The Old Enemy:

...One must take Christianity or leave it, and not shoehorn it into the latest theories from Paris or the Black Forest...

...The Devil developed in the Old Testament and even Apocalyptic thought without much (if any) influence from Iranian dualism: an absolutely correct point, I believe...

...Chapter ten deals with the Qumran dichotomy of light/good against darkness/evil...

...the Devil's alleged intercourse with Eve- appear in chapters other than the one on anti-feminism...

...THE OLD ENEMY SATAN AND THE COMBAT MYTH Neil Forsyth Princeton, $67.50, 506 pp...

...Forsyth has obviously never forgotten this maxim...

...Part Two, "Rebellion and Apocalypse," treats the Old Testamentand, in superlative, unequaled fashion, Intertes-tamental materials...

...Chapter nine shows how the Apocalyptic Book of Jubilees ties Satan to the lustful angels, thus beginning the tradition that it is he who is the origin of sin through lust...

...Forsyth links the rebel of Isaiah 14 with the Greek Phaethon myth and the Ugaritic myth of Athtar...

...Jeffrey Burton Russell The Old Enemy is a book on the development of the literary, mythological, legendary, and folkloric perceptions of the Devil from about 2000 B.C...

...Part Four deals with the early Fathers and the heretics, showing how Tertul-lian, Irenaeus, and others identified Satan with Judas as the archetypal betrayer of the Lord and saw Satan as the cause of the heresy and the leader of heretics...

...Some challenging perceptions along the way: After the exile, when the Zadokite priesthood largely replaced the Levites, it emphasized the temple as the center of worship and connected it closely to the monarchy...

...Augustine...

...If some modern academics are correct, and Christianity has been dead wrong on a central issue from its very inception, why bother with Christianity at all...

...The roots of such narrative are already firmly imbedded in the Old Testament, of course, where the story line of sacred history is precisely the repeated rebellion of humanity, first directly against God (Adam and Eve...

...In the Intertestamental material, an ultimate question begins to be clear: to what extent did emerging dualism shift the myth from a struggle of humanity against an evil permitted by God (as in Job) to a struggle of God himself against that evil...

...Part One, "Ancient Enemies," examines combat myths in the Ancient Near East (including Canaan) and Greece...

...he misses many a good bet...

...My chief reservation about method is the sin of omission that the author commits in not drawing much more upon the rich Jungian tradition of treating such materials...

...Chapter eight discusses the addition of lust to motives for the fall through Apocalyptic interpretation of the "Watcher Angels" of Genesis 6. In the complex Enoch tradition, sexual lust becomes the transgression that brings evil into the world...

...The book really is one of the dozen most genuinely brilliant and original works I've encountered in the past few years: it is subtle, dense, learned, and analytical-always without sacrificing its clarity...

...The deep magic is that-as Paul, Augustine, Luther, and so many others have seen through two millennia-it is Jesus Christ who works whatever good there may be in us...

...Forsyth is not a theologian, and he does not investigate the truth of the Satan concept so much as the literary and mythological structure of the figures surrounding Satan, such as the serpent, the tyrant, the rebel, the sexual outlaw, the dragon, chaos, and so on...

...Later the Gnostics would go further by claiming that the Devil had sexual intercourse with Eve and was the physical father of Cain and Abel...

...Within Part Three, chapters 13-16deal with the early Christian development of the myth...

...For Paul, Satan, "the stumbling block," was the center of opposition to preaching the Good News, and here the idea that Satan was not only the opponent of God and of Christ but also of the Christian community first emerges...

...by tempting Adam and Eve he encouraged (he could not cause) the original sin of humanity...

...Part Five is devoted primarily to the greatest of all Christian diabologists, Augustine himself...

...The most wonderful thing about this splendid book is its clarity...

...to us...

...What came eventually to be (with Augustine) the standard Christian interpretation draws deeply from ancient mythological roots...

...But here, placing this view in the philosophical context of Neoplatonism, Forsyth misses the deeper meaning- the Deep Magic, as C.S...

...Forsyth reveals, by the way, that Paul's curious connection of Satan with "the angel of light'' derives from the Qumran Damascus Document...

...Like it or not, belief in the conflict between Christ and Satan is an integral part of Christianity that can be removed only by ruthlessly tearing apart the fabric...

...For Irenaeus in his war against the Gnostics, Satan is the arch-apostate, the arch-heretic, and the first Gnostic...

...further, the Enoch materials attribute the introduction of lust not to humanity itself but to evil angels...

...Cain...

...they are not our creation or in our possession...

...Though Isaiah explicitly says that the fall of the "son of the morning" refers to the "king-of Babylon," Forsyth points out that the mythic content overwhelms and overflows the historical reference...

...That is, one may tell the whole story in such enormous complexity that readers will be unable to grasp it (chaos), or one may be clear through oversimplification (lies...

...The book is much richer than I can indicate in a few pages, and the best I can do is to follow the author's organization and draw attention to some of his most important points...

...He considers both myths and legends, which claim truth, and folklore, which does not...

...The Devil is the enemy of Adam and his progeny, and the enemy of the Second Adam (Christ) and Christ's progeny, the Christian community...

...It is Augustine who undeniably establishes what became the standard view of the Devil in Christendom (especially the West...

...Chapter 21 develops the view that H. A. Kelly first stated clearly and I have followed-namely that Origen was the most original demonologist among the Fathers and that it was he (along with Tertullian) who firmly linked the rebel princes of Isaiah 14 and Ezechiel 28 with Satan himself...

...When Satan enters Hebrew-Christian narrative, Forsyth argues, he transforms legend into myth...

...One must have something to grumble about, and in a few places trendy words and phrases appear that set one's teeth on edge...

...For those interested in "methodology," Forsyth draws upon Propp, Levi-Straus, and the structuralist tradition as well as Freudian psychology, but he never follows them narrowly, using them rather to construct a method in large part his own...

...Readers have reason to be standoffish about many allegedly brilliant works recently appearing in the humanities, for a number of contemporary humanists forget the lesson we teach our undergraduates every week: if you express it clearly, it indicates that you are probably understanding it...

...Perhaps the closest we get to truth is in the balance between the two, and Forsyth seems as close to the fulcrum as one can get...

...Materials seem sometimes out of order: one example is that a number of important comments on sexuality-e.g...

...Finally, though it is good to think about the power of evil historically, theologically, mythologically, and literarily, it is much better to act in the power of good...

...to act in the power of good...

...the first section of the book ought to have been trimmed to leaner size...

...The sea (chaos) is the primordial enemy of God...

...He shows a rare and precious charity to his audience: he wants to communicate more than to impress us with his brilliance...

...Chapters 7-11 (in Part Two), which deal largely with Jewish Apocalyptic literature, are the most brilliant of the book...

...Legend is set in "history," as with Moses or Jesus, while myth is set in Mo tempore, in another dimension...

...Chapter eleven is anachronistic in its concern with "anti-feminism," but Forsyth does make the important point that the suspicion of sexuality that has always run as an undercurrent in Christianity derives from this Intertestamental Apocalyptic literature...

...Lewis put it...

...our own part is merely to assent...

...The Zadokites then made Satan a cosmic projection onto opposing political forces...

...With Augustine the storyline is rationalized, drawn out of myth into history: God created a great angel with freedom...

...Dissent from this consensus first became significant in the eighteenth century, but not till the twentieth (certainly among Catholics) did it become broadly influential...

...Having wrestled with similar problems myself, I cannot blame the author for such difficulties, for the "story line" of the development of the concept of the Devil is so complex that any serious author dealing with the question is forced to choose (as a famous historian once said) between chaos and lies...

...Forsyth summarizes the center of Augustine's ethic as "sin is the love of one's own excellence, or pride...

...Forsyth analyzes the well-known close connection between Isaiah 14 and Ezechiel 28 in the same manner: Ezechiel's "prince of Tyre" reverberates to the rebel/dragon motif of the gentile Tiamat, Mot, and Prometheus...

...to St...

...As Forsyth, not...

...It is absolutely clear that the Gospel writers set the struggle of Jesus against the demons and the Devil as one of the central themes of their work, and clear too (as Forsyth shows later), that the Fathers and Christian tradition were unanimous in agreeing with this...

...that angel abused his freedom and sinned, thus introducing evil into the world...

...The Devil has become embarrassing to many modern theologians caught up in secularist patterns of thought, but any nonbeliever or clear-thinking believer will want to consult two millennia of Christian tradition including the New Testament with more interest than the latest critical and, theological theories of contemporary academics...

...In one of his most brilliant intuitions, For-syth shows how this view connected with Irenaeus's well-known "ransom theory" of soteriology-a view that launched a debate still alive after nearly two millennia...

...Chapter four,' 'Combat at the Red Sea,'' examines the Exodus story in the light of earlier literature and shows that the Red Sea is another manifestation of chaos, "the deep waters," and Tiamat...

...I think) himself a practicing believer, deals with the role of the Devil and demons in the Gospels, he raises a crucial contemporary theological problem...

...In telling the story of the world, one must account for how evil corrupted God's creation...

...Whatever talents we have are given (or lent: remember the parable...

...Part of the credit is due to the Intertestamental writers themselves as well as Forsyth, for they were the first to try to construct a coherent myth about the origin of evil in the world...

...Here and in Part Three, which deals superbly with the Gnostics, one senses with a desperate effort on the part of the conscious minds of these writers to deal with chaotic feelings/images/powers-perhaps best seen in terms of Jungian archetypes-a chaos too great, in other words, for any myth or any theology to bear...

...Noah), and then against God through rebellion against the Covenant...

...The rebel to be cast down here is something deeper and more powerful than an earthly king, though the "king of Babylon," enemy of God's chosen people, is necessarily the enemy of God as well...

...Forsyth points out the bitter irony that the theologian who did the most to create Christian diabology was condemned as a heretic for the implications of his "apocatastasis," his view that everything will be drawn back to God at the eschaton (including Satan...

...The crux of the Satan story for the author is that it is the nexus of a combat myth whose origins stretch back to the ancient Near East...

...Forsyth's originality here is to treat the question more as a narrative than a theological issue...