Christa Giles

Of course, sacrilege is a central characteristic of Satanism –
a characteristic which paradoxically implies a belief in God;
otherwise, blasphemy would be rendered meaningless. ˝All
sins,˝ Wilde informs us in The Picture of Dorian Gray, ˝are
sins of disobedience. When that high spirit, that morning
star of evil, fell from heaven, it was as a rebel that he fell.˝ 250
Yet the manner in which this ˝disobedience˝ manifests itself
is rendered deliberately ambiguous in the novel. Thus
Wilde could say
Each man sees his own sin in Dorian Gray.
What Dorian Gray’s sins are no one knows.
He who finds them has brought them. 251
In A rebours Des Esseintes admires Barbey D’Aurevilly’s
works and decides that D’Aurevilly ˝was constantly
tacking to and fro between those two channels of Catholic
belief which eventually run into one: mysticism and
sadism.˝ 252 In a preface to A rebours he similarly claimed
that sadism was a bastard of Catholicism: ˝Evil and vice in
order to exist must have their opposite poles, virtue and
goodness.˝ 253 Thus Dorian can conclude: ˝The soul is a
terrible reality. It can be bought, and sold, and bartered
away. It can be poisoned, or made perfect.˝ 254 Virtue and
vice, Satan and God, co-exist and serve to illustrate one
another, and both are, Wilde maintained, the province of
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