Paul Carus’ The History of the Devil and the Idea of Evil (1899) — The Public Domain Review

Paul Carus thought the history of evil deserved as much attention as the history of God. Ross MacFarlane’s introduction to Carus’ illustrated 1899 book follows an ambitious attempt to compare religious traditions while reconciling science with faith.

• Carus traced images of the Devil through Gnostic Christianity, Egyptian, Indian, and Persian mythology, medieval Catholic art, and Dante.
• He argued that witchcraft beliefs and a literal Devil gave way to a more abstract understanding of evil as scientific ideas spread.
• His book contains more than three hundred illustrations. Carus also edited The Open Court and The Monist and helped bring Buddhist thought to American readers.
• MacFarlane points out the problem with Carus’ neat story of progress: witch hunts persisted in Protestant lands, and his stages of religious “evolution” inherited the assumptions of Victorian anthropology.

The book is most interesting as both a comparative history and a record of its own era’s confidence that science could transform religion without abolishing it. Its blind spots are part of the history too.