“The devil made me do it” – Flip Wilson in the role of Geraldine
Hollywood produces horror films in which grotesque demons terrorize individuals and whole communities, until the demons disappear and the sun comes out again and The End informs us that it was all fiction. Indeed, modern or post-modern society seems to have lost all belief in the devil. Such was not the case with Amory Blaine, the main character in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first novel This Side of Paradise. Amory retained some remembrance of the devil due to his Catholic upbringing but not enough to resist our culture’s appetite for success by whatever means. In pursuit of that goal he entered Princeton University, aspiring to become prominent within the well-to-do and influential Ivy League society of his time (the beginning of the Jazz Age).
He was handicapped, however, by being raised Catholic, a noticeable flaw among the country club set. Nevertheless he throws a lot of effort into gaining notice, editing a school journal, being a live wire among classmates, attending parties where debutantes were accessible. (Of course it was not long before he was disillusioned with Ivy League standards, evident in a poem he writes about a professor: Good morning, Fool . . . / Three times a week / You hold us helpless while your speak, / Teasing our thirsty souls with the / Sleek ‘yeas’ of your philosophy . . . / Well, here we are, your hundred sheep, / Tune up, play on, pour forth . . . we sleep . . .
Yet try as he might he can’t shake that repressed belief in the devil that was part of his upbringing. While attending a dance of Ivy Leaguers in Manhattan one night, he is thrown off by someone at a nearby table . looking at him. A middle aged man dressed in a brown sack suit, it was, sitting a little apart at a table by himself and watching their party intently. Later when his party adjourns to a Manhattan suite and Amory is about to imbibe he drops his glass. There the man half sat, half leaned against a pile of pillows . . . his face pallid, gray eyes rotating around the group with just a shade of a questioning expression. He wore no shoes . . . or rather soft shoes, pointed in medieval fashion.
Similar occasions occur that make Amory second-guess his ambition to be an up to date success. It makes him question the material and celebrity ambitions of the new century; makes him want to lay aside his becoming a “personage” (one who acquires acclaim and awards that are soon forgotten) – in order to become a “personality”, a man true to what he is, free of wearing disguises. By the end of the story he has returned to square one, not with any sense of accomplishment but as a good place to begin life honestly – at last. Or as Fitzgerald concludes Amory’s story: He stretched out his arms to the crystalline, radiant sky. “I know myself,” he cried, “but that is all.”
In the biblical Book of Job Satan is described as the prosecutor in God’s heavenly court whose task is to roam the earth and patrol it and bring before God charges against even a saint like Job. You could say his role is to awaken in us our conscience, make us conscious of the wrongs we do, the wrong turns we are about to make. In today’s Gospel do not the devil’s temptations, his challenges to Jesus to flaunt his power, to go totalitarian, serve to force a response in Jesus, to grasp and articulate with finality and conviction his true mission in this world: to force Jesus to declare himself to be true to God and not just another tedious show off?
Geraldine always says, “The devil made me do it.” But maybe the real role of the devil in our tradition is not so much to tempt us to sin but, in the tussle of our day to day existence, to challenge us to recover and articulate our true selves – as true to God, to others and to ourselves.