The Counterfeiters (54 page)

“I’ll confess that I’ve never been able to understand what interest there could be in believing in sin, hell, or satanism.”

“Just a minute, just a minute! The same with me—I don’t believe in the Devil; except that—and here’s what bothers me—whereas you can serve God only if you believe in Him, the Devil does not require you to believe
in him before you can serve him. On the contrary, he is never so well served as when he is unperceived. It’s always to his interest not to let himself be recognized; and there, as I said, is what bothers me: to think that the less I believe in him, the more I strengthen him.

“It bothers me, if you follow me, to think that that is exactly what he wants: that he should not be believed in. He knows very well how and where to insinuate himself into our hearts, and he knows that to enter for the first time he must enter unperceived.

“I have reflected a great deal about this, I assure you. Of course, in spite of all I have just told you, in perfect sincerity I do not believe in the Devil. I take him, such as he may be, as a puerile oversimplification, an apparent explanation, of certain psychological problems—for which my mind vigorously rejects any solutions other than the perfectly natural, scientific, and rational ones. But, let me repeat, the Devil himself would agree with me here; he is delighted; he knows he has no better hiding-place than behind such rational explanations, which relegate him to the plane of the gratuitous hypothesis. Satan, or the Gratuitous Hypothesis—probably the alias he prefers. Indeed, in spite of everything I am saying about him, in spite of everything I think and am not telling you, one fact nevertheless remains: from the moment I admit his existence—and this happens in spite of me, if only for an instant now and then—from that moment everything seems to be clarified, I seem to understand everything; it seems to me that at one fell swoop I discover the explanation of my life, of all the inexplicable, of all the incomprehensible, of all the dark corners of my life. Some day I should like to write a—oh, I don’t know how to explain it to you—I see it in my mind in the form of a dialogue, but there would be more to it. In short, it might possibly be called “Conversation with the Devil”—and do you know how it would begin? I have discovered his first remark, the first one for him
to say, you understand; but just to find that opening remark you have to be already very well acquainted with him.… I am having him say at first:
‘Why should you be afraid of me? You know very well I don’t exist.’
Yes, I think that’s it. That sums it all up: it is from this belief in the nonexistence of the Devil that—But say something; I need to be interrupted.”

“I don’t know what to say to you. You are talking to me about things I perceive I have never thought about. But I cannot forget that a great many minds, some of those I consider the greatest, believed in the existence of the Devil, in his role—and even made it a leading role. Do you know what Goethe said? That a man’s strength and his force of predestination were recognizable by the demoniacal element he had in him.”

“Yes, I’ve already heard about that remark; you ought to try to find it for me.”

(Theory: just like the kingdom of God, hell is within us):

“And I feel in myself, on certain days, such an overwhelming inrush of evil that I imagine the Prince of Darkness is already beginning to set up hell within me.”