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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 November 2024
This essay highlights the centrality of ‘the demonic’ in human experience, both collective and personal. It argues in favour of the possibility of explaining it; it dismisses its personification into a demon or several demons; it then proceeds towards a definition and a phenomenology of it; it examines its effects; and it portrays a final feature, namely resentment and revenge, as well as a religious response.
1 Pope John Paul II, Memory and Identity: Conversations at the Dawn of a Millennium (New York: Rizzoli, 2005), p. 167.
2 Fred E. Katz, Ordinary People and Extraordinary Evil: A Report on the Beguilings of Evil (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1993), p. 13.
3 Ordinary People and Extraordinary Evil, p. 5.
4 Providing some psycho-sociological explanation of evil is an undertaking that many authors rule out, regrettably. For instance, Arthur C. McGill, Suffering: A Test of Theological Method (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1982; first published in 1968); Larry D. Bouchard, Tragic Method and Tragic Theology: Evil in Contemporary Drama and Religious Thought (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989); Lawrence L. Langer, Preempting the Holocaust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).
5 Brand Blanshard, Reason and Goodness (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1961), p. 341.
6 Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, vol. 3, ed. by Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), p. 690; see pp. 689–91.
7 See Immanuel Kant, ‘Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason’, in Religion and Rational Theology, trans. by Allen W. Wood and George Di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 55–215, esp. 69–171 (= parts 1–2, Ak 6:18–6:89).
8 Paul Ricœur, Evil: A Challenge to Philosophy and Theology, trans. by John Bowden (New York: Continuum, 2007), p. 53.
9 Mt 6:13b (as well as Jn 17:15, 1 Jn 2:14, and I Jn 5:18) suggests either an impersonal or a personal understanding of evil, since this last petition of the prayer ‘Our Father’, rusai ēmas apo tou ponērou, can be translated as ‘deliver us from evil’ (as in the Roman Catholic mass) or as ‘deliver us from the evil one’ (as in the New Revised Standard Version). So the genitive ponērou can refer either to the neuter ponēron or to the masculine ponēros.
10 ‘Reflections and Commentary by Rollo May’, in Clement Reeves, The Psychology of Rollo May: A Study in Existential Theory and Psychotherapy (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1977), p. 304. The Book of Job (chaps. 1 and 2) is typical of that kind of projection, which is justifiable by its literary genre. However, the Letter of James (at 1:13–15) rectifies that view. Indeed, if God never tempts anybody, why should he delegate Satan to do so?
11 See Malachi Martin, Hostage to the Devil: The Possession and Exorcism of Five Living Americans (New York: Reader’s Digest Press, 1976), and M. Scott Peck, People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982). The psychiatrist Peck agrees with Martin’s understanding of satanic possession while adding that Martin does not have the kinds of insights that psychiatrists readily get.
12 Jean Lhermitte, ‘Les pseudo-possessions diaboliques’, in ‘Satan’, Études carmélitaines (Paris: Desclee de Brouwer, 1948), pp. 472–92.
13 In the Bible, the Hebrew name is Satan (‘the adversary’) and the Greek name is Diabolos (‘the slanderer’, rendered in English as Devil).
14 See The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, ‘Christian Faith and Demonology’ (1975).
15 Nigel Goring Wright, A Theology of the Dark Side: Putting the Power of Evil in its Place (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2010), p. 79.
16 James Hillman, Insearch: Psychology and Religion (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1967), p. 89.
17 Hillman, Insearch, 91. Compare with Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, trans. by Arthur Wills (New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1952), p. 121: ‘When we do evil we do not know it, because evil flies from the light’.
18 Philip G. Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How God People Turn Evil (New York: Random House, 2008), p. viii. See also his Foreword to Edith Eva Eger, The Choice: Embracing the Possible (New York: Scribner, 2017), pp. ix–xiii.
19 The Lucifer Effect, p. xii.
20 See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I–II, q. 94, a. 2: ‘This is the first precept of law, that good is to be done and pursued, and evil is to be avoided. All other precepts of the natural law are based upon this’.
21 See Robert and Carol Ann Faucett, Personality and Spiritual Freedom (New York: Doubleday, 1987), p. 95.
22 Zimbardo, ‘A Situationist Perspective on the Psychology of Evil: Understanding How Good People are Transformed into Perpetrators’, in The Social Psychology of Good and Evil, ed. by Arthur G. Miller (New York: Guilford Press, 2004), p. 26.
23 Nevitt Sanford and Craig Comstock, in Nevitt Sanford, Craig Comstock & Associates, Sanctions for Evil: Sources of Social Destructiveness (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1971), p. 9.
24 Roy F. Baumeister, Evil: Inside Human Cruelty and Violence (New York: Freeman, 1997), p. 170.
25 Sanford and Comstock, in Sanctions for Evil, p. 5.
26 Neil J. Smelser, in Sanctions for Evil, p. 19.
27 Peck, People of the Lie, pp. 42–43.
28 Eric Fromm, The Heart of Man, its Genius for Good and Evil (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), p. 30.
29 Jordan B. Peterson, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief (New York and London: Routledge, 1999), p. 468.
30 Arthur Miller, a text of 1949, reproduced in Death of a Salesman, ed. by Gerald Weales (New York: Viking Press, 1967), p. 144.
31 Miller, in Death of a Salesman, p. 168.
32 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, ed. by Bernard Williams, trans. by Josefine Nauckhoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), Book One, §13 (his italics).
33 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Book Four, §325 (his italics). In these two texts, Nietzsche evidently praises cruelty, although his psychological analysis is terribly accurate.
34 Petru Dumitriu, To the Unknown God, trans. by James Kirkup (New York: Seabury, 1982), p. 58.
35 Fromm, The Heart of Man, p. 32. For vivid depictions of the human degradation of Jewish victims, performed by sadist and cruel men during the Second World War, see Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, revised and updated edition (New York: Pocket Books, at Simon & Schuster, 1985), pp. 85–105, and Elie Wiesel, Night, a new translation by Marion Wiesel (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006).
36 Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect, p. 259.
37 Jordan B. Peterson, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief (New York and London: Routledge, 1999), p. 460.
38 Raymund Tallis, Seeing Ourselves: Reclaiming Humanity from God and Science (Newcastle upon Tyne: Agenda, 2020), p. 297. Further on in his book, talking about ‘fanaticism’ he comments: ‘If the meaning of life is something you are prepared to die for, it may well be that, in ranking your own life below some cause, you may rank others’ lives even lower’ (314).
39 Emil Fackenheim, God’s Presence in History: Jewish Affirmations and Philosophical Reflections (New York: New York University Press, 1970), p. 81.
40 Herbert McCabe, God Still Matters (New York: Continuum, 2002), p. 169.
41 Peck, People of the Lie, 66; as we can observe, he associates ‘deceiving others’ with self-deception. On self-deception, see Louis Roy, The Three Dynamisms of Faith: Searching for Meaning, Fulfilment, and Truth (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2017), pp. 165–77. Augustine defines lying as ‘a false signification told with desire to deceive’, in ‘Against Lying’, trans. by Harold B. Jaffee, chap. 12, Treatises on Various Subjects, ed. by Roy J. Deferrari (New York: Fathers of the Church, 1952), p. 160. See the same definition by Augustine, in ‘Lying’, trans. Mary Sarah Muldowney, chap. 3, in Treatises on Various Subjects, pp. 54–56; interestingly, in chap. 6 of ‘Lying’, p. 67, Augustine quotes The Wisdom of Solomon 1:11, ‘a lying mouth destroys the soul’.
42 Wiesel, in Elie Wiesel and Michaël de Saint-Cheron, Evil and Exile, trans. by Jon Rothschild and Jody Gladding, 2nd edn (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000), p. 40.
43 Peck, People of the Lie, p. 69.
44 Stavrogin is an example of awful, callous and cruel behavior, and yet not without a few passing elements of goodness in him, in Dostoevsky’s novel The Possessed, aptly and subtly described by Jeffrey Burton Russell, The Prince of Darkness: Radical Evil and the Power of Good in History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), pp. 249–51.
45 King Henry V, Act 4, scene 1, verses 4–5.
46 May, Man’s Search for Himself (New York: Norton, 1953), pp. 148–49.
47 Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect, pp. 222–23.
48 Baumeister, Evil, p. 124.
49 Baumeister, Evil, p. 125.
50 Baumeister, ‘Human Evil: The Myth of Pure Evil and the True Causes of Violence’, in The Social Psychology of Morality: Exploring the Causes of Good and Evil, ed. by Mario Mikulincer and Phillip R. Shaver (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2012), p. 368.
51 Smelser, in Sanctions for Evil, p. 17.
52 The phenomenon of falsification is increasing. Through a pernicious use of artificial intelligence, adversaries can now produce fake news and declarations that are indistinguishable from actual news or declarations.
53 Abraham Heschel, God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), p. 383.
54 See Hanna Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2nd edn (Cleveland: Meridian Books, 1967).
55 Craig A. Anderson and Nicholas L. Carnagey, ‘Violent Evil and the General Aggression Model’, in The Social Psychology of Good and Evil, p. 168.
56 Tallis, an unbeliever, honestly and fairly weighs the pros and cons of secularist humanism. For our purposes here, I am drawing my readers’ attention to ‘What secularism cannot offer’, namely, among the several benefits of religious faith, ‘Profound belonging’, ‘Convergence of meaning and purpose’, and ‘Consolation’. See his Seeing Ourselves, pp. 343–46.
57 Heschel, God in Search of Man, p. 376.
58 For a vivid illustration of a Jesuit priest who was his best self in a harrowing situation, see Walter J. Ciszek, With God in Russia, ed. by Daniel L. Flaherty, 2nd edn (New York: HarperOne, 2017).
59 Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, Act V, Scene 1.
60 George Eliot, Wise, Witty and Tender Sayings (Edinburgh & London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1875), p. 190.