indifferent as its members, which has died to itself, can inflict it administratively on innumerable people.
—Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life
You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you . . . Take away hatred from some people, and you have men without faith.
—Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind
It is true that storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it, that it brings about consent and reconciliation with things as they really are, and that we may even trust it to contain eventually by implication that last word which we expect from the “Day of Judgment.”
—Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times
At the core of liberalism is the spoiled child—miserable, as all spoiled children are, unsatisfied, demanding, ill-disciplined, despotic, and useless. Liberalism is a philosophy of sniveling brats.
—P.J. O’Rourke, Give War a Chance
The champions of socialism call themselves progressives, but they recommend a system which is characterized by rigid observance of routine and by a resistance to every kind of improvement. They call themselves liberals, but they are intent upon abolishing liberty. They call themselves democrats, but they yearn for dictatorship. They call themselves revolutionaries, but they want to make the government omnipotent. They promise the blessings of the Garden of Eden, but they plan to transform the world into a gigantic post office. Every man but one a subordinate clerk in a bureau. What an alluring utopia! What a noble cause to fight for!
—Ludwig von Mises, Bureaucracy
The crisis of the West consists in the West’s having become uncertain of its purpose.
—Leo Strauss, The City and Man
Contents
Preface to the Paperback Edition
Preface: The Argument
Introduction: Of the Devil’s Pleasure Palace
Chapter One: Whose Paradise?
Chapter Two: Thesis
Chapter Three: Antithesis
Chapter Four: The Sleep of Pure Reason Produces Monsters
Chapter Five: The Descent into Hell
Chapter Six: The Eternal Feminine
Chapter Seven: Of Light and Darkness
Chapter Eight: Of Words and Music
Chapter Nine: The Venusberg of Death
Chapter Ten: World without God, Amen
Chapter Eleven: Of Eros and Thanatos
Chapter Twelve: The Consolation of Philosophy
Chapter Thirteen: Mephisto at the Ministry of Love
Chapter Fourteen: The Devil Is in the Details
Chapter Fifteen: Oikophobes and Xenophiles
Chapter Sixteen: Good-Bye to All That
Acknowledgments
Index
Illustration to Goethe’s “Erlkönig,” Moritz von Schwind, 1917. A dying child and a desperate father fleeing seductive Death.
Satan Cast Out of the Hill of Heaven, Gustave Doré, 1866. The Paradise that has been irrevocably lost is not ours but Satan’s. No wonder those who advocate the satanic position fight for it so fiercely.
Mephistopheles in Flight, Eugène Delacroix, 1828. The fallen angel, his wings still intact, flies impudently naked above the symbols of the Principal Enemy.
Fantasy abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters: United with her, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of their marvels, Francisco Goya, 1799.
The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in Sun, William Blake, 1805. It is not for Jesus to defeat Satan. Instead, that task is given to a woman, the Woman: Mary, the Mother of Christ.
Gretchen im Kerker (Gretchen in Prison), Peter Cornelius, 1815. Sie ist gerichtet! (She is damned!) Ist gerettet! (Is saved!)
In the Venusberg, John Collier, 1901. Wagner provides us with his own version of the Devil’s Pleasure Palace, the seductive erotic prison of the Venusberg in Tannhäuser.
Lilith, John Collier, 1892. “She most, and in her looks sums all Delight / Such Pleasure took the Serpent to behold… / fawning, and licked the ground whereon she trod.”
Preface to the Paperback Edition
The Devil’s Pleasure Palace is a book about Good and Evil, about the Fall of Man and our long journey home, and about how Art, not Science, is the medium best suited to steer us toward that beacon of magic fire which lights the path to redemption. Big themes, worthy of capitalization.
But rather than a single Virgil, conducting us back to the first principles of Western civilization from which our culture has sprung, the reader will encounter a score or more: Milton, Mozart, Schubert, Wagner, Goethe; Joseph Campbell; the philosophers of the Frankfurt School of Marxist intellectuals; Marcus Aurelius, Boethius; Hegel and Marx; Francis Ford Coppola and Walt Disney. Some are saintly, some diabolical—but all, in their fashion, have helped us understand the central questions of man’s existence: Why are we here, and where are we going? If it is not the Pilgrim’s Progress, it is at the very least the story of the Hero’s Journey, the hero in this case being all of us.
Please don’t be frightened by this ghostly parade of cultural icons; at heart, this is an adventure story, analyzed via the medium of the oldest of human activities, storytelling itself. Call it what you will—myth, legend, narrative fiction, faith—the human need for stories that help explain the human condition antedates organized religion
