The Devil's Pleasure Palace. Michael Walsh

better Paradise that they themselves control, one from which God is entirely absent.

      Which raises this important question: Just whose Paradise has been lost? The conventional interpretation of our Genesis-based foundational myth is that it is our paradise, the Garden of Eden, that has been lost. But man’s heroic post-lapsarian quest is not to return to Eden, but to get to Heaven—something that is explicitly denied forever to Satan and his minions. They made their choice when they allied themselves with the seductive and beautiful angel Lucifer, and now they (save only Abdiel, the angel who was tempted by the satanic but in the end returned to God) must suffer eternally in the realm of the hideous, deformed Satan into whom the angel Lucifer has been transformed.

      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; it is not Eden they seek to restore but Heaven itself, albeit under new management. Bent on revenge, it is Satan who, in the form of the Serpent, tempts Eve to taste of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. (Satan, it should be noted, is extremely sexually attracted to the gorgeous Eve.) In Milton’s poem, it is Satan whose journey we follow. For some divine reason, he has been given a sporting chance for revenge, and, by God, or somebody, he is going to take it.

      The roots of the intractable political conflict that currently plagues Western societies lie almost entirely in our rejection of myth, legend, and religion as “unscientific” and in our embrace of barren “process” to deliver solutions to the world’s ills. Whether it goes by the name of “global warming” or “climate change” or “social science,” this worldview claims to be all-encompassing, eternal, and grounded in “settled science,” which boasts remarkable successes in empirical, experimental endeavors. With these technological achievements as cover and camouflage, this ideology brooks no rivals to its monopoly of knowledge; it dogmatically excommunicates all competing truth claims. Nulla salus extra scientiam, it thunders. Outside science, there is no salvation.

      Let us call this Lenin’s Wax Dummy Effect. During the Cold War, critics in the West remarked that the Soviet Union and its doctrine of Marxism-Leninism resembled nothing so much as a new religion, complete with scripture (the writings of Marx and Engels), charismatic prophets (Lenin and Stalin) with the aura of demigods, a Church Militant (the Party), a mother church (the Kremlin), and a clerical caste (the Politburo and Soviet apologists in the West). The religion also had, tellingly, a funerary temple to the mummified corpse of the Founder lying in eternal state just outside the Kremlin’s walls, where tourists and Soviet citizens alike would wait in the cold of a Russian winter to shuffle past the bier and gaze upon the embalmed body of the Leader, Teacher, Beacon, Helmsman, the Immortal Guide, V.I. Lenin (whose relics were gathered at the Lenin Institute and Lenin Museum immediately upon his death).

      Having officially outlawed religion in the name of state atheism—or, rather, mandated the replacement of the Deity with the State—the Soviets nevertheless needed to create a faux Christianity, a grotesque and parodic wax dummy, in order to make a successful transition from the Church (the opiate of the masses) to dialectical materialism. In the Hegelian dialectic of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, the thesis was the Church, the antithesis was Lenin’s wax dummy, and the synthesis was to be the triumphant materialism of Marx. But if they truly believed in the principles of Marxism-Leninism (a modification of German Communism with Russian overtones), why did they need the wax dummy, the faux religion?

      Deception. Full fraught with mischievous revenge, the ghost of Karl Marx, via his vicar on earth, Lenin, demanded that his deeply anti-human prescriptions for human happiness be obscured with the trappings of old Mother Russia’s traditional culture. But this had things exactly backward: an attempt to create Marxism’s foundational myth both ex nihilo and as a false-flag operation. That Soviet Communism collapsed in a smoldering heap less than seventy years after its founding should have come as no surprise to anyone—it had not a leg to stand on—but the fact that its demise surprised so many in the West tells us a lot about the weakened state of Western culture as well.

      True, “deception” is a loaded word. It has a whiff of conspiracies, of lurkers behind the arras, of plots hatched in the dead of night in clandestine safe houses, of dead drops in pumpkin patches. The act of deception has two goals. The first is to confuse and mislead the enemy, while the second is to secretly communicate with one’s own side, safely passing along information so as not to raise suspicion and bring unwelcome attention and consequences.

      Deception, however, can work for good and ill. Many of our cultural narratives feature a hero in disguise: the undercover cop, bravely penetrating a criminal organization; the spy behind enemy lines; the code-writers and encryption experts, signaling to on-the-ground agents and triggering acts of sabotage. In Puccini’s Turandot, the hero Calàf arrives in Peking as the Unknown Prince in order to tackle the life-or-death riddles posed by the ice-maiden Princess Turandot and thus win her hand. Turandot’s recondite puzzles collide with Calaf’s hidden identity: In the often-unremarked twist at the heart of the opera, Calàf must turn his own heart to ice and reject the love of his faithful slave girl, Liù, in order to warm the heart of Turandot and win both her love and her kingdom—the hero as a cold bastard.

      For heroes can be morally compromised. Think of John le Carré’s world-weary spies, evolving into the very monsters they fight. Think of the nonviolent worm finally turning at the conclusion of Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs, when the nerdy mathematician (Dustin Hoffman) at last goes on a homicidal rampage. Recall Shane, who reluctantly resumes his past role as a gunslinger to save the family he loves, only to ride off at the end into the gathering darkness, knowing he has broken his compact with himself. Not even the pitiful cries of the boy who has adopted him as a surrogate father—“Come back, Shane!”—can make him change his mind.

      All these heroes embody what we might call the satanic in men, the flirtation with the dark side, by which so many of us are tempted. In itself, there is nothing wrong with this. The Fall freed man from the shackles of a deathless Paradise and allowed him to assist in his own salvation by facing up to evil, not by avoiding it. Eve unknowingly, innocently, confronted evil for the first time in human history—an evil that God has allowed to exist—and accepted its implicit invitation to begin the struggle anew, this time on the turf of human souls.

      But perhaps the first real hero of the creation ur-Narrative is not Eve but the angel Abdiel, who faces down the rebellious Lucifer in Book Five of Paradise Lost and warns his angelic cohort of the doom that is fast approaching:

       Unshaken, unseduced, unterrified

       His Loyalty he kept, his Love, his Zeal . . .

       And with retorted scorn his back he turn’d

       On those proud Towers to swift destruction doom’d.

      The “dreadless angel,” as Milton calls Abdiel, is one of the most fascinating minor characters in the poem, and were it a television series, he would no doubt eventually have had his own spin-off. For it is Abdiel, a seraph in Lucifer’s legion in Heaven, who first ponders Lucifer’s revolution—brought on by God’s announcement that he had begotten a Son—and then rejects it, returning to the divine fold, even though his former comrades reward his faithfulness with scorn and threats. He stands in for all thinking members of humanity, who must face, or flirt with, evil in order to know it, who must hear its siren song in order to resist it, and who must at least briefly contemplate or perhaps even embrace it before rejecting and destroying it. “Unshaken, unseduced, unterrified”—what better description of a true hero can there be?

      As readers have often remarked, Milton’s God—“Heaven’s awful Monarch”—is a morally complex character, more akin to the stern God of the Israelites in the Old Testament than to the loving God in the New; “Messiah,” his Son, is the Hero-to-Come. Love does not seem to be one of the prime attributes of Milton’s God. Indeed, one way to interpret his actions during the Fall of Man—given his omnipotence and omnipresence—is that he foresaw and willed the fate of Adam and Eve, created (or allowed) the test he at least knew they could fail, and issued the demand for obedience with the absolute knowledge that they would fail through his poisoned gift of free will.

      “The