Satanic Indifference and Ultimate Reality

Satan has captured the imagination of writers in the English language for centuries. This figure and the notion of evil have gone through many changes in English literature of the 19 and 20 centuries. Something changed Satan during this time, and made him into an arbiter of truth rather than a figure of rebellion. In The Mysterious Stranger, Mark Twain used him as the grand narrator of the universe who explains the truth of all existence, that life is an illusion. The American horror author H.P. Lovecraft carried this one step further, using Rudolf Otto's mysterium horrendum to divest Satan of his supernatural status. Satan was transformed from a symbol of evil in a Manichean universe to an articulate arbiter of the revelation that human existence means nothing cast against the broad spectrum of the cosmos. There are many vantage points from which to examine a subject like Satan. To paraphrase Mark Twain's comments about man, Satan "is too large a subject to be treated as a whole;" so this paper will "merely discuss a detail or two of him at this time.” There are many platitudes about Satan that have been as grossly misunderstood as his legacy. The most interesting comes from Percy Shelley: “Depend upon it, that when a person once begins to think that perhaps there is no Devil, he is in a dangerous way.” (Shelley 1965, 87) At first glance, this appears to be similar to the statement in Charles Baudelaire's “The Generous Gambler,” that “the devil's slickest trick is to convince you that he does not exist!”(Baudelaire 1991, 407) Shelley seems to state that the Devil is a real force in the world, and if one is to deny this force's existence, one is in danger of falling into sin. However, Shelley's “On the Devil and Devils,”—from which this statement is taken—presents a rebuke of the Christian religion, invoking the Devil in order to explain how a Manichean universe—one with a Devil—could justify and give greater moral agency to the Devil than to God. This is a call to understand that—in the religious mindset—if there is good, perhaps there is evil. Baudelaire's story takes this a step further and presents the Devil not as this necessary force, but as a freethinker and explicator of truth. The narrator, a preacher relates: This paper will be using the word “Satanic,” as it originally means—adversarial. An illuminating article, “The Doctrine of Satan I: The Old Testament” by William Caldwell puts this in perspective. The word Satan, he states is “often used in the Old Testament as a verb, meaning to be or act as an adversary. Satan as a noun means a human adversary” or a “superhuman adversary.” According to Caldwell, “[. . . ]it appears as though these adversaries are[ . . . ]only functionally separate from God.” He further states that “angels that have evil tasks are not themselves thereby evil,” Moreover, “the Book of Job” mentions “one of the 'sons of God,' or angels, called Satan or Adversary. Anything like a clear outline of Satan appears here for the first time in the Old Testament. But even here it is the Satan. The presence of the article denotes the function of adversary rather than a character personally adverse to the good.” In The Biblical World 41.1 (1913): pg. 32 1 Reis: Satanic Indifference and Ultimate Reality