Literary Deviltry

An Essay - originally posted on my old blog 06/06/06.

“The Devil is an egoist and certainly not inclined to help anyone for god’s charity.” (Goethe 51) He is a character as old as literature itself. He represents the dark face of nature; the destructive force of life that is as obligatory as its creative face and, perhaps, the baseness of dichotomous man. Particularly in Western writing, the figure of the devil portrays the ultimate antagonist. Unlike the spirituality of oneness in Eastern thought, he is splintered from the personality of Western man to become his depraved doppelganger, allowing humanity to explore and accept the actuality of his own dark side while removing personal guilt and responsibility for the existence of the need for such a vice.

In Goethe’s tale, Faust’s greed for sensuality is personified as Mephistopheles. Remaining true to the classical satanic character, this demon is inflicted with the blackest of all desires - to own Faust’s soul - and will bargain within his powers to gain it.

"I’ll bind myself to your service here

And do everything you ask of me;

Then when we meet over yonder, you shall do

As much for me as I’ve done for you." (51)

Faust’s prideful ego has convinced him that human nature is insatiable and that his sense of want can never be fulfilled.

"Poor devil, what have you to give?

Was ever the ambitious spirit of man

understood by one of your kind?

If you have food – it never satisfies;

you have red gold – that’s fickle as mercury

and runs from the hands; a game - nobody wins;

a girl – right in my arms

she would make eyes at someone else;

suppose you give the godlike joy of honor –

it vanishes like a meteor!" (52)

This becomes the contract between Faust and the Devil.

"If ever I say to any moment:

“Linger – you are so wonderful!”

Then you may throw me in chains." (52)

Moreover, it is a metaphor for the internal conflict within man. Faust is giving himself permission to indulge his ego’s desires by means of a challenge. To suspend any guilt he may feel from the pleasure of indulgence he must deny that the act of giving in to his whims is pleasurable at all. Thus the demon character is introduced as the representation of the ego that negotiates with Faust’s conscience to get what it wants.

Western literature is riddled with this theme of spiritual schizophrenia due to the influence of Christianity. Occidental religion introduces the idea that the bipolar absolutes of nature are entities outside of nature, an idea completely absurd to an eastern mind. The entities are labeled good and evil by modern theology, giving one of them a negative connotation referring uniquely to morality rather than to constitution, as is the case in more ancient religions. Thus Satan becomes the scapegoat for Christianity’s guilty conscience about sensual enjoyment and God becomes the beneficent deity for mankind’s deficient self esteem to supplicate itself to.

In his novel Love in the Ruins, Walker Percy coins the phrase angelism vs. bestialism to refer to the sundered self that is modern man since the Renaissance.

"More’s syndrome, or: chronic angelism-bestialism that rives the soul from body and sets it orbiting the great world as the spirit of abstraction whence it takes the form of beasts, swans and bulls, werewolves, bloodsuckers, Mr. Hydes, or just poor lonesome ghost locked in its own machinery." (Percy 326)

The theory belongs to his character Tom Moore, an inventor and psychiatrist. He seeks to cure society’s malaise of spirit out of a sense of either divinely ordained duty or guilt about losing his faith in the Catholic Church following the death of his daughter and the desertion of his wife. Tom is comparable to Faust in his pride about his invention, the Ontological Lapsometer, with which he plans to cure mankind of his spiritual ailments.

"But the question remains: which prospect is more unpleasant, the destruction of the world, or that the destruction may come before my achievement is made known? The latter I must confess, because I keep imagining the scene in the Director’s office the day the Nobel Prize is awarded." (6)

Pride seems to be the invocation for the devil, as man claims it Satan comes to challenge it. The Nobel Prize symbolizes Tom’s pride, arrogance comparable to the original story of the fall of Lucifer as Tom falls prey to a physician’s God-complex, thinking he alone can cure modern man of all “perturbations of the soul.” (332) Thus, like Faust, Tom’s ego overtakes his conscience. While he truly has good intentions they are used against him while he is blinded by self-importance. Art Immelmann becomes Percy’s characterization of the devil.

"Dr. Moore was a diagnostician. He knew something was wrong, but he fell victim to pride, was seduced by the devil. Immelmann was the devil, of course, who showed Dr. Moore how to cure. It worked for a while… the big mistake was in him, that he could believe he could treat a spiritual disease with a scientific device however sophisticated." (204)

In the end, Tom Moore falls victim to the same “Lucifer syndrome” (200), which he sought to cure.

Christianity has had a profound effect on Western literature by personifying the dual nature of man. The introduction of dichotomous characters allows authors to explore the extremes of personality without changing their characterizations. The devil character is especially needed to personify the more undesirable qualities of human beings since Westerners have been taught shame and fear of anything as unfamiliar as their own unconscious. Hence, the Devil will continue to hunger for the souls of men as long as men continue to hunger for the forbidden desires he has come to represent.

© 1999