Paul Carus’ The History of the Devil and the Idea of Evil (1899)

Paul Carus’ _The History of the Devil and the Idea of Evil_ (1899) Paul Carus, _The History of the Devil and the Idea of Evil_ (Chicago: Open Court, 1899). So begins _The History of the Devil_, wherein this perceived wrong is to be righted by Paul Carus, a self-described “theologian of science”. Although an unfamiliar name now, at the end the nineteenth century Carus was hailed for his attempts to “conciliate science and religion”.

He also played a key role in the introduction of Buddhist thought to the United States, to which he emigrated from his native Germany in the mid-1880s. A prolific author — _The History of the Devil_ was one of the seventy-five books he published in his lifetime — Carus also edited two philosophical journals (_The Open Court_ and _The Monist_), through which he published some of the most notable thinkers of his day. His work reflected the intellectual climate of the times.

Educated at Strasburg and then Tübingen, he used rigorous historical techniques such as textual analysis in his comparative studies of religion and mythology. Carus was also conceptually influenced, like many other writers of the period, by the ideas of Edward Tylor, an English anthropologist, who applied Darwinian principles to the evolution of the social world. Carus’ view that “the belief in magic is a natural phase in the evolution of mankind” closely aligned with Tylor’s theory that societies evolve from savagery to barbarism and finally to civilisation.

Scroll through the whole page to download all images before printing. The approach is broad, sweeping, and comparative. It is also inherently Tylorean: “Demonolatry, or Devil-worship, is the first stage in the evolution of religion, for we fear the bad, not the good”, he declares.

Carus pays particular attention to the era of European witch trials, arguing that beliefs in witchcraft and the selling of souls marked “a new period in the evolution of mankind”. So too was their later decline, which “ceased naturally with the ascendancy of science”, a development that Carus sees as interlinked with the rise of Protestantism. Indeed, in his interpretation, the Reformation played a major role in how the Devil was understood, with the notion of evil changing from a real-life personification to a more abstract notion or principle.

By the nineteenth century, the Devil’s powers had declined from their medieval peak, with “his main office . . . that of a general mischief-worker in the universe”; a figure of fun rather than of fear, he had now become a laughable character in folktales, easily outwitted by old women and children. For Carus, the changing status of the Devil was intimately linked to a similar transformation in perceptions of the Christian God — less of a regular interventionist and more the background orchestrator of a harmonious universe. In Carus’ words: > The abandonment of the belief in witchcraft tacitly implied the abandonment of a belief in God as a miracle-worker, and prepared the way for a nobler religious faith which surrendered the idea of seeking God in the suppositious possibility of breaking the laws of nature, and finally found him in the cosmic order itself, i.e. in the unity, the harmony, the rightness of those eternal factors of existence which are the conditions of reason, of truth, and of justice.