The Life and Times of the Prince of Darkness

Historian Jeffrey Burton Russell has spent 20 years charting the strange career of a fallen angel.

Not too many people would want to spend 20 years with the Devil, but historian Jeffrey Burton Russell has. And after writing five books on the Evil One, he says he is ready to move on.

An early scholarly interest in the history of heresy led Russell to an interest in medieval witchcraft, which has led him to his most recent preoccupation. Russell, who teaches at the University of California-Santa Barbara, set out to write a single book on the history of the concept of the Devil, but ended up writing five (all published by Cornell University Press). The first four covered the periods from antiquity to the New Testament (The Devil), the early Christian tradition (Satan), the Middle Ages (Lucifer), and the modern world (Mephistopheles). The Prince of Darkness, released in 1988, is a more popular treatment that summarizes and “corrects” the history covered in the preceding four books.

CHRISTIANITY TODAY talked to Russell to get an idea about how the church has formed its ideas about the Devil and how these have changed over the centuries. Russell, who describes himself as a traditional and ecumenical Christian, keeps an open mind about the exact nature of the Devil, but takes him very seriously.

Does the Devil have horns?

The typical iconography of the Devil has him as a tall, saturnine figure dressed in red with horns, cloven feet, and a tail, with a sinister expression on his face, and sometimes holding a trident or a fork. The horns are an ancient symbol of power associated with gods and goddesses throughout the ancient Middle East. They represent power, fertility, and growth, and are associated with fertility cults.

A tail and the cloven hooves go along with the horns in the sense that they represent bestiality. The Devil lost his angelic form and has become something lower than angels, even lower than humans; he has become bestial.

The color red comes from both Egypt and Canaan as a symbol of the desert, the symbol of death and sterility. The trident is the most difficult to track down, but there is iconographical evidence that for some reason the Devil gets associated with either Neptune or river gods in late Roman art, and so you sometimes get the Devil as blue, holding a trident.

What about the idea that demons have batlike wings and angels have feathery wings?

This is not as simple as I thought it was, to tell you the truth. I had a number of conversations with an art historian friend of mine who also specializes in the Devil. The beautiful, feathery angelic wings and the ugly, batlike demonic ones do not become clear in the iconography until the illustrations of Dante’s Inferno and Milton’s Paradise Lost by Gustave Doré in the nineteenth century. But before that, in medieval and early modern art, there is not as much of that as one would think.

Why are demons supposed to smell like sulphur?

Demons have all kinds of unpleasant smells, and I don’t think it requires any deep historical or psychological roots to understand that. If you go back and look at the church fathers, the demons are assaulting Christians’ minds and senses. And the demons do it by making a horrible racket, a horrible noise; they do it by pounding and shaking on the door of the hut; they do it by emitting horrible screams; they do it by emitting foul odors. It is all part of the effort to frighten and intimidate us.

How recent is the practice of giving demons the names of particular sins, like the spirit of lust or the demon of pride?

In the Middle Ages there was certainly a tendency to speak of demons of pride. It is not until perhaps as late as the nineteenth century that you get almost whimsical dictionaries of demons: this demon is responsible for lust and this demon for avarice and so on.

Going back to the church fathers, there is some basis for this in Evagrius of Pontus who had the sophisticated psychological idea that demons are attuned to our sins. For example, as soon as you would open your mind to the sin of avarice, as soon as you would be tempted by some deal that would get you a lot of money, then that action would open a hole in your soul’s defenses, and the demons are primed to go in. Sometimes Evagrius does speak as if there were special demons who go after avarice and others with all of the other specialties.

You note that little is said about the Devil in the Old Testament, and then, all of a sudden, much is said in the New Testament. What is behind that shift?

In the Old Testament there is a tension between the idea that the Lord is absolutely powerful, that everything that happens is the will of the Lord, and the idea that there are spiritual forces obstructing or battling the work of the Lord. The most striking example of the tension is the difference between 2 Samuel 24:1 and 1 Chronicles 21:1 that both portray how David takes a census, which is, of course, against the covenant. In the earlier version (2 Samuel), it says the Lord provoked David to undertake this census. By the time of 1 Chronicles, which is a couple of hundred years later, it is changed to read that Satan incited David to do the census. We must also keep in mind that satan in Hebrew is a common noun meaning an obstruction, a blockage, something that gets in your way. In the Old Testament it is used mostly as a common noun. It is not until the intertestamental period that Satan really comes forth as a very powerful and independent personality.

In the Jewish writings beginning about 150 to 100 B.C., there is a major shift toward the apocalyptic. The world seems to be in very bad shape. The end must be near. Powerful forces of evil are rising up, and there is going to be a vast battle between good and evil. In this intertestamental literature the Devil or devils or demons become increasingly vivid and terribly powerful. The New Testament writers are born into a period where this is very much in the air, and it becomes a part of their world view.

How are we to understand the demon possession mentioned in the Gospels, and how does it relate to illness?

We must be careful first to understand the Gospel world view, then to understand our own world view, and finally to try to make a connection while recognizing that the world views are different. It is too simplistic when some biblical scholars say these accounts of curing people by casting out demons are really some kind of physical cure.

Most people today don’t have demons. When I get sick I don’t go for an exorcism. I go down to the clinic and get antibiotics. That is our world view.

Their world view is very different. There is evil—not only illness, but earthquakes, storms, and so on—that is explained in terms of hostile forces beyond human control. In the first-century world view it is natural to assume that these things come from the Devil. It is Satan and his legions who are assaulting us. So how do you help someone who is suffering? You cast the demon out of him.

Did the early church and other Christians throughout history uphold this idea of demons possessing individuals?

Definitely. The apostles cast out demons. Holy men and women—monks, martyrs, hermits—also have such powers. In fact, one way of demonstrating that someone is especially holy is the person’s ability to do what we would call miracles, mainly healing miracles. This goes right on through the early church, through the Fathers, through the Middle Ages, and right down to the present in some sectors of Christianity.

The desert fathers saw the primary tactics of Satan as individual temptation. Was there any sense that the Devil also worked on a corporate level, that he controlled certain structures?

Definitely. For example, the Devil controlled the Roman Empire. Any secular authority who was hostile to Christ or to Christianity is deemed to be under the control or influence of Satan.

That probably changed when the Roman Empire became Christian.

It is funny to see that within about a ten-year period the Roman Empire stops being the visible manifestation of the kingdom of Satan on earth and becomes the visible manifestation of the kingdom of God on earth.

You mentioned that one of the problems with medieval scholasticism was that in its diabology it moved too far away from experience. What do you mean?

The tendency of the great scholastics of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, with Aquinas being the most obvious example, was to try to pin down every conceivable detail of theology. You have people trying to define exactly how many demons there are, what ranks of demons there might be, who is in charge of what, how you deal with them, and so on. They built intricate systems that grew increasingly complex and intricate, which eventually got top-heavy and fell down. Toward the end of the thirteenth century and the fourteenth century, the whole realist-scholastic synthesis collapsed. They were trying to pin things down intellectually which were no longer rooted in people’s experience.

The Devil played a big role in Luther’s thought. But diabology did not really change much in the Reformation.

The diabology of Luther and Calvin, particularly Luther, is virtually identical with late medieval diabology except for a couple of things. First, Luther takes the Devil, I think, more seriously and more personally. He existentially experiences the Devil far more than any other Christian theologian with the possible exception of some of the early desert fathers.

The other change is the proliferation via the Lutheran churches of little pamphlets on Scripture, including pamphlets on the Devil. And in these catechisms, Luther’s doctrines are reflected and the Devil and the demons are given a powerful role indeed.

Yet some of the popular protections against the Devil were taken away by the Reformation.

I think this is important. The medieval Catholics had a sense that, yes, the Devil was important, but we are part of a community of saints, in which the saints are helping us. If we feel the Devil getting after us, we can call on the saints, and they will call on Christ, and he will help us out. Whereas the Protestants, by downplaying the community aspect of Christianity and by up-playing its individual aspect, put the individual in his closet face-to-face with the powers of darkness—and that is a very scary thing.

You spend a number of chapters talking about the effect of secularization, the Enlightenment, and science on cultural conceptions of evil. But in the realm of popular religion, was Satan still prominent?

The first answer is yes: popular belief in the Devil continues through the time of the Enlightenment and into the present. But the answer is also no, because when the scientific, secular world view starts percolating down as it does after the French Revolution, there is a huge change. With the educated middle classes, there is a rapid decline in popular belief in the Devil and demons from roughly 1800 onward.

How does today’s church handle this subject?

The intellectual leaders of the churches for the most part tend either to deny or avoid discussions of demons and diabology, the big exception being Cardinal Ratzinger. Yet people are finding that the public theology of the churches is not doing a terribly good job of addressing the problem of evil. As a very regular churchgoer, I virtually never hear preached from the pulpit anything about evil or about sin.

A hot topic in some Christian circles today is the idea of praying against territorial spirits—that certain cities or areas have a particular demon. These Christians have prayer marathons to cast it out. Is there a historical precedent for this?

Definitely. Interestingly, one must go back centuries in the Christian tradition to find it. The territoriality of angels and demons plays very little if any role in mainstream Christian theology. After the fourth or fifth century, you find it rarely referred to. But in some of the church fathers, Origen particularly, you find the idea that each nation or community has its own angel and its own demon. So there is an angel of the Persian Empire and a demon of the Persian Empire. There is an angel of the Roman Empire and a demon of the Roman Empire, and so forth.

One reason the desert fathers are going out in the desert is that they maintain the cities have been purified or exorcised. As Christianity grows, more and more areas are liberated from the Devil, so where does he go? Well, he has to escape into the desert where there are not any churches. And so the desert fathers are, in effect, going after him where he lives, tracking him and hunting him down.

How has your view of evil and the Devil changed over the course of your study?

I ended up with the same answer that God gave Job. Where were you, you silly little college professor, when I was laying the foundations of the earth?

I think I have changed in that I started with more hope of ending up with a coherent diabology and have ended up not believing that one is possible. That is to say, whatever is going on or not going on is beyond our powers to define. So, I have become, let’s say, humbled in this experience, probably wiser than I was.

At the end of The Prince of Darkness you affirm that you do believe in some personal Devil, or at least you are open to that being a possibility.

I am definitely open to it. I do believe that there is some force beyond the individual human personality; beyond the darkness that exists in each one of us, there is some force that pulls us as a race toward evil.

As a traditional Christian, I would call that the Devil; other people might call it something else.

Have something to add about this? See something we missed? Share your feedback here.