Word: satanic
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Satan, I know thy strength, and thou...
When the Devil comes up in conversation, modern Christians have a tendency to tuck up their skirts and scurry to the shelter of safer doctrinal topics like the brotherhood of man or the Sermon on the Mount. In a book called Satan (Sheed & Ward; $5.50), newly published in the U.S., a group of scholars under the editorship of Father Bruno de Jesus-Marie, a French Carmelite, have made a frontal attack on the question of what the Devil is and what he should mean to a Christian...
...Christian view of Satan is no less fanciful. In Dante's Divine Comedy he is meticulously described as a giant with three heads (colored red, yellow and black respectively). In the hands of Milton and Goethe, he became successively a tragic hero and a debonair, reasonable-seeming man of the world. At 20th century masquerade parties and in subway headache ads, the Devil generally wears a red union suit and wields a large pitchfork...
Holes in a Sponge. This popularization has only made his real nature more obscure. Satan, as his current biographers believe, is literally "a fallen angel," a pure spirit without a body who tempts man to sin. He is not the principle of Evil, since Evil is itself a negative quality, i.e., merely the lack of Good in God's imperfect creatures. As French Historian Henri-Irénée Marrou explains it, it is like the holes in a sponge. "Evil," he continues, "is something that need not have existed ... It reveals in all its depth and ambivalence...
...highly Shavian Don Juan denounces Hell for just that reason: it is no proper place for man, for the one animal with brains. And what, sneers Satan, has man done with his precious brains...