THE END OF EVIL : ...

With the millennium upon us, God and Satan are scheduled for a battle royal, though we skeptics suspect that the winner will be the super-hero who can pull off the most successful vanishing act. So far it’s a lopsided match. Evil is all the rage, and Good, the frail blessing of a decamped deity, is clearly in need of a new press agent.

In magazines, on television, the radio and the Internet, pundits accustomed to the meaty certainties of politics and policy have been wrestling with imponderables, explicating Saint Augustine and “Pulp Fiction” to get at predestination and free will. With each fresh outbreak of all-American violence comes another round of think pieces, more poking and prodding of the nation’s moral soul, more earnest grappling with the Problem of Evil.

Scholars have been thinking theodicy, too. Earlier this year there were Elaine Pagels’ “The Origin of Satan” and Robert Fuller’s “Naming the Antichrist: The History of an American Obsession”; this month we have Andrew Delbanco’s “The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil” and Richard Elliott Friedman’s “The Disappearance of God: A Divine Mystery.”

Pagels and Fuller warn against the habit, especially prevalent in times of crisis, of using religion to demonize enemies, piety in these cases serving as a cloak for the scapegoat mechanism. Delbanco and Friedman are steeped in what Delbanco calls “theological nostalgia,” a condition marked by undisguised yearning for the moral certainties once provided by the devil, whom Delbanco declares dead, and Friedman’s deity, currently missing in action.

Pagels and Fuller study people for whom Satan and his minion, the Antichrist, are wholly alive--active and mingling. Pagels writes about 1st-Century Christians who conceived of a “stark and polarized” world engulfed in a “cosmic war” between supernatural forces of good and evil. She believes that the New Testament gospels were designed to dramatize both the struggle of Christ against Satan and Christ’s persecution by satanically inspired humans. “The gospel writers,” she claims, “want to locate and identify the specific ways in which the forces of evil act through certain people to effect violent destruction.” According to Pagels, the gospels provide lessons in the “demonic vilification” of one’s opponents. Thus early Christians learned to invoke Satan first to demonize Jews, then pagans, and later Christian heretics.

Fuller picks up the story in the New World. He reminds us that there have always been among us militant types ready to brand as the devil or the devil’s work anyone or anything, including fiber optics and supermarket bar codes, that looks like an enemy. From the Salem witch trials to the Evil Empire, from Cotton Mather to Pat Robertson, Fuller traces a succession of zealots ready to defend Christian civilization against evil incarnate. To account for the group dynamics of apocalyptic faith, Fuller trots out concepts imported from sociology and psychology, phrases like “crisis mentality” and “cognitive dissonance.” The jargon tells us that here at least no supernatural forces are at work.

Armed with the agnosticism of professional scholars, Pagels and Fuller round up the facts and parade them in the serried ranks of argument. They are fearless with textual data: the gospels, church doctrine, the curious creeds of obscure millennial sects--all of it gets processed impartially.

Although Pagels can cast doubt on the historical plausibility of gospel accounts of the trial and execution of Jesus, and Fuller can raise an eyebrow at “grotesque” pre-millennial conspiracy theories, neither of them will condemn particular forms of belief. Her argument suggests that the “cultural legacy” of the early Christians is a polarized world view and an itch to blame the other, but Pagels can’t bring herself to say that this is bad, wrong . . . evil.

Fuller never denounces the venerable American tradition of crackpot name-calling, though he does suggest, after considerable hemming and hawing, that “apocalyptism and separatism,” hallmarks of the freaky fringe of the religious right, are not conducive to “wholeness-making behavior.”

It is, of course, appropriate that these two authors, each writing about the dangers of scapegoating, should avoid the temptation to demonize. They would not stoop so low. But all the same--how disappointing to let the bad guys off the hook, to allow the demonizing impulse, the source of horrific violence and pain, to escape with a tut-tutting rebuke.

There it is: the stirring of theological nostalgia. As usual, it’s not benediction we pine for; what we miss is the power of damnation. It’s unbearably tempting to persecute malefactors, to fight fire with hellfire and brimstone. The urge to condemn the scapegoat mechanism as the work of the devil should alert us to the possibility that evil and the impulse to check evil come from the same source.

When we pronounce judgment on any evil (save perhaps the evil we find in ourselves), do we not start down a slippery slope destined to dump us in the samesulfurous pit with bigots and racists and every other stripe of self-righteous persecutor?

You see how it goes--Delbanco is quite right, in his brilliant introduction to “The Death of Satan,” to declare a “crisis of incompetence before evil.” So long as violence crashes down around us and whimpers of pain reach our ears, we can’t help but agree that everyone “wants to live in a world in which evil can still be recognized, have meaning and require a response.” Delbanco measures deadeye how far we are today from living in such a world. Though it’s anything but a happy reckoning, his forthright account of our condition (“our reticence,” he charitably calls it, a telling mimetic lapse), raised my hopes like a bright pennant against the gloom.

He has no easy answers--except to proclaim like a politician on the stump that our sense of evil must be “renewed, not restored.” Once upon a time, he tells us, we knew a devil who had a name and a place to hang his hat, but all that’s out of date. Now we have no adequate name for evil, and we don’t know where to locate it.

The language of evil, Delbanco notes, is littered with what George Orwell called “dead metaphors”--like sin --most of them killed off by the scientific spirit of the 20th Century. The old words point to a supernatural force our secular culture teaches us to dismiss along with the tooth fairy, while the new words, “dysfunctional,” “antisocial behavior” and other similarly sterile euphemisms, are drained of moral content. Face to face with evil, we are reduced, as Delbanco puts it, to “inarticulate dread”--”we feel something that our culture no longer gives us the vocabulary to express.”

We feel it, if we’re honest, in ourselves; we own up to a seed of bad that might flower some day into wickedness. But not everybody looks inside. “We live in the most brutal century in human history,” Delbanco writes, “but instead of stepping forward to take the credit, [the devil] has rendered himself invisible.” He blends in with the crowd--”banal,” as Hannah Arendt famously observed--and weaves himself into the fabric of the system, so that he’s at once ubiquitous and elusive. Evicted from Hell, Satan takes dominion everywhere: in each of us, in all of us collectively and (most conveniently, as Fuller and Pagels demonstrate) in all our best enemies. He is not dead so much as dispersed.

Delbanco set out to write what he calls “a kind of national spiritual biography,” which sounds bold but in practice reads rather like conventional intellectual history--though this one is much livelier than most, and written with unusual flair, mercifully sans jargon. He begins with the “God-centered” world of the New England colonies, a Puritan culture “saturated with the consciousness of sin.”

For the theologically nostalgic, it’s all downhill from there. Delbanco faithfully records the relentless advance of Enlightenment rationalism in the 18th Century, of liberal individualism in the 19th Century. He keeps an eye, all the while, on the devil’s doings, Satan’s eager resurgence during the Revolutionary War, his gloating triumph at the outbreak of the Civil War. With the rosy dawn of the 20th Century, Delbanco notes, America experienced its “great age of scapegoating,” marked by paroxysms of bigotry, racism, misogyny and xenophobia.

He explains this orgy of hate as a form of cultural panic, “a lunge for something graspable, for a clear scheme of value, in a world that had become spiritually incomprehensible.” Lunge extends into plunge--right through the abyss of the Holocaust--and we land at last smack-dab in the “culture of irony,” which is where we sit, like Job, in dust and ashes.

The last 50 pages of “The Death of Satan” recapture the thrill of the beginning. Delbanco defies the constraint of irony, the arriere-pense reminding us that “all talk about morals has come to sound moralistic,” and delivers a vigorous jeremiad, a dressing-down aimed at a culture that has discredited “not only specific objects of belief . . . but the very capacity to believe.”

Irony sets up on the altar an absence--nothing--then crowns the gesture with quotation marks, lest there be some mistake about the utter emptiness.

Postmodernism takes a particularly hard slap (“it is a way of thinking about the self that is incompatible with personal responsibility”), as does the radical relativism that robs us of solid ground for making value judgments. Lamenting our rootless state, Delbanco quotes Richard Rorty’s appropriately ungainly phrase: We are now definitively without a “criterion of wrongness.”

In a last-minute aside, Delbanco admits that he has left out of his study a vast segment of the American population (all the people, in fact, Fuller writes about in “Naming the Antichrist”): the millions, many millions, who believe not only in Satan but in God, too. The story of American culture is not a lock-step progression from an age of belief to an age of irony. Pockets of piety have quietly survived the onslaught of secular rationality, and others thrive in opposition to it. And some people, Richard Friedman for instance, have found in man’s scientific progress a measure of religious consolation--indeed, a spur to faith.

Friedman’s “The Disappearance of God” sometimes reads like a sugar-coated version of Delbanco’s book. The same crisis is reinterpreted as a blessing in disguise; potential disaster becomes an opportunity for salvation.

“The Disappearance of God” is divided into three parts, the first of which is an easy-access tour of a phenomenon well-known to Friedman’s fellow Bible scholars: God disappears from the Scriptures. He argues that God’s protracted leave-taking coincides with “a shift in the divine-human balance”--man struggles to grow up and assume responsibility for his own destiny. All of this is carefully argued, but as I read I nevertheless had the feeling I was being spoon-fed, gingerly, and that the substance on the end of the spoon was pabulum.

Friedman’s starting point in the second part of the book is the life and work of two men: Nietzsche and Dostoevsky. He wants to convey, as dramatically as possible, the personal cost of announcing the death of God, as Nietzsche did, or even thinking about it long and hard, as Dostoevsky did. Like Delbanco, he declares that we are living in times of acute spiritual crisis: “Is there anyone who does not know that something is wrong here? That something is missing?” Chaos, he warns, threatens the existence of life on the planet. It seems we have not finished growing into our post-God responsibilities.

By the time he gets to the third part, the happy ending in which he proposes a cure for our ills, Friedman has tossed the spoon aside; instead he applies himself with a shovel to heaping mounds of suspicious lukewarm mush, one part weird science, one part mysticism. He presents the mystic doctrine of cabala as a prefiguration of contemporary cosmology’s favorite creation theory, Big Bang:

“Cabala contains central doctrines concerning God and creation, in which the universe began as a central point; in a great flash the point expanded into the universe. . . . This sounds familiar.”

The consonance inspires a new mystico-scientific reading of God’s disappearance from the Bible: Think of it as a metaphorical representation of “a correct perception that we are moving away (in time and space) from the explosion of origin.” God hasn’t vanished after all; he is merely exploded throughout the cosmos.

Friedman stops just short of announcing that “the universe is the hidden face of God.” Full of enthusiasm for cosmology, he is convinced that scientists are on the verge of unlocking the key to creation, a discovery he equates with “an impending encounter with divinity.” The prospect of “reunion” with God is clouded, however, by the threat of self-annihilation through nuclear war, or global warming, or holes in the ozone layer, or the population explosion: “We are in a race between discovery and destruction.” Simultaneous recognition of the peril and promise of our predicament should prompt, according to Friedman’s scheme, “adherence to a moral code of common decency.” A little good behavior will tide us over until we achieve the cosmological close encounter.

Maybe it’s because I’m mired in irony, but I can’t help dismissing Friedman’s mysticism as disguised apocalyptic faith, complete with postponed revelation.

Delbanco would likely feel the same. He writes, “it is the central and irreversible fact of modern history that we no longer inhabit a world of transcendence.”

Despite his theological nostalgia, he knows that there is no necessary connection between religious faith and morality. And he knows that religion doesn’t work in practice the way it does in our rosy retrospective imagination. Yet like Friedman he hopes for a rapprochement between science and religion, a “cooperative intellectual venture.”

He’s betting not on cosmology but on evolutionary psychology, a not-quite-new wave of sociobiology that relies on Darwinian concepts to account for human behavior (Konrad Lorenz worked the same territory 30 years ago in “On Aggression”). But even if Darwin’s nice-guys-finish-first suspicions were unequivocally confirmed and altruism were popularly recognized as an evolutionary advantage, the oomph that could make the difference in the next round of natural selection, such scientific knowledge in itself will never substitute for the “revival of serious moral thinking” Delbanco hopes it would prompt.

In the meantime Delbanco puts his faith in language, in the resuscitation of dead metaphors--minus the supernatural trappings. He is aware that to renew our conception of evil will require “great exertion of the moral imagination,” especially if we are to avoid the Manichean habit of scapegoating. He wants us to embrace the Augustinian idea of evil as the absence of God (no easy feat once you’ve ruled out transcendence) and cites by way of encouragement a tradition of American thinkers--including Jonathan Edwards, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Martin Luther King--who see evil as “our own deficient love, our potential for envy and rancor towards creation.”

Delbanco holds out no special hope for the new millennium, no promise that we will outgrow the self-righteous instinct to finger the blamable other. My guess is that we will cling to the American way. And Satan will thrive--out there.