Subjects of the modern, neoliberal order have little idea of what is enjoined upon them, apart from the burden of being maximally “themselves.” Duties beyond or superior to this tend to wield minimal influence and often are little more than hating the “right” people. Collectively we have little more than the negative ideal. “Don’t be evil,” the Google motto once admonished, though ironically — and suspiciously — this has been jettisoned. Evil is simultaneously suspected of being ideological dead weight imposed upon us by regressive forces in culture even as it is a possibility we fear and revile.
We remember images of the 20th century’s barbarism and shudder, hoping that the contemporary world will not sink to such depths. Much of the time we are confident we could never perpetrate such horrors. The fear creeps upon us from time to time, however, that we are in fact capable of such depravity, but the possibility disturbs us, and we suppress it from our consciousness. Our staunch instrument of comparison is some grotesque archetype – Adolf Hitler, for example – against whom every actual or potential ill is measured.
Why is it, though, that we routinely index evil in personal terms? Though there is a sense in which we recognize a natural disaster such as a hurricane or wildfire as an evil, we don’t tend to attribute malice to it. We understand these are forces that intend nothing, that cannot bear responsibility or culpability for their actions. And yet a protest arises in us as we insist on an answerability for these evils. There is an uncanny element to evil that seems to demand a kind of agency to be described rightly.
Martin Heidegger claimed that philosophy lost its way when the distinction between Being and beings was forgotten. It is arguably necessary for Christian theology to distinguish between Evil and evils. The apocalyptic witness of the New Testament testifies to this distinction in its depiction of both sins and the tyrannical power, Sin. Emerging from such a recognition, two recent books address the Devil’s place in understanding evil.
In The Persistence of Evil: A Cultural, Literary, and Theological Analysis, Fintan Lyons examines how incredulity toward the Devil became common and yet, despite this, how he has never left the Western symbolic universe. The problem of evil for Lyons is more than a question of theodicy. The issue is too profound and too significant to leave to the abstractions of philosophy, as it doesn’t concern a possible universe or a Prime Mover: It concerns our actual world and the God of the gospel. The problem of evil is the mystery of iniquity, the absurd existence of enmity against God and the distortion and degradation of creatures made by that God for blessing.
Lyons surveys the development of the Church’s understanding of the Devil, beginning with Scripture’s treatments of the Enemy before scanning centuries of systematic reflection upon its witness. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas are pivotal thinkers of the diabolical, codifying the nature of evil as lack and as parasitic upon the good that God created, with monastics and mystics of the medieval period devising strategies for countering evil’s influence.[1]
Considering the Enlightenment, Lyons notes that while Satan might have been formally banished by many of its thinkers, the “fundamental instinct for belief resulted in a resurgence of belief expressed in a more disguised way in literature” (197). Disembedding the Devil from the foreground allowed him to hide in plain sight everywhere and to assume new guises. The Romantic movement, for example, offered a reinterpretation of Satan as the Father of liberty, as in Victor Hugo’s “Le fin du Satan,” and as a Prometheus figure, betrayed by God, as in Charles Baudelaire’s “Litanies to Satan.” Dialectically, however, it was also Baudelaire who gave us the great aphorism, “The cleverest ruse of the Devil is to persuade you he does not exist” (201).
The hubris of this age exploded, however, with the First World War. The devastation of that war and of other subsequent horrors in the decades to come made apparent an emptiness and hopelessness that were not finally reducible to immanent features. For many people, these were revelatory of spiritual realities that had been dismissed or neglected, though others, “lacking religious conviction, lacked also the language which could have identified a conflict that went deeper than the political or economic” (223). Many of the voices Lyons marshals to chronicle the 20th century’s evils, however, such as Wilfred Owen, Primo Levi, and Hannah Arendt, “could take their reflections only so far if they lacked the transcendent perspective and the language that Christian faith could provide,” to name the demonic depth dimension of these evils (243).
This brings us to exorcism in the contemporary era. The phenomenology of exorcism recognizes an uncannily personal dimension to the encounter, an inhuman third element besides the exorcist and the one afflicted. Joseph Ratzinger’s remarks about what is between the poles of the I and the Thou being “a category that can help us to understand more exactly the power of demons, whose existence is … independent of such categories” (283) illuminates this third element. The Devil most accurately “is the un-Person, the disintegration and collapse of personhood,” which is why “he characteristically appears without a face and why his being unrecognizable is his real strength” (284). Nevertheless, the demonic evil that torments human subjects can be addressed; it bears an answerability as though it were a subject. The confrontation with evil may, in emulation of the Lord Jesus, need the naming of the Evil One to be effective.
Lyons does not offer a solution that synthesizes the world’s evils and the goodness of God, as any such attempt only ever trivializes both evil and God. The persistence of the Devil in this age is a nightmarish vestige that will ultimately be eradicated with the eschaton. He is right to focus attention upon Karl Barth’s doctrine of das Nichtige (“the Nothingness”) in his conclusion as a bridge out of his focus upon the un-personality of the Devil and into the absurd, uncanny continuance of evil in the wake of Jesus’ resurrection.
Declan Kelly’s The Defeat of Satan: Karl Barth’s Three-Agent Account of Salvation devotes sustained attention to this concept as it appears in Barth’s soteriology. Kelly also recognizes the importance of the Devil for contemporary theology, as he begins by noting how 1 John 3:8 explicitly identifies the purpose of Jesus’ coming as “destroy[ing] the works of the Devil” (1). Though not alone, Karl Barth was a pivotal thinker in “refut[ing] the assumption that a ‘theology without Satan’ was the only reasonable option” for contemporary theology (2). The young Barth unashamedly connected “the immoral activity of the world to demonic activity,” even claiming, as Lyons’s witnesses do, that demonic forces instigated the Great War (6). This attention to the Devil persisted into his mature dogmatics, where the contest with Satan is a central feature of what salvation is.
The apocalyptic tenor of the New Testament and the fact that humanity’s plight is retroactively grasped in its solution led him to see that Jesus’ resurrection being the solution “engenders a ‘cosmological apocalyptic’ character of the plight” (12). While forensic elements are present in Barth’s account of salvation, the martial language of his doctrine of reconciliation shows that it isn’t solely or finally a juridical matter but one of battle and of triumph. Though other motifs are present in the biblical witness, “the three-agent conflict simply is the heart of the matter,” with this motif “absorb[ing] all others and help[ing] to make sense of them” (17).
The forensic doesn’t go far enough, as the death of Christ shatters “a legal relationship fatal to the human being,” of imprisonment “under the powers of darkness … of Satan the accuser … of sin … of the law as it is itself under the power of sin and the devil” (88-89). This nexus of concepts Barth dubbed, in imitation of the void described in Genesis 1, “the Nothingness.”
The Nothingness does not properly exist as creatures do because it is only a consequence of God’s holy No, as that which God rejects (34-35). Similar to the traditional notion of sin as privation, it mimics with distortion and degradation the good things God has created, but Barth is eager to differentiate it from a good thing that became corrupted. The Nothingness, for him, has only ever been malign and parasitic, and only has its sham existence due to God’s potent repudiation of it.
God’s judgment upon Nothingness is aptly described as his judgment upon Satan’s world as it is enslaved and oppressed by Satan (51-79). God’s election of Jesus Christ has as its end fellowship with his human covenant partner but of necessity involves overcoming the Nothingness that threatens them and their world. Warfare against the Nothingness continues as temptation is the Nothingness acting out its undead existence; resisting temptation and working against injustice is a participation in Christ’s combat against the Nothingness. As Lyons noted, the satanic does not always bear Satan’s name but does bear his imprint.
Barth’s account is commendable for its unflinching portrayal of evil’s absurdity and how it complicates all categories we would use to describe it; evil is never allowed even a moment of rational grounding. But does this account not introduce an unnecessary tension within God? Why, he asks, is the rejection of Nothingness the “alien” work of God? Why would this not be the proper work of God (42)? Does God’s alien work entail an interior division he must overcome (123)?
Barth was sensitive to and conversant with the tradition and was prepared to criticize his Reformed tradition. He criticized it for being “far too moralistic and spiritualistic” and “blind to this aspect of the Gospel,” that of Jesus’ works as “objective manifestations of His character as the Conqueror not only of sin but also of evil and death, as the Destroyer of the destroyer” (14). Indeed, this emphasis is “not a relapse behind the Reformers” but “a corrective renewal of thoughts that are inalienable not only to the Eastern church, but to the whole Christian church” (16).
Indeed, these works together showcase how the Devil crosses confessional lines as a truly Christian concern. Lyons ably shows how the idea of the Devil persists despite a decline in belief in him, but his book would be improved by more material theologizing. Kelly demonstrates the centrality of the Devil to the 20th century’s greatest dogmatician, but draws attention to tensions within his account that require further investigation. Both agree that modernity does not rule out the Devil, as no era’s presuppositions can invalidate that to which Scripture bears witness. An understanding of evil that does not include the Devil stops short of the reality that Jesus Christ is redeeming. Acknowledging the Devil cannot positively guide us, but it may lead us to consider a depth to the world and ourselves that is concealed and denied by malignant forces within our culture. Ultimately, both urge us to take the Devil seriously and to be vigilant against his wiles, but to take Jesus Christ even more seriously.
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[1] A problem arises, unfortunately, when Lyons invokes a familiar story of Protestant desacralization that risks being reductive due to its brevity. He isn’t wrong to emphasize ritual’s “importance in relation to coping with fundamental evil” (257), but the significance and possibility of the individual Christian’s ability to withstand the Devil in the Spirit seems unduly downgraded such that the priestly ministry of exorcism is treated as seemingly the one reliable defense against the Devil’s incursions. The sacramental life of the church is important, of course, but the underrating of the layperson risks trivializing the dignity and authority that is shared with all who are united to Jesus Christ through faith. These are important points when trying to understand evil because it is the nature of the thing being studied to reinforce our prejudices and to locate wrong only in our Others.
Ian Olson is a Guest Writer. His work has appeared on Covenant, Mockingbird, and Mere Orthodoxy.
