century, Friedrich Nietzsche spoke of a mad sage, stating “(we) have killed God.” Mankind had turned its back on kindness, beauty, and the mystery of magnificence, and society would have to pay for it. At the time, Nietzsche imagined a superman who could save him from his will. Short decades later, a “superman” manifested as Adolph Hitler would treat the world and mankind in a way that his predecessors—Europe’s imperial colonists—treated a great number of people around the world.

Hitler dominated the majestic soul of the German nation and massacred millions in the western world. The western world fought back with an astounding modern technology, the atomic bomb, which ended the Second World War. However, those bombs did not kill Hitler, but rather decimated thousands of helpless civilian victims of the war.

At the end of the Second World War—a Hot War—commenced the even more frightening Cold War, which continued until the fall of the Soviet superpower and then ushered in an unprecedented and terrifying situation for the world and mankind.

In my view, the world has turned into a group of “superpowers” that consider themselves to be uncontested masters of the