Chapter 7 continued

THE HISTORIA OF FAUSTUS

VII. (continued)
Concerning Doctor Faustus' Inquiries into the Intentions of Hell

Thus while he lived day for day with no purpose and no meaning like an Epicure, who justifies his sinfulness with long sentences, or like a sow, that justifies nothing to no one and is therefore more admirable than a Philosopher guilty of both sin and wordiness, Doctor Faustus began to question whether this was what the Evil Spirits of Hell had planned for him, and he asked Mephostophiles, "When I sold my soul to Hell, I must say I expected to be used for more evil than mere slothfulness – is it so that Hell hath no imagination for Evil?"

And thus answered the spirit disguised as a gray friar: "It is not our duty to invent sin, only to lure human beings to commit it. In fact, we in Hell are so busy tempting mankind to sin that we don’t have time to invent new sins or to plot new forms of evil."

"But would it not be in your interests to plot evil?"

"Certainly," replied the Spirit, "And in fact we do have a division which we call the Evil-Magineers which is assigned only to plot evil and invent new sins, but it is not considered a very successful division for it is reft by politics and in-fighting with every devil in it competing for the ear of Satan, who is so inundated by the demands of temptation and soul-getting that he has little time for innovation and experiment. Why the very PlayStation which I brought to entertain your friend Wagner is a product of the Evil-Magineers, which, they say, is bound to eventually destroy the world by luring every man away from his fruitful work onto the couch to waste away his days and thus to destroy civilization by neglect, but immediately as this device was proposed a hundred other evil spirits arose to criticize it with such objections as, 'But in order to produce such a machine mankind must first be extremely innovative, hard-working and highly imaginative; if mankind were addicted to such a thing it would at least have to get off the couch enough to invent new games for the machine, which in turn would prerequire great amounts of learning, ability, imagination, investment, counseling, cooperation and a myriad of efficiently working industries, all of which would continually have to improve and progress, which would imply that in its drive to destroy itself, civilization would in fact be continually recreating itself; in other words, if we attempt to destroy civilization in this way, we must give civilization the means to progress well beyond what it is now, even to a point where we are no longer in a position to destroy it – better not to let civilization proceed so far than to risk that the lure of the PlayStation might not then be enough to destroy it completely.' So the introduction of the PlayStation into human life has been stopped."

"It would appear that you devils in Hell have a problem," said Doktor Faustus. "Without innovation, cooperation and a risk-taking mentality there can be no future for Hell."

"You don’t know the half of it," replied Mephostophiles.