Dialogues With the Devil Read online

  You have asked of Our Father if He will create a new race on Melina. He will not give you that answer.

  But mourn with Him that you succeeded in your encouragement of the evil that dwelt in the hearts of the men of Melina! The death of that planet was another great death for you. Do not taunt the Lord, for you taunt only yourself, and this you know, alas, only too well. True it is that Our Father grieves for Melina, but He grieves also for you.

  Is there no way to appeal to your pity, though you have vowed that you will have no pity towards men? Consider again Terra, third from a certain star (a dwarf yellow sun, that little guardian of nine infinitesimal worlds, that feeble dim spark in the mighty Galaxy which I rule, a Galaxy of enormous suns, too many even for my own counting, and whose numbers are known only to God). Why, of all the billions of planets in Creation did God choose to be born of Terra, a hesitant, trembling flash of blue, a darkling little spot, an unseen tiny glimmer in a whirlwind of planets, whose name is not known to the children of mighty distant worlds in other universes? You have asked that with wrath and fury, many thousands of times. I have no answer for you. Our Father made Terra’s soil sacred with His Holy Blood, which He shed for that world, and for all its souls. We have never understood, for this He has not done before. He chose the smallest and the weakest, the frailest and meanest, the most insignificant, the most obscure and shrouded, the most crepuscular, the most hidden, the most tremulous, the most unsound and uncertain, the most fragile and coldest, the least endowed with the reflected beauty of Heaven. On this barren and ignominious spot He laid down His human life in agony, and it astounded not only you, but your brothers also. You alone questioned, and turned away in disgust, and then your anger was aroused beyond what it had ever been aroused before. You have tempted uncountable worlds to their death in the past, but never were you so affronted before by any world, and never did you vow so pitilessly to destroy it. Its creatures were no match for you, Lucifer, yet you have no pity.

  This fledgling world has been redeemed by God. Have other worlds been redeemed also by that awesome Redemption? This is known only to Our Father. He lifted the feeblest in His Hands and that must have been for the most regal reason, for He pressed it to His Breast. But did He not say, “The first shall be last, and the last first”? Terra is, above all worlds, the most humble. Yet, He redeemed it, and perhaps in that Redemption the shadow of evil was lightened on other worlds also, and death driven away.

  But there are so many myriads of worlds where your dark wings have not fallen, and whose children know the Face of God and obey His laws! Are these beyond your temptation? We hope, for your sake, my brother, that this is so.

  Have pity on Terra. So poor a little world for your mighty efforts! So small an arena for your powers! Alas, however, pride dwells there, and hatred also, and these draw your attention. He died in His human flesh for her, and we know that this you cannot forgive. Yet, have pity.

  Your brother, Michael

  Greetings to my brother, Michael, Archangel of the Conformists who ask no troubling questions:

  Always have I loved you, dear brother, despite your simplicity! I see again, as I write you now, your shining blue eyes, your golden hair, your tall and muscular body, your heroic arms, your sudden smile, your strong hands, your firm feet, and your broad shoulders. Do not think I mock you with these words. I write them with admiration. I always loved your conversation, though it was not notable for challenging speculation and was often too grave. Yet you are often merry, and your laughter boomed through Heaven. But, you are too simple.

  For another time without count you have asked me to have some pity on Terra, that miserable speck of congealed slime that lumbers heavily about a wretched dwarf yellow star in a forgotten boundary of your own Galaxy. There have been moments when I have considered if Our Father had not deliberately tormented me by choosing that depraved little morsel for the scene of His universal Redemption. From among the inconceivable bounty of His billions of worlds He chose the most loathsome and insignificant, the dullest and most lightless, the most stupid and degenerate. Is there a meaning in that? Who knows His Mind? You, too, have asked that question. I, therefore, am not alone. You, however, accept meekly. But I am not meek and so there can never be any acceptance in me, but only incredulity and affront. Endless other worlds have sinned and fallen, under my tutelage and suggestion, beautiful vast worlds of blinding color and enormous vistas and splendid cities, and with men who could at least claim to have a wink of intelligence. But He did not choose one of them. He chose the most vulgar, the most animalistic, the muddiest, the dirtiest, the most inarticulate, the least endowed with poetry and comprehension, without mercy and faith and learning. It is not worthy even to be called a latrine or a gutter, this murderer of prophets and heroes, this murderer of God, Himself. This delighter in filth, in sins most abominable and unspeakable, this arrogant little squeak in the song of creation! I have felt some pity for other worlds which have fallen, for they had some splendor and some glory. But for Terra I have only revulsion. Half desert, half storm, half-polluted seas, half-eroded mountains, it is a fit habitation of the creature which reared itself on its hind legs and dared to call itself a man!

  You, too, were present with a host of my unfallen brothers, when God was killed by the animal who pretends to be human. (Dear Heaven, so base a beast!) Do you remember that day, Michael? Ah, you can never forget! Nor can I.

  You will say, as you have said before, that it was Our Father’s will, and that His son was born for that very purpose of the one creature unstained by the contemptible sins of her fellowman. It was a Consummation, you have told me, that He designed from the beginning of time. But the Consummation was man’s doing, his unpardonable sin. (You do not agree with me in this, though you have no other explanation. You will say that I am incapable of understanding, but I was always wiser than you, beloved brother.)

  Would other worlds have consummated that supreme crime, other worlds fallen and now vanished? I think not. They, evil though they were, would have revolted against such a Consummation, even if they had considered the Christ only a man as they were men. They were not forever intent on the murder of the innocent, for the destruction of the harmless, despite their tedious wars. The manifestly pure and good never aroused their hatred, as the men of Terra are endlessly aroused. Even if the good angered them they recognized its virtue, and though they often exiled it, out of expediency and because it was troublous and interfered with the enjoyment of life, they did not torture and condemn it to death in a most infamous way. They even gave it an amused honor, though they did not wish to embrace it. They had tolerance, so they were truly men, suffering what was incomprehensible and annoying. But the men of Terra are not really men, though you would deny this. Does Our Father realize that in truth the creatures of Terra are not absolute men, and was it His desire that He raise them to manhood? If so, He has dolorously failed. Those who are men on Terra can be counted only in the thousands, and it was always so. They conceal themselves with justified terror and prudence from those who presume to call themselves their fellows. They hide in far places, behind walls and in jungles, in the lost sanctuaries and in the deserts. When they emerge with words of love and mercy and compassion they are greeted with derision, or with the inevitable murder. Have they not learned? Will they never learn? The man who comes with the bread of pity and the bread of life in his hands is doomed, forever and a day, on Terra, to hatred and assassination.

  Our Father, through the ages of Terra, inspired priests of all religions with the secret and mystical knowledge that He would send His Son to man to open again the gates of eternal life, which you, yourself, were bidden to close to him. There was not a religion through the ages which did not dimly proclaim the coming of the Redeemer. The priests of Babylonia, of Egypt, of Greece, of Rome, of Persia, of wearisome other nations also, proclaimed this living Promise. (And so did the priests of the dead continents of Atlantis, Lemuria and Mu and Endria.) The prophets repeatedly anno
unced the coming of God unto man, in his flesh. Do I need to recall to you the words of the prophet, Isaias: “Unto us a Child is born. Unto us a Son is given. The Government is upon His shoulder, and His Name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, God the Mighty, the Father of the world to come, the Prince of Peace.” His Mother was prophesied: “Who is she that looks forth as the bright morning, fair as the moon, clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners?” Unto the priests of Khem, in Egypt, the prophecy was given also, and they wore the Cross of infamy ages before the vile deed was consummated in Judea, and the pyramids were inscribed with the Cross, which was to mankind the sign of Resurrection and life. The Greeks had their mysterious altar to the Unknown God, and awaited Him. The Romans vaguely understood also, and in the realms beyond the seas which men did not know as yet. God did not withhold His secret, nor come in stealth without prophecy. Yet, when He came He was murdered.

  It has been endlessly amusing to me to listen to men since the day of that most infamous murder. “We should not have killed Him, had He been born to us instead of the Jews,” they vehemently declare. “We should have cherished Him and raised Him upon our shoulders and cried ‘Hosannah to the Lord!’” Liars, liars! The men of Judea, who had witnessed through the ages the mercy of God, said to Jesus, “Had the prophets been born to us we should not have killed them!” But all men kill their prophets and their heroes. They cannot endure their proximity, their implicit reproach.

  Had not God been born to the Jews His Name would still be unknown among the children of men, for It would have been obliterated. But the Jews had cherished and remembered the prophecies of the Messias, and when He came among them thousands of them indeed did cry, “Blessed is He who comes in the Name of the Lord!” It was not an accident that He chose His Apostles from among the Jews, for only they were devoted to the prophecy, and recognized Him. (But how ironical it was that Peter, who had said, “You are the Christ,” denied Him three times! Is that not natural for man?) I often conjecture: Had not Israel been oppressed by Rome, and in terror of her, would the Christ have been yielded pusillanimously by the priests of Judea to the Romans? Had Israel been free, would she not have joyously lifted up her Lord and proclaimed Him to the nations? But then the prophecies of Isaias would not have been fulfilled. It is a great mystery and I despised it from the beginning. The ways of God are indeed inscrutable, and a weariness.

  It was the Jews who spread the “good news” to the children of men, that the Messias had been born and had died for the salvation of men, according to the prophecies. It was the Jews who, for three hundred years, cried forth the words of deliverance from evil—from me. They took His Name to the Greeks and the Romans and the Persians and the Egyptians—and died in their own blood for the message. They died joyfully—for nothing. For I followed them everywhere, and raised up haters and cynics among the listeners, and skeptics among the wise and urbane—as I raise them to this day. I whispered, “Nonsense!” to the multitudes, and they laughed at the Jews and struck them down, as they had struck them down in Egypt and Persia and Syria and Babylonia. Yes, and other prophets in Atlantis and Lemuria and Mu and Endria, until the day Our Father sank them under the waters in the great Flood. And in Terra today, where the whisper and laughter and merriment announce, “God is dead!” It is my ultimate success.

  You have asked me always, “Why do you do this thing?” I do not do it out of hatred for Our Father, Whom I love. I do it to prove to Him that He was wrong from the beginning, and that He must erase, forever, the memory of Him from among the cattle who dare to call themselves men. Shall a beast share in the feast of the Holy of Holies? It is a profanation. The trample of hoofs in the Temple must cease! The ass and the wild owl and the serpent must know the Temple no more. I shall not rest until this is accomplished. I shall not rest until Terra is dead, and dies in her own fire and blood, for she has blasphemed God too long.

  I have given Terra the formula for her death, as I have given similar formulae to the men of other worlds. You will not rejoice with me that this abattoir of God and prophets and heroes will soon be caught up in the whirlwind of flame as prophesied by the prophet, Joel. But then, you do not share with me my abhorrence of mankind, wherever it has manifested itself throughout the universes. The suns and the worlds were created for angels, and not animals who stink of manure and sweat and vice and bowels and bladders and disease and all vileness.

  It is again my vow that I shall not cease until this insult against God has been purged by universal death, and until the province of the galaxies belongs to angels only. If God will not do it I shall.

  Your brother, Lucifer

  Greetings to my brother, Lucifer, who desires, in his enigmatic heart, that he be refuted and rejected and that the Glory of God be proclaimed forever to angels and men—though he would deny it:

  I have read your letter with sorrow, for I know the anguish of your spirit. I, too, remember you, and your grand appearance and the glory of your presence. How is it possible, I often ask myself, for poor men to resist you, who are so many apparitions, all of them seductive? So small a foe, man! So helpless, so feeble, so confused, so blind, so dejected, so little! I look upon him and weep. The wonder to me is not that he has often rejected and blasphemed God, but that he has remembered Him so long, despite the scorners and the philosophers and the erudite scholars. The wonder to me is not that he resists the tender blandishments of the Lord in such multitudes, but that so many men—though you would deny this—hold Him so preciously to their hearts and adore His Name daily after their death, and they turn from you as they turned from you in life, and they fly like radiant birds to the bosom of their Lord.

  You would scornfully call this “simplicity.” But virtue is simple and easily understood. It is only evil that is complex, complicated, twisted in all its ways, and devious. Virtue is a stream of bright water going faithfully to the sea. But evil winds through many passages and gorges and chasms, and it takes on many intricate colors and hides itself in alien caverns. Evil has a thousand conversations and uncountable perverse rituals. It is a thousand undisciplined wheels within a wheel, all zealously spinning. Life, on the contrary, is direct and without guile, and has no arguments, for Life is, and there can be no argument in the presence of order. Evil lives in a multitude of philosophies and controversies and conjectures and speculations. It attempts, always, to argue Life out of existence, and is triumphant only where there is nothingness. In short, it is death.

  There is, in evil men, the will to die, to be absolved from the burden of being, to be rescued from seeking an answer—though the answer is so plain and so unequivocal. Evil seeks absolution from the necessity to accept. It shares one thing in common with virtue—the desire for adherents. Man cannot live alone, either in virtue or in evil. As virtue cannot tolerate the evil, neither can the vile tolerate the just. One must perish. You will say that evil is always victorious. No, not always, for does Life not endure? Life cannot exist in the presence of death and midnight cannot be while the suns shine.

  The poor men on Terra shout passionately, “Life is not lucid! There is no simplistic answer to being! Life is complicated and involved and has many faces, and who can say which face is reality?” But Life has only one Face, in truth, and that is the Face of God, and before Him there is no torturous path, no concealed passages, no multitude of answers, no confusion, no “This is the way, but on the other hand, this may be the way also.” Man’s mind, assisted by yours, becomes a hive of cells, each with a contradictory life entombed, each with an individual insistence, each with a different clamoring voice, each with a refuting reply. Only in the pure honey of truth is there one flow of sweetness, and there is naught so simple as honey.

  Our Father does not dwell in the labyrinthine places. He lives in the sun where there is no concealment. But defiled in soul by you, man exclaims, “Where is God? I do not see Him! All is darkness. He has asked me, in this darkness, to be docile and accept as simply as does the beast of the field, or
an infant in arms and at its mother’s breast.”

  Yet the Lord has said so plainly, “You must be as children, to inherit the Kingdom of Heaven.” Children do not question obliquely and in large words and in erudite phrases, nor do they accept the words of the old wise and reject the evidence that is before them. They see clearly and in whole, and not obscurely and in part.

  You have told man that he has reason, and therefore he is like unto the gods and is aware of good and evil. But you have shown him only his own passions and his own desires and have urged him not to refuse them but to gratify them, for are they not his inherent nature? His reason is perverted by his intimate lusts, which you stimulate, and tempt in delectable form. He has no merit of his own, but only those merits granted by the Grace of God. Instinctively, in childhood, man recognizes this. It is only with learning that he glorifies that which he calls his “reason.” So sad a little creature, so worthy of mercy, in his helplessness! The wisest of the men of Terra are the most stupid, the most refractory, the most blinded. But, are they the wise in truth? No, they are the most absolutely dumb and null. Only the simple are wise in the ways of wisdom, for when they ask they perceive the answer, and immediately. You have called this infantile, and men have listened to you through the ages. The spiral to them is fascinating and the more it curves about itself the more delighted they are, and they call it subtlety. The straight way is jejune to their contorted spirits. It lacks sophistication. Sad little man, strutting on his dung-heap and crowing defiantly at the sun as it rises, and often believing that without his crow the sun would not come up at all! At the worst, he is convinced that his dung-heap is the center of the universe and that the beat of his wings is heard to the farthest star.