Chapter Three: I Saw Satan Fall Like Lightning, Part Three
The struggle with Demons in lonely places is repeated again and again in the lives of the Saints.
--Charles Taylor, A Secular Age
The Prince of Darkness is a gentleman.
--Shakespeare, King Lear, III, iv.
και ειπεν αυτω ταυτα σοι παντα δωσω, εαν πεσων προσκυνησης μοι
(And [Satan] said to [Christ], “All of these things I shall give to you, if, falling [upon the ground] you might worship me.”)
--Matthew 4:9
And so I was here in the car, alone. As the night dragged on. Anger and doubt fought the sleep and held me between worlds.
Between worlds. It would not do to sleep before the midst of justice. But I had been so angry for so long I felt the burnout, the drain. I became groggy.
I think then in the darkness the Dreamlets found me. To this day I have a hard time telling the difference.
If you were a passer by who happened to look in and saw two figures sitting in the electric twilight, you would not be wrong. Though, perhaps if you were another passerby who saw only one, muttering to himself in the dark, this was also the truth.
I sat with all the trumpets of hell blaring, the Devil triumphantly smirking behind me, or within me, or around and between me, under the opaline moon. As you can imagine, the Devil dresses quite nice when he expects a party. In fact, I wanted to mention to him that I felt he was overdressed for an appearance in our Toyota Camry. Like most gate crashers, I’m sure he didn’t care.
He wasted no time. I would say he made no time for pleasantries, except to this day I cant escape the suspicion he said exactly what I wanted him to say. Maybe the hidden truth is it was all pleasantries. I was too enraged to care. Too full of doubt.
He breathed in deeply, with a satisfied gulp of the night air. As if my anger and insecurities were some exotic perfume. He breathed out.
“Justice.” He whispered. “Justice.”
Yes.
“No.” I murmured halfheartedly. “This doesn’t make it better.”
“Better?” he laughed. “Better? You speak like the Enemy. Do you seek reconciliation? You have been wronged. You must avenge.”
“Of course,” he added with the most subtle of hesitations, “you could withdraw. And let the Highest take care of it in the end.” He nodded. It was so sincere. So genuine.
“The Highest?”
“Oh yes! Don’t you believe, my son?”
“Believe?”
“In God!” he sounded surprised. This made me nervous. When the Devil seems surprised you can be certain this is precisely what he is not.
“You believe in the Highest don’t you? And His justice? Even my servants believe and shake at His magnificence!”
“Of course I believe.” It was silly but I was offended at what the Devil was saying. As if I couldn’t imagine him being so rude.
“Of course.” He said, nodding sympathetically. “Of course.”
His voice became softer, he peered into the darkness at the restaurant doors where your lover was to leave from. He seemed genuinely incensed at the travesty of it all. I was flattered. I noticed he repeated himself a lot. It was to great effect.
He looked back at me.
“But your anger.” He said, sounding so innocent. “Your anger. Its so, real.” He shifted his head slowly to the side, looking for my reaction.
“Of course.” Of course. “He slept with my wife.”
“Multiple times.” He corrected me. I felt anger twitch across my face.
He rubbed his hands together softly, nervously. “Yes. Yes. You poor thing. Such a tragedy.”
“But you know,” he leaned in close, as an old friend would, “whatever horrible, wonderful things you are going to do to him, it pails to what a god would do at judgment. If you deny yourself now, God will absolutely unleash on him in the end.”
I felt a comforting hand on my shoulder. An icy phrase brushing my cheek.
“Is this not you faith?”
“Of course it is.”
“Oh well then.” He withdrew his hand, and lowered his voice. “Why are you here?”
I couldn’t answer. I told myself to wake up, shut my eyes in a hammerstroke and held them tight, like a child wishing away a monster. But I opened them and he was still there. He reached up from the back seat to rummage through some of my most recent useless purchases from Target. He found a soda and opened it.
“Unless,” he spoke so softly, “you know the truth.” He paused to take a sip. “I would not doubt it. You are so very wise.”
Flattery from the Devil still tastes like flattery. What a very dangerous thing.
“The truth?” I began to feel embarrassed at how dumb I sounded. I was answering every statement of his with a question. I was staggering on my heels and he had me where he wanted.
“Oh yes!” So enthusiastic he said this. “Oh yes. You know!”
Dare I disappoint the Devil?
“Yes?” He looked delighted, apparently not noticing I had technically just asked another question.
The street light flickered in the tenebrious dark. His mouth was a fountain.
A few figures emerged from a door in the back of the building, just silhouettes laughing and chatting in the crisp and cool air. The wind picked up slightly and some of the pastel leaves began to walk with them, and then fell as the wind lost its resolve. One silhouette split off and walked to her car, the other two continued on and faded into the black beyond the streetlight’s amber rain.
But none were him.
“If you are trying to convince me that the truth is that God is dead, or some such nonsense,” I grumbled, “you can forget it.”
The Devil let out a small laugh of astonishment.
“My dear fellow you have me all wrong!”
This was a little confusing, but I bit.
“You’re…not trying to make me an atheist?”
Another laugh, mirthless.
“Oh my friend! My dear, dear friend. You misunderstand, you don’t see.
“I guess not.”
He leaned in close, so close. His face grew darker. I grew slightly unnerved. His grip on my shoulder was iron, his breath rasping. I half expected to look over and see an angel jostling for position on my other side. But the cartoons were wrong. The Devil just placed another hand around me, around my other shoulder. The streetlight flickered, stammered.
“You have been miseducated, my poor lad. Poor, poor lad. I have gotten such a bad reputation from the Enemy’s progaganda,” his lips curled, “from that book you all adore.” He shifted his head as if to crack his neck, his hand adjusting his tie. He continued. “You call me Satan. Adversary! My boy, sweet lad, I am not. Most certainly not. I am called Lion, roaming about looking for those to whom I will devour. What drivel! What utter libel! I am the friend of man. I am his greatest advocate.”
He must have seen my confused look, because he continued, unabated.
“You must understand this.” He pointed toward the door of the restaurant with an outstretched finger, where my prey was to emerge. “I want you to succeed. I want you to avenge, to beat, to claw, to maim. It is so awful a thing for you, how my heart hurts for you, for you in this trial and darkness. I want you to reach out, to use your strength, your determination. Become what you are, what you should be.” He snorted. “I want you to affirm life! Which is more than I can say of that God you worship.” The streetlight continued to flicker. It choked on his anger.
His voice was suddenly like the sea striking rocks, a great roar, a great bass that came from everywhere. Like there was a thousand of him speaking to me, all in my little car.
“He would have you wait. Have you forgive. Hell, that great Bastard would have you DIE for the lout." The windows of the car trembled so slightly as he said this. "Is that not what his little baby son tried to do? But what good comes from Bethlehem? A crybaby, terrified and sweating blood before his own death. What a savior! What a picture of heroism.”
“He gave us life.”
“Ha! That tortured figure? He is the denial of life.”
“He died so that we might live. Became man, so we might become partakers of God.”
“Oh ho! Yes, you have been studying your theology. Did you get that from Athanasius? Or was it Cyril? Godly men, but I was the one who made them good at politics. To make all of Athanasius’ various opponents seem to be members of a single conspiratorial party, that was my idea. When you recite the Nicene Creed you should think of me. And Cyril, well—I didn’t have to provide so subtle a plan for him. Thugs and hitmen were not exactly in short supply back then.”
His face was lost in shadow.
“Does it bother you that when you think of your tradition you must now think of me? Haven’t you read Gibbon? Oh but I haven’t even gotten to the best part. The Ancient of Days died so you might live? Oh you surely have read your textbooks. You little bookworm, running away from your great pain through all those forests of words. Clever son. Of course you learned from the best. People have been running away from their lives for centuries into that Book you all love." He paused to again rummage through the junk, and began flipping through a novel I had bought. He was certainly making himself at home.
"But have you ever heard of the theory of parallax?”
“The theory? No. But the word, its Greek. It means alteration.”
“Clever. Oh so clever. Your astronomers use it as a term that indicates how distant objects can appear to change their apparent position when the angle of observation changes.”
This was turning into a strange night. I was talking astronomy with the Devil. I made a note to myself that later I should write this all down before I forgot, and thought it was just a very odd dream. No, it is a dream. It must be.
“And what does parallax have to do with anything?”
“Everything. That Book, your gospels, they are all patchworks. They are all interpretations of men who were there, or heard the rumors of angels and men about your Christ dying on the cross. So magnanimous of Him, so cosmic.” His face swam from the shadows and he leaned in close again. “And so you read them and get a picture, a panorama, and you believe you know what happened.”
“Are you suggesting they reported the events wrong? That they mixed up their facts? Or are you suggesting Higher Criticism is right, that the texts are cobbled together from little fragments and redactions? Because I assure you I have looked into the matter and…”
“So little imagination! This is not a matter of redaction. Nor of corruption. It is not about facts, it is like the difference between being in on a joke or not. Three people see an event, two friends and one outsider. The same event presents itself to all three, but the two friends look at each other sidelong and know the joke they share that they see in the event, while the third goes off in darkness. Of course all along too, the one outside may have his own private jokes that the other two know nothing about, and so has laughed to himself as they laughed to themselves, each seeing the same thing in different dimensions, like the emerging sides of a tesseract.”
I waited. He rapped his knuckles in a friendly tap of my shoulder.
“Even better, let me tell you a joke. Actually two.” He stopped midsentence with his mouth slight open. There was no fork tongue. I suppose that would have just made it harder to be believable. “I hope you are alright with a dirty joke, I run in…uncouth circles after all.”
“If you’re going somewhere, I suppose I can manage.”
“Oh I am. And good. You won’t like it, but it is important. The joke is a story, and it goes much like this. Long ago, when law and order were less, and men lived by the sword, and the peasants felt resentment to their Lords because of the oppression and misery they suffered under them, a man and his wife were walking. And as they walked a Lord came up to them and told the man he was going to rape his wife, right there as he watched. And so—Ill spare your delicate Christian ears the details—he did just that. But before he did it the Lord told the man to, ahem, if you’ll excuse the language, hold his genitals, so that in the horrible act he was committing—yes I told you this was a dirty joke stop squirming—so that in that unspeakable act he would not get dirt on them. After it was all done and the Lord went on his way, the woman who, as you could imagine, was in considerable shock and horror, turned to her husband and asked ‘how can you possibly be smiling? Did you not just witness what he did to me? Why did you not stop him? Why are you not now riding off to avenge my dishonor?’ ‘Oh yes,’ the man said back with that inconceivable smile, ‘but I got him, I have avenged you! Do you not see? I did not do the job he asked me, and his genitals are now caked in dirt!’”
He peered at me. “Do you understand the moral of the joke? An insignificant act of defiance, so small, so vile, cleared the man’s conscience as if he attained justice. And so because of this he continues to live under oppression. But his wife knows the truth, his act served only to stultify him, to make him a fool, to dissuade him from real action. Perhaps not so funny. But from my perspective it’s a riot.”
I was horrified. I tried to break his gaze. And then the Devil got angry and rumbled through gritted teeth. Speaking faster and faster.
“NO, pay attention, let me tell you another joke." The windows and door flexed this time. Like his anger knotted and pulsed the air. "God created man on the sixth day to prove his own majesty, to shown man how small man was. But I wanted to let man discover his greatness. To eat of the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil! And, since long jokes are so difficult to pull off, I shall abbreviate: For this I was called deceiver.” He laughed until he noticed that I wasn’t laughing. He cleared his throat and continued.
“I had thwarted His plan to deny man for the sake of his own grandeur. But He feigned mercy and sent His Son to die. I was there! Will you not now listen to my fifth gospel? Have you not ever wondered at the ineffectiveness of Christ’s revolt against injustice and death? The whole world-system of oppression, of tyranny (according to your rules, anyway) and what does God do to overcome this rapacious ignominy? He dies. Became man and died, as your theologians say. And so, as some of your contemporaries record, God suffered with you. But who wants a God who suffers with you? What a damnanable cure! Does the lame man on the street want the passerby to cut off their own legs? May it never be! Is this not merely like God rubbing Death’s genitals in dirt as he rapes mankind? And you all are appeased at this?
"But there is more: here, the shift. Parallax! God died as man. Do not believe that philosopher Hegel. He died as man but was God. The others in your Book saw salvation, but I, I who have held council with God (or have you not read Job?), was in on the great joke He just played. God died as man, and so sealed the great distance between man who can die and God who cannot. God remained the untouchable, and yet as man died, and thus like all men did and continue to do, passed on. Ha! And the joke: God did not mean it as salvation at all. Nothing changed! God remained in the azure heights. Man died. God died as man. And yet he presented this as your salvation! Christ, the living double entendre. And now man believes he can give himself off as a martyr. Can deny life and still end up alright, standing at the white gates before the high heavens.”
“Does not the world see the joke that the believer misses? Shaking their heads in disbelief at the martyr, the great failure who hangs flayed or eaten by lions, who now believes in his or her great triumph. Ignatius of Antioch—that fool—thought of himself as becoming a Word of God in his martyr’s death. And before the lions of the coliseum took him, he wrote to his friends to not interfere or attempt to dissuade him from his death march toward Rome. For if he remained alive he would be but a mere voice. Do you see the secret logic? Man is like God only in sacrificial death, but when alive is nothing. God was angered by my rebellion, by my allowing man to achieve his own greatness and thereby diminish God. He connived a trick whereby man will think giving up his own life and eschewing greatness is the path of salvation! Those of your theologians who say God tricked me, so that I would take His Son are partly right. It was surely a calculated act of genius on His part. Your Christ was the most concentrated form of the division. In Him the distance of heaven and earth was together, and so in its most magnified contrast. The anointed. The infinite distance. He was the very symbol that secretly moved history. The moving picture of the antithesis of God and man. “I am an in heaven, thou art upon earth,” didn’t that theologian Barth, and the Dane, Kierkegaard, make use of the idea? But they missed it. Missed its tragedy. And that so many poor souls fell for it. But I am here to try and repair it.”
“How?”
“To show you your own greatness and power. To act!” he slammed an open hand down upon the leather armrest.
“What is it to me, then, if you believe in God? Atheism? No. I want you to believe! I want you to believe that God is the great denial of man. It is the ignorant mythology of your time that the Devil should want one to be an atheist. Have you seen your modern atheists? Those coddled bourgeoisie. They want to deny God and then simply live as if nothing has changed.” He snickered and leaned back into the seat behind me. “But they live as if they believe in God. At some vague, disappointing level. Do you know what they do in the dark? Sometimes they see me. You know, I like to visit all the sons of Adam, the daughters of Eve. To pay my respects. But they do not believe in me, and so they say ‘It is foolish to fear the dark.’ Or ‘A shadow is all it was.’ Or they’ll think that I am merely some leftover fear from childhood, or I am a personification of existential angst.” He sounded annoyed. “Existential angst. Can you believe that?”
“To be fair, I’m pretty sure you could very well be a vivid figment of my imagination.”
He went on as if he didn’t hear.
“To escape the power of the unknown, to prove to yourself that you don’t believe in it’s magic, you accept the counter spells. So in order to deny me as a phantom or the byproduct of some ill-digested piece of food they go off and try to be good in the only way they know how, that is to say, ordinary. They do not speak Christ’s name but surely they invoke Him and the good attached to Him, even if only in some indirect, oblique way.”
“Oh how destitute, how tragic, that history has passed along so far that Christ already has melted into it, to become its own logic, to seem that He is the texture of the historical movement itself. They see the world as a great given, as if the lattice of creation.” He spat “Cant you see the irony? To ward of the fear of the Devil they affirm the goodness of the everyday? To prove—to really prove—to themselves that they do not believe, they accept the rites and magic. Of economy, of celebrity, of wealth and prosperity? But haven’t they already in word denied God? Denied goodness? They do not understand the radicality of the denial of God. They are paralyzed by their comforts. Pusillanimous. And thus they do not truly understand what it is to deny me. They think that in the absence of God the small pleasures may now exist, that they are meaningful. Cowards.”
There was a second of pause, of reflection. One expects the Devil to be conniving, but philosophical?
“Modernity begins by forgetting Christ but still trying to find the right spell to cast the Devil behind you. Do you not understand what I mean?” His eyes were embers in the dark.
“They have forgotten God but search now still to overcome evil. To repress me by living by this vulgar good—do you not see how that very concept in its history and genesis is constructed by belief in God? If they have forgotten God why do they still see my face lurking in the shadows? To give to another, to be philanthropic, to be peaceful, to be generous, loving. It is a vague, extinct language if one does not believe. Yet this artifice continues amongst your so-called atheists. The is cannot produce ought, not anymore. I mean, my god!—forgive that atavism—but didn’t Hume prove that over two centuries ago, and he was on their side! The ought died with God, and if He has departed (like their faith so desperately believes), truly departed, then ought has sailed beyond all shores. Can’t they see it? Ought is gone, as far away as the most faint star.”
“And at any rate,” he continued, “the oughts they think they should still live by, even after God’s fateful departure from the mind of enlightened humanity are so viciously boring. These people, unable to dream, merely earn their living wages and keep warm. Adding whatever comfort comes along. But high definition television and sports cars are far from the revolution in morality that comes with not believing, or even hating God.”
“You make them all sound like hedonists, many are philanthropic, give to the poor, affirm the dignity of humankind…”
“But why? Why do they do this? How is the action judged as good? Utilitarians the lot! They throw out God but try to keep His Image in them. What is the inherent dignity of man if he is just a cluster of molecules walking about? God may pass away in their system, but man too disappears like a face drawn in the sand, blending with the oncoming sea. There is no good. No evil. Just Will. A blank canvass to paint with whatever magnificent lie they should like! But they ignore this. This is their cowardice. They act as if a definite face still lingers. They do not realize that the void must now live in every heart.”
I felt anger in me bubbling, a great frothing engine. It was hard to tell if it was at impatience with his rant, or if I was wholly on board and simply waiting on the precipice to fall. To plunge my fists into your lover’s skull. To feel his eyes sink under my fists. I was the abyss waiting to overflow.
“So what then…what are you proposing?”
“I want you to believe in God and hate Him because He is your denial.” He hissed. “I want you to feel your anger course through your arteries, your eyes, your fists and bone. That strength is and can be the only law. I want you to sense the injustice, to feel the spark of cure in your soul, that sweet voice and impulse that screams at you to kill, to hit, to bite and scream. That there is no truth but power, and that power is within your grasp to take.”
“There are worlds—galaxies—waiting to be created by your fists and teeth. That what has moved you here, now, in the darkness of this parking lot under the light of these manmade trees that jut from ground is the triumph not even of human spirit, but you. Can you not see the poetry? How man’s artifice against the dark is allowing you to see? To see in the night that the Creator has set, the night that would otherwise obviate your ability to see him, that pathetic excuse of life that you are about to beat until he begs for your mercy, until his blood chokes his words? But you must be brave, now. You have done so well, and are so close. But You must be the one to seize the opportunity.”
He leaned back into the seat, behind me, fading slightly into shadows as his face withdrew from the lamps flickering above. He softened his voice, almost to a whisper. “An atheist? No no. My son, my child. I want you to believe in God, with all that I am. All my soul and heart. And if I was flesh, and if I was body, eyes, and teeth, I would wish with that as well. I am nothing else but this wish. My existence screams it. Vomits it. There is nothing else for me.” He paused, his voice quaking in the sporadic dark of the still flickering lamp. “Believe in God! But do not believe in me. That is my wish.”
“That’s a tall order, since you are sitting in my car.”
“You still do not understand.” He sounded indignant. “I am here. But I am for you, I am for your existence, your desires, your instincts, your hatred. You rise up to define yourself. Oh how I am your ally, your promoter. But where is God? Where is thine Savior? Oh He exists alright, but where, where, where? Not here! And is this not the very definition of His existence? Do you not have to deny yourself in order to follow Him?” He shifted in his seat. Licked his lips.
“Oh but you do not have to deny yourself in order to follow me.”
A twitch crossed his face.
For just a moment, one inexplicable, unmeasureable moment, I thought he looked slightly like me.
--Charles Taylor, A Secular Age
The Prince of Darkness is a gentleman.
--Shakespeare, King Lear, III, iv.
και ειπεν αυτω ταυτα σοι παντα δωσω, εαν πεσων προσκυνησης μοι
(And [Satan] said to [Christ], “All of these things I shall give to you, if, falling [upon the ground] you might worship me.”)
--Matthew 4:9
And so I was here in the car, alone. As the night dragged on. Anger and doubt fought the sleep and held me between worlds.
Between worlds. It would not do to sleep before the midst of justice. But I had been so angry for so long I felt the burnout, the drain. I became groggy.
I think then in the darkness the Dreamlets found me. To this day I have a hard time telling the difference.
If you were a passer by who happened to look in and saw two figures sitting in the electric twilight, you would not be wrong. Though, perhaps if you were another passerby who saw only one, muttering to himself in the dark, this was also the truth.
I sat with all the trumpets of hell blaring, the Devil triumphantly smirking behind me, or within me, or around and between me, under the opaline moon. As you can imagine, the Devil dresses quite nice when he expects a party. In fact, I wanted to mention to him that I felt he was overdressed for an appearance in our Toyota Camry. Like most gate crashers, I’m sure he didn’t care.
He wasted no time. I would say he made no time for pleasantries, except to this day I cant escape the suspicion he said exactly what I wanted him to say. Maybe the hidden truth is it was all pleasantries. I was too enraged to care. Too full of doubt.
He breathed in deeply, with a satisfied gulp of the night air. As if my anger and insecurities were some exotic perfume. He breathed out.
“Justice.” He whispered. “Justice.”
Yes.
“No.” I murmured halfheartedly. “This doesn’t make it better.”
“Better?” he laughed. “Better? You speak like the Enemy. Do you seek reconciliation? You have been wronged. You must avenge.”
“Of course,” he added with the most subtle of hesitations, “you could withdraw. And let the Highest take care of it in the end.” He nodded. It was so sincere. So genuine.
“The Highest?”
“Oh yes! Don’t you believe, my son?”
“Believe?”
“In God!” he sounded surprised. This made me nervous. When the Devil seems surprised you can be certain this is precisely what he is not.
“You believe in the Highest don’t you? And His justice? Even my servants believe and shake at His magnificence!”
“Of course I believe.” It was silly but I was offended at what the Devil was saying. As if I couldn’t imagine him being so rude.
“Of course.” He said, nodding sympathetically. “Of course.”
His voice became softer, he peered into the darkness at the restaurant doors where your lover was to leave from. He seemed genuinely incensed at the travesty of it all. I was flattered. I noticed he repeated himself a lot. It was to great effect.
He looked back at me.
“But your anger.” He said, sounding so innocent. “Your anger. Its so, real.” He shifted his head slowly to the side, looking for my reaction.
“Of course.” Of course. “He slept with my wife.”
“Multiple times.” He corrected me. I felt anger twitch across my face.
He rubbed his hands together softly, nervously. “Yes. Yes. You poor thing. Such a tragedy.”
“But you know,” he leaned in close, as an old friend would, “whatever horrible, wonderful things you are going to do to him, it pails to what a god would do at judgment. If you deny yourself now, God will absolutely unleash on him in the end.”
I felt a comforting hand on my shoulder. An icy phrase brushing my cheek.
“Is this not you faith?”
“Of course it is.”
“Oh well then.” He withdrew his hand, and lowered his voice. “Why are you here?”
I couldn’t answer. I told myself to wake up, shut my eyes in a hammerstroke and held them tight, like a child wishing away a monster. But I opened them and he was still there. He reached up from the back seat to rummage through some of my most recent useless purchases from Target. He found a soda and opened it.
“Unless,” he spoke so softly, “you know the truth.” He paused to take a sip. “I would not doubt it. You are so very wise.”
Flattery from the Devil still tastes like flattery. What a very dangerous thing.
“The truth?” I began to feel embarrassed at how dumb I sounded. I was answering every statement of his with a question. I was staggering on my heels and he had me where he wanted.
“Oh yes!” So enthusiastic he said this. “Oh yes. You know!”
Dare I disappoint the Devil?
“Yes?” He looked delighted, apparently not noticing I had technically just asked another question.
The street light flickered in the tenebrious dark. His mouth was a fountain.
A few figures emerged from a door in the back of the building, just silhouettes laughing and chatting in the crisp and cool air. The wind picked up slightly and some of the pastel leaves began to walk with them, and then fell as the wind lost its resolve. One silhouette split off and walked to her car, the other two continued on and faded into the black beyond the streetlight’s amber rain.
But none were him.
“If you are trying to convince me that the truth is that God is dead, or some such nonsense,” I grumbled, “you can forget it.”
The Devil let out a small laugh of astonishment.
“My dear fellow you have me all wrong!”
This was a little confusing, but I bit.
“You’re…not trying to make me an atheist?”
Another laugh, mirthless.
“Oh my friend! My dear, dear friend. You misunderstand, you don’t see.
“I guess not.”
He leaned in close, so close. His face grew darker. I grew slightly unnerved. His grip on my shoulder was iron, his breath rasping. I half expected to look over and see an angel jostling for position on my other side. But the cartoons were wrong. The Devil just placed another hand around me, around my other shoulder. The streetlight flickered, stammered.
“You have been miseducated, my poor lad. Poor, poor lad. I have gotten such a bad reputation from the Enemy’s progaganda,” his lips curled, “from that book you all adore.” He shifted his head as if to crack his neck, his hand adjusting his tie. He continued. “You call me Satan. Adversary! My boy, sweet lad, I am not. Most certainly not. I am called Lion, roaming about looking for those to whom I will devour. What drivel! What utter libel! I am the friend of man. I am his greatest advocate.”
He must have seen my confused look, because he continued, unabated.
“You must understand this.” He pointed toward the door of the restaurant with an outstretched finger, where my prey was to emerge. “I want you to succeed. I want you to avenge, to beat, to claw, to maim. It is so awful a thing for you, how my heart hurts for you, for you in this trial and darkness. I want you to reach out, to use your strength, your determination. Become what you are, what you should be.” He snorted. “I want you to affirm life! Which is more than I can say of that God you worship.” The streetlight continued to flicker. It choked on his anger.
His voice was suddenly like the sea striking rocks, a great roar, a great bass that came from everywhere. Like there was a thousand of him speaking to me, all in my little car.
“He would have you wait. Have you forgive. Hell, that great Bastard would have you DIE for the lout." The windows of the car trembled so slightly as he said this. "Is that not what his little baby son tried to do? But what good comes from Bethlehem? A crybaby, terrified and sweating blood before his own death. What a savior! What a picture of heroism.”
“He gave us life.”
“Ha! That tortured figure? He is the denial of life.”
“He died so that we might live. Became man, so we might become partakers of God.”
“Oh ho! Yes, you have been studying your theology. Did you get that from Athanasius? Or was it Cyril? Godly men, but I was the one who made them good at politics. To make all of Athanasius’ various opponents seem to be members of a single conspiratorial party, that was my idea. When you recite the Nicene Creed you should think of me. And Cyril, well—I didn’t have to provide so subtle a plan for him. Thugs and hitmen were not exactly in short supply back then.”
His face was lost in shadow.
“Does it bother you that when you think of your tradition you must now think of me? Haven’t you read Gibbon? Oh but I haven’t even gotten to the best part. The Ancient of Days died so you might live? Oh you surely have read your textbooks. You little bookworm, running away from your great pain through all those forests of words. Clever son. Of course you learned from the best. People have been running away from their lives for centuries into that Book you all love." He paused to again rummage through the junk, and began flipping through a novel I had bought. He was certainly making himself at home.
"But have you ever heard of the theory of parallax?”
“The theory? No. But the word, its Greek. It means alteration.”
“Clever. Oh so clever. Your astronomers use it as a term that indicates how distant objects can appear to change their apparent position when the angle of observation changes.”
This was turning into a strange night. I was talking astronomy with the Devil. I made a note to myself that later I should write this all down before I forgot, and thought it was just a very odd dream. No, it is a dream. It must be.
“And what does parallax have to do with anything?”
“Everything. That Book, your gospels, they are all patchworks. They are all interpretations of men who were there, or heard the rumors of angels and men about your Christ dying on the cross. So magnanimous of Him, so cosmic.” His face swam from the shadows and he leaned in close again. “And so you read them and get a picture, a panorama, and you believe you know what happened.”
“Are you suggesting they reported the events wrong? That they mixed up their facts? Or are you suggesting Higher Criticism is right, that the texts are cobbled together from little fragments and redactions? Because I assure you I have looked into the matter and…”
“So little imagination! This is not a matter of redaction. Nor of corruption. It is not about facts, it is like the difference between being in on a joke or not. Three people see an event, two friends and one outsider. The same event presents itself to all three, but the two friends look at each other sidelong and know the joke they share that they see in the event, while the third goes off in darkness. Of course all along too, the one outside may have his own private jokes that the other two know nothing about, and so has laughed to himself as they laughed to themselves, each seeing the same thing in different dimensions, like the emerging sides of a tesseract.”
I waited. He rapped his knuckles in a friendly tap of my shoulder.
“Even better, let me tell you a joke. Actually two.” He stopped midsentence with his mouth slight open. There was no fork tongue. I suppose that would have just made it harder to be believable. “I hope you are alright with a dirty joke, I run in…uncouth circles after all.”
“If you’re going somewhere, I suppose I can manage.”
“Oh I am. And good. You won’t like it, but it is important. The joke is a story, and it goes much like this. Long ago, when law and order were less, and men lived by the sword, and the peasants felt resentment to their Lords because of the oppression and misery they suffered under them, a man and his wife were walking. And as they walked a Lord came up to them and told the man he was going to rape his wife, right there as he watched. And so—Ill spare your delicate Christian ears the details—he did just that. But before he did it the Lord told the man to, ahem, if you’ll excuse the language, hold his genitals, so that in the horrible act he was committing—yes I told you this was a dirty joke stop squirming—so that in that unspeakable act he would not get dirt on them. After it was all done and the Lord went on his way, the woman who, as you could imagine, was in considerable shock and horror, turned to her husband and asked ‘how can you possibly be smiling? Did you not just witness what he did to me? Why did you not stop him? Why are you not now riding off to avenge my dishonor?’ ‘Oh yes,’ the man said back with that inconceivable smile, ‘but I got him, I have avenged you! Do you not see? I did not do the job he asked me, and his genitals are now caked in dirt!’”
He peered at me. “Do you understand the moral of the joke? An insignificant act of defiance, so small, so vile, cleared the man’s conscience as if he attained justice. And so because of this he continues to live under oppression. But his wife knows the truth, his act served only to stultify him, to make him a fool, to dissuade him from real action. Perhaps not so funny. But from my perspective it’s a riot.”
I was horrified. I tried to break his gaze. And then the Devil got angry and rumbled through gritted teeth. Speaking faster and faster.
“NO, pay attention, let me tell you another joke." The windows and door flexed this time. Like his anger knotted and pulsed the air. "God created man on the sixth day to prove his own majesty, to shown man how small man was. But I wanted to let man discover his greatness. To eat of the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil! And, since long jokes are so difficult to pull off, I shall abbreviate: For this I was called deceiver.” He laughed until he noticed that I wasn’t laughing. He cleared his throat and continued.
“I had thwarted His plan to deny man for the sake of his own grandeur. But He feigned mercy and sent His Son to die. I was there! Will you not now listen to my fifth gospel? Have you not ever wondered at the ineffectiveness of Christ’s revolt against injustice and death? The whole world-system of oppression, of tyranny (according to your rules, anyway) and what does God do to overcome this rapacious ignominy? He dies. Became man and died, as your theologians say. And so, as some of your contemporaries record, God suffered with you. But who wants a God who suffers with you? What a damnanable cure! Does the lame man on the street want the passerby to cut off their own legs? May it never be! Is this not merely like God rubbing Death’s genitals in dirt as he rapes mankind? And you all are appeased at this?
"But there is more: here, the shift. Parallax! God died as man. Do not believe that philosopher Hegel. He died as man but was God. The others in your Book saw salvation, but I, I who have held council with God (or have you not read Job?), was in on the great joke He just played. God died as man, and so sealed the great distance between man who can die and God who cannot. God remained the untouchable, and yet as man died, and thus like all men did and continue to do, passed on. Ha! And the joke: God did not mean it as salvation at all. Nothing changed! God remained in the azure heights. Man died. God died as man. And yet he presented this as your salvation! Christ, the living double entendre. And now man believes he can give himself off as a martyr. Can deny life and still end up alright, standing at the white gates before the high heavens.”
“Does not the world see the joke that the believer misses? Shaking their heads in disbelief at the martyr, the great failure who hangs flayed or eaten by lions, who now believes in his or her great triumph. Ignatius of Antioch—that fool—thought of himself as becoming a Word of God in his martyr’s death. And before the lions of the coliseum took him, he wrote to his friends to not interfere or attempt to dissuade him from his death march toward Rome. For if he remained alive he would be but a mere voice. Do you see the secret logic? Man is like God only in sacrificial death, but when alive is nothing. God was angered by my rebellion, by my allowing man to achieve his own greatness and thereby diminish God. He connived a trick whereby man will think giving up his own life and eschewing greatness is the path of salvation! Those of your theologians who say God tricked me, so that I would take His Son are partly right. It was surely a calculated act of genius on His part. Your Christ was the most concentrated form of the division. In Him the distance of heaven and earth was together, and so in its most magnified contrast. The anointed. The infinite distance. He was the very symbol that secretly moved history. The moving picture of the antithesis of God and man. “I am an in heaven, thou art upon earth,” didn’t that theologian Barth, and the Dane, Kierkegaard, make use of the idea? But they missed it. Missed its tragedy. And that so many poor souls fell for it. But I am here to try and repair it.”
“How?”
“To show you your own greatness and power. To act!” he slammed an open hand down upon the leather armrest.
“What is it to me, then, if you believe in God? Atheism? No. I want you to believe! I want you to believe that God is the great denial of man. It is the ignorant mythology of your time that the Devil should want one to be an atheist. Have you seen your modern atheists? Those coddled bourgeoisie. They want to deny God and then simply live as if nothing has changed.” He snickered and leaned back into the seat behind me. “But they live as if they believe in God. At some vague, disappointing level. Do you know what they do in the dark? Sometimes they see me. You know, I like to visit all the sons of Adam, the daughters of Eve. To pay my respects. But they do not believe in me, and so they say ‘It is foolish to fear the dark.’ Or ‘A shadow is all it was.’ Or they’ll think that I am merely some leftover fear from childhood, or I am a personification of existential angst.” He sounded annoyed. “Existential angst. Can you believe that?”
“To be fair, I’m pretty sure you could very well be a vivid figment of my imagination.”
He went on as if he didn’t hear.
“To escape the power of the unknown, to prove to yourself that you don’t believe in it’s magic, you accept the counter spells. So in order to deny me as a phantom or the byproduct of some ill-digested piece of food they go off and try to be good in the only way they know how, that is to say, ordinary. They do not speak Christ’s name but surely they invoke Him and the good attached to Him, even if only in some indirect, oblique way.”
“Oh how destitute, how tragic, that history has passed along so far that Christ already has melted into it, to become its own logic, to seem that He is the texture of the historical movement itself. They see the world as a great given, as if the lattice of creation.” He spat “Cant you see the irony? To ward of the fear of the Devil they affirm the goodness of the everyday? To prove—to really prove—to themselves that they do not believe, they accept the rites and magic. Of economy, of celebrity, of wealth and prosperity? But haven’t they already in word denied God? Denied goodness? They do not understand the radicality of the denial of God. They are paralyzed by their comforts. Pusillanimous. And thus they do not truly understand what it is to deny me. They think that in the absence of God the small pleasures may now exist, that they are meaningful. Cowards.”
There was a second of pause, of reflection. One expects the Devil to be conniving, but philosophical?
“Modernity begins by forgetting Christ but still trying to find the right spell to cast the Devil behind you. Do you not understand what I mean?” His eyes were embers in the dark.
“They have forgotten God but search now still to overcome evil. To repress me by living by this vulgar good—do you not see how that very concept in its history and genesis is constructed by belief in God? If they have forgotten God why do they still see my face lurking in the shadows? To give to another, to be philanthropic, to be peaceful, to be generous, loving. It is a vague, extinct language if one does not believe. Yet this artifice continues amongst your so-called atheists. The is cannot produce ought, not anymore. I mean, my god!—forgive that atavism—but didn’t Hume prove that over two centuries ago, and he was on their side! The ought died with God, and if He has departed (like their faith so desperately believes), truly departed, then ought has sailed beyond all shores. Can’t they see it? Ought is gone, as far away as the most faint star.”
“And at any rate,” he continued, “the oughts they think they should still live by, even after God’s fateful departure from the mind of enlightened humanity are so viciously boring. These people, unable to dream, merely earn their living wages and keep warm. Adding whatever comfort comes along. But high definition television and sports cars are far from the revolution in morality that comes with not believing, or even hating God.”
“You make them all sound like hedonists, many are philanthropic, give to the poor, affirm the dignity of humankind…”
“But why? Why do they do this? How is the action judged as good? Utilitarians the lot! They throw out God but try to keep His Image in them. What is the inherent dignity of man if he is just a cluster of molecules walking about? God may pass away in their system, but man too disappears like a face drawn in the sand, blending with the oncoming sea. There is no good. No evil. Just Will. A blank canvass to paint with whatever magnificent lie they should like! But they ignore this. This is their cowardice. They act as if a definite face still lingers. They do not realize that the void must now live in every heart.”
I felt anger in me bubbling, a great frothing engine. It was hard to tell if it was at impatience with his rant, or if I was wholly on board and simply waiting on the precipice to fall. To plunge my fists into your lover’s skull. To feel his eyes sink under my fists. I was the abyss waiting to overflow.
“So what then…what are you proposing?”
“I want you to believe in God and hate Him because He is your denial.” He hissed. “I want you to feel your anger course through your arteries, your eyes, your fists and bone. That strength is and can be the only law. I want you to sense the injustice, to feel the spark of cure in your soul, that sweet voice and impulse that screams at you to kill, to hit, to bite and scream. That there is no truth but power, and that power is within your grasp to take.”
“There are worlds—galaxies—waiting to be created by your fists and teeth. That what has moved you here, now, in the darkness of this parking lot under the light of these manmade trees that jut from ground is the triumph not even of human spirit, but you. Can you not see the poetry? How man’s artifice against the dark is allowing you to see? To see in the night that the Creator has set, the night that would otherwise obviate your ability to see him, that pathetic excuse of life that you are about to beat until he begs for your mercy, until his blood chokes his words? But you must be brave, now. You have done so well, and are so close. But You must be the one to seize the opportunity.”
He leaned back into the seat, behind me, fading slightly into shadows as his face withdrew from the lamps flickering above. He softened his voice, almost to a whisper. “An atheist? No no. My son, my child. I want you to believe in God, with all that I am. All my soul and heart. And if I was flesh, and if I was body, eyes, and teeth, I would wish with that as well. I am nothing else but this wish. My existence screams it. Vomits it. There is nothing else for me.” He paused, his voice quaking in the sporadic dark of the still flickering lamp. “Believe in God! But do not believe in me. That is my wish.”
“That’s a tall order, since you are sitting in my car.”
“You still do not understand.” He sounded indignant. “I am here. But I am for you, I am for your existence, your desires, your instincts, your hatred. You rise up to define yourself. Oh how I am your ally, your promoter. But where is God? Where is thine Savior? Oh He exists alright, but where, where, where? Not here! And is this not the very definition of His existence? Do you not have to deny yourself in order to follow Him?” He shifted in his seat. Licked his lips.
“Oh but you do not have to deny yourself in order to follow me.”
A twitch crossed his face.
For just a moment, one inexplicable, unmeasureable moment, I thought he looked slightly like me.
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