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Paul Carus, The History of the Devil and the Idea of Evil (London: Kegan Paul, 1900)

Abstract

From ancient Egyptian religions to Judaism, Hinduism to Buddhism, Christianity to Islam, as well as many more, Carus analyses each religion in turn to expose their views of the devil and where those views came from ... He takes the reader from five thousand years ago through to near the present day to give a wide overview of changing views on good and evil and how different civilisations created varying ideas of the devil ... In the last five hundred years of history the devil has appeared to be marginalised as only a literary figure rather than a genuine fear, but Carus demonstrates how throughout the Reformation, the Inquisition and even the nineteenth century, fear of the devil was extremely real ... Paul Carus provides an extremely thorough survey of various ideas about the devil along with what is good and what is evil.

"Paul Carus’s The History of the Devil and the Idea of Evil (1900) offers a comprehensive survey of the development of diabolical figures and the concept of evil from ancient mythologies to modern thought, written from the standpoint of comparative religion and philosophical rationalism. Rejecting the literal reality of the Devil, Carus interprets Satan as a symbolic embodiment of humanity’s moral struggles and cultural fears. The volume traces antecedents of the Christian Devil in Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Persian, and Greco‑Roman traditions, highlighting especially the influence of Zoroastrian dualism on Jewish and Christian demonology. Within the Hebrew Bible, Carus identifies only rudimentary adversarial figures, arguing that the fully personified Devil emerges in post‑exilic and apocalyptic literature and is elaborated in the New Testament and patristic theology. Subsequent chapters examine the medieval consolidation of demonological doctrine, the proliferation of witchcraft beliefs, and the gradual decline of Satan’s power in the Enlightenment and modernity. Interweaving historical, literary, and artistic evidence, Carus situates the Devil as a cultural construction whose transformations reflect broader shifts in human understanding of evil. The study thus anticipates later religious‑historical approaches by presenting the Devil not as a metaphysical being but as a mythological and ethical idea shaped by evolving religious consciousness."--ChatGPT

Author

Carus was a pioneering author and thinker of the early twentieth century. He became the first managing editor of the Open Court Publishing Company which aimed to provide a forum for the discussion of philosophy, science, and religion, and to make philosophical classics widely available by making them affordable. As an author he published 75 books and 1500 articles. He died in Februrary 1919.