Authors: Stanislaw Lem
The conversation that developed during that solitary meal—for no one else was eating—turned once again, perforce, to transcendental things. I wished to know what the last believers of Dichotica thought on the subject of good and evil, God and the devil, but when I posed this question, there was a long silence, during which only the striped light bulbs buzzed softly in the corners of the refectory; though this might have been, too, the current of the Prognosticants.
At last an elderly Computer sitting opposite me—a specialist in religious history, as I later learned from Father Darg—spoke up.
“Getting straight to the point, I would put our views in the following way,” he said. “Satan is that which we understand the least in God. This does not mean that we consider God Himself to be an alloy of elements, of the high and the low, good and evil, love and hate, the power of creation and the lust for destruction. Satan is the idea that God can be delimited, classified, isolated, separated by fractional distillation until He becomes that—and only that—which we are able to accept and need no longer defend ourselves against. An idea which is untenable inside history, because it leads inevitably to the conclusion that there is no knowledge but what derives from Satan, and that he will extend his influence until he has encompassed all that fosters knowledge,
in
toto.
And this, because knowledge gradually nullifies the directives we call revealed commandments. It permits us to kill without killing, to destroy, but in such a way that the destruction is creative, it evaporates off those persons whom we are supposed to honor, the father and the mother for example, and it does away with such dogmas as immaculate conception and the immortal soul.
“If these are the work of the devil, then everything you touch is the devil’s work, nor can it even be said that Satan has engulfed all civilization but the Church in it he has not engulfed, for the Church, albeit reluctantly, step by step consents to the acquisition of knowledge, and on that road there is no place where one can say ‘Thus far, and no farther!,’ for no one—within the Church or without—can tell what the outcome of today’s knowledge will be tomorrow. The Church may from time to time declare war upon that progress, but as she defends one front—say, the sanctity of conception—progress, instead of making a frontal attack, executes an encircling maneuver, which obviates the sense of the defended position. A thousand years ago our Church defended motherhood, but knowledge obviated the very concept of a mother, first by cutting the act of maternity in two, then by removing it outside the body, then by performing embryo synthesis, so that after three centuries the defense had lost all meaning. The Church then had to accept remote-control insemination and test-tube conception, and artificial birth, and artificial intelligence, and the ghost in the machine, and the machine receiving the sacraments, and the disappearance of every distinction between naturally created and man-made entities. Had the Church persisted in her opinion, eventually she would have been forced to admit that there is no God but Satan.
“To save God, we acknowledged the historicity of Satan, that is, his evolution as a projection, changing in time, of all those qualities which in Creation both terrify and sadden us. Satan is the naive idea that one can differentiate between God and Not-God as between day and night. God is Mystery, while Satan represents the personed aggregate of the isolated constituents of that Mystery. For us there is no Satan outside history. This is the one thing, constant in him and personified, which proceeds from freedom. However you must, O guest and stranger from afar, forsake the categories of your thought, which have been shaped by a different history than ours, as you listen to my words. Freedom to us means something altogether different than it does to you. It means the collapse of all limitations on action, that is, the withering away of all the constraints life encounters at the dawn of intelligence. Those constraints form the mind, for they lift it up out of the vegetable abyss. And since those constraints are a terrible nuisance, the fondest dream of the historical mind is to achieve complete and total liberty, and that is why it is in this direction that civilization heads, step by step. There is the step of hewing urns of stone and the step of raising the dead, and the step of extinguishing suns—and there are no insurmountable obstacles between these steps.
“The freedom I speak of, it is not that modest state desired by certain people when others oppress them. For then man becomes for man—a set of bars, a wall, a snare, a pit. The freedom I have in mind lies farther out, extends beyond that societal zone of reciprocal throat-throttling, for that zone may be passed through safely, and then, in the search for new constraints—since people no longer impose these on each other—one finds them in the world and in oneself, and takes up arms against the world and against oneself, to contend with both and make both subject to one’s will. And when this too is done, a precipice of freedom opens up, for now the more one has the power to accomplish, the less one knows what ought to be accomplished. At first wisdom is tempting, but from a jug of water in the desert it becomes like a jug of water in the middle of a lake, since wisdom—like water—is readily assimilable, and since you can bestow it upon scrap iron and frog’s eggs.
“Yet however respectable the striving after of wisdom may appear, there are no respectable arguments for the flight from wisdom, no one then will say aloud that he desires to be stupid, and even if—so desiring—he has the courage of his convictions, to where exactly is he to retreat? No natural gap exists any longer between reason and unreason, for science has quantized and dissolved that gap, therefore even a deserter from knowledge cannot evade his freedom, for he must choose the state that suits him best, and before him lie more possibilities than there are stars in the firmament. He who is terribly wise among those like himself becomes a caricature of wisdom, much as a queen bee becomes—without her hive—the caricature of a mother, no purpose being served by the heap of eggs bursting from her abdomen.
“We have then escapes from that position, furtive and in the greatest shame or scrambling and in the greatest panic. There where each must be as he is, one sticks it out out of necessity. There where each may be different than he is, one will fritter away his appointed time leaping frantically from life to life. Such a society, seen from above, looks like a swarm of insects on a heated stove. At a distance its agony has the aspect of a farce, with those comical leaps from wisdom to stupidity, with the fruits of knowledge used so one can play his stomach like a drum, run on a hundred legs or paper a wall with his brain. When it is possible to duplicate the one you love, there is no more loved one, there is only the mockery of love, and when it is possible to become anyone at all and hold whatever convictions you like, then you are already no one and can hold no convictions. And so our history falls to the bottom and bounces up again, jumping like a puppet on a string, and that is why it seems so gruesomely amusing.
“Government regulates freedom, but in so doing imposes arbitrary limits, limits which rebellion will overthrow, for you cannot conceal what once has been discovered. Therefore in saying that Satan is the embodiment of freedom, I mean that he represents that side of God’s work which frightens us the most: a crossroads of countless continua where we stand, paralyzed by the attainment of our goal. According to one naive philosophy the world ‘ought to’ limit us, in the way that a strait jacket limits a madman, and another voice in that philosophy tells us that these fetters ‘ought to’ reside within ourselves. He who says this, yearns for the existence of restrictions on freedom, manifested either in the world or in himself, for he would have the world close certain roads to him, or else have his own nature restrain him thus. God however has given us neither the one nor the other sort of restriction. And not only that, but He ironed out the places where we had anticipated such restrictions, in order that we would not know, when crossing them, that this was precisely what we were doing.”
But did it not follow from this—I asked—that God was, according to the Duistic faith, identical with Satan? I observed a slight agitation among those present. The historian was silent, but the general of the order said:
“It is as you say, but not as you think. Saying ‘God is Satan,’ you impart to those words a sense of the Creator’s villainy. What you said therefore is false—but only because you said it. If I were to say it, or any of the brothers here, those words would have an altogether different meaning. They would mean merely that there are gifts of God we can accept without resistance, and gifts we are unable to assume. They would mean, ‘God has in no way;—but in no way—limited us, curtailed us, confined us.’ And note, please, that a world compelled to good alone is as much a shrine to compulsion as a world compelled to evil only. Do you not agree with me, Dagdor?”
The historian, to whom this question was addressed, concurred and then said:
“There are known to me, as a chronicler of beliefs, theogonies, according to which God fashioned the world to be not entirely perfect, yet a world which, in a direct or zigzag path, or in a spiral, was heading towards perfection, and there are known to me doctrines, according to which God is an enormous infant that has set its playthings going in the ‘right’ direction, for its own amusement. I also know teachings which call perfect that which already is, in order however to balance the books of that perfection they throw in a correcting factor, and that factor bears the name of the devil. But the model of existence as a toy train with a perpetually self-winding spring of progress, which moves Creation faster and faster to where things are always better, as well as the model of existence in which miraculous interventions are indispensable, in other words Creation as a broken watch and miracle as God’s tweezers probing its stellar works to make the necessary adjustments, not to mention the model of the world as a delicious cake in which are embedded the fish bones of diabolical temptation—all these are taken from the primer of an intelligent race, that is, a picture book which adulthood places—with a twinge of nostalgia perhaps, but also with a shrug—back on the shelf of the child’s room. There are no demons, if you do not count the demon of freedom; the world is one and God is one, and faith too is one, O stranger, and the rest is silence.”
I was going to ask what then, according to them, were the positive qualities of God and the world, since so far I had heard only what God was
not,
and then too, after this lecture on the eschatology of freedom, my head was all aspin and in confusion—but it was time for us to continue on our way. When we were already waddling on our iron steeds, as we rode along I asked Father Darg, struck by a sudden thought: why exactly did his order have the name of Demolitian?
“That has to do with the topic of our conversation at the table,” he replied. “The name, of historical derivation, signifies the acceptance of existence in its entirety, an entirety originating with God and including not only that which is in Him creativeness, but also that which to us appears to be its opposite. It does not signify”—he hastened to add—“that we ourselves are on the side of demolition; indeed, no one today would give the order that name, it was the product of a certain theological grudge reflecting bygone crises of the Church.”
I was now squinting, for we had come to a place where the sewer, on account of cave-ins in the ceiling, here and there opened up onto the surface—and for a while I could not lift my eyelids, so unaccustomed was I to the sun. We were on a plain devoid of any sign of vegetation; the city had become a gray-blue edge of buildings on the horizon, and the whole expanse was crisscrossed with smooth, wide roads, roads like ribbons of silvery metal; they were as empty as the sky above, where only a few puffy white clouds could be seen drifting along.
Our mounts, looking particularly misshapen on that high-speed road, slowly, creaking, and as if blinded by the rays of the sun, to which they were not accustomed, followed a shortcut known to the monks, but before we reached the concrete drain that led back down into the earth, there appeared between the arches of a viaduct a small building in emerald green and gold; this, I thought, was probably a gas station. Standing next to it was a flat vehicle, like a big roach, streamlined thus for speed. The building itself had no windows, only semi-translucent walls, through which the sun was shining as if through stained glass; when we were some sixty feet away, stretched out in one long column, I heard groans issuing from that place, and a throaty rattle so dreadful, my hair stood on end. The voice, undeniably human, choked and moaned in turn. I knew for a certainty that this was the cry of someone being tortured, being murdered perhaps; I looked at my companions, but they paid absolutely no attention to those grisly sounds.
I wanted to shout to them, shout that we should go at once and help, but then I was speechless with dismay, that they could be that indifferent to the fate of a man undergoing torture, so I jumped from my iron animal and ran straight ahead, throwing all caution to the winds. But before I could make it to the building a short, strangled scream rang out, followed by silence. The building was a pavilion, gracefully structured, with no apparent door; I ran around it in vain, then stopped, rooted to the spot before a wall of blue enamel, transparent to such a degree that I could see inside. There on a blood-spattered table lay a naked figure, surrounded by machines that had sunk gleaming tubes or tongs into its body, which was now dead, and so contorted by the final throes, I couldn’t tell arms from legs. Nor did I see the head, or whatever served for a head, locked inside a heavy metal bell that went down over and bristled with tiny spikes. The corpse no longer bled from its numerous wounds, the heart had ceased to beat. With my feet burning on the sun-baked sand and the horrible scream of the Dichotican still ringing in my ears, I stood, overcome by the horror, the ghastliness, the mystery of the scene, for the corpse was alone—I could look into all the corners of that mechanized torture chamber; I felt rather than heard the approach of a cowled figure and, seeing out of the corner of my eye that it was the prior, I said in a ragged voice: