Satan is back

It used to be said by Catholic priests back in the 1950s that the Devil was delighted when human beings decided that he did not exist. In those days it seemed unlikely that he would disappear altogether from human consciousness because he was so well known — as Baal or Beelzebub in the Old Testament, the Prince of Lies in the New, as Lucifer in the King James Bible, as Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost, and as Mephistopheles in the legend of Faust; but it has turned out that a subtle move from scripture into myth, folklore and finally literature has been an effective way of becoming unreal. Today we hear his name more frequently in lectures on English literature than in seminars on theology. Films about demonic possession and exorcism still send shivers down the spine, but we know it is make-believe. The precipitous decline in Britain in the number of those who believe in God was long preceded by the disappearance of the Devil even from the cognizance of Christian believers.

Is this about to change? Soon after his election, Pope Francis told the College of Cardinals not ‘to give in to the pessimism, to that bitterness, that the Devil places before us every day’. More radically, in his first homily as Pope, he quoted the French author from the turn of the 20th century, Léon Bloy: ‘He who does not pray to the Lord prays to the Devil.’ Bloy was a zealous, even belligerent Catholic: he believed, like Pope Francis, in spiritual renewal through poverty and suffering, and eschewed any compromise with the world.

But who, or what, is the Devil? Even in scripture he is elusive. He tempts Christ during his 40 days in the wilderness; he prompts Peter to refuse to wash the feet of Jesus (‘Get thee behind me, Satan’); and in some translations of the Lord’s prayer, we are enjoined to ask God to deliver us not just from evil in the abstract but from ‘the evil one’ — a personal adversary of a personal God.