Can the Damned Be Redeemed?

Tosca Lee points out a really fascinating complexity about the state of demonic salvation.

She quotes Augustine quoting the philosopher Plotinus* (and I quote Lee quoting them!):

"…that the very fact of man’s corporal mortality is due to the compassion of God, who would not have us kept for ever in the misery of this life. The wickedness of demons was not judged worthy of this compassion, and in the misery of their condition, with a soul subject to passions, they have not been granted the mortal body, which man had received, but an eternal body."

Plotinus is right. By association, so are St. Augustine and St. Tosca.

"Damned" isn't soft terminology. I think it is easier for those who have not faced a direct confrontation with evil to believe that it can be redeemed or reformed. It doesn't work like that. You don't purify Tianenman Square by celebrating the Olympics there: you only spoil the torch.

Keep in mind that demons, before demonhood, had been granted the one thing we really wish we had: immortal bodies. How many times have we thought that everything would be just fine if we only didn't have to deal with death in all its forms (breakdowns, breakups, breakouts, brokenness).

Well, so did the angels. But immortality turned out to be insufficient for a huge number of them.

So the demons are blessed with the one thing we covet: eternal existence. But it still isn't enough for them. They were built for community with God, but they used their immortality as a wedge against their own design!

Theoretically, physically, God could redeem a demon, but His just and righteous -- and loving -- character dictates that he not redeem a demon.

I know you humans think you are smarter than He is. You think you are more loving than He is. You, given the omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence of the Lord, would devise a delightful means by which the whisperers of Auschwitz might find redemption, even if they don't want the redemption you offer.

Instead of casting them to outer darkness, you'd be better than our father Abraham, who would not even send a dead man to witness to five lost brothers. Instead of separating yourself from the absence of good, you people, in your infinite justice, would marry yourselves to it.

Oh, wait, you** already have.

Why do we have such compassion for the devil? Isn't a demon a sort of tarbaby for misplaced sympathy?

Sincerely,


St. Grumpy



*Plotinus' efforts, by the way, should rightly be seen as an attempt to clarify Plato. His philosophical influence stretched from neopagans of the day to Christians. It is also worth noting that his philosophy is as overtly hostile to gnosticism at the intellectual level as Christianity is at the spiritual.

**(we)

Review-A-Palooza: Demon: A Memoir Discussions Start to Hit Stride

Nicole Petrino-Salter is suffering from another bout of the God virus, as propagated by Demon: A Memoir.

Fancy that.

This is one of the first reviews that I've come along that really starts to dig into the book's greater implications.* I have a feeling that the conversation started by Tosca Lee won't end until Judgment Day. If then.

This is going to be fun.**

*I mean, I've seen a few who have spoken of the book as "witnessing tool" to non-believers, but that falls short of the mark if that is the end of the discussion. The book is, first and foremost, a great story in an otherworldly format. It is a real story that makes demands on the reader--not to take a prescription or a "message" from it-- but demands that actually cause the reader to be somebody better, deeper, more loving, more engaged.***

**I mean, you know, I'm talking about a restrictive, semi-joyless fun, just in case you were getting worried. Only Diet Chocolate Cherry Fun for you!

***I know, I know. I've been playing it close to the vest about my opinion of Demon: A Memoir, so here's my big reveal: I kind of liked it. Shh.

Jesus loves Demon (A Memoir, that is)

I've noticed a few reviews of my new favorite book on the planet: Demon: A Memoir.

The Review Hutch: Review of Demon: A Memoir

Dave enjoys Demon: A Memoir

Ginny Smith has a few thoughts as well.

Detecting a pattern, I'm sure. I hope you don't think its all just a bunch of hype. Would I lie* to you?

Okay, so maybe these do not constitute a direct endorsement from our friend and master. But, wherever two or more are gathered in his name...and I've gathered three! (four if you count all present semi-humans.)

*I mean, not counting that bit about me doing time for counterfeiting currency, or accidentally derailing transcontinental train shipments with a penny, or eating a rock or that bit about the cannibalism.

Tosca Lee Chernobyls Her Underwood

Just to finish off the invasion of words that Tosca Lee launched on her editors (previous posts here and here):

Her first run-through hit 160,000+. Considering the target was 100,000, I'm thinking that she met her mark. Then punched it in the face. Then kicked it when it was down and rolled it off a cliff.

Poor mark.

Sorry for all the violence, but I've never been one to tack toward the Isle of Appropriate Social Conduct.*

In case you didn't know.

* This also applies to my disgusting disregard for the victims of bureaucratic failure and improper oversight in the old Soviet Union from whom I carelessly appropriated for my title. Also, I lied about Lee and her Underwood. At least, I think I lied. I don't actually know how she first writes her words, but the two things I'm pretty sure she doesn't use are a clay tablet or a manual typewriter. But a clay tablet would be cool. Especially if that's how she wrote Demon: A Memoir.

Author Lee Departs Crazytown for Insanity City

Post below, updated: Tosca Lee just passed 144,000.

A significant number, considering its importance in the Book of the Revelation.

"Then I looked, and behold, on Mount Zion stood the Lamb, and with him 144,000 who had his name and his Father's name written on their foreheads."

Although not as significant as each living member of the remnant, every word is significant, even those that do not make it to final edit. Editing a full third of the draft away is going to be an amazing feat of scrutiny.

Wow. This is like watching Skywalker* in the trench, TIE fighters on his tail, the meter counting down, and an exhaust port no bigger than wamprat for a target. I don't know how it is all going to end, but I guarantee it will be spectacular.

The one thing that Red 5 can't be aware of in the thick of this, and what most of the audience will have forgotten by now, is that Han Solo may be rough, but he's no derelict, and he doesn't stand by when there is action in the game.

*What follows are a series of obscure references to a little-known art film from the late 70s.

Tosca Lee Kicks Asterisks

Ugh, in her latest post, world renowned-author Tosca Lee notes that she's hit 131,000 words in the new novel she's working on. This is a big number, especially to me, who tends to think of long-form fiction as anything that doesn't fit in one of my stupid asterisked* comments.

I've mentioned it before, but none of my major publications have ever cracked the 100-word limit. In one of them, I lost the plot twice before the 50-word mark. So, yeah, to have cranked through, oh, 1,310 times as many words and to complain about not being quite finished is a little like Edmund Hilary summiting Everest and complaining that it doesn't go up any more.

By the way, if you haven't read Lee's Demon: A Memoir yet, you probably should. But only if you don't want me uprooting you like the witless stripling that you are and picking my crooked teeth with the remains.

*My asterisk comments are brief, is what that means.

Demon: A Memoir (Reviewed by Me, Read by You)

As you know, I don't rank works of literature, however, I can name only about a score of major modern* works that really matter: Beowulf, Don Quixote, Dante's Divine Comedy, Hamlet and Henry V, Canterbury Tales if you must. In the 20th Century, I've read a few great tales - The Wasteland, the Lord of the Rings, Perelandra, The Great Divorce, The Violent Bear it Away, Ficciones, the Name of the Rose, and The Secret History.

So, there you have it. This reader's noted great works first saw print, with the exception of Tart and Eco, well before my birth. Because it has been 15 years or so since the last straggler (Donna Tart's The Secret History) made it through the arch, I had lulled myself into thinking that my personal canon of great works was closed.

I am an idiot.

One of the greatest perils of postmodern thought is postmodern ideology, which carries an inherent risk: the risk that qualities such as good and bad, important and irrelevant, will be drained of meaning. Eventually, only the "personal" matters, and, eventually, not even that. I must have fallen in line with this quiet assumption at some point, because otherwise I cannot explain the shock I experienced when Demon: A Memoir appeared in my mailbox through what I can only describe as a series of unusual circumstances.

Let me get to the point: Tosca Lee's Demon: A Memoir is great literature, and being such, will very likely be misunderstood (at best) or overlooked (at worst) for another 30 years or so.

Me and the followers of the only way worship the Word, so it has always baffled me as to why we are, generally, so incapable of writing well. Eliot, L'Engle, O'Connor and Lewis are, of course, among many examples to the contrary, but there is a lot of Christian literature that can't even get the prose right, much less the theme. Demon: A Memoir is a new exception to that general tendency.

The plot structure is that of an architect's, the characters are vivid, the writing expresses clarity, wit, realism and logophilia. The book has three extraordinary characters that I'll be able to name on my deathbed. The climax is taut and spectacular. If Tosca Lee ripped out her own heart, I think words would come pouring from the wound.

This is a brave book - one that very humbly ventures into darkness with a candle.

Let me bypass a synopsis in favor of persuasion. I'll give you three reasons to pick this book up through a scene, an artifice, and an element of pathos:

A scene: The recently divorced protagonist, Clayton, is approached by, and drawn to, a beautiful woman in a bookstore. Lee masterfully negotiates a vulnerable man's complex lusts without ever once relying on cultural myths of manhood. Clay's emotions towards her come from a good place, a desire for the comforts and companionship of a wife, and quickly distort into more complex, and less pure desires.

An artifice: I love mis en abyme, when done well. The play-within-a-play in Hamlet, the book-within-a-book in The Name of the Rose, the poet-within-a-poem of Eliot, are all flawlessly executed. I'm a sucker for them, but I also know that they can be a trap, tempting the author to pull the trick once too often (a fate that befell the great artiste of our generation, Michael Jackson, when he turned the spectacular Thriller into a movie within a dream, or vice versa, or something.) The 70s film They Might Be Giants was brilliant mis en a byme, but had to bail on the ending to avoid the myriad traps that the story-within-a-story structure. Demon: A Memoir, shamelessly goes for mis en abyme, and delivers. In spades.

Demon not only is a story-within-a-story-within-a-story, but it is also a Truth-Within-the-Lie-Within-the-Truth story. Not only that, but it makes subtle reference to the conceit with overt references to John Gardner's Grendel and even, of all things, Sesame Street's infamous "Monster at the End of This Book."

The pathos: I know demons. I've seen their handiwork (so have you). Even as a weak and vain bridge-troll, I know my charge: to wrestle against principalities and powers, spiritual wickedness in high places, and the rulers of darkness. Somehow, like the unconsolable wailing of Esau over the unfairness of the loss of his birthright to his deceptive younger brother Jacob, the demon Lucian, with craft, earnestness and emotion, quickly earns my sympathy with his account of the Cosmic Disaster, even though I know that he too abandoned his own birthright for even less than a trifle.

Lee must be crazy or brilliant to try to pull this off. Just because it works flawlessly doesn't mean she isn't crazy. Van Gogh cut his own ear off, you know.

Are you getting the impression that I liked the book yet? Go buy it, already, for God's sake. And yours, too.

Post Scriptum - I have noticed two somewhat prevalent comparisons among commentators that don't quite jive with me.

There are a few references in other places to the work as being derivative of Anne Rice's Interview with A Vampire, but this is error. Lee's novel displays an episodic structure that has greater kinship with Stoker's Dracula, and though the villain is certainly sympathetic, he is no less a villain. Why do people think Demon is like Interview? Uhm, I guess because it has an interview in it, I don't really know. Trust me, Demon has a far greater sense of creeping dread, malevolence and power than Rice's Lestat-as-Superman saga (Don't get me wrong, IwaV is a good book, but isn't similar to Demon in any important or thematic way). I guess by this logic, Les Miserables is derivative of The Music Man, because, uh, they're both plays.

Also, Screwtape Letters. C.S. Lewis' demonic parody is delightful and full of insight and encouragement. Demon: A Memoir aims at a much different target. Lucian has much more in common with one of my favorite figures in literature, Lewis's Professor Weston in Perelandra, than he does with the master's more famous work about the corporate inner workings of hell.

A better book to compare Demon: A Memoir to is Stoker's Dracula. The full story emerges through obfuscation and deceptive trails, through a variety of voices and media (where Stoker utilized telegrams and letters, Lee takes advantage of text messages, calendar reminders, e-mail, cell phones) and centers around an evil that takes most of the book to fully appear. Although Lee is a better writer than Stoker, both Demon and Dracula share the same attention to layering.

Post Post Scriptum - If none of this has encouraged you to pick up Demon: A Memoir, here's one last-ditch effort: if you liked Lois Lowry's The Giver, Rice's The Vampire Lestat, the aforementioned The Great Divorce or Perelandra, King's The Eyes of the Dragon (or, for different reasons, The Shining), Borges' The Library of Babel, Robert E. Howard's Solomon Kane stories, Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, Dante's Inferno or Poe's Fall of the House of Usher, you are probably going to enjoy Tosca Lee's debut novel.

*You do recall my somewhat broad definition of "modern" don't you? Everything following 601 and the baptism of King Aethelbert. The brief thousand-year-or-so period before that is the Classical, and before that, the Ancient. Suck it up if you don't like it. Keep things simple, I say.