God and the Devil
God and the Devil name the two poles of the theological vision that runs through Mailer’s work — a cosmos in which God is not omnipotent but embattled, “a god in danger,” locked in a real and uncertain war with the Devil for the future of humankind, with human beings as the contested instruments. It is a Manichaean, existential theology rather than an orthodox one: God can lose, evolution is God’s experiment, and technology may be the Devil’s contract.
The vision surfaces as early as “The Metaphysics of the Belly” and the 1958–59 interviews (59.2), and Mailer named it the “metaphysical and moral center” of his work. His fullest 1970s statement comes in the second part of the 1975 Rolling Stone interview — pointedly titled “Sympathy for the Devil” (75.2), his longest discussion of God and the Devil since 59.2 — and in Laura Adams‘s “Existential Aesthetics” (75.11): “if there is a war continuing between God and the Devil, for the future of humankind, then this war is much more complex than a simple confrontation.” The theme threads forward through Ancient Evenings (1983), The Gospel According to the Son (1997), The Castle in the Forest (2007), and the book-length conversation On God (2007).
Related pages
- “Sympathy for the Devil” (75.2) | “Existential Aesthetics” (75.11)
- 1975
- Letters to Mike Lennon (30 January 1972, 7 October 1974) (82.15) | God and Man and Norman Mailer (83.45) | Cosmic Ventures: A Meditation of God at War (89.11)
- Hip, Hell, and the Navigator (59.2)