The next August, after clearing out our home and listing it for sale, I put everything in storage, piled up boxes full of books and financial records, and moved with the children into the small, simple apartment that the institute assigned to us on Einstein Drive. We lived opposite an identical apartment occupied by a family from Tel Aviv, whose children, Tamar and Daniel, were the same age as Sarah and David. From there we could walk to Crossroads Nursery School, a comfortable space with outdoor playgrounds, where Sarah and David could join children of other institute members to swing, climb the slides and go down, or play with trucks in the sandbox, speaking Chinese, Spanish, Hebrew, French, Russian, and a variety of languages I couldn’t identify. On weekday mornings, after walking there with the children, grateful for the time, I’d carry two strong cups of coffee to a bare office overlooking fields and trees. At the time, I jokingly thought of this peaceful refuge as a much-needed mental hospital, a private sanatorium, where I hoped that writing might help clarify the noisy cacophony swirling through me.
Sitting there at a wooden desk, facing empty pages and a blank computer screen, I was stopped. How had I ever imagined that I could engage in creative work again? A practical friend, a writer himself, said, “Why not skip the academic stuff, and write about what you’re dealing with—write about grief?” “I don’t want to write about grief—what, go on talk shows and act like some kind of expert? I hate grief—I just want to get through it!” What he suggested sounded blinding and futile, like staring into the sun—or into a black hole. Besides, anything written with passion, “academic” or otherwise, inevitably engages whatever challenges we’re confronting.
Back, then, to Satan. How to start? I began exploring a handful of stories in the Hebrew Bible, in apocryphal Jewish sources, in the Dead Sea Scrolls, and in writings of Jesus’s followers, to see how, some two thousand years ago, various people had spun the figure of Satan out of their own conflict and pain. How, then, did this figure of Satan originate? Who invented him, and why? Asking these questions allowed me to acknowledge emotions that made no rational sense; and this seemed an innocuous, perhaps therapeutic, way of dealing with them.
What first surprised me was to see that Satan does not appear in the Hebrew Bible—not, at least, as Christians and Muslims know him, as an evil supernatural power. Christians who identify the snake in Paradise as Satan actually are projecting a far more recent invention into that ancient story, since the Genesis folktale pictures the serpent only as a cunning, talking snake, perhaps a stand-in for the humans’ inner voice. A handful of stories in the Hebrew Bible do speak of a supernatural character they call “the satan”—a name that characterizes his role as “adversary,” but in these stories he acts more like a storytelling device than a dangerous enemy. As in the story of Job, his presence often marks misfortune, a setback, or a twist in the plot. But before the first century CE, groups of dissident Jews, including Jesus’s followers, began to turn this rather unpleasant angel into the far more powerful, malevolent figure whom Christians and Muslims see as personifying evil, making war on God and humankind alike.
Reading a book by Jeffrey Burton Russell, who has written five books on the devil and his origin, I was stopped by one sentence: “The figure of Satan has nothing to do with social history.” Impossible! I thought; that’s obviously wrong. People who take Satan seriously, whether thousands of years ago or today, aren’t simply imagining ethereal spirits clashing in the stratosphere. Anyone who says, for example, that “Satan is trying to take over this country,” has in mind certain people right here on the ground, seen as Satan’s agents—and likely could give you names and addresses!
That misguided sentence spurred me to write what I privately—and ironically—called “the social history of Satan.” How, after all, could an imaginary being have a social history? But I’d begun to see that Satan does—and wanted to track it down. Why were Christians writing about Satan? How do they associate him with certain people, and who are those people? What practical difference does it make to put Satan into a story?
I found a clue in the famous “Scroll of the War of the Sons of Light against the Sons of Darkness,” discovered in 1947 in Israel among the Dead Sea Scrolls, a sacred library hidden in caves apparently by the strict sect of Jews often called Essenes, who’d withdrawn from ordinary Jewish society to protest Rome’s occupation of Israel. Whoever wrote this scroll warns the “holy ones,” as “sons of light,” to prepare to fight on the side of the angels to destroy “the sons of darkness,” allies of the Evil One, a.k.a. Satan, Prince of Darkness. The Book of Jubilees also calls him Mastema, perhaps his most appropriate name: “hatred.”
The author of the War Scroll envisions God contending against Satan, and sees the human world similarly divided. Thus members of the desert community see themselves fighting against outsiders, including uninitiated Jews who, they charge, have gone over to the dark side and unwittingly serve Satan. Anyone entering this sacred community would have to swear to love and defend his fellow “holy ones,” and “to hate the sons of darkness”—not only the hated Romans, but also all Jews who cooperate with the Roman occupation. Were these devout sectarians expecting God to send an army of angels to destroy Rome by divine power, or were they actually stockpiling weapons to fight? We can’t know for sure; but since Roman military leaders assumed that they were preparing for war, battalions of Roman soldiers besieged their fortified camp near the Dead Sea in 70 CE, and slaughtered everyone they found there.
Since Jesus of Nazareth, a contemporary of the Essenes, shared a similar vision, his earliest followers also saw themselves caught in conflict between God’s spirit and Satan. Who, then, did they see as God’s people, and who as Satan’s? When first asking this question, I thought the answer was obvious: they’d identify Jesus and his disciples—and, by extension, themselves—with God’s spirit; and they’d see “Satan’s people” as the Jewish leaders who opposed and arrested Jesus, and the Romans who sentenced and crucified him.
But I was wrong—and astonished. When I began to reread the gospels stories, I was surprised to see that they never blame the Romans for killing Jesus. Instead, they blame only the Jewish enemies of Jesus—first of all, Judas Iscariot, whose name, in Greek, connotes “Jew” (Ioudas); then they blame the chief priest and the Jewish council, who, Mark says, sentenced Jesus to death. Matthew’s gospel goes so far as to blame “all the people,” and John’s gospel accuses “the Jews”—as if Jesus weren’t Jewish himself!
But why, I wondered, would Jewish writers indict only Jews, even if some did play a role in Jesus’s arrest, while exempting the Romans, who, as all the evidence indicates, crucified Jesus on charges of inciting revolution against Rome? After struggling with this question, I began to untangle a convoluted story, which I describe in The Origin of Satan. Here I can only quickly sketch how, having started out investigating Satan, I was shocked—and dismayed—to have stumbled unexpectedly onto the origins of Christian anti-Judaism, which later ignited into Christian anti-Semitism. Most simply put, Jesus’s earliest followers spun the story as they did because they were terrified of being arrested and killed themselves.
The earliest gospel writer, whom we call Mark, likely had lived through some forty years of violent clashes between Roman soldiers and Jewish militants fighting to regain their independence from Rome. During those tumultuous years, Jesus of Nazareth was only one of thousands of Jews whom Roman soldiers crucified on charges of inciting revolution. The magistrates who ordered those crucifixions would have felt their suspicions fully justified in 66 CE, when Jewish revolutionaries broke into open war, fighting “in the name of God and our common liberty,” as American revolutionaries would do nearly two thousand years later. But unlike the American Revolution, the Jewish revolution failed. After four years of ferocious fighting, during which some sixty thousand Roman soldiers besieged, starved, and pillaged Jerusalem, they finally attacked the Jerusalem Temple, where the militants had barricaded themselves to fight a desperate la
st stand. Then the Roman commander proclaimed victory and ordered his soldiers to plunder, desecrate, and tear down the temple, and set fire to its remains, reducing the sacred center of the city to an enormous heap of charred rubble.
Even after the war, Roman officers continued to suspect Jews of inciting revolution, including followers of Jesus, who remained doggedly loyal to their dead leader, convicted and executed for sedition. Others, too, were targeted and killed—Peter, caught, tortured, and crucified; Paul, arrested, often put on trial, horribly whipped, and finally beheaded; and Jesus’s own brother, James, lynched by a mob near the Jerusalem Temple.
Acutely aware of the danger, Mark and the others chose to narrate Jesus’s death in ways that emphasize his innocence—and their own. When I realized the situation in which they were writing, I began to understand why they’d spun their stories defensively, shifting the blame for his crucifixion onto certain Jewish leaders. Mark goes so far as to suggest that chief priests invented the charge of sedition to trick the Romans into crucifying Jesus, and that Pilate, the Roman governor, recognized Jesus’s innocence. As Mark tells it, Pilate worked hard to save Jesus’s life, rejecting the priests’ accusations and defending him from a hostile crowd of Jews shouting for crucifixion, until finally, still unconvinced of Jesus’s guilt, he gave in to placate the mob.
Everything we know of Roman history shows that this story is extremely unlikely, since it contradicts everything that Pilate’s contemporaries say about him and about Roman policies toward Jews accused of sedition. But the story stuck—and still holds sway in the gospel accounts. Yet when spinning the story this way, Mark apparently didn’t intend to denigrate his fellow Jews so much as to save his own life, and those of others loyal to Jesus.
While discovering what happened, though, I realized that whatever the gospel writers had in mind, or didn’t, matters less than the unintended consequences. Mark’s successors added even more incendiary details to his story; Matthew’s gospel, as noted, pictures “the whole nation” of Jews calling down a blood curse on themselves, while shouting for Jesus’s death: “His blood be upon us, and upon our children.” And John’s gospel, written perhaps a decade later, pictures Jesus himself denouncing “the Jews” in first-century hate speech, as if he weren’t one of them: “You are of your father, the devil . . . and he was a liar and murderer from the beginning!”
Over two hundred years later, as Constantine and his successors began to shift imperial policies toward what they saw as Christian values, “Christian prejudices against the Jews became legal disabilities”; now, for example, Christian legal codes decreed that converting someone to Judaism was a crime punishable by death. Christian bishops today revered as saints, including Saint Augustine, bishop of Hippo, and Saint Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, seized on gospel accounts of Jesus’s death to demonize Jews as “Christ killers”—guilty not only of murder, but even of the recently invented crime of deicide, “killing God.” Such traditions, sometimes hidden, often exposed, have set off a long and horrific history of pogroms, lynching, legal restrictions, even genocide—first against Jews and dissident Christians called heretics, then against “infidels,” and, more recently, against tribal people branded as “Satan worshippers.”
All of this came to me as a tremendous shock. What seemed so innocuous when I started—investigating an imaginary angel gone rogue—suddenly jolted me back into the real world. Even more, this research opened up an ominous undercurrent in Christian tradition—one with very real, and terrible, consequences. When I spoke about this with a friend raised Catholic, she objected: “But isn’t Christianity all about love?” At its best, of course, it is, but not without an undercurrent of hate.
What struck me, too, is that the Christian stories that Renato Rosaldo dismissed as mere “solutions of the imagination” could evoke destruction as real and as horrific as the headhunters’ rage, and likely far more so. Throughout two thousand years of Christian history, the use of these stories in war, especially by Christians and Muslims, has resulted in countless people killed “in the name of God.” People who interpret human conflict in terms of good against evil, God against Satan, obviously find it much easier to kill those they identify as evil—even to insist that killing them is morally necessary.
But when we take one step further, we can see that the headhunters’ ritual is no less a “solution of the imagination.” For how could anyone imagine that tossing away a head could “carry his anger,” unless he’d been nurtured in the (imaginative) traditions of a culture that taught him that? How could the political and military leaders of any nation today engage in genocide unless deeply felt traditions persuaded them that “ethnic cleansing” could “purify” a group “polluted” by people they see as alien? Only imagination, apparently, can evoke the visceral, powerful responses required to wage war, incite terrorism and acts of violence, whether triggered by fear, paranoia, or patriotic emotion. No wonder that all over the world, throughout human history, tribes and peoples have relied on religious traditions—rituals, music, narratives—to arouse the passions that prove so useful, even indispensable, in war.
This doesn’t mean, though, what people who hate religion often say—that religion simply causes violence, pogroms, and war, which may be triggered by all kinds of conflict. What it does mean, as we’ve seen, is that simplistic scenarios of good against evil encourage people to interpret conflict as nonnegotiable. Nor does it support the opposite, equally superficial claim that “there’s no such thing as evil.” As I see it, acts of violence, especially against defenseless people, are unquestionably evil. But reflecting on stories of Satan has led me to avoid using the term “evil” to characterize entire groups of people, or even individuals, and to apply the term instead to specific acts.
Above all, exploring stories of Satan shows that what we imagine is enormously consequential. Are “solutions of the imagination” nothing but ways to deny reality, as Renato Rosaldo initially suggested? No doubt that’s one way to use them. But having been unable to deny reality, even when I most wanted to, I’m convinced that we cannot interpret our own experience, much less that of our culture, without simultaneously engaging both imagination and rationality. So far, we’ve been looking at negative consequences of religious traditions, crucial for understanding their impact on Western history. But I’ve come to see that there are other aspects of these complex cultural traditions—even stories about Satan—that also may help people cope with reality; may even offer practical ways to confront it.
Chapter 7
Wrestling with the Devil
Mark and Heinz Pagels, in Castle Creek, Colorado.
At three A.M., alone in the dark, endless hours before dawn, I turned to where for so long he’d slept, as we’d closed each day comfortably intertwined, and awakened every morning to each other’s rhythms. Now, reaching toward him, I felt only crumpled sheets and empty space, his absence still somehow a shock, every time. Dark outside, still dark, a low hum of traffic seared by an ambulance siren; after three or four more hours, I might hear a clatter of garbage cans. Already it’s been so long; weeks, months, even years. Why did I feel as if he’d just fallen, or even as if it hadn’t happened yet, could somehow be stopped, turned back?
Shaking with tears as memories flooded back, I realized how many of them had vanished a year after Mark died, when Heinz’s death crashed over us like a tsunami. Even as the wave receded, I was living in a world of raw absence, shock, dumb grief. And the same questions tumbled back, over and over. How could that have happened—just as we’d begun to imagine that we might be able to survive the death of our child? Hadn’t we paid our dues, and more? How to go on, without drowning in despair?
I’d seen what happened to Heinz’s mother. Having anticipated that we would hold each other close after these losses, since now we lived nearby, I was disappointed; instead, she withdrew, her lips firmly closed, stoically silent. What surprised and grieved me even more was that she scarcely could bear to see me and
the children; apparently our presence recalled too sharply the deaths of her son and grandson. Devastated, as if irreparably broken, this strong woman fell ill, lingering for months before she died. Heinz’s brother, her older son, was with her, but he neither notified us nor invited us to her funeral, if he’d arranged one; we never heard from him. I realized that she may have requested that.
Every morning, before school, I’d make the effort to get up, wake the children, look for matching socks and sort out clothes to help them get dressed, make breakfast, do whatever had to be done; but on many dark mornings even that felt impossible. Then there were days that hit with the sharpness of new grief, which I longed to dodge, or at least postpone. So about a year and a half after Heinz died, when I was invited to the University of Texas, I agreed to speak on the anniversary of Mark’s death, hoping that the intense engagement of giving a talk might help me get through a day that, left open, could smack me down like a tidal wave, sobbing, gasping for breath.
At the airport in Austin, I was met by a young couple who hugged me as if we were close friends and invited me to their home for lunch. As they talked familiarly of Heinz and Mark, I realized that they’d been in our New York apartment. Somehow I recognized them, but how? Who were they? Had he been one of Heinz’s graduate students in physics? After a couple of hours, when his wife spoke of what happened the day that Mark died, suddenly I remembered. She’d been a student of mine at Barnard, who, after taking my class, chose to become a historian of religion herself, a scholar of Tibetan Buddhism. In January of her senior year, needing to supplement college expenses, she and her boyfriend, now her husband, had come to live in a room in our apartment while they helped care for the children on weekends. They’d been living with us for months when Mark died in April, and for months after that—and I hadn’t recognized them!
Why Religion? Page 15