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By
Micah Mattix
Thursday, June 27, 2024
Saturday, June 01, 2024
The Devil’s Best Trick
Review in WSJ of the book The Devil’s Best Trick
Letter to the editor about the review:
While an actual disappearance of the devil would be one of the most glorious events in human history, the disappearance of which Randall Sullivan speaks has not been an even remotely positive development (“In Search of the Unseen Evil,” Micah Mattix reviewing Mr. Sullivan’s “The Devil’s Best Trick,” Bookshelf, May 28).
According to the old adage, “Capitalism without failure is like Christianity without hell.” Our increasingly socialist and agnostic society seems to have dispensed with both failure and hell. The consequences haven’t been at all favorable, except, perhaps, for the actual, and real, devil.
Mark M. Quinn
Naperville, Ill.
An engraving by Gustave Dore from ‘Milton’s Paradise Lost’ by Robert Vaughan, 1885 PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES
‘The Devil’s Best Trick’ Review: In Search of the Unseen Evil
Satan has faded from view over the last few centuries. But ‘systems and situations’ still can’t explain the depth of human sin.
Does the Devil exist, or is he a figment of our imagination? This is the first question Randall Sullivan tries to answer in “The Devil’s Best Trick: How the Face of Evil Disappeared.” The second: If he is real, who or what are “we describing when we refer to ‘the Devil’?”
Mr. Sullivan seriously entertains both questions. A longtime contributing editor to Rolling Stone, he wrote previously about supernatural events in his 2004 book, “The Miracle Detective,” in which he investigated the appearance of the Virgin Mary to six young people in the early 1980s in Medjugorje, Bosnia and Herzegovina.
“The Devil’s Best Trick” is something of a companion volume. It also begins in Medjugorje, in this case in the summer of 1995, when Mr. Sullivan witnessed an exorcism. The experience shook him. “I’ve attempted to deconstruct that experience many times in the years since,” he writes, “mainly in the hope that I would be able to put it out of mind.” He couldn’t. “I became utterly convinced,” he continues, “that something was leaving” the exorcism’s subject and that what he had witnessed “was not emotional or psychological or imaginary but real, whatever that meant.” This sends Mr. Sullivan on a journalistic and intellectual quest to “find” the Devil.
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Atlantic Monthly Press
352 pages
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Mr. Sullivan revisits the deaths of Tate Rowland and Terrie Trosper in the small Texas town of Childress. The two were siblings. Rowland hanged himself at age 17, and three years later Trosper died at 27 from suffocating on her own vomit. Rowland seems not to have had an initial autopsy, and Trosper’s was later discovered to contain significant errors and omissions. Stories of “a satanic cult being involved in Tate’s death,” he writes, had long circulated through the town. Why does Mr. Sullivan investigate these two deaths, which took place during the “Satanic panic” of the 1980s and early ’90s? Because he knows someone who had a childhood friend who seemed to confess to participating in Rowland’s murder. “I don’t believe in God,” the friend had said. “I believe in the Devil.”
Mr. Sullivan also travels to Mexico to participate in a Satanic ritual. The ritual doesn’t require a human sacrifice, but Mr. Sullivan describes Mexico’s cult of Santa Muerte—Saint Death—in detail, tracing its origins back to the religious practices of the Aztecs. He should be lauded for frankly describing the Aztecs’ practice of sacrificing and eating human victims by the thousands.
In between these two accounts of contemporary Satan worship, Mr. Sullivan traces the idea of a devil from the ancient world to the present. There was no figure of evil in ancient Greece, Mr. Sullivan notes. The gods themselves “did the dirty work,” and good and evil were understood to be tendencies that were present in all people. But there is a figure of evil in Judaism called Satan, which comes from the verb meaning “to obstruct.” Satan is an obscure figure in the Old Testament, only appearing a handful of times. He precipitates man’s fall (taking the traditional interpretation that the serpent is Satan), and in the Book of Zechariah, he is “described as ‘the adversary’ of mankind.” In the Book of Job, he is allowed by God to take Job’s family, wealth and health to see if Job will curse God.
Only in Christianity, Mr. Sullivan argues, “has the Devil been absolutely essential from the very beginning.” Jesus was tempted by Satan, cast out demons and warned his disciples about the Devil. “John’s Gospel,” Mr. Sullivan writes, “is in its entirety the story of a cosmic conflict between God’s light and the darkness of the Devil.” The authors of the books of the New Testament “repeat again and again the idea that Jesus came to break the hold of Satan.”
Mr. Sullivan traces the early Christian controversies over how God could be the creator of all things and not the author of evil and describes how subsequent writers understood evil. Thomas Aquinas argued that Lucifer perverted his own nature by foolishly attempting to reject God’s sovereign rule. Martin Luther “insisted,” Mr. Sullivan writes, “on a Devil who was at once God’s servant and his enemy.” He sometimes oversimplifies. His portrait of Augustine, whom he accuses of “fatalism,” is a caricature. Percy Bysshe Shelley may have been a zealous atheist, but Lord Byron was not, and Mr. Sullivan clumsily lumps them together. He also oddly ignores 18th-century Gothic writers and 19th-century Russian novelists, who were obsessed with devils and the problem of evil.
Mr. Sullivan’s account of how belief in the Devil gradually disappeared in the West is plausible, if conventional. Witch hunts in Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries reached a climax in England in the 17th, when a professional “witchfinder” named Matthew Hopkins managed to execute some 300 women over a two-year period in the 1640s. The abuse of these trials, combined with anticlericalism in 18th-century France and changing attitudes toward the supernatural, led to increasing skepticism regarding the reality of a literal Devil.
We often think of evil today as “something created by systems and situations,” Mr. Sullivan notes, but he doesn’t find this convincing. “What ‘situation,’ ” he asks, “could produce the likes of Lawrence Bittaker,” who raped, tortured and murdered five teenage girls in 1979. If evil is simply the result of man-made “systems,” how did it enter our world in the first place, and why does it flourish in some people but not others in roughly the same situation?
Mr. Sullivan is a gifted storyteller, even if the shifts between recent events and intellectual history can be jarring. Not everyone will find his concluding equivocation satisfying. There “is a Devil,” he writes, by which he means “a force of evil that human beings can best comprehend by personifying it.” To acknowledge this, he says, is to throw open the door the Devil “hides behind.” Maybe. But I’m not sure it opens the door all that wide.
Mr. Mattix is a professor of English at Regent University.
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