The Rolling Stones and Philosophy_ It's Just a Thought Away - Luke Dick [117]
I had given Mick a copy of Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita to read—out of which came “Sympathy for the Devil.” The book does deal with magic and the central character is Satan, but it has nothing to do with demonism and black magic. It’s about light, if anything. (Faithfull, Penguin, 1995, p. 267)
The novel begins with two writers, Bezdomny and Berlioz, arguing about the existence of Jesus Christ . The two atheists are then disturbed by an eavesdropping “foreign” gentleman:
Please, excuse me … for presuming to speak to you without an introduction, but the subject of your learned discussion is so interesting that … . (The Master and Margarita, Picador, 1997, p. 6)
Satan, here disguised as Professor Woland, introduces himself and the novel gears up into a savage critique of the vanity and secularism of Russian society—something that must have chimed with Mick and Keith’s (then) anti-establishment ethos. Russia’s bourgeois, particularly the literary and cultural elite, come in for particular scorn. Woland attacks the two atheists by immediately invoking Augustine’s ideas about predestination in arguing that if man truly rules himself, he must have a plan—yet no man is capable of that:
… how can man be directing things, if he not only lacks the capacity to draw up any sort of plan even for a laughably short period of time—well, let’s say, for a thousand years or so—but cannot even vouch for his own tomorrow? (p. 9)
The Moscow of the 1930s is pictured as being so Godless that it takes the Devil himself to restore belief in God; we are all, including the Devil, part of God’s divine plan.
And I Was ’Round when Jesus Christ Had His Moment of Doubt and Pain
The Master and Margarita also has a ‘novel within a novel’, a device whereby a novelist, known only as ‘The Master’ writes an updating of the New Testament in which the mysterious Yeshua Ha-Nozri (Christ) battles with Pontius Pilate, while Christ’s own spin-doctor, Matthew the Levite, embellishes his “miracles.” The Master is eventually locked in a lunatic asylum after turning in his manuscript, in much the same way that a reluctant Pilate handed over Yeshua Ha-Nozri to be crucified. All the while Satan looks on. The reader gradually realizes that The Master’s novel is no fiction, but is meant to be an accurate account of historical events, similar to Augustine’s re-reading of the Book of Genesis and the events in the Garden of Eden.
Back in Moscow, a more sympathetic Woland turns The Master’s mourning lover, Margarita, into a witch. The most climatic scene of the novel comes as Margarita leads hundreds of ‘dead’ people—characters stretching right back throughout human history—out of Hell into a huge masked ball that she hosts for Woland in central Moscow. The decapitated head of the character Berlioz reappears to suggest that death is not in any sense a final ending. Margarita’s selflessness is rewarded and she is allowed to live in a kind of limbo with The Master, a limbo that they both assume to be death. This time, it is God himself who intervenes and orders Woland to grant The Master and Margarita peace. Even Pilate is forgiven, as he sits waiting to be reunited with Christ; he even wishes now that he had taken Christ’s place at the crucifixion.
Bulgakov, like Augustine before him, suggests that there is evil in the world, but that there is good in all of us, which can be united with the Divine if we turn away from the material world. Pilate, the Master, and Margarita all end up rejecting the material world and are joined with the Divine at the end of the novel.
Like Augustine’s Confessions, the novel begins by posing the question of God’s existence and ends by answering it firmly in the affirmative. Bulgakov’s Satan also operates within the divine constraints of Augustinian free will. He is more like an employee of a large