Devil's Advocate

Speak of the devil, and up pops John Updike. In an introduction to a new anthology called Soundings in Satanism (Sheed & Ward; $6.95), Updike--a childhood Lutheran who became a Congregationalist--even turns into something of a devil's advocate. Speaking disapprovingly of the widespread disbelief in God's opponent, the novelist observes: "We have become, in our Protestantism, more virtuous than the myths that taught us virtue; we judge them barbaric. We resist the bloody legalities of the Redemption; we face Judgment Day, in our hearts, much as young radicals face the mundane courts--convinced that acquittal is the one just verdict. We judge our Judge . . . incidentally reducing his 'ancient foe' to the dimensions of a bad comic strip."

The court is more complicated than that. Says Updike: "The assertion 'God exists' is a drastic one that imposes upon the universe a structure; given this main beam, subordinate beams and joists must follow . . . A potent 'nothingness' was unavoidably conjured up by God's creating something."

That powerful "nothingness," says Updike, is named the devil--and the devil pervades man's experience. "These grand ghosts did not arise from a vacuum; they grow (and if pruned back will sprout again) from the deep exigencies and paradoxes of the human condition. We know that we will live, and know that we will die. We love the creation that upholds us and sense that it is good; yet pain and plague and destruction are everywhere."

Beyond the archdemonic Hitlers, Updike points out, are the evils that persist in Everyman: "Is not destructiveness within us as a positive lust, an active hatred? Who does not exult in fires, collapses, the ruin and death of friends? What man can exempt from his purest sexual passion and most chivalrous love, the itch to defile?"

Good fortune is no escape, Updike warns. "Indeed, the more fortunate our condition, the stronger the lure of negation, of perversity, of refusal . . . Thus the devil thrives in proportion, is always ready to enrich the rich man with ruin, the wise man with folly, the beautiful woman with degradation, the kind, average man with debauches of savagery. The world always topples."

What does all this suggest to Updike? "I would timidly, as a feeble believer and worse scholar, open the question of the devil as a metaphysical possibility, if not necessity."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.