Some interesting thoughts on mind in Derek Murphy’s Evil be my Good: An Unauthorized Paradise Lost Study Guide:
The mind which is immortal makes itself / Requital for its good or evil thoughts — / Is its own origin of ill and end — / And its own place and time — its innate sense…
Byron, Manfred
Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell / Receive thy new Possessor: One who brings / A mind not to be chang’d by Place or Time. / The mind is its own place, and in it self / Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.
John Milton, Milton - Paradise Lost
It is a baffled attempt, a falsity, a mental phantom, and no solution at all. Instead of answering the question, it simply removes the question one step further off, and wins a fraction peace for the mind, not by overcoming, but by eluding the genuine problem. By the supposition of a Devil, it is plain that we evade, instead of explaining, the origin of evil, for then the Devil is the evil, and we ask how his existence is to be accounted for.
William R. Alger, The Theory of a Personal Devil
RE: theodicy
Page 234:
God, conquered, will become Satan: Satan, conquering, will become God. May the fates spare me this terrible lot: I love the Hell which formed my genius.
If there is no universal Good or Evil, then war will be continuous, the subjected always trying to overthrow the more powerful forces, then secure power for themselves, in meaningless carnage. Instead, Anatole’s Satan ends by reminding us that whether or not people believe in the divine tyrant (laldabaoth) doesn’t really matter, what matters is that they free themselves from negative influence of the “god of old.”
Now, thanks to us, the god of old is dispossessed of his terrestrial empire, and every thinking being on this globe disdains him or knows him not. But what matter that men should be no longer sub-missive to laldabaoth if the spirit of laldabaoth is still in them; if they, like him, are jealous, violent, quarrelsome, and greedy, and the foes of the arts and of beauty?
As for the demons, Satan claims they have destroyed the Tyrant “if in ourselves we have destroyed Ignorance and Fear.” He also claims to have failed his first revolution (the one featured in Paradise Lost), because he had failed to understand that “Victory is a Spirit, and that it is in ourselves and in ourselves alone that we must attack and destroy laldabaoth” (348).
As they have been looking for the past 7 years: as being non-existent. That is, that there is nothing. That there is no God and no universe; that there is only empty space, and in it a lost and homeless and wandering and companionless and indestructible Thought. And I am that thought. And God, and The Universe, and Time, and Life, and Death, and Joy and Sorrow and Pain only a grotesque and brutal dream, evolved from the frantic imagination of that insane Thought.
A letter by Mark Twain.
You perceive that they are pure and puerile insanities, the silly creations of an imagination that is not conscious of its freaks-a word, that they are a dream, and you the maker of it. It is that which I have revealed to you, there is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream-a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought-a vagrant thought, a useless thought. a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!
Mark Twain, The Mysterious Stranger
(An interesting contrast with the affirmations from his letter—see above.)