Innocence is America's mystical cloud of unknowing. We are forgiven simply by virtue of not knowing what we do. To wrap ourselves round in the Good — that is the American dream, leaving place for the evil nightmare only in the "other," where it can be diagnosed, treated, prevented, and sermonized about. A history of this habit of the heart has been exposed by Elaine Pagels (in her important study The Origin of Satan) as a disastrous, perhaps "evil" essential, an inherent bad seed, in Western religious denominations, making obligatory as countermeasure their relentless insistence on "love."
— James Hillman, The Soul's Code