The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil.

Satan is dead, and with him we have lost the belief in evil and sin that might serve as a moral anchor in our sprawling, postideological world. So goes the popular wisdom, and Andrew Delbanco offers it up as the lesson of American literary history in his new book, The Death of Satan. We are more surrounded by images of violence and horror than ever before, according to Delbanco, yet we have lost the ability to talk meaningfully about them. This is no small matter because the idea of evil is "a metaphor upon which the health of society depends." Yet Delbanco never explains what he means by this, aside from a vague intimation that those who fail to understand evil will surely fall into it. His survey of American literature is eloquent, but his broader moral argument is fraught with confusion. He concludes that "We want Satan back because God depends on him," yet he claims to speak for the "party of secular liberalism." He fends off charges of nostalgia for religious certainties, yet he feels that we have suffered from their loss. The result is a kind of unintentional plea for casuistry: if we could learn to talk about evil, Delbanco implies, we might diminish it.

The recent history of Yugoslavia suggests that this is not so. But literary history is full of writers who have championed evil as a clarifying principle. Poets and preachers have always known that Satan's threat is the linchpin of God's grace. In our own century, Graham Greene appears to have embraced Catholicism precisely so as to dramatize the meaning of evil in his own life and work; and T.S. Eliot claimed that "damnation itself is an immediate form of salvation--of salvation from the ennui of modern life, because it at last gives some significance to living."

There is something decadent in these attitudes, which seem to render evil into mere spice for a theatrical appetite. And it should be said at once that Delbanco is innocent of any such jaded posturing. He claims to have no interest in jump-starting older religious attitudes, and he has little to say about the actual figure of Satan, despite his title. He offers instead a strictly moral history, in which Satan generally figures as a scapegoat. The colonists of early New England, for instance, who thought of themselves as "primitive" Christians in a renewed and purified world, had nonetheless to resign themselves to the realities of modern commerce in order to survive. "Their language was simply at odds with their circumstance," Delbanco writes, "and Satan was the name they gave to the contradiction." But even at Salem, Satan was doomed. Puritan New England was the last great flare-up of this visible devil. Thereafter he began to retreat into the concept of evil, which was itself chiefly manifested in two ways. First, an external sense of evil: someone else, whether Satan, the Jews, or a neighbor, is the focus of final blame. The second and far nobler sense of evil is internal, residing in our own failures of love or power, or in our very tendency to demonize others.

Delbanco, who started his career at Harvard as a student of Puritan New England, names Benjamin Franklin and Jonathan Edwards as the two early and paradigmatic moral voices of our literature. Franklin was the secularist and explainer, the transformer of "sin" into mere "erratum," whose scientific spirit has come to dominate the culture of the secular West. Edwards represents the voice of individual moral responsibility, insisting that good and evil are inescapable poles of human action. Behind Edwards stands Augustine, who recognized in the Confessions that the great source of evil was within the self, not beyond it in some hooved and horny nemesis. He pointed the way, Delbanco writes, to the "difficult literary problem of representing evil as a negation rather than as an entity."

This literary problem, Delbanco rightly observes, was an enormous one for the canonical American writers of the nineteenth century, who masked their own theologies in skepticism and transcendental sublimity. They had less trouble describing the habits of their fellow Americans, who were too often eager to demonize, oppress, enslave, and slaughter. In this landscape of horror and Civil War, Lincoln emerges as the heroic heir to Augustine and Edwards, a man who saw "a vision of a world drenched in sin, but free of targetable devils."

For the culture at large, the Civil War was "the great divide between a culture of faith and a culture of doubt." Thereafter the heroic struggles of Lincoln and Captain Ahab began to recede into the past, as the decrees of Providence began to look more and more like random events in a mechanistic universe. Evil was not so much a problem, for the realist writers of the postwar decades, as a precondition, an atmosphere of loss, in which all ideals seemed tarnished, all natural order broken.

The final chapters of this literary story Delbanco titles "The Age of Blame" and "The Culture of Irony." In the twentieth century the demographic growth of the country made Americans more likely than ever before to identify evil with some other ethnic or social group. And in our own time, with the end of the cold war and the continued erosion of tradition, evil is often taken for a kind of joke, a piece of leftover theological jargon to be kicked around by columnists and critics.

This narrative expresses a complaint popular among liberals about their own secular and cosmopolitan culture. Delbanco tells it well, but as a scholar he ought to be more sensitive to the ways in which our sense of evil has diversified, not disappeared. His subtitle is "How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil." But the early American colonists and the United States of today are the same country only by virtue of a myth preserved in textbooks. To say that "we" (in the present) have lost what "we" had 300 years ago makes little sense. If a wandering Jew had written a book on morals in 1700 and marketed it in Salem, Paris, Rome, Ispahan, and Delhi, he would surely have found distressing evidence that "we" lacked a common language for evil. The same thing is true today, except that it happens within the borders of the United States. Americans have not lost anything substantial. They have gained a hundred new ways to talk about evil--and good, for that matter--and they hear them on TV, on the radio, and in newspapers twenty-four hours a day. This cacophony may make for a certain reticence about morals among the more prominent public voices in our culture, but it does not mean that we are on the verge of falling into a vast and unperceived evil.

Robert Worth is a graduate student in English at Princeton University.