Mephistopheles: The Devil in the Modern World (review)

Abstract

Goethe Yearbook 359 reaction to enthusiastic acceptance, through puzzlement, doubt, irony, and attempts at synthesis. Other responses to the painful impact of "modernization" were provided by Russia and other East European nations later in the century and (among others) by the Caribbean and Middle Eastern worlds in our own day. In any such process there is some loss of substance, but there are also gains in options, breadth, and openness to the world, nowadays no less than in the days of Blake or Görres. Looking at the Goethezeit in the light of a paradigmatic "Third World" response to the (seemingly ineluctable) onslaught of modernity is, I think, more helpful than looking at it inside the (almost incestuous) limits of Hegelian-Marxist "historical" dialectics with all their closures and Eurocentrisms. Such an alternative mode of looking would provide us with both historical distance and hindsight, and with solid sociopolitical grounds for continuing to analyze with intellectual curiosity and respect the shortcomings or achievements of the Goethezeit. Catholic University of America Virgil Nemoianu Russell, Jeffrey Burton, Mephistopheles: The Devil in the Modern World. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1986. Jeffrey Russell is widely known for his many books on medieval religion, philosophy, and culture, including witchcraft. Preceded by the Devil (1977), Satan (1981), and Lucifer (1984), the present volume completes a tetralogy on perceptions of evil from antiquity through the early Christian tradition and Middle Ages to our contemporary world. Unmistakable beneath the antipodal subject-matter is a family resemblance to Irving Singer's also praiseworthy two-volume work on The Nature of Love (I, Plato to Luther, 2nd ed., and II, Courtly and Romantic [1984]). Russell draws yet more heavily and by and large more successfully on imaginative literature and art in following his particular pathway through the history of ideas. Here is not the place to rehearse the coverage of Mephistopheles, which starts from the Renaissance and Reformation — let alone outline the earlier volumes. But readers who currently feel limited to modern topics will be encouraged to venture into the Devil, Lucifer, and Satan, too, by learning that Russell sticks throughout to the same crystal-clear phenomenological approach that he duly restates in Mephistopheles (e.g., I43ff.). Following the lead of Vico and Kant, he approaches the variety of beliefs about evil over the ages as our relevant data; and, openly rejecting (though striving to describe accurately and fairly) rational skepticism, moral relativism, materialism, and scientism, among the various modern responses he deems to be inadequate, he avows his own belief that radical evil is rooted in human nature and must be acknowledged and countered. Russell's methodological frankness and impressive grounding in Western religion and philosophy greatly help the reader to grasp involved points when, 360 Book Reviews foreshortening as every historian must do, he interprets the complex processes by which ideas come into being, fade, perdure, metamorphose, and combine. Especially stimulating in Mephistopheles are his explanations of the logic of longer-term displacements of systems of belief whereby advocates of certain positions sometimes bring about results as remote from their intentions as from their times. To name just a couple of examples: chapter two suggests why the impugning of hermeticism, because it was widely perceived as a threat to religion, helped promote the ultimate victory of the then weaker rival, science, over Aristotelian Christianity; chapter four, why especially Hume's arguments, by devastating late Renaissance theodicy and deism, cleared the way for secular theodicies such as Hegelianism and Marxism, with their confusing pretense of being "scientific." Russell creates a more convincing texture and depth for his treatment of the religious and philosophical trends with comparable examinations of shiftings, conflations, and displacements in literature. In so doing he sometimes provokes with a thesis that challenges the latterday critical consensus on a masterwork. A case in point (contradicting interpreters of no less stature than James Joyce!) is his reading of the ghost in Hamlet as the shapeshifting devil who traduces the flawed hero into hurting innocents out of lust for revenge (69ff.). Russell thereby pulls the prince's notoriously ambiguous behaviour closer to instances of radical evil in such late tragedies as Titus Andronicus, Richard LU, and Lear...