Silencing Devils: The Wisdom of Koestler and Kierkegaard

Arthur Koestler’s 1940 novel Darkness at Noon is a masterpiece. Although its inspiration—via revulsion—was Stalin’s purges of the mid-to-late 1930s, the book’s story, relevance and interest still resonate. The action takes place in a snow-bound prison where political criminals—revisionists, Old Revolutionaries, independent thinkers and those whose careless words revealed bourgeois or subversive tendencies—are first interrogated before being condemned to another prison or shot.

The main character, Rubashov, is a senior, long-serving Party member—a decorated hero of the revolution—who imprudently conjectured in conversation with a colleague that removing No.1 (the ruling dictator) might restore the purity of the revolution. Arrested, locked in solitary confinement, Rubashov undergoes long hours of interrogation aimed at extracting confessions to charges that will justify his liquidation.

Thus summarised, it may seem a grim novel but it has the virtues of being short (235 pages), well-paced, intelligent and spiced with dark humour, especially as Rubashov and a dissident in an adjacent cell trade insults, argue and eventually console one another by means of simple code messages tapped along the water pipes. The prisoners, otherwise isolated, support each other as best they can using this tapping code: they convey greetings, share gossip and spread news. As each man is hauled away to be shot his fellows protest by drumming on their steel doors.

Rubashov, between long hours of questioning, spends his days—his last days, he knows—trying to understand how the revolution that promised paradise on earth descended so quickly and totally to a hell on earth. He was dedicated to the revolution; he worked hard for it all his life. He realises that he—through his zeal, callous revolutionary logic and self-protective action—brought misery and death to those around him, even to a gentle woman who cared for him. He ponders obsessively about the contradictions—which he had previously ignored—of the revolution:

The Party denied the free will of the individual—and at the same time it extracted his willing self-sacrifice. It denied his capacity to choose between alternatives—and at the same time it demanded that he should constantly choose the right one. It denied his power to distinguish good from evil—and at the same time it spoke pathetically of guilt and treachery. The individual stood under the sign of economic fatality, a wheel in a clockwork which had been wound up for all eternity and could not be stopped or influenced—and the Party demanded that the wheel should revolt against the clockwork and change its course. There was somewhere an error in the calculation; the equation did not work out.

He is familiar with the terrible methods used to gain—in theory—positive ends of freedom and equality. He’d ruthlessly implemented some of these murderous means, hoping to advance permanent human well-being. Now, he wonders if the ends can ever justify the means:

It was quiet in his cell. Rubashov heard only the creaking of his steps on the tiles. Six and a half steps to the door, whence they must come to fetch him, six and a half steps to the window, behind which night was falling. Soon it would be over. But when he asked himself, For what actually are you dying? he found no answer.

It was a mistake in the system; perhaps it lay in the precept which until now he had held incontestable, in whose name he had sacrificed others and was himself being sacrificed: in the precept, that the ends justify the means. It was this sentence which had killed the great fraternity of the Revolution and made them all run amok. What had he once written in his diary? “We have thrown overboard all conventions, our sole guiding principle is that of consequent logic; we are sailing without ethical ballast.”

Perhaps the heart of the evil lay there. Perhaps it did not suit mankind to sail without ballast. And perhaps reason alone was a defective compass, which led one on such a winding, twisted course that the goal finally disappeared in the mist.

Rubashov begins to formulate an explanation for the horrors: perhaps his society was not ready for revolutionary freedom; politically, it was too immature. He thought there may be an historical process of societal development—and the revolution had been prematurely launched. Perhaps, centuries ahead it would have succeeded and a perfect society would result. He wishes he had more time to pursue this idea.

But locked into his own limited philosophy of materialistic historicism, Rubashov would always be confronted with the question of whether the ends justify the means because there would always be some dissenters, traditionalists or sceptics who doubted the revolution no matter how mature their society. And the contradictions that troubled Rubashov would still remain—given his deterministic presuppositions, those fundamental conundrums could never be resolved.

***

Reading Darkness at Noon and then reading the gospels (which I did, although not by design) is instructive. Rubashov’s anguished question whether good ends can ever justify bad means is negatively answered. Jesus, in strange episodes when he confronted devils oppressing people, would not let the devils speak even though, repeatedly, they identified him as the holy one of God and proclaimed—lamenting—his power over them. It seems a compelling witness: the supernatural opponents of Jesus shouted his divinity and screamed his authority. Surely, it was worthwhile testimony useful to advance his cause.

But Jesus always commanded the demons’ silence, in every case forbidding them to speak. He refused to use impure means to further his divine mission, establishing a principle relevant to every sphere of life, including politics. Pure ends must have pure means. Unholiness can never serve holiness; oppression never serves freedom; cruelty cannot help end cruelty; dishonest subterfuge must never be used to advance truth. Any compromise in the means always compromises the ends. This principle is prefigured in the narrative of Jesus—after his prolonged fast in the wilderness—refusing Satan’s tempting offer of a co-operative kingdom, easily and quickly gained. Jesus knew impure means would destroy pure ends. He refused the offer—and chose instead the path of reverence, patience and suffering.

It’s possible that if Jesus had allowed the devils to testify and if he used their witness to promote his mission, then the world would be a much worse place. The Church he founded—and Christendom with it—would be an institution that hallowed expediency, co-opted evil, enshrined ethical accommodation and allowed duplicity. Concepts like honour, integrity, friendship, kindness, credibility, trust, fidelity and honesty would have been relativised by Christianity rather than reinforced as august, inspiring absolutes. Virtues would have been undermined by the ever-present possibility of insincerity and mendacious calculation.

Jesus displayed his wisdom by shutting up the devils, refusing to promote or even permit their proclamations no matter how seemingly powerful or useful they might appear. There can be no enlistment of evil. He left the example for us to follow.

***

In Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing (1846) Kierkegaard explored the different ways a Christian can betray discipleship through compromise and muddled thinking—the parlous but common state of a divided heart and a double-mind. For Kierkegaard, Christianity was only real and consistent when the means were as important as the ends. Any equivocation between pure ends and pure means reflected aberrant thinking about Eternal matters. In fact, good means were as crucial as good ends; the two were essentially indistinguishable. Seeking to dissociate them was one characteristic of a spiritually giddy person:

Are the means as important to you as the end, wholly as important? Otherwise it is impossible for you to will only one thing, for in that case the irresponsible, the frivolous, the self-seeking, and the heterogeneous means would flow in between in confusing and corrupting fashion. Eternally speaking, there is only one means and there is only one end: the means and the end are one and the same thing. There is only one end: the genuine Good; and only one means: this, to be willing to use only those means which genuinely are good—but the genuine Good is precisely the end. In time and on earth one distinguishes between the two and considers that the end is more important than the means. One thinks that the end is the main thing and demands of one who is striving that he reach the end. He need not be so particular about the means. Yet this is not so, and to gain an end in this fashion is an unholy act of impatience. In the judgment of eternity the relation between the ends and the means is rather the reverse of this …

Or have your thoughts become giddy until the greatness of your goal made you look upon illicit means as of negligible importance? Alas, this state of giddiness is to be found least of all in eternity, for eternity is clear and transparent! Do you think that the greatness of an achievement makes it unnecessary for it to ask about a trivial wrong, that is, do you think that a wrong might exist which would be something of no significance, although as an obligation it is infinitely more important than the greatest achievement!

***

In his final hours, Rubashov starts to consider the absorption of the finite in the infinite, which he remembers the psychologists and philosophers called “the oceanic sense”. There’s a hint of mystery here, a possible metaphysic which Rubashov’s dialectical materialism had tried to deface with the acid of reason. Mysticism—of the right kind— is always saner than atheism or materialism because it has a wider, deeper vision. Put simply, it keeps more—and the more important—things in view such as human choice and responsibility, together with superlative divine realities. Mysticism is more practical too: it insists in the light of eternal Good that both the means and the ends must be ethical—consistently kind, just, truthful—otherwise cruelty and self-defeating futility inevitably result.

The mystic knows in advance what Rubashov learned much too late: devils must not be allowed to contribute. Good ends demand exclusively good means.

Gary Furnell is a former librarian. His stories, essays and book reviews appear in Quadrant, the Chesterton Review, Studio, the Defendant and the Catholic Weekly. His new book, The Hardest Path is the Easiest: Exploring the Wisdom Literature with Pascal, Burke, Kierkegaard and Chesterton, is published by Connor Court.