Devil -- Fiction; Devil in literature; Short stories
Needless to say that this Devil is not the evil spirit of mediaeval
dogma. The Romantic Devil is an altogether new species of the _genus
diaboli_. There are fashions in Devils as in dresses, and what is a
Devil in one country or one century may not pass muster in another. It
is related that after the glory of Greece had departed, a mariner,
voyaging along her coast by night, heard from the woods the cry:
“Great Pan is dead!” But Pan was not dead; he had fallen asleep to
awake again as Satan. In like manner, when the eighteenth century
believed Satan to be dead, he was, as a matter of fact, only
recuperating his energies for a fresh start in a new form. His new
avatar was Prometheus. Satan continued to be the enemy of God, but he
was no longer the enemy of man. Instead of a demon of darkness he
became a god of grace. This champion of celestial combat was not
actuated by hatred and envy of man, as Christianity was thought to
teach us, but by love and pity for humankind. The strongest expression
of this idea of the Devil in modern literature has been given by
August Strindberg, whose Lucifer is a compound of Prometheus, Apollo
and Christ. However, this interpretation of the Devil, whatever value
it may have from the point of view of originality, is aesthetically as
well as theologically not acceptable. Such a revaluation of an old
value offends our intellect while it touches our heart. All successful
treatment of the Devil in literature and art must be made to
correspond with the norm of popular belief. In art we are all
orthodox, whatever our views may be in religion. This new conception
of Satan will be found chiefly in poetry, while the popular concept
has been continued in prose. But even here a gradual evolution of the
idea of the Devil will be observed. The nineteenth century Demon is an
improvement on his _confrère_ of the thirteenth. He differs from his
older brother as a cultivated flower from a wild blossom. The Devil as
a human projection is bound to partake in the progress of human
thought. Says Mephistopheles:
“Culture, which the whole world licks,
Also unto the Devil sticks.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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