Chapter 29: The Fate of the Master and Margarita is Decided

[Robert Tulip]

Satan (Woland) and Azazello survey the Moscow skyline beneath the setting sun, as the novel draws toward its close. The beautiful panorama from the high balustrade seems rather like the vision that Satan gave Christ of all the kingdoms of the earth. They watch the burning of the Writer’s Building set alight by the fiendish cat, who later arrives in comical style carrying a whole fish and various other loot, engaging in a typically demented effort to justify his crimes.

But first, Saint Matthew the apostle turns up to plead the case of the Master and Margarita to the dark lord, on behalf of Jesus Christ. This act of supplication tells an interesting story in itself about Bulgakov's perception of the power dynamics. In an interesting exchange of sophistry about the interrelationship between light and dark, Satan puts Matthew down as a mere tax collector, and then gives voice to the secular contempt for the stupidity of religion.

Matthew for his part refuses to argue with the great deceiver. Satan sees this refusal to argue as evidence of stupidity, and says they are speaking different languages when the religious ideal of discipleship looks more like slavery.

This exchange illustrates how simple religious piety struggles to develop intellectual arguments that have the immediate persuasive power of Satanic delusion. Bulgakov is once again satirising the patronising superior affectation of communist reason, its ability to win debates by swaying popular opinion, its rhetorical power to minimise public focus on its deep flaws.

Communist intellectuals assume their Marxist dialectics are rejected by conservatives only because Christians lack the powers of logic to see the moral force of class analysis with its easy path to universal prosperity. And yet the big lesson of history is that the seduction of the broad and easy path of communist redistribution leads to destruction, as economies collapse under the inability to sustain central planning, due to its basic conflicts with human incentives. It is far from stupid to support this critique, whatever the devil may say.

The cryptic agreement between Matthew and Satan is that the Master and Margarita have earned the right to rest and peace, but have not earned the right to light. This puzzling point is seemingly saying that even though Jesus Christ himself has read the book and liked it, the author and his lover must still go to hell, if only to a non-tormenting part of Infernia.

It seems their souls have been weighed in the balance and found wanting, meaning they cannot gain access to heaven. It is like the weight of evil of the surrounding world is so great that even the Master’s remarkable insight cannot really save his soul. Perhaps Margarita’s decision to serve as the Devil’s Queen for a night was an unacceptable compromise in the eyes of Christ.

[Harry Marks]

But first, Saint Matthew the apostle turns up to plead the case of the Master and Margarita to the dark lord, on behalf of Jesus Christ.

I would have said Matthew Levi was simply conveying the orders. I think the usual convention is that Satan rules this world, and God disposes of souls. And I did not see anything to contradict that. I don't much like that theology, but it's the traditional one, and it stands even more in contrast to the ways of the world when this world has been made a living hell by determined totalitarian oppressors.

In an interesting exchange of sophistry about the interrelationship between light and dark, Satan puts Matthew down as a mere tax collector, and then gives voice to the secular contempt for the stupidity of religion.

His sophistry is an interesting one, because it gets a lot of play among Eastern non-dualist thinkers, and with Jung and the other myth-bringers. How could you appreciate the light if there were no darkness? Well, that story of contrast doesn't mean ignorance is helpful or pain gives pleasure its nature.

In taking it so far as to claim that we would not be able to deal with pure light, he seems to be giving cover for Margarita's pact with the devil, and perhaps Bulgakov's (and his friends? ?) accommodation with the horrible order of the world established by the Party. I don't find it any more satisfying than the dual structure with Satan as lord of this world but obedient about the next. But it is merciful, and that's worth a lot. Like Lancelot who is not pure enough to find the Grail, or David who is too much a warrior and adulterer to be allowed to build the temple, this formulation in which they merit peace, but not the light, expresses the human acceptance of our sinful nature.

Matthew for his part refuses to argue with the great deceiver. Satan sees this refusal to argue as evidence of stupidity, and says they are speaking different languages when the religious ideal of discipleship looks more like slavery.

I think Bulgakov has had his say about this with the Satanic Ball, in which character after character displays a nature corrupted by self-assertion over against the needs of their fellow creatures, and also by his tormented Pilate. Woland treats servanthood as something beneath real dignity, but is fine with those puppets who respond when he is pulling the strings.

This exchange illustrates how simple religious piety struggles to develop intellectual arguments that have the immediate persuasive power of Satanic delusion.

Perhaps. "Immediate" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. It suggests that the pious do not really think about things, so the sophistry of Satan takes them by surprise. Which would be bad enough, but the real issue is the choice a person makes, which values to be guided by. And if you choose temptation, then the sophistry is granted the ability to give you cover for your bad conscience. The weakness of the pious person's intellect on such matters, the refusal to be wise as serpents, only really matters if they fail to be innocent as doves.

Bulgakov is once again satirising the patronising superior affectation of communist reason, its ability to win debates by swaying popular opinion, its rhetorical power to minimise public focus on its deep flaws.

All parts of the political spectrum have both shallow and deep appeals. The emotional appeal of communism was shown by a wave of barn burnings in post-Soviet Russia. Some of these were caused by people taking revenge on local manipulators who got hold of key resources using political pull, but mainly that seems to have been a cover story for sheer envy of the successful. Who is really proof against the observation that other people often have success they don't really deserve, and the urge to see them get their comeuppance? Not a good way to run a society, though.

However I agree that Woland is here representing a kind of facile, plausible behavior all too common among those who think the problem with the rich having influence is that they aren't intellectual enough to deserve it. After all, what could be more equitable and benevolent than a dictatorship with me running it?

Communist intellectuals assume their Marxist dialectics are rejected by conservatives only because Christians lack the powers of logic to see the moral force of class analysis with its easy path to universal prosperity.

Speaking of facile arguments, that is one. I have met leftists who take Christians for dupes, but you have mixed in rejection of values and rejection of logic, as if they are the same critique of the traditionals. While the two critiques are related, especially in the minds of Marxists, my experience is that when someone proposes alternative values and alternative logic, the usual response is "to Hell with you," as leftists write off reactionaries as morally bankrupt. Some conservatives are indeed running dogs for the capitalists, and lackeys of the elite. But you rarely see the leftists respond, as Bernie Sanders or Tony Blair would, would redoubled passion to persuade. It seems that to have enough faith in fellow humans to suppose they would change with persuasion is a (perhaps naive) property of the mainstream.

And yet the big lesson of history is that the seduction of the broad and easy path of communist redistribution leads to destruction, as economies collapse under the inability to sustain central planning, due to its basic conflicts with human incentives. It is far from stupid to support this critique, whatever the devil may say.

I really doubt that this is the big lesson of history. Redistribution, for example, was done quite effectively all over Western Europe. Humans need both incentive and support, and a system that does not combine the two effectively will lag behind its potential. Central planning, remember, did a great job when the main point was to build capacity quickly, pouring concrete and shaping steel. What it never did well was to allow freedom, and that was the reason why it did badly at producing quality when it had reached sufficient quantity, and so stagnated.

If we are entering a world, as I suspect we are, in which incentives don't matter much anymore to the overall performance of the economy, and support continues to matter quite a lot, then the surge in inequality will lead to stagnation in the most unequal countries and the conflict generated by lack of support will come back to haunt them. Here's the key indicator: if tightening the money supply in the U.S. and Europe leads to higher interest rates and the result is higher growth, you will know that we have not really reached secular stagnation. But if instead, as I suspect, the growth rate of GDP falls below the rate of interest in 2019, then we will need a big re-think about all this systems stuff.

The cryptic agreement between Matthew and Satan is that the Master and Margarita have earned the right to rest and peace, but have not earned the right to light. This puzzling point is seemingly saying that even though Jesus Christ himself has read the book and liked it, the author and his lover must still go to hell, if only to a non-tormenting part of Infernia.

It seems their souls have been weighed in the balance and found wanting, meaning they cannot gain access to heaven. It is like the weight of evil of the surrounding world is so great that even the Master’s remarkable insight cannot really save his soul. Perhaps Margarita’s decision to serve as the Devil’s Queen for a night was an unacceptable compromise in the eyes of Christ.

I don't think Hell is the implication. Just death. But I think you have the right idea with the notion that the surrounding world, with its burdens, is responsible for souls which give way beneath the strain.

[Robert Tulip]

Matthew Levi was simply conveying the orders. I think the usual convention is that Satan rules this world, and God disposes of souls. And I did not see anything to contradict that.

The tone of supplication enters the conversation when Bulgakov mentions the note of entreaty in Matthew’s voice as he conveys Christ’s request that Satan grant peace to Margarita by also taking her with him.

I don't much like that theology, but it's the traditional one, and it stands even more in contrast to the ways of the world when this world has been made a living hell by determined totalitarian oppressors.

Yes, the strangeness of this conversation is the implication that Satan has power to “take the master with you and grant him peace.” Inevitably, for the devil to take someone means they go to hell, implying the disposition of souls is a shared task between God and Satan. But your point makes sense, since if God admits someone into heaven, Satan cannot steal them away to hell, and Matthew’s request is absurd.

His sophistry is an interesting one, because it gets a lot of play among Eastern non-dualist thinkers, and with Jung and the other myth-bringers. How could you appreciate the light if there were no darkness? Well, that story of contrast doesn't mean ignorance is helpful or pain gives pleasure its nature.

Yes, and you and I discussed this precise point in our conversation on Answer to Job where Jung suggests the theology of light is unbalanced. That does not make Jung a Satanist, although Saint John might beg to differ. Satan’s point is that a world with no shadows would have no trees, but Matthew thinks that is just mendacious quibbling. Arguing with the devil is a slippery slope towards an acceptance that freedom is slavery, good is evil and ignorance is strength.

In taking it so far as to claim that we would not be able to deal with pure light, he seems to be giving cover for Margarita's pact with the devil, and perhaps Bulgakov's (and his friends? ?) accommodation with the horrible order of the world established by the Party. I don't find it any more satisfying than the dual structure with Satan as lord of this world but obedient about the next. But it is merciful, and that's worth a lot. Like Lancelot who is not pure enough to find the Grail, or David who is too much a warrior and adulterer to be allowed to build the temple, this formulation in which they merit peace, but not the light, expresses the human acceptance of our sinful nature.

One of the great themes of humanism in philosophy and literature is the acceptance that the world is flawed, and that human life is of the world, with the powers of good existing in a constant negotiation with the powers of evil. This stands in contrast to the Christian formulation from John 17:14 of Christ as ‘in the world but not of the world’, imagining a life of pure light.

I was chatting with some Mormon friends yesterday about their vision of the church as an island of integrity in a sea of evil, like a moral castle protected by the moat of faith in God. Unfortunately, building conceptual moats creates the problem that sound critiques of the castle cannot be heard in the citadel. The allegorical beauty of the Book of Mormon, in that example, is undermined by the insistence on its literal truth, with the insistence on literality a barrier to dialogue.

Bulgakov, perhaps like all great novelists, sustains a moral demand that human life is of the world, seeing that the metaphysical escape into pure light offered by John avoids the fully human dimension of incarnation.

This exchange illustrates how simple religious piety struggles to develop intellectual arguments that have the immediate persuasive power of Satanic delusion.

Perhaps. "Immediate" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

Yes, the point of immediacy is that the first impression given by a con-man uses the power of fake sincerity to convince the gullible, whereas more considered reflection can reveal the deception, and can develop protections against such deceptive tactics.

Arguments that pitch to emotional comfort and reassuring lies are more popular than inconvenient truths. The positing of God as eternal while Satan is temporal, with God representing enduring values against the Satanic desires of immediate gratification, helps to temper the humanist impulse to be of the world. In this model God is the inconvenient truth while Satan is the reassuring lie.

It suggests that the pious do not really think about things, so the sophistry of Satan takes them by surprise. Which would be bad enough, but the real issue is the choice a person makes, which values to be guided by. And if you choose temptation, then the sophistry is granted the ability to give you cover for your bad conscience. The weakness of the pious person's intellect on such matters, the refusal to be wise as serpents, only really matters if they fail to be innocent as doves.

I don’t see Matthew’s refusal of debate as a failure of thought, but rather as a statement of settled view that will not be swayed by false argument, equivalent to Dawkins' refusal to debate creationists. Piety is these days widely seen as more vice than virtue, due to the ability of the secular world to poke holes in common thoughtless pious beliefs such as young earth creationism. I would hope that piety can be reconfigured in terms of awe at the complex fragility of existence, in a way that can rebut critiques of its virtue.

Bulgakov is once again satirising the patronising superior affectation of communist reason, its ability to win debates by swaying popular opinion, its rhetorical power to minimise public focus on its deep flaws.

All parts of the political spectrum have both shallow and deep appeals. The emotional appeal of communism was shown by a wave of barn burnings in post-Soviet Russia. Some of these were caused by people taking revenge on local manipulators who got hold of key resources using political pull, but mainly that seems to have been a cover story for sheer envy of the successful. Who is really proof against the observation that other people often have success they don't really deserve, and the urge to see them get their comeuppance? Not a good way to run a society, though.

More broadly than Bulgakov’s specific satire of Stalinist Russia, his message here speaks to the universal dangers of authoritarian politics, the ability of confidence-tricksters to spin a compelling story that conceals malignant and ignorant motives.

However I agree that Woland is here representing a kind of facile, plausible behavior all too common among those who think the problem with the rich having influence is that they aren't intellectual enough to deserve it. After all, what could be more equitable and benevolent than a dictatorship with me running it?

Such arguments against the influence of the rich get dismissed as the politics of envy, but that phrase is dripping with emotion and vested interest. Nietzsche castigated Christianity as a slave morality based on resentment, and we all saw what that meme led to with Hitler’s master morality. In calling Matthew stupid, Satan is expressing a prejudiced bigotry, caricaturing his opponent.

Communist intellectuals assume their Marxist dialectics are rejected by conservatives only because Christians lack the powers of logic to see the moral force of class analysis with its easy path to universal prosperity.

Speaking of facile arguments, that is one.

Forgive my confusion about the ambiguity of your comment. I can’t tell if you are saying my argument is facile, or if the facility rests with the dialecticians.

I have met leftists who take Christians for dupes, but you have mixed in rejection of values and rejection of logic, as if they are the same critique of the traditionals. While the two critiques are related, especially in the minds of Marxists, my experience is that when someone proposes alternative values and alternative logic, the usual response is "to Hell with you," as leftists write off reactionaries as morally bankrupt.

I am still a bit confused on your point here. The “someone” in your description could equally apply to reactionary or revolutionary. Christianity constitutes an alternative logic to the secular world, and Christians are equally prone to write off leftists as morally bankrupt.

Some conservatives are indeed running dogs for the capitalists, and lackeys of the elite. But you rarely see the leftists respond, as Bernie Sanders or Tony Blair would, would redoubled passion to persuade. It seems that to have enough faith in fellow humans to suppose they would change with persuasion is a (perhaps naive) property of the mainstream.

If persuasion cannot change anything then we are surely lost. Admittedly persuasion is difficult when views are fixed, but I retain a faith that people are generally open to listen to arguments based on evidence and logic.

And yet the big lesson of history is that the seduction of the broad and easy path of communist redistribution leads to destruction, as economies collapse under the inability to sustain central planning, due to its basic conflicts with human incentives. It is far from stupid to support this critique, whatever the devil may say.

I really doubt that this is the big lesson of history. Redistribution, for example, was done quite effectively all over Western Europe. Humans need both incentive and support, and a system that does not combine the two effectively will lag behind its potential. Central planning, remember, did a great job when the main point was to build capacity quickly, pouring concrete and shaping steel. What it never did well was to allow freedom, and that was the reason why it did badly at producing quality when it had reached sufficient quantity, and so stagnated.

I thought that comment might wind you up. I see existence as a dialectic of cooperation and competition, balancing works of mercy with reward for talent, equality with freedom. The problem with communism is that it takes the ethic of redistribution to extremes.

Bulgakov saw that extreme in Stalin’s policy of the liquidation of the kulaks as a class. Your point about the virtues of support and planning is well made, but as ever, the problem is that any such tendency becomes corrupted in a system that lacks checks and balances.

If we are entering a world, as I suspect we are, in which incentives don't matter much anymore to the overall performance of the economy, and support continues to matter quite a lot, then the surge in inequality will lead to stagnation in the most unequal countries and the conflict generated by lack of support will come back to haunt them. Here's the key indicator: if tightening the money supply in the U.S. and Europe leads to higher interest rates and the result is higher growth, you will know that we have not really reached secular stagnation. But if instead, as I suspect, the growth rate of GDP falls below the rate of interest in 2019, then we will need a big re-think about all this systems stuff.

I remain of the view that moral incentives are central to productivity. The overall incentive to effort provided by the removal of high effective marginal tax rates has a ripple effect through the culture, supporting the creative work of reward for risk, enabling space for civil society, cultural freedom and social capital. Europe’s acceptance of big government has made it sclerotic, as has the US acceptance of a big military.

I don't think Hell is the implication. Just death.

Matthew says Christ has asked that Satan take the master with him. An image that comes to mind from the clarification that this is about rest and peace rather than light is Pluto bursting from the chthonic depths to drag Proserpine down to the underworld as Queen of Hell. The overall question is the destination of the soul, which Bulgakov seems to present as a matter for bargaining between the divine and demonic forces. One wonders what would happen if Satan rejected Christ’s request – would the Master and Margarita have to be accepted in heaven?

But I think you have the right idea with the notion that the surrounding world, with its burdens, is responsible for souls which give way beneath the strain.

Solzhenitsyn wrote a wonderful novel, The First Circle, about the military scientists who worked for Stalin and received privileged status. The title is drawn from Dante’s Inferno, where the first circle of hell is the limbo containing virtuous pagans and the unbaptised. We could imagine this is the eternal fate Bulgakov has in mind for his heroes, who like the unbaptised are barred from heaven due to the compromising accidents of their life.

[Harry Marks]

The tone of supplication enters the conversation when Bulgakov mentions the note of entreaty in Matthew’s voice as he conveys Christ’s request that Satan grant peace to Margarita by also taking her with him.

I went back and re-read this just to try to understand. It isn't clear that the metaphysics in a work of magical realism is important. But the working hypothesis seems to be that Woland can "take her" so she no longer suffers in the world, without necessarily tormenting her. He offers back a sort of ironic quip, "Did it occur to you that might already have been considered?" to suggest (I think) that he has considerable appreciation for her strength of character, and would already have granted her peace by not having her left behind on earth with the Master departed.

It's a curious thing about Bulgakov's novel that he takes "supernatural" things seriously enough to build a story around them, mocking those who mock such matters, even while tinkering with the theological niceties to get a witch worked in, and considerable respect granted to the witch. Whether there is some secret message in this about his own wife (or mistress?) is beyond me. Dostoyevsky did not go so far, though he put some daring imaginings in the writing of his characters.

In a way it feels to me like a looking-glass version of the story of Job. Margarita is not long-suffering, but she is dedicated to someone else and to something higher. Her determination and her willingness to go through Hell, so to speak, for the Master become the only admirable qualities of any of the people in this story. It really is a curiosity.

Inevitably, for the devil to take someone means they go to hell, implying the disposition of souls is a shared task between God and Satan. But your point makes sense, since if God admits someone into heaven, Satan cannot steal them away to hell, and Matthew’s request is absurd.

Yes, I think the implication is that the timing of her death is up to Woland. This might be because she has "sold her soul" so to speak, but I think it is just part of the departmental division: he is in charge of earthly matters such as deaths.

How could you appreciate the light if there were no darkness? Well, that story of contrast doesn't mean ignorance is helpful or pain gives pleasure its nature.

Yes, and you and I discussed this precise point in our conversation on Answer to Job where Jung suggests the theology of light is unbalanced. That does not make Jung a Satanist, although Saint John might beg to differ. Satan’s point is that a world with no shadows would have no trees, but Matthew thinks that is just mendacious quibbling. Arguing with the devil is a slippery slope towards an acceptance that freedom is slavery, good is evil and ignorance is strength.

I find myself very sympathetic to Matthew on this point. And yet Jung has a serious point, and if indeed the Evangelist John is the same as John the Revelator, it gives a lot of weight to Jung's use of "shadow" analysis. On the whole then, I am thinking Satan was arguing using a point that was true, but there was probably something amiss about the way he used it, very much like the scene in the NT in which Jesus is tempted by a scripture-quoting Satan.

The problem may be an implied extension from "trees cast shadows" to "therefore we should embrace the dark." In some sense. The characters who paraded before Margarita at the Ghoul's Ball were those who had completely sold out, had surrendered both principle and any higher purpose, craving only status or power or sensual pleasure. They were not merely creatures placed in a fallen world, but were themselves active agents of the fall. I rather suspect Bulgakov had opportunity to view many such creatures of the dark, and had no interest in indulging apologetics for them.

One of the great themes of humanism in philosophy and literature is the acceptance that the world is flawed, and that human life is of the world, with the powers of good existing in a constant negotiation with the powers of evil. This stands in contrast to the Christian formulation from John 17:14 of Christ as ‘in the world but not of the world’, imagining a life of pure light.

I was chatting with some Mormon friends yesterday about their vision of the church as an island of integrity in a sea of evil, like a moral castle protected by the moat of faith in God. Unfortunately, building conceptual moats creates the problem that sound critiques of the castle cannot be heard in the citadel. The allegorical beauty of the Book of Mormon, in that example, is undermined by the insistence on its literal truth, with the insistence on literality a barrier to dialogue.

The twisted mess of Mormon theology is an interesting example of both the flawed nature of humans and human institutions, and of your interesting observation that such "castles" tend to resist dialogue.

You are probably aware that the LDS movement was deeply racist from the beginning, and had to have a special revelation to allow African-Americans to have any status at all (and they still are relegated to an outsider status from the real power base.) The "lost tribes" of Israel who supposedly came to the Americas and build pyramids and temples are portrayed in Mormon art as white. (Smith apparently believed that the "savages" he was aware of were incapable of such a thing, even though, e.g. the Iroquois confederacy had a constitution before the U.S. did, and the white "Christian" treatment of Native Americans was considerably more cruel than the Aztec treatment of subject tribes.) Always European, even though the actual lost tribes were evidently Middle Eastern and probably looked like the Lebanese and Syrians of today.

Their theology of "eternal progression" while in some sense similar to the Purgatory themes of the RCC, are also probably intended as a justification for the supposedly merit-based system of polygamy. I have never gotten a conversation going with any LDS friends about how they square grace with eternal progression, but let's just say I am pretty sure they don't have an idea of theiosis behind it.

And yet the tight-knit community is in fact responsible for highly dependable behavior. I told a visiting European that if they meet a Mormon their estimate of the likelihood of integrity should go up by maybe 15% over whatever they consider standard for the person's culture. Sure, there are unscrupulous Mormons, and some whose lives are a wreck, but on balance they are impressively honest, hard-working and sociable.

Their well-known welfare system for members is probably a good model for the nation as a whole, since it provides needed support but is not particularly shy about expecting life choices and time use that justify the support.

The positing of God as eternal while Satan is temporal, with God representing enduring values against the Satanic desires of immediate gratification, helps to temper the humanist impulse to be of the world.

I'm not too worried about humanists surrendering too easily to worldly systems. But humanism does tend to be biased toward optimistic assumptions about government solutions. After all, if you don't think in terms of individual, internal reform as an approach to problems, then you are going to opt for what's left.

In this model God is the inconvenient truth while Satan is the reassuring lie.

One could apply that to a lot of situations. The Bolsheviks presented the convenient, if not reassuring, lie that elections would sell out the workers. If you look at American and European elections of the time, there was some basis for this. Yet in the end Socialism in Europe was able to create a high standard of living for the working class in a democratic context. No serious loss of freedom, no serious loss of efficiency. Yet people are still arguing that a socialist society is somehow unfree. That is another lie that seems reassuring to some, but speculation is required to fill in the reason for that reaction.

I don’t see Matthew’s refusal of debate as a failure of thought, but rather as a statement of settled view that will not be swayed by false argument, equivalent to Dawkins' refusal to debate creationists.

Yes, I think Dawkins made the appropriate choice. Superficial emotional appeals by Creationists have created a specialization in plausible-sounding arguments with no honesty or accountability. Much the same kinds of specialization have occurred in the climate-skepticism movement (which has virtually nothing to do with religion but appeals to many of the same tribe.) However, in that case the more head-on debates the better, as public opinion is already swinging and the skepticism flourishes in echo chambers which don't include the broad public.

After all, what could be more equitable and benevolent than a dictatorship with me running it?

Such arguments against the influence of the rich get dismissed as the politics of envy, but that phrase is dripping with emotion and vested interest.

Yes, although it remains a good rhetorical tactic to raise the profile of the nasty emotions on the other side (such as envy), that approach is always going to have limited success against "the politics of envy" since the envied are both few and themselves highly manipulative (for the most part).

Communist intellectuals assume their Marxist dialectics are rejected by conservatives only because Christians lack the powers of logic to see the moral force of class analysis with its easy path to universal prosperity.

Speaking of facile arguments, that is one.

Forgive my confusion about the ambiguity of your comment. I can’t tell if you are saying my argument is facile, or if the facility rests with the dialecticians.

Yes, well I did get us in rather a tangle. Sorry. Your claim is that communists take a certain view. I am saying that is not the only, and I think not even the main, objection to Christian rejection of Marxist dialectics.

I have met leftists who take Christians for dupes, but you have mixed in rejection of values and rejection of logic, as if they are the same critique of the traditionals. While the two critiques are related, especially in the minds of Marxists, my experience is that when someone proposes alternative values and alternative logic, the usual response is "to Hell with you," as leftists write off reactionaries as morally bankrupt.

I am still a bit confused on your point here. The “someone” in your description could equally apply to reactionary or revolutionary. Christianity constitutes an alternative logic to the secular world, and Christians are equally prone to write off leftists as morally bankrupt.

Again, sorry for lack of clarity. In my few serious engagements with Marxists, they tend to see Christians as misguided on values, not on sophistication of understanding. Christians are too ready to accept inequality, too ready to accept power structures that exploit the average person, and too ready to dismiss intellectuals as duplicitous and power-mad, in that view. So they tend to say "To Hell with Christianity." I have never heard anything along the lines of Christians being unable to follow some inevitable logic of class conflict, although I have seen such things in writing.

Economists, you may know, tend to take a very different path. We reject the premise of the labor theory of value, which is really a moral argument dressed up as descriptive analysis (it was taken from Ricardo by Marx, but used very differently). But in principle the notion that capitalists provide a lot of value by allocating capital where it is most profitable is not really much stronger than the notion that feudal lords were needed for defense. That comparison is Marx's key idea, really.

If persuasion cannot change anything then we are surely lost. Admittedly persuasion is difficult when views are fixed, but I retain a faith that people are generally open to listen to arguments based on evidence and logic.

I would go so far as to say that summarizes my faith in God. If people are completely impervious to appeals to the common good, and to evidence, then we are lost indeed.

I see existence as a dialectic of cooperation and competition, balancing works of mercy with reward for talent, equality with freedom. The problem with communism is that it takes the ethic of redistribution to extremes.

I think that's pretty well put, actually, especially the second sentence. The Mormons have an ethic of redistribution, but it is solidly based in an ethic of support.

I don't think Hell is the implication. Just death.

Matthew says Christ has asked that Satan take the master with him. An image that comes to mind from the clarification that this is about rest and peace rather than light is Pluto bursting from the chthonic depths to drag Proserpine down to the underworld as Queen of Hell. The overall question is the destination of the soul, which Bulgakov seems to present as a matter for bargaining between the divine and demonic forces. One wonders what would happen if Satan rejected Christ’s request – would the Master and Margarita have to be accepted in heaven?

Well, that's one interesting insight that might not have come up without your connections between celestial rhythms and psycho-social forces. I see Bulgakov as taking the side of human passion (as a good Russian novelist would) against either unrealistic utopian ideals or oppressive manipulation of the system (any system) for personal advantage. As such, the passion could be viewed as a sort of Proserpine re-emergence with Spring. Stravinsky's masterpiece "The Rite of Spring" comes to mind as a celebration of the same values. I also like the comparison to the scientists who cooperated with Stalin.