Stephen Batchelor, Living with the Devil: A Meditation on Good and Evil (New York: Riverhead Books, 2004) ("Dante's descent into hell suggests that the closer you come to the heart of the demonic, the more you are deprived of light and warmth. You experience alienation and despair. Hell is a metaphor of desolation." "But the devil is more than just a figurative way of describing a compulsive reaction to this contingent world into which we were thrown at birth. There is something demonic about the contingent world itself. This is a place where things we don't want to happen, happen. Cars skid on ice and swerve off roads into trees instead of reaching their destination. Floods, bombs, and earthquakes destroy in moments what years of labor have created." Id. at 15. "The struggle to resist temptation is like the struggle to resist the pull of a tide. And these longings seem but pale shadows of that deeper and darker drift of our existence, which is known as the devil." Id. at 16. "In popular mythology, devils are quixotic and cruel tyrants who relish tormenting their victims. Their vitality obscures how the demonic is subjectively experienced as a state o existential and psychological paralysis. When seized by a demon, one feels suffocated, oppressed, and fatigued as one struggles to be free from what entraps you. The devil is way of talking about that which blocks one's path in life, frustrates one's aspirations, makes one feel stuck, hemmed in, obstructed. While the Hebrew Satan means 'adversary,' the Greek diabolos means 'one who throws something across the path.' In India, Buddha called the devil Mara, which in Pali and Sanskrit means 'the killer.'" Id. at 17. "Nowhere is Mara's treachery more apparent than when he suggests that death is nothing to worry about. For while personifying death, Mara is that quiet, consoling conviction that one will be exempt from it. 'Long is the life span of human beings,' he whispers. 'One should live like a milk-sucking baby.' Mara infantilizes us, makes us crave the blissful forgetfulness of being cuddled and nourished. He jump-starts the furious insistence to have what we want and the whine of thwarted desire. 'Short is the life span of human beings,' counters Buddha. 'One should live as if one's head is on fire.'" Id. at 25-26. "The devil is the contradictoriness of our nature. As soon as we make a foolhardy commitment to 'enlightenment' or 'salvation,' we start being torn apart by diabolic forces we only dimly understand and can scarcely control. For when we choose to follow a path that Buddha described as 'going against the stream,' we choose to confront those fears and desires that hitherto we had either repressed or acted out." Id. at 37.).
Jeffrey Burton Russell, The Devil: Perceptions of Evil from Antiquity to Primitive Christianity (Ithaca & London: Cornell U. Press, 1977, 1987) ("This is a work of history, not of theology. It is a study of the development of a concept in the human mind, not a metaphysical statement.... This book is a history of the personification of evil, which for the sake of clarity I have called 'the Devil'." Id. at 11. "I would like to make completely clear.... It is this: the historical evidence can never be clear enough for us to know what really happened..., but the evidence as to what people believed to have happened is relatively clear. The concept--what people believed to have happened--is more important than what really did happen, because people act upon what they believe to be true." Id. at 12. "The essence of evil is abuse of a sentient being, a being that can feel pain. It is the pain that matters." Id. at 17. "It may also now be time for humanity to consider that its responsibilities go beyond humankind and extend to other beings as well--to animals and even to plants. What is the basis of the assumption that I have the right to cut down trees that were growing before I was born? What gives me the right to deprive animals who live in the forest of their sustenance? The JudeoChristian tradition says that God gave the creatures of the world to Adam's hand for his use; but other traditions have viewed God's purpose differently. At any rate, the continued exploitation of nature by those who have ceased to believe in God or in the Book of Genesis reveals the real basis for this human 'right.' It is might, sheer might and might alone. Because we have the power to exploit other beings to slake our greed, we do it, and until very recently we have done it without thought or consideration. It may be that there is a virtue in the Hindu principle of ahimsa, respect for every living being, for every creature that can feel." Id. at 24-25. "The function of the Devil in the New testament is as counterprinciple to Christ. The central message of he New Testament is salvation: Christ saves us. What he saves us from is the power of the Devil. If the power of the Devil is dismissed, the Christ's saving mission becomes meaningless. The Devil occupies a central position in the New Testament as the chief enemy of the Lord." Id. at 229-230. "What is the function of the Devil today? Is belief in the Devil of positive value, or not? On the one hand, belief in the Devil is harmful, because attributing evil to the Devil may excuse us from examining our own person responsibility for vice, and the responsibility of unjust societies, laws, and governments for suffering.... On the other hand, there is at least one advantage to belief in the Devil. The old liberal belief that man is somehow, for some reason, intrinsically good, and that evils can be corrected by adjusting education, penal laws, welfare arrangements, city planning, and so on, has not proved its validity. Recognition of the basic existence of evil, and consequently of the need for strong efforts to integrate and overcome it, may be socially more useful as well as intellectually and psychologically more true...." "The story of the Devil is grim, and any world view that ignores or denies the existential horror of evil is an illusion. Ivan's one child crying out alone in the darkness is worth the whole creation, is in a sense the whole creation. If any world view...minimizes her suffering, declares it nonexistent, gives it elaborate philosophical justification, or explains it in terms of a greater good, whether the name assigned that good be God or the People, that world view renders her life, and yours, empty and vain. Yet in spite of the reality of evil and amid the unceasing suffering of the world, Marcus Aurelius could write: 'The cosmos is in love with creating whatever is to be. To the cosmos I say then: I will love with you." Id. at 260.).
Jeffrey Burton Russell, A History of Heaven: The Singing Silence (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1997, 1999) (So this posting will not be a total downer: "The central theme of this book is the fulfillment of the human longing for unity, body and soul, in ourselves, with one another, and with the cosmos. The book is aimed at deepening understanding of a blessed otherworld by engaging the Christian tradition of heaven." Id. at xiii. "A normal human being longs for three things that cannot be attained in this life: understanding of self, understanding of others, and understanding of the cosmos. We cannot be sufficient unto ourselves. We are created for the connection with others, for the connection with the cosmos, for the dynamics connection among ourselves and with God. When we ask for connection, we are often met by silence. But if we listen, the silence sings to us." Id. at 3. "Heaven itself cannot be described, but the human concept of heaven can be. Heaven is not dull; it is not static; it is not monochrome. It is an endless dynamic of joy in which one is ever more oneself as one was meant to be, in which one increasingly realizes one's potential in understanding as well as well and is filled and more with wisdom...." Id. at 304. I, personally, find it easier to wrap my mind around the concept of the Devil than around the concept of heaven. I guess I am just a class half empty kind of guy. Then again, like the concept of the Devil, the concept of heaven is a metaphor. So, perhaps it is just that the heaven metaphor itself does not work for me and I need another metaphor to get me there. I find concept of eternal bliss to be rather boring, if not frightening. Then again, this is purely an intellectual exercise for me because, as any one who knows me will tell you, upon my demise I will be most certainly heading in the opposite direction. :-) or :-( ??? Anyway, I not living my life hoping to win the big lottery prize at the end.).
Jeffrey Burton Russell, Lucifer: The Devil in the Middle Ages (Ithaca & London: Cornell U. Press, 1984) ("Evil is real and immediate." Id. at 19. "Real, absolute, tangible evil demands our consideration. It threatens every one of us and all of us together. We avoid examining it at our grave peril. And on no account may we trivialize it. Unless the Devil is perceived as the personification of real evil, he becomes meaningless." "The heart of evil is violence....The action of causing harm is the active evil: it is here that Satan dwells...." Id. at 20. "Moral relativism is fashionable in many circles today, but more profess to believe it than actually behave as if they did. If good and evil truly do not exist, then one has no grounds on which to complain about anything, nothing real to hope for, and one's own ideas and values are arbitrary and artificial and need be taken seriously by no one. Few really practice such a faith; most understand intuitively that real evil exists, that torture, starvation, and cruelty are unacceptable and cannot be ignored. Evil consists of the nexus of suffering and the conscious intent to cause suffering." Id. at 302. "Is the concept of the Devil helpful in understanding evil?" Id. at 302. "Now the value of the [Devil] metaphor may have become diluted and hopelessly trivialized in modern perception. But if the figure--Satan, Lucifer, or whatever its name--has been trivialized, the reality for which it stands is more powerful than ever in the world of Auschwitz and Hiroshima [or, all the "ethnic cleansing' of the twentieth century?]. We may need a new metaphor, but the concept behind the metaphor can seem trivial only to those who lack the courage to face the evil that now threatens to consume the earth. If we hope to survive, this evil must be faced without illusion and without empty words. If the Devil has become an empty word, he must be be eliminated, but we must not eliminate the concept for which he stands." Id. at 303. "The Devil is a metaphor. Even as such he is not to be dismissed, for we have no access to absolute reality and must always rely upon the metaphors that our minds manufacture from sense observations, reason, and unconscious elements. The idea of the Devil is a metaphor; so is the idea of God, in the sense that anyone's view of God--Christian, Muslim, Hindu, or whatever--is a metaphor for that which passes understanding. Physics too is a metaphor. If we transcend the metaphor of the Devil we may arrive at an understanding that is still a metaphor but a metaphor at a deeper level of understanding." Id. at 307. "The most poignant aspect of the problem of evil for...all monotheist religions is the reconciliation of God's power and goodness with the existence of evil." Id. at 307. "The Devil is a metaphor for the evil in the cosmos, an evil that is both in God and opposed by God; he represents the transconscious, transpersonal evil that exceeds the individual human evil will; he is the sign of the radical, unmanageable, yet ultimately transcendable evil in the cosmos. We may now be in need of another name for this force. Let it be so, if one can be found. But let it be one that does not evade, blur, or trivialize suffering." Id. at 311.).
Jeffrey Burton Russell, Mephistopheles: The Devil in the Modern World (Ithaca & London: Cornell U. Press, 1986) ("In the two decades that I have been exploring and reflecting upon this subject [that is, 'diabology'' or 'diabolology'], my views have continued to develop. One learns to know that one cannot know and that in the end all that is left is the desire to know, for wisdom is greater than knowledge, and greater than wisdom is love." Id. at 12 (emphasis added). "Aside from witchcraft, the Protestant Reformation itself was the most important element in the revival of the Devil. The Protestant emphasis upon sol scriptura--the Bible as the only source of authority--meant a due regard for New Testament teaching on Satan. Because of their fear of witchcraft, the reformers went further; despite their enthusiasm for pruning out of tradition any growths that they considered not to be rooted in scripture, they uncritically accepted virtually the entire tradition of medieval diabology. In the long run, the Protestant emphasis upon the absolute sovereignty of God and the refusal to believe that any being could interpose between man and God man may have promoted skepticism about Satan's power, but if so, it took almost centuries to do so." Id. at 30.).
Jeffrey Burton Russell., The Prince of Darkness: Radical Evil and the Power of Good in History (London: Thames and Hudson, 1988) ("Evil is directly experienced and directly intuited. A young woman is beaten; an old man is mugged; a child is raped; a terrorist rips a plane apart in midair; a great nation bombs a civilian population. Those who minds are not bent by personal or societal madness immediately respond to such actions with justifiable anger. You do not make abstract calculations in ethical philosophy when you see a baby being beaten. At the most fundamental level, evil is not abstract. It is real and tangible." Id. at 1. "This direct perception of evil is the most important thing. But standing back to reflect on the general nature of evil is also valuable. What is evil? What do evil actions have in common? Philosophers have traditionally identified three kinds of evil. The first is moral, evil that occurs when an intelligent being knowingly and deliberately inflicts suffering upon another sentient being.... The second kind of evil is he natural, the suffering resulting from processes of nature such as cancers and tornadoes. Some argue abstractly that natural processes should not really be called evil, but this is an evasion, for we perceive them directly as such. Further, natural and moral evil overlap. A child may starve in a famine resulting from a drought, but if I could have saved him or her had I been more open in my bank account, is the evil natural or moral? [Query: Is climate change a natural or a moral evil, or both?] Further, if any intelligent Being is responsible for the cosmos, then the suffering that occurs in the cosmos is that Being's responsibility, and again moral and natural ills converge. The third kind of evil is the metaphysical.... Metaphysical evil is the necessary lack of perfection that exists in any created cosmos, since no cosmos can be perfect as God is perfect." Id. at 1-2. "Whether or not the Devil exists outside the human mind, the concept of the Devil has a long history and the most fruitful approach to it is historical." "The historical approach observes the origins of the concept, sketches its early lines, and shows is gradual development through the ages down to the present. The concept of the Devil is found in only a few religious traditions.... Most religions--from Buddhism to Marxism--have their demons, but only four major religions have has a real Devil. these are Mazdaism (Zoroastrianism), ancient Hebrew religion (but not modern Judasism), Christianity, and Islam. Through these four religions, the tradition of the Devil can be historically traced and defined." Id. at 4. "Globally radical evil expresses itself in genocide, terrorism, and preparations for nuclear war. Individually it appears in actions of callousness and cruelty." Id. at 271. "Radical evil has always existed; it now threatens to overwhelm us entirely." Id. at 271.).
Jeffrey Burton Russell, Satan: The Early Christian Tradition (Ithaca & London: Cornell U. Press, 1981, 1987) ("The problem evil is the theme of this book. Why is evil done to us, and why do we do evil ourselves? No easy answers work; in human affairs the truth is often inversely proportional to the certitude with which it is stated." Id. at 15. "Evil--radical evil--exists, and its existence imposes on us the obligation of attempting to understand it and transform it." Id. at 16. "What history shows is the concept of the Devil, a coherent historical development growing from pre-biblical roots through Hebrew and Christian thought into the present. The essential point of this tradition is that the Devil is a satan, an 'obstructor'' of the will of the good Lord. Satan's basic function is to say, 'My will, not ours, be done.'..." "To deny the existence and central importance of the Devil in Christianity is to run counter to apostolic teaching and to the historical development of Christian doctrine. Since defining Christianity in terms other than these is literally meaningless, it is intellectually incoherent to argue for a Christianity that excludes the Devil. If the Devil does not exist, then Christianity has been dead wrong on a central point right from the beginning." Id. at 25. "Christianity is a moderate dualist religion. The devil has great power to oppose the work of Christ, but his power is always limited and held in check by God." Id. at 32. "The idea that the Devil, the leader of the forces of darkness, pits the heretics against the church has had consequence throughout the ages. If the world is a battleground in a cosmic war between light and darkness, and if the church, the community of light under the leadership of Christ, is at utter war with the community of darkness, it follows that the Christian must give no quarter in battle, for he is at war with total evil." Id. at 36. Notice whether one's thoughts wander to George W. Bush's "axis of evil' and "crusade" utterances. "The final question is the most immediate; what, if anything, does the Devil mean today? What grounds exist today for believing in the Devil? The most fundamental answer is that we are incapable of knowing whether the Devil exists 'objectively' or 'transcendently.' Absolute knowledge is not obtainable. But we can know in a secondary sense. Human experience is the basis of this 'secondary knowledge.' When we have set rationalization and embarrassment aside, most of us will recognize that we have experience in our lives of real evil, not just maladjustment or some other euphemistic dodge of reality, but real, conscious, purposeful hatred of the good and beautiful for their own sake and love of the ugly and twisted for their own sake. And we have the sense that the depth and intensity of this evil, though responding to the corruption that is in all of us, exceeds and transcends what could be expected in an individual human. The persistence of the idea of the Devil indicates that it continues to generate a resonance of experience in many people." Id. at 225.).
David Gordon White, Myths of the Dog-Man, with a foreword by Wendy Doniger (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 1991) ("In all the traditions we will address in these pages, monsters are ideological ... construed as marginal groups that haunt the boundaries of human, civilized space. Their peripheral location does not imply, however, that they have been of marginal concern to humans living within such bounded space. The important, even central role played by these borderline creatures arises from the fact that their existence, real or imagined, has done nothing less than place in question the self-identity of humans. Where does the human begin and the monster leave off? Where does inside meet outside? Where do we become them?" Id. at 1. "One need only reflect, however, in the lot of monsters, enemies, outsiders, or others in our own contemporary context to realize that that they nearly always constitute an anonymous order. In the history of twentieth-century belligerence, for example, we have known, among others, the Krauts, the Japs, the Reds, and the Yellow Peril; closer to home, we find Spics, Wops, Niggers, and Kikes, to say nothing of the dread Wasp. Such caricaturization, of racist and any other ilk, preclude all chances for the individual to emerge." Id. at 47. "At the heart of this perverse state of affairs lies the ancient problem of 'us, not them.' they are the mad dogs, the great satans, the empires of evil, while we are the self-proclaimed divinely ordained dog-catchers or saviors of a threatened world. It is such logic which has permitted such human monsters as Hitler and McCarthy to present themselves as defenders of the general welfare against generally non-existent 'lists of names' and anonymous aggregates. How are we to respond to such violence to others, to 'them', between humans and monsters, or civilization and barbary. Only through an openness to meaningful encounter, to dialogue, and to interaction can we hope to find a path to authentic self-understanding, and hope for the continued existence of our fragile blue planet. So it is that we let ourselves 'see God in the face of the other' and allow the other to figure in the reckonings we make of ourselves--just as we would the God who created us." Id. at 209.).
Heinrich Zimmer, The Kings and The Corpse: Tales of the Soul's Conquest of Evil (Bollingen Series XI), edited by Joseph Campbell (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1948) (From the backcover: "Drawing from Eastern and Western literature, Heinrich Zimmer presents a selection of stories linked together by their common concern for the problem of our eternal conflict with the forces of evil. Beginning with a take for the Arabian Nights this theme unfolds in legends from Irish paganism, medieval Christianity, the Arthurian cycle, and early Hinduism. In retelling of these tales, Zimmer discloses the meanings within their seemingly unrelated symbols and suggests the philosophical wholeness of this assortment of myth.").
I have seen a lot of minor evil, but I have also witnessed some radical evil. Living in twentieth- and twenty-first-century America, how could I not. I am not amazed or puzzled by the existence of evil. Rather I am perplexed by the reality that most of the evil, be it minor or radical, I have witnessed has been perpetrated by individuals, groups, or institutions that ostensibly believe that they are acting for the advancement of the good. That, in a literal sense, god or the right was on their side. They were arrogant and self-deceived, and others had to pay the price for that arrogance, for that self-deception. An Assistant United States Attorney once told me how she was on the side of god. I groan from the weight of the vision of all the lives she was going to wreck. Promising someone a little power over the lives of others and he or she is an ready recruit for the Devil's game.
POSTSCRIPT:
This blog was prepared and scheduled (for today) prior to the mass shooting at the elementary school here in Connecticut on Friday morning. As of this time of this posting, little is known about the motives of the alleged gunman. Perhaps he was an evil person doing evil. Perhaps he was not an evil person, but rather mentally imbalanced person who did evil. I don't know. You don't know. But before we judge, reflect on the possibility that the gunman was merely a seriously mentally imbalanced person (or, as the criminal law might characterize it, a temporarily insane person) who did a very evil act or an act with very evil consequences. Reflect on the possibility that you, or anyone, might lose it for a moment, for an hour, for a day, or whatever, just long enough to do an evil act. Hard as it may be, try to see the gunman as potentially you or me. If we can do that, then the judgment of the gunman may not be so severe, though we will still be greater saddened by Friday's events. However, if we cannot do that, then we need to work on rediscovering the limits of this thing we call our humanity which, I believe, entails having (or striving to have) understanding and compassion for those less fortunate than ourselves. And that includes not just the victims of the gunman, but also the gunman.
I have seen a lot of minor evil, but I have also witnessed some radical evil. Living in twentieth- and twenty-first-century America, how could I not. I am not amazed or puzzled by the existence of evil. Rather I am perplexed by the reality that most of the evil, be it minor or radical, I have witnessed has been perpetrated by individuals, groups, or institutions that ostensibly believe that they are acting for the advancement of the good. That, in a literal sense, god or the right was on their side. They were arrogant and self-deceived, and others had to pay the price for that arrogance, for that self-deception. An Assistant United States Attorney once told me how she was on the side of god. I groan from the weight of the vision of all the lives she was going to wreck. Promising someone a little power over the lives of others and he or she is an ready recruit for the Devil's game.
POSTSCRIPT:
This blog was prepared and scheduled (for today) prior to the mass shooting at the elementary school here in Connecticut on Friday morning. As of this time of this posting, little is known about the motives of the alleged gunman. Perhaps he was an evil person doing evil. Perhaps he was not an evil person, but rather mentally imbalanced person who did evil. I don't know. You don't know. But before we judge, reflect on the possibility that the gunman was merely a seriously mentally imbalanced person (or, as the criminal law might characterize it, a temporarily insane person) who did a very evil act or an act with very evil consequences. Reflect on the possibility that you, or anyone, might lose it for a moment, for an hour, for a day, or whatever, just long enough to do an evil act. Hard as it may be, try to see the gunman as potentially you or me. If we can do that, then the judgment of the gunman may not be so severe, though we will still be greater saddened by Friday's events. However, if we cannot do that, then we need to work on rediscovering the limits of this thing we call our humanity which, I believe, entails having (or striving to have) understanding and compassion for those less fortunate than ourselves. And that includes not just the victims of the gunman, but also the gunman.
