Taking a shallow look at the ‘Devil’

Starting with his 1978 bestseller about spiritual growth, “The Road Less Traveled,” M. Scott Peck has been preoccupied with the problem of good and evil. As a believer in a “benign spirit,” God, he began to wonder if the existence of human evil meant “there was such a thing as an evil spirit or the devil.” As a self-described “open-minded scientist,” he decided to test the theory of Satan’s presence in the world by looking “for the possibility of possession as a routine part of making my diagnoses.” For assistance in his search for the unholy grail, he turns to a colorful and somewhat notorious renegade priest named Malachi Martin who had performed a number of exorcisms and claimed that the Vatican was infested with worshipers of Satan. Peck asks him to refer any cases to him that might involve Satanic possession. Martin sends him two; their diagnosis and treatment form the subject of “Glimpses of the Devil.”

Even if you believe in the existence of the devil, you’re not going to have an easy time swallowing Peck’s analysis of his two patients, both women. Simply put, there is no good reason to grasp at such an extreme diagnosis as demonic possession when simpler, more obvious explanations will do. The women tell Peck they are possessed by demons and, with a breathtaking lack of skepticism, he quickly agrees. Since neither Martin nor any other godly representative is willing, Peck decides to exorcise them himself.

His first client, Jersey, is an immature, self-absorbed young woman who is neglecting her husband and children. Maybe that’s because she’s too busy dabbling in New Age spiritualisms rather than because demons got into her. Those demons, when they speak to Peck, have nothing evil on their minds. They’re as confused as their host and just as inarticulate. Peck claims that he could feel the presence of evil, experienced as coldness, and saw Jersey twist her face into a demonic mask.

The fact that the videotape of the exorcism showed no such change doesn’t faze him: You had to be there. In any case the exorcism is a success and Jersey becomes a loving wife and mother again. In explaining why the devil possessed her at age 12, Peck claims it was just a little bit her fault. When her stepfather “checked” her vagina after an operation, Jersey made herself believe that nothing unusual was happening. It is unconscionable that Peck interprets her understandable strategy of denial as the sin of choosing “to believe what you knew was a lie” that would open herself to Satan.

His second patient is a middle-aged woman named Beccah who is depressed, married to an abusive man and given to cutting herself and thinking about suicide. A religious woman, she is torn over her role in her husband’s shady insider trading practices; she knows they are doing something wrong but gets a heady rush from her successes at trading.

After a period of psychiatric counseling, she still can’t stop. Has Peck not heard of addictions? Apparently not. “Whenever someone says, ‘I can’t help myself’ I am immediately and instinctively skeptical. Yet, after a year I knew Beccah was not a weak person. Almost against my will I opened myself to the possibility that she was correct....” Of course the next logical step is to ask her if she thinks she’s being possessed. “Yes,” she answers almost joyfully. She’s been hearing voices and is sure that they’re all related to Lucifer. Who wouldn’t want to unload painful unhappiness onto a scapegoat?

Peck gathers another team and performs the exorcism rites on Beccah. In the process he is quite certain that she is turning into an enormous coiled snake millions of years old (guess who) though the videotape doesn’t capture the transformation. As proof of Satan’s presence, he quotes Beccah screaming, “I have no reason to join your ranks and be put in the toaster!”

This may be a gnomic revelation, or gibberish. I incline to the latter view. “Glimpses of the Devil” is a superficially written, distinctly unthoughtful book. Jersey, and to a lesser degree, Beccah, responded to Peck’s unorthodox treatment. But then, all therapies work for some people. If Satan is as petty, even childish, as he shows himself here, without even the gift of gab you might expect of him, then he can be dismissed as devilish nonsense.

Brigitte Frase is a reviewer and contributing editor to the journals Speakeasy and Ruminator Review.