The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil
Has anyone read it?
Re: Death of Satan
sounds interesting (controversial).
Have you read it? Whats it all about?
Re: Death of Satan
The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil
Has anyone read it?
Agree with Muqaw. Sounds interesting. What is it about and do you agree with the author's perspective? I will look into this one as well.
Re: Death of Satan
I Haven't read it yet...it's basically talks about the concept of satan throughout the American history. The first chapter is posted somewhere on Internet...let me google it.
Re: Death of Satan
Sounds hateful. Do tell us how you liked it and why
Re: Death of Satan
I really want to read it but it’s not available where I live and it’s not available as an E-book either…so that’s gonna have to wait for another month or so…though I would share this review here I think it’s one of the best.
An Excellent, Important Book 5 May 2012
*By *Richard B. Schwartz - Published on Amazon.com
**This is a rich and subtle book whose prose is so smooth and lucid that it risks masking the depth of its thought. While it is a book of literary and cultural history it has philosophic roots and impulses without the dense language that often accompanies them.
The title is straightforward enough–an account of the ways in which Americans have lost their sense of evil (which was often embodied in a fallen archangel). The author begins with the colonies–the old enemy coming to the new world–and proceeds across history to our own period.
Ultimately, this is a book about secular rationality, secular epistemology, secular relativism–the current world in which intellectual elites (by and large) live and move and try to find their being. There are specific historical arguments. The horrors of the civil war and the first world war, for example, undercut our belief in providence and focused attention on luck and chance. (Of course, the Roman Goddess Fortuna and fortune’s wheel were much in evidence in the Middle Ages and Renaissance despite the rise of Christianity, so we are talking here about stresses and emphases, not absolutes.) The rise of science obviated the need for certain religious/quasi-religious explanations. Witches largely disappeared because we had better explanations for human behavior and phenomena.
Still, the need to believe, the hunger for transcendence, persists. Exorcisms are common in popular culture even if they have faded from common experience. Satan might not be the source of explanations in philosophy textbooks, but he is almost surely alive and well at a cineplex near you.
The ultimate inspiration for Delbanco’s argument is Augustinian (the Confessions remaining an important text in the general education program at Columbia). The evil with which we must ultimately deal is that of privation. Augustine moved beyond his flirtation with Manicheianism with its targeted, embodied, equal-and-opposing form of evil. The evil of privation is not the more banal type of evil that looks at the things which man cannot do (we cannot fly as the birds do, hear and smell as dogs do, etc.) but rather evil as absence, evil as emptiness, evil, ultimately, as a failure to love, as an ultimate selfishness (as Gilbert Osmond in Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady, for example).
And here is the problem for the secularist, Delbanco argues. While the secularist might find some psychic satisfaction in seeing evil in a historical, opposing other', he or she still feels the need for transcendence, since the satisfactions of the secular prove to be ultimately unsatisfying. There is simply never enough, as Johnson pointed out in Rasselas, with his discussion of the hunger of the imagination’ or as Carlyle pointed out in Sartor Resartus with his discussion of the shoeshine boy who could not be made happy by all of the industrial wealth of Europe, because he has a soul in addition to a stomach.
The secular evolutionary psychologist sees the development of humanity as, ultimately, a quest for survival, with selfish impulses (drives, genetic wiring) aiding us in that process. The truly `evolved’ person, however, knows that selflessness can prove far more gratifying. If there is nothing worth dying for, there is nothing worth living for. Of course, we now see the evolutionary psychologists looking at selfless activities that confer evolutionary advantages, but the broad-brush sweep of contemporary secularism was advanced by simplistic readings of Darwin.
The bottom line, which is both cultural and philosophic (in terms of relevant discourses) is that we have lost our language for dealing with evil at the same time that we feel its obvious presence. If we divide the world into secular rationalists and believers, it is difficult if not impossible for one to talk to the other because each sees the other’s `language’ as either sadly uninformed by faith or sadly weakened by superstition. This is what the death of Satan has wrought.
A highly-recommended, important book.