There’s something of a millennial flavour about the recent upsurge
in talk of the Devil. Last month saw the release of Elaine Pagels’ scholarly
treatise on The Origin of Satan and now Peter Stanford
is hitting these streets with a biography (unauthorised we’re told) of the horned
one as he rears his ubiquitous head in our murky history and, in one form
or another, throughout our daily lives.
Charting the mutating perceptions of Satan from Biblical adversary
to ‘naughty but nice’ cream cake advocate in the advertising campaign,
there’s more than enough in this eminently readable book to tempt
even the most jaded palate from dry old scholasticism. There’s every confection
from anthropology to history, from folklore to superstition, film
criticism to literary anecdote, and, oh yes, there’s even some
theology thrown in for good measure (or is that light relief?).
The question, surely as topical now as its ever been, of whether
Satan is a state of sinfulness in man or something existing as objectively
as God, is left-in all the fun-unresolved and, to all intents and purposes,
unaddressed by Stanford. Rather, the issues are clouded by his
keenness to present the Devil as a magnet for loony fundamentalists, heavy
metal headbangers and visionary romantics alike. The rebels and misfits,
so the argument runs, flock to Satan’s side, attracted by the archetypal
symbol of rebellion and the irrational for which science has no place
in its limited scheme. This idea, that Satan’s elasticity and near-infinite
adaptability as a metaphor-through literature, art, film and mass-media
exploitation, somehow undermines the possibility of objective
evil, is a doomed logic from the start. Stanford never gets far beyond it,
posing and re-posing the same conundrum with the deployment of history’s
movers and shakers on either side of a line of chalk. In his efforts at accessibility
he’ll dip into the waters of the Hammer film genre and then, before
we can acclimatise to the shift in temperature, the real life horror
of the Holocaust and Satanic ritual abuse are his subjects, graphically
dwelt on to show us the full evil of which mankind is capable.
C.S Lewis, the creator of Uncle Screwtape, claims that there are
two opposite but nevertheless equal errors about devils; "One
is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, i.e. to feel an excessive
and unhealthy interest in them." Screwtape himself maintains
that the whole art of seducing mankind to evil is to persuade it that devils
don’t exist. Perhaps Stanford’s biography was authorised by its subject after
all.
Reviewed by Francesco Spagnolo
