Harry Mulisch - The Discovery of Heaven

— Go on. Was Satan-El behind that, too?

— We assume so now. He was going with a Phoenician whore, whom he maintained was an incarnation of Helen of Troy.

— How can you claim such a thing?

— On earth you can claim all sorts of things, and there are always people who will believe you. But be careful, don't underestimate him. He said that the Feminine Principle was the first Idea in Thought — that is, in the Chiefs thought; that is, his own. That Principle next created us, whereupon we in our turn created the world. But according to him we do not want to be regarded as creatures, only as creators, and so we dragged our creator from Light to the Darkness of our creation and forced it into the physical shape of a centuries-old series of women, including Helen, and finally into a whore in the brothel in Tyre from where the Father, having descended to earth and become flesh, finally rescued the imprisoned Mother.

— What a story! Of course that bit about the abduction and all those women is a scandalous lie — but how did that magician find out the truth about creation? Did Lucifer tell him about all that?

— Can you think of another explanation?

— And what did he have up his sleeve in doing that?

— It was a red herring to disguise his real intention. Without anyone realizing it Simon Magus returned toward the end of the sixteenth century in the legend of Faust, the restless seeker after knowledge, who entered into a pact with the devil. The first literary adaptation was Christopher Marlowe's, The Tragicall History of Doctor Faustus , which was performed in London in about 1590. That was the beginning of a continuous succession of adaptations of the theme, down to the present earthly day, the high point of which was, naturally, Goethe's version, in which Helen again appears. In one of the most recent versions, Doktor Faustus by Thomas Mann, a syphilitic whore again crops up as the companion of the hero, and that was, significantly enough, inspired by a fatal whore in the life of Nietzsche, whom we were talking about just now. She was the cause of his fatal madness.

— I know all about that. At the time I even dispatched that creature to get him. People shouldn't pronounce the Chief dead. But where was Lucifer's red herring? What was he trying to distract attention from?

— The intention was to impress upon mankind that a pact with the devil was a literary matter: the noncommittal story of an imaginary individual thirsting after knowledge, who sells his soul. That was how it was possible for a dreadful, far from literary but very real event to go unnoticed until today — namely, that in that same last decade of the sixteenth century, also in London, Lucifer entered into a pact with mankind, a collective contract in which the whole of mankind sold its soul to him.

— Good God! How should I imagine that? Did someone sign that contract on behalf of mankind?

— Yes.

— Who was that?

— Francis Bacon.

— Francis Bacon?

— Francis Bacon. He has always been regarded as a man who prophetically foresaw the modern scientific and technological world. In a number of epoch-making works he sketched the outlines of a world in which science and technology would no longer be in the hands of a few individual amateurs, as was the case in his own days around 1600, but would have changed into an internationally organized, collective endeavor, subsidized by governments, with conferences and systematic publications. Only in that way could a full mastery of nature be obtained; and the scientific method would have to be that of induction, in which one progressed from the particular to the general, from empirical phenomena to natural laws, although you and I of course know that the only true method is the reverse one, that of deduction. At the end of his life he wrote Nova Atlantis , "The New Atlantis," which remained as a fragment and was published after his death. In it he sketches a central institute of a Utopian island called Bensalem, which he dubs "Solomon's House," but it is not something like the blessed temple of Solomon in Jerusalem, which is so dear to our hearts, not even something like a Christian church, but more like a modern research center, in which new biological species are manufactured.

— From a human point of view, that all seems obvious.

— So obvious that in the twentieth century he is scarcely mentioned on earth any longer. That's the danger of being absolutely right: virtually no one realizes that things were ever any different. Just imagine, in his day even scientific experiments were virtually unknown. That is why it has always astonished us that this rational founder of modern science and technology of all people should be surrounded by mystery. He is supposed to be the founder of freemasonry, he has been called a clandestine Rosicrucian and an initiate in numerous other secret societies. There has long been a Baconian sect, which with a lot of numerological hocus-pocus tries to prove that he wrote the plays and sonnets of Shakespeare. All nonsense, of course, but why is it that all this has become attached precisely to that cool, realistic combater of delusions? Not only has he been called the true author of Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy , but all kinds of acrostics have been dragged in to prove that the work of Edmund Spenser were actually by him — and of course, inevitably, that of Marlowe too. Bacon as the author of the first Faust play! It is claimed that at his funeral an empty coffin was consigned to the earth, because he is claimed to have lived for a further twenty-one years in Germany under another name.

— In Württemberg, of course!

— In the capital no less, Stuttgart. The so-called discovery finally woke us up, and we can now reconstruct the course of events. Baconians sometimes claim that he was the illegitimate son of Queen Elizabeth and the earl of Leicester, but in reality he was born in 1561 as the son of Elizabeth's Keeper of the Great Seal. Because he was the youngest son, he was left penniless on his father's death; as a twenty-three-year-old lawyer he obtained a seat in Parliament. He was determined to become as rich and powerful as his father, but his career did not progress well. His bosom friend the earl of Essex, the queen's lover, did what he could for him, but Elizabeth did not trust Bacon. When all his attempts to secure his friend a high office had failed, the loyal Essex gave him one of his own estates as a consolation. That was in 1595. However, four years later Essex himself fell out of favor, a charge of high treason was prepared against him, and now Elizabeth suddenly intervened. She asked Bacon if he would be so kind as to draw up the indictment. And now the hour of the devil had struck — because, what do you think? He did it, although he knew that it would lead to the execution of his benefactor. The serpent promised him that he would rise even higher than his father, but for that he must first put his signature to the indictment and then publish a number of books, which would be dictated to him.

— Why did Lucifer choose Bacon, of all people? Had he already written anything?

— In 1597 he had published a collection of intelligent Essayes, which are still read, but are not anything that would have attracted the attention even of the devil. But much earlier, at the age of twenty-one, in 1583, he had published a pamphlet entitled Temporis Partus Maximus , "The Great Birth of Time." The fact that not a single copy of it has survived aroused our suspicions; and we now assume that it struck a tone that had made the devil prick up his ears. For some reason he later suppressed all copies of it. Be that as it may, after the prophet of the new age had signed the diabolical pact with mankind by putting his signature to the effective death sentence against his best friend, the stagnation of his career was suddenly over. In 1600 Essex was beheaded in the Tower, in 1607 Bacon became Attorney General, in 1613 Procurator General, and in 1617 he equaled his father's achievement by being appointed Keeper of the Great Seal. Two years later he confirmed his subservience to the devil by having an innocent prisoner tortured, because King James required a confession and a sentence; shortly afterward he became Lord Chancellor, the highest position in the land, thus surpassing his father. He was raised to the nobility as Lord Verulam, and later further elevated to become Viscount Saint Albans. Meanwhile he wrote the books that the devil dictated to him, and which were not prophetic but clever self-fulfilling prophecies intended to destroy mankind.