We do not have to see malice in the actions of Satan or “the Devil”. Satan is, in fact, a charming character, quite well-intentioned. As you’ll see, the Church tried its hardest to give the guy a bum rap. The character of Levi Matthew, Jesus’ devoted follower in The Master and Margarita, states that Satan can provide Margarita with “peace” whereas Jesus can only provide “light”. This is a clue from Bulgakov as to what we can envision Satan to be if we reject the overly simplistic characterization that Satan is inherently “evil” or motivated by the basest and most petty motives, as we see, for example, in Milton’s Paradise Lost or C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters.

A person who aspires to truly humane values, after all, must reject the notion that anything is inherently evil. Evil is a construct we developed toward other people whose acts of harm are especially egregious and painful to us and who seem to lack the empathy and capacity to recognize that they have done something wrong and harmful, or, they may even relish the harm they do. We use the term “evil” toward those folks we have given up on as a way to give up on them.

When we cannot fathom why a person commits unspeakable harm, they become evil. When a person crosses a line such that we can no longer show mercy to them, or sympathize with them, they become evil. This is a psychological response, not an objective category.

It is more accurate as an interpretation to believe that Satan is motivated by the highest rather than lowest motives, and if something negative ensues it is still due to the best of his intentions. More than anything, it is possible to derive an interpretation of Satan as a non-malicious and even pro-social entity. In the Bible, at times, Satan can be perceived as a type of trickster figure who feels that he knows enough to challenge God. World folklore is chockful of charming, know-it-all tricksters who often offer bad advice with the best of intentions. They are not evil and are not driven by envy or duplicity.

If we take the Genesis serpent as Satan, he is offering humanity what he believes to be a better way to salvation, allowing humanity to show some agency in its own rise. According to the story, this badly backfires. Yet, it is absurd to believe he is holding some kind of grudge or wishes to harm God by harming humanity. A close reading of the Book of Genesis does not reveal this.

Nor can it be safely assumed he is deliberately malevolent or derives pleasure from misleading Eve. This is all later imputed to the serpent with no evidence to support it (indeed, that he is Satan is also imputed; he is probably just another ancient trickster figure).

In lieu of the common misinterpretation of Satan, we are free to interpret that he wishes to help the first humans but offers an unviable suggestion that leads to a situation felt to be less than optimal by the Genesis author(s). This is much more accurate/parsimonious than the elaborately constructed story of a civil war in heaven suddenly motivated by an angel who wants power, who is thrown out of heaven and goes looking for the first humans to corrupt them so he can irritate God.

The three temptations in the desert can be interpreted as really bad pieces of well-meant advice that Jesus must refrain from taking in order for him to reach “grace” or salvation. Satan becomes a trickster and assessment tool. There is no malice in his actions. We choose to place malice into our interpretations, and this may be a greater reflection of ourselves than the material. We like thinking we are good guys who are always fighting against bad guys.

C.S. Lewis’s Satan is a different guy, a different Satan from the trickster Satan. Like the devil in Goethe’s Faust and Bulgakov’s Margarita he is no longer the devil in the Bible. In its battle with the magical beliefs of the countryside, the Church demonized magic and the religion of nature. The pagan god of nature (e.g. Pan) which was pervasively worshipped, was now to be called Satan. Just as Satan might have kept Jesus from salvation in the desert, this new Satan, according to the Church, now tried to divert people away from the Christian path through magic and the pleasures of nature. The similarities in appearance between Satan and Pan are, of course, revealing.

As a thought-experiment, we can divorce a “real” Satan from the propaganda Satan of the Medieval Church. The “real” Satan is not trying to deceive or mislead anyone from grace. Again, why would he? In The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus Marlowe even mocks the attitude that Satan tempts people away from the Christian path. When Faustus asks Mephostophilis why he tempts people to hell, Mephostophilis facetiously says, “Misery loves company”. Clearly, there’s no good reason, no maliciously influenced reason why Satan would be tempting people away from God.

Perhaps Satan/Pan does not even consider or concern himself with the possibility of Christian grace and merely offers an option that assists one in the hardships of daily life. People were accustomed to this magical option for generations, believed in it deeply, and the Church felt it had to root out this long established and deeply ingrained belief system if it, the Church, was going to prosper.

So, for example, women who used herbs to ease childbirth in other women were labeled as witches and murdered. The use of magic or natural healing was almost always the go-to answer for any type of health issue and this was demonized. There are Church documents that say, to paraphrase, “Let your child or loved one die before using a Satanic medicinal cure! Their soul will go to heaven!” Indeed, the Church will begin to overuse this ploy: You should label something as Satan or Satanic, if you are attempting to get rid of it. This is why we have had so many types of Satan (as we’ll see).

Satan is a functional term meaning that something really has to go. In the Middle Ages magic had to really go. It became Satan. And instead of Satan being equated to positive things such as healing herbs and magical actions to ease a difficult life (which is what Pan, the nature god, offered), the Church pushes and distorts things to the point where Pan as Satan encourages excess, irresponsible pleasure and that using his magic will stop Christians from achieving grace.

Augustine and Aquinas and the mendicant priests who wandered hither and thither to fight against magic in the Middle Ages asserted that magic was never “natural magic”, all magic proceeded through Satan. Whereas people were once humorously misled through a charming and well-intentioned guy giving bad advice in the Bible, now the Church asserted that Satan was pulling folks away from a life of grace through the wonders and pleasures of magic.

Although there is a lot of sarcasm and skepticism in Marlowe’s Faustus, we still see Satan used in this new way in his play (perhaps as a type of satire). Faustus seems to have given up on Christian salvation because Christian theology states “Si peccasse negamus, fallimur…”, basically, we have no choice but to sin. Faustus has mastered theology and knows that attaining grace cannot be an act of human will. Grace is an emergent quality given as a gift. Faustus can wait in humility to see whether he is lucky or he can take an alternate route that seems to be producing medicine and wealth in the world and which will give him agency and a challenge to his intellect.

The big fallacy being promoted by the Church was that you can’t wait for grace and discover medicine at the same time. The demonization of magic was all about this “you gotta choose” attitude. Furthermore, Satan would not be trying to divert people away from the Church’s program because, frankly, Satan came first. Magic clearly preceded the Christian religion. If we want to be honest, Satan set up his path first and the Church came along and tried to divert people from that deeply respected way!

If we really want to be honest, what Satan would represent preceded Yahweh and all the other divinities created in the Axial Age. Even though his work has been widely criticized and revised, we would still have to agree with Frazer that magic precedes what we now call religion. What Satan represents comes first and then efforts are made by the priests of the gods to extinguish one’s path in this previous way of life. The open war between the new god and the idols and paganism constitute a huge chunk of the Hebrew Bible. So the story gets flip-flopped – God came first and Satan rebelled. No, Satan was there first and God came along and put the clamps on.

Thinking figuratively, Satan came first, then God messed things up by overly tweaking the natural system and expecting too much from mortal, biological beings with a specially developed neocortex. This is why it is so hard to attain grace. There emerged two entities, two paths. The only one, perhaps, which could be called evil would be the path of the organized Church.

Faustus has mastered divinity, but chooses magic above his “chiefest bliss.” It is strongly indicated that these are irreconcilable paths and that magic can stop one from pursuing salvation. Why? Faustus was a smart guy, if anyone could have done both, it was he. My advice to Faustus would have been: Wait for grace to emerge so you can love and forgive and control your temper, and experiment on healing herbs too. What’s the problem?

In Act 5 scene 2 Mephostophilis boasts that he “damned up” Faustus’s passage to heaven. Earlier in scene 1 Faustus laments “I do repent, and yet I do despair: / Hell strives with grace for conquest in my breast.” Hell came first. And hell is not hell anyway. This is hilariously parodied in Bulgakov’s novel during the huge ball given in hell for people who are quite educated, civil, respectful and charming.

The church, of course, in its propaganda campaign against the Prince of Darkness, misrepresents what a life devoted to Lucifer will be like. The Seven Deadly Sins scene from Marlowe’s play seems to imply that the follower of Lucifer will not give heed to controlling one’s desires for pleasure. One will give in to the excesses of pride, covetousness, envy, anger, gluttony, sloth and lechery. The Church wishes to implant the idea that relying on nature will naturally corrupt you, lead you to excess and pull you far from your spiritual goal. No.

This is just more anti-Lucifer propaganda by the church. It does not follow that one who relies on the earth for healing will go overboard and start eating everything in sight in between fits of uncontrollable anger. Indeed, nobody goes overboard like an evangelical Christian. The history of the papacy tells us that. The people of the countryside who believed in magic (Satan) lead relatively simple and austere lives. Gluttony, sloth, lechery etc. became big problems in cities dominated by churches.

The attraction of a nature god must have been immense in the old days, as the earth always sustained and aided humanity. When we needed something, we looked to the earth. It must have been considered marvelous that so many medicinal cures could be found in the earth as if stored there by the nature god for our benefit. It seemed as if there must have been some being that was providing for us through the soil and plants and animals of the earth. This would be worshipped, of course, and was worshipped for thousands of years.

If we take the “fall” of Satan story seriously, the fall of Satan can be viewed as a symbolic fall of a follower of God back to the Earth and its values. Following Satan would seem to involve embracing the joys, pleasures and healing of nature, but there is no reason to believe it would encourage excesses of pleasure which stop a person from loving and forgiving others. Physical and sensual pleasure became one of the joys of life, not something to be guarded against lest it lead one to a mythical hell. Because we both transcended and transgressed nature, we needed a nature god. Satan became conflated with that nature god due the development of the Christian religion.

So we see two paths here. The path of nature and the path of the church. The Church argued that both paths can not be pursued at one time, but can both be rejected? Yes.

What’s interesting about Goethe’s Faust I and II is that Faust seems to also despair in regard to attaining grace or salvation and turns skeptically to worldly pleasures as an alternative. He is exploring whether it will work for him. He seeks even a moment of true satisfaction in Mephisto’s scheme. His eventual redemption and grace come from his inability to find satisfaction purely within this realm of nature. He, basically, rejects the ephemeral realm of the nature god and finally receives grace and salvation.

It is his relentless commitment to higher purposes as opposed to succumbing to temporary earthly pleasures that allows his redemption. We get a new type of “hero’s” journey: Seek grace, abandon grace, try pleasure, abandon pleasure, get grace + pleasure. This is what I believe Bulgakoz meant when he said that Satan can give peace and Jesus can give light. This is, of course, a descriptive and not proscriptive formula.

Theoretically, what is left for a person who refrains from the extraneous pleasures the world is willing to provide, but has not yet found “grace”? I am reminded of a scene from Luis Bunuel’s short film Simon of the Desert, where the devil who has been tempting Simon takes him to a swinging 1960s nightclub filled with music, alcohol and sexy young people. At the end of the film, Simon sits there, bored, as the devil takes to the dance floor. The implication is that this is his final temptation and he will pass. Or will he? Bunuel leaves this open. Will the guy finally attain to grace because he does not like disco music?

I am tempted to say that if you have no truck for the empty pleasures of the world but do not think that grace is your bag, you always have the prerogative of becoming a revolutionary. Think of Peter Weiss’ play Marat/Sade where de Sade might represent a type of Lucifer and Marat represents the person between the two possible states of being. In fact, I think it is fun to think of de Sade as Mephisto and Marat as Faust. The representative of the Church could be Coulmier, the director of the Asylum of Charenton. He is out of the picture, largely. He is the social authority being ignored.

Marat had rejected a life of pleasure but never had any intention of pursuing Christian grace. He seeks justice. He becomes the type of person who believes in social engineering or that a use of force is justified to change the circumstances of the world. The “it’s gonna hurt for awhile, but then everything will be wonderful” attitude that so many terrible dictators chose in the 20^th century is Marat’s belief system. “We’ll use the guillotine now so we don’t have to use it later” concept. One large amount of cruelty and suffering now can be justified if future generations live in peace.

Sade states that while lying in the Bastille he realized this was a world of bodies. In regard to the type of social change Marat seeks or the type of radical inner change a Christian might seek, Sade says, “Marat…these cells of the inner self are worse than the deepest stone dungeons. For as long as they remain locked, all your revolution is but a prison mutiny to be put down by corrupted fellow prisoners. And what’s the point of a revolution without general copulation!?”

Sade as a type of Satan is stating that the complete transformation of the human self, promised by the “New Man” concept of Christian rebirth, is not something that nature can provide. Our very cells lack the DNA to do this.  

For such a person like Simon or Jean Paul Marat, temporarily or permanently between two states of being, one would guess the devil might promote the world more effectively than the church promoting grace and sooner or later folks might take the bait. Assessing the pleasures of the world, however, they may decide that the only misery greater than being without grace is having it.

So how many Satans are there? In anthropology there is something called spirit possession. Angry spirits are wandering around looking for warm bodies. Hollywood has declared this is Satan (heads spin around and girls vomit pea soup). The trickster in the Bible has been called Satan. The nature god of Europe has been called Satan. Amoral serial killers have been called Satanic. Brutal dictators who callously kill millions of people are Satanic or following the Prince of Darkness. Satanic choreographers highjacked the opening of the Paris Olympics and are in league with the Illuminati who, with Lady Gaga and Miley Cyrus, run the world. No, no, no, no, no, maybe. 

I like Bulgakov’s guy a lot. Jesus reveals stuff and then you wait to see whether you win the spiritual lottery – few seem to do so given those cells of the inner self. Bulgakov’s guy gets stuff done. He functions within the world to engage in pro-social acts within the world and he is guided by a basic ethical system. There is an ethics within nature. Haven’t you seen those short videos on Tik Tok where a crocodile will attack a gazelle and a big old hippo will come along and go after the croc to save the gazelle?

Our ethics are premised on feeling pain when we see pain in others and taking action to ensure we do not see pain in the world. That big old Hippo feels the same thing. There is a very definite ethical system within many of nature’s creatures and this is what Bulgakov’s guy seems to draw upon. To a great extent the ethics in nature and Christian ethics, and its belief in rising to a higher level of being, can intersect like two large circles in a Venn diagram. You can see that Bulgakov’s Satan often makes reasonable judgments and works toward benevolent ends that Christians would also pursue.

Is there another path than the one offered by Bulgakov’s guy? Can we take the Christian belief in grace seriously despite biology and other obstacles? I believe so. In fact, I am writing this because I feel a lot like Simon of the Desert these days. I’m sitting around hoping to win the spiritual lottery, night clubs no longer hold any fascination for me and I do not want to violently collectivize farms. I want to love my “enemies”, forgive people who did rotten things to me, control my frustration and anger, show tolerance, promote justice, educate people and all that jazz. It’s just really hard. Why is it so hard?

I would say that the Christian conception of grace and redemption is higher than what we can get in nature or through Satan’s scheme. This is what Goethe was saying, I believe. But, let’s keep both systems open, just in case. Bulgakov’s guy is very sweet and reasonable. Be nice to him and he’ll be nice to you. We can always work with him while we are waiting.

 

Further reading:

Satan as Trickster in the Desert: An Experiment in Non-literal Interpretation – ProgressiveChristianity.org

The Devil MAY Care: The Comedy of Job – ProgressiveChristianity.org

 

About the Author

Daniel Gauss is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin and Columbia University. He has been published on numerous platforms dealing with art and culture and has been working in the field of education for over 20 years. He currently teaches in Shenzhen, China.