Mailer's "Gnostic" gospel

Mailer’s favorite religious idea, one that he usually incorporated into his literary characters’ speech and into his own, is that “there is a God and a Devil at war with one another, neither of whom is invincible” (Time 1223). Mailer found this Manichean doctrine attractive for at least three reasons. Given the “philosophical vertigo” (1224) induced by the concept of a benevolent deity, “capable of doing everything and anything at any given moment” (Conversations 29), but continuously allowing war, genocide, torture, rape, disease, poverty, and starvation to occur, Manicheanism dissolves theodicy’s cognitive dissonance. Based on the premise that God cannot be omnipotent, Manicheanism “diminishes the absurdity,” in Camus’ words, “of an intimate relationship between suffering humanity and an implacable god’” (qtd. in Smith 545). Another reason that Mailer was drawn to this Manichean doctrine is that it restores substance to evil; that is, evil is not the perversion or absence of the good but an active force embodied by the world’s Archon and his minions. Third, Manicheanism, inherently existentialist, grants free will to human beings, whom Mailer regarded as microagents of benevolence or malevolence, existing on “some mediating level” (Time 1224) between “a Creator” and “an opposite Presence (to be called Satan, for short)” (qtd. in Levenda 1). --From publisher description.