To be frank, I haven’t read any of the previous three of Jeffery Burton Russell’s books which together comprise a “history of the Devil” from antiquity through the twentieth century. I started at the end, because the only other volume I own, the third in the series, is packed away in a box somewhere and it didn’t have the chance to catch my eye. The reason why series like these attract me so much is beyond me – maybe I’m just drawn to big, unwieldy reading projects. However, judging from the last volume alone, this seems to be at a superficial treatment, with little to offer someone already interested in the history of religious ideas.
This volume picks up with the beginning of the Reformation, whose emphasis on sola fide revitalized older medieval ideas of diabology. Some interesting, and scary, fragments of Martin Luther’s life are retold, including the tidbit that one of his most important biographers, Heiko Oberman, described Luther’s whole existence as a “war with Satan.” He also uses this section of the book to look at the diabology of John Calvin and sixteenth-century mystic-contemplatives St. John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila.
With the appearance of the Enlightenment, increasing popularity of empiricism, rationalism, and use of the scientific method, people started to take diabology – or at least the possible existence of the Devil – much less seriously (which is hardly a surprise). In this section of the book, Chapter III, the reader gets a plodding, thirty page-long piece of exegesis on Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” which while it is a poem largely about the Devil, seems to consist of too much summary and too much ham-handed literary analysis. Its appearance is abrupt and completely out of place in an otherwise smooth (at least until that this point) history of ideas.
When Russell begins to talk about the Enlightenment and some of its most prominent thinkers, he weirdly and biliously starts tossing around pejoratives, like “propagandist.” He doesn’t seem to except the modern biological consensus position on evolution, stating “new reflections on randomness and time suggest that even in billions of years the information of intelligent life by random processes is virtually impossible,” though he intelligently stops short of trying to argue that a supernaturally intelligent being is responsible for the diversity of life on Earth (p. 151).
He has a particular dislike for Hume, especially his argument against miracles, which Russell again endlessly belabors, attempts to rebut, and fails. He hilariously claims that de Sade is the “logical conclusion of atheism” – an interesting admission concerning an author whose work perhaps more than any other in the eighteenth century confirms the existence of evil in the world. He reads de Sade as an inveterate misanthrope and sexual deviant (which is much too easy) instead of as an ironist who is actually trying to make cogent points about the very real existence of good and evil in society. None of this bodes well for his reading of Goethe’s “Faust” – which is much shorter than his reading of Milton, though just as uninteresting.
The overall tone of this book comes across as a later-day apology for religious ideas which don’t really jibe with modernity, which probably explains his hostility to several facets of it. Russell’s obvious trouble reconciling himself to commonly accepted scientific positions (like evolution), the long, meandering renditions of literary works (of which I only mentioned two, but there are several more of less important writers), and his obvious disdain for the Enlightenment make for a perfect storm which make this book both sad and funny to read. Russell’s specialization is the medieval time period, so maybe I just caught him trying to tie up loose ends in a historical period with which he has little familiarity. This can be forgiven. As soon as third volume finds its way out of a box and onto a bookshelf, I might pick it up.
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