It should
be (but it is not) unnecessary to add that a belief in angels, whether good or
evil, does not mean a belief in either as they are represented in art and
literature. Devils are depicted with bats’ wings and good angels with birds’
wings, not because anyone holds that moral deterioration would be likely to
turn feathers into membrane, but because most men like birds better than bats.
They are given wings at all in order to suggest the swiftness of unimpeded
intellectual energy. they are given human form because man is the only rational
creature we know. Creatures higher in the natural order than ourselves, either
incorporeal or animating bodies of a sort we cannot experience, must be
represented symbolically if they are to be represented at all.
These forms
are not only symbolical but were always known to be symbolical by reflective
people. The Greeks did not believe that the gods were really like the beautiful
human shapes their sculptors gave them. In their poetry a god who wishes to “appear”
to a mortal temporarily assumes the likeness of a man. Christian theology has
nearly always explained the “appearance” of an angel in the same way. It is
only the ignorant, said Dionysius in the fifth century, who dream that spirits
are really winged men.
In the
plastic arts these symbols have steadily degenerated. Fra Angelico’s angels
carry in their face and gesture the peace and authority of Heaven. Later come
the chubby infantile nudes of Raphael; finally the soft, slim, girlish, and
consolatory angels of ninteenth century art, shapes so feminine that they avoid
being voluptuous only by their total insipidity—the frigid houris of a teatable
paradise. They are a pernicious symbol. In Scripture the visitation of an angel
is always alarming; it has to begin by saying “Fear not.” The Victorian angel
looks as if it were going to say, “There, there.”
The
literary symbols are more dangerous because they are not so easily recognised
as symbolical. Those of Dante are the best. Before his angels we sink in awe.
His devils, as Ruskin rightly remarked, in their rage, spite, and obscenity, are
far more like what the reality must be than anything in Milton. Milton’s
devils, by their grandeur and high poetry, have done great harm, and his angels
owe too much to Homer and Raphael. But the really pernicious image is Goethe’s
Mephistopheles. It is Faust, not he, who really exhibits the ruthless,
sleepless, unsmiling concentration upon self which is the mark of Hell. The
humorous, civilised, sensible, adaptable Mephistopheles has helped to
strengthen the illusion that evil is liberating.
A little
man may sometimes avoid some single error made by a great one, and I was
determined that my own symbolism should at least not err in Goethe’s way. For
humor involves a sense of proportion and a power of seeing yourself from the
outside. Whatever else we attribute to beings who sinned through pride, we must
not attribute this. Satan, said Chesterton, fell through force of gravity. We
must picture Hell as a state where everyone is perpetually concerned about his own
dignity and advancement, where everyone has a grievance, and where everyone
lives the deadly serious passions of envy, self-importance, and resentment.
This, to begin with. For the rest, my own choice of symbols depended, I
suppose, on temperament and on the age.
I like bats
much better than bureaucrats. I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of “Admin.”
The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid “dens of crime” that Dickens
loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In
those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved,
seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted
offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven
cheeks who do not need to raise their voice. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol
for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the offices of
a thoroughly nasty business concern.
Milton has
told us that “devil with devil damned Firm concord holds.” But how? Certainly
not by friendship. A being which can still love is not yet a devil. Here again
my symbol seemed to me useful. It enabled me, by earthly parallels, to picture
an official society held together entirely by fear and greed. On the surface,
manners are normally suave. Rudeness to one’s superiors would obviously be
suicidal; rudeness to one’s equals might put them on their guard before you
were ready to spring your mine. For of course “Dog eat dog” is the principle of
the whole organisation. everyone wishes everyone else’s discrediting, demotion,
and ruin; everyone is an expert in the confidential report, the pretended
alliaance, the stab in the back. Over all this their good manners, their
expressions of grave respect, their “tributes” to one another’s invaluable
services form a thin crust. Every now and then it gets punctured, and the
scalding lava of their hatred spurts out.
This symbol
also enabled me to get rid of the absurb fancy that devils are engaged in the disinterested pursuit of something called Evil (the capital is essential). Mine
have no use for any such turnip ghost. Bad angels, like bad men, are entirely
practical. They have two motives. The fist is fear of punishment: for as
totalitarian countries have their camps for torture, so my Hell contains deeper
Hells, its “houses of correction.” Their second motive is a kind of hunger. I
feign that devils can, in a spiritual sense, eat one another; and us. Even in
human life we have seen the passion to dominate, almost to digest, one’s
fellow; to make his whole intellecutal and emotional life merely an extension
of one’s own—to hate one’s hatred and resent one’s grievances and indulge one’s
egoism through him as well as through oneself. His own little store of passion
must of course be suppressed to make room for ours. If he resists this
suppression he is being very selfish.
On Earth
this desire is often called “love.” In Hell I feign that they recognise it as
hunger. But there the hunger is more ravenous, and a fuller satisfaction is
possible. There, I suggest, the stronger spirit—there are perhaps no bodies to
impede the operation—can really and irrevocably suck the weaker into itself and
permanently gorge its own being on the weaker’s outraged individuality. It is
(I feign) for this that devils desire human souls and the souls of one another.
It is for this that Satan desires all his own followers and all the sons of Eve
and all the host of Heaven. His dream is of the day when all shall be inside
him and all that says “I” can say it only through him. This, I surmise, is the
bloated-spider parody, the only imitation he can understand, of that unfathomed
bounty whereby God turns tools into servants and servants into sons, so that
they may be at last reunited to Him in the perfect freedom of a love offered
from the height of the utter individualities which he has liberated them to be.
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