ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to relate God, Devil, and Comedy. Rationalist, traditionalist theodicies endeavor to justify God before the fact of evil, to reconcile God and faith in the very face of evil, to attest to the justice of God despite evil. The chapter shows how the relative convincingness of particular theodicies turns upon the degree to which they take the Devil into account, or at least a serviceably equivalent reality, as source and agent of radical evil. God reaches out to inchoate being and renders it into something good. God may be dealt with in both God's fundamental roles—the font and origin of all good and, indeed, the very essence of good. To sneak in one metaphysical presupposition, the Devil joins God in being essentially hidden. To treat the Devil and God as polar opposites, without perforce claiming final metaphysical identifications of them, is of course not new.
