The devil a new biography free pdf download

One problem is that some of the details are slightly misrepresented along the way. Specialist training in the vast religious time frames he covers would, of course, probably rob an author of the ability to write for non-specialists.

This book walks that balance fairly well. The Stanford's treatment of the Devil is a good general introduction to the topic. The place the book really shines, as I mention on my blog Sects and Violence in the Ancient World , is when it addresses more modern literary treatments.

Unlike some other books on the topic, Stanford takes the role of films seriously, and discusses a few of the more notable examples of the Devil on celluloid. He seems to be much more comfortable with modern era literature than the somewhat complex and tangled world of antiquity. All of this makes sense since the Devil is a compound character, brought together from several different sources including religious publications, folklore, and non-Christian beliefs.

Nobody, it seems, is in charge of Satan's identity. Even the Christian belief structure doesn't present a uniform view of the prince of darkness. If what you're looking for is a basic, non-technical introduction to a complex character, this book is a good place to start. May 07, Mathilde Bellemare rated it liked it.

Gives a cursory overview of the development of the Devil. I would have liked to see a little more time devoted to the difference between satan, Satan, and the Devil. The compare and contrast of monotheistic and ditheistic religions is clear. The problems inherent to an independent, sometimes omnipresent and omnipotent, evil being within a monist theology is well expressed. Modern images and ideas of Gives a cursory overview of the development of the Devil.

Modern images and ideas of the purpose of the Devil is somewhat laxking. However, the author does leave the question of a "secular devil" open. I had some problems with the author's intentional provocative language. His personal distain or, at least, ambivalence, for the Catholic Church is painfulky obvious. His use of "immature" to describe muscians or artists who use or abuse Satanic symbols is lacking professionalism. The language calls into question the author's relationship with the Catholic Church, the Devil, and his imagery.

Even so, a nice read of a short, comprehensive biography. Oct 19, Erika Harlitz-Kern rated it liked it. Even though it sometimes feels as if The Devil is everywhere, there is surprisingly little written about him from a scholarly perspective. Journalist Peter Stanford has written The Devil: A Biography in an attempt to synthesize the research that does exist, while at the same time addressing the general public and make available in easily-digested format the research that has been done on this intriguing character.

The Devil is a Christian invention with long ancient roots. Stanford traces these Even though it sometimes feels as if The Devil is everywhere, there is surprisingly little written about him from a scholarly perspective.

Stanford traces these roots all the way back to Mesopotamia, by way of Egypt, Ancient Greece, and the Germanic cults of northern Europe. He demonstrates deftly how Jewish apocrypha helped in the development of the idea of The Devil. Where Judaism has abandoned these ideas, they remained among those Jews who formed the earliest Christian congregations in the ancient Mediterranean.

Stanford's purpose with his book is to write a biography of The Devil. He succeeds only in part, the reason being that he sets the Fourth Lateran Council in as the end in the development of The Devil as concept.

Instead, the development of the lore that surrounds The Devil has taken place among regular people and the lower clergy. The problems with this statement are, firstly, that Stanford does not discuss what the Fourth Lateran Council actually says about The Devil.

Almond shows that the Prince of Darkness remains an irresistible subject in history, religion, art, literature, and culture. Woven throughout the account of the Christian history of the Devil is another complex and complicated history: that of the idea of the Devil in Western thought. Almond shows that the story of Satan, emerging in its definitive form in the second-century BCE, provided a solution to a paradox that was at the heart of the Christian tradition: how to explain the persistence of evil within a world that was governed by a just and benevolent God?

In the Satanic story inherited from the early Church Fathers, Satan and his demons were fallen angels who retained their free will despite their rebellion against God. They were thus tacitly sanctioned by God to intervene in human affairs. Yet questions about the nature and extent of demonic power remained, eventually giving rise to the theological subfield of demonology in the Middle Ages.

For Saint Augustine , demons had subtle corporeal bodies made of thin air that gave them extraordinary mobility and allowed them to enter the bodies of human beings. Peter Lombard believed that demons possessed bodies made of thick gloomy air, derived from the dark layer of the atmosphere beneath heaven within which they resided.

Thomas Aquinas, for his part, denied the corporeality of demons, but wrote that they were capable of condensing air into visible shapes and bodies. Far from being a matter of sterile academic debate, demonology provided the intellectual foundations for the great witch hunts of the early modern period.

The possibility of demons that could assume the shape of visible bodies, engage in copulation with witches to seal Satanic pacts, leave physical marks on the bodies of sorcerers and witches, and take control over human bodies through possession crucially depended upon the reality of their corporeal interactions with human beings. Determining the boundaries of demonic agency within the physical world thus became essential to adjudicating the trials of men and women accused of invoking the power of demons.

It is not coincidental that the most influential of Catholic demonologies of the period, the Malleus Maleficarum [ The Hammer of Witches ], was penned by a Dominican inquisitor, Heinrich Kramer, in the course of a career spent persecuting witches in the Holy Roman Empire. He is being too literal-minded, and will only leave readers with an itch to examine why the modern world refuses to abandon the concept of a devil-like figure to demonise others in our midst.

We make modern devils out of those whom we cannot readily understand, or who frighten or revolt us, and in so doing we continue to invoke the 2,year-old vocabulary of the Devil himself. There is still plenty of life left in the Devil. You can post as a subscriber user By continuing your visit on this website, you agree to the use of cookies to give you the very best browsing experience and to collect statistics on page visits. To find out more and to change your cookie settings click here.