The Quest For the Historical Satan, Miguel A. De La Torre and Albert Hernandez, Fortress 2011.
It’s a familiar image to most people in (post) Christian societies – the red, pitchforked Satan. but how did we get such an image, and what does it mean for the way we perceive political and religious enemies? In their fascinating book The Quest for the Historical Satan, theologians Miguel De La Torre and Albert Hernandez trace the development of the idea of Satan and its many multifarious, nefarious uses.
The book begins in the present day, with a neat introduction laying out some of the recent usages of Satan and the Anti-Christ in present-day America, with the public demonisation of Barack Obama, Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 terrorists all making an appearance. Also introduced is a major theme, that the idea of Satan attempts to resolve a major contradiction in monotheisms – the conflict between a good, powerful God and a world filled with evil. As Torre and Hernandez put it, “Satan literally becomes a necessary evil–an evil that excuses God.”
From there, the book moves into more contemporary permutations of the idea of Satan, including film representations like The Omen, the evil of the Holocaust and the Church of Satan. While it provides some interesting material (in particular on the Church of Satan), this chapter is patchy and lurches from subject to subject, with no clear organising principle.
The next chapter, however, begins the historical development of Satan in the ancient world of the Middle East. Clever framed as a life (“Satan’s conception,” “Satan’s early childhood,” “Satan’s adolescence” and so on), the authors show the roots of the modern Satan emerging in ancient Egypt in the form of the God Seth. From there, the idea is picked up in the Hebrew Bible, where there is little of the later understanding of demons and no connection to the personhood of Satan. Instead, God is frequently described as creating evil himself, sending evil spirits and misfortune to various people like Saul and Job. With the exile in Babylon, Satan picks up a Persian Zoroastrian influence, develops further in the post-Bible apocrypha and Pseudoepigrapha, and then finally, we reach the Christian New Testament, termed “Satan’s Early Adulthood.” This chapter works fantastic and is an engrossing whistle-stop tour of the Middle East’s ancient traditions.
The following chapter gives a more in-depth treatment of the early Church’s discussions of evil and the influence of Hellenist-Roman metaphysical ideas. Luminaries like Saint Augustine are also covered well. From there, we move to the medieval and early modern periods, where there’s an engaging discussion of Dante’s Inferno, which remains one of the key sources for pictorial representations of Satan and Hell. And then lastly we have the demonisation of Others in Salem’s witch-trials, and colonial violence.
This is, on description, an enormous period of history and culture for a book to cover, pulling together disparate cultural contexts into one coherent story. It’s to the authors’ credit that they manage to do so easily and entertainingly. The prose is accessible and intelligible, knowledgeable without too much unnecessary jargon.
Through-out all of this, the authors show a persistent human failing in seeing Satan in their fellow human beings. By creating an image of absolute Evil, numerous groups have been able to define themselves as only and ever Good – a conception which the authors show (particularly as Christian civilisation gathers maturity) has been used to justify great evil itself.
Few people in the world see themselves as actively evil. To use a current example of my own, there’s an amusing sketch in the British series That Mitchell and Webb Look in which one Nazi turns to another and asks “Hans, are we the baddies?”
And if we (any “we”) are by definition good, then everything we do must also be good, especially if we’re fighting the manifestations of Satan himself. De La Torre and Hernandez suggest that we must let go of the image of Satan as evil and instead look to the evil in our hearts. “We have ended our quest for the historical Satan by finding him in the mirror.”
It’s a compelling point, and one that the contemporary examples show is still powerful in the present-day. As we move to an American election next year in which the Religious Right is shaping up to be a significant force once again in American politics, it is well worth looking more at the evil inside people’s hearts than for the signs of a supernatural evil. This short but punchy book brings together a wealth of historical information and ethical consideration of evil in general and Satan in particular, and opens a conversation about evil that many readers, Christian or not, should find well worth engaging with.