In Our Time - The Devil

Episode Date: December 11, 2003

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the history of the Devil. In the Gospel according to John he is ‘a murderer from the beginning’, ‘a liar and the father of lies’, and Dante calls him ‘the ill Worm that pierces the world’s core’. But Milton’s description of him as a powerful rebel was so attractive that William Blake declared that Milton was ‘of the Devil’s party, without knowing it’. To ordinary folk the Devil has often been regarded as a trickster, a tempter, sometimes even a figure of fun rather than of fear. How did this contradictory character come into being? Why did it take so long for him to become an established figure in Christianity? And if the Devil did not exist, would we have had to invent him? With Martin Palmer, theologian and Director of the International Consultancy on Religion, Education and Culture; Alison Rowlands, Senior Lecturer in European History at the University of Essex; David Wootton, Professor of Intellectual History at Queen Mary, University of London.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk, forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, in the Gospel according to John, he is a murderer from the beginning, a liar and the father of lies. And Dante calls him the ill worm that pierces the world's core.

But Milton's description of Satan as a powerful rebel was so attractive that William Blake declared that Milton was of the day. devil's party without knowing it. To ordinary people, the devil has often been regarded as a trickster, a tempter, sometimes even a figure of fun rather than a fear. How did this contradictory character come into being? Why did it take so long for him to become an established figure in Christianity? And how pagan is he? We're going to discuss the history of the devil, are Martin Palmer, theologian and director of the International Consultancy on Religion, Educational Culture,

Alison Rowlands, senior lecturer in European history at the University of Essex, and David Wooten, Professor of Intellectual History at Queen Mary, University of London. Martin Palmer, the devil's first major appearance, as I understand it, in the Old Testament, is the book of Job. What role does the devil's Satan have in that parable? Well, it's really his only appearance, and it is as a tempter, as someone who is licensed by God to test the fortitude and the belief of Job, who's had a pretty easy life up until that time.

I mean, it's painted in very broad colors, to put it mildly. He has everything. He's got seven sons and three daughters and thousands of cattle and thousands of sheep and wonderful houses and all the rest of it. And the devil is asked, or Satan is asked by God where he's been, and he said, I've been wandering the earth. And he says, and have you seen my good servant, Job?

And the devil says, yes, well, he's only really your good servant because basically he's got it cushy, hasn't he? And God goes, oh, all right, well, well, you know, test him. And so he destroys everything that Job has. And Job is still very phlegmatic about it and goes, well, you know, that's how it goes. So Satan goes back to God and says, you know, everything's gone, but he's still okay. Can I touch his person?

God says, you can't kill him, but you can hurt him. And then Job is reduced to this terrible state of sores all over him. And at the end of chapter two, before we get into the enormous discussions and dialogues that then fill the rest of the book. You get this extraordinary line where Job says to his wife, you know, if we thank God for all the good things that have come, we should also recognize that we should thank him for the troubles as well. And in a sense, that's the nub of the issue that in the Hebrew Bible,

and indeed in the only story in which the devil really features in the New Testament, in Matthew and Luke, the temptation of Christ, it is that sense that you have a dilemma. If God is omnipotent, then where does evil come from? And frankly, I would argue that neither Judaism nor Christianity actually answer that. Well, I hope we're coming to that. But the interesting thing about that for me, and I suspect for a lot of our listeners, is that when Satan comes in, he's helping God.

Oh, absolutely. He's only allowed to do what he's allowed to do because God gives him permission. It's only much, much later, and I would argue after the New Testament's really taken firm shape, that you get this idea of a total adversary. What influence did Zoroastrianism have on the idea of Satan and the devil? Can you briefly give us that? Well, Zoroastrianism influences Judaism through the exile when in the 6th century BC the Jews are taken,

or the elite of the Jews are taken to Babylon. And there they're exposed to a very powerful world in which there is an evil force and a good force, and they're locked in a mortal combat. And in Zoroastrianism, God is weak, is vulnerable. And that notion that perhaps there is a vulnerability in God comes into Judaism, it begins to particularly come to the fore in the Maccabees' revolt in the middle of the second century BC. Can you open that up a bit?

Well, the Maccabees' revolt is an extraordinary sort of existential crisis for Judaism. The whole area of Palestine. It's a hundred and 166 BC and that area is then ruled by the Greeks, the descendants of Alexander the Great. and they try to enforce a Greek policy of what I suppose they were called civilization and getting rid of superstitious ideas that there's just one god and tribal identities. And a rebellion rises up amongst the Maccabee family. And then a great tremendous revolt takes place. But the Greeks had obviously done comparative religion very thoroughly

and they knew that if you attack the Jews on the Sabbath, the Jews could not attack you back because that would be work. And so you have this dilemma. the Jews do not respond to being attacked on the Sabbath, and they're massacred. And the question comes, well, if we're doing what God wants us to do, if we're obeying the laws, but we are still being massacred by the infidel, then maybe there's something wrong here, and the wrong begins to be attributed to the idea

that there is actually a force against goodness. That is not just a problem, it's actually an attack by an evil force. And that hinges onto Zoroastrianism. It draws out of the Zoroastrian model, and it's really where you first begin to get it expressing itself. Alison Rowland, as most people listening, will know the devil's command appearance in Matthew, where he tempts Christ three times after Christ's being wild crisis,

the 40 days and 40 nights in the wilderness. Can you tell us the significance of that? I think it's very significant because it sets up the devil very, very strongly as the tempter at the beginning of the chapter. He's referred to as the tempter. and the three temptations of Christ make that very, very clear. So I think it's setting up even more strongly, perhaps, than the story of Job that Martin referred to,

the idea of the devil as the arch tempter. Can you go through the three temptations? Yes. Jesus is led by the spirit into the wilderness. This is straight after his baptism. After fasting for 40 days and 40 nights, the tempter appears to him and shows him stones and says, you know, if you really are the son of God, turn these stones into bread.

and Jesus says, man shall not live by bread alone, but from every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God. So he resists that rather base attempt to appeal to his appetite, if you like, sort of the material level of temptation. The second temptation is when the devil takes Jesus to the pinnacle of a temple in the holy city and says, if you're the son of God, cast yourself down, cast yourself off the pinnacle, because it's written that God will essentially send his angels to preserve you.

from any injury. And again, Jesus resists and says, you know, it's also written that thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God. And the third temptation is when the devil takes Jesus up to a very high mountain, shows them all the riches and wonders of the world and the glory of them and says, all this will be yours if you fall down and worship me. And at this point, Jesus says, get thee hence Satan. And he obviously refuses to give in to that final and perhaps most taxing temptation.

At the risk of disappearing in the labyrinth of theology, how different is this testing of Christ from the testing of Job in the Old Testament? Is there a difference that matters for us in this discussion? I think it's interesting. The word Satan is used, as far as I know once by Jesus when he says, get the hence Satan. Otherwise, the word the devil is used, and that comes from the Greek diabolos,

which translates roughly as adversary. So I think whereas in the story of Job, as Martin said, the devil is acting very clearly as God's tool. Here we have the devil perhaps set up far more clearly as a direct adversary of Christ. We've got the Old Testament, Job, and we've got Matthew, the first book of the New Testament. In between are the apocryphal books, in which, as I understand it, the devil rages away.

I think the apocrypha are very, very important for Christian understandings of the devil, and that continues to be the case through, through the middle ages even because they influence tradition and legend. Can we turn on books of Enoch and Jubilee, is it? Well, there are several that contain quite a lot about the devil. For example, several of the apocry written particularly in the second century,

or that we can date to the second century, talk about the period of the second century AD as a period where Satan is literally almost amongst us. It's a time of lawlessness, a time of disorder, a time of sin. I think it's this apocalyptic literature which is suggesting, you know, Jesus is going to come again, the end of the world is nigh, you know, Satan is ruling now. So I think particularly the second century, second century AD apocrypha, really perhaps hammer home this idea of the presence of the devil on earth. So what we receive from the Bible now doesn't contain anything like as much of the devil as would have been received in the second third centuries from these very active and popular apocryphal books.

For example, ideas about ideas about hell, which are very, very, very. vague, if you like, in the New Testament. I mean, the idea is that Jesus, after his crucifixion, perhaps goes to the underworld to reemerge at the resurrection. But there's very little detail about hell and about death and about the relationship between hell and death and Satan. And in some of the apocrypha, for example, the odes of Solomon, the Gospels of Nicodemus and so on,

there's a whole narrative developing about hell, about Christ going to hell, freeing the just from hell, defeating Satan, leaving Satan as hell's prisoner, and these are actually personified as figures. And these ideas actually feed into medieval ideas. There's a very important legend about the harrowing of hell, which appears in literature and in imagery in the Middle Ages, where Jesus literally breaks down the barriers of hell,

rescues the just and defeats Satan. But that's nowhere in the Bible. That's really, I think, coming from this apocryphal tradition. So we have a sort of incensed-up version of the Bible, but we can come back to that maybe in another programme. David Wooten, the idea of the evil figures, call an opposite to God. Develop more with the arrival of the

Manichaean heresy, as I understand it. If that's true, could you unravel that, please? Yes, the Manichaean heresy is a Christian heresy. It's also a derivation of Gnostic, and there are pagan Gnostics and Christian Gnostics. But all the Gnostics argue that there's a force for good and a force for evil.

They think of the force for good as being associated with light, the force for evil as being associated with darkness. For the Gnostics, the force for evil is subordinate to the force for good. But for the manichies, the force for evil is an independent force from the very beginning. The two are in permanent conflict. And the world in which we live, the world of the flesh of matter, of sexuality and so on, is entirely governed by the force for evil. And it's only insofar as we have trapped within us a

spiritual element that we belong to another world, the world of light and of truth. And the whole purpose of our existence is to escape from this world, which is governed by the prince of darkness, and get into this other world, which is governed by truth. So that for the manichies, there's a a permanent conflict between these two forces, which one day will be resolved with the triumph of good over evil. And can you tell us, as Alison began to tell us with the apocry, how that fed into the stories of and to the narrative of Christianity, how the Maniche and Heresy fed into

and when it began to feed into the notion of what Christianity was and what was going on there? The manichies are enormously successful from the 3rd century on. They spread their gospel because they're a missionary movement right across the Eastern Roman Empire through into the West, right through to China. But I think in a way, for the long term, their main importance is that Augustine starts as a maniche,

he spends nine years as a manichy. And so Augustine sets out to define Orthodox Christianity as opposed to manichyism. And so he wants to limit the role of the devil. He wants to insist that evil is simply the absence of good. He wants to deny in a way that there's an independent force for evil active in the world. And so there's an Orthodox form of Christianity

that gets constructed. to make barriers against manichaeism. How did the dualistic idea take root in the Middle Ages? And the dualistic route is deep in Christianity by that time, is it? Well, there's a clear process, the late 14th century after the Black Death, after the great schism in the church when there are two popes and there's a real sort of crisis in establishment Christianity.

There's a clear process where the devil becomes a much more important figure. There's much clearer iconography of the devil, paintings in which you see the devil as a great ruler lauding over hell. And some people say this is part of a shift to a new politics where the devil has been presented as a king. So that it's very clear that by the late 14th, early 15th century, the devil is a much more important figure in Christian thinking.

David mentioned the black death that, Martin. You speak of the massive significance of the black death. It was 1349, the black death, massive death, in Europe, but on a scale which is almost unimaginable. You are of the opinion that it was one of the major factors that shook Christianity

to its roots and made it tear up those roots. So can you take us through the black death and bring in, and the devil flourished then as he never done before? Absolutely, because the trouble with the black death was that it simply broke every understanding of what was normative.

Essentially the church had fairly successfully negotiated a sort of covenant, a concord act with the people, with the powers that be and it was, you know, if you respect the church with certain variations, then we will protect you in this life. It won't be great,

but it won't be too horrendous. And there was a sense that you were saved because the church existed. You didn't have to do much. You were just simply saved by it. And you can see that in the layout of early medieval cathedrals. For instance,

Wells Cathedral, where you come in through the door of judgment, the west front, is all to do with heaven and hell. And there's Christ rising, and the damned are being cast down, the saved are being raised. And that's a picture of what could happen. But then by simply entering the church, physically, you're saved. And the journey to the altar is a journey through the life of Christ,

up to Golgather, to the crucifixion, down into the crypt. And you have a whole drama, and you end up with the Lady Chapel at the far end of the church, and Our Lady intercedes for you. So there is a story of salvation. you don't have to do much other than agree. Then the black death comes. And as the dance macabre depicts,

and the dance macabre comes from the dance of the Maccabees, which was again going back to this story where for some reason that nobody could work out the just were being slaughtered as much as the unjust. So we get the dance macabees, the dance macabre. You see popes, you see kings, you see saints, you see monks, abbots, working class people, the peasants. everybody is sithed down by death

and the crisis comes well you know we've got this agreement with God why is God slaughtering us when there's no apparent reason huge huge existential crisis and out of that comes the kind of questioning well maybe the church can't broker my salvation what we have coming up here though

David which is fascinating is that as I understand before 1485 on record there are only three witchcraft trials after that there's an explosion of them and there's the great book of demonologies come out the most important being Malis Malificarum the hammer of witches in 1486 so around that time we have this explosion

could you sort of focus on this sudden fury of demonology, witchcraft that sort of thing? Can you take us there? It's an enormous historical puzzle. The devil becomes active in the world as people understand the world the devil becomes active in a quite new way He's looking for agents.

He's forming pacts with them. He's having sexual relations with them. They're gathering in gatherings called Sabbaths. They're traveling through the air to get to these gatherings. People believe that there are very powerful demonic forces all around them in a way that they haven't done before. One of the questions is how does this happen and why does it happen? And there's obviously a buildup of a new fear of the devil.

And then there's a very particular sort of crisis in Savoy where there's an attack upon what they think of initially as heretics in whom they then begin to think of. as devil worshippers. And out of that comes a sense that there's a real religion of the devil present in society. And certainly one aspect of this is a new recognition of the presence of pagan beliefs in society and the presence of beliefs about spiritual forces that travel around at night, often called Diana's Horde. As theologians become aware of these claims about strange beings, they begin to think these must be devils and people must be meeting devils and

dealing with devils and the devil must therefore be present in our world in a way that we haven't understood before. And so they develop a military fear of the devil and a need to campaign against the devil. Alison, can you take us a bit further into these demonologies? But these are very foreign to us these days. These are books that are written with massive scholarship. They're tremendously influential in a direct way. We can think of things of 20th century, but let's not make it relevant. So can you just talk about that? Yeah. If we go back to the Malius Malificaran published in the late 15th century, the first two sections of that were talking really about who witches were,

what they did, what their relationship with the devil was. And essentially, the author of this text, Heinrich Kramer or Instatoris, his Latin name, he was trying to convince his contemporaries of the reality of witchcraft. I mean, we mustn't think that every single person in Europe was absolutely convinced that the devil was stalking the earth. People had to be convinced of this. So one role of the demonologies was actually to, spread this idea that witchcraft is real,

the threat of their heresy is real, there's a demonic conspiracy out there that needs fighting. I'm coming back to you now, David, about the intensity of demonology. It was very powerful for two centuries, and then it declined, but it did permeate the whole of the Christian world. Alison talked about how there's a need to convince people of the reality of witchcraft in the late 15th century.

By the 16th century, that's been enormously successful. It's impossible to find a 16th century intellectual who systematically denies the reality of witchcraft. There's only one in England, Reginald Scott in 1584. Everybody else accepts that witchcraft is real. It's here and now. It's dangerous. What separates out the areas where there is intensive witch persecution and areas where there's light witch persecution is essentially the techniques of investigation you use.

If you torture enough people, you'll get enough confessions. And wherever torture is allowed to be used freely, and it's legal across most of Europe, it's part of Roman law, wherever torture is used freely, you get large numbers of confessions, you get large numbers of executions. So what's crucial to the decline of which convictions is withdrawing torture or using torture only in a limited fashion. It depends crucially upon that.

And then quite separately in a way, belief in witchcraft also begins to alter. So there are two processes. One is how the jurisdictions apply the law and the other is what the intellectuals believe and they work in a different time frame. Let's talk about what the intellectuals believe. Why do they withdraw their allegiance? to this notion?

Well, I think that's a very slow process because it's become central to Christianity. And I think we tend to forget how central to Christianity it's been. And so there's also the danger that if you deny the existence of spiritual forces, you'll be denying the existence of angels and miracles and a whole set of fundamental

beliefs. So intellectuals are very slow to deny that they believe in devils and demons. They're much quicker to argue that you shouldn't execute people without good proof. Martin Palmer, Milton's Paradise Lost in 1667 has people think that the most important and engaging character, most powerful character, is Satan. That represents move on.

Is there any continuity there? Can we bring him into the argument? Yes, I mean, he's fascinating. And of course, his roots go back to Dante, the first great creator of a novel about Satan. And he likewise draws, Dante draws upon Greek mythology. He draws upon Islamic thinking and Jewish thinking of his time, as well as Christian, to forge this extraordinary figure.

And Milton carries that forward. But what Milton is dealing with is really the Puritan, the Protestant, existentialist angst of the lone individual and where authority and truth and justice and integrity lie in a world that is good and evil. And the crunch point in Milton's story, this extraordinary story of the temptation of Eve and then of Adam by Satan is that crucial moment where, Eve says to Adam, let's go and work separately in the garden. And he argues with her, no, no, no, no, we must stick together. She says, no, no, I'm quite safe. She goes off, and that's when she's tempted, when she's on her own.

And Luther makes this extraordinary comment at the beginning of the Reformation, that the time at which he is most tempted by the devil is when he's on his own. There is this tremendous problem. You are no longer part of the gathered church. The church is no longer protecting you. You are an individual alone. How the hell do you know whether what you're thinking? thinking is good or bad.

And what Milton does is he takes us on this extraordinary journey, which is really a sort of psychological journey into the soul of modern, early modern Europe, where we stand alone and we have to make decisions. And when we go wrong, we have to live with those consequences. And the devil at the end becomes this defeated figure, but ultimately the responsibility is thrown back on human beings. The devil becomes, is this enormously attractive figure. but in the end collapses

is very similar to the Muslim figure of the great deceiver who ultimately is powerless if the individual decides to grapple with the existential issue of good and evil. David Woodham. Yes, there's also a political aspect, I think, to what happens in Milton.

The devil is a rebel against God and God is the ruler of the world. Milton himself has been a rebel. He's been a rebel against Charles I. He's supported the execution of Charles I. He's written in favour of rebellion over and over again. He's suffered terribly for it. he finds it impossible not to give the devil the arguments that he himself is used in attacking monarchy.

And so that while he has no sympathy with the devil officially in the sense that rebellion against God must be wrong, he understands what it's like to be a rebel, to think that you have right on your side, to think that you should be able to make your own decisions. And so Milton can't help, I think, identifying with the devil and can't help giving to the devil republican republican language. When the Enlightenment got underway and natural science as natural philosophy, were questioning in a different, more concentrated way, we were questioning the world a different way. Did that put the church witchcraft, the devil, hell,

did that put them markedly on the back foot, Alison? I think as far as witchcraft is concerned, the main shift is a legal one insofar as people do actually begin to think we can't any longer prove adequately who may or may not be a witch. So it's not that they have to dismantle all of those beliefs about witchcraft and the devil. It's more, as David said, that it's a legal problem identifying who may or may not be a witch. What that is to do with a different form of thinking, isn't it?

Yes. That particular form of legalistic inquiry, that demand for proof as distinctly demand for show, is a big shift in the way we think. I think it is, but as I say, I mean, there are areas of Europe where witches are never persecuted. So I think this cautious legalistic tendency becomes more prevalent in the late 17th than into the the 18th century, but it has been present in parts of Europe before. So I think actually what you can perhaps see is is continuity from the medieval period that's actually being, if you like, distorted by the very brutal, large-scale persecutions,

which are exceptions. They are patchy in terms of their spread. At this point in the curve, Marjabon, we're seen that the devil is dying away, and yet in the 19th century it is still powerful. missionaries, the dark satanic mills, the top thumpers, Wesley, who's not a top sumpers, that sort of thing, right. Very much, then, I think suddenly,

remember it is very suddenly, only at the beginning of the 19th century do you get the major missionary movement, a huge movement of personnel, mostly working class, mostly coming out of the non-conformist churches to a very great extent, with the main line churches following on behind.

They go overseas, they go, They go to China, they go to India, they go to Africa, and there they discover that the medieval world view of people boiling in tubs of fat and being torn apart is part of that culture. So in China they run into the 18 hells of Buddhism and the nine hells of Taoism. And what happens is they externalize all this stuff

and they say, you see, that's where the devil is now. The devil is out there in Buddhism, in Taoism, in Hinduism and Jainism. Look at this terrible world that they're telling you, you will go into, only Christ can save you. So ironically, you get a resurgence of a belief that the devil is in these other religions, that all these terrible stories that we used to tell

are now being told by others, and we must save them from it. So ironically, the evangelical movement fuses very successfully at an emotional, political, social, and monetary level with elements of the Enlightenment and projects onto the others that this is where the problem now lies. And so you get a resurgence of belief

that the devil is actually now functioning in other faiths. But in parallel with that, we have in this country, and in other countries, but she's in this country. Deirdre Lawrence, for instance, standing for a view, he said, it's no good casting out devils, they belong to us. We must accept them and be at peace with them. The internalising and the fact that they are there part of us

becomes a way of absorbing this, coping with it, re-describing it, what would you say? I think so. I mean, if you go back to the church fathers, for example, the church father, Oregon had this idea that we have kind of a guardian angel and an evil demon, and that the baptism ensures that we are perhaps ruled more by the guardian angel than the evil demon. But I think this idea that we have kind of external forces prompting us to do good or evil has shifted as a result of intellectual changes during the Enlightenment. I think there's a far more internalized idea that it's our conscience that is pushing us one way or the other. So we no longer have these external forces. It's become internalized, a sort of a struggle of conscience that we have.

David, do you see the idea of the devil as being meaningful in today's culture? Well, it means a lot. I mean worldwide, that's too much. Just the sort of people we're addressing, I think. It means a lot to a lot of people. I mean, there are clearly people who believe in the devil and believe in the presence of the devil and the world. I think one of the striking cultural problems we have,

the Enlightenment tried essentially to abolish the devil. It tried to replace the devil by deism, Christianity by deism, to say that there was a good God who'd constructed the world on excellent principles. The problem there was that evil became something that was supposed not to exist. And that presents a real crisis when you recognise that evil is, as it were, an ineradicable presence in our world.

Voltaire's Candide is designed to restore the notion of evil. And all of us, I think, to some degree, find some need to conceptualise evil in some way or other. Thank you very much. Thank you very much to Martin, David Wooden and Alison Rowlands. and next week we will be talking about the birth of the alphabet. Thank you very much for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast.

You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.uk forward slash radio 4.