The Prince of Darkness: Radical Evil and the Power of Good in History by Jeffrey Burton Russell

Author:Jeffrey Burton Russell [Russell, Jeffrey Burton]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2016-02-04T07:00:00+00:00

Satan, king of hell, tortures the damned while bound to a fiery grill as in the Vision of Tundale. Illumination from the Très riches heures du Duc de Berry, Burgundy, fifteenth century. Courtesy Musée de Condé, Chantilly, and Photographie Giraudon.

The most important development of the Devil in literature appeared in the work of Dante (1265–1321), the greatest medieval poet and lay theologian. His Divine Comedy, written in the last fifteen years of his life, is a complex mystical poem in which the Devil, though seldom “on stage,” is a powerful force operating throughout both hell and earth. Dante did not mean to write a scientific treatise on the physical universe. Rather, he wished to portray the cosmos according to its moral design. For Dante and his contemporaries, the deepest meaning of the cosmos was ethical, not physical, although as a careful artist he wished this ethical world to be analogous to the physical universe as it was understood in his time. In the Comedy, the physical universe is a metaphor for the ethical cosmos rather than the other way round.

Like Ptolemy’s, Dante’s universe was arranged in a series of concentric spheres, the earth being the sphere at the center. Above and around the earth was the sphere of the moon and then in order those of Mercury, Venus, the sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, the fixed stars, and the primum mobile, the sphere that moves the whole universe. Beyond and above these was heaven, the abode of God, the angels, and the blessed souls. In the center of the earth was hell, and at the very center of hell, imprisoned in darkness and ice, was Satan.

Dante worked out a mystical vision not unlike that of Dionysius. Every being in the cosmos moves either toward God or toward the Devil. God is ultimately far up and out; the Devil is ultimately far down and in. When we are filled with our true human nature, which is made in the image of God and buoyed by the action of the Holy Spirit within us, we rise naturally up toward God, we spread out, widen our vision, open ourselves to light, truth, and love, with wide vistas in fresh air, clean, beautiful, and true. The mystic rose at the threshold of heaven opens out for us. But when we are diverted by illusion and weighed down by sin and stupidity, we sink downward and inward, away from God, ever more narrowly confined, our eyes gummed shut and our vision turned in upon ourselves, drawn down, heavy, closed off from reality, bound by ourselves to ourselves, shut in and shut off, shrouded in darkness and sightlessness, angry, hating, and isolated. Each circle of hell as we descend is narrower and darker. There is nothing in that direction, literally nothing: silence, lack, privation, emptiness. God is expansion, being, light; Satan, drawn in upon himself, is nothingness, hatred, darkness, and despair. His isolation stands in utter contrast to the community of love in which God joins our minds with the first star.

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