The Devil's Pleasure Palace Read Free

the principal words in the debate, including “democracy,” “culture,” “civilization,” and “justice,” among others. The two sides speak different languages, but with a superficially shared vocabulary that serves as a means of deceit for one and confusion for the other.
    Seduction, subversion, sedition—these are the tools of a creature we once called Satan, the Father of Lies, the loser of the Battle in Heaven. Yet he continues the fight here on earth with the only weapons at his disposal: man’s inherent weaknesses and zeal to be duped if the cause seems appealing enough. Chief among the weaknesses of Western man today are his fundamental lack of cultural self-confidence, his willingness to open his ears to the siren song of nihilism, a juvenile eagerness to believe the worst about himself and his society and to relish, on some level, his own prospective destruction.
    Whether one views the combatants in the struggle between God and Satan ontologically, mythically, or literarily, God created man in his ownimage and likeness but chose to give him free will—a force so powerful that not even God’s infinite love can always overcome it. Thus given a sporting chance to ruin God’s favorites, the fallen Light-Bringer, Lucifer, picked himself and his fellows off the floor of the fiery lake into which they were plunged by the sword of St. Michael, and endeavors each day not to conquer Man but to seduce and destroy him. As Satan observes in Book One of Milton’s Paradise Lost :
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  The mind is its own place, and in itself
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  What matter where, if I be still the same . . .
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heav’n.
    Satan himself, however, has no need for servants in Hell, as God does in Heaven; he is instead satisfied with corpses on earth. As modern history shows, the Devil has had great success and ample reward in that department. But he cannot be satisfied with his infernal kingdom. As in a Hollywood sequel, the body count must be ever higher, just to keep the antagonist interested. Damnation consists not in consignment to the netherworld, but in the rejection of the ur-Narrative—a willful separation of oneself from the heroic path for which history and literature provide a clear signpost.
    As Milton writes in the Areopagitica, the poet’s seminal essay on freedom of speech and, more important, freedom of thought: “I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.” For Milton, the very absence of conflict was in itself contemptible, unmanly—inhuman.
    This eternal conflict, then, is the essence of my religio-cultural argument, which I will view through the triple prisms of 1) atheist cultural Marxism that sprang up amid the physical and intellectual detritus of Europe after the calamity of World War I, and its practical, battering-ram application, Critical Theory; and 2) the Book of Genesis, from which our cultural self-understanding flows, and Milton’s great explicative epic poem, in which a God who reigns supreme is also a strangely absentand largely offstage Prime Mover; and 3) Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s emblematic reworking of the man caught in the middle between Heaven and Hell, between God and Mephistopheles: Faust .
    It is the story of humanity’s journey, of roads taken and not taken, and about the choices we must make. Let us begin, then, in Hell.

INTRODUCTION
    OF THE DEVIL’S PLEASURE PALACE
    I n 1813, the sixteen-year-old Viennese composer Franz Peter Schubert began work on his first opera, Des