The Devil doesn't really get his due in this rushed ``If it's Tuesday, it must be Beelzebub'' biography. While most religions have devils, few have placed as much emphasis on this personification of evil as Christianity. His lineage is mixed, with distant relations as diverse as Egyptian gods, the Canaanite's divinity Baal, and the Greek god Pan (from whom he inherited his looks). Because the early Church focused almost exclusively on the supposedly imminent Second Coming, the Devil played only a secondary role. But with apocalypse a no-show, he was rushed onstage to shore up the faltering beliefs on the faithful. Evil is always a problem in a monotheistic system, and the Devil was a useful scapegoat. Those, like the Gnostics, the Cathars, and the Albigensians, who suggested that the world and everything in it (including, perhaps, the religious establishment) was the work of the Devil, were ruthlessly suppressed. In fact, the Devil has usually been more sinned against than sinning, offered up as the thin pretext for a truly horrific Church-sponsored catalogue of repressions, inquisitions, and other general nastiness, from the extirpation of heretics to religious wars to the witch-hunt mania. As medieval superstition gave way to the Enlightenment, the Devil began to fade as an active instrument of malice, but he acquired a compensating literary reputation as Goethe, Milton, Hugo, and Shaw all gave him star treatment, often casting him as a ``romantic rebel.'' The 20th century has not been kind. Despite several recent comeback attempts, he is now largely washed up, with perhaps only Baudelaire's wisdom for comfort: ``The Devil's deepest wile is to persuade us that he does not exist.'' Stanford, former editor of the Catholic Herald of London, does a thoroughly adequate job of chronicling his subject's career, but there is just too much material for one slim volume to fully examine the significance of the Devil in all his guises.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-8050-3082-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.
A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.
“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles, I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars. It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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