Paul Carus’ The History of the Devil and the Idea of Evil (1899)

“While the idea of God has received much attention from philosophers and progressive theologians, its counterpart, the dark figure of the Evil One, has been much neglected”. So begins The History of the Devil, wherein this perceived wrong is to be righted by Paul Carus, a self-described “theologian of science”.

Although an unfamiliar name now, at the end the nineteenth century Carus was hailed for his attempts to “conciliate science and religion”. He also played a key role in the introduction of Buddhist thought to the United States, to which he emigrated from his native Germany in the mid-1880s. A prolific author — The History of the Devil was one of the seventy-five books he published in his lifetime — Carus also edited two philosophical journals (The Open Court and The Monist), through which he published some of the most notable thinkers of his day.

His work reflected the intellectual climate of the times. Educated at Strasburg and then Tübingen, he used rigorous historical techniques such as textual analysis in his comparative studies of religion and mythology. Carus was also conceptually influenced, like many other writers of the period, by the ideas of Edward Tylor, an English anthropologist, who applied Darwinian principles to the evolution of the social world. Carus’ view that “the belief in magic is a natural phase in the evolution of mankind” closely aligned with Tylor’s theory that societies evolve from savagery to barbarism and finally to civilisation.

The History of Devil, then, brings the same sensibility to bear on the Evil One. The approach is broad, sweeping, and comparative. “The Gnostic Christian view of Doomsday and Hell”, Carus tells us, “embodies many ancient traditions of Egyptian, Indian, and Persian mythology and foreshadows at the same time the later Roman Catholic view as represented in mediaeval art, finding its poetical consummation in Dante’s Divina Comedia”. It is also inherently Tylorean: “Demonolatry, or Devil-worship, is the first stage in the evolution of religion, for we fear the bad, not the good”, he declares.

Carus pays particular attention to the era of European witch trials, arguing that beliefs in witchcraft and the selling of souls marked “a new period in the evolution of mankind”. So too was their later decline, which “ceased naturally with the ascendancy of science”, a development that Carus sees as interlinked with the rise of Protestantism. Indeed, in his interpretation, the Reformation played a major role in how the Devil was understood, with the notion of evil changing from a real-life personification to a more abstract notion or principle. By the nineteenth century, the Devil’s powers had declined from their medieval peak, with “his main office . . . that of a general mischief-worker in the universe”; a figure of fun rather than of fear, he had now become a laughable character in folktales, easily outwitted by old women and children.

For Carus, the changing status of the Devil was intimately linked to a similar transformation in perceptions of the Christian God — less of a regular interventionist and more the background orchestrator of a harmonious universe. In Carus’ words:

The abandonment of the belief in witchcraft tacitly implied the abandonment of a belief in God as a miracle-worker, and prepared the way for a nobler religious faith which surrendered the idea of seeking God in the suppositious possibility of breaking the laws of nature, and finally found him in the cosmic order itself, i.e. in the unity, the harmony, the rightness of those eternal factors of existence which are the conditions of reason, of truth, and of justice.

In this changing conception of Christianity, Carus sees civilised society as one where science alters but does not replace religion, “passing out of the old stage of magic into the higher stage of a direct comprehension of facts . . . as astrology changed into astronomy, so the religion of miracles will give way to the religion of science”. In other words, “faith in the objective authority of truth is the next step in the religious evolution of mankind”.

Although The History of the Devil is easy to critique from the standpoint of the twenty-first century — how to explain the witch hunts that took place in Protestant lands during and after the Reformation? — its attempts to show the complex nature of the development of religious beliefs still hold relevance to our contemporary world. The book also anticipates later, better-known ideas: Carus’ schema for the growth of a sceptical worldview — where excessive religious faith is beaten back by the rationality of science — prefigures in part Max Weber’s thesis on the “Disenchantment of the World”. If nothing else, The History of the Devil deserves attention as a work of comparative scholarship as such. Carus builds his argument in a chronological fashion with the help of over three hundred illustrations. Highlighting similarities and differences between gods and goddesses across different belief systems, he ranges across history, philosophy and theology, providing a more ambitious work of comparative mythology than the volume’s title suggests.

Finally, the book reveals the mind and character of a humane and thoughtful individual. Carus is nothing if not an optimist in his belief that science and religion can exist in harmony, and he often exhibits wry humour about evil and the human condition. He thus concludes The History of the Devil with a suggestion that a little devilish mischief may go a long way in achieving a happy life:

If we took away from life its satire, jokes, and other “devilries,” it would lose part of its most fragrant zest, and if constructing a man consisting of virtues only, would not that fellow be the most unbearable bore in the world, wearisome beyond description? For it is a sprinkling of petty vices that makes even a great man human. A mere ethical machine would neither be attractive nor arouse our sympathies.