THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, December 31, 1995 TAG: 9512310326
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY ROGER K. MILLER
LENGTH: Medium: 93 lines
THE DEATH OF SATAN
How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil
ANDREW DELBANCO
Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 274 pp. $23.
One thing that, as the product of a fundamentalist Protestant upbringing, I have never been able to understand is people who say, when something especially fortunate happens to you: ``My, the Lord must have been looking out for you that day.'' Yet when something really awful happens, like a planeload of people smacking into the side of a mountain, they don't say, ``Well, you can certainly see the hand of the Lord all over that.'' I mean, if the Lord was looking out one day, was he watching television the other?
Even stranger is that such people rarely attribute catastrophes like that to Satan, despite his reputation for having played hob with our history right from the time the first Indian-robber set foot - or cloven hoof? - on American soil. They don't even give the devil what presumably should be his due.
Unfortunately for the furtherance of my theological education, Andrew Delbanco fails to cut this somewhat-less-than-Gordian knot in The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil. He is trying to unweave a more tangled web in this brilliant and at times witty book: how, at a time when ``the repertoire of evil has never been richer,'' we deal with the problem of evil when we no longer agree on a way to name it, and how ``this crisis of incompetence before evil came about and how it has made itself felt in the United States, whose culture is the dominant one of the West.''
Delbanco, a professor of humanities at Columbia University, says the first colonial settlers had no such difficulty: ``Evil had a name, a face, and an explanation. It was called the Fall, it was personified in the devil, and it was attributed to . . . original sin.'' But that consensus disappeared long ago, and he ranges through 350 years of subsequent American history to explain ``this process of unnaming evil.''
Actually, to give my own devilish little conundrum its due, the author does in a sense address it in two ways. One, Americans were sometimes inclined to ascribe even ``accidental'' acts to Satan, before he got watered down to a figure of fun. Second, there came a time when we no longer could (or would) see that the cloven hoof was at the end of our own legs:
``This dissociation of the devil from the self marked the beginning of his end as a significant cultural symbol,'' he writes. ``By the early 18th century, Satan was no longer physically or morally credible, and the problem for his survivors was how to find a way to speak of evil without him.''
Which is precisely the problem we ``survivors'' are faced with today, and as the book goes on, Delbanco, using his vast knowledge of and insight into American literature, warms to the task of showing how we got here. This task gradually becomes one of indicting American life and culture at every stop along the line.
That's all right, our life and culture can use some bashing; unlike human bashing, it can make us better. But even the devil can quote Scripture - he does it by picking and choosing his texts. Using similar techniques, Delbanco at one point, at least, cooks up a literary-sociological stew that only the intellectually gullible will swallow.
This is when he links America's xenophobia and ``lock-step tribe'' conformity with a penchant for equating evil with the ``outsider.'' This is a far cry from the theological and moral constructs he had been discussing. Even if such a leap is defensible, and it may be, the reader is constrained to remark that xenophobia and conformity are hardly unique to the United States, and that their excesses here have been subjected to more severe self-criticism than elsewhere.
Delbanco ends by seeing a ``corrosive spirit of irony'' reasserting itself in our national discourse, which creates a ``kind of paralysis'' that prevents us from acting, other than to blame others and claim victim status for ourselves. Ironically (there is no escaping the word), the great American theologian, Jonathan Edwards, predicted this sort of society almost 250 years ago.
Delbanco thinks that we cannot continue to live with a sense of evil and yet have no metaphor for talking about it. Ultimately, though, he wimps out, which is no discredit to him, for most of us do. He engages in some fancy intellectual footwork at the end, but has little idea what this metaphor should be. The field of battle is left to the ironists and the true believers.
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EDITOR'S NOTE: For another ``take'' on Satan, his social history and worldly mission, see Princeton religion professor Elaine Pagels' The Origin of Satan (Random House, 214 pp., $23), which traces Satan's gradual transformation from the Hebrews' fallen angel to a Christian demon associated with ``otherness.'' MEMO: Roger K. Miller, formerly the book editor for The Milwaukee Journal, is
a freelance writer in Grafton, Wis. by CNB