The Prince of Darkness: Radical Evil and the Power of Good in History

Rating:
Summary: Please allow him to introduce himself....
Review: An amazing, fascinating, intellectually stimulating book on a subject too often the province of cranks, fanatics, or frauds--the Devil himself. Russell, a California history professor, has written several volumes on Lucifer, and this is the most far-ranging. An in-depth study that traces the history of the Devil from his shadowy origins in the desert wastes of the Middle East and of course even further back, in Africa; follows him through Judaism and early Christianity to the Middle Ages, up through the Reformation and Age of Enlightenment, right through to the Holocaust and the post-modern world. Russell explores theology, folklore, literature, and history to piece together this ultimate symbol of evil. From early church writers such as Origen and Tertullian to Milton and Dante, to Baudelaire, de Sade, Dostoevski and Flannery O'Connor, Russell looks at the ways in which the Devil has been personified for different ages. Highly readable, packed with accurate and well-researched information, this should appeal to anyone with an interest in comparative religions, mythology, or history. This really is perhaps the definitive book on the figure of the Devil, although I would also recommend Paul Carus' "The Devil and the Idea of Evil," Alice Turner's "The History of Hell" and Homer Smith's "Man and His Gods."

Rating:
Summary: a good history
Review: I just finished reading this book. Overall, I recommend it, although I think the author makes a much better historian than philosopher. Fortunately, he spends most of the book being a historian. The book covers the beginnings of a Devil concept in Zoroastrianism up to modern beliefs about the Devil. Naturally, there are surveys of Milton, Dante, and Faustian motifs. The author admits that his book is Christian-centric, which I can accept for the historical parts of the book. But I think he took a wrong turn in the last few, more philosophical, chapters where he dismisses modern materialism and skepticism of the existence of Satan.

Rating:
Summary: a good history
Review: I just finished reading this book. Overall, I recommend it, although I think the author makes a much better historian than philosopher. Fortunately, he spends most of the book being a historian. The book covers the beginnings of a Devil concept in Zoroastrianism up to modern beliefs about the Devil. Naturally, there are surveys of Milton, Dante, and Faustian motifs. The author admits that his book is Christian-centric, which I can accept for the historical parts of the book. But I think he took a wrong turn in the last few, more philosophical, chapters where he dismisses modern materialism and skepticism of the existence of Satan.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Introduction to the History and Myth of the Devil
Review: Jeffrey B. Russell's "Prince of Darkness" is an excellent introduction to the complex history and mythology surrounding one of the most famous entities to grace the stage of religion and history, a being known by many names: Beelzebub, the Archfiend, Old Scratch, Lucifer, and Satan. It serves essentially as an overview of his series of four books on the Devil at each stage of history from ancient to modern times.

Russell traces the Satan myth from its earliest primitive conceptual origins in Summerian and Babylonian myth and its influence on ancient Judaism and Zoroastrianism. He shows that there are really only four religions throughout all of history that have had a concept of a singular entity that is the total personification of pure and radical evil, these being anicent Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and Islam. Each has its own rich and complex history and diabology, but it has been Christianity that has had the most complex and influential.

The book then continues with an analysis of the miriad of influences within Christianity on the evolving concept, role, and image of the Devil, from the early Christian tradtions as developed by Origen, Justin Martyr, St Anthony, and St. Augustine to the various Christian heretical sects, such as the Gnostics, Cathars, and Waldensians. It then traces the rise of the Devil to prominence in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and his role in the rise of the witchcraze of the 16th and 17th centuries. At this time, there was such an obsession with the concept of Satan and his minions that a complex demonology grew up around him, created by theologians, clerics, jurists, and crackpots. As time passed, the fearful influence of the Devil waned as belief in spirits and demons passed into the realm of superstition and Satan was reduced to little more than an advertising ploy and horror movie cliche. As it was with Christianity, so it is in the secular world as well: Satan Sells.

Russell's introduction gives an excellent overview to a fascinating and complex subject and hopefully will lead to an even more in-depth investigation of the most feared being in history, that Father of Lies and Seducer of All the World called the Devil and Satan.