The uses of the Devil
By James Tuttleton
Books January 1996
On The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil by Andrew Delbanco.
Most of us are probably used to imagining the figure of Satan in Miltonic terms—as the fallen Son of Morning, as Lucifer corrupted by pride, as the master of Hell himself, inciting all to evil, yet enwrapt in flame, eternally tormented on that burning lake in Pandemonium:
So stretched out huge in length the arch-fiend lay,
Chained on the burning lake; nor ever thence
Had risen or heaved his head, but that the will
And high permission of all-ruling Heaven
Left him at large to his own dark designs,
That with reiterated crimes he might
Heap on himself damnation, while he sought
Evil to others.
The American Puritan minister Jonathan Edwards recurs to this fiery image of Hell in his justly famous sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (1741). There the ungodly are seen to dangle above “a great furnace of wrath, a wide and bottomless pit, full of the fire of wrath,” hanging “by a slender thread, with the flames of divine wrath flashing about it, and ready every moment to singe it, and burn it asunder.” When they fall “the Devil stands ready to fall upon them and seize them as his own.” If Hell or “Pandemonium” locates in one place every evil together with its satanic fountainhead, the image of continuous fiery torment in the bowels of Hell has kept more than one believer on the straight and narrow path. For any culture, of course, it is desirable for people to know right from wrong and to live by the right.
Although Milton has given us our most recognizable personification of evil, in my view the most impressive vision of Satan is that found in the Inferno.
Although Milton has given us our most recognizable personification of evil, in my view the most impressive vision of Satan is that found in the Inferno. There, after a terrifying descent into deeper and deeper levels of exhibited and punished depravity, Virgil brings Dante down into the ninth and last circle of Hell. This is the abyss most remote from God’s life and light and is a place of darkness visible and intensest cold. There Dante and Virgil find all those who have slain their own kin, like Cain; or betrayed their own countries, like Cassius and Brutus; or destroyed innocents who have trusted them, like Judas Iscariot. Locked in the center of this field of encrusted ice is Satan himself, ugly, triple-faced, shagged with rime, befouled and matted and entangled in himself, and frozen in woe. He tries to lift himself, but his fanning wings create such chill that he is locked even more tightly into the frozen crust of ice.
Despite the manifest difference in the image of Satan as enwrapt in fire or encased in ice, both figurations share one thing: the externalization of evil in the form of a personality or being other than ourselves. Now, the idea that evil arises in human affairs because of a malign agency outside oneself is an old one. And, although Andrew Delbanco makes little or nothing of Dante and Milton, this is one of the subjects that he has taken up in The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil. Historically considered, the sense of evil has been inseparable from the imagination of the Devil. He has gone by many names (Lucifer, Beelzebub, Belial, the Serpent, the Tempter, and the Prince of the Power of the Air), and, as a conniving shape-shifter, Satan has also presented himself in many different guises throughout history. In both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, he has almost always constituted an agent of evil subverting the lives of the people (King David, Job, Christ) whose stories are fundamental to the Judeo-Christian conception of morality. As St. Peter put it in his first epistle, “your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.”
In any case, Mr. Delbanco, a professor of English at Columbia University and a specialist in colonial American literature, has written at length in The Death of Satan about the collapse of the moral sense in American culture as men have abandoned the concept of an actually existing exterior agent of evil and undertaken to account for evil by other means. The book is thus meant to be “a national spiritual biography,” lamenting the loss of “some conceptual means for thinking about the sorts of experiences that used to go under the name of evil.” Delbanco finds evil all around us, but he thinks that we have no way of dealing with it now: “The repertoire of evil has never been richer. Yet never have our responses been so weak.”
The Death of Satan offers a rapid historical resumé of reflections on the Devil in American thinking. In surveying this matter, Delbanco remarks quite rightly that, in the early seventeenth century, the American Puritans held to a theological determinism according to which every event had its supernatural origin—as reflecting the agency of God or the work of Satan. He remarks that “the Puritans’ Satan was much more an abstract idea than a representable creature or thing.” Nevertheless, Satan was real enough. He had spectral powers, could impersonate anyone, and was known by his agents—the self-confessed witches and the savage Indians who resisted the Gospel and tomahawked one’s wife and children. But Delbanco is averse to a Christian supernaturalism that sees Satan as objectified in other people. That kind of thinking, he believes, leads to the persecution of others, the oppression of the socially “deviant,” and eventually to horrors like “ethnic cleansing.”
Throughout The Death of Satan, Delbanco continually recurs to Melville as the pole star of an American literature preoccupied with the Devil.
Throughout The Death of Satan, Delbanco continually recurs to Melville as the pole star of an American literature preoccupied with the Devil. He stands at the center of a literary tradition that “expounds evil as the capacity to render invisible another human consciousness. Sin, in this view, is the failure to meet what Kant called the ‘categorical imperative,’ by which one is compelled to treat other persons as ends rather than means.” Captain Ahab in Moby-Dick is a “demagogue” who compels or seduces men to follow him in attacking an objectified evil. A sort of proto-Hitler or Klan Imperial Wizard, he is “the crusader who construes evil as a malignant, external thing—a thing alien to himself” and thus “by far the worst kind of barbarian. The struggle of the twentieth century was to keep this proficient hater from seizing the world.”
I have no quarrel with this view of insane Ahab, but it has nothing to do with the Christian view of evil. Indeed, Ahab is, like the Persian Fedallah, a Zoroastrian whose dualistic faith posits that the world was created by Ormazd, the spirit of light and fire; his twin brother, Ahriman, represents the spirit of darkness and evil, continually at war against this light and life. The disfiguring scar that runs the length of Ahab’s body came from his participation in the sacramental rites of fire worship. What could be clearer than Ahab’s prayer in the chapter called “The Candles,” where he invokes the lightning? “Oh! thou clear spirit of clear fire, whom on these seas I as Persian once did worship, till in the sacramental act so burned by thee, that to this hour I bear the scar; I now know thee, thou clear spirit, and I now know that thy right worship is defiance.”
So far as Christianity is concerned, this Zoroastrian idea of a satanic principle of Evil standing co-equal alongside the divine principle of Good is the heresy of Manichaeism. It is anathema to Judeo-Christian theology, which sees God as omnipotent and so not really challenged in authority by one of His own creatures. Lucifer is such a subordinate to “all-ruling Heaven,” no matter how much the clown may want to rival God himself. In the Confessions, St. Augustine remarks that, although he had once been “under the spell of the Manichaeans” and took evil to be some kind of “substance,” he later came to understand evil as privatio boni, the absence of good.
Delbanco is most in sympathy with this Augustinian view of evil as a mere nothingness. And he warms to Emerson, who told a group of Harvard students in “The Divinity School Address” (1838) that “Good is positive. Evil is merely privative, not absolute: it is like cold, which is the privation of heat. All evil is so much death or nonentity.” According to this view, the Devil is really an unnecessary bit of personification: he will have no space to exist and evil will vanish if we fill our lives with virtuous works. Delbanco calls this Emersonian view of evil a countertradition in New England theology in that it conceptualized evil “without relying on an embodied evil spirit.” There is nothing heretical about Emerson’s definition of evil here. But Delbanco fudges matters in accounting Emerson as a spokesman of New England theology. Since Emerson did not believe in a personal God or in the “only-begotten” divinity of Jesus, his “Divinity School Address” was, to the Christian believers of his time, “The Latest Form of Infidelity,” as the Harvard professor Andrews Norton characterized it in an essay.
Still, Delbanco is right to note that the privative view of evil became more and more dominant as Christian faith wavered under the assault of Enlightenment scientism. Increase Mather, a late Puritan holdout, warned in 1684 of “the Sadducees of these dayes” who “say that there are no spirits, and that all stories concerning them are either fabulous or to be ascribed to natural causes.” But his warning was ignored. As Puritanism collapsed, the decline of belief in Satan was inevitably accompanied by the eventual loss of belief in God, and with the loss of God, men lost faith in the Christian basis for a wholesome social order.
Later, in the Age of Reason, evil as a concept was further emptied of significance.
Later, in the Age of Reason, evil as a concept was further emptied of significance. The former belief in witchcraft was now dismissed as mental delusion; religious ardor was diagnosed as a “phrenzie of the intellects,” and too ecstatic a belief in God was no longer a sign of sainthood but of insanity. Partial evil dissolved into a deistic universal good operating through a determinism of natural laws. The foreordination of God gave way to a belief in unalterable scientific phenomena. No supernatural entities were needed by the advocates of Enlightenment reason. Even the virtues, as Franklin’s Autobiography made plain, were merely skills or habits that could be cultivated like playing whist or learning to dance the minuet. Vice was likewise a mere miscalculation or mental error.
What happens to the concept of evil in such a cultural transition? By Victoria’s time, in Delbanco’s account, “evil” devolved into “a synonym of dyspepsia and diarrhea, and turns up in advertisements for ‘antiscorbutic drops,’ guaranteed effective against ‘scurvy, leprosy, ulcers, the evil, fistula, [and] Piles.’ ” As Delbanco remarks,
The idea that conscious purpose might be driving history and nature seems vaguely insane to most Americans today; but in the late nineteenth century the idea had not yet quite been relinquished—or at least its aftereffects could still be felt. It was still news that nature, according to Darwin, “harbored no . . . purpose.” It was still quite recent that in science the “assumption that the world and its parts were designed” was being purged, and teleological language rejected as what one modern philosopher of science has called a “vestigial . . . way of speaking.”
As one of these “vaguely insane” who believe that a conscious purpose drives history and nature, I confess that my interest in this book flagged after the first two chapters. Remarks of the kind I have just quoted, frequent enough throughout, show that Delbanco has no grasp of religious faith or of the certitude felt by Christian believers. I don’t think he has any insight into the faith of the “People of the Book” either, although he affirms his Jewish identity. By 1800, according to Delbanco, American theological discussion of evil had evaporated. What we have henceforth is evil defined in sociological terms (the effect of class or economic determinism) or in psychoanalytic terms (the effect of repression and neurosis). This is also the point in the book at which Delbanco’s impressive command of Puritan and Federalist literature gives way to very general notions about our literature and culture, notions formed at a great distance or formed very long ago.
In Delbanco’s opinion, very little of compelling interest was said about the Devil after about 1800, the notion of theological evil evaporates from the book. Henceforth, evil for Delbanco—if not for most Americans—is a social, economic, political, or psychological phenomenon. Here he undertakes to analyze various American cultural conflicts in which one faction or another accused its enemies of being “the Devil incarnate” (even though few believed in the Devil any longer). His intent is to show the malignity of a mind-set that “demonizes” other people because they think or act differently. This rehearsal of “problems” produces a form of self-excoriation now de rigueur amongst the politically correct on the Left.
After 1800, in what social problems could “Satan” now be found? The litany will seem familiar: the oppression of blacks under slavery and racism, the extirpation of peace-loving American Indians, mindless prejudice against immigrant foreigners (especially the Jews), the rise of soulless corporations indifferent to the worker, the pollution of the ocean by industrial criminals, the use of the atom bomb against the defeated Japanese, the McCarthyist oppression of political idealists, the ongoing mistreatment of innocent women, the public indifference to homosexuals with AIDS, etc. Shorter or longer units of the book are devoted to potted treatments of each of these complex social issues, but they are brought up and dropped with such rapidity that all moral complexity is lost and, unwittingly, Delbanco reduces them to black-and-white moral issues.
Why does Delbanco so oversimplify these cultural phenomena? In my view he does so in order to condemn the surviving Christian religious belief in an exterior Satan and to establish his bona fides as politically correct, liberal in every respect, and indubitably devoted to the side of “virtue.” Delbanco needs to establish these credentials because secular intellectuals are not going to like what he has to say at the end of his book. And what he has to say is that the triumph of secular rationalism has been a disaster for modern American culture.
With the loss of a belief in Satan, belief in God disappeared.
In this he is quite right. With the loss of a belief in Satan, belief in God disappeared; and with the loss of belief in the reality of evil, good itself has dissolved into mere ideological self-interest. Everything is now permitted, we are told by those who have shaped contemporary American culture. And who has shaped it? They are the secular intellectuals and “ironists” who think that freedom is the only permissible value in life. They hold that a belief in anything positive is not merely impossible but savagely to be attacked as a form of reactionary susperstition or repressive intolerance. Without the capacity to believe in anything, these ironists have freed themselves from any moral constraint, as Kierkegaard predicted, and are ready to subvert any positive social or moral principle as repressive. The downside, for society, is that secular rationalism has now made it impossible for Americans to make any discriminations of value.
Conservatives, of course, have been saying for a long time that the secular intellectuals’ attack on organized religion was subverting society’s moral foundations. For conservatives the acknowledgment of the reality of sin, corruption, and human evil is preliminary to any kind of moral or social reform. Without it, there can be no religious transcendence. Kierkegaard’s critique of the ironic intellectual temper made many of these points long ago. But it is interesting to hear a secular liberal concede that rationalism has produced the American moral wasteland in which we are all mired.
Many of Delbanco’s points are also identical with those made by Walker Percy in novels like The Last Gentleman, Lancelot, and The Thanatos Syndrome. Percy was of course much influenced by Kierkegaard, as well as by other existentialists like Karl Jaspers and Gabriel Marcel. He is quoted at length by Delbanco so as to diagnose the cultural and moral ills that we all feel so keenly. But Delbanco does not share in Kierkegaard’s or Percy’s Christian faith, so the juxtapositions are merely poignant. Like Gertrude Himmelfarb in The De-moralization of Society, Delbanco rightly diagnoses our cultural dilemma as a loss of the sense of good and evil and the attendant collapse of values. But as a member of the secular rationalist culture he here indicts, Delbanco, like Professor Himmelfarb, can offer no foundation on which the moral reorientation of the culture could be based. For both of them, it would seem, traditional religion is a good thing for society, though “other people” should practice it. But evil, in the long run, is not an intellectual problem; nor can a historicizing scholarship find a means of exorcising it. In this connection Baudelaire was right: the Devil’s cleverest ruse has been to convince us that he really does not exist.
For Delbanco matters can be somewhat repaired if we stop projecting the satanic onto the people who differ from us. Evil must be named and acknowledged, but sin must be first recognized in the self. The idea of the Devil cannot be “used for the purpose of construing the other as a monster.” What sin comes down to for him is “a failure of knowledge—a lack, an obtuseness, a poverty of imagination.” Hereafter, in Delbanco’s view, evil must always be seen in Augustinian terms, as a lack, an imperfection, a void or nothingness, as a manifestation of “our own deficient love, our potential for envy and rancor toward creation.” In this, at least, he strikes me as eminently right. But that will not stop those with a passionate grievance from continuing to demonize the supposed external source of it.
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