Selected Poems and Prose
Page 69
From On the Devil, and Devils
To determine the Nature and functions of the Devil is no contemptible province of the European mythology.1 Who or what he is, his origin, his habitation, his destiny, and his power, are subjects which puzzle the most acute Theologians, and on which no orthodox person can be induced to give a decisive opinion. He is the weak place of the popular religion, the vulnerable belly of the Crocodile.
The Manichaean philosophy2 respecting the origin and government of the world, if not true is at least an hypothesis conformable to the experience of actual facts. To suppose that the world was created, and is superintended by two Spirits of a balanced power and opposite dispositions is simply a personification of the struggle which we experience within ourselves, and which we perceive in the operations of external things as they affect us, between good and evil. The supposition that the good Spirit is, or hereafter will be superiour, is a personification of the principle of hope, and that thirst for improvement without which, present evil would be intolerable. The vulgar are all Manichaeans: all that remains of the popular superstition is mere machinery and accompaniment. To abstract in contemplation from our sensations of pleasure and pain, all circumstance and limit,—to add those active powers of whose existence we are conscious within ourselves—to give to [?those] which are most pleasing to us a perpetual or an ultimate superiority, with all epithets of honourable addition, and to brand that which is displeasing with epithets ludicrous or horrible, predicting its ultimate defeat, is to pursue the process by which the vulgar arrive at the familiar notions of God and the Devil.
The Devil was clearly a Chaldaean invention, for we first hear of him after the return of the Jews from their second Assyrian captivity3 […]4 Those among Greek philosophers whose poetical imagination suggested a personification of the cause of the Universe, seemed nevertheless to have dispensed with the agency of the Devil […]5 They accounted for evil by supposing that what is called matter is eternal and that God, in making the world, made not the best that he, or even inferior intelligences could concieve; but that he moulded the reluctant and stubborn materials ready to his hand into the nearest arrangement possible to the perfect archetype existing in his contemplation—in the same manner as a skilful watchmaker, who if he had diamonds and steel and brass and gold, can construct a time piece of the most accurate workmanship, could produce nothing beyond a coarse and imperfect clock if he were restricted to wood as his material.
The Christian theologians, however, have invariably rejected this hypothesis, on the ground that the eternity of matter is incompatible with the omnipotence of God. Like panic-stricken slaves in the presence of a jealous and suspicious despot, they have tortured themselves ever to devise a flattering sophism by which they might appease him by the most contradictory praises—endeavouring to reconcile omnipotence and benevolence and equity in the Author of an Universe where evil and good are inextricably intangled, and where the most admirable tendencies to happiness and preservation are forever baffled by misery and decay. The Christians therefore invented or adopted the Devil to extricate them from this difficulty.
The account they give us of the origin of the Devil is curious. Heaven, according to the popular creed, is a certain airy region inhabited by the Supreme being and a multitude of inferior spirits. With respect to the situation of it, theologians are not agreed, but it is generally supposed to be placed beyond the remotest constellation of the visible stars. These spirits are supposed, like those which reside in the bodies of animals and men, to have been created by God with a foresight of the consequences which would result from the mechanism of their nature. He made them as good as possible, but the nature of the substance out of which they were formed, or the unconquerable laws according to which that substance when created was necessarily modified prevented them from being so perfect as he could wish. Some say that he gave them free will, that is, that he made them without any very distinct apprehension of the results of his workmanship, leaving them an active power which might determine themselves to this or that action independently of the motives afforded by the regular operation of those impressions which were produced by the general agencies of the rest of his creation. This he is supposed to have done, that he might excuse himself to his own conscience for tormenting and annoying these unfortunate spirits, when they provoked him, by turning out worse than he expected. This account of the origin of evil, to make the best of it, does not seem more complimentary to the Supreme Being, or less derogatory to his omnipotence and goodness, than the Platonic scheme.6—
They then proceed to relate, gravely, that one fine Morning, a chief of these spirits took it into his head to rebel against God, having gained over to his cause a third part of the eternal angels who attended upon the Creator and Preserver of Heaven and Earth. After a series of desperate conflicts between those who remained faithful to the antient dynasty, and the insurgents, the latter were beaten, and driven into a place called Hell, which was rather their empire than their prison, and where God reserved them to be first the tempters and then the jailors and tormentors of a new race of beings whom he created under the same conditions of imperfection, and with the same foresight of an unfortunate result. The motive of this insurrection is not assigned by any of the earliest mythological writers. Milton supposes that on a particular day God chose to adopt as his son and heir (the reversion of an estate with an immortal incumbent would be worth little7) a being unlike the other spirits, who seems to have been supposed to be a detached portion of himself, and afterwards figured upon the earth in the well known character of Jesus Christ. The Devil is represented as conceiving high indignation at this preference; and as disputing the affair with arms. I cannot discover Milton’s authority for this circumstance; but all agree in the fact of the insurrection, and the defeat, and the casting out into Hell.
Nothing can exceed the grandeur and the energy of the character of the Devil as expressed in Paradise Lost. He is a Devil very different from the popular personification of evil; and it is a mistake to suppose that he was intended for a personification of evil, implacable hate, and cunning refinement of device to inflict the utmost anguish on an enemy; these, which are venial in a slave, are not to be forgiven in a tyrant; these, which are redeemed by much that ennobles in one subdued, are marked by all that dishonours his conquest in the victor.
Milton’s devil as a moral being is as far superior to his God, as one who perseveres in some purpose which he has conceived to be excellent in spite of adversity and torture is to one who in the cold security of undoubted triumph inflicts the most horrible revenge upon his enemy,—not from any mistaken notion of bringing him to repent of a perseverance in enmity but with the open and alledged design8 of exasperating him to deserve new torments.
Milton so far violated all that part of the popular creed which is susceptible of being preached and defended in argument, as to alledge no superiority in moral virtue to God over his Devil […]9 The writer who would have attributed majesty and beauty to the
As it is, the Divine Paradise Lost has conferred on the whole modern mythology a systematic form; and when the immeasurable and unceasing mutability of time shall have added one more superstition11 to those which have already arisen and decayed upon the earth, commentators and critics will be learnedly employed on elucidating the religion of ancestral Europe, only not utterly forgotten because it will have participated in the eternity of genius.
The Devil owes everything to Milton. Dante and Tasso12 present us with a very gross idea of him. Milton divested him of a sting and hoofs and horns; [and] clothed him with the sublime grandeur of a graceful but tremendous Spirit.
I am afraid there is much laxity among the orthodox of the present day respecting a belief in the Devil. I recommend the Bishops to make a serious charge to their diocesans13 on this dangerous latitude. The
Devil is the outwork of the Christian faith; he is the weakest point—you may observe that infidels in their noviciate always begin by tremulously doubting the existence of the Devil. Depend on it that when a person once begins to think that perhaps there is no Devil, he is in a dangerous way. There may be observed in polite society a great deal of coquetting14 about the Devil, especially among divines, which is singularly ominous. They qualify him as the evil Spirit—they consider him as synonymous with the flesh. They seem to wish to divest him of all personality; to reduce him from his abstract to his concrete; to reverse the means by which he was created in the mind; which they will by no means bear with respect to God. It is popular and well looked upon if you deny the Devil a ‘local habitation and a name.’15 Even the vulgar begin to scout16 him. Hell is popularly considered as metaphorical, the torments of an evil conscience, and by no means capable of being topographically ascertained. No one likes to mention the torments of everlasting fire and the poisonous gnawing of the worm that liveth for ever and ever.17 It is all explained away into the regrets and the reproaches of an evil conscience […]18
The Devil is Διάβολος,19 an accuser […]20 In this view, he is at once the informer—and the Attorney General [and] the jailor of the celestial tribunal. It is not good policy, or at least cannot be considered as a constitutional practise to unite these characters. The Devil must have a great interest to exert himself to procure a sentence of guilty from the judge; for I suppose there will be no jury at the resurrection—at least if there is, it will be so overawed by the bench and the counsel for the Crown as to ensure whatever verdict the court shall please to recommend. No doubt, that as an incentive to his exertions, half goes to the informer. What an army of spies and delators21 all Hell must afford under the direction of that active magistrate the devil! […]22 If the Devil takes but half the pleasure in tormenting a sinner which God does, who took the trouble to create them, and then to invent a system of casuistry by which he might excuse himself for devoting them to eternal torment, this reward must be considerable.
Conceive how the enjoyment of half the advantages to be derived from their ruin, whether in person or property, must irritate23 the activity of a delator. Tiberius, or Bonaparte or Lord Castlereagh24 never affixed any reward to the disclosure or the creation of conspiracies, equal to that which God’s government has attached to the exertions of the Devil to tempt, betray and accuse unfortunate man. These two considerable personages are supposed to have entered into a sort of partnership in which the weaker has consented to bear all the odium of their common actions, and allow the stronger to talk of himself as a very honourable person, on condition of having a participation in what is the especial delight of both of them—burning men to all eternity. The dirty work is done by the Devil, in the same manner as some starving wretch will hire himself out to a king or a minister with a stipulation that he shall have some portion of the public spoil, as an instrument to betray a certain number of other starving wretches into circumstances of capital punishment, when they may think it convenient to edify the rest by hanging up a few of those whose murmurs are too loud.
It is far from inexplicable that earthly tyrants should employ these kind of agents, or that God should have done so with regard to the Devil and his angels, or that any depositary of power should take these measures with respect to those by whom he fears lest that power should be wrested from him. But to tempt mankind to incur everlasting damnation must on the part of God, and even on the part of the Devil, arise from that very disinterested love of tormenting and annoying which is seldom observed on earth except among old maids, eunuchs and priests. The thing that comes nearest to it is a troop of idle dirty boys baiting a cat. Cooks skinning eels and boiling lobsters alive and bleeding calves and whipping pigs to Death, naturalists anatomising dogs alive25 (a dog has as good a right and a better excuse for anatomising a naturalist) are nothing compared to God and the Devil judging, damning, and then tormenting the soul of a miserable sinner. It is pretended that God dislikes it; but this is mere shamefacedness and coquetting, for he has everything his own way and he need not damn unless he likes. The Devil has a better excuse, for as he was entirely made by God he can have no tendency or disposition the seeds of which were not originally planted by his creator […]26
Christians in general will not admit the substance and presence of Devils upon the earth in modern times, or they suppose their agency to be more obscure and surreptitious in proportion as the histories of them approach to the present epoch, or indeed any epoch in which there has been a considerable progress in historical criticism and natural science. There were a number of Devils in Judaea in the time of Jesus Christ, and a great deal of reputation was gained both by him and others by what was called casting them out. A droll story is related amongst others of Jesus Christ having driven a legion of Devils into a herd of Pigs, who were so discomfited with these new inmates that they all threw themselves over the precipice into the lake and were drowned.27 These were a set of hypocondriacal and high minded swine, very unlike any others of which we have authentic record; they disdained to live if they must live in so intimate a society with devils as that which was imposed on them; and the pig drivers were no doubt confounded at so heroical a resolution. What became of the Devils after the death of the pigs, whether they past into the fish, and thence by digestion thro’ the stomach into the brain of Gadarean Ichthyophagists;28 whether they returned to Hell, or remained in the water, the Historian has left as subjects of everlasting conjecture. I should be curious to know whether any half starved Jew picked up these pigs, and sold them at the market at Gadara, and what effect the bacon of a demoniac pig who had killed himself produced upon the consumers29 […]30
The Devil and his angels are called the Powers of Air, and the Devil himself Lucifer […]31 The Devil after having gradually assumed the horns, hoofs, tail and ears of the antient Gods of the Woods,32 gradually lost them again; although wings had been added. It is inexplicable why men assigned them these additions as circumstances of terror and deformity. The Sylvans and Fauns with their leader the Great Pan were most poetical personages, and were connected in the imagination of Pagans with all that could enliven and delight. They were supposed to be innocent beings not greatly different in habits and manners from the shepherds and herdsmen of which they were the patron saints. But the Xtians contrived to turn the wrecks of the Greek mythology as well as the little they understood of their philosophy to purposes of deformity and falshood. I suppose the sting with which he was armed gave him a dragon like and viperous appearance very formidable.
I can sufficiently understand why the author of evil should have been typified under the image of a Serpent, that animal producing merely by its sight,33 so strong an associated recollection of the malignity of many of its species. But this was eminently a practise confined to the Jews, whose earliest mythology suggested this animal as the cause of all evil. Among the Greeks the Serpent was considered as an auspicious and favourable being. He attended on Aesculapius and Apollo.34 In Egypt the Serpent was an hieroglyph of eternity.35 The Jewish account is, that the serpent, that is the animal, persuaded the original pair of human beings to eat of a fruit from which God had commanded them to abstain; and that in consequence God expelled them from the pleasant garden where he had before permitted them to reside. God on this occasion, it is said, assigned as a punishment to the serpent that its motion should be as it now is along the ground upon its belly; we are given to suppose that before this misconduct it hopped along upon its tail, a mode of progression which if I were a serpent I should think the severest punishment of the two. The Christians have turned this serpent into their Devil, and accommodated the whole story to their new scheme of sin and propitiation.36
From A Philosophical View of Reform
1st. Sentiment of the Necessity of change.
2nd. Practicability and Utility of such change.
3rd. State of Parties as regards it.
4th. Probable mode—Desirabl
e mode.
Let us believe not only that is necessary because it is just and ought to be, but necessary because it is inevitable and must be.
Those who imagine that their personal interest is directly or indirectly concerned in maintaining the power in which they are clothed by the existing institutions of English Government do not acknowledge the necessity of a material change in those institutions. With this exception, there is no inhabitant of the British Empire of mature age and perfect understanding not fully persuaded of the necessity of Reform.
Introduction
From the dissolution of the Roman Empire, that vast and successful scheme for enslaving the most civilized portion of mankind, to the epoch of two recent wars,1 have succeeded a series of schemes on a smaller scale, operating to the same effect. Sacred names borrowed from the life and opinions of Jesus Christ were employed as symbols of domination and imposture; and a system of liberty and equality, for such was the system preached by that great Reformer, was perverted to support oppression.—Not his doctrines, for they are too simple and direct to be susceptible of such perversion—but the mere names. Such was the origin of the Catholic Church, which, together with the several dynasties then beginning to consolidate themselves in Europe, means, being interpreted, a plan according to which the cunning and selfish few have employed the fears and hopes of the ignorant many to the Establishment of their own power and the destruction of the real interest of all.
The Republics and municipal governments of Italy opposed for some time a systematic and effectual resistance to the all-surrounding tyranny. The Lombard League defeated the armies of the despot in open field, and until Florence was betrayed to those flattered traitors