Illustration inspired by Goethe’s Faust
I’ve always preferred my devils civilised.
Not the horned livestock of Sunday-school murals, nor the pantomime villain with a pitchfork and a contract written in sulphur. Those devils are easy to spot, which is why they’re mostly harmless. The devil that troubles me — the one who lingers — is the one who smiles as though we’ve already agreed.
The Mephisto I’m thinking of isn’t painted on canvas but worn like a second skin. A jester’s cap. A scholar’s sneer. Burnt red cloth clinging to a body that seems less corporeal than performative. He’s not evil incarnate so much as evil entertained. He’s come not to destroy the world, but to comment upon it — and to enjoy himself while it does the rest.
This is Goethe’s gift to Europe: the devil as companion.
Mephistopheles doesn’t tempt Faust with orgies or slaughter. He tempts him with clarity. With boredom sharpened into wit. With the suggestion that nothing really matters quite enough to deserve reverence. He doesn’t scream ‘sin’; he yawns at virtue. He doesn’t deny God so much as find Him faintly embarrassing. The most corrosive phrase in all of modern thought is not God is dead but Oh, is He still about? That’s the Mephisto who survives.
He’s dressed as a fool because fools are permitted to say what priests once guarded. He grins because mockery is lighter than argument. He crouches, leans forward, beckons — not because he’s predatory, but because he’s conspiratorial. Come now, he seems to say. Surely you don’t believe all that anymore.
And we don’t. Not really. Or at least, not without an apology.
This Mephisto belongs to a Europe tired of kneeling. Tired of certainty. Tired of heaven. He’s the devil of clever people — journalists, critics, academics, men who’ve read too much to believe and too little to worship. He doesn’t break commandments; he reframes them. He doesn’t burn churches; he turns them into heritage sites. He doesn’t silence the sacred; he makes it ironic.
What fascinates me is that Mephisto never lies outright. He simply removes weight. He lifts gravity from things that once mattered — truth, sacrifice, loyalty, God — until they float away like party balloons. Evil becomes light, playful, ironic. Nothing heavy enough to crucify oneself over.
I sometimes think the great modern sin isn’t cruelty but flippancy.
The devil no longer needs contracts. He thrives on commentary. On distance. On the smug assurance that one has seen through things. Mephisto’s greatest triumph isn’t damnation but detachment. To stand before the world’s suffering with arms folded and say, Well, what did you expect? That tone — that exhausted cleverness — is his real voice.
And yet, there’s something profoundly human about him. That’s the uncomfortable truth. Mephisto isn’t alien; he’s recognisable. He looks like the man at the end of the bar who’s lost faith but kept his humour. He looks like a disappointed idealist who mistook cynicism for wisdom. He looks, at times, uncomfortably like myself.
Because who among us hasn’t felt the temptation to laugh rather than kneel? To mock rather than mourn? To intellectualise rather than love?
Mephisto isn’t the enemy of humanity. He’s the echo of its fatigue.
That’s why he endures. Why he keeps shedding paint and stepping into flesh, into costume, into performance. He belongs to ages where belief has grown thin but conscience hasn’t yet thickened. Where irony replaces confession. Where we sneer because hope feels embarrassing.
The tragedy of Faust isn’t that he bargains with the devil. It’s that he finds him agreeable.
And perhaps that’s the final horror: Mephisto doesn’t drag us to hell. He simply keeps us amused while we wander there ourselves — laughing, analysing, explaining it all away — until we look up one day and realise we’ve forgotten how to pray, and worse, why we ever did.
He’s still smiling. And the joke, I fear, is on us.
Wording 