Sympathy for the devil? You must be joking!
By PETER STANFORD, Daily Mail
7th August 2006
Talk of the Devil has been brushed under the carpet in our churches in recent times. Once an essential feature of any decent sermon, Satan is now seen as an embarrassing reminder of the Church's superstitious past.
It is, after all, hard to sound as if you are in touch with the real 21st-century world when you are preaching about a monster with sulphur breath, scaly skin and a cloven hoof who lives in the centre of the earth in a fiery den called Hell.
Now, on top of this, an American academic, Professor Henry Ansgar Kelly, is publishing a book, Satan: A Biography, arguing that we have all got the Devil wrong. He was, in fact, a good guy all along, on the side of God.
Kelly's stunningly bold attempt at rehabilitation makes the late Lord Longford's efforts to convince the British public that Moors Murderer Myra Hindley was a reformed character look positively timid.
And if he's right, there may even one day be holy statues of the Devil on church altars next to the Virgin Mary and the Baby Jesus.
Kelly's thesis is based on Satan's one and only appearance in the Old Testament. In the Book Of Job, Satan - who has been patrolling the earth - argues that a wealthy but righteous man named Job does not really love God.
To prove him wrong, God puts Job to the test, allowing Satan to inflict all manner of hideous tragedies on the man. Satan slaughters Job's servants, kills his animals, then massacres his children before finally inflicting his body with painful boils and sores.
Despite entreaties from his wife and friends to renounce God, Job never does, arguing that God sometimes tries the ones He loves, allowing them to grow spiritually.
From this episode Kelly concludes that Satan is really a vital part of God's celestial management team rather than his arch-enemy.
His very necessary job, argues Kelly, is to test the faith of human beings - rather like an official investigator - and he gets a bad press because he is usually overzealous in performing his duties.
And it is true, as Kelly argues, that the story of the Devil as the fallen angel was concocted only just before the time of Christ - during the years between when the Old and New Testaments were written.
So what should we believe? Is the Devil really the victim of the biggest miscarriage of justice in human history?
Diabolical
In short, the answer is a resounding no. The Devil really is diabolical.
The trouble is that Kelly's interpretation is based on a selective reading of the Bible, for he completely ignores the New Testament, in which the Devil is Jesus's principal rival.
Just as he tested Job, he tests Jesus, trying to tempt him away from God during 40 days and 40 nights in the wilderness.
But there is a crucial difference. Jesus is not Job - he is God's representative on earth, the personification of good. And as his rival, the Devil can be regarded only as the personification of evil.
Indeed, can it be pure coincidence that if you take 'o' from good you arrive at God while if you add a 'd' to evil you come to the Devil?
And it is because he represents evil that mankind throughout the ages has been so bewitched by Lucifer, to give him another of his biblical names, as I discovered recently on a most prosaic level.
A few years ago I wrote my own biography of the Devil. I followed it with a book about Heaven. The Devil outsold paradise four to one.
Give us a choice between the ultimate sinner and a host of perfect angels and we opt every time for the bad guy. Perhaps it is because we see a part of ourselves in him.
Over the centuries, the Church exploited this fascination, reinforcing the view of the Devil as the con man waiting round every corner to capture unsuspecting souls and lure them away from God.
Only by doing what the Church said could you hope to escape damnation. If you refused to put your money in the collection plate or broke the Church's rules in the bedroom, you would be possessed by the Devil.
Early congregants were filled with fear that Incubus and Succubus, Satan's two copulating demons, would seduce women and cause them to give birth to the Devil's children.
Every medieval church would have as its dominant religious painting not a reassuring picture of a smiling Jesus sitting on a cloud waiting to welcome us to Heaven, but rather 'The Harrowing of Hell' with tormented souls stoking the fires of the underworld, presided over by the Devil who would torture and abuse any slackers.
Coercion
Fear of such a fate kept pews full and people obedient. Such coercion, however, stopped working when science began to show how ridiculous were claims that every calamity or illness could be attributed to supping with the Devil.
Scientists today dismiss Satan as medieval hokum and he has even been written off by today's thoroughly modern Church of England in a learned bishops' report as being about as real as 'the holes in Swiss cheese'.
Yet still he lives on. However much the Church may wish to brush him under the carpet, however much Professor Kelly would like to rehabilitate him, mankind's intense fascination with the Devil remains.
Because, as the personification of evil, he provides a means of explaining the human suffering that all of us, to a greater or lesser extent, endure - suffering which science and rationality can never explain.
Most of all, though, he gives us someone to blame.
So when we read about gunmen entering a school, when we hear of the gruesome activities of serial killers, when we see pictures of the devastation wreaked by suicide bombers on people who have done them no harm at all, we still instinctively reach for the word 'evil' and are tempted to see the Devil's hand in such horror.
Often, too, we demonise the perpetrators. Myra Hindley was routinely referred to as the Devil incarnate. The infamous 1966 mugshot of her, all peroxide hair and defiance, became for many the modern face of Satan.
But when we talk about evil today, what precisely do we mean? Modern psychiatrists tell us that we all essentially have the seeds of good and evil within us.
Most of us maintain a decent balance. Some, like Mother Teresa, have an abundance of good. Others, like Osama Bin Laden, have the opposite.
This is a tough message to take on board because essentially it links us with the Bin Ladens and Hindleys of this world. It invests us all - good and bad alike - with a common humanity.
Yet every fibre in our body wants killers and terrorists to be monsters, not human at all, because of their evil deeds. So we call them the Devil.
It is no longer a question of expecting some pantomime villain dressed in black to drag us down to Hell if we have sex outside marriage.
Instead, the Devil continues to fascinate as part of our struggle to find a vocabulary and a set of ideas to begin to make sense of otherwise inexplicable and bewildering events.
He may be utterly illogical, but then so is the world around us. And if we rehabilitate him as merely an agent of the Almighty, performing a task to God's bidding, to whom then can we apportion the blame for the ills of the world?
• Peter Stanford's The Devil: A Biography is published in paperback by Arrow.
dailymail.co.uk
By PETER STANFORD, Daily Mail
7th August 2006
Talk of the Devil has been brushed under the carpet in our churches in recent times. Once an essential feature of any decent sermon, Satan is now seen as an embarrassing reminder of the Church's superstitious past.
It is, after all, hard to sound as if you are in touch with the real 21st-century world when you are preaching about a monster with sulphur breath, scaly skin and a cloven hoof who lives in the centre of the earth in a fiery den called Hell.
Now, on top of this, an American academic, Professor Henry Ansgar Kelly, is publishing a book, Satan: A Biography, arguing that we have all got the Devil wrong. He was, in fact, a good guy all along, on the side of God.
Kelly's stunningly bold attempt at rehabilitation makes the late Lord Longford's efforts to convince the British public that Moors Murderer Myra Hindley was a reformed character look positively timid.
And if he's right, there may even one day be holy statues of the Devil on church altars next to the Virgin Mary and the Baby Jesus.
Kelly's thesis is based on Satan's one and only appearance in the Old Testament. In the Book Of Job, Satan - who has been patrolling the earth - argues that a wealthy but righteous man named Job does not really love God.
To prove him wrong, God puts Job to the test, allowing Satan to inflict all manner of hideous tragedies on the man. Satan slaughters Job's servants, kills his animals, then massacres his children before finally inflicting his body with painful boils and sores.
Despite entreaties from his wife and friends to renounce God, Job never does, arguing that God sometimes tries the ones He loves, allowing them to grow spiritually.
From this episode Kelly concludes that Satan is really a vital part of God's celestial management team rather than his arch-enemy.
His very necessary job, argues Kelly, is to test the faith of human beings - rather like an official investigator - and he gets a bad press because he is usually overzealous in performing his duties.
And it is true, as Kelly argues, that the story of the Devil as the fallen angel was concocted only just before the time of Christ - during the years between when the Old and New Testaments were written.
So what should we believe? Is the Devil really the victim of the biggest miscarriage of justice in human history?
Diabolical
In short, the answer is a resounding no. The Devil really is diabolical.
The trouble is that Kelly's interpretation is based on a selective reading of the Bible, for he completely ignores the New Testament, in which the Devil is Jesus's principal rival.
Just as he tested Job, he tests Jesus, trying to tempt him away from God during 40 days and 40 nights in the wilderness.
But there is a crucial difference. Jesus is not Job - he is God's representative on earth, the personification of good. And as his rival, the Devil can be regarded only as the personification of evil.
Indeed, can it be pure coincidence that if you take 'o' from good you arrive at God while if you add a 'd' to evil you come to the Devil?
And it is because he represents evil that mankind throughout the ages has been so bewitched by Lucifer, to give him another of his biblical names, as I discovered recently on a most prosaic level.
A few years ago I wrote my own biography of the Devil. I followed it with a book about Heaven. The Devil outsold paradise four to one.
Give us a choice between the ultimate sinner and a host of perfect angels and we opt every time for the bad guy. Perhaps it is because we see a part of ourselves in him.
Over the centuries, the Church exploited this fascination, reinforcing the view of the Devil as the con man waiting round every corner to capture unsuspecting souls and lure them away from God.
Only by doing what the Church said could you hope to escape damnation. If you refused to put your money in the collection plate or broke the Church's rules in the bedroom, you would be possessed by the Devil.
Early congregants were filled with fear that Incubus and Succubus, Satan's two copulating demons, would seduce women and cause them to give birth to the Devil's children.
Every medieval church would have as its dominant religious painting not a reassuring picture of a smiling Jesus sitting on a cloud waiting to welcome us to Heaven, but rather 'The Harrowing of Hell' with tormented souls stoking the fires of the underworld, presided over by the Devil who would torture and abuse any slackers.
Coercion
Fear of such a fate kept pews full and people obedient. Such coercion, however, stopped working when science began to show how ridiculous were claims that every calamity or illness could be attributed to supping with the Devil.
Scientists today dismiss Satan as medieval hokum and he has even been written off by today's thoroughly modern Church of England in a learned bishops' report as being about as real as 'the holes in Swiss cheese'.
Yet still he lives on. However much the Church may wish to brush him under the carpet, however much Professor Kelly would like to rehabilitate him, mankind's intense fascination with the Devil remains.
Because, as the personification of evil, he provides a means of explaining the human suffering that all of us, to a greater or lesser extent, endure - suffering which science and rationality can never explain.
Most of all, though, he gives us someone to blame.
So when we read about gunmen entering a school, when we hear of the gruesome activities of serial killers, when we see pictures of the devastation wreaked by suicide bombers on people who have done them no harm at all, we still instinctively reach for the word 'evil' and are tempted to see the Devil's hand in such horror.
Often, too, we demonise the perpetrators. Myra Hindley was routinely referred to as the Devil incarnate. The infamous 1966 mugshot of her, all peroxide hair and defiance, became for many the modern face of Satan.
But when we talk about evil today, what precisely do we mean? Modern psychiatrists tell us that we all essentially have the seeds of good and evil within us.
Most of us maintain a decent balance. Some, like Mother Teresa, have an abundance of good. Others, like Osama Bin Laden, have the opposite.
This is a tough message to take on board because essentially it links us with the Bin Ladens and Hindleys of this world. It invests us all - good and bad alike - with a common humanity.
Yet every fibre in our body wants killers and terrorists to be monsters, not human at all, because of their evil deeds. So we call them the Devil.
It is no longer a question of expecting some pantomime villain dressed in black to drag us down to Hell if we have sex outside marriage.
Instead, the Devil continues to fascinate as part of our struggle to find a vocabulary and a set of ideas to begin to make sense of otherwise inexplicable and bewildering events.
He may be utterly illogical, but then so is the world around us. And if we rehabilitate him as merely an agent of the Almighty, performing a task to God's bidding, to whom then can we apportion the blame for the ills of the world?
• Peter Stanford's The Devil: A Biography is published in paperback by Arrow.
dailymail.co.uk
