The Hermeneutics of Hell

The
Hermeneutics
Visions and Representations
ofof the Devil

in World Literature
Hell
Edited by Gregor Thuswaldner

and Daniel Russ
The Hermeneutics of Hell
Gregor Thuswaldner · Daniel Russ
Editors
The Hermeneutics
of Hell
Visions and Representations of the Devil
in World Literature
Editors
Gregor Thuswaldner Daniel Russ
College of Arts and Sciences Gordon College
North Park University Wenham, MA, USA
Chicago, IL, USA
ISBN 978-3-319-52197-8 ISBN 978-3-319-52198-5 (eBook)

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-52198-5
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017939075
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

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Contents
1 Introduction: The Devil We Know and the Devils We

Don’t Know 1
Daniel Russ and Gregor Thuswaldner
2 “Two Brass Mites of the Widow”: Saint Bridget of

Sweden and the Terrors of Hell 9
Mark Edwin Peterson
3 The Uses of Tentatio: Satan, Luther, and Theological

Maturation 27
Carl P.E. Springer
4 As an Angel of Light: Satanic Rhetoric in Early Modern

Literature and Theology 47
David Parry
5 Astrophal Redivivus: The Coinage of the Discourse on

the Devil in the Early Modern Age in Georg Bernardt
S.J.’s Tundalus Redivivus (1622) 73
David Johannes Olszynski
v
vi Contents
6 The Drama of Hell: Sources and Interpretation in

Seventeenth-Century Operatic Infernal Scenes 93
Aliyah M. Shanti
7 The Diabolic Logic of Logos: Towards a Hermeneutics of

Hell in Goethe’s Faust 115
Caroline Sauter
8 Literature, Theology, Survival 143

S.Jonathon O’Donnell
9 Dostoevsky’s Demons 165

Irina Kuznetsova
10 Money as the Devil in B. Traven’s “Assembly Line,”

and Its Sources in Scripture, the Faust Legend,
and New England Puritanism 187
Anthony R. Grasso, C.S.C.
11 “la manière de Milton”: Baudelaire Reads Milton’s

Satan 211
Matthew J. Smith
12 Visions of Hell in Flannery O’Connor 239

George Piggford, C.S.C
13 “He Haunts One for Hours Afterwards”: Demonic

Dissonance in Milton’s Satan and Lovecraft’s
Nyarlathotep 253
Marcello Ricciardi
14 “The One Who Knocks”: Milton’s Lucifer and the

American Tragic Character 271
Edward Simon
Contents vii
15 Reading the Devil in the Landscape 291

Deborah C. Bowen
16 A Landscape of the Damned: Evil and Nothingness in

Cormac McCarthy’s Outer Dark 305
Matthew Potts
Index
319
Contributors
Deborah C. Bowen Redeemer University College, Ancaster, Canada

Anthony R. Grasso C.S.C. King’s College, Wilkes-Barre, USA
Irina Kuznetsova New Economic School, Moscow, Russia
David Johannes Olszynski University of Koblenz-Landau, Koblenz,
Germany
S. Jonathon O’Donnell Aoyama Gakuin University, Tokyo, Japan
David Parry Christ’s College, University of Cambridge, Cambridge,
England
Mark Edwin Peterson Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library & Museum‚
Library & Research Center, Staunton, VA, USA
George Piggford C.S.C Stonehill College, Easton, USA
Matthew Potts Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA
Marcello Ricciardi St. Joseph’s College, New York, USA
Daniel Russ Gordon College, Wenham, MA, USA
Caroline Sauter Goethe University Frankfurt, Department for General
and Comparative Literature, Frankfurt am Main, Germany
Aliyah M. Shanti Princeton University, Princeton, USA
ix
x Contributors
Edward Simon The Marginalia Review of Books, Los Angeles, CA,

USA
Matthew J. Smith Azusa Pacific University, Azusa, CA, USA
Carl P. E. Springer University of Tennessee Chattanooga, Chattanooga,
USA
Gregor Thuswaldner College of Arts and Sciences, North Park
University, Chicago, IL, USA
List of Figures
Fig. 6.1 Beginning of Orpheus’ aria “Possente spirto.” Trans.

“Powerful spirit, and formidable god.” 100
Fig. 6.2 Excerpt from ritornello and sinfonia from the end
of Act 3 of Jacopo Melani’s Ercole in Tebe 104
Fig. 6.3 Illustration of infernal scene, from Stefano Landi,
Il S. Alessio: Dramma Musicale (Rome: Appresso
Paolo Masotti, 1634) 107
Fig. 15.1 Evening lake-sky. “Witness to the
unpresentable” (original photograph by John Bowen,
summer July 2009. Reproduced with permission) 294
Fig. 15.2 The Russian steppes, “a landscape where the
supernatural [lies] just below the surface” 296
Fig. 15.3 The Devil’s Punch Bowl, Hamilton,
Ontario—the negative sublime 297
Fig. 15.4 The Badlands—garden or grave.
North Dakota Badlands 299
Fig. 15.5 Jonathan Day (jeighdeigh), “Bach In Heaven”
Reproduced with permission 302
xi
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: The Devil We Know

and the Devils We Don’t Know
Daniel Russ and Gregor Thuswaldner
For many American theologians, Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) is

regarded as “America’s greatest theologian.”1 In his famous sermon,
“Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (1741), Edwards, who accord-
ing to Diarmaid MacCulloch “lent respectability to a seductive concep-
tion of the Last Days,”2 depicts hell as a
world of misery, that lake of burning brimstone [‚] extended abroad under
you. There is the dreadful pit of the glowing flames of the wrath of God;
there is Hell’s wide gaping mouth open; and you have nothing to stand
upon, nor any thing to take hold of; there is nothing between you and
Hell but the air; tis only the power and mere pleasure of God that holds
you up.3
D. Russ (*) 
Gordon College, Wenham, MA, USA
G. Thuswaldner 
College of Arts and Sciences, North Park University, Chicago, IL, USA
© The Author(s) 2017 1

G. Thuswaldner and D. Russ (eds.), The Hermeneutics of Hell,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-52198-5_1
2 D. Russ and G. Thuswaldner
A homology reminiscent of Edwards’ sermon is almost unthinkable in

the twenty-first century, apart from radical fundamentalist churches.
Today, “speaking of the devil” is an idiomatic phrase, not something that
is literally carried out. The theological discourse on the devil has seen a
sharp decline, especially since the age of Enlightenment. While the devil
and his ability to physically appear in order to torture people in this life
and beyond was hardly questioned until the sixteenth century, the sev-
enteenth and eighteenth centuries saw a dramatic shift when it comes to
belief in the devil.4 Addressing the University of Oxford on March 21,
1741, cleric William Dodwell complained that disbelief in the devil and
uncivility went hand in hand:
It is but too visible, that since men have learnt to wear off the
Apprehension of Eternal Punishment, the Progress of Impiety and
Immorality among us has been very considerable. […]
Unusual crimes have appeared; Uncommon heights of wickedness have

been attained […].5
Belief in the devil, Dodwell suggests, had measurable consequences on

everyday life; apparently, the fear of eternal punishment in the afterlife
was a stronger deterrent from immoral behavior than the fear of God,
which, as the Psalmist notes, is the beginning of wisdom.6 As the plau-
sibility of the devil waned, so did the notion of hell as a place of eternal
punishment. By the twentieth century “[h]ell was no longer seen, except
by fundamentalists, in terms of satisfying divine justice by the imposition
of vindictive punishment, but rather in terms of the inherent freedom of
the rational creature to say a final ‘no’ to God’s truth and love.”7
While today the devil is hardly the subject of sermons, he can still
be found in numerous literary works. Literature, as it were, has given
the devil a new home. According to Elena Volkova, it is not a coinci-
dence that we frequently encounter hell in literature, as “[a]ny work of
literature that deals with conflict, pain, suffering, grief, misery, and dis-
aster (and which does not, at least indirectly) bears an analogy of hell
[…].”8 Literary works that have emerged in the West and also partly in
the Russian tradition have been shaped by Judeo-Christian visions of
hell. Beginning in the late Middle Ages, folk traditions added new facets
to the biblical devil. But it was not until the early modern period that
1 INTRODUCTION: THE DEVIL WE KNOW … 3
individual authors portrayed devils that were only loosely based on bibli-
cal motives and inventions of the Middle Ages.9
The devil we know from the biblical tradition appears quite differently
from the new devils that we find in works such as Dante’s Commedia
and Milton’s Paradise Lost. Dante depicts the devil as frozen in the ninth
circle of hell, impotent and awaiting final judgment. In contrast, Milton’s
Satan prowls through the chasm between hell and the newly created
earth to avenge himself and his demonic cohort by bringing God’s
beloved image bearers to that
First Disobedience, and the Fruit

Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste
Brought Death into the World, and all our woe.10
In the Western tradition this Judeo-Christian vision of the devil is the

devil we know. And yet, these two great Christian poets render very dif-
ferent devils. Indeed, we could say the same about Chaucer’s impish
devils, the appearance in modernity of the Faustian devils of Marlowe,
Goethe, and Mann, to name only the most influential poets of the
Faustian myth. In short, even within the Western Judeo-Christian tradi-
tion, our cultural imagination of this archetype of evil incarnate does not
portray a single, abstract vision of the devil but of devils that come in
many guises—the malevolent tricksters we thought we knew.
An intriguing example in ancient Hebrew literature of the devil we
do not know is found in the book of Job. This biblical and world classic
opens with God boasting about his servant Job, a pious man unsurpassed
in his character and integrity. Satan, the accuser, overhears God’s boast
upon this his model creature and challenges God’s proud description of
Job. He says that if you take away all that you have given him—children,
wealth, reputation—he will curse you and die. Satan is a behaviorist.
As you may recall, God allows Satan to take away everything includ-
ing Job’s health but no more and Job descends into a dark night of the
soul. His friends come to comfort him in his unspeakable grief, sitting
silently with him on the ash heap for a week. When they finally speak to
him, they become, like Satan, his accusers, declaring that the only expla-
nation for his affliction is that he has sinned against God. Job defends
himself round after round, saying that he has done nothing to deserve
such suffering. The mysterious part of these arguments between Job and
his friends-turned-accusers is that none of them even hint at the exist-

ence of a malevolent creature like Satan. We the readers know that he is
behind Job’s losses and laments, but for Job and his accusers, he is the
devil you don’t know. And he is never mentioned again after the opening
two chapters.
While the significance of the devil decreased in theology, authors
began exploring and exploiting the complex roles of devils in litera-
ture. As it turns out, the devil can have multiple functions that might be
rooted in the paradoxical nature of the biblical devil, as Philip Almond
explains:
[The Christian story] is a story that is deeply paradoxical. The Devil is

God’s most implacable enemy and beyond God’s control – the result of
this having been given by God the freedom to rebel against him. Yet, he
is also God’s faithful servant, acting only at God’s command, or at least
with his endorsement. The Devil literarily and metaphorically personifies
the paradox at the heart of Christian theism.11
The collection of essays in this volume about the diverse and universal
visions of devils and their domains attempts to give a sample of this devil-
ish diversity across traditions and centuries.
The Hermeneutics of Hell features essays by senior and junior schol-
ars who trace the numerous transformations, developments, and mani-
festations of the devil in world literature from the early modern period
to the twenty-first century. Grounded in a connection between religion
and literature, this volume will be of interest to colleagues working in
British, American, French, Russian, Italian, and German literature as well
as in religious studies. As our volume has gathered essays by international
scholars trained in very different schools and traditions of literary criti-
cism, we purposely allowed for different styles of scholarship and writing.
In his essay on the Swedish mystic, Saint Bridget, Mark Peterson
depicts purgatory and hell as divinely sanctioned places for sin, suffering,
and redemption. Saint Bridget emphasizes the redemptive role the Virgin
Mary plays as well as the prayers of believers who ease the pain of suf-
fering in purgatory. Her visions and interpretations of hell had a direct
impact on believers’ personal piety. While Peterson’s essay discusses hell
and not the devil, it should also be noted that according to many theo-
logians and poets, hell is the devil’s de-creation, perhaps best depicted in
Milton’s Paradise Lost.
In a similar vein, Martin Luther saw a connection between the temp-

tations of the devil as a theologian’s education. Unlike many other theo-
logians, Luther emphasized the important role tenatio plays in shaping
a person’s character. In his essay “The Uses of Tenatio: Satan, Luther,
and Theological Maturation,” Carl Springer shows that Luther sees the
devil’s weapon to lead humans astray as a welcome gift for moral devel-
opment. In a paradoxical way, the devil’s tactics are portrayed as poten-
tially positive.
By exploring early modern literature and theology David Parry finds
further evidence of rhetorical paradoxes. Johann Susenbrotus’ influen-
tial Epitome Troporum ac Schematum et Grammaticorum & Rhetorum
links paradiastole, “a technique of excusing a vice by characterizing it in
terms of the nearest virtue,” with the biblical image of the devil’s ability
to appear as an angel of light. Is it possible to distinguish between divine
and satanic appearances? What are the ethical consequences of paradias-
tole as a rhetorical device?
Beginning in the seventeenth century, literary manifestations of the
devil seem only loosely connected to biblical sources. As David Olszynski
demonstrates, hell in Georg Bernhardt S.J.’s drama fragment Tundalus
redivivus (1622) appears as a very complex devilish enterprise. Ironically,
hell resembles Bernhardt’s native Bavarian society as it is depicted as a
hierarchical place where individualized devils are given quite specialized
tasks.
Similarly, the devils that inhabit Italian opera libretti in the seven-
teenth century are shown as biblically emancipated satanic forces that,
as Aliya Shanti shows‚ are more inspired by humanist literary works than
post-Tridentine theology. In addition to analyzing libretti, Shanti also
considers the role music, costumes, dance, and scenery play in creating
innovative visions of hell.
Caroline Sauter offers a close reading of Goethe’s Faust, Parts I and
II, which, arguably, present us with one of the most influential diabolic
visions of world literature. By introducing irony, ambiguity, and differ-
ence, Goethe’s sophisticated Mephistopheles appears, as Sauter dem-
onstrates, as a dia-bolos in the literal sense. Because of Mephistopheles’
dia-bolic use of language, Faust’s traditional understanding of hermeneu-
tics falls short.
Jonathon O’Donnell compares in his essay Goethe’s Mephistopheles
with Milton’s Satan, which has also proven to be a highly influential lit-
erary character. Building on Derrida’s insights regarding the notion of
survivance, O’Donnell uses a poststructuralist framework in order to

explain both their extinction in theology and their survival in literature.
Irina Kuznetsova discusses Dostoevsky’s quite diabolic demons
which we encounter in his novels Demons and The Brothers Karamazov.
According to Kuznetsova, Dostoevsky’s demons are a synthesis of
Russian and Western visions of devils. But what do these demons stand
for? Are evil forces manifestations of a character’s psychological pro-
cesses? Or are they otherworldly (meta)physical beings?
Anthony Grasso focuses in his essay on the short story “Assembly
Line” by the lesser-known, enigmatic writer known as B. Traven. By
comparing “Assembly Line” with Matthew’s Gospel and the Faust(us)
myth in Marlowe and Goethe, Grasso shows the intertextual nature of
the temptation narrative that is at the heart of B. Traven’s story.
Milton’s Satan, as Matthew Smith shows, was a source of inspiration
for Baudelaire’s aesthetic and religious expression of Satanism. Smith
analyzes the relationship between Baudelaire and Milton through the
eyes of T.S. Eliot which provides insight into Baudelaire’s curious poetic
ritualism.
As a practicing Catholic, Flannery O’Connor’s notion of hell is closely
tied to Catholic theology. She understands hell as a place where love
is completely absent. Focusing on her story “The Artificial Nigger,”
George Piggford demonstrates that the mysterious sewer system of
Atlanta with its equally tempting and repulsive entrance is linked to the
author’s vision of hell.
Although H.P. Lovecraft has a significant following, especially
among connoisseurs of the horror genre, his oeuvre might almost be as
unknown as B. Traven’s. Like other authors in the Anglo-American tra-
dition, Lovecraft was influenced by Milton’s Satan. Marcello Ricciardi
contrasts the similarities and differences in Milton’s and Lovecraft’s liter-
ary expressions of evil. Even though Lovecraft’s evil god, Nyarlathotep,
was clearly inspired by Milton’s Satan, Ricciardi also shows Lovecraft’s
indebtedness to devilish visions of the Middle Ages and Renaissance.
Milton’s Satan is not only alive and well in American literature but
also in popular culture. Edward Simon argues that Milton’s shadow can
be seen in the Ahab character in Melville’s Moby Dick, as well as in TV
shows such as Mad Men, The Sopranos, and Breaking Bad. The red thread
Simon detects in these seemingly unrelated narratives is the consummate
tendency in the quintessential American (and diabolic) characters.
Deborah Bowen confronts us with a very surprising encounter of the

diabolic in nature. Landscape, as she convincingly argues, is socially con-
structed. Why is it that 105 canyons in the U.S. are called “The Devil’s
Canyon?” Bowen considers three Christian authors—Leo Tolstoy, John
Terpstra, and Leif Enger—who connect the devil with very different
landscapes.
In Cormac McCarthy’s gloomy novel Outer Dark we are also
confronted with a “landscape of the damned” and a “faintly smok-
ing garden of the dead.” Matthew Potts’ reading of McCarthy’s novel
is informed by Karl Barth’s notion of das Nichtige (Nothingness). By
presenting a theological interpretation, Potts helps us understand the
author’s hellish depiction of Appalachia.
As the fifteen essays of The Hermeneutics of Hell demonstrate, visions
of hell and devils abound in world literature. Providing a comprehensive
overview is not the goal of this volume, as it would be an impossible task
to capture all hellish manifestations from antiquity to the twenty-first
century. Instead, The Hermeneutics of Hell provides important glimpses
of historical developments and transformations of traditional notions of
the devil. Although René Girard reminds us that “traditional medieval
theology […] refuses to ascribe being to Satan,”12 our volume makes
clear that to this day the devil remains a very important literary being.
Notes
1. Mark Galli and Ted Olsen, eds. 131 Christians Everyone Should Know.
Nashville: Broadman and Holman, 2000, 43.
2. Diarmaid MacCulloch. Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. New
York: Penguin, 2009, 759.
3. Jonathan Edwards. “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” In: Michael
Warner, ed. American Sermons: The Pilgrims to Martin Luther King Jr.
New York: The Library of America, 1999, 354.
4. Cf. D. P. Walker. The Decline of Hell: Seventeenth-Century Discussions of
Eternal Torment. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1964.
5. William Dodwell. “The Eternity of Future Punishment Asserted and
Vindicated. In Answer to Mr. Whiston’s Late Treatise on that Subject.
In Two Sermons, Preached before the University of Oxford, On Sunday,
March 21. 1741. By William Dodwell M.A. Rector of Shottesbrook,
Berks, Oxford, 1743,” 85.
6. Cf. Psalm 111, 10.
7. Adrian Hastings. “Hell.” In: The Oxford Companion to Christian

Thought: Intellectual, Spiritual, and Moral Horizons of Christianity.
Adrian Hastings, Alistair Mason, and Hough Pyper, eds. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2000, 292.
8. Elena Volkova, “Visions of Heaven and Hell.” In: Andrew Haas, David
Jasper, and Elisabeth Jay, eds. The Oxford Handbook of English Literature
and Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, 795.
9. Cf. Elisabeth Frenzel. Stoffe der Weltliteratur. 9th edition. Stuttgart:
Kröner, 1998, 702–7, keyword “Satan.”
10. John Milton. The First Six Books of Milton’s Paradise Lost. Vol. 1.
Edinburgh: Kincaid, 1773, 5.
11. Philip C. Almond. The Devil: A New Biography. Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 2014, xv.
12. René Girard. The One by Whom Scandal Comes. Trans. M. B. DeBevoise.
Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2014.
Bibliography
Philip C. Almond. The Devil: A New Biography. Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
2014.
Dodwell, William. The Eternity of Future Punishment Asserted and Vindicated.
In Answer to Mr. Whiston’s Late Treatise on that Subject. In Two Sermons,
Preached before the University of Oxford, On Sunday, March 21. 1741. By
William Dodwell M.A. Rector of Shottesbrook, Berks, Oxford, 1743, 85.
Girard, René. The One by Whom Scandal Comes. Transl. M. B. DeBevoise.
Lansing: Michigan State University Press 2014.
Edwards, Jonathan. “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” In: Michael
Warner, ed. American Sermons: The Pilgrims to Martin Luther King Jr. New
York: The Library of America, 1999, 347–364.
Hastings, Adrian. “Hell.” In: The Oxford Companion to Christian Thought:
Intellectual, Spiritual, and Moral Horizons of Christianity. Adrian Hastings,
Alistair Mason, and Hough Pyper, eds. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2000, 292.
Milton, John. The First Six Books of Milton’s Paradise Lost. Vo. 1. Edinburgh:
Kincaid.
Volkova, Elena. “Visions of Heaven and Hell” In: Andrew Haas, David Jasper
and Elisabeth Jay, eds. The Oxford Handbook of English Literature and
Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, 793–809.
Walker, D. P. The Decline of Hell: Seventeenth-Century Discussions of Eternal
Torment. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1964.
CHAPTER 2
“Two Brass Mites of the Widow”: Saint

Bridget of Sweden and the Terrors of Hell
Mark Edwin Peterson
Estimations of Saint Bridget of Sweden (1303–1373) have swung

remarkably over the centuries, from delusional dreamer, to the Bride of
Christ, to patroness of Europe. We can find her described as the mod-
est beloved of Christ and the terror of popes. Yet very little has been
said about her theological ideas. Much scholarship on Bridget in English
has focused on her influence as a model holy woman on late medieval
mystics in England, such as studies about Margery Kempe or Julian of
Norwich.1 Other work examines the spread of Bridget’s writings in ver-
nacular languages across Europe in manuscript and print.2 When we
examine Saint Bridget’s ideas about creation, however, she shows herself
to possess a deep mind with an intriguing understanding of the Catholic
Church and its relationship to medieval believers. One can only hope
“But this man’s learned unwisdom and good will are as pleasing to me as the two brass
mites of the widow (Luke 21:2) that I preferred to the riches of kings. He possesses all
wisdom in his unwisdom.” Rev. VI. 116. P. 177.
M.E. Peterson (*) 
Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library & Museum‚ Library & Research
Center, Staunton, VA, USA

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-52198-5_2
10 M.E. Peterson
that the recent completion of the translation of the Revelationes into

English3 will spur further discussions of Bridget’s faith and her life.
Like many of the laywomen of the medieval period who shared their
communications with God, Bridget had to work through mediators.
Even with her literacy and her training in Latin, Saint Bridget’s work
found acceptance only after consultations with churchmen, after record-
ing by clerical scribes. The possibilities of manipulation of her message
by men have been discussed repeatedly on the topic of Bridget and
more generally about visionaries of the Middle Ages. There is not space
enough to wade into the complications here, other than to suggest that
we should understand Bridget as a woman who thought of herself as car-
rying religious messages direct from God to the world, a visionary who
also strove to be an obedient subject to the Catholic Church. The voice
that spoke of the sufferings of hell and the need for penance was the
same voice that told readers of her fears for the eternal welfare of her
children, the joys of pregnancy, the making of beer, and the work of the
honeybee. The images that Bridget shared with us came from an edu-
cated laywoman, and many of their messages were directed at the laypeo-
ple she knew in Sweden and in Italy. She consciously worked within the
world of the Church and used her confessors as teachers and guides, as
well as servants and secretaries.
What we find in looking on her views of the fate of souls after death is
that Bridget took on the ideas of the Church that had been developing
for several centuries in the works of other Christian writers. The afterlife
held horrors in store for sinners, and it worked according to a specific
understanding on the nature of creation and human spirits. Like Dante
and other fourteenth-century writers, Bridget imagined the structures
of purgatory and hell in their divine purposes of sin, suffering, repent-
ance, and redemption. For this Swedish mystic, though, repentance and
mercy lay at the heart of judgments to come. God punished willful sin-
ners but offered mercy. His divine mercy functioned within the mechan-
ics of painful punishment for sin that remained on the balance sheets
after death, offering escape from hell, while repentance and prayers of
the Church could bring relief from purgatory. Just as she worked within
the confines of her culture and Church as a devout laywoman, Bridget
began with the rules of purgatory accepted by the people of the four-
teenth century. Within that framework, Bridget stressed the role of the
Virgin Mary, both in connecting with women like her and in pleading
for mercy for sinners; Bridget also stressed the connection of believers
2 “TWO BRASS MITES OF THE WIDOW”: SAINT … 11
to God in prayer and repentance. The Church had its role, but that did
not mean that Christ could not be felt directly in the lives of faithful
Christians like her.
Bridget and her confessors took great care that her message fit within
the orthodoxy of the church of her time.4 Visions and other divine com-
munications, especially those relayed by women, caused great anxiety
among the church leadership, in part because of their growing popular-
ity. Many holy women found that they had to make the effort to prove
themselves always mindful of established theology and obedient to
Church authority, if they wanted to find acceptance and even influence
among believers.5 Some scholars have taken this to mean that we must
consider Bridget’s voice to be lost to the influence of the churchmen
around her, or at least joined in collaboration with the influential theo-
logians with which she surrounded herself.6 However, the descriptions of
her methods of forming and recording her visions—reviewing transcrip-
tions and even learning Latin to check translations—make it clear that
Bridget had a clear sense of her own communication from God that she
wanted to share.7 She worked to keep the records of her message free
from mistaken transmissions and from false visions.8
Bridget’s orthodoxy came under review during several papal confir-
mations of her canonization and again at the Council of Constance and
the Council of Basel.9 There can be little doubt that her visions had the
full support of the Catholic Church in the long run. Several complete,
scholarly editions of her book, published after the doctrinal conflicts of
the Reformation, only confirm her good standing with the church as a
visionary saint. The criticisms of Jean Gerson, a leading theologian of the
fifteenth century, focused on his general distrust of female mystics and
obscure notions of the bodily resurrection in heaven,10 more than any
issues of doctrine. The Perugian Libellus, a book critical of Bridget that
has been lost, seemed to argue that angels could never be chatty enough
to pass on the longer visions to her in one go, and certainly not to a
woman, without ever seriously addressing the theology of the message.11
However, Bridget’s accepted orthodoxy does not mean that she did not
have challenges for believers, or even the structures of Christian belief, in
the visions that she presented.
An important example of the scope of Bridget’s independence can be
found in her understanding of the Virgin Mary. In one vision, Mary’s
pain in childbirth was compared to the suffering of Christ on the cross.
Then Bridget joined in the suffering of Mary by feeling the sensation
12 M.E. Peterson
of carrying Christ in her own womb. The sanctified Mother made all
mothers holy, making motherhood a route for union with Christ. As a
holy widow, Bridget could even reclaim her chastity in this view, so that
she, like Mary, approached him as a virginal mother.12 Many of Bridget’s
visions involved messages from the Virgin Mary, criticizing sinners and
calling them to repentance, asking for the divine mercy available to all
sinners. Mary took an active part in Christian salvation for Bridget, as
the helpmate to the savior.13 This went beyond any discussions of Mary’s
Immaculate Conception taking place at the time.
Bridget’s views on the afterlife shared a similar adherence to the
orthodoxy she had learned from the church, while also bearing her own
personal stamp on the understanding of the redemption of souls. To
examine her geography of heaven and hell fully, we must first take a brief
look at her book, the only source available on the saint’s theology. Over
700 visions and divine messages were collected over the course of nearly
30 years and then organized into the eight books of the Revelationes.
Bridget had her confessors act as scribes and even editors of the records
of these Latin communications, but she repeatedly wrote of Christ call-
ing her his bride and channel, a direct messenger of divine words.14 She
considered herself to be the connection, while she remained obedient to
her churchmen. Though her enemies and chiders were often described
suffering eternal damnation, and even Bridget’s son received a divine
warning about his sinful behavior, she would not have considered herself
the author of the books. The visions came from God and any specific
connections to her life and her country were in response to her personal
prayers and questions.
When first called to be a divine messenger, as relayed in several sep-
arate descriptions, Bridget feared illusion by the Devil, but Christ
scolded her distrust, advising her on how to be certain of her visions.15
In general, she imagined herself as a passive receptacle for the message.
After fasting and prayer, she prepared herself with pen in hand, wait-
ing to write as instructed.16 The rule for her proposed order came to
her in a flash of inspiration while traveling, and she had to rush to get
it recorded as fast as she could. Other visions, however, could take sev-
eral days to play out in her mind, and might have included consulta-
tions with theologians. Even so, the experiences often left her in wonder,
though the presence of the divine could also terrify her.17 In Bridget’s
view, Christ spoke to her directly in these visions, as did the Virgin Mary
at other times and, occasionally, angels, as part of intense trance-like
experiences—though not dreams—as she said repeatedly.18 The mean-

ings of the visions were not always clear, and they could even be revised
years later. Many times, a vision was followed with a divine message on
how to interpret what she witnessed, but Bridget could leave details
unexplained as well, not fully understanding what she had seen. Later
compilers then prefaced the visions with their own interpretations of the
prepared text.
The need for clarification means that not all of her visions could be
considered the intellectual sort described by Saint Augustine, despite
Alfonso’s arguments that they were. Intellectual visions could not be
false.19 Bridget’s message, though, was not always so clear, and a good
number of her visions involved prophecies about Swedish or papal poli-
tics.20 She directed quite a few at specific individuals, sometimes in
response to their requests.21 Among the questions some modern schol-
ars have asked about the clarity of Bridget’s voice, is whether the final
book clearly reflected her personal theology.22 When we look at topics
that interested Bridget specifically, though, it becomes clear that this holy
woman had a great deal to say about her own world and her own ideas
on religion. Her conscious decision to follow the dictates of orthodoxy,
as an obedient daughter of the church, was the most important support
for her claims to have the authority to represent her visions as legitimate,
as she and her followers well understood. Certainly this path gave her
visions the strong impact the godly voices had told her to expect. Many
people thought the holy woman’s work to be inspired by God.23 They
responded to her ideas and used them to shape their understanding of
their faith.24 Even her prophecies continued to be read and anticipated
for more than a century.25
Having said that, however, it is also important to note how dif-
ficult it can be to discern a clear theology from Bridget, because of its
somewhat random organization around unidentified events of mystic
vision. Perhaps this is why her theology has received very little study.26
While teasing out the degree to which Bridget built a formal theology
is beyond the scope of this paper, her writings on the fates of departed
souls, including those predicted by prophesy, reveal important details
about the understanding of hell and purgatory in the decades immedi-
ately after the Black Death. First of all, since she intended to share her
visions and auditions with a broad audience of believers, we can suppose
that many people at the time shared or at least understood her geogra-
phy of the afterlife and how it worked like it did. Hell played a large role
14 M.E. Peterson
in her mission; if the revelations of the eight books showed any over-
arching theme it would be that the omnipotent God exercised justice
on sinners, mostly after death, but tempered just punishment with the
mercy expressed by Christ and the Blessed Virgin.27 And secondly, just as
the Virgin Mary served as an important symbol of the holiness of moth-
ers for the widow Bridget and held a role in redemption, so should we
understand that the treatment of sinners in the afterlife reflects impor-
tant elements of Bridget’s personal views on the purposes of hell and
purgatory.
By the late Middle Ages, Catholic Christians believed that people’s
immortal souls would join their recreated bodies at the end of time.
In the period before the Last Judgment, however, souls had their own
materiality that could experience pain and suffer punishment just like the
body.28 Sometimes people were lucky enough to go through the nec-
essary suffering in their lifetimes, as we read in the Revelationes: “The
Mother speaks, ‘When you make dough, you have to knead and work
it a lot. Fine wheaten bread is set before lords, but courser bread is set
before commoners, and an even worse kind of bread is given to dogs.’”
Just in case the imagery was not clear enough, this was followed by an
explanation: “The kneading stands for hardship. A spiritual person suf-
fers great hardship when God does not receive honor.”29 This example
stressed the types of spiritual suffering. Those whose only pain was not
getting the evil they desired were sinners as low as the dogs in hell and
should fear punishment.
For most sinners, God’s justice still demanded more suffering after
death to make up for the deficit of good works balanced against their
many sins. However, divine mercy meant that many could still get to
heaven, after first suffering in Purgatory, an idea that had been clearly
defined and placed in the Christian universe at least by the end of the
twelfth century.30 As the devil states in one of Bridget’s visions:
If anyone dies without mortal sin, then he or she will not enter the pains
of hell and that whoever has divine charity has a right to heaven … she
should be purified in such a way that not a single stain remains in her
because, although she has justly been sentenced to be given to you, she is
still impure and cannot come to you without first receiving purification.31
Oftentimes it took concessions to Bridget’s human understanding to try

to explain how it all fitted together.32
Mary tells her “You are wondering how it is that I, the queen of heaven,
and you, who are living on earth, and that soul in purgatory and that one
in hell can all speak together simultaneously. I will explain it to you. It is
true that I never leave heaven. … Nor will the soul in hell ever be removed
from her punishments. And the other soul will not be removed from pur-
gatory until she has been purified, nor will you come to us before your
removal from the life of your body. Yet your soul along with your under-
standing is by the power of God’s Spirit lifted up in order to hear God’s
words in heaven. You are also allowed to learn of some of the punishments
in hell and purgatory as a warning to the wicked.”33
Bridget, like most believers, had trouble in picturing the mechanics of

all this, but her revelations helped to clarify the workings of hell, often
by the use of symbols she could grasp. As with so many of her visions,
puzzling out the ramifications of the imagery brought her closer to see-
ing how God treated believers and non-believers, though the work could
remain difficult. Referring to language used at several points in the Bible,
she writes in one of the Interrogations that God used symbols such as
these for the child to suck on, nourishing the developing mind.34 Part of
the difficulty rested in trying to explain to a human audience the com-
plexities of time and materiality. For God, all of creation had passed as
if in one hour.35 A departed soul appeared to Bridget as a man suffering
in a furnace of purgatory while dressed in a cloth that looked like a sheet
drenched in sperm, which was icy cold and stinking, while he squeezed
with both hands a greasy tar-like thing that was on fire.36
Physical space itself posed problems in picturing how this suffering
took place. Hell was a furnace containing a fire that burned in eternal
darkness, enacting different punishments for the variety of sins. The
darkness around the furnace was limbo, which came from the dark-
ness from within the furnace. Both were part of one place and one hell.
Above this darkness lay the deepest pit of purgatory where the harshest
punishments were doled out. Lesser punishment took place in a higher
place, a level of purgatory holding just those recovering their strength,
as if recuperating from illness. Then, finally, the third place, the highest
station of purgatory, held those whose only punishment was an intense
longing for God. It all functioned like a smelter separating copper from
gold: in the lowest purgatory, a place of punishing beasts and vermin,
souls suffered darkness and confusion, heat and cold, depending on the
level of sin, until the impurity of sin could be stripped away and God
moved the soul to the higher level.37
16 M.E. Peterson
Several aspects of this system of punishment appeared to come from

Bridget’s personal ideas. The bride is given the example of the three
proud women: one living, her mother in hell, and her daughter in purga-
tory. The mothers bear special responsibility for what they have taught
their children and even suffer further torment after death because of
the continuing sins the children commit based on their teachings. Only
a scintilla of love for Christ kept the granddaughter from following her
grandmother to hell, but her torments were extreme.38 Many other
examples of the proud suffering in hell bore strong resemblances to the
literature of medieval estates satire,39 but Bridget directed special ran-
cor at members of religious houses who ignored their vows. An abbess
who refused to live by her rule, unless she changed her ways, would
wade with the fat cows into hell and the ravens of hell would tear her to
pieces.40 The Franciscans were especially at risk.41
While Bridget held an apocalyptic view of history, she had no inter-
est in predicting the coming of the end.42 Still, she saw the final judg-
ment as part of the system of divine justice that got so much attention
in her writing. Like many lay Christians of her time, Bridget focused on
the power of repentance to bring about God’s mercy.43 Anyone without
mortal sin could escape the eternal punishment of hell, but it was divine
charity that gave a sinner the right to eventually enter heaven. As we
have seen, Mary played a special role in earning mercy for sinners: “My
son, since I have won mercy from you, then I ask you to have mercy
on all the wretched and help them.”44 In another vision Mary says to
Bridget:
Nobody in the world is so great a sinner – provided he says in his heart

that my Son is the Creator and Redeemer of the universe and dear to him
in his inmost heart – that I am not prepared to come to him immediately
… if only he has the intention of not caring for worldly honors or greed or
carnal lust … then he and I will right away get along quite well.45
What sinners could do to earn mercy was to have faith in Christ, appar-
ently, but then in the next breath, Mary suggested that the intention to
avoid sin was also required. Other sinners, including Bridget’s own hus-
band according to the visions, only escaped hell barely by avoiding spe-
cific sins, such as not drinking on the road, avoiding sex with pregnant
wives, keeping a proper household, and resisting pride.46
The souls of dead sinners fell down like snowflakes into hell, there
were so many.47 Even though the torment of hell was thought to be
eternal, the punishments there differed by location in the furnace based
on the evil of the sinner just like in Purgatory. God punished sinners like
a parent punishes a child in this, caring for their welfare but refusing to
tolerate the willfulness of sin.48 The visions condemned many promi-
nent churchmen and politicians specifically to hellfire if they refused to
change their path, warning them that their behavior threatened to deny
themselves the mercy that Christians could normally expect. Frequently,
however, the descriptions and explanations of punishment after death
centered on those souls suffering in Purgatory. The bride of Christ also
treated people like her children, in a way, by seeking to scare readers
away from sin with the horrors they might meet in the afterlife, whether
from damnation or purgation. In one vision, Bridget saw a condemned
king in purgatory,
like a newborn child scarcely able to move. … Then I heard a voice say-
ing: “This king now appears such as his soul was when it left his body.”
… Then the demon placed the king’s brain between his press-like knees
and pressed it forcefully on all sides until all its inmost marrow was as thin
as the leaf of a tree. … Then he placed the nozzle of his bellows-like head
into the king’s mouth and blew into it forcefully and filled him powerfully
with such a terrible blast of air that all his veins and sinews were burst-
ing painfully. … “Just as you used to jab your subjects sharply, so too my
snake-like arms will tear you apart with terrible pain and loathing.”49
The Revelationes offered hope too, though. Not only did Bridget
write about Christ’s mercy and the possibilities of redemption, but
also about the effects that others could have on the souls in purgatory.
Through their prayers and penance, along with payment for such from
the church, friends and family members eased the sufferings of the dead.
“All the souls … participate in the prayers of the Holy Church and in
the good works done in the world, especially those that they did in their
lifetimes and in those that are done by their friends after their death.”50
In this Bridget supported the doctrines of the Catholic Church, lending
her authority to the concept of prayers for the dead while explaining the
notion of purgatory clearly for readers. The church of the late Middle
Ages had been floundering in crisis because of alienation from believers,
corruption, and papal squabbles.51 While adding her own criticisms
18 M.E. Peterson
of popes and bishops, the holy woman also defended practices that con-
nected Christians to the Church and formed a foundation for donations
to the clergy. The prayers of others could even save someone’s soul from
damnation.52 Like her elevation of Mary above the position given to her
by other contemporary mystics, Bridget’s appreciation for the power of
prayer and penance increased the mercy of the Church as much as she
could. Even as she spoke of countless sinners in hell, she held out hope
that people would take advantage of the ways to escape that fate.
Saint Bridget showed the changing nature of spirituality at her time,
a new religiosity that found new places to grow and develop outside of
clerical circles. In assembling her visions, she also took great pains to
identify the failings of the Church and individual churchmen. Her sense
of divine justice, even when used to attack the clergy, had firm founda-
tions in the medieval traditions of theology, however. She made great
efforts to ensure that her interpretations were grounded in doctrines
considered orthodox, and her confessors claimed that her books added
nothing to the teachings of Christ.53 Like other holy women of the
Middle Ages, though, Bridget confidently examined the allegorical sense
of Scripture and her own visions.54 Her interests in motherhood, domes-
tic management, virginity, children, and mercy came across frequently in
them. Her work to explain all of the divine messages, as well as the com-
plicated elements of the theology they often contained, led her in new
directions beyond the banks of her confessors’ concerns.
In one vision, Bridget described how the feathers of a goose were
revolting to the stomach. One ate the meat. In the same way, the Church
had within its structures the body of Christ, the freshest of meats. The
faithful needed to have the proper approach to the indulgences and sac-
raments to take advantage of the sustaining food on the inside of the
goose.55 Her own appreciation of the Catholic religion included strict
obedience and orthodoxy. However, within that framework, she man-
aged to construct a formidable spiritual authority for herself. Bridget
used her voice as a mystic and prophet, then, to make several changes to
contemporary understandings of faith. First of all, her elevation of the
Mother Mary had the effect of adding the Virgin as a working partner
to the Godhead in determining the fate of eternal souls. Mary had been
divinized as she explained her role in Bridget’s visions,56 which became
part of her redefinition of the role of women in relation to Christ.57 The
saint’s work in this arena illustrated the interest that medieval women
had in taking on new relationships to the faith that we can also find in
the number of Beguines, mystics, and holy women publicly active in the
fourteenth century. When the Brigittine houses, headed by abbesses,
spread across Europe in the next century, even more women became
prominent religious figures. Bridget’s influence illustrates how many
Christians were willing to listen to new actors on issues of personal faith
at the time.
Her Revelationes also showed how the laity had begun to look for
ways to both foster their internal religious lives and connect them to
Christ and salvation without the Church interceding. Indulgences may
have been useful for salvation, but many of her visions revealed that
people working in the Church were hopelessly corrupt, while other pas-
sages discussed the central roles of repentance and mercy for salvation.
It could all be done without the clergy if a believer was willing to face
purgatory alone. Bridget found a new way to get at the goose meat, we
could say. It involved sticking to the dictates of the Church, but without
relying on the pope or the bishop. In the process, she created a book
that would become an important door to Christian faith for the next two
centuries, which functioned as its own Scripture for the common peo-
ple in some ways.58 With the development of the printing press, and
the spread of the Brigittine Order, its preachers and libraries, Bridget’s
visions became well-known across the continent, and her explanations of
hell and redemption helped to shape the culture of personal piety that
gained such force in the fifteenth century.
In one of her early visions in the 1340s, Christ told Bridget that
sometimes the vineyard owner drinks the mediocre wine, saving the bet-
ter for more appropriate occasions. And so, He said to her:
I have many friends whose life is sweeter to me than honey, more delicious
than any wine, brighter in my sight than the sun. However, it pleased me
to choose you in my Spirit, not because you are better than they are or
equal to them or better qualified, but because I wanted to – I who can
make sages out of fools and saints out of sinners.59
For many of her readers, the story of Saint Bridget of Sweden being cho-
sen by God was a hopeful message. She struggled to be worthy of her
role as a communicator of divine messages but continued to feel herself
to be a great sinner and just a humble widow. Still, He chose her. God’s
20 M.E. Peterson
grace could fall on everyone, even someone like Bridget. His use of her
to spread the message was indeed part of that message; that everyone
could look to God for salvation. Her sufferings in this life and the next
would bring her to heaven in the end.
The images of hell and purgatory that Bridget described could be con-
fusing and complicated, even with the divine explanations that accom-
panied them. What they show us is that the Christian faithful of the
fourteenth century, like her, were eager to make themselves part of their
religion, to approach Christ directly, to love him, and to do what they
could to avoid damnation. The workings of Bridget’s hell also show the
continuing influence and power of the Catholic Church, troubled as it
was, to be part of the fight against the devil in the minds of the devout
even when they turned their criticisms and frustrations against it. Many
Christians still learned everything about their faith through the Church, but
they read, listened, thought, and prayed intensely about what it all meant
for them, which in some cases could mean new explorations of theology.
For Bridget, her visions brought her to find an immense religious power
for the Blessed Virgin, a respect for mothers and widows, a fear of sin, and a
hope for believers in the threats of hell and the mercies of purgatory.
Notes
1. Going back to Julia Bolton Holloway, “Bride, Margery, Julian, and
Alice: Bridget of Sweden’s Textual Community in Medieval England,”
in Margery Kempe: A Book of Essays, ed. Sandra J. McEntire (New York:
Garland. 1992). Also Catherine Sanok, Her Life Historical: Exemplarity
and Female Saints’ Lives in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).
2. V. O’Mara and B. Morris, eds., The Translation of the Works of St.
Birgitta of Sweden into the Medieval European Vernacular. Vol. 7 of The
Medieval Translator (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000); Pavlina Rychterova,
“Die Reception der Schriften der hl. Birgitta von Schweden in Böhmen
in der 2. Hälfte des 14. und im 15. Jahrhundert,” in The Development
of Literate Mentalities in East Central Europe, ed. Anna Adamska and
Marco Mostert (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004); Domenico Pezzini. “Book IV
of St. Bridget’s Revelations in an Italian (Ms Laurenziano 27.10) and an
English Translation (Ms Harley 4800) of the Fifteenth Century,” Aevum
70, no. 3 (1996): 487–506.
3. Denis Michael Searby and Bridget Morris, The Revelations of St. Birgitta of
Sweden, 4 Vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006–15).
4. Drahomira Breedveld-Barankova, “St. Bridget of Sweden in the Pre-

Reformation Bohemia Matthaeus De Cracovia: Proposicio Pro
Canonizatione B. Brigide,” Communio viatorum 46, no. 2 (2004): 163.
5. Vickie Jeanne Larson, “Pious Fringe: Julian of Norwich’s Readers and
their Books, 1413–1843” (Ph.D. diss., University of Iowa, 2009), 2–4.
6. Tracey R. Sands, “‘Sät vppa thik mins sons pino braz’: Memory and
Action in Heliga Birgittas uppenbarelser,” Scandinavian Studies 82, no. 4
(2010): 394; Bridget Morris, St. Birgitta of Sweden (Woodbridge: Boydell
& Brewer, 1999), 4.
7. Rosalynn Voaden, God’s Words, Women’s Voices: The Discernment of Spirits
in the Writing of Late-Medieval Women Visionaries (York: York Medieval,
1999): 94; Kirsi Irmeli Stjerna, “St. Birgitta of Sweden: A Study of
Birgitta’s Spiritual Visions and Theology of Love” (Ph.D. diss., Boston
University, 1995): 11.
8. Päivi Salmesvuori, Power and Sainthood: The Case of Birgitta of Sweden
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014): 164.
9. Bridget Morris, St. Birgitta of Sweden (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer,
1999): 153–4.
10. Dyan Elliott, “Authorizing Life: The Collaboration of Dorothea of
Montau and John Marienwerder,” Voice, Gender, and the Portrayal
of Sanctity, ed. Catherine M. Mooney (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania
University Press, 1999): 190. See also Dyan Elliott, The Bride of Christ
Goes to Hell: Metaphor and Embodiment in the Lives of Pious Women, 200–
1500 (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 2011): 248–56.
11. Melanie Starr Costello, “Women’s Mysticism and Reform: The
Adaptation of Biblical Prophetic Conventions in Fourteenth Century
Hagiographic and Visionary Literature” (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern
University, 1989), 80. We know of the Libellus from Adam Easton’s sys-
tematic refutation of it, arguing like Alfonso of Jaen for the similarities
between biblical prophetesses and Bridget.
12. Julia Mortimer, “Reflections in the Myroure of Oure Ladye: The
Translation of a Desiring Body.” Mystics Quarterly 27, no. 2 (2001): 64.
13. Kari Børresen, “Religious Feminism in the Middle Ages: Birgitta of
Sweden,” in Maistresse of My Wit: Medieval Women, Modern Scholars, ed.
Louise D’Arcens and Juanita Feros Ruys (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004),
301.
14. Claire L. Sahlin, Birgitta of Sweden and the Voice of Prophecy, Studies in
Medieval Mysticism 3 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2001), 47.
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 93.
16. Julia Mortimer, “Reflections in the Myroure of Oure Ladye: The
Translation of a Desiring Body,” Mystics Quarterly 27, no. 2 (2001): 69.
22 M.E. Peterson

Medieval Mysticism 3 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2001), 57–8.
18. Rev. IV. 77. p. 147. “3 … Whenever you please, you put my body to
sleep – yet not with a bodily sleep but with a spiritual rest. 4 Then you
rouse my soul to life as though from sleep so that I hear and feel in a spir-
itual way.”
19. Rosalynn Voaden, God’s Words, Women’s Voices: The Discernment of Spirits
in the Writing of Late-Medieval Women Visionaries (York: York Medieval,
1999), 86.
Medieval Mysticism 3 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2001), 40.
22. Roger Ellis, “The Visionary and the Canon Lawyers,” in Prophets Abroad:
The Reception of Continental Holy Women in Late-Medieval England, ed.
Rosalynn Voaden (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1996), 75.
23. Stephan Flemmig, Hagiografie und Kulturtransfer: Birgitta von Schweden
und Hedwig von Polen (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2011), 307.
24. Bridget Morris, “St. Birgitta of Sweden’s Revelationes (1492) in York
Minster Library,” Journal of the Early Book Society for the Study of
Manuscripts and Printing History 13 (2010): 225.
25. Kaare Rübner Jørgensen, “Birgitta prophetans: The Use of St. Birgitta’s
Revelations in Sixteenth Century Controversies,” in Medieval Spirituality
in Scandinavia and Europe: A Collection of Essays in Honour of Tore
Nyberg, ed. Lars Bisgaard (Odense: Odense University Press, 2001), 296.
26. Kirsi Irmeli Stjerna, “St. Birgitta of Sweden: A Study of Birgitta’s Spiritual
Visions and Theology of Love” (Ph.D. diss., Boston University, 1995), 17.
27. James Hogg, “St. Birgitta’s Revelationes Reduced to a Book of Pious
Instruction,” in Vox Mystica: Essays on Medieval Mysticism in Honor of
Professor Valerie M. Lagorio, ed. Anne Clark Bartlett et al. (Cambridge:
D. S. Brewer, 1995), 204.
28. John Lancaster Murphy, “The Idea of Purgatory in Middle English
Literature” (Ph.D. diss., UCLA, 1995), 15.
29. Rev. IV. p. 75.
30. John Lancaster Murphy, “The Idea of Purgatory in Middle English
Literature” (Ph.D. diss., UCLA, 1995), 51–5.
31. Rev. VI. p. 87.
32. Many medieval writers dove into the difficulties of exegesis as an exercise
to discover God’s truth, but Bridget’s lessons for the common Christian
more often contain their own explanation direct from the divine messen-
ger. See Michelle Karnes, “Julian of Norwich’s Art of Interpretation,”
Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 42, no. 2 (2012): 340.
33. Rev. VI. p. 113.

34. Rev. V. Interrogation 16. p. 318.
35. Rev. IV. 134. p. 242.
36. Rev. IV. 7. p. 39.
37. Rev. IV. p. 40.
39. Kevin Scott Echart, “Birgitta of Sweden and Late Medieval Prophecy”
(Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1993), 301.
40. Rev. VI. 98. p. 165.
41. Kevin Scott Echart, “Birgitta of Sweden and Late Medieval Prophecy”
(Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1993), 288.
42. Melanie Starr Costello, “Women’s Mysticism and Reform: The
Adaptation of Biblical Prophetic Conventions in Fourteenth Century
Hagiographic and Visionary Literature” (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern
University, 1989), 102–3.
43. Mandi Lee Roberts, “Evil Spirits, Desires of the Flesh, and Vain Fears”:
Margery Kempe, Walter Hilton’s ‘The Scale of Perfection,’ and the
Construction of the Medieval Enemy” (Master’s thesis, Tarleton State
University, 2011), 46.
44. Rev. I. (1). 50. p. 142.
45. Rev. IV. 32. p. 77.
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 37, 141, 122.
47. Rev. IV. 103. p. 184.
49. Rev. VIII. 48. p. 85.
50. Rev. IV. 7. p. 41.
52. Rev. IV. 7. p. 39.
53. Roger Ellis, “Text and Controversy: In Defence of St. Birgitta of
Sweden,” in Text and Controversy from Wyclif to Bale: Essays in Honour
of Anne Hudson, ed. Helen Barr and Ann M. Hutchinson (Turnhout:
Brepols, 2005), 312.
54. Caitlyn Duehren, “From the Mouth of God: Hildegard of Bingen’s
Biblical Hermeneutics,” Journal of Theta Alpha Kappa 35, no. 1 (2011):
83; Michelle Karnes, “Julian of Norwich’s Art of Interpretation,” Journal
of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 42, no. 2 (2012): 333.
55. Rev. IV. 16. pp. 54–5.
24 M.E. Peterson
56. Kari Børresen, “Religious Feminism in the Middle Ages: Birgitta of Sweden,”

in Maistresse of My Wit: Medieval Women, Modern Scholars, ed. Louise
D’Arcens and Juanita Feros Ruys (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004), 297–301.
57. Yvonne Bruce, “‘I am the Creator’: Birgitta of Sweden’s Feminine
Divine,” Comitatus 32, no. 1 (2001): 31.
58. Yvonne Bruce, “‘I am the Creator’: Birgitta of Sweden’s Feminine
Divine,” Comitatus 32, no. 1 (2001): 22.
59. Rev. I. (2). 16. p. 216.
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Bechtold, Joan. “St. Birgitta: The Disjunction between Women and Ecclesiastical
Male Power.” In Equally in God’s Image: Women in the Middle Ages, ed. Julia
Bolton Holloway, Joan Bechtold, and Constance Wright, 88–102. New York:
Peter Lang, 1990.
Børresen, Kari. “Religious Feminism in the Middle Ages: Birgitta of Sweden.”
In Maistresse of My Wit: Medieval Women, Modern Scholars, edited by Louise
D’Arcens and Juanita Feros Ruys, 295–312. Turnhout: Brepols, 2004.
Breedveld-Barankova, Drahomira. “St. Bridget of Sweden in the Pre-
Reformation Bohemia Matthaeus De Cracovia: Proposicio Pro Canonizatione
B. Brigide.” Communio Viatorum. A Theological Journal 46, no. 2 (2004):
149–67.
Bruce, Yvonne. “‘I am the Creator’: Birgitta of Sweden’s Feminine Divine.”
Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 32, no. 1 (2001):
19–40.
Costello, Melanie Starr. “Women’s Mysticism and Reform: The Adaptation of
Biblical Prophetic Conventions in Fourteenth Century Hagiographic and
Visionary Literature.” PhD diss., Northwestern University, 1989.
Duehren, Caitlyn. “From the Mouth of God: Hildegard of Bingen’s Biblical
Hermeneutics.” Journal of Theta Alpha Kappa 35, no. 1 (2011): 79–90.
Echart, Kevin Scott. “Birgitta of Sweden and Late Medieval Prophecy.” PhD
diss., Yale University, 1993.
Elliott, Dyan. The Bride of Christ Goes to Hell: Metaphor and Embodiment in the
Lives of Pious Women, 200–1500. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press,
2011.
———. “Authorizing Life: The Collaboration of Dorothea of Montau and John
Marienwerder.” In Voice, Gender, and the Portrayal of Sanctity, edited by
Catherine M. Mooney, 168–191. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press,
1999.
Ellis, Roger. “‘Flores ad Fabricandam … Coronam’: An Investigation into
the Uses of the Revelations of St Bridget of Sweden in Fifteenth-Century
England.” Medium Aevum 51. (1982): 163–186.
———. “The Visionary and the Canon Lawyers.” In Prophets Abroad: The
Reception of Continental Holy Women in Late-Medieval England, edited by
Rosalynn Voaden, 71–90. Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1996.
———. “Text and Controversy: In Defence of St. Birgitta of Sweden.” In Text
and Controversy from Wyclif to Bale: Essays in Honour of Anne Hudson, edited
by Helen Barr and Ann M. Hutchinson, 303–321. Turnhout, Belgium:
Brepols, 2005.
Flemmig, Stephan. Hagiografie und Kulturtransfer: Birgitta von Schweden und
Hedwig von Polen. Orbis mediaevalis: Vorstellungsweslten des Mittelalters,
Vol. 14, edited by Hans-Werner Goetz et al. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2011.
Fredriksson, Anna. “The Council of Constance, Jean Gerson, and St. Birgitta’s
Revelaciones.” Medieval Studies 76 (2014): 217–39.
Gardiner, Eileen. Medieval Visions of Heaven and Hell: A Sourcebook. New York:
Garland, 1993.
Gilroy, Jane Hagan. “The Reception of Bridget of Sweden’s Revelations in Late
Medieval And Early Renaissance England.” PhD diss., Fordham University,
1999.
Hess, Cordelia. Heilige machen im spätmittelalterlichen Ostseeraum: Die
Kanonisationprozesse von Birgitta von Schweden, Nikolaus von Linköping und
Dorothea von Montau. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2008.
Hogg, James. “St. Birgitta’s Revelationes Reduced to a Book of Pious
Instruction.” In Vox Mystica: Essays on Medieval Mysticism in Honor of
Professor Valerie M. Lagorio, edited by Anne Clark Bartlett et al., 201–229.
Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1995.
Holloway, Julia Bolton. “Bride, Margery, Julian, and Alice: Bridget of Sweden’s
Textual Community in Medieval England.” In Margery Kempe: A Book of
Essays, edited by Sandra J. McEntire, 203–221. New York: Garland. 1992.
Jørgensen, Kaare Rübner. “Birgitta prophetans: The Use of St. Birgitta’s
Revelations in Sixteenth Century Controversies.” In Medieval Spirituality
in Scandinavia and Europe: A Collection of Essays in Honour of Tore Nyberg,
edited by Lars Bisgaard, 295–307. Odense, Belgium: Odense University
Press, 2001.
Karnes, Michelle. “Julian of Norwich’s Art of Interpretation.” Journal of
Medieval and Early Modern Studies 42, no. 2 (2012): 333–363.
Larson, Vickie Jeanne. “Pious Fringe: Julian of Norwich’s Readers and their
Books, 1413–1843.” PhD diss., University of Iowa, 2009.
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Stimme einer Frau jenseits von Geschlecht und Glauben.” Jahrbuch der
Oswald von Wolkenstein Gesellschaft 16 (2006): 101–111.
Morris, Bridget. St. Birgitta of Sweden. Woodbridge, England: Boydell & Brewer,
1999.
26 M.E. Peterson
———.“St. Birgitta of Sweden’s Revelationes (1492) in York Minster Library.”

The Journal of the Early Book Society for the Study of Manuscripts and Printing
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Desiring Body.” Mystics Quarterly 27, no. 2 (June 2001): 58–76.
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Margery Kempe, Walter Hilton’s ‘The Scale of Perfection,’ and the
Construction of the Medieval Enemy.” Master’s thesis, Tarleton State
University, 2011.
Sahlin, Claire L. Birgitta of Sweden and the Voice of Prophecy. Studies in Medieval
Mysticism 3. Woodbridge, England: Boydell, 2001.
Salmesvuori, Päivi. Power and Sainthood: The Case of Birgitta of Sweden. New
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Heliga Birgittas uppenbarelser.” Scandinavian Studies 82, no. 4 (2010):
389–416.
Schirmer, Elizabeth. “Reading Lessons at Syon Abbey: The Myroure of Oure
Ladye and the Mandates of Vernacular Theology.” In Voices in Dialogue:
Reading Women in the Middle Ages, edited by Linda Olson and Kathryn
Kerby-Fulton, 345–76. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press,
2005.
Searby, Denis Michael, and Bridget Morris. The Revelations of St. Birgitta of
Sweden. 4 Vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006–15.
Stjerna, Kirsi Irmeli. “St. Birgitta of Sweden: A Study of Birgitta’s Spiritual
Visions and Theology of Love.” PhD diss., Boston University, 1995.
Straubhaar, Sandra. “Birgitta Birgersdotter, Saint Bride of Sweden
(1303–1373).” In Women Writing in Latin: From Roman Antiquity to
Early Modern Europe. Vol. 2. Medieval Women Writing, edited by Laurie
J. Churchill, Phyllis R. Brown, and Jane E. Jeffrey, 309–318. New York:
Routledge, 2002.
Voaden, Rosalynn. God’s Words, Women’s Voices: The Discernment of Spirits in
the Writing of Late-Medieval Women Visionaries. York: York Medieval Press,
1999.
Watt, Diane. “Reconstructing the Word: The Political Prophecies of Elizabeth
Barton (1506–1534).” Renaissance Quarterly 50, no. 1 (1997): 136–63.
CHAPTER 3
The Uses of Tentatio: Satan, Luther,

and Theological Maturation
Carl P.E. Springer
Temptations presented by the Devil to humans, like the serpent’s

enticements of Eve in Eden (Genesis 3) or the alluring visions of Saint
Anthony in the desert, are traditionally described in negative terms. But
Martin Luther (1483–1546) valued tentatio highly, considering it to be
one of the essential ingredients of a theologian’s education. Throughout
his life Luther continued to emphasize how much his biblical theology
owed not only to such spiritual disciplines as meditation or prayer, but
also to tentatio, and in this regard he credited the Devil with providing
invaluable pedagogical assistance for his own theological development.
Oratio, Meditatio, Tentatio

Among the essential ingredients that go into making a good student of
theology, Luther lists oratio, meditatio, and tentatio.1 The last word is
difficult to translate succinctly into modern English. As Luther and other
contemporaries used the Latin word tentatio, it had a wider range of
signification than its English derivative, “temptation,” possesses today.
C.P.E. Springer (*) 
University of Tennessee Chattanooga, Chattanooga, USA

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-52198-5_3
28 C.P.E. Springer
Tentatio meant much more than “enticement” or “testing”; it also

encompassed the idea of “experience,” or even “suffering.” One of the
words used to translate it in German is Anfechtung, which can mean
“sharp attack” or “affliction.”
It is no accident that tentatio comes last in the triadic formulation
above. Luther is making use of the time-honored rhetorical device often
referred to with the Latin word (derived from the Greek) for “ladder,”
climax. Each element in a step-like sequence is carefully chosen to pre-
pare the way for the next one. Oratio can be rendered quite simply and
accurately as “prayer.” Prayer comes first because the proper relation-
ship with God is fundamental. Only then can meditation on God’s word
(cf. Psalms 1:2) proceed aright. Meditatio means something like
“thoughtful reflection” and has a range of connotations very similar to
our English word “meditation.” Both of these first two items are fairly
positive. One could easily imagine how oratio and meditatio might be
considered productive, practical exercises for anyone preparing to preach
a sermon or lead a devotion. The last element in the series is the most
arresting. Indeed, one might reasonably expect that tentatio would not
be included in the list at all. Its connotations are far more negative than
positive. Certainly, tentatio is not something that one would normally
ever seek out for oneself. Prayer and meditation can be laborious pro-
cesses, to be sure, even tedious, but they are not as unpleasant, painful,
or even potentially destructive as the deleterious effects of tentatio. Why
would it be included in such a list at all?
It is precisely because tentatio is so often overlooked that Luther
assigns it such a prominent position. Prayer and meditation are invalu-
able spiritual exercises, but even so, these two by themselves, in the
absence of tentatio, cannot adequately prepare good theologians; good
monks perhaps, but not theologians like Luther. Theologians must not
only engage in prayer and reflection, but they must also learn from the
formative, challenging experiences into which real life thrusts them,
rather than avoiding them, if they are to apply all that they have studied
for the benefit of the individuals and communities whom they serve and
with whom they live.2
“By living, no rather by dying and being damned, is a theologian
made, not by understanding, reading or speculating.”3 So said Luther,
the former friar. For him, the idea that it might be especially conducive
for those who wish to lead a truly spiritual life to beat a retreat from
the world of love, family, state, work, theological disputation, even war,
3 THE USES OF TENTATIO: SATAN, LUTHER, AND THEOLOGICAL … 29
was simply unthinkable. On the contrary, for Luther, the right way to
pursue divine truth and to contemplate the goodness of God, was not
in solitude or in a quiet community of fellow ascetics or scholars, but in
the busy, chaotic, messy world into which God’s son was born. The truly
“happier life,” Luther argues in a poem that lampoons the Epicureanism
of Martial’s Epigram 10.47, is one that takes seriously the Psalmodic
paradigm (cf. Psalms 128) of a father surrounded by wife and children,
all busy obeying God’s commands.4 In fact, after he left the monas-
tery behind, Luther himself became a university professor, got married
(1525), fathered six children, and even owned a house. As Roland
Bainton observes, marriage was for Luther “a school for character.” For
Luther and would-be Lutheran theologians, the joyful travails associated
with family life were to replace the ascetic rituals of monastery life so
long regarded by the medieval church as the “training ground of virtue
and the surest way to heaven.”5
Mere living itself, Luther suggests in the passage quoted above, is not
enough for the theologian’s maturation. It is possible, after all, for peo-
ple to go through their entire lives superficially, managing to avoid all
tentationes. Only by “dying and being damned,” in the same way that
the Apostle Paul declares that he is crucified with Christ, is it possible for
one to practice authentic theology. Not the Apostle himself, but Christ,
Paul declares, is living in him (cf. Galatians 2:20). No doubt Luther has
this passage in mind here, as well as Paul’s paradoxical observation in 2
Corinthians 6:9: “As dying, and behold we live.”6
Tentatio is critical for this kind of vivid, life-and-death theology. “It is
the touchstone,” Luther declares, “which not only teaches you to know
and understand, but also to experience how correct, how truthful, how
sweet, how lovely, how powerful, how reliable God’s word is, the wis-
dom beyond all wisdoms.”7 It is experience that makes what one has
learned in school vivid and real. The bitter realities of life make God’s
word sweet. In fact, the quality of one’s theology is proportionate to
how severe one’s tentationes have been. The Psalmist David must have
had a “tougher devil than we, because he could not have had such rev-
elations without great tentationes.”8 As Luther observed of himself: “I
did not learn my theology all at one time, but rather I have had always
had to dig deeper and deeper; my tentationes have brought me this far,
because without practice it is not possible to be taught.”9 (If Luther
had not had such a devil, he would have just been another theologus
30 C.P.E. Springer
speculativus.10) Luther offers an analogy for proper theological education

from the realm of medicine:
Other disciplines are not learned without practice. How good would
a doctor be if he were permanently taking course work in school? But
when he starts to practice, the more he works with actual cases in the
natural world, the more the doctor sees that he still has not mastered his
discipline.11
Practice is so essential because it is the only way in which it is possible to

discover whether what one has learned really works and how much more
one has yet to learn.
Luther’s deep interest in pursuing applied learning characterized
his own earliest school experiences, as his friend and colleague, Philip
Melanchthon, once observed. When Luther read Latin authors like
Virgil and Cicero in school, according to Melanchthon, he did not read
them as schoolboys were wont to do, “just picking out words,” but
instead drew from these authors’ works their “teachings or illustrations
about human life.” This is why Luther “paid close attention to the advice
and opinions contained in these writings,” and thanks to his extraordi-
nary memory, “kept them in the forefront of his mind as he read and
listened to them over and over again.”12
Luther changed his views on many things over the course of his life.
His thought, he once observed, resembled the erratic pattern of a wan-
dering planet more than the fixedness of a star.13 But even at the end of
his life, in his last written statement, Luther was still marveling at how
difficult it was to prepare oneself to read anything deeply and correctly,
especially the sacred scriptures, by dint of study alone, without actual
experience:
No one understands Cicero in his epistles correctly unless he has been

involved in the affairs of some important state for twenty years. No one
should think that he has tasted enough of the Holy Scriptures unless he
has governed the churches with the prophets for a hundred years … “Lay
no hand on this divine Aeneid, but rather fall down flat and worship at its
feet” [Statius, Thebaid 12.816–17]. We are beggars. This is true.14
Luther was a biblical humanist. God was revealed to Luther not in pri-
vate revelations, or even in the traditions and councils of the church, but
through his “external” word alone. And for Luther that meant the Bible.
Sola scriptura. The greatest test of a theologian’s abilities, therefore, was
how well he could read and apply the Holy Scriptures to his own life
and that of others. Even after a lifetime of teaching, preaching, and writ-
ing about the Bible, Luther confesses in his last words that he must still
admit that he has failed to understand it fully. He has not mastered the
Bible; it has overmastered him. Its rich, overwhelming, content makes
him feel like a beggar.
It is interesting that Luther mentions Cicero in this last bit of writ-
ing of his. Luther regarded the ancient Roman rhetor so highly that he
thought he should be in heaven. In one of his Table Talks he made men-
tion of Cicero:
the best, wisest, and most hard working man, and of how much he suf-
fered and accomplished. “I hope,” he said, “that our Lord God will also be
gracious to him and those like him. …”15
At the very least, Luther opined, Cicero should sit “higher” in the next
world than Duke George, a Christian (unlike Cicero), but a fierce foe of
Luther’s reformation efforts.
The fact that he “suffered” so much, even to the point of death, is
one of the main reasons Luther identifies for his hope that Cicero would
receive favorable consideration in the world to come: “Cicero bravely
suffered death in a just and good cause.”16 However much he may have
pursued a course of expediency earlier on in his life, Cicero found his
political backbone at the conclusion of his career, and his resistance to
Mark Anthony was unwavering at the very end. Cicero’s head, along
with the hand that wrote the impassioned Philippics, were removed from
his body at Anthony’s command, and affixed to the rostra from which he
had so often addressed his Roman countrymen in the forum.
This kind of dedication to civic engagement was not a deficiency on
Cicero’s part. In fact, in Luther’s eyes it was a positive virtue that he
went so far as to term “truly heroic.”17 Aristotle and other philosophers,
by contrast, were fatally associated with the idea that the contemplative
life is more conducive for the pursuit of virtue than the active life. As
a “man full of cares and civic burdens,” in Luther’s estimation Cicero
easily outranked Aristotle, “the leisured ass, who had more than enough
money and time on his hands.”18 The glory that comes from virtue, as
Cicero himself declared, depends not so much upon what one says but
32 C.P.E. Springer
what one does (De officiis 1.6). Under different temporal circumstances
Cicero could have been a Lutheran theologian.19
“Dear Devil”
That Luther hurled frequent verbal abuse, if not an actual inkpot, at
Satan, is well known.20 Luther gave the “the old evil foe” far greater
attention than he usually receives from most modern Protestant theo-
logians. Luther’s Morning and Evening Prayers leave the image of the
Devil as the last one in the mind of the pious petitioner: “Let your
holy angel be with me that the wicked foe may have no power over
me. Amen.”21 The high degree of interest that the premodern Luther
took in the Devil has been frequently noted in recent years. Most often
scholarly attention has focused on the negative aspects of this subject,
as, for instance, Luther’s belief that Satan was “the spirit of sadness.”22
Less often noted, however, is that Luther’s attitude toward the Devil was
sometimes positive, especially with regard to tentationes.
We should recognize that like most of his contemporaries Luther felt
himself to be in close and constant proximity to the Devil. In fact, he
could go so far as to address him fondly as Lieber Teufl [“Dear Devil”],
as though he were a member of his immediate family or a close friend.
Sometimes Luther would even tease him, addressing him as “Saint
Devil,” or “Holy Lord Satan,” asking him to pray for him because he
must be so “very pious.”23
Understanding Luther’s views on the Devil is a problem for mod-
erns, many of whom regard diabolical temptations and attacks as less
than real. This is clear from the audience guffaws that regularly greeted
Flip Wilson’s well-known laugh line: “The Devil made me do it.”
Representations of the Devil on bottles of hot sauce or canned ham in
the grocery aisle rarely give modern shoppers pause or cause them con-
sternation. In sermons, theological treatises, prayers and devotions today,
his presence is conspicuous by its absence. But it would be a mistake to
extrapolate such trivializing or minimalistic views of the Devil back to
Luther and his world of thought.
As Peter Brown observes of believers in late antiquity: “Christians
worshipped the one high God; but unlike modern post-Enlightenment
Christians, who are wary of the notion of a universe crowded with inter-
mediary beings, they positively gloried in the closeness of invisible guides
and protectors. … They did not carry around in their heads the empty
skies of [modern European] missionary Christianity.”24 For a closer

modern parallel to Luther’s worldview we might do well to compare him
to early Christians or to believers in Africa today. Luther’s views on the
Devil resemble less those of twentieth-century Protestant theologians
like Karl Barth or Paul Tillich than they do the contemporary hymn of
the Ghanaian poet Afua Kuma:
Satan, your bullets can’t touch us.

If Satan says he will rise up against us
We are still the people of Jesus.
If Satan troubles us,
Jesus Christ,
You who are the Lion of the grasslands,
You whose claws are sharp,
Will tear out his entrails
And leave them on the ground
For the flies to eat.25
As Philip Jenkins observes: “Demonology is credible for African and

Asian churches in a way it can scarcely be for educated westerners.”26
Far from being a distant, abstract spiritual concept for Luther and his
contemporaries, the Devil and his minions might very well fill the entire
world, as Luther suggests in his famous chorale, Ein’ feste Burg. He
might even show up as an uninvited guest in your house. As Luther once
related:
But it is not an unusual or unheard of thing for the Devil to bang around
and haunt houses. In our cloister in Wittenberg I heard him clearly. For
when I began to lecture on the Psalter and after we had sung the nocturnal
mass and I was sitting in the refectory, and studied and wrote in my notes,
the Devil came and made a noise in the cellar three times as though he was
dragging a bushel basket out of the cellar. Finally, when he did not want to
stop, I gathered my little books together and went to bed; but to this hour
I am sorry that I did not sit him out; I could have seen what else the Devil
wanted to to do. Once I also heard him above my bedroom in the cloister,
34 C.P.E. Springer
but when I realized that it was the Devil, I paid him no mind and fell back
to sleep.27
Instead of turning over and going back to sleep, Luther might have fol-
lowed the example of a woman in Magdeburg who drove Satan away by
breaking wind.28 Luther did often use “scatology-permeated language”
against the Devil. Heiko Oberman understands this propensity on his
part as “an expression of the painful battle fought body and soul against
the Adversary.”29 The Devil had lain dormant for centuries, while the
church was imprisoned in its “Babylonian captivity,” but now that the
Gospel was being proclaimed in its truth and purity, the Devil’s attacks
had become intensified in what Luther saw as the last days of the world.
He recommended dismissing the Devil emphatically by reminding him
of one’s baptism and the forgiveness of sins, but, if that approach failed,
by using scatological expressions such as the following: “If you haven’t
yet had enough, you Devil, I have also shit and pissed; wipe your mouth
on that, and take a good bite, too.”30 The Devil’s realm is in the nether
regions, as a monk explained to Satan (in verse) when he criticized him
for praying while sitting on the toilet:
Purgo meum ventrem

Et colo Deum omnipotentem;
Tibi quae infra,
Deo omnipotenti quod supra!
[I am cleaning out my intestines
And worshipping the all powerful God;
You get what is below where I am sitting,
While the all powerful God gets what is above me!].31
Notice, too, that Luther says that he stayed in bed, rather than getting
up and singing a hymn, as he did at other times when assailed by the
Devil. The adjective describing “the prince of this world” in Luther’s
Ein’ feste Burg, is “sour.” The Devil is “the creator of saddening cares
and disquieting worries,” but he can easily be put to flight by sweet
music, which is second only to theology in Luther’s mind because of
this unusual power.32 Music, dance, good company, beer and wine—all
could be put to good use in dispelling the isolating attacks of the gloomy
tempter. For someone with a “melancholic head,” which, as Luther
colorfully puts it, Satan may use as “his bathtub,” it is not a good idea to
be alone or to have “an empty stomach.”33
Luther would surely not have slept so securely if he had been a
Manichaean. But in Luther’s theology, the universe is not locked in a
battle between forces of light and darkness that are evenly matched. The
Devil is firmly under God’s control. He is, after all, an angel, albeit a
fallen one. God created him. Luther’s Devil is not only a rebellious
counterforce to God, but a divine minister as well, who is sent forth
among human beings, to carry out God’s gracious and overarching will.
He is “the prince of this world,” to be sure, but he operates in the world
only with God’s permission.
Despite his own frequent excoriation of “the world,” there are a num-
ber of aspects of Luther’s theology that could be described as “worldly.”
He marveled often that God would be willing to be incarnate, encased
in a mother’s womb, laid in a manger, surrounded by animals and the
lowliest of humans, and even laid in a tomb. It was in the world, not
heaven, that the great strife between life and death took place. It was
the “worldly wisdom” in pagan works such as Cicero’s De officiis and
Aesop’s fables that Luther believed could be so aptly applied to life in
what he calls “the kingdom of God’s left hand.”34 This is where the
Devil feels right at home, this fallen world, where the holy God cannot
rule, but the prince of this world can.35
Luther’s Wittenberg was no Geneva. Unlike Calvin and other con-
temporary reformers, Luther had no utopian dreams for a new kind of
society that would emerge after the Gospel had been proclaimed long
enough in its truth and purity. He did not imagine that human beings
would ever become sinless this side of eternity (cf. Romans 7:18–19).
The bondage of the human will is a permanent condition. The “Old
Adam” is still present even in the most pious of Christians, and he needs
to be “drowned with daily contrition and repentance,” as Luther puts it
in his Small Catechism.36
From a philosophical perspective, Luther’s view of the inevitabil-
ity of tentatio more closely resembles that of the ancient Stoics than the
Epicureans.37 He frequently railed against the latter, seldom against the
former. For the Epicureans, pain was to be avoided at all costs and pleas-
ure to be sought out.38 Stoic philosophers like Seneca, however, rec-
ommended simply shouldering whatever burden Fate assigned them.39
36 C.P.E. Springer
Luther was quite comfortable with this kind of passive approach to liv-
ing. After all, anything good that human beings possess is mere passivum
anyway, the product not of something that they have done, but entirely
the result of an “alien” grace, given by God without “any merit or wor-
thiness in us.”40
The principle of sola gratia includes as well those gifts humans do not
always understand or appreciate, like suffering.41 As the later Lutheran
hymn puts it: Was Gott tut, das ist wohlgetan (“Whatever God does is
well done”). And as Job asks (2:10): “Shall we receive good at the hand
of the Lord and not evil?”42 No matter how “evil” anything that is pre-
sented to them in their life may appear to be, children of a loving heav-
enly father will not question anything that comes from his gracious hand,
not even death. It was possible for a Lutheran composer like Johann
Sebastian Bach to set texts such as Komm, süsser Tod (“Come, sweet
death”) to memorable music. The Devil really “can harm us none,” as
Luther puts it in Ein’ feste Burg.
The question as to how a good God could allow suffering to hap-
pen, especially to people who do not deserve it, was one whose serious-
ness Luther recognized, but did not often permit himself to ask.43 To
judge from an American best-seller some decades ago entitled When
Bad Things Happen to Good People, the author (and his readers) not
only imagine themselves to belong to this group of “good people,” but
also consider themselves able to draw a distinction between “good” and
“bad” things.44 Luther, by contrast, saw himself as a “beggar,” hardly in
a position to question the goodness of God, as though he were his supe-
rior, as though he were God’s God.45 Even Jesus refused to call himself
“good” (Luke 18:19).
The assignment which John Milton set himself in Paradise Lost, “to
justify the ways of God to man,” an intellectual exercise known as “the-
odicy,” is something of a fools-errand from a Lutheran perspective.
“Philosophically speaking, theodicies end in betrayals and sin against
those who suffer: theologically, we preach Christ crucified, not suffer-
ing justified.”46 To the oft-expressed concern that God might not be
“good,” as though the great sovereign being himself could be subject to
a norm outside and above himself and then fail to meet its expectations,
the Lutheran counter is: “Let God be God.”47 It is God’s will that is to
be done, and that is the ultimate import of all real prayer.
Sola fide (“by faith alone”) is another one of the tenets of Lutheran
theology. Pistis, the Greek word often translated as “faith,” is not simply
intellectual assent to a body of truths, but is perhaps better rendered into

English as “trust.” “Faith,” in other words, is not simply “knowledge.”
It is nigh impossible to calculate God’s reasons for allowing suffering to
happen. Why does the all-powerful God not simply put a stop to all of it
right now? Why did the omnipotent creator of a world put such a prob-
lematic tree in the middle of Paradise in the first place? Why did he per-
mit the serpent to tempt Eve? There may be no answer to such questions
that would satisfy a logical mind, but they do not shake the confidence of
those who put their trust in God. Those who trust in him will roll over
in their beds, like Luther, and fall back asleep, even though the Devil is
upstairs.
This kind of trust relies, according to the last of Luther’s 95 Theses,
not upon “the false security of peace,” but, strangely enough, upon
the presence in one’s life of “many tribulations” (Acts 14:22). As Jesus
instructs his followers in the Sermon on the Mount: “Blessed are you
when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil
against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward
is great in heaven” (Matthew 5:11–12). Only if Christians are not suf-
fering does Luther advise them to worry, because the absence of afflic-
tion means that Satan does not feel it necessary to attack them; they are
already safely under his aegis.
It may be true, as Luther observes, that “God both loves and hates
temptations,”48 depending on their ultimate effect, but he himself per-
sonally “tempts no one,” and certainly never with malicious intent. This
is how Luther’s explanation of the sixth petition of the Lord’s Prayer
begins in the Small Catechism, echoing James 1:13: “Let no one say
when he is tempted, ‘I am being tempted by God,’ for God cannot be
tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no one.” The Devil in Luther’s
thought performs a valuable etiological function; his continued baleful
activity helps to account for the persistence of temptation and suffer-
ing in a world designed to be “very good” (Genesis 1:31) by its divine
creator.49 And suffering has meaning in Luther’s thought. The purpose
of suffering, as Paul observes in Romans 5:3–4, is beneficial, at least
eventually: “We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering pro-
duces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character pro-
duces hope, and hope does not put us to shame.” Suffering is one of the
marks of the true church, along with Word and Sacrament, according to
Luther. In his observations on “Seven Penitential Psalms,” he declares:
“weeping is preferred to working and suffering exceeds all doing.”50
38 C.P.E. Springer
Learning from the Devil

Comparing his own deeply intensive theological development with that
of more shallow and less theologically mature “fanatics,” Luther once
observed that they had not had the benefit of the “real contradictor,” the
Devil, who as Luther says, is a very good teacher (der lernets einen wol).51
A subject as weighty as God’s grace, Luther says, cannot be apprehended
fully, absent the tentationes administered by the Devil.52
The Devil so effective at this kind of teaching because he is “the real
contradictor” (der rechte Widersprecher). Luther is probably thinking here
of the Greek word diabolos, which means literally “the accuser.” The
Devil is the ultimate critic, a relentless and truthful dialectician.53 Unlike
human teachers who decline (for all sorts of reasons) to render criticism
ruthlessly, or whose critique is often far from the mark, the Devil slings
accusations that hurt so much precisely because they are so consistently
accurate. He knows the human heart better than its possessor does. He is
supremely effective at what he does. When someone once complained to
Luther that he was being tempted mercilessly by the Devil on the right
hand and on the left, he responded: “The Devil is able to do that master-
fully; he wouldn’t be the Devil if he couldn’t.”54
This is the same kind of valuable function that the Law plays theo-
logically in its so-called “second use.”55 The Ten Commandments, for
instance, can be seen to function not only as a curb against sin and a
guide for correct behavior and attitudes, but also as a mirror to show
those who behold in it the reflection of their own imperfections. This
is not far different from how the Devil exercises his critical function; he
reveals human sinfulness when it might otherwise remain hidden. In
this respect, everything that he says has the ring of an unpleasant truth.
Satan’s “strange syllogism,” as Luther explains, proceeds as follows: First
premise: “You have sinned.” Second premise: “God is angry with sin-
ners.” Conclusion: “Therefore, despair.” The only possible response for
the believer is not to deny the biblical premises, but “to seize hold of the
article of the forgiveness of sins.”56
“How else to explain why God has another adversary in the Holy
Scriptures?” Luther asks.57 If there were no such use for the Devil,
why would God have ever set up an adversary of this sort? Why would
Jesus be driven out into the wilderness, by God’s spirit, to be tempted
by Satan, at the beginning of his ministry (see Mark 1:12), unless there
were some point to the exercise? Luther’s answer is that not just Christ,
but Christians, too, need this kind of tentatio to grow theologically. It

has an educational purpose. The Apostle Paul was subject to “buffeting”
at the hands of “a messenger from Satan” whom he implored God to be
freed of at least three times. God sided against Paul and with the Devil,
because, as he said, he wanted Paul to learn an important lesson, namely,
that his “grace was sufficient” for him.58
The purpose of suffering, for Luther, is that we learn through it.
(Perhaps it is the only way in which we really learn anything at all.) More
than once Luther credited his own theological development to this indis-
pensable, if not always appreciated, diabolical function. In his “Preface to
the Wittenberg Edition of the German Writings” of 1539, he says:
I must give my papists most hearty thanks that they have beaten, pressed,
and cramped me so, through the Devil’s raving, meaning that they have
turned me into a pretty good theologian, which otherwise I would not
have become.59
How exactly does Luther’s strange theology instructor do this? For one
thing, by dint of the bitter experiences and suffering to which the Devil
exposes Christians over the course of their lives, he teaches them how
to really comprehend the word of God. It takes a lifetime of effort, not
just a single educational epiphany. Even after all these years, Luther says,
he still does not really understand the Lord’s Prayer. Unlike Zwingli and
other theologians who are quick to learn and to teach (see James 3:1),
Luther calls himself a slow learner. It is practice over time that is needed.
Theories may seem very attractive, brilliant insights are impressive, but
the real test is whether the Scripture can be put to effective use in real-
life situations:
Therefore, it is the greatest gift of all when one has a text of which he can
say: “This is right; I know this.” They think that they know everything as
soon as they have heard one sermon. Zwingli also failed in this respect,
insofar as he thought he could do it all already, that it was a simple matter.
But I know that I still do not know the “Our Father.” Without practice no
one can be taught. That farmer put it well: “The harness is fine, if some-
one knows how to use it.”60
The centrality of the Bible in Luther’s theology increased his eager-

ness to have budding theologians study language and literature. Luther
40 C.P.E. Springer
maintained that “the first concern of a theologian” should be how to

become “a good textualist.”61 After all, Jesus was able to ward off the
attacks of the Devil when tempted in the wilderness by using apt quota-
tions from the Scriptures. Luther warned that without such verbal facil-
ity in the word of God, based on his observations of what happened to
theology during the late Middle Ages, there would be frightening con-
sequences for its future: “I am convinced that without literary training,
pure theology is not able to stand upright, just as heretofore it has col-
lapsed entirely when literary studies toppled and fell.”62
It is not enough to know the entire Bible by heart; what is important
is knowing how to use it properly. Here Luther gives an example of how
Satan teaches. The accuser criticizes his human pupils unremittingly. He
goes right to the weakest part of their argument. And that weak spot is
always exactly the place in which humans begin to rely upon themselves
instead of God. Only experience will teach the theologian the lesson of
lessons, how to depend only upon arguments that center around what
God has done for humans instead of vice versa. Only responses that pre-
suppose that theologians themselves are truly beggars will stand up to
diabolical criticism:
So, the Holy Scriptures are also certain enough, but God grant that I
know how to use the right words. Because when Satan argues with me
about whether God is merciful to me or not, I dare not say: “He who
loves God, will possess the kingdom of God.” Because at once he will he
raise the objection: “You have not loved God!” Then I cannot object to
him that I am a careful reader or preacher. The shoe doesn’t fit the horse.
But that Jesus Christ has died for me and the article of the forgiveness of
sins, that works.63
Theological education of this sort can take place in two ways: either
directly, as in the case of Jesus’ temptations in the desert, or indirectly. It
is possible to learn through others’ suffering, vicariously. One of Aesop’s
fables that Luther included in his collection of fables that he began but
never finished while staying in Veste Koburg in 1530 was the following:
A lion, fox and ass were hunting with each other and caught a deer. Then
the lion ordered the ass to divide up the prey. The ass made three piles. At
this the lion became angry and pulled the ass’s skin over his head, so that
he stood there with blood streaming from him, and he ordered the fox to
divide up the prey. The fox pushed the three parts together and gave them
all right to the lion. Then the lion laughed at this and said: “Who taught
you how to divide like that?” The fox pointed to the ass and said: “The
doctor over there with the red biretta.”64
Luther admired the ancient Greeks and their system of liberal education
and the results it produced.65 Learning lessons in the “school of hard
knocks” is one of the most important of ancient Greek ethical princi-
ples. The Greek phrase pathei mathos (“learning comes through suffer-
ing”) is the succinct way in which this principle is expressed in Aeschylus’
Agamemnon (176–178): “Zeus, who guided men to think … has laid it
down that wisdom comes alone through suffering.” Greek tragedy was
not simply entertainment for entertainment’s sake; it was, as it has aptly
been called, an exercise in the “paideia of pity.”66 The point of tragedy,
as Aristotle observes in his Poetics, is that the audience undergoes some-
thing vicariously that evokes their emotions of pity and fear. The lessons
they draw from dramatic examplars might well change the way they think
or live their own lives as a result. A moral is added to the fable in a 1557
edition that makes explicit its unstated lesson: “Happy is he whom the
dangers of others makes cautious.” The clever fox has learned a valuable
lesson from the tragic fate of the donkey.67
This is one reason, surely, why Luther insisted that the bonarum
artium cognitio (“knowledge of the good arts”) must be one of the
essential ingredients in a theologian’s education.68 Whether written “by
pagans or Christians,” literature was indispensable. In a letter to the
Lutheran poet Helius Eobanus Hessus, he observes:
Besides, these fears of yours should not move you in the slightest when
you worry that we Germans are becoming more barbaric than we ever
were, with literary learning collapsing because of our theology …. No,
indeed, I notice that no important revelation of God’s Word has ever
occurred unless he first prepared the way with a rising and flowering of
languages and literature, as its precursors, John the Baptists, if you will.69
By assigning them to read works such as Aesop’s fables and Cicero’s De

officiis, Luther hoped that young theologians could learn vicariously.
Through the suffering of others they might be prepared to encounter
the tentationes of the Devil in real life some day themselves.
42 C.P.E. Springer
We might note that there is no provision for anything resembling

what we refer to today as “trigger warnings” in Luther’s pedagogy. If
gruesome stories like Aesop’s fables make young readers uncomfortable,
so much the better. That is the rough way the Devil goes about his edu-
cational process. Far better to read a story about terrible afflictions vis-
ited upon someone else and to learn from these painful experiences while
safe in school than to be sheltered from such visions of reality until they
are encountered later in actuality, without any kind of preparation.
Still, Luther was not some sort of punitive monster in the classroom.
He was himself an educator by profession, and he valued the teaching
vocation: “But a pastor and schoolteacher plant and nurture young trees
and saplings in their gardens. Oh, they have a valuable office and func-
tion, and they are the most precious jewels of the church; they preserve
the church.”70 If Luther had not become a theologian, he would have
liked to have been a teacher: “For I know that this work, next to the
office of the preacher, is the most useful, grandest, and best of them
all.”71 Luther describes the schools he himself attended as “a hell and
purgatory in which we were martyred because of cases and tenses even
though we learned absolutely nothing, despite so much beating, trem-
bling, distress, and miserableness.”72 Elsewhere he complains: “There are
some teachers who are as cruel as hangmen. One time I was beaten fif-
teen times before noon without having done anything wrong, for I was
supposed to decline and conjugate and had not yet learned how to do
that.”73
Despite his criticism of his own instruction, Luther must have actu-
ally learned quite a lot in his early schooling; after all, he was able to
go on and complete a doctoral degree and become a professor. In fact,
the educational methods he espoused for his own students were not all
that different from those tedious strategies with which he had himself
been trained. He continued to appreciate the key role of the memory “as
the locus for learning, reasoning, imagination and thought.”74 No mat-
ter how kindly a schoolmaster might be, learning in Lutheran schools
still required some real mental work (and even suffering) on the part of
students.
If the Devil had a role to play in the successful development of
Luther as a theologian, then he must have been equally important for
the training of those who followed in his footsteps, taking full advantage
of the literature-heavy curriculum Luther approved and Melanchthon
implemented at the University of Wittenberg and elsewhere. That

the success of Lutheran theology owed a great deal to this most unu-
sual pedagogue is a historical judgment that Luther himself would have
heartily endorsed, even if Satan’s name is not included by most historians
of education on the list of great teachers of the Reformation.
Notes
1. D. Martin Luthers Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe. Weimar: Böhlau 1883
[hereafter WA]: WA 50,659. See Kelly, “Oratio, Meditatio, Tentatio
Faciunt Theologum,” 9–27.
2. See Kleinig, “Oratio, Meditatio, Tentatio,” 255–68.
3. WA 5,163. Here and elsewhere translations from Luther’s works are my
own.
4. See my “Martin’s Martial,” 23–50.
5. Bainton, Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther, 300.
6. Here and elsewhere for biblical quotations, I use the English Standard
Version.
7. WA 50, 660.
8. D. Martin Luthers Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Tischreden. Weimar:
Böhlau, 1912–21 [hereafter WATr]: WATr 1, 87.
9. WATr 1,146.
10. Podmore, Struggling with God, 102.
11. WATr 1,146.
12. Corpus Reformatorum 6,157.
13. WATr 4,501.
14. WATr 5,317–18. See Bayer, “Vom Wunderwerk Gottes Wort,” 258–79.
15. WATr 4,14.
16. WA 40.1,219.
17. WA 40.1,543.
18. WATr 2,456–7.
19. For a fuller discussion, see the second chapter of my Cicero in Heaven: The
Roman Rhetor and Luther’s Reformation (forthcoming, Brill).
20. See, for example, Springer, “Luther’s Latin Poetry and Scatology,” 373–87.
21. WA 30.1, 322–3.
22. WATr 1, 86.
23. WATr 2,132 and WATr 1,261.
24. As quoted by Jenkins, The New Faces of Christianity, 99.
25. Bediako, Jesus and the Gospel in Africa, 11.
26. See Jenkins, Believing in the Global South.” For an exorcism that Luther
himself performed, see WATr 3,518–19.
44 C.P.E. Springer
27. WATr 6,219. For a fundamental study, see Obendiek, Der Teufel bei
Martin Luther.
28. WATr 3,635.
29. See Oberman, Luther: Man between God and the Devil, 108–9.
30. WATr 6,216.
31. WATr 2,413.
32. See Leaver, Luther’s Liturgical Music, 93.
33. WATr 2,64; see also WATr 1,122–3 and WATr 2,33.
34. WA 36,385.
35. WATr 2,308.
36. WA 30.1,312.
37. See Boyle, “Stoic Luther,” 69–93.
38. See Hibler, Happiness through Tranquility.
39. See, for example, the strange way in which Seneca comforts his mother
in her moment of grief (Consolatio ad Helviam 3.1–2) by reminding her
of all the suffering that she has been fortunate enough to have already
endured.
40. “The perspective of the vita passiva brings the notion of ‘experience’ into
unequivocal opposition to the modern concept of experience as under-
stood especially since Schleiermacher. For Luther, experience is not an
independent, self-sufficient category, but rather one bound to Scripture
and filled through concrete encounter with God’s word” (Hütter,
Suffering Divine Things, 74).
41. On this point, see Pfeiffer, “The Place of Tentatio in the Formation of
Church Servants,” 119.
42. For Luther’s thoughts on Job’s afflictions while himself suffering from a
painful intestinal ailment, see WATr 4,489–92.
43. WATr 3,174: “The most serious temptations are when Satan induces us to
seek in our conscience reasons for good or evil outcomes …. The ques-
tion of why (quare) has tormented all the saints.” See also WATr 2,218.
44. Kushner, When Bad Things Happen to Good People.
45. Luther distinguishes between spiritual temptations that lead us to “hate
God, blaspheme, or despair” (WATr 4,660) or to be unsure “whether
God is the Devil or the Devil is God.” To his way of thinking, these kinds
of temptations are much worse than “temporal” ones (WATr 5,600).
46. Schulz, The Problem of Suffering, 27.
47. See Watson, Let God Be God.
48. WATr 1,483.
49. See Genesis 1:31.
50. As quoted in Schulz, The Problem of Suffering, 15.
51. WATr 1,146.
52. WATr 2,68.
53. See WATR 4,513 on the Devil as dialectician.

54. WATr 2,26.
55. Concordia: The Lutheran Confessions, 558.
56. WATr 3,623.
57. WATr 1,146.
58. See 2 Corinthians 12:7.
59. WA 50,660.
60. WATr 1,146.
61. WA 40.2593.
62. D. Martin Luthers Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Briefwechsel. Weimar:
Böhlau, 1930–78 [hereafter WABr]: WABr 3,50.
63. WATr 1,146
64. See Springer, Luther’s Aesop, 133.
65. WA 15,46.
66. Alford, “Greek Tragedy and Civilization,” 259–80.
67. See the discussion in Luther’s Aesop, 134.
68. WATr 3,312.
69. WABr 3,50.
70. WA 50,617.
71. WA 30.2,579–80.
72. WA 15,46.
73. WATr 5,254. On Luther’s own education, see Scheel, Martin Luther: vom
Katholizismus zur Reformation, Vol. 1.
74. See Korcok, Lutheran Education, 87.
Bibliography
Alford, C. Fred. “Greek Tragedy and Civilization: The Cultivation of Pity.”
Political Research Quarterly 46 (1993): 259–80.
Bainton, Roland H. Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther. New York and
Nashville: Abingdon-Cokesbury Press, 1950.
Bayer, Oswald. “Vom Wunderwerk Gottes Wort recht zu verstehen: Luthers letz-
ter Zettel.” Kerygma und Dogma 37 (1991): 258–79.
Bediako, Kwame. Jesus and the Gospel in Africa: History and Experience.
Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2004.
Boyle, Marjorie O’Rouke. “Stoic Luther.” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 73
(1982): 69–93.
Concordia: The Lutheran Confessions: A Reader’s Edition of the Book of Concord.
Paul T. McCain, gen. editor. St. Louis: Concordia (2nd edn.), 2006.
Corpus reformatorum. Halle: Schwetske, 1834 ff.
D. Martin Luthers Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe. Weimar: Böhlau, 1883 ff.
46 C.P.E. Springer
D. Martin Luthers Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Briefwechsel. Weimar: Böhlau,

1930–78.
D. Martin Luthers Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Tischreden. Weimar: Böhlau,
1912–21.
Hibler, Richard. Happiness through Tranquility: The School of Epicurus. Lanham:
University Press of America, 1984.
The Holy Bible: English Standard Version. Wheaton: Crossway, 2001.
Hütter, Reinhard. Suffering Divine Things: Theology as Church Practice, transl.
Doug Stott. Grand Rapids and Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2000.
Jenkins, Philip. The New Faces of Christianity: Believing the Bible in the Global
South. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Jenkins, Philip. “Believing in the Global South,” First Things, December 2006.
Accessed March 24, 2016: http://www.firstthings.com/article/2006/12/
believing-in-the-global-south.
Kelly, Robert. “Oratio, Meditatio, Tentatio Faciunt Theologum: Luther’s Piety
and the Formation of Theologians.” Consensus 19 (1993): 9–27.
Kleinig, John W. “Oratio, Meditatio, Tentatio: What Makes a Theologian?”
Concordia Theological Quarterly 66 (2002): 255–68.
Korcok, Thomas. Lutheran Education: From Wittenberg to the Future. St. Louis:
Concordia, 2011.
Kushner, Harold. When Bad Things Happen to Good People. New York: Avon
Books, 1981.
Leaver, Robin. Luther’s Liturgical Music. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007.
Obendiek, Harmannus. Der Teufel bei Martin Luther: Eine theologische
Untersuchung. Berlin: Furche Verlag, 1931.
Oberman, Heiko. Luther: Man between God and the Devil. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1989.
Pfeiffer, Andrew K. “The Place of Tentatio in the Formation of Church
Servants.” The Lutheran Theological Journal 30 (1996): 111–19.
Podmore, Simon D. Struggling with God: Kierkegaard and the Temptation of
Spiritual Trial. Cambridge: James Clark, 2013.
Schulz, Gregory P. The Problem of Suffering: A Father’s Hope. St. Louis:
Concordia, 2011.
Scheel, Otto. Martin Luther: vom Katholizismus zur Reformation. Vol. 1: Auf
der Schule und Universität. Tübingen: Mohr (4th edn.), 1921.
Springer, Carl P. E. Luther’s Aesop. Kirksville: Truman State University Press, 2011.
Springer, Carl P. E. “Luther’s Latin Poetry and Scatology.” Lutheran Quarterly
23 (2009): 373–87.
Springer, Carl P. E. “Martin’s Martial: Reconsidering Luther’s Relationship with the
Classics.” The International Journal of the Classical Tradition 14 (2007): 23–50.
Watson, Philip S. Let God Be God: An Interpretation of the Theology of Martin
Luther. Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2000.
CHAPTER 4
As an Angel of Light: Satanic Rhetoric

in Early Modern Literature and Theology
David Parry
Satan is “a cunning Rhetorician,” warns Richard Sibbes, an influential

Puritan minister who preached in Cambridge and London.1 Likewise,
the Dissenting preacher and writer John Bunyan, best known for his
allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress, notes the use of “Satanical Rhetorick” in
a marginal annotation to the temptations offered by his devil character
Diabolus in The Holy War.2 In the broad sense, rhetoric can be described
as the art of persuasion, and few who accept the existence of the devil
would doubt his persuasive powers. This essay, however, will focus in on
one particular dynamic of satanic rhetoric, described by St Paul in terms
of Satan appearing as an “angel of light,” and linked by at least one
sixteenth-century rhetorician to one particular rhetorical figure, that of
paradiastole.
Warnings of the persuasive power of the devil and his presentation
of himself to the tempted soul relate to wider anxieties over the verac-
ity of appearances in early modern Europe (including the British Isles).
For instance, Katharine Eisaman Maus speaks of a “sense of discrepancy
D. Parry (*) 
Christ’s College, University of Cambridge,
Cambridge, England

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-52198-5_4
48 D. Parry
between ‘inward disposition’ and ‘outward appearance’” in Renaissance

theater.3 Leif Dixon summarizes a more general mood of skepticism
across different domains of early modern culture:
Some people no longer felt entirely able to trust their senses – a gap was
opened up between what was perceived and what actually was. The idea
that man was being deceived, or was deceiving himself, began to enter
into mainstream discourse, and soon was to spread like wildfire through all
aspects of thought. Political theory became fascinated by the possibilities
of dissimulation; humanist rhetoric was prized for its ability to manipulate
concepts, and thus audiences; popular theatre, too‚ played with subjectivity
and with inversions of the natural order.4
In the spiritual domain the stakes of discerning between appearance and

reality were high, since the individual’s salvation or damnation could
depend on such discernment. In English Protestantism, the gap between
appearance and reality generated soteriological anxiety around the fig-
ure of the “hypocrite”—the one who appeared to be a true believer but
in fact was not.5 It is pertinent here that the etymology of “hypocrite”
relates back to an actor playing a role on the stage.
Polemic and Paradiastole: Satan’s Slippery Rhetoric

The devil’s deceptive self-presentation is also described in terms of theat-
rical performance in both early modern religious writing and more “liter-
ary” texts of the period. Martin Luther, for instance, speaks of the devil
masking himself. One of the most disturbing features of satanic activity
according to Luther’s works is the apparent difficulty sometimes of dis-
tinguishing between divine and diabolic appearances:
So God and Satan weary us with masks and external spirits so that we are
led to believe that what is of God is Satan, and what is Satan is of God, and
then we say in our heart, “I wish I had never been born.”6
For Luther, the devil can even take on the appearance of Christ himself:
The devil so clothes and adorns himself with Christ’s name and works and
can pose and act in such a way that one could swear a thousand oaths that
it is truly Christ himself, although in reality it is the Archenemy and the
true Archantichrist.7
4 AS AN ANGEL OF LIGHT: SATANIC RHETORIC … 49
These anxieties over the devil’s presentation of himself as good or

even as God are strikingly identified with one particular technique of
classical rhetoric by the German humanist scholar Johann (Joannes)
Susenbrotus.8 Although he remained a Catholic, Susenbrotus’ Epitome
Troporum ac Schematum et Grammaticorum & Rhetorum was used as a
textbook in Protestant England, and T.W. Baldwin has demonstrated the
influence of Susenbrotus on Shakespeare and other Elizabethan writers.9
In his definition of the figure paradiastole, the technique of excus-
ing a vice by characterizing it in terms of the nearest virtue, Susenbrotus
observes that “we have an example of paradiastole when vices show
themselves under the guise of virtue, and by this means even the Devil
himself can be transfigured into an Angel of light.”10 Susenbrotus is here
alluding to a biblical phrase from 2 Corinthians 11:14, whose context is
a polemical attack by St Paul on his doctrinal opponents, whom he sees
as agents of Satan seeking to deceive the Corinthian Christians:
For such are false apostles, deceitful workers, transforming themselves into
the apostles of Christ. And no marvel; for Satan himself is transformed
into an angel of light. Therefore it is no great thing if his ministers also be
transformed as the ministers of righteousness; whose end shall be accord-
ing to their works (2 Corinthians 11:13–15).11
Interest in paradiastole has been revived in recent scholarship by the

intellectual historian Quentin Skinner.12 As Skinner explores, the rhetori-
cal efficacy of paradiastole exploits an understanding of ethics developed
by Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics, in which virtue is the golden
mean between two opposite vices—for instance, true courage entails hav-
ing the right degree of boldness rather than its deficiency, cowardice, or
its excess, foolhardiness.13
In an English context, paradiastole is defined in the Elizabethan rhet-
oric manuals of Thomas Wilson, Henry Peacham, George Puttenham,
and Angel Day, but it is more vividly conveyed (though not by name) in
a poem by Sir Thomas Wyatt from the 1530s:
With the neryst virtue to cloke always the vise

And as to pourpose like wise it shall fall
To press the vertue that it may not rise;
As dronkenes good felloweshippe to call,
50 D. Parry
The frendly ffoo with his dowble face

Say he is gentill and courtois therewithal;
And say that Favell hath a goodly grace
In eloquence, and crueltie to name
Zele of Justice and chaunge in tyme and place[.]14
Skinner observes that the examples of paradiastole used by Tudor rheto-

ricians were nearly all taken from the classical accounts, with a few excep-
tions:
Wilson proposes one new example, which Peacham repeats: that of excus-
ing gluttony and drunkenness as good fellowship. Peacham adds two
more, both of which gesture at his puritan sympathies: one is excusing
idolatry as “pure religion,” the other excusing pride as “cleanlynesse.”15
However, Skinner points out that there is some confusion in the classi-
cal definition of paradiastole—while Quintilian gave the definition that
has endured, the earliest definition from P. Rutilius Lupus (around ad
20) says that paradiastole is the technique of exposing when someone
is trying to pass off a vice as a virtue.16 Skinner observes that these two
contrasting definitions of the figure illustrate the instability of the para-
diastolic dynamic, since it is often very difficult to determine objectively
where the golden mean is, and so both parties to a dispute can plausibly
depict the other as deviating from the golden mean and thus falling into
vice. This rhetorical redescription could thus be used to impugn virtue as
well as to exculpate vice.17
Susenbrotus’ connection of the figure of paradiastole to St Paul’s
observation that “Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light”
is illuminating when examining other explorations of the devil’s decep-
tive persuasiveness in early modern writing. For instance, John Calvin’s
commentary on 2 Corinthians brings together a number of the themes
drawn together by Susenbrotus:
when Satan tempts us to evil, he does not profess to be what he really is.
For he would lose his object, if we were made aware of his being a mortal
enemy, and opposer of our salvation. Hence he always makes use of some
cloak for the purpose of insnaring us, and does not immediately show his
horns (as the common expression is) but rather makes it his endeavor to
appear as an angel. Even when he tempts us to gross crimes, he makes use,

nevertheless, of some pretext that he may draw us, when we are off our
guard, into his nets. What then, if he attacks us under the appearance of
good, nay, under the very title of God?18
Calvin’s warning that Satan “attacks us under the appearance of good”

resonates with another aspect of Aristotelian ethical theory that was
taken up by medieval scholastic theologians such as Thomas Aquinas: the
idea that people choose to act in certain ways in pursuit of some appar-
ent good, to the extent that, even when making a morally wrong choice,
they are not consciously pursuing evil qua evil, but choosing an evil
“under the appearance of the good” (sub specie boni).19
Calvin also, like Paul, draws a connection between Satan’s disguising
himself under the appearance of good, and Satan’s agents in the form
of illegitimate religious leaders doing the same: “His life-guards imitate,
as I have said, the same artifice. These are golden preambles—‘Vicar of
Christ’—‘Successor of Peter’—‘Servant of God’s servants,’ but let the
masks be pulled off, and who and what will the Pope be discovered to
be?”20 Calvin’s reference to masks once again associates satanic deception
with theatrical performance.
This polemical use of the Pauline “angel of light” to attack one’s doc-
trinal opponents is pervasive in early modern religious writing, though,
of course, the contemporary application of this Pauline polemic is ver-
satile as the opponents in view will vary. For instance, in controversies
around the early Quakers, both Quaker pamphlets and anti-Quaker
tracts characterized their opponents as deceived by Satan in the form of
an angel of light.21
The motif also crosses confessional divides in the domain of discern-
ing spiritual experience. For instance, as Susan Schreiner has explored,
the Spanish Catholic mystic Teresa of Ávila expresses similar concerns to
those of Luther in her guidance on the spiritual life:
It is always good that we walk with fear and caution. For, although the
work may be from God, the devil at times can transform himself into an
angel of light; and if the soul has not a great deal of experience, it will not
discern the devil’s work.22
Like Calvin, Teresa identifies the devil as sometimes coming “under the
color of the good,” the dynamic that Susenbrotus identifies with the fig-
ure of paradiastole.23
52 D. Parry
Another notable Spanish Catholic, the founder of the Jesuits, Ignatius

of Loyola, uses 2 Corinthians 11:14 to warn of the subtlety of Satan’s
temptations towards those seeking to deepen their devotion:
It is proper to the evil Angel, who forms himself under the appearance of
an angel of light, to enter with the devout soul and go out with himself:
that is to say, to bring good and holy thoughts, conformable to such just
soul, and then little by little he aims at coming out drawing the soul to his
covert deceits and perverse intentions.24
Both Catholic and Protestant divines seek to provide guidance in dis-

cerning divine from experientially similar diabolic activity. For instance,
Calvin exhorts his readers to test the spirits by their conformity to the
“most certain mark” of Scripture,25 and the Catholic abbot Louis de
Blois offers a moral test:
Those revelations which are made from heaven to the pious, console and
soothe the mind, and make it humble; those visions, on the contrary,
which are concocted by the craft of the demons, do nothing but disturb
and harden the heart, and render it perverse.26
The Devil Cites Scripture: Satanic Paradiastole

in Shakespeare
The paradiastolic dynamic of Satan appearing as an angel of light, dis-

guising evil under the form of good and vice under cover of virtue, also
surfaces in English literary texts of the early modern period. Shakespeare
is sometimes thought to be a skeptic regarding the demonic realm, as his
plays at times parody rites of exorcism in ways that might suggest skepti-
cism regarding its efficacy.27 Nevertheless, Shakespeare takes seriously the
slipperiness of the powers of evil and their self-presentation.28
In response to Shylock’s citation of the biblical example of Jacob’s cun-
ning methods of obtaining livestock from his uncle Laban to justify his
own gain through exploitation, The Merchant of Venice’s Antonio remarks,
“The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose” (I.iii.98), exclaiming “O,
what a goodly outside falsehood hath!” (I.iii.102).29 Quentin Skinner
links this dialogue to Susenbrotus’ discussion of satanic paradiastole:
Antonio not only echoes Susenbrotus’s view of paradiastole as a devilish

force; his remark about giving falsehood a goodly outside alludes to one of
the metaphors most frequently invoked by the rhetoricians to describe this

specific figure of speech.30
Hamlet is a play that exemplifies the epistemological uncertainties gen-

erated by religious conflict and other cultural shifts in early modern
Europe. As David Bevington notes, Hamlet is a student at Luther’s
University of Wittenberg confronted by a ghost from a Catholic
Purgatory, and he wavers between Reformed/Calvinist views of divine
providence and a more secular skepticism represented by his friend
Horatio.31 In seeking to ascertain the truth or otherwise of the message
relayed to him by what purports to be his father’s ghost, Hamlet ponders
the dangers of satanic deception:
The spirit that I have seen

May be a [dev’l], and the [dev’l] hath power
T’assume a pleasing shape[.] (II.ii.598–600)
The 2 Corinthians passage is directly alluded to once in Shakespeare’s

corpus, in his early play The Comedy of Errors. In one of a series of comic
mishaps arising from the confusion of two sets of separated identical
twins with the same names (two servant and master pairs), the following
exchange occurs when a courtesan seeks payment of a gold chain for her
favors from the wrong Antipholus:
[Antipholus of Syracuse:] Sathan, avoid, I charge thee tempt me not.
[Dromio of Syracuse]: Master, is this Mistress Sathan?
[Antipholus of Syracuse]: It is the devil.
[Dromio of Syracuse]: Nay, she is worse, she is the devil’s dam, and
here she comes in the habit of a light wench; and thereof comes that the
wenches say, “God damn me,” that’s as much to say, “God make me a
light wench.” It is written, they appear to men like angels of light, light is
an effect of fire, and fire will burn: ergo, light wenches will burn. Come not
near her (IV.iii.48–57).
Dromio’s speech is a comic parody of theological discourse, using the

logical form of the syllogism: “It is written, they appear to men like
angels of light: light is an effect of fire, and fire will burn; ergo, light
54 D. Parry
wenches will burn.” However, the logic of the syllogism breaks down,
since Dromio equivocates on the word “light,” turning the noun “light”
that in the scriptural passage is a signifier of good that in fact masks evil
into the adjective “light” that signifies sexual sin.
Full Persuasion and Carnal Presumption in Puritan

Practical Divinity
Anxieties about Satan appearing as an angel of light also surface in an
English context in the spiritual guidance given by Puritan preachers and
writers. While English Puritans warn of the devil’s temptations to sin in
terms of the ethical paradiastole identified in classical rhetoric, there is
a greater anxiety in Puritan “practical divinity” about the devil disguis-
ing evil as good and falsehood as truth with regard to inward spiritual
experience rather than outward ethical action. These more subtle inward
temptations to misinterpret one’s spiritual experience can be understood
as exhibiting the paradiastolic dynamic of satanic rhetoric in an extended
sense.
The Cambridge ministers William Perkins (1558–1602) and Richard
Sibbes (c.1577–1635) are among those who warn of paradiastolic temp-
tations in the more straightforwardly ethical sense. In a list of errors held
by the common people, Perkins includes the belief “That drinking and
bezeling in the ale-house or tauerne is good fellowship, & shews a good
kinde nature.”32 This drink-lubricated form of sociability is evidently
considered a virtue by the masses (as represented by Perkins) and a vice
by Perkins. The excusing of drunkenness as good fellowship is also, as
Skinner notes, one of the examples of paradiastole given in the rhetorical
manuals of Thomas Wilson and Henry Peacham.
Sibbes likewise warns of the tendency of the fallen human nature to
excuse vices by redescribing them “under milder termes”:
Though we desire to know all diseases of the body by their proper names,
yet wee will conceive of sinfull passions of the soule under milder termes;
as lust under love, rage under just anger, murmuring under just displeasure,
&c. thus whilest wee flatter our griefe, what hope of cure!33
Though not using the term, this is a clear description of paradiastole in

the classical sense, justifying a vice by assimilating it to the nearest virtue.
Nevertheless, the deadlier form of satanic deception according to

these divines was not found in the relatively obvious temptations to
drunkenness or lust. The satanic paradiastole that they were most con-
cerned to counter was not the paradiastole of outward actions, with
which the classical ethical tradition was primarily concerned, but a para-
diastole of inward spiritual experience.
Hence, in Perkins’ A Dialogue of the State of a Christian Man,
Perkins’ mouthpiece Eusebius tells his friend Timotheus that, prior to his
conversion, “the Diuel himself (as now I perceiue) did often perswade
my secure conscience that I was the child of God, and shoulde be saued
as well as the best man in the world.”34 This is a false persuasion which
counterfeits to the pre-regenerate Eusebius the assurance of salvation
attainable by the regenerate believer. In A Golden Chaine, Perkins tells us
that those who are certain of their salvation may be relying either on the
“full perswasion” of the Holy Spirit or on “their owne carnall presump-
tion.”35 It can be difficult to distinguish the two, and, just as the devil
endeavors to have “carnall presumption” taken for godly persuasion, he
tries to make the Christian doubt his or her true assurance by making it
appear to be presumption.
In this connection, Eusebius takes Timotheus into his confidence as
“a Christian and a faithfull friende” and confesses that the “dearth” of
the previous year led him into the sin of sheep-stealing.36 Afterwards,
although he confessed to his neighbor and made restitution, Eusebius
was afflicted with doubt as to his spiritual status: “Then the Diuell
assailed me on euerie side, to perswade that God had cast mee awaie.”37
One should note that both Eusebius’ pre-conversion belief that he was
a child of God and his recent fear that he might be a reprobate after all
are seen as deceptions of Satan. Though apparently opposite in content,
both of these states of mind are doctrinally erroneous and so both are
identified as false persuasions that misread the available signs.
Eusebius’ spiritual conflicts illustrate how the devil’s wiles can tip
godly conviction into a dangerous despair, and pass presumption off
as assurance. We cannot quite describe this spiritual deception in terms
of the Aristotelian ethics typically exploited in paradiastole—presump-
tion does not consist in excessive confidence but rather in misplaced
confidence, though despair could be considered an excess of spiritual
affliction. Both despair and presumption result from an assessment of
one’s spiritual state that fails to lay hold in faith of the gospel promise
56 D. Parry
of salvation. However, both in the paradiastole of the outward ethical

sphere and in this extended paradiastole of inward spiritual experience,
the devil exploits the resemblance of the desired state to its counterfeit.
The prolific Presbyterian writer Richard Baxter (1615–1691) also
depicts a devil prone to paradiastolic temptation in the domains of ethi-
cal action, spiritual experience, and doctrinal orthodoxy. Baxter warns
the spiritually weak that “A Seducer will easily make us shake, and evil
may be made to appear to us as Good, truth as falshood, sin as a duty.”38
An instance of paradiastole in the more straightforwardly ethical sense
of passing off a vice as the nearest virtue is found when Baxter speaks
of “many that affect the Reputation of Orthodox, while they are indeed
factious.”39 Baxter’s funeral sermon for Mary Hanmer, whose daughter
he was later to marry, commends her ability not to be taken in by such
worldly paradiastole:
She had an honest impatiency of the life which is common among the rich
and vain-glorious in the world: Voluptuousness and Sensuality, Excess of
Drinking, Cards and Dice, she could not endure, what ever names of good
house-keeping or seemly deportment they borrowed for a mask[.]40
One might recall here the example of paradiastole which Henry Peacham
adds to the classical lists—the calling of “glotony and dronkennesse,
good fellowship.”41
Speaking of the spiritual benefits of humbling oneself, Baxter says:
It unmasketh sinne, which had got the vizard of Virtue, or of a small mat-
ter, or harmless thing. It unmasketh Satan, who was transformed into a
Friend, or an Angel of light, and sheweth him, as we say, with his cloven
feet and horns.42
Here, satanic paradiastole is characterized also as a satanic prosopo-

peia, the taking on of the persona of another by putting on a mask or
“vizard.”
Baxter warns of the possibility of preachers leading their hearers astray
thus: “The Prince of darkness doth frequently personate the Angels of
light, to draw children of light again into his darkness.”43 In relation to
doctrinal controversy, Baxter warns: “The Devil is a greater Scholar than
you, and a nimbler disputant: he can transform himself into an Angel of
light to deceive.”44 With regard to spiritual experience, Baxter warns his
readers that subjective inward experience is no guarantee of truth: “If

only to inward sense; then how know you but a counterfeit Angel of Light
may produce more strange effects in your soul, then these which you take to
be such a manifestation?”45
Counterfeit Names: Discerning Deception in the Works

of John Bunyan
Satan also appears as an angel of light in the works of John Bunyan

(1628–1688), a Nonconformist/Dissenting preacher imprisoned for
his unlicensed preaching and rejection of the established Church and
its liturgy, but most celebrated for writing the allegorical journey narra-
tive The Pilgrim’s Progress. Although Bunyan lacked a classical education,
there are instances in his works that are almost textbook examples of the
classical figure of paradiastole, notably in The Holy War, Bunyan’s bat-
tle allegory in which the City of Mansoul is usurped by Diabolus (Latin
for “devil”) and regained by the Christ-figure Prince Emanuel. When the
Diabolonians, Diabolus’ followers who represent various vices, are put
on trial, their defense tactics include the rhetorical ploy of paradiastole, as
their prosecutor Mr. Knowledge recognizes:
But these Diabolonians love to counterfeit their names: Mr. Covetousness

covers himself with the name of good Husbandry, or the like; Mr. Pride
can, when need is, call himself Mr. Neat, Mr. Handsome, or the like; and
so of all the rest of them.46
Christopher Hill notes that there are “examples of vices disguising

themselves as virtues,” including covetousness masquerading as “good
Husbandry” and gluttony as hospitality, in religious works that Bunyan
had read by Arthur Dent, Lewis Bayly, and Richard Bernard.47 However,
Hill does not observe that these are textbook examples of paradiastole
listed by Henry Peacham.48 Though it is likely that Bunyan did not
know the word paradiastole, he appears to be drawing on a rhetorical
analysis of vice mediated through vernacular religious writing.
Bunyan began his writing career writing pamphlets against the
Quakers, and, as with Calvin and others, Bunyan uses the “angel of
light” reference polemically against his doctrinal opponents. Even the
apparent moral uprightness of the Quakers, Bunyan argues, is part of a
satanic strategy to distract them from true faith in Christ:
58 D. Parry
And if he [i.e. the devil] will deceive a professing generation, he must

come in this manner; first, under the name of Christ; secondly, with a fair
shew in the flesh of outward holiness, Gal. 6. 12. Thirdly, he must come
with good words and fair speeches, Rom. 16. 18. Now though he come to
drunkards, swearers, whoremongers, thieves, liars, murderers, and covet-
ous persons, in his black colours; yet if he will come to deceive a professing
party, he must appear like an angel of light.49
Coming “under the name of Christ” suggests that here satanic paradi-
astole is accompanied by satanic prosopopeia, taking on the persona of
another, while “good words and fair speeches” suggests that Satan and
his representatives can adopt eloquent rhetoric.
Bunyan is also an heir of the tradition of Puritan practical divinity,
with its anxieties and its consolations.50 Bunyan’s Satan cites Scripture,
exploiting the knife edge between assurance and presumption, on the
one hand, and between conviction and despair, on the other: this is so in
Bunyan’s spiritual autobiography Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners
and also in Bunyan’s poem “A Discourse between Satan and the tempted
Soul,” which bears some comparison with Perkins’ prose dialogue.51 In
causing the religiously deluded to remain in error, “the Devill is wonder-
ful cunning,” even to the point of representing the preaching of truth as
satanic temptation: “And now he begins first to cry, avoyd Satan.”52 This
devious strategy parallels the cunning of Satan in Luther’s accounts.
In Good News for the Vilest of Men, Bunyan gives presumption the sug-
gestive name of “wild faith,” that is, an apparent faith not rightly culti-
vated:
I have observed, that as there are Herbs and Flowers in our Gardens, so
there are their Counterfeits in the Field; only they are distinguished from
the other by the Name of Wild Ones. Why, there is Faith, and Wild Faith;
and Wild Faith is this Presumption.53
Satanic paradiastole not only seeks to persuade sinners to mistake pre-

sumption for true faith, but also to persuade saints to mistake true faith
for presumption: “The design of Satan is to tell the Presumptuous, that
their presuming on Mercy is good; but to perswade the Believer, that his
believing is impudent bold dealing with God.”54 This is paradiastole
operative in both directions, both to justify what is wrong and to vilify
what is right.
The slipperiness of satanic rhetoric is most vividly portrayed in

Bunyan’s work through his allegorical narratives. One striking instance
in The Pilgrim’s Progress is the figure of the Flatterer, who appears at a
point in the narrative when the pilgrims “saw a way put it self into their
way, and seemed withal, to lie as straight as the way which they should
go; and here they knew not which of the two to take, for both seemed
straight before them.”55 In their confusion, Christian and Hopeful take
directions from “a man black of flesh, but covered with a very light
Robe,” but‚ as they follow him, their path turns “by degrees” until they
are led into a net, at which point “the white robe fell off the black man’s
back.”56
Christian and Hopeful are rescued, rebuked, and whipped by “a shin-
ing One,” who informs them, alluding once again to 2 Corinthians
11:14, that their advisor was “Flatterer, a false Apostle, that hath trans-
formed himself into an Angel of Light.”57 The pilgrims lament to the
Shining One that, though the shepherds warned them about the
Flatterer, “we did not imagine […] that this fine-spoken man had been
he.”58 The marginal note generalizes the observation—“Deceivers fine
spoken”—and directs us to Romans 16:18, which warns of those who
“by good words and fair speeches deceive the hearts of the simple.”
“Evil Be Thou My Good”: Milton’s Satan’s

Self-Deception
The most prominent “Puritan” writer in the literary canon is John
Milton, despite his theological idiosyncrasies, and probably the most
prominent depiction of the devil in early modern English literature is
Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost. It is a perennial question in Milton criti-
cism since William Blake whether Milton is “of the Devils party with-
out knowing it.”59 While rehearsing all the moves and countermoves
of that debate would distract from our main focus, I find Stanley Fish’s
proposed resolution helpful. Fish acknowledges that Satan is an attractive
character, but argues that this is a sign of the fallen nature of the reader,
allowing Milton to enact and thus expose temptation through the experi-
ence of the reader.60
Fish’s reading of the poem allows us as readers to feel the force of
Satan’s persuasive powers while still evaluating Satan as evil. Introducing
his survey of the debate on Milton’s Satan, John Leonard recognizes that
60 D. Parry
whether one considers the character of Satan admirable depends in part

on the reader’s ethical valuation of ambiguous qualities: “Critics on both
sides of the argument agree that Satan’s most conspicuous characteristic
is pride. The contentious point is whether his pride is a vice or a virtue.
Satan’s vices often resemble virtues.”61 Relating Leonard’s observation
to the terms of our discussion, this suggests that the operation of the
paradiastolic dynamic on the reader is one of the fault lines underlying
three centuries of critical debate on Milton’s Satan.
Milton’s Satan is widely recognized to be an eloquent rhetorician in
his rallying of the fallen angels and in his temptation of Eve.62 However,
I would like here to focus on Satan’s rhetoric in a scene where he is
ostensibly alone, that is, in his soliloquy on Mount Niphates that opens
Book IV of Paradise Lost. Here Satan pauses, having landed on Earth
and being within sight of the Garden of Eden where God has placed
Adam and Eve, to survey the landscape and to reflect on his rebellious
enterprise.
During this lengthy speech, Satan appears to be deliberating with
himself, and to hint at some regret (and perhaps remorse) over his
choices and their consequences. This is an episode that Miltonists iden-
tify as crucial to the whole poem, particularly with regard to the char-
acterization of Satan. John Carey calls this “The one part of the poem
where access is provided to the ‘true’ Satan,” and observes that Satan’s
“inner debate and self-criticism reveal him as a creature of dynamic ten-
sions” as he “vacillates between remorse and defiance.”63
The key passage in this speech for our purposes is its conclusion, in
which Satan resolves his conflicted thoughts by recommitting himself to
obstinate rebellion against God:
So farewell hope, and with hope farewell fear,

Farewell remorse: all good to me is lost;
Evil be thou my good: by thee at least
Divided empire with heaven’s king I hold
By thee, and more than half perhaps will raign:
As men ere long, and this new world shall know (IV:108–13)64
The imperative “Evil be thou my good” has occasioned much scholarly

conversation. The main point at issue is whether Satan in fact believes
evil to be in some sense truly good, or whether he is simply taking evil to

be his “good” in the sense of an Aristotelian telos, that is, the desired end
to which he aspires, while knowing that telos to be objectively evil.
Neil Forsyth has argued that only on Mount Niphates does Satan rec-
ognize his rebellion as “evil,” having earlier in the narrative sequence
(though later in the work) refused Michael’s naming of the angelic
revolt as “evil”: “Only later, when Satan has arrived on Earth and seen
the newly created physical world […] does his initial choice become
the famous and paradoxical cry, ‘Evil be thou my good’ (4.110).”65 In
the same volume, Paul Stevens recognizes Satan’s inversion of values as
implicitly already condemned by a scriptural text that it echoes:
On Niphates, his challenge is immediately confounded by the Word: when

he insists “Evil be thou my good” (110), Scripture echoes his words and
interprets his defiance as the solipsism of unaided reason: “Woe unto them
that call evil good, and good evil. … Woe unto them that are wise in their
own eyes, and prudent in their own sight!” (Isaiah 5:20)66
The verse that Stevens cites here establishes Scripture as anti-paradias-

tolic, opposing the redefining of moral values by moral agents in ways
that suit their own ends.
Besides the debate over this passage by literary scholars of Milton,
Elizabeth Anscombe, noted twentieth-century Catholic philosopher and
pupil of Wittgenstein, has sparked much significant discussion of Satan’s
words “Evil be thou my good” in the literature of ethics and moral phi-
losophy (though Anscombe herself does not explicitly note that these are
the words of Milton’s Satan). She concludes on balance that this is an
intelligible maxim for a moral agent, though it may still be misguided:
If then the answer to this question at some stage is “The good of it is that
it’s bad,” this need not be unintelligible; one can go on to say “And what’s
the good of its being bad?” to which the answer might be condemnation
of good as impotent, slavish, and inglorious. Then the good of making evil
my good is my intact liberty in the unsubmissiveness of my will. Bonum
est multiplex: good is multiform, and all that is required for our concept
of “wanting” is that a man should see what he wants under the aspect of
some good.67
Anscombe displays her Aristotelian and Thomist tendencies here in

deploying the notion of embracing evil under the aspect of good (sub
62 D. Parry
specie boni). Attributing this action to “a man” suggests that this may not
be an interpretation of Milton’s Satan, but rather a borrowing of Satan’s
words as a pithy summary of an ethical attitude held by some human
agents.
Milton’s Satan thus becomes a proxy in a discussion among modern
moral philosophers seeking to distinguish “perverse” motivations for
evil, in which moral agents pursue ends perceived to be good but in a
distorted manner that leads to evil, and “pure” evil, in which a moral
agent pursues that which is evil because it is evil.68 David McNaughton
posits a provisional distinction between the “bad person” who is will-
ing to do morally wrong things in pursuit of given objectives, and the
“wicked person” who “would be attracted to a course of action because
it was cruel, unjust, sordid, or obscene. He is the mirror image of the
virtuous person—like Milton’s Satan his motto is: ‘Evil, be thou my
good.’”69 However, McNaughton goes on to conclude that Milton’s
Satan “embraces evil, not for its own sake, but because it is the only way
to satisfy his ambition and preserve his pride.”70
One recent philosophical critic of Anscombe’s reading of Milton
is Robert Dunn, who sees Milton’s Satan as an example of “perverse
agency,” exemplifying that moral agents such as ourselves are not always
“lovers of the good” (as an Aristotelian model might suggest) but
“sometime mere lovers of success in action” (even if the goals achieved
might be morally objectionable).71 Dunn objects that Anscombe is turn-
ing Satan into “a closet lover of the good,” and argues instead that
When Satan resolves, “Evil be thou my Good,” he of course is not revising

his theory of moral good and evil. What makes him satanic is that, while
holding his moral theory constant, he substitutes evil for good as his goal
in action, seeing the pursuit of evil as a means to several ends.72
Dunn thus takes Satan’s “good” to be something closer to the

Aristotelian telos—Dunn agrees with Anscombe that Milton’s Satan sees
evil as the means to ends he desires, but disagrees with her contention
that Satan (mistakenly) sees those ends as truly good.
Satan’s words in this soliloquy can be plausibly interpreted in both
directions. A pithy saying attributed to G.K. Chesterton helpfully high-
lights the slipperiness of “good”: “The word ‘good’ has many meanings.
For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of 500
yards I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.”73
I would like to suggest here that “Evil be thou my good” is paradiastole

pushed to its extreme. Perhaps the paradiastolic dynamic offers a middle
way that allows Milton’s Satan to be read as an exemplar both of per-
verse and of pure evil. Satan is a master of deception, so masterful that he
succeeds in deceiving himself—he is self-tempted and thus self-deceived.
Notes
1. Richard Sibbes, The Soules Conflict with It Selfe, and Victory over It Self by
Faith (London, 1635), 26.
2. John Bunyan, The Holy War, made by Shaddai upon Diabolus, for the
Regaining of the Metropolis of the World, or, The Losing and Taking
again of the Town of Mansoul, ed. Roger Sharrock and James F. Forrest
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1980), 20.
3. Katharine Eisaman Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English
Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 13.
4. Leif Dixon, Practical Predestinarians in England, c.1590–1640 (Farnham:
Ashgate, 2014), 39.
5. See Dixon, Practical Predestinarians, 39.
6. Martin Luther, Lectures on Isaiah 40–66, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan, in
Luther’s Works, 75 vols. projected, gen. eds. Jaroslav Pelikan, Helmut
T. Lehmann, and Christopher Brown (St Louis: Concordia/Philadelphia:
Muehlenberg and Fortress, 1955–), 17:127. See further Tibor Fabiny,
“The ‘Strange Acts of God:’ The Hermeneutics of Concealment and
Revelation in Luther and Shakespeare,” Dialog: A Journal of Theology 45
(2006): 44–54.
7. Cited in Susan E. Schreiner, Are You Alone Wise?: The Search for Certainty
in the Early Modern Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 294.
8. On Susenbrotus, see especially Joseph X. Brennan, “The Epitome
Troporum et Schematum of Joannes Susenbrotus: Text, Translation and
Commentary” (Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois, 1953). For a brief sum-
mary of the Epitome, see Peter Mack, A History of Renaissance Rhetoric
1380–1620 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 218–21.
9. On Shakespeare’s alleged use of Susenbrotus, see T. W. Baldwin, William
Shakspere’s Small Latine & Lesse Greeke, 2 vols. (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1944), I:664–5, 747–8; II:93–5; and esp. II:138–76. For
Baldwin’s numerous references to Susenbrotus in the curriculum of
English grammar schools, see his index.
10. Johann Susenbrotus, Epitome troporum ac schematum (1562), 46, cited
in Quentin Skinner, “Paradiastole: Redescribing the Vices as Virtues,” in
Renaissance Figures of Speech, ed. Sylvia Adamson, Gavin Alexander, and
Katrin Ettenhuber (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 160.
64 D. Parry
11. Biblical quotations are taken from the Authorized/King James Version.

12. See, for instance, Quentin Skinner, “Moral Ambiguity and the Art of
Eloquence,” in Visions of Politics, vol. 2, Renaissance Virtues (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002), 264–85; Quentin Skinner, Reason
and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996), esp. 142–80, 279–84, 317–26, 338–43, 401;
Skinner, “Paradiastole.”
13. Skinner, “Paradiastole,” 155–6. See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics,
1106a–b.
14. Sir Thomas Wyatt, “Myne owne John Poyntz,” in Collected Poems of
Sir Thomas Wyatt, ed. Kenneth Muir and Patricia Thomson (Leicester:
Leicester University Press, 1969), 90.
15. Skinner, “Paradiastole,” 155. Pace Skinner, it seems that Wilson does
not explicitly mention drunkenness here, only calling “a glutton, a good
felowe at hys table” (Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique (London,
1553), fol. 67), whilst Peacham does indeed mention calling “glotony
and dronkenesse, good fellowship” (Henry Peacham, The Garden of
Eloquence (London, 1577), sig. N4v). Skinner also notes the earlier men-
tion of calling drunkenness good fellowship in the Wyatt poem cited
above.
16. Skinner, “Paradiastole,” 149–51.
17. Skinner, “Paradiastole,” 154–5.
18. John Calvin, Commentary on the Epistles of Paul the Apostle to the
Corinthians, 2 vols., trans. John Pringle (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation
Society, 1849), II:351.
19. See, for instance, Aristotle, On the Soul, III.10; Thomas Aquinas,
Quaestiones Disputatae de Veritate, Q24.a8.
20. Calvin, Corinthians, II:351.
21. For instance, John Pain, A Discovery of the Priests; That say they are sent
off by the Lord, but upon trial are found out of the commands of Christ, the
Prophets, and Apostles, and to be those that are not the sent of the Lord, but
to be such that the sent ones of the Lord did cry wo against, and to be such
that are false Apostles, deceitful, wicked, transforming themselves into the
Apostles of Christ: and no marvail, for Satan himself is transformed into an
Angel of light […] (London, 1655); John Deacon, A publick discovery of
a secret deceit. Or, The man of sin unmasked, his sheeps-clothing of glorious
pretences pulled off; and his wolvish inside set forth in its colours. Where may
easily be discerned Satan transformed into the resemblance of an angel of
light, in that sect or society commonly called Quakers (London, 1656).
22. Teresa of Avila, The Book of her Life, cited in Susan Schreiner, “Unmasking
the Angel of Light: The Problem of Deception in Martin Luther and
Teresa of Avila,” in Mystics: Presence and Aporia, ed. Michael Kessler and
Christian Sheppard (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 125.
23. Ibid.
24. The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola, trans. Elder Mullan, S.J.
(New York: P. J. Kenedy and Sons, 1914), 35.
25. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 2 vols., ed. John
T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles. (London: SCM Press/
Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1961), 1:94 (I.ix.2).
26. Spiritual Works of Louis of Blois, Abbot of Liesse, ed. John Edward Bowden,
4th edn. (London: R. & T. Washbourne, 1903), 67.
27. See, for instance, Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The
Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1988), chapter 4, “Shakespeare and the Exorcists,”
94–128.
28. See Ernest A. Strathmann, “The Devil Can Cite Scripture,” Shakespeare
Quarterly 15 (1964): 17–23.
29. Shakespeare citations from The Riverside Shakespeare, gen. ed.
G. Blakemore Evans with J. J. M. Tobin, 2nd edn. (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1997). References in body of text by act, scene, and line num-
bers.
30. Skinner, “Paradiastole,” 161.
31. David Bevington, “The Debate about Shakespeare and Religion,” in
Shakespeare and Early Modern Religion, ed. David Loewenstein and
Michael Witmore (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 31–6.
32. William Perkins, The foundation of Christian religion, gathered into sixe
principles (London, 1590), sig. A2v.
33. Sibbes, Soules Conflict, 77.
34. William Perkins, A treatise tending vnto a declaration whether a man be in
the estate of damnation or in the estate of grace and if he be in the first, how
he may in time come out of it: if in the second, how he maie discerne it, and
perseuere in the same to the end (London, 1590), 134.
35. William Perkins, A golden chaine, or the description of theologie containing
the order of the causes of saluation and damnation, according to Gods woord
(London, 1591), sig. V7r.
36. Perkins, Treatise tending vnto a declaration, 160–1.
37. Perkins, Treatise tending vnto a declaration, 162.
38. Richard Baxter, Gildas Salvianus; The Reformed Pastor (London, 1656), 72.
39. Baxter, Gildas Salvianus, 230.
40. Richard Baxter, The Last Work of a Believer: His Passing Prayer
Recommending his Departing Spirit to Christ to be Received by Him
(London, 1682), 63.
41. Peacham, Garden of Eloquence, sig. N4v.
42. Richard Baxter, Directions and Perswasions to a Sound Conversion
(London, 1658), 133.
66 D. Parry

45. Richard Baxter, The Saints Everlasting Rest: or, A treatise of the blessed state
of the saints in their enjoyment of God in glory, 4th edn. (London, 1653),
Part I, 207.
46. Bunyan, Holy War, 130.
47. Christopher Hill, A Turbulent, Seditious, and Factious People: John Bunyan
and His Church 1628–1688 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), 161–6 (quota-
tion from 164); citing Arthur Dent, The Plaine Mans Path-way to Heauen
(London, 1601), 102; Lewis Bayly, The Practise of Pietie Directing a
Christian how to Walke that he may Please God, 3rd edn. (London, 1613),
253–4; and Richard Bernard, The Isle of Man: or, the Legall Proceeding in
Man-shire against Sinne, 4th edn. (London, 1627), 27.
48. Peacham, Garden of Eloquence, sig. N4v.
49. John Bunyan, Some Gospel-Truths Opened, in The Miscellaneous Works
of John Bunyan [henceforth MW], 13 vols., gen. ed. Roger Sharrock
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1976–94), 1:101.
50. See Michael Davies, Graceful Reading: Theology and Narrative in the
Works of John Bunyan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), esp.
17–116; Richard L. Greaves, Glimpses of Glory: John Bunyan and English
Dissent (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 103–15; James G.
Randall, “Against the Backdrop of Eternity: Narrative and the Negative
Casuistry of John Bunyan’s The Life and Death of Mr. Badman,” Baptist
Quarterly 37:7 (July 1994): 347–59; Mary Ann Lund, “Bunyan and
the Tradition of ‘Pastoral’ Writing in Early Modern England,” Bunyan
Studies 12 (2006/7): 6–21.
51. Bunyan, “A Discourse between Satan and the Tempted Soul,” in
Profitable Meditations, MW, 6:11–21.
52. Bunyan, Some Gospel-Truths Opened, in MW, 1:216.
53. Bunyan, Good News for the Vilest of Men, in MW, 5:67.
54. Bunyan, Good News for the Vilest of Men, in MW, 5:69.
55. John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress from this World to that which is to
Come, ed. James Blanton Wharey, rev. Roger Sharrock, rev. edn. (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1960), 132.
56. Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress, 133.
59. William Blake, “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” in The Complete
Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman, 2nd edn. (New
York: Anchor, 1988), 35.
60. Stanley Fish, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost, 2nd edn.
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).
61. John Leonard, Faithful Labourers: A Reception History of Paradise Lost,

1667–1970, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), II:394.
62. See, for instance, William Pallister, Between Worlds: The Rhetorical
Universe of Paradise Lost (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008),
151–96.
63. John Carey, “Milton’s Satan,” in The Cambridge Companion to Milton,
ed. Dennis Danielson, 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1999), 163.
64. John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler, 2nd edn. (Harlow:
Longman, 1998), 221.
65. Neil Forsyth, “Satan,” in The Cambridge Companion to Paradise Lost, ed.
Louis Schwartz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 25.
66. Paul Stevens, “The Pre-Secular Politics of Paradise Lost,” in Cambridge
Companion to Paradise Lost, ed. Schwartz, 105.
67. G. E. M. Anscombe, Intention, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1963),
75.
68. See survey in Mark Smith Ferguson, “A Prolegomenon on Evil: ‘What
Does it Mean to be Evil?’” (MA thesis, University of Central Oklahoma,
2009), 17–26.
69. David McNaughton, Moral Vision: An Introduction to Ethics (Oxford:
Basil Blackwell, 1988), 135.
70. McNaughton, Moral Vision, 142.
71. Robert Dunn, Values and the Reflective Point of View: On Expressivism,
Self-Knowledge and Agency (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 61.
72. Dunn, Values, 64.
73. Cyril Clemens, Chesterton as Seen by his Contemporaries (Webster Groves,
MO: International Mark Twain Society, 1939), 7.
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Aristotle. On the Soul; Parva Naturalia; On Breath. Translated by W.S. Hett.
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Baldwin, T.W. William Shakspere’s Small Latine & Lesse Greeke, 2 vols. Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1944.
Bayly, Lewis. The Practise of Pietie Directing a Christian how to Walke that he may
Please God. 3rd ed. London, 1613.
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Baxter, Richard. The Last Work of a Believer: His Passing Prayer Recommending
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Bernard, Richard. The Isle of Man: or, the Legall Proceeding in Man-shire against
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Bevington, David. “The Debate about Shakespeare and Religion.” In Shakespeare
and Early Modern Religion, edited by David Loewenstein and Michael
Witmore, 23–39. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
Blake, William. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Edited by David
V. Erdman. 2nd ed. New York: Anchor, 1988.
Brennan, Joseph X. “The Epitome Troporum et Schematum of Joannes
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Illinois, 1953.
Bunyan, John. The Pilgrim’s Progress from this World to that which is to Come.
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Oxford: Clarendon, 1960.
Bunyan, John. The Miscellaneous Works of John Bunyan, 13 vols. General editor
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Bunyan, John. The Holy War, made by Shaddai upon Diabolus, for the Regaining
of the Metropolis of the World, or, The Losing and Taking again of the Town of
Mansoul. Edited by Roger Sharrock and James F. Forrest. Oxford: Clarendon,
1980.
Calvin, John. Commentary on the Epistles of Paul the Apostle to the Corinthians,
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1849.
Calvin, John. Institutes of the Christian Religion, 2 vols. Edited by John
T. McNeill and translated by Ford Lewis Battles. London: SCM Press/
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Carey, John. “Milton’s Satan.” In The Cambridge Companion to Milton. Edited
by Dennis Danielson, 160–74. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University
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Clemens, Cyril. Chesterton as Seen by his Contemporaries. Webster Groves, MO:
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Davies, Michael. Graceful Reading: Theology and Narrative in the Works of John
Bunyan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Deacon, John. A publick discovery of a secret deceit. Or, The man of sin unmasked,
his sheeps-clothing of glorious pretences pulled off; and his wolvish inside set forth
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Dent, Arthur. The Plaine Mans Path-way to Heauen. London, 1601.
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Dunn, Robert. Values and the Reflective Point of View: On Expressivism, Self-
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Fabiny, Tibor. “The ‘Strange Acts of God:’ The Hermeneutics of Concealment
and Revelation in Luther and Shakespeare.” Dialog: A Journal of Theology 45
(2006): 44–54.
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Evil?’” MA thesis, University of Central Oklahoma, 2009.
Fish, Stanley. Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost. 2nd ed. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.
Forsyth, Neil. “Satan.” In The Cambridge Companion to Paradise Lost. Edited by
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and to be those that are not the sent of the Lord, but to be such that the sent ones
70 D. Parry
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CHAPTER 5
Astrophal Redivivus: The Coinage

of the Discourse on the Devil in the Early
Modern Age in Georg Bernardt S.J.’s
Tundalus Redivivus (1622)
David Johannes Olszynski
Despite the increasing de-Christianization of the late modern Western

world, interest in the devil remains strong. Cinema, literature, music,
and fine arts all engage with the topic of the devil. Knowledge of the
devil, such as his appearance, his capabilities, and his history, is wide-
spread.1 This attention is remarkable because the privileged actor in the
discourse2 on the devil, the Magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church,
has expressed very few definite teachings and only with great reluctance.
The Magisterium’s definitions speak of the nature of the devil in abstract
form, as pure spirit or angel, and are meant to reject any dualistic think-
ing that elevates the devil in a position equal to God as heresy.3 This has
been the official view until today. Yet in no case one can find among
D.J. Olszynski (*) 
University of Koblenz-Landau, Koblenz, Germany

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-52198-5_5
74 D.J. Olszynski
these definitions a plastic description of the devil or a debate on the

motives of his actions.
By examining the origins of the images, conceptions, and knowledge
about the devil, this chapter aims to describe the characteristics of the
early modern devil and its enduring influence. It is quite obvious that
contemporary discourses on the devil go well beyond the Church’s
teaching of the devil. Early modern works of literature were vastly
important in widening the discourse on the devil that differs from the
biblical sources and the Church’s interpretation.
Georg Bernhardt S.J.’s drama, Tundalus redivivus (1622) illustrates
this thesis.4 Following a short introduction to the play, this article will
present the discourse on the devil found in the play itself and then com-
pare this treatment of the devil with relevant Catholic doctrinal state-
ments in order to determine similarities, differences, and additions. This
paper analyzes Tundalus as an example of the early modern discourse on
the devil in order to reveal general tendencies, developments, and inter-
textual references. My approach is informed by and indebted to Michel
Foucault, Achim Landwehr, and Jürgen Link, whose concept of inter-
discourse proved particularly fruitful for my analysis. Literature seen as
interdiscourse focuses on literary works as a transfer medium that spreads
highly specialized knowledge to a broader audience. This process of
transposing is a complicated one, as it is not free of distortions.5
The Drama of Tundalus
Tundalus redivivus is a Latin drama written by the Jesuit Georg Bernardt in

1622.6 It was first performed to open a new school year at the Jesuit school
in Ingolstadt on October 17, 1622. Although it is very unconventional in
terms of Jesuit staging traditions, it had a repeat performance at the school
in 1646, probably because the Jesuits in Ingolstadt did not have enough
resources to commission a new work due to the Thirty Years War.7 Given
Jesuit theatrical traditions and Bernardt’s position as a poetry teacher,
it is believed that he was the director of the first performance. Tundalus
has its origin in the Visio Tnugdali (“The Vision of Tnugdalus”) that the
Benedictine monk Marcus chronicled in Regensburg in 1150. The mate-
rial was very popular, as numerous adaptations and translations testify. The
Perioche, the Jesuit version of a program booklet, of the Tundalus perfor-
mance refers to Vincent of Beauvais’s version in his Speculum historiale
from the thirteenth century and one of the Carthusian Dionys, which he
5 ASTROPHAL REDIVIVUS: THE COINAGE OF THE DISCOURSE … 75
presents in his Quartuor novissimis from the fifteenth century.8 Tundalus,

however, adopts only the basic structure; the main material is from
Bernardt. The template tells the frame story and prehistory in a few sen-
tences and describes mainly the afterlife vision, paradise and hell. The drama
Tundalus shifts the focus by presenting history in two acts, which represent
the unbridled life of Tundalus. For dramatic and didactic reasons, only the
final act takes place in hell.
In this way the drama gains a different focus. First, the model of the
noble knight, who still found admiration in the medieval versions of the
story, is broken. He is no longer a figure of identification for the audi-
ence, but only a deterrent negative example. This characterization is an
instrument of reception control and gives in that way instructions for an
alternative approach towards life to the audience: one should not follow
Tundalus’ bad examples—he ends up in hell for his deeds. This is also sup-
ported by the consequent localization on earth, which facilitates the trans-
fer to the practice of the recipients and assists the educational concerns of
the discourse fragment. Finally, the development of earthly action offers
the opportunity to situate the events in real life even further. The raw
humor, the violence shown, the soldiers’ misery and the poverty are cer-
tainly common experiences of the audience during the Thirty Years War,
even more so at the second performance in 1646 than at the first.
The spectacular production made the play attractive for a wide
audience, especially for those without knowledge of Latin. With its
detailed representation of hell, its torments, and the appearance of sev-
eral elaborate devils, the play is based on highly interesting material.
Unfortunately, no description of the staging of Tundalus in Ingolstadt
can be found, but other Jesuit productions with the appearance of the
devil indicate spectacular costumes. Its crudely humorous scenes in the
tradition of the Schwank serve to illustrate the moral misconduct of
Tundalus and offer relieve to the audience.
Georg Bernardt was a product of the Jesuit education system before
he was appointed as poetry teacher at the order’s Gymnasium in
Ingolstadt from 1620 to 1622. During his time teaching he wrote and
staged three of his four dramas: Theophilus (1621), Jovian (1523), and
Tundalus.9 He wrote the fourth drama, Thomas Becket, for the college in
Konstanz in 1626 and personally oversaw its production. His superiors
appointed him to Konstanz specifically for this task.
Bernardt probably acquired his own knowledge of Latin at the
Wilhelm Gymnasium, a high school in Munich, which he developed and
76 D.J. Olszynski
used virtuosically. Language training at the time was combined with the
teaching in classical forms of Greek and Roman literature and their cor-
rect application. Bernardt’s talent can be seen in his plays as well as by
the fact that his superiors used him as a poetry teacher according to the
Jesuit practice to give a task to the most fitting member. His proficiency
in Latin guaranteed that his works were not affected by discursive exclu-
sion mechanisms concerning the form. That means that he was able to
write a play following the stylistic standards of the discourse community
of humanist scholars. If he had failed to reach this standard, his work
would have been considered insufficient and therefore would have been
dismissed as inferior. The commission for Konstanz is another indication
that Bernardt was not only able to fulfill the demands of the discourse
community, but also that his work as playwright and choragus was viewed
as special. At least his superiors seem to have been convinced by the
merit of his artistic endeavors.
As a Jesuit, Bernardt was an intelligent and competent expert on the
Church’s teachings. This was part of his education. His doctorate in the-
ology and subsequent professorships in scholastics and moral theology
are additional indicators for his familiarity with doctrine. This guarantees
that he did not stray far from the orthodox path, while this surely limited
his imagination of hell.10
The drama centers on Tundalus, a noble, wealthy, intelligent, hand-
some, and physically powerful Irish knight. Yet Tundalus lives immorally,
as he believes neither in the existence of the devil nor in eternal punish-
ment in hell:
Splurging. perjuring, profiteering and at the same time hunting Venus

without restraint and like a swine – these were the prevailing virtues of
Tundalus. Heaven seemed to him an old wives’ tale, God a hollow fantasy,
hell a ridiculous scare instrument; the devils were a game to him, a joke, an
amusing story, an unreal masquerade, a cipher.11
He plays macabre jokes on journeymen, pilgrims, beggars, and war inva-

lids, is a bad example for his sons, and eventually visits one of his debt-
ors. As the debtor is unable to pay Tundalus back, he arranges a feast in
order to distract Tundalus. During the banquet scene, Tundalus is hit by
a divine punishment for his sinful life, probably a heart attack, and dies
by the time the doctor arrives. Under the leadership of Astrophal, devils
immediately gather around him, but are banished by Tundalus’ guardian

angel. The angel takes him to hell, so that Tundalus witnesses the hell-
ish punishment for deadly sinners there.12 After this descent to hell, he
awakes to renewed life and leads a holy existence from then on.
The Devil as Character

The summary shows that the drama is not primarily about the devil, but
discusses how to lead a pious life via the negative example of Tundalus.
Although not the main focus, the play shows a number of different
aspects of the devil. Nine times the devil is described as vicious or com-
mitting atrocious actions. This underlines his dangerousness and warns
recipients of engaging with the devil. There are also numerous passages
that address the hierarchical order of hell. The devil acts in concert with
many supporting devils, rigidly organized in rank and title who dutifully
carry out their tasks. Astrophal, the prince of hell, stands at the helm of
this hellish community, and the devil Toxartes (who delivers the prolog)
wants to impress him as he hopes to become a prince of hell himself. In
Tundalus we are presented with aspects regarding the devils’ characteris-
tics as well as details regarding the inner structure of hell, which resem-
bles a societal structure the audience is quite familiar with.
The devils, particularly Astrophal, appear very human in many
respects, as they too are in need of sleep, and just like humans the devils
are depicted as complex characters. Although the motives of Astrophal’s
enmity with God and man remain in the dark, he is no longer a one-
dimensional character who is simply evil. Astrophal exhibits various emo-
tional states and even has mixed feelings regarding his own misdeeds and
those that were inspired by him:
Sometimes I [the devil] had persuaded you [Tundalus] to infamies, and I

was terrified by it and trembled, I, the creator of all evil, the sworn enemy
of God and the saints. I say therefore, I only instigated with fear, what
Tundalus then executed with the utmost impartiality and self-evidence and
downright cheerful with a relaxed sense.13
Another anthropomorphism in the discourse fragment is the industrious-

ness of the main devil, which is mentioned three times. He acts like a mem-
ber of the emerging group of early modern lawyers—when in the presence
78 D.J. Olszynski
of Tundalus’ guardian angel he defends his right to take the Irish knight’s
soul. He resembles the biblical image of the devil as accuser (cf. Job 1:6–12),
as well as representing the newly established belief in the functionality of
court proceedings in early modern times.
When it comes to his appearance, however, the devil resembles quite
traditional medieval ideas:
I appeared to them as I am in their sleep: with a black face, the hands of

a harpy, goat feet, terrifying throat, threatening look, the whole body and
with every gesture the devil.14
A significant addition to the previous discourse on the devil has to do

with witchcraft, which is now seen as a diabolical art. In addition, the
notion that humans can perform sorcery only with help from the devil
also occurs at this time. Sorcery is no longer perceived as an independ-
ent force; instead sorcery and it’s effects are now interpreted as executed
directly by the devil. These statements elide the discourse on sorcery
with that on the devil. This might explain why sorcery replaced laziness
in the order of the seven deadly sins, according to which the vision of
hell is described.
It is also noteworthy that, despite being an important part of the spe-
cialized theological discourse on the devil, statements defining the nature
of the devil are missing in Tundalus. The audience learns nothing about
the previous angelic nature of the devil or his form of existence as a pure
spirit. Equally, his relationship to God and position within the order of
creation remains unclear. Although the devil is “the sworn enemy of God
and the saints,”15 it is unquestionable that he assumes a function in the
order of creation, namely the punishment of sinners in hell.
The absence of statements on the nature of the devil and his rela-
tions to God and creation as well as the inconsistencies and anthropo-
morphisms described are indications that the focus of Tundalus is not
on the mediation of theological teachings. Instead, Bernardt’s discourse
fragment presents a quite modern devil with a complex emotional life
pointing to developments that not only set the groundwork for the con-
cept of the devil in future literature but also have an impact on theologi-
cal thought regarding the devil, that is, the question on the personality
of the devil. This development can be observed further, on a micro-
cosmic scale, in Bernardt’s oeuvre itself, especially in his work Thomas
Becket (1626),16 which presents a devil that cannot be distinguished from

a human.
The Magisterium’s Discourse on the Devil—Deviation

and Extension
To contextualize the conceptual approach of the devil as found in

Tundalus, it is important to examine the Magisterium’s binding discourse
fragments about the devil to reveal discrepancies and similarities between
the special discourse of theology and the interdiscourse of literary works.
Key documents shaping the Magisterium’s teachings on the devil include
the synodal letter of the Synod of Braga of 561, the creed of the Fourth
Lateran Council of 1215, and the Catechismus romanus of 1566.17
First, one needs to consider that the Magisterium, in particular its
early statements, focuses on the devil differently than Georg Bernhardt in
his Tundalus, especially when it comes to the determination and nature
of the devil. The statements found in the synodal letter of Braga and the
creed of the Lateran Council proclaim on a very fundamental level what
the devil is and is not. They state that the devil is clearly a creature of
God, not an anti-God, and that God did not create him evil, but that he
became evil by himself.
Tundalus, however, introduces a new category of characteristics that
go well beyond the ones described by the Magisterium  that is the appear-
ance of the devil. When comparing the Magisterium’s discourse fragments
with one another, one can see that the Catechismus romanus, published
only 60 years before Tundalus, lists significantly more aspects of the devil
in general and covers much more than just the nature of the devil. Thus,
the Catechismus romanus can be seen as meeting the demand in the early
modern period to know more about the devil than the Bible and the
Magisterium had to offer. Additionally, the Catechismus romanus itself is
a seminal fragment of the devil discourse that, due to its quantity of state-
ments on the devil, its coverage, and its exceptional authority, was vastly
influential on both the specialized theological discourse and the interdis-
course on the devil. One has to consider that the Catechismus romanus was
found in every priest’s household for centuries and so shaped preaching and
eventually significantly contributed to the widespread reception of particu-
lar visions of the devil.18 Comparison with the Tundalus shows that the cat-
echism is committed, at least in a subtle way, to give the devil a character
80 D.J. Olszynski
when he describes cunning and arrogance as the dominant traits of the devil.
These are driving forces behind his actions, whereas the Tundalus puts an
emphasis on the cruelty, industriousness and self-reflection of the devil.
Concerning the capabilities of the devil, his relationship with man
as well as God, and the tools for use against the devil (e.g. prayers and
exorcisms), it is clear that different basic problems are addressed in the
catechism and in Tundalus. These lead to different conclusions. The cat-
echism stresses the devil’s permanent danger and threat to man, the feel-
ing of defenselessness, and the perfidy of the seduction machinated by
the declared enemy of man, who “… is constantly at war with us and
pursues us with deadly hatred.”19 This threatening situation is only bear-
able because the catechism promotes the victory of Christ over the devil,
the limits of the devil’s powers, and numerous defenses against the devil,
including baptism and exorcism.
Unlike the catechism, Tundalus addresses the issue of sorcery. It
speaks of the miraculous abilities of the devil, including the devil’s ability
to give his human followers power to perform magic. In Tundalus the
devil Panurgus provides a brief but comprehensive summary of sorcery:
You are my true sons. I have taught you, my own breeding and offspring,
to handle adders and snakes and seven-headed hydras without fear, bring
down the moon to the earth, to eclipse the sun, to call on hell to bewitch
the people, to beat lands and vineyards with hail, to haunt them with frost,
and to destroy them. To you my chicks, we assign punishment in the meas-
ure of bushels.20
Thus, Tundalus can be interpreted as a work warning about sorcery,

which was a discourse connected strongly to the devil.21 Bernardt
reminds his audience that sorcery leads directly to damnation and eter-
nal punishment, as the last scene impressivly tries to demonstrate. But
the discourse fragment is also altering the discourse on sorcery because
it transfers the problem of sorcery away from the seemingly uneducated,
naïve, and therefore easily seduced female witch to the well-educated
sorcerer who is actively and willingly in league with the devil and as a
direct result even more guilty. This development can also be observed in
other early modern discourse fragments.
Two other points of intersection between the catechism and Tundalus
are remarkable. Both place the devil in the same position within the
order of creation. He punishes the sinners in hell in the service of God.
Also, in both sources hell appears as a hierarchical place. In contrast to

the catechism, however, Tundalus provides a much more detailed over-
view of the hierarchical order, providing the names and functions of indi-
vidual devils.
Trends in the Discourse on the Devil in the Early

Modern Age
A constant in the discourse on the devil in literary works of the early
modern era are depictions of the hierarchy of hell. The devil is seen in
the company of numerous other devils who share responsibilities. As
early as in the Historia von D. Johann Fausten (1587)22 it is not Lucifer
who is attending to Faustus, but rather a lower devil, Mephistopheles. In
addition, a number of other minor devils are presented in the Historia,
even if they appear as rather marginal characters. As Tundalus as well as
other contemporary works such as Albertinus’ Lucifers Königreich und
Seelegejaidt (1616)23 and Masen’s Sarcotis (1654) make clear, devils have
a certain professional expertise when it comes to different types of sin.24
Klopstock’s epic poem, Der Messias (“The Messiah” (1748)), presents a
similar but even more refined vision of hell.25 In Klopstock’s epic poem all
the individual devils he introduces are depicted as three-dimensional char-
acters, whose past actions as well as their motivations are depicted. The
Messias provides a surprising account of the internal order of hell by intro-
ducing devils who each have various functions. Klopstock’s hell has her-
alds, generals, and even a priest, who is in charge of the religion of hell.
This preoccupation with hell’s hierarchy is indicative of an interest in
the organization of the damned. The continuity and frequency of this
statement suggests that a continuing interest in knowledge about the
organization of hell must have existed on the part of recipients. This may
be because the formation process of the early modern state is reflected in
the structures of hell and the development of a complex administration
system was also transferred to the organization of hell.26 Indeed, there is
also danger in organization: with order comes efficiency and, in turn, the
success of hell on earth. So the hierarchy of hell is at the same moment a
reflection of and model for the corporate state.
In Tundalus two discourses meet, which are also significant for
other discourses such as those on sorcery and sin. No discourse frag-
ment tackles the devil exclusively; statements on the devil are merely in
82 D.J. Olszynski
addition to others. The goals of all discourse fragments on the devil are

not primarily to inform about the devil, but to inspire the recipient to
lead a better life, whether through information about church teachings,
creating a consciousness for sin, promoting the right way of life, or con-
sidering the negative example of the clear failure of a misguided life in
league with the devil. This can be found in Tundalus. The protagonist is
first cast as a bad example as he leads a wicked life before his journey to
hell. He then appears as a role model, as he is portrayed as a redeemed
sinner. Furthermore, Tundalus also introduces the negative example of
two sorcerers who suffer punishment in hell for their pact with the devil.
This archetype can also be found in the Historia and in Cenodoxus by
Jakob Biedermann.27
What becomes particularly apparent in literary works of the early
modern period is the fact that the devil becomes a three-dimensional
character. In the Historia, the devil is constructed as a stock character
that is simply evil. Although Mephistopheles shows few distinct motives
for his actions. With this the devil’s character development starts to
take place. The devil’s actions and attitudes were motivated in a more
reasonable way and he became much more than plain evil. As it turns
out, he is now a complex character who can appear as anxious or capa-
ble of suffering. As a result, it is no longer easy to position the devil
within the dialectic of good and evil. Tundalus is a good example for this
development, as its devil experiences scruples reflecting his own deeds.
Ultimately, this enrichment of the devil figure is not durable. Indeed, the
devil is split into three by the time of Klopstock’s Messias. This work also
contributes to the discourse on the devil; as in Tundalus the Messias the
devil has the ability to find redemption.
Considering these aspects, Tundalus can be seen as an important doc-
ument regarding the discourse on the devil in literature and its devel-
opment over time. Its consequent anthropomorphizations and the
presentation of a broader range of emotions and motives of the devil
were revolutionary additions to the discourse. They also indicated the
future development of the whole discourse on the devil.
Discourse Distribution
Even though the discourse on the devil is reflected in literature, it goes
well beyond that. The devil as presented in Tundalus and its deviations
from theological discussions is only a portion of the concept of the devil
in the early modern period. The distribution and proliferation of this

discourse throughout society is also key in recognizing the devil and its
many shapes in earlier centuries and today. Although a few texts may
indeed be an excellent indication of the larger discourse, the extent of its
readership and impact has not yet been fully acknowledged.
In the case of Tundalus, the choice of material may have helped its
distribution, as it received a lively interest among recipients due to the
topic. Bernardt could surely expect prior knowledge of the discourse on
witches. Ingolstadt, the location of its only performances, had a popula-
tion of 4,500–5,000 people in the seventeenth century. Its wealthy citi-
zens were rich craftsmen and university professors, who made up the city
council. Ingolstadt housed the University of the Duchy of Bavaria and
numerous other high-level humanist educational institutions. Citizens of
Ingolstadt were the first audience of Tundalus. It can be expected that
there was a high level of literacy within this group, that they were likely
familiar with the rules of discourse, especially with the formal require-
ments of early modern poetry, and many members of the audience had
a certain knowledge of Latin. The play aims precisely at this audience
and acts deliberately with the advantage of knowledge on the hand of the
recipients and the internal action of the drama and the limited knowl-
edge of its characters. For example, when the guadian angel says to
Tundalus,
You’ll see hell, Tundalus, not as the impious madness of Tundalus has
devised it, but as the Lord in his wrath has decided it to be since eternity
and established it for eternity for the atonement of the mortals’ sins. Oh, if
only the whole world would be the audience of this tragedy: people would
find faith, I know it well, they would believe, sigh, cry and come to their
senses.28
This wish of the guardian angel that the whole world would witness the
tragedy is not fulfilled in the play itself but in the situation of perfor-
mance. Through staging, not only Tundalus but also the entire audience
of the performance learn of the punishments of hell. Furthermore, like
Tundalus, by watching the play the members of the audience should also
be brought to faith and repentance and in that way the highly didactic
play is supposed to impact their everyday lives.
Ingolstadt was known as a place of lively discourse on sorcery in
several respects. First, there was a local tradition of the historical
84 D.J. Olszynski
Dr Faust, whom many perceived as a sorcerer and who was closely
associated with discourses on the devil and sorcery. The historical Dr
Johann Georg Faust was banned from the city in 1528, which was
documented in the records of the city.29 Furthermore, witch trials
were held in Ingolstadt from 1589 until the first half of the seven-
teenth century and the legal and theological faculties there were heav-
ily involved in approving and justifying the persecution of witches in
Bavaria in 1590.30 In the following years there were trials resulting
in executions in Ingolstadt until Duke Maximilian suspended them
in 1593. Ten years later, Duke Maximilian enacted the Lanndgebott
wider den Aberglauben, Zauberey, Hexerey und andere sträffliche
Teufelskünste (Country Law against Superstition, Magic, Sorcery,
and other Punishable Satanic Arts) that condemned all forms of
superstition, especially witchcraft. Its authors were former students
of the Ingolstadt university. In Ingolstadt the law was read publicly
in the city council on March 16, 1611.31 Despite this official docu-
ment and the strict law to prosecute witches, witch trials declined
in Bavaria after 1613, even if there were still ongoing trials, such
as those in Ingolstadt in 1623 against children and in 1630 against
Christoph Wagner.32 It is also noteworthy that Ingolstadt’s Catholic
Church administratively belonged to the diocese of Eichstätt, where
Christoph von Westerstetten, a particularly zealous witch hunter,
was bishop from 1612 to 1636 and was more than willing to provide
ecclesiastical support for these trials.33 Judging from these witch trials,
it becomes clear that the discourse on sorcery was discussed lively in
Ingolstadt. The author of Tundalus, Georg Bernardt, could therefore
assume a certain level of understanding among his intended audience
and certainly his work would have been received with some interest.
The reception of the drama was mainly limited to the two Ingolstadt
performances. Thanks to the two performances, Tundalus was not solely
received by readers alone, because the practice of performance opens this
contribution to the discourse on the devil potentially to a illiterate circle
of recipients. Latin is certainly an obstacle to reception, even if an attempt
to counter it was made by handing out bilingual Perioche. The play did
not appear in printed form, and there was a very limited distribution of
the discourse fragment through written copies. It is only through one
surviving manuscript that we have full knowledge of the entire drama.
Conclusion
Despite being a good source for research on the discourse on the devil,
Tundalus itself failed to widen the discourse in its time. Although strate-
gies and techniques were employed that should have aided the distribu-
tion, like being a topic of high interest, written in magnificent language,
and performed in an extraordinary way, the work lacked the benefit of a
proper publication in the form of a printed text and so its effects were
mainly limited to the audiences of the two performances in Ingolstadt
in 1622 and 1646. This was due to the rigid publication traditions of
the Jesuits, who tried to avoid creating literary stars among themselves.
It was only through chance that the text survived until today and saw
proper publication roughly 350 years after its creation.
And what a loss it would have been. Not only is it a rare example of
the dramas of the Jesuits, but also one that is a true masterpiece. In addi-
tion, Tundalus is also a good example and witness of the discourse on
the devil in the early modern period. Because of the limited number of
discourse fragments on the devil, Tundalus is a valuable addition that
helps us better understand the concept of the devil. It shows that the
official and highly specialized discourse of the Church’s Magisterium was
found somewhat insufficient and was therefore augmented by works of
literature. These add depth to the metaphysical debate on the devil by
working out his motivations, character traits, and relations to God and
humans. Aspects that would later be parts of the modern concept of per-
sonality and lead directly to the very recent theological debates on the
devil.34
It also became evident that the discourse on the devil developed
throughout the early modern period and that Tundalus, a relatively
early discourse fragment, contains all of the major themes of the dis-
course, and also includes those that would become more important in
the future, like the hierarchy of hell, the anthropomorphization of the
devil, and added complexity that eventually opens a path for his possible
salvation in Klopstock’s Messias with it’s idea of apokatastasis. Bernardt’s
Tundalus was well ahead of the contemporary discourse on the devil
and is unique in its modernity, only rivaled by his later Thomas Becket.
Together with the other fragments Tundalus has shaped the discourse on
the devil until today. To understand our concept, it is absolutely neces-
sary to be aware of its early modern roots, to revive the old Astrophal.
86 D.J. Olszynski
Notes
1. Ute Leimgruber, “‘Den Bösen sind sie los …’ Der Teufel in Gesellschaft,
Kunst und Volksglaube,” Salzburger Theologische Zeitschrift 15 (2011):
64–83.
2. Throughout my article, I refer in the question of method to Michel
Foucault’s discourse analysis. However, I find Siegfried Jäger’s termi-
nology for the different layers of the discourse highly practical: Siegfried
Jäger, “Diskurs und Wissen. Theoretische und methodische Aspekte einer
Kritischen Diskurs- und Dispositivanalyse,” in, Reiner Keller, Andreas
Hirseland, Werner Schneider, and Willy Viehöver, eds., Handbuch
sozialwissenschaftliche Diskursanalyse. Band 1: Theorien und Methoden
(Wiesbaden: VS, 2011), 91–124. I will use discourse for the whole vari-
ety of possible statements. Following Jäger, I refer to single literary
works as discourse fragments because these fragments together comprise
the discourse on which the focus of this analysis lies, not just on a sin-
gle fragment. Furthermore the division between a specialized discourse
taking place in a highly professional, mostly scholarly theater and an
interdiscourse mostly in the form of literary works that transmit special-
ized knowledge to a wider group of recipients, is highly important for my
research. With this I follow Jürgen Link and his interdiscourse theory:
Jürgen Link, “Diskursanalyse unter besonderer Berücksichtigung von
Interdiskurs und Kollektivsymbolik,” in, Keller et al., Handbuch sozialwis-
senschaftliche Diskursanalyse. Band 1: Theorien und Methoden, 433–58.
3. The acts of Braga can be found in: Karl-Joseph Hefele and Henri
Leclercq, Histoire des conciles 3, 1 (Paris: Librairie Letouzey et Ané,
1973), 175–81. The documents of the Fourth Lateran Council are in:
Josef Wohlmuth, ed., Dekrete der ökumenischen Konzilien. Band II.
Konzilien des Mittelalters. Vom ersten Laterankonzil (1123) bis zum fünf-
ten Laterankonzil (1512–1517) (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2000), 230–71.
4. Fidel Rädle, ed., Georg Bernardt SJ. Dramen II. “Tundalus redivi-
vus” 1622. Eine Jenseitsvision aus dem Dreißigjährigen Krieg nach
der Mittelalterlichen “Visio Tnugdali”. Lateinisch und Deutsch.
Herausgegeben, übersetzt und kommentiert von Fidel Rädle (Amsterdam:
Holland University Press, 1985).
5. Michel Foucault, Die Ordnung des Diskurses (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer,
2012); Michel Foucault, Die Ordnung der Dinge. Eine Archäologie
der Humanwissenschaften (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2003); Michel Foucault,
Archäologie des Wissens (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1981); Achim
Landwehr, Historische Diskursanalyse (Frankfurt am Main: Campus,
2008); Jürgen Link, “Literaturanalyse als Diskursanalyse” in: Jürgen
Fohrmann and Harro Müller, Diskurstheorie und Literaturwissenschaft
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988), 284–307.
6. Fidel Rädle, “Zum dramatischen Œuvre Georg Bernardts SJ

(1595–1660),” in: Reinhold Glei and Robert Seidel, eds., Das lateinis-
che Drama der Frühen Neuzeit. Exemplarische Einsichten in Praxis und
Theorie (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2008), 233–54.
7. Fidel Rädle, ed., Georg Bernardt SJ. Dramen II. “Tundalus redivi-
vus” 1622. Eine Jenseitsvision aus dem Dreißigjährigen Krieg nach
der Mittelalterlichen “Visio Tnugdali”. Lateinisch und Deutsch.
Holland University Press, 1985), 143.
8. Ibid., 144; Fidel Rädle, “Zu Form und Funktion der Komik in den
Dramen Georg Bernardt SJ (1595–1660),” in: Jan Bloemendal and
Philip Ford, eds., Neo-Latin Drama. Forms, Functions, Receptions
(Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 2008), 103–31; Fidel Rädle, ed., Georg
Bernardt SJ. Dramen III. “Jovianus” 1623/1642. Lateinisch und Deutsch.
Holland University Press, 2006); Herbert Haag, Abschied vom Teufel.
Vom christlichen Umgang mit dem Bösen (Zurich: Benziger, 1990);
Joseph Ratzinger, “Abschied vom Teufel?” in: Joseph Ratzinger, Dogma
und Verkündigung (Munich: Wewel, 1973), S.233–4.
9. Karl Lehmann, “Der Teufel ein personales Wesen,” in: Walter Kasper and
Karl Lehmann, eds., Teufel—Dämonen—Besessenheit. Zur Wirklichkeit des
Bösen (Mainz: Grünewald, 1978), 71–98.
10. Bernd Claret, Geheimnis des Bösen. Zur Diskussion um den Teufel
(Innsbruck: Tyrolia, 1997); Jürgen Bründl, Masken des Bösen. Eine
Theologie des Teufels (Würzburg: Echter, 2002).
11. Helluari, peierare, foenerari simul et Venerem spurcissime, libidinosis-
sime sectari inter Tundali virtutes primas obtinebat. Coelum illi anile
delirium, Deus inane somnium, Erebus ridiculum terriculamentum,
cacodaemones ludus, iocus, fabula, larvae umbratiles, nihil. Fidel Rädle,
ed., Georg Bernardt SJ. Dramen II. “Tundalus redivivus” 1622. Eine
Jenseitsvision aus dem Dreißigjährigen Krieg nach der Mittelalterlichen
“Visio Tnugdali”. Lateinisch und Deutsch. Herausgegeben, übersetzt und
kommentiert von Fidel Rädle (Amsterdam: Holland University Press,
1985), 81. For a better understanding I have translated all quotations
from Rädle’s German version into English.
12. Bernd Roling, “Der Engel als Spielfigur in den Dramen der Jesuiten
Jakob Gretser (1562–1625), Jakob Bidermann (1578–1639) und Georg
Bernardt (1595–1660),” in: Hartmut Beyer, Christel Meier, and Bart
Ramakers, eds., Akteure und Aktionen. Figuren und Handlungstypen im
Drama der Frühen Neuzeit (Münster: Rhema, 2008), 233–67.
13. Ipse ego flagitium subinde suasi et horrui et totus tremui, ego omnis auctor
mali, hostis Dei Divorumque iuratissimus, ego inquam horrui et pavidus
88 D.J. Olszynski
suasi, quae Tundalus liberrimo, facillimo et otioso prope exequebatur usu.

Fidel Rädle, ed., Georg Bernardt SJ. Dramen II. “Tundalus redivivus”
1622, 81.
14. Obieci me illis dormientibus eum qui sum: vultu Aethiopem, manibus
Harpyiam, pedibus caprum, rictu formidabilem, oculis minacem, toto cor-
pore et gestu cacodaemonem. Fidel Rädle, ed., Georg Bernardt SJ. Dramen
II. “Tundalus redivivus” 1622, 5.
15. hostis Dei Divorumque iuratissimus. Fidel Rädle, ed., Georg Bernardt SJ.
Dramen II. “Tundalus redivivus” 1622, 81.
16. Fidel Rädle, ed., Georg Bernardt SJ. Dramen IV. “Thomas Becket” 1626.
Sanctus Thomas Archiepiscopus Cantuariensis Martyr. Lateinisch und
Deutsch. Herausgegeben, übersetzt und kommentiert von Fidel Rädle
(Amsterdam: Holland University Press, 2008).
17. Pedro Rodriguez, ed., Catechismus Romanus seu catechismus ex decreto
concilii tridentini ad parochos Pii Quinti Pont. Max. iussu editus (Vatican:
Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1989). Table II gives a systematic overview on
the various statements on the devil found in these texts.
18. Andreas Holzem, Religion und Lebensformen. Katholische
Konfessionalisierung im Sendgericht des Fürstbistums Münster 1570–1800
(Paderborn: Schoeningh Ferdinand, 2000), 155–224.
19. perpetuum bellum nobis infert et capitali nos insectatur odio. Pedro
Rodriguez, ed., Catechismus Romanus, 635.
20. Vos soboles genuina estis mea: ego vos aspides et cenchrides hydrasque sep-
templices interrita tractare manu, ego vos Lunam devocare, nebulam soli
obducere, Orcum adiurare, homines fascino ligare, agros et vineta gran-
dine verberare, pruina adurere et pessum dare, ego, inquam, vos ova mea et
nativam progeniem erudii: vobis pullis meis per modios, per modios poenas
emetimur. Fidel Rädle, ed., Georg Bernardt SJ. Dramen II. “Tundalus
redivivus” 1622, 103.
21. Walter Rummel and Rita Voltner, Hexen und Hexenverfolgung in der
Frühen Neuzeit (Darmstadt: WBG, 2012), 4.
22. Stephan Füssel and Hans Kreutzer, eds., Historia von D. Johann Fausten.
Text des Druckes von 1587. Kritische Ausgabe. Mit den Zusatztexten der
Wolfenbütteler Handschrift und der zeitgenössischen Drucke (Stuttgart:
Philipp Reclam, 2006).
23. Rochus Freiherr von Liliencron, ed., Aegidius Albertinus: Lucifers
Königreich und Seelengejaidt. Oder Narrenhatz. In acht Theil abgetheilt
(Stuttgart: W. Spemann, 1884).
24. Jakob Masen, Sarcotis (Munich: Saur, 1991).
25. Elisabeth Höpker-Herberg, ed., Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock. Der Messias.
Gesang I–III. Text des Erstdrucks von 1748 (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam,
2000).
26. Michael Erbe, Die Frühe Neuzeit. Grundkurs Geschichte (Stuttgart:

Kohlhammer, 2007), 40; Wolfgang Beutin, ed., Deutsche Literaturgeschichte.
Von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2008), 102;
Johannes Burkhardt, Das Reformationsjahrhundert. Deutsche Geschichte
zwischen Medienrevolution und Institutionenbildung 1517–1617 (Stuttgart:
Kohlhammer, 2002), 166.
27. Rolf Tarot, ed., Jakob Bidermann. Cenodoxus. Abdruck nach den “Ludi
theatrales” (1666) mit den Lesarten der Kelheimer und Pollinger
Handschrift (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1963).
28. Spectabis infernos, Tundale, non quales impia finxit Tundali dementia, sed
quales ad scelera pianda mortalium ab aeterno statuit, aeternitati struxit
furor domini. O utinam tragoediae huius spectator orbis esset: crederet,
sat scio, crederet, suspiraret, eiularet, saperet. Fidel Rädle, ed., Georg
Bernardt SJ. Dramen II. “Tundalus redivivus” 1622, 85.
29. Günther Mahal, Faust. Die Spuren eines geheimnisvollen Lebens (Bern:
Scherz, 1980), 235.
30. Fidel Rädle, “‘Faustsplitter’ aus lateinischen Dramen im Clm 26017,”
in: Johanne Autenrieth and Franz Brunhölzl, eds., Festschrift Bernhard
Bischoff (Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1971), 478–95; Siegfried Hofmann,
Das bayerische Jahrtausend. Ingolstadt im 17. Jahrhundert (Munich: Volk,
2012), 93–4.
31. Siegfried Hofmann, Das bayerische Jahrtausend. Ingolstadt im 17.
Jahrhundert (München: Volk 2012), 91–92.
32. Although the similarity in the name is remarkable, the trialed one is not
Faust’s assistant. Ibid., 87–90.
33. Siegfried Hofmann, Das bayerische Jahrtausend. Ingolstadt im 17.
Jahrhundert (München: Volk 2012), 99.
34. Herbert Haag, Abschied vom Teufel. Vom christlichen Umgang mit
dem Bösen (Zürich: Benziger, 1990); Joseph Ratzinger, “Abschied vom
Teufel?” in: Joseph Ratzinger, Dogma und Verkündigung (Münich:
Wewel, 1973), S.233–4. Karl Lehmann, “Der Teufel ein personales
Wesen,” in: Walter Kasper and Karl Lehmann, eds., Teufel—Dämonen—
Besessenheit. Zur Wirklichkeit des Bösen (Mainz: Grünewald, 1978),
71–98. Bernd Claret, Geheimnis des Bösen. Zur Diskussion um den
Teufel (Innsbruck: Tyrolia, 1997); Jürgen Bründl, Masken des Bösen.
Eine Theologie des Teufels (Würzburg: Echter, 2002).
Acknowledgements I would like to thank David Grotzky, Dr Austin Glatthorn

and Dr Paul Strauss for comradery, critical comments and especially for aid in my
struggle with the English language–all of it was very helpful in the creation of
this chapter.
90 D.J. Olszynski
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CHAPTER 6
The Drama of Hell: Sources

and Interpretation in Seventeenth-Century
Operatic Infernal Scenes
Aliyah M. Shanti
Io fin qui qui t’ho condotto, or più non lice

Teco venir, ch’amara legge il vieta,
Legge, iscritta col ferro in duro sasso
De l’ima reggia in su l’orribil soglia,
Che in queste note il fiero senso esprime:
“Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’intrate.”
[Thus far I have led you, but further I may not
Come with you, for a harsh law forbids it,
A law inscribed in iron on hard stone
At the hideous threshold of the lowest kingdom
Which in these words declares its ruthless intent:
“Abandon all hope, ye who enter.”]
A.M. Shanti (*) 
Princeton University, Princeton, USA

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-52198-5_6
94 A.M. Shanti
With these words, in Claudio Monteverdi and Alessandro Striggio’s

landmark 1607 opera, Orfeo, the goddess Hope abandons Orpheus at
the banks of the River Styx. Striggio’s libretto takes Dante’s famous
inscription very literally, but the hell that Orpheus enters is not that of
Dante’s Inferno. Neither is it that of Virgil and Ovid, whose works pro-
vided Striggio’s source material for the story of Orpheus and Eurydice.
Instead, the hell of Orfeo, and of the many operas that followed it in
the seventeenth century, could only be a product of post-Tridentine
Catholicism mixed with classical notions of the underworld (interpreted
though a late humanistic lens), and a healthy dose of the stage effects so
beloved by early opera audiences.
In this chapter, I will show how this mixture of sources created an
operatic hell that was both a product of its time and completely distinct
from the visions of damnation disseminated by post-Tridentine devo-
tional writers. In so doing, I will demonstrate that the orderly and stable
Dantean hell continued to dominate the popular imagination, perhaps
even more than the chaos envisioned by the early Jesuits and other six-
teenth- and seventeenth-century theologians. While the quotation of
Dante in the libretto of Orfeo is the most obviously deliberate operatic
reference to the Divine Comedy, Dante’s influence on the imagery of hell
reached into opera, even as his reputation as a poet underwent a distinct
decline. I will explore how Dante’s stratified and ironic hell became a
guiding vision for humanistic writers, and how they, in turn, influenced
the developing conventions of the operatic infernal scene.
Hell in Devotional Writing and Literature

The popular and theological conception of hell was in a state of transi-
tion in the early seventeenth century, which necessarily affected its depic-
tion on the stage. The reforms of the Council of Trent and the rise of
the Jesuit order promulgated a new vision of damnation. The pre-Ref-
ormation hell had been an organized place, in which each sin had a spe-
cific, often ironic, punishment, and in which sins and punishments could
be ordered by their relative severity. The most representative depiction
of this hell, of course, was the Divine Comedy, which, in one way or
another, influenced all literary and artistic hells that followed it, as well
as being vitally influential to Italian literature in general. Dante’s hell,
though loud, stinking, and dark, is symmetrical and well-organized, and
lies, cosmologically, at the very center of the universe. Dante leaves no
6 THE DRAMA OF HELL: SOURCES AND INTERPRETATION … 95
doubt that hell was part of the original, just plan of God. As the writing
above the gate says: “Justice moved my exalted Maker: I was constructed
by the divine power, the highest wisdom, and the first love. Before
me was nothing made that was not eternal; eternal I remain.”1 Within
Dante’s hell, punishment was organized by the ideal of contrapasso, in
which the punishment is related to the crime, though often quite subtly.
Thus, the lustful, who in life could not control their appetites, are blown
about by the wind, and the heretics, who denied the immortality of the
soul, are sealed within tombs of flame.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this orderly hell was
replaced, in theological writings, by a vision of absolute chaos. Hell,
in the post-Tridentine period, was represented as a complete break-
down of social order, in which rich and poor alike were thrown into a
vast, burning pit. The image that St Francis de Sales used in his 1609
Introduction à la vie devote was that of “a shadowed city, all burning with
sulfur and stinking pitch, full of citizens who cannot leave.”2 The image
of this overcrowded, plague-ridden city haunted the imaginations of
many authors of devotional works. While, in previous centuries, authors
would warn against specific sins and detail the punishments for them, in
the post-Tridentine period, “sin” became an all-encompassing category,
and the very lack of differentiation in hell became one of its horrors.3
Devotional writers, particularly Jesuits, instructed the faithful to medi-
tate upon the sensory experience of hell. Ignatius of Loyola, for example,
in the fifth of his Spiritual Exercises, instructs the reader in practices for
each of the five senses, including “to see with the sight of the imagina-
tion the great fires, and the souls as in bodies of fire,” and “to smell with
the smell smoke, sulphur, dregs and putrid things.”4
Thus, the varied and colorful punishments of the medieval hell, as
delineated by Dante and the many other authors of visions of damna-
tion, were reduced in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to only a
few, of which fire was the foremost.5 While Dante had the worst of his
sinners frozen in a lake of ice, the new hell was uniformly fiery. Although
the demons remained, their infinite variety, too, was lessened. The over-
all emphasis was on a realm that was crowded, stinking, dark, hot, and
hopeless. The post-Tridentine devotional writers aimed to create a hell
that inspired a visceral feeling of disgust and revulsion in the faithful
instead of the terror combined with fascination and wonder that earlier
writers had provoked.6 Although the devils remained in hell, the idea
began to develop that the damned souls tormented each other, either
96 A.M. Shanti
physically, or by feeling each other’s pain. Lorenzo Pezzi, in his 1589

Vigna del signore, wrote:
… si come con quella spaventosa luce vedranno quelle brute, e monstruose

figure, per le quali haranno gran spavento, così ill or dolore sarà fatto piu
grande dal vedere esser tormentati coloro, che saranno stati loro piu cari in
vita. Il Fratello havrà dolore dell’altro: il padre del figliuolo: Il figliuolo del
padre, e gli amici de gli amici; e mentre, che ciascuno si dolerà del suo pro-
prio e dell’altrui male, verrà il suo tormento à farsi maggiore.
[… even as, with that fearful light they will see those ugly and monstrous
figures, of which they will be terrified, so their pain will be made worse
through seeing tormented those who were most dear to them in life. One
brother will feel the pain of the other, the father of the son, the son of the
father, friends of their friends, and since each one will feel both his own
pain and that of others, his torment will be all the greater.]7
While the standard Catholic hell of the seventeenth century was dark,
chaotic, and unpleasant even by the standard of existing concepts of
hells, secular literary works continued to show the powerful influence
of Dante’s organization. It is no exaggeration to claim that all ver-
nacular Italian works written after the Divine Comedy that include a
depiction of hell show some influence of Dante’s work.8 For example,
Luigi Pulci’s comic epic Morgante, published between 1478 and 1483,
includes several passages describing hell and its inhabitants. In one, the
giant Morgante expresses his desire to go to hell and free all the damned
souls, cut off Minos’ tail, pluck out Charon’s beard, throw Pluto off of
his chair, swallow Phlegethon and Phlegyas, kill the Furies, Erichtho, and
Cerberus, and “Make Beelzebub flee farther than a dromedary would go
in Syria.”9 While all of the figures Morgante names are classical, with the
exception of Beelzebub, their details, such as Minos’ tail, are Dantean.
More influential to later writers, including the creators of opera, was
Ariosto’s 1532 Orlando Furioso, which also includes an infernal episode.
Ariosto’s debts to Dante are somewhat more subtle than Pulci’s, as they
are based more on language than on imagery. Astolfo, in Canto X of the
Furioso, follows some harpies to a cave in the mountains. Even from the
outside, Astolfo can tell it is hell by the loud screams and sighs that issue
from it, and upon entering he is assailed by the horrifying smell. Cristina
Ubaldini, in her essay on the influences of Dante and Ovid on this epi-
sode, notes that Dante’s first impressions of hell are similarly auditory
and olfactory.10 Unlike Dante, Astolfo does not get the full guided tour.
He actually sees very little of hell, both because he only enters a little
way in, and because the part he does see is full of blinding smoke and
heavy fog. This is also where the souls of the ingrate, women who lead
on their lovers without returning their love, are punished, as Astolfo will
learn after his encounter with Lidia, who tells him of how she came to
be in hell for spurning the love of a knight, Alceste. Astolfo attempts to
go deeper into hell, but is overcome by the smoke and must leave. As
Ubaldini observes, the language used by Ariosto in this episode is heav-
ily Dantean, but it borrows more from the Purgatorio than the Inferno,
specifically from Purgatorio Canto XVI, where Dante encounters a dense
smoke that blinds him and compels Virgil to lead him by the hand. The
story of Lidia is a source for the tradition whereby hell became a punish-
ment for women who fail to return the love of their admirers. Indeed,
the metaphor of love as hell was something of a poetic cliché.11 This
“inferno d’amore” was represented in several musical-dramatic works
of the seventeenth century. One of the first and most famous of these
was Monteverdi’s 1608 Ballo delle ingrate, a brief work work for singers
and dancers, performed as part of the 1608 wedding celebrations at the
Mantuan court: the souls of “ungrateful” women, who did not return
their lovers’ affections and were condemned to hell for their frigidity,
emerge and warn the ladies of the audience not to follow in their foot-
steps.
In the seventeenth century, epic poets—not surprisingly—continued
to follow the example of Dante in their depiction of hell, rather than
absorbing features of the newer post-Tridentine theological models.
Lorenzo Lippi’s epic, Il malmantile racquistato, posthumously pub-
lished in 1677, includes a canto in which the witch Martinazza journeys
into hell.12 Martinazza is guided by the sorcerer Nepo da Galatrona, as
Dante was guided by Virgil, or Orpheus, in Monteverdi’s opera, was led
by Hope. Pluto, here, is king of hell, rather than Satan, and Lippi avoids
explicitly Christian references. Martinazza’s journey nevertheless pro-
ceeds along distinctly Dantean lines, and the concept of the ironic and
creative punishment, which had more-or-less disappeared from theologi-
cal literature (and was never common at all among the ancients, except
in very specific cases of particular individuals who had personally angered
the gods) is in full force in Lippi’s poem. A usurer is beaten by bags of
money, and a vain person is dunked in manure, among many other such
sentences.
98 A.M. Shanti
One of the most fascinating of the early modern Italian visions of

hell is that of the scholar, writer, and publisher Anton Francesco Doni
(1513–1574). The full synthesis of the classical underworld with the
Dantean categorization of punishments is evident even from the title
page, which reads. “The Second Book of I Mondi by Doni: Called
the Seven Hells. By the Academici peregrini: Sent to Pluto, Cerberus,
Charon, Minos, Aeacus, Rhadamantos, and Proserpina.”13
In the second book of I Mondi, a series of satirical prose dialogues
published in 1552, Doni describes a succession of seven hells, including
“The Hell of scholars and pedants too given to allegory,” “The Hell of
the unhappily married and of dishonest lovers,” and “The Hell of pro-
fane and lascivious poets and composers,” among others. Doni’s ironic
punishments are unusual and vivid. Bad poets, for example, are drowned
in a lake of boiling ink, while negligent academics are treated like the
books they have abused, passed from hand to hand until they eventually
fall apart. Dante himself has a speaking part in one of the dialogues, as
do other modern Italian figures such as the fifteenth-century Florentine
humanist Matteo Palmieri, as well as ancient figures including Orpheus.
Doni’s hell is, in a way, explicitly Christian, as he cites at the very begin-
ning the Doctors of the Church as “those who have already spoken of
hell” (and cites no others), names demons from the Christian tradition
(including Lucifer) as those the academic narrators see, and includes sec-
tions on what the Church says of various sins. Doni’s work is satirical and
intentionally bizarre, but it demonstrates the ease with which humanists
could synthesize Christian and pagan hells, allowing them to speak of St
Augustine in one breath and Proserpina in the next.
The Humanist Origins of the Operatic Infernal Scene

It is from this amalgamated tradition that the first creators of opera drew
their images of hell. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the infernal
acts of Orfeo. The libretto of Orfeo, by Alessandro Striggio, is far more
directly influenced by Dante than the librettos of later seventeenth-
century operas.14 It is, in fact, saturated with Dantean language, not
only in the infernal acts, such that I theorize it may have been written
as a sort of defense of Dante in the then current debates over the poet’s
literary merit.15 Striggio’s blatant quotation of the most famous line of
the Inferno, “Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’intrate,” is not, as it might
seem, an almost comical pandering to the most famous literary depiction
of hell. Instead, it is a signpost to a far richer system of Dante quotations

and allusions within the libretto.
Most of the third act of Orfeo is taken up with the singer’s attempt
to convince the boatman Charon to allow him to cross into hell as a liv-
ing man. Orpheus uses all the persuasive power of his music in the aria
“Possente Spirto” (Fig. 6.1). This aria, by far the most virtuosic in the
opera, and situated in the exact center of the five-act structure, is writ-
ten in terza rima, the meter of interlocking hendecasyllable tercets that
Dante used throughout the Divine Comedy and which is indelibly associ-
ated with him. This, the center point and musical climax of the opera,
is the only place in the work where Striggio used terza rima, which was
not a popular meter in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In his
nearly fifty-year career, Monteverdi only set a handful of poems in terza
rima, but among them was this aria, intended to be the ultimate demon-
stration of the persuasive power of music. In this way, the supreme singer
and infernal traveler of classical myth takes up the language of the Italian
poet who wrote what was, before Paradise Lost, unquestionably the fin-
est Christian religious epic.
In later operas, the poetic influence of Dante was far less promi-
nent. In the seventeenth century, Dante’s esteem as a poet hit its nadir,
as many linguistic scholars agreed with Pietro Bembo’s opinion that
Dante’s use of language was “coarse,” in comparison with the refine-
ment of Petrarch.16 Only three new editions of the Commedia were
published in the entire seventeenth century (compared to 29 in the
sixteenth century), although older ones continued to be reprinted.17
Regardless of contemporary debates over the merits of Dante as a poet
and the Commedia as an epic, and the power of the new post-Tridentine
model of hell, Dante’s imagery continued to be pervasive in the Italian
imagination. Nowhere was the poet’s continued influence more promi-
nent than in his hometown of Florence. In 1667, the city celebrated the
wedding of the Grand Prince of Tuscany Cosimo III de’ Medici to the
French Princess Marguerite Louise d’Orleans. Among the many enter-
tainments that accompanied the wedding was an opera, the first per-
formed at the newly constructed Teatro della Pergola. This work, Ercole
in Tebe, with music by Jacopo Melani and a libretto by Giovanni Andrea
Moniglia, has left unusually complete records relating to its performance,
likely due to its premiere at a large, official state occasion. These include
a detailed description of the opera in the official chronicle of the wed-
ding, almost certainly by Alessandro Segni.18 Segni was later secretary of
100 A.M. Shanti
Fig. 6.1 Beginning of Orpheus’ aria “Possente spirto.” Trans. “Powerful spirit,

and formidable god.”
the Accademia della Crusca, the most prominent Italian linguistic society
up to the present day, of which Moniglia was also a member. From the
amount of detail in his description of Ercole in Tebe, it seems likely that
he may have had some role in the production.
Segni was intimately familiar with both Dante and Petrarch. He
quotes both poets in his description of the opera in the Memorie, but
Dante quotations are particularly thickly strewn throughout his descrip-
tion of the third act of Ercole in Tebe, which is set in hell. For example,
he describes Act 3, Scene 1 as follows:
… verso la riva venia per nave, un vecchio bianco per antico pelo, a forza
di remi colla piccola barca, che sola per la palude era, sendendo l’acque,
e con gentilissime canzonette morali derideva l’umane speranze, che dalla
tagliente falce di morte restano sempre recise sul verde …
[… towards the bank an old man, white-haired with age, came in a boat,
using his oars in the little vessel, who was alone in the marsh, hearing the
water, and with a most gentle moralizing song derided human hopes …].19
When he reaches for a description of the boatman of the Styx, Segni’s

first point of reference is not Virgil or Ovid (whom he certainly also
knew well), or any of the popular devotional writers, but Dante. While
Dante quotations in librettos are rare (although not non-existent) in the
later seventeenth century, hell and its demons, in the popular imagina-
tion, still owed much to the Commedia.20 The visual spectacle of the
infernal scene, so crucial to seventeenth-century audiences, still clearly
drew its inspiration from the colorful variety of the medieval Hell, as fil-
tered through a humanistic literary lens. Hell on stage does not contain
the existential horror evoked by post-Tridentine theologians.21 Its pur-
pose was to inspire awe and to entertain, perhaps even to titillate with
a hint of terror, but not to advise against sin. Moralizing, in fact, is rare
in the operatic hell. Ercole in Tebe includes a rare exception, in which
two servant characters, who have descended into hell with their masters,
Hercules and Theseus, comment upon all of the people they knew in life,
who seemed like paragons of virtue, but whom they now see condemned
to torment. This scene, however, is presented as black comedy, rather
than a serious warning about the consequences of living a corrupt life.
102 A.M. Shanti
Stylistic Features of the Operatic Hell Scene

As opera became a popular form of entertainment, particularly beginning
in the late 1630s when the first public opera theater opened in Venice,
the depiction of hell in opera accumulated certain conventions.22 While
poets and composers of Italian opera over the course of the seventeenth
century produced variant versions of this hell, a few aspects became
nearly universal. These included somber music, dancing, and visual spec-
tacle. Through these conventions, the creators of opera created an infer-
nal vision that was, in many ways, antithetical to the chaos and visceral
horror described by devotional writers.
Dante’s hell was cacophonous and discordant, and the post-Triden-
tine hell was, if anything, even louder. One might expect the music of
the operatic hell to reflect this imagination, with loud dissonance and
general noisiness. Instead, in fact, the operatic hell is characterized more
by a somber gloominess, particularly in works from early in the century.
The inhabitants of hell, for the most part, sing in the speech-like rhythms
of recitative, expressed poetically through versi sciolti (irregular, usually
unrhymed lines of a mixture of seven or eleven syllables), rather than
the metrically regular, lyrical, rhymed lines of aria. Visitors to hell, such
as Orpheus, often sing arias, which stand in stark contrast to the sober
recitative of the infernal denizens.
To the early modern humanists who created opera, music, in itself,
was associated with divinity. Singing and listening to music were thought
to bring one closer to God.23 It is logical, then, that hell would not be
simply cacophonous, but indeed anti-musical, and, when music could
not be avoided, as in opera, it would be so sparse and somber as not to
invite any comparison to celestial song. Dante, indeed, avoids almost all
mention of singing in the Inferno, while the Purgatorio and Paradiso are
full of music.24 The only inhabitants of hell who normally sing metrically
regular music are the nameless demons and monsters that populate the
infernal choruses. These often dance as they sing, in raucous, strongly
accented rhythms. The music for the dances, or balli, at the ends of
acts, was often omitted from opera scores and are thus lost. One of the
examples of an infernal ballo with extant music is the dance of monsters
and Cupids from the aforementioned Ercole in Tebe. Alessandro Segni
describes it thus:
Allora fur un aria, che nel suo sforzato concerto spirava terrore, I mostri
seguaci di Pluto diero cominciamento con ispaventosi salti ad una fiera
danza, nella quale varie forze, bizzari passi regolati da stravagante capric-
cio si videro nel tempo medesimo, che gli amori, che cola eran discesi con
Citerea intrecciarono su la medesima aria un ballo nobile, che giocondis-
sima cosa fu à vedere la terribil fierezza de mostri, e l’aggiustata lindura
degli degli amori tramischiare I lor movimenti in tal forma, che gli uni, e
gli altri accordando le lor fermate, venivano à dimostrarne nuove, e dilet-
tose figure.
[Then there was an aria, that inspired terror with its forceful music. The
monstrous followers of Pluto began a fierce dance with terrifying leaps, in
which one saw various forces, bizarre steps ruled by strange caprice. One
saw at the same time, that the Cupids, that had descended there with
Venus, weave upon the same aria a noble dance. How enjoyable it was to
see the terrifying fierceness of the monsters, and the well-tuned neatness of
the Cupids mixing their movements in such a way, that, pausing together,
they demonstrated new and delightful figures.]25
As the official chronicler of the wedding, Segni was certainly determined

to laud the spectacular elements of the production. But when we look at
the score, his references to terror and fierceness seem somewhat exag-
gerated (Fig. 6.2). Of course the scoring, for cornets and trombones, is
certainly loud, and is typical of the underworld scenes performed outside
Venice, where winds were not usually included. The sinfonia that follows
the chorus, and its accompanying brass and wind ritornello, which might
have been part of the ballo, used the more usual scoring for strings, and
the faster tempo may have been a chance for the Cupids to shine, or
it may have simply been a transitional piece to the next act. However,
given Segni’s description, we might expect a musical representation of
Dante’s “Sighs and weeping,” but none is forthcoming. What we find
are a few unexpected leaps, some irregular dotted rhythms, but other-
wise, to modern ears, the music is melodically and harmonically unex-
ceptional, only hinting at the monstrousness of the dancers and certainly
without any of the overblown dissonance and chaos one might expect
from Segni’s description.
According to every literary and theological source, from Homer
to St Francis de Sales, hell is crowded. The overwhelming, undifferen-
tiated masses of people were one of its greatest horrors, and post-Tri-
dentine authors concentrated on this aspect of hell far more than earlier
104 A.M. Shanti
Fig. 6.2 Excerpt from ritornello and sinfonia from the end of Act 3 of Jacopo
Melani’s Ercole in Tebe
writers.26 The teeming throngs of Hell were reflected in its representa-

tion in opera. Even more than other fantastic operatic set-pieces, the
infernal scene required large numbers of people on stage, as dancers,
chorus singers, or supernumeraries. Nearly every infernal scene included
a dance, even in Venice, where the normal fashion was for relatively
few people on stage at a time. On those occasions when these dances
were not included, their very lack is telling. In Aurelio Aureli and Pietro
Andrea Ziani’s 1661 Antigona delusa da Alceste, for example, the libret-
tist, Aureli, who was also the impresario of the theater company, placed
the infernal scene at the beginning of the second act rather than the end
of the first in order to avoid the infernal ballo. Aureli relates in the pref-
ace to the libretto that Antigona delusa was produced in a great hurry,
using the balli and stage machinery from another opera produced that
season, Gl’avvenimenti d’Orinda.27 This opera has no infernal scene, and
so it was in Aureli’s interest to avoid writing an infernal ballo in Antigona
delusa. By the 1660 s, the dance at the end of the first and second acts of
a three-act opera was an obligatory convention in Venice. Thus, in order
to use the balli of hunters and of artisans and of hunchbacks already pre-
pared for Orinda, Aureli places the infernal sequence at the beginning of
the second act rather than the end of the first, where it might otherwise
have gone.
Where budget permitted, the infernal dance could be incredibly
elaborate. In 1647, Cardinal Mazarin invited an Italian company to per-
form the first opera in France. This work was yet another setting of the
Orpheus myth, Luigi Rossi’s Orfeo. A description of the infernal ballet,
most likely written by someone involved in the performance, reads:
Plutone, che fatto L’Inferno in allegria domanda, che si faci una danza, la
quale fù bellissima, e stravagantissima. Le comparve Quattro dragoni, con
Quattro Arpia, alla fine della coro danza lascirono ott’ ova, dalle quali usci-
rono otto diavoletti, e ballono, el’Arpie, e li draghi volono, chi uscirono
Quattro lumaconi con 4 fantasme, e poi dale fantasme uscirono 4 lanter-
noni, e poi uscirono 4 civettoni e li diavoli fecero la caccia con bellissime
e stravagantissime muttanze, e fini, fù sonata il ballo da piferi, e cornetti, e
cornamuze.
[Pluto, who has made the underworld happy, commands that a dance be
done, which was most beautiful and extravagant. There appeared four
dragons, with four Harpies, who danced and left behind eight eggs, from
which hatched eight little devils, who danced, and the dragons and harpies
flew. Then there appeared four snails with four spirits, and from the spir-
its there appeared four lantern bearers, and then entered four owls, and
the devils hunted them with beautiful and extravagant dance steps, and it
ended. The dance was played by pifferi (a kind of oboe), cornets, and bag-
pipes.]28
106 A.M. Shanti
Obviously, this colorful and diverse throng of stage effects is very differ-
ent from the chaotic lack of differentiation typical of the post-Tridentine
hell. It was, perhaps, impossible to represent properly the unpleas-
ant chaos of this hell through sound or dance, while remaining in the
stylized idiom of the early modern stage. However, when one looks to
paintings of hell from this period, such as those of Jan Brueghel,29 which
show disorganized, asymmetrical masses of bodies, even in works on
ancient subjects such as Aeneas and the Sybil, it becomes clear that peo-
ple of the time did have a clear visual understanding of the post-Refor-
mation hell, and the choice to represent a more orderly vision on stage
seems more deliberate, and speaks to the survival of older literary sources
such as Dante.
The Christian Hell on the Operatic Stage

Most seventeenth-century operas had subjects based on classical mythol-
ogy or loosely inspired by history, mostly pre-Christian. The hells therein
depicted are thus ostensibly Pagan, although, as we have seen, the line
between the Christian and Pagan hell was malleable. There is one sub-
genre, however, which is explicitly Christian, and which was produced by
and for some of the highest authorities of post-Tridentine Catholicism.
This is so-called “sacred” opera, which enjoyed a period of popular-
ity at the Barberini papal court between 1630 and 1660. These works
were mostly hagiographical in subject, although a few, such as Erminia
sul Giordano (1637) were based on works of secular literature, such as
Tasso’s Jerusalem Liberated. These Roman operas were not only per-
formed for the papal court; they were produced by the nephews of Pope
Urban VIII, Cardinals Francesco and Antonio Barberini. The librettos
were written by a friend of Francesco, Giulio Rospigliosi, who had a long
and illustrious career as a priest, scholar, and poet, culminating in his
election as Pope Clement IX in 1667.
Several of Rospigliosi’s operas include infernal scenes, the most
extended of which is that of Sant’Alessio (1631) with music by Stefano
Landi.30 In this hagiographical work on the life of Saint Alexius, a
demon tries to tempt the saint away from holiness, appearing to Alexius
in disguise. The first appearance of this demon (given no name in the
libretto, save for “Il Demonio”) is in hell, surrounded by a chorus of
dancing demons, with another chorus of singing demons backstage. He
Fig. 6.3 Illustration of infernal scene, from Stefano Landi, Il S. Alessio:

Dramma Musicale (Rome: Appresso Paolo Masotti, 1634)
outlines his plans to tempt Alexius, and the demons sing and dance in
anticipation of their upcoming victory.
If there is any operatic hell that one might expect to display the chaos
and horror of the post-Tridentine hell, it is this. Indeed, the emphasis on
sin and temptation is foreign to infernal scenes from secular works. The
Demon is a far more complex and seductive character than any oper-
atic Pluto, able to shift swiftly and gracefully between different musical
modes and styles, melodically demonstrating his ability to disguise him-
self. The seductive qualities of sin, however, were certainly not a new,
post-Reformation concept, and the music of the infernal chorus, with its
dotted rhythms and distinctive poetic meter, could come from any infer-
nal scene from the first half of the seventeenth century.31
Visually, as well, these “sacred” operas took little influence from the
new vision of Hell. Illustrations of the demonic dances in Sant’Alessio
and Michelangelo Rossi’s Erminia sul Giordano (1633) are nearly identi-
cal, which is perhaps not so surprising for two Roman works performed
under the same patronage, with the same librettist, less than two years
108 A.M. Shanti
apart (Fig. 6.3). Both show two rows of four dancers each, all nude or
nearly so, mostly human, but with the tails of animals, all holding snakes,
or torches, or whips. The dancers’ bodies are grotesquely twisted, and
their gestures hint at their inhuman natures while still remaining within
the bounds of the human anatomy they possess. The illustrator clearly
depicts their dynamic motions. At the same time, these dancers remain
in two straight lines, symmetrically arrayed against the sides of the stage.
Even in these Roman works on Christian subjects, which one might
expect to be most inspired by post-Tridentine infernal visions, the influ-
ence seems to be that of Dante’s hell, symmetrical and orderly on the
large scale, but bizarre and grotesque in the details.
If even Christian works produced by and for the highest authori-
ties of the Catholic Church still drew more inspiration from the won-
der and symmetry of Dante and his humanist followers rather than the
grim vision of devotional writers, it casts doubt on how much sway those
theologians actually had on the popular imagination. It certainly shows
that, far from fading, Dante’s well-ordered vision of damnation was alive
in the seventeenth-century consciousness, even if his poetic prowess was
questioned.
Although the writers of operatic hell scenes in secular works took their
subjects from ancient myth and their imagery from Dante, they were
still concerned with retaining the appearance of orthodox Catholicism.
In Venice, for example, all librettos had to be certified for religious
and moral legitimacy before they could be printed or performed, and
approval was by no means certain. Some librettists published disclaimers
in their works, noting that even though they used the names of Roman
gods and made references to polytheism, these references were merely
poetic expressions, and should not be taken as evidence of religious
unorthodoxy on the part of the author.32
The Later Seventeenth Century

The humanist admixture of classical characters, Dantean organization,
and post-Tridentine horror created an operatic hell that was entirely
fresh and new. As the seventeenth century passed, however, composers
found ways to play with the newly formed conventions of the infernal
scene, and even to mock them.
Like so many other seventeenth-century Venetian operas, Mateo
Noris and Carlo Pallavicino’s 1675 Galieno ends its penultimate act in
hell. As the beautiful Fulvia, mistress of the Roman Emperor Galieno,

sleeps on stage, the set changes around her to the Inferno degli amanti,
the “Hell of the lovers.” When Fulvia wakes, she is confronted, accord-
ing to the libretto, by a “Spirit in the form of Cupid on a high throne.”
Above the stage, “many spirits in the form of Cupids fly through the
air.”33 The act ends with a ballet of monsters. The remarkable aspect of
Galieno’s infernal scene is that the hell it displays is entirely fraudulent.
Cloro, a young Roman nobleman in unrequited love with Fulvia, hires
the sorcerer Aristodemo to help him coerce Fulvia’s love. Aristodemo
commands the infernal spirits that are his servants to construct a sim-
ulated hell on earth around Fulvia as she sleeps. The “spirits in the
form of Cupids” are, in fact, Aristodemo’s servants, and the Cupid on
the throne, another of the sorcerer’s spirits, tells Fulvia that in order
to escape from hell, she must agree to love Cloro and forsake Galieno.
Fulvia unwillingly acquiesces.
Galieno’s infernal scene demonstrates just how unorthodox the depic-
tion of hell on stage could be in seventeenth-century Italy. Not only is
this hell a fake, but, far from being a warning to avoid immoral behavior,
its very purpose is to instigate an illicit love affair. Galieno is a pseudo-
historical work set in ancient Rome, but the vivid, constantly moving
nature of its “hell of the lovers” is as far from the gloomy, somewhat
formless Hades of the ancient Romans as it is from the chaotic, undiffer-
entiated, moralizing hell of the post-Tridentine Roman Catholic Church.
The operatic hell played at religious orthodoxy, at classical learning, and
at horror, but its ultimate purpose was as terrifying spectacle.
Hell, to the creators of early opera, occupied a space between the real
and the imagined: a place no living person could visit, yet one that they
believed to be real, and which possessed a long list of attributes derived
from older imagination and visions. To realize hell on stage, librettists
drew from the humanist literary tradition, which filtered classical myth
through a colorful Dantean lens, rather than the viscerally terrifying
post-Tridentine devotions. The operatic infernal scene has humanist
bones, even when the hell it depicts is ostensibly Christian, as in Roman
sacred opera. The multiplicity of sources from which librettists created
their hell allowed for a presentation that could refresh, and at times, as
in Galieno, subvert the infernal conventions of Dante and his successors.
110 A.M. Shanti
Notes
1. Dante Alighieri, Inferno, Canto III, 3–9. “Giustizia mosse il mio alto fat-
tore;/fecemi la divina podestate,/la somma sapienza e ‘l primo amore./
Dinanzi a me non fuor cose create/se non etterne, e io etterno duro.”
2. Francis de Sales, Introduction À La Vie Dévote, Le Club Du Livre
Chrétien (Fourcalquier: Morel, 1963), 57.
3. Piero Camporesi, The Fear of Hell: Images of Damnation and Salvation in
Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 3–23.
4. Ignatius of Loyola and David L. Fleming, The Spiritual Exercises of St.
Ignatius: A Literal Translation and a Contemporary Reading, Series IV—
Study Aids on Jesuit Topics, no. 7 (St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources,
1978), 44.
5. For other medieval infernal visions, see Eileen Gardiner, ed., Visions of
Heaven and Hell before Dante (New York: Italica Press, 1988).
6. Camporesi, 7–11.
7. Lorenzo Pezzi, La vigna del Signore, nella quale si dichiarano i santissimi
sacramenti, et si descrivono il paradiso, il limbo, il purgatorio, & l’inferno.
Venice, Appresso Girolamo Porro, 1589), 124.
8. For more on the influence of Dante on later literary work, see Simon
A. Gilson, Dante and Renaissance Florence (Cambridge and New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2005); and Marco Arnaudo, Dante Barocco:
L’influenza Della Divina Commedia Su Letteratura E Cultura Del
Seicento Italiano, Il Portico; Sezione Materiali Letterari 162 (Ravenna:
Longo, 2013).
9. Luigi Pulci, Il Morgante, 1. ed., I Classici Rizzoli (Milan: Rizzoli, 1961),
2, 38.
10. Cristina Ubaldini, Metamorfosi, Parodia ed Eros: Studi su Dante, Ariosto e
Dosso Dossi, Negotia Litteraria. Studi 12 (Manziana: Vecchiarelli, 2012),
87–8.
11. Perhaps the most representative seventeenth-century use of this trope can
be found in Giambattista Marino’s sonnet, “Donna, siam rei di morte,”
in which the poet laments his excess of ardor and his beloved’s disdain,
concluding that they are both damned: she to burn in the Hell of his
heart, and he in that of her eyes.
12. Lorenzo Lippi, Il malmantile racquistato di Perlone Zipoli (G. Barbeia,
1861), canto 6.
13. Antonio Francesco Doni, Libro secondo de mondi: Inferni del Doni
academico Pellegrino (Venice: Marcolini, 1553).
14. Opera—that is, fully staged dramatic works that are entirely sung—dif-
fers from nearly all other musical genres in that there is a generally
accepted point at which it was invented, and a good deal of historical
documentation surrounding this invention. The very first music-dramas

to which the title “opera” is generally given were produced around the
turn of the seventeenth century in Florence, by composers and poets
associated with the circle of Count Giovanni de’ Bardi, a loosely organ-
ized society devoted to the discussion of music, particularly of that of
the ancient Greeks. The first surviving opera was by Jacopo Peri, with a
libretto by Ottavio Rinuccini: Euridice, premiered at the Palazzo Pitti for
the wedding of Maria de’ Medici and Henri IV of France in 1600.This
was followed swiftly by another Euridice to the same libretto, by Peri’s
colleague and rival Giulio Caccini. Monteverdi and Striggio’s Orfeo,
which premiered on February 24, 1607 for the Accademia degli Invaghiti
at the Ducal Palace in Mantua, was greatly influenced by Rinuccini’s
libretto, and its two settings. Monteverdi’s opera, however, became far
better known than the Florentine works, and remains the best-known
early opera. In part, this is due to the austerity of the Florentine musi-
cal style, which is not very appealing to many modern ears. The birth of
opera, and Orfeo in particular, have been the subject of much scholarly
scrutiny. See, for example, John Whenham, Claudio Monteverdi, Orfeo
(Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Tim
Carter, Music in Late Renaissance & Early Baroque Italy (London: B.
T. Batsford, 1992); and Gary Tomlinson, Monteverdi and the End of the
Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).
15. See author’s dissertation, “Musical Descents: Creating and Re-Creating
Hell in Italian Opera, 1600–1680,” forthcoming.
16. Michael Caesar, Dante, the Critical Heritage, 1314–1870 (London and
New York: Routledge, 1989), 23–31.
17. Ibid., 36.
18. Alessandro Segni, Memorie Delle Feste Fatte in Firenze Per Le Reali Nozze
De’ Serenissimi Sposi Cosimo, Principe Di Toscana, e Margherita Luisa,
Principessa d’Orleans (Florence: Nella Stamperia di S.A.S., 1662).
19. Ibid., 162. Italics are in the original, and denote quotations from the
Divine Comedy.
20. One clear allusion to the Inferno occurs in the very short infernal scene
of Francesco Cavalli and Francesco Melosio’s 1653 Orione. In this scene,
Diana refers to Hell as the place “where there is no hope,” alluding to
the same line quoted in Orfeo. Francesco Melosio, L’ Orione dramma di
Francesco Melosio da Città della Pieue (Venice, 1673), 67.
21. Segni, for example, in denoting the emotions of the audience raised by
the appearance of the infernal scenery, notes “they recognized the
bizarreness in the invention, in the order loveliness, in the color, fear, and
finally in all the parts a marvelous grandness.”
112 A.M. Shanti
22. For the first 30 years of its existence, opera was performed exclusively at
courts, open only to select, highly learned audiences. In 1637, the first
opera theater opened in Venice. As a republic, Venice did not have a cen-
tralized court, and the Venetian theaters were open to anyone who could
afford a ticket. Opera in Venice achieved a vastly greater popularity, with
at least two new operas premiered every year for the rest of the century,
and became a favorite entertainment for both Venetians and tourists from
all over Europe. For more on the forces that shaped opera in Venice,
see Beth Lise Glixon and Jonathan Emmanuel Glixon, Inventing the
Business of Opera: The Impresario and His World in Seventeenth-Century
Venice (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), and Ellen
Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice: The Creation of a Genre
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).
23. Andrew Dell’Antonio, Listening as Spiritual Practice in Early Modern
Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 15–34.
24. For an overview of Dante’s references to music, see Francesco Ciabattoni,
Dante’s Journey to Polyphony (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto
Press, 2010).
25. Segni, 167–8.
26. Camporesi, The Fear of Hell, 8–10.
27. Aurelio Aureli, L’Antigona Delusa Da Alceste (Venice: Appresso Giacomo
Batti, 1660), 8–10.
28. Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Ms. Barb. Lat. 4059, fol. 136v.
29. For example, see his “Aeneas and Sibyl in the Underworld,” or “Les
Enfers” By François de Nomé.
30. Although Sant’Alessio was first performed in 1631, almost no information
about this performance exists beyond the fact that it took place. All of the
extant performance information concerns the 1632 revival.
31. The distinctive line-endings of this meter, in which the accent falls on the
antepenultimate syllable, are known as sdruccioli, and are specifically asso-
ciated with the underworld and with magic.
32. See, for example, Aurelio Aureli, L’Antigona Delusa da Alceste: Drama
per Musica: Favola Settima. Rappresentata in Bologna l’Anno M.DC.LXI
(Bologna: Benacci, 1661), 6.
33. Matteo Noris, Galieno (Venice: Francesco Nicolini, 1676), 48–51.
Bibliography
Alm, Irene, (Author). “Winged Feet and Mute Eloquence: Dance in
Seventeenth-Century Venetian Opera.” Cambridge Opera Journal 15, no. 3
(2003): 216–80.
Arnaudo, Marco. Dante Barocco: L’influenza Della Divina Commedia Su

Letteratura E Cultura Del Seicento Italiano. Il Portico; Sezione Materiali
Letterari 162. Ravenna: Longo, 2013.
Baur-Heinhold, Margarete. The Baroque Theatre; a Cultural History of the 17th
and 18th Centuries. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967.
Caesar, Michael. Dante, the Critical Heritage, 1314–1870. London; New York:
Routledge, 1989.
Camporesi, Piero. The Fear of Hell : Images of Damnation and Salvation in Early
Modern Europe. Translated by Lucinda Byatt. London: Polity Press, 1991.
Carter, Tim. Monteverdi’s Musical Theatre. New Haven, Conn: Yale University
Press, 2002.
———. Music in Late Renaissance & Early Baroque Italy. London: B. T.
Batsford, 1992.
Ciabattoni, Francesco. Dante’s Journey to Polyphony. Toronto; Buffalo: University
of Toronto Press, 2010.
Dell’Antonio, Andrew. Listening as Spiritual Practice in Early Modern Italy.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.
Doni, Antonio Francesco. Libro secondo de mondi: Inferni del Doni academico
Pellegrino. Venice: Marcolini, 1553.
Gardiner, Eileen, ed. Visions of Heaven and Hell before Dante. New York: Italica
Press, 1988.
Gilson, Simon A. Dante and Renaissance Florence. Cambridge; New York:
Glixon, Beth Lise, and Jonathan Emmanuel Glixon. Inventing the Business of
Opera : The Impresario and His World in Seventeenth-Century Venice. Oxford;
New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Hammond, Frederick. Music and Spectacle in Baroque Rome  : Barberini
Patronage under Urban VIII. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994.
Heller, Wendy. “Opera Between the Ancients and the Moderns.” In The Oxford
Handbook of Opera, 275–95. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Lippi, Lorenzo. Il malmantile racquistato di Perlone Zipoli Lorenzo Lippi. G.
Barbeia, 1861.
Meraviglie E Orrori Dell’aldilà: Intrecci Mitologici E Favole Cristiane Nel Teatro
Barocco. I Libri dell’Associazione Sigismondo Malatesta: Studi Di Letteratura
Comparata E Teatro 8. Roma: Bulzoni, 1995.
Molinari, Cesare. Le Nozze Degli Dèi. Un Saggio Sul Grande Spettacolo Italiano
Nel Seicento. Biblioteca Teatrale, Studi, n. 3. Roma: M. Bulzoni, 1968.
Pezzi, Lorenzo. La vigna del Signore, nellaquale si dichiarano i Santissimi
Sacramenti … appresso Girolamo Porro, 1589.
Pirrotta, Nino Povoledo. Music and Theatre from Poliziano to Monteverdi.
Cambridge Studies in Music; Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1982.
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Pulci, Luigi. Il Morgante. 1. ed. I Classici Rizzoli. Milano: Rizzoli, 1961.

Roglieri, Maria Ann. Dante and Music: Musical Adaptations of the Commedia
from the Sixteenth Century to the Present. Aldershot; Burlington USA:
Ashgate, 2001.
Rosand, Ellen. Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice: The Creation of a Genre.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.
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Fourcalquier: Morel, 1963.
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serenissimi sposi Cosimo, principe di Toscana, e Margherita Luisa, principessa
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Bucknell University Press; Associated University Presses, 1985.
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Whenham, John. Claudio Monteverdi, Orfeo. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge
CHAPTER 7
The Diabolic Logic of Logos: Towards a

Hermeneutics of Hell in Goethe’s Faust
Caroline Sauter
Throughout world literature, the devil is involved with language and

interpretation. Satan, the devil of the biblical tradition, for instance, is
first introduced within the biblical canon in the narrative of the Fall of
Man (Gen. 3) in the form of a speaking serpent, and from then on, he
is conceptualized as a being that is competent in using language and
in interpreting the divine word. In the Genesis narrative, for example,
the speaking serpent overtly challenges the authority of the divine word
(“Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?”:
Gen. 3:1), and offers an alternative interpretation of the divine command
(“You will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it your
eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil”;
Gen. 3:4). Likewise, the New Testament accounts of Satan’s attempts to
tempt Christ emphasize his rhetoric and interpretative skills in offering
alternative interpretations of Scripture’s meaning (Matt 4:6; Luke 4:5).
Therefore, in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, warnings
C. Sauter (*) 
Goethe University Frankfurt, Department for General and Comparative
Literature, Frankfurt am Main, Germany

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-52198-5_7
116 C. Sauter
and exhortations against the devil’s deceiving and manipulating words

are manifold.
Given Satan’s preoccupation with (and skillful use of) language and
interpretation within the biblical tradition, it is unsurprising that devil
figures generally play an important part in Judeo-Christian literature:
whenever the devil appears in literary works, his role consists largely in
making nonsense of language and scripture, and in challenging received
assumptions about language and interpretation. I would like to claim
that the linguistic strategy of the devil—in the Bible and in other works
of world literature alike—consists in introducing difference into a uni-
verse that, according to the biblical narrative, was created to be unified.
For example, while God created the universe and “everything he had
made” to be “very good” (Gen. 1:31), Satan explicitly introduces a con-
cept of difference, namely “good and evil” (Gen. 3:5), implying the pos-
sibility that not “everything” was “very good,” and thus, questioning the
truth of God’s word. Satan’s use of words therefore dismisses truth and
divine authority as knowable categories of interpretation.
This is what I shall demonstrate in what follows, drawing on a promi-
nent example of “devil literature”: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s
Faust, a two-part tragic play written between 1808 (The First Part of the
Tragedy) and 1832 (The Second Part of the Tragedy). Goethe’s monu-
mental opus magnum is perhaps the single most prominent piece of
German dramatic literature, and it is often considered to be one of the
greatest and most difficult works of literature in general. Interestingly,
however, anglophone scholars agree that, despite attempts to read Faust
as “a fundamental icon of Western modernity,”1 and despite Harold
Bloom’s inclusion of Faust in the so-called Western Canon,2 Goethe’s
play has been largely neglected by English-speaking literary scholarship
over the past decades.3
This might have to do with a specifically German, or, even more
specifically, a nineteenth-century German preoccupation of Faust’s:
namely, his coming to terms with new and modern hermeneutics that
were prevalent in Bible exegesis in nineteenth-century Germany, as I
shall elucidate in what follows. Thus, my chapter is an attempt to dem-
onstrate that Mephistopheles, Goethe’s devil figure, challenges Faust’s
“conventional,” traditional hermeneutics, and confronts him with the
ambiguities inherent in language. Faust’s and the devil’s respective
discourses in Goethe’s Faust tragedy in fact stage a battle of two her-
meneutical models prevalent during the hermeneutic paradigm shift
7 THE DIABOLIC LOGIC OF LOGOS … 117
in nineteenth-century Germany: a traditional, theological hermeneu-

tics (Faust), and a modern, “deconstructive,” differential hermeneutics
(Mephistopheles).
In order to shed new light on Goethe’s tragedy in terms of herme-
neutics, and in order to substantiate my claim, I will, in what follows,
conduct close readings of two scenes from the better-known First Part
and the lesser-known Second Part of the Faust tragedy, respectively.4
The aim of my chapter is to show that, even though Faust, as a German
nineteenth-century scholar of “Philosophy, Law, Medicine, and – what is
worst – Theology” (v. 355–6),5 has been, much “to his regret” (v. 354),
trained in the theological model of interpreting Scripture, whose aim it is
to establish truth, the devil tempts Faust into dismissing truth as a know-
able category of interpretation. He does so by introducing difference
into Faust’s thinking and into his language, as I will demonstrate.
The Diabolic Logic of Faust I

The very first encounter between the two protagonists, the scholar and
the devil, takes place in Dr. Faust’s study (vs. 1210–1385). Here, two
parallel things happen at once on stage: while Faust is in the process
of translating New Testament Scripture, thereby transforming a Greek
text into a German one, Mephistopheles is in the process of transform-
ing himself from dog to devil. Within the general theme of transforma-
tion, the opening “Study” scene exposes a specific linguistic strategy of
introducing difference into language and speech: translation. My read-
ing shall demonstrate that Faust at first tries to cling to his conception
of a clear-cut, knowable, unique truth, but, in the process of trans
lation, it is language itself which leads him to different hermeneutical
presuppositions.
Translation: The Logic of Difference

In nineteenth-century Germany, Friedrich Schleiermacher stressed the
close affinity between translation and hermeneutics: for him, translation
is a sort of model for a general theory of understanding and interpreta-
tion.6 This seems to be a point of departure for Goethe’s play: before
Mephistopheles even enters the stage, we see Faust engaged in transla-
tion, and thus, in a hermeneutic activity. Furthermore, Faust is trans-
lating the New Testament—and Bible translation, for biblical scholars,
118 C. Sauter
religious scholars, and scholars of literature alike, is very much an act of

exegesis and, moreover, an act of commentary, since every translation
is perceived as an interpretation of the “sacred original.”7 After an early
Easter Sunday walk, which has fueled his doubt both about the Christian
doctrine and about the general meaningfulness of scholarly achievements
(and incidentally, life in general), the weary scholar Faust returns to his
study in the company of a peculiar poodle who keeps following him,
in order to translate, and thereby interpret, a piece of New Testament
Scripture:
I feel impelled to open the text on which all rests

and, deeply moved, properly translate
the sacred Greek original
into my own dear native tongue. (vs. 1220–4)
Specifically, Faust endeavors to render the notorious first verse of the

prologue to the Gospel of John in German: Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ Λόγος (“In
the beginning was the Word”; John 1:1). This enigmatic verse, one of
the most often commented-on verses of Scripture, has of course a long
and intricate exegetical history within biblical hermeneutics that the
learned theologian Faust would be aware of. However, Faust does not
consult any other prior translations or commentaries. His work is not
scholarly in the sense that he wants to advance (theological) knowledge,
but rather, it has to do essentially with himself. His interest lies not so
much in adding another piece of New Testament interpretation to the
discipline of academic theology, but rather in transmitting its “dignity
and beauty not elsewhere matched” (v. 1219), which is missing within
the scope of his very own experience. Faust hopes that what is utterly
absent from his life could be supplied by turning to the New Testament:
“Still, this want can be supplied (Doch dieser Mangel läßt sich ersetzen)
[…]/We pine and yearn for revelation/whose fire burns in the New
Testament” (vs. 1215–19).
What exactly is lacking in Faust’s life? On his Easter Sunday walk, the
scholar confesses to his assistant, Wagner: “Two souls, alas!, reside within
my breast/and each is eager for a separation” (Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach!,
in meiner Brust/Die eine will sich von der andern trennen; vs. 1112–14).
The Mangel (lack, defect, want) that Faust complains about here, is a
lack of unity and wholeness. Hence, Faust’s yearning is, above all, a long-
ing for completeness and unity. In other words, as Hamacher has already
pointed out, Faust’s Übersetzung (translation) is in fact an Ersetzung
(substitution)—namely, the substitution of a deeply-felt lack, or defect,
or absence, or want (Mangel) within both the “sacred original,” which
is yearning for its translation, and the translator Faust himself, who is
yearning for completion and contention, for unity and wholeness.8
Faust’s hermeneutic approach to translation therefore is an attempt
to create a unified whole. Yet this attempt backfires, as language itself
gets in Faust’s way. Interestingly, but perhaps unsurprisingly, the word
Faust is struggling with is the word logos—the Greek word which
means “word” (or not).9 The scholar is toying with different possibili-
ties of translation for logos—“word” (Wort), “sense/mind/thought”
(Sinn), and “power” (Kraft)—before finally settling on the one option
the Greek term surely does not mean, and which is actually the semantic
opposite of every other term he contemplated before: “act” (Tat).
It is written, “In the beginning was the Word.”

How soon I’m stopped! Who’ll help me to go on?
I cannot concede that words have such high worth
and must, if properly inspired,
translate the term some other way.
It is written: “In the beginning was the Mind.”
Reflect with care upon the first line,
and do not let your pen be hasty!
Can it be mind that makes all operate?
I’d better write: “In the beginning was the Power!”
Yet, as I write this down,
something warns me not to keep it.
My spirit prompts me, now I see a solution
And boldly write: “In the beginning was the Act.” (vs. 1224–37)
120 C. Sauter
The translator Faust is struggling with the logic of logos, which stands
in opposition to his attempt at creating unity and wholeness: he strug-
gles with the fact that the word “word” can mean something other than
“word.” Faust feels that he has to do something about this state of (lin-
guistic) affairs, and this is why he engages in speaking as an act: instead
of “peddling empty words” (v. 385), Faust endeavors to find out “how
to do things with words (logoi).”10 It is not a coincidence, then, that
he sets up a contract with Mephistopheles, the devil, who is an expert
with language. In fact, in his encounter with one of Faust’s students,
Mephistopheles explicitly extols the power of language—and the power
of speech acts:
Words are perfect for waging controversies,

with words you can construct entire systems,
in words you can place perfect faith,
and from a word no jot or tittle may be taken.
Mit Worten lässt sich trefflich streiten,

Mit Worten ein System bereiten,
An Worte lässt sich trefflich glauben,
Von einem Wort lässt sich kein Jota rauben. (vs. 1996–2000)
Therefore, as Hamacher has already demonstrated, Goethe’s Faust is

very much a drama of speech acts—and “it is a drama, because those acts
produce aporiae, which cannot be solved by the power of positing lan-
guage itself.”11
Now, the very first linguistic act that we see Faust actively engaged in,
as mentioned before, is translation. In the act of translation, he encoun-
ters the problem that is inherent in all language, and therefore, in each
and every logos: the multiplicity of meaning, the incommensurability of
languages. It is this quality of language which Mephistopheles will use to
his advantage in tempting Faust. Yet, we see in the translation scene that
language does not need the devil in order to turn against itself. Against
Faust’s better intentions, he comes up with a translation that not only
stands in contrast and opposition to the original, but in fact takes the
“sacred original’s” place: as Hamacher in his careful reading of the trans-
lation scene has shown, Faust’s solution to translate the Greek logos with
the German Tat (act) does not rest anymore on the lexical or seman-
tic spectrum of the Greek logos, and therefore, it does not even rest on
the (original) text; rather, its only foundation is the translator’s “deeply
moved” spirit (Mir hilft der Geist! Auf einmal seh’ ich Rat/Und schreibe
getrost: Im Anfang war die Tat!; vs. 1236–7). Insofar as the final transla-
tion of the word “word” (logos) is resting solely on the spirit (and not on
semantics), it is literally inspired—and as an inspired text, the translation
(or interpretation) itself becomes the “sacred original.”12 In other words,
Faust’s translation takes the place of the “sacred,” inspired text, and his
own words replace the divine, authoritative words. In this sense, Faust’s
Übersetzung (translation) is indeed an Ersetzung (substitution), but, in
opposition to his intentions, it is not an act of substituting brokenness
with wholeness, or a lack (Mangel) with fullness. Instead, translation is
a linguistic procedure which produces difference. It reveals that logos is
always not what it is. Thus, translation introduces difference into lan-
guage, as Faust’s struggle with translating logos demonstrates very clearly.
The Poodle’s Core

While Faust is in the act of translating the Greek New Testament verse
into German, Mephistopheles is in the act of transforming himself from
dog to devil. Or rather: from dog to devil in disguise. In an extended
theatrical act of metamorphosis, complete with smoke, mist, fire, and
magic (vs. 1248–1324), Mephistopheles changes his form from poo-
dle to scholar. After the transformation, and upon perceiving the devil
in a scholar’s costume, Faust exclaims: “This, then, was the poodle’s
core!/A wandering scholar?” (Das also war des Pudels Kern!/Ein fahren-
der Skolast?; v. 1324, trans. modified). Mephistopheles is not a “traveling
scholar,” but he only disguises himself as one—the stage direction here
reads: “Enter Mephistopheles from behind the stove as the mist subsides; he
is dressed as a wandering scholar” (gekleidet wie ein fahrender Scholastikus;
v. 1322, my emphasis, trans. modified). In other words, what Faust takes
to be the “poodle’s core” is in fact nothing but another devilish disguise.
Faust is, as we know, searching for truth, but when he thinks he has
found it, and when he thinks he has grasped the “poodle’s core,” that
is, its true inner being, he is fooled by yet another disguise of the devil’s.
But what exactly is the “poodle’s core”? Or rather, is there a core to
the poodle? Throughout the play, Mephistopheles will appear in all sorts
of costumes and disguises: a poodle, a scholar, a fool, a servant, a knight,
122 C. Sauter
a pirate, and manymore.13 Thereby, he is actually acting out one of the

most famous New Testament teachings about the devil: “Satan disguises
[μετασχηματίζω] himself” (2 Cor. 11:14). And yet, the deceptive form
(or, as the Dedication has it, the “elusive shape”; schwankende Gestalt;
v. 1) of the devil’s outer appearance in Goethe’s Faust is perhaps only an
enactment of another New Testament doctrine about the devil, namely,
that he is “the father of lies” (John 8:44), and “the truth is not in him”
(1 John 2:4).14 In other words, it is Mephistopheles’ very core to be
untruthful. His different shapes and forms only demonstrate the com-
plete lack of truth “within him.” The “poodle’s core” is that he does not
have a true core, that is, a core of truth. There is, indeed, no truth in
him. And this is why he impersonates the dismissal of truth as a knowable
category of making sense. Mephistopheles is always not what he is—and
when he speaks, he speaks in ambiguous terms. Hence, the only thing
that the devil figure positively “is,” is the exact opposite of God, who
famously affirms: “I am who I am” (Exod. 3:14). In contrast to God
who represents the principle of self-identity and truth, Mephistopheles
thus represents the principles of difference, ambiguity, and un-truth.
This is demonstrated, above all, in his speech. The very first words
that Faust actually speaks to Mephistopheles try to get to the “poodle’s
core”: Faust wants to find out the truth about his peculiar visitor. He
starts his inquiry by formulating an obvious, seemingly innocent ques-
tion that is generally used for asking about the specific identity of one’s
interlocutor: he asks for his name (Wie nennst Du Dich?; v. 1327).
Goethe’s original German wording is quite telling at this important
point in the drama, since Faust actually asks Mephistopheles: “How do
you call yourself?” If we take this phrase literally (and, following the
drama’s general preoccupation with words and meanings, it seems wise
to do so), Faust’s question seems to imply that it is in Mephistopheles’
own power to name himself. From the beginning, then, Faust thus
acknowledges, or at least indirectly and tacitly considers the possibility
to be plausible, that his interlocutor has unusual linguistic powers: the
power to name himself, and therefore, the power to exercise full control
over his linguistic identity. In this sense, on a linguistic level, the relation
between Faust and the devil is unequal from the start.
Tellingly, Mephistopheles never answers Faust’s question—and it
turns out that this question is not as innocent as it seems. Instead of
answering, the devil figure challenges Faust to rethink his relationship
with words and language in general, referring back to Faust’s failing
attempts at translating the term logos in John 1:1: “That seems a petty
question/from one who is so scornful of the Word” (Die Frage scheint
mir klein/Für einen, der das Wort so sehr verachtet; vs. 1328–9). With
his elusive answer, Mephistopheles is hinting at Faust’s previous experi-
ence as a translator, which he (in the shape of a poodle) has witnessed.
Let us remember that Faust did not translate logos with “word”; instead
he said explicitly: “I cannot concede that words have such high worth”
(Ich kann das Wort so hoch unmöglich schätzen; v. 1226). In translating,
he makes a difference between “word” and logos. If we concede that dif-
ference is the opposite of identity, with identity representing God (“I am
who I am”), then Mephistopheles, in referring back to Faust’s denial of
the word, is indeed hinting at an answer to Faust’s question—albeit in
purposefully unclear and ambiguous terms: he is, perhaps, the opposite
of the divine.
Faust, however, does not get this point. He does not want ambiguity.
He wants truth and unity. He does not see that the devil’s logic is the
inverted logic of logos. Instead, he clings to his idea of truth, and tries
again to obtain as clear and non-ambiguous an answer as possible, when
he phrases his question about the devil’s identity differently, and (seem-
ingly) more to the point (or rather, more to the core): “But I still ask
you, who are you?” (Nun gut, wer bist du denn?; v. 1334). In contrast
to Faust’s previous question about how his interlocutor “calls himself,”
this question explicitly asks about his being (“who are you?”), and thus,
the scholar asks for an objective truth that is external to linguistic iden-
tity. However, Mephistopheles again does not supply the desired infor-
mation about his “true” identity. Instead, he answers with a riddle: “A
part of that force/which, always willing evil, always produces good” (Ein
Teil von jener Kraft,/Die stets das Böse will und stets das Gute schafft; vs.
1335–6).15
A riddle, of course, is a statement with multiple meanings, and it is
the linguistic ambiguity of the riddle which makes it an enigma, or a
logical conundrum. As a teacher and a doctor who has studied (among
other subjects) philosophy, law, and theology, Faust is used to using the
methods of philosophical, juridical, and theological hermeneutics, in
order to establish a truth that can be used as the foundation for making
valid judgments.16 Therefore, Faust quickly acquiesces that he is indeed
confronted with a riddle, and explicitly asks for guidance in understand-
ing and making sense of it: “This is a riddle. What does it mean?” (Was
ist mit diesem Rätselwort gemeint?, v. 1337). The scholar here reveals
124 C. Sauter
himself to be a true theologian: whenever confronted with a textual rid-

dle, a theologian endeavors to make sense of it in his quest for truth.
Faust is explicitly referring to the hermeneutic method of Christian Bible
exegesis (with its low tolerance of ambiguity) prevalent from late antiq-
uity until the Enlightenment, which is trying to reveal the hidden layers
of meanings behind a Bible passage’s sensus litteralis.
Diabolic Hermeneutics
And this is, indeed, at the core of Faust’s struggle with hermeneutics,
and at the core of the linguistic drama unfolding within Goethe’s play.
In nineteenth-century Germany, the Bible and its interpretation became
objects of increased scholarly attention, and a fundamental shift in regard
to the foundational biblical texts of Judeo-Christianity took place, when
Goethe’s contemporaries, a number of scholars like Faust—philologists,
theologians, orientalists, historians, and philosophers such as Herder,
Schleiermacher, Michaelis, Eichhorn, and others17—developed a new
approach to Bible criticism: a so-called “higher criticism,” that is, a his-
torical-critical method that sees the Bible as a human cultural artifact
rather than a divine and unquestionable revelation of truth, thus dis-
missing it as a source of authority and making it an object of criticism
in secular academies and universities.18 This paradigm shift in regard to
biblical interpretation in turn changes the prevalent model for general
hermeneutics, which had henceforth been based on traditional theologi-
cal interpretation of Scripture that saw the Bible as faultless and authori-
tative, and therefore as non-criticizable. In contrast, new hermeneutical
approaches in nineteenth-century Germany used the Bible as an object
of textual critique.19 And hence, instead of regarding the Bible as a uni-
fied whole, the new historical-critical approach highlighted its inherent
ambiguities.
Faust, however, is adhering to another, perhaps older or more tra-
ditional, model of (theological) hermeneutics—one that is striving for
unity, wholeness, and ultimately truth. Interestingly, Mephistopheles
takes him up on his implicit assumptions. Let us therefore come back
to the conversation between Faust and the devil, picking up where we
left their encounter. Confronted with Mephistopheles’ riddle about
his own identity, Faust has just asked for clarification: “This is a riddle.
What does it mean?” (Was ist mit diesem Rätselwort gemeint?; v. 1337).
Mephistopheles again eludes Faust’s striving for clarity, when he answers
with yet another riddle: “I am the Spirit of Eternal Negation!” (Ich bin
der Geist, der stets verneint!; v. 1338). Faust, however, still seems to pon-
der Mephistopheles’ last riddle (“part of that force …”) and wonders:
“You call yourself a part, yet stand before me whole?” (Du nennst dich
einen Teil, und stehst doch ganz vor mir?; v. 1345). The puzzled scholar
is challenging his interlocutor: how can you say you are a part, when I see
you as a whole?, clearly struggling with the obvious difference between
what is, and what is being said. Again, Faust is asking for completeness,
wholeness, clarity and unity in order to find out the truth. In answering,
Mephistopheles addresses Faust’s underlying search for truth, and retorts
ironically: “I only speak the sober truth” (Bescheidne Wahrheit sprech’ ich
dir; v. 1346). He is implying that whereas Faust understands truth to be
a unity, or a whole, it might just as well be a part only. The “sober truth”
then is that truth, in the devil’s logic, is always only partial and never
absolute, and therefore never fully knowable.
Mephistopheles develops this logic of partial truth further in a later
line: “I’m a part of the Part that first was all/part of the Darkness that
gave birth to Light” (Ich bin ein Teil des Teils, der anfangs alles war/Ein
Teil der Finsternis, die sich das Licht gebar; vs. 1349–50). The devil figure
might be referring to the traditional Christian narrative here, according
to which Satan once belonged to the host of angels, and thus, to the
realm of the creating power, before he rebelled and fell—an extra-biblical
narrative which Milton so vividly describes in his epic poem Paradise Lost
(1667). The fall of Satan obviously is something like the primal scene of
difference in the Western tradition. However, with his alternative crea-
tion narrative (“the Darkness that gave birth to Light”), Mephistopheles
of course also refers back to the prologue to the Gospel of John, which
Faust has just translated:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the
Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made
through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. In
him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the dark-
ness, and the darkness has not overcome it. (John 1:1–4)
Mephistopheles makes nonsense of those words of Scripture. While the

Prologue to the Gospel of John emphasizes the impartial and divine
nature of the logos who exists in complete unity with God (“the Word
was God”), Mephistopheles highlights his own partial existence as
126 C. Sauter
being nothing but “part of a part.” And while in the Gospel of John
“the light shines in the darkness” and gains power and dominion over
it, Mephistopheles claims instead that it is darkness that gave birth to
light.20 He therefore puts himself in the position of the divine Word,
who is traditionally identified with Christ, and reverses the propositions
usually pertaining to the Christ. His words are not words of unity and
wholeness. Unlike God, he is always only not who he is.
We have seen in the “Study” scene that Mephistopheles repeat-
edly evades Faust’s attempts to make sense in a non-ambiguous way. In
other words: he denies unity, identity, and completeness of meaning.
Instead, the devil insists on difference and ambiguity. Hence, to sum-
marize the first conversation between Faust and Mephistopheles, we see
two different principles of language and logic at work in the protago-
nists’ speech, which I would like to call symbolism and diabolism, respec-
tively.21 Symbolism etymologically stems from two Greek words, sym
(“together”), and ballein (“throwing, tossing”), and it literally means
“to throw together,” while diabolism literally means “to throw across, or
apart” (from Greek dia, “through, across,” and ballein, “throw, toss”).
At first, Faust seems to be applying a symbolic principle—he tries (albeit
in vain) to unite, to “throw together” word and meaning, whereas
Mephistopheles, the tempter, is applying a diabolic principle, dissociating
word from meaning.
Confronted with this diabolic language, Faust’s (theological) her-
meneutics fail. Faust seeks to restore an order of clearly decipherable
symbolic language, in which one word means exactly one thing, while
Mephistopheles is fooling him with diabolic puns. The “success” of
Mephistopheles’ temptation therefore rests on a linguistic premise which
one might call the diabolic principle: namely the assumption that lan-
guage is always already paradoxical, and a word always has a double or
multiple meaning. (This is very clearly exemplified in Faust’s desper-
ate struggle to translate the word logos, “word.”) What is at work in
Goethe’s Faust in general, and in the devil’s temptation in particular,
therefore is the diabolic logic of logos.
The Irony of Faust II

The diabolic logic of Faust I is shaking Faust’s world of thinking, but
the scholar still clings to his hermeneutic model of unity, wholeness,
and truth, and the Gretchen tragedy of the First Part is still perfectly
conventional from a dramatic point of view.22 In The Second Part of the

Tragedy, however, there is a clear paradigm shift on the linguistic stage
with far-reaching implications for the dramatic stage, and vice versa. This is
what the second section of this paper shall focus on. In what follows, I will
argue that the often-declared “unstageability” of Faust II stems from the
fact that Dr. Faust has adopted Mephistopheles’ diabolic logic, and imple-
mented it into his own speech acts—and this, in turn, affects the acting
and the staging of those acts. More specifically, Faust begins to speak in an
ironic way. Since irony is a disruptive rhetoric figure, dissociating “word”
from “meaning,” the irony of Faust II leads to a continued disintegration
on stage. The fact that the action on stage is slowly but surely losing con-
trol and coherence and seems to be floating freely through space and time,
is, as I will argue, an image of the fact that Faust follows the devil in dis-
missing truth as a knowable category of making sense, which would safe-
guard linearity and coherence and unity. Rather, the devil introduces irony
into the drama—and the ironic quality of the text, in turn, plays out on
stage. In this sense, the action on stage mirrors the linguistic drama that is
unfolding within Goethe’s play, as my close reading shall demonstrate.
Darkness
The first private conversation between Faust and Mephistopheles in
the tragedy’s Part Two is taking place in a “Dark Gallery” (Finstere
Galerie) at the emperor’s court. The adjective “dark” might be decisive
for two reasons: first, the topic of the conversation between scholar and
devil is darkness—the darkness of the underworld and the darkness of
myth—not only in a physical sense, but also in a linguistic or herme-
neutic sense. And second, in the dark gallery, Faust finally becomes part
of the “dark” force when he adopts Mephistopheles’ diabolic logic for
himself, and begins to speak ironically. Moreover, two different layers
of conversation are juxtaposed in the “Dark Gallery” scene: on the one
hand, Faust needs Mephistopheles’ help in performing magic, and on the
other hand, Faust and Mephistopheles discuss their respective relation-
ship with words and with reality. It is very noteworthy that the words
“word” (Wort), “(to) speak” (sprechen), and “(to) sound” (klingen)
resound throughout this scene. In other words, while the two protago-
nists are negotiating the possibility (and the practice) of magic, they are
also negotiating the (possibly “dark”) power of words. Magic becomes
closely linked with the question of “how to do things with words.”23
128 C. Sauter
At this point in the dramatic plot, Faust is desperate and furious, and
he needs Mephistopheles’ help: having been promoted to a position as
court sorcerer, Faust has promised the emperor to conjure up the mythi-
cal ideals of female and male beauty, Helen of Troy and Paris, from the
underworld of Greek mythology—but he does not know how to go
about it, since he has never before been asked to perform “real” magic,
rather than “entertaining tricks” (Spaß und Trug; v. 6174). Therefore
he is “dragging” (as Mephistopheles complains) the devil to “a dreary
hallway” (v. 6173), and starts rambling about his problem, intermingled
with reflections about the power of words and acts, shouting impatiently
at the complaining devil:
Spare me such talk! In the old days

you used to wear your shoes out in my service,
but now you only rush about
in order to evade my orders.
But I’m now under pressure to perform,
urged by the Steward and the Chamberlain.
The Emperor wants to see, and will brook no delay,
Helen of Troy and Paris here before him,
and gaze upon clear counterfeits
of those two paragons of male and female beauty.
Quick, get to work! I must not break my word.
Sag mir das nicht, du hast’s in alten Tagen

Längst an den Sohlen abgetragen;
Doch jetzt dein Hin- und Widergehn
Ist nur, um mir nicht Wort zu stehn.
Ich aber bin gequält zu tun:
Der Marschalk und der Kämmrer treibt mich nun.
Der Kaiser will, es muß sogleich geschehn,
Will Helena und Paris vor sich sehn;
Das Musterbild der Männer so der Frauen

In deutlichen Gestalten will er schauen.
Geschwind ans Werk! Ich darf mein Wort nicht brechen. (vs. 6177–87)
This encounter between Faust and Mephistopheles still struggles with

the question of “how to do things with words”—especially since Faust
is (rather unsuccessfully) trying to give an order to Mephistopheles,
and thus trying to perform a performative speech act. Just like in the
translator scene from Faust I, “word” (Wort) and “act” (Tat/Werk) are
directly juxtaposed in Faust’s speech in the “Dark Gallery” scene twice:
“Ist nur, um mir nicht Wort zu stehn./Ich aber bin gequält zu tun” (“It’s
just not to keep your word [answer me]/but I am now suffering to act
…”; vs. 6180–1, trans. modified); “Geschwind ans Werk! Ich darf mein
Wort nicht brechen” (“Quick, get to work! I must not break my word”;
v. 6187). Confronted with the necessity to act, because he “must not
break his word” (v. 6187), Faust positively suffers (Ich aber bin gequält
zu tun; v. 6181)—he suffers from the fact that he needs to act, and he
challenges Mephistopheles to keep his word given in a promise (another
performative speech act) in Part One: namely, the promise to put words
into practice—to act and to work instead of “peddling empty words”
(v. 385). Faust here experiences that speech acts, such as a promise, are
in fact not mere words, but they entail the potential, and even the neces-
sity, to turn words into actions.
Interestingly, it is Mephistopheles himself who makes Faust aware of
this by rebuking him for his quick promise to the emperor: “You were
a fool to make a thoughtless promise” (Unsinnig war’s, leichtsinnig zu
versprechen; v. 6188). The original German phrasing here is decisive,
since Mephistopheles is making two references to Sinn (sense, mean-
ing) in just one line. He qualifies Faust’s quick promise literally as unsin-
nig (nonsensical) and as leichtsinnig (careless, lightheaded, thoughtless),
thus implying that Faust’s promise to the emperor is an empty speech
act, which entails no “sense” whatsoever, not even a “light sense”
(Leicht-Sinn): it is an unfulfillable speech act, and an unkeepable prom-
ise. Therefore, Mephistopheles takes the freedom to flatly refuse Faust’s
order “Quick, get to work!” (v. 6186), thus rendering Faust’s second
performative speech act equally empty and, indeed, senseless.
Upon Mephistopheles’ demonstration of the power and impotence
of words and speech acts, Faust starts playing the blame game, and
130 C. Sauter
shouts at the devil: “You are the one, my friend, who didn’t think/to
what your cleverness would bring us” (vs. 6189–90), until he finally
explodes: “With you one always finds that nothing’s certain” (Bei dir
gerät man stets ins Ungewisse; v. 6204). This (rather frustrated) accusa-
tion on Faust’s part is a true statement, as manifold instances in this very
scene reveal: Mephistopheles’ use of semantic uncertainty is the most
characteristic facet of his ironic speech, as well as of irony in general. For
instance, he tells Faust that semantic opposites are actually all the same:
“Well then, descend! Or, if you wish, ascend—/it makes no difference
which I say” (Versinke denn! Ich könnt’ auch sagen: steige!/‘s ist einerlei;
vs. 6275–6). By ironically claiming the indifference of semantic oppo-
sites, Mephistopheles makes a highly significant difference: he claims that
words and meaning do not match, and therefore, what one says and what
one means have, at best, a loose or flexible relationship with each other
(if at all). He implies that any word can always have multiple meanings,
its very opposite included. In other words, Mephistopheles is introduc-
ing difference within the words themselves.
Irony
The assumption that semantic opposites are actually “all the same”
because their semantics “makes no difference,” and the underlying
condition that there is a huge gap between word and meaning, are,
of course, the basic conditions for the devil’s business as a tempter.
Temptation is, above all, a linguistic phenomenon: it presupposes that
one word can—and does—have multiple meanings. Thereby, the dis-
course of temptation introduces difference into language: a tempter can
say words without meaning them—at least, without meaning them in the
way he presumes his victim (or interlocutor) understands them. Different
repertoires of already known meanings of linguistic signs are intertwined
in the discourse of temptation, resulting in an “other,” alternative mean-
ing that is slightly different from, if not contrary to the first or suppos-
edly obvious understanding. Hence, the discourse of temptation uses and
exemplifies language’s potential to entail and eventually reveal more than
what is actually said. In other words: the discourse of temptation takes
language apart, revealing its potentials and possibilities—at the cost,
however, of admitting that there is no unique, specific, and unshakable
“true” meaning of a given word or phrase. Consequently, the discourse
of temptation dismisses truth as a knowable category of language and of

hermeneutics.
The dismissal of truth, and the differentiation between word and
meaning is, of course, also the basis for rhetorical figures of distance and
difference, such as irony and allegory—and not surprisingly, almost any
tempter in world literature and in philosophy (Mephistopheles included)
speaks and acts ironically—just think of Kierkegaard’s Seducer’s Diary, or
of the Vicomte de Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil in Choderlos
de Laclos’ Dangerous Liaisons. Irony is a rhetorical figure of making a
difference, of dissociating word and meaning, and this is why it is of
course so useful a tool for tempters. Unsurprisingly, then, throughout
Goethe’s drama, the devil as a tempter employs irony. Being ironic, the
devil claims that word and meaning do not match, and therefore, he
makes it impossible to decide on the specific meaning of a given word, or
to have control over language. Faust, who is adhering to a hermeneutical
model that tries to find out the truth of “what it means,” quite rightly
feels a threat going out from Mephistopheles’ ironic use of words—a
threat that Paul de Man, in his brilliant lecture “The Concept of Irony,”
describes thus:
These two codes [in an ironic statement] are radically incompatible with
each other. They interrupt, they disrupt, each other in such a fundamen-
tal way that this very possibility of disruption represents a threat to all
assumptions one has about what a text should be.24
When Mephistopheles claims that the semantic opposites “descend-

ing” and “ascending” are actually the same, Faust obviously feels the
incompatibility between the codes, and he realizes how threatening this
ironic use of language is to his worldview. This is why, slowly but surely,
Faust is losing his temper, until he shouts at the devil: “With you one
always finds that nothing’s certain. /You are the father of all stumbling
blocks” (Bei dir gerät man stets ins Ungewisse. /Der Vater bist du aller
Hindernisse; vs. 6204–5). This uncertainty (Ungewisse) is what Faust is
suffering from in the devil’s company. Faust wants truth and certainty.
He wants a knowable truth, and he wants a word to mean what it says it
does. In other words, he wants control over language.
The linguistic uncertainty exemplified in Mephistopheles’ ironic
speech is what makes Faust lose his temper, and what makes the action
132 C. Sauter
on stage fall apart.25 The drama on stage is a mirror of the linguistic

drama unfolding in Goethe’s text. The more time Faust spends with
Mephistopheles (who is, of course, a professional tempter and ironist),
the scholar finds that there is (at least, in the devil’s universe) no way out
of linguistic paradoxality and uncertainty. With the devil, words never
mean exactly one thing. Words always entail an ironic potential. This
realization leaves Faust desperate. He understands that Mephistopheles
has tricked him out of his conventional symbolic logic into diabolic
irony.
At a certain point in the drama, Faust adopts this diabolic logic of
irony literally, when he says to Mephistopheles: “in your Nothingness
I hope to find my All” (In deinem Nichts hoff’ ich das All zu finden;
v. 6255) A lot is at stake here for Faust: It is, quite literally, all or noth-
ing: the foundation of his hermeneutics, and thus, his means of making
sense of his world. In adopting Mephistopheles’ ironic way of speak-
ing, Faust is dismissing truth as a knowable category, and he acknowl-
edges that semantic opposites may in fact have one and the same truth
value (or, perhaps, none at all). This is the core of irony. As Paul de Man
has pointed out, irony is a dangerous and threatening figure for schol-
ars whose declared aim it is to “make sense”—scholars of literature, and
scholars of other textual practices, like the theologian and lawyer Faust.
A lot is at stake for him. Paul de Man writes:
[W]hat is at stake in irony is the possibility of understanding, the possi-

bility of reading, the readability of texts, the possibility of deciding on a
meaning or on a multiple set of meanings or on a controlled polysemy
of meanings […]. There would be in irony something very threatening,
against which interpreters of literature, who have a stake in the under-
standability of literature, would want to put themselves on their guard
[…].26
Therefore, when Faust finally admits that it might in fact “make no dif-
ference which he says” (vs. 6275–6)—Nothingness or All—the scholar
is taking a huge risk: he adopts the devil’s diabolic irony, which threat-
ens his very own hermeneutic assumptions, most of all, the possibility of
understanding (understandability).
During the course of the tragedy’s development, this important
paradigm shift on the linguistic stage slowly leads to deterioration and
disintegration on the dramatic stage, as the play itself, along with the
protagonist Faust, adopts a new kind of diabolic irony: the more things,
words and actions do not “make sense” anymore according to Faust’s
original symbolic hermeneutics, and the more words and things are dis-
rupted by the devil’s piercing irony, the more the basic parameters of the
human experience—such as linearity, coherence, or chronology—disin-
tegrate on stage. In fact, The Second Part of the Tragedy dismisses all of
the “three unities” that, according to Aristotelian and neoclassical poet-
ics, make the rules of a drama: unity of action, unity of time, and unity of
place.27
Instead of the unity of action, there is no clear and coherent
plot anymore, but the dramatic action seems to follow a stream-of-
consciousness-like movement throughout the long and rather confus-
ing composition of five more or less self-contained acts, with lots of
plays-within-the-play, staged dreams, deliriums, allegories, and carnivals.
Instead of a unity of time and place, respectively, the action takes place in
a phantasmagoric setting which oscillates freely (and un-chronologically)
between a fairy world, a medieval fortress, the mythological Roman-
Greek Elysium, the pastoral baroque idyll of Arcadia, a kind of science-
fiction setting, and Dante’s medieval heaven. Faust II is therefore
denying the very notion of unity in general (that Faust, as we know, is
looking for) by specifically staging the deconstruction of the three classi-
cal dramatic unities.
Moreover, along with adopting his ironic speech, Faust also has
adopted Mephistopheles’ “elusive shape” (schwankende Gestalt; v. 1).
Both protagonists keep changing their form, speech, and looks; both
Mephistopheles and Faust transform, disguise, and act throughout
Part Two. The “elusive shapes” of Part One are thus multiplied in Part
Two of the tragedy: here, we encounter both protagonists (not just the
devil) under different names, in different disguises, assuming differ-
ent identities, and acting different roles. While Faust was nothing but a
scholar in Part One, we see him (among others) on stage as a ruler, a
hero, an emperor, a priest, a warlord, an engineer, and an economist in
Part Two.28 Mephistopheles’ diabolic irony now has a direct effect on
the dramatic stage: just as there are no non-ambiguous words in ironic
speech, there are also no non-ambiguous protagonists on stage anymore.
Everything always has at least a double code and multiple layers in the
devil’s world. Nothing is stable, and nothing is ever what it seems. The
play itself, including its protagonists, becomes a schwankende Gestalt
(“elusive shape”; v. 1).
134 C. Sauter
Permanent Parabasis
At one point in the drama, Faust loses control of his own acting. The
scene is taking place in the “Knight’s Hall” of Act I of The Second Part
of the Tragedy. Faust, with Mephistopheles’ help, has in fact managed
to conjure up Helen of Troy and Paris from the underworld of Greek
mythology, and their spectral apparition is literally staged as a play within
the play—it takes place on a theater stage. Mephistopheles performs the
role of the prompter (“I trust my being here will be approved by all/
the devil’s eloquence is always sotto voce”; v. 6399), and Faust “climbs
on the proscenium” and “grandiosely” announces the performance
of what we can only call (with Mephistopheles) a “spectral masque”
(Fratzengeisterspiel; v. 6546). First Paris enters; his extraordinary beauty
is commented on by the excited audience, and then the more-than-
beautiful Helen makes her entry. Faust—who, in theory, should be (as
Mephistopheles reminds him) “the author of this spectral masque”
(v. 6546)—is overwhelmed by her perfect beauty, and spontaneously
breaks into worshipping Helen, until he exclaims: “To you [Helen] I
offer as my homage/all my vitality, and passion’s essence: devotion, love,
idolization, madness” (vs. 6498–500). At this point Mephistopheles,
from the prompter’s box, interrupts Faust’s speech quickly, by hissing:
“Control yourself, and don’t forget your part!” (So faßt Euch doch und
fallt nicht aus der Rolle!; v. 6501).
This short intermezzo is acting out the concept of irony itself. In
fact, irony has poignantly and famously (and rather enigmatically) been
defined as a “permanent parabasis” in nineteenth-century Germany, spe-
cifically by Friedrich Schlegel in his Philosophische Lehrjahre: “Die Ironie
ist eine permanente Parekbase” (Irony is a permanent parabasis).29 A
“parabasis” (Parekbase) is the act of stopping to act, the act of “forget-
ting one’s part” (Aus-der-Rolle-fallen), the actor’s act of stepping out of
the play and addressing the public, and thus, the act of destroying any
kind of mimesis illusion that theater (or speech, or literature) might be
able to produce, and to “break” the supposed reality of fiction. Irony
as an act of parabasis, then, is an act of dis-illusioning and disruption.
Quite correctly, Paul de Man speaks of “the destructive power, the nega-
tive power, of the parabasis.”30
The interesting aspect that Schlegel’s definition of irony highlights,
however, is that the destabilization and the dis-illusioning of the para-
basis is taking place permanently in irony. In other words, irony is
permanently disrupting coherence—be it dramatic coherence, or epic

coherence, or any other notion or phantasma of coherence. It is, con-
sequently, “the undoing of the work,” its “radical negation.”31 And this
permanent undoing rests on the fact that irony, in general, uses words—
words, logoi, which “have a way of saying things which are not at all
what you want them to say”32—because words in general are made up
with “total arbitrariness” (unbedingte Willkür), as Friedrich Schlegel
has it in his Lyceum fragment no. 42.33 Because of this inherent qual-
ity of words, irony is permanently at work whenever and wherever one
uses language—one can never exclude the threatening possibility of irony
as soon and as long as one speaks. This is why Paul de Man takes up
Schlegel’s definition for his own attempt at defining what irony is, and
takes it one step further:
[I]rony is the permanent parabasis of the allegory of tropes. The allegory

of tropes has its own narrative coherence, and it is that coherence, that
systematicity, which irony interrupts, disrupts. So one could say that any
theory of irony is […] the necessary undoing of any theory of narrative
[…], irony is precisely what makes it impossible ever to achieve a theory of
narrative that would be consistent.34
Since irony permanently disrupts any form of coherence, it necessarily

also disrupts any narrative (which is, per se, defined by coherence), and
since any theory is nothing but a coherent narrative, irony renders theory
itself impossible, because it renders the very idea of narrative (and thus,
theorizing) implausible. This means, of course, that not only the act of
speaking (or acting) becomes threatening, but even the act of theoriz-
ing becomes potentially dangerous, or even (with De Man) impossible.
Furthermore, if irony is a “permanent parabasis”, as Schlegel has it (and
as De Man quotes Schlegel), then any narrative is always infinitely open
at any point of itself. Irony, then, would be the opening up of one text,
or speech act, towards its own impossibility.
This understanding of irony is at the core of Goethe’s “devil drama.”
In fact, the end of the scene we have just discussed is very ironic. Faust,
as we saw, attempts to perform an act of parabasis: he tries to disrupt
the play-within-the-play’s mimesis illusion by worshipping Helen, and
by storming on stage and trying to seize Helen from Paris’ “strength-
ened arms” (v. 6543), but he fails, because he is violently mistaken about
the reality of what he perceives to be “reality” (v. 6554). As the stage
136 C. Sauter
direction has it, finally “Faust is seen lying on the floor; the phantom fig-
ures dissolve as vapors,” Mephistopheles (“hoisting Faust on his shoul-
der”) makes a sneering, ironic remark about Faust’s “stupidity,” and, in
the very end, “darkness and noisy confusion” reign (again) “as the cur-
tain falls” (v. 6566). The darkness and uncertainty with which the act
began in the “Dark Gallery” scene, now comes to a grand finale: Faust’s
act of (ironic) parabasis has revealed that he (still) does not realize that
there is no reality (at least, as long as it is fabricated by using words, as
in Goethe’s drama) that does not necessarily turn against itself by the
inherent irony of language and textuality. He is trying to step out of his
role, and to perform an act of parabasis once, but since irony is a perma-
nent parabasis, it is much stronger than him. It is ironic that irony turns
against the one who wants to use irony. And yet, this is the diabolical
irony of the devil that is at work throughout Goethe’s play. In this sense,
Faust’s act of parabasis in Faust II puts the work of irony itself on dis-
play, or rather, on stage: the play-within-the-play stages the logic that is
at work within the play (Faust II) as a whole.
Hermeneutics of Hell
In conclusion, let me come back to the devil’s preoccupation with lan-

guage and interpretation that this chapter started out with. My two
close readings have demonstrated that the devil figure in Goethe’s Faust
drama systematically uses linguistic strategies and rhetorical figures of
difference, such as translation (Faust I) and irony (Faust II), in order
to reveal the inner workings of language as such. It is therefore not so
much the devil who is the agent of chaos and confusion, but rather, it is
the inherent (diabolical) logic of language itself. Mephistopheles merely
acts out the logic of the logos, and, most importantly, he speaks it out. In
this sense, Mephistopheles himself becomes an incarnation of the logos
(and thus, perhaps, a sort of anti-Christ figure).
Furthermore, this linguistic and hermeneutical drama is mirrored in
the actual dramatic action. The dismissal of truth as a knowable category
of interpretation, and the permanent destabilization of linguistic and
interpretative coherence that Mephistopheles time and again hints at in
his conversations with the learned scholar Faust, present a serious threat
to the drama’s development in Part Two of the tragedy. The more Faust
adopts and appropriates Mephistopheles’ way of speaking, the more the
action on stage falls apart. Specifically, the dramatic action in Faust II
dismisses the notion of unity (which is of utmost importance for Faust

throughout the play, starting from the very first scene of Faust I), as
exemplified in the fact that it deconstructs the three classical Aristotelian
dramatic unities of time, place, and action.
It is not a coincidence that all this takes place in a “devil drama.”
Given the devil’s general preoccupation with language and interpretation
in the biblical context, he functions as a self-reflective agent for the very
notion of language and literature. In other words, the devilish employ-
ment of language and interpretation adds a self-reflective element to the
literary depiction (and to the acts) of reading, writing, and interpreting,
and hence to the very foundation of literature and its critique. Therefore,
the devil’s discourse within literature sheds light on our own theory and
practice as readers, critics, and scholars of literature. Faust’s diabolic
experiment in Goethe’s Faust is therefore calling for a new hermeneu-
tics—perhaps a hermeneutics of hell.
Notes
1. Hans Schulte, “Introduction,” Goethe’s Faust: Theatre of Modernity,
ed. Hans Schulte, John Noyes, Pia Kleber (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2011), 1.
2. Harold Bloom, The Western Canon. The Books and School of the Ages (New
York/San Diego/London: Harcourt Brace, 1994), 203–236.
3. Cf. Schulte, Introduction, 1.
4. The two parts of the tragedy exemplify the hermeneutical struggle
between Faust and the devil figure, Mephistopheles, in two different are-
nas: while Faust I is decidedly embedded within the Christian context,
and therefore the hermeneutical model refers to biblical hermeneutics
within the framework of academic theology, Faust II is decidedly classi-
cist, and the hermeneutic model is that of interpreting Greek and Latin
literatures within the academic field of classical philology. However, I
will neglect this categorizing in my analysis, since what is at stake in both
conversations between scholar and devil is the issue of making sense by
means of language.
5. Unless otherwise cited, my default Faust translation is that of Stuart Atkins,
Faust I and II (Cambridge, MA: Suhrkamp, 1986); all modifications on
my part will be indicated. Quotations from Goethe’s Faust will be refer-
enced by verse number, and will appear in brackets in the body of my text.
6. Cf. Friedrich D. E. Schleiermacher, “Über die verschiedenen Methoden
des Übersetzens” [1813], Akademievorträge, ed. Martin Rössler
138 C. Sauter
(Berlin/New York: De Gruyter, 2002), 76f. Following Schleiermacher’s

model, the identification between translation and exegesis/interpreta-
tion (Auslegung) is a crucial point in later philosophical hermeneutics,
especially in Martin Heidegger’s Heraklit lectures, and in Hans-Georg
Gadamer’s Truth and Method.
7. See, for instance, Jacob Neusner, What is Midrash? (Philadelphia: Fortress,
1987), 23, who claims that Bible translation falls into the category of
midrash, i.e. rabbinic Bible commentary.
8. Werner Hamacher develops this point in his essay “Die andere
Übersetzung des Wortes,” Minetti: Faust-Skriptogramme, ed. Gerhard
Ahrens (Berlin/Vienna: Medusa, 1983), p. 99.
9. Numerous books, essays, and dictionary entries have been devoted to the
intricate concept of logos in the New Testament scriptures, to its connec-
tions with Greek philosophy and ancient Hebrew thinking, and to its
translation history. Unfortunately, they cannot all be discussed here. For a
very detailed account of the logos problematics in the Gospel of John, see
John L. Ronning, The Jewish Targums and John’s Logos Theology (Peabody,
MA: Hendrickson, 2010).
10. How To Do Things With Words is, of course, the title of the British philoso-
pher John L. Austin’s influential lectures delivered at Oxford (1952–4)
and at Harvard University (1955), which were later developed into a
book (1965) that became the foundational work for Austin’s theory of
speech acts. Austin’s How To Do Things With Words claims that the truth-
value of sentences or utterances are not their most important qualities;
instead, Austin focuses on so-called “performative utterances” which are
neither true nor false (and therefore have no truth-value) and which per-
form an action—this is what he terms “speech acts”. See John L. Austin,
How To Do Things With Words. Second Edition, ed. J. O. Urmson and
Marina Sbisà (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), esp.
4–7, 12–14, 21–24.
11. Werner Hamacher, “Faust, Geld,” Athenäum. Jahrbuch für Romantik 4,
ed. Ernst Behler, Jochen Hörisch, Günter Oesterle (Paderborn: Fink,
1994), 132; my trans.
12. For a more detailed account, and a development of this reading, see
Hamacher, Die andere Übersetzung, 84f.
13. On Mephistopheles’ manifold forms and manifestations and their sym-
bolic potential, see Ulrich Gaier, “‘Schwankende Gestalten’: virtuality in
Goethe’s Faust,” Goethe’s Faust: Theatre of Modernity, ed. Hans Schulte,
John Noyes, Pia Kleber (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011),
56ff.
14. In contrast to my reading of Mephistopheles, Peter Huber argues against
understanding Mephistopheles as a devil in the Christian tradition.
For Huber, Mephistopheles “represents the value-free destructive force of

nature and thus guarantees the evolution of nature. He is beyond good
and evil.” See Peter Huber, “Mephisto is the devil—or is he?‚” Goethe’s
Faust: Theatre of Modernity, ed. Hans Schulte, John Noyes, Pia Kleber
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 52. My point, how-
ever, is not to make a moral or ethical judgment about Mephistopheles’
behavior, but rather to highlight the distinction between truth and non-
truth within Goethe’s tragedy, in order to make a point about (linguistic)
ambiguity.
15. Referring to this statement of the devil’s, Hamacher reads Mephistopheles
as the embodiment of negative dialectics, namely as the “negative dialec-
tic of production”: he is the spirit who, due to his negative intentions,
still only produces good (v. 1335). See Hamacher, Faust, Geld, 145.
16. It is perhaps not too far-fetched to see Faust as an implicit self-portrait of
Goethe’s in this regard: Goethe himself was trained in law and philoso-
phy, and very much preoccupied with theology throughout his career,
but especially in the early years of Faust I. For Goethe’s familiarity with
Bible hermeneutics and law exegesis, see Thomas Tillmann’s excellent
Hermeneutik und Bibelexegese beim jungen Goethe (Berlin/New York: De
Gruyter, 2006), 2f. Tillmann embeds Goethe’s preoccupation with the
Bible explicitly within the context of the ongoing debate about the cor-
rect understanding of the Bible in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
Germany, which he (quite correctly) considers to be “one of the most
important […] events within the intellectual history” of Goethe’s time,
namely: “the formation of a modern understanding of the Bible and of
the historical-critical method” (ibid., 5f.; trans. mine).
17. For a detailed account of the context and of Goethe’s familiarity with the
endeavors of his contemporaries, such as Michaelis’ journey to the orient,
see Tillmann, Hermeneutik und Bibelexegese, 6ff.
18. For detailed accounts of the Bible, and of theological hermeneutics,
within the intellectual history of nineteenth-century Germany, see the
three following groundbreaking studies, to which I am much indebted:
Jonathan Sheehan, The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship,
Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), especially Chaps.
3, 4, and 8; James Turner, Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern
Humanities (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), especially
Chaps. 8 and 13; Daniel Weidner, Bibel und Literatur um 1800 (Munich:
Fink, 2011).
19. See, for instance, Schleiermacher’s New Testament lectures (Berlin,
1832), translated into English as Friedrich D. E. Schleiermacher, The
Life of Jesus, ed. J. C. Verheyden (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1975); for
the close connection between his work as a theologian and his general
140 C. Sauter
hermeneutics, cf. Manfred Frank, “Einleitung,” F. D. E. Schleiermacher,

Hermeneutik und Kritik, ed. Manfred Frank (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,
1977), 8ff.
20. The exact wording in the German here seems to be decisive:
Mephistopheles actually speaks of himself as being part of the darkness,
“die sich das Licht gebar” (v. 1350). The self-reflexive pronoun “sich”
implies that darkness gave birth to light out of itself and for its own sake.
21. Unfortunately, I cannot claim the author rights to this pun: Hamacher
has already termed Faust’s signature (in signing the contract with
Mephistopheles) a “diabol,” as opposed to a “symbol”: “it [the signa-
ture] is not a symbol, in which the living totality of that which is meant
could appear, but rather, sit venia verbo, a diabol, in which the referents
are thrown apart, and the relationship between the sign and its meaning
is torn” (Hamacher, Faust, Geld, 137; trans. mine). Following this argu-
ment, Hamacher then calls the contract “diabolic,” and continues: “The
contract is contract only in its decontraction. And the speech act is an act
only in so far as it inactivates itself” (ibid., 137f.; trans. mine).
22. William Lynch’s classic Christ and Apollo constructs an interesting par-
allel case: Lynch contrasts the “univocal and equivocal minds” with the
“analogical imagination.” The former either reduces everything to same-
ness or in a binary way everything to its difference; see William F. Lynch,
S. J., Christ and Apollo: The Dimensions of the Literary Imagination
(Notre Dame/London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975), 113–
132. These are both modern ways of thinking and one might read Faust
as univocal and Mephistopheles as equivocal.
23. See John L. Austin, How To Do Things With Words. Second Edition, ed.
J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2003).
24. Paul de Man, “The Concept of Irony,” Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej
Warminski (Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996),
169.
25. Interestingly, within the drama as a whole, it is not only Mephistopheles,
the tempter and great ironist, who uses linguistic uncertainty and ambi-
guity to his advantage, but also Faust himself. In the Gretchen trag-
edy of Part One, Faust himself appears as a tempter (instructed by
Mephistopheles, of course), seducing an innocent, beautiful, and pious
young girl called Gretchen. In the scene “Martha’s Garden” (Marthens
Garten; vs. 3413–70), Gretchen explicitly and repeatedly inquires about
Faust’s religion (v. 3415), about his faith in God (v. 3426), and about
his attitude towards Christianity (v. 3468)—and every time, Faust gives
elusive answers, tries to twist and turn meanings of all of those religious
phrases (vs. 3432–45), and avoids calling God “God” (vs. 3451–8).
Hence, recourse to linguistic ambiguity and uncertainty indeed seems to

be one of the most characteristic strategies of temptation—be it in love
affairs, or in a deal with the devil.
26. De Man, “The Concept of Irony,” 167.
27. According to Aristotle’s “unity of time,” a tragedy “tends so far as possible
to stay within a single revolution of the sun, or close to it”; for “unity of
action,” Aristotle defines the tragedy as “mimesis of an action, which is
complete, whole, and of magnitude,” and he further defines its “whole-
ness” as “that which has a beginning, middle, and end”; see Aristotle,
Poetics, ed. and trans. Stephen Halliwell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1995), 47, 55f. While Aristotle himself never mentions
the “unity of place” explicitly in his Poetics, neoclassical poetics in six-
teenth- and seventeenth-century Europe attributed this prescription for
structuring plays to him. In any case, Goethe’s Faust II obviously does
not conform to any of those two or three Aristotelian/neoclassical unities.
28. Actually, Faust is depicted as the inventor of paper money—which means
he introduces the difference between the tangible thing—gold—and its
economic value. For a detailed reading of Faust as an economist, espe-
cially as the inventor of paper money, and on the aporiae of assigning
value, and the language of credit, see Hamacher, Faust, Geld, esp. 157ff.
29. Friedrich Schlegel, Philosophische Lehrjahre 1796–1806 nebst philosophis-
chen Manuskripten aus den Jahren 1796–1828, KFSA 18, ed. Ernst Behler
(Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1963f.), 85.
33. Friedrich Schlegel, Lyceum Fragment 42, KFSA 2, ed. Ernst Behler
(Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1963f.), 151; cf. De
Man, “The Concept of Irony,” 181.
Bibliography
Aristotle, Poetics, ed. and trans. Stephen Halliwell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1995).
Austin, John L. How To Do Things With Words. Second Edition, ed. J.O. Urmson
and Marina Sbisà (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).
Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon. The Books and School of the Ages (New York,
San Diego, London: Harcourt Brace, 1994).
De Man, Paul. “The Concept of Irony,” Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej
Warminski (Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996),
pp. 163–184.
142 C. Sauter
Frank, Manfred. “Einleitung,” F.D.E. Schleiermacher, Hermeneutik und Kritik,

ed. Manfred Frank (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977), pp. 7–67.
Gaier, Ulrich. „‘Schwankende Gestalten’: virtuality in Goethe’s Faust,“ Goethe’s
Faust: Theatre of Modernity, ed. Hans Schulte, John Noyes, Pia Kleber
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 54–67.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. Faust I and II, trans. Stuart Atkins (Cambridge, MA:
Suhrkamp, 1986).
Hamacher, Werner. „Die andere Übersetzung des Wortes,“ Minetti: Faust-
Skriptogramme, ed. Gerhard Ahrens (Berlin/Vienna: Medusa, 1983),
pp. 98–111.
Hamacher, Werner. “Faust, Geld,” Athenäum. Jahrbuch für Romantik 4, ed.
Ernst Behler, Jochen Hörisch, Günter Oesterle (Paderborn: Fink, 1994),
pp. 131–187.
Huber, Peter. “Mephisto is the devil—or is he?” Goethe’s Faust: Theatre
of Modernity, ed. Hans Schulte, John Noyes, Pia Kleber (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 40–53.
Lynch, William F. Christ and Apollo. The Dimensions of the Literary Imagination
(Notre Dame/London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975).
Neusner, Jacob. What is Midrash? (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987).
Ronning, John L. The Jewish Targums and John’s Logos Theology (Peabody, MA:
Hendrickson, 2010).
Schlegel, Friedrich. Lyceum, KFSA 2, ed. Ernst Behler (Darmstadt:
Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1963f.).
Schlegel, Friedrich. Philosophische Lehrjahre 1796-1806 nebst philosophis-
chen Manuskripten aus den Jahren 1796-1828, KFSA 18, ed. Ernst Behler
(Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1963f.).
Schleiermacher, Friedrich D.E. The Life of Jesus, ed. J.C. Verheyden
(Philadelphia: Fortress, 1975).
Schleiermacher, Friedrich D.E. „Über die verschiedenen Methoden des
Übersetzens“ [1813], Akademievorträge, ed. Martin Rössler (Berlin/New
York: De Gruyter, 2002), pp. 67–93.
Schulte, Hans. “Introduction,” Goethe’s Faust: Theatre of Modernity, ed. Hans
Schulte, John Noyes, Pia Kleber (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2011), pp. 1–14.
Sheehan, Jonathan. The Enlightenment Bible. Translation, Scholarship, Culture
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).
Tillmann, Thomas. Hermeneutik und Bibelexegese beim jungen Goethe (Berlin/
New York: De Gruyter, 2006).
Turner, James. Philology. The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014).
Weidner, Daniel. Bibel und Literatur um 1800 (Munich: Fink, 2011).
CHAPTER 8
Literature, Theology, Survival
S. Jonathon O’Donnell
Demons survive—today certainly, perhaps always already—as a trace, or a

trace of a trace. The trace, for Jacques Derrida, occupies that undecidable
territory between past and present, absence, and presence. It marks the
site of a haunting, of a lingering spectrality. For the demon, such spec-
trality appears at several intersecting levels. The demon itself, in its frac-
tured ipseity, marks the trace of an angel, or at least a remnant of divinity.
Its discursive operations, marked by magic and by counterfeiture, bear
the logic (and signal the dangers) of a simulacrum standing in for the
thing itself. It marks the trace of an otherness within theology itself—not
the Otherness of God, but a more ancient otherness displaced and disa-
vowed, wrought of combat myths and chaotic oceans before creation.1
Yet maybe more than these it marks the historical traces of theology in its
others—in politics, in art, but perhaps most of all in literature. As their
socio-religious roles faded following the European Enlightenment, the
Devil and his demons were quickly adopted and adapted by artistic, liter-
ary, and political milieux. Romantics, Socialists, Decadents, Anarchists,
Gothics, Feminists, and their forebears all found a shared source of
symbolism in, and sometimes common cause with, the language of the
demonic.2 If the demon’s survival takes the form of a spectral trace it is
S.J. O’Donnell (*) 
Aoyama Gakuin University, Tokyo, Japan

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-52198-5_8
144 S.J. O’Donnell
in literature, and in literature as an archive of symbolic traces, that this

specter has adopted the greatest semblance of living on.
How, however, are we to think of the demon’s symbolic survival, its
survival as symbol? Derrida has claimed that survival is something that is
structural to existence, but also that it bears within it an inherent dual-
ity and ambiguity; the verb “to survive” means both “to continue to
live and to live after death.”3 The demon’s survival may be conditioned
by similar ambiguity, caught between a continuation of an old life and
the potentiality for new existence. Despite multifaceted and polyvalent
reinscriptions, the archive of the demon’s theological inheritance none-
theless endures, giving it both its power and its limits, granting it those
ideological and affective marks to which its poetico-literary manifesta-
tions adhere to or subvert. In short, the “lives” of demons in literature
cannot escape their “death” in theology. It provides the condition of
their possibility. However, this death is also conditional on, conditioned
by another. Within the archive of its survival, there is more than a sin-
gle death for the demon to survive. There is the “death” of the demon
in the discursive field of theology, which permits its ironic resurrection
and the polyvalent proliferation of its sign. Yet there is also its death in
the discursive frame of theology—its death in theology’s narrative of his-
tory. Cast out of paradise for treason, the demon is given to damnation
without possible redemption. It exists under—and perhaps only under—
a sovereign decree of perdition, a death penalty whose execution comes
in the deferred inevitability of an apocalyptic horizon. How might the
interplay of these demonic deaths—in theology-as-field and theology-as-
frame—condition its post-theological (after)lives? And how, moreover,
might they condition such (after)lives figured in—and as—literature?
This chapter explores these questions through an analysis of the
responses to damnation by two of the most influential poetico-literary
devils, ones that in many ways stand at the crossroads of the demon’s
symbolic resurrection: the Satan of John Milton’s Paradise Lost and the
Mephistopheles of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust. Influential
works of “world literature,” Faust and Paradise Lost occupy a liminal
position in the demon’s transition from a theological to a poetic and
literary object, and have arguably become more influential to mod-
ern depictions of demons than any scriptural text.4 Yet despite becom-
ing a foundation for the demon’s poetico-literary survival, both Satan
and Mephistopheles are constituted in relation to a radical finitude
that acts as their condition of possibility. Through a close reading of
8 LITERATURE, THEOLOGY, SURVIVAL 145
passages exemplifying these devils’ reactions to damnation, the chapter

first explores the discursive figure of the demon through its performa-
tive construction as a bearer of death, subsequently theorizing this
construction in terms of the demon’s transition from theology to lit-
erature. It reframes the demon’s construction in theology as a sign of
ontological absence and simulacra in light of Derrida’s theorization of
literature’s mimetological relationship to philosophy, its structural rela-
tion as the immanent imitation of a discourse of truth, tied to a transcen-
dental referent that remains necessarily external. In doing so, the chapter
explores demons’ discursive relation to the dual archives of theology and
of literature as tied to the disavowed horizon of its own radical finitude,
a horizon before which—to appropriate Derrida—they can only “mul-
tiply their strategic maneuvers in order to assimilate [the] unassimilable
wholly other” of their “ultimate and a-symbolic referent”: the remain-
derless destruction of perdition.5
Performing Perdition
While phrases like “demonic” or “diabolic” appear in several of Derrida’s
works, he discusses demons only rarely. Moreover, his usage of terms
relating to them is fairly normative, without the close attention to ety-
mology or genealogy usually found in his texts even when he addresses
concepts historically tied to demons, such as lies or the bestial.6 One of
the rare occasions, however, is in relation to death and the penalty of
death. He begins with the daimon of Socrates, which Derrida sees as
possessing an “unstable and equivocal” capacity to figure good and evil,
divinity and cursedness. In the classical Greek, he observes, “the daimon
is both divine and inferior to the divinity of the God (theos); it means
both the soul of the dead and the revenant but also fate, the singular
destiny, a kind of election, and often, in the bad sense, the unfortunate
destiny, death.” However, in the Greek of Christian scripture, “the dai-
mon is always taken in the bad sense, as the bad spirit, the demonic, the
spirit of evil.”7 If the demon contains ambiguities, for Derrida these
result from its Greco-Christian inheritance, not from anything within
Christianity itself or its secularized reinscriptions. The demon—the
Christian demon, but by implication or omission also the post-Christian
demon—is merely a figure of “the unfortunate destiny.”
There is certainly truth to Derrida’s assessment. Yet it might also be
that it is its very circumscription by this unfortunate destiny, this bond
to a death—humanity’s and its own—that has both already occurred

and yet which remains always to come, which gives the Christian demon
its own distinctive ambiguities. The Christian demon is both the beck-
oner and the embodiment of sin, and the wages of sin is death. As sin’s
beckoner, it is the one who ushers death into the world via the power
of temptation, and it is by further temptation that humanity can be led
astray into a shared perdition. As sin’s embodiment, it is marked for that
perdition without possibility of pardon, and the divinely guided narrative
of history becomes a gradual working-out of its demise. Despite strong
classical influences (and the idiosyncrasies of authorial philosophies)
on both Faust and Paradise Lost, Satan and Mephistopheles remain nar-
ratively enframed by this very-Christian fate.8 If traits drawn from the
classics restored to these demons some daimonic attributes long stripped
from them, a future was not one of them. Denied any future, the demon
becomes the enduring symbol of all that cannot endure. Severed from
the stability of eternity, it becomes the vector of transience itself.
At least since the Renaissance, the demonic relation to transience
was tied to ambiguities of language, specifically to language as a con-
veyor of truth and meaning. As Maggi details, in Renaissance demonol-
ogy demonic language was seen as distinct from both God’s language
and that of angels. God spoke “the language of things”—his words
became creation—and angels channeled his words with neither ambigu-
ity nor accent in “a nonlanguage” that “simply voices the Divinity’s will
by the means of human signifying sounds.” Demonic speech was differ-
ent, however. Exiled from divine plenitude, the demon’s words held no
immediate or even mediated insight into things themselves. This sepa-
ration from truth was associated with a perceived ability of demons to
recall—and thus reinforce—humanity’s shared status as exilic beings, as
equal pariahs from paradise. “If a good angel is the linguistic statement
connecting a speaker with his interlocutor,” Maggi relates, “a devil is the
memorial of perpetual exclusion from meaning.” Like the demon itself,
demonic speech bears witness to a severance from ontotheological truth,
from the metaphysical inextricability of being in general from God as
the highest being, as being of beings, and through this to the notion of
metaphysics of presence and as presence. Far from simply lacking mean-
ing, demonic speech was constructed as threatening to meaning, to the
presence of meaning as such. Demons spoke silently into human minds,
leading us astray into a perdition in which truth becomes irreconcilable
to language and humans become irredeemable to truth: “to speak the

devil’s language is as well as means to devour creation.”9
Through their speech acts, both Satan and Mephistopheles perform
a relation of negation towards the divinely ordained ontotheological
order of the created world. However, they perform this negation in dis-
tinct ways. As Fred Parker remarks, “Milton’s Satan tells the sun how
he hates his beams, and is driven throughout by the passion of envy.
He is nothing if not passionate in his anguished revolt. But Goethe’s
Mephistopheles is diabolical in his seeming indifference, rather than his
malice.”10 In the case of Satan this is illustrated throughout Paradise
Lost, but is best exemplified in his rallying cry to his fellow fallen:
Warriors, the flower of heaven, once yours, now lost,

If such astonishment as this can seize
Eternal spirits; or have ye chosen this place
After the toil of battle to repose
Your wearied virtue, for the ease you find
To slumber here, as in the vales of heaven?
Or in this abject posture have ye sworn
To adore the conqueror? who now beholds
Cherub and seraph rolling in the flood
With scattered arms and ensigns, till anon
His swift pursuers from heaven gates discern
The advantage, and descending tread us down
Thus drooping, or with linkèd thunderbolts
Transfix us to the bottom of this gulf.
Awake, arise, or be forever fallen. (PL I.316–30)
The speech provides insight into Satan’s response to his defeat, one he
hopes to instill in his compatriots. He is a defiant survivor, defined not
only by his defeat but his struggle to persist and exist beyond it, find-
ing new ground on which he can “wage by force or guile eternal war”
(I.121). This defiance continues throughout the epic, as Satan plots
“with hellfire/To waste his whole creation, or possess All as our own,”
or to “Seduce [humanity] to our party” to the extent that God “with
repenting hand/Abolish[es] His own work” (II.364, 370). Satan’s pur-
suit of these goals takes several forms, but these are always active. His
solitary voyage over Chaos in Book II, “strikes out into new areas of
space and time,” and deliberately recalls the heroic and chance-laden
voyages of European explorers, wreaking equal devastation on those he
ultimately encounters.11 His infiltration of Paradise in Book IV serves
to juxtapose Satan’s volatility and mutability with the “fixity and serene
stasis” of the Divine, first threatening and then shattering the unity of
the prelapsarian world in a “demonic rejection of the idea of permanence
figured in heaven.”12 Until his return to Hell in Book X and permanent
reduction to a speechless serpent at the climax of his self-exhortation,
Satan is an active force, a passionate orator determined to undermine
God’s divine order by force or guile or any other means available.
Mephistopheles is a clear contrast, one made apparent from the play’s
Jobian prologue. His temptation of Faust results not from a drive to
conquer God’s creation but from a wager with the Lord himself. God
even calls attention to Mephistopheles’ position within the created order,
which he serves by motivating humanity through performing the Devil’s
work (als Teufel schaffen).13 Unlike Satan, Mephistopheles is not driven
by clear opposition to this divine order, or at least not so simply as was
his relation, “die berühmte Schlange” (I.335). He summarizes his own
essence in two of his most famous statements on meeting Faust in the
doctor’s study: that he is “Ein Teil von jener Kraft/Die stets das Böse will
und stets das Gute schafft” (1336–7), a part of that power that wills evil
yet does good, and “der Geist, der stets verneint!” (1338), the spirit of
negation. These and other statements work simultaneously to establish
Mephistopheles’ “eigentliches Element,” his proper element, as one of
“Sünde,/Zerstörung, kurz das Böse nennt” (1342–4)—sin and destruc-
tion; namely, evil—and yet also highlight the ultimate futility of that ele-
ment in the grand scheme of things. As Brown observes, Mephistopheles
claims to oppose divine order, but the prologue “denies the possibility of
destroying divine order: the hymn of the archangels subsumes the vio-
lence of nature under the inscrutable cosmic order, and God subsumes
the devil under the universal order of striving.”14
Satan’s serpentine transfiguration in Paradise Lost performs a similar
function in highlighting the impossibility of demonic victory. He falls
“A monstrous serpent on his belly prone,/Reluctant, but in vain, [for] a
greater power/Now ruled him” (X.514–16). Satan is forced to confront

the illusion of his assumed autarky. Mephistopheles, however, is aware
of it from Faust’s onset; his unfurling introduction to the doctor only
serves to compound his diabolic double bind. Upon hearing his demonic
visitor’s portfolio, Faust declares:
Nun kenn ich deine würdgen Pflichten!

Du kannst im Großen nichts vernichten
Und fängst es nun im Kleinen an.
[Now I grasp your noble obligation!
Inadequate for grander desolation,
You attempt it on a smaller scale.] (I.1359–61)
Faust understands Mephistopheles’ vocation: finding himself inca-

pable of significant destruction, he only manages it on a smaller scale.
Mephistopheles then replies with an evocative, ironic—and profoundly
pitiful—admission: even on this level, he fails.
Und freilich ist nicht viel damit getan.

Was sich dem Nichts entegegenstellt,
Das Etwas, diese plumpe Welt,
So viel als ich schon unternommen,
Ich wußte nicht, ihr beizukommen
Mit Wellen, Stürmen, Schütteln, Brand –
Geruhig bleibt an Ende Meer und Land.
Und dem verdammten Zeug, der Tier- und Menschenbrut,
Dem ist nun gar nichts anzuhaben:
Wie viele hab ich schon begraben!
Und immer zirkuliert ein neues; frisches Blut.
So geht es fort, man möchte rasend werden!
[And I must confess: here too I fail.
For the object that confronts my Nothing
Is this lumpen world, this Something –

And despite my every undertaking,
It shows no single sign of breaking.
Wave and tempest, fire and quake, I send,
Yet land and sea stay tranquil in the end.
And as for that – accursed brood of beasts and men,
My every venture’s simply doomed.
Countless numbers I’ve entombed!
Fresh, new blood just circulates again.
So it goes on. It drives me insane!] (I.1362–73)
In spite of his attempts, the Something (Etwas) of this crude world

stands in the way of Mephistopheles’ much-desired Nothing (Nichts).
As evil’s onslaught subsides, the world remains as calm and steadfast as
ever before. But worse than this stoic staticity before Mephistopheles’
destructive (im)potency is a power that makes it meaningless: creation
itself—the reproductive cycles of humans and animals that ceaselessly
give rise to new life in the face of the grave. Against this, he laments,
nothing can be done.
In his introduction to the very one he ostensibly comes to tempt into
perdition, Mephistopheles repeatedly emphasizes the ultimate futility
of his mission. Indeed, by wryly observing that his willing of evil does
good he acknowledges that his attempts at destruction are themselves
only part of creation’s generative processes. One could argue that this
is a rhetorical tactic to lull Faust into a false sense of security, but the
play itself seems to reinforce it as representative of Mephistopheles’
self-identity and desires. Whereas Satan rouses his defeated troops lest
they remain “forever fallen,” Mephistopheles yearns for the Eternal
Void (Ewig-Leere) (II.11603); his sole hope is the eventual decay of all
things: the belief that one distant day entropy will win out and that mat-
ter, and with it light, will reach their end and cede all back to Mother
Night (I.1349–58). Moreover, it is this same awareness of his status that
returns in Part II’s conclusion, when Faust’s immortal part is stolen from
under him and Mephistopheles’ ultimately places blame on himself, on
his folly (Torheit) and horrific mishandling (schimpflich mißgehandelt) of

the situation (II.11834–9).
The contrast between activity and passivity, rebellion and resigna-
tion, that is exhibited by Satan and Mephistopheles can be analyzed as
reflective of what Philip C. Almond terms the “demonic paradox” in
Christianity—the discursive role of the devil as both “God’s implacable
enemy and beyond his control” (as in Revelation) and “God’s serv-
ant and the enforcer of his will” (as in Job).15 For Almond, this para-
dox encodes and encapsulates the problem of evil, in which Satan must
simultaneously be inside and outside of divine control, thereby justify-
ing God’s omnipotence and his omnibenevolence, respectively. Figured
thusly, Satan embodies the implacable enemy. His rebellion continues
through the epic, and right up until the moment he is rendered speech-
less and prone by the curse of his transgressions Satan exhorts his efforts,
boasting of how easily “I have seduced … Both [God’s] beloved Man
and all his world” (X.485, 489). Even his final spoken words recall in
both message and tone his earlier rallying call, enjoining his fellows to
rise:
Ye have the account

Of my performance: what remains, ye gods,
But up and enter now into full bliss. (X.501–3)
In contrast, Mephistopheles plays the part of reluctant enforcer. This is

not to say that he does not attempt to outwit God or oppose his will—
indeed, his initial wager, his identification with negation and his visible
bitterness when Faust’s soul is secreted to salvation suggests he does—
but that despite or because of these he has also come to acknowledge
the existential irony that, as the Lord himself says, he must “als Teufel
schaffen”: be active as, create as, and thereby perhaps even create, the
Devil (I.343). Mephistopheles, a figure characterized by sardonic wit
and ironic awareness, creates (as) the Devil via the performance of his
ascribed devilish role. This is not to argue that he is not a devil meta-
physically, but rather that he is—as a devil—aware that the Devil is as
much a performative identity as an essential one, and one into which
he is interpellated.16 He also grasps that devils will only ever be actors
in, never directors of, the play—and ones without true recourse. “Bei
wem soll ich mich nun beklagen? Wer schafft mir mein erworbnes Recht?”
(II.11832–3), he laments at the play’s end, after Faust’s soul is stolen

and saved from the terms of his pact: “To whom should I now air my
grievances? Who will give me back my due, enforce my rights?” A fig-
ure of mocking irony, Mephistopheles finally turns this mockery on him-
self for having thought he might succeed, confronting his incapacity to
enforce his will and rights.
The unfortunate destiny enframes both Satan and Mephistopheles.
Satan rages against it, but his identity is conditional upon it. As Forsyth
argues, Satan “discovers at the moment of his rebellion just what it
means to be subject to God. Subjection is the origin of his subjectiv-
ity.”17 This experience of “profoundest Hell” (I.251) in which he finds
himself becomes “not only his refuge, but also the site of the battle he
now wages; he appeals to Eve’s own inner image of herself, and when
he succeeds, Adam and Eve join him in this newly invented, Hellish
interiority.”18 Yet if it is Satan who inaugurates this state, Faust shows
a Mephistopheles who has long wrestled with the ontological and tele-
ological consequences of having once been an “accessor[y]/To his bold
riot” (X.520–1). While Satan attempts to inscribe himself as an equal
power, declaring “Evil, be thou my good; by thee at least/Divided
Empire with Heavens King I hold” (IV.110–11), Mephistopheles knows
that willing evil finally only does good and that the spirits of negation
only feed the ceaseless cycles of creation. Unlike Satan, who until the end
strives to destroy or conquer the stage through an exercise of his autono-
mous will (as illusory as this autonomy proves to be), Mephistopheles’
main source of solace is a nihilistic hope that, given enough time, the
play will simply end.
Surviving Theology
Formed in and formative of the Western cultural moment in which the
demon ceased to be only a representation of metaphysical evil and began
to adopt more polyvalent characteristics, heroic as well as villainous,
both Faust and Paradise Lost can be said to occupy the threshold of its
theological death and poetico-literary resurrection. It is thus important
to recognize that Paradise Lost and Faust’s demonic renaissances take
place within a framework of apocalyptic foreclosure. Satan ends his revolt
dragged in chains and left confounded by the risen Son until Doomsday,
“When this world’s dissolution shall be ripe” (XII.459). While it is
not as overt in Faust, the dissolution of signification posited by its last
chorus—“Alles Vergängliche/Ist nur ein Gleichnis,” “All that fades/Is but

a parable” (II.12104–5)—gestures toward an equally apocalyptic resolu-
tion.19 If Satan and Mephistopheles can be seen as capturing the essence
of devils reborn in the theater of modernity, even as figures of moder-
nity as such, then it is important to recognize that the moment of that
(re)birth is conditional upon a death they cannot escape and yet which
remains always to come.20 This perdition is presaged but never enacted,
and its trace haunts their ontological and teleological (im)potentiali-
ties—knowledge of which Mephistopheles maintains ironic awareness
and Satan willfully represses. Reinscribed as poetico-literary figures, they
nonetheless bear the trace of a theological archive, and the unfortunate
destiny with which it enframes them. Yet given this enframing by radical
finitude, by a perdition manifested in a drive for and to destruction, what
does it mean to speak of demons (and of these specific demons, Satan
and Mephistopheles) as surviving, as surviving theology—as literature?
Addressing this question requires the exploration of the discursive
figure of the demon in its structural relationship to two interwoven
archives: first, the archive of the history of theology and of theology as a
narrative of history, and second, the archive of literature as the bearer of
the trace of that theologico-historical archive. If the theological archive
gives the demon over to perdition as its absolute referent, the demon
also operates within that archive as an agent of the very perdition to
which it is destined. The demonic discursively functions in Christianity
as a force of theologico-historical disruption and destruction, trying to
divert creation from its creator’s intent. The workings of this disrup-
tion/destruction tie closely to the conflagrating capacities attributed to
demonic speech acts, discussed earlier. As Maggi argued, devils signify a
“perpetual exclusion from meaning” and their temptations recall human-
ity to its status as pariah from the presence and plenitude of paradise;
to “speak the devil’s language is as well as means to devour creation.”21
Moreover, this language lacks any presence, including that of the spoken
word (and certainly the Word), for as Maggi makes clear demonic speech
is ultimately silent—demons speak into human minds, articulating, and
thereby making us articulate—“their silent idiom of solitude and devasta-
tion.”22
Bound to the theological archive, the demonic articulates the language
of its erasure. This relationship conjures shades of what Derrida calls mal
d’archive: that fever to possess the archive, but whose “silent vocation is
to burn the archive and to incite amnesia … aiming to ruin the archive
as accumulation and capitalization of memory.”23 Dickinson identifies this

duality of mal d’archive, as, “In essence … the desire to be sovereign, to be
the patriarchal master of the materials within the archive, and ultimately to
a desire to efface the archive and render oneself as an ‘I’ that has become
a sovereign self.”24 Yet in the theologico-historical archive of demonology,
there is—and can be—only one sovereign self: that One who, in Satan’s
words, “Sole reigning holds the tyranny of heaven” (PL  I.124), and in
relation to whom both Satan and Mephistopheles persist only in ontothe-
ological contrast and evitable contestation. The demon qua demon can-
not exist beyond this contingent relation, and the mal d’archive of Satan
and Mephistopheles—their drive to command and efface the ontothe-
ological archive of their origination—cannot be thought outside of this
radical contingency. On the surface, one might attribute Satan as mani-
festing the desire for ownership and Mephistopheles the desire for eras-
ure, but focusing exclusively on their revolutionary zeal and embittered
nihilism overlooks elements of their respective dynamics. Satan’s attempt
to conquer first Heaven and then Earth is clearly a desire for mastery, but
one that seeks to efface the existing ontotheological archive and replace it
with another. Similarly, Mephistopheles’ nihilism masks a will to mastery
and particularly for self-mastery—to be part of a structure in which he can
symbolize more than mere lack and his every effort is not destined for
futility. Both devils strive towards the impossible creation of a new archive
that can exist outside of ontotheology, beyond the reach of the ineluctable
inheritance it bequeaths to them.
If the theological archive destines the demon for destruction, and in
response the demon attempts to orchestrate that archive’s disintegration,
it is tempting to credit its passage into literature as a mark of its quasi-
success. By becoming an object of art and literature, rather than theol-
ogy and philosophy, the demon escapes perdition via the actualization of
its own ontotheological demise. It dies in order to be reborn. Or perhaps
as Hawkes more cynically frames it, “Satan’s worldly power increases to
the degree that his spiritual reality is denied,” a scenario he is happy to
acquiesce to, as “in the age of the hyperreal, physical nonexistence is no
bar to earthly dominion.”25 Yet such a reading, cynical or otherwise, can-
not be so straightforward. As Faust and Paradise Lost illustrate, the tran-
sition from theology to literature is not so immaculate a reconception.
The ontotheological archive endures much as the demon endures, and
endures as demon. “That is what this literature attests,” Derrida writes
at the climax of Archive Fever, “literature itself, an inheritor escaped—or
emancipated—from the Scriptures.”26 Literature (and perhaps this litera-

ture more evidently, more apparently, than others) inherits and escapes
the archive of Scripture—inherits the Scriptures as it emancipates itself
from the Scriptures. And with the inheritance of this archive comes the
inheritance of a radical contingency and of an unpardonable, inevitable
sentence. Addressing the demon’s presaged but eschatologically pre-
mature death in theology and its survival in literature requires not only
an exploration of the ontological status of this or that devil in one or
another literary work but rather an examination of how the demon as
a figure intersects with the concept and function of “literature itself”—
of literature as a space of impossible possibility and as an archive that
operates in relation to death, and to its own death most of all.
Discussing the figuration of writing in Plato’s Phaedrus, Maurice
Blanchot attributed to writing, and art, a certain prophetic quality, in
that its language was not bound to the surety and stability of truth: it
“does not rely on something that already exists—neither on an already
accepted truth nor on a language that has already been spoken or veri-
fied.”27 Derrida follows Blanchot’s path when he situates literature as “a
modern invention, inscribed in conventions and institutions” that “ties
its destiny” to the possibility of democratic freedom through “its right
to say everything … the unlimited right to ask any question, to suspect all
dogmatism, to analyze every presupposition.”28 Literature can therefore
be said to articulate a space of radical possibility, one that exceeds the
symbolic limitations of its contemporary reality and its material exigen-
cies, its manifestation as literature in this or that literary work. It bears
an undecidability placing it beyond the binarization of “the real and the
unreal, the actual and the inactual, the living and the non-living, being
and non-being,” but gives it the structure of the trace in opening the
space of difference. It is in this space of literature—as the Romantic (mis)
readings of Milton and their heirs demonstrate—that the demon was
able to attain a liberating polyvalence previously denied to it.29
At the same time, however, Derrida calls attention to literature’s
structural foundation in the notion of mimesis, which he sees as
grounded in a hierarchy of imitated over imitation, a relation that binds
literature to philosophy and history (and one might add theology), and
specifically to ontology and to truth—mimesis “is commanded by the
process of truth” and judged in relation to the adequacy of its approxi-
mation.30 This dependence on an imitated to imitate and its opening of a
space of radical potentiality are not at odds, however. As Kronick writes,
“to say that literature suspends the referential and/or representational

dimension of language by virtue of its literariness, or its being as fiction,
confirms its subservience to” mimesis, since its identity as fiction cannot
exist outside of this structure. “Literature will displace metaphysics only
when it negates itself as literature,” he continues, “that is, as a self-reflex-
ive totality in which mimesis is judged in reference to truth.” That is,
“literature itself,” much like the demons that endure within it, can only
be the imperfect replicant of a truth that remains forever elsewhere.31
Literature thus operates as an opening up of a space of possibility, but
one tied intrinsically to both an archive—the conventions and institu-
tions, the operations of a politics that permits its more or less subversive
articulations—and to a transcendental referent (truth as theology, as phi-
losophy, as history) to which it can relate only via mimesis. This dual reli-
ance on an archive and on a referent that can never be its own creates a
relationship between literature and the experience of mortality, one that
mimics the demon’s own eschatological horizon in perdition. Writing on
the social structures surrounding the experience of death and the work
of mourning, Derrida appeals to literature. Individual or group death—
“a destruction affecting only a part of society, tradition, or culture”—he
claims, remains always assimilable by
memory, compensation, internalization, idealization, displacement … there

is monumentalization, archivization, and work on the remainder, work of
the remainder. Images, grief, all the resources of memory and tradition,
can cushion the reality of that death, whose anticipation remains therefore
interwoven with fictionality, symbolicity, or if you prefer, literature.32
However, the archivizing task of literature is not the only relation of lit-
erature to death. For while literature is conceptually irreducible to a spe-
cific work or body of works, its dependency on its archive means that its
being as literature requires that material base. As such, it also bears in
itself the relation to its own death. Kronick summarizes:
Literature cannot “outlive” its material base and still be called “literature”
insofar as it has no referent outside itself or its “own possibility.” If lit-
erature possessed a real referent external to the juridico-literary archive, it
would be able to reconstitute itself on that basis. Yet Derrida implies that
such an external referent would make what remains something other than
literature … literature belongs to or is subordinate to the order of Being.
To that extent that literature, the being of literature, is determined by
mimetologism, it is subordinate to an essence exterior to itself.33
Writing in the 1980s, Derrida identified the death of literature with what
he termed the “structuring fable” of nuclear war: “a hypothesis, a phan-
tasm, of total self-destruction” that formed literature’s “only absolutely
real … ultimate and a-symbolic referent.” The nuclear catastrophe here
symbolizes the irreversible destruction of “the entire archive and all sym-
bolic capacity.” It is the “absolute referent of all possible literature … on
par with the absolute effacement of any possible trace.” However, the
apocalyptic imagery evoked by this “remainderless and a-symbolic destruc-
tion of all literature” should give us pause. While the specters of mega-
death reinvigorated both the cultural archive and academic analysis of
Christian apocalypse, Derrida warns that such an “assimilating resemblance
of discourses” obscures its uniqueness—traditional apocalypse operates as
a revelation of meaning; nuclear catastrophe presents only “the historical
and ahistorical horizon of an absolute self-destructibility without apoca-
lypse, without revelation of its own truth, without absolute knowledge.”34
Rather than apocalypse, I believe that it is perhaps better to speak of
this “structuring fable” as the perdition of literature. Like the perdition
that haunts the ontotheological devil, literature’s horizon unveils noth-
ing but an absolute destruction beyond signification: an unassimila-
ble other before which it can but multiply its strategic maneuvers in a
doomed attempt at assimilation.35 Everything transient is only a parable,
proclaimed Faust’s closing chorus, and “It is literature and culture and
the here and now that are spoken of here,” Richter writes: “All that is
temporal and contingent—our human world, our culture—is set in rela-
tion to literature, the ‘Gleichnis.’”36 If this final choir gestures to the
ultimate, a-symbolic referent of the human world, it also does this for the
demonic one. Or rather, it points to such a referent for a human world
constructed as demonic, as transient because exiled from the pure and
purifying presence of the thing itself. As with literature to philosophy,
the demon—the being of the demon—is determined by mimetologism,
subordinated to an ontotheological truth that it cannot be and which
remains always external. The interiority of Hell can only exist in relation
to a Heaven that is always already elsewhere: the objective reality that
grounds demonic subjectivity. Satan and Mephistopheles both reflect
this relationship differently. Satan does so by attempting to construct a
counterfeit Kingdom outside divine oversight on the forlorn plains of
Hell, trying to reinscribe Evil as equal to Good. Mephistopheles does so
through his association with magic, which as Hawkes argues is discur-
sively bound to ideas of idolatry as counterfeit, a mimicking of creative
potential in subjective and phantasmatic rather than objective and practi-

cal terms—a relation encapsulated by his loss of Faust’s soul, in which
the pact is revealed as the unenforceable replica of a divine relationship
that always assumes precedence, a symbol that inevitably fades.37
Like literature—as literature—both Satan and Mephistopheles are
enframed by finitude and contingency. Bound structurally to a truth that
can only exist outside of it, one that it can merely approximate through
a mimesis that only serves to confirm its subservience, the demon qua
demon cannot become truth but only an imperfect copy, a symbol as tran-
sitory as every symbol. It is perhaps only in this that one can speak of the
demon, and of these demons—Satan and Mephistopheles, but not only
these—as surviving in and surviving as literature. As archives of traces,
both these demons and this literature are bound in structural dependency
to a truth they can imitate but never become and to the absolute, a-sym-
bolic referent of their own destruction. And it is, ultimately, perhaps to
this that “this literature attests … literature itself,” as it both escapes and
inherits the Scriptures, as it inherits itself in emancipating itself from the
Scriptures.38 Literature testifies to a site of lingering spectrality, in which
the demon appears to us as surviving theology, as survivals of and sur-
viving beyond theology. Reflecting the haunting trace of an ontotheology
inherited and emancipated by its others, the demon qua demon mirrors
the structure of the very literature (qua literature) in which it lives on,
and vice versa. In literature and as literature, the demon inherits an archive
it desires both to master and (thereby) to efface, but outside of which it
cannot signify anything beyond its own perdition, beyond an absolute
conflagration “without remains and without knowledge… without a
name, without the least symptom, and without even an ash.”39
Notes
1. I refer here to the figuration of tehom in Genesis and its genealogical roots
in Near Eastern creation mythologies, charted by Neil Forsyth in The Old
Enemy: Satan and the Combat Myth (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1987). Catherine Keller has expertly discussed the theological cod-
ing of tehom in Christianity in her work of process theology Face of the
Deep: A Theology of Becoming (London and New York: Routledge, 2003).
2. For analyses of some these movements, see Per Faxneld, Satanic
Feminism: Lucifer as the Liberator of Women in Nineteenth-Century
Culture (Stockholm: Molin & Sorgenfrei, 2014); Peter A. Schock,
Romantic Satanism: Myth and Historical Moment in Blake, Shelley, and

Byron (London and New York: Routledge, 2003); and Robert Ziegler,
Satanism, Magic, and Mysticism in Fin-de-siècle France (Basingstoke and
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
3. Jacques Derrida, Learning to Live Finally: The Last Interview, trans.
Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Basingstoke and New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 26.
4. Both texts’ legacies are too multiform to present in any semblance
of totality, but two recent studies are Inez Hedges’s Framing Faust:
Twentieth-Century Cultural Struggles (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois
University Press, 2009) and John Leonard’s Faithful Labourers: A
Reception History of Paradise Lost, 1667–1970 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2016).
5. Jacques Derrida, Psyche: Inventions of the Other, Volume I, eds. Peggy
Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2007), 403.
6. He links the beast to the demonic twice, cursorily: in the context of
Saddam Hussein’s demonization in the 1991 Gulf War and in rela-
tion to Rousseau’s feelings of social outsider status (Rogues: Two Essays
on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2004), 97); The Beast and the Sovereign, trans.
Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009),
99–100). Meanwhile, his “History of the Lie: A Prolegomena” oddly
makes no reference to demons at all (Without Alibi, trans. Peggy Kamuf
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002).
7. Jacques Derrida, The Death Penalty, Volume I, trans. Peggy Kamuf
(Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 24.
8. The classical influences on both works have been discussed at length by
numerous scholars; Neil Forsyth’s The Satanic Epic (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2003) and Jane K. Brown’s Goethe’s “Faust”:
The German Tragedy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986) offer
detailed overviews of the works’ vast intertextuality. For discussions of the
figures of Satan and Mephistopheles directly, see also Katherine Calloway,
‘Beyond Parody: Satan as Aeneas in Paradise Lost,’ Milton Quarterly
39:2 (2005) and Ida H. Washington, ‘Mephistopheles as an Aristophanic
Devil,’ MLN 101:3 (1986).
9. Armando Maggi, Satan’s Rhetoric: A Study of Renaissance Demonology
(Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 2, 5,
24–5. See also David Hawkes, The Faust Myth: Religion and the Rise of
Representation (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)
for a discussion of this concept in the history of the Faust legend. While
Maggi is discussing Renaissance demonology specifically, his observations
can be applied more widely, as this conception of demonic language

exerted a significant impact on the European witch-hunts and on dis-
courses of anti-Semitism. Its construction is tied closely to the privation
theory of Augustine (and of Plato), in which evil is understood as pri-
vatio boni, as a privation of the good. In Simona Forti’s words, priva-
tio boni defines evil “as the simple lack of a good that ‘should be,’” but
such ontological lack is never self-contained—indeed, the framework of
diabolic temptation requires it cannot be. The figuration of “evil as onto-
logical defectiveness,” instead signals “an evil that gets worse and worse
until arriving at the last step—the simulacrum, or forms that lack a type,
the adaptive, metamorphic methods of a foreign, defective substance that
disintegrates through contagion” (New Demons: Rethinking Power and
Evil Today, trans. Zakiya Hanafi (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
2015), 91, 165).
10. Fred Parker, “‘Much in the mode of Goethe’s Mephistopheles’: Faust
and Byron,” in International Faust Studies: Adaptation, Reception,
Translation, ed. Lorna Fitzsimmons (London and New York:
Continuum, 2008), 108.
11. Forsyth, Epic, 56. See also Julie Cyzewski, “Heroic Demons in Paradise
Lost and Michael Madhusudan Datta’s Meghanadavadha kavya: The
Reception of Milton’s Satan in Colonial India,” Milton Quarterly 48:4
(2014).
12. John S. Tanner, Anxiety in Eden: A Kierkegaardian Reading of Paradise
Lost (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 136.
13. The German text of Faust is taken from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,
Faust: The Original German and a New Translation, trans. Walter
Kaufman (New York: Random House, 1961).
14. Jane K. Brown, “Mephistopheles the Nature Spirit,” Studies in
Romanticism 24:4 (1985), 479.
15. Philip Almond, The Devil: A New Biography (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 2014), xvi.
16. The paradox of demonic subjectivity is a theme I explore elsewhere in
regard to Paradise Lost (S. Jonathon O’Donnell, “Whom We Resist:
Subjectivity and Resistance at the Infernal Periphery,” ed. Benjamin
W. McCraw and Robert Arp (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2015)). The paradox operating as the demon-qua-demon’s
condition of possibility can perhaps best be understood as an act of
ontotheological interpellation. Derived here from Louis Althusser,
the conceptual framework of interpellation posits that the act of nam-
ing is constitutive of the subject that it names, and is a core concept in
Judith Butler’s performative theory of subjectivity. Drawing attention to
interpellation’s socially coercive function, Butler highlights the double
meaning of subjection as both “subjection (in the sense of subordination)

and becoming a subject.” Butler observes that this double meaning
“seems as well to contain the paradox of power as it both acts upon and
activates a body … presuppos[ing] the subject in its first meaning, and
induc[ing] the subject in its second” (“Bodies and Power, Revisited,”
Radical Philosophy 114 (2002), 16–17).
17. Forsyth, Epic, 150.
18. Ibid., 151.
19. Compare the more overt references in Marlowe’s version of the Faust
myth, where Mephistopheles describes his interior Hell in explicitly apoc-
alyptic tones (Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, ed. John D. Jump
(London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 65):
where we are is hell,

And where hell is there must we ever be,
And, to be short, when all the world dissolves
And every creature shall be purify’d,
All places shall be hell that is not heaven.
20. For some explorations of these devils as representatives of Western moder-

nity, see Forsyth, Epic, and Hawkes, Myth.
21. Maggi, Rhetoric, 5, 24–5.
22. Ibid., 2.
23. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. David Wills
(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 12. This is also one of
the few places where Derrida discusses the Devil, as a construct that oper-
ates as an externalization of this second function.
24. Colby Dickinson, Between the Canon and the Messiah: The Structure of
Faith in Contemporary Continental Thought (London: Bloomsbury,
2013), 87.
25. Hawkes, Myth, 176–7.
26. Derrida, Archive Fever, 100.
27. Maurice Blanchot, A Voice from Elsewhere (Albany, NY: State University of
New York Press, 2007), 41.
28. Jacques Derrida, On the Name (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
1995), 28.
29. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of
Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York
and London: Routledge, 2006), 12.
30. Jacques Derrida, Disseminations, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago, IL:

University of Chicago Press, 1981), 193.
31. Joseph G. Kronick, Derrida and the Future of Literature (Albany, NY:
State University of New York Press, 1999), 88–9.
32. Derrida, Psyche, 402.
33. Kronick, Future, 114.
34. Derrida, Psyche, 389, 401, 403.
35. Derrida, Psyche, 403.
36. Simon Richter, ‘The Errors of Our Ways: The Relation of Literature to
Culture in Goethe’s Faust,’ in Practicing Progress: The Promise and
Limitations of Enlightenment, ed. Richard E. Schade and Dieter Sevin
(Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007), 122.
37. Hawkes, Myth, 21–4.
38. Derrida, Archive Fever, 100.
39. Ibid., 101.
Bibliography
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Press, 2014.
Blanchot, Maurice. A Voice from Elsewhere. Translated by Charlotte Mandell.
Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2007.
Brown, Jane K. ‘Mephistopheles the Nature Spirit.’ Studies in Romanticism 24:4
(1985): 475–490.
Brown, Jane K. Goethe’s “Faust”: The German Tragedy. Ithaca, NJ: Cornell
Butler, Judith. ‘Bodies and Power, Revisited.’ Radical Philosophy 114 (2002):
13–19.
Calloway, Katherine. ‘Beyond Parody: Satan as Aeneas in Paradise Lost.’ Milton
Quarterly 39:2 (2005): 82–92.
Cyzewski, Julie. ‘Heroic Demons in Paradise Lost and Michael Madhusudan
Datta’s Meghanadavadha kavya: The Reception of Milton’s Satan in Colonial
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Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Translated by David
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Derrida, Jacques. Without Alibi. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. Stanford, CA:
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Derrida, Jacques. Rogues: Two Essays on Reason. Translated by Pascale-Anne

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and the New International. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. New York and
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Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
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Derrida, Jacques. Learning to Live Finally: The Last Interview. Translated by
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Derrida, Jacques. The Death Penalty, Volume I. Translated by Peggy Kamuf.
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Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
CHAPTER 9
Dostoevsky’s Demons
Irina Kuznetsova
The demonic is a seductive, perennial topic. In the gallery of Russian

writers, hardly anyone involved himself so intensively with demons and
the demonic as Feodor Dostoevsky. Few before him had attempted to
unveil the lure and persistence of these constructs in the literary imagina-
tion. Dostoevsky never formalized his understanding of the demonic in
theory, yet his exploration of the theme is complex and precarious, per-
meating most of his oeuvre and culminating in his novels Demons (1872)
and The Brothers Karamazov (1880). As Leatherbarrow maintains, “the
inscription of the demonic in Dostoevsky’s fiction […] is rarely straight-
forward, and most often designed to establish and exploit uncertainty
and ambiguity, both in what might simplistically be called narrative con-
tent […] and in narrative form.”1 What remains less ambiguous, how-
ever, is that the demonic in Dostoevsky is conceived as an evil, diabolic
force that tempts, seduces, and threatens an individual. In his novels, this
force is most commonly inherent in a genius (for example, in characters
like Raskolnikov, Stavrogin, or Ivan Karamazov), and manifests itself as
a disease. The major question with which Dostoevsky struggles, how-
ever, is whether the source of this evil force is intrinsically psychologi-
cal, or whether it should be ascribed to something external, for instance,
I. Kuznetsova (*) 
New Economic School, Moscow, Russia

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-52198-5_9
166 I. Kuznetsova
the influence of foreign ideas on Russian society, or even metaphysical

factors—such as the existence of actual otherworldly tempters.
Scholars from various academic communities have already addressed
the demonic in Dostoevsky’s works.2 Nevertheless, the writer’s novels
still allow for a further exploration of the theme. Dostoevsky’s Demons,
in particular, presents the first intensive exploration of the demonic and
appears, to a significant extent, to prefigure the demonic imagination
in early twentieth-century Russian and European culture. Its demonic
imagery is constructed by both the convergence and dismantling of
several traditions of diabolic representation: the Christian tradition,
the tradition of European Romanticism, and Russian folk demonol-
ogy. Moreover, I will argue, the novel borders on subverting some of
Dostoevsky’s own ideas: for example, his perception of the West as the
source of the demonic contamination of Russia, as well as his belief that
the essential and healing elements of Russian nation and religious life
were kept alive by the ordinary Russian peasantry. This pattern of the
construction of the demonic in Demons reappears again in its most con-
densed form in Ivan’s conversation with the devil in Dostoevsky’s last
novel, Brothers Karamazov, introducing thereby an entirely new type of
devil, a hybrid devil-figure, to Russian and European literature.
Dostoevsky, critics agree, drew material for the inscription of the
demonic into his art from a broad variety of cultural sources: from pop-
ular folk belief, from Christian images, as well as from European and
Russian literature.3 Russian culture, unlike the Western European tradi-
tion, lacked a highly developed demonology rooted in a philosophical
understanding of the devil’s role in creation.4 Before the Christianization
of Russia in 988, the Russian peasantry believed in “unclean forces,” and
in dangerous, but not evil spirits associated with the forces of nature.
After the adoption of Christianity from Byzantium, the devil joined the
gallery of these nature spirits, but assumed an exclusively negative role.
In general, as Simon Franklin maintains, “neither in Byzantium nor in
Russia was there much emphasis on a towering figure of Satan in splen-
dor,”5 namely on a grandiose powerful devil. Having absorbed and
adapted their own local demons into the Orthodox tradition, Russian
narratives and iconography have given preference to the portrayal either
of demons/devils (besi) or of a shabby petty demon (chert, bes, besjonok).
These petty demons (besi) generally caused minor trouble and personi-
fied banality, stupidity, and stagnation,6 as illustrated in Nikolai Gogol’s
9 DOSTOEVSKY’S DEMONS 167
tales, and in particular in the cycle Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka

(1831–1832), Overcoat (1842) and others.
The lack of a grandiose Devil in the Russian tradition explains the
enchanting attraction that Russian writers have felt for the impressive
demonic figures in European literature, like Dante’s Devil or Goethe’s
Mephistopheles. In particular, they admired those characters, who like
Byron’s Cain or Milton’s Satan, capture the spirits of rebellious times
and personify defiant revolutionary freethinkers in arms against an unjust
universe. Thus, in order to construct a powerful literary demon, Russian
writers of the early nineteenth century, like Pushkin and Lermontov,
were obliged to turn to European imagery.7 The Romantic demon of
Lermontov’s poem Demon (1838), a seductive, ambivalent, and philo-
sophical figure, is probably the most prominent example of such borrow-
ing. This image, as I will demonstrate in my analysis, will reappear in the
portrayal of Dostoevsky’s characters.
As a deeply religious person, Dostoevsky also worked closely with
Biblical sources while constructing his demons. The Book of Job and the
New Testament, especially the Book of Revelation, were among his most
important sources. His reflections on the demonic, therefore, are closely
interwoven with his exploration of metaphysical evil and his overall per-
ception of the desacralized world. Dostoevsky’s treatment of the demonic
is also highly representative of his social and political awareness. Exploring
the dangerous and threatening tendencies that affected the society of his
time, Dostoevsky, naturally, raises questions about the roots of “demonic
possession,” and in his novels attaches demonic markers to particular ideas
that he forms and develops throughout his writing. These ideas are inter-
twined with Dostoevsky’s critique of nihilism, atheism, social determin-
ism, and the Western civilization that served as their cradle.
Dostoevsky’s Demons was initially conceived as a pamphlet novel,
aimed against the spread of nihilism and revolutionary activity in Russia.
The plot of the novel is modeled after the story of the homicide of a
student named Ivanov, carried out by Sergei Nechaev, one of the most
dangerous revolutionary figures in Russia. In the novel, the members
of Pyotr Verkhovensky’s revolutionary cabal murder Ivan Shatov in
revenge for his decision to break with the circle. This event, however,
is overshadowed by the spiritual crisis of the group’s guiding spirit and
Dostoevsky’s most enigmatic demonic character, Nikolai Stavrogin.
Demons was not the first anti-nihilist novel of nineteenth-century
Russia. Its originality, commentators agree, lies in attributing responsibility
168 I. Kuznetsova
for the appearance of a radical generation of nihilists in the 1860s to the

liberal generation of Westerners of the 1840s.8 Westerners and Slavophiles
had engaged in fierce debates as opposing intellectual and political forces
in Russia throughout the nineteenth century. Slavophiles believed Russia
possessed a unique historical and social order that was disrupted by the
reforms of Peter the Great, while Westerners supported a European model
of development for Russia. By 1860, however, the Westerners had split
into two major camps. The liberals, associated mainly with the generation
of the 1840s, advocated a gradual, peaceful change through reform. The
younger generation of radicals, later known as nihilists, agitated for far-
ther-reaching social change and, if necessary, for revolution.9 In Demons,
Dostoevsky portrays these two generations as different stages of the aliena-
tion of Russian intelligentsia from its national roots, and presents the
absorption of Western culture as a form of demonic possession.
In Demons, Stepan Verkhovensky, symbolic father of the radicals (he
is the actual father of Pyotr Verkhovensky and used to be a tutor of
Stavrogin, Shatov, and other characters) represents a generalized portrait
of major Russian Westerners and liberal idealists of the 1840s, in par-
ticular of Peter Chaadayev, Timofey Granovsky, and Alexander Herzen.
Dostoevsky portrays Stepan Verkhovensky as a ridiculous character.
Verkhovensky, having abandoned his career as a university professor,
lives off the largesse of the landowner Varvara Stavrogina as a virtual
hanger-on. Moreover, while cultivating the image of a man who suffers
“persecution” and “exile” for his bold views, he leaves the country or
collaborates with officials whenever he senses real or imagined politi-
cal pressure. Thus, Verkhovensky’s political engagement, far from being
bold, is limited to “the most innocent, nice, completely Russian, cheer-
ful, liberal, idle talk” over cards and champagne in cozy salons.10 This
composite portrait of the Russian liberals of the 1840s implied “effete
posturing, empty rhetoric, and hypocritical advocacy of high-sounding
ideals that they are allegedly not prepared fully to translate into
practice.”11
The characterization of major revolutionaries in the novel overtly sug-
gests both demonic and Western elements, and it is tempting to think
Dostoevsky is equating and conflating the two. The portrait of Nikolai
Stavrogin, for example, evokes the depiction of Lucifer by Romantics,
and coincides with Dostoevsky’s conviction that the “evil” represented
by figures like Stavrogin was imported into Russia along with the cult of
Byronism during the 1820s. Pyotr Verkhovensky bears the name of the
Russian tsar Peter the Great, whose imposition of Western-style reforms

and his conflict with the Orthodox Church made him the embodiment
of the Antichrist for many Russians. In the description of Pyotr, the nar-
rator stresses his non-human physical traits, in particular his unnaturally
long, narrow and sharp tongue, a clear allusion to the character’s asso-
ciation with the serpent in the Garden of Eden. Pyotr’s features are also
suggestive of Goethe’s Mephistopheles.12 Although Pyotr does not pos-
sess any supernatural powers, with his serpent-like tongue he creates tur-
moil in the quiet provincial town of the novel’s setting as if by magic.
Spying, lying, and manipulating everyone around him, Pyotr pursues
his vicious aims with uncanny success. When one of the group members
considers his escape, for example, he realizes that there is no way to leave
Verkhovensky’s circle, since, like in a devil’s pact, “it had already been
decided, signed and sealed.”13
Dostoevsky, in his description of Pyotr’s circle, portrays with prophetic
power the destructive impact of Russian socialist revolution and the
abstractness of its ideas and ideals. Pyotr, whom Dostoevsky makes an ide-
ological follower of his own contemporary Chernyshevsky, seeks to estab-
lish a reformed, egalitarian state, “an earthly paradise”14 that Shigalev,
the circle’s major theoretician, formulates as follows: “[…] the division
of mankind into two unequal parts. One-tenth is to receive personal free-
dom and unlimited rights over the remaining nine-tenth. The latter are
to lose their individuality and turn into something like cattle […]”15 In
support of “Shigalyovism,” Verkhovensky states that only despotism is
capable of establishing both “freedom” and “equality,” and proclaims:
“Each belongs to all, and all to each. All are slaves, and are equal in their
slavery.”16 He even suggests handing the world over to the pope: “[…]
The pope on top, we all around, and under us Shigalyovism.”17 Here
Dostoevsky clearly associates the Catholic Church with demonic forces.
This episode, along with the “Legend of the Grand Inquisitor” from
Brothers Karamazov, suggests that Dostoevsky views Roman Catholicism
as having lost its connection to true Christianity, while preaching a Christ
who had succumbed to the temptations of the Devil.
Indeed, while the “Legend of the Grand Inquisitor,” as recounted by
Ivan Karamazov in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, shares with
Demons this critique of Catholicism, it also presents a similar vision of
“the earthly paradise, as proposed by the revolutionaries. The Grand
Inquisitor, disillusioned by the futility of Christ’s teachings, confesses
in his conversation with the returned Christ that he had followed “the
170 I. Kuznetsova
wise and dread Spirit, the spirit of self-destruction and non-existence,”18

only in order to correct Christ’s mistakes, and to save humanity from the
unbearable burden of freedom. Arguing that “man prefers peace, and
even death, to freedom of choice in knowledge of good and evil,”19 the
Grand Inquisitor is now saving man from suffering, having proclaimed
a new empire based on the three wisdoms that Christ had rejected:
miracle, mystery, and authority. Yet, the Inquisitor argues, success in
implementing these principles does not depend only on oppression and
exploitation. In essence, miracle, mystery, and authority correspond to
man’s real needs and desires, which in turn have to be cultivated. In this
sense, Ivan’s legend provides bitter commentary on a deep insight into
human nature, as well as into the mechanisms involved in application of
and in submission to power.
But not only this. “The Grand Inquisitor” also suggests something
else about the demonic evil. While Dostoevsky identifies evil with human
deprivation of freedom, he also constructs his tempters as apparent ben-
efactors of humanity. The Grand Inquisitor, accusing Christ of “caring
only for the tens of thousands of the great and strong,”20 convincingly
positions himself as a humanist by asserting, “No, we care for the weak
too.”21 He thereby seems to take upon himself Christ’s own role as a
savior of the weak and poor, undermining the traditional image of Jesus.
As Fernie writes, “it is the Inquisitor’s fellow feeling for the mass who
are weak and impotent, and not at all Christ’s exorbitant demand that
the individual soul should make a free choice for his image and his truth,
that is more continuous with the revolution in favor of the weak, the
poor and ‘the poor in spirit’ that Christ’s life otherwise proclaimed.”22
The “demonic markets” in both novels thus strongly demonstrate that
socialism and Catholicism are united, in Dostoevsky’s perception, as left-
ist ideas, while the West, accordingly, and those who advocate its values,
appear as the source of evil.
Yet in an interesting reflection on Russian Westerners (or
Westernizers) in the June 1876 entry of A Writer’s Diary entitled “My
Paradox,” Dostoevsky writes:
And isn’t it a curious thing that precisely those Russians who are most given
to considering themselves Europeans, and whom we call “Westernizers,”
[…] that these very people are the quickest to join the extreme left, are
those who deny civilization and who would destroy it […].23
Raising the question of why Russian Westerners side with the extreme
left, Dostoevsky rejects the assumption that Russians “are Tatars and have
the savage’s love of destruction,”24 and instead suggests the following:
This is what I think: does not this fact (i.e. the fact that even our most
ardent Westernizers side with the extreme left – those who in essence reject
Europe) reveal the protesting Russian soul which always, from the very
time of Peter the Great, found many, all too many, aspects of European
culture hateful and always alien? […].25
Thus, Dostoevsky ironically notices that the most ardent Westerners,

namely those who struggle for reform and join the left, hence reject-
ing Europe, are indeed “the most fervent Russians of all, the champions
of old Russia and the Russian spirit.” This “paradoxical” idea, shifting
responsibility for destructive impulses towards the “Russian soul” and
subverting Dostoevsky’s obvious construction of the demonic West, also
finds support in the text of Demons. This could be best illustrated on the
analysis of the novel’s major character, Nikolai Stavrogin.
With the entry of Nikolai Stavrogin, Dostoevsky’s novel moves
beyond political satire, and sets off in the direction of an exploration
of metaphysical evil. As mentioned previously, the portrait of Stavrogin
bears clear demonic traits:
He was a very handsome young man […] I was also struck by his face:
his hair was somehow almost too black, his bright eyes were somehow too
calm and clear, his complexion was somehow too delicate and white, the
color of his cheeks was somehow too bright and clear, his teeth were like
pearls, his lips like coral – you might say that he was a picture of beauty,
but at the same time there was also something repellent about him. They
said that his face resembled a mask […].26
The adverb “too” that precedes nearly each of his facial features empha-
sizes something supernatural and bestial about him. Indeed, the first
mention of Stavrogin in the text is linked to gossip describing his devil-
ish prank-playing, like biting the governor’s ear and pulling an official
by the nose. Stavrogin’s beautiful mask-like face, his mysterious gran-
deur and extraordinary physical strength, his rebelliousness and bound-
less individualism—all these traits recall the free-thinking demon Lucifer,
172 I. Kuznetsova
and also, as commentators have agreed, the Demon from Lermontov’s

poem Demon. 27 Philosophical depth and ambiguity, emblematic for the
Romantic demon, are coded not only in Stavrogin’s character in general,
but also in his name: “stavros” means “cross” in Greek, and “rog” is ren-
dered into Russian as “horn.” This bifurcation between the divine and
the demonic manifests itself in opposing impulses in the hero’s nature.
On the one hand, as we learn, Stavrogin commits multiple vicious acts,
the most horrific of which is the rape of a girl, Matresha. On the other
hand, he is not incapable of magnanimous deeds. Thus, for example,
he takes upon himself the burden of marrying the half-witted and crip-
pled Lebjadkina. But none of his deeds diminish the enigmatic power
Stavrogin exercises over both female and male characters of the novel.
They all perceive him as an “idol,”28 as a heroic God-like figure, who
shapes and influences their lives. “Do you think I won’t kiss your foot-
prints when you’ve left?” exclaims Shatov during their final meeting.29
Indeed, both possessed and possessing, Stavrogin appears in the novel
as a catalyst for everyone else’s ideas, which fluctuate wildly between
opposite extremes. Stavrogin not only stands behind Verkhovensky’s
vision of an “earthly paradise,” but he also produces the idea of Man-
God, and the God-like folk, which motivate two other figures in the
novel—the atheist and Westerner, Kirillov, and the religious fanatic and
Slavophile Ivan Shatov. Kirillov, a nihilist who still collaborates with the
Verkhovensky circle, intends to eradicate belief in God and to proclaim a
new revolutionary being whom he calls the “Man-God.” His central belief
borders on Feuerbach’s idea of man being God, and on the Darwin’s evo-
lutionary theory. By committing suicide, Kirillov wishes to demonstrate
that he can overcome the fear of death and thus become a “Man-God”
and redeemer of humanity. Kirillov sets man’s will above all else: “If God
exists, then all will is his, I can’t escape his will. If he does not exist, then
all will is mine, and I am obliged to proclaim self-will.”30 In his theory,
Kirillov shifts the emphasis from the notion of God becoming man, to
man becoming God through a similar sacrificial act. His idea presents an
inversion of the central doctrine of Christianity,31 which appears as an act
of religious despair on the part of a former believer.
Ivan Shatov, on the other hand, who has decided to break with Pyotr
Verkhovensky’s revolutionary cabal, has renounced his former socialist
convictions and has “jumped to the opposite extreme.”32 Reiterating to
Stavrogin what was formerly Stavrogin’s own conviction, Shatov articu-
lates what would become the central tenet of Slavophile thought at the
end of the nineteenth century, and what was one of the most controver-
sial ideas of Dostoevsky himself—“the Russian idea.” In Shatov’s view,
God, whom he conceives of more as a principle than as Judaic-Christian
God, represents the synthesizing element of a nation. Every nation, he
maintains, has its own special God, and its own concept of good and evil.
But only Russia “is one of all peoples […] capable of having the true
God,” and thus is called upon to save other nations with its truth.33
Yet, in Demons, Dostoevsky portrays Shatov’s nationalism as highly
problematic. Believing in Russia, Shatov cannot fully embrace faith in
God, and, as Stavrogin correctly notices, he “reduces God to a simple
attribute of nationality.”34 This way, one can conclude, the two theo-
ries of Shatov and Kirillov do not appear so different after all. Whereas
Kirillov raises Man to the height of God, Shatov identifies one people
with the divinity. Eventually, the text of the novel undercuts both of these
ideas as heretical. At the end of the novel, Kirillov’s idea of the assertion
of self-will through the act of self-destruction is subverted by the asser-
tion of devil’s will, when Pyotr Verkhovensky manipulates him into com-
mitting suicide. The novel’s conclusion also dooms the “Russian idea,”
as embodied by Shatov’s corpse, which sinks into the depths of a lake.
Stavrogin himself, however, having implanted opposing ideas into Kirillov
and Shatov at the same time, remains completely dispassionate toward
them. For him, these theories are mere cerebral games, and he even
seems disgusted and appalled when re-encountering them in his disciples.
Overall, Stavrogin, positioning himself in opposition to the rest
of the world, is neither an independent rebel, nor a supporter of the
Verkhovensky circle. Rather than striving for liberation, he seems to be
over-saturated with freedom. He has supposedly assisted with the reor-
ganization of the revolutionary society, but refuses to assume leadership
within the group. He never reveals the nature of his political convic-
tions. In fact, one can hardly judge Stavrogin, based on his own deeds
or speeches throughout the novel. All his creative and intellectual influ-
ence is long in the past. Upon close analysis, he, unlike other characters,
is almost incapable of either active deeds or of fully articulate speech.
The list of Stavrogin’s major wrongdoings consists of that which he
rather does not do. He does not find courage to admit his marriage to
Maria Lebjadkina; by not taking the life of his duel opponent Gaganov,
he insults him even more deeply; he warns Shatov of his murder, but he
does not try to prevent it, as he does not stop the murder of his wife. The
most horrendous instance of Stavrogin’s lack of action manifests itself in
174 I. Kuznetsova
the situation with Matresha, the girl he raped. Aware of the fact that the
girl, unable to forgive herself, was committing suicide, Stavrogin, as if
glued to his own mirror reflection, chooses to watch a spider, savoring
the taste of his own depravity, instead of saving the girl. Even when he
goes to the monk Tikhon to confess, he chooses not to follow the pro-
posed path to redemption.
Thus, whereas Pyotr’s deeds are characterized by active destruction,
Stavrogin’s demonism is apparent in his equally destructive apathy. In
this regard Stavrogin correctly identifies himself with the angel of the
Laodicean Church from Revelation:
And to the angel of the Church in Laodicea write: These things saith the
Amen, the faithful and true witness, the beginning of God’s creation. I
know your works, you are neither cold or hot! Would that you were cold
or hot! So, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will
spew you out of my mouth. For you say, I am rich, I have prospered, and
I need nothing; not knowing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind
and naked ….35
Stavrogin is similarly neither cold nor hot. He admits to Dasha, one of the
female characters he trusts, that he even envies the radicals who are able to
devote themselves passionately to an idea, because he himself is unable to
embrace any faith and can’t be committed either to evil or to good:
I am still, as I have always been, capable of wanting to do a good deed and

I take pleasure in this; at the same time I want evil as well, and I also feel
pleasure. But both feelings are too shallow, as always before, and they are
never enough. My desires are too weak, they can’t guide me.36
In the absence of any ethical code, spiritual foundation, or the eternal

striving that saves Faust, Stavrogin falls into inertia, not knowing where to
apply his boundless strength and his freedom. Having committed further
crimes, Stavrogin ends up killing himself, and justifiably earns the nick-
name of a nihilistic Russian Faust.37 Thus, in the world of Dostoevsky, the
absolute, unlimited freedom of Stavrogin appears absolutely as demonic as
the deprivation of freedom expressed in the “The Grand Inquisitor.”
The charge of lacking a purposeful direction—identified as one of
the keys to Stavrogin’s tragedy—is also made against Russian liberalism.
As the narrator ironically remarks, “‘Higher liberalism’ and ‘a higher
liberal’, that is, a liberal without any program in mind, are possible only
in Russia.”38 In the text of Demons, this delineation of apathy and stag-
nation on both the individual and political level is masterfully achieved
by the parallel careers of Stavrogin and Stepan Verkhovensky. Similarly
to Stavrogin, Stepan Verkhovensky identifies himself shortly before
his death with the Angel of the Church in Laodicea. Most important,
however, is how Stepan interprets the episode from the Gospel of Luke
describing the possession of the Gadarene swine and the exorcism per-
formed by Jesus, which also serves as one of the novel’s epigraphs:
You see, it’s like our Russia. These demons who come out of the sick man
and enter the swine – these are all the sores, all the contagions, all the
uncleanness, all the demons, large and small, who have accumulated in our
great and beloved sick man, our Russian, over the course of centuries, cen-
turies!39
Stepan Verkhovensky’s important observation that Russia has been sick

for centuries implies that the demons, associated with the radicals, are
not actually the source but rather the symptom of Russia’s sickness, and
that demonic possession was merely a foreseeable consequence of the
ongoing disease of the society.
The episode unmasking Stavrogin’s demonism serves as another exam-
ple of such subversion. Having learned about Stavrogin’s hallucinations,
Dasha exclaims, “May God preserve you from your demon […]!”40 The
word “demon” (“дeмoн”) which Dasha chooses derives from Greek, and
it is commonly used in Russian to refer to a powerful Romantic image
of the European tradition, as earlier discussed. Stavrogin, however, rap-
idly corrects her: “Oh, it’s quite a demon I have! He’s simply a small,
nasty, scrofulous little demon [бeceнoк] with a head cold, one of life’s
failures.”41 The word “бeceнoк” in Russian is diminutive of “bes” [бec]
that derives from the Old Church Slavonic “бѣcъ”, meaning “devil” or
“evil spirit,” and it is commonly used in Russian culture to refer to the
“indigenous” petty demons. Some commentators argue that Dostoevsky
seeks to “debunk the glamor formerly associated with the demon
of Romanticism” in his portrayal of Stavrogin’s hallucination.42 As
Leatherbarrow writes: “We’re alerted that this proud spirit of Romantic
revolt might be only a deflated demon, a Lucifer with the air let out.”43
An alternative interpretation, however, is plausible. By drawing on the
Russian tradition of a petty demon, Dostoevsky implies that the true evil
176 I. Kuznetsova
is not necessarily imported, and that the source of Stavrogin’s demonism

is of intrinsic nature. Later Stavrogin confesses to the monk Tikhon that
the “mocking and rational” creature he sees in his visions is just him “in
different guises,”44 and admits thereby that he is neither a God-like figure
nor its absolute opposite, a powerful Devil. Rather, he is an incarnation
of a spirit of insipidity and triviality, and that once his mask is taken off he
is a personification of the futile and comic folk-Russian “bes”.
Interestingly, despite Dostoevsky’s construction of a demonic West
and his idealization of the Russian peasantry as a possible savior to the
nation, the major murders in both Demons and Brothers Karamazov are
committed precisely by “little calculating demons” from the Russian
folk, the former convict Fedjka in Demons and Smerdjakov in Brothers
Karamazov. Fedjka, in particular, is a deep Orthodox believer, untar-
nished by Western ideology by virtue of his lack of any education. His
belief in God, however, does not stop him from robbing a church and
from the cold-blooded murder of innocents for money. The interac-
tion between these pairs—Stavrogin and Fedjka, Ivan Karamazov and
Smerdjakov—definitely deserves its own analysis. It is also intriguing that
in both cases the characters of Fedjka and Smerdjakov appear as tempt-
ers who manipulate their masters in commissioning the murders. Thus,
in promoting the missionary role of the Russian people, particularly in
A Writer’s Diary, Dostoevsky nevertheless suggests there is something
inherently demonic deep in his own culture, which he reinforces in his
construction of one of the most famous characters in European litera-
ture, the devil from Ivan Karamazov’s nightmare.
In Demons, Stavrogin only sketches the features of the devil from his
hallucination. In Brothers Karamazov, however, Dostoevsky grants the
devil his own voice, social background, and a meticulous characteriza-
tion. As Victor Terras contends, “of all the personages in the novel, the
devil gets by far the most detailed description.”45
This was a person or, more accurately speaking, a Russian gentleman of a

particular kind, no longer young, […] He was wearing a brownish reefer
jacket, rather shabby, evidently made by a good tailor though, and of a
fashion at least three years old […] In brief, there was every appearance
of gentility on straitened means. […] He had unmistakably been, at some
time, in good and fashionable society, […], becoming gradually impov-
erished upon the abolition of serfdom, he had sunk into the position of
a poor relation of the best class, wandering from one good old friend to
another and being received by them for his companionable and accommo-
dating disposition […].46
This description of the devil as prizivalschik, a sponger or poor relation

supported by more prosperous friends because he is a “gentleman,”
“accommodating, and ready to assume any amiable expression,”47 brings
to mind Stepan Verkhovensky, who lives off Varvara Stavrogina long after
he had accomplished his tutoring services for her son. The devil thus is
presented as a familiar Russian type, not simply earthly—the social type
that Dostoevsky had already attacked in Demons. More importantly,
the description of the devil in such terms, as scholars agree, serves to
challenge and confuse Ivan’s perception, leading and misleading him
between belief and disbelief.
At the very beginning of his conversation with Ivan, the devil rejects
the popular conceptions of his nature. First, he discards the com-
mon Christian narrative of his own origin: “[…] it’s an axiom generally
accepted in society that I am a fallen angel. I certainly can’t conceive
how I can ever have been an angel.”48 Moreover, the devil subverts the
Christian dichotomy that posits an opposing nature to the forces of good
and evil. Despite the devil’s claims of ignorance in regard to whether God
really exists or not (“And if you come to that, does proving there’s a devil
prove that there’s a God?”49), Dostoevsky’s devil asserts he is part of the
divine order and a servant to the higher forces. “Predestined to deny,”
since “without denial there is no criticism,”50 he flirtatiously complains:
I, for instance, simply ask for annihilation. No, live, I am told, for there’d
be nothing without you. If everything in the universe were sensible, noth-
ing would happen. There would be no events without you, and there must
be events. So against the grain, I serve to produce events and do what’s
irrational because I am commanded to.51
This declaration recalls the disposition of characters in Goethe’s Faust.

Indeed, already in Faust’s “Prologue in Heaven,” Mephistopheles func-
tions, along with the three archangels, as one of the Lord’s servants. He
reports to the Lord on affairs on earth, albeit in a spiteful and critical
manner. Yet Goethe’s Lord still shows favor to Mephistopheles, calling
him a type he “never learned to hate among the spirits who negate.”52
Like Dostoevsky’s devil, Mephistopheles proves indispensable to human
affairs, as God admits:
178 I. Kuznetsova
Man is too apt to sink into mere satisfaction,

A total standstill is his constant wish:
Therefore your company, busily devilish,
Serves well to stimulate him into action.53
Thus, Ivan’s devil seems only to reiterate the idea that evil plays a role
in the divine design and that the spirit of negation is necessary for the
continuance of being.
Nevertheless, Dostoevsky’s devil, apparently quite familiar with
Goethe, thoroughly rejects his similarity with Mephistopheles. As Frank
has remarked, there is “no question in Goethe about the reality of
Mephistopheles’ existence or of the existence of the supernatural world
from which he sprang.”54 In Dostoevsky’s text, on the other hand, this
question is posed to Ivan and the reader at the very beginning of the
conversation, and is not resolved by the conversation’s conclusion. The
entire dialogue with the devil forces a fluctuation between acceptance
and rejection of the reality of its occurrence, as it unfolds amid a more
brutal battle between the stirring of Ivan’s consciousness and the conclu-
sions of his intellect. As soon as Ivan cries out: “You are a lie, you are my
illness, you are a phantom […] you are my hallucination,”55 the devil
cunningly assures him of the opposite. Leading Ivan to belief and dis-
belief by turns, the devil, as he admits, is testing his “new method”: “As
soon as you disbelieve in me completely, you’ll begin assuring me to my
face that I am not a dream but reality.”56 The great irony here, as Frank
earlier noticed, “is that it should be the devil who apparently leads him
along the path to faith.”57
In fact, the devil affirms on several occasions that he has “a kind and
merry heart,”58 setting himself this way apart from Mephistopheles:
“Mephistopheles declares to Faust that he desired evil, but did only
good. Well, he can say what he likes, it’s quite the opposite with me. I
am perhaps the one man in all creation who loves the truth and genu-
inely desires good.”59
Stressing his love for truth, goodness, and justice, Ivan’s devil recalls
not only the revolutionaries from Demons, but also the demons of
Romanticism. Yet, Dostoevsky, as in the case of Stavrogin, unmasks the
Romantic image through aesthetic means. In his pitiful old-fashioned
outfit, suffering from a head cold,60 Ivan’s interlocutor clearly recalls
the shabby demon from Stavrogin’s hallucination. Knowing that Ivan

expects “something big and fine”61 of him, he instantaneously senses
Ivan’s discontent:
You are really angry with me for not having appeared to you in a red glow,
with thunder and lightning, with scorched wings, but have shown myself in
such a modest form. You are wounded, in the first place, in your aesthetic
feelings, and, secondly, in your pride. How could such a vulgar devil visit
such a great man as you! Yes, there is that romantic strain in you […].62
Ivan’s devil, as critics agree, is strongly allusive of the petty demon from
the Russian folk tradition, but the novel subverts this obvious imagery.
Whereas Ivan, in a manner similar to that of Stavrogin, repeatedly calls
his demon fool and stupid,63 the text of Brothers Karamazov suggests
the opposite. Regardless of his petty appearance, the reader can assume
that Ivan’s devil is much shrewder, wittier, and more charming than the
petty demon Stavrogin hallucinated. Moreover, (since “nothing human
is foreign to [him]”64) he calls himself a dreamer, and admits to loving
“dreams of [his] young friends, quivering with eagerness for life” who
“propose to destroy everything.”65 Thus, his ultimate aspiration is to
“join an idealist society”66—a possible allusion to Pyotr Verkhovensky’s
circle—and to become a leader of the opposition in it. Most impor-
tantly, the devil is very convincing in reiterating Stavrogin’s, Kirillov’s,
and Ivan’s own thoughts and recommendations for the younger
generation that would later sound even more compelling in Nietzsche’s
formulation:
I maintain that nothing need be destroyed, that we only need to destroy the
idea of God in man, that’s how we have to set to work. […] As soon as men
have all of them denied God – and I believe that period, analogous with
geological periods, will come to pass – the old conception of the universe
will fall of itself without cannibalism and what’s more, the old morality, and
everything will begin anew. Men will unite to take from life all it can give,
but only for joy and happiness in the present world. Man will be lifted up
with a spirit of divine Titanic pride and the man-god will appear. From hour
to hour extending his conquest of nature infinitely by his will and his sci-
ence, man will feel such lofty joy from hour to hour in doing it that it will
make up for all his old dreams of the joys of heaven. Every one will know
that he is mortal and will accept death proudly and serenely like a god.67
180 I. Kuznetsova
Inspiring “joy and happiness in the present world,” the devil, analo-
gously to other demonic characters of Dostoevsky, solidly positions him-
self as a great benefactor, and this form of temptation, as Cherkasova
argues, is the most dangerous one: “Dostoevsky often presents tempta-
tions by good as an attractive offer to take the fastest route to the fulfill-
ment of an ideal. […] Regardless of how realistic a shortcut may appear
to be, it betrays the end by betraying a required path.”68 Overall, Ivan’s
devil synthesizes all major features of the demonic that we have ear-
lier encountered in Demons. He presents himself therefore as a literary
hybrid drawing on predecessors in Christianity, Romanticism, Goethe,
and Russian folk tales. This hybrid introduces a new and influential type
of literary demon to European literature that seems to personify a far
more frightening force than that of even Lucifer.
Despite the fact that the devil appears to Ivan as strikingly familiar—
namely, as the worst part of himself 69—the text of the novel never
clarifies whether Ivan is really seeing a devil or whether his vision is a
hallucination, produced by his disturbed psyche. Nevertheless this scene
strongly suggests one of Dostoevsky’s most important points with
regard to the demonic: the devil’s residence might be not in hell, but
in humans’ souls, with features that are often a quite accurate reflection
of human traits—or, as Ivan Karamazov notes, “[…] if the devil doesn’t
exist, but man has created him, he has created him in his own image and
likeness.”70 Thus, despite his serious attitude towards the Bible and reli-
gion, Dostoevsky addresses the demonic not simply as an external and
transcendent power, but as one best observed in human behavior.
It should probably be noted here that apart from his novels
Dostoevsky directly expressed his attitude toward otherworldly creatures
like devils and spirits only on one occasion—namely, in a January 1876
entry of A Writer’s Diary. In this entry, discussing the current Russian
enthusiasm for spiritualism,71 Dostoevsky mockingly attempts to develop
his own theory, which posits that devils do, in fact, exist. In this pas-
sage Dostoevsky defends spirits summoned at séances, whom he identi-
fies as devils, from charges of opponents of spiritualism who call them
stupid for indulging only in moving furniture and revealing nothing of
the mysterious world beyond. Dostoevsky argues, on the contrary, that
the refusal of the devils to perform the miracle of “stones turned into
bread” is rather a measure of their intelligence and their deep insight
into human nature. Calling devils “smart politicians,” Dostoevsky sug-
gests that the devils have recognized that “happiness lies not in happiness,
but only in the attempt to achieve it.”72 Provisioning humanity with

material sufficiency and blessings would result in despair on the part of
humans that “they had no more life left, had no more freedom of spirit,
no will or personality.”73 The boredom that would follow the final reali-
zation of material sufficiency when man had sated himself on earthly
bread would lead inevitably to despondency and mass suicide, and ulti-
mately to an uprising of humans against the devils. Dostoevsky contends
instead that the devils will not commit such a “grave political mistake.”
On the contrary, in order to divide and rule, they will continue to exploit
disagreements over the question of whether or not they actually exist.
On completing his entry, Dostoevsky dismisses his theory as a joke and
admits: “My whole problem is that I simply cannot believe in devils
myself […].”74
In Demons and Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky invokes the demonic
to reflect on a broad range of social, national, religious, and ethical
issues, and portrays it as a malevolent force of stagnation and destruction
on both ethical and political levels. Yet, despite his sharp political aware-
ness, Dostoevsky does not propose any distinct method of “exorcism,”
but implies that the future spiritual recovery of humanity and a way out
of crisis depend on the moral renewal of each individual rather than on
revolutionary schemes.
While converging and dismantling several traditions of the demonic
representation and by creating a demonic hybrid, personified in Ivan’s
devil, Dostoevsky attempts, it seems, to cleanse his demons of any tempt-
ing attractiveness, but does not thoroughly succeed in this endeavor.
Most of his demonic characters remain alluring, and intellectually con-
vincing. This probably suggests struggle on the part of Dostoevsky him-
self, but also underscores his genius as a polyphonic novelist. After all,
Dostoevsky is an artist, rather than a preacher or a moralist. His con-
struction of the demonic at a crossroad of multiple citations appears
indeed very modern.
In fact, Dostoevsky’s novels foreshadow various discourses of
European modernity. Stavrogin’s and Ivan’s visions of the devil,
for example, anticipate the psychological concept of the “shadow”
archetype, elaborated by Jung, as well as Freud’s understanding of the
demonic as an individual’s repressed, unconscious drives.75 Kirillov’s con-
cept of Man-God prefigures Nietzsche’s “Übermensch.”76 Andrei Bely
celebrates Pyotr Verkhovensky’s revolutionary rhetoric in his symbolist
novel Petersburg (1922); Thomas Mann appropriates Shatov’s idea on
182 I. Kuznetsova
the role of national identity in The Magic Mountain (1924)77 and seems
to model the dialogue with the devil in Doctor Faustus (1947) after the
one in Brothers Karamazov.78 In this sense Dostoevsky’s polyphonic nov-
els resemble the charismatic figure of Stavrogin, succeeding in embed-
ding different ideas into the minds of various thinkers at the same time.
Overall, Dostoevsky perceives the demonic as a disease and as the
product of a disturbed psyche. What the demonic produces is ideas that
tempt and possess the human mind, seducing it with the most danger-
ous and compelling rhetoric and hindering an individual from making
the right choice between good and evil. These “evil” ideas that possess
the minds of Dostoevsky’s characters are often drawn as a distorted ver-
sion of the values of Western enlightenment, yet they are nurtured and
brooded over in the Russian consciousness. In this sense Dostoevsky def-
initely does not write the last word in the debunking of “the demonic”
West. At the same time, the novels discussed here suggest that the surg-
ing radicalism and spiritual stagnation of Dostoevsky’s time reflect a
long-lasting disease rooted deep within Russian culture itself. That dis-
ease is inertia, which in some respects lingers even in the present day,
however hard the current Russian ruling government and society
attempt to mask it under the euphemism of “stability.”
Notes
1. William J. Leatherbarrow, A Devil’s Vaudeville: The Demonic in
Dostoevsky’s Major Fiction (Evanston: Northwestern University Press,
2005), 1.
2. The demonic in Dostoevsky has been discussed in: W. J. Leatherbarrow, A
Devil’s Vaudeville: The Demonic in Dostoevsky’s Major Fiction (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 2005); W. J. Leatherbarrow, “The
Demonic in Dostoevsky’s The Devils,” in: Russian Literature and its
Demons, ed. Pamela Davidson (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2000); Julian
Connolly, The Intimate Stranger: Meetings with the Devil in Nineteenth-
Century Russian Literature (New York: Peter Lang, 2001); Adam
Weiner, By Authors Possessed: The Demonic Novel in Russia (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1998); Ewan Fernie, The Demonc:
Literature and Experience (New York: Routledge, 2013), and others.
3. Connolly, The Intimate Stranger, 161, and also Leatherbarrow, A Devil’s
Vaudeville, 2.
4. Simon Franklin, “Nostalgia for Hell: Russian Literary Demonism and
Orthodox Tradition,” in: Russian Literature and its Demons, ed. Pamela
Davidson (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2000), 31–57.
5. Franklin, “Nostalgia for Hell,” 35.

6. Franklin, “Nostalgia for Hell,” 36.
7. In search of a powerful literary image of Satan with strong theological
backing, Russian writers would turn to the traditions of Catholicism or
Protestantism. One could trace the examples of such borrowings in the
portrait of Lermontov’s demon in his poem Demon (1838), his portrayal
of Pechorin in the novel The Hero of Our Time, as well as in the character
of Pushkin’s Demon (1823).
8. Richard Peace, Dostoevsky. An Examination of the Major Novels
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 142; see also Joseph
Frank, Dostoevsky (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 638.
9. Derek Offord, “The Devils in the Context of Contemporary Russian
Thought and Politics,” in: The Devils: A Critical Companion, ed.
W. J. Leatherbarrow (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1999),
63–99.
10. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Demons: A Novel in Three Parts, ed. Ronald Meyer,
trans. Robert A. Maguire (London: Penguin, 2008), 37.
11. Offord, “The Devils in the Context of Contemporary Russian Thought
and Politics,” 74.
12. Vjatcheslav Ivanov already pointed out that Pyotr and Stavrogin are remi-
niscent of the Faust–Mephisto pair in: Vyatchslav Ivanov, Freedom and the
Tragic Life: A Study in Dostoevsky (London: Harvill Press, 1952), 60–5.
13. Dostoevsky, Demons, 623.
18. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Constance Garnett
(New York: Barnes & Noble, 1995), 232.
19. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, 234.
22. Ewan Fernie, The Demonc: Literature and Experience (New York:
Routledge, 2013), 99.
23. Fyodor Dostoevsky, A Writer’s Diary, ed. Gary Saul Morson (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 2009), 182.
24. Dostoevsky, A Writer’s Diary, 182.
26. Dostoevsky, Demons, 47–8.
27. Leatherbarrow, “The Devils in the Context of Dostoevsky’s Life,” 45–6.
184 I. Kuznetsova
31. Connolly, The Intimate Stranger, 184.

37. Irina Kuznetsova, “The Possessed: The Demonic and Demonized East
and West in Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg and Dostoevsky’s Demons,”
German Quarterly 85:3 (2012): 285.
42. Connolly, The Intimate Stranger, 186.
43. Leatherbarrow, “The Demonic in Dostoevsky’s The Devils,” 301.
45. Victor Terras, A Karamazov Companion (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1981), 385.
46. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, 596–7.
52. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, trans. David Luke (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2008), 12.
53. Goethe, Faust, 12.
54. Frank, Dostoevsky, 900.
57. Frank, Dostoevsky, 901.
68. Evgenia Cherkasova, Dostoevsky and Kant (New York: Rodopi, 2009), 71.

71. Interest in spiritualism and the supernatural had begun to spread in Russia
from the early 1870s and developed into a new form of amusement,
which was even practiced by Tsar Alexander II who permitted the stag-
ing of séances in the Winter Palace. In 1875 the Commission of Inquiry
on spiritualism was established, and even prominent scientists such as
Mendeleev were participants. Leatherbarrow also discusses it in A Devil’s
Vaudeville, 179.
75. In his studies, Freud frequently invokes the concept of “demon/
demons” [Dämonen] as a symbol of the dark and repressed depths of
the unconscious, for example here: Sigmund Freud, Zwei Fallberichte,
in: Gesammelte Werke (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1997), 173–4; see
also J. B. Russell’s Mephistopheles: The Devil in the Modern World (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1986), and Connolly’s The Intimate Stranger
for the discussion of Carl Jung’s theories in connection with the demonic
imagination.
76. One of the first scholars to notice the affinity between Nietzsche’s and
Dostoevsky’s ideas, as revealed in the character of Kirillov, was Dmitry
Merezhkovsky. See Dmitry Merezhkovsky, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky
(Moscow: Kniga po trebovaniju, 2013), 417.
77. See Kuznetsova, “The Possessed: The Demonic and Demonized East
and West in Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg and Dostoevsky’s Demons”:
275–94.
78. In his book Doktor Faustus: Die Entstehung des Doktor Faustus, Thomas
Mann mentions rereading Dostoevsky while working on his novel:
“Iwan Karamasows Teufelsvision gehörte auch zu meiner Lektüre von
damals.” Doktor Faustus: Die Entstehung des Doktor Faustus (Frankfurt
am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag Vorm S. Fischer, 1949), 70. See also: Grigory
Friedlender, “Mann’s Doctor Faustus and Dostoevsky’s Demons,” in:
Dostoevsky: Materiali in Issledovania 14 (1997): 7.
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Dostoevsky, Fyodor, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Constance Garnett. New
York: Barnes & Noble, 1995.
186 I. Kuznetsova
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. Demons, trans. Robert A. Maguire, ed. Ronald Meyer.

London: Penguin, 2008.
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. A Writer’s Diary, ed. Gary Saul Morson. Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 2009.
Fernie, Ewan. The Demonic: Literature and Experience. New York: Routledge,
2013.
Frank, Joseph. Dostoevsky. Princeton: University Press, 2010.
Franklin, Simon. “Nostalgia for Hell: Russian Literary Demonism and Orthodox
Tradition,” in: Russian Literature and its Demons, ed. Pamela Davidson.
Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2000.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Faust. trans. David Luke. Oxford: Oxford
Ivanov, Vyatchslav. Freedom and the Tragic Life. A Study in Dostoevsky. London:
Harvill Press, 1952.
Kuznetsova, Irina. “The Possessed: The Demonic and Demonized East and
West in Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg and Dostoevsky’s Demons.” German
Quarterly 85. 3 (2012): 275–94.
Leatherbarrow, W. J. “The Devils in the Context of Dostoevsky’s Life
and Works”: in Dostoevsky’s The devils: a Critical Companion, ed. by
W. J. Leatherbarrow. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1999.
Leatherbarrow, W. J. A Devil’s Vaudeville: The demonic in Dostoevsky’s Major fic-
tion. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2005.
Offord, D. C. “The Devils in the Context of Contemporary Russian Thought
and Politics,” in: Dostoevsky’s The Devils: a Critical Companion, ed.
W. J. Leatherbarrow. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1999.
Peace, Richard. Dostoevsky. An Examination of the major Novels. Cambridge:
Terras, Victor. A Karamazov Companion. Madison: The University of Wisconsin
Press, 1981.
Weiner, Adam. By Authors Possessed: the Demonic Novel in Russia. Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1998.
CHAPTER 10
Money as the Devil in B. Traven’s

“Assembly Line,” and Its Sources
in Scripture, the Faust Legend, and New
England Puritanism
Anthony R. Grasso, C.S.C.
At first glance, B. Traven’s 1928 story, “Assembly Line,” seems clever,

yet innocuous, by today’s standards. Yet, as one delves more deeply into
its subject matter, one discovers how prescient Traven was about matters
of economic greed and its corrupting influence in modern society. He
was, as well, prophetic about how the developed world has dealt with
indigenous peoples in the “developing” nations, as we mistakenly label
them. However, by offering a Western capitalist who is convinced he is
“improving” native life and culture with the offer to earn more money,
Traven not only reveals the problem of colonial greed which had con-
sumed resources and people for decades—and still does in many parts of
the globe—but also provides an ironic twist from its usual outcome.
As the main narrative frame for his story, Traven employs subtle ref-
erences to the scriptural “Temptation of Jesus” during the dialogues
A.R. Grasso, C.S.C. (*) 

King’s College, Wilkes-Barre, USA

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-52198-5_10
188 A.R. Grasso, C.S.C.
between the Indian and the New York businessman who encounters the
native while on vacation in Mexico and tries to make of him a budding
capitalist. The repartee and structure of the dialogue in his story repli-
cate the exchange between Jesus and Satan during the temptation scene
in Matthew, Chap. 4 and also contains elements of the temptation nar-
ratives found in the Goethe and Marlowe versions of the Faust legend,
although with quite a different ending. I would suggest that Traven,
who was likely American born of German and Scandinavian parents, and
had lived in Germany for a short time, was not only familiar with both
the biblical text and the Faust legend, mainly Goethe’s version of it, but
he may also have known Marlowe’s version, since evidence exists that he
read and emulated the works of several American and British authors.1
Clearly, he had in mind the temptation to possess or consume, which is
evident in all renditions of the Faust legend, as a major motif to high-
light the danger of the acquisitive spirit upon the open and trusting
indigenous culture which he describes in “Assembly Line.”
Because he was adamant about remaining anonymous, it is impor-
tant to discuss B. Traven’s identity before examining the text, because
his life has a bearing upon the story. Since no birth certificate exists
for him, there is some verbal evidence, largely what can be deduced
from Traven’s own telling, that he was born Traven Torsvan in 1890
in Chicago of immigrant parents, but that fact cannot be verified from
the Cook County records. He had lived in Germany for a time, the full
period also unknown, and many of his novels and stories were published
by the Büchergilde Gutenberg between 1926 and 1939. Some critics
surmise that he might have been born in or near Brandenburg, Germany,
with speculation that he may even have been the well-known German
actor, Ret Marut, whose real name was Otto Feige, born on February
23, 1882. The Torsvan and Cloves aliases, by which he was commonly
known, may have come from the names “Berick Traven Torsvan” and
“Hal Croves,” the latter having been his mother’s maiden name, both of
whom he claimed were his literary agents, but likely were pseudonyms he
used to meet secretly with publishers.
The idea that Croves was Traven resulted from a remark from John
Huston, the director of the film version of The Treasure of the Sierra
Madre, who became suspicious of his identity because of the intimate
knowledge he exhibited about the author’s intent.2 What is clear is that
this mysterious writer used a variety of aliases when dealing with pub-
lishers, agents, and the press. He employed the name Hal Croves when
10 MONEY AS THE DEVIL IN B. TRAVEN’S “ASSEMBLY … 189
he sought publication of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre in the United

States, which occurred in 1935, and again when it was made into the
1948 film, on the set of which he worked for 10 weeks. For years that
novel amounted to Traven’s only or best known work in America. For
much of his life he lived in Mexico, recounting the experiences of the
indigenous population surrounding Chiapas and Tampico in the southern
portion of the country. The bulk of his fiction, several novels, and collec-
tions of short stories have this region as their setting. Given his intense
desire to remain anonymous, Traven is fittingly quoted as saying that “The
creative person should … have no other biography than his works.”3
Traven’s enigmatic qualities continue even concerning his outlook on
the working classes and the poor. While he reveals great sympathy for
and understanding of workers, suggesting his own humble background,
he does not fully align with any particular “-isms.” Although he is clos-
est to holding what most would define as a socialist position, he made it
clear that he did not want to be labeled. Traven was especially opposed
to Communism, which he readily dismissed because he realized that no
society composed of human beings would adhere to a completely egal-
itarian sharing of wealth or power. He has been classified as a “prole-
tarian” writer by some critics,4 because he wrote about the American
underdog and the Mexican Indian peon, yet, as one can glean from read-
ing his fiction, he never preached revolution. On the contrary, his often
anti-Marxist and generally anarchist orientation buffaloed some readers
since he had exhibited so much sympathy for the plight of the worker.5
For Traven no “system”—religious, political, or economic—seemed
adequate, because none could escape the force and power of human
greed. His travels, which may have included a stint either in the Navy or
Merchant Marine, added to his observations of people across the United
States and Europe, as well as from his many years of living in Mexico,
had taught him that lofty ideals could not overcome the more brutal and
self-serving aspects of human nature. Some sources have recently indi-
cated that, although he eschewed organized religion for the same rea-
sons, Traven held Jesus in high regard because of the latter’s radicalism
in the face of the exploitative religious authorities of his time and his
consistent care for and love of others.6 This appreciation may account for
his oblique reference in the story “Assembly Line” to the temptation of
Christ, and Traven’s portrayal of the seemingly naïve native suggests that
he cast him to reflect the guileless character of Jesus in his interactions
with others.
If he wasn’t writing to promote an ideological agenda of socialism,

what appears to motivate Traven’s fiction is the desire to point out the fail-
ure of capitalism and of most systems, including religious ones, to uphold
the ideal that people should treat one another with integrity and respect:
Brotherly love and charity are what Traven misses in all white men. This is
a theme that runs through the entire Traven canon … Another unstated
theme … is the recognition of man’s ability to get used to almost anything
… Presumably this is true of all human beings, not only whites, although
the Mexican Indians of Traven’s Caoba-cyclus [or Mahogany cycle] novels
do finally rebel against the hell that white men and mestizos have placed
them in. But the point is that man’s capacity for suffering is almost too
great for his own good.7
Also referred to as the “Jungle Series,” these novels set in Mexico repeat-
edly reveal the darker motif of the economic and social relationships
found there, because of the oppressive labor involved in the mahogany
trade. That the capitalists of the developed world and the Mexican power
base collude to persecute the indigenous peoples of southern Mexico, is
revealed in titles such as The Death Ship, The Bridge in the Jungle, and
The Rebellion of the Damned, for example, rife with social Darwinism.
“Assembly Line,” as an earlier and less intense version of this encounter,
offers a lighter, more satiric treatment of the theme.
The interaction between Mr. Winthrop, the New York businessman,
and the indigenous basket weaver appears to be unremarkable at first,
because we had already seen the weaver being mistreated and disre-
spected by his Mexican countrymen, who clearly treat him as an inferior,
as someone to be tolerated or even badgered. In one exchange a woman
would not pay the 50 centavos asked for, a fair price since each basket
took over 20 h of labor to make. She, like so many others according to
Traven, offered ten centavos with the comment:
Well, I take that piece of nonsense only for charity’s sake. I know my
money is wasted. But then, after all, I’m a Christian and I can’t see a poor
Indian die of hunger since he is come such a long way from his village.8
The point isn’t lost on the reader that indigenous folk are routinely
browbeaten by their fellow countrymen because they have little recourse
to redress prejudicial treatment. Not unlike the caste system of India,
this stratification comes about on the basis of social—read “ethnic”
here—and economic distinctions. It is no small irony that the lady high-

lights her Christian faith as the source of her condescending “compas-
sion” towards the native.
Thus, when Winthrop, a white man, arrives shortly after the encoun-
ter with this previous client and pays the full amount for the basket,
the Indian is astounded. However, it won’t be long before the capital-
ist sees an opportunity to make an immense profit. In the discussions
which follow Winthrop’s attempts to cajole the native into expand-
ing his business, the structure of these exchanges follows, both in style
and format, the question and answer repartee that occurs in Chap. 4 of
Matthew’s Gospel when Jesus is being tempted by the devil. I’m sure it
did not escape Traven’s eye that Satan uses the ploys of consumption,
money, and power to work, ironically, on Jesus’ supposed human “van-
ity.” During that exchange one notes three components, each of which
is encapsulated in a question, to highlight the ascending importance of
what he assumes Jesus needs and desires.
Although the narrative is a familiar one, it may help to summarize
briefly the three temptations and Jesus’ responses which caused Satan
to disappear. First, because he’d been in the desert for so long, Satan
addresses physical hunger by asking Jesus to “command the stones to
turn into bread,” to which Jesus replies with the now-familiar scriptural
quote, “Not on bread alone is man to live but on every utterance that
comes from the mouth of God.”9 Secondly, Satan suggests that, as the
Son of God, Jesus may do whatever he likes, including flying or other
feats of magic because he has powers and God will not let his angels “…
cause you to stumble [even] on a stone.” And Jesus retorts, “Scripture
also has it: ‘You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.’”10 Finally,
as we know, Satan ironically offers Jesus all the kingdoms of the world
if he will “… prostrate … in homage before me.” At this, Jesus says to
him, “Away with you Satan! Scripture has it: ‘You shall do homage to
the Lord your God; Him alone shall you adore.’”11
At the risk of diverting us even further from the short story, I should
situate Traven’s use of the temptation motif as also being directly related
to aspects of the Faust legend, probably well known to him as a writer,
wherein Faust or Faustus, depending upon the version, unlike Jesus,
clearly desires the sorts of power and status which Satan employed to lure
Jesus in, and that his intellectual pursuits in the dark arts have opened
up to him. One of the greatest ironies and somewhat troublesome com-
ponents of the legend remains the sardonic, almost slapstick, quality of
Faust’s cavorting about Europe debasing his lifelong quest of knowledge,

while imbibing food and drink, harassing clerics at the Vatican, or flying
about to survey Rome’s seven hills. Because these actions are so inconsist-
ent with those of a man of his purported intelligence and learning, they
have often stood out as childish to readers of the play, and are more prom-
inent in Marlowe’s and in other, earlier versions of the story. Not only do
they mock the temptations of Jesus, they also diminish much of Satan’s
power because Faustus did not need to be controlled to succumb. Some
critics surmise the work to be anti-Catholic, because Faustus selects the
Vatican to visit and gains the pope’s approbation, implying another win for
Satan since this spiritual leader of the Roman church has been co-opted by
wealth and worldly power in exactly the ways that Satan had hoped.
Goethe was certainly familiar with Marlowe’s version, having com-
mented in a letter upon its “grand plan,” and wondered why it wasn’t
“more universally admired.”12 That concern may offer one reason why
he chose to eliminate this low and unseemly material in Faust, Part I,
but the lacunae may also be owing to its period of composition. While
Marlowe’s Renaissance themes in drama often encompass the overa-
chiever’s pride and hubris, Goethe softens those impulses into the
purer motive of intellectual speculation rooted in the Enlightenment
ideals of his time concerning knowledge as a key to higher things. Yet
Goethe’s version of Faust still reveals a glimpse into the overinflated ego
when he contemplates the book of “magic,” turning his back on the
traditional disciplines of “… Philosophy, Jurisprudence, Medicine, and
even, alas! Theology …” (ll. 354–6) and rationalizes the need to look
into Nostradamus’ book, in order to “… perceive whatever holds the
world together in its inmost folds/See all its seeds, its working power/
And cease word-threshing from this hour” (ll. 382–5).13 Both authors
highlight, albeit in different ways, the Faustian desire not only to know
more, but also to be able to comprehend the inner workings of the uni-
verse to the point of exercising control over them. The same impulse
might also be seen in Shakespeare’s Prospero, for example, roughly con-
temporaneous with Marlowe’s play, and interestingly also involved with
the theme of colonization as possession. While the Renaissance lust for
power, grossly manifest in castles, banquets, and wealth, gives way to a
more philosophical quest, an epistemological need for answers, which
typifies the Enlightenment, both renditions of Faust maintain a sense of
the strong sensual desire that undermines loftier goals and aspirations.
Goethe, for example, reveals Faust’s undoing in Part I through his
pursuit and conquest of the naïve Margaret, hardly an intellectual pur-

suit. Yet, even in her simplicity, Margaret deduces what his brilliant mind
cannot about Mephistopheles, commenting that “It long has been a grief
to me/That I see you in such company …/The man who is with you
as your mate/Deep in my inmost soul I hate/… there’s not a thing/
That’s given my heart a sting/As that man’s hostile face …” (“Martha’s
Garden,” ll. 3469–75).14
This view of the blinding lust for power over the world and others is
also enhanced in Scene Nine of Marlowe’s version, as Faustus dines with
Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, in their spiraling descent into gluttony
and baser appetites to feed the lust for power simply because one can.
Although different in Goethe’s version, Faust in Part II is drawn to the
imperial court where the magician becomes adviser to the Emperor.15
While Faustus and Mephistopheles conjure Alexander and his Paramour
at the court for the Emperor’s delight, we are made to see the connec-
tion between gluttony and lust. Finally, when they get to Trier, during a
visit with the Duke and Duchess of Vanholt, they conjure up the image
of Helen of Troy until Faustus, who had commanded such incredible
intellectual powers, is rendered powerless ironically by the height of his
desires: to lie with Helen. To Mephistopheles, Faustus says:
One thing, good servant, let me crave of thee,

To glut the longing of my heart’s desire:
That I might have unto my Paramour
That heavenly Helen which I saw of late,
Whose sweet embracing may extinguish clean
These thoughts that do dissuade me from my vow
And keep mine oath I made to Lucifer. (Sc.12: 72–8)16
Once her appearance is accomplished, we already know the outcome.

His pride would not allow Faustus to renege on the desire for power
and for possessing more, the gluttonous pursuit into which his quest for
knowledge had devolved, until he perishes, immersed in physicality but
still unsated, and completely unable to extricate himself from desire long
enough even to repent. Goethe’s version, however, sublimates the lust
into a “play within a play” during Faust, Part II, Act III. After Faust
and Helena presumably sleep together in the cavern under “shield and
shelter” (l. 9587) in this highly pastoral motif, Helena says that they
“possess godlike joy” (l. 9701), whereupon Faust replies that, “All is
found, our love’s requited,/I am thine and mine art thou …” (ll. 9703–4).
Here the enactment of the succubus is even more egalitarian, requiring
no source to act as tempter other than one’s own deep-seated desire.
Later, as the couple are treated to the dance of “Euphorian bearing a
young maiden,” they chant in unison, “Oh what madness! Oh what
daring!/There’s no hope of moderation” (ll. 9785–6), as Euphorian
comments that he had dragged her hither to “enforced enjoyment”
(l. 9795), in a contorted allusion to the procession of the Deadly Sins,
with a specific focus on Lust as a form of consumption.17
Marlowe reveals in Faustus a desire to control everything through
the power of his mind, which could exert dominion even over all the
domains of the earth. However, the notion of “temptation” moves
away from what had seemed its purpose in pointing out the corruptions
of Catholicism. What might have fed the humor of an overwhelmingly
Protestant audience, has perhaps less to do with religion than with the
fact that Faust’s erudition has been coopted by a consumerist mentality;
having learned all there was to know, his ego literally lusted to possess and
control everything he encountered. Here one might posit that knowledge
fueled by desire may assume on a symbolic plane the biblical connota-
tion of “carnal knowledge” as a form of possession on several levels. In
Faust’s case, the intensity of that desire eventually led him to succumb to
physical and status desires for the first time in his life. Beyond this sense of
lust for another, in Faust, Part II, Act V, Goethe alludes to the colonial
“prerogative”: “The old folks there should make concession,/I’d have the
lindens for my throne;/The few trees there, not my possession,/Spoil me
the world I call my own” (ll. 11239–42). Mephistopheles replies, “Why
are you troubling, temporizing?/Aren’t you long used to colonizing?”
(ll. 11273–5).18 Thus, the whole of Faust’s enterprise culminates in the
desire for knowledge manifest as the act of “colonizing” by dint of power.
To this point, in her reading of Marlowe’s version of the play, critic Myka
Tucker-Abramson suggests that Faustus may not primarily capitalize on
anti-Catholic images, but may have more to say about the rise of capi-
talism, which accompanied Protestantism in Europe and in England, and
by extension in America via the English colonies as well, and the change
which that wrought on the social fabric and ideals of what had until that
time been an agrarian and communitarian society.
While this author does not suggest that Marlowe is a Marxist, she
does critique the excesses of the times, and suggests that a Marxist read-
ing of the play offers much that is enlightening:
The reason critics cannot agree on the ideological message of Doctor

Faustus is that Faustus’s grappling with the Reformation is not simply doc-
trinal or metaphysical; it is also a struggle to come to grips with the eco-
nomic, social and political transformation that shaped and was shaped by
the Protestant Reformation. … The magic in Doctor Faustus can be read
as a metaphor for the growing demonic power of capital in early modern
England; … and … Faustus’s fall to the devil must be read not as a per-
sonal failure, but is emblematic of the social struggle to grapple with the
emergence of Protestantism and nascent capitalism in seventeenth-century
England.19
Tucker-Abramson illuminates Faustus’ visit to the city of Trier, argu-

ing that Luther regarded Trier as one of “… the chapels in the forest
and the churches in the fields … that must be burned.” These refer to
a system of chapels built not for congregations but for pilgrimages; in
other words, they are temples for monetary gain. “For Luther, Trier rep-
resents the worldly meanings of Catholicism in the pilgrimages and the
papal power, which he despised so much.”20 For Marlowe, as well as for
Luther, the corruption that wealth and status present as a temptation
away from one’s ideology and the ethical practice of religion, bespeaks
the relationship between Faustus and Lucifer, revealing it to be emblem-
atic of the society’s absorption into early capitalism. This fresh interpre-
tation of the absurdities in this play is helpful because it also enlightens
the tongue-in-cheek humor in and the sentiment that motivates Traven’s
work. In both, the link with the demonic has less to do with religion
than it does with the temptation to make a profit at others’ expense, and
to use wealth as the delineation of one’s superiority over others.
What makes the dynamic between Lucifer, Mephistopheles, and
Faustus so interesting, according to Abramson, is that it enacts the tran-
sition from feudalism into capitalism. As was observed earlier, the odd-
ity of Faustus’ “temptation” is that while it subverts the temptation
narrative in Matthew’s Gospel, it is sought by Faustus rather than being
presented as his being tempted by the forces of evil. Thus, it is impor-
tant to underscore this divergent approach to what would qualify as a
“temptation” into greed that the procession of the Seven Deadly Sins
symbolizes in the play. Marlowe interprets it as resulting less from the

demonic interventions of the nether world, than its being a natural off-
spring of the dark forces of knowledge viewed as a consuming power,
which has been spawned from the depths of human desire turned to the
wrong purposes. Marlowe and Bacon, suggests Marlowe’s Faustus lies in
the spirit of other texts of the period.
As we find in many sixteenth- and seventeenth-century colonial and scien-

tific narratives, and in literary genres like utopias and lunar voyages, knowl-
edge is achieved through an abstracted Archimedean perspective, resulting
in a sense (or even claim to) possession over the observed, fully encom-
passed, and newly measured space.21
This, too, is closer to the role that Traven assigns to the upheaval of capital-
ism as a demonic force that turns people against one another and enables
them to rationalize their exploitation of each other as normal behavior.
Offering a Marxist analysis of the interaction among the three pro-
tagonists in Doctor Faustus, Tucker-Abramson deduces that
Lucifer … gains profit (specifically souls) through Mephistopheles’ labor,

but he owns Mephistopheles … The capitalist social relation only occurs
when “the worker is the free proprietor of the conditions of his labor”
(Marx, Das Kapital, 927) … which Mephistopheles is not. Lucifer and
Mephistopheles exist in a feudal relationship. However, the relation-
ship between Faustus and Lucifer is more complex. Lucifer offers to buy
Faustus’s soul, and Faustus agrees. This, in a way, means that he, too, has
thrown in his lot “against our God with Lucifer” (DF, 3.1), but Faustus
has not given himself to Lucifer; he is selling part of himself, his soul, in
exchange for Mephistopheles’ labor.22
Faustus profits from Mephistopheles’ performing magical labors, which

enable him to engage in his travels, deceits, and machinations, but
Mephistopheles never benefits from the purchase of Faustus’ soul. In
spite of his perceived powers, he remains an indentured servant, little
more than a slave to Lucifer. However, in making the bargain, Faustus
becomes alienated from his own soul, an agreement in which he is,
except for those few hours near to the end of his life, completely com-
plicit. That alienation “… Replicates the process by which man’s labor
becomes alienated and commodified [sic] … [by] magic,” the kiss shared
between the succubus Helen and Faustus as he declares: “… her lips
suckes [sic] forth my soul” (Sc. 12).23 Under the guise of magic, another
metaphor for the capitalist transformation by profit and wealth, the prac-
tice of capitalism is linked with demonic forces that literally suck the soul
out of any person who follows the system blindly.
In many respects this point about money or wealth as a form of mag-
ical power is the crux in Traven’s story of the encounter between the
artistic native and the wily capitalist. While this connection is less obvi-
ous in Goethe’s version of the Faust legend, it exists to the degree that
Faust’s intellectual desire for knowledge and the power it brings degen-
erates easily into his possession of both Margaret and Helena, that drive
his actions to a baser level than one would at first have supposed him
capable of demonstrating, until the latter part of the play in Part II,
when his worldly ambitions have become thoroughly mundane.
To elucidate this connection between possession and economic con-
sumption in Traven’s story, it is useful to see the demonic metaphor of
possession as it is perceived in the cultures of South America and Africa,
all of which have suffered as a result of the profit motive exercised
through colonization, as studied by scholars of that relationship and
summarized by Tucker-Abramson:
Following up on his work with peasants and workers in the plantations of

Colombia and in the mines of Bolivia, Taussig explores the connections
between the demonic and the arrival of capitalism: “The fetishization of
evil, in the image of the devil, is an image which mediates the conflict
between pre-capitalist and capitalist modes of objectifying the human con-
dition” (1980, xii). Similarly, David Hawkes points out that “throughout
Africa, people speak interchangeably of magical ‘witches’ and wealthy ‘big
men’ who ‘eat’ the souls of the people” (2004, 11.11).24
Mythic and demonic language is used to describe economic and physical

oppression and the violence that destroys lives by literally “eating” away
at what makes people human. The same force is evident throughout the
Faust legend wherein we see exploitive relationships between characters:
Lucifer and Mephistopheles, Emperor and subjects, Pope and church,
Faust/us and Wagner, Wagner and Robin, Faust and Margaret, and so
on. The result is that normal relationships are eroded which forecasts
the high cost of capitalism on the whole of the social fabric, creating
as Thomas Carlyle had aptly termed it in Past and Present, an unnatu-
ral “cash-nexus” which wrong-headedly implied that people could be
bonded together by financial transactions and dealings, or the power that

they bring, rather than by caring and loving interactions.25
In Traven’s narrative, it is interesting to note that the capital-
ist Winthrop’s name is one that bears a prominent place in the
Massachusetts Bay Colony, the Puritan settlement in America whose
roots lie in seventeenth-century England with identification between the
Calvinist work ethic and capitalism. As the first governor of the colony,
Winthrop’s accomplishment is tarnished when one considers his his-
tory of supporting the enslavement of Native Americans and Africans,
even owning at least one Native American slave who had been captured
during the Pequot War of 1636–7. As a well-read man, it is likely that
Traven was aware of Winthrop’s past when he chose this name for the
abrasive antagonist to the native in “Assembly Line.”26 Although the
dialogue between the nameless native and Mr. Winthrop is much longer
than that in Matthew’s temptation narrative, the parallel between the
texts lies in the three major turning points during the “temptation” nar-
rative that align directly with Satan’s verbal assault on Jesus in the Gospel
version. Once back in New York after purchasing one of the native’s
exquisitely made baskets, Winthrop negotiates a deal with a Mr. Kemple,
a prominent Manhattan confectioner, for a thousand of what he has
termed “… One of the most artistic and at the same time the most orig-
inal of boxes. … These little baskets would be just right for the most
expensive chocolates meant for elegant and high priced gifts. Just have a
good look at them, Sir.”27
When he returns to Mexico, Winthrop approaches the native with
the offer of making many baskets. Instead of being enthusiastic at the
prospect, the Indian is literally dumbfounded, unable to conjure what
is involved in producing such a huge order of his handcrafted work.
Winthrop, who has made no attempt to understand either the Indian’s
situation or his culture, is perplexed. He humorously ruminates that he
“… had expected the Indian to go crazy on hearing that he was to sell
10,000 baskets without having to peddle them from door to door and
be treated like a dog with skin disease.”28 However, both the number
of baskets and the calculation of what he’d expect in payment for each
of them, is beyond the native’s rudimentary powers to fathom; he has
no frame of reference with which to compare this offer, let alone the
mathematical acumen to handle the calculation. Winthrop is frazzled as
the native attempts to explain that it “… Has cost me much labor and
worry to find out the exact price,” to which Winthrop replies, “Skip that,
amigo, come out with the salad. What’s the price?”29
What ensues is a virtual comedy of errors, as Winthrop makes his first
sally into tempting the native to devote himself to making 10,000 bas-
kets, or canastitas, as the native calls them:
If I got [sic] to make one thousand canastitas, each will be three pesos. If I
must make five thousand, each will cost nine pesos. And if I have to make
ten thousand, in such a case, I can’t make them for less than fifteen pesos
each. … Mr. Winthrop felt as if he would go insane any minute now. “Yes,
so you said. Only what I can’t comprehend is why you cannot sell at the
same price if you make me ten thousand.”30
The Indian further responds that he could “… not finish them, not even
in 100 years.” He attempts to explain to this foreigner that his ingredients
are natural: red beetles, plants, and roots, and particular types of bark used
for the dyes. “One root with the true violet blue may cost me 4 or 5 days
until I can find one in the jungle. And have you thought about … who
will work and who will look after my corn and my beans and my goats. …
If I have no corn, then I have no tortillas to eat.”31 The New York entre-
preneur and accidental tourist can’t possibly understand what any of this
entails, so he embarks on his second attempt at convincing the Indian:
“But since you’ll get so much money from me for your baskets, you can
buy all the corn and beans in the world and more than you need.” The
native retorts, “That’s what you think, señorito, little lordy. But, you see, it
is only the corn that I grow myself that I am sure of. Of the corn that oth-
ers may or may not grow, I cannot be sure to feast upon.”32
As in the biblical temptation narrative, Winthrop appeals directly to the

native’s desires with the offer of more food than he could ever want
which he wouldn’t even have to work for, a concept that is completely
foreign to this indigenous person who has never wanted more than what
he needs for himself and his family to survive each day.
Finally, Winthrop badgers him further, as he grows increasingly anx-
ious about losing the profit he hoped to make from the confectioner. In
his third speech he tries another approach, this time a blend of higher
mathematics and the “fear factor”:
“You know, my good man … Such a wonderful chance might never

again knock on your door, do you realize that? Let me explain it to you
in ice-cold figures what fortunes you might miss if you leave me flat on
this deal.” He tore out leaf after leaf from his notebook, covering each in
figures … The Indian watched with a genuine expression of awe, as Mr.
Winthrop wrote down these long figures, executing complicated multipli-
cation subdivisions and subtractions so rapidly that it seemed to him the
greatest miracle he had ever seen.33
This enormous opportunity represents the equivalent of the “all the

kingdoms of the world” that Satan had offered to Jesus and the cor-
ruption of the ideal of “possessing knowledge” of the world to which
Goethe’s Faust eventually succumbs in Part II of that work. While the
native is mesmerized by this new magic of mathematical calculation, the
promise of more money than he has ever seen or could need, mixed with
the fear of losing something he has not had, reminds modern readers of
the recent economic problems we have encountered with stock market
and real estate speculations. It is  both ironic and sad to build up a fear
of loss over items, financial or otherwise, that we don’t yet even pos-
sess, which is the major theme of Traven’s dialogue. The magic spell is
broken because the numbers are beyond anything the native can com-
prehend. Not only do they exceed his education, they hold no ultimate
sway because he has begun to deduce that to succumb to the temptation
of earning so much money, he would have to forsake his way of life and
culture. There would be no time to farm, yet his extended family and
neighbors depended on him for that produce. The entire village’s way of
life would be affected; thus, he intuits that this sort of business is neither
right for him nor even moral. Winthrop is of course beside himself, and
reverts to insulting the native: “Where have you been all this time? On
the moon or where? You are still at the same price as before.”34
The native’s response gets literally to the heart, or should I say soul,
of the matter:
You see, my good lordy and caballero, I’ve to make these canastitas my
own way and with my song in them, and with bits of my soul woven into
them. If I were to make them in great numbers, there would no longer be
my soul in each, or my songs. Each would look like the other with no dif-
ference whatever, and such a thing would slowly eat up my heart.35
The native uncannily intuits that Winthrop’s offer will be for him a form
of enslavement, in which his soul, like Faust’s, will be lost. Traven’s
expression of it prefigures what the sociologists eventually would
uncover about the indigenous people’s perceptions of capitalism as
“bad magic” that threatens their souls. He takes clear aim at the com-
modification of goods and of workers that the assembly-line process as
the mainstay of capitalism’s notions of “piece-work” and profit entails.
No thought is required, no work is original, nor does most require any
skilled craftsmanship, let alone an imagination or an eye for what is beau-
tiful. The human soul under an industrial cloud is literally suffocated.
During the height of the Industrial Revolution in England, John Ruskin,
in his essay The Stones of Venice, had alluded to this loss when discussing
as he termed it, “the nature of Gothic.” The worker’s individual stamp,
his creativity, and a bit of his personal soul, emerges in the roughness
and uniqueness of each carved stone that went into building those great
cathedrals. No one piece is exactly like another and each bears the dis-
tinctive mark of its maker, even if the laborer’s name is not inscribed
thereupon. Ruskin demonstrates through goods no longer made by hand
the stultifying force of mechanized labor on the workers, and the politi-
cal economy that had come to devalue their artisanship and contribution
to society.36
Beyond this point of the worker as being an artist and artisan, which
is by no means to be diminished, there is also a financial discrepancy at
the heart of capitalist exploitation. Donald Gutierrez, in his essay on this
story, explains the reality of the income gap by considering the actual
earnings promised to the Indian:
Winthrop … with his commission in mind if not in hand, tabulates his

gross income for the 10,000 baskets to be $15,440. Out of this handsome
sum—derived from work that he did not lift a finger to accomplish—he
tells the Indian he will give him 5000 pesos, hardly a generous “cut.” The
following calculation, based on the 1960 currency exchange rate of one
peso equals eight cents, gives a reasonably accurate idea of the real nature
of this projected financial transaction. Thus the Indian sells each basket
for 50 centavos, or four cents. If an American dollar equals 12 ½ pesos,
then the value in American currency of the Indian’s 5000 pesos amounts
to $400, compared to Winthrop’s $15,040 profit figure (his sum after
deducting the Indian’s $400) … The comparative work-and-earnings rates
of these two fellow workers, then is a gross-income ratio of approximately
39 to 1, although the work ratio is exactly the reverse. It becomes clear

where the North American behaves so genially.37
The situation also clearly parallels the labor–profit relationship delineated

in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus between Lucifer and Mephistopheles; the
one does all the work, while the other profits overwhelmingly. Yet the
financially magical exploitation of the native fails here because the lat-
ter remains true to his culture and his passion, rather than succumbing
to the lure of lucre promised so glibly by Winthrop and his ilk. Sadly,
even the satirical nature of the banter between the native, who resists
the soul-eroding call of money, and Winthrop acting as a well-dressed
rendition of Lucifer with a friendly demeanor, cannot hide the reality.
Traven’s native rebuffs the modern-day Lucifer, just as Jesus had done
in Matthew’s Gospel because of his innate virtue, which is what I suspect
Traven had in mind when composing his own allegory of native culture
in this compellingly entertaining short story. The remainder of his works
point, much less optimistically, to the unceasing exploitation wrought
by capitalism’s encompassing snare. Grossly uneven profit margins have
been and remain the stuff of colonialism’s exchanges between “devel-
oped” and “developing” parts of the world in the ongoing cash-nexus
that impels global capitalism.
Many cultures, mainly rural and agrarian ways of life, have been
destroyed by the essential greed inherent in what has been falsely labeled
the profit-sharing component of capitalist “investment,” or trickle-down
economics. Countries and communities have been maimed and their
souls sucked away by the impulse of some to have and to make more
than one could ever use or need.38 Sadly, what has been true in the rela-
tionship between what we have erroneously labeled the “first” and the
“third” or “fourth” worlds, is also happening increasingly within our
own society. The disappearance of a middle class has given rise to increas-
ing wealth for a smaller portion of the population, and an increase in the
numbers and struggles of the working classes and the poor, those mar-
ginalized by lack of access to proper jobs and earnings, as Pope Francis
and many other commentators have cited. For example, In Evangelii
Gaudium, Francis identifies the problem:
The culture of prosperity deadens us … all those lives stunted for lack of
opportunity seem a mere spectacle; they fail to move us. The current finan-
cial crisis can make us overlook the fact that it originated in a profound
human crisis: the denial of the primacy of the human person … The wor-
ship of the ancient golden calf (cf., Ex. 32: 1–35) has returned in a new
and ruthless guise in the idolatry of money and the dictatorship of an
impersonal economy lacking a truly human purpose. The worldwide crisis
affecting finance and the economy lays bare their imbalances and, above
all, their lack of real concern for human beings; man is reduced to one of
his needs alone: consumption.39
The insights of Scripture on temptation, enhanced by writers such as

Traven, with Goethe, Marlowe, and others before him, are aptly high-
lighted by Pope Francis. They remind us that we don’t need to create
Satan, Lucifer, or any kind of a devil, or to blame one for the dehu-
manization that rampant consumerism promotes. We have only to look
around at our possessions, and think about the forces within that drive us
to want more than we will need.
Lucre, with all of the material things that word represents, sidetracks
us from a purer vision of what ought to propel our human existence.
Traven has subtly but cleverly re-worked traditional temptation nar-
ratives into his tale of the clash between cultures. In “Assembly Line,”
what some might call a naïve, but most would recognize as authen-
tic, indigenous culture triumphs, because it is rooted in a sense of per-
sonal commitment to the members of a community. Symbolized in the
native from the story, that culture had not yet succumbed to the notion
that personal acquisition and greed are, or even ought to be, the goals
of one’s life. As Matthew appropriately describes it later in his Gospel,
“Where your treasure is, there your heart will also be.”40 Based upon
the stirring reflections of the indigenous basket maker in “Assembly
Line,” Traven might well add, and your soul as well, using the word
to imply the “essence” of our humanity more than in a specifically reli-
gious sense.  The tale of the global marketplace, so cleverly captured in
Traven’s short story, shows how tempting aggressive acquisition can be.
The lure of wealth as power remains a constant threat to community and
to the deeper sense of personal fulfillment, whose loss Traven witnessed
on a daily basis. What sets him apart is his recognition of the native as
a Jesus figure armed not with divine power but with a resolve rooted
in cultural and communitarian values. Following the evangelist’s lead,
Traven’s native serves as a symbolic reminder that resistance to prevailing
consumer trends is difficult to attain, but it need not be impossible to
accomplish.
Notes
1. Donald Chankin, Anonymity and Death: The Fiction of B. Traven
(University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1975), 113.
Critics see a number of influences in his work, with “… great resemblance
to the stories of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, from the
‘hard-boiled’ school of writing, whose philosophy embodied two crite-
ria: his characters must exhibit physical durability and maintenance of the
stoic ‘pose’ and the power to confront death without morbid pessimism”
(113). The native in “Assembly Line” meets the first one, while other
protagonists in Traven’s fiction meet both. Chankin continues, “… The
Treasure of Sierra Madre is an updating of Chaucer’s ‘The Pardoner’s
Tale’ combined with an adventure narrative. ‘Macario’ has an arche-
typal motif. The Grimm tale, ‘Godfather Death,’ which is its source, has
many analogies in folklore and myth. The Death Ship borrows theme and
structure from Moby Dick and The Inferno” (115). Other critics have
also noted similarities in Traven’s fiction with the narrative style of Jack
London, who also used Mexican settings in his work (114) and with
Herman Melville’s nautical fiction. Clearly, Traven read widely, absorbing
plot details and structural elements from literary sources across America
and Europe.
2. In his lengthy study of existing materials on Traven’s life, Donald Chankin
reports on Huston’s suspicions on Croves’ identity. Shown what was an
authenticated photo of Traven using the Hal Croves pseudonym, after
the film was complete the picture of the “tiny, thin man with gray hair …
dressed in khaki,” was identified by Bogart as Croves, with whom he’d
worked for 10 weeks on the set of the film (4–5). He further discovered
that journalists were trying to uncover the identity of this “gringo” in
their midst. Once, in Acapulco, confronted by Luis Spota, he suggested
that Traven was his cousin. Yet, in what was a rare slip during that inter-
view, Traven inadvertently admitted that, “When I worked in the oil
fields, they called me ‘The Swede.’ That bothered me … and I decided
not to use my name ‘Torsvan,’ typically Scandinavian. From then I called
myself B. Traven” (4). Years later in 1966, in an interview with Luis
Suarez, a journalist from Mexico City, the author repeated that he was
born in Chicago in 1890, and that his real name was Traven Torsvan (5).
However, since Traven had spent his life borrowing tales and re-telling
them, one cannot be sure about much concerning his real origin.
3. Michael Baumann, Traven: An Introduction (Albuquerque, NM:
University of New Mexico Press, 1976), 12.
4. Charles Miller in his essay, “B. Traven, Pure Proletarian Writer”
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968) argues, using
Traven’s own description, that he is “… a proletarian, indistinguishable

from the others” (114). Essentially, his article provides a chronological
treatment and overview of all of Traven’s works, many of which are unfa-
miliar to an American audience. He concludes by declaring that Traven
has “achieved a status which shines above all classes and categories: he is
a liberated proletarian who wants all proletarians and oppressed minori-
ties to share his status of enlightened liberty” (133). Miller’s assessment
of Traven’s writings is good, but he lacks objectivity when he suggests
that Traven “… doesn’t need to be criticized or analyzed, but to be read”
(132). Miller’s anti-critical position isn’t very helpful.
5. Baumann, 13.
6. Baumann argues that “Stirner … was not the only anarchist to have influ-
enced Traven … there was the Ur-anarchist: Christ. That Christ served
Traven as a source of inspiration should not really surprise us, in view of
Traven’s interest in the poor, the disinherited, the enslaved. … Traven
is an offended Christian [one who liked the teaching of Jesus, but was
unhappy with the institutional church]. This means that Traven’s
Christianity consists above all in an admiration of Jesus the man and in
the acceptance of certain very unambiguous teachings, such as the neces-
sity to love one’s neighbor—as long as that necessity is not made a com-
mandment. Men must be allowed to recognize it by themselves” (76–7).
7. Baumann, 47.
8. B. Traven, “Assembly Line” (New York: Hill & Wang, 1966), 63.
9. The New American Bible (New York: Kenedy & Sons, 1970), Matt. 4: 34.
10. Ibid., Matt. 4: 6–7.
11. Ibid., Matt. 4: 8–10.
12. Otto Heller, Faust and Faustus: A Study of Goethe’s Relation to Marlowe
(New York: Cooper Square Publishers, 1972), 15–16. Heller mentions
a letter from Charlotte von Schiller (June 1818) in which she discusses
a copy, likely of Wilhelm Müller’s translation, of Marlowe’s Faustus. In
another from Eckermann in 1824, he discusses praise at Goethe’s table
for Marlowe and other Elizabethans. Goethe’s praise for Marlowe’s
Faustus is also cited in Douglas Cole’s article, “The Impact of Goethe’s
Faust on Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Criticism of Marlowe’s
Doctor Faustus” (in Peter Boerner and Sidney Johnson, eds., Faust
through Four Centuries: Retrospect and Analysis (Tubingen: Niemeyer,
1989)), 188.
13. Johann von Goethe, Faust, Parts I & II (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1969),
101.
14. Ibid., 15, 16, respectively.
15. Heller, 45. He comments here that, “It is in Faust II that Faust really
gains the extravagant wealth and worldly power to which Marlowe’s
Faustus had so arrogantly aspired. So that … the reader … might suspect

the general design of derivation from Marlowe.”
16. Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, in The Norton Anthology of English
Literature (New York: W. W. Norton, Vol. B, 2012), 1159.
17. Goethe, Faust II, 277–80.
18. Ibid., 321–2.
19. Myka Tucker-Abramson, “Is Marlowe a Marxist?” (Rethinking Marxism:
A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society, April 2012), 289–90.
Similar ideas emerge in Ian Watt’s essay, “Faust as Myth of Modern
Individualism,” Faust through Four Centuries, 42–3. He addresses the
role of logic, suggesting that Faust’s desire to discover through magic,
begun as a quest for knowledge, becomes associated with the acquisition
of power, and regards the magician as “Demi-God.” This shift reflects
Satan’s offer of complete power “over the kingdoms of the world” in his
attempt to tempt Jesus.
20. Ibid., 290.
21. Susan Hogan, “Of Islands and Bridges: Figures of Uneven Development
in Bacon’s New Atlantis” (Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies,
2012, 12:3), 35. She goes on to say that, “Marlowe distinguishes this
power from the brute military invasion of the conquering prince, yet
throughout the play Faustus’s longing to understand the world also belies
an imperial and mercantile ambition to own it and alter it, both in a social
and geographical sense... The practice of magic not only makes plun-
der possible here, but also renders the nations of the world obedient to
Faustus” (35). Again, the focus becomes the desire to know that ends
up being a vcitim to the passion to consume, whether it is knowledge as
information, of the world’s nations or of people.
22. Myka Tucker-Abramson, “Is Marlowe a Marxist?”, 290.
23. Ibid., 294.
24. Ibid., 295.
25.
Thomas Carlyle, in Past and Present, Book III, “The Gospel of
Mammonism,” (New York: Scribner & Sons, 1896), 170, writes: “… we
for the present, with our Mammon-Gospel, have come to strange conclu-
sions. We call it a Society; and go about professing openly the totalest
[sic] separation, isolation. Our life is not a natural helpfulness; but rather,
cloaked under due laws-of-war, named ‘fair competition,’ and so forth;
it is a mutual hostility. We have profoundly forgotten everywhere that
Cash-payment is not the sole relation of human beings; we think … that
it absolves and liquidates all engagements of man.”
26.
Richard S. Dunn, “John Winthrop: American Colonial Governor”
(https://www.britannica.com/; updated Feb. 12, 2016), accessed June
6, 2016. Born in Suffolk, England, he died in 1644 as a chief figure
among the Puritan founders of New England. It was he who had perse-
cuted Anne Hutchinson, poet and first female leader of a church (Boston,
1636), which led to her banishment and excommunication. Suspicious
of new ideas and against the practice of accepting Native Americans and
Africans into the church, Winthrop also helped write the Massachusetts
Body of Liberties, sanctioning slavery in North America.
27. B. Traven, “Assembly Line,” 64.
28. Ibid., 68.
29. Ibid., 68.
30. Ibid., 69.
31. Ibid., 69.
32. Ibid., 69–70.
33. Ibid., 71.
34. Ibid., 71.
35. Ibid., 71–2.
36. John Ruskin, “On the Savageness of Gothic Architecture” (Vol. 2, Ch. 6,
“The Stones of Venice.” In The Norton Anthology of English Literature
(New York: W. W. Norton, Vol. E, 2012)), 1350–1351. Ruskin employs
language similar to Traven’s describing that men’s handiwork reflects
the originality and diversity found in nature, pointing out the deleteri-
ous effects an “assembly line” process has on workers: “For the finer the
nature, the more flaws it will show through … and it is a law of this uni-
verse that the best things shall be seldomest seen in their best form …
But … in our dealings with the souls of other men, we are to take care
how we check … efforts which might otherwise lead to a noble issue”
(1345).
37. Donald Gutierrez, “Maker Versus Profit-Maker: B. Traven’s ‘Assembly
Line’” (Studies in Short Fiction, 1980, 17:1), 11–12.
38. “After Recognition: Indigenous Peoples Confront Capitalism” (NACLA
Report of the Americas, 43: 5, 2010). The NACLA Report is one of a
string of documents that discuss the long-ignored cultural perspective
of indigenous people, which capitalism, even in its reminted guise of
social and economic reform proposed by neoliberal movements (such as
the World Bank, NAFTA, the IMF, and the World Trade Organization)
appear not to understand. “Indigenous peoples ask why it is always neces-
sary to privilege profits over life, to defend the rights of corporations and
not the rights of Mother Earth, and to treat nature as a source for the
taking. In the terrain of politics as well, indigenous mobilizations have
challenged the dominance of vertical decision-making on both the right
and the left, and the neoliberal state’s tired mantras of national security
and economic interest” (3). The report suggests that these always come
at the cost of indigenous values and cultural norms, as well as their right
to exist at peace in their own countries without having to deplete the

world’s resources to feed the perennial quest for the consumption of
goods which are anything but good for them or for the planet.
39. Gutierrez, “Maker Versus Profit-Maker,” 28–9.
40. The New American Bible, Matt. 6: 21.
Bibliography
After Recognition: Indigenous Peoples Confront Capitalism. North American
Congress on Latin America. NACLA Report on the Americas, 453: 5 (Sept.
2010): 11–39. Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost, accessed June 6, 2014.
Baumann, Michael L. B. Traven: An Introduction. Albuquerque, NM: University
of New Mexico Press, 1976.
Carlyle, Thomas. Past and Present. With an Introduction and Notes by Edwin
Mims. New York: Scribner & Sons, 1896.
Chankin, Donald S. Anonymity and Death: The Fiction of B. Traven. University
Park, PA & London: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1975.
Cole, Douglas. “The Impact of Goethe’s Faust on Nineteenth- and Twentieth-
Century Criticism of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus.” In Boerner, Peter and
Sidney Johnson, eds. Faust Through Four Centuries: Retrospect and Analysis/
Verhundert Jahre Faust: Rucksblick und Analyse. Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1989:
185–96.
Dunn, Richard S. “John Winthrop: American Colonial Governor.” Brittanica.
com, updated February, 12, 2016; accessed June 13, 2016.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Faust, Parts One and Two. Translated from the
German by George Madison Priest. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969.
Gutierrez, Donald. “Maker Versus Profit-Maker: B. Traven’s ‘Assembly Line’.”
Studies in Short Fiction, 17: 1 (Winter 1980): 9–14.
Heller, Otto. Faust and Faustus: A Study of Goethe’s Relation to Marlowe. New
York: Cooper Square Publishers, Inc., 1972.
Hogan, Susan. “Of Islands and Bridges: Figures of Uneven Development in
Bacon’s New Atlantis”. Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 12: 3
(Summer 2012): 28–59. Published by the University of Pennsylvania Press.
doi:10.1353/jem.2012.0038.
Marlowe, Christopher. Doctor Faustus (1604). The Norton Anthology of English
Literature. Ninth Edition. Volume B: The Sixteenth to the Early Seventeenth
Century. Stephen Greenblatt, et al., General Editors. New York: W. W.
Norton, 2012: 1127–65.
Miller, Charles H. “B. Traven, Pure Proletarian Writer.” Proletarian Writers of
the Thirties. Edited by David Madden. With a “Preface” by Harry T. Moore.
Carbondale & Evansville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968:
114–33.
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Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2013; reprinted, Washington, DC:
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et al., General Editors. Ninth Edition. Volume E: The Victorian Age. New
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of the Catholic Biblical Society of America. New York: P. J. Kenedy & Sons,
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1966; reprinted, Pocket Books: A division of Simon & Schuster, 1968.
Tucker-Abramson, Myka. “Is Marlowe a Marxist?: The Economic Reformation
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Four Centuries: Retrospect and Analysis/Verhundert Jahre Faust: Rucksblick
und Analyse. Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1989: 41–52.
CHAPTER 11
“la manière de Milton”: Baudelaire Reads

Milton’s Satan
Matthew J. Smith
In 1979, responding to three-quarters of a century of scholarship repudi-

ating Romantic readings of Milton’s poetry in favor of classical readings,
Joseph Wittreich asserted the staying power of Milton’s “visionary poet-
ics” and called for “a new literary history that will show more clearly the
extent to which what Christopher Caudwell calls ‘Miltonic Romanticism’
is one of the main sources of post-Miltonic poetry.”1 It is a testament
to Wittreich’s argument that his statement feels especially dated now.
But as his subtitle—Milton’s Tradition and His Legacy—suggests, inter-
preting Milton is often a matter of deciding which traditions to read his
writing from and which legacies to read toward. For several decades fol-
lowing Matthew Lewis and William Blake, Milton frequently was treated
as a prophet of his Romantic legacy, with particular interest, of course, in
the character of Satan. Whereas in the early twentieth century and per-
haps italicized by T.S. Eliot’s opinion about the moral derivativeness of
Paradise Lost, the critical emphasis turned to Milton’s tradition.
I want to call attention to a figure that sits middle-swing of this pen-
dulum in Milton criticism: Charles Baudelaire. Baudelaire’s pronounced
M.J. Smith (*) 
Azusa Pacific University,
Azusa, CA, USA

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-52198-5_11
212 M.J. Smith
investment in Satanism as a trope or philosophy derives to some extent

from the influence of Milton. In the posthumously published Mon
cœur mis à nu, Baudelaire points to “la plus parfait type de Beauté” in
Satan—“à la manière de Milton.”2 What is significant about Baudelaire’s
reception of Milton’s Satan is that it demonstrates an emerging perspec-
tive on Miltonic reception history itself. In Milton’s Satan, Baudelaire
finds a figure of failed energy and melancholy virility, a distinctly post-
Romantic hero whose classical nature is reinstalled by Baudelaire’s differ-
entiation between the Satan of the Romantics and the Satan of Milton’s
Paradise Lost. In short, in Baudelaire’s poetry we see the convergence of
Milton’s tradition and Milton’s legacy.
In what follows, I seek to elucidate Baudelaire’s distinctly Miltonic
Satanism in Les Fleurs du Mal and particularly in the pivotal poem, “Les
Litanies de Satan.” I begin by looking at Eliot’s comparisons of Milton
and Baudelaire, which are informative for their unromantic treatments
of both poets. I then look in detail at several moments of Miltonic
Satanism in “Les Litanies de Satan” and other poems in Les Fleurs du
Mal, with the help of François-René de Chateaubriand’s translation, Le
Paradis Perdu. Baudelaire’s Satanism demonstrates an awareness of both
the Romantic and the Miltonic and ultimately, I conclude, appropriates a
kind of moral duality that he associates with Milton’s predominantly clas-
sical vision of social corruption and moral decay.
Miltonic Satanism in Les Fleurs du Mal

Critical studies of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs Du Mal almost invariably recog-
nize the importance of his Satanism, broadly defined as a kind of poetic
attraction to Satan as a mythic-religious figure as well as a representation
of revolutionary (or post-revolutionary) energy. While many accounts
trace Baudelaire’s interest in Satan to the tragic yet heroic Romantic
rebel—and thus to the Romantic appropriation of Milton’s Satan—
others explain Baudelaire’s attraction to Satan as a manifestation of an
aesthetic of duality, one that simultaneously rejects the Romantic ideal
of transcendence yet also celebrates the natural world as a socially and
sensually bounded incarnation of the spiritual. Satan, in such accounts,
while not celebrated, is nonetheless beautiful in his misery. I want to
highlight the perhaps unexpected prominence of duality and moral
binary in some explanations of Baudelaire’s Satanism.
11 “LA MANIÈRE DE MILTON”: BAUDELAIRE READS MILTON’S SATAN 213
Karl Beckson explains this non-transcendent spirituality, arguing that

unlike the Romantic writers before him Baudelaire believed that “nature
was not an inspiration to his creative genius but the material from
which to forge new images; it existed only because it had its origins in
the spiritual world.”3 David Carrier adds that Baudelaire’s “dualism of
the natural and supernatural worlds is not bridged by representations,”
emphasizing the anti-transcendent post-romantic character of his poet-
ics. “Oddly, these two worlds are the same place, the everyday world,
experienced in two absolutely different ways.”4 The dominant figure
of Baudelaire’s dualistic aesthetic is Satan, and some scholars have sug-
gested not only that Satan provides Baudelaire with a trope for imma-
nent poetics and aesthetic paradox but that Baudelaire turns to Satan
to reclaim a moral framework for damnation. That is, Satan brings with
him that moral dualism that he rejects in his Romantic appearances. As
many have noted, Baudelaire seemed particularly tied to the doctrine
of original sin. John Jackson argues that Satanism provided Baudelaire
with a way of retaining his belief in original sin without condoning the
Christian society that he detested: “His solution was Satanism. Satanism
was for him the inevitable but logical way to maintain both his creed and
hope for salvation.”5
There is a difference between what is often recognized as a Romantic
invocation of Satan and Baudelaire’s: where the Satanism of a poet
like William Blake might have the effect of rejecting moral binaries,
Baudelaire seeks them out. In his important study of the history of eroti-
cism and aesthetics, The Romantic Agony, Mario Praz draws attention
to a Bryonic description by Ralph Milbanke, 2nd Earl of Lovelace and
grandson of Lord Byron, from his Astarte: A Fragment of Truth concern-
ing George Gordon Byron, first Lord Byron. In this description of Byron,
writes Praz, “Milton’s type of Satan is immediately recognizable”:
He had a fancy for some Oriental legends of pre-existence, and in his con-
versation and poetry took up the part of a fallen or exiled being, expelled
from heaven, or sentenced to a new Avatar on earth for some crime, exist-
ing under a curse, predoomed to a fate really fixed by himself in his own
mind, but which he seemed determined to fulfil [sic].6
Imagining his grandfather as a fallen angel, Lovelace remembers a person

who desired to suffer rather than reject moral consequences for rebel-
lious actions. Baudelaire’s Satanism similarly embraces moral structure
214 M.J. Smith
but with less despair and more insistence. Thus, Nicolae Babuts notices
in his duality the poetic inspiration of a psychological “Satanic pull.”
This “pull” combines madness with a longing for traditional morality. The
expression “ivre [drunk] de ma folie” … describing the climax of this mad
act indicates clearly the “joie de descendre” characteristic of [Baudelaire’s]
allegiance to Satan. Yet it is also clear that the structure exacts the pres-
ence of the allegiance to God. And indications are that certain words and
images that shine at the textual surface betray this presence.7
In Mon Coeur Mis à Nu, a work in which he maintains that moral pro-
gress cannot be facilitated by society but can only occur in the individual,
Baudelaire describes the duality of his Satanism as “à toute heure, deux
postulations simultanées, l’une vers Dieu, l’autre vers Satan” (“always
in two simultaneous postulations, one toward God, another toward
Satan”). He explains, that “L’invocation à Dieu, ou spiritualité, est un
desire de monter en grade; celle de Satan, ou animalité, est une joie de
descendre” (“The invocation of God, or spirituality, is a desire to ascend;
that of Satan, or animality, is a pleasure in descending”).8
Reading about these “deux postulations,” one might think of the
opening plate of Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, depicting
coupled figures floating between hell and the sunlit heavens; whether
they are moving up or down is ambiguous. A similar motion appears in
the second plate, “The Argument,” showing one figure at the base of a
tree and another up in the tree’s branches, pulling up or pulling down
(again, ambiguously), followed in Plate 3 by a summary of this dynamic
vertical energy: “Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and
Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human
existence.”9 James Lawler describes Baudelaire’s Satanic attraction simi-
larly to Blake’s, as making a progressive “dialectic” out of contraries:
There can be no question of following Evil to the exclusion of Good but,

rather, Evil for the sake of Good, Satan for the sake of God, opposition for
the sake of refound unity. Pure idealism is not enough: this negative moral-
ity (as one speaks of a negative theology) requires at every moment the
dialectic that finds truth by a series of negations.10
Yet here, again, we may have come full circle to the Romantic adop-
tion of Satan, that which invokes moral duality for the sake of pushing
beyond it—“Without Contraries is no progression.” Which is it? Is

Baudelaire’s Satanism characterized by a rejection or reclamation of
moral hierarchy? The question resonates because it also asks which or
whose Satan Baudelaire has in mind.
A key to understanding the Satanic trope and style in Baudelaire’s
poetry is to view him in the tradition of Miltonic reception. T.S. Eliot
wrote multiple essays on both Baudelaire and Milton that draw compari-
sons between the two poets and that are clarifying as well as problematic
for the question of Baudelaire’s Miltonic Satanism.
It is frequently noted that Eliot was critical of Milton’s writing but
equally approving of Baudelaire’s. One way of parsing Eliot’s nuanced
comparisons of the two figures appears in an essay on Andrew Marvell
where Eliot attempts to describe a certain poetic change in the seven-
teenth century. He observes the historical separation of “wit” and “mag-
niloquence in the period,” two concepts that are especially important to
Eliot’s literary critical views.11 Magniloquence, he writes, is “the delib-
erate exploitation of the possibilities of magnificence in language which
Milton used and abused,” a trait that is also used and abused “in the
poetry of Baudelaire.” Eliot defines wit as a “literary” quality, “a tough
reasonableness beneath the slight lyric grace” that is effected by one’s
adherence to “civilization” and to “the traditional habit of life.” Wit, in
short, becomes morally reified. Eliot observes, moreover, that Milton
and Baudelaire are less witty because they are too inventive, particu-
larly regarding morality. Defoe, for one, complained that Milton indeed
overstepped his moral responsibility as a writer through his misguided
innovations to the character of Satan.12 It is notable, as Eliot says in an
essay on Baudelaire, that wit rarely accompanies magniloquence after the
seventeenth century because witty poets often have “too much fear, or
too much respect” for the moral norms of civilization to speak magnilo-
quently about moral matters.13 And for Eliot this is a crucial difference
between Milton and Baudelaire. What Eliot calls “civilization” does not
determine morality in Baudelaire’s writing as it does in Milton’s. Eliot
criticizes Milton for his adhering too closely to an ideal of civilization,
for having too much wit but, of course, the comment betrays Eliot’s own
historical biases: “This it is that makes some of the most distinguished
English poets so trifling. Is anyone seriously interested in Milton’s view
of good and evil.”14
At the heart of Eliot’s sometimes tangled terminology of
“wit,” “magniloquence,” and “civilization” is the influence of his
216 M.J. Smith
contemporary T.E. Hulme and, specifically, Hulme’s well-known opinion

that a new period of classical thought has come to follow the decline of
Romanticism. Hulme writes:
Put shortly, these are the two views, then. One, that man is intrinsically
good, spoilt by circumstance; and the other that he is intrinsically lim-
ited, but disciplined by order and tradition to something fairly decent. To
the one party man’s nature is like a well, to the other like a bucket. The
view which regards man as a well, a reservoir full of possibilities, I call the
romantic; the one which regards him as a very finite and fixed creature, I
call the classical.15
Magniloquence in Milton is grandiose in style but never approaches “the

infinite nothing”; rather, poetic style in Milton gives the “impression” that
the author is “standing outside” the work of art, acknowledging its bounds
and “not quite believing it.”16 The Romantic, by contrast, positions the
author within the work of art, such that, “accustomed to this strange light,
you can never live without it. Its effect on you is that of a drug.”17 Such
language of addiction might help to explain Baudelaire’s allegiance to a doc-
trine of original sin, as well as Eliot’s impression that Baudelaire’s Satanism
is actually an expression of Christian belief “by the back door,” as it were.18
His claims about Baudelaire’s belief notwithstanding, Eliot’s compari-
sons of Milton and Baudelaire throughout his career as a literary critic
highlight their shared respect for a poetic informed by classical moral-
ity, that is, by a rejection of the idea that poetic imagination when exu-
berantly—even rebelliously—realized supersedes moral limitations
and extends human nature beyond the confines of civilization. What is
nuanced about Eliot’s reading of Baudelaire and of his views about Satan
and evil in particular is the reclamation of a Miltonic, “classical” Satan
from the Satan of the Romantics—a Satan that reinstates, as Hulme puts
it, the “creative” and “necessary” power of “Institutions” and “Order.”19
It is well documented that the capacious scholarship on Romantic
appropriations of Milton’s Satan—rebellious, promethean, inven-
tive, energetic—emphasizes the ways that Blake, Shelley, Wordsworth,
Coleridge, Byron, and others (in England) champion a Satanic figure
that defies the moral hierarchy and institutional dualism representative
of their views on traditional religion and government. As a result, while
some note Baudelaire’s aesthetic dualism, as I discuss above, scholars
continue to grapple with the heroic victim trope that Romantic writers
often celebrated, citing Milton’s Satan almost exclusively with reference

to Romantic ideals. According to John Jackson, for example, Satan pro-
vides a figure of mediation between infinite desire and finite objects of
desire—a formulation similar to Hulme’s theory of the return of the
classical—and this reading is grounded on a Romantic reading of Satan
as both perpetuator and victim of evil.20 Obviously, there is no doubt
that Romantic writers greatly influenced the cultural imaginary and con-
notative world of Baudelaire’s concept of evil, but I would suggest that
Baudelaire’s attention to Satan’s distinctively Miltonic traits signals a
deliberate deviation from the romantics. One can see this crux, again,
in Nicole Jouve’s comparison of Milton’s and Wordsworth’s respective
epics: “when one compares them with Fleurs de Mal,” however, “a new
Satan, l’Ennui, stands at the gate, as certain of his power to swallow the
world in one yawn as Milton’s Satan is of his bold attempt to conquer
Eden.”21 But whose Satan is, in fact, “bold” in his conquest of para-
dise? Arguably, Milton’s emphasis in Paradise Lost is rather on Satan’s
reticence, illustrated in scenes of pause and watching—reflecting on his
own diminished splendor, emotionally affected by Eve’s overwhelming
beauty, and cognizant of the sanctity of innocence.
Jonathan Shears addresses this bias in critical accounts of Milton’s
Romanticism, and chiefly that of Lucy Newlyn. Romantic-leaning readings
of Paradise Lost often note the poem’s moral ambiguity, epistemological
indeterminacy, and creative license. Much modern criticism on Paradise
Lost has celebrated its open-ended futures in the Romantic and other mod-
ern movements in the arts, as for instance, John Rumrich does in high-
lighting the epistemological influence of Chaos as the creative “womb” of
God in the poem.22 Yet Shears contends that Paradise Lost is “paraphras-
able” and faithful to the moral direction of its classical genre, the epic.
Complaining that Romantic readers treat Paradise Lost as if it were a lyric,
Shears points to the moral structure inherent to Milton’s choice of form,
as described by C. S. Lewis and Christopher Ricks, the former prescribing
“the subordination of the line to the paragraph and the paragraph to the
Book and even of the Book to the whole, of the grand sweeping effects
that take a quarter of an hour to develop themselves.”23 While I don’t take
a side in this argument, I do want to contend that Baudelaire does.
What Baudelaire finds compelling about Milton’s Satan—son
“manière”—is not primarily his style or even his energy but the moral
stakes of his activity. “Genuine blasphemy,” writes Eliot of Baudelaire,
“is the product of partial belief. … It is a way of affirming belief.”24 To
218 M.J. Smith
be certain, Baudelaire celebrates the inventiveness and charisma that

attracted poets in the generation before him, and it is worth noting that
his central Satanic poem, “Les Litanies de Satan,” occurs in a short and
pivotal section entitled “Révolte.” But Baudelaire doesn’t want his read-
ers to simply think of Satan; he wants them to think of Milton’s Satan—
to remember not only the beauty of misery but also the self-cause of
Satan’s misery in Paradise Lost and the reader’s complicity in it.
Miltonic Satanism in “Les Litanies de Satan”

More than a muse or trope, Baudelaire approaches Milton’s Satan as a
co-reader of sorts, a self-conscious member of the reception tradition.
While aspects of Milton’s Satan appear throughout Baudelaire’s poetry
and prose writings, a concentrated literary personality emerges in “Les
Litanies de Satan,” which begins:
Ô toi, le plus savant et le plus beau des Anges,

Dieu trahi par le sort et privé de louanges,
Ô Satan, prends pitié de ma longue misère!
Ô Prince de l’exil, à qui l’on a fait tort

Et qui, vaincu, toujours te redresses plus fort,
Ô Satan, prends pitié de ma longue misère!
(O Angel, the most brillant and most wise,

A God betrayed by fate, deprived of praise,
Satan, take pity on my misery!
O Prince of exile, you who have been wronged,

Who, even conquered, rises yet more strong,
Satan, take pity on my misery!)25

Although the poem opens in this heroic tone, the challenge against
God’s justice is immediately and repeatedly qualified by the refrain,
which reminds us that this indeed is a litany prayer. The repeated line
consolidates a sadistic contradiction running through the poem between
ruin and self-inflicted reprisal. The prayer asks Satan to take pity on the
speaker’s long despair or misery, where “longue” denotes both depth
and perpetuity. Yet even though the petition is directed toward Satan,
the poem also asserts that it is Satan who inflicts suffering. Satan’s role
as the architect of hardship appears in the poem, first, in specific inflic-
tions of pain, such as disease and war, but the longevity of misery also
takes a historical form as original sin, here figured as an adoption into
the family of the fallen: “Père adoptif de ceux qu’en sa noire colère/
Du paradis terrestre a chassés Dieu le Père” (“Adoptive father of those
ostracized/By God, and banished from his paradise”). In the book’s
opening poem, “Au Lecteur,” the Satanic litany is foreshadowed by
a statement about the failure of conventional confession—“Nous nous
faisons payer grassement nos aveux,/Et nous rentrons gaiement dans le
chemin bourbeux” (“We offer lavishly our vows of faith/And turn back
gladly to the path of filth”) (4–5). “Au Lecteur” repeats images of labor
and the expenditure of breath, mixed with the inefficacy of confessional
speech acts, until finally the speaker consummates his Satanism by inhal-
ing his demonic ideas into his lungs, “Et, quand nous respirons, la Mort
dans nos poumons/Descend, fleuve invisible, avec de sourdes plaintes”
(“And, when we breathe, death flows into our lungs,/A secret stream
of dull, lamenting cries”). At the end of the poem, summarizes Tony
Garland, “Baudelaire creates a continuity of experience with the reader
and condemns the reader, along with the hypocritical sinner, to ennui.”26
The refrain of “Les Litanies,” insofar as it is preceded by the failed con-
fessions that come before it, implicates the reader beyond an accusation
of ennui by putting the litany prayer into the mouth, or throat, of the
reader who echoes, “prends pitié.”27
The character of Satan that appears in the refrain and throughout
“Les Litanies,” thus, is not without precedent in Les Fleurs du Mal.
While Satan is sometimes admired in the book, most references to him
that precede the relatively late placement of the section “Révolte” also
portray Satan as seductive and as a symbol of defeat. In this vein, the sec-
ond stanza of “Au Lecteur” depicts Satan cradling (“berce”) our minds,
as on a pillow (“l’oreiller”) of evil, successfully enchanting our wills
(“le riche métal de notre volonté”). This is reminiscent of the Miltonic
220 M.J. Smith
episode in Book 4 when Satan sits “Squat like a toad” beside the ear of
Eve as she sleeps, in Chateaubriand’s translation, “comme un crapaud,
tout prêt de l’oreille d’Eve, essayant par son art diabolique d’atteindre
les organes de son imagination et de forger avec eux des illusions à son
gré, de fantômes et de songes.”28 As we will see, sleeping is a powerful
Miltonic image in Baudelaire’s poetry, and “Les Litanies” ends with a
direct prayer, breaking the repeated couplets and refrains, when it asks
Satan—“où, vaincu, tu rêves en silence” (“Where now you dream in
silent reverie”)29—to allow the speaker’s soul to one day repose nearby,
where the tree of knowledge spreads over Satan and casts shade over his
face (“sur ton front”). We might recognize this as an image of ennui,
and it certainly is. However, its Miltonic valences reinforce the binary
contradiction introduced in the refrain and in “Au Lecteur” showing
Satan as one who robs human volition and invoking the Miltonic context
of Eve’s dream—its forecasting of fall, regret, and repentance.
The most popular French translation of Paradise Lost available to
Baudelaire was François-René de Chateaubriand’s Le Paradis Perdu,
first printed in 1836. Although Chateaubriand’s was not the first French
translation, Le Paradis Perdu was a relatively new experience to France
since Milton’s prior reputation in France was dominated by his prose
and especially his revolutionary writings.30 Chateaubriand’s translation
includes an introduction to the epic and also the Essai sur la Literature
Anglais, a good portion of which serves as a commentary on Paradise
Lost, but Chateaubriand remembers Milton in many of his critical works.
In his Génie du Christianisme Chateaubriand establishes a precedent for
relating the suffering of postlapsarian humanity with those of the fallen
angels that we see in Les Fleur du Mal:
Milton est le premier poëte qui ait conclu l’épopée par le malheur du prin-
cipal personnage, contre la règle généralement adoptée. Qu’on nous per-
mette de penser qu’il y a quelque chose de plus intéressant, de plus grave,
de plus semblable à la condition humaine, dans un poëme qui aboutit à
l’infortune, que dans celui qui se termine au bonheur.31
(Milton is the first poet who has closed the epic with the misfortune of the
principal character, contrary to the rule generally adopted. We are of the
opinion, however, that there is something more interesting, more solemn,
more congenial with the condition of human nature, in a history which
ends in sorrows, than in one which has a happy termination.)32
Chateaubriand suggests that an epic ending in sorrow communicates

something more universal about the human condition than one end-
ing in hope. Many of Chateaubriand’s critical ideas about Milton are
informed, of course, by the period following the revolution, and some of
his own admitted problems in translating the poem attest to this33; but
generally, he views Paradise Lost as a poem about empathy with the post-
lapsarian condition, wherever it is found.
In his own way, Baudelaire adopts Chateaubriand’s focus on postlap-
sarian empathy. What Baudelaire calls “la manière de Milton” is an aes-
thetic idea native to a fallen state. Beauty, Baudelaire says in Journaux
Intimes, is “quelque chose d’ardent et de triste” (“something burning
and sad”).34 It is “une idée contraire, c’est-à-dire une ardeur, un désir de
vivre, associés avec une amertume refluante, comme venant de privation
ou de désespérance. Le mystère, le regret sont aussi des caractères du
Beau” (“a contrary idea, that is to say, a fervor, a desire to live, combined
with an ebbing bitterness, as coming from deprivation or from despair.
Mystery, regret, are also characters of the Beautiful”).35 Baudelaire
does not claim that beauty cannot be joyful but that misery, or melan-
choly, is simply more beautiful than joy: “Je ne prétends pas que la Joie
ne puisse pas s’associer avec la Beauté, mais je dis que la Joie est un des
ornements les plus vulgaires, tandis que la Mélancolie en est pour ainsi
dire l’illustre compagne” (“I do not pretend that Joy cannot associate
with Beauty, but I say that Joy is of the most common of ornaments—
whereas Melancholy may be called her illustrious companion”).36 This
is what Eliot praises about Baudelaire; yet where Eliot criticizes Milton
for standing outside of his poem to ensure that it acquiesces to society’s
moral vocabulary and literary decorum, Baudelaire sees Milton’s his-
torical inclination toward moral structure—what Eliot degradingly calls
“wit”—as a powerful precondition for the deep, old, and “longue” mis-
ery that he finds in Milton’s Satan.
Much of the Miltonic imagery in Les Fleurs and particularly in “Les
Litanies” comes, in fact, from the latter books of Paradise Lost, and spe-
cifically from the vision that the angel Michael shows Adam. This vision
occasions an extended reflection on fallenness itself, on the combined
effects of angelic and human sins, and while much of the vision depicts
escalating corruption ensuing from original sin, it also shows the con-
tinued and direct involvement of fallen angels. Perhaps one reason why
Baudelaire was attracted to this scene in Paradise Lost is because of its
dual feeling of determinism and melancholy. The archangel’s visit to
222 M.J. Smith
Adam and Eve is ultimately comforting, but it initially inflicts a state

of psychological vertigo as the pair senses the apparent fruitlessness of
repentance. At one moment, Adam takes comfort in God’s promise that
“thy Seed shall bruise our Foe,” assuring him “that the bitterness of
death/Is past, and we shall live.”37 Yet moments later, at the news of
God’s requirement that they leave the garden, Eve laments, “O unex-
pected stroke, worse then of Death!/Must I thus leave thee Paradise”
(11.268–9)? Adam sees both futures of his “Seed,” and while it culmi-
nates in the incarnation of the Son, the vision nonetheless shows the
confluence of society-building and moral decay. Each act of violence,
idolatry, and pride that he witnesses—along with acts of heroism and
self-sacrifice—generate from him and reflect “mystery” and “regret” as
much as hope.
Baudelaire uses the figure of the prostitute in Les Fleurs to embody
this decadent aspect of Adam’s seed, which Baudelaire reimagines as
adopted by Satan. In “Les Litanies,” the prostitute is subtly combined
with the doctrine of original sin through the mark of Cain. The speaker
echoes the inhalation/infusion image from “Au Lecteur” and positions
the prostitutes of Paris as already deprived of volition: “Toi qui mets
dans les yeux et dans le coeur des filles/Le culte de la plaie et l’amour
des guenilles” (“Who sees that women’s hearts and eyes sustain/The
love or rags, the cult of wounds and pain”). In these lines Baudelaire ful-
fills the request of the speaker in “Le Mauvais Moine,” which appears in
the first section of the book, called “Spleen et Idéal.” There, the speaker
condemns the lazy monk for failing to make his “misère” intelligible to
the realm of his hands and his eyes—“La travail des mes mains et l’amour
de mes yeux” (“To labour of my hands, my eyes’ delight”) (28–9). “Le
Mauvais Moine” echoes the monastic setting of “Les Litanies” by com-
paring the once flourishing walls of beautiful monasteries to the una-
dorned “tombeau” (“tomb”) of the speaker’s soul. This striking imagery
reverses the usual trope of a body being the house of the soul. Moreover,
the following poem, “L’Ennemi,” revisits the figure of the tomb as
soul, showing its decay over time, washed out and eroded by water, but
the speaker rejects any suggestion of rebirth that might grow from the
water’s nourishment, like “les fleurs nouvelles que je rêve.” It ends with
the haunting image of “l’obscure Ennemi” chewing on the human heart
and replacing the water with blood. In both “Le Mauvais Moine” and
“L’Ennemi,” the human soul is a tomb that stifles the senses and the
passions—again, much the opposite of the traditional formulation where
the body is the prison of the soul. The enemy, elsewhere called Satan,
does not cause but takes advantage of this sort of emotional blindness
(in terms of “l’amour de mes yeux”). Both poems appear in the opening
section, “Spleen et Idéal,” and so to some extent speak to the unanswer-
able hope of transcendence. “Les Litanies” comes long after this earlier
idealism has vanished and, therefore, when the speaker of “Les Litanies”
lauds Satan for filling the eyes of Europe’s prostitutes with “Le culte
de la plaie et l’amour des guenilles,” the earlier dynamic and yearning
imagery of eyes, empty hands, unadorned souls, and eroded tombs is not
satisfied but, instead, is ironically met with a picture of local disease and
moral corruption.
Baudelaire pulls this depiction of the prostitute from Adam’s vision
at the end of Paradise Lost, where he witnesses the future race of Cain
inventing, mining, and prostituting in its camp—three activities that are
characteristic of the Satanists in “Les Litanies”:
when from the Tents behold

A Beavie of fair Women, richly gay
In Gems and wanton dress; to the Harp they sung
Soft amorous Ditties, and in dance came on:
The Men though grave, ey’d them, and let thir eyes
Rove without rein, till in the amorous Net
Fast caught, they lik’d, and each his liking chose[.] (11.581–7)
Michael then explains the scene:
Those Tents thou sawst so pleasant, were the Tents

Of wickedness, wherein shall dwell his Race
Who slew his Brother; studious they appere
Of Arts that polish Life, Inventers rare,
…
Womans domestic honour and chief praise;
Bred onely and completed to the taste
Of lustful appetence, to sing, to dance,
To dress, and troule the Tongue, and roule the Eye. (11.607–10,
617–20)
224 M.J. Smith
The prostitutes of this scene have been given the power of the eye—
that is, the power to “roule the Eye” of men. Baudelaire’s prostitutes’
eyes and hearts are filled with “The love of rags, the cult of wounds and
pain.” Throughout Les Fleurs, prostitution carries a sense of enslavement
to the “amorous Net/Fast caught.” The section preceding “Révolte,”
entitled “Fleurs du Mal,” contains several poems that both celebrate and
decry lesbianism. The speaker of “Femmes Damnées” closes his descrip-
tion of these women with “coeurs épris” by following them into hell:
“Vous que dans votre enfer mon âme a poursuivies,/Pauvres soeurs, je
vous aime autant que je vous plains” (“You whom my soul has followed
to your hell,/Poor sisters, let me pity and approve”) (246–7). The preva-
lence of lesbians in the section preceding “Révolte,” thus lends a history
to the prostitutes of “Les Litanies.” Their full hearts (“coeurs épris”) are
emptied and refilled with pain.
And more than mere pain, they are given a devotional membership
in what Baudelaire calls “Le culte de la plaie,” a status that Milton asso-
ciates with the mark or “Race” of Cain. Baudelaire takes this imagery
from another passage in Paradise Lost, found earlier in the poem when
Raphael recounts to Adam the Son’s triumph over Satan during war in
heaven:
Full soon
Among them he arriv’d; in his right hand

Grasping ten thousand Thunders, which he sent
Before him, such as in thir Soules infix’d
Plagues[.] (6.834–8)
Chateaubriand translates “Plagues” as “plaies,” Baudelaire’s term for

the mark of the prostitute: “il les envoie devant lui tels qu’ils percent de
plaies les âmes des rebelles.”38 That Baudelaire chooses a vocabulary—
“culte de la plaie”—that also topically references physical sickness and
syphilis demonstrates his sustained investment in the reversal of the tradi-
tional soul–body duality, where the plagued body represents a deep spir-
itual destitution and slavery.
Moreover, these instances of “plaies” demonstrate Baudelaire’s recur-
rent conflating of the fallen angels with fallen humans, focusing atten-
tion on universal creaturely fallenness. Importantly, it is the Son’s justice
that infixes “Plagues” in the angels’ “Soules,” just as Milton depicts the
corruption of the race of Cain as the result of God’s justice, his mark.
Baudelaire repositions the mark of Cain within the context of angelic and
human moral decay, and one effect of this is to retain or even impose
the moral state of Milton’s angels—regretful yet unforgiven—in Adam’s
fallen seed and in the women that Baudelaire expresses affection for
throughout Les Fleurs. This is a key aspect to Baudelaire’s Satanism: the
combining of universal moral principles (angels) with local and contin-
gent human circumstance (syphilis and révolte). Antoine Campagnon
approaches this incarnationalism from the opposite direction, arguing
that Baudelaire’s depictions of the modern city and the irreducibility of
his poetry suggest that his images of, say, figures like “la plaie” and even
Satan are not allegorical but, instead, “non sequitur.”39 Babuts similarly
describes the “Satanic pull” at the center of Baudelaire’s combining of
the universal and the local in a non-allegorical manner, writing that “The
two moments [of eternity and present time] may belong to two differ-
ent metaphoric fields; but often … they coexist in the same field and
are distorted by the tension of the fundamental conflict.”40 Although
Compagnon may be less ready than Babuts and others to accept the
concept of duality to explain Baudelaire’s portrayals of the universal and
local, Baudelaire’s prostitutes, as members of the race of Cain, are char-
acterized by this very duality—by the reality of lust and sexual transac-
tion on the one pole and by original sin and the manifestation of God’s
judgment on the other.
What marks the race of Cain is neither exclusively spiritual nor physi-
cal, but it is through his use of Milton that Baudelaire insists that spir-
itual consciousness entombs their material reality. He demonstrates this
in the figure of the prostitute and in the progress from “Spleen et Idéal,”
to the transient vision of lesbianism in “Fleurs du Mal,” and finally to
the prostitution and slavery of “Révolte.” Baudelaire finds similar tragic
potential in the activity of mining in the same vision of the race of Cain.
Again returning to the eye as a symbol of false progress, “Les Litanies”
praises Satan’s geological secrets: “Toi dont l’oeil clair connaît les pro-
fonds arsenaux/Où dort enseveli le peuple des métaux” (“Who knows
which corners of the envious lands/The jealous God has picked to hide
his gems”). In Paradise Lost, mining is a regular symbol of rebellion
and destruction. In his vision of the race of Cain, Adam witnesses these
“Inventors rare,” which is another mark of damnation that Baudelaire
appropriates when he combines the inventor and the conspirator: “Bâton
226 M.J. Smith
des exilés, lampe des inventeurs,/Confesseur des pendus et des con-

spirateurs” (“Staff of the exiles, the inventor’s lamp,/Confessor of the
hanged, plotters and tramps”). Adam’s glimpse of the miners is techni-
cal, complex, and in some sense impressive:
In other part stood one who at the Forge

Labouring, two massie clods of Iron and Brass
Had melted (whether found where casual fire
Had wasted woods on Mountain or in Vale,
Down to the veins of Earth, thence gliding hot
To som Caves mouth, or whether washt by stream
From underground) the liquid Ore he drain’d
Into fit moulds prepar’d; from which he form’d
First his own Tooles; then, what might else be wrought
Fusil or grav’n in mettle. (11.564–73)
This scene is an internal allusion to the mining performed by Satan and

his angels in hell and during the war in heaven. Milton credits Satan with
the invention of gunpowder and cannons. He digs into the earth to find
“Sulphurous and Nitrous Foame” which he then mixes into “blackest
grain … Whereof to found thir Engins and thir Balls/Of missive ruin”
(6.512, 515, 519–20). For Milton, gunpowder production is associated
morally with the prideful pursuit of secret knowledge; mystically with
alchemy, superstition, and Roman Catholicism; and of course politically
with the Gunpowder Plot.41 All three valences—secrecy, Catholicism,
and revolution—take on powerful new meaning for Baudelaire when the
speaker of “Les Litanies” acknowledges the invention of gunpowder as a
kind of pathetic consolation: “Toi qui, pour consoler l’homme frêle qui
souffre,/Nous appris à mêler le salpêtre et le soufre” (“Who, to console
us in our fearful lot,/Taught us the mysteries of shell and shot”).
For Milton, as later for Baudelaire, mining and producing artillery
represent human progress at its most self-destructive. Milton offers a
further explanation of Satan’s invention that explicitly looks forward to
Adam’s vision of the race of Cain:
Th’ invention all admir’d, and each, how hee

To be th’ inventor miss’d, so easie it seemd
Once found, which yet unfound most would have thought
Impossible: yet haply of thy Race
In future dayes, if Malice should abound,
Some one intent on mischief, or inspir’d
With dev’lish machination might devise
Like instrument to plague the Sons of men
For sin, on warr and mutual slaughter bent. (6.498–506)
Notice the ironic in situ tone of the social dialogue Milton reconstructs.
Other angels wonder how they “To be th’ inventor miss’d,” while soci-
ety uncritically and “haply” (i.e. by accident) institutionalizes the pro-
duction and use of gunpowder. A similar irony informs Baudelaire’s
comment that saltpeter is “pour consoler l’homme frêle qui souffre.”
Perhaps Baudelaire has in mind the speaker in “Le Mauvais Moine” and
his complaint that his misery and suffering never turn productive, never
transform into “Le travail de mes mains et l’amour de mes yeux.” What
Baudelaire does not allow is a promethean analogy or any idealization
of scientific discovery. He replaces Romantic and promethean eternal
yet heroic suffering with, “Ô Satan, prends pitié de ma longue misère,”
increasingly self-reflexive with each repetition.
Baudelaire’s Satanism
Baudelaire’s reimaginings of Milton’s prostitutes, the race of Cain, and
miners in “Les Litanies” extend many of the problems introduced in
the book’s earlier poems. The soul-as-tomb, empty hearts, aimless eyes,
and the forfeiture of will are several of such motifs, and together they
represent Baudelaire’s Satanism perhaps less as sadistic than predeter-
mined and destructive—marked, like the duality manifest in Abel and
Cain, by the first violent sin. This cursed aspect of the cult of Satan in
“Les Litanies” fails to eradicate human will altogether, however, as the
speaker asserts at least the will to worship in the last stanza: “Gloire et
louange à toi, Satan, dans les hauteurs/Du Ciel, où tu régnas, et dans les
228 M.J. Smith
profondeurs/De l’Enfer, où, vaincu, tu rêves en silence!” (“Glory and

praise to Satan, where you reigned/In Heaven, and in depths of Hell
the same,/Where now you dream in silent reverie!”). Yet even here,
Satan’s achievements are praised in the past tense; the speaker is think-
ing in terms of a Satanic narrative history, which phenomenally connects
the liturgical form of the poem to the lost monastery of “Le Mauvais
Moine” and universalizes religious devotion in all its forms as a practice
of narrative reception and interpretation.
Satan’s demeanor at the end of “Les Litanies”—silently dreaming,
reclining outspread under the shade of the tree of knowledge—consum-
mates a final significant Miltonic appropriation in the poem. Perhaps
the most potentially incriminating moment, several stanzas prior,
shows Satan covering the eyes of the sleepwalker (“somnambule”) who
walks dangerously close to the edge of a precipice: “Toi dont la large
main cache les precipices/Au somnambule errant au bord des edifices”
(“Whose large hand overrides the sudden edge/For the somnambulist
who walks the ledge”). This scene dramatizes several of the book’s recur-
rent symbols—dreaming, sleeping, loss of volition, and vision. The image
is also one of the most morally ambiguous. For instance, we can easily
imagine Baudelaire being critical of the willful sleepwalker, whose grad-
ual relaxation into ennui contrasts to the energy of Satanic invention and
to the ingenuity of the race of Cain. But at the same time, nowhere in
the poem is Satan more personally engaged in human destruction. To
this point, “Au Lecteur” differentiates between Satan and a personi-
fied figure of ennui. The devil, as he is called here, like a puppeteer pulls
humanity slowly down to hell:
C’est le Diable qui tient les fils qui nous remuent!

Aux objets répugnants nous trouvons des appas;
Chaque jour vers l’Enfer nous descendons d’un pas,
Sans horreur, à travers des ténèbres qui puent.
(Truly the Devil pulls on all our strings!
In most repugnant objects we find charms;
Each day we’re one step further into Hell,
Content to move across the stinking pit.) (4–5)
This is a prolonged version of what “Les Litanies” portrays more

violently, as Satan leads the “somnabule” toward a dangerous fall.
Milton’s rendition of hell and the mobilization of demons is echoed by
Baudelaire’s picture of people “Content to move across the stinking pit.”
Yet in the frequently quoted last stanza of “Au Lecteur” it is not the devil
but the speaker and the reader who are accused of passivity and ennui:
C’est l’Ennui! L’oeil chargé d’un pleur involontaire,

II rêve d’échafauds en fumant son houka.
Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre délicat,
– Hypocrite lecteur, – mon semblable, – mon frère!
(He is Ennui! – with tear-filled eye he dreams
Of scaffolds, as he puffs his water-pipe.
Reader, you know this dainty monster too;
– Hypocrite reader, – fellowman, – my twin!) (6–7)
The devil is quasi-exonerated by this stanza’s condemnation of the

speaker and reader—the eye once again the casualty of a lack of volition.
Satan may be to blame for a violent wreck in “Les Litanies,” but it is
the reader who slowly sinks into the abyss.
The image of the sleepwalker appears in several passages in Paradise
Lost, one of which—yet again—is in Adam’s vision at the end, where he
first witnesses death and expresses his fear that the body might die while
the soul goes on living in dead matter, an anxiety that reflects Milton’s
own mortalist theology.42 Adam says:
Yet one doubt

Pursues me still, least all I cannot die,
Least that pure breath of Life, the Spirit of Man
Which God inspir’d, cannot together perish
With this corporeal Clod; then in the Grave,
Or in some other dismal place who knows
But I shall die a living Death? (10.782–8)
230 M.J. Smith
The fear is that consciousness would continue without the body

to animate it—wakefulness as a living tomb for human energy.
Chateaubriand specifically praises this passage of Le Paradis Perdu and
its haunting “mort vivante” as unprecedented in philosophy and litera-
ture: “La philosophie ne peut demander un genre de beautés plus élevées
et plus graves. Non-seuelement les poëtes antiques n’ont jamais fondé
un désespoir sur de pareilles bases, mais les moralistes eux-mêmes n’ont
riend d’aussi grand” (“Can philosophy require a species of beauties more
exalted and more solemn? Not only the poets of antiquity furnish no
instance of a despair founded on such a basis, but moralists themselves
have conceived nothing so sublime”).43 Notice that here it is Adam who
is the subject of sublimity instead of Satan and that what Chateaubriand
finds beautiful about this “living Death” is the despair of ennui, the act
of sleepwalking. What is being praised as both “exalted” and “solemn” is
a fear of immaterialized ennui, a living death after physical death.
That this fear of wakefulness comes in the form of Adam’s vision may
have added significance with regard to Baudelaire’s engagement with
the figure of the “somnambule” while translating Edgar Allen Poe’s
“Mesmeric Revelation”—or, more accurately, his mis-translation. It has
been noted that Baudelaire mis-translates Poe’s “sleep-waker” as “sleep-
walker” (“somnanbule”), where sleep-waking has distinct relevance to
Poe’s interest in mesmerism and in the sorts of experiences a patient
communicates while in a trance.44 Among the possible explanations of
Baudelaire’s translation is that Baudelaire understood “somnambule” to
contain aspects of both English terms and that his sleepwalker in “Les
Litanies” and elsewhere is characterized also by a kind of occulted wake-
fulness, as in a vision from “some other dismal place.”
Adam’s fear of “living Death” further substantiates the parallel
between the fallen angels and fallen man that we see in the “culte de la
plaie” of Baudelaire’s Satan. The “somnambule” anxiety is earlier drama-
tized in hell when the demons debate about how to proceed after their
banishment. This circumstance is also invoked in “Les Litanies” in the
“conquered” (“vaincu”) and the “despised” (“parias”). Milton’s demons
ultimately choose Satan’s suggestion to continue the rebellion and leave
hell against the alternatives advocated by Belial and Mammon who rec-
ommend that the fallen angels remain unoppositional in hell and rebuild
a kingdom there. The fallen angels suggest that it is possible that they
might psychologically and physically acclimate to the new environment
over time, as Belial states:
Our purer essence then will overcome

Thir noxious vapour, or enur’d not feel,
Or chang’d at length, and to the place conformd
In temper and in nature, will receive
Familiar the fierce heat, and void of pain[.] (2.215–19)
Mammon’s plan is similar, arguing that in time the “torments” of hell

might somehow fuse with the “Elements” of their bodies and cause the
“temper” of their bodies to acclimate to that of hell, “which must needs
remove/The sensible of pain” (2.274–8). The effect is a numbing of the
senses, a loss of virility and emotion, a positive version of Adam’s mortal-
ist fear.
The horror of living death runs throughout Les Fleurs. In “Spleen
(II)” the speaker, depressed by the artifacts accumulated throughout his
life, mourns:
Rien n‘égale en longueur les boiteuses journées,

Quand sous les lourds flocons des neigeuses années
L’ennui, fruit de la morne incuriosité,
Prend les proportions de l’immortalité.
– Désormais tu n’es plus, ô matière vivante!
(Nothing is longer than the limping days
When under heavy snowflakes of the years,
Ennui, the fruit of dulling lassitude,
Takes on the size of immortality,
– Henceforth, o living flesh, you are no more!) (146–7)
Michèle Lowrie observes that the “emotional apostrophe to ‘matière

vivante’ presupposes that living matter is already absent. This apostrophe
is the poem’s lament for its poet—who, from this very moment (‘désor-
mais’), is already dead.”45 Baudelaire repeats the distinction between the
devil and ennui that he introduces in “Au Lecteur” where the speaker
is still shown in the process of dying. There is a moral structure that
transcends and predates both the poet and the devil; while we see Satan
232 M.J. Smith
leading the blind “somnambule” in “Les Litanies,” there is also a corre-

lation between the two since, for Baudelaire, Satanism is not “fruit de la
morne incuriosité.”
What “Spleen (II)” calls “les proportions de l’immoralité” mate-
rializes in Les Fleurs’ several vampires—and I would suggest that
Baudelaire’s vampire draws on the “living Death” that is characteris-
tic of Milton’s fallen angels. The vampire in “Les Métamorphoses du
vampire,” which appears in the section entitled “Fleurs du Mal” that
immediately precedes “Révolte” in each of the book’s early editions,
may also be a prostitute. The poem brings together the prostitute, liv-
ing death, loss of will, and Milton’s fallen angels. Seduced by the vam-
pire’s breasts (“ces matelas”), “Les anges impuissants se damneraient
pour moi” (“Even helpless angels damn themselves for me”) (254–5).
The second of the poem’s two stanzas shows the vampire’s transfor-
mation into a “mannequin,” and its breast into “une outré aux flancs
gluants, toute pleine de pus” (“A greasy leather flask that overflowed
with pus”). This latter image repeats “Le sein martyrisé d’une antique
catin” (“The sad, tormented tit of some old whore”) in “Au Lecteur,”
that transforms from too much fondling, like a dried-up orange (“une
vieille orange”) (4–5). Similarly, “Danse Macabre” dramatizes the sud-
den decay of a female skeleton dancing at a ball, when the speaker asks
whether “quelque vieux désir,/Eperonnant encor ta vivante carcasse,/Te
pousse-t-il, crédule, au sabbat du Plaisir?” (“Some ancient fire,/Does it
ignite your living carcass yet,/And push you to the Sabbath of Desire?”)
(196–7). This “vivante carcasse,” like the “corporeal Clod” that terrifies
Milton’s Adam, is ultimately animated only by the serpent coiled up in
the skeleton’s ribcage—like the “somnambule,” unaware of the unseen
puppeteer. Baudelaire’s version of the dance of death retains the tradi-
tional mirror effect, where the decaying skeleton reflects the unnoticed
passage of time and warns of the plight of Milton’s fallen angels who
are tempted simply to allow their bodies and minds to acclimate to “the
sleep drench/Of that forgetful Lake” (2.73–4).
Viewed in relation to Milton’s poem, such images of the vampire,
the danse macabre, the sleepwalker, and the lover and prostitute reveal
Baudelaire’s Satanism to be at once commendable and cautionary.
Satan’s effect on his followers straddles the concrete benefits of ingenu-
ity and secret knowledge on the one hand, and the slow process of ennui
on the other. Thus, a final observation I would like to make is about
the refrain—“prends pitié de ma longue misère.” Is this an invitation?

Is it an expression of devotion, a kind of liturgical euphemism? Or, does
the request communicate just the opposite? Is it a self-abasing appeal
for Satan to stay away—perhaps an acknowledgment of blindness and
the loss of will without a proclamation of partisanship or sympathy—to
take pity in the form of a passover? It is clear that Baudelaire’s Satan, like
Milton’s, is not entirely to blame for the corruption of human will, and
there is even a sense in “Les Litanies” that Satan represents a reminder
of morality and the threat of damnation. Given Baudelaire’s extended
interest in Adam’s vision of postlapsarian human future, it seems that the
plea—“prends pitié”—is written from a manifold historical perspective.
One of these historical horizons is Baudelaire’s view of Europe as influ-
enced by biblical imagery of Satan and his followers. Yet another horizon
is that of Satanism; it is Baudelaire’s reading of Milton’s Satan, his van-
tage on Milton’s history of Satan. In this form, Milton’s Satan is a figure
that traverses the Romantic movement in the form of a history—as Eliot
might say—of the poet becoming “accustomed to this strange light,”
renouncing Satanism while also acknowledging its drug-like quality as
something “you can never live without.”
Notes
1. Joseph Anthony Wittreich, Jr., Visionary Poetics: Milton’s Tradition and
His Legacy (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1979), p. xvi.
2. Charles Baudelaire, Journaux Intimes, ed. Adolphe van Bever (Paris: G.
Crès, 1920), p. 20.
3. Karl Beckson, Aesthetes and Decadents of the 1890s: An Anthology of British
Poets and Prose (Chicago: Academy Chicago, 1981), p. xxix.
4. David Carrier, High Art: Charles Baudelaire and the Origins of Modernist
Painting (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1996), p. 2.
5. John E. Jackson, “Charles Baudelaire, a Life in Writing,” in Rosemary
Lloyd, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Baudelaire (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 10.
6. Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony, trans. Angus Davidson (London:
Humphrey Milford, 1933), pp. 61–2.
7. Nicolae Babuts, Baudelaire: At the Limits and Beyond (Newark: University
of Delaware Press, 1997), p. 53. Unless otherwise specified, translations
from Journaux Intimes are my own.
8. Baudelaire, Journaux Intimes, p. 57. Also quoted in Babuts, p. 52.
234 M.J. Smith
9. William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell; The William Blake Archive,
ed. Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi: http://www.
blakearchive.org/exist/blake/archive/work.xq?workid=mhh&java=no.
10. James R. Lawyer, Poetry and Moral Dialectic: Baudelaire’s “Secret
Architecture” (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997), p. 25.
11. T. S. Eliot, Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (New York:
Harcourt Brace, 1975), 161–2.
12. According to Daniel Defoe’s complaint, Paradise Lost fails to address the
“main difficulty” of any treatment of the angelic and human falls, namely,
the problem of the origin of evil; The Political History of the Devil, ed. Irving
N. Rothman and R. Michael Bowerman (New York: AMS, 2003), p. 55.
13. T. S. Eliot, “The Lesson of Baudelaire,” in Anthony Cuda and Ronald
Schuchard, eds., The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition,
vol. 2 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), p. 306.
14. Ibid., p. 307.
15. T. E. Hulme, Speculations, ed. Herbert Read (London: Routledge, 1924),
p. 117.
16. Ibid., p. 120.
17. Ibid., p. 127.
18. T. S. Eliot, “Baudelaire,” in Jason Harding and Ronald Schuchard, eds.,
The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition, vol. 4 (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), p. 157.
19. This language is quoted by Eliot as “a paragraph which Baudelaire would
have approved.” The Complete, vol. 4, pp. 163–64.
20. John E. Jackson, “The Devil Doesn’t Only Wear Prada: Dialectics of Evil
in Baudelaire,” in After Satan: Essays in Honour of Neil Forsyth, edited by
Kirsten Stirling and Martine Hennard Dutheil de la Rochère (Newcastle
upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2010): 155–64.
21. Nicole Ward Jouve, Baudelaire: A Fire to Conquer Darkness (London:
Macmillan, 1980), p. 26.
22. John P. Rumrich, Milton Unbound: Controversy and Reinterpretation
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 118–46.
23. Jonathan Shears, The Romantic Legacy of Paradise Lost: Reading Against
the Grain (Burlington: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 187–93, 188. See also Lucy
Newlyn, “Paradise Lost” and the Romantic Reader (Oxford: Clarendon,
2001).
24. Eliot, The Complete, vol. 4, p. 157.
25. Fuller translations of poems from Les Fleurs du Mal, as well as the French
text, are from the parallel French–English edition: Charles Baudelaire,
The Flowers of Evil, trans. James McGowan (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1993). “Les Litanies de Satan” appears on pp. 268–73. For con-
ciseness, I will refrain from citing specific page numbers within these.
26. Tony Garland, “Brothers in Paradox: Swinburne, Baudelaire, and the

Paradox of Sin,” Victorian Poetry 47, no. 4 (2009): 633–45, p. 638.
27. The image of the choking, congested Satanic speaker is reminiscent of the
fallen angels’ hissing when they are transformed into serpents in Book 10
of Paradise Lost.
28. F. A. de Chateaubriand, Œuvre Complètes, vol. 6 (Paris: Furne, 1859), p. 456.
29. The translation omits the judgment of defeat in “vaincu.”
30. See Jean Gillet, Le Paradis perdu dans la littérature française de Voltaire à
Chateaubriand (Paris: Klincksieck, 1975).
31. Œuvre Complètes, vol. 2, p. 158.
32. Translation by Charles White, in Chateaubriand, The Genius of
Christanity, or the Spirit and Beauty of Christian Religion (Baltimore:
John Murphy, 1879), p. 215.
33. Œuvre Complètes, vol. 6, pp. 329–40.
34. Baudelaire, Journaux Intimes, p. 18.
35. Ibid., p. 19.
36. Ibid., p. 20.
37. All references to Milton’s Paradise Lost are from Merritt Y. Hughes, ed.,
John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose (Indianapolis: Bobbs-
Merrill, 1957), 11.155–8.
38. Œuvre Complètes, vol. 6, p. 521.
39. Antoine Compagnon, Baudelaire Devant L’innombrable (Paris: Sorbonne,
2003), pp. 149–89.
40. Babuts, p. 54.
41. Anti-papist Protestants like Milton directed blame more specifically
at Rome; “Rome became most popularly stigmatised as the birth-
place of firearms, the onus being placed on the old religion”: Jack M.
Craze, “Balls of Missive Ruin: Milton and the Gunpowder Revolution,”
Cambridge Quarterly 26, no. 4 (1997): 325–43, p. 328. See also Robert
Appelbaum, “Milton, the Gunpowder Plot, and the Mythography of
Terror,” MLQ 68, no. 4 (2007): 461–91.
42. See William Kerrigan, “The Heretical Milton: From Assumption to
Mortalism,” ELR 5, no. 1 (1975): 125–66.
43. Œuvre Complètes, vol. 2, p. 161. Trans. by White, The Genius of
Christianity, p. 219.
44. Ineke Wallaert, “Writing Foreign: The Paradoxes of Baudelaire’s
Neologizing Strategies in His Translations of Poe,” Palimpsestes 25
(2012): 69–92, pp. 39–40. My italics.
45. Michèle Lowrey, “Spleen and the Monumentum: Memory in Horace and
Baudelaire,” Comparative Literature 49, no. 1 (1997): 42–58, p. 53.
236 M.J. Smith
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Edition, edited by Jason Harding and Ronald Schuchard. Vol. 4. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins UP, 2015.
Garland, Tony. “Brothers in Paradox: Swinburne, Baudelaire, and the Paradox of
Sin.” Victorian Poetry 47, no. 4 (2009): 633–45.
Gillet, Jean. Le Paradis perdu dans la littérature française de Voltaire à
Chateaubriand. Paris: Klincksieck, 1975.
Hughes, Merritt Y., ed. John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose.
Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957.
Hulme, T. E. Speculations, edited by Herbert Read. London: Routledge, 1924.
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Companion to Baudelaire, edited by Rosemary Lloyd, 1–13. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 2005.
Jackson, John E. “The Devil Doesn’t Only Wear Prada: Dialectics of Evil in
Baudelaire.” In After Satan: Essays in Honour of Neil Forsyth, edited by
Kirsten Stirling and Martine Hennard Dutheil de la Rochère, 155-64.
Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2010.
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Kerrigan, William. “The Heretical Milton: from Assumption to Mortalism.” ELR
5, no. 1 (1975): 125–66.
Lawyer, James R. Poetry and Moral Dialectic: Baudelaire’s “Secret Architecture.”
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Lowrey, Michèle. “Spleen and the Monumentum: Memory in Horace and

Baudelaire.” Comparative Literature 49, no. 1 (1997): 42–58.
Newlyn, Lucy. Paradise Lost and the Romantic Reader. Oxford: Clarendon,
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Humphrey Milford, 1933.
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Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996.
Shears, Jonathan. The Romantic Legacy of Paradise Lost: Reading Against the
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strategies in his translations of Poe.” Palimpsestes 25 (2012): 69–92.
Wittreich, Jr., Joseph Anthony. Visionary Poetics: Milton’s Tradition and His
Legacy. San Marino: Huntington Library.
CHAPTER 12
Visions of Hell in Flannery O’Connor
George Piggford, C.S.C
Hell, a literal hell, is our only hope.

O’Connor, A Prayer Journal, 26.
Although most of her references to hell are glancing and even humor-
ous, Flannery O’Connor was convinced of its reality and defined it as
“an absence of love.”1 As a Catholic, O’Connor believed that no one
is predestined to spend eternity in hell because “God does not judge
those acts that are not free” (HB 488). Hell is for her always a human
choice, although a choice that is difficult to resist owing to the pervasive
effects of original sin. For this reason the proper attitude toward sin is to
“repent or burn in hell” as a sign mentioned in the story “The Lame
Shall Enter First” baldly characterizes it.2 One might indeed understand
central crises in many of her stories as choices between repentance and
hell, between a decisive turning back towards God and a continuing
rejection of divine love. As her reading of Dante taught O’Connor, such
choices will define us for eternity, even as this fallen world itself conspires
to turn humans from God.
In the short story “The Artificial Nigger” hell is associated with urban
space and its manifold temptations.3 Underlying the city of Atlanta in that
G. Piggford, C.S.C (*) 
Stonehill College, Easton, USA

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-52198-5_12
240 G. Piggford, C.S.C
story is a pervasive, hidden sewer system, a secret and subterranean network

that both entices and threatens total destruction: “At any minute any man
might be sucked into the sewer and never heard from again” (CS 259).
The entrance to it both repulses and tempts and represents the real pull of
what O’Connor terms elsewhere the “the ultimate horror” (HB 244). This
diabolical system is ever present, albeit hidden, and its enticements can be
overcome only by an act of human will powerfully aided by divine grace.
Flannery O’Connor was introduced to the idea and reality of hell
very early in her Catholic schooling, no doubt by her parents, then by
the Sisters of Mercy who instructed her during her elementary school
years at St Vincent’s Grammar School for Girls in Savannah, Georgia.
The Baltimore Catechism, first published in 1885, was the official text-
book in such schools, and provided doctrinal information in a question
and answer format.4 Its question on hell asks, simply, “What is Hell?”
Its answer is similarly straightforward: “Hell is a state to which the
wicked are condemned, and in which they are deprived of the sight of
God for all eternity, and are in dreadful torments.”5 The commentary
on this question, found in the fourth volume of the catechism, intended
for religious educators, notes the two primary pains of hell: the pain of
loss and the pain of sense (see the appendix at the end of this chapter
for the complete commentary on this question). The pain of loss is the
worse, and “causes the unfortunate souls more torment than all their
other sufferings.”6 This is so because we are created for God as our telos
or last end,7 and the permanent loss of God from human sight is “the
most dreadful evil that can befall us.”8 To put this in the terms of the
Confessions of St Augustine, if our hearts are restless until they rest in
God, then hell is eternal restlessness, a perpetual thwarting of our great-
est desire. There is for human beings no worse punishment.
The second pain of hell, the pain of sense, evokes the many tortures
that artists and writers have associated with hell, including the Inferno
of Dante and the vivid paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. Like Bosch,
Dante is rightly famous for his imaginative and fitting punishments for
the various classes of the damned that his fictionalized self and the guide
Virgil witness in the descending circles of hell. However, even the most
evocative illustrations fall short, because “no matter how terrible the
description may be, it is never as bad as the reality.”9 Hell is, in sum, the
absence of all good and the presence of all evil, forever. It is, rightly, a
terrifying place, a place of “unquenchable fire”10 that “neither gives light
12 VISIONS OF HELL IN FLANNERY O’CONNOR 241
nor consumes what it burns.”11 This fire refers both to physical torment
and to the fire of our desire, never consumed, never satisfied.
In her correspondence, lectures, and stories O’Connor emphasizes the
first of the two pains of hell: the pain of loss. In “The Enduring Chill,”
for example, a priest visits an obstinate young man, Asbury Fox, in order
to attempt to school him in the catechism and to instill in him fear of the
pains of hell. The priest asks, “Do you want your soul to suffer eternal
damnation? Do you want to be deprived of God for all eternity? Do you
want to suffer the most terrible pain, greater than fire, the pain of loss? Do
you want to suffer the pain of loss for all eternity?” (CS 377). The reso-
nances with the Baltimore Catechism, in its questioning form and straight-
forward language, are unmistakable. This priest, Father Finn, is to some
extent a comic character, a stereotypical Irish Catholic clergyman. When
he meets Asbury he claims that he is from “Purrgatory”—spelled with an
additional “r” to call attention to his burr. He has a “large red face” and
is “blind in one eye,” perhaps an indication that he emphasizes doctrinal
formulation at the expense of theological mystery (CS 375). Despite his
comical and cyclopean appearance, Father Finn visits Asbury on the most
serious business: to begin to instruct the young man in the Catholic cate-
chism. Through his questions he powerfully invokes the Catholic teaching
on hell and rightly emphasizes loss as the “greater” pain.
In a letter to her friend Elizabeth Hester from 1957, O’Connor reveals
that her most powerful childhood fear was associated with profound loss:
the prospect of losing her parents and becoming an orphan. Gifted with
an overactive imagination, as a child she would consider this possibility
and associate it with damnation. As she says to Hester, “I have been at
least an Imaginary Orphan and that was probably my first view of hell”
(HB 244). Echoing the Baltimore Catechism, she continues: “Children
know by instinct that hell is an absence of love, and they can pick out
theirs without missing” (HB 244). In light of this comment, the multi-
plicity of orphans in O’Connor’s fiction is striking. These include adult
orphans such as Hazel Motes and Enoch Emory in the novel Wise Blood,
Sarah Hamm in “The Comforts of Home,” and O.E. Parker in “Parker’s
Back.” There is also Harry Ashfield, emotionally orphaned by his bohe-
mian parents in “The River.” Finally, there are three prominent orphaned
children in her fiction: Nelson Head in “Artificial,” being raised by his
grandfather; Francis Marion Tarwater in The Violent Bear It Away, like-
wise raised by a great-uncle; and Rufus Johnson in “The Lame Shall
Enter First.” It is surely no coincidence that these characters appear in

her three most hell-laden fictions, and in any case the presence of so many
fatherless and motherless children in her stories indicates a continued
engagement with O’Connor’s childhood fear of hell and its pain of loss.12
Spending eternity in hell, however, does not come about through pas-
sive victimization. The pain of loss in hell is a pain that we are empow-
ered to choose or to decline. O’Connor makes this clear in a letter to
another close friend, Elizabeth Abbott: “hell is what God’s love becomes
to those who reject it” (HB 354). Hell is for O’Connor always a choice,
and she is clear that no one is forced to reject God’s love. She continues
in the same letter: “God made us to love Him. It takes two to love. It
takes liberty. It takes the right to reject” (HB 354). The possibility of
choosing damnation by rejecting God’s love is a consequence of basic
human dignity and the free will that accompanies it. O’Connor explains
this position in her letter to Abbott: “If there were no hell, we would be
like the animals. No hell, no dignity. And remember the mercy of God.
It is easy to put this down as a formula and hard to believe it, but try
believing the opposite, and you will find it too easy. Life has no mean-
ing that way” (HB 354). Hell, or at least the possibility of hell, gives life
meaning for O’Connor. It is, as she wrote in the early Prayer Journal,
“our only hope.”13 Just as life becomes valueless from an atheist perspec-
tive for O’Connor, so too a world without the specter of hell is irremedi-
able, populated only by the forlorn.
Although O’Connor was familiar with famous literary portrayals of
hell including Milton’s in Paradise Lost (see HB 134), the vision pro-
vided in Dante’s Inferno gave her both a vivid sense and a better theologi-
cal understanding of hell and its pains. As an undergraduate at Georgia
State College for Women in 1946 O’Connor made a careful study of the
Carlyle–Wicksteed translation of The Divine Comedy. In the copy that she
used she provides a telling marginal comment at the end of the Inferno:
“Without free-will you could not have hell as Christian conceives it.”14
This insight comports well with O’Connor’s comments in the letter to
Elizabeth Abbott and provides another decisive if implicit rejection of the
doctrine of double predestination as O’Connor understood it. O’Connor
disagrees with John Calvin’s claim from the Institutes of the Christian
Religion that “God has predestined some to salvation, others to destruc-
tion.”15 According to Catholic teaching, God in his omniscience knows
the ultimate state of every human—either damnation or salvation—but
leaves it to the individual to make the choices that lead to that end. From
O’Connor’s perspective, “God does not judge those acts that are not free,
and … he does not predestine any soul to hell—for his glory or any other
reason” (HB 488). Sustained by God’s grace, we choose, in effect, to
spend eternity in God’s presence, or we opt to be forever barred from it.
As long as we are alive, we never make this decision in a definitive
way. There is always a possibility of repentance, a turning away from
evil actions and back towards God. Owing to original sin, sinful acts
can appear to us as more enticing and exciting, but our free will is never
extinguished despite any power that Satan might exert. In her story
“The Artificial Nigger,” first published in 1955, O’Connor presents a
journey through a Dantean Inferno—the city of Atlanta—and an escape
from that space through free choice in cooperation with God’s grace. In
“Artificial” a grandfather, Mr. Head, concedes to his 15-year-old grand-
son’s longstanding wish to travel from the small Georgia town in which
they live to the big city. Nelson, the grandson, has not been to the city
since he was born there. His mother died when Nelson was just one, and
he never knew his father, so the orphan has been raised by his grandfa-
ther, who is described as his double: “they looked enough alike to be
brothers and brothers not too far apart in age” despite the 45-year dif-
ference between them (CS 251). The grandfather is compared both to
Raphael, called to the side of Tobias, and to Virgil “summoned in the
middle of the night to go to Dante” (CS 250). Mr. Head will serve as his
grandson’s guide in the diabolical urban space of Atlanta.
As a number of critics including John F. Desmond, Yumiko Hashizume,
Deanna Ludwin, and Kenneth Scouten have pointed out, the allusions to
the Inferno in this story are multiple.16 For example, the trip commences
in early morning darkness in a clearing in the woods akin to Dante’s “dark”
and “stubborn wood.”17 The train that takes grandfather and grandson to
the city is like the ferry to hell, while the conductor—both Charon and
Cerberus—is described as having “the face of an ancient bloated bulldog”
(CS 253). The other passengers on the train are “sprawled out” (CS 253)
like the “dreary souls” waiting for their passage over the river Acheron.18
Once they disembark at Atlanta’s central train station, Mr. Head will lead
Nelson through the Inferno-like space of the city. Gilbert H. Muller notes
that the topography of O’Connor’s Atlanta is “concentric”: Mr. Head
leads Nelson around and around, like Virgil and Dante always turning to
the left to encounter the next neighborhood or circle of hell.19
Underlying this urban geography is the ever pervasive though hid-
den sewer system of the city, the drain into which all effluvia eventually
finds its way. Mr. Head calls his grandson’s attention to this feature after
Nelson expresses excessive enthusiasm for the city: “I was born here!”
Nelson exclaims. “This is where I come from!” (CS 259). At this point,
Mr. Head invites Nelson to “squat down” and “stick” his head in the
sewer. After getting a whiff of its foulness, Nelson is prepared for his
grandfather’s lesson. Mr. Head then explains “the sewer system, how the
entire city was underlined with it, how it contained all the drainage and
was full of rats and how a man could slide into it and be sucked along
down endless pitchblack tunnels.” He continues: “At any minute any
man in the city might be sucked into the sewer and never heard from
again.” This space of isolation and unmitigated darkness Nelson under-
standably associates with hell, and he understands “for the first time how
the world was put together in its lower parts” (CS 259). Nevertheless,
the stubborn boy, in his own way a product of sin, insists for a second
time, “This is where I come from!” (CS 259). Even after gaping into the
maw of the lowest rung of hell, Nelson wishes to remain in what he sus-
pects might be his true home: the city in all its evil.
As the pair continues their journey, Mr. Head becomes ever more dis-
oriented until they are lost in a maze subjected to the heat of the day
and extreme hunger because they left their lunches behind on the train.
When they stumble into an African-American neighborhood, the story
describes that area like Dante’s Dis, the city of fallen angels.20 The deni-
zens of this city are described by Dante as “outcasts of Heaven! Race
despised!”—language that likely evoked for O’Connor the racism and
segregation of her native Georgia and of Atlanta.21 Then ahead of them
appears a “large colored woman” whose “hair stood straight out from
her head for about four inches all around” (CS 261–2). She is a version
of Dante’s Medusa, and her words and gaze paralyze Nelson, just as the
Gorgon’s gaze threatens to “change [Dante] into stone.”22 O’Connor’s
narrator elaborates: “He suddenly wanted her to reach down and pick
him up and draw him against her and then he wanted to feel her breath
on his face. He wanted to look down and down into her eyes while she
held him tighter and tighter. He had never had such a feeling before.
He felt as if he were reeling down through a pitchblack tunnel” (CS
262). Nelson is saved from this stunning sight when Mr. Head pulls him
“roughly away,” just as Virgil saves Dante from the Medusa (CS 262).
“Turn thee backwards,” Virgil says, “and keep thy eyes closed”; he then
takes Dante by the hands, closing them “also with his own.”23 Likewise,
Nelson “took hold of the old man’s hand, a sign of dependence that he
seldom showed” (CS 262). Nelson can overcome this challenge only
with the guidance and help of his grandfather.
Not completely satisfied, however, with Nelson’s growing fear of the
city, Mr. Head next chooses to play a trick on his grandson. After Nelson
falls asleep, exhausted, hot, and hungry, Mr. Head leaves him alone,
abandons him to see how his grandson will act in the absence of his
guide. Understandably, the boy panics when he awakes and discerns Mr.
Head’s absence. He bolts and crashes into a woman carrying groceries.
While she threatens to call a policeman, Mr. Head walks up to his grand-
son, who grabs tightly onto his waist. It is at this point that Mr. Head
makes what O’Connor terms in a letter to Alfred Corn the “Satanic
choice” (HB 484). Like Peter before the crucifixion, he denies that he
knows his grandson and ward: “This is not my boy,” he says. “I never
seen him before” (CS 265).24 This particular sin qualifies Mr. Head for
a place in the ninth circle of hell with the fraudulent and the falsifiers,
including Potiphar’s wife who falsely accused Joseph, and Sinon, the
Greek who allowed the Trojans to take him prisoner so that he might
convince them to allow the wooden horse within their city walls.25 At
this point Mr. Head finds himself no longer a guide in the Inferno but
one of its denizens. We are told that he “lost all hope,” as the damned
are advised to do as they enter Dante’s Inferno (CS 266–7). He feels
“the depth of his denial” and fears “that his sins would be visited
upon Nelson and that even now, he was leading the boy to his doom”
(CS 266). Their journey into the depths of hell, which was meant by the
grandfather and guide to be a journey through hell, is now complete. Mr.
Head has abandoned Nelson, and the older man now feels abandoned by
God, “like someone shipwrecked on a desert island” (CS 267).
O’Connor’s infernal allegory, like Dante’s, does not however end in
the maw of hell. Both The Divine Comedy and “The Artificial Nigger”
are designed by their authors not only to produce a meditation on the
nature of hell but also to provide hope that as long as we live we are able
to repent, to seek to undo Satanic choices, aided by God’s grace. Grace
in O’Connor’s story takes the form first of a helpful man who points
grandfather and grandson to a nearby suburban train station. “I’m lost!”
Mr. Head shouts to the man, “Oh Gawd I’m lost! Oh hep me Gawd
I’m lost!” (CS 267). After the man explains the way to the station, Mr.
Head looks “as if he were slowly returning from the dead” (CS 268).
Second, Mr. Head and Nelson, walking finally in the right direction, spy
a small and peculiar statue, an artificial African-American. This appears to
Mr. Head as what Roman Catholics term a “sacramental,” defined by the

Baltimore Catechism as “anything blessed or set apart … to excite good
thoughts and to increase devotion.”26 In its basic definition a sacramen-
tal is a holy gesture, such as the sign of the cross, or a holy item, such
as “holy water … blessed candles, ashes, palms, crucifixes, images of the
Blessed Virgin or of the Saints, rosaries and scapulars.”27 These outward
signs become the means of what the Church calls “actual grace,” which
“enlightens our mind and moves our will to shun evil and do good.”28
In Catholic teaching such grace helps believers to draw closer to God
and to become better people.29
The statue takes on the qualities of a blessed object for Nelson and
Mr. Head: “They stood gazing at the artificial Negro as if they were
faced with some great mystery, some monument to another’s victory
that brought them together in their common defeat. They could both
feel it dissolving their differences like an action of mercy. Mr. Head had
never known before what mercy felt like because he had been too good
to deserve any, but he felt he knew now” (CS 269). The statue is like
another sacramental or holy item, the crucifix, in that it signifies a seri-
ous, social sin that might be transformed by God’s grace into a sign
of hope. While they gaze at and ponder the mysterious statue, God’s
unmerited favor comes to grandfather and grandson, unifies them in a
kind of communion, and allows for a reconciliation both with God and
with one another. Despite his succumbing to temptation, to the Satanic
choice, when he denies Nelson, Mr. Head is not left beyond God’s
mercy at the story’s end. He is not condemned, inevitably, to hell.
Through Mr. Head’s guidance and even through his failure, Nelson is
able to acknowledge that his true home is not the sinful city but a kind
of rural paradise from which the two characters emerge and to which
they return. Nelson says to his grandfather, “Let’s go home before we
get ourselves lost again” (CS 269). This acceptance allows for an entry
into heaven despite original sin and Mr. Head’s own faults: “He real-
ized that he was forgiven for sins from the beginning of time, when he
had conceived in his own heart the sin of Adam, until the present, when
he had denied poor Nelson. He saw that no sin was too monstrous for
him to claim as his own, and since God loved in proportion as He for-
gave, he felt ready at that instant to enter Paradise” (CS 270). Inspired
by his vision of the statue, Mr. Head has rejected the diabolical system
he encountered in Atlanta, most powerfully at the entrance to its utter
abyss: the hell-within-hell of its underground sewers. He has associated
himself with the sin of Adam and accepted his own complicity in the evils
of the world, and has repented of his unloving actions towards Nelson,
his own flesh.
As O’Connor wrote in the 1959 letter to Louise Abbott on the topic
of hell, “It takes two to love” (HB 354). This simple fact indicates that
the reconciliation of Nelson and his grandfather overcomes the most ter-
rifying possibility associated with hell: the pain of loss. Back at home,
they are no longer alone. Nelson is no longer a spiritual orphan. What
makes their reunion sacramental is that it prefigures one’s unification
with God in the heavenly afterlife, whereas in hell, according to the
Catechism, “the damned hate each other.”30 At the end of “Artificial,”
the train that both conveyed the two pilgrims to the hellish metropo-
lis and returned them to their rural paradise “disappeared like a fright-
ened serpent into the woods” (CS 270). Through human choice aided
by God’s grace, the Satanic power is overcome and, at least for a time,
disappears from view. Nelson’s face “lighten[s],” and he reflects on the
journey to what has turned out not to be his true home. He exclaims,
“I’m glad I went once, but I’ll never go back again!” (CS 270). As in
Dante, one trip through the Inferno suffices.
Notes
1. O’Connor, Habit of Being, 244. Hereafter cited by page number as HB.
In both fictional and nonfictional writing, O’Connor ordinarily uses
the word “hell” in its profane sense, sometimes for comic effect. In “A
Late Encounter with the Enemy” (1953) the General, exhibiting symp-
toms of dementia, mutters: “God damm every goddam thing to hell”
(O’Connor, Complete Stories, 140). In “Revelation” (1964) the disturbed
girl Mary Grace says to the self-righteous racist Ruby Turpin, though
with more theological portent than she intends, “Go back to hell where
you came from, you old wart hog” (Complete Stories, 500). In one of the
most well-known quotations from her letters, on the Catholic sacrament
of the Eucharist, O’Connor employs the term “hell” for profane empha-
sis: “Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it” (HB 125).
2. O’Connor, Complete Stories, 450–1. Hereafter cited by page number as
CS.
3. The final word in this story’s title has caused no little consternation to
readers and critics since before the work was published, when O’Connor
sent it to John Crowe Ransom at the Kenyon Review. When he hesi-
tated to include the offensive word, she stood up for her title (see Wood,
144, n. 38). Doreen Fowler, in a perceptive semiotic study of this mat-

ter, offers a compelling explanation: “O’Connor elects to couple the dis-
paraging racial epithet with the word ‘artificial’ so as to underscore the
artificiality of the term. Like the statuary it refers to, a white-constructed
racist caricature of a real human being, the racist designation ‘nigger’ is
artificial; that is, it is fabricated by the dominant white culture so as to
subordinate the real person of African ethnicity into an artificial construc-
tion” (Fowler, 75).
4. In a telephone interview, O’Connor’s close friend William Sessions
explains that for her “the catechism was just understood. It was like
a law text—you didn’t keep in around, but you knew the law” (qtd. in
Baumgaertner 104, n. 4). On the ubiquity of the Baltimore Catechism
in early twentieth-century American Catholicism and in O’Connor’s
Catholic upbringing, see Baumgaertner, esp. 102–5.
5. Baltimore Catechism, 1:78.
6. Ibid., 4:348.
7. See Aquinas, 437–8.
8. Baltimore Catechism, 4:348. Scholasticism, the theological tradition insti-
tuted by St. Thomas Aquinas, provides the foundation for the official
Catholic theology evident in and simplified by the Baltimore Catechism.
O’Connor once claimed that she read the Summa Theologica of St.
Thomas “for about twenty minutes every night before I go to bed” (HB
93). St. Thomas on hell is found in the Supplement to the Third Part of
the Summa, Questions 97 and 98 (“Of the Punishment of the Damned”
and “Of the Will and Intellect of the Damned”). Careful reading of these
sections indicates that the Baltimore Catechism was the much profounder
influence on O’Connor’s thinking about hell.
10. Matthew 3:12. All scripture quotations are taken from the 1899 American
edition of the Douay-Rheims Bible.
12. As in “Artifical” hell in The Violent Bear It Away (1960) is associated with
urban space, specifically a fictionalized version of Macon, GA. After he
sets fire to his great-uncle’s home at the beginning of the novel, young
Francis Marion Tarwater is ferried to the city by the “stranger” or devil
in the form of Meeks, a travelling copper-flue salesman (O’Connor,
Violent, 52). When Tarwater first sees the lights of the city, he associates
them with the inferno that he ignited and left behind: “We’re going back
where we came from. There’s the fire again. There’s the fire we left.”
Meeks replies: “Boy, you must be nuts … . That’s the city we’re coming
to. That’s the glow from the city lights” (Violent, 51–2). It is, that is, the
glow of hell. In the 1962 story “The Lame Shall Enter First” the orphan
Rufus Johnson is closely associated with the diabolic. When his purported
secular savior, Sheppard, asks him “what’s made you do the things you’ve
done?” Rufus replies, “Satan … . He has me in his power” (CS 450).
For the boy, the wages of sin are “burn[ing] in hell,” which he assumes
will be his own eternal fate (CS 450). Those raised by their parents (in
Violent, Bishop, and Norton in “Lame”) have a difficult time imagining
hell, whereas the orphans in these fictions are much more in tune with
the Inferno and its pains.
13. O’Connor, Prayer Journal, 26.
14. Qtd. in Kinney, 135.
15. Calvin, 606.
16. See esp. Ludwin, 11–20, and Scouten, 89–90.
17. Dante, 19.
18. Ibid., 30.
19. Muller, 208.
20. See ibid., 209.
21. Dante, 58.
22. Ibid., 57.
23. Ibid.
24. See Mark 14:54, 66–72. Multiple cultural implications of this scene take
us beyond the interpersonal and into the political realm. Mr. Head’s
denial of his own kin Nelson mirrors broader cultural disavowals includ-
ing, e.g. the Jewish people and other unwanted minorities by National
Socialists in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. The most apt analogy is
to whites’ denial of the full humanity of African-Americans in the context
of slavery and later the Jim Crow laws in the American South. Arguably,
O’Connor’s story itself participates in the social sin of institutionalized
racism in its reducing of African-American characters to mere allegories,
as in the encounter in Atlanta between the white protagonists and the
medusa-like “colored woman” (CS 2651). The small statue of an African-
American that occasions Mr. Head and Nelson’s shared moment of grace
is likewise problematic and raises the issue of to what extent these charac-
ters’ epiphany relies on the racist attitudes that they hold in common and
never seriously question.
25. See Dante, 166, note 6; see also Muller, 210.
27. Ibid., 1:52.
28. Ibid., 1:24.
29. In the catechism the “actual grace” associated with holy gestures and
items is contrasted to “sanctifying grace,” which is bestowed by the seven
Catholic sacraments and directly transforms the human soul. In this sense
the official sacraments outlined in the Baltimore Catechism—Baptism,
Confirmation, Holy Eucharist, Penance, Extreme Unction, Holy Orders,

and Matrimony—are much more potent and reliable means of God’s
grace than are “sacramentals.” For a thoughtful theological investigation
of the differences between sacramentals and sacraments in the fiction of
Flannery O’Connor, see Andretta, esp. 41–3.
30.
Baltimore Catechism, 4:349.
31. Ibid., 4:348–9.
Appendix
Baltimore Catechism, vol. 4, question 413, with commentary by Thomas
L. Kinkead.
413 Q. What is Hell? A. Hell is a state to which the wicked are con-
demned, and in which they are deprived of the sight of God for all eter-
nity, and are in dreadful torments.
“Deprived of the sight of God.” This is called the pain of loss, while
the other sufferings the damned endure are called the pain of sense—that
is, of the senses. The pain of loss causes the unfortunate souls more tor-
ment than all their other sufferings; for as we are created for God alone,
the loss of Him—our last end—is the most dreadful evil that can befall
us. This the damned realize, and know that their souls will be tortured
by a perpetual yearning never to be satisfied. This is aggravated by the
thought of how easily they might have been saved, and how foolishly
they threw away their happiness and lost all for some miserable pleasure
or gratification, so quickly ended.
Besides this remorse, they suffer most frightful torments in all their
senses. The worst sufferings you could imagine would not be as bad as
the sufferings of the damned really are; for hell must be the opposite of
Heaven, and since we cannot, as St. Paul says, imagine the happiness of
Heaven, neither can we imagine the misery of hell. Sometimes you will
find frightful descriptions of hell in religious books that tell of the hor-
rible sights, awful sounds, disgusting stenches, and excruciating pains the
lost souls endure. Now, all these descriptions are given rather to make
people think of the torments of hell than as an accurate account of them.
No matter how terrible the description may be, it is never as bad as the
reality. We know that the damned are continually tormented in all their
senses, but just in what way we do not know. We know that there is fire
in hell, but it is entirely different from our fire; it neither gives light nor
consumes what it burns, and it causes greater pain than the fire of earth,
for it affects both body and soul. We know that the damned will never
see God and there will never be an end to their torments. Now, all this
is contained in the following: Hell is the absence of everything good
and the presence of everything evil, and it will last forever. Now, a priest
coming out to preach on hell would not say to the people: “Hell is the
absence of everything good and the presence of everything evil, and it
will last forever,” and then step down from the altar and say no more.
He must give a fuller explanation to those who are unable to think for
themselves. He must point out some of the evils present in hell and some
of the good things absent, and thus teach the people how to meditate
on these dreadful truths. If, then, you bear in mind that there is nothing
good in hell and it will last forever, and often think of these two points,
you will have a holy fear of the woeful place and a deep sorrow for your
sins which expose you to the danger of suffering its torments.
It should be enough, therefore, for you to remember: there is nothing
good in hell, and it will last forever. Think of anything good you please
and it cannot be found in hell. Is light good? Yes. Then it is not in hell.
Is hope good? Yes. Then it is not in hell. Is true friendship good? Yes.
Then it is not in hell. There the damned hate one another. There the
poor sufferers curse forever those who led them into sin. Hence, persons
should try to bring back to a good life everyone they may have led into
sin or scandalized by bad example.31
Bibliography
Andretta, Helen R. “The Hylomorphic Sacramentalism of ‘Parker’s Back.’” In
Inside the Church of Flannery O’Connor: Sacrament, Sacramental, and the
Sacred in Her Fiction, edited by Joanne Halleran McMullen and jon Parrish
Peede, 102–116. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2007.
Aquinas, Thomas. Introduction to St. Thomas Aquinas: The Summa Theologica,
The Summa Contra Gentiles. Edited by Anton C. Pegis. New York: Modern
Library, 1948.
Baltimore Catechism, vol. 1 (A Catechism of Christian Doctrine: Prepared and
Enjoined by Order of the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore), and vol. 4 (An
Explanation of the Baltimore Catechism of Christian Doctrine: For the Use of
Sunday-School Teachers and Advanced Classes). With commentary by Thomas
L. Kinkead. Vol. 1, 1885; vol. 4, 1891, 1921. Charlotte, NC: TAN Books,
2010.
Baumgaertner, Jill Peláez. “Flannery O’Connor and the Cartoon Catechism.”
In Inside the Church of Flannery O’Connor: Sacrament, Sacramental, and the
Sacred in Her Fiction, edited by Joanne Halleran McMullen and jon Parrish
Peede, 102–116. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2007.
Calvin, John. Institutes of the Christian Religion. Translated by Henry Beveridge.
Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2008.
Dante Alighieri. The Divine Comedy. Translated by John Aitken Carlyle, Thomas
Okey, and Philip H. Wicksteed. New York: Modern Library, 1932.
Desmond, John F. “Mr. Head’s Epiphany in Flannery O’Connor’s ‘The Artificial
Nigger.’” NMAL: Notes on Modern American Literature 1.3 (1977): Item 20.
Douay-Rheims Bible. Edited and translated by Gregory Martin, et al. American
ed. Baltimore, MD: John Murphy, 1899.
Fowler, Doreen. Drawning the Line: the Father Reimagined in Faulkner, Wright,
O’Connor, and Morrison. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013.
Hashizume, Yumiko. “Urban Experience in Flannery O’Connor’s ‘The Artificial
Nigger.’” Sophia English Studies (Japan) 11 (Oct. 1986): 41–58.
Kinney, Arthur F. Flannery O’Connor’s Library: Resources of Being. Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 1985.
Ludwin, Deanna. “O’Connor’s Inferno: Return to the Dark Wood.” Flannery
O’Connor Bulletin 17 (1988): 11–39.
Muller, Gilbert H. “The City of Woe: Flannery O’Connor’s Dantean Vision.”
The Georgia Review 23 (1969): 206–213.
O’Connor, Flannery. The Violent Bear It Away. New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 1960.
———. The Complete Stories. Edited by Robert Giroux. New York: Farrar,
Straus, and Giroux, 1971.
———. The Letters of Flannery O’Connor: The Habit of Being. Edited by Sally
Fitzgerald. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux 1979.
———. A Prayer Journal. Edited by W.A. Sessions. New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 2013.
Scouten, Kenneth. “‘The Artificial Nigger’: Mr. Head’s Ironic Salvation.”
Flannery O’Connor Bulletin 9 (1980): 87–97.
Wood, Ralph C. Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South. Grand
Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004.
CHAPTER 13
“He Haunts One for Hours Afterwards”:

Demonic Dissonance in Milton’s Satan
and Lovecraft’s Nyarlathotep
Marcello Ricciardi
H.P. Lovecraft’s life, to quote Churchill on Russia, is “a riddle, wrapped

in a mystery, inside an enigma, but perhaps there is a key.” Dark father
of the weird tale, atheistic occultist, espouser of cosmicism, the philo-
sophical and inverted theological belief that life is essentially meaningless,
Lovecraft believed that man himself was bound to a cyclical existence
where alone, alienated and abject, outgunned and outnumbered, he is
a victim of random forces beyond his comprehension, forces that seek
to devastate and subjugate both his psychological and biological impera-
tives. Living a life of almost total anonymity and dying in a state of abject
poverty, Lovecraft has become more than a cult hero, but the embod-
iment of paradox itself, a proponent of strange gods but a believer in
none, a materialist who entertained the possibility of time travel and
inter-dimensionality, a xenophobic recluse who was both emotionally
accessibly yet physically inaccessible to those who courted his affections.
Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos saga, his most conspicuous and well-known
M. Ricciardi (*) 
St. Joseph’s College, New York, USA

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-52198-5_13
254 M. Ricciardi
achievement, and one that has taken on an extra-literary life of its own,
is a reworking and rewriting of Eastern and Western demonology, and
the only other artist who aspired to such a hierarchical reconstruction
of the divine and diabolical is the exact antithesis of Lovecraft himself,
a committed theist, an instantaneous literary celebrity, a cosmopolitan
personality, and one who reinterpreted and revised his own biblical
tradition—John Milton, author of, as his contemporaries and votaries
would phrase it—The Paradise Lost.
Milton’s and Lovecraft’s vision of the diabolical may initially appear
antithetical to one another, but not diametrically opposed despite each
mystic’s latent and overt dissimilarities of temperament, ideology, and
faith-filled/faithless hermeneutics. In fact, to speak of the demonic in
relationship to both is to come to terms with each artist’s preoccupation
with the mysterium tremendum (overwhelming mystery), the numinous,
and humanity’s role in relationship to the Insidious Other. Although
Lovecraft’s Gnosticism appropriates the ineffable as a violent, intru-
sive power which seeks to divest humanity of self-dignity and self-will,
Milton’s Christocentrism is no less concentrated in its depiction of evil
as malevolent presence, as a power, not an ideology, divested of form
and substance, and one which seeks to entrap the human psyche in a
web of self-doubt and self-incrimination. This power, for both authors,
assumes a myriad of shapes, and although Lovecraft’s pantheon of hide-
ous interstellar–extraterrestrial–interdimensional deities operates outside
of Milton’s Judeo-Christian matrix, Lovecraft is no less a witness to the
absolute vulnerability of humanity in the face of malevolent malleability
and subterfuge. From Flannery O’Connor’s Southern Nemesis in The
Violent Bear It Away who relentlessly attempts to corrode the psycho-
logical stamina of future prophet Francis Tarwater to the New England
devil’s casual discrediting of humanity’s better potential in Hawthorne’s
“Young Goodman Brown,” the Satanic in both the American and
European tradition is always understood in terms of duality, duplicity,
and disingenuousness.
Milton posits the multi-fractured inner divisiveness of evil, this lack of
cohesive identity, and henceforth, lack of simplistic wholeness in his por-
trayal of Satan. In fact, Milton’s devil is in many ways the culmination
of the entire Biblical, Medieval, and Renaissance tradition in portray-
ing the multiple tiers of evil and how each stratum reveals and conceals
the inner workings of a ravaged mind pitted both against itself and the
human spirit. Lovecraft’s Nyarlathotep can rightly assume the mantle of
13 “HE HAUNTS ONE FOR HOURS AFTERWARDS” … 255
Milton’s Greco-Roman-Judeo-Christian-New World devil. He evinces

characteristics that are reminiscent of the Miltonic Satan in both Paradise
Lost and Regained, able to effortlessly shift stations from a regal grandi-
osity to a connivingly mean spiritedness bent on first intimidating and
then berating and bullying his adversary. Although Lovecraft orchestrates
his demonic hierarchy in a categorical and structured manner, developing
and expanding his unholy theophany, Nyarlathotep, like Milton’s Satan,
is the most anthropomorphic devil in the Lovecraftian catalogue, inher-
iting par excellence attributes chiefly associated with the devil in world
religions.
First and foremost, there are three incarnational or demonic mani-
festations, three Luciferean embodiments, of Lovecraft’s Nyarlathotep
and Milton’s Satan as seen in Lovecraft’s “Nyarlathotep,” “The Dreams
in the Witch House,” and The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kaddath.
Arguably, The Dream-Quest provides the most extensive and nuanced
portrayal and reinterpretation of Scripture’s Satan, with “Nyarlathotep”
and “The Dreams in the Witch House” serving as both prologue and
epilogue or at least as preliminary and final exploration of the Dark Lord,
much in the same way as Milton’s Comus prepares the way for Satan’s
subtler, fuller, and final manifestation in Paradise Lost and Regained.
The first attribute Milton’s and Lovecraft’s Luciferean figures
inherit is their ability to assume a majestic countenance, either implic-
itly indicative of their character, or feigned, since the devil, as St. Paul
aptly reminds us, does have the ability to assume a pleasing shape and
transform himself “into an angel of light.”1 Angel is the key motif
here, because Milton does not refrain from reminding us that the devil
in Paradise Lost is a fallen angel, faded, failed, and frustrated. The old
cliché of giving the devil his due is not far from the truth here since
Milton’s Satan, at least in Books I and II of Paradise Lost, has the abil-
ity to entrance and intoxicate, making the reader or auditor either sur-
prised by sin, to borrow the phrase from Stanley Fish à la Milton, when
the ugly truth about satanic “heroism” is inevitably exposed beneath
the artifice, or take up arms against the blind bard himself as Blake does
when he maintains that Milton was of the devil’s party without knowing
it.2 In either case, whether one accepts or rejects the Romantic Milton,
the authenticity and deep biblical understanding of Milton’s enterprise
remains—the Satan in Books I and II assumes center stage, so much so,
that the introductory books of Paradise Lost might be justly construed as
Satan’s epic as noted by Robert McMahon in The Two Poets of Paradise
256 M. Ricciardi
Lost. And this follows suit with Lovecraft’s Nyarlathotep in Dream-

Quest, appearing as a resplendent Egyptian pharaohitical deity arrayed
in daemonic-angelic majesty and power, a luminous being appropriating
all prestige and glory unto himself atop a cosmic mountain and appar-
ently in complete possession of both himself and his environs. Paradise
Lost and The Dream-Quest (and one might posit that Lovecraft’s
Dream-Quest is his own reworking of his predecessor’s poem) con-
vey a Luciferean figure both malignant and magnificent, seductive and
resplendent.
The second attribute is the devil as gentleman trickster as demon-
strated in “Nyarlathotep” and Paradise Regained. Lovecraft’s earliest
depiction of the Egyptian deity is one of transmogrification, the abil-
ity to magically and radically alter one’s appearance—cunningly able to
convey a sense of showmanship, appearing as a worker of marvels and
cryptic phenomena in order to entertain, divert, and delight the uniniti-
ated. In this respect, Nyarlathotep foreshadows Ray Bradury’s Mr. Dark
in Something Wicked This Way Comes and Stephen King’s Leland Gaunt
in Needful Things, but Milton’s Satan in Paradise Regained also can lay
claim to such a role as well. Vastly inferior to his royalistic role as the
outcast of Paradise Lost, Milton’s new devil in many ways serves as a cor-
rective to his predecessor. Books I to III of Paradise Regained present
an entity that cajoles, enjoins, insists, coerces, pouts, prances, prods, and
desperately tries to sell his bill of wares. He is the cosmic charlatan while
still attempting to retain the guise of a decorous demon. This type of
devil conjoins “Nyarlathotep” and Regained in significant ways.
Last, but not least, is the third characteristic, the devil as fiend as seen
in both conclusions of Lost and Regained, the Beast of the Apocalypse –
vile, reptilian, behemothic, and leviathanic, the bogey man who haunts
“The Dreams in the Witch House.” It is this last manifestation that puts
into right perspective what is witnessed in the previous two incarnations,
Pharahoic overlord and civil seducer—here, all guises are stripped bare,
here all resemblances and semblances fail and fall—here lies bare the
stark reality of what lies beneath, the degenerative locus of the medieval
devil hiding under the transparent grandeur of a Renaissance seraphim.
Book X of Paradise Lost and Book IV of Paradise Regained ultimately
reveal the raving maniacal lunatic desperately seeking to devour any-
thing in its path—the inner and outer realities finally coalescing, and the
appealing maestro ultimately giving way to the appalling monster.
Given the centrality of The Dream Quest to the Nyarlathotep mythos

and its centrality in the canon compared to its subordinate satellite nar-
ratives involving Nyarlathotep, Lovecraft’s Satan will be considered in
relationship to the centrality of Milton’s own Satanic mythos as best
epitomized in Paradise Lost. However, it is important to note that both
Milton and Lovecraft’s devilish figures do undergo an aesthetic evolution
even as they experience a moral de-evolution or degradation. And what
this means is that although Nyarlathotep and Satan seem to hold center
stage in both The Dream Quest and Paradise Lost, this centrality is elusive
and ephemeral. Regardless of the artistic and technical mastery of these
two formidable adversaries as conceived in these major works, Milton
and Lovecraft inevitably experienced a further deepening and maturing
understanding of the covert nature of evil, an understanding that evil’s
predominantly dynamic nature in Lost and Dream Quest is ultimately
empty and false, and the cadence of that paltriness reverberates hollowly
in both “The Witch House” and Paradise Regained. What is important
to emphasize is that what appears initially as aesthetically disappointing
to the reader in terms of a construed dissipation of character, a lapse in
poetical artistry, is, in reality, a tremendous moral triumph and ascend-
ancy for Milton and Lovecraft alike.
When first introduced to Milton’s Satan, one’s initial impression
of him is that of Elizabethan tragic pathos and grandiosity. He hovers
above his compeers in rebellion in a state of corrupt resplendence, dark-
ened, morose, but with a call to resistance, the Byronic hero, ablaze in
all of his degraded amorality. But in the midst of this, Milton reiterates
his state of opulent fallenness—so, too, with the Nyarlathotep of the
Dream Quest. When Randolph Carter encounters him for the first time
he abides aloft the cosmic mountain, the mountain traditionally and bib-
lically understood in ancient cultures as being the center of the world,
a point of contact between God and man, a liminal space or threshold
of transcendence. Unlike Milton, Lovecraft’s demonic entities appropri-
ate the role of the sacred since his Gnosticism, at least in relation to his
tales, does acknowledge supernal forces, but forces whose moral identity
is moot and ambivalent; therefore, Nyarlathotep approximates the clos-
est thing to an anthropomorphized variation of a false messianic figure.
At least, in this current embodiment, he is described as a “tall, slim fig-
ure with the young face of an antique Pharaoh, gay with prismatic robes
and crowned with a golden pshent that glowed with inherent light.”3
Milton’s Satan serves as the prototype here, where in the opening of
258 M. Ricciardi
Book II of Paradise Lost he is described as seated “High on a Throne of

Royal State, which far/Outshone the wealth of Ormus and of Ind ….
Satan exalted sat ….4
Milton and Lovecraft emphasize the regality of their malevolent royal-
ties. When Death approaches Satan, Milton speaks of how “Hell trem-
bled as he [Death] strode.”5 Lovecraft transposes this image of Death to
Nyarlathotep himself describing how “[c]lose up to Carter strode that
regal figure.”6 The linguistic affinities concerning “strode” are self-evi-
dent here. But the allusions continue: Nyarlathotep possesses a “proud
carriage”7 just as Satan’s “proud imaginations” are “thus display’d,”8
pride being the first of the seven deadly sins in the Christian tradition,
and the preeminent sin resulting in Satan’s fall. Nyarlathotep’s “swart
features”9 are, pejoratively, reminiscent not only of his Middle Eastern
background but of the ravages of hell, and Lovecraft’s comparison
of him as a “dark god or fallen archangel”10 are clearly reminiscent of
Milton’s own description of Satan as “Dark’n’d so, yet shone/Above
them all the Arch-Angel”11—both men clearly indebted to their scrip-
tural heritage. Milton and Lovecraft play with the duality of false emo-
tional splendor and ponderous gravitas, Lovecraft in particular by adding
how “around [his] eyes there lurked the languid sparkle of capricious
humour.”12 Milton sets this technique in motion by providing the
reader with a subversive perspective following Satan’s self-congratula-
tory speech: “So spake the Apostate Angel, though in pain,/Vaunting
aloud, but rackt with deep despair”13—a purposefully epic reinterpreta-
tion, misinterpretation, and assimilation of Vergil’s description of Aeneas’
self-doubts after encouraging his tempest-tossed men to carry on and
hope for better days—but minus the pious humility: “So ran the speech.
Burdened and sick at heart,/He feigned hope in his look, and inwardly/
Contained his anguish.”14
Lovecraft certainly read Paradise Lost—the Gustave Dore illustrated
version in particular haunted his youth and gave birth to his Night
Gaunts, and he did have a copy of Milton’s complete poetry as refer-
enced by S. T. Joshi in Lovecraft’s Library.15 What is of greater signifi-
cance is that this initial encounter between Carter and Nyarlathotep is
in many ways modeled on the temptation narrative in Milton’s later,
briefer, and in his judgment, superior epic, Paradise Regained, itself a
reappropriation of both the Gospel wilderness narratives and the Book
of Job as noted by Barbara Lewalski in Milton’s Brief Epic.16 Regardless
of each antagonist’s narrative placement, Satan and Nyarlathotep assume
the guise of helpers, assistants in Carter’s and Christ’s, or, for that mat-
ter, Eve’s quest for interior discernment. It is here that their roles shift
from the grandiose to something smaller, less visually and auditorily
impressive, less inclined to coerce through an opulent display of rhe-
torical power, each being more reserved and measured in their assaults.
As noted earlier, this is the trickster devil with the capricious humor
alluded to previously, hiding beneath the dark god and fallen archangel.
The Nyarlathotep in the opening of the same tale bearing his name still
possesses that “swarthy, slender, and sinister”17 visage as his counter-
part in The Dream Quest, “of the old native blood” and looking like a
Pharaoh.18 Like any tyrant, the fellahin kneel when they saw him, “yet
could not say why,” a wraith-like figure rising up “out of the blackness
of twenty-seven centuries,”19 much like the visitation of the Antichrist in
Yeat’s “The Second Coming.”20 But, as shall be explored later, this ver-
sion of Nyarlathotep is like but unlike himself, if any such self is possible
amidst the ruins of a fractured psyche.
Surprisingly or rather, unsurprisingly, given their rather inflated sense
of self-importance, Milton’s Satan and Nyarlathotep are not above exer-
cising flattery, commending and complementing the heroes on their
extraordinary accomplishments and perseverance: “But you, Randolph
Carter,” applauds Nyarlathotep, “have braved all things … and burn
still with the flame of quest. You come not as one curious, but as one
seeking his due.”21 And Milton’s Satan to Christ: “I see thou know’st
what is of use to know,/What best to say canst say, to do canst do;/
Thy actions to thy words accord.”22 Shortly after feigned admiration, the
Tempters, in both cases, remind the heroes of who really is in control,
of bridled power that chooses not to release itself against a potential ally
provided certain set conditions are met. “So, Randolph Carter,” enjoins
Nyarlathotep with a casual easiness, “in the name of the Other Gods I
spare you and charge you to serve my will. I charge you to seek that sun-
set city which is yours.”23 Milton’s Satan is no less glib in his utterance:
“All these …/The Kingdoms of the world to thee I give;/For giv’n to
me, I give to whom I please, …/On this condition, if thou wilt … wor-
ship me as thy superior Lord.”24 Both invitations involve a conformity
and a surrendering of will.
In addition, Nyarlathotep and Satan, under the guise of friendly ben-
eficiaries, threaten Carter and Christ with great evils if their guidance
and advice remain unheeded. Nyarlathotep warns Carter of the dangers
awaiting him in the vast gulfs beyond space and time, horrors and outer
260 M. Ricciardi
hells, and minds that have been shattered by “the pounding, clawing
horrors of the void.”25 And yet, Nyarlathotep expounds, “I myself har-
bored no wish to shatter you, and would indeed have helped you hither
long ago had I not been elsewhere busy.”26 The Jobean biblical refrain is
evident here, when God exhorts Satan to tell him where he has been and
the adversary retorts: “I have gone round about the earth, and walked
through it.”27 Nyarlathotep’s whereabouts remain equally unsure, but
offices of malevolence and mayhem are certainly endemic to his charac-
ter. Satan in Book IV of Paradise Regained, depleted of all his earthly
whiles, exhausts himself against Christ with one final tirade in the face of
failed temptations: “Sorrows, and labors, opposition, hate,/Attends thee,
scorns, reproaches, injuries,/Violence and stripes, and and lastly cruel
death.”28 Both tempters try to wear down the resolve of each protago-
nist, threatening him with a sordid fate if he refuses to seek refuge under
their tutelage.
In the end, when rhetoric fails and the hero’s interior resistance sur-
mounts, ruffianism and thuggery are their last resort. Inevitably, the
false veneer of civility and respectability is immediately dropped when it
fails to achieve its positivistic ends. Nyarlathotep’s final words to Carter
unravel the false inner serenity and feigned reasonableness that attend
the autocracy of evil. “Hei! Aa-shanta ‘nygh!” is the language of dismiss-
ive defeatism, an incantation and cry of desperation as all devices fall flat:
“You are off! … and pray to all space that you may never meet me in
my thousand other forms. Farewell, Randolph Carter, and beware; for
I am Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos.”29 Lovecraft’s devil, as men-
tioned previously, is an avataric being with many names in many civili-
zations in many galaxies. Milton’s Satan breaks down twice before the
Son, once when he rejects all worldy means of establishing his Kingdom:
“Since neither wealth, nor honor, arms nor arts,/Kingdom nor Empire
pleases thee,” shrieks Satan, “nor aught/By me propos’d in life con-
templative,/Or active, tended on by glory or fame,/What dost thou in
this World?30 and secondly when he places Christ high on the pinnacle
of the Holy City hoping he will plummet to his death: “There stand,
if thou wilt stand; to stand upright/Will ask thee skill.”31 Nyarlathotep
and Satan believe equally that their noncomformist adversaries should be
and go somewhere else, anomalies who refuse to fit into the status quo
of smug self-satisfied gentility, uncategorized and, thereby, uncategoriz-
able, and as such a threat to Satanic Empire since diabolical baubles offer
no appeal. In a word, both Carter and Christ are uncontrollable—Carter
refusing anything less than his dream city of Kadath and Christ refus-
ing any kingdom divorced from God. Nothing more can be offered since
nothing more can be gained—the inviolable self, as Christ reminds, is its
own kingdom: “Yet he who reigns within himself, and rules/Passions,
Desires, and Fears, is more a King.”32 Camus’ pronouncement on true
freedom and authentic revolt best sums it up: “The only way to deal with
an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence
is an act of rebellion.” Milton and Lovecraft would find common ground
on this point.
With the words “for I am I Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos,”33 the
Beast is finally revealed. Nyarlathotep and Satan have done their best in
hiding their myriad forms—Milton’s Satan in Paradise Regained, first
under the appearance of a humble shepherd in “[r]ural weeds,”34 then
as a world-weary cosmopolitan, and finally as a wingless “Hippogrif”35;
Nyarlathotep as an Egyptian deity, a negotiator, and fellow cosmic
explorer, and ultimately as encroaching Void, in the end, to reference
Yeats once more (a poet who was himself an adept at occult exploration
and who at a seance in his youth repetitively and prayerfully recited ran-
dom lines from Paradise Lost when believing himself to be under some
form of psychic attack36), “Something slouches towards Bethlehem to be
born.”37
This multifarious duality of evil is, as noted previously, intrin-
sic to the Satanic mythos. In Lovecraft’s earlier version of the mythos,
Nyarlathotep had “risen out of the blackness of twenty-seven centu-
ries”38 only to appear among men as “swarthy, slender, and sinister.”39
Yeats prophetically explores this duality as well in “The Second Coming”
as a bestial sphinx-like deity roams the desert only to anticipate its earthly
visitation and incarnation as the Antichrist. “[T]wenty centuries of stony
sleep” which “[w]ere vexed to nightmare by [the] rocking cradle”40 of
the Christ finds its counterpart in “Th’old Dragon under ground,/In
straiter limits bound”41 with the advent of Emmanuel in Milton’s “On
the Morning of Christ’s Nativity”—the point being that in both poems,
Satan as Beast of the Apocalypse is a subversive identity which must for-
ever lay carefully concealed if seduction and betrayal are to remain effec-
tive instruments in the temptation arsenal. The violence of the irrational
masquerades as the voluptuousness of the rational as Nyarlathotep, the
Dweller from the Abyss, and the Ruler of men, becomes the sophisti-
cate savant, always “buying strange instruments of glass and metal and
combining them into instruments yet stranger” and speaking “much
262 M. Ricciardi
of the sciences—of electricity and psychology” while giving exhibitions

of power.42 As Nyarlathotep tries to consolidate his power with exhibi-
tionism, trinkets, and baubles of enticement, so, too, does the Satan of
Milton’s Paradise Regained parade himself as huckster, a carnival sales-
man who seeks to induce the Son of God to buy his bill of goods and
thereby be bound by satanic materialism rather than by divinized matter:
“Tell me,” poses Satan, “if Food were now before thee set,/Would’st
thou not eat? Thereafter as I like/The giver, answer’d Jesus.”43
Lovecraft’s Sonnet XXI: “Nyarlathotep” from “Fungi from Yuggoth”,
the title itself indicative of the intrusive and exploitative nature of
the alien Other, offers the maturest, most concentrated study of
Nyarlathotep. As in his previous literary incarnations, he is called “The
strange dark One” (here given a more universally archetypal sinister
presence) to whom “the fellahs bowed,”44 a synonym for commoner
or peasant indicating Nyarlathotep’s capacity to bewitch and corrupt
the masses. Lovecraft’s prose account of Nyarlathotep emphasizes this
seductive aspect as the narrator’s friend insists upon the “impelling fas-
cination and allurement of his revelations.”45 Lovecraft relates how the
narrative itself came to his mind in a dream in which he was reading a
letter from his good friend Samuel Loveman who wrote: “Don’t fail to
see Nyarlathotep if he comes to Providence. He is horrible—horrible
beyond anything you can imagine—but wonderful. He haunts one for
hours afterward. I am still shuddering at what he showed.”46 The son-
net “Nyarlathotep” elaborates upon the outer garments of the fallen one,
“wrapped in fabrics red as sunset flame,”47 an appropriate allusion to the
devil’s interior and anterior state of habitation. However, regardless of
the finery adorning him, the splendor of his silent and cryptic appear-
ance, Lovecraft more than subtly suggests that here form precedes sub-
stance, and that rhetoric and response are all but hollow. Like Milton’s
Satan in Paradise Regained where all the Tempter’s utterances are so
many empty compliments and lies, so, too, are Nyarlathotep’s as the
“Throngs pressed around” him, “frantic for his commands/But leav-
ing, could not tell what they had heard.”48 Subterfuge and evasion are
intrinsic to Luciferean language, and the ambiguity of such utterances
only serves to conceal acrimonious intent. As Satan exhorts his cohorts
to false bravery in Paradise Lost, Milton reminds us: “but he his wonted
pride/Soon recollecting, with high words, that bore/Semblance of
worth, not substance.”49
After Milton’s Christ’s first encounter with Satan in the wilderness,

the episode ends with a hybrid amalgamation of both feigned submis-
sion and malevolent purpose. Satan bows low in gray dissimilation before
leaving the Son of God with a feint at civility, false courtesy, and dif-
fident attention, but as night falls, Milton describes the dark as “with
… sullen wing to double shade/The Desert,”50 an allusion to Satan’s
cloaked fallen archangelic status and ever encroaching parasitical proclivi-
ties. But even more relevant, as evil enshrouds the night, Satan’s min-
ions awaken to assault the unwary—monster, mist, and shadow but the
presage of their adversarial agenda. Despite Nyarlathotep’s august and
solemn bearing, the Lovecraftian, like the Miltonic narrator, undermines
his prospective postulant’s demand for allegiance. “And now wild Beasts
came forth the woods to roam”51 is how Milton concludes Book I of
Paradise Regained. The devil, traditionally, like the vampyr, wields con-
trol over wild beasts, and Milton, throughout all of his major and minor
poems, repeatedly refers to demons as locusts and flies, an allusion evi-
dent in the Books of Exodus and Revelation as well as in Assyrian and
Babylonian mythology, conveying not only the essence of the diabolical,
but its mindlessly relentless and repetitive habit of instinctual assault: the
devil “[s]till will be tempting him who foils him still,/And never cease,
though to his shame the more” like “a swarm of flies in vintage time/
About the wine-press where sweet must is pour’d”52—the wine being a
veiled allusion to the life-giving Blood of Christ poured out for humanity
on the wine press of the Cross and the swarm of flies indicative of Satan’s
seemingly triumphant feast of death.
Milton’s wild beasts find their counterpart in Lovecraft’s poem as
well: “While through the nations spread the awestruck word/That wild
beasts followed him and licked his hands.”53 Lovecraft and Milton care-
fully craft a multiplicity of meanings here. Although the wild beasts in
both poems are clearly predatorial and malevolent, the very reality that
Christ is alone in the wilderness and remains unmolested—“Among
wild Beasts: they at his sight grew mild,/Nor sleeping him nor waking
harm’d, his walk/The fiery Serpent fled, and noxious Worm;/the Lion
and fierce Tiger glar’d aloof”54—suggests his exorcismal mastery over
them as Second Adam, and their recognition of his authority, albeit sus-
picious, in a fallen world; Christ is the New Man who rectifies the First
Man’s sin of disobedience through his triumph on the Cross—a not
yet fully realized Isaiahian Kingdom prophecy of universal peace, of the
Lion laying down with the Lamb.55 Lovecraft’s poetic rendition inverts
264 M. Ricciardi
and parodies this dynamic, positing Nyarlathotep as a false Adamic and

Messianic figure, The Beast in disguise among beasts, seemingly accept-
ing homage from his own.
The end result of both Milton’s and Lovecraft’s Old Enemy, to bor-
row the title from Neil Forsyth, is ultimately one of frustration and
self-betrayal. As Milton’s Satan purposely seeks to waylay and mislead
Christ in both his mission and self-identity through his wilderness jour-
ney, Nyarlathotep seeks to sidetrack Carter in the accomplishment of his
quest. And Carter, much like Milton’s Son, seeks both self-transcend-
ence and the fulfillment of his vocation. Both know who they are and
what they are about, the Kingdom being the Son’s constant paradigm as
Lovecraft’s Providence is his. As such, when evasion, allusion, and temp-
tation fail, Evil, much like in Shakespeare’s tragedies and Spenser’s The
Faerie Queen, ultimately self-destructs and reluctantly reveals itself. This
usually becomes apparent at the conclusion of combat narratives, and
Milton and Lovecraft both share that sense of dramatic revelation when
the Son and Carter elude the satanic grasp. The conclusions of Paradise
Regained and The Dream Quest each end in storm scenes, chaotic mael-
stroms of unholy fury, impotence, and spite. A common biblical motif
and one which Christ affirms in the Gospel of St. John is the appella-
tion of Satan as the prince of this world.56 As such, although he inhabits
the infernal kingdom beneath the earth, he also occupies the space just
below the Empyrean but above the globe. This is evident when Satan
in Book I of Paradise Regained “who [when] roving still about the
world”57 in Jobean fashion, upon hearing God the Father’s pronounce-
ment upon His Son at the river Jordan, “[flies] to his place, nor rests,
but in mid air/To Council summons all his mighty Peers.”58 The dia-
bolical, therefore, can certainly be immanent in nature as demonstrated
in the terror evoked both by land and by sea from the Book of Job’s
Behemoth and Leviathan. Even the storm scenes in the Gospel narra-
tives give proof to Christ’s supremacy and ascendency over the natural
and supernal realms, the winds and waters in the ancient world being the
abode of all things infernal.
Lovecraft and Milton continue in that same scriptural tradition
as Nyarlathotep and Milton’s Satan release their full fury once their
quarry has at least spiritually and emotionally, if not yet physically,
evaded them. “Only to taunt,” Lovecraft reminds, “had Nyarlathotep
marked out the way to safety … only to mock had that black messen-
ger revealed the secret of those truant gods …. For madness and the
void’s wild vengeance are Nyarlathotep’s only gifts ….”59 As Carter

frantically attempts to reign in his “disgusting steed, that leering, tit-
tering shantak coursed on impetuous and relentless, flapping its great
leathery wings in malignant joy, and headed for those unhallowed pits
whither no dreams reach.”60 The allusions to devils, hell, and damna-
tion are more than self-revealing here, as the flying steed takes on a varia-
tion of Lovecraft’s own treacherous night-gaunts that plagued him in his
dreams, seizing him and plummeting him down razor sharp mountain
peaks. Milton’s Satan in Paradise Regained employs the same techniques
of psychological intimidation and physical bullying, apparently recruit-
ing some of Lovecraft’s own monstrosities of the outer darkness as they
assault the Son of God while asleep in the wilderness and undergoing his
own dream quest: “nor yet stay’d the terror there./Infernal Ghosts, and
Hellish Furies, round/Environ’d thee, some howl’d, some yell’d, some
shriek’d,/Some bent at thee thir fiery darts.”61
Milton and Lovecraft consistently variegate and destabilize satanic
manifestations, evil alternating between the anthropomorphic and non-
anthropomorphic, Nyarlathotep and Satan never fully assuming a fixed
identity since the truth of their inner essence always inevitably contra-
dicts and betrays their outer form. Nyarlathotep’s last anthropomorphic
incarnation, albeit warped and degraded, is as the Black Man in “The
Dreams in the Witch House”—from imperial world sovereign to mon-
ster in the closet, garbed in a shapeless black robe with indistinguishable
feet that went clicking whenever he changed positions.62 Here, finally,
is a more regional diabolism, a being still tall and lean as in The Dream
Quest, but with cloven feet and sly demeanor—Old Scratch himself
haunting old attics and dusty parlors—a true heir of Hawthorne’s and
Stephen Vincent Benet’s New England devils, waiting and watching for
unwary Puritan pilgrims to contract unholy alliances and bloody cove-
nants in the wilderness.
And on a side note, regardless of Lovecraft’s own consciously reli-
gious prejudices and despite critical grumblings concerning the overt
role religious iconography plays in “The Dreams in the Witch House,”
Joe Mazurewicz, the “superstitious loom fixer,”63 does confront the
diabolical and survives with the help of a silver crucifix and the inter-
cessory prayers of the Rosary. Regardless of how this may offend the
aesthetical and ethical decorums of Lovecraft’s more nontheistic admir-
ers, Lovecraft’s final tale, “The Haunter of the Dark,” makes mention of
“praying crowds [that] had clustered around the church in the rain with
266 M. Ricciardi
lighted candles and lamps … a guard of light to save the city from the
nightmare that stalks in darkness.”64 The significance of these inclusions,
I am certain, are related to the revelation of the true nature of these dark
monstrosities which infest Lovecraft’s narratives. While Milton naturally
assumes that demonic activity as biblically understood is self-evident,
Lovecraft adopts a more suggestive, if not more tangential approach.
Milton enters through the front gate when exploring the satanic, while
Lovecraft takes the back, much like Algernon Blackwood’s depiction
of animism in The Willows which inevitably betrays a deeper and darker
presence that belies the author’s pantheistic vision: “‘You think,’ he said,
‘it is the spirits of the elements, and I thought perhaps it was the old
gods. But I tell you now it is—neither. These would be comprehensi-
ble entities, for they have relations with men, depending upon them for
worship or sacrifice, whereas these beings who are now about us have
absolutely nothing to do with mankind ….’”65 Nonetheless, Milton and
Lovecraft inevitably come to the same conclusions when exploring the
horrors behind extra-, intra-, or ultra-terrestrial activity—calculating,
premeditative, rapacious malevolence.
Towards the conclusion of Paradise Lost, Book X, Satan, ultimately,
is revealed as the Serpent, the Beast from the Book of Revelation, the
Great Dragon of the Apocalypse. Although Milton has been criticized
for poetically demoting his Archangelic nemesis from his initially lumi-
nous origination in Book I, in reality, this is not so; rather, Milton has
merely unveiled what is already there but craftily and carefully con-
cealed, by poet and antagonist alike. Whether described as a Typhon or
a Leviathan in Book I66 (the Jobean Leviathan in particular given the
fitting epithet of “the king over all the children of pride”67), a “gryphon
through the wilderness/With winged course,”68 or as a squat “Toad,
close to the ear of Eve,”69 Satan, at any point in the narrative, is never
far removed from the bestial. The Satanic, as envisioned by Milton and
Lovecraft, makes its final appearance totally divested of all and any traces
of feigned humanity, with Satan “without wing of Hippogrif” bearing
“through the Air sublime/Over Wilderness and o’er the Plain”70 the Son
of God, only to set him on the highest pinnacle for a final assault, and
with Nyarlathotep, vibrating the air as with flapping wings, like a dense
black blast of a sudden east-blowing wind – a formless cloud of smoke
with meteor-like speed (another allusion to Milton’s Satan shining “like
a Meteor streaming to the Wind”71) shooting towards the east.72 Both
scenarios involve high precipices, Milton’s “highest Pinnacle”73 and
Lovecraft’s church tower,74 and although the outcomes are radically dif-
ferent, the ascendancy and triumph of the Son as opposed to the descent
and devastation of Robert Blake, the devil, in all of his guises, whether
as an avatar of “The Haunter of the Dark” or as that “Theban Monster
[the Sphinx], that propos[es] her riddle”75 (which, by the way, is the last
poetical reference to Milton’s Satan), is always, to quote the Epistle of
St. Peter, as a “roaring lion” who “goeth about seeking whom he may
devour.”76 The animal imagery is significant here, since the lion, mytho-
logically and symbolically, is considered to be the king of the beasts, but,
ironically and prophetically, so, too, is the Lion of Judah.
Notes
1. 2 Corinthians 11:14 in Douay-Rheims.
2. Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Plates 5–6.
3. Lovecraft, The Dream Quest, 482.
4. Milton, Paradise Lost, II, 1–4.
5. Ibid., II, 675.
7. Ibid.
8. Milton, Paradise Lost, II, 9.
10. Ibid.
11. Milton, Paradise Lost, I, 599–600.
14. Vergil, Aeneid, I, 208–10.
15. Joshi, Lovecraft’s Library.
16. Lewalski, Milton’s Brief Epic, 102–29.
17. Lovecraft, “Nyarlathotep,” 120.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid., 121.
20. Yeats, “The Second Coming.”
21. Lovecraft, The Dream Quest, 482–3.
22. Milton, Paradise Regained, III, 5–9.
24. Milton, Paradise Regained, IV, 161–6.
26. Ibid.
27. Job, 1:7.
268 M. Ricciardi

31. Ibid., IV, 550–1.
32. Ibid., III, 465–6.
34. Milton, Paradise Regained, I, 314.
35. Ibid., I, 541.
36. Maddox, Yeats’ Ghost, 14.
37. Yeats, “Second Coming,” 22.
39. Ibid.
40. Yeats, “Second Coming,” 19–20.
41. Milton, “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” 168–9.
43. Milton, Paradise Regained, II, 320–2.
44. Lovecraft, “Fungi from Yuggoth: ‘Nyarlathotep,’” 2.
46. Lovecraft, Lord of a Visible World, 81.
47. Lovecraft, “Fungi from Yuggoth: ‘Nyarlathotep,’” 4.
48. Ibid., 5–6.
50. Milton, Paradise Regained, I, 499–500.
51. Ibid., I, 502.
52. Ibid., IV, 13–16.
53. Lovecraft, “Fungi from Yuggoth: ‘Nyarlathotep,’” 7–8.
55. Isaiah 11:6; 65:25.
56. Gospel of St. John 14:30.
58. Ibid., I, 38–9.
59. Lovecraft, The Dream Quest, 486–7.
60. Ibid., 487.
62. Lovecraft, “The Dreams in the Witch House,” 874.
63. Ibid., 866.
64. Lovecraft, “The Haunter of the Dark,” 1011.
65. Blackwood, The Willows, 561.
67. Job 41:25.
68. Milton, Paradise Lost, II, 943–4.
69. Ibid., IV, 800.
71. Milton, Paradise Lost, I, 537.

72. Lovecraft, “Haunter of the Dark,” 1015.
73. Milton, Paradise Regained, IV, 549.
74. Lovecraft, “Haunter of the Dark,” 1017.
75. Milton, Paradise Regained, IV, 572.
76. 1 Peter 5:8.
Bibliography
Blackwood, Algernon. The Willows. Classic Horror Stories. New York: Barnes and
Noble, 2015.
Blake, William. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Complete Writings. London:
Oxford, 1972.
Bradbury, Ray. Something Wicked This Way Comes. New York: Avon, Reprint ed.
2006.
Douay-Rheims. The Holy Bible. New Hampshire: Loreto, 2004.
Forsyth, Neil. The Old Enemy: Satan and the Combat Myth. New Jersey:
Princeton, 1989.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. “Young Goodman Brown.” Tales and Sketches. New
York: Library of America, 1982.
Joshi, S.T. Lovecraft’s Library: A Catalogue. New York: Hippocampus, 2002.
King, Stephen. Needful Things: The Last Castle Rock Story. New York: Viking,
1991.
Lovecraft, H.P. “Fungi from Yuggoth: ‘Nyarlathotep.’” The Ancient Track. New
York: Hippocampus, 2013.
---. The Complete Fiction. New York: Barnes and Noble, 2008.
---. Lord of a Visible World: An Autobiography in Letters. Athens: Ohio University
Press, 2000.
Maddox, Brenda. Yeats’ Ghost: The Secret Life of W.B. Yeats. New York:
HarperCollins, 1999.
McMahon, Robert. The Two Poets of Paradise Lost. Louisiana: Louisiana State
Milton, John. Complete Poems and Major Prose. Ed, Merritt Hughes. New Jersey:
Prentice-Hall, 1957.
O’Connor, Flannery. The Violent Bear It Away. Collected Works. New York:
Library of America, 1988.
Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queene. New York: Penguin, 1978.
Vergil. The Aeneid. Trans. Robert Fitzgerald. New York: Random House, 1983.
Yeats, William Butler. “The Second Coming.” The Poems. New York: Macmillan,
1983.
CHAPTER 14
“The One Who Knocks”: Milton’s Lucifer

and the American Tragic Character
Edward Simon
“Better to reign in Hell, than to serve in Heaven.”1

Lucifer in John Milton’s Paradise Lost
“I have written a wicked book, and feel as spotless as the lamb.”2
Herman Melville in letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne
“I did it for me. I liked it. I was good at it. And I was really alive.”3
Walter White in Breaking Bad.
We are presented with a series of images of the severe, sun-burnt, wind-

swept, almost-apocalyptic American southwest. A barbed wire fence and
the alien thread of high-power wire both seem as unforgiving and distant
as the brutal landscape itself. A gnarled Joshua tree comes into view, and
a sunset that is so rapid it seems as if the sun is being cast out of heaven
itself, thrown to the ground, shattering more than descending. Soon we
are confronted with more artificial constructions, a lower-middle-class
suburban ranch house, the angular corners of an old trailer abandoned
in the desert, an empty urban tableau of the sprawl of Albuquerque, New
E. Simon (*) 
The Marginalia Review of Books, Los Angeles, CA, USA

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-52198-5_14
272 E. Simon
Mexico, the luminescent hydrogen neon of traffic as the day turns to

night. The images speed up rapidly so that we see the swirling of clouds,
the movement of the sun, and the sifting of sands, a day compressed into
minutes, the desert’s sand evoking nothing so much as the rapidly deplet-
ing grains of an hourglass. Through it all there are no humans, the most
personal evidence being a broken, dust-covered porkpie hat gathering grit
as it sits underneath a windswept mesa. Over the course of the 1 h 10 min
video we hear the hypnotic voice of actor Bryan Cranston, reading Percy
Byshe Shelley’s 1818 sonnet “Ozymandias.”4 “I met a traveler from an
antique land/Who said: ‘Two vast and trunkless legs of stone/Stand in
the desert.” Cranston’s tenor is a commanding performance, reading
through the enjambments in the steady iambic pentameter of Shelley’s
poem, his voice ever so slightly indicating a bottled rage when he reads
the line about Ramses’ “wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command.”
The video is a teaser-trailer for the second half of the fifth season
(2013)5 of producer Vince Gilligan’s television masterpiece Breaking
Bad (2008–13), and the poem would share a title with the third to last
episode of the series. For English professors teaching Romanticism, the
trailer quickly became a convenient leitmotif in undergraduate classes, a
way to introduce bored students to Shelley’s iconic poetic depiction of
the fleeting and entropic nature of temporal greatness, the poem made
visceral through its association with Cranston’s character Walter White
and in turn that character’s alter ego the fearsome meth-cook and drug
dealer “Heisenberg.” Contemporary television shows in what critic Bret
Martin has called the “third golden age of TV”6 have had high literary
aspirations before; no less an antecedent to Breaking Bad than David
Chase’s The Sopranos (1999–2007) also had the third to last episode
of its final season named after a canonical bit of verse, this time W. B.
Yeats’ apocalyptic, modernist “The Second Coming.” Arguably since
David Lynches’ Twin Peaks (1990–1), an element of producers, writers,
and directors in American television have attempted to create work that
in some sense could be described as “literary,” but as Martin explains,
Chase’s series created an entirely new form in the medium, shows that
were not just quality programing, but that indeed had aspirations towards
becoming the “literature” of American life in the twenty-first century.
Martin argues that these shows like The Sopranos and Breaking Bad inau-
gurated a new American art by adopting the methods, tropes, themes,
narratives, and characters associated with more “serious” art. In this
intertextual network of allusions these shows often adopted from, and in
14 “THE ONE WHO KNOCKS”: MILTON’S … 273
some case deferred to, high culture. Cranston’s heteroglossic adoption of

Shelley’s poem was hardly incongruous, but rather part of a developing
method and tradition within the “prestige television” industry.
Gilligan certainly picked an appropriate poem. Breaking Bad, a series
as fascinated with self-invention and morality as any in the third golden
age of TV, followed the transformation of lower-middle-class high school
chemistry teacher Walter White into a methamphetamine drug kingpin,
responsible for 271 deaths over the course of five seasons of the show.
The pilot episode sees the teacher explaining that chemistry is the study
of “change,” and indeed the whole series utilized this scientific meta-
phor in presenting Walter’s descent as a sort of moral chemical reaction.7
Walter’s change from “Mr. Chips into Scarface”8 presents us with the
(perhaps illusory) mild-mannered teacher becoming a ruthless, socio-
pathic killer, where his life became a culmination of the moral choices
he has made over the course of his embrace of evil. Through a combina-
tion of luck, guile, and skill, the drug dealer “Heisenberg” constructed
an invisible empire built on millions of dollars, and an exceptionally
pure drug product. The ruthlessness of Heisenberg is so all-consuming
that White may very well feel entitled to borrow as a personal motto
the inscription that Shelley says graced a statue of the Egyptian pharaoh
Ramses: “king of kings:/Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair.”
But as “Ozymandias” is a memento mori contemplating the inevita-
bility of decay, the teaser hints at the inevitable fall that the powerful
man may experience as the season draws to a conclusion, for the trave-
ler in Shelley’s poem informs its narrator that the statue of the proud
ruler now “Half sunk, a shattered visage lies,” where “Nothing beside
remains.” As the image of Heisenberg’s characteristic porkpie hat accu-
mulates detritus from the desert’s dusk, Cranston reads “Round the
decay/Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare/The lone and level
sands stretch far away,” typologically collapsing that Egyptian desert of
Ramses into the New Mexican one of Heisenberg.
The use of “Ozymandias” in both the teaser trailer and the episode
title was appropriate in a more general and abstract way as well. Shelley is
of course one of the representative and canonical poets of the Romantic
era, and in many ways this third golden age of television is one that is
explicitly defined by Romantic aesthetics. This is not an inappropriate
aesthetic for this consummately American media form to define itself
by, for even if the United States’ political system was a child of the
eighteenth-century Enlightenment, our literary and artistic culture was
274 E. Simon
very much one of a generation later, during the height of the transat-
lantic Romantic Movement. If this is the argument to be made, how-
ever, we can push that back even further, since so much of Anglophone
Romantic aesthetic values, from Shelley’s “Prometheus” and the Byronic
Hero in Britain to Emerson’s self-reliance and Whitman’s celebration
of self, was based on a conscious misreading of John Milton’s charac-
ter of Lucifer in his early modern epic poem Paradise Lost (1667).
William Blake famously said that Milton was “of the devil’s party, but
didn’t know it.” For the Romantics Satan became a Promethean figure
of rebellion against tyranny, a democratic revolutionary, and an aesthetic
libertine.9 If this interpretation of Lucifer became the central protago-
nist of Romantic aesthetics, then in many ways he became the central
figure of American aesthetics as well, for Lucifer becomes in some sense
the consummate American. But as Stanley Fish makes clear in Surprised
by Sin,10 there are moral implications to misinterpreting Lucifer as the
hero of Paradise Lost, implications which were expressed in American
dark Romanticism, particularly the ur-text of American novels, Herman
Melville’s Moby-Dick, which has defined American literary canonicity and
is now reaching its fullest summation in our contemporary visual novels
which are the products of the third golden age of TV.
In his classic work Love and Death in the American Novel, the critic
Leslie Fiedler argued that there exists a “dimly perceived need of many
Americans to have their national existence projected in terms of a com-
pact with the Devil.”11 For scholars like Fiedler and Leo Marx the
American experience could be conceived of as a type of Faustian bar-
gain, the gaining of an earthly paradise at the expense of our previous
innocence.12 Indeed, this is not a new idea; Puritan writers like Cotton
Mather in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw America as
simultaneously a New Israel but also the site of Satan’s throne in the wil-
derness. It’s generated a self-contradictory view of America’s providen-
tial role—simultaneously heaven and hell, utopia and dystopia, Canaan
and Babylon—a phenomenon that I call “covenantal ambivalence.”
This critical neologism refers to a tendency that I identify in much of
American canonical literature from the colonial era till today. It refers to
when texts have a property of simultaneously and paradoxically depicting
“America” as a culture which is both Edenic, and demonic. In previous
articles of mine I have examined the ways in which “covenantal ambiva-
lence” becomes a defining characteristic of what we think of as American
literature.13 Perhaps no literary character embodies these contradictions
like John Milton’s Lucifer in Paradise Lost, and perhaps no character

has been more borrowed by canonical American literature to stand-in
for our national character. As William Spengemann has argued, Milton’s
Britishness has been no impediment to Americans gravitating to his work
as somehow authentically “American,” and disturbingly nowhere is this
truer than in the character of Lucifer.
While the Romanticism of Lucifer as “Byronic hero” has been well
commented on, less discussed is how archetypally “American” he is
and how as a character he is threaded through our national literature.
In Studies in Classic American Literature, D.H. Lawrence remarked
that, “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It
has never yet melted,” an apt description of Milton’s novel creation in
Lucifer.14 The devil as depicted in Paradise Lost is a consummate and
archetypal “American”; he is a confidence man, advertiser, rebel, parti-
san of liberty, and faker at the same time, self-made, a rugged individu-
alist setting out into the wilderness to make his own world anew. I will
look at how this type of character is the dominant one of American lit-
erature, focusing on that most Miltonic of creations, Ahab in Herman
Melville’s Moby-Dick, and investigating his appearance in modern texts,
as Tony Soprano in David Chase’s The Sopranos, Don Draper in Mathew
Weiner’s Mad Men, and most notably as Walter White in Vince Gilligan’s
Breaking Bad. All of these characters are consummate Americans and
embodiments of our period’s desperately flailing and dying “angry white
men.” They are entitled, ruthless, innovative, enraged, creative, and dan-
gerous—Luciferian through-and-through as well as American.
My overreaching claim is that the Miltonic Lucifer is an archetypal
American character who in many ways defines our canonical litera-
ture. That the Miltonic Lucifer was a Romantic favorite is a critical tru-
ism bordering on cliché, but it requires a bit of explication as to what
is particularly “American” about him. The character of Lucifer has long
been one of the central preoccupations of Milton studies; critics from
the Romantic era onward have noted that the character is particularly
evocative, and it has been a point of contention as to where exactly the
author’s sympathies lay. Certainly Milton was a committed Protestant
(even if the precise nature of his faith remains an area of debate), though
he made the character of Lucifer the undeniable locus of the poem’s rhe-
torical power. In short, there is something uncomfortable in the fact that
Lucifer is simply so much more interesting than any other characters; in
276 E. Simon
particular the power of his oratory is more adept than any other charac-
ter (certainly better than that spoken by either God or Christ). This facet
of Lucifer is what inspired Blake to make his appraisal of Milton’s secret
allegiances, and the character was refashioned not into a satanic figure,
but rather a Promethean one who signified man’s rebellion against tyr-
anny.
In this understanding (and for Blake there was something Gnostic
about this), Lucifer is a revolutionary, and indeed Blake utilized this
chthonic and Luciferian spirit in his own poem America: A Prophecy.
Milton was a committed republican and an agent of the Commonwealth
government during Interregnum; this no doubt contributes to the sense
that there is something not just sympathetic, but celebratory in the
depiction of Lucifer. If one party of Milton criticism is represented by
Blake’s contention, then the literary critic and Christian apologist C.
S. Lewis represents the other pole: a view that holds that Milton was a
good Calvinist (though probably more likely an Arminian in matters of
soteriology) whose Lucifer is a conventionally evil agent.15 In Surprised
by Sin Fish fuses these two views, acknowledging that Lucifer is the
more evocative character, but Fish argues that the reader’s response of
aesthetic pleasure to those lines is precisely the point, to demonstrate a
completely theologically orthodox understanding of how sin operates. In
short, Fish’s view is that there simply is no theological difficulty in the
poem; that readers would be more interested in Lucifer than God pre-
cisely proves the point about what is so dangerous about Lucifer.
In this chapter a correct textual reading of the role of the character
of Lucifer in Paradise Lost is less important than how the reception his-
tory of that text dialogically influenced other texts and literary culture
at large. Whether Milton is of Lucifer’s party or not (and a reading of
the poem can be ambiguous), the Romantics certainly took him as such.
This is not to say that a Romantic Lucifer is unequivocally good—far
from it. Yet the role of Milton’s Lucifer as a type of republican revolu-
tionary, especially during the age of revolutions beginning with the
American in the late eighteenth century and then moving through the
Romantic era, is an archetypal theme which looms large in the cultural
imagination. And it is this Miltonic Lucifer that becomes a representa-
tive figure in American literature during the early nineteenth century,
where the original is transformed into an “American” character, and
so many of our self-made heroes convey something that is particularly
Luciferian. Surrounding the figure is the sense of “Awake, arise, or be for

ever fall’n,” a strangely inspirational conceit for those facing defeat, but
also one that would work well as the motto for a Horatio Alger type. As
a consummate sovereign individual Lucifer adheres to his adage that it is
“Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven,” and even though Fish
might argue that this is theologically delusional rationalization meant
to sustain Lucifer in his absence from God, it also contains more than
a bit of the American propensity towards idealizing (and idolatrizing) a
strong individual’s ability to recreate the world on his own terms. For
the Lucifer in Paradise Lost is not just a rebel, but he is also a creature
whose very words can generate their own reality (or a type of reality),
the being who famously declared that “The mind is its own place, and in
itself/Can make a heav’n of hell, a hell of heav’n”, as pithy—and dark—a
summation of the American credo of being self-made as one can imag-
ine. Indeed, it is Lucifer’s individualism that strikes one as so particularly
American; the character has about him the feeling of pulling himself up
by his bootstraps after he has been exiled from heaven.
The central argument is that the Miltonic Lucifer is the primary arche-
typical masculine character of American canonical literature and that
this archetype defines the protagonists of the third golden age of tele-
vision. This argument is in two parts; the first is a demonstration that
a particular Miltonic worldview permeates American literature as medi-
ated through Milton’s greatest American (mis)interpreter Melville.16
The American author consciously replicates the ambiguities of Lucifer’s
character in that of the mad captain of the Pequod, Ahab.17 Like Lucifer,
Ahab is of a singular vision, and he believes that through sheer force of
will he is able to remake reality according to his own agency (as indeed
Walter White believes, as well as our other post-modern anti-heroes).
And like Lucifer, Ahab’s megalomaniacal narcissism, while sublime in its
intensity, is also necessarily fleeting and leads to a downfall that repre-
sents the “American Tragic Character” of my chapter’s subtitle.
Using the critic Lawrence Buell’s schema of four “scripts” defining
potential Great American Novels will show how The Sopranos, Mad Men,
and Breaking Bad follow a particularly Melvillian, and thus ultimately
Miltonic structure.18 This demonstrates the permeating and enduring
significance of Milton in early American literary culture, followed by an
examination of how these energies were filtered through an equivalent,
latter influence mediated by Melville. Secondly, I will provide overviews
of the three television shows, and draw explicit parallels between the
278 E. Simon
characters of Tony Soprano, Don Draper, and Walter White, to Lucifer

and Ahab. This demonstrates how the deep archetypal character struc-
ture for Lucifer, which originates in Milton, in many ways defines the
“difficult men” of contemporary television. This ghostly presence of the
seventeenth-century poet in our most democratic and popular of enter-
tainment mediums demonstrates what Spengemann has called “Milton’s
brooding presence on the national literary horizon.”19
The place which Milton occupied in the early American imagination
far outstripped almost every other Anglophone author, including William
Shakespeare.20 The founders of the Republic were keen readers of
Milton, and in him saw a precedent for the nascent political order of the
United States. In both politics and poetics Milton was the undisputed
sui generis of English writers, and pamphlets like Areopagitica and poems
like Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes were in the
mental arsenals and libraries of the revolutionary generation. This influ-
ence was all-pervading, and the desire to read the radical Protestant poet
as particularly American led the nineteenth-century critic Ebenezer Syme
in The Westminster Review to christen Milton “the most American author
that has ever lived,” and his contemporary Rufus Griswold remarked
that the poet was “more emphatically American than any author who has
lived in the United States.”21 Indeed, as literary historian Nigel Smith
has argued, “Milton is an author for all Americans, whether conserva-
tive, liberal, or radical, not only because he was a favorite of the founding
fathers, so that his voice echoes through their writings, but also because
his visionary writing is a literary embodiment of so many of the aspira-
tions that have guided Americans as they have sought to establish lived
ideals …” (11).22
Milton’s republican politics are not the only aspect that makes him
particularly American, but that indeed as the dark American Romantics
like Melville intuited, it is also a cannibalistic individualism whose ulti-
mate implications when misdirected can result in a certain enshrine-
ment of the Luciferian ideal in the composition of its atomistic character.
Spengemann writes, “When Melville set out to embody in Captain Ahab
what seemed to him a dominant strain in the American character, he
turned instinctively to Milton for one of his models; and there is no rea-
son to suppose that Melville’s Miltonism has played no part in the virtual
identification of American literature with Moby-Dick” (96). If Moby-Dick
is the ur-text of American literature, it is one that tonally, modally, the-
matically, and theologically is one that stems directly from Paradise Lost;
as such, we can say by the transitive property that American literature is

also Miltonic.23 Historically it would seem as a process that Milton was
taken as the “most American author” until those energies could be fun-
neled and supplanted into Melville as an inheritor of that particular posi-
tion. Writing about the novel, Buell claims that our “unusually strong
valuation set by national ideology upon individualism, or more precisely
individual fulfillment and self-realization” (387)24 explains the enduring
critical popularity of Melville’s masterpiece. Since 1998 with the emer-
gence of “literary television” this particular Miltonic energy has become
central to that latest iteration of American literature—television.
The comparison of the central characters of the canonical television
shows of the third golden age is apparent when we compare each of
them to both Ahab and, ultimately, Lucifer. The Miltonic Lucifer is not
just a rebel, but an extreme individualist, willing to subvert the natural
order of reality and to bend it to his own specifications. His tragic nature
is that this task is impossible to do. Ahab is, perhaps, a more ambigu-
ous character than Lucifer, for his relationship to the whale itself—who
is also an ambiguous cipher that can variously stand in for God or the
devil—makes the nature of his moral and ontological transgressions more
ambivalent. Yet Ahab shares certain over-preening qualities with Lucifer;
not just rebelliousness of a type, and narcissism, but also obsession bor-
dering on madness, entitlement, arrogance, and rage. Buell writes that
“one significant revelation to be gleaned from the unofficial discourse
generated by Moby-Dick in modern times is the reminder that the novel’s
dominant presence is for better or for worse Ahab” (387).
If Ahab is Melville’s rewriting of Lucifer into an unofficial American
mascot, then Gilligan’s Walter White, Chase’s Tony Soprano, and
Matthew Weiner’s Don Draper are post-modern updates of Ahab (and
thus of course also of Lucifer). Comparisons of these characters to Ahab
and Lucifer are not unheard of among reviewers of popular culture.
Joyce Carol Oates wrote that Walter White had joined the “pantheon of
American mythic types,” including Ahab.25 Rich Bellis in The Atlantic
wrote, “Walt’s single-minded mastery of the ‘empire business’ recalls
Captain Ahab’s ‘monomania’ … Blue meth is as potent a cypher as the
white whale: a thing of awful mystique where both infirm antiheros
focus the anger, bloodlust, and delusions that drive them.”26 Meanwhile,
Albert Wu and Michelle Kuo in The Los Angeles Review of Books wrote
that “Walt’s dilemma is the same as Satan’s: how to assert a modicum of
control … against forces larger than oneself.”27
280 E. Simon
Tony Soprano has been explicitly compared to both characters as well;

pop culture critic Chuck Klosterman connects him to Paradise Lost28
and in The Washington Post Alyssa Rosenberg wrote that “‘Which way
I fly is Hell; myself am Hell,’ Milton’s Satan ruminated. That seems like
a decent description of Tony Soprano. That he has to share Satan’s fate
and live with himself forever or at least until his natural death.”29
Don Draper has also received the literary comparative treatment;
Ron Ben Tovim in Salon declared Mad Men to be a “modern day Moby-
Dick.”30 The Romantic Satan makes complete sense as a foundational
archetype for American individualism, as Martin explained: “Men alter-
nately setting loose and struggling to cage their wildest natures has
always been the great American story, the one found in whatever hap-
pens to be the ascendant medium at the time,” which seems as apt an
explanation of Lucifer as one can make. This type of character is ever
permeable, and applicable to American cultural life, as Martin continued:
“Our favorite genres—the western; the gangster saga; the lonesome but
dogged private eye operating outside the comforts of normal, domestic
life; the superhero with the double identities—have all been liberaliza-
tions of that inner struggle” (84). The second half of this chapter will
investigate more closely how apt these comparisons are, so as to demon-
strate that Milton’s Lucifer does indeed define the American tragic char-
acter in our most popular modern literary medium.
Martin identifies the third golden age of American television as begin-
ning with Chase’s The Sopranos. Clearly, the series marked a turning
point in American popular culture as both Chase and HBO (the net-
work which produced the series) demonstrated that a series untethered
from the expectations of advertisers and offered directly to a potential
audience as the product itself could reach aesthetic and narrative heights
unheard of on network television. From the series’ pilot until its much-
watched (and debated) finale viewers were presented with the exploits of
an amoral sociopath. Tony Soprano, as performed by James Gandolfini,
was an almost painfully accurate portrayal of an economically upwardly-
mobile northern New Jersey Italian-American suburban father.31 Critics
originally associated the series with a minor comedic film called Analyze
This, released shortly before The Sopranos, which featured the same con-
ceit as the show—that of a mafia boss who finds himself in psychoanalytic
therapy. Viewers were quickly dissuaded, however, that the show was
simply a one-off joke about shrinks and mobsters, as it became clear that
the main character as brilliantly animated by Gandolfini provided one of
the most thorough investigations of the complex, multifaceted interiority

of a character ever depicted on the small screen.
The question of “interiority” and its emergence as a narrative form
is a complex one in literary history. Critics like Michael McKeon have
pointed to the novel as the first major narrative form to present a mime-
sis of the subjective experience of an individual.32 The argument is that
the multifaceted, dialogic, heteroglossic aspects of the novel lend itself to
a certain mimetic ability to represent the complexities of human subject-
hood. As a literary form, the novel’s relative length and ability to place
the reader empathetically into the subjectivity of a character is seen as the
ultimate origin of interiority as a fictional conceit. Other critics, like Jack
Miles, have pointed to much older antecedents in the biblical corpus as
the ultimate origin of interiority.33 Following Miles’ example, one could
argue that an epic poem like Paradise Lost displays a profound under-
standing of human complexity and interiority though the ambiguities of
the Miltonic Lucifer (right at the moment that the novel was supersed-
ing the epic poem as the primary means of conveying cultural capital).
Lucifer, in his complexities and contradictions, offers a potent example
of a particular type of interiority that is demonstrated precisely through
those contradictions.
While interiority is taken as a given in novels, commercial television
is derided as too superficial a medium to adequately convey the sort of
inner complexity that more “serious” literature is capable of. The criti-
cal status quo was first seriously challenged by the character of Tony
Soprano, who arguably displays an incredible degree of interiority, in
part by direct comparisons that can be drawn between that character and
Lucifer. Like Lucifer, who believes that it is better to reign in hell than
serve in heaven, Tony declares, “A wrong decision is better than inde-
cision.”34 And like Lucifer, speaking to his minions at the infernal par-
liament of Pandemonium, Tony claims that with “All due respect, you
got no fucking idea what it’s like to be number one. Every decision you
make affects every facet of every other fucking thing. It’s too much to
deal with almost. And in the end you’re completely alone with it all.”35
As Lucifer’s ontological status is defined by his complete and utter
separation as creature from the Creator, Tony’s status as the Don of the
New Jersey Mafia is one where you are “completely alone.” This some-
times manifests itself as a profound ability for Tony to feel sorry for him-
self, arguably born from an over-preening pride. In the pilot episode he
tells his psychiatrist that “I find I have to be the sad clown: laughing on
282 E. Simon
the outside, crying on the inside.” As delivered by Gandolfini, the audi-

ence is unclear as to whether we’re to read this self-pitying as tongue-in-
cheek, ironic, or genuine; and furthermore whether we are to view it as
valid or not. Much as Lucifer’s hubris is tied to his despair, a sinful state
of self-pitying, Tony refuses to take responsibility for his own actions and
the part that they play in his emotional state. For Tony, there is a sense
of entitlement and privilege, as he also says in the pilot, “It’s good to be
in something from the ground floor. I came too late for that and I know.
But lately, I’m getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best
is over.” Much like Lucifer cast out from paradise, Tony feels that he is
entitled to some mythic past, that by all natural rights a certain status or
respect should be afforded to him that he is being denied.
This is arguably the central cultural predicament of so many in
American society who feel threatened by the political, cultural, social,
and economic strides made by marginalized communities, the so-called
“angry white men” who rail against progressive social programs and
entitlements. Part of the popularity of The Sopranos lies in its accurate
depiction of this personality type, without minimizing any of the hypoc-
risies a person advocating such a position might engage in. Interestingly
enough, part of Tony’s claim for rugged individualism is predicated pre-
cisely on an erroneous denial of the existence of his own interiority; wax-
ing poetic on Gary Cooper, Tony says, “The strong, silent type. That
was an American. He wasn’t in touch with his feelings. He just did what
he had to do.”36 This particular personality type is the Miltonic Lucifer
as well. The post-Romantic inheritance of reading that character as
purely a rebel against tyranny glosses over Lucifer’s profoundly narcis-
sistic qualities, which are ones that are ultimately spiritually destructive
(and in the profane world materially destructive). As Fish would argue,
the evocativeness of Lucifer as a character is precisely the response that
Milton is trying to engender in the reader which is not dissimilar to the
audience reaction to Tony. As mediated through Gandolfini’s multifac-
eted performance, it’s hard not to empathize and sympathize with Tony;
it’s hard not to like him. Yet by any moral criterion, Tony is a monster,
the sort of man who is capable of brutally strangling to death a Witness
Protection Program informant he recognizes and then nonchalantly
continuing to take his daughter on a college visit weekend.37 Much as
the memorable iambic pentameter of Lucifer makes him attractive in
Paradise Lost, Tony’s charisma, good humor, and generosity trick the
audience into overlooking the fact that he is a clearly evil figure. In this
way, The Sopranos enacts the exact same readerly response that Paradise
Lost does: it “surprises” you with sin.
Don Draper is in one sense a less consciously Luciferian figure than
either Tony or Walter. At no point in the run of Mad Men does he ever
directly murder someone, and the world of 1960s Madison Avenue
advertising executives seems thematically removed from either the meth
labs of New Mexico or the mafia dens of New Jersey, not to mention
from the hell of Paradise Lost. And yet what satanic qualities Don would
seem to lack in the form of an actual record of literal criminality, he
makes up for in his diabolical rhetoric of his profession. Mad Men has
often been celebrated for its literary qualities and its similarities to the
novels of Richard Yates and John Cheever in depicting a particular type
of alcohol-soaked, mid-century American ennui.38 Along with David
Simon’s The Wire, Mad Men has been conceptualized as the most self-
consciously literary of television shows, even if its intellectual predeces-
sor seems more F. Scott Fitzgerald than it does Charles Dickens (as the
former show is often most readily connected to).39 And yet for all the
literary comparisons to Ford, Cheever, and Fitzgerald, Don Draper (like
many characters within the tragic American archetype) is consummately
Luciferian, not in spite of but because of his chosen profession, and how
it is reflected within the character’s autobiography.
The brilliance of Mad Men that makes it a viable candidate for being a
sort of visual Great American Novel is in its subject matter of portraying
advertising precisely at the moment that it became inseparable from the
ideological structures of capitalist hegemony. Creator Matthew Weiner
is able to cannily depict how advertising is a complex system of duplic-
ity, affirmation, projection, and conspicuous consumption that is able
to convince people to acquire what they do not need, and that this is
the guiding principle of American late capitalism. This is precisely what
is Luciferian about the character Don Draper, who shares Lucifer’s abil-
ity to claim that, “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a
Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.”
Don’s tragic American character is built on the erroneous belief that
the individual can completely build his own reality, and that furthermore
a whole systematic reality of surface appearances can be constructed for
society at large. In an apt description of the realm of chaos from Paradise
Lost, Don claims in the first season episode “The Hobo Code” that
“there is no big lie, there is no system, the universe is indifferent.” This
sentiment was also expressed by Don’s Miltonic partner, Walter White
284 E. Simon
when he said, “The universe is random. It’s not inevitable. It’s simple
chaos. It’s subatomic particles in endless, aimless collision. That’s what
science teaches us ….”40 But as Lucifer is able to make a heaven of hell,
Don tells a beatnik poet in the episode “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” that
“What you call love was invented by guys like me … to sell nylons.”
As Lucifer believes that sheer mental agency is its own form of almost
omnipotent power in terms of restructuring reality, Don argues that his
own creative energies can will into being concepts like love, despite the
chaotic and meaningless status of the universe. Much as Lucifer refused
to serve in Heaven, in “New Amsterdam” Don admits that he is “not as
comfortable being powerless.” And in a manner not unbecoming to the
tricks and deceptions of Satan, the consummate American advertiser Don
Draper claims in the pilot episode, “Advertising is based on one thing,
happiness. And you know what happiness is? Happiness is the smell of a
new car. It’s freedom from fear. It’s a billboard on the side of the road
that screams reassurance that whatever you are doing is okay. You are
okay.”
Much as Lucifer (“Light Bearer”) after his descent becomes Satan
(“The Adversary”), Don Draper undergoes a name transformation as
well. Born in Pennsylvania coal country and originally named “Dick
Whitman,” Don ultimately stole the identity of a commanding officer
killed alongside him in the Korean War. The name “Satan” is hardly ever
used in Paradise Lost; in Mad Men it is rather Draper’s original name
that is rarely heard. Don’s transformation from Dick Whitman into Don
Draper is not a descent in the same manner as Lucifer being cast out of
Paradise; after all, the offices and apartments of Madison Avenue seem
an obvious and extreme improvement in Don’s life. Yet the flight from
his authentic self is its own type of moral exile, even if it results in mate-
rial improvements. It is also a fulfillment of a certain trope of American
self-invention that is so exact that it almost seems parodic. In the same
way that names are so important in Paradise Lost in their manner of sign-
aling certain essential or acquired attributes, Mad Men enacts a similar
importance in terms of the relationship of name to identity: Don’s birth
name of “Dick Whitman,” with its association to that most iconic of
American poets (who was, after all, the author of “Advertisements for
Myself”) into the coolly alliterative and almost obviously fake handle of
“Don Draper.” The artifice of his assumed alias enacts one of the central
themes of the show—that we often prefer surfaces, tricks, and illusions
to reality. But this dimension of fakery that seems so promising to Don
is also that which increasingly mires him in his distance, depression, and
addictions. The very thing which promises liberation is in the end that
which shackles him even more, so that we find the American ability to
continually transform is not as redemptive a process as initially under-
stood; the rage which results from such pride is an apt summation of
both the Miltonic Lucifer and the American tragic character.
Don is not the only character from the third golden age of television
that has a name change at the center of his story. Returning to Breaking
Bad, we see Walter ready to make a drug distribution deal with a rival
dealer from Phoenix. With both sides standing uneasily at a distance
Walter asks the rival to “Now, say my name.” Declan, the other dealer,
says “You’re Heisenberg.” The response from Walter: “You’re god-
damned right.”41 This is remembered as an iconic scene from the last
season of the show, often repeated in popular culture, even if some view-
ers may perseverate in its cool allure rather than the dark implications.
In Breaking Bad the adoption of a new identity very literally signifies
Walter’s transformation as he completes his moral descent. Like Don,
Walter’s real name invokes America’s national poet, and in an impor-
tant plot point that reveals his true identity to his brother-in-law who is
a DEA agent, Walt is literally conflated with Whitman.42 And like Don
who rejects a connection with the American bard, he has chosen a new
name signaling his flight from his origins. In the name “Heisenberg”
we have both a scientist’s cheeky joke by being conflated with Werner
Heisenberg, the German physicist who discovered the Uncertainty
Principle, as well as an ontological statement about the unfixed, uncer-
tain, ambiguous nature of human identity itself. Heisenberg is an appro-
priate name for this particularly devilish trickster; like Don, he embraces
surfaces, illusions, and tricks. Trickery is at the heart of the satanic imper-
ative, as the French poet Charles Baudelaire reminds us: “The finest trick
of the devil is to convince you that he doesn’t exist.”43 That the main
characters of Mad Men and Breaking Bad perform a sort of alchemical
inverse, convincing you that the devil does exist, does not remove the fla-
vor of infernal deception—indeed it only serves to reinforce it.
This uncertainty as to the nature of Walter’s true identity, whether he
is truly his original identity, or rather now Heisenberg (or some combi-
nation thereof) is replicated in the reactions of his family members. In
one scene he says to his wife, “You clearly don’t know who you’re talk-
ing to, so let me clue you in. I am not in danger, Skyler. I am the danger.
A guy opens his door and gets shot, and you think that of me? No! I am
286 E. Simon
the one who knocks!”44 This sense of identity in flux, the ultimate free-
dom to be able to completely reorganize not just what you do but also
who you are, lay at the center of Walter’s transformation and his inter-
actions with his family. In that same episode he says to his wife “Who
are you talking to right now? Who is it you think you see?” forcing her
to confront the shifting nature of her husband’s psyche. His hubristic
Luciferian pride is consummate in his new role as Heisenberg: he tells
her, “Do you know what would happen if I suddenly decided to stop
going into work? A business big enough that it could be listed on the
NASDAQ goes belly up. Disappears! It ceases to exist without me.”
Fiedler writes of how Ahab is doomed because in him “the once
heroic act of Perseus becomes an analogue of the Faustian bargain with
the Devil” (384). Indeed, as it was for Ahab and for Lucifer, so it was
for Tony, Don, and Walter. At the center of all these stories is a narra-
tive of descent and transformation through descent, followed by the
self-delusion that because falling sometimes feels like flying that they
are really the same thing. Martin states that “Walter White was insist-
ently, unambiguously, an agent with free will. His journey became a gro-
tesque magnification of the American ethos of self-actualization” (267),
but asks what the implication would be if your best life was a descent
towards evil? In the pilot episode Walter tells his high school students,
“Chemistry is, well technically, chemistry is the study of matter. But I
prefer to see it as the study of change.” Indeed this is precisely what all
of these texts under consideration are also studies of: change. Whether
Dick Whitman into Don Draper, Walter White into Heisenberg, Lucifer
into Satan, or any number of other changes, all of these texts have at
their center a representation of the perils of radical self-invention and the
inevitable incompleteness that can result. This particular myth, and the
dangers surrounding it, is what lies at the heart of the American tragic
character, a Miltonian–Luciferian ethos through and through.
Notes
1. All John Milton quotes are from Paradise Lost, Hackett Classics (New
York, 2005) edited by David Scott Kastan.
2. “Letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne,” The Life and Works of Herman Melville,
http://www.melville.org/letter7.htm, accessed June 17, 2016.
3. Felina, directed by Vince Gilligan (2013; New York, AMC).
4. Consult Percy Shelley’s The Major Works (Oxford, 2009) edited by

Zachary Leader.
5. Vince Gilligan. Teaser Trailer for Breaking Bad. Film. Performed by Bryan
Cranston (2013; New York, AMC).
6. Brett Martin’s Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution:
From the Sopranos and the Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad (New
York, 2014).
7. Pilot, directed by Vince Gilligan (2008; New York, AMC).
8. As quoted in Brett Martin’s Difficult Men.
9. Jeffrey Burton Russell’s Mephistopheles: The Devil in the Modern World
(Ithaca, NY, 1990).
10. Stanley Fish’s Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost (Cambridge
MA, 1968).
11. Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel (New York, 1965).
12. Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Idea
in America (Oxford, 1967).
13. Edward Simon. “Cotton Mather, Heterodox Puritanism, and the
Construction of America.” Puritans and Catholics in the Trans-Atlantic
World, 1600–1800. Ed. Crawford Gribben and Scott Spurlock. London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. 164–74.
14. Consult D. H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature (New
York, 1923).
15. C. S. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost (Oxford, 1961).
16. Robin Grey Melville and Milton: An Edition and Analysis of Melville’s
Annotations on Milton (Pittsburgh, PA, 2004).
17. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick: or the Whale (New York, 1992) edited by
Rockwell Kent.
18. Lawrence Buell, The Dream of the Great American Novel (Cambridge,
MA, 2016).
19. As quoted in William Spengemann’s A New World of Words: Redefining
Early American Literature (New Haven, CT, 1994).
20. Nigel Smith, Is Milton Better Than Shakespeare? (Cambridge, MA, 2008).
21. As quoted in William Spengemann’s A New World of Words: Redefining
Early American Literature (New Haven, CT, 1994).
22. Nigel Smith, Is Milton Better Than Shakespeare? (Cambridge, MA, 2008).
23. Robin Grey, Melville & Milton: An Edition and Analysis of Melville’s
Annotations on Milton (Pittsburgh, PA, 2004).
24. As quoted in Lawrence Buell’s The Dream of the Great American Novel
(Cambridge, MA, 2014).
25. As quoted in John Williams, “Ahab, Huck and Walt.” New York Times,
October 11, 2013.
288 E. Simon
26. Rich Bellis, “What Great Literary Work Explains Breaking Bad best?” The
Atlantic, October 2, 2013.
27. Albert Wu and Michelle Kuo, “In Hell, ‘We Shall Be Free:’ On Breaking
Bad.” The LA Review of Books, July 13, 2012.
28. As quoted in June Thomas, “Talking with Chuck Klosterman.” Newsday,
August 1, 2013.
29. Alyssa Rosenberg,“Tony Soprano Lives—and That is the Perfect
Punishment for Him.” The Washington Post, August 27, 2014.
30. Ron Ben Tovim,“Call me Don Draper: ‘Madman begets Mad Men.’”
Salon, May 31, 2013.
31. George DeStefano, An Offer We Can’t Refuse: The Mafia in the Mind of
America (New York, 2007).
32. Michael Mckeon, The Origins of the Novel, 1600–1749 (Baltimore, MD,
1987).
33. Jack Miles, God: A Biography (New York, 1996).
34. White Caps, directed by John Patterson (2002; New York, HBO).
35. All Due Respect, directed by John Patterson (2004; New York, HBO).
36. Christopher, directed by Tim van Patten (2002; New York, HBO).
37. College, directed by Allen Coulter (1999; New York, HBO).
38. James Walton, “Mad Men: The Most Literary Show on TV.” The
Telegraph, March 27, 2012.
39. Josh Rothman,“Was ‘The Wire’ the Best Victorian Novel Ever?” The
Boston Globe, March 24, 2011.
40. Fly, directed by Rian Johnson (2010; New York, AMC).
41. Say my Name, directed by Thomas Schnauze (2012; New York, AMC).
42. Gliding Over All, directed by Michelle MacLaren (2012; New York,
AMC).
43. Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil, Oxford World Classics (Oxford,
2008).
44. Cornered, directed by Michael Slovis (2011; New York, AMC).
Bibliography
All Due Respect, directed by John Patterson (2004; New York, HBO).
Baudelaire, Charles. The Flowers of Evil (Oxford World Classics) (Oxford, 2008).
Bellis, Rich. “What Great Literary Work Explains Breaking Bad best?” The
Atlantic. October 2, 2013.
Ben Tovim, Ron. “Call me Don Draper: ‘Mad Men begets Mad Men.’” Salon.
May 31, 2013.
Buell, Lawrence. The Dream of the Great American Novel (Cambridge MA,
2016).
Christopher, directed by Tim van Patten (2002; New York, HBO).
College, directed by Allen Coulter (1999; New York, HBO).

Cornered, directed by Michael Slovis, (2011; New York, AMC).
DeStefano, George. An Offer We Can’t Refuse: The Mafia in the Mind of
America (New York, 2007).
Felina, directed by Vince Gilligan (2013; New York, AMC).
Fiedler, Leslie. Love and Death in the American Novel (New York, 1965).
Fish, Stanley. Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost (Cambridge MA,
1968).
Fly, directed by Rian Johnson (2010; New York, AMC).
Gliding Over All, directed by Michelle MacLaren, (2012; New York, AMC).
Grey, Robin. Melville and Milton: An Edition and Analysis of Melville’s
Annotations on Milton (Pittsburgh PA, 2004).
Gilligan, Vince. Teaser Trailer for Breaking Bad. Film. Performed by Bryan
Cranston. 2013. New York City: AMC.
Lawrence, D. H. Studies in Classic American Literature (New York, 1923).
Lewis, C. S. A Preface to Paradise Lost (Oxford, 1961).
Martin, Brett. Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From the
Sopranos and the Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad (New York, 2014).
Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Idea in
America (Oxford, 1967).
McKeon, Michael. The Origins of the Novel, 1600-1749 (Baltimore MD, 1987).
Miles, Jack. God: A Biography (New York, 1996).
Milton, John. Paradise Lost, edited by David Scott Kasten, Hacket Classics,
2005.
Melville, Herman. “Letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne,” The Life and Works of
Herman Melville, accessed June 17, 2016, http://www.melville.org/letter7.
htm.
Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick: or the Whale (New York, 1992) edited by
Rockwell Kent.
Pilot, directed by Vince Gilligan (2008; New York, AMC).
Rosenberg, Alyssa. “Tony Soprano Lives – and That is the Perfect Punishment
for Him.” The Washington Post. August 27, 2014.
Rothman, Josh. “Was ‘The Wire’ the Best Victorian Novel Ever?” The Boston
Globe. March 24, 2011.
Russell, Jeffrey Burton. Mephistopheles: The Devil in the Modern World (Ithaca
NY, 1990).
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Spengemann, William. A New World of Words: Redefining Early American

Literature (New Haven CT, 1994).
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Wu, Albert and Michelle Kuo. “In Hell, ‘We Shall Be Free:’ On Breaking Bad.”
The LA Review of Books, July 13, 2012.
CHAPTER 15
Reading the Devil in the Landscape
Deborah C. Bowen
If you take a look around the geography that you know, you may agree
that it is little short of extraordinary how much the devil has gotten his
name all over the map. For a start, at least 105 of the canyons in the U.S.
are called “Devil’s Canyon.” One enterprising researcher for the State
Atlas of Connecticut has charted that whole state in terms of its devil-
ish cartography and found that its landscape is “pockmarked with place
names bearing the Devil’s name or home”—32 of them, in fact. “These
names were given,” says the writer, “because legends told that the Devil
actually visited these places, or they looked like places he would feel com-
fortable …. From a historical perspective this leads to the state’s founding
Puritans. The hard-working no-nonsense Puritans believed the Devil was
always about. Certain places, they felt, should be named justly to avoid
[sic] settlers from entering.”1 Indeed, the names clearly refer to an actively
present being, and some are notably anthropocentric: the article lists five
named “Devil’s Den”, four “Devil’s Backbone”, two “Devil’s Footprint”,
two “Devil’s Kitchen”, and also singular instances of the “Devil’s Pulpit,”
“Devil’s Mouth,” “Devil’s Belt,” “Devil’s Dripping Pan,” and “Devil’s
Hopyard.” And that’s only in Connecticut. So perhaps it was just too
tempting for a graphic designer from Salt Lake City not to go much
D.C. Bowen (*) 
Redeemer University College, Ancaster, Canada

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-52198-5_15
292 D.C. Bowen
further, and make a United States Devil Map that is available in full
screen,2 demonstrating, as John Metcalfe put it in the October 2013 issue
of The Atlantic, “a fantastic example of how a nation’s burning obsession
with the supernatural has influenced its entire cartography.”3
This approach to cartography falls under the heading of what has
come to be called the new “cultural geography” which has burgeoned
since the 1990s, and which examines how landscape is socially con-
structed, particularly considering the influence of literature, art, and
politics.4 And yes, in this evidence of the devil’s name inscribed all over
North America, we might descry an obsession with the supernatural.
But why the devil, rather than the Lord? Should we see this tendency to
read the devil, and not the divine, into extreme landscapes as suggesting
an embodiment of spiritual danger? In any case, we cannot just blame
the Puritans: the devil’s name predates the Puritans on dramatic features
of the landscape all over the Western world. I grew up near a Devil’s
Punchbowl in Surrey, England, and there were lots of colorful local leg-
ends explaining its creation. According to one story, during the Middle
Ages the devil became so irritated by all the churches being built in
Sussex, the next county over, that he decided to dig a channel from the
English Channel, through the South Downs, and flood the area. As he
began digging, he threw up huge lumps of earth, each of which became
a local landmark; his work produced, for instance, those distinctive fea-
tures of the region known as Chanctonbury Ring, Cissbury Ring, Mount
Caburn, and Rackham Hill. When he reached an area which became
known as the Devil’s Dyke, he was disturbed in his nefarious night-time
activities by an early cock crowing, because the solicited prayers of St.
Dunstan had induced all the local cocks to sound off earlier than usual.
Thinking that dawn was about to break, and aware that his was the time
of darkness, the devil made a huge leap into Surrey, slightly further west,
creating the Devil’s Punch Bowl where he landed.5
So, we are prompted to ask, how come the devil seems to get so
many of the best views? Might this tendency to give the devil’s name
to particularly impressive features of the landscape be somehow related
to the notion of “the sublime?” Though we popularly associate that
term with apprehensions of the divine, actually back in the eighteenth
century Edmund Burke characterized the sublime as an attribute of
things that are “fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and dan-
ger,” as long as the observer is himself safe, and therefore able to experi-
ence a “delightful horror” rather than a painful terror.6 Similarly, Kant’s
15 READING THE DEVIL IN THE LANDSCAPE 293
notion of the “negative pleasure” we get in experiencing what he called

nature’s “dynamically sublime” stems from our ability to formulate an
“admiration or respect” for nature’s overwhelming power, while again
presupposing a safe vantage point for the observer. The sight of volca-
noes, waterfalls, overhanging rocks, or a tumultuous ocean “is the more
attractive,” says Kant, “the more fearful it is, provided only that we are
in security; and we willingly call these objects sublime, because they raise
the energies of the soul above their accustomed height and discover in
us a faculty of resistance … which gives us courage to measure ourselves
against the apparent almightiness of nature.”7 Perhaps the devil’s land-
scape is so called when security is deemed unavailable, or suspect, and
when without the warning device of the devil’s name the terror and
fear might predominate instead of that “delightful horror” or “negative
pleasure.” Perhaps the faculty of mental resistance is the very faculty that
names the devil in the landscape.
And perhaps unsurprisingly, it is in postmodern theory that we find
the most telling expression of this notion of the sublime as unavoidably
unsafe. For if “knowledge and experience are inextricably bound to each
other,”8 a tenet widely accepted by theorists of the postmodern, then
no safe vantage point for a would-be observer of the sublime is in fact
available. Jean-François Lyotard in 1979 argued that, traditionally, all the
artist has been able to do is to “mak[e] an allusion to the unpresent-
able by means of visible presentations”; Kant himself, says Lyotard, “cites
the commandment, ‘Thou shalt not make graven images’ (Exodus), as
the most sublime passage in the Bible in that it forbids all presentation
of the Absolute.”9 However, what a proto-postmodernist like James
Joyce does is to “allow the unpresentable to become perceptible in …
the signifier,” in order to “put forward the unpresentable in presentation
itself.” Postmodern aesthetics, Lyotard argues, “denies itself the solace
of good forms,” and searches for new presentations “in order to impart a
stronger sense of the unpresentable.”10 Lyotard’s call is to “let us be wit-
nesses to the unpresentable.” Is there a sense in which the devil’s name
in the landscape is doing just that? (Fig 15.1).
I want to look specifically at three literary instances of this phenom-
enon, to see what insight might be gained from stories consciously focus-
ing on these issues. There are any number of texts we could explore; in
the interests of aiming for the greatest breadth of coverage in a small
space I will consider three, all written by Christians, but from three dif-
ferent landscapes, in three different countries, couched in three different
294 D.C. Bowen
Fig. 15.1 Evening lake-sky. “Witness to the unpresentable” (original photo-

graph by John Bowen, summer July 2009. Reproduced with permission)
genres, and over a hundred years apart. On the Russian steppes, the
shape-shifting devil tempts a man to his death by manipulating his
greedy desire for more and more land.11 In southern Ontario, the setting
of the Devil’s Punch Bowl prompts a poetic meditation on the impossi-
bility of protecting the innocent from human fallenness.12 And in North
Dakota, “a devilish little man,” inhabiting the Badlands where fire con-
tinually spurts out of the earth, allures three young people through their
particular physical and psychological weaknesses, stealing their allegiance,
their freedom, and their very breath; even after committing murder he
avoids capture and lives on beyond the novel.13 In each case, the devil is
mapped onto the landscape in such a way that his power is felt as imme-
diately threatening and apparently unquenchable.
In the opening tableau of Leo Tolstoy’s 1886 story, “How Much
Land Does a Man Need?” two sisters are found disputing the value of
town life versus country life. The no-nonsense life of the peasant farmer
may not be grand but it is secure, says the country wife, and her hus-
band, listening from on top of the stove, agrees: “Our only trouble is
that we haven’t land enough. If I had plenty of land, I shouldn’t fear

the devil himself!” Unfortunately for him, the devil is eavesdropping
from behind the stove. “All right,” he thinks, “We will have a tussle. I’ll
give you land enough; and by means of that land I will get you into my
power.”14 The story tracks the peasant’s progress through ever-larger
acquisitions of land, the human relationships shrinking and decaying
as the physical spaces expand. At the end of the story, when in various
human disguises the devil has fulfilled his destructive plan, we come to
a final image of six feet of land: all that is needed to bury a man whose
greed has driven him to his death.
The story reads like a parable, or a particularly didactic folk-tale. The
devil appears to have control over the landscape through moral suasion;
the implication is that the peasant farmer could withstand temptation if
his desires were less egocentric. Tellingly, Tolstoy has the farmer dream a
powerful dream the night before his final defeat: in this dream, the men
who have led him into land purchases all devolve into one figure, “the
Devil himself with hoofs and horns, sitting there and chuckling,” and
it becomes clear that the dead man lying in front of him is the farmer
himself.15 However, so far into his greedy plans is the farmer that he is
unable to respond with more than a momentary shrug: “‘What things
one does dream,’ thought he.”16 After all, what safer vantage point could
there be than that of the man who awakes from a dream? Before him lie
the Russian steppes, stretching out as far as the eye can see—a view of
an unspoiled wilderness of good farmland (Fig. 15.2). One present-day
environmentalist has written about the history of wilderness as “a land-
scape where the supernatural [lies] just beneath the surface,” and that
can mean both the devil and the divine: “One might meet devils and
run the risk of losing one’s soul in such a place, but one might also meet
God.”17 In Tolstoy’s story we are left with the impression that the peas-
ant farmer too might have met with grace in the wilderness, if not with
God Himself, if he would have listened to his dream instead of his greed.
Second, a poem by contemporary Canadian poet John Terpstra.
Here there is no devil character per se, but the setting is at the very edge
of a Devil’s Punch Bowl where the poet stands with his young daugh-
ter (Fig. 15.3). He has his arm around her waist as she stands on the
fence, the “narrow / band of water dropping / into the gorged hollow,
elbowing / around the boulders a good / two hundred feet below /
our feet.” The poet muses, “I haven’t dreamt / of falling since I was
young enough / to be your brother,” and back then “the falling always
296 D.C. Bowen
Fig. 15.2 The Russian steppes, “a landscape where the supernatural [lies] just
below the surface” (by User Shizhao on zh.wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Mongolian-Manchurian_grassland#/media/File:Grasslands-menggu.JPG)
became / flying, landing softly.” But in the present, “I know what rocks
awake / and men can do, now / There is no true protection / Forgive
me.”18 Thus the poem ends, the poet in his mature knowledge unable
to provide any ultimate safety for his child against any number of falls,
other than the present physical one. And he feels guilt about this, by
reason of his human nature making him complicit in “what men can
do” to innocence, and recognizing his inadequacy as a protecting par-
ent. The distance between the observer and the observed is radically
conflated here: there is no safety, and one might say that the negative
sublime therefore wins out, turning the primary response into the wry
fearfulness of experience.
Since he lives in my neighbourhood, it happened that I was able to
ask Terpstra in person about the devil in this poem. I wanted to know
how deeply the name of the site—the Devil’s Punch Bowl—related to
Fig. 15.3 The Devil’s Punch Bowl, Hamilton, Ontario—the negative sublime

(https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10153911779665470&set=g.13
358248908&type=1&theater)
298 D.C. Bowen
the end of the poem: “I know what rocks awake / and men can do,
now. / There is no true protection. / Forgive me.” “Well, I guess the
poem wouldn’t have been written anywhere else,” he said.19 Here, then,
is the issue of naming in cultural geography working as a kind of back
formation: because this chasm is named after the devil, Terpstra is set to
thinking not just about its beauty, and not even just about the danger it
presents, but also about the theological issues of human fallenness and
human culpability in face of the young and the vulnerable. And so we
might say that this text too presents a kind of parable, though with fewer
hints of a way to safety than in Tolstoy’s. Here, unlike in Tolstoy’s story,
the natural feature itself embodies both physical and spiritual danger.
And then, third, a contemporary novel. Leif Enger’s Peace Like a
River came out in 2001 to popular critical acclaim. It is a present-day
Western romance, set in Minnesota and the North Dakota Plains, with
a great deal to say about the place of miracles in everyday life. The char-
acter through whom miraculous events occur is the narrator’s father,
Jeremiah Land, both halves of whose name are obviously significant,
and who not only begat his son Reuben but commanded him back to
life out of the terrifying unbreathing of his first moments. Jeremiah’s
prayers for his children are so intense that one night he walks right off
the flatbed truck on which he is pacing in earnest intercession, contin-
ues walking on thin air, and then returns to the truck none the wiser.
Jeremiah’s hospitality, poverty, and faith are such that a special soup he
makes for his daughter’s birthday keeps bountifully feeding the family
and an uninvited guest long after it must logically have been finished.
And Jeremiah’s compassion leads him to reach out and heal the boil-
infested face of a man who has just unfairly fired him. The miracles grad-
ually change in kind as the book progresses: Jeremiah and two of his kids
drive unseen through a state bristling with troopers on the lookout for
them, and Reuben comes to understand that their whole lives have been
miraculously guided. Gradually he appreciates the internal miracles: that
Jeremiah is able to forgive his enemies; that Reuben can repent of his
own hatred; and finally that his life is miraculously saved by his father’s
sacrificial death on his behalf.
But precisely because this book is about miracles and compassion and
forgiveness, it needs also to give the reader a powerful representation of
evil. At first evil is personified as “the devil called Valdez,” a wild “ban-
dit king”20 in the Western epic poem that Reuben’s precociously tal-
ented little sister Swede is writing in parallel to the events of their daily
Fig. 15.4 The Badlands—garden or grave. North Dakota Badlands (Britannica

Online for Kids, http://kids.britannica.com/comptons/art-163471)
lives. When her older brother Davy is on trial for shooting two high-
school dropouts who invade the Lands’ home seeking to molest Swede,
and it looks as though Davy is going to lose badly, she finds she can’t
kill Valdez off in her poem—what he represents is too powerful. There
can be no place of safety. Slowly Reuben and Swede come to “an unrea-
soning fear that Valdez was no invention. That he was real and coming
toward us on solid earth.”21 When the family are trekking west to look
for Davy who has broken out of jail, Reuben in an asthma attack dreams
of “a little devilish fellow” who steals his breath and trusses it all up in a
skin bag.
And then indeed the devil appears fully personified in Jape Waltzer,
a man of apocalyptic vision and megalomaniac anti-Christian sensibility
who has set up camp, with Davy in tow, in the North Dakota Badlands
(Fig. 15.4). On Reuben’s first encounter with him, as an asthma attack
is coming on, Waltzer tries to force him to breathe, but instead Reuben
passes out, and dreams for a second time that a man with a skin bag has
“harvested” his breath:
300 D.C. Bowen
The moment of highest peril in that dream came when he crouched down
peering at my face. His eyes were windows through which I glimpsed an
awful country. I don’t like telling about it. The point here is that for a long
while I walked in a gray place where I felt again that little man’s presence.
Across a landscape of killed grass and random boulders I moved, look-
ing for something I needed. In the dream I didn’t even know it was my
breath. I thought of it as a thing packed tight in a seamed bag. I knew
who had it and knew I hadn’t the strength to take it from him, yet there
I was in his country. A sunless place – the cold from the ground came up
through my shoes. The boulders lay everywhere and cast no shadows, and
they were the same color as the dead grass and as the sky. I smelled decay
on the wind …. I had the sense of walking through an old battlefield upon
which the wrong side had prevailed. It was the little man’s country …. It
was colder every second and the smell of decay strengthened and mixed
with sulfur as I heard his nimble steps. Even shuteyed I knew what he
would do …. “Reuben,” he whispered. “Look at me.”22
This is terrifying stuff, reminiscent of Stephen Dedalus’ personal picture

of hell in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The landscape is vitally
significant here. This is very far from the sublime and terrible of Burke
and Kant—it does nothing to “raise the energies of the soul”; rather, it
is what Reuben calls a “dead country,” and we may recall from Scripture
“him who has the power of death, that is, the devil.”23 “The little man’s
country” is a gray place of killed grass and random boulders; it is sunless
and cold; the wind smells of decay and sulphur; it is an “old battlefield
upon which the wrong side had prevailed.”
Enger’s picture of the devil is particularly powerful because the devil
inhabits not only the world of Swede’s ballads, and not only the land-
scape of Reuben’s dreams, but also the realities of the everyday—and of
the future. Waltzer tells Reuben he is waiting for the world to change,
when “those hills you rode over will be shaken to dust, and … waters
will rise up in their place, and … creatures like none you can think of will
swim in that sea.”24 It is not coincidental that Waltzer has a “country,”
albeit an imaginary one. In telling contrast, at the end of the novel in
one of the most audacious scenes in contemporary fiction, Reuben and
Jeremiah, both shot by Waltzer, find themselves in “the next country”
of heaven, where Jeremiah continues on to eternity, but Reuben, whose
life Jeremiah has exchanged for his own, returns to this world with com-
pletely healed lungs. Reuben tells us, “The pulse of the country worked
through my body until I recognized it as music. As language. And the
language ran everywhere inside me, like blood …. Is it fair to say that
country is more real than ours? That its stone is harder, its water more
drenching—that the weather itself is alert and not just background?”25
Waltzer’s gray and death-filled apocalyptic country is the antithesis of
the glorious apocalyptic country of Jeremiah’s Master. It is striking that
the landscape of the everyday world works differently for those who
acknowledge that Master: the Badlands as inhabited by Waltzer run
with veins of fire that bring death to the enemy he bludgeons into them,
whereas for Jeremiah and his family these same Badlands are a “miracu-
lous” place, a “garden of fire” which warms their winter picnic.26
But earlier, Davy listening to Swede’s presentation of Valdez has said
that he is “exactly right: savage, random, wolflike—and also probably
uncatchable, right down through time.”27 And it proves true that Waltzer
is “as uncatchable as Swede’s own Valdez.”28 Insofar as Valdez and
Waltzer represent the principle of evil at work in the world—represent, in
fact, the devil—it is entirely appropriate both that they should be unkill-
able in worldly time, and that they should be unimportant in heavenly
time. Enger’s master-stroke is to convey this reality through the charac-
ters’ relationship to the land, so that those who, like Waltzer, have done
their gruesome worst will go on to mischief elsewhere; those who, like
Davy, are in conflict with their own behaviors can live only in exile; and
those who, like Reuben and his family, have rightly conquered may enjoy
the fruits of the soil and await fulfilment in “the next country”: “I’ve been
there and am going back,” says Reuben, at the end of the novel.29
And so in these literary examples the devil does not, in the end, get all
the best views. In Enger’s novel, the Badlands are a place of danger and
death for those in league with the devil, but a place of grace for those in
grace. Tolstoy’s grassy Russian steppes have a similar relationship to the
demonic and the divine; Terpstra’s chasm, though it prompts sobering
reflection, does not lead to death, but to a deeper relationship between
the poet and his child. If cultural geography shows human beings as likely
to name the devil before the divine, this is not the fault of the landscape.
The job of the artist, says Lyotard, is to trouble our comfortable pieties
about what is real and how we relate to it. Perhaps, then, this is a job that
the signifier of the devil has been performing in our landscape for centu-
ries; within such a signifier is the suggestion of the dark sublime, in that
it is too great for us either to control or to observe from a safe distance.
Terpstra articulates this sensibility at the end of “Devil’s Punch Bowl.”
Enger recognizes it in the indestructibility of his devil characters. We read
302 D.C. Bowen
Fig. 15.5 Jonathan Day (jeighdeigh), “Bach In Heaven” (http://jeighdeigh.

deviantart.com/art/Bach-In-Heaven-356322546) Reproduced with permission
into the landscape what we fear, or what we are seduced by, more readily
than what we worship. But the Christian must also recognize the power
that lies in being able to name the devil as a warning device of distan-
ciation in these extreme geographical locations; as Enger so dramatically
shows us, the devil’s landscape of death is always exceeded by the sublime
reality of a God whose country is eternally alive (Fig. 15.5). “The pulse of
the country worked through my body until I recognized it as music. As
language. And the language ran everywhere inside me, like blood …. Is it
fair to say that country is more real than ours?”30 Selah.
Notes
1. http://members.tripod.com/ct_atlas/history/devil.html.
2. http://visualizing.org/visualizations/united-states-devil-map.
3. John Metcalfe, writing in The Atlantic’s “City Lab”, October 29, 2013,
http://www.citylab.com/design/2013/10/take-hellish-tour-americas-
most-satanic-landmarks/7396/.
4. Carolyn Podruchny, “Writing, Ritual and Folklore: Imagining the

Cultural Geography of Voyageurs,” Method and Meaning in Canadian
Environmental History, ed. Alan MacEachern and William J. Turkel
(Toronto: Nelson, 2009), 55–74; 56.
5. Details from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil%27s_Punch_Bowl.
6. Edmund Burke, Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of
the Sublime and Beautiful [1757], qtd in M. H. Abrams and Geoffrey
Galt Harpham, “Sublime,” in A Glossary of Literary Terms, 10th edn.
(Stamford, CT: Cengage, 2012), 390.
7. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment [1790], Second Book: “Analytic
of the Sublime,” The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary
Trends, 2nd edn., ed. David H. Richter (Boston: Bedford, 1998), 275.
8. Philip Rice and Patricia Waugh, eds., Modern Literary Theory: A Reader, 4th
edn. (New York: Hodder Arnold/Oxford University Press, 2001), 326.
9. Jean-François Lyotard, “Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?”,
The Postmodern Condition [1979], trans. R. Durand (1986), 71–82, in Rice
and Waugh, 335–7.
10. Lyotard in Rice and Waugh, 337.
11. Leo Tolstoy, “How Much Land Does a Man Need?” [1886], rpt. in
Shadow and Light: Literature and the Life of Faith, 3rd edn, ed. Darryl
Tippens, Jeanne Murray Walker, and Stephen Weathers (Abilene, TX:
Abilene Christian University Press, 2013), 203–17.
12. John Terpstra, “Devil’s Punch Bowl,” Devil’s Punch Bowl (Toronto: St.
Thomas Poetry Series, 1998), 9–10.
13. Leif Enger, Peace Like a River (New York: Grove Press, 2001).
14. Tolstoy, 204.
15. Tolstoy, 213.
16. Tolstoy, 213.
17. William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to
the Wrong Nature” [1995], Ecocriticism: The Essential Reader, ed. Ken
Hiltner (London and New York: Routledge, 2015), 102–19; 104.
18. Terpstra, “Devil’s Punch Bowl.”
19. John Terpstra, in conversation with the author, July 11, 2014.
20. Enger, 27.
21. Enger, 101.
22. Enger, 237.
23. Hebrews 2:14.
24. Enger, 228.
25. Enger, 302–3.
26. Enger, 198.
27. Enger, 298.
28. Enger, 309.
304 D.C. Bowen
29. Enger, 311.
30. Enger, 303.
Bibliography
Bowen, John. “Evening lake-sky: witness to the unpresentable.” Original photo-
graph. July 2009.
Burke, Edmund. Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime
and Beautiful. 1757. Qtd in M.H. Abrams and Geoffrey Galt Harpham,
“Sublime.” A Glossary of Literary Terms, 10th ed. Stamford, CT: Cengage,
2012. 389–92.
Cronon, William. “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong
Nature.” 1995. Ecocriticism: The Essential Reader. Ed. Ken Hiltner. London
& New York: Routledge, 2015. 102–119.
Day, Jonathan. “Bach in heaven.” Original painting. http://jeighdeigh.devian-
tart.com/art/Bach-In-Heaven-356322546.
Enger, Leif. Peace Like a River. New York: Grove P, 2001.
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. 1790. Second Book: “Analytic of the
Sublime.” The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, 2nd
ed. David H. Richter, ed. Boston: Bedford, 1998. 275.
Lyotard, Jean-François. “Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?” The
Postmodern Condition. 1979. Tr. R. Durand, 1986. Rice and Waugh, 335–37.
Metcalfe, John. “City Lab.” The Atlantic, October 29, 2013. http://www.city-
lab.com/design/2013/10/take-hellish-tour-americas-most-satanic-land-
marks/7396/.
“North Dakota Badlands.” Britannica Online for Kids. Photograph. Accessed
April 1, 2016. http://kids.britannica.com/comptons/art-163471.
Podruchny, Carolyn. “Writing, Ritual and Folklore: Imagining the Cultural
Geography of Voyageurs.” Method and Meaning in Canadian Environmental
History. Ed. AlanMacEachern and William J. Turkel. Toronto: Nelson, 2009.
55–74.
Rice, Philip and Patricia Waugh, ed.s. Modern Literary Theory: A Reader, 4th ed.
New York: Hodder Arnold/Oxford U P, 2001.
Shizhao. “Russian Steppes: Mongolian grasslands.” Photograph on zh.wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolian-Manchurian_grassland#/media/
File:Grasslands-menggu.JPG.
Terpstra, John. “Devil’s Punch Bowl.” 1998. Two or Three Guitars: Selected
Poems. Kentville, NS: Gaspereau, 2006. 113.
Tolstoy, Leo. “How Much Land Does a Man Need?” 1886. Rpt in Shadow and
Light: Literature and the Life of Faith, 3rd ed. Darryl Tippens, Jeanne Murray
Walker & Stephen Weathers, ed.s. Abilene, TX: Abilene Christian U P, 2013.
203–17.
CHAPTER 16
A Landscape of the Damned: Evil

and Nothingness in Cormac McCarthy’s
Outer Dark
Matthew Potts
Cormac McCarthy’s Outer Dark is—as its title warns—an incredibly dark
novel, grim to a degree rare even among the author’s grim corpus. As
the novel opens, Culla Holme and his sister Rinthy are living a reclusive
life somewhere in the woods of Johnson County, Kentucky. Rinthy deliv-
ers a baby, whom we soon surmise has been fathered by Culla, where-
upon Culla takes the child out into the woods and leaves it to die in a
small clearing as it “howls execration upon the dim caramine world of
its nativity wail on wail while [Culla] lay there gibbering with palsied
jawhasps, his hands putting back the night like some witless paraclete
beleaguered with all limbo’s clamor.”1 A tinker wanders through the
clearing, finds the child, and takes it as his own. Meanwhile, Culla has
told Rinthy the child died and was buried, but when Rinthy unearths the
false grave and finds it empty, she leaves in search of “her chappy.” Culla
then follows in search of Rinthy. The novel is the episodic recounting of
their respective wanderings as they travel by foot throughout Kentucky.
M. Potts (*) 
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-52198-5_16
306 M. Potts
Oddly, however, a strange trio of men begins to follow Culla as he wan-

ders after Rinthy, and every person with whom Culla interacts ends up
murdered by them. Culla encounters this unholy trinity twice, and these
passages will receive closest attention in this chapter, because—on my
reading—these two scenes offer a rather sophisticated consideration of
the nature of evil, and perhaps even suggest a compelling account of the
relationship between ontology and ethics in Christian life and thought,
between the reality of human being, and the demand of human respon-
sibility.
In the first such scene, Culla comes to a river where a strange ferry-
man forces him to wait for crossing. Eventually, when another passen-
ger arrives on horseback, the ferryman sets off across the river. The ferry
is bound and guided by a complex system of lines that reach across the
river, but rising waters and high winds cause these lines to break and, in
snapping apart, they throw the ferryman and the other passenger and his
horse overboard. The barge drifts unguided before running up against
land. Culla can see a light a short distance from shore and he advances
towards a campfire around which sit the three aforementioned men.
There follows some tense conversation between Culla and the leader of
these three, a bearded man who looks like a minister. As they speak, the
bearded man shares his meal with Culla, a “blackened meat … [with the]
consistency of whang … dusted with ash, [tasting] of sulfur,” and Culla
struggles to swallow it. After a few minutes, Holme looks directly
at the man. The fire [has] died some and he [can] see him better, sitting
beyond it and the scene [compresses] into a kind of depthlessness so that
the black woods beyond them [hang] across his eyes oppressively and the
man [seems] to be seated in the fire itself, cradling the flames to his body
as if there were something there beyond all warming.2
Then the man takes Culla’s new boots from him, a pair Culla has himself
stolen in a previous episode. As they leave Culla by the fire, the bearded
man asks him,
Where was you headin sure enough?

Nowheres, Holme [says].
Nowheres.
16 A LANDSCAPE OF THE DAMNED: EVIL AND NOTHINGNESS … 307
No.
You may get there yet, the man [says]. He [comes] along the edge
of the fire and [stops], looking down at Holme. Holme [can] see
only his legs … The fire has burned low and there [is] but a single
cleft and yellow serpent tongue of flame standing among the coals.3
Then the three depart as the fire dies and Culla is left alone in the
silence.
Before addressing Culla’s second encounter with this trio of men,
allow me briefly to flag some diverse but recognizable signs of hell, dam-
nation, and evil in this first scene. Culla’s passage across the river to the
men’s encampment recalls the classical passage across the River Styx into
Hades, and the mysterious ferryman here might even suggest a sort of
Appalachian Charon. The serpent tongue of flame merges traditional
Christian images of Satan as an ophidian monster with conventional
depictions of hell as a place of fiery torment.4 Even the figure of the man
cradling flames to himself “beyond all warming” seems to note tropes of
Satan as a fallen angel consigned to fiery, unconsuming torment, while
also invoking the freezing cold of Dante’s deepest and furthest circle
of the inferno. So there are clear signals of hell here, but there are also
other, perhaps less recognizable, signs which I will revisit: the ashen,
inedible meat, and that nowhere for which and to which Culla says he is
bound.
Culla’s second encounter with the fearsome trio is more frightening
and consequential. At the end of the novel, Culla chances upon another
clearing in the woods and the three men are there again, gathered once
more around a fire. Above their heads, unseen, hangs the murdered
tinker, and they have the child—Culla and Rinthy’s child—with them.
The boy is mute and docile and badly burned on one side of his body.
The bearded man interrogates Culla again:
Well, I see ye didn’t have no trouble findin us.

I wasn’t huntin ye.
You got here all right for somebody bound elsewhere.
I wasn’t bound nowhere. I just seen the fire.
I like to keep a good fire …
Where you bound?
308 M. Potts
I ain’t, the man said. By nothin. He looked up at Holme. We ain’t

hard to find. Oncet you’ve found us.5
Recognizing the tinker’s things around the campfire, Culla asks after his
sister, and the bearded man asks Culla if this boy is the one his sister
bore:
It ain’t nothin to me.

The bearded one raked a gobbet of clay from his stick and cast it
into the fire. You know what I figure? He said.
What.
I figure you got this thing here in her belly your own self and then
laid it off on that tinker.
I never laid nothin off on no tinker.
I reckon you figured he’d keep him hid for ye.
I never figured nothin.
What did ye have to give him?
I never give nobody nothin. I never had nothin.
Never figured nothin, never had nothin, never was nothin, the man
said. He was looking at nothing at all …
What are you? Holme muttered …
The bearded one smiled. Ah, he said. Now. We’ve heard that one
before, ain’t we?
You ain’t nothin to me.
But the man didn’t seem to hear. He nodded as if spoken to by
other voices.6
The man then takes the child between his legs and draws a knife as he
presses Culla more directly:
What do you want with him? Holme said.

Nothin. No more than you do.
He ain’t nothin to me.
No … What’s his name? the man said.

I don’t know.
He ain’t got nary’n.
No. I don’t reckon. I don’t know.
They say people in hell ain’t got names. But they had to be called
something to get sent there. Didn’t they.
The tinker might have named him.
It wasn’t his to name …
Holme seemed to be speaking to something in the night beyond
them all. My sister would take him, he said. That chap. We could
find her and she’d take him.
Yes, the man said.7
I’ll spare us McCarthy’s florid description of the subsequent and imme-

diate murder of this child. But one detail, perhaps the most gruesome,
must not be overlooked. After the boy’s throat is cut, the bearded man’s
nameless companion approaches, whimpering and antic, then kneels by
the dying child and buries his face in the wound to consume the child’s
blood.
There may not be a better adjective for what I have just described
than hellish, but many of the traditional markers of hell—the ferry-
man, the serpent, and so on—have been left behind. What has come
into prominence in this scene is not only its graphic and disturbing vio-
lence, but also this refrain of “nothin … nothin … nothin” which the
bearded man draws out of Culla, as well as the vampiric consumption of
the dying child’s blood. I believe these two terrible details—the nihilistic
refrain and the drinking of blood—can be meaningfully bound in inter-
pretation. My rationale for this reading will depend, perhaps surprisingly,
upon the Christian theology of Karl Barth.
It’s not uncommon in the critical literature around McCarthy to see
him read as either a nihilist or an existentialist.8 This is partly because
this notion of nothingness recurs thematically in much of McCarthy’s
work and explicitly here. But of course, nihilists and existentialists are not
the only thinkers who theorize nothingness. The concept of nothingness
has served a significant role in Christian systematic and dogmatic reflec-
tions upon the nature of evil since at least the time of Augustine. In this
310 M. Potts
longstanding Christian theological tradition, the nature of evil presents

a severe ontological dilemma. Where God is the source of all being and
goodness, the Christian theologian is left to ponder how and why evil is,
how it can and does exist, from where and for what reason that evil has
any reality. Traditionally, evil has often been articulated as a privation in
goodness and being, as a nothingness that seems real in human experi-
ence due only to the limits of human perception.9 But this understand-
ing of evil as a privation in being and goodness does not always sit easily
for theology.
Among twentieth-century Christian theologians, perhaps none thinks
about nothingness as thoroughly as Karl Barth. In his Church Dogmatics,
Barth shows concern for placing his own account of evil within this
longstanding Christian tradition of nonbeing. But having witnessed the
horrors of midcentury Europe, Barth is also clearly dissatisfied with any
notion of evil as mere privation. The challenge for Barth in his Dogmatics
is thus to demonstrate God as the source of all goodness and being while
simultaneously offering an account of evil that attests to all its awful real-
ity. The nothingness of evil—of the Shoah, of the two world wars—bears
a reality for Barth which mere privation fails to capture.10 The problem
of evil, for Barth, is not a problem in perception but in being itself. As
Barth states, even though God is the source of all being and goodness,
there remains a reality somehow outside the singular reality of God, a
reality “which cannot be overlooked or disowned but must be reckoned
with in all its peculiarity.”11 In other words, the challenge for Barth
here is to reckon with the strangely paradoxical reality and agency of a
nothingness which, almost definitionally, should bear neither reality nor
agency in God’s creation.
Barth’s theological move is clever, and creatively depends upon a
distinctively reformed theology of election, but an explanation of it is
aided by beginning from a brief exposition of his ontology. For Barth,
all being (even the being of God) is grounded in the activity of God. As
he states early in the Church Dogmatics, “God exists in his acts”; “God
is who He is in His works.”12 Or, as he says more forcefully a bit later
on, “to its very deepest depths God’s Godhead consists in the fact that
it is an event—not any event, not events in general, but the event of
His action.”13 Any and all other existing things exist only in relation to
the activity of God. For Barth, all beings must be conditioned and pre-
ceded by God’s prior action and being, and so if the being of God is in
act, then the being of any other beings will be in their activity which
responds and corresponds to God’s prior action. It can be no different

for nothingness, Barth argues, however peculiar the form of nothingness’
being. Thus, Barth concludes, the
ontic reality in which nothingness is real is that of God’s activity as

grounded in his election … Nothingness is that from which God separates
Himself and in face of which He asserts Himself and exerts his positive will
… Nothingness has no existence and cannot be known except as the object
of God’s holy activity … God elects, and therefore [God also] rejects what
He does not elect. God wills, and therefore opposes what He does not
will. He says Yes, and therefore says No to that to which He has not said
Yes. He works according to His purpose, and in doing so rejects and dis-
misses all that gainsays it … [Nothingness], too, belongs to God. It “is”
problematically because it is only … the object of his jealousy, wrath, and
judgment. It “is” not as God and His creation are, but only in its improper
way, as inherent contradiction, as impossible possibility.14
The repetitive rhetoric of the Dogmatics often demands exposition, but

here the emphasis is clear. Barth’s argument in this passage is that all
things not God exist by the prior action of God and that nothingness
can only be another such thing. Nothingness may be peculiar thing to be
sure, but like any other thing which is not God, it exists only by virtue of
God’s prior act—in this case, as the shadow-side of the act of election.
Because God has offered an eternal Yes, he must also offer an eternal No.
This dialectical simultaneity of justification and judgment is a recurring
theme in Barth’s thought, but here he is especially concerned to draw
out the ontological implications.15 Election coincides with rejection, it
conditions and gives rise to its opposite, and so nothingness can come
into its own peculiar existence as the object of God’s rejection through
the grace of God’s election.
It might seem here that Barth is merely begging the question: noth-
ingness is the object of a divine rejection which becomes real in being
thus rejected. But how can this resolve the dilemmas of nothingness’ odd
reality and agency? Where did this nothingness come from, we might
respond, that it could be rejected by God in the first place? But such
questions would miss the point of Barth’s larger ontological scheme.
When Barth writes that “Nothingness has no existence and cannot be
known except as the object of God’s holy activity,” we might substitute
any other word for “Nothingness” (“das Nichtige”) and the sentence
312 M. Potts
would remain entirely consistent with Barth’s larger theological scheme.

All being is the object of God’s activity. For Barth, everything is condi-
tioned by God and God’s being is itself the event of divine action. Any
and every other thing only exists as the object of God’s holy activity and
Nothingness is no different, however shadowy and peculiar its being may
be. The command is the condition of all being, because God’s activity is
what brings forth being in the first place. When God says, “Let there be
light,” for example, that divine command doesn’t flip a switch on a pre-
existing cosmic light bulb. The fundamentally creative power of God’s
divine command creates both the light and the possibility for darkness,
all at once, in its utterance. What is unique about Barth’s nothingness
is not that it is conditioned and brought into being by the activity of
God; what is unique is that the uniquely prior act of God’s rejection is
implied in the eternally gracious favor of God’s election. Nothingness
only exists as that which God has denied. If creation is the realization to
God’s explicitly eternal Yes, then Nothingness is the realization to God’s
implicitly eternal No.
This theological maneuver—and its implications for the reader of
Cormac McCarthy—might be further illuminated by considering how
Barth’s theological anthropology also follows this conceptual model of
divine and created being-in-action. On Barth’s account, there is no such
thing as a godless human. To be at all is to be in relationship with God,
to live in response to God’s word. Thus human godlessness, Barth says,
is “an ontological impossibility.”16 In the presence of God the human
“cannot retreat into himself”; rather, that divine presence constitutes
the human called into being.17 To retreat from God’s call therefore is
to retreat from being. To be real is to respond rightly to God; God’s
summons conditions any and all human reality, and the human therefore
simply
is the being which is addressed in this way by God. He does not become
this being. He does not first have a kind of nature in which he is then
addressed by God. He does not have something different and earlier and
more intrinsic, a deeper stratum or more original substance of being, in
which he is without or prior to the Word of God. He is from the very out-
set … a being which is summoned by the Word of God.18
Just as the bulb does not already exist to be lighted by God’s command,
the human doesn’t already exist to be addressed by God’s word. The
address itself summons the human into being. Strikingly, Barth states
that when “the reality of human nature is in question, the word ‘real’
is simply equivalent to [the word] ‘summoned.’”19 The real human is
that being uniquely summoned by God, just as Nothingness is that being
uniquely rejected by God.
Interestingly, Barth concludes that this ontology ramifies in eth-
ics. According to Barth, the word of God by which humans are sum-
moned is a word of grace. The only ontologically possible response for
the human to God’s summoning grace, then, is gratitude. There are no
possibilities outside this response. According to Barth, “what is by the
Word of the grace of God, must be in gratitude; and man’s casting his
trust upon God is nothing other or less, but also nothing more, than the
being of man as his act of gratitude.”20 This demands emphasis, I think:
for Barth, responding to grace with gratitude is nothing less and nothing
more than human being itself, and vice versa. Perhaps playing with the
rhetoric of Paul in Romans, Barth dramatically declares that “obedience
without gratitude would be nothing. Love without gratitude would be
nothing. The best and most pious works in the service of God, whatever
they might be, would be nothing if in their whole root and significance
they were not works of gratitude.”21 Note the recurrence of the word
nothing here, of the peculiarly impossible and shadowy ontology that
creeps into the ungrateful human and which recalls what we’ve learned
already about das Nichtige. To be human is to respond to God’s gracious
prior act appropriately, in gratitude; to fail to do so it to invite and incur
one’s own nothingness, to fade thanklessly into unreality.
But thanksgiving is not just a warm feeling of cozy appreciation. For
Barth, it is a moral and social imperative. Gratitude, Barth says, is the
human’s “responsibility to the Word of God spoken to him.”22 When
the human makes herself responsible to God, she makes of her life “a
response to the word of God.”23 In fact, for Barth, these words all carry
the same significance: “being, human thanksgiving,” he writes, “has the
character of responsibility.”24 But response and responsibility are always
embodied and enacted among other humans. This notion of human
responsibility for Barth is never just a general sense. The word of God is
never simply a generality; it is always aimed at particular humans in spe-
cific ways. God’s command “does not hang ineffectively in the air above
man. Its particular aim and concern are with him and his real activity.”25
Nor is the human respondent to God’s command merely “an atom in
empty space, but a man among his fellows, not left to himself in his cases
314 M. Potts
of conscience nor in a position to leave others to themselves.”26 The

proper human response (that is, real human being) with respect to God’s
command is always concrete and particular, with and for other human
beings in their actual historical conditions. Grateful response to God can-
not amount simply to reflection, however reverent, upon God’s word. It
is impossible to overstate the stakes here: for Barth, human response is
human reality, but real response is social and moral. The ethical event is
the constitutive moment of human existence. What one does to and for
others in grateful response to God’s word manifests one’s very creaturely
reality.
It also bears mention that throughout these dramatic passages in the
Dogmatics when Barth speaks of thankfulness, he invokes it in Greek
translation: eucharist. When Barth means thanksgiving, he writes eucha-
rist. Somehow, all this consideration of ethics and ontology in the
Dogmatics is also implicated in communion. Once again: being, human
thanksgiving, has the character of moral responsibility. Rendered in the
jargon of theology then, we might thus say that ontology, eucharist, has
the character of ethics.
Barth’s doctrines of election, divine command, and creation are fun-
damental to his Dogmatics at large and this brief survey must leave aside
much of what is most nuanced and subtle in his work. Nonetheless, I
think this paraphrase of Barth can illuminate some of the horror we have
encountered in Outer Dark. In that scene where the bearded man inter-
rogates Culla just before he murders Culla’s child, the man asks Culla
where he’s bound. Culla replies, “Nowhere,” then responds to the man
with the same question. The bearded man, however, twists the mean-
ing of the phrase slightly. “I’m bound by nothin,” he replies. But his
reply also reveals Culla as likewise bound by and to and for nothing.
As we hear, Culla “never figured nothin, never had nothin, never was
nothin.”27 He is bound nowhere. Since the beginning of this novel,
Culla has repeatedly and specifically rejected his responsibility and there-
fore his own reality; he has failed over and again to respond rightly to the
Yes of God, and so has come under the judgment of God’s No. In a real
way, Culla is no longer real. He has faded into impossibility, or better,
into nothingness.
The evil that lurks throughout this novel, an evil which binds itself to
nothingness, arises as the object of God’s rejection because it arises as
the outcome of Culla’s failure to claim concrete responsibility for all that
he has done and failed to do. He will not claim, he has never claimed, his
child; he refuses to claim the boy as his own—to name him as his own—
even as the child is held at knifepoint and the blade is drawn across his
throat. The bearded man uses these verbs too—claim him, name him—
over and over in their exchange, provoking Culla and challenging him
towards the very responsibility towards which he has been called. As
shown above, the man even taunts Culla, exhorting him to name his
child and take responsibility for it against the others who seek to do so in
Culla’s stead:
They say people in hell ain’t got names. But they had to be called
something to get sent there. Didn’t they.
The tinker might have named him.
It wasn’t his to name …28
This brief exchange suggests how, for both McCarthy and Barth,
being, responsibility, condemnation, and nothingness all hang together.
Nothingness is allowed to overtake and consume this child precisely
because that one who can claim him, that one who is responsible for
him, refuses responsibility. It is important also to note that, although
this child is murdered, he does not appear condemned as Culla is. The
child is nameless, the damned have names. No one has taken responsi-
bility for this child, but he has not failed in his own responsibility. The
nameless child is killed, but it is Culla who has faded into condemnation
because he has failed to respond to this child and to God. What is par-
ticularly Barthian here then is the odd and awful agency Culla’s nothing-
ness takes on in the world. Culla’s irresponsible self-annihilation arises as
real violence for this child. Culla fails to stake the necessary claim, and
we shouldn’t be surprised by this failure, since there is no ethical gap
between allowing a man to cut your son’s throat and leaving that child
to die in a wooded clearing. One is an extension of the other, and each
extends the real and violent reach of das Nichtige in this novel. Against
all the bearded man’s accusations and affronts, Culla only replies, over
and over, “he ain’t nothin to me.”29 “What do you want with him,”
Culla asks the man. “Nothin,” the man replies, “no more than you.”30
Of course, the man is right, and that is exactly the problem.
Given Barth’s eucharistic references above, we might not be surprised
then that Culla’s irresponsibility, this unresponsibility, takes as its unholy
form that of a black mass, an anti-sacrament, a dread eucharist. Recall
316 M. Potts
those ashen pieces of inedible meat that Culla chokes down in the first
hellish encounter, or the blood consumed by the murderer’s mute com-
panion in the second. What Culla and the mute cannibal consume is
a sacrament of das Nichtige, the shadowy but entirely real presence of
nothingness. What McCarthy’s gruesome novel depicts is, in fact, the
terrible reality and agency of nothingness in our world, the hellish and
terribly real form it can take in our lives. What the novel dramatizes is
the relentless collusion of evil with our own improper responses to God,
with our failures to accept our own responsibilities and our failures to
allow ourselves to be bound by and to the grace that has always already
claimed us as real human beings.
Thus it is no surprise that when this frightful novel ends, Culla still
wanders around what should surely be interpreted as—what McCarthy
clearly infers is—hell. Many years later, Culla Holme continues to walk
alone up and down a road that leads back and forth to nowhere, a road
that passes “on through a shadeless burn and for miles there [are] only
the charred shapes of trees in a dead land where nothing move[s] save
windy rifts of ash that [rise] dolorous and [die] again down blackened
corridors.”31 Meanwhile, all before him stretches “a spectral waste out of
which rear[s] only the naked trees in attitudes of agony and dimly homi-
noid figures in a landscape of the damned. A faintly smoking garden of
the dead.”32
Notes
1. Cormac McCarthy, Outer Dark (New York: Vintage International, 1993), 18.
2. Ibid., 179.
3. Ibid., 181.
4. These conventional tropes, though by no means universal, do find some
warrant in Christian scripture. Fiery torment is mentioned by Jesus in his
warnings of judgment (see Matthew 5:22; 18:8, and Mark 9:43). These
saying perhaps influenced early translators of the gospels to render Jesus’
use of the Hebrew loan word gehenna in Greek as “hell” in English.
(Gehenna was a trash-burning site outside the city walls of Jerusalem.)
And the persuasive serpent of Genesis 3 who converses with Eve has
become merged in the Christian imagination with the figure of God’s
adversary Satan.
5. McCarthy, Outer Dark, 232–3.
6. Ibid., 233–4.
7. Ibid., 235–6.
8. Studies of McCarthy as existentialist or nihilist are longstanding. The first
critical studies of McCarthy by Vereen Bell used each of these catego-
ries in a somewhat loose way. See “The Ambiguous Nihilism of Cormac
McCarthy,” Southern Literary Journal 15:2 (Spring 1983): 31–41, and
The Achievement of Cormac McCarthy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 1988). Many others have followed in this tradition. For
more on this critical tendency in reading McCarthy, see the introduction
to my book Cormac McCarthy and the Signs of Sacrament (New York:
Bloomsbury), 2015.
9. See especially book seven of the Confessions for a representative treatment
of the nonbeing of evil by Augustine. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions
(New York: Oxford University Press), 2009, 111–32.
10. It should be noted also that Barth’s use of the term Nichtige—as opposed
to German synonyms such as Nichts—to describe the nothingness of evil
represents a deliberate theological choice aimed at emphasizing the pecu-
liar nature and shadow-being of evil. The English word nothingness fails
somewhat to capture this aspect of Barth’s choice.
11. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III.3, §§50–1 (New York: T. & T. Clark,
2009), 3.
12. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II.1, §§28–30 (New York: T. & T. Clark,
2009), 16, 4.
13. Ibid., 7.
14. Barth, Church Dogmatics III.3, §§50–1, 63.
15. “Christ in us is therefore both the place where we are deprived of our
liberty and the place where we receive it, both the place where we are
judged and the place where we are justified …. The life of the Spirit shines
forth in the light which displays the death of the body: death, because of
the sin which has been condemned in Christ; life, because of the right-
eousness which has been established in Him. Both cohere together, and
the one is known and measured by the other. But the second, because of
its eternal, qualitative pre-eminence, is the dissolution of the first; and it
is therefore the freedom of men in Christ Jesus.” Karl Barth, Epistle to the
Romans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 286.
16. Barth, Church Dogmatics III.3, §§50–1, 63.
17. Ibid., 135.
18. Ibid., 142–3.
19. Ibid, 143.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid., 165.
318 M. Potts
23. Ibid., 182.
24. Ibid., 167.
25. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III.4, §§52–54 (New York: T. & T. Clark,
2009), 3.
26. Ibid., 7.
27. McCarthy, Outer Dark, 233.
28. Ibid., 236.
29. Ibid., 235.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid., 242.
32. Ibid.
Bibliography
Augustin of Hippo, Confessions. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Barth, Karl. Church Dogmatics II.1, §§28–30. New York: T. & T. Clark, 2009.
———. Church Dogmatics III.3, §§50–1. New York: T. & T. Clark, 2009.
———. Church Dogmatics III.4, §§52–4. New York: T. & T. Clark, 2009.
———. Epistle to the Romans. New York: Oxford University Press, 1968.
Bell, Vereen. The Achievment of Cormac McCarthy. Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State University Press, 1988.
———. The Ambiguous Nihilism of Cormac McCarthy. In Southern Literary
Journal 15:2 (Spring 1983): 31–41.
McCarthy, Cormac. Outer Dark. New York: Vintage International, 1983.
Index
A C
Afterlife, 2, 10, 12–14, 17, 75, 247 Calvin, John, 50, 242
Angel of light, 5, 47, 49–52, 54, Catholic Church, 9–11, 17, 20, 73,
56–59, 255 84, 108, 109, 169
Aquinas, Thomas, 51 Chateaubriand, François-Rene, 212,
Ariosto, 96, 97 220
Aristotle, 31, 41, 49 Christ, 9, 11, 12, 16, 17, 19, 40, 48,
Augustine, 13, 98, 240, 309 80, 115, 169, 170, 205, 259,
260, 263, 264
Church councils, 30
B Cicero, 30, 31, 35, 41
Barth, Karl, 7, 33, 309, 310 Classical literature, 76
Baudelaire, Charles, 211, 285 Classical music, 99
Baxter, Richard, 56 Clergy, 18, 19
Beelzebub, 96
Bernhardt, Georg, 5, 74, 79
Bible, 15, 31 D
Blake, William, 59, 211, 213, 274 Dante, 3, 10, 94–99, 101, 108, 133,
Blanchot, Maurice, 155 240, 242–245, 247
Breaking Bad, 6, 272, 273, 275, 277, Death, 3, 10, 13, 16, 17, 29, 31,
285 35, 144, 145, 258, 280, 282,
Brothers Karamazov, The, 6, 169 300–302
B. Traven, 6, 187, 188, 204, 205, 207 de Man, Paul, 131, 132, 134, 135
Bunyan, John, 47, 57
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 319

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-52198-5
320 Index
Demons, 6, 166–169, 171, 173, Hell, 1, 4, 7, 12, 13, 15–17, 20, 42,
175–178, 180, 181 242, 250, 251, 258, 277, 281,
Derrida, Jacques, 143 284, 307
Devil, 2–4, 7, 12, 27, 32, 285, 291, Hermeneutics, 4, 5, 7, 116–118, 123,
292, 294, 295, 298, 300, 301 124, 126, 131–133, 137, 254
Divine Comedy, 94, 96, 99, 242, 245 Hildegard of Bingen, 23
Dostoevsky, Feodor, 165
I
E Inferno, 94, 97, 98, 102, 109, 240,
Early modern period, 2, 52, 79, 83, 85 242, 243, 245, 247, 307
Eliot, T.S., 6, 211, 215
Ercole in Tebe, 99, 101, 102, 104
J
Jesus. See Christ
F Job, 3, 4, 36, 167, 202, 258, 301
Fall of Man, 115 Justice, 2, 14, 16, 18, 50, 95, 178,
Faust/Faustus, 6, 81, 84, 116–123, 219, 224
197, 202, 206
Faust Part I (Goethe), 5, 192
Faust Part II (Goethe), 5, 193, 194, K
197, 200 Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb, 81, 82,
Dr. Faustus (Mann), 182, 193–195, 85
205
Fish, Stanley, 59, 255, 274
L
Laity, 19
G Lermontov, Mikhail, 167, 172
Galieno, 108, 109 Les Fleur du Mal, 220
Gerson, Jean, 11 Lewis, C.S., 217, 276
God, 1, 3, 10, 12, 14, 15, 17, 19, 30, Logos, 115, 119–121, 123, 125, 126,
38, 40, 48, 55, 76, 78, 115, 125, 136
148, 172, 175, 191, 225, 240, Lovecraft, H.P., 6, 253
247, 258, 264, 279, 310–314 Lucifer, 81, 168, 171, 175, 180, 193,
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 116, 195–197, 202, 203, 274–277,
144 284–286
Luther, Martin, 5, 27, 48
H
Heaven, 11, 14, 16, 20, 29, 31, 37, M
60, 76, 148, 154, 157, 177, 228, Magisterium, 73, 79, 85
250, 277, 284 Mann, 3, 181
Index 321
Marlowe, Christopher, 206 Prayer, 4, 10, 12, 17, 18, 27, 28, 32,
McCarthy, Cormac, 7, 305, 312 37, 39, 80, 219, 220, 242, 292,
Medieval, 7, 9, 10, 16, 18, 29, 51, 75, 298
78, 95, 101, 133, 254, 256 Prophecy, 263, 276
Meditation, 27, 28 Protestantism, 48, 194, 195
Melanchthon, Philip, 30 Purgatory, 4, 10, 13–17, 19, 20, 42,
Melani, Jacopo, 99, 104 53
Melville, Herman, 204, 274, 275 Puritans, 54, 291, 292
Mephistopheles, 5, 81, 82, 116, 117,
120–125, 158, 177, 178, 193,
194, 196, 197, 202 R
Der Messias, 81, 82, 85 Rhetoric, 47–49, 54, 59, 60, 115,
Milton, John, 36, 59, 144, 254, 275 127, 181, 182, 260, 262, 283,
Moniglia, Giovanni Andrea, 99 311, 313
Monteverdi, Claudio, 94 Romantic, 143, 167, 168, 172, 175,
Music, 99, 102, 103, 106, 107 178, 179, 211–213, 216, 217,
Mystics, 9, 11, 18, 19 227, 233, 273–276, 280, 282
Rossi, Luigi, 105
N
Noris, Mateo, 108 S
Nyarlathotep, 6, 254–266 Sacrament, 18, 37, 315, 316
Satan, 3, 5–7, 32–34, 37, 38, 40, 48,
51, 54, 55, 57, 58, 152, 154,
O 157, 188, 192, 212, 217–219,
O’Connor, Flannery, 6, 240, 254 226, 227, 230, 233, 255, 257–
Opera, 5, 94, 98, 99, 102, 105 266, 274, 280, 284, 286, 307
Oratio, 28 St. Bridget of Sweden, 9, 19
Orfeo, 94, 98, 99, 105 Schlegel, Friedrich, 134, 135
Orthodoxy, 11, 12 Scholastic theologians, 51
Ovid, 94, 96, 101 Segni, Allesandro, 99, 102
Shakespeare, William, 278
Sin, 10, 15, 16, 36, 38, 54–56, 94,
P 107, 146, 148, 213, 222, 225,
Pallavicino, Carlo, 108 245, 246, 251, 258, 263, 276
Paradise Lost, 3, 4, 36, 59, 60, 99, Soul, 3, 12–15, 17, 18, 34, 47, 51,
125, 144, 146–148, 152, 154, 52, 58, 95–97, 145, 152, 158,
211, 217, 218, 220, 221, 224, 171, 180, 196, 200, 202, 207,
225, 229, 242, 254, 255, 274, 222, 224, 227, 241, 250, 251,
276, 278, 283, 284 293, 295, 300
Petrarch, 99, 101 St. Paul, 250, 255
Poe, Edgar Allen, 230 Striggio, Alessandro, 94, 98
322 Index
Styx, 94, 101, 307 Tundalus redivivus, 5, 74

Suffering, 2–4, 10, 12, 14, 16, 17,
20, 36, 37, 39, 41, 82, 129, 131,
170, 178, 190, 219, 227, 250, V
251 Virgil, 30, 94, 97, 101, 240, 243, 244
Visions, 2, 4, 5, 13, 15, 18–20, 94,
108, 176, 181
T
Tenatio, 5
Theology, 4–6, 11, 13, 18, 20, 29, 35,
39, 41, 76, 118, 144, 145, 153,
155, 158, 192, 309, 310, 314

The Hermeneutics of Hell

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The

ofof the Devil

Edited by Gregor Thuswaldner

ISBN 978-3-319-52197-8 ISBN 978-3-319-52198-5 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017939075

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

Cover illustration: Antiquarian Images/Alamy Stock Photo

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

1 Introduction: The Devil We Know and the Devils We

2 “Two Brass Mites of the Widow”: Saint Bridget of

3 The Uses of Tentatio: Satan, Luther, and Theological

4 As an Angel of Light: Satanic Rhetoric in Early Modern

5 Astrophal Redivivus: The Coinage of the Discourse on

6 The Drama of Hell: Sources and Interpretation in

7 The Diabolic Logic of Logos: Towards a Hermeneutics of

8 Literature, Theology, Survival 143

9 Dostoevsky’s Demons 165

10 Money as the Devil in B. Traven’s “Assembly Line,”

11 “la manière de Milton”: Baudelaire Reads Milton’s

12 Visions of Hell in Flannery O’Connor 239

13 “He Haunts One for Hours Afterwards”: Demonic

14 “The One Who Knocks”: Milton’s Lucifer and the

15 Reading the Devil in the Landscape 291

16 A Landscape of the Damned: Evil and Nothingness in

Deborah C. Bowen Redeemer University College, Ancaster, Canada

Edward Simon The Marginalia Review of Books, Los Angeles, CA,

Fig. 6.1 Beginning of Orpheus’ aria “Possente spirto.” Trans.

Introduction: The Devil We Know

Daniel Russ and Gregor Thuswaldner

For many American theologians, Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) is

© The Author(s) 2017 1

A homology reminiscent of Edwards’ sermon is almost unthinkable in

Unusual crimes have appeared; Uncommon heights of wickedness have

Belief in the devil, Dodwell suggests, had measurable consequences on

First Disobedience, and the Fruit

In the Western tradition this Judeo-Christian vision of the devil is the

his friends-turned-accusers is that none of them even hint at the exist-

[The Christian story] is a story that is deeply paradoxical. The Devil is

In a similar vein, Martin Luther saw a connection between the temp-

survivance, O’Donnell uses a poststructuralist framework in order to

Deborah Bowen confronts us with a very surprising encounter of the

7. Adrian Hastings. “Hell.” In: The Oxford Companion to Christian

“Two Brass Mites of the Widow”: Saint

Mark Edwin Peterson

Estimations of Saint Bridget of Sweden (1303–1373) have swung

© The Author(s) 2017 9

that the recent completion of the translation of the Revelationes into

experiences—though not dreams—as she said repeatedly.18 The mean-

Oftentimes it took concessions to Bridget’s human understanding to try

Bridget, like most believers, had trouble in picturing the mechanics of

Several aspects of this system of punishment appeared to come from

Nobody in the world is so great a sinner – provided he says in his heart

4. Drahomira Breedveld-Barankova, “St. Bridget of Sweden in the Pre-

17. Claire L. Sahlin, Birgitta of Sweden and the Voice of Prophecy, Studies in

33. Rev. VI. p. 113.

56. Kari Børresen, “Religious Feminism in the Middle Ages: Birgitta of Sweden,”

———.“St. Birgitta of Sweden’s Revelationes (1492) in York Minster Library.”

The Uses of Tentatio: Satan, Luther,

Carl P.E. Springer

Temptations presented by the Devil to humans, like the serpent’s

Oratio, Meditatio, Tentatio

© The Author(s) 2017 27

Fig. 6.1 Beginning of Orpheus’ aria “Possente spirto.” Trans.

7. Adrian Hastings. “Hell.” In: The Oxford Companion to Christian

“Two Brass Mites of the Widow”: Saint

4. Drahomira Breedveld-Barankova, “St. Bridget of Sweden in the Pre-

17. Claire L. Sahlin, Birgitta of Sweden and the Voice of Prophecy, Studies in

33. Rev. VI. p. 113.

56. Kari Børresen, “Religious Feminism in the Middle Ages: Birgitta of Sweden,”

The Uses of Tentatio: Satan, Luther,

Learning from the Devil

53. See WATR 4,513 on the Devil as dialectician.

As an Angel of Light: Satanic Rhetoric

Polemic and Paradiastole: Satan’s Slippery Rhetoric

appear as an angel. Even when he tempts us to gross crimes, he makes use,

Full Persuasion and Carnal Presumption in Puritan

Counterfeit Names: Discerning Deception in the Works

11. Biblical quotations are taken from the Authorized/King James Version.

43. Baxter, Gildas Salvianus, 275.