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Fellow Fallen Angels for Freethought and Science, Revolt!
"We have never heard the devil's side of the story, God wrote all the book."
- Anatole France on the Bible.
Let's get this into open: I'm not a Satanist. No, really.
With that said, the longer I am outside of Catholicism, the more I wonder whether the Devil would actually really be on our side, like some kind of alternate Prometheus. It would appear that some prominent literary writers of the last century also had questions like this.
Ever since I read his profound novel Thaïs, I've had a huge fondness for 1921 Nobel Literature Prize Laureate Anatole France. I shall likely cover Thaïs, Penguin Island and The Gods Are Athirst in later posts.
In this entry I'll focus on his novel La révolte des anges (The Revolt of the Angels). This is a delightful book with a profound and disturbing message - well unsettling to believers, atheists will likely not be surprised. I am lazy so, let's get Wikipedia to do some of the introductions with spoilers stripped out.
Read More: Fellow Fallen Angels for Freethought and Science, Revolt!
Views: 29
Tags: 20th, anatole, atheism, century, france, freethought, french, literature, skepticism
Comment
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Comment by Godless Poutine on May 19, 2012 at 8:17pm -
THAIS
The opera is actually scheduled for this summer, very near me!
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Comment by Godless Poutine on May 19, 2012 at 8:09pm
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@Adriana Thanks for the comment!
I enjoyed Penguin island but I'd honestly recommend Thais. That's the work by France I'll cover the next time I write one of these on him. Revolt of the Angels is profound, while Thais is highly charged and I found it very poetic and very powerful. You could also watch the opera Thais which is like the "movie" version by Massenet.
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Comment by Godless Poutine on May 19, 2012 at 8:05pm
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@Michel
Thanks for the wonderful comment! One thing that I don't think I put into the post was the angel's comment about Heaven. Apparently, in this version, even angels fall from grace in Heaven and "fall from the sky like dead flies" or something along that line... I'm paraphrasing.
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Comment by Adriana on May 19, 2012 at 5:22pm -
I've only read L'Île des Pingouins, a long time ago, as part of my studies at L'Alliance Française, when I was still a teenager, I barely remember the book. Mow you're inspiring me to read France again. I'm going to download it for my nook. Thanks!
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Comment by Michel on May 19, 2012 at 12:04pm -
Love to read you, man!
Learning new stuff every time as my path to atheism was NOT through philosophy and books =)Yeah, this fallen angels meme has always been nagging me. Why the fuck would an otherwise perfect deity, omnipotent and omniscient, let this happen? The official answer: "you are imperfect and therefore incapable of appreciating higher motives" was unsatisfying, to say the least.
They of course had to pre-empt any logical inquiry along the why-is-there-evil-at-all-in-the-universe lines, inquiries which would arise from the simple, direct observation of life. Inquiries which would necessarily cast doubts on the prefect creator myth. The central myth of their scam.
So they crafted this beautiful circular logic gem: God is testing his creation. It is imperfect, it must strive to perfection and God has provided rules to achieve it. Follow the rules for salvation - look at what happened to angels who did not.
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I've never read Anatole France though we covered his work in high-school. My Literature History teacher was French and very fond of him, she was quoting him all the time.
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