Chronicles of the Beast

Henry Ansgar Kelly
SATAN
A biography
360pp. Cambridge University Press. £35 (paperback, £12.99); US $65 (paperback, $19.99).
0 521 84339 1

Robert Lima
STAGES OF EVIL
Occultism in Western theater and drama
329pp. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press. $55; distributed in the UK by Eurospan. £38.50.
0 8131 2362 3

David Brakke
DEMONS AND THE MAKING OF THE MONK
Spiritual combat in early Christianity
308pp. Harvard University Press. £31.95
(US $48.50).
0 674 01875 3

Alain Boureau
SATAN THE HERETIC
The birth of demonology in the medieval West
Translated from the French by
Teresa Lavender Fagan
250pp. University of Chicago Press. $30; distributed in the UK by Wiley. £19.
0 22606 748 3
 
 
Railing against Graham Greene’s tendency to glamorize evil in the New Yorker in 1948, George Orwell wrote that Greene “appears to share the idea, which has been floating around ever since Baudelaire, that there is something rather distingué in being damned”. Trying to persuade people otherwise is a thankless task. As anybody who has seen the recent Meryl Streep movie The Devil Wears Prada knows, Satan is back in vogue.

It is unsurprising, then, that some of the Devil’s sparkle has rubbed off in Western universities. The past two decades have witnessed an efflorescence of academic studies in witchcraft, demonology and the occult. Perhaps the volume of works about the Devil is appropriate: when Jesus met a man possessed by an evil spirit and asked the demon to reveal itself, it replied, “My name is Legion: for we are many”.

In Satan: A biography, the American scholar and former Jesuit Henry Ansgar Kelly talks of “the unjustifiably bad press given to Satan over the centuries”. This is not a new idea – more than a hundred years ago, Samuel Butler jotted in his notebook, “An apology for the devil: it must be remembered that we have heard only one side of the case; God has written all the books”. But Kelly’s use of the word “unjustifiably” betrays his innate sympathy for his subject: he is of the Devil’s party. In this succinct study, he adopts the role of Satan’s unofficial spin doctor. The result is entertaining as well as rigorous.

He is writing in a robust tradition. In 1726, Daniel Defoe published his satirical work, The Political History of the Devil. In the introduction he wrote, “I seem inclin’d to speak favourably of Satan, to do him justice, and to write his story impartially”. This deliberately reversed the beginning of Paradise Lost, where Milton famously sets out to “justify the ways of God to men”. (Milton subsequently receives a kicking in Defoe’s work: “Mr Milton has indeed told us a great many merry things of the Devil”; “neither do I think that the great Milton, after all his fine Images and lofty Excursions upon the Subject [of solving the Difficulties of Satan’s Affairs], has left it one jot clearer than he found it”.) While he acknowledges their shared purpose, Kelly mentions Defoe only in passing – which is a shame, given the jovial mettle that animates The Political History of the Devil, as well as the theological teaser about Satan’s nature as a rebel angel that Defoe pithily raises (“How came seeds of crime to rise in the Angelic Nature?”).

Instead, Kelly focuses on Satan’s appearances in the Old and New Testaments and early post-biblical Christian writings by, among others, Origen of Alexandria. What could have been a crawling survey is in fact a lively and sane account that does much to rehabilitate Satan’s reputation. Kelly’s conclusions will surprise many. He begins with the bald statement that there is no devil in Genesis (the identification of the serpent with Satan came much later). He points out that the Hebrew word “satan” simply means “adversary”: it is in this guise that Satan appears in the Old Testament, in Numbers, Job and Zechariah, where he is identified as one of the “sons of God” responsible for testing the devotion of mankind. In the Old Testament, Satan exists as God’s assistant rather than his enemy, in a role that Kelly calls “Celestial Prosecutor against Humanity”. In short, he undertakes dirty work on the Lord’s behalf.

In the New Testament, his role shifts, but not dramatically. Satan retains his job as a shady functionary of God, testing Jesus during his forty-day sojourn in the wilderness. After cajoling him to turn rocks into bread, the Devil shows Christ the entirety of the world, which he claims to control and which he offers to hand over in exchange for homage. Who gave the world’s kingdoms to the Devil? “There is only one possible answer: God”, argues Kelly. “In other words, we must assume that Satan is somehow God’s Vicar-General on Earth.” In the later books of the New Testament, Satan spends his time luring Christians away from their faith, fulfilling the same function as he did in Job. He is not yet the scintillating overlord of evil that dominates popular imagination today.

Most significantly, perhaps, Kelly debunks the notion of “a primeval Luciferian fall”: in Revelation, Satan’s demise is clearly set in the present or the future and the narrative foretells the end of his role as the accuser of mankind. Kelly also makes clear that there is no single figure of the Antichrist in the Bible, nor is there a rebellious Lucifer (rather, Lucifer, the Morning Star, is a positive image associated with Christ in Revelation).

It was not until the 220s ad, when Origen of Alexandria wrote his De Principiis, that Satan started to resemble the Devil we know. Origen twisted the meaning of Isaiah 14:12 (“How is Lucifer, who used to arise in the morning, fallen from Heaven!”), which referred to the King of Babylon, into an opaque reference to Satan. Origen’s notion of a rebel Lucifer, of a sinful Angel cast down from Heaven before the world was created, meant that Satan could have infiltrated Eden in the form of the serpent, thus being responsible for the fall of mankind. Kelly calls this Satan’s “new biography”. It is exactly the kind of “unfavourable media attention” he wishes to dispel.

Throughout, Kelly displays impressive control of his material, attuned to nuances in Hebrew, Greek and Latin. He makes a convincing case that the Satan of the Bible is a very different figure from the cloven-footed, sulphur-snorting Beelzebub that emerged in later centuries. It is fascinating to discover, for example, that Satan was not associated with Hell until hundreds of years after the death of Christ. While Kelly warns that we must not view the past through the lens of the present, however, he is guilty of some anachronistic comparisons of his own in his zeal to pep up his account. He compares the saints who battle with the Devil in the medieval classic The Golden Legend to “that great fictional Defense Attorney, Perry Mason: they always win”. Later, Kelly facetiously refers to Satan as “the CEO of Evil, Inc”. I warmed to this colloquial style, which seems to be pitched at an audience of students with short attention spans. But many readers will not.

More fundamentally, Kelly has only written a partial biography of Satan. The treatment of Satan in the Bible is complex; the later sections of Kelly’s book, which sketch Satan’s after-lives over the past millennium, feel simplistic. The thirty-page survey of the Devil’s representation in literature and the visual arts, for instance, is far too skimpy: an up-to-date history of Satan’s relations with artists and writers is still crying out to be written.

Robert Lima’s Stages of Evil, an account of playwrights’ fascination with the supernatural from Euripides to Arthur Miller, is an example of how not to write about dramatic representations of Satan. “To my knowledge, no other critical study has ranged as widely in time or assessed so many works on the subject of occult thematics in Western theater and drama”, Lima boasts. Sadly, the author has been unable to draw his ranging research together with any success: the book is a baggy mess. Lima touches on several loosely connected themes (Dionysus, the Harlequin figure of commedia dell’arte, the “Mouth of Hell” motif in medieval theatre, lycanthropy, witches on the English stage, Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones). The analysis of each is workmanlike and plodding, prone to vaporous nonsense (“The masks of Harlequin are manifestations of the primal elements of human nature itself”) and overlong synopses (a chapter on The Crucible barely moves beyond a retelling of the story).

David Brakke’s Demons and the Making of the Monk, by contrast, is a very sharply focused study of spiritual combat between monks and demons in fourth- and early fifth-century Egypt. Satan takes a back seat in this story; Brakke concentrates instead on the emergence of the monastic project (“The monk is now such a familiar figure that it is difficult to remember that he did not always exist”), and examines how conflict with demons was essential to the formation of this freshly minted religious identity.

Brakke’s dense, often abstract argument is written for the specialist, unlike Kelly’s biography of Satan. The book comes to life, though, in the second half, which is devoted to analysis of the monks’ graphic stories about their encounters with demons. The appearance of an Ethiopian demon, for example, in the Lausiac History, a collection of tales about Christians in Egypt written by Palladius, Bishop of Helenopolis in Asia Minor, around 420, is a tantalizing glimpse into the psychological combat in which the monks were mired.

Palladius records meeting a monk called Pachon, who was attacked by a demon that visited him in the form of a sexy Ethiopian maiden (a forerunner, perhaps, of Coleridge’s dulcimer-playing Abyssinian damsel). After trying to resist the demon’s lap dance for twelve years, Pachon became so despondent that he attempted suicide by wandering naked into a hyenas’ den. When the hyenas refused to kill him, but rather licked him all over, Pachon returned to his cell, only to be attacked by the demon “even more harshly than before”. In despair, Pachon stumbled into the desert, where he picked up an asp and placed it on his genitals, hoping to die from the snakebite. Although the asp refused to strike, the action seemed to do the job, for soon afterwards the demon stopped troubling him.

Brakke skilfully relates the appearance of black demons to the threat posed by the military power of the darker-skinned Ethiopian people to Egyptians at this time. He also makes a sound case for reading such stories from a psychological point of view: the demons represent aspects of a monk’s character (sexual desire, for example) that were deemed incompatible with an ascetic lifestyle.

Alain Boureau’s Satan the Heretic, an excellent account of the swift development of Scholastic demonology during the thirteenth century, has a similarly sure grasp of anecdotal detail that enlivens potentially dusty arguments. In 1308, for instance, Guichard, Bishop of Troyes, followed the instructions of a demon he had invoked and created a wax figurine in the image of Queen Jeanne de Navarre, wife of Philip the Fair, whom he wanted dead. He baptized the figure in her name before stabbing it, an action that supposedly hastened the Queen’s death. The incident exemplifies popular belief in the proximity of demons and recalls the famous story of Gregory the Great, also related by Boureau, about a nun who ate a lettuce leaf without making a precautionary sign of the cross over her food: she was immediately possessed by a demon hidden in the leaf.

It also exemplifies Boureau’s argument that a sudden obsession with the Devil emerged between 1280 and 1330, after a period of several centuries during which “the Devil appeared to have been defeated or confined”. Pope John XXII was so concerned by the sudden rash of demonic stories that in 1320 he consulted ten theologians to classify the invocation of demons as heresy. The repercussions of their decision resonated down the centuries, ultimately paving the way for the crazed persecution of sorcerers that began with the publication of the Malleus Maleficarum at the end of the fifteenth century.

Boureau’s sharp analysis of the thirteenth-century “return of the Devil” is a reminder that for long periods Satan has slackened his hold over humanity. Over the past half-century, though, the Devil has rarely been out of fashion, and today he is no longer a figure of fear. Mick Jagger, following Bulgakov, pinpointed this shift when he sang about the Devil as “a man of wealth and taste”. When Orwell sneered that Greene had reduced hell to “a sort of high-class nightclub”, his analysis was absolutely on the money: nowadays, everyone wants an entrée into the hottest club around.

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Alastair Sooke works for the Daily Telegraph.