A potpourri of evil

Decay tends to have a relatively evil aroma, and there’s a reason for that. When something is passing out of existence, it leaves a rotten hole. And that is the traditional definition of evil—a hole in Reality.

The Devil’s Best Trick is a potpourri of evil-smelling things. It has little holding it together except accounts of wickedness, human and devilish. But considering the subject matter, the book’s helter-skelter nature is apropos: Evil is disorder. Consider the word pandemonium. It literally means, “devils everywhere.” But debate concerning evil has had less to do with its nature than its origin and whether it is in a sense necessary and inescapable. Christianity, along with Judaism and Islam, claims it is neither. Instead, its origin is found in the free choices of God’s creatures. And in Christianity the first to choose evil was Satan.

The blithe pseudo-sophistication of the last few hundred years has served as a buffer to belief in the Devil, and even evil itself. But author Randall Sullivan believes in both, as he makes clear from the start. Perhaps the only thing more surprising than an unfashionable confession of faith in the Devil is who’s making it. Sullivan was a contributing editor for Rolling Stone for 20 years. Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised. The mendacity of mainstream media and the federal government, along with a widespread sense of anomie, has turned some cultured despisers of religion into wistful admirers. Ironically, the problem of evil might be the only thing that can pierce the veil of contempt for religion that sophisticates wear in public. Immanuel Kant once consigned God to the space between our ears, but Sullivan tells us it was “the problem of evil that made him religious.”

In a backhanded way this brings me to the Devil’s best trick. The title of Sullivan’s book is taken from Baudelaire’s The Generous Gambler, in which we read, “My dear brothers, never forget when you hear the progress of the Enlightenment praised, that the Devil’s loveliest ruse is to persuade you that he doesn’t exist.” You see, the trouble with modernity is it doesn’t answer some questions, it begs them. Modern thinkers assume anything real must be quantifiable. But spiritual things can’t be measured that way. And that includes our own spiritual selves. Here’s an example of foolish consistency: Physicalists wave away their own experience of consciousness as illusory since it can’t be reduced to physical processes. How can we expect people to believe in the Devil when some can’t even believe in themselves?

And yet there’s so much evidence for both.

Sullivan begins his book with a conversation he had with a woman named Rita Klaus in Medjugorje in 1995, which began with these words, “Satan exists.” Sullivan then shifts to an exorcism he witnessed conducted by Fr. Slavko Barbaric—a man with multiple Ph.D.s whom only a fool would dismiss as benighted. The account is darkly fascinating and includes the following, “At the moment of what I could sense as a climax, she arched her back into a position that not even a world-class gymnast could have held, impossibly extended, with her weight resting entirely on her heels and the crown of her head, and let forth a hoarse, croaking expulsion of breath that must have emptied her lungs entirely.” Sullivan goes on to say that he felt that something real and rotten was exiting her.

The spine of the book is cold-case reporting on the death of Tate Rowland in Childress, Texas, in 1988. Originally ruled a suicide, it is believed by many observers to have been a ritual killing conducted by a Satanic cult. Although Sullivan fails to reopen the case, his investigation serves as a platform to answer the deeper question, is the Devil real?

While Sullivan doesn’t yield pride of place to the Bible, he takes it seriously. His survey is largely historic, describing the understanding of the demonic in animism, Judaism, Buddhism, Islam, and finally Christianity. Although he doesn’t say it in so many words, it’s evident he believes the Christian understanding is the most compelling. From there the balance of the book surveys wickedness—everything from the Marquis de Sade, to industrial-scale human sacrifice among the Aztecs. It’s difficult reading, not nightstand material. And at points I wondered if I really needed to know what I was being told. But if the point is moral outrage, and not reducing evil to mental illness, details matter.

The theological sensibility of the book is Roman Catholic. But the strength of the book isn’t Biblical exegesis; it’s honesty—that and Sullivan’s impatience with explaining evil away in terms acceptable to modern sensibilities.