DARWINISM ON THE DEVIL.
It has been said--perhaps more satirically than seriously--that theology
could not get on without its devil. Certain it is that wherever there
has been a vivid realization of the Spirit of Light, there, as if by way
of antithesis, there has been an equally clear recognition of the Power
of Darkness. Ormuzd--under whatever name recognised--generally supposes
his opponent Ahriman; and there have even been times, as in the
prevalence of the Manichean heresy, when the Evil Spirit has been
affected in preference to the good--probably only another way of saying
that morals have been held subordinate to intellect. But I am growing at
once prosy and digressive.
The announcement that the "Liberal Social Union" would devote one of
their sweetly heretical evenings at the Beethoven Rooms, Harley Street,
to an examination of the Darwinian development of the Evil Spirit, was
one not to be scorned by an inquirer into the more eccentric and erratic
phases of theology. Literary engagements stood in the way--for the
social heretics gather on a Friday--but come what might, I would hear
them discuss diabolism. Leaving my printer's devil to indulge in
typographical errors according to his own sweet will (and I must confess
he _did_ wander), I presented myself, as I thought in good time, at the
portals of the Harley Street room, where his Satanic Majesty was to be
heretically anatomized. But, alas! I had not calculated aright the power
of that particular potentate to "draw." No sooner had I arrived at the
cloak-room than the very hats and umbrellas warned me of the number of
his votaries. Evening Dress was "optional;" and I frankly confess, at
whatever risk of his displeasure, that I had not deemed Mephistopheles
worthy of a swallow-tailed coat. I came in the garb of ordinary life;
and at once felt uncomfortable when, mounting the stairs, I was received
by a portly gentleman and an affable lady in violent tenue de soir. The
room was full to the very doors; and as soon as I squeezed into earshot
of the lecturer (who had already commenced his discourse) I was greeted
by a heterodox acquaintance in elaborate dress-coat and rose-pink
gloves. Experience in such matters had already told me--and thereupon I
proved it by renewed personal agony--that an Englishman never feels so
uncomfortable as when dressed differently from his compeers at any kind
of social gathering. Mrs. T---- asks you to dinner, and you go clad in
the correct costume in deference to the prandial meal, but find all the
rest in morning dress. Mrs. G----, on the contrary, sends you a
rollicking note to feed with a few friends--no party; and you go
straight from office to find a dozen heavily-got-up people sniggering at
your frock coat and black tie. However, as I said, on this occasion the
lecturer, Dr. Zerffi, was in the thick of what proved to be a very
attractive lecture; so I was not the observed of all observers for more
than two or three minutes, and was able to give him my whole attention
as soon as I had recovered from my confusion. Dr. Zerffi said:--
Dr. Darwin's theory of evolution and selection has changed our modern
mode of studying the inorganic and organic phenomena of nature, and
investigating the realities of truth. His theory is not altogether new,
having been first proclaimed by Leibnitz, and followed up with regard to
history by Giovanni Battista Vico. Oken and Goethe amplified it towards
the end of the last, and at the beginning of the present century.
Darwin, however, has systematized the theory of evolution, and now the
branches of human knowledge can only be advantageously pursued if we
trace in all phenomena, whether material or spiritual, a beginning and a
gradual development. One fact has prominently been established, that
there is order in the eternal change, that this order is engendered by
law, and that law and order are the criterions of an all-wise ruling
Spirit pervading the Universe. To this positive spirit of law a spirit
of negation, an element of rebellion and mischief, of mockery and
selfishness, commonly called the Devil, has been opposed from the
beginning.
It appeared, till very lately, as though God had created the world only
for the purpose of amusing the Devil, and giving him an abundance of
work, all directed to destroying the happiness of God's finest
creation--man. Treating the Devil from a Darwinian point of view, we may
assert that he developed himself from the protoplasm of ignorance, and
in the gloomy fog of fear and superstition grew by degrees into a
formidable monster, being changed by the overheated imaginations of
dogmatists into a reptile, an owl, a raven, a dog, a wolf, a lion, a
centaur, a being half monkey, half man, till, finally, he became a
polite and refined human being.
Man once having attained a certain state of consciousness, saw sickness,
evil, and death around him, and as it was usual to assign to every
effect some tangible cause, man developed the abstract notion of evil
into a concrete form, which changed with the varying impressions of
climate, food, and the state of intellectual progress. To the white man
the Devil was black, and to the black man white. Originally, then, the
Devil was merely a personification of the apparently destructive forces
of nature. Fire was his element. The Indians had their Rakshas and
Uragas, the Egyptians their Typhon, and the Persians their Devas. The
Israelites may claim the honour of having brought the theory of evil
into a coarse and sensual form, and the Christians took up this
conception, and developed it with the help of the Gnostics, Plato, and
the Fathers dogmatically into an entity.
I shall not enter on a minute inquiry into the origin of this formidable
antagonist of common sense and real piety; I intend to take up the three
principal phases of the Devil's development, at a period when he already
appears to us as a good Christian Devil, and always bearing in mind Mr.
Darwin's theory of evolution, I shall endeavour to trace spiritually the
changes in the conceptions of evil from the Devil of Luther to that of
Milton, and at last to that of Goethe.
The old Jewish Rabbis and theological doctors were undoubtedly the first
to trace, genealogically, the pedigree of the Christian Devil in its
since general form. If we take the trouble to compare chap. i. v. 27 of
Genesis with chap. ii. v. 21, we will find that two distinct creations
of man are given. The one is different from the other. In the first
instance we have the clear, indisputable statement, "So God created man
in his own image:" and to give greater force to this statement the text
goes on, "in the image of God created he him; male and female created he
them." Both man and woman were then created. Nothing could be plainer.
But as though no creation of man had taken place at all, we find, chap.
ii. v. 7: "And the Lord formed man of the dust of the ground, and
breathed into his nostrils the breath of life." This was evidently a
second man, differently created from the first, who is stated to have
been made "in the image of God himself." This second creature was
entrusted with the nomination and classification of all created things;
that is, with the formation of language, and the laying down of the
first principles of botany and zoology. After he had performed this
arduous task it happened that "for Adam there was not found an help meet
for him" (verse 20), and chap. ii. v. 21 tells us, "The Lord God caused
a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept; and He took one of his
ribs and closed up the flesh instead thereof;" and verse 22, "And of the
rib which the Lord God had taken from man made He a woman, and brought
her unto man." Adam then joyfully exclaims (verse 23), "This _is_ now
bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh." This cannot but lead to the
conclusion that this woman was an altogether different creature from the
first. The contradiction was most ingeniously explained by the learned
Jewish Rabbis, who considered the first woman the organic germ from
which the special Hebrew-Christian devils were evolved. The Rabbis
discovered that the name of the first woman was "Lilith"[1] (the
nightly); they knew positively--and who can disprove their
assertion?--that she was the most perfect beauty, more beautiful than
Eve; she had long waving hair, bright eyes, red lips and cheeks, and a
charmingly finished form and complexion; but having been created at the
same moment as the first man, and like him, in the image of God, she
refused to become man's wife; she objected to being subordinate to the
male part of creation--she was, in fact, the first strong-minded woman,
claiming the same rights as man, though a woman in body and form. Under
these circumstances the existence of the human race was deemed to be an
impossibility, and therefore the Lord had to make good his error, and He
created Eve as the completing part of man. The first woman left her
co-equally created male, and was changed into an enormous, most
beautiful, and seducing "She Devil," and her very thoughts brought forth
daily a legion of devils--incarnations of pride, vanity, conceit, and
unnaturalness. Happily these devils were so constituted that they
devoured one another. But in their rage they could take possession of
others, and more especially entered little children--boys under three
days old, girls under twenty days--and devoured them. This myth, by
means of evolution and the law of action and re-action, engendered the
further legend about the existence of three special angels who acted as
powerful antidotes to these devils, and whose names, "Senoi, Sansenoi,
and Sanmangeloph," if written on a piece of parchment suspended round
the neck of children afforded certain protection against them.
The origin of the Devil may thus be traced to the first vain contempt
for the eternal laws of nature. The woman, refusing to be a woman,
engenders devils; the man, trying to be a God, loses paradise and his
innocence, for the element of the supernatural intruded upon him and
abstracted his thoughts from this earth. These were the half idealistic
and half realistic elements from which the three greatest spiritual
incarnations of the Evil Spirit sprung up. Luther took the Evil Spirit
as a bodily entity, with big horns, fiery eyes, a reddish, protruding
tongue, a long tail, and the hoof of a horse. In this latter attribute
we trace at once the Kentaur element of ancient times. Through nearly
one thousand three hundred years from Tertullian and Thaumaturgus down
to Luther, every one was accustomed to look upon life as one great
battle with tens of thousands of devils, assaulting, harassing,
annoying, and seducing humanity. All fought, quarrelled, talked, and
wrestled with the Devil. He was more spoken of in the pulpits of the
Christian Churches, written about in theological and scientific books,
than God or Christ. All misfortunes were attributed to him. Thunder and
lightning, hailstorms and the rinderpest, the hooping cough and
epileptic fits were all the Devil's work. A man who suffered from
madness was said to be possessed by a legion of Evil Spirits. The Devil
settled himself in the gentle dimples of a pretty girl with the same
ease and comfort as in the wrinkles of an old woman. Everything that
was inexplicable was evil. Throughout the Middle Ages the masses and the
majority of their learned theological teachers believed the Greek and
Latin classics were inspired by Evil Spirits; that sculptures or
paintings, if beautiful, were of evil; that all cleverness in
Mathematics, Chemistry, or Medicine proved the presence of the
corrupting Evil Spirit working in man. Any bridge over a chasm or a
rapid river was the work of the Devil; even the most beautiful Gothic
cathedrals, like those of Cologne and St. Stephen at Vienna were
constructed by architects who served their apprenticeship in the
infernal regions. The Devil sat grinning on the inkstands of poets and
learned men, dictating to the poor deluded mortals, as the price for
their souls, charming love-songs or deep theological and philosophical
essays. It was extremely dangerous during this period of man's
historical evolution to be better or wiser than the ignorant masses.
Learning, talent, a superior power of reasoning, love for truth, a
spirit of inquiry, the capacity of making money by clever trading, an
artistic turn of mind, success in life, even in the Church, were only so
many proofs that the soul had been sold to some dwarfish or giant
messenger from Lucifer, who could appear in a thousand different forms.
Man was, since his assumed Fall, the exclusive property of the coarse
and vulgar conception of the Evil Spirit. Luther was full of these
ideas, he was brought up in this belief, and though he unconsciously
felt that the Devil ought to be expelled from our creed, he did not dare
to attempt the reform of humanity by annihilating the mischief-maker: he
could not rob man of his dearest spiritual possession; had he thought of
consigning the Devil to the antediluvian period of our moral and social
formation, he never could have succeeded in his reform. The Devil, in
fact, was his strongest helpmate; he could describe the ritual of the
Romish Church as the work of the Evil Spirit, produced to delude
mankind. The Devil had his Romish prayers, his processions, his worship
of relics, his remission of sins, his confessional, his infernal synods;
he was to Luther an active, rough, and material incarnation of the
roaring lion of the Scriptures in the shape of the Romish Church,
walking about visibly, tangibly, bodily amongst men, devouring all who
believed in the Pope, and who disbelieved in this stupid phantom of a
dogmatically blinded imagination.
The Evolution-theory may be clearly traced in the two next conceptions:
Milton's Satan and Goethe's Mephistopheles. They differ as strongly as
the periods and the poems in which they appear. Milton's Satan loses the
vulgar flesh and bone, horn and hoof nature--he is an epic character;
whilst Goethe's Devil is an active dramatic entity of modern times.
Milton's representative of evil is a very powerful conception--it is
evil in abstracto; whilst Mephistopheles is evil in concreto--the
intelligible, tangible Devil, evolved by the power of selection from an
antediluvian monster, and transformed through a civilizing process of at
least six thousand years into its present form. Milton's Satan is a
debased intellect who in his boundless ambition is still a supernatural
being. Mephistopheles is the incarnation of our complicated modern
social evils, full of petty tricks and learned quotations; he piously
turns up his eyes, he lies, doubts, calumniates, seduces, philosophizes,
sneers, but all in a polite and highly educated way; he is a scholar, a
divine, a politician, a diplomatist. Satan is capable of wild
enthusiasm, he sometimes remembers his bright sinless past; "from the
lowest deep," he yearns, "once more to lift himself up, in spite of
fate, nearer to his ancient seat;"--he hopes to re-enter heaven, "to
purge off his gloom;" some remnant of heavenly innocence still clings to
him, for, though _fallen_, he is still an _angel_! Mephistopheles in his
real nature is without any higher aspirations, he argues with a
sarcastic smile on his lips, he is ironical with sophisticated
sharpness. Satan has unconsciously gigantic ideas, he is ready to
wrestle with God for the dominion of heaven. Mephistopheles is perfectly
conscious of his littleness as opposed to our better intellectual
nature, and does evil for evil's sake. Satan is sublime through the
grandeur of his primitive elements, pride and ambition. Mephistopheles
is only grave in his pettiness; he does not refuse an orgie with
drunken students, indulges in jokes with monkeys, works miracles in the
witch's kitchen, delights in the witch's "one-time-one;" distributes
little tracts "to stir up the witch's heart with special fire." Satan
has nothing vulgar in him: he is capable of melancholy feelings, he can
be pathetic and eloquent. Mephistopheles laughs at the stupidity of the
world, and at his own. Satan believes in God and in himself, whilst
Mephistopheles is the "Spirit that denies;" he believes neither in God
nor in heaven nor in hell; he does not believe in his own entity--he is
no supernatural, fantastic being, but man incarnate: he is the evil part
of a good whole, which loses its entity when once seen and recognised in
its real nature; for Mephistopheles in reality is our own ignorant,
besotted, animal nature, cultivated and developed at the expense of our
intellectual part.
Luther's devil is the outgrowth of humanity in long-clothes. Man,
ignorant of the forces of the Cosmos, blinded by theological dialectics
and metaphysical subtleties, incapable of understanding the real essence
of our moral and intellectual nature, philosophically untrained to
observe that evil is but a sequence of the disturbed balance between our
double nature--spirit and matter--attributed all mischief in the
intellectual as well as in our social spheres to an absolute powerful
being who continually tormented him.
Milton's Satan is the poetical conception of man developed from an
infant in long-clothes into a boisterous but dreamy youth, ascribing to
every incomprehensible effect an arbitrary, poetical cause. Goethe's
Mephistopheles, lastly is the truthful conception of evil as it really
exists in a thousand forms, evolved from our own misunderstood and
artificially and dogmatically distorted nature.
Goethe in destroying the Devil as such, consigned him to the primeval
myths and legends of ignorance and fear, and has shown us the real
nature of the evil.
What then is the Devil?
The Devil took, as I said in the beginning, his origin in our blinded
senses, in an undue preponderance of that which is material in us over
that which is intellectual. The moment we look the Evil Spirit in the
face, he vanishes as an _absolute_ being and becomes--
A portion of that power
Which wills the bad and works the good at every hour.
After having been exposed during several periods of generations to new
conditions, thus rendering a great amount of variation possible, the
Devil has developed from a monster into a monkey, and from a monkey into
a man endowed with the nature of a monkey and the propensities of a
monster. In the State and in the Church, in Arts and Sciences, the Devil
is the principle of injustice, hypocrisy, ugliness, and ignorance.
Goethe has annihilated the ideal poetical grandeur of Milton's Satan; he
has stripped Luther's Devil of his vulgar realism; Goethe has driven
Satan from an imaginary hell, where he preferred to rule instead of
worshipping and serving in heaven, and with the sponge of common sense
he wiped the horned monster, drawn by the imagination of dogmatists,
from the black board of ignorance. In banishing the Evil Spirit into the
dominion of myths, Goethe showed him in his real nature. Darwin
displaced man from the exalted pedestal of a special creation, and
endeavoured to trace him as the development of cosmical elements. Darwin
enabled us to look upon man as the completing link in the great chain of
the gradual evolution of the life-giving forces of the Universe, and he
rendered thus our position more comprehensible and natural. Goethe, in
proving that the Evil Spirit of ancient and Hebrew-Christian times was a
mere phantom of an ill-regulated fantasy, taught us to look for the real
origin of evil. What was a metaphysical incomprehensibility became an
intelligible reality. The Demon can be seen in "Faust" as in a mirror,
and in glancing into it we behold our Darwinian progenitor, the animal,
face to face. Before the times of Goethe, with very few exceptions, the
Evil Spirit was an entity with whom any one might become familiar--in
fact, the "spiritus familiaris" of old. The Devil spoke, roared,
whispered, could sign contracts. We were able to yield our soul to him;
and he could bodily enter our body. The Devil was a corporeal entity.
The rack, water, and fire were used to expel him from sorcerers and
witches, and to send him into all sorts of unclean animals. Goethe, in
unmasking this phantom, introduced him not as something _without_, but
as an element _within_ us. The service rendered to humanity in showing
us the true nature of evil is as grand as the service rendered by Mr.
Darwin in assigning to man his place _in_ nature, and not _above_
nature. It is curious that those who have most of the incorrigible and
immovable animal nature in them should protest with the greatest
vehemence and clamour against this theory. They think by asserting their
superiority, based on a special creation, to become at once special and
superior beings, and prefer this position to trying, through a
progressive development in science and knowledge, in virtue and honesty,
to prove the existence of the higher faculties with which man has been
endowed through his gradual development from the lowest phases of living
creatures to the highest. In assuming the Devil to be something absolute
and positive, and not something relative and negative, man hoped to be
better able to grapple with him. Mephistopheles is nothing personal; he
can, like the Creator himself, be only traced in his works. The Devil
lurks beneath the venerable broadcloth of an intolerant and ignorant
priest; he uses the seducing smiles of a wicked beauty; he stirs the
blood of the covetous and grasping; he strides through the gilded halls
of ambitious emperors and ministers, who go with "light hearts" to kill
thousands of human beings with newly-invented infernal machines; he
works havoc in the brains of the vain. The Devil shuffles the cards for
the gambler, and destroys our peace whether he makes us win or lose on
the turf; he sits joyfully grinning on the tops of bottles and tankards
filled with alcoholic drinks; he entices us on Sundays to shut our
museums and open our gin-palaces; to neglect the education of the
masses; and then prompts us to accuse them with hypocritical
respectability of drunkenness and stupidity. It is the Devil who turns
us into friends of lapdogs and makes us enemies of the homeless. The
Devil is the greatest master in dogmatism; he creates sects who, in the
name of love and humility, foster hatred and pride; the Devil encloses
men in a magic circle on the barren heath of useless speculation; drives
them round and round like blinded horses in a mill, starting from one
point, and after miles and miles of travel and fatigue, leading us to
the point, sadder but not wiser, from which we set out. The Devil makes
us quarrel whether we ought to have schools with or without bigoted
religious teachings; he burns incense to stupefy our senses, lights
candles to obscure our sight, amuses the masses with buffooneries to
prevent them from thinking, draws us away from common-sense morality,
and leads us, under the pretext of a mystic and symbolic religion, to
the confessional, the very hothouse of mischief. Satan in all his
shapes and forms as he rules the world has been described by Goethe as
Egotism. Selfishness is his element and real nature. Selfishness not yet
realizing the divine, because so entirely _humane_ command--"Do unto
others as you wish that they should do unto you." Selfishness is the
only essence of evil. Selfishness has divided men into different
nations, and fosters in them pride, envy, jealousy, and hatred. Mr.
Darwin has shown that one animal preys on the other, that the weaker
species has to yield to the stronger. Goethe again has shown us how the
Evil Spirit drags us through life's wild scenes and its flat
unmeaningness, to seek mere sensual pleasures and to neglect altogether
our higher and better nature, which is the outgrowth of our more
complicated, more highly developed organization. Were we only to
recognise this, our real nature, we should leave less to chance and
prejudices; were we to study man from a physiological, psychological,
and honestly historical point of view, we should soon eliminate
selfishness from among us, and be able to appreciate what is really the
essence of evil. The more nearly we approach Darwin's primitive man, the
ape, the nearer do we draw to the Mephistopheles who shows us his exact
nature with impudent sincerity in Goethe's "Faust."
That which changes our Psyche, that is our intellectual faculty with its
airy wings of imagination, its yearnings for truth, into an ugly,
submissive, crawling worm, is heartless selfishness. Not without reason
is poor guileless Margaret horrified at Mephistopheles. She shudders,
hides herself on the bosom of Faust, like a dove under the wings of an
eagle, and complains that the Evil Spirit--
... Always wears such mocking grin,
Half cold, half grim,
One sees that nought has interest for him;
'Tis writ on his brow, and can't be mistaken,
No soul in him can love awaken.
When all goes wrong, when religious, social, and political animosities and
hatred disturb the peace; when unintelligible controversies on the
inherited sin, the origin of evil, justification, and transubstantiation,
"grace and free will," the creative and the created, mystic incantations,
real and unreal presences, the like but not equal, the affirmative and the
negative natures of God and man confuse the finite brains of infinite
talkers and repeaters of the same things; when they quarrel about the
wickedness of the hen who dared to lay an egg on the Sabbath; when the
glaring torch of warfare is kindled by the fire of petty animosities, then
the Evil Spirit of egotism celebrates its most glorious festivals.
What can banish this monster, this second and worse part of our nature?
To look upon it from a Darwinian point of view. Goethe saves his fallen
Faust through useful "occupation," through honest hard work for the
benefit of mankind. The more we make ourselves acquainted with evil, the
last remnant of our animal nature, in a rational and not mystic
dogmatical sense, the less we exalt ourselves as exceptional creatures
above nature, the easier it must be for us to dry up the source of
superstition and ignorance which serves to nourish this social monster.
Let our relations to each other be based on "mutual love," for God is
love, and selfishness as the antagonist of love, and the Devil as the
antagonist of God, will both vanish.
Let us strive to vanquish our unnatural social organization by a
natural, social, but at the same time, liberal union of all into one
common brotherhood, and the roaring lion will be silenced for ever.
Let us purify society of all its social, or rather unsocial, iniquities
and falsehoods, of all ingratitude and envy, in striving for an honest
regeneration of ourselves, and through ourselves of humanity at large,
convincing one another that man has developed by degrees into earth's
fairest creature, destined for good and happiness, and not for evil and
wretchedness, and there will be an end of the _Devil_ and all his
_devilries_.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] The word is found in Isaiah xxxiv. 14. Translated in the Vulgate as
"Lamia;" in Luther's translation as "Kobold;" in the English version as
"screech-owl;" and in others as "an ugly night-bird."