Locating Lucifer
Pollsters have a habit, every Easter and Christmas, of carrying out surveys to demonstrate how ignorant most of us now are about even the basics of the Christian story. Respondents regularly muddle up Jesus’s crucifixion with chocolate bunny rabbits, and miscast Peter, Mary Magdalene and Judas Iscariot as if they are interchangeable characters in a half-remembered soap opera.
But when it comes to the Devil, memories are much sharper, even in our sceptical, scientific and secular times. A good half of respondents can usually be counted on to know exactly who the Devil is. And many of them also believe that he is real.
Now, if the Church of England could get half of us to walk through its doors once in a while, it would be loudly singing alleluia. So, to follow the logic of the polls, what it should be doing is responding to public interest by talking up the Devil. Perhaps not in his time-honoured garb as the cloven-hoofed, scaly-skinned tempter with sulphur breath who lures us down to the fires of hell – that might sound a bit medieval – but perhaps as a familiar way into the otherwise intangible question of evil that continues to trouble so many today. The same pollsters report that between 70 and 80 per cent of us believe in the existence of evil.
Instead, the General Synod this week has voted to pension the Devil off. One of the few places you can still hear him mentioned in a mainstream church (on the evangelical fringes talk of the Devil never went out of fashion) is during the baptism service. Parents and godparents are invited to reject the Devil and all his false promises. Such wording, however, has been judged “unhelpful” by the Church of England’s governing body. Those assembled around the font will henceforth be asked simply to “turn away from sin” and to “stand bravely” against evil.
At least evil still gets a mention – until the next rush to water things down in the cause of modernity. But by decoupling the abstract reality of evil from the name and face that has, for 2,000 years, so regularly characterised it, something is surely being lost.
Once, you couldn’t so much step inside a church as hear about the dangers to your soul of supping with Satan. He was everywhere, medieval clerics taught. “Sine diabolo, nullus dominus,” – “without the Devil, no God” – was the message that resounded from every pulpit. It may have been wildly over the top and hugely damaging – searching out the Devil’s agents consumed the Inquisition – but it also inspired the likes of Dante and Milton to produce memorable portraits of God’s adversary that echo through the ages.
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