 with again. Good afternoon everyone. I am Dr. Ryan Lozano from the Department of Language, Philosophy and Culture here at San Antonio College and this is the fourth annual special edition Halloween lecture. This year philosophy goes back to hell. We went to hell two years ago when I talked about Dante's Inferno. Other lectures have included lectures on the European witch trials. Let us burn the witches to save them. Also we've looked at trickster mythology, or trickster gods in world mythology, which I entitled Loki's Siblings. But this year we're going to take a look at a philosophical history of the devil. Can anyone tell me what that image is from? Legend. Yes. Who has seen the abysmal 1980s Tom Cruise film Legend? Outstanding. The rest of you are remiss. Add it to your Netflix cube post taste. You will be better for having done so. I would like you to take just a minute, close your eyes, trust me, I'm a doctor, and picture the devil. See what you come up with. What do you got? What are some features? What can we expect? Right. Anything like us? Exactly like the top right. Especially like that middle one. I don't know. It's very little. Where do these ideas come from? So we've got the red. We've got the horns. We've got the tail. Usually a pitchfork. Maybe even the addition of wings. Oh, look at him. That's cute, isn't it? How did these ideas get into our heads? When we think of the devil, what exactly is it that we pick up on? What is it that we key into? And where do those ideas come from? We are all predominantly in a Western understanding of Satan. And so when we think about this, regardless of our religious tradition or lack thereof, we are kind of the imperators of this tradition of making it this, we're going through about two millennia of Western theology, literature, both big and little T tradition within the churches. And it's really kind of hard to avoid. The devil is always going to have certain characteristics when he's depicted. They're more or less the same. Let's take a look here. We've got Elizabeth Hurley and B. Dazzled. We've got Alan Cumming and Bob the Devil and God, Dan Castellaneda and Futureama, Trey Parker, one of the most familiar ones to us in South Park, Vigo Mortensen, free Lord of the Rings in the prophecy. If you haven't seen the prophecy, you'd pick that one up too. Tim Curry as the Lord of Darkness in Legend. We've got Al Pacino in the Devil's Advocate, Harvey Stevens in Omen and the rest of the Davian movies. And we have Rosa Linda Salatano in the Passion of the Christ as kind of that most recent sort of androgynous and doubly evil version of the devil. When we talk about the devil, we tend to refer to he or him. Why do we use these particular personal pronouns? Well, we have a tendency to anthropomorphize both the devil and God. So if we think of God, now we probably think of Morgan Freeman or we think of something along these type lines. But why do we do this? Well, there is Peter Stormar and Constantine. These reflect kind of the roles that we've imposed upon the devil. The devil for the most part is a cultural creation of ours coming out of this tradition. The Old Testament Satan is just an opponent or an obstacle and very often appears actually as an angel of God. In this case Satan is depicted doing God's bidding as he very often shows up in the Old Testament. In Greek that becomes the adversary or the slanderer as it sometimes interpreted which was Latinized as Diabolos which has entered into Diablo and finally into the devil. That's where we get our modern word. And I'm going to use these kind of interchangeably. Satan, the devil and so on and so forth. Now it is pretty safe to say that as much has been written about the devil as has been written about God possibly even more so. As a literary antagonist alone he's probably surpassed God long since as kind of the ultimate foil to the godly protagonist or just the hero figure in literature. The largest body of work is coming from about 500 years ago and that period of time up until the 19th century. Over there we have William Blake's illustration of a scene from Paradise Lost in which the devil is descending upon the heavenly angel. This is an illustration this one's somewhat more recent of Gerta's Faust where Mephistopheles the particular iteration of the devil is tempting Faust to find that truly unique experience for which he would sell his soul. Perhaps the most famous literary expression of Satan shows up in Dante's Inferno where Virgil has led Dante down through all the different levels of hell and finally in the very pit of hell they encounter Lucifer and Lucifer has three heads with three mouths and he is forever chewing on and here's a color illustration of that from a little bit later. Judas the betrayer of Price in the middle, Brutus over here the betrayer of Ed Tuobrutte and Cassius one of Brutus' collaborators in Killing Caesar. Interestingly enough if we fast forward to Soren Kierkegaard we find Brutus cast now as a tragic hero and not as the ultimate betrayer but the character of Lucifer more or less remains unchanged throughout all of these. In the largest medieval manuscript ever written both literally and figuratively a book we call the Codex Gigas. It's a Latin term that implies just a great big book is basically what it is and it is indeed that. The book is about three and a half feet from top to bottom. The book weighs 165 pounds and has several hundred vellum pages comprising it. This is a nearly perfect flawless copy of the Old and New Testament but interestingly interspersed with that is a collection of metaphysical knowledge folklore folk remedies and so on and it's thought that this was either inspired by devoted to or perhaps even penned by Satan himself. Interestingly enough paleographical research into this text has revealed that a single scribe did this. Now writing in that medieval unsealed hand it takes about 20 seconds per line. This book has over 500,000 lines. Now realizing that the medieval monasteries day to day would give you only about an hour or two to write it's suspected that it took the author of this book between 20 and 25 years to write this and the stories that grew up around it were that he was a monk in trouble and he had sold his soul to Satan in order to get just a few more years of life and so he told the advent superior of his Benedictine monastery sometime around 1265 or so so roughly contemporaneous with Dante that he would write this Bible and all of human knowledge in a single night finding that he was unable to do so he called upon Satan himself and we have an illustration here of him opposite an illustration of the city of heaven building off St. Augustine's the city taught today that kind of counter places this. This is what we're avoiding this is what we're seeking but it's been kind of a controversial book because it does have those diabolical influences here. Let's take a look at that image that shows up in the Codex Gigas. So here we have kind of a proto version of what we've come to associate with the devil. We've got our two horns we've got our scary-looking face kind of a staley thing here. The feet aren't quite close yet at this point but the claws are certainly there a bifurcated tongue like a serpent might be for instance and very interestingly the loincloth that he's wearing here is ermine. Whenever we see those pictures of the old kings and queens and they've got the white cloak on with the little black dots those are all ermine skins which in medieval heraldry was reserved come on in was reserved only for kings and queens of and royalty in general and so this is kind of been looked at as is Satan wearing this as what essentially is a diaper out of disparaging those kings and queens or is this to show that they're lower on his respective totem pole and so on but this image 13th century image is nothing new to the world. The Christians that for our purposes more or less invented the devil at this time are taking something ready at hand the god Pan very familiar theme in Greco-Roman mythology we have the horns we have the hooves and so on and these have transitioned nicely into what we now think of as the devil specifically they transitioned into the form of Baphomet one of the many iterations of Satan himself whether it's Beelzebub the lord of the plies, Mephistopheles as we saw in Faust, Baphomet and so on and so forth where we've got those elements plus the wings of the fallen angel the breasts of the nurturer there are the hooves down there this is the statue that's being proposed I think it's Tulsa Tulsa Oklahoma to go alongside the Ten Commandments as the the Satanist monument so we got the cute little kids looking up to old Baphomet there this is an ancient ancient image that has come full circle into modern times we've taken mythology and we've co-opted it more for our own use now in 1942 the poet W. H. Auden right over there is supposed to have asked a group of Sunday school children do you know what the devil looks like and he said the devil looks like me and he might have been right in this sense this is perhaps the best understanding of what we now have when we think of the devil or diabolical type influences the devil has a metaphor is kind of our modern understanding of this it's the confluence of social and political biological psychological and philosophical notions all brought together in something that just to us represents a sort of evil idea but it has a surprisingly ancient pedigree to it this is back to that adversary of the pre-christian Jews all the way up through Pope Gregory great's ancient enemy as he refers to him in the western world Satan almost exclusively is described as what he's not and rather than what he is almost always in negative terms and we owe that particular legacy to Saint Augustine who's depicted here conversing with one of the devils Saint Augustine described evil very much like physics describes cold in physics the further away you move from the source of heat the colder something is going to become in this case the further we move away from the source of good that is God the more evil that we're liable to become and so we have this almost negative understanding of what the devil is if we update and there's our physics reference if we update this to the rather controversial journalism professor at UT Robert Jensen he describes the devil as the incarnation of vacuity that is to say the earthly presence of an infinite absence and so kind of carrying forward Augustine the poet Auden himself had said that the devil has no positive existence but is just a recurrent state of fear faithlessness and hate so again we have the absence of things like confidence faith and love all those things that we typically associate in the western world with that ethical monotheistic God be it of the Jews of the Christians of the Muslims or what have you what about the problem of evil how do we explain that one that's a big that's our recurrent problem in the philosophy of religion why does this good God allow bad things to happen for instance why do we have hurricanes that destroy villages why do we have childhood leukemia why did jersey shore get six seasons and firefly only had one problems of evil this isn't a problem though until ethical monotheism enters the picture evil is not problematic until you try and say that there's only one God and that that God's essentially good up until that point you can blame it on well the bad gods did that that was Hades or maybe that was Loki or Anansi being tricky on something as soon as we positive a good God now we've got to say that that God has either created the evil himself allows it to exist or otherwise has just not gotten around to it quite yet all of which are really problematical and so we've taken what is a remarkably zoroastrian or by theistic or dualistic approach we've given God a counterpart we've given God a devil on which to blame some of the bad things if we look back at the Old Testament specifically the prophetic books some of the earlier books that we find Joe which we know was an oral tradition long before it was written down here we have another William Blake illustration of Satan pouring the plagues onto Joe the story if you're not familiar with it was Joe was a very godly man a very righteous and faithful man and God and Satan are observing his behavior and they're having a discussion between the two of them and Satan says let me test his faith let me see how much he really believes and if he's really faithful to you and God essentially says go for it do your worst test it come on in guys test him however you like there's particularly telling version in Isaiah chapter 45 7 God says I form the light and create darkness uh-oh is God now taking credit for the bad stuff too I make peace and create evil I the Lord do all of these things Satan in the Old Testament is very often cast as an observant obedient servant of God rather than an adversary in fact there's our Greek word Diabolos that adversary or opponent in the Hebrew and I've added here the the diacritical marks to show us that there's a long a sound this is Satan those three letters as they're put together just means adversary and that's not the enemy of God in Joe that's the obedient angel that sent to test the righteous Joe he's working for God in numbers Satan is the angel who blocks the path of Balaam a non-Israeli prophet whose journey God is forbidden and so again we have this as the agent working for rather than the adversary of in chronicles Satan here actually named and personified is the one who inspires King David to evilly enact a census and count the Israelites the book of Enoch which is not part of the accepted canon but it's had a great deal of influence in our culture has anyone seen that movie Noah from last year the giant rock monsters that helped Noah build the ark and that fight off the evil two-ball came okay that that is a scriptural but a non canonical scriptural reference in the book of Enoch the big inspiration for that movie we have this notion of watcher angels and the the term for watcher in Hebrew is really really close just a couple of those little accent marks away from being fallen okay those watcher angels that have been bound hand and foot cast into the darkness ostensibly here to earth their leader a Zazel that shows up in the movie the name of Zazel is one of those along with Biel's above mythosopheles and so on that we ascribe to the devil we see that most currently in Islamic mythology as they shows up as one of the characters of Satan a similar story this one a little more familiar to us was recorded of st. John of Patmos in about 90 AD or thereabouts and we have a war in heaven in which st. Michael overcomes Lucifer the lightbringer and cast him down that didn't go as he hoped where does he cast him down to it's not to hell he gets sent here if you remember the Kevin Smith movie from several years ago dogma remember the ultimate punishment isn't hell it's where do they get sad yeah specifically wasn't like Detroit or something that would be a punishment oh yeah they're sent to Wisconsin that would be just about as bad now this book comes down to us now as part of the accepted canon in fact the very last canonical book revelation Satan is on earth according to this now when the creator gets cast as benevolent and we've all of a sudden got a very good god now evil is a problem as i mentioned earlier this is closer to the end of the old testament as we're entering that kind of a scene or prophetic apocalyptic age right before the new testament takes over and they tend to emphasize that it reaches its high point in christ confrontations with satan that appears in the gospels where he's tempted at various times either to give up the mission to more or less sell out god and his apostles and so on and so forth in luke specifically in the 10th chapter jesus relates having seen satan as lightning fall from heaven where does lightning strike again on the earth and thought of as a murderer from the beginning in john chapter eight paul calls the devil the god of this world earth in second Corinthians and urges his raiders to put on the whole armor of god against him in Ephesians in first john specifically in the third chapter we're told that the whole purpose of jesus coming is to destroy the works of the devil by the time we get to the earliest gospel of mark the first thing jesus does following his baptism by john is resist the temptations of satan in the wilderness and i just love that so now we have satan recast from the adversary to the servant to the tempter and this is a theme that carries forward throughout the new testament and it carries in more or less to our own age we find moral evils mass murders and so on and natural evils hurricanes eventually satan comes to be found in both we sometimes think of the tempting of eve as a satanic influence but if you read the text in genesis carefully satan doesn't get mentioned at all we find there that cunning serpent in that case with the human head down here the serpent is kind of coiled around the back and around the feet but it never says say over here we've got a really weird idea of a serpent kind of the helo monster komodo dragon sort of serpent i suppose but it's not until very much later until the 14th century when john wycliffe sometimes called the morning star the very first guy to try and translate the bible from the vulgates into english refers to the snake now as this satanic personification in the form of the serpent if we move forward in the west we find martin luther thinking in a very augustinian way in his commentary on galatians he tells us satan reigns over the whole world as his domain fills the air with ignorance contempt hatred and disobedience to god in this devil's kingdom we live being a creation of god though on an augustinian account satan's actions too ultimately must always lead to good outcomes either in this world or in the next it's unsatisfyingly left there because we don't really get any finality on this in milton the illustration on the right comes from william blake's watercolor of milton we find satan's evil as ultimately bringing this world into infinite goodness and so he's pictured there with the orb of the kingdom and the scepter over which to rule rule where rule this earth the devil was clearly a source of heresies inherent in the protestant sex as far as the roman catholics were concerned right after the protestant reformations and in league with the pope as the head of the church and so here's some modern uh protestant propaganda tying the romans to uh to ignoring the bible working in league with satan fulfilling revelation and apocalyptic prophecies and so on and so forth and the romans were just as quick to accuse protestants of having diabolical purposes or motives in this as we enter the puritan area era appropriate since we're coming up on thanksgiving those wonderful ancient american traditions of eating turkey and killing natives we find the puritans uh thinking of the devil as kind of god's hangman now historically the hangman was the guy doing the job that nobody else wanted to do but nonetheless needed to be done we've got to execute these people and so we find that guy that really kind of enjoys his work and we allow him to do that taking delight in the suffering that he causes but ultimately still serving god's beneficence taking out the trash as it were statements satan stays the enemy of god's purpose but is still this many thousands years later acting as their agent what about images of hell this is the one that culturally at least is probably most familiar to us as inheritors of the western western literary tradition this is daunte's depiction of hell and when we talk about the uh the several rings of hell i think meetings are somewhere in here okay traffic falls down here a little ways why isn't the devil ever shown suffering the devil actually seems to be kind of enjoying himself in all the depictions that we see of hell he's still the greatest sinner still eternally damned but this again gives us that idea that hangman phenomena we have someone that enjoys their work that's being placed in that we explain that by saying the damned continue to suffer even in the afterlife and who better to administer that suffering than satan and company uh the idea of contra posso enters daunte and this is the punishment aspect of hell and in daunte's where we see it best or at least better than anywhere else very similar to the idea of karma what goes around comes around life's not a bitch till you're a bitch first daunte we have the fortune tellers who claim to be able to see the future and their heads have been turned backwards so they have to rock they have to walk backwards everywhere they go because they can no longer see the future we have the characters of ugolino and rugieri forever gnawing on one another struggling in death as they did in life if we update this theme to uh modern literature and cinema we have the character of viscerus targaryen in georgia martin's game of throne series given the golden crown that he's so badly wanted from calderoto as he gets the molten gold poured over his head sorry spoiler alert but we find a bit of comfort in this idea of sinners getting what they hubristically think they've got coming to them especially if we look around and we see bad people seeming to enjoy living rather good lives uh bunion the guy who had written the pilgrims uh progress relates the story of the life and death of mr bad man i know not a terribly original name for the guy where the eponymous anti-hero closes his eyes one moment and opens them in hell not unlike the rich man in luke uh 1622 where you live the good life and the idea of punishment is eventual but not necessarily temporal another tradition has satan being the embodiment of hell in and of himself when mephestopheles appears to dr faustus and christopher marlowe's play the first question faustus has formed isn't one of shock or surprise but how did you escape from hell and satan very casually replies to his inquiry this is hell nor am i out of it a chilling if plausible thought given this old problem of evil why is evil allowed to exist in the world because this is an inherently evil world we are in hell even as we speak if marlowe is to be believed and there's some compelling evidence to believe that that might be the case uh by the time we update this to the 1940s in sarah's quick flow that is to say no exit now it goes from being hell on earth to us who inhabit it hell is other people something we can understand easily in the midst of rush hour traffic or while we're watching the evening news hell can even be a state of mind or the mind itself uh the best literary depiction of this i think is in melville's depiction of the cursed captain a have bent on his revenge uh here let me read you this phrase from moby dick a have carried hell in himself from which forked flames and lightning shot up and a cursed fiends beckoned him to lead down among them what better depiction of the hell that we're used to in the western tradition than the one that a have brings to the readers of melville ambrose beers would later in his devil's dictionary which is a delightful read if you can get a copy of it says each of us have our own secret and personal hell we take our hell with us now we kind of look back at these past here is the classical and the medieval and we view those beliefs as just being ignorant there she weighs the same as a duck she's must be a witch great reference to money python and we're inclined to dismiss it out of hand but it's important to realize that like a great many of our own cultural assumptions including the ones that we make today he was simply another part of a perceived reality of their worldview any understanding of the pre-modern world is almost always going to be a religious one just because of the way things were in those times we simply view it as superstition but they were viewed then and accepted as matters of fact not as a superstitious league as early as the writings of gutta and shelly shelly actually writes a fairly lengthy and very good essay on the devil we start to see a bit of amusement creeping into the writings we start to see them viewed not necessarily as matters of fact but we start to see little tinges of could this possibly be relegated to a superstition and should it rather be entered into the dustbins of failed theory than accepted as scientifically verifiable things today we're most likely to take the position of thomas tannery huxley his day's wolverine when he describes our biology rather than our sins as the rude explanation of our wickedness when we find evil in the world we not look to religious reasons but how are we made if we go back as far as Hobbes we're inherently selfish creatures we are self-interested all day long and we look out for number one how we fulfill those desires is a biological question not necessarily a theological one and the antidote prescribed by huxley is moral education an approach that further pushes the devil from matter of fact inclusion in our daily lives as a religious reality with the early 20th century producing a level of violence and genocide that had been previously unheard of there was a momentary but not lasting resurgence of belief in the devil as the cause for all of this evil in the world for the most part our advances in psychology as well as an increased separation and secularized world have banished these notions as out of date or as ill-equipped to explain easily evil as easily as we did in the past today we find ideas of the devil based in religion to have largely become optional a great many religious believers even those that are very devoted in their faith will look at the devil as well that's a cute mythology it's handy to counter impose against good and makes the good look even better but that's about as far as it takes it movements like the church of satan in the 1960s there's maryland manson's membership card he's number 100261 in case you were curious this surprisingly doesn't worship satan at all the church of satan worships the self something we also find in itia in iron rand in el ron hubbard as well as several others this shows us that secularism at this point has kind of attained the ultimate irony in our culture satan has given his own church but even there is not considered indispensable in western belief we've moved away from our creations and we're back to where we started the devil today is not something that haunts us in the middle of the night drags us down to hell and makes us perform evil deeds the devil is cute and there i leave you to ponder this history of the devil in our society answer any questions that you may have about this there is just a fascinating body of literature that that attends all of this like i said just as a as a key theme the devil has enticed our imagination since the beginning of writing and seeing that evolution through the literature is really one of the best ways to look at this christian do you have a question i was going to say i think it's really nice that you have uh textual evidence when you're talking about the bible most people don't they just kind of reference wissy and you know luke and that's all they said they don't say you know the chapter or sure whatever yeah specifically and a lot of this falls into the category of i didn't know that was in the bible yeah you know when we look at numbers and we look at joe when we look at isiah and we don't see the devil as we're used to him culturally being depicted we see him as one of the boys helping out god how are we to reconcile ourselves with that given the cultural picture that we're given and that puts us in kind of an awkward position sometimes religiously other questions yes sir um is it your sense that belief in a literal devil is uh waning among christians or is that not something that you i think so um given the resurgence of some of the the evangelical movements and the pentecostal movements it's it sort of makes it difficult to gauge i think in some of those and granted i'm generalizing here but in some of those i think you're much more likely to see a very literal understanding of an actual devil at work but i think generally within mainstream christianity your average church going christian i don't think is really going to take the idea of the devil particularly seriously today unless your supreme court judgment yes unless you're supreme court justice yes sir uh i wonder if you could say something about um the phenomenon we sometimes uh encounter where we try to insert something in this case maybe the devil to explain something else so for example in the bible the number 666 for example refers to i seemingly kzarni run rather than the devil it gets interpreted as the number of beasts so yeah well we we have a natural i i think on a species level need to know otherwise we wouldn't be philosophers but we need that account for why these things are done and so in the older religions specifically in those that are uh mythological or polytheistic or especially pantheistic animistic and so on we've got that very ready and very easy scapegoat to say it's a good god or a bad god even as we update that like i said the zoroastrianism we've got a real monster and we've got meter over here causing trouble now it's difficult for us to do that though and in an increasingly secularized culture we don't really look for a supernatural explanation we look for that scientific explanation if we've got a monstrous birth or something odd happening we're not going to go to church we're going to go to the scientists we're going to go to the doctors and look for explanations there but i think there's always going to be that inclination to try and explain things on that supernatural level just because we're kind of hardwired that way uh if we look at atheism that's sort of a next step level of thinking because basically we're sort of naturally inclined to look for a higher being or a supreme being does that kind of help at all is that in terms of the the numerology i mean we can do a whole lecture just on the the numbers and significance in the bible there because clearly caesar nero nero caesar nero the the greek translates into six six six so it's a reference to an actual person yeah we interpret that as well and that that has overlaps with the identifying with the caesars kind of like we identify the the horror babelana she appears she you know again that anthropomorphism uh in revelation and so on is we like to attach it to things that are familiar to us and i think having that that set reference point he's almost uh it's a security blanket for us more than anything else i think rather than something to be taken literally other questions well yes i'm just curious about the role of uh satan or the devil in islam because i don't know a lot about it you know when when mohammed first does he mention them very little specifically are yet very little and it shows up not so much in chronic belief but as as sort of um particularly within sufism within the mysticism that sort of uh risen out of that and again that focuses there is some mention of of satan and of satan that's the uh the arabic that we saw this is an adaptation of the hebra terms so they're they're both somitic terms that mean essentially the same thing they've got that idea of the adversary or the opponent um but it's not quite the same sense as as say your modern christian perspective of this ultimate evil it's it's more of a an antagonistic presence and it gets personified in the character of that as zazel uh which is one of the names that is given to the fallen watcher angels one of the names that's ascribed to satan now and that's sort of that confluence of all the western mythologies pushed together and is also a place there's actually a mount a zazel that you can go to that's associated kind of like cyan eyes associated with holiness this is associated with a place of evil uh sort of a a connection of maybe a gulgoth a type idea that there's this mount that has all of the focus well thank you so much for coming uh please eat copious amounts of chocolate so i don't have to take it back to my office and uh i've been delighted having you all here