The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil

Columbia University literary scholar Delbanco (The Puritain Ideal) weighs in with a plea for revival not of old-time religion but of the sense of personal responsibility fostered by traditional religious notions of evil. His subject: ``the incessant dialectic in American life between the dispossession of Satan under the pressure of modernity and the hunger to get him back.'' Delbanco argues that in contemporary America, the Devil and the evil the Devil represents are stranded between the liberal tendency to explain heinous acts as the consequence of bad social luck and the fundamentalist hunger to demonize one's enemies. The author takes his most useful notion of evil from St. Augustine by way of Jonathan Edwards, Reinhold Niebuhr and Martin Luther King Jr., who, he argues, all saw Satan not as an invading other but as a symbol of ``our own deficient love, our potential for envy and rancor toward creation.'' When we cease being able to imagine and name this evil (whether in horror movies or serious literature or daily conversation), Delbanco argues, it will have truly gained mastery over us. This is serious cultural history, as witty and elegant as it is impassioned. Illustrations not seen by PW. (Oct.)