BY JOYCE CAROL OATES

PHOTOGRAPHY BY ARTHUR TRESS

To the Spanish it was the "French disease"; to the French it was the "Italian disease"; to the Germans it was the "Spanish disease." Elsewhere, though not in Great Britain, it was the "British disease." More ingeniously, its origins were sometimes believed to be the consequence of extraterrestrial forces, a malevolent conjunction of Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn in the night sky.

The subject is syphilis, but we apply analogous reasoning to evil: In the most obvious of ways, we ascribe to others the pathogens in ourselves. We gaze into the face of evil and give it a name not ours, unaware that what we're gazing into is a mirror, and that our instinct to attribute evil to extraterrestrial origins is an oblique way of denying the very human roots of much of human suffering.

To me, evil isn't a theological concept. Its source is not extraterrestrial or supernatural. Evil no more exists beyond the reaches of our planet than do our politics, our popular culture, the waxing and waning of our world crises, and the storms that blow ceaselessly over the rounded, grooved, and pocked face of our planet; it has no more currency than such kindred concepts as good, beauty, ugliness, and justice. These speak to purely and exclusively human preoccupations, subject to continual change and modification and (sometimes) reversal. Evil is the mote in the Other's eye, a passing wink or twinkle in our own, for which we protest that we are blameless--innocent.

Elaine Pagels, in The Origin of Satan (1995), her examination of the origins of Satan in the New Testament and the subsequent demonizing of putative enemies of Christendom through the centuries, noted that this form of Satan never appears in the Hebrew Bible or in mainstream Judaism; in the Hebrew Bible a satan was an angel sent by God "for the specific purpose of blocking or obstructing human activity." "The satan's presence in a story," Pagels wrote, helped "to account for unexpected obstacles or reversals of fortune." Though Pagels didn't develop this functional aspect of the satan in ancient religious narratives, the satan may well have been a device akin to a second or third actor in a play, or to the often ingenuous participants in the Socratic dialogues of Plato. In other words, the satan is a narrative device to allow for conflict, debate, resolution, the restoration and reiteration of beliefs and values. Edmund is a manipulative satan in King Lear, and Iago a diabolically inspired satan in Othello.

As the role of the satan evolved, however, the concept was given a primitive, literal presence in religious texts: not the satan but Satan emerges as a singular malevolent force in the New Testament. Whereas the ancient Greeks and Romans seem to have perceived their numerous gods as capricious projections of human desires, and rarely as wise or "moral," early Christians saw their singular God (the Father) and their singular Savior (Jesus, the Son of the Father) as purely moral, always wise and good, and never capricious. To account for the moral chaos of nature, the allegorical figure of Satan was invested with the power to tempt humankind, as in the crude cautionary tale of the Garden of Eden--a biblical version of Pandora's box and other pagan cautionary tales.

It's as if a poetic metaphor leaped to life, as in comic-book magic: the satan becomes Satan becomes an adversary of God so invested with wiles and power that he is virtually a shadow God, an almost equal opponent whose domain is pure evil, as God's domain is pure good.

In The Origin of Satan, as in her earlier, highly influential Adam, Eve, and the Serpent (1988) and The Gnostic Gospels (1979), Pagels traced the fascinating ways in which the ever evolving vision of Christianity's Satan has served "to confirm for Christians their own identification with God and to demonize their opponents--first other Jews, then pagans, and later dissident Christians called heretics." In the 21st century, as in the earliest centuries of Christianity, baptism requires the convert to solemnly "renounce the devil and all his works" and to accept the principle of exorcism. Christian baptism seems to confirm the almost equal status of Satan vis-ˆ-vis God the Father: an astonishing elevation of a minor folktale functionary to major status. It's as if a maverick congressman from an outlying district in Utah were suddenly granted almost equal status with the President of the United States, and we thrilled to their televised debates, Whose side are you on? being the hyperventilated media question.

To examine the historical origins of such cultural archetypes--or stereotypes--as God, Satan, Good, and Evil is to demystify these concepts, and to dismantle, or deconstruct, the primitive scaffoldings of superstition that have supported them. This is, of course, a rich, wildly extravagant and imaginative aesthetic heritage, which we would not wish to banish, for all the cruel perversity of certain of its impassioned visions.


O'er many a frozen, many a fiery alp,
Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and shades of death,
A universe of death, which God by curse
Created evil, for evil only good,
Where all life dies, death lives, and nature breeds,
Perverse, all monstrous, all prodigious things,
Abominable, inutterable, and worse
Than fables yet have feigned, or fear conceived,
Gorgons and Hydras, and Chimeras dire.

– Milton, Paradise Lost


The potency of such visions is not lessened by the suggestion that their divine or diabolical dimensions are purely projective fantasies of mankind. In fact, that such fantasies have the power to enthrall some of us, to impel us to extraordinary acts of selflessness (heroism, fanaticism, or martyrdom, depending on one's perspective), suggests their ineffable and enduring nature.

The wish to believe in extraterrestrial forces that condone, confirm, and meticulously guide and govern our lives is, for some, stronger even than the wish to persevere in our own being (to use Spinoza's haunting phrase). The power of such a wish was tragically dramatized for us in the suicide terrorist acts of September 11 and in similar acts of self-destruction for political or religious causes in recent times. Where we see terrorism and suicide, the performers of such rites see martyrdom. Where we see evil, they see good. As in a nightmare, we who believe ourselves good are perceived, apparently by millions of Islamic believers, as evil. We, who imagine that God is on our side, are stunned to learn that in our enemies' eyes we are of the devil; they are of God, and their war with us is no mere politically expedient war, like every other, but a "holy war."

How like the vengeful mysticism of certain passages of the Hebrew Bible and the Book of Revelation of St. John the Divine are these impassioned yet chilling "poetic" words:

Praise be to God and we beseech Him for help
and forgiveness. We seek refuge with the Lord...
He whom God guides is rightly guided but he whom God
leaves to stray, for him will he find no protector
to lead him to the right way.

I witness that there is no God but God and Mohammed
is His slave and Prophet. God Almighty hit the
United States at its most vulnerable. He destroyed
its greatest buildings. Praise be to God.

The United States is filled with terror from its
north to its south and from its east to its west.
Praise be to God. . .

They champion falsehood, support the butcher against
the victim, the oppressor against the innocent child.
May God mete them the punishment they deserve.


These remarks, by Osama bin Laden, were broadcast shortly after the terrorist destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11.

When we attribute instinctive beliefs to extraterrestrial sources, and theological motives to unconscious, biologically driven wishes for survival and self-aggrandizement, we are surely susceptible to such stunning dramatic reversals.

Most of us are probably more comfortable with the concept of evils than with Evil. Evils are multiple and finite; Evil is an alarming singularity suggesting that all evils spring from a primary source, as in a theologically defined cosmos. Most of us don't really believe that two polar forces, Good and Evil, God and the Devil, are struggling with each other for dominance by way of our vaporous souls.

We do believe in the evils of poverty, illiteracy, illness, political tyranny, sexism, and racism--and that these evils are remediable. We believe that some individual, wholly human political leaders and self-ordained "holy men" (not so many women--one wonders why) behave out of self-interest; they appeal to their credulous constituents in the name of good, even as they commit unspeakable evils against humankind.

But we don't believe that these people are in a mystic communion with Evil or are in themselves evil--any more than we can conceive of ourselves as evil, in any scenario whatsoever.

Poet, playwright, essayist, and co-founder of the Ontario Review, Joyce Carol Oates is the author of more than 20 novels. Them (1970) was the winner of the National Book Award. Blonde (2000), drawn from the life of Marilyn Monroe, was nominated for a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize. Oates is a recipient of the PEN/Malamud Award for Lifetime Achievment in the Short Story. Her most recent book, Beasts, appeared in January. Oates is the Roger S. Berlind Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University.

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