Living with the Devil

by Stephen Batchelor

  “Stupidity, error, avarice, sin,” he says, “engage our minds and work our bodies.” Evil urges prompt us darkly and furtively from the obscure depths of our self. For Satan lies beside us at night, resting his head “on the pillow of evil.” We think of ourselves as free and independent agents, but Baudelaire insists that the devil “has long cradled our enchanted mind. And the rich metal of our will / Is vaporized by this savant chemist.” “The Devil pulls the strings that stir us!” he says. “Tight and teeming like a million parasites, / A populace of Demons cavorts in our brain.” The theological concepts of “the devil” and “demons” have taken a psychological turn. They are ciphers for something sinister and troubling within us that we dimly intuit but do not understand.

  An impersonal sense of evil nonetheless persists. In his poem “Destruction,” Baudelaire writes:

  Ceaselessly the Demon races at my side;

  He swims around me as an impalpable breeze;

  Which I inhale—I feel it burn my lungs

  And fill them with eternally guilty desire.

  The poet suspects that the source of this disturbing but irresistible feeling is something dynamic but insubstantial existing apart from himself (“an impalpable breeze”), over which he has no control but which he cannot help breathing. Although “guilty desire” seems irredeemably “mine,” I do not choose to feel such an emotion. It happens to me, breaks into consciousness, as though it came from elsewhere. Being prone to such random attacks on the privacy of my soul, I become subject to the destructive potential of the demonic. “When we breathe,” says Baudelaire, “Death’s invisible river / Pours into our lungs with faint moans.” In capitalizing “Death,” Baudelaire links it to “Devil” and “Demon,” recalling the theological identification of death with Satan and anticipating the Freudian struggle between eros (desire) and thanatos (death).

  The European Enlightenment of the seventeenth century inaugurated a period in which the demonic lost its identity, leaving us unsure of what, if anything, it stands for. The soul of early modern man found itself split in two: detached Cartesian reason at odds with exuberant Wordsworthian emotion. Since the rationalists believed in systematic human progress and the establishment of an ordered world, they demonized chaotic outbursts of unbridled emotion that threatened their goals. The romantics, however, asserted the primacy of feeling and regarded any attempt to impose abstract rules, controls, or measurements onto the spontaneous fluidity of life as a form of demonic inhibition. Nietzsche regarded the moribund state of European civilization as the legacy of a stifling Apollonian tradition of repression that needed to be revitalized by a resurgence of Dionysian energy and passion.

  Over the past hundred years, management of this conflict within individual human minds has largely fallen to psychologists and psychotherapists. Freud understood our anxious sense of self (ego) to be forged by two opposed and irreconcilable forces: the blind drives of biology (the largely unconscious id) and the moral constraints of society (the superego). Both these forces are characteristic of Mara: the tempestuous longings and fears that assail us, as well as the views and opinions that confine us. Whether we talk of succumbing to irresistible urges and addictions or being paralyzed by neurotic obsessions, both are psychological ways of articulating our current cohabitation with the devil.

  By identifying boredom as a primary evil, Baudelaire understands the demonic more as oppression and inhibition than as violent or erotic abandon. For when we do transgress, we do so guiltily. “We steal a secret pleasure on the side,” he says, “That we squeeze hard like an old orange.” This disturbing awareness of being psychologically and morally ensnared by forces we scarcely comprehend reappears in the novels of Franz Kafka. “Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K.,” opens The Trial, “for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.” Poor K. never finds out why he was arrested, fails to penetrate very far into the labyrinth of the judicial system, and finally is executed. The devil as “a liar” and “a murderer from the beginning” who blocks our path (arrests us) has assumed the guise of sinister, invisible powers that without apparent reason invade and destroy an ordinary person’s life. This acutely secular entrapment is captured by the spare, halting prose of Samuel Beckett: “Suddenly, no, at last, long last, I couldn’t anymore, I couldn’t go on. Someone said, You can’t stay here. I couldn’t stay there and I couldn’t go on.”

  In confronting the demonic with little prospect of redemption, these writers practice a curiously civilized kind of nihilism. While appearing to shun any hope of religious salvation, they achieve, at least momentarily, a secular salvation in the transformative workings of their art. Their despair is redeemed by becoming a beautiful despair. Baudelaire admits as much in one of his projected prefaces to Les Fleurs du Mal: “It seemed to me pleasant, and all the more agreeable as the task was difficult, to extract the beauty of Evil” (Baudelaire’s italics). The poet enjoys an aesthetic pleasure in the very act of coming to terms with the demons that torment him. Just as knowing Mara frees Buddha from Mara’s grip, reimagining the devil loosens the bonds with which the demonic binds the poet. The stifling desperation evoked in the poems contrasts with the effortless and fluid rhythms of each verse. Describing his plight at the hands of the Demon, Baudelaire seems to be borne away on the “impalpable breeze” that envelops him:

  So he leads me, far from God’s sight,

  Gasping and broken with fatigue, in the midst

  Of Boredom’s profound deserted plains

  And throws in my bewildered eyes

  Soiled clothes, open wounds

  And the bleeding apparatus of Destruction.

  This “apparatus of Destruction” is the systemic violence that permeates and infects the totality of contingent events. For created things are subject to breakdown, corruption, deception, and extinction. They are ultimately unreliable. No matter how well we care for this organism of flesh and nerves and blood, it will one day fail us. “The undependable lord of death,” remarks Shantideva, “waits not for things to be done or undone. Whether sick or healthy, this fleeting life cannot be trusted.” The stuff of which we are made, that allows the possibility of consciousness, love, and freedom, will also destroy us, wiping out that poignant identity of a sensitive creature with an unrepeatable history, who has become a question for itself.

  Disease, ageing, and death are forms of an internal violence that afflicts all creatures; whereas natural disasters, viral infections, and terrorist attacks are examples of an external violence that threatens to break out anywhere. The globalized, interconnected world has become a body that is prone to these outbursts without warning. In a way that Baudelaire could not have imagined, we are capable of feeling the instability and vulnerability of the living system of which we are a part and on which we depend. Whether it be the appearance of a virus, a hole in the ozone layer, or a hijacked plane, such events are rapidly and vividly made known through the electronic media. They do not have to impinge on our personal existence or occur very often to frighten us. Mara’s most effective weapon is sustaining a climate of fear.

  Cancer cells and suicide bombers share the capacity to occupy the space of one’s body without one’s consent. Every act of violence is a violation of the integrity of my enfleshed being. Whether it be a breaching of my skin, my immune system, or my right under law to live unmolested, a violent act is an intrusion into the intimate space I cherish as my own. Whoever or whatever deprives me of the right to that space violates me. That violence is a form of rape is implied by the French le viol (rape) and violer (to rape). Whenever humans resort to violence, men are murdered and women raped. That inviolable space they regard as their own is penetrated against their will by a bullet or a penis.

  Acts of genocide, child abuse, and terrorism are perpetrated by educated, civilized, and religious people. The willingness to violate others furtively behind closed doors or defiantly in the name of a higher good (the survival of a
nation or the truth of a religion) is readily concealed behind a smiling or pious exterior. When these evildoers are exposed, the world heaps scorn and hatred upon them, apparently unaware of the violent impulses from which its own reactions stem.

  “It is more difficult to love God than to believe in him,” said Baudelaire elsewhere in his abandoned preface.

  By contrast, it is more difficult for people of this century to believe in the devil than to love him. Everybody serves him, but no one believes in him. The sublime subtlety of the devil.

  I may sincerely believe in doing good and renouncing evil, but my thoughts and actions often suggest that I wholeheartedly do neither. In the quiet and lonely solitude of the soul, inadmissible urges co-exist with yearnings to act justly and kindly. Both exert an equal claim on my attention. I oscillate between them, one moment consumed with self-loathing only in the next to be granted access to a rapture of compassion. It is here, in the heart of this inner space, that we first face the challenge of living with the devil.

  TWO

  CREATING A PATH

  6

  Fear and Trembling

  “ALL THE UNHAPPINESS of men,” remarked Pascal, “comes from one thing: not knowing how to stay quietly in a room.” Sitting still on your own confronts you with the intolerable contingency of your existence. You feel the breath come and go, the heart thud, a jab of pain in the lower back, a ringing in the ear, another anxious cascade of thoughts. When Michel de Montaigne retired to his country estate in 1571, he hoped to leave his mind “in complete idleness to commune with itself, to come to rest, and to grow settled.” To his surprise it turned out to be “like a runaway horse” confronting him with “chimeras and imaginary monsters, one after another, without order or plan.”

  To be thrown into existence is painful and shocking. I was forced from my mother’s uterus to emerge bloodied and screaming, gasping for air in an alien world. I had no choice in the matter. As I learned to organize the chaos of the senses into an intelligible world, negotiate the labyrinth of language and signs, get used to hearing and telling my own and others’ stories, I discovered that I would be expelled from the world’s stage as unceremoniously as I was thrust upon it.

  Rather than face the contingency of my existence, I flee it. This existential flight is the diabolic undercurrent of human life. It is that bewildered and fearful recoil against having been born and having to die, that brooding anxiety that is not anxious about anything in particular. Its quivering unease is like the lazy collision of two rings of ripples on water: one a reverberation from the shock of birth, the other an intimation of the shock of death.

  I am divided against myself. Part of me remains aware of how weird it is to be this self-conscious animal; another part averts its gaze and flees to the security of what seems manageable. I succumb to an insatiable fascination with trivia and gossip. I crave stimulation and intoxication. I suffer an uncontrollable tendency to daydream, a chronic inability to remain focused on what matters most. In spite of lofty aspirations to pursue a path, I begin to suspect that I am spinning in circles.

  The relative constancy of the “I” is exaggerated into a permanent and disconnected self that seems to protect me against the terror of contingency and change. I feel as though I am an unborn, immortal soul temporarily inhabiting a body. To believe in this only intensifies the contradictions of existential flight. For this seemingly eternal self is afflicted with a gnawing doubt that something essential to it is lacking. I appear to be self-sufficient, but crave to be loved and recognized by others; I project self-assurance, but feel as though I’m wearing a mask; I present a cheerful exterior, but inwardly suffer a quiet desperation; I affirm my singularity, but suspect that I am a jumbled collection of roles.

  Existential flight is driven by fear. One of the armies of Mara, fear penetrates deep into the roots of human existence. It originates in the very feeling of being contingent: that deep, intuitive anxiety that one need not have been born and will inevitably die. This diffuse anxiety manifests as my concrete fear of rejection, of failure, of cancer, of madness, of senility. Such anxiety and fear seem to brood beneath the surface of awareness, waiting to rise up and seize me. One moment I am contentedly going about my business, only in the next to find myself gripped by an irrational dread. Fear darkens and paralyzes the mind, transforming a world of enticing possibilities into one of malicious indifference toward me. Fear unnerves me, making me panic and act rashly. When fear rules, I become neurotically convinced that something awful is about to happen.

  This body that thrills to the prospect of pleasure recoils at the hint of pain. From the cries of the newborn infant to the complaints of arthritic old age, the organism struggles to be free from the suffering knit into its condition. With each footstep, we run the risk of tripping and falling, bumping into an obstacle, inadvertently slipping a disc or pulling a muscle. Every worry reveals a preoccupation with not getting hurt. Every plan for the future is an attempt to eradicate the anxiety that gnaws on the margins of the present.

  Fear is the longing not to be hurt; the craving not to suffer misfortune; the yearning not to be contingent. It is the fundamental aversive reaction to the threats with which life confronts us. As well as being an emotion in its own right, fear pervades all self-centered emotion. Whether I am consumed by hatred or riddled with doubts, in both cases I am afraid—I want to avoid the pain inflicted by an enemy’s barbed remarks as much as I do the anguish of my own uncertainty.

  As he approached the final rupture with those powers that had hitherto dictated the terms of his life, Gotama unleashed deeply latent fears. “Mara conjured up his host,” relates the Sanskrit Mahavastu, “and advanced to the bodhisattva’s seat. Mounting his chariot drawn by thousands of horses and carrying a dazzling bow, he uttered a fearful cry: ‘Kill him, kill him, seize him, quick!’” At his command, hordes of animal-headed demons surged around Gotama, large-bellied snakes crawled out of the earth, goblins rained down embers upon him. The very intensity of his quest for freedom provoked equally intense fright. “The less the sage feared the frightful hosts of that multitude,” says Ashvaghosa in his second-century-CE account of Buddha’s life, “the more did Mara continue his attacks in grief and anger.”

  When Pascal said, “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me,” he expressed a longing not to be hurt that goes beyond being afraid of a particular object or person. Pascal’s dread came from his awareness of being enclosed in a vast and indifferent universe from which he would soon be expelled. Such fear is the anxiety we feel when the transitoriness and contingency of our existence become apparent. But as well as feeling anxious, we might also feel awestruck. Although this anxiety might undermine a sense of being a separate self, it reveals something infinitely fascinating and terrifying. Some would consider this revelation as religious in nature. It is an intimation of the sublime power that creates, sustains, and destroys all life, before which one feels humbled.

  Although recoiling in fear from life’s destructiveness triggers Mara’s instinctive strategies of closure, it also allows a glimpse of what we need to understand and tolerate if we are to be free from Mara’s control. Buddha’s victory over the forces of Mara is a way of describing how he has come to terms not only with the limiting and distorting powers in his own mind but also with the powers of contingency and change that drive the world itself. In relinquishing the obsession of being an isolated self, Buddha opens himself fearlessly and calmly to the tumult of the sublime.

  In a theistic context, to be afraid of the devil is not the same as fearing God. In the former case, one is terrified of something unpleasant happening to oneself, whereas in the latter, one is awestruck by the terrible power and mystery of what transcends one. When Paul in his letter to the Philippians urged his followers in his absence to “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling,” he was inciting them to live their lives in constant awareness of their finitude and mortality. By facing what is limit
less and unbounded, such fear cannot be equated with the limiting and constricting fear that belongs to Mara. Instead of driving us round and round in a futile quest for that perfect situation where all pain is banished, this fear opens up a path that might free us from fear.

  For Tsong-kha-pa, writing in Tibet at the end of the fourteenth century, fear is one of the causes that brings one to the path opened up by Buddha. This fear too is not one of Mara’s “troops.” It is fear of Mara himself. This longing not to be hurt by the armies of Mara is the beginning of faith: a yearning to transcend one’s limitations and embark on a path. Lacking this wider perspective, we try to ward off fear by desperately avoiding or destroying whatever seems to pose a threat to our well-being. We are unlikely to notice that the strategy itself may be flawed. For no matter how many heads you cut off this Hydra-like Mara, another will grow in its place. Only by stepping back to contemplate this broader picture do you start to realize what is truly frightening: being trapped in a cycle of fearful reactivity.

  Even after their awakening, Mara approaches Buddha and his followers “in order to arouse fear, trepidation and terror” in them. Their ability to remain fearless in the face of Mara’s threats is taken as a sign that they are no longer subject to their patterns of reactive behavior. Mara tries to distract the beautiful nun Uppalavanna from her meditation as she stands alone at the foot of a tree in a forest by voicing fears of being molested. “Though a hundred thousand rogues just like you might come here,” she replies, “I stir not a hair, I feel no terror; even alone, Mara, I don’t fear you.” Since her life is no longer driven by the compulsive longing not to be hurt, she can declare to him, “I am freed from all bondage, therefore I don’t fear you, friend.”