Poets and the Devil’s Party

This new book in Baylor’s series The Making of the Christian Imagination explores an old topic: the perennial and peculiar affinity between the artist and the Devil. By the sheer act of creation, the artist treads dangerously close to Lucifer’s challenge of divine authority. Closely associated is the suspicion that such extraordinary powers must come from Hell if they cannot be explained as a normal part of human psychology. Finally the free exercise of imagination has always resembled madness, which in turn was once thought to be the work of a possessing demon.

In this study, however, Fred Parker avoids many of these familiar themes, focusing instead on what he calls “a radical tension between the ethical and the aesthetic,” a tension that finds expression in the ambiguous role of the Devil in literature as “Adversary, the supreme figure of opposition, in a multiple sense: as the opponent of God; as the accuser who brings the knowledge of good and evil, that divisive polarity which shapes most ethical thought, and as the figure who tells us that our habits of reflective consciousness . . . are alienated, fallen, the mark of our exile from the garden.” With this complex set of associations in mind, he explores how poets make use of this adversarial muse. Refreshingly free of jargon and engaging to read, the book offers not an exhaustive treatment of the subject but a series of approaches for the reader to explore the idea of opposition as “true Friendship” (to borrow Blake’s phrase).

The book’s subtitle is somewhat misleading since Parker deals not only with Blake and Byron but also substantially with Goethe’s Faust and Mann’s Doctor Faustus, and to a lesser degree with Milton’s Paradise Lost and Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita (though not with Marlowe’s play). His discussion of Mann’s novel frames the book: a prologue in chapter one uses the composer Leverkühn as a test case, suggesting that his artistic breakthrough reaches an “equivocal” state beyond opposition. Parker suggests that the artist, by engaging with the supreme “otherness” of the Devil, frees us from the ethical opposition of good and evil and from our alienated reflective consciousness; but this is achieved at a great price.

Chapter two traces the history of Satan in Christian tradition, noting that the “unambiguously evil Devil” is a late development. Although the Church Fathers made him the Evil One, he appears throughout the Old Testament as an accuser and prosecutor, but never completely split from God. This is what Parker terms the “secret history” of the Devil, a much more ambiguous figure who “used to work for the divine administration, and conceivably still does.” Parker explores this ambiguity through a brief examination of Milton, whom Blake identified as “a true Poet and of the Devil’s Party without knowing it.” Although Milton follows the received narrative of Satan’s rebellion, he grants sufficient ambiguity for us to see God’s allowing Satan to act as he does. Parker suggests that the same dualistic thinking that defines the Devil by separating good from evil is also able to “call itself into question” as it recalls the Archangel in his unfallen glory.

The central chapters on Blake and Byron trace the well-known relationship of each poet with the Devil, but in each case suggest a specific connection between the stance of parody (in Blake’s case) or the cynical spectator (in Byron’s) and the opposing or ambiguous voice of the Devil. The parodic or reflective voice can help to uncover truth, but it also threatens to undermine the power of imagination to transform. I quibble with Parker’s negative evaluation of Blake’s Milton, which seems to hang on Parker’s opinion that Blake’s poetry peaks in the early to mid-1790s and falls away after that. His reading of Byron focuses primarily on the later works, especially Don Juan, whose style of narration incorporates “the Mephistophelean bathos.” This reading...