Why we need the Devil

In Breaking the Spell, Dennett quotes Rodney Stark's assessment of the need for the demonic to counter our understanding of the divine:

he even proposes that a God without a counterbalancing Satan is an unstable concept - "irrationaland perverse." Why? Because "one God of infinite scope must be responsible for everything, evil as well as good, and thus must be dangerously capricious, shifting intentions unpredictably and without reason" (p. 24). (192)

The question raised by Stark and Dennett here is the human need to create a powerful parental figure who wishes us good - who is benevolent and caring. But the universe as we know it is not composed entirely of positives. Humanity therefore has created for itself a scapegoat, a figure of pure and unadulterated evil whose purpose and intention is to do harm to us, to cause us to give in to our darker desires. A figure on which to blame those who do not wish to subscribe to that benevolent dictator.

We, as human beings immersed in our constructed religions, want someone to blame for the evils we have created. In Judaism, there was no devil (originally). There was only a deity whose capriciousness and violent changeability made him inherently unreliable as a father-figure. So, in subsequent years, humanity created a counterpart to this god, a way to siphon off those things that were undesirable in a deity and place them into the - necessarily weaker - body of a creature we dubbed the devil.

So what does it mean that future generations - notably including our own - have attempted to reclaim this devil from his isolation and damnation? Why have we tried so hard - and sometimes, as with Milton's Paradise Lost, against our will - to redefine and reidentify this demon as something we can understand? Something we can sympathize with? Something we can - sometimes - even love?

It is because, I think, we are coming to terms - slowly and unconsciously - with the fact that both deity and devil are contained within ourselves. If we love the divine, then we must also love the demonic, because we are both.