Errata and Marginalia 028: Defoe

 Daniel Defoe, The Political History of the Devil (Mineola, New York: Dover, 2016; originally published in 1726). 

Well! That was one of the stranger books I've ever read. I have no obvious way to account for it other than to remind us that Defoe—like many of the greatest authors in history—wrote for money. This book is padded and uneven, and meanders and loses its thread, perhaps most of all because Defoe was under a deadline and needed to keep the pot boiling. 

But what sort of book is this? In Defoe's outstanding introductory chapter, he promises us a sort of biography of Satan. He tells us that he will track the progress of the Devil's actions throughout human history—from ancient times to the present. And he does it all with a witty polemical tongue that keeps us doubting exactly how literally and in what spirit he intends us to take all this. 

And yet, the rest of the book never quite lives up to this promise. Part I of the book is largely a satirical critique of Milton (which I enjoyed), followed by a surprisingly orthodox—rather dully so—retelling of the Biblical narrative. 

Part II is where we really expect Defoe to ramp up. In the introduction, he entertainingly blasted the crusades and the wars of religion and the Spanish atrocities in the Americas as products of the Devil. We think he will devote the second half of the book to going over these episodes of history in greater detail. But no—the "modern history of the Devil" we were promised does not really materialize. 

Instead, Defoe debates in a rather repetitive and tiresome way a number of issues relating to the supernatural. Sprinkled throughout the text are also such odds-and-ends as jokes, personal anecdotes, ghost stories, fables, and humorous dialogues—many of which are quite entertaining in their own right, but are hardly the content Defoe's opening led us to expect. 

And throughout all of this, Defoe's theology remains basically orthodox. This surprised me—because André Gide, in a reference to this book in an essay on James Hogg's Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (a book that shares certain themes in common with the present volume), suggested that Defoe had "too much of the the Devil in him to be taken in" by his own tall tales. 

Is this true? Was Gide right? Is the author's pose as orthodox believer just an act? Was it a role he was adopting to write a popular work and pay the bills? Could we say of Defoe too—as Blake wrote of Milton—that he was "of the Devil's party without knowing it"?

There are a few hints—especially in the early part of the book—that Defoe's tongue in all this devil-talk is indeed somewhere near his cheek. His critique of contemporary atheists and deists boils down to essentially a version of Pascal's wager. "If it should fall out, as who can tell,/ But there may be a God, a heaven, and hell/ Mankind had best consider well, for fear [...]" he writes, in a specimen of comic verse. 

And like all uses of Pascal's wager, it is an argument that confesses its own skepticism in the very act of disclaiming it. It is a nonbeliever's argument for God—and as such, it stands a bit incongruously with the role Defoe adopts in the remainder of the book—where he tends otherwise to present himself as a wholly convinced, even bigoted, votary of the Church of England. 

Perhaps the passage in which Defoe allows this mask to slip most, however—and to reveal most clearly the winking skeptic's face behind—is when he comes to the great theological riddle of the origin of evil. How is it, Defoe asks, that Satan could rebel against God through pride, if God had not first created pride, and thus sin? Whence came Satan's illicit desires—or Adam and Eve's for that matter—if not from God? 

As Stephen Crane once posed the same riddle in a sardonic poem—how is it that God could hold Adam and Eve responsible for eating the forbidden fruit, when he had presumably implanted in them the very desire that led them into temptation? 

Oh, most interesting God
What folly is this?
Behold, thou hast moulded my desires
Even as thou hast moulded the apple.

Defoe knows there is no answer to this riddle, within the bounds of orthodox theology. And so, he confesses as much, and here is where the Devil in him that Gide spotted shows itself most plainly. "How came seeds of crime to rise in the angelic nature? created in a state of perfect, unspotted holiness?" he asks. 

And he answers, or rather declines to answer: "Happy it is to me, that, writing the history, not solving the difficulties of Satan's affairs, is my province in this work; [...] if it was otherwise I should break off at this difficulty, for I acknowledge I do not see through it; neither do I think that the great Milton, after all his fine images and lofty excursions upon the subject, has left it one jot clearer than he found it."

In other words, to quote Gottfried Benn in a different context, "I don't know it to this day, and now I must go myself." (Hofmann trans.)

Defoe leaves the orthodox believer in a paradox of their own making, that is to say; and there we shall have to leave him as well. I am no more able to divine a way out of it than Defoe was. And it is none of my business to do so.

Since this most interesting question, and this most strange book—and all its surprises and impenetrable layers of pose and irony and artifice—deserve to be debated endlessly, I offer my editorial corrections of the typos I spotted in the 2016 Dover edition, for the benefit of future editions. 

I fear Dover's editors may have used software to transcribe the text from an earlier hard copy—which is all well and good, but it seems to have led to some systematic errors. Something about the typography of the hard copy tended to dupe the software in consistent ways. As a result, "he" is often rendered as "be" or "lie." Here are the examples I found, as well as the other typos: 

p. 30 "when lie was cast" sic; should be "he"

p. 42 "as if be alone" sic; should be "he"

p. 47 "and be [sic], who was once equal to the angel"

p. 50 "no of fence" sic; should be "offense"

p. 60 "before his fail" sic; in context, should be "fall"

p. 78 "how easily could lie" sic; should be "he"

p. 90 "he does hot [sic] accept your offerings"

p. 111 "tbe [sic] adulterer" 

p. 114 "Ninrod" sic

p. 115 "whole worrd" sic

p. 133 "be [sic] so effectually debauched them"

p. 171 "common foibles lies" sic; subject/verb agreement

p. 199 "aswe" instead of "as we"

p. 205 "remarkable thinks" sic; should be "things"

p. 213 "for the bail" sic; should be "ball" in context

p. 222 "end imaginary" sic; should be "and" in context

p. 263 "be [sic] was concerned in them"

p. 265 "nankind" sic

p. 269 "they arc" sic; should be "are" in context