On God: An Uncommon Conversation by Norman Mailer, Michael Lennon

And the Devil looks to destroy God’s hope in us. Whether this effort looks to attain a world that can be taken over, or whether the Devil, to the contrary, aims to acquire a ruined world or works toward a world transferable to some other god are, I repeat, questions that obviously remain far beyond our reach right now.
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    So you’re not sure whether the Devil is ambitious or nihilistic?
    Why must you see that as contradictory? As a novelist, I would say some characters in Dostoyevsky are both nihilistic and immensely ambitious. The two go together. Frustrated ambition can turn quickly to nihilism. A rotten fruit can grow poisonous.
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    You seem to be in agreement with some of the other religions of the world on the role of saints.
    Saints?
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    Do you see them as intermediaries, or do they play a larger role, a prophetic role? Do they actually see themselves as instruments of God, paralleling demons on the other side? I wonder if you could say something about saints and monsters.
    Hagiography is not my strong point. I would guess, given my general hypotheses, that very few of the saints were wholly bona fide—by that I mean vastly more good than bad. I would think some of them had incredible powers. I believe many saints were perfectly capable of small miracles—that doesn’t bother me a bit. I would take that for granted. There are such things as psychic powers, and they can be raised to a very high degree in certain humans.
    But the idea that saints are as good as the hagiographers have made them out to be does give great pause because, finally, the Catholic Church may be the most complex and powerful and manipulative and intricate power system in history. But from what we have learned about history, we also know that most powerful people rewrite history to their own specifications. Many a saint may have been built up into much more than that saint deserved—the Church needed him or her at the moment. Nonetheless, I also subscribe to the notion that some people do represent the best and most magical elements in God. That is not a concept I would scorn. I believe there were, and are, saints. I would just approach them more critically than might a devout Catholic.
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    I guess I agree with you. In each period, the Church has to create saints of a certain stripe. But one thing that struck me about your scheme is your declaration that most of us don’t know most of the time whether our actions are ultimately for good or for ill—or, indeed, which side we’re helping, which hindering. But saints struck me as those who might have greater premonitions, greater knowledge of what was to come and what certain human actions could do to advance the cause of good. And I can see a similar faction on the side of the Devil—those who asked, “What can I do to bring down, hurt, or destroy some strength of the Lord?” In that sense, human demons would also be more aware of their mission.
    Yes, saints are imbued with the fundamental belief that what they’re doing is absolutely right—when it may not be. There’s many a saint who might prove to be a devil on closer examination. And many a devil may have been working perversely to undermine the Devil.
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    I want to challenge your idea about things getting worse—with a couple of brief statistics. I chose these carefully. In 1900, the average American lived to be forty-six years old. Six percent of Americans graduated from high school. Only 14 percent of homes had a bathtub. Six percent had a telephone—the flush toilet was a rarity in 1900. And so on. Perhaps, as you have said, the level of language was higher among the intelligentsia. But the vast majority had hardly any books in their homes. Today, a thousand books, I believe, are published every day,