Pact With the Devil
By John Thomas Didymus

There was a tradition, in the prescientific Christian world, of viewing individuals who appear obsessively absorbed in private research into new fields of knowledge, as men with secret pact with the Devil. Indeed, all traditional cultures look with eyes of disapproval at men who seek to uncover, what in folk wisdom, are the "secret things" of the gods: precisely, the ingenuous devices by which the gods constituted nature, and secure their immortality.

The ancient Greeks considered it hubris (overweening pride) for a man to think that he could foray successfully into the fields of knowledge deliberately hidden from human beings by the gods. In the medieval Christian tradition, the researcher could get around God to the hidden secrets and arcane knowledge reserved to himself by God, only by a pact with the Devil who, according to Christian mythology, was the first to indulge in the hubris of seeking equality with God by special knowledge-quest: the quest for the secrete of divine power and immortality.

This idea is echoed in the biblical story of Genesis. God has certain categories of knowledge hidden from men symbolized in the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. The Devil slinks past God to tempt Eve into desiring a peep into God's classified information files. She shares her knowledge with her husband and both acquire a new awareness they had lacked. God is displeased with them and says, "See, the man and his wife have become as the gods: for now they have knowledge of good and evil. Let us send them out of the garden before they reach out for and eat of the Tree of Life, and become also immortal like us."

The Primal Crime, or Original Sin, is also often expressed in the metaphor of incest. In many languages, sex is often expressed in the metaphor of gaining knowledge. Thus, in the Bible, we encounter the expression "Adam knew his wife," in reference to sexual intercourse, and even in modern English, we speak of a man as acquiring "carnal knowledge" of a woman, as if a woman were a body of hidden secret knowledge to be researched out. In Greek mythology, for instance, Ixion rebels against Zeus by desiring to mate with The Mother. Zeus punishes Ixion by sentencing him to be bound with snakes to a winged, fiery four-spoked wheel which turns ceaselessly. Similarly, Tantalus is punished on account of his seeking equality with the gods. And so is Sisyphus, who seeks after immortality by acquisition of a special knowledge available only to the gods. An eternal task is assigned to him; the task of rolling a great boulder up an incline, but the great boulder falls back as soon as Sisyphus is some way up the incline.

The notion of a researcher as seeking some secret knowledge for power and immortality finds its typical form in the Legend of Faust, who sells his soul to the Devil in return for power and control. The obsession with quest for knowledge as means to power and control over nature, as pursued in modern day scientific research, for instance, thus assumes a diabolical dimension in popular imagination. In the religious world view of traditional cultures, knowledge is by revelation of the gods and not forcefully extracted by self-directed research. The tendency of ordinary folk to be wary of the persistent researcher is evidence of a cross-cultural human anxiety to avoid provoking the anger of the spiritual powers by untempered intellectual curiosity. The attitude of mind prescribed by religion is that of humility which aspires not to special knowledge, for this is seen as insolent prying into the privacy of gods.

The wariness and suspicion in which ordinary folk hold researchers is further accentuated by the tendency of such men to various exotic patterns of eccentricity in their characters. It would seem that ordinary folk find it difficult to appreciate the psychological compulsion which drives curious intellectual minds to ceaseless toil, burning the midnight oil, in a hero quest for some new knowledge. This explains the fact of hostility evinced by the Church to early scientific researchers like Copernicus, Brahe and Galileo. A church preacher had provoked the conflict between the Church and Galileo when he declared that all mathematicians were "agents of the devil" who should be banished from Christendom.

Sir Isaac Newton is one of history's most notable researchers into the "secret things of the gods." His servants held him in dark suspicion over his nocturnal habits. He would usually work very late into the night, sometimes till dawn, for weeks at end. He absent-mindedness and often usually abstracted state of mind made him a very odd person to be with. Some of his servants were uneasy about his motives and imagined that he had made a pact with the Devil for special knowledge.

Similarly, John Napier, the Scotsman, who discovered the mathematical method of logarithms, was thought by local folk to be a warlock with in compact with the Devil. He was, admittedly, an eccentric man who lived by himself in an old house near a mill. His neighbors did not fail to notice his nocturnal study habits. This, along with his odd dressing habits and manners contributed to the impression that he was a warlock. He would often complain, very vehemently, to his neighbors that their domestic noise disturbed his concentration at work that they soon began wondering, with suspicion, at what he was up to in the privacy of his home.

In general, all exceptional human achievement, in the intellectual realm, was apt to be attributed to a pact with the Devil in prescientific European culture. Not until scientific research, discovery and application, in technology, come to its own, after the triumph of the renaissance, did the notion of the researcher as being in a special contract of exchange of favors with the Devil begin to seem folk superstition.

The writer JohnThomas Didymus is the writer of "Confessions of God: The Gospel According to St. JohnThomas Didymus." He manages a blog at http://www.johnthomasdidymus.blogspot.com/ and a website at http://www.resurrectionconspiracy.com/

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