Chapter 1. The Devil: The Basic Idea
Most or all of us have a mental image of the Devil, often taken from the genre of cartoon caricature, a figure with a pitchfork, horns, a tail, and cloven hooves for feet. We know that he lives in Hell or is bound there but he seems to pop up in many other places, so if he is confined, he clearly has a day pass at least. Another part of the image is that he is a tempter and seducer who encourages us to give in to our darker desires or puts suggestions in our minds. Today in Western countries most do not believe in the actual existence of such a being but there are more who still do than one might think. Among those who take the concept seriously some think of him as having an actual physical existence (although that is now rare) while others believe that although an actual person, he is by nature a spiritual and immaterial being or entity. The commonest view of him, particularly among those obliged to think about him in a professional capacity, is that he is a kind of personification or objectification of the dark side of human nature and the human capacity for evil and cruelty. What is striking is how familiar the ideas and images are and how much people know, or believe they know about him even if they do not believe in his existing in some sense. This knowledge though is partial and it pays to elaborate the essential features of the Devil and his main qualities. Who or what is he? What is his nature and where did he come from? What part does he play in the larger story in which he is a character, the Christian and Islamic account of the world?
The fundamental point about him is that he is evil. He is without redeeming quality or virtues, at least as he was originally thought of and imagined. (This changed later, as we shall see). What though is evil? All human beings agree that there is such a thing and can give examples of it. Trying to define it is more difficult and has taxed many of the greatest minds. That does not stop most people from being sure of its existence and certain that they know what it is, even if they can’t put that understanding into words. To paraphrase a US Supreme Court Justice, we may not be able to say what it is but we know it when we see it. The common element to most descriptions is suffering. Evil is the part of life that involves pain, loss, and deprivation. That however is only the start of the challenge of definition. In practice most people who have thought about the problem of evil have concluded that there are two kinds of category of things that we can attach that label to. The first is that of what we may call natural evil, the suffering, pain and loss that results from features of the natural world such as disasters and catastrophic events, age and illness, or accidents. For some this would include things such as the suffering and pain that is part of nature, as in the relations between predator and prey or host and parasite for example. Evil in that sense is pervasive and inescapable. It is also natural in a very specific sense: it does not derive from human beings or their actions and choices (rather it is something that happens to them) and as such it is not the product of willed choice (at least, not in the common contemporary view). However, there is a second category of evil. That is the bad things, the pain, suffering and loss that result from human choice and which has therefore been willed by human beings (in the sense that a human being had to act purposefully for it to happen, so it was brought about by an act of will, will being the active part of the mind).
This leads in turn to another distinction. In many cases (most philosophers would say all) the people whose choices bring about the evil do not intend that choice knowing that it will result in evil and doing it for that reason, precisely to bring about that evil. Instead, they will or intend something else without realising that doing so will bring about evil or they know it will bring about evil but believe that will be necessary for something good to happen, which will outweigh the bad. In some instances however, we have what seems to most people to be radical evil, the bringing about of bad things deliberately and as an end in itself. What we have here is acts that are motivated not through following a misguided understanding of the good or because doing them will ultimately lead to a better end but rather by pure spite and malice. This is how we often understand gratuitous cruelty and sadism where the cruelty has no obvious or necessary connection to any goal or purpose, however misguided: it is an end in itself. This radical evil, pure malice, is not part of the natural or non-human world most of us now believe. Rather, it is distinctively human. If so where does it come from, and what does it say about us as a type of being, and our nature? This is where the Devil comes in. Before he was invented or discovered the common practice was to make no distinction between the human world and the natural, in this or in other respects. Humans were part of a natural world and qualities that they had were shared by the rest of the natural order, including the capacity to cause evil. What appeared was a way of thinking where humans were seen as separate from the natural world but this made the question of why radical evil existed more acute. The answer was that there was a being or entity who caused it.
The second feature of the Devil as a concept is that he is an entity, of immense power and ability to affect the world. Because his power is so universal and profound, he must be a spiritual being, even if he also has a physical nature, because only a being that was spiritual and not limited by the constraints of time and matter could have such extraordinary power and capacity. He is the cause of evil, the reason why it exists, for some only in the human world, for many in both the human and natural worlds. This makes evil problematic and, in a sense, unnatural: it is something that should not exist (as opposed to being regrettable but inevitable). The Devil is the explanation for this, the cause of it. He is an entity or being or force precisely because he has a will. It is his actions and choices that result in and bring about evil and suffering. If not then he would be a part of the world and evil would also be a part of that order. The concept means that as a spiritual entity he is active in the world we know and experience and has an effect on it but he is also not a part of it, even though he exists within it and operates upon it. He has come from elsewhere and probably predates it, he is an outside force that marrs or distorts the world but is not himself a part of it.
The fact of his having a will is to say that he has the capacity for choice, reflection, and understanding: he is not an automaton or creature that is guided by instinct and can do only what he does. He chooses or wills what he does. This brings us to the third and central quality of the Devil. He is malevolent. That is, he consciously, knowingly, and deliberately wills the bad. He has an evil will. He is in some sense a personification or embodiment of pure unadulterated spite and malice. For a whole tradition of philosophy from Plato onwards the idea of malevolence is at least problematic and more likely nonsense or incoherent. For Plato and those who agree with him, it is impossible to be truly malevolent. That is because in this way of thinking evil as a quality has no positive actual existence of its own; it is only the radical weakening or absence of the good. Since one cannot will a negative or absence it follows that we cannot actually will or chose evil: what we do is to will a mistaken notion of the good or an incorrect means of realising it. The contrary view is that even if we grant the argument that evil is only the absence or destruction of the good it is still possible to be malevolent because we can imagine someone who hates the good precisely because it is good and wishes and wills its destruction. This is malevolence. Interestingly, many of the most arresting expressions of this view come from authors who have portrayed malevolent characters or actions that are purely malevolent in their motivation. William Shakespeare is one of the best examples as several of his most memorable and powerful characters are malevolent – Iago, Richard III, Aaron the Moor to give just three examples. Another directly relevant example is that of Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost, with Milton using his soliloquies to explore the nature of malevolent motivation. Most readers find such portrayals persuasive and plausible, which suggests that as far as human experience goes Plato was missing something. There is a rival tradition in philosophy that asserts both the existence of evil and the need for the concept to understand or categorise certain kinds of action and choice. Believing in the possibility of evil and malevolence does not mean that one therefore has to believe in the Devil, a malevolent power who is the source of evil, but it does make that belief possible. Moreover, the formulation of the idea of a malevolent being was a key part of the origins of both the separation between human action and natural action and also the problematisation of evil as something produced by the choice of acting agents.
All accounts of the Devil have these two features, that he is a spiritual being or force and that he is malevolent. At this point though ideas about his nature diverge and from the beginning there are three different views of his nature and existence. The orthodox view is that he is an actual person, a being with a personal identity. This is similar to the Christian conception of Jesus, who as the Son is God but also a distinct person, one of the three persons of the trinity. So in this way of thinking, which is the predominant one among both Christians and Muslims for most of history, the Devil, (Satan or Iblis) is an actual individual being and person in the same way as you or I even if he is spiritual rather than physical – he is immensely more powerful and also immortal but he is not different in his nature and he exists as an actual person with a name, an identity and a history or biography. It is because he is a person that we can speak of his having a will and a purpose. A different way of understanding him, which has become widespread in more recent times, is that he is an entity but not a person in the usual understanding of the term. According to this he is not a person but a personification, of the dark side of human nature and the human mind. In this way of thinking it is each of us who may sometimes display malevolence and knowingly will the bad.
The malevolent will is a feature or quality of all human beings, at least potentially, even if it is not always realised. What personification of this dark part of our nature, thinking of it as a separate thing, does is to make that reality both more solid and at the same time easier to grasp or understand. It also fits in to the idea that we must resist or deny and control this aspect of our being, which otherwise can break free and come to dominate our will and decisions, with disastrous results. There is a third position, which combines the first two. According to this, the Devil is a person or being but he exists within our minds or works through us and our actions and choices. This can be combined with the idea of the collective unconscious, the notion of a kind of shared group mind at the unconscious and unarticulated level, something that is common to all human beings and can act both through particular individuals and large groups or even the entire population of the world. The Devil is then the dark side or Shadow of that collective subconscious, the force within not only each mind and self but the collective totality of all human minds that wills or desires destructiveness and hate.
The fourth essential feature of the Devil is that he does not exist on his own but in opposition to God, in fact it is that that defines what he is (in the same way that for thinkers who follow Plato evil can only be defined in contrast or opposition to good). He is the adversary, the enemy of God, his opponent throughout all times and in all places and in the hearts and minds of all human beings everywhere and in every age. He seeks constantly to subvert God’s purpose and to defeat it, this is his only goal. Himself forever damned and cast out by God, he seeks constantly to corrupt the divine creation and to seduce others so that they share in his damnation. Given that he appears mainly in monotheistic religions this raises obvious challenges, which have taxed the wits and intellects of theologians and apologists for centuries.
The obvious problem is this: if he is the adversary of God and his opponent then whence comes his power – how is he able to do this, and why? This is not a problem in the first religious tradition to formulate the idea of an eternal malevolent power, the old Persian religion of Zoroastrianism. There the Good Lord and the Dark Lord are equal and coeval powers matched against each other in conflict but each with their own power. In the three monotheistic faiths this does not apply, as in all of them God is omnipotent (all powerful) which logically means that if the Devil has power and works against God then it is God Himself who has given him that power and allows him to do this. Two questions follow from this. The first is how to make sense of this, if we can. The other is to ask why then the three monotheistic faiths at one time all shared the idea of a malevolent adversary to God and his will. If that notion causes such intellectual difficulty then why have it?
The answer is that it is difficult for monotheistic religions to do without some notion of an adversary because it helps to deal with what is otherwise a huge challenge to the monotheistic way of thinking. This is the problem of divine justice or theodicy, which arises because of the way all three faiths attribute two qualities to God: he is all powerful (omnipotent) and he is perfectly good and always and only wills the good (he is omnibenevolent). The difficulty is how to reconcile these given the undeniable existence of suffering, and even more troublingly, of deliberate cruelty and malice. How can the existence of these things be made compatible with God being both all-powerful and perfectly good? This is also connected to the fact that in the monotheistic faiths God is transcendent – he is not a part of the world because the world derives its existence from him and he existed before it and beyond it. This is because if the universe has an existence independent of and prior to God’s will then he is not omnipotent. (This is radically different from the divine powers of other traditions who order the world and govern it but are also part of it and in which the universe existed before the gods and independently of them – they shape and guide it but do not create it). This means that God, the divine power, has created the world (and even, in orthodox Islamic theology, continues constantly to recreate it at every instant of time). If that is so, then why if he is all good, did he create a world with suffering and evil? And why does he allow it to continue?
There are several possible answers to that challenge which, however, are incompatible with the monotheistic faiths. One is to say that he could have created a perfect world and could end evil but chooses not to. This means that he is not benevolent, indeed in the extreme case it means he is actually malevolent so that we live in a world created by an evil power that does not wish us well (this is the view of Gnosticism). Another possibility is that he is benevolent and wished to create a perfect world and wishes to eliminate suffering and evil but is unable to do so or is incompetent. In that case he is not omnipotent. It could be that he neither wishes to eliminate evil nor is he able to do so but, in that case, he is not God. There are only two ways to resolve this and save the combination of omnipotence and omnibenevolence. The first is the one that Judaism eventually arrived at and which many Muslim theologians advocate. That is that God is indeed responsible for all of the suffering and evil in the world and he...