Volume 42, Number 14 · September 21, 1995
Le Diable au Coeur
By Norman Cohn
The Origin of Satan
by Elaine Pagels
Random House, 214 pp., $23.00
Whereas in the nineteenth century Satan seldom attracted the attention of serious historians—Gustave Roskoff's two-volume Geschichte des Teufels (1869) stands almost alone—of late he has done so repeatedly, and to excellent effect. The collection of essays published in 1948 under the auspices of the French Carmelites, and entitled simply Satan, heralded what became in the 1970s and 1980s a flood of scholarly studies. The five-hundred-page Teufelsglaube by Herbert Haag and others (1974), Jeffrey Russell's trilogy, The Devil, Satan, Lucifer (1977–1984), Henry Ansgar Kelly's The Devil at Baptism, Bernard Teyssèdre's Naissance du Diable and Le Diable et l'Enfer (all 1985), Neil Forsyth's The Old Enemy: Satan and the Combat Myth (1987)—all these make up a large contribution to our knowledge and (more importantly) to our understanding. So is there anything left to say? Indeed there is—and Elaine Pagels has made a commendable attempt at saying it.
Review, 3227 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |