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A review by lee_foust
The Sorrows of Satan; or, The Strange Experience of One Geoffrey Tempest, Millionaire by Marie Corelli
5.0
There are several things to love about this novel. It's very witty and quite well written. It's also amazingly philosophical and smart. I love the fact that it's written by a female author, thus blasting the sexist cultural cliche that man are thoughtful and women emotional. Not that the narrative lacks some drama, but The Sorrows of Satan is more intellectual and moral enterprise than novel of sensation, sensibility, or melodrama.
Of course I have a penchant for such texts, being a Dante scholar by trade, and I must say this moral diatribe is very high on my list of such writing. I agree with all of the novel's moral targets--egotism, selfishness, wealth, greed, cronyism, sexism, the literary establishment, decadentism, etc.--and about 90% of its solution. Yes, you could probably call Marie Corelli the anti-Ayn Rand. Also, the literary portrait of Satan here, to my mind, blows Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita out of the water. To be fair, Corelli's is a kind of Victorian updating of Milton's Lucifer, the evil but also pitiable and tragic figure of the angel who couldn't accept God's eternal superiority. Loved that she sticks with Milton's version, more or less, of the fallen angel and eschews--what annoyed me about Bulgakov's novel--rewriting the Bible to make it palatable to the modern mind. (As you will see if you read on, I'm an atheist so re-writing the Bible strikes me as cheating. I mean, if the Bible is abhorrent to the modern mind it's because we've evolved--it doesn't mean we have to re-write it to fall into sync with contemporary morality. We can, and should, write new, better books, I should think.)
This, I'm sad to say, leads me directly to the ten percent of Corelli's Christian solution with which I disagree. While I teach for a Jesuit University and have come to know, love, and really admire many Christians who absolutely believe in and practice the love for their fellow human beings that Jesus taught, obviously there are also scads of so-called Christians, and practitioners of the other millions of religions in the world, who, despite the moral precepts of the deity to love their fellow man, fall into the egotism, prejudices, and frequently commit horrific acts against their fellow man that pretty much every religion claims in abhors. When I argue this point with believers they always seem to fall back on "Jesus tells me to love God first and foremost." For many, then, this allegiance to God is merely a fantastic projection of their own hatreds and prejudices onto their imaginary deity and thus we have all of the heinous acts against their fellow human beings that religious people commit as a matter of course justified by the holy scriptures: war, genocide, shooting up churches, shooting up schools, flying airplanes into buildings, etc., etc., etc.
As Jesus himself is supposed to have said: "A good man out of the good treasure of the heart bringeth forth good things: and an evil man out of the evil treasure bringeth forth evil things." The Bible is a treasure out of which far too many Christians bring warfare, slavery, selfishness, greed, sexism, and genocide. Of course I believe these things are already inside of those people. Therefore I have difficulty seeing allegiance to an imaginary deity--faith--as the solution to social strife after so many centuries of this concept failing to solve these problems.
Also, if one practices the opposite of all of these evils: pacifism, equality, peace, and love, only because they are afraid of the chastisement that this paternal deity will exact upon their immortal souls--as this novel offers as a solution to the narrator's having fallen into sin--what real good is that person's virtue? Are we always children or trained dogs only forbearing to shit on the carpet in the living room because we fear the rolled up newspaper? I declare that virtue is self evident--linguistically anyway, good is always good and evil always bad. We just have to be careful not to let the evil among us redefine concepts like war, genocide, slavery, sexism, greed, and wealth, as good things. They are evil and remain evil and evil needs to be avoided not because God says so or we'll be punished after death for them but quite simply and logically because they are evil. So, to reverse paraphrase Voltaire's oft-repeated maxim: If God did exist, it would be necessary--to secure peace through actual equality and justice for all--to ignore him.
If you want to meditate on these moral issues, even though more than a hundred years old, The Sorrows of Satan has a lot to say about the ills of our monetary bourgeois culture as we inherited it from Jolly old England.
Of course I have a penchant for such texts, being a Dante scholar by trade, and I must say this moral diatribe is very high on my list of such writing. I agree with all of the novel's moral targets--egotism, selfishness, wealth, greed, cronyism, sexism, the literary establishment, decadentism, etc.--and about 90% of its solution. Yes, you could probably call Marie Corelli the anti-Ayn Rand. Also, the literary portrait of Satan here, to my mind, blows Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita out of the water. To be fair, Corelli's is a kind of Victorian updating of Milton's Lucifer, the evil but also pitiable and tragic figure of the angel who couldn't accept God's eternal superiority. Loved that she sticks with Milton's version, more or less, of the fallen angel and eschews--what annoyed me about Bulgakov's novel--rewriting the Bible to make it palatable to the modern mind. (As you will see if you read on, I'm an atheist so re-writing the Bible strikes me as cheating. I mean, if the Bible is abhorrent to the modern mind it's because we've evolved--it doesn't mean we have to re-write it to fall into sync with contemporary morality. We can, and should, write new, better books, I should think.)
This, I'm sad to say, leads me directly to the ten percent of Corelli's Christian solution with which I disagree. While I teach for a Jesuit University and have come to know, love, and really admire many Christians who absolutely believe in and practice the love for their fellow human beings that Jesus taught, obviously there are also scads of so-called Christians, and practitioners of the other millions of religions in the world, who, despite the moral precepts of the deity to love their fellow man, fall into the egotism, prejudices, and frequently commit horrific acts against their fellow man that pretty much every religion claims in abhors. When I argue this point with believers they always seem to fall back on "Jesus tells me to love God first and foremost." For many, then, this allegiance to God is merely a fantastic projection of their own hatreds and prejudices onto their imaginary deity and thus we have all of the heinous acts against their fellow human beings that religious people commit as a matter of course justified by the holy scriptures: war, genocide, shooting up churches, shooting up schools, flying airplanes into buildings, etc., etc., etc.
As Jesus himself is supposed to have said: "A good man out of the good treasure of the heart bringeth forth good things: and an evil man out of the evil treasure bringeth forth evil things." The Bible is a treasure out of which far too many Christians bring warfare, slavery, selfishness, greed, sexism, and genocide. Of course I believe these things are already inside of those people. Therefore I have difficulty seeing allegiance to an imaginary deity--faith--as the solution to social strife after so many centuries of this concept failing to solve these problems.
Also, if one practices the opposite of all of these evils: pacifism, equality, peace, and love, only because they are afraid of the chastisement that this paternal deity will exact upon their immortal souls--as this novel offers as a solution to the narrator's having fallen into sin--what real good is that person's virtue? Are we always children or trained dogs only forbearing to shit on the carpet in the living room because we fear the rolled up newspaper? I declare that virtue is self evident--linguistically anyway, good is always good and evil always bad. We just have to be careful not to let the evil among us redefine concepts like war, genocide, slavery, sexism, greed, and wealth, as good things. They are evil and remain evil and evil needs to be avoided not because God says so or we'll be punished after death for them but quite simply and logically because they are evil. So, to reverse paraphrase Voltaire's oft-repeated maxim: If God did exist, it would be necessary--to secure peace through actual equality and justice for all--to ignore him.
If you want to meditate on these moral issues, even though more than a hundred years old, The Sorrows of Satan has a lot to say about the ills of our monetary bourgeois culture as we inherited it from Jolly old England.