Religion: The Devil

Satan, I know thy strength, and thou

know'st mine,

Neither our own, but given . . .

—Paradise Lost

When the Devil comes up in conversation, modern Christians have a tendency to tuck up their skirts and scurry to the shelter of safer doctrinal topics like the brotherhood of man or the Sermon on the Mount. In a book called Satan (Sheed & Ward; $5.50), newly published in the U.S., a group of scholars under the editorship of Father Bruno de Jesus-Marie, a French Carmelite, have made a frontal attack on the question of what the Devil is and what he should mean to a Christian.

The 30 essays in the book jump from the theological aspects of evil to the psychology of witchcraft and demonic possession. Tolerantly and patiently written, they draw in their sum an interesting picture of a basic Christian doctrine which has had more than its share of rough handling.

The idea of an Evil Being is as basic as belief in a supreme God. Devils were a keystone of belief among the Aztecs, the Assyrians and the ancient Chinese. In the Buddhist scriptures, the Devil Mara appears at the head of an army of demons with "bodies of flame . .. with the skin of oxen, asses, boars . . . spitting snake venom—and swallowing balls of fire."

The Christian view of Satan is no less fanciful. In Dante's Divine Comedy he is meticulously described as a giant with three heads (colored red, yellow and black respectively). In the hands of Milton and Goethe, he became successively a tragic hero and a debonair, reasonable-seeming man of the world. At 20th century masquerade parties and in subway headache ads, the Devil generally wears a red union suit and wields a large pitchfork.

Holes in a Sponge. This popularization has only made his real nature more obscure. Satan, as his current biographers believe, is literally "a fallen angel," a pure spirit without a body who tempts man to sin. He is not the principle of Evil, since Evil is itself a negative quality, i.e., merely the lack of Good in God's imperfect creatures. As French Historian Henri-Irénée Marrou explains it, it is like the holes in a sponge. "Evil," he continues, "is something that need not have existed ... It reveals in all its depth and ambivalence the mystery of liberty . . . Satan, an angel, is the free being who first chose to move away from the Source of all being and towards the nothingness from which he had been drawn."

True to this idea, early Christian art portrayed the Devil as a fine-looking angel, with only a slightly dark coloring to suggest his fall from grace. The reason for this characterization: "True Christianity's . . . refusal to give a positive character to evil."

Up to modern times, Catholics and Protestants generally kept up a lively acquaintance with the Devil. The 16th century Catechism of St. Peter Canisius mentions the Devil more often than it mentions Christ. Martin Luther thought of Satan as a very personal antagonist—one real enough to hurl an inkpot at, as legend has it he did.