ABSTRACT
The specter of radical evil continues to stand erect and powerful, to go out stalking, as the Spoiler not alone of human life and of the world as such but as the very frustration of God. To deny the Devil is to deny God. The comic vision does not seek to justify God before the fact of evil—or at least some of its deputies have grown terribly tired and even discouraged with the spate of efforts to do that. By contrast, the comic vision is not unwilling to speak of God as sonofabitch—in these latter days, daughterofabitch. This chapter examines a few primordial grounds out of which a comic vision might spring, but only within the frame of reference of a Devil/God dichotomy. Heiko A. Oberman points out, when the vision of a world pervaded by the Devil ends in repudiation of one or another group identity, the results can only be an appalling betrayal of individual dignity.
