Benjamin Griffin, Editor, Mark Twain Project, UC Berkeley

Monday Night Philosophy plays its iconoclast card. Mark Twain’s Chronicle of Young Satan—a late work that he left unfinished—has a passage in which the “angel” Satan forms people out of clay, and gives them life, only to kill them. Twain’s literary source was the Apocryphal New Testament published by William Hone in 1821, by way of an 1867 article by—Mark Twain.

In its time, Hone’s book was a scandal, and it remained one. Mark Twain eventually became an inventor of biblical apocrypha himself: the “diaries” of Adam, Eve, Shem and Methuselah, and his letters of Satan. Mark Twain’s treatment of the clay-people episode in his re-writing of the Infancy Gospel, despite Twain’s habitual railing against “The Moral Sense,” is strictly moral. Twain asks: Shall human beings expect better treatment by the gods than mosquitoes can expect from humans? And he recognizes that the advent of a truly omnipotent child would, in reality, be a disaster for human society, and uses that to critique the theological commonplace that “apparent evils” are wrought by God for our own benefit, if we only could see.