Mephistopheles

...the same unwillingness to permit the historiographic fashions of the day (or, indeed, the traditional boundaries dividing history from philosophy and theology) to impede progress towards his chosen goal...

...20, 12...

...As he says at the start of Lucifer (p...

...In Mephistopheles, as in its predecessor volumes, he is faithful to his pledge to speak "as a human being as well as a historian...

...At the simplest level, he has done so by his very willingness to undertake the sort of grand project pursued in these four volumes: that of tracing the history of a concept over the course of millennia and multiple national and cultural boundaries...

...But if it is from that stock figure of skeptical modernity that Russell draws the title of his book, he ends it with the chastening insistence that 56: Commonweal the apocalyptic rigors of twentiethcentury life have thrust the problem of radical evil into the forefront of the post-modern consciousness...

...My philosophy is unabashedly idealist: it assumes that ideas are important in themselves and that the social context in which they arise is less important for understanding the ideas than the other way around...

...58: Commonweal...

...Hence the passion with which he insists that "History is not merely an intellectual exercise...

...lnSatan (Cornell, $27.50, 258 pp...

...Milton's is the last convincing fulllength portrait of the traditional lord of evil" and, by the end of the seventeenth century, the notion of the Devil as the personification of radical evil was giving way to the notion that demons were nothing more than symbols of an evil that was human...

...If we take ideas seriously we must encounter them with our whole personalities" (Lucifer, p. 13...

...That fact imparted to the book itself a higher degree of coherence and consistency than one can reasonably expect to find in Mephistopheles, where, confronting the disintegration of the tradition, he is forced to scan great sweeps of intellectual territory...

...By many, no doubt, these will be dismissed as overweening claims, and Russell has more than once been accused of mixing his history with theology...

...In The Devil, the first of these books (Cornell, $27.50, 276 pp...

...In Lucifer, Russell was able to focus on the traditional diabology at its most consistent...

...the same stubborn refusal to permit us to evade or explain away the fact that our lives are tragically shadowed by the continuing presence in our world of radical evil...

...Lewis, Goethe to Thomas Mann...

...At a deeper level, and sustaining that insistence, lies an even less fashionable but quite explicit set of metahistorical commitments...

...In the catechism of Canisius the name of Satan appears more frequently than that of Jesus (sixty-seven as opposed to sixty-three times), but a century later, with the discrediting of the witchcraft craze, the emergence of the rationalist and empiricist approaches to the understanding of the world, and the gradual growth of materialism, diabology began to run afoul the shoals of skepticism...

...Even more markedly than in the earlier volumes, he forced at times to essay something close to a general intellectual history...

...Hence, too, the confidence with which he can claim that " 'The Devil' is best investigated by history, which does not make the faith as30 January 1987: 57 sumptions of theology yet can, unlike science, address the phenomenon directly" (p.23...

...BOOKS Bewitched, bothered, & bedeviled In this intriguing book, the fourth in a series of related works, Jeffrey Russell brings to a triumphant conclusion the effort he began over a decade ago to trace the idea of the Devil ("the best-known symbol of radical evil") as it has developed across the centuries down to the present day...

...To the general reader the last point may not appear to be of any great mo, ment, but perhaps I may be permitted, as a fellow historian, to dwell on it with some insistence...

...he charted perceptions and personifications of evil from the cultures of antiquity to the New Testament era...

...But what promised to be a death-bed scene had a curious ending...

...Francis Oakley century by the witchcraft craze and the theology of Luther, he goes on to describe the subsequent fragmentation of the traditional belief in the malign existence of a prince of darkness...

...I differ from the materialism presently dominant in the historical profession and deny that modern, materialism possesses any objective framework within which or by which ideas are to be judged...

...he arrived at his own period of particular expertise, outlining the ideas about the Devil prevalent during the Middle Ages, the great age of consistent diabology...

...12) and in the clearest of his several statements on the matter: Throughout these volumes I have been drawing the history of a concept...

...It would be presumptuous and futile to deal with so fundamental a problem as evil without confronting it personally...

...But the virtues evident in the earlier volumes are evident here too: the same, seemingly effortless, lucidity...

...Rarely does one hear a mention of the marked interpretative distortions or impoverishment or perspective occasioned by simple ignorance of the longer history of an enduring tradition of thought...

...And that produces in the reader sensations akin to those experienced when traveling by train through countryside usually traversed by road: disturbingly unfamiliar glimpses of the familiar, seen from a radically different perspective and clad in darker hues...

...With Lacj/er (Cornell, $24.95, $12.95 paper, 356 pp...

...Satan Expiring," therefore, is the rubric under which Russell discusses the decline of diabology during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, when the very foundations of Christianity itself were called into question...

...Rather, the first function of history is to open our minds to the infinite wealth of possible world views and to help us to understand that our own view, whatever it may be, is precarious, limited, and open to sudden and radical change...

...With the advent of Romanticism the recumbent figure of the Devil underwent an unexpected resuscitation, this time as "a powerful and ambivalent symbol," personifying, among other things "noble rebellion against autocracy...

...With such accusations he canliave, I suspect, little patience...

...In a profession currently enamored of the virtue of "thick description" and the type of precision made possible only by microhistory or the painstaking attention to the density of highly confined and localized contexts, the inevitable exposure to error on the part of those foolhardy enough to embark upon more sweeping voyages through time has been sagely and widely canvassed...

...And now, in Mephistopheles, having first delineated the deepening belief in the Devil fostered during the sixteenth MEPHISTOPHELES THE DEVIL IN THE MODERN WORLD Jeffrey Burton Russell Cornell University, $24.95, 323 pp...

...Hence the refreshing (if startling) impact of Russell's insistence that a given concept is "a coherent whole transcending time," something that can properly be understood only "in terms of its entire tradition" (Satan, pp...

...it is a sacred calling" (Satan, p. 19...

...And that symbol then modulated, in the music, art, and literature of the nineteenth century , into the ironic and sometimes comic Mephistopheles...

...is superior to all other approaches," he says, "in that it includes them all" (p...

...it is the historian's life" (The Devil, p.40...

...Augustine...

...If he has chosen to approach the mystery of evil using the techniques of a historian, he has clearly not been tempted to confine the mystery within the orbit described by those techniques...

...So that for a truly contemporary theology the concept of the Devil is a matter not lightly to be dismissed...

...After reading these splendid volumes, no one will be tempted, I suspect, to accuse him of any lesser undertaking...

...he analyzed the diabology of the early Christian era down to the influential crystallization of the Western patristic tradition in the writings of St...

...The history of that phenomenon (-i.e., the changing concept of the Devil), embracing as it does such other knowing "as theology, mythology, and literature...

...Or, again, that "History is more than a game...

...Not least of all because most of Russell's originality and the power of his work to compel stems from the calm resolution with which he has apparently determined to swim against the prevailing historiographic currents of the day...

...Namely, a blunt rejection of the "materialist" paradigm prevailing in so much of the historical thinking of our day, and a decision instead to pursue "a more idealist tack...

...from Luther to Baudelaire, the Faust book to Flannery O'Connor, Leibniz to C.S...