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III

THE DEVIL AS A FATHER-SUBSTITUTE

I fear that sober critics will not be prepared to admit that this fresh interpretation has made the meaning of this pact with the Devil clear. They will have two objections to make to it.

In the first place they will say that it is not necessary to regard the bond as a contract in which the undertakings of both parties have been set out. On the contrary, they will argue, it contains only the painter’s undertaking; the Devil’s is omitted from the text, and is, as it were, sousentendu: the painter gives two undertakings - firstly to be the Devil’s son for nine years, and secondly to belong to him entirely after death. In this way one of the premisses on which our conclusion is built would be disposed of.

The second objection will be that we are not justified in attaching any special importance to the expression ‘the Devil’s bounden son’; that this is no more than a common figure of speech, which anyone could interpret in the same way as the reverend Fathers may have done. For in their Latin translation they did not mention the relationship of son promised in the bonds, but merely say that the painter ‘mancipavit’ himself - made himself a bondslave - to the Evil One and had undertaken to lead a sinful life and to deny God and the Holy Trinity. Why depart from this obvious and natural view of the matter?¹ The position would simply be that a man, in the torment and perplexity of a melancholic depression, signs a bond with the Devil, to whom he ascribes the greatest therapeutic power. That the depression was occasioned by his father’s death would then be irrelevant; the occasion might quite as well have been something else.

¹ In point of fact, when we come to consider later at what time and for whom these bonds were drawn up, we shall realize that their text had to be expressed in unobtrusive and generally comprehensible terms. It is enough for us, however, that it contains an ambiguity which we can take as the starting-point of our discussion.