In “September 1, 1939,” Auden deploys Freudian categories to describe Hitler as a “psychopathic god” created by unresolvable psychodynamic conflicts in the German soul, whose sufferings had “driven a culture mad.” Three weeks after the German invasion of Poland, Freud had died, in London, and from New York Auden wrote a brilliant and reverent elegy for him:
One rational voice is dumb: over a grave
The household of impulse mourns one dearly loved.
Sad is Eros, builder of cities,
And weeping anarchic Aphrodite.1
This “rational voice,” Auden then believed, “would have us remember most of all / To be enthusiastic over the night,” “because it needs our love.” It is populated by “delectable creatures . . . exiles who long for the future / That lies in our power.” They wish merely “to serve enlightenment like him,” like Dr. Freud.
But his review of de la Mare’s anthology, written at almost the same time as the elegy for Freud, reconceives the night not as a place inhabited by “delectable creatures” but as a realm ruled by demons. And this alternative account had been brewing in Auden’s mind for several years. In 1936, he had written a sonnet (“And the age ended, and the last deliverer died”) about the successful elimination of magical creatures, supernatural forces. The giants, the dragons, the kobolds are gone. What now? Alas: “The vanquished powers were glad / To be invisible and free.” Now they “struck down the sons who strayed into their course, / And ravished the daughters, and drove the fathers mad.” When they are no longer believed in, “the vanquished powers” but grow in malignity and influence.2
By late 1942, Auden had come fully to endorse this account, which sees Freudian psychoanalysis not as complementary to a Christian account of the afflicted human soul, nor even as a merely deficient alternative, but as something that obscures, in potentially deadly ways, the truths we need to know about ourselves. He wrote,
Psychoanalysis, like all pagan scientia, says: “Come, my good man, no wonder you feel guilty. You have a distorting mirror, and that is indeed a very wicked thing to have. But cheer up. For a trifling consideration I shall be delighted to straighten it out for you. There. Look. A perfect image. The evil of distortion is exorcised. Now you have nothing to repent of any longer. Now you are one of the illumined and elect. That will be ten thousand dollars, please.”
And immediately come seven devils, and the last state of that man is worse than the first.3
That last sentence is a quotation from the Gospels, in which Jesus describes a demon who has been cast out but has the power to return, with “seven other spirits more wicked than himself” (Luke 11:24–26); and it is fair to say that in the period between 1936 and 1942, with the process accelerating dramatically with war’s onset, Auden replaces a psychoanalytic account of human wickedness with a demonological one. And for him this demonological account was relevant both on the cultural and the personal level. If the societies of the democratic West had fallen into “an ecstatic and morbid abdication of the free-willing and individual before the collective and daemonic,” Auden knew this experience in an intimate way: he would later write that, when faced with Kallman’s infidelity to their “marriage,” “I was forced to know in person what it is like to feel oneself the prey of demonic powers, in both the Greek and the Christian sense, stripped of self-control and self-respect, behaving like a ham actor in a Strindberg play.”4
It is impossible to be sure, but I suspect that Auden’s acquaintance with Charles Williams, as a person and as a writer, was key to his acceptance of this demonological account of human evil and pain. In all of Williams’s writings, he accepts, and in his novels writes continually of, demonic forces at work in the world, and in the book of his that most profoundly influenced Auden, Descent of the Dove, just mentioned, he cites the very passage from the Gospels that Auden does: “There has never yet been found any method of driving out one devil—except by pure love—which does not allow the entrance of seven, as Messias had long ago pointed out.5
Eliot, whose response to Williams’s personal charm and charisma was almost identical to Auden’s, was taken by the matter-of-factness with which Williams accepted supernatural forces at work in our world. In an introduction to All Hallows’ Eve, the novel that Williams completed just before his unexpected death in April 1945, Eliot wrote, “Williams seemed equally at ease among every sort and condition of men, naturally and unconsciously, without envy or contempt, without subservience or condescension. I have always believed that he would have been equally at ease in every kind of supernatural company; that he would never have been surprised or disconcerted by the intrusion of any visitor from another world, whether kindly or malevolent; and that he would have shown exactly the same natural ease and courtesy, with an exact awareness of how one should behave, to an angel, a demon, a human ghost, or an elemental.” Eliot is struck by the evident fact that for Williams “there was no frontier between the material and the spiritual world . . . . To him the supernatural was perfectly natural, and the natural was also supernatural.”6
Eliot only rarely suggested in print that he himself thought along these lines, but in the very first meeting of the Moot, Eliot warned that any attempt to provide a compelling socio-political organization “could let loose terrible demonic forces.” In the second meeting, he said (in the secretary’s summary), “We must bring to the surface these true religious impulses and guide thought so that their forces should not become demonic.”7
Of all the figures studied here, it is of course Lewis who is most closely associated with writing about demonic powers, thanks largely to the enormous success of The Screwtape Letters. Giving a commencement address in 1944, he would wryly comment, “Everyone knows what a middle-aged moralist of my type warns his juniors against. He warns them against the World, the Flesh, and the Devil . . . . The Devil, I shall leave strictly alone. The association between him and me in the public mind has already gone quite as deep as I wish: in some quarters it has already reached the level of confusion, if not of identification.”8 Such “confusion” may best be illustrated by the clergymen who wrote to the magazine in which Screwtape originally appeared to complain that “much of the advice given in these letters seemed to him not only erroneous but positively diabolical.”
But it is not just in Screwtape that Lewis writes about demons. In the first chapter of Perelandra, for instance, the narrator tries to get to a house, a place where he can offer aid to a good man, but has to do it “despite the loathing and dismay that pulled me back and a sort of invisible wall of resistance that met me in the face, fighting for each step”—and when he arrives, he discovers that he has made his way against the pressure of demonic opposition.9 We will look later at That Hideous Strength, where the nature of this world as a battlefield, the site of ceaseless spiritual warfare between the forces who obey and those who repudiate God, is made explicit. And in the second talk in the second series of his BBC broadcast talks, delivered in early 1942, Lewis raises, with some trepidation, “all the difficult and terrible doctrines about sin and hell and the devil” that he knows many Christians are inclined to avoid.
He does this, interestingly enough, by using the current war to provide a set of metaphors that he hopes will make such “difficult and terrible doctrines” more comprehensible and ultimately more acceptable. He asks his readers to imagine that, in relation to eternal spiritual realities, they are already in the situation that the English had been fearing since September 1939: “Enemy-occupied territory—that is what this world is.” And Christians are called “to take part in a great campaign of sabotage.”
When you go to church you are really listening-in to the secret wireless from our friends: that is why the enemy is so anxious to prevent us from going . . . . I know someone will ask me, “Do you really mean, at this time of day, to re-introduce our old friend the devil—hoofs and horns and all?” Well, what the time of day has to do with it I do not know. And I am not particular about the hoofs and horns. But in other respects my answer is “Yes, I do.” I do not claim to know anything about his personal appearance. If anybody really wants to know him better I would say to that person. “Don’t worry. If you really want to, you will. Whether you’ll like it when you do is another question.”10
But in the rest of Mere Christianity, Lewis says almost nothing about Satan or the demons, and I believe that is because he understands that no argument could be made, in the context of his own time and place, for traditional Christian teaching in these matters. Lewis once commented that reading, when he was a young atheist, the fantasies of George MacDonald had “baptized [his] imagination”—had given him a feeling for a world saturated by supernatural realities at a time when he would have poured scorn on any rational “case” made for them. It is for this reason that his major explorations of demonic activity are made in fiction. And it is on the basis of the same understanding, though with reversed moral priorities, that the demon Screwtape utters his very first words to his pupil Wormwood: “I note what you say about guiding your patient’s reading and taking care that he sees a good deal of his materialist friend. But are you not being a trifle naïve? It sounds as if you supposed that argument was the way to keep him out of the Enemy’s clutches.” Lewis and Screwtape alike, then, hope to shape dreams before turning to the shaping of minds.11
* * *
In 1929, Raïssa Maritain had published a short treatise on Satan, Le Prince de ce monde, a translation of which (“Done into English by Gerald B. Phelan”) was published by St Dominic’s Press, the small publishing house Eric Gill had created at his communal retreat, Ditchling in Sussex, and from which he had published a translation of Jacques’s Art and Scholasticism. In this curious pamphlet, she speaks of what she believes to be the chief work of the Evil One on human beings:
Lucifer has cast the strong though invisible net of illusion upon us . . . . He persuades us that we can only love creatures by making Gods of them. He lulls us to sleep (and he interprets our dreams); he makes us work. Then does the spirit of man brood over stagnant waters. Not the least of the devil’s victories is to have convinced artists and poets that he is their necessary, inevitable collaborator and the guardian of their greatness. Grant him that, and soon you will grant him that Christianity is unpracticable. Thus does he reign in this world.12
What Henri de Lubac had called “atheist humanism” tends, then, to become a demonic humanism. What is required is a conversion of human imagination, and of our strongest conceptions of what art is, in order that we may understand who is our true Helper and who our true Enemy. One might say that what is first required is a redefinition of imagination itself, so that it is no longer valorized but rather feared as a source of illusion. Shelley had written in 1821 that “[t]he great instrument of moral good is the imagination”; but St. Paul had denounced those who are “vain in their imaginations” (Romans 1:21) and had declared that his apostolic work requires “casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God” (2 Corinthians 10:5). The unbaptized imagination kills, but the baptized imagination giveth life. Thus Weil, in a rare comment on these matters, says, “Man has to perform an act of incarnation, for he is disembodied”—literally “disincarnated,” désincarne—“by his imagination. What comes to us from Satan is our imagination.”13
That unconverted imagination, then, takes us out of embodied life: for Weil this means, above all else, that we are deprived of the right understanding of human affliction, malheur. To imagine rightly is to be truly embodied; to be truly embodied is to imagine rightly. It is just this proper grounding in the world that the demons wish to deny us, and they deny it to us primarily through working in our dreams and visions. To be converted to true faith, then, is to be dis-illusioned—to be freed from a spell. In 1941, Lewis said, “Spells are used for breaking enchantments as well as for inducing them. And you and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness which has laid upon us for nearly a hundred years.” Similarly, Auden wrote in 1943: “Art is not Magic, i.e., a means by which the artist communicates or arouses his feelings in others, but a mirror in which they may become conscious of what their own feelings really are: its proper effect, in fact, is disenchanting.”14
* * *
The “Christmas Oratorio” that Auden would write in the aftermath of his mother’s death, in August 1941, is a poem above all about illusions, temptations, enchantments—and their possible remedies. The aesthetic models of For the Time Being are not musical but visual: the poem renders in verse and prose scenes from the Nativity narrative traditionally featured in Renaissance art. There is an “Annunciation,” for instance, in which a soloist and chorus urge rejoicing: “Let even the small rejoice”; “Let even the old rejoice.” But the scene ends when “The Demolisher arrives”—and we are transferred to “The Temptation of St. Joseph.”15
From offstage, voices sing doubts into Joseph’s mind: “Joseph, you have heard / what Mary says occurred; Yes, it may be so. / Is it likely? No.” This is disillusionment in a more familiar sense: a loss of faith and trust in the beloved. And all Joseph wants from God is a single
Important and elegant proof
That what my Love had done
Was really at your will
And that your will is love.
But this double comfort—that Mary is virtuous and God good—is denied him. The angel Gabriel merely replies: “No, you must believe; / Be silent, and sit still.”16
The existential paradoxes of faith and doubt—so familiar from Pascal and Kierkegaard and Karl Barth, all of whom Auden was reading with great attention at this time—might be expected to fill the remainder of the poem, but instead the poem takes a peculiar turn into the political realm: for, after all, what happened to Mary and Joseph and their baby happened not only within the history of Israel but within the history of the Roman Empire. The child born to these obscure Jews will teach and embody an ordering of the world that challenges and reproaches the claims of the Caesars.
The book that most thoroughly shaped Auden’s thoughts on these matters is Charles Norris Cochrane’s Christianity and Classical Culture: A Study of Thought and Action from Augustus to Augustine, which was published in 1940. Auden probably read it in the second half of that year, soon after completing “New Year Letter.” By 1944, when he somehow convinced the New Republic to allow him to write a review of it, he claimed to have read it “many times,” and at the end of the review explains one of the chief reasons he was so enamored with it:
Our period is not so unlike the age of Augustine: the planned society, caesarism of thugs or bureaucracies, paideia, scientia, religious persecution, are all with us. Nor is there even lacking the possibility of a new Constantinism; letters have already begun to appear in the press, recommending religious instruction in schools as a cure for juvenile delinquency; Mr. Cochrane’s terrifying description of the “Christian” empire under Theodosius should discourage such hopes of using Christianity as a spiritual benzedrine for the earthly city.17
Cochrane himself meant for all these analogies to be noted, and his ideas dominate the second half of For the Time Being. His study is enormously rich and complex, but it may perhaps be summarized thus, with the relevant page numbers indicated:
•Augustus, by uniting virtue and fortune in himself (pp. viii, 174), established “the final triumph of creative politics,” solving “the problem of the classical commonwealth” (p. 32).
•For a Christian with Tertullian’s understanding of human history, the “deification of imperial virtue” that accompanied this “triumph” was sheer idolatry: therefore Regnum Caesaris, Regnum Diaboli (pp. 124, 234).
•“The crisis of the third century . . . marked . . . an eclipse of the strictly classical ideal of virtue or excellence” (p. 166), and left people wondering what to do if the Augustan solution were not a solution after all. What if there is “no intelligible relationship” between virtue and fortune (p. 171)?
•Christians had remained largely detached during the crisis of the third century, neither wanting Rome to collapse nor prone to being surprised if it did, since its eventual fall was inevitable (p. 195).
•Then Constantine ascended the throne and “both professed and practiced a religion of success” (p. 235), according to which Christianity was a “talisman” that ensured the renewal of Romanitas (p. 236).
•After some time and several reversals (most notably in the reign of Julian the Apostate) and occasional recoveries (for instance in the reign of Theodosius), it became clear that both the Constantinian project and the larger, encompassing project of Romanitas had failed (p. 391).
•Obviously this was in many ways a disaster, but there was some compensation: the profound impetus these vast cultural crises gave to Christian thought, whose best representatives (above all Augustine) understood that neither the simple denunciations of the social world of Tertullian nor Constantine’s easy blending of divergent projects were politically, philosophically, or theologically adequate.
•Thus the great edifice of the City of God, Cochrane’s treatment of which concludes with a detailed analysis of the philosophy of history that emerges from Augustine’s new account of human personality (pp. 502, 536, 542, 567–69).
We have already seen in our look at “New Year Letter” that for Auden both nationalism and romantic individualism had failed, and had thrown us back on the formation of local communities of understanding; but he had also suggested that the sustaining of such communities is impossible in the absence of religious belief: thus the poem’s great concluding prayer. So far, his thinking might be seen as an echo of Maritain’s, or that of Mortimer Adler and Robert Maynard Hutchins. But Cochrane’s book had taught him that such a program of Christian social renewal has its own dangers and temptations—and its own characteristic illusions. For it is a massive misunderstanding of the claims of Christianity to see it as “spiritual benzedrine for the earthly city,” as a means to an end, that end being social cohesion and perhaps even victory against totalitarianism. This is to re-enact the Constantinian error, which was to “profess and practice a religion of success”: now Christianity becomes once again a “talisman,” not for Romanitas but for the successor of Romanitas, liberal Western democracy. Meet the new Caesar, same as the old Caesar.
In For the Time Being, the claims of Caesar are first announced in a great “Fugal Chorus,” each stanza of which begins with the claim that Caesar has “conquered seven kingdoms”: “Abstract Idea,” “Natural Cause,” “Infinite Number,” “Credit Exchange,” “Inorganic Giants,” “Organic Dwarfs,” and “Popular Soul.” These correspond to the signal achievements of democratic societies: for instance, the “Organic Dwarfs” are the microorganisms conquered by the modern pharmaceutical industry, and the “Popular Soul” is equally subject to Caesarist control.18 And what is Caesar? What President Eisenhower, in his farewell address to the nation in 1961, called the “military-industrial complex”; what Michel Foucault called the “power-knowledge regime”; what Auden himself in “New Year Letter” had called “the machine.” In a word, Caesar is force—a word to which we will soon return.
The one figure in For the Time Being who grasps this, and the relation of the Christ Child to it, is King Herod. It should first be said that “The Massacre of the Innocents” is by far the funniest section of this poem. After the model of the commemoration of good influences that lead off Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations (“From my grandfather Verus I learned good morals and the government of my temper”), Herod begins his own reflection thus:
To Fortune—that I have become Tetrarch, that I have escaped assassination, that at sixty my head is clear and my digestion sound.
To my Father—for the means to gratify my love of travel and study.
To my Mother—for a straight nose.
To Eva, my coloured nurse—for regular habits.
To my brother, Sandy, who married a trapeze artist and died of drink—for so refuting the position of the Hedonists.19
It it useful when reading Auden, who learned from Kierkegaard the strategy of “indirect communication,” to assume that the broader the humor, the more serious the point he wishes to make. Herod’s long complaint is comical almost throughout, which should alert readers that its concerns lie at the very heart of this poem.20
Herod, reflecting on his long career as Tetrarch, sees that he has governed well in Judaea, has brought the province into ever greater order and conformity to the rule of Reason.
Yes, in twenty years I have managed to do a little. Not enough, of course. There are villages only a few miles from here where they still believe in witches. There isn’t a single town where a good bookshop would pay. One could count on the fingers of one hand the people capable of solving the problem of Achilles and the tortoise. Still it is a beginning. In twenty years the darkness has been pushed back a few inches.21
Yet news has come to him that makes him fear that the whole edifice he has so carefully constructed could fall like a nest made of twigs. Three ancient scholars have announced that “God has been born . . . we have seen him ourselves. The World is saved. Nothing else matters.”
Herod immediately sees the danger: “One needn’t be much of a psychologist to realise that if this rumour is not stamped out now, in a few years it is capable of diseasing the whole Empire.” But why? Because the proclamation of these Wise Men addresses something his people that no legal structures can ever address: “Legislation is helpless against the wild prayer of longing that rises, day in, day out, from all these households under my protection.” If that prayer has been answered, or if people believe it has been answered, then “Reason will be replaced by Revelation. Instead of Rational Law, objective truths perceptible to any who will undergo the necessary intellectual discipline, and the same for all, Knowledge will degenerate into a riot of subjective visions.” But more than the intellectual life will be degraded: the political realm will be corrupted beyond recognition:
Justice will be replaced by Pity as the cardinal human virtue, and all fear of retribution will vanish. Every corner-boy will congratulate himself: “I’m such a sinner that God had to come down in person to save me. I must be a devil of a fellow.” Every crook will argue: “I like committing crimes. God likes forgiving them. Really the world is admirably arranged.” . . . The Rough Diamond, the Consumptive Whore, the bandit who is good to his mother, the epileptic girl who has a way with animals will be the heroes and heroines of the New Tragedy when the general, the statesman, and the philosopher have become the butt of every farce and satire.
And therefore he concludes: “Naturally this cannot be allowed to happen.” The Child must be found, and destroyed, and Herod will give the necessary orders because he lives by Necessity—though he grieves at what his actions will do to his reputation: “I’ve tried to be good. I brush my teeth every night. I haven’t had sex for a month. I object. I’m a liberal. I want everyone to be happy. I wish I had never been born.”22
What Herod realizes is that this Child and the message he brings of universal forgiveness and reconciliation with God do not offer a rival source of power and order but a radical alternative to what the classical world understands as “power” and “order.” They do not seek to replace him on the throne of his kingdom but to usher in a wholly new Kingdom, not providing “spiritual benzedrine for the earthly city” but replacing that city with a new one: the City of Man passes away, the City of God abides forever. This Child marks the end of the machine, the end of the military-industrial complex, the end of force.
* * *
In December 1943, a young scientist then doing research for the Royal Air Force, primarily on the development of radar, wrote to C. S. Lewis, “I wish to disagree, somewhat violently, with you over a passage” in Lewis’s new novel Perelandra. The passage concerns a scientist named Weston, whom the protagonist, Ransom, had met on Mars in Lewis’s previous science fiction novel Out of the Silent Planet. Now Weston is interested in Venus—in conquering and controlling it. The passage that Lewis’s correspondent objected to is this:
He was a man obsessed with the idea which is at this moment circulating all over our planet in obscure works of “scientifiction,” in little Interplanetary Societies and Rocketry Clubs, and between the covers of monstrous magazines, ignored or mocked by the intellectuals, but ready, if ever the power is put into its hands, to open a new chapter of misery for the universe. It is the idea that humanity, having now sufficiently corrupted the planet where it arose, must at all costs contrive to seed itself over a larger area.
Weston, thinks Ransom, is one of the few who openly embraces this dream of conquest, which is “fondled in secret by thousands of ignorant men and hundreds who are not ignorant. The destruction or enslavement of other species in the universe, if such there are, is to these minds a welcome corollary.”23
To Lewis’s correspondent, “The whole passage seems to be an outburst of unreasoning and emotional panic rather surprising after the acute penetration of ‘The Screwtape Letters’ which, incidentally, appealed considerably to me notwithstanding the fact that I have never felt much sympathy towards the Christian tradition.” Lewis replied in a conciliating tone, though reaffirming the essential claim, which the correspondent had rightly identified as Lewis’s own:
I don’t of course think that at the moment many scientists are budding Westons: but I do think (hang at all, I live among scientists!) that a point of view not unlike Weston’s is on the way . . . . I agree Technology is per se neutral: but a race devoted to the increase of its own power by technology with complete indifference to ethics does seem to me a cancer in the universe. Certainly if he goes on his present course much further man can not be trusted with knowledge.24
It is a shame that the correspondence, it appears, went no further; it would have been especially interesting to hear Lewis’s correspondent’s thoughts on what happens to Weston: his body is possessed by a demon while his soul is cast into Hell.
A decade later that correspondent—his name was Arthur C. Clarke—published a novel of his own, Childhood’s End, which is a mirror image of Perelandra: humans do not reach and conquer other worlds, but a powerful alien race comes to conquer us. They are the Overlords, and they bring powerful technological gifts—though these gifts serve chiefly to sap human creativity and energy: as one character says, “The world’s now placid, featureless, and culturally dead: nothing really new has been created since the Overlords came. The reason’s obvious. There’s nothing left to struggle for, and there are too many distractions and entertainments.”25
There is reason to suspect that humans may have met the Overlords before, at some long-forgotten period of our history, and held in their minds a collective memory of the event. This suspicion is based on the Overlords’ appearance: “There was no mistake. The leathery wings, the little horns, the barbed tail—all were there. The most terrible of all legends had come to life, out of the unknown past. Yet now it stood smiling, in ebon majesty, with the sunlight gleaming upon its tremendous body, and with a human child resting trustfully on either arm.”26
After a century of rule, the Overlords begin to explain themselves, and their view of human beings, and in their apparently demonic form, they say this: “In the centuries before our coming, your scientists uncovered the secrets of the physical world and led you from the energy of steam to the energy of the atom. You had put superstition behind you: Science was the only real religion of mankind. It was the gift of the western minority to the remainder of mankind, and it had destroyed all other faiths.”27
When Childhood’s End appeared, Lewis wrote to Joy Gresham, who would later become his wife, and called it “AN ABSOLUTE CORKER.” “It is a strange comment on our age that such a book lies hid in a hideous paper-backed edition, wholly unnoticed by the cognoscenti, while any ‘realistic’ drivel about some neurotic in a London flat—something that needs no real invention at all, something that any educated man could write if he chose, may get seriously reviewed and mentioned in serious books—as if it really mattered. I wonder how long this tyranny will last? Twenty years ago I felt no doubt that I should live to see it all break up and great literature return: But here I am, losing teeth and hair, and still no break in the clouds.”28
(Clarke and Lewis eventually met, perhaps around 1960, as Francis Spufford has narrated: “Clarke contacted Lewis and they arranged to meet in the Eastgate Tavern, Oxford. Clarke brought Val Cleaver as his second; Lewis brought along J. R. R. Tolkien. They saw the world so differently that even argument was scarcely possible. As Orwell said about something completely different, their beliefs were as impossible to compare as a sausage and a rose. Clarke and Cleaver could not see any darkness in technology, while Lewis and Tolkien could not see the ways in which a new tool genuinely transforms the possibilities of human awareness. For them, machines at very best were a purely instrumental source of pipe tobacco and transport to the Bodleian. So what could they do? They all got pissed. ‘I’m sure you are very wicked people,’ said Lewis cheerfully as he staggered away, ‘but how dull it would be if everyone was good.’ ”29)
Lewis of course understood just what new mythology Clarke was weaving in Childhood’s End, and applauded it not because he agreed with it but because he admired its audacity and imaginative power. And Clarke, also of course, knows precisely what he is doing in portraying his Overlords so: if, as Blake famously said, “Milton was of the Devil’s party without knowing it,” Clarke, if he does not quite take the Devil’s side, at least acknowledges that the Devil’s claims and purposes are as valid as our own. Certainly Clarke believes that what Christians call sinful disobedience is in fact intellectual liberation. When in Paradise Lost the angel Raphael warns Adam, “Solicit not thy thoughts with matters hid, / Leave them to God above, him serve and fear” (VIII.167–68), he is, by Clarke’s lights, merely forging manacles for Adam’s mind. By contrast, Lewis, in his brilliant little book on Paradise Lost, says, “What we see in Satan is the horrible co-existence of a subtle and incessant intellectual activity with an incapacity to understand anything.”30 And therefore when Satan transmits his ideas to Eve and Adam, he does not liberate them but infect them with his own incapacity. Clarke and Lewis could not disagree more about the effects of these supposedly demonic forces on human well-being; but they agree in this at least, that what the demons bring to our world is indeed force.