The Devil by Jeffrey Burton Russell
The Devil: Perceptions of Evil from Antiquity to Primitive Christianity by Jeffrey Burton Russell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
(I originally posted this review to Amazon.com in April 2008.)
Drawing on many different sources, the author suggests how the concept of the Devil as used in the New Testament took shape.
Clearly, some reviewers of this book on Amazon were very disappointed with it. They did not find what they were looking for. Speaking for myself, I pretty much did. Russell takes some pains early on to say that his work is part of the history of concepts, and even spends time distinguishing this from the history of ideas—a distinction that I found to be a bit pedantic and, for me, unhelpful.
However, in the rest of the book I mostly found what I hoped to find: an inventory and discussion of the ideas and images that contributed to the concept of the Devil as he appeared in the Judeo-Christian world by New Testament times.
Since the Devil came to be known as the source and personification of evil in the world, Russell starts off very well by discussing what he means by "evil": the immediate and unjust suffering of an individual. For Russell this is an immediate and visceral experience, not a philosophical conclusion or theological category. We know evil when we see it, and there's no mistaking it.
Having set these terms of reference, Russell goes on to discuss how evil and its related mythological characters were portrayed in various ancient societies, from India to Iran to Mesopotamia to Egypt, among others. Along the way he shows how various characteristics were eventually echoed by the Biblical portrait of the Devil. For example, in Egypt the god most identified with evil was Seth, killer of Osiris. Seth was pictured as red, the color eventually taken on by Satan. Seth was also "twinned" with Horus in a close antagonism, as the Devil eventually came to be regarded as the dark "twin" of the good God.
Russell is clear that these links are only suggestive. There is no way of knowing exactly how ideas arrived at the minds of the writers of the ancient texts, or how they combined there. Rather, the ancient writers, having a need to explain or demonstrate certain things, reached into the bank of images and ideas of which they were aware, and made use of those that fit their purpose. Over time the Devil gradually took shape, acquiring more definite features as his role in the evolving theological system developed.
Here and there Russell makes declarations or assumptions that are not necessarily backed up by authority. He declares, for example, that in ancient Egypt and ancient Greece there was one God who manifested in the multifarious guise of the gods of mythology. It's not clear to me how true this is, or in what sense.
He also refers to "the God" and "the Devil" as near-universal concepts for many cultures, underlying specific figures such as Yahweh and Satan. Again, it's not clear to me that there really is a universal concept underlying these different manifestations.
However, these ideas are not unreasonable, and I was certainly willing to entertain them in order to engage with Russell's argument. The author did a lot of homework and a lot of thinking in preparing this book, and for me earned some credit. The idea of gods' appearing as twins or doublets in the process of unconscious contents' becoming differentiated en route to consciousness is intriguing, plausible, and backed up by the thinking of Jung and Erich Neumann, among others.
There is a certain diffuseness to the book that comes from the fact that ideas usually cannot be linked with certainty. The process is probabilistic. Russell assembles myths, images, ideas from various places, and there is a feeling that he is preparing to launch into a more definite account which never actually happens. Or maybe it does happen—in the subsequent books of the series.
In this one, the outlines of the Devil appear gradually, as though he were walking slowly toward us out of a fog.
