Browse content similar to Andy Hamilton's Search for Satan. Check below for episodes and series from the same categories and more!
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# You are not alone | 0:00:02 | 0:00:04 | |
# I am here with you... # | 0:00:04 | 0:00:06 | |
So then Norman Lamont says...something funny. | 0:00:06 | 0:00:14 | |
And... Oh! | 0:00:14 | 0:00:15 | |
Bloody hell! | 0:00:17 | 0:00:18 | |
Andrew Neil Hamilton, I have chosen you to make a pact | 0:00:18 | 0:00:22 | |
with Satan himself. | 0:00:22 | 0:00:25 | |
Oh, right. What, a pact with the Devil? Like, er...what's his name? | 0:00:27 | 0:00:33 | |
-Simon Cowell. -No, Faust. -Oh, yeah, him. Sorry. | 0:00:33 | 0:00:37 | |
-What kind of pact have you got with Simon Cowell? -Doesn't matter. His time's nearly up anyway. | 0:00:37 | 0:00:41 | |
So, fleshling, | 0:00:41 | 0:00:43 | |
I, the Prince Of Darkness, can offer you anything that you... | 0:00:43 | 0:00:48 | |
Untold riches, please. I'd like untold riches. | 0:00:48 | 0:00:50 | |
-Mm, sorry, budget cuts. -Eh? | 0:00:50 | 0:00:53 | |
I've had to restrict my exposure, you know, | 0:00:53 | 0:00:56 | |
downsize my army of demons, sell my wings, ration my... | 0:00:56 | 0:00:59 | |
Helen of Troy, then. I'd like Helen of Troy as my...consort. | 0:00:59 | 0:01:03 | |
Helen of Troy'd be great. Cheers. | 0:01:03 | 0:01:06 | |
No, afraid not. No, she's, er, not really into that sort of thing any more. | 0:01:07 | 0:01:11 | |
She's...fed up with all the mucky stuff. | 0:01:11 | 0:01:14 | |
Well, then, can you at least give me some piece of secret, forbidden knowledge? | 0:01:14 | 0:01:22 | |
Er... | 0:01:22 | 0:01:24 | |
John Major's having sex with Edwina Currie. | 0:01:24 | 0:01:26 | |
-Well, if you're going to muck about. -I am Satan! I do not "muck about"! | 0:01:28 | 0:01:32 | |
-Well, what CAN you offer me? -Using my diabolic powers, I can offer you... | 0:01:32 | 0:01:38 | |
..a long-running sitcom on Radio Four. | 0:01:39 | 0:01:42 | |
-A sitcom on Radio Four? -Yeah. Inspired by my wacky adventures. | 0:01:44 | 0:01:49 | |
Right. Er...well, that'd be lovely. | 0:01:49 | 0:01:52 | |
I'm not complaining, you know, it's just that...Helen of Troy would... | 0:01:52 | 0:01:57 | |
-Helen of Troy is not on the table. -OK, then. So, I get this sitcom. | 0:01:57 | 0:02:02 | |
What price would you exact? | 0:02:03 | 0:02:05 | |
That in 16 years' time, | 0:02:05 | 0:02:07 | |
you shall make a documentary on a digital channel, | 0:02:07 | 0:02:10 | |
correcting all the disinformation about me! | 0:02:10 | 0:02:14 | |
What's a...digital channel? | 0:02:14 | 0:02:17 | |
It's like a normal channel, only without the viewers. | 0:02:17 | 0:02:20 | |
-Now, sign, pitiful mortal! -Not much of a devil's pact, is it? | 0:02:20 | 0:02:26 | |
No money, no Helen of Troy. | 0:02:26 | 0:02:29 | |
Can you at least promise me that I will never go bald? | 0:02:30 | 0:02:35 | |
Yeah, all right. | 0:02:36 | 0:02:38 | |
-Huh! Great. -Now you are mine, fleshling! | 0:02:38 | 0:02:43 | |
LAUGHS EVILLY | 0:02:43 | 0:02:45 | |
OK, we've a lot to get through. | 0:02:51 | 0:02:52 | |
This is a BBC documentary, so I'm afraid I am | 0:02:52 | 0:02:56 | |
contractually obliged to begin with the words, "I'm going on a journey". | 0:02:56 | 0:03:01 | |
My contract also stipulates that I must gaze | 0:03:01 | 0:03:04 | |
thoughtfully into the distance on at least five occasions. | 0:03:04 | 0:03:08 | |
So, I'm going on a journey. | 0:03:09 | 0:03:13 | |
And it begins here, in this theatre - The Drill Hall in London, | 0:03:14 | 0:03:19 | |
where, for the past 16 years, I have spent many an enjoyable evening | 0:03:19 | 0:03:23 | |
pretending to be Satan in the Radio Four comedy Old Harry's Game. | 0:03:23 | 0:03:29 | |
But now, it's payback time. | 0:03:29 | 0:03:31 | |
Time to ask the big question about Satan - just how did this | 0:03:31 | 0:03:35 | |
fantastically powerful and ambiguous character get inside our heads? | 0:03:35 | 0:03:41 | |
And who put him there? | 0:03:41 | 0:03:45 | |
-The Devil starts out as a divine hitman. -The Devil is a manipulator. | 0:03:45 | 0:03:49 | |
The Devil is a place where you put things you'd rather forget about. | 0:03:49 | 0:03:53 | |
-The Devil is primarily a tempter. -The Devil is the mischievous one. | 0:03:53 | 0:03:58 | |
The tempter who tries to destroy that relationship God has | 0:03:58 | 0:04:01 | |
with his people. | 0:04:01 | 0:04:02 | |
But creating the Devil, it means you're giving evil a name | 0:04:02 | 0:04:05 | |
and turning it into a thing that you can fight against. | 0:04:05 | 0:04:08 | |
Can I talk to you about Satan? | 0:04:08 | 0:04:10 | |
Excuse me, can I talk to you about Satan? Excuse me, can I talk...? | 0:04:10 | 0:04:14 | |
Can I talk to you about Satan? | 0:04:14 | 0:04:16 | |
Excuse me, can I ask you about Satan? | 0:04:16 | 0:04:18 | |
Excuse me, could I talk to you about Satan? | 0:04:18 | 0:04:20 | |
-What sort of things did he do? -He just made everything bad. | 0:04:20 | 0:04:24 | |
I think he exists possibly as an idea, as a way of thinking. | 0:04:24 | 0:04:30 | |
It's quite attractive sometimes. | 0:04:30 | 0:04:32 | |
Excuse me, could I talk to you about Satan? | 0:04:32 | 0:04:35 | |
If I say the Devil to you, what picture do you get in your head? | 0:04:35 | 0:04:40 | |
Awesomeness! Heavy-metal music, brilliant! | 0:04:40 | 0:04:43 | |
-What did he do, what did he get up to in the Bible? -Er... -I don't know. | 0:04:43 | 0:04:49 | |
I don't really know, to be honest. | 0:04:49 | 0:04:51 | |
-Excuse me, madam, could I talk to you about Satan? -Sorry, I'm a bit late! -OK. | 0:04:51 | 0:04:55 | |
Could I talk to you about Satan? | 0:04:55 | 0:04:57 | |
Oh. I have got to come up with a new opening line. | 0:04:58 | 0:05:02 | |
Now, I bet already, many of you are thinking, | 0:05:04 | 0:05:06 | |
"Well, Satan's got nothing to do with me!" | 0:05:06 | 0:05:08 | |
But even if you don't believe in him, he's still a big part of your life. | 0:05:08 | 0:05:12 | |
In fact, you've probably encountered the Devil several times today... | 0:05:12 | 0:05:16 | |
because he permeates every corner of our culture. | 0:05:16 | 0:05:19 | |
He loiters in our church windows, lurks behind our superstitions, | 0:05:19 | 0:05:24 | |
he bedevils our language, haunts our art and literature. | 0:05:24 | 0:05:29 | |
Satan has become a global superstar of stage and screen. | 0:05:29 | 0:05:33 | |
He's been portrayed by actors | 0:05:33 | 0:05:35 | |
like Richard Burton, Al Pacino, Jack Nicholson...Liz Hurley. | 0:05:35 | 0:05:41 | |
But, the Devil we have now, who haunts our popular imagination, | 0:05:41 | 0:05:45 | |
is not the one we started out with - no, no. | 0:05:45 | 0:05:47 | |
No, he's evolved over thousands of years. | 0:05:47 | 0:05:50 | |
-MAN SNEEZES -Bless you. | 0:05:50 | 0:05:52 | |
Now, why'd I say that? | 0:05:53 | 0:05:55 | |
So, the Devil that we know, the visual form - | 0:05:55 | 0:05:58 | |
the horns, the tail, the goat's legs, the pitchfork - | 0:05:58 | 0:06:01 | |
what are the sources for that? | 0:06:01 | 0:06:02 | |
One of the main sources is Egyptian mythology. | 0:06:02 | 0:06:06 | |
In Ancient Egypt, Egyptian belief, | 0:06:06 | 0:06:09 | |
you had this underworld called Tuat, which was ruled over by the god | 0:06:09 | 0:06:13 | |
Anubis, who was black-skinned, jackal-headed, smelt of sulphur. | 0:06:13 | 0:06:19 | |
Lots of images of fire. | 0:06:19 | 0:06:21 | |
The idea of a force against the force of good, | 0:06:22 | 0:06:25 | |
we find in pretty much every religion. | 0:06:25 | 0:06:28 | |
For example, if we go back to 500BC, we have the Buddha | 0:06:28 | 0:06:32 | |
about to achieve enlightenment, | 0:06:32 | 0:06:34 | |
sitting under the Bodhi tree, and at this point | 0:06:34 | 0:06:36 | |
he's attacked by Mara, the manifestation of evil, | 0:06:36 | 0:06:39 | |
temptation, destruction, etc. | 0:06:39 | 0:06:42 | |
And he sees him off. | 0:06:42 | 0:06:44 | |
They also borrowed from Greek mythology. | 0:06:44 | 0:06:48 | |
-Pan, and that's where you get the legs from. -The legs, and the cloven hoof. | 0:06:48 | 0:06:52 | |
That half-man, half-beast thing, you find often, | 0:06:52 | 0:06:54 | |
all gathered together at different stages. | 0:06:54 | 0:06:57 | |
Another more defined concept of a force of evil emerged with | 0:06:59 | 0:07:03 | |
Zoroastrianism, a faith which took root in Persia over 3,000 years ago. | 0:07:03 | 0:07:10 | |
In Zoroastrianism, the belief is that God is wounded. | 0:07:10 | 0:07:14 | |
God has actually lost the battle, | 0:07:14 | 0:07:16 | |
and that this physical world is now in the power of Ahriman, | 0:07:16 | 0:07:22 | |
the evil one, the force of evil, who is a complete equal. | 0:07:22 | 0:07:25 | |
They are locked in this cosmic struggle and, at the moment, | 0:07:25 | 0:07:29 | |
the Devil, as we would call him, is winning. | 0:07:29 | 0:07:31 | |
The ancient world was jam-packed with gods. | 0:07:31 | 0:07:35 | |
A multitude of mischievous supernatural beings, | 0:07:35 | 0:07:38 | |
who were quite capable of exhibiting a vicious streak. | 0:07:38 | 0:07:42 | |
But hardly any were exclusively evil. | 0:07:42 | 0:07:45 | |
So none of them really resemble OUR Devil. | 0:07:45 | 0:07:48 | |
Except, well, there is one from early Judaic mythology, | 0:07:48 | 0:07:52 | |
who is quite similar to Satan in many ways - | 0:07:52 | 0:07:54 | |
rebels against God, sworn enemy of man, and what's more, | 0:07:54 | 0:07:58 | |
in the great story of creation, SHE is there from the start. | 0:07:58 | 0:08:04 | |
Lilith. | 0:08:04 | 0:08:06 | |
You can look at the Garden of Eden story from the point of view of | 0:08:06 | 0:08:09 | |
the Devil, Lucifer, Satan, whatever you want to call him or it, | 0:08:09 | 0:08:12 | |
but I think it's more interesting to look at it from the point of view | 0:08:12 | 0:08:15 | |
of Lilith, who was sort of Eve's predecessor and got | 0:08:15 | 0:08:18 | |
slung out of the garden because she challenged the gender arrangement | 0:08:18 | 0:08:22 | |
and who had the power, who could be on top when they screwed | 0:08:22 | 0:08:25 | |
and all that kind of thing. | 0:08:25 | 0:08:28 | |
Lilith is really interesting because, | 0:08:28 | 0:08:30 | |
the rabbinical tradition says there were three attempts to create | 0:08:30 | 0:08:33 | |
women at the beginning of time. | 0:08:33 | 0:08:36 | |
The first one is that God creates man and woman, | 0:08:36 | 0:08:39 | |
and the man is actually Adam and the woman is Lilith. | 0:08:39 | 0:08:43 | |
Adam sidles up to Lilith and goes, "Come on, how about it, then?" | 0:08:43 | 0:08:46 | |
She goes, "If you were - Oh, you are! - | 0:08:46 | 0:08:49 | |
"the last man, the only man on the planet, I wouldn't go to bed with you." | 0:08:49 | 0:08:53 | |
And God actually goes and says, "Come on, Lilith." She goes, "Oh! | 0:08:53 | 0:08:58 | |
"I mean, are we serious? With that?!" And she wanders off. | 0:08:58 | 0:09:01 | |
Right. | 0:09:01 | 0:09:03 | |
Now, Lilith is therefore the first person to refuse God's command. | 0:09:03 | 0:09:09 | |
She goes off into the desert and becomes, as legends grow, | 0:09:09 | 0:09:15 | |
this deeply malevolent spirit. | 0:09:15 | 0:09:18 | |
What's interesting is that she was seen as being at large in the world. | 0:09:18 | 0:09:23 | |
As I understand it, | 0:09:23 | 0:09:25 | |
she was implicated in the death of infants and unpleasant events. | 0:09:25 | 0:09:31 | |
She is the person who is there, who basically says, | 0:09:31 | 0:09:34 | |
normal life is wrong. | 0:09:34 | 0:09:38 | |
And that's deeply threatening to a world that is desperately trying to hold onto normal life. | 0:09:38 | 0:09:43 | |
Right. | 0:09:43 | 0:09:44 | |
While other religions of the ancient Middle East featured many gods | 0:09:44 | 0:09:49 | |
capable of good or bad, Judaism recognised just one, | 0:09:49 | 0:09:53 | |
who controls everything. | 0:09:53 | 0:09:55 | |
And that raises a problem. | 0:09:55 | 0:09:58 | |
The moment you say he's universal, what do you do with evil? | 0:09:59 | 0:10:02 | |
What do you do with violence, what do you do with mindless killings | 0:10:02 | 0:10:08 | |
and harm and pain? | 0:10:08 | 0:10:10 | |
It was the attempts to answer this huge question that would lead | 0:10:11 | 0:10:15 | |
to the Devil being given shape in scripture. | 0:10:15 | 0:10:19 | |
So, let's take a look at the Devil's appearances in the Old Testament. | 0:10:19 | 0:10:23 | |
This is where we come across a startling fact. He is barely in it. | 0:10:23 | 0:10:27 | |
The Devil actually appears for less than 0.5% of the Old Testament. | 0:10:27 | 0:10:33 | |
What sort of villain is that? | 0:10:33 | 0:10:35 | |
That means if the Old Testament were a Bond movie, | 0:10:35 | 0:10:38 | |
you'd see this much baddie. | 0:10:38 | 0:10:40 | |
Welcome, Mr Bo... | 0:10:41 | 0:10:42 | |
Yep, that's all. | 0:10:42 | 0:10:44 | |
In percentage terms, | 0:10:44 | 0:10:45 | |
Satan doesn't appear much more in the New Testament. About the equivalent of... | 0:10:45 | 0:10:49 | |
Welcome, Mr Bond. I've been expecti... | 0:10:51 | 0:10:54 | |
But the New Testament is different, | 0:10:54 | 0:10:57 | |
because although the Devil hardly appears in person, | 0:10:57 | 0:10:59 | |
he is constantly referred to lurking and plotting off-stage. | 0:10:59 | 0:11:04 | |
He becomes Jesus's Moriarty. | 0:11:04 | 0:11:07 | |
All right, so Satan might not get many scenes in the Bible, | 0:11:07 | 0:11:10 | |
but we all know what he gets up to, don't we? | 0:11:10 | 0:11:13 | |
What about the Garden of Eden, what did he get up to there? | 0:11:13 | 0:11:16 | |
-He was the snake. -He was the snake? -He was the snake, wasn't he? | 0:11:16 | 0:11:20 | |
-I thought he was the snake. -Yeah, there was the apple. | 0:11:20 | 0:11:24 | |
Yeah, he's a snake, not a lizard. He's a snake. | 0:11:24 | 0:11:27 | |
-He came as a snake, didn't he, and persuaded them to eat the apple? -The forbidden fruit. | 0:11:27 | 0:11:32 | |
Well, no. Not according to Genesis. That mentions no Devil. | 0:11:32 | 0:11:36 | |
Just blames the snake, which was, | 0:11:36 | 0:11:39 | |
"More subtil than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made." | 0:11:39 | 0:11:44 | |
So, what else did the Devil famously get up to? | 0:11:44 | 0:11:47 | |
He used to be an angel but got cast out of Heaven. | 0:11:47 | 0:11:50 | |
He was cast from Heaven in the Bible. | 0:11:50 | 0:11:53 | |
Yep, I made that mistake as well. | 0:11:53 | 0:11:55 | |
I was such a beautiful angel, with flaxen hair, wings like a swan. | 0:11:55 | 0:12:01 | |
I could always beat the angel Gabriel in a race. Down to Galilee and back. | 0:12:01 | 0:12:05 | |
Whoosh! I looked magnificent. | 0:12:05 | 0:12:10 | |
Many years ago, I sat down to write a radio sitcom, set in Hell, about the Devil. | 0:12:10 | 0:12:15 | |
Naturally, as a writer, I was drawn to the psychological heart | 0:12:15 | 0:12:19 | |
of the character, that is the story of the fall. | 0:12:19 | 0:12:23 | |
You know, his roots, his pride, his rebellion, | 0:12:23 | 0:12:25 | |
his subsequent damnation for all eternity. It's a fantastic story. | 0:12:25 | 0:12:28 | |
Got out the Bible, started to read it, looking for this story, it's not there. | 0:12:28 | 0:12:33 | |
Where do we get this story from, the fall? | 0:12:33 | 0:12:37 | |
The story comes in that gap between the Old and New Testament. | 0:12:37 | 0:12:42 | |
We have to know what was happening in Judaism at that time. | 0:12:42 | 0:12:45 | |
Judaism, the Jewish homeland, had been occupied by the Romans, | 0:12:45 | 0:12:50 | |
so this great question about, "We were God's chosen people, | 0:12:50 | 0:12:54 | |
"we were Yahweh's chosen people, why has he abandoned us?" | 0:12:54 | 0:12:57 | |
Then you come to the apocryphal texts written, | 0:12:57 | 0:13:01 | |
Baruch and others, written from around about 150 BC | 0:13:01 | 0:13:06 | |
right through to the beginning of the Christian period | 0:13:06 | 0:13:10 | |
by Jewish writers grappling with why everything seems to have gone wrong again. | 0:13:10 | 0:13:14 | |
Then this mythology grows up, this story emerges that, yes indeed, | 0:13:14 | 0:13:18 | |
Satan used to be in the court of Heaven, | 0:13:18 | 0:13:23 | |
the court of God, but did something so dreadful, he was thrown out. | 0:13:23 | 0:13:28 | |
There's a series of literature that isn't in the Bible, | 0:13:28 | 0:13:32 | |
Book of Enoch, Book of Jubilees, which explored these myths, | 0:13:32 | 0:13:35 | |
to try and explain why the Jews were in such a mess, | 0:13:35 | 0:13:39 | |
why they'd been occupied, and why it wasn't God's fault. | 0:13:39 | 0:13:42 | |
So they created this character of the Devil. | 0:13:42 | 0:13:44 | |
All right, never mind what isn't in the Bible. Let's look at what is. | 0:13:44 | 0:13:48 | |
In the very first Satanic appearance, he...startles a donkey. | 0:13:48 | 0:13:54 | |
In the Book of Numbers, Balaam's ass sees a frightening figure | 0:13:54 | 0:13:58 | |
brandishing a sword blocking the way, so it swerves off the path. | 0:13:58 | 0:14:02 | |
Balaam, who can't see the spectre, keeps beating the animal | 0:14:02 | 0:14:06 | |
until the donkey speaks and says, "Why are you beating me?" | 0:14:06 | 0:14:09 | |
Before Balaam can say, "Bloody hell, a talking donkey," | 0:14:09 | 0:14:13 | |
the spectre intervenes and admonishes Balaam for his cruelty. | 0:14:13 | 0:14:18 | |
In the King James Bible, that spectre is called the Angel of the Lord, | 0:14:18 | 0:14:22 | |
but in the original Hebrew scripture, it's Satan. | 0:14:22 | 0:14:26 | |
Or rather A satan. | 0:14:26 | 0:14:28 | |
In the Hebrew language, the word satan means? | 0:14:28 | 0:14:31 | |
It means to get in the way, actually. | 0:14:31 | 0:14:34 | |
If you're on the way to do something bad, he'll get in your way. | 0:14:34 | 0:14:37 | |
That's Balaam on his way to curse Israel, | 0:14:37 | 0:14:40 | |
it's an angel who "satan", who stops him. | 0:14:40 | 0:14:42 | |
What's his identity? | 0:14:42 | 0:14:45 | |
Is he an angel who forgot his job spec, | 0:14:45 | 0:14:47 | |
if you like, and then became this renegade angel? | 0:14:47 | 0:14:51 | |
He's never, in Judaism, he's never been a renegade angel. | 0:14:51 | 0:14:54 | |
He's part of the infrastructure of God's divine plans. | 0:14:54 | 0:14:57 | |
Therefore, he has a job to do, but he's not independent of God, | 0:14:57 | 0:15:01 | |
and he's not a renegade, as he would be in Christian thought. | 0:15:01 | 0:15:05 | |
In Jewish tradition, | 0:15:05 | 0:15:06 | |
this is a little bit how the Devil is regarded. | 0:15:06 | 0:15:10 | |
That which makes you think. | 0:15:10 | 0:15:12 | |
What you're supposed to do is reach a position of moral ascendancy, | 0:15:13 | 0:15:17 | |
-put thee behind me. -You can reject him. | 0:15:17 | 0:15:20 | |
Yeah, exactly. | 0:15:20 | 0:15:22 | |
He's not someone who's the source and epitome of evil, | 0:15:22 | 0:15:26 | |
he's a minor angel with a particular task. | 0:15:26 | 0:15:29 | |
It's very important that the Satan figure in the Old Testament is not | 0:15:29 | 0:15:33 | |
the same as the Devil. | 0:15:33 | 0:15:36 | |
It's not the sort of face of evil. | 0:15:36 | 0:15:38 | |
Satan is a prosecutor in God's Holy Court. He's absolutely on God's side. | 0:15:38 | 0:15:44 | |
It's as God's inspector general on Earth that we first meet | 0:15:44 | 0:15:48 | |
Satan with a capital S in the Book of Job. | 0:15:48 | 0:15:52 | |
The Book of Job is a powerful | 0:15:52 | 0:15:53 | |
and moving exploration of the mysteries of man's existence | 0:15:53 | 0:15:57 | |
in a hostile universe, and I strongly recommend that you read it. | 0:15:57 | 0:16:01 | |
But if you can't be arsed, here's what happens in two minutes. | 0:16:01 | 0:16:05 | |
God's sitting on his throne when along comes Satan | 0:16:05 | 0:16:07 | |
and his mates, the children of God, whoever they might be. | 0:16:07 | 0:16:10 | |
God says, "You all right, Satan? What you been up to?" | 0:16:10 | 0:16:14 | |
Satan says, "Roaming through the Earth, going to and fro." | 0:16:14 | 0:16:17 | |
God says, "Have you seen Job in your travels? | 0:16:17 | 0:16:19 | |
"He's a God-fearing man, isn't he?" | 0:16:19 | 0:16:21 | |
Satan says, "Nah, only cos you're so good to him." | 0:16:21 | 0:16:25 | |
God says, "You're wrong, and to prove it, I authorise you to | 0:16:25 | 0:16:29 | |
"torment him, but you're not allowed to hurt him physically." | 0:16:29 | 0:16:32 | |
One morning, Job's at home when a messenger runs in and says, | 0:16:32 | 0:16:36 | |
"The Sabaeans have stolen all your cattle and killed all your servants." | 0:16:36 | 0:16:40 | |
And even as that messenger is speaking, another messenger | 0:16:40 | 0:16:42 | |
runs in and says, "You won't believe this, Job. | 0:16:42 | 0:16:45 | |
"All your sheep have been struck by lightning." | 0:16:45 | 0:16:48 | |
Even as THAT one's talking, another arrives and says, | 0:16:48 | 0:16:51 | |
"The Chaldaeans have stolen all your camels." | 0:16:51 | 0:16:54 | |
Before Job can even check out the insurance, | 0:16:54 | 0:16:57 | |
another messenger runs in and says, | 0:16:57 | 0:16:59 | |
"You know that party your sons and daughters were having? The roof just fell in. They're all dead." | 0:16:59 | 0:17:04 | |
But Job doesn't blame God, no. | 0:17:04 | 0:17:06 | |
He just falls to his knees and praises his Lord. | 0:17:06 | 0:17:09 | |
God turns to Satan and says, "1-0". | 0:17:09 | 0:17:12 | |
Satan says, "Well, you didn't let me hurt him physically, | 0:17:12 | 0:17:14 | |
"it wasn't a proper test." | 0:17:14 | 0:17:16 | |
"All right, you can torture Job, but you mustn't kill him, cos that'd be crossing the line." | 0:17:16 | 0:17:20 | |
So Job erupts in sores, he's in terrible agony, | 0:17:20 | 0:17:24 | |
then so-called comforters arrive full of platitudes about why God's punishing him. | 0:17:24 | 0:17:29 | |
Job starts asking good questions like, "Why do bad people get rich? | 0:17:29 | 0:17:33 | |
"How can a god know what it's like to suffer?" | 0:17:33 | 0:17:35 | |
The comforters give him more blah, blah, until Job says, | 0:17:35 | 0:17:39 | |
"I don't understand any of this. | 0:17:39 | 0:17:41 | |
"I'm just going to place my trust in my god." | 0:17:41 | 0:17:44 | |
God appears and says, "Well played, Job." | 0:17:44 | 0:17:46 | |
And he says to the comforters, "You lot, shut up. | 0:17:46 | 0:17:49 | |
"It's not for you to understand my ways, I'm God, you're not. | 0:17:49 | 0:17:52 | |
"Sacrifice seven bulls and seven rams and I'll let you off." | 0:17:52 | 0:17:54 | |
Then Job gets given a new wife, loads more kids and tons of wealth, and God proves he's a loving god, | 0:17:54 | 0:18:01 | |
and no-one ever mentions the civilian deaths and collateral damage. | 0:18:01 | 0:18:05 | |
There is a moment in the Book of Job where God admonishes the Devil, | 0:18:05 | 0:18:09 | |
and says, "You persuaded me against my better judgment | 0:18:09 | 0:18:12 | |
"to inflict that suffering on good old Job." | 0:18:12 | 0:18:15 | |
That seems rather odd for me, | 0:18:15 | 0:18:18 | |
because it implies God can be almost outwitted by the Devil. | 0:18:18 | 0:18:22 | |
Yeah, there's a saying which says, "If this had not appeared | 0:18:22 | 0:18:25 | |
in the Bible, I would never have believed it could have been said." | 0:18:25 | 0:18:28 | |
So yes, you're not the first to be puzzled by this. | 0:18:28 | 0:18:31 | |
There is a saying that Job never existed, that he's only | 0:18:31 | 0:18:36 | |
a figment of somebody's imagination, the whole thing is a kind of attempt | 0:18:36 | 0:18:41 | |
to argue about the nature of evil and how it affects people, | 0:18:41 | 0:18:44 | |
and the question about why do the righteous suffer? | 0:18:44 | 0:18:47 | |
This is the ultimate question in our world. | 0:18:47 | 0:18:49 | |
The Devil in the Book of Job displays little | 0:18:49 | 0:18:53 | |
in the way of personality, and he's very much God's employee. | 0:18:53 | 0:18:56 | |
It's only in the New Testament that Satan develops his own agenda. | 0:18:56 | 0:19:00 | |
What did he do when he tempted Jesus? | 0:19:00 | 0:19:03 | |
Make stone into bread, jump off the temple, | 0:19:03 | 0:19:07 | |
then the angels would catch him and showed him the world, and said, | 0:19:07 | 0:19:11 | |
"You can have it all if you worship me." | 0:19:11 | 0:19:15 | |
If you look at the temptations of Jesus in the Gospels, | 0:19:15 | 0:19:18 | |
there is nothing evil that Satan asks Jesus to do. | 0:19:18 | 0:19:21 | |
He's tempting him to see if he really understands what he's here for. | 0:19:21 | 0:19:26 | |
Then at the very end, Jesus says, "Get you behind me", | 0:19:26 | 0:19:30 | |
because Satan then says, "Why don't you worship me, | 0:19:30 | 0:19:34 | |
"and we'll be a really good partnership?" | 0:19:34 | 0:19:36 | |
So you're beginning to get that sense of, he's not just doing what | 0:19:36 | 0:19:40 | |
God wants, he actually wants some of God's praise and power, and glory. | 0:19:40 | 0:19:46 | |
That's why he fell. | 0:19:46 | 0:19:48 | |
When you have notions of pre-existence theory, | 0:19:48 | 0:19:51 | |
the idea that everything Jesus did being part of a plan, | 0:19:51 | 0:19:55 | |
the Devil is part of that scheme. | 0:19:55 | 0:19:58 | |
He's the jeopardy. | 0:19:58 | 0:20:01 | |
If you took the story of Jesus to a script doctor in Hollywood | 0:20:01 | 0:20:05 | |
and said, "I've got this idea. What do you think about this?" | 0:20:05 | 0:20:11 | |
And there was no Devil in it, he would say, by about page 8, | 0:20:11 | 0:20:14 | |
this guy needs a Devil. | 0:20:14 | 0:20:15 | |
In the story of Jesus's temptation in the wilderness, | 0:20:15 | 0:20:18 | |
does the Devil know that Jesus is the son of God for certain? | 0:20:18 | 0:20:24 | |
Because it's possible to read that story | 0:20:24 | 0:20:29 | |
as if the Devil is sort of checking him out. | 0:20:29 | 0:20:32 | |
Absolutely. | 0:20:32 | 0:20:34 | |
There is a kind of playfulness on the part of the Devil in that story. | 0:20:34 | 0:20:38 | |
The Devil tries to get Jesus to declare his goodness. | 0:20:38 | 0:20:41 | |
The playfulness is really the Devil's way of trying to get Jesus | 0:20:41 | 0:20:46 | |
to say publicly and clearly that he is the son of God. | 0:20:46 | 0:20:49 | |
With a view to...? How would that benefit the Devil? | 0:20:49 | 0:20:52 | |
To manipulate Jesus. | 0:20:52 | 0:20:54 | |
The Devil wants Jesus to act as he would, | 0:20:54 | 0:20:58 | |
the Devil is trying to get Jesus... | 0:20:58 | 0:20:59 | |
Once the Devil knows he is the son of God, | 0:20:59 | 0:21:01 | |
how can he hope to manipulate him? | 0:21:01 | 0:21:04 | |
He can't, but that's what he's trying to do. | 0:21:04 | 0:21:07 | |
Why would he imagine that he could dupe the Son of God? | 0:21:07 | 0:21:10 | |
Hubris. | 0:21:10 | 0:21:13 | |
But that's pretty stupid. That's more than hubris, isn't it? | 0:21:13 | 0:21:17 | |
That's not a tragic flaw, that's stupidity. | 0:21:17 | 0:21:20 | |
Yes, the Devil is flawed. | 0:21:20 | 0:21:22 | |
The Devil will keep trying to manipulate people to turn them | 0:21:22 | 0:21:25 | |
against God, and will use whatever means possible. | 0:21:25 | 0:21:28 | |
There are some teachings that say as soon as the Devil realises | 0:21:28 | 0:21:31 | |
that Jesus is Jesus, that he is the son of God, the anointed one, | 0:21:31 | 0:21:36 | |
that he knows his fate from then on. | 0:21:36 | 0:21:38 | |
As a writer, do you think that, narratively, that's a problem? | 0:21:38 | 0:21:42 | |
Everybody knows. | 0:21:42 | 0:21:43 | |
It's foretold that he's going to fail and be defeated. | 0:21:43 | 0:21:46 | |
Yes, but knowing what happens at the end of something | 0:21:46 | 0:21:50 | |
doesn't necessarily ruin the journey to get there. | 0:21:50 | 0:21:53 | |
When James Cameron came in with the idea for Titanic, | 0:21:53 | 0:21:57 | |
I shouldn't imagine they went, "Here's one problem. | 0:21:57 | 0:22:00 | |
"How are we going to...? | 0:22:00 | 0:22:02 | |
"We've got to somehow sort of stop it being known. | 0:22:02 | 0:22:05 | |
"I know it happened in 1912, | 0:22:05 | 0:22:07 | |
"but there must be a way, otherwise this has got no ending." | 0:22:07 | 0:22:10 | |
-It's about the journey. -The Devil is the iceberg. | 0:22:10 | 0:22:13 | |
What I'm getting out is it's only a problem in the characterisation | 0:22:13 | 0:22:18 | |
of the Devil, in terms of... | 0:22:18 | 0:22:21 | |
The Devil is a flawed character. | 0:22:23 | 0:22:25 | |
That is actually one of his most defining characteristics, | 0:22:25 | 0:22:29 | |
that he is flawed. | 0:22:29 | 0:22:32 | |
He's got issues, you're right. He has got issues. | 0:22:32 | 0:22:36 | |
In some of the Gospels, | 0:22:36 | 0:22:38 | |
the Devil is implicated in the corruption of Judas. | 0:22:38 | 0:22:41 | |
But it's in the letters of St Paul, | 0:22:41 | 0:22:43 | |
the earliest recorded Christian writings, that he starts to emerge | 0:22:43 | 0:22:47 | |
as the ever-present enemy, lying in wait, ready to sabotage and entrap. | 0:22:47 | 0:22:52 | |
So, St Paul put a bit more general... | 0:23:20 | 0:23:23 | |
-OMEN THEME PLAYS -..into the notion of the Devil, | 0:23:23 | 0:23:26 | |
but he is still a very one-dimensional character. | 0:23:26 | 0:23:30 | |
And what doesn't help is that there are no visual descriptions | 0:23:30 | 0:23:34 | |
of him in the Bible. Well, not until the end | 0:23:34 | 0:23:36 | |
when we get an idea of what he looks like in the Book of Revelations. | 0:23:36 | 0:23:40 | |
Well, sort of. | 0:23:42 | 0:23:45 | |
There is a reference to "that great dragon", | 0:23:45 | 0:23:47 | |
this is the vision of the Apocalypse, and there is a reference | 0:23:47 | 0:23:51 | |
to, "That great dragon, | 0:23:51 | 0:23:53 | |
"the old serpent that is called the Devil and Satan." | 0:23:53 | 0:23:58 | |
And it's a sort of mystical, ecstatic vision of this curious beast | 0:23:58 | 0:24:02 | |
with lots of heads and mystical signs, but it is putting together, | 0:24:02 | 0:24:06 | |
if you like, a notion of some diabolical beast. | 0:24:06 | 0:24:10 | |
This is heavy stuff about Rome and the powers and pressures, | 0:24:12 | 0:24:15 | |
but the image that comes through that is of this dragon who has | 0:24:15 | 0:24:20 | |
a gaping mouth into which the damned are thrown and chewed up. | 0:24:20 | 0:24:25 | |
You've got the brimstone, you've got the salt, the sulphur smell, | 0:24:25 | 0:24:29 | |
you've got the horns, you've got the tail, the lake of fire, | 0:24:29 | 0:24:32 | |
and that whole question about the role of the Devil in relation | 0:24:32 | 0:24:36 | |
to God, they try and reconcile in the Book of Revelation. | 0:24:36 | 0:24:40 | |
The Devil is there as a menace and as a temptation to us, | 0:24:40 | 0:24:44 | |
but ultimately it will never be victorious. | 0:24:44 | 0:24:46 | |
It's like he's fighting with his arm tied behind his back. | 0:24:46 | 0:24:49 | |
So, by the end of Revelations, yes, the... | 0:24:49 | 0:24:53 | |
OMEN THEME PLAYS | 0:24:53 | 0:24:55 | |
..has been upped again and there is more of the Devil, | 0:24:55 | 0:24:59 | |
but still our picture of him is no clearer, really. | 0:24:59 | 0:25:02 | |
He is described through allegory and symbolism | 0:25:02 | 0:25:07 | |
and extravagant chaotic imagery. | 0:25:07 | 0:25:09 | |
One second he's a huge red dragon, then he's a serpent, | 0:25:09 | 0:25:13 | |
then he's got seven heads and ten horns | 0:25:13 | 0:25:16 | |
and then he's a leopard with the feet of a bear | 0:25:16 | 0:25:19 | |
and the mouth of a lion. | 0:25:19 | 0:25:21 | |
It's bewildering. | 0:25:21 | 0:25:23 | |
Imagine I'm an early Christian. | 0:25:23 | 0:25:25 | |
What mental image do you think they had of Satan? | 0:25:25 | 0:25:28 | |
My basic answer is, there are as many devils as there are early Christians. | 0:25:28 | 0:25:33 | |
Unless the Devil chooses to take a form and appear to you as a man | 0:25:33 | 0:25:37 | |
or an angel or a lion, you probably won't see him | 0:25:37 | 0:25:41 | |
with your own eyes, so there are no pictures of the Devil | 0:25:41 | 0:25:44 | |
pictured as a human with horns and wings and a tail | 0:25:44 | 0:25:47 | |
until the late 6th century, and even then it takes | 0:25:47 | 0:25:49 | |
another 200 years or so to really take off. | 0:25:49 | 0:25:52 | |
But if early Christians found it hard to get | 0:25:52 | 0:25:55 | |
a visual fix on the Devil, | 0:25:55 | 0:25:56 | |
they found it even harder to answer the biggest question of all. | 0:25:56 | 0:25:59 | |
What the Christian world does is have one single all-powerful God | 0:26:01 | 0:26:05 | |
who creates everything. | 0:26:05 | 0:26:08 | |
And therefore, for the first time, you have a force of evil | 0:26:08 | 0:26:11 | |
in the cosmos who has to be produced by the good God, | 0:26:11 | 0:26:14 | |
and that puts an awful lot of strain into theology. | 0:26:14 | 0:26:17 | |
All right, so, anything good in the latest epistle from Paul? | 0:26:21 | 0:26:24 | |
Not much, a bit of gossip about Timothy. | 0:26:24 | 0:26:27 | |
Right so that just leaves us with "Any Other Business". | 0:26:27 | 0:26:30 | |
I'm still getting a lot of grief from believers about that question, | 0:26:30 | 0:26:35 | |
if there is only one God, and he's a loving God, | 0:26:35 | 0:26:39 | |
why did he let my crops fail? | 0:26:39 | 0:26:40 | |
-Look... -Why did he said my barn on fire? | 0:26:40 | 0:26:43 | |
-Look... -Why did he let the Romans crucify all my relatives? | 0:26:43 | 0:26:47 | |
-Yeah, I'm getting that one a lot as well. -We've been over this. | 0:26:47 | 0:26:50 | |
Tell them that all the evil in the world should be blamed on the Devil. | 0:26:50 | 0:26:53 | |
But then they just ask, "Who is this Devil?" | 0:26:53 | 0:26:56 | |
-Well... -And who made him? | 0:26:56 | 0:26:58 | |
Well, God made everything. | 0:26:58 | 0:26:59 | |
Then they just ask, "Why did God make him?" | 0:26:59 | 0:27:02 | |
-Well... -And why did God make him such an evil git? | 0:27:02 | 0:27:04 | |
Ah! No! God doesn't make anything evil. | 0:27:04 | 0:27:07 | |
So he didn't make the Devil, then? | 0:27:07 | 0:27:09 | |
-So the Devil is some sort of rival god? -Absolutely not. | 0:27:09 | 0:27:14 | |
-There is one God and he made everything. -Including the Devil? | 0:27:14 | 0:27:18 | |
Well... | 0:27:18 | 0:27:19 | |
Who is evil. | 0:27:19 | 0:27:21 | |
No, but... | 0:27:21 | 0:27:23 | |
I've got a headache now. | 0:27:24 | 0:27:28 | |
The Jews have had one God for centuries, | 0:27:28 | 0:27:30 | |
how do they deal with this one? | 0:27:30 | 0:27:31 | |
They just shrug and get on with it. | 0:27:31 | 0:27:32 | |
They say God knows what he's doing. | 0:27:32 | 0:27:34 | |
I'm not sure my lot will settle for that. | 0:27:34 | 0:27:36 | |
That's a lot of trust. | 0:27:36 | 0:27:38 | |
Maybe we could make this Devil person a bit clearer. | 0:27:38 | 0:27:42 | |
What we need is a back story. | 0:27:42 | 0:27:45 | |
Now, before David Starkey writes in, | 0:27:45 | 0:27:48 | |
this is not an attempt at historical accuracy, OK? | 0:27:48 | 0:27:51 | |
There were never any meetings like this, | 0:27:51 | 0:27:53 | |
this is just a low-budget dramatisation | 0:27:53 | 0:27:55 | |
of a huge philosophical question that confronted the early Church. | 0:27:55 | 0:27:59 | |
Sorry, it's just I didn't want any e-mails. | 0:28:01 | 0:28:05 | |
-Back story for the Devil. -Perfect! | 0:28:05 | 0:28:08 | |
Oh, hang on, I've got some Apocrypha in here. | 0:28:08 | 0:28:10 | |
Oh no, not the Apocrypha! That's full of mental stuff about giants. | 0:28:10 | 0:28:13 | |
It will destroy our credibility. | 0:28:13 | 0:28:16 | |
You can cherry-pick. | 0:28:16 | 0:28:17 | |
I know I saw something in here, something about fallen angels. | 0:28:17 | 0:28:21 | |
Ah! Found it! | 0:28:21 | 0:28:22 | |
A biography of the Devil duly emerged, | 0:28:24 | 0:28:28 | |
partly to answer pagan critics | 0:28:28 | 0:28:29 | |
who found the idea of a single force of evil ridiculous. | 0:28:29 | 0:28:32 | |
Writing in the third century, | 0:28:32 | 0:28:34 | |
the Christian theologian, Origen, put some flesh on Satan's bones. | 0:28:34 | 0:28:38 | |
He's the one who actually, | 0:28:38 | 0:28:40 | |
I think, probably first puts together various different bits | 0:28:40 | 0:28:43 | |
of scripture to produce a story of the Devil's origin | 0:28:43 | 0:28:47 | |
as being pride before a fall. | 0:28:47 | 0:28:49 | |
So, for Origen, the Devil was created as a good angel, | 0:28:49 | 0:28:52 | |
and his first sin was that of pride, | 0:28:52 | 0:28:55 | |
of wanting to be as big as, and as powerful as God. | 0:28:55 | 0:28:59 | |
The idea of a devil brought down by pride | 0:29:01 | 0:29:05 | |
is common to both Christianity and Islam. | 0:29:05 | 0:29:08 | |
God creates this being, Adam, the human, the first human. | 0:29:08 | 0:29:12 | |
And he calls upon all the inhabitants of Paradise | 0:29:12 | 0:29:15 | |
to basically bow down before this being that he has created, | 0:29:15 | 0:29:19 | |
as the Koran says, with his own hands. | 0:29:19 | 0:29:21 | |
And, of course, Satan refuses to do so and says, "Why should I? | 0:29:21 | 0:29:25 | |
"I have worshipped you for so many years. | 0:29:25 | 0:29:27 | |
"I am made of fire, this thing is made of clay. | 0:29:27 | 0:29:31 | |
"I am superior to it." So there's a sin of pride involved in that. | 0:29:31 | 0:29:36 | |
But also a sin of pride involved with respect to, "I've worshipped | 0:29:36 | 0:29:39 | |
"you for so many years and you're telling me | 0:29:39 | 0:29:41 | |
"to commit a violation of the basic precept of monotheism, | 0:29:41 | 0:29:45 | |
"to bow down before something other than God." | 0:29:45 | 0:29:47 | |
So, it seems that in some Islamic traditions | 0:29:47 | 0:29:51 | |
the Devil's sins are pride and being a stickler for the rules. | 0:29:51 | 0:29:55 | |
In the poetry that you see in the medieval period, | 0:29:55 | 0:29:57 | |
that is seen as the ultimate sincerity of worship, | 0:29:57 | 0:30:02 | |
the fact that he is even willing to disobey God in his worship of God. | 0:30:02 | 0:30:09 | |
In Christianity, | 0:30:09 | 0:30:11 | |
the Devil's charge sheet had been totting up for centuries. | 0:30:11 | 0:30:15 | |
And top of the list were offences committed in Paradise. | 0:30:15 | 0:30:19 | |
There, you see? Satan is an angel who rebels and is banished by God. | 0:30:26 | 0:30:30 | |
Satan's got the hump and that's why there's suffering in the world. | 0:30:30 | 0:30:33 | |
Well, that makes enough sense to stop the questions, doesn't it? | 0:30:33 | 0:30:39 | |
-So, did God create Satan, the angel? -Obviously, God makes everything. | 0:30:39 | 0:30:44 | |
-So, was Satan evil from the start? -No, God wouldn't make anything evil. | 0:30:44 | 0:30:48 | |
-So, Satan turned evil? -Yes, that's it! He turned evil. | 0:30:48 | 0:30:52 | |
-Of his own free will. -Perfect. -Why? | 0:30:52 | 0:30:54 | |
Pride. He wanted to be God. | 0:30:55 | 0:30:57 | |
But surely he must have known he couldn't become God because... | 0:30:57 | 0:31:01 | |
Envy, then. He was envious of us because God liked us best. | 0:31:01 | 0:31:05 | |
He was cross with God, so, he took it out on man. | 0:31:05 | 0:31:09 | |
With God's authority? | 0:31:09 | 0:31:11 | |
-Erm... -Or was he outside God's power? | 0:31:11 | 0:31:14 | |
Well, no. Nothing is outside God's power. | 0:31:14 | 0:31:19 | |
Then, why didn't God just destroy him? | 0:31:19 | 0:31:21 | |
I think, theologically, one can try too hard | 0:31:25 | 0:31:28 | |
to nail things down sometimes. | 0:31:28 | 0:31:30 | |
All this fallen angel stuff, I mean, | 0:31:30 | 0:31:33 | |
there's no real specific mention of it in the scriptures, is there? | 0:31:33 | 0:31:37 | |
Isaiah 14. | 0:31:37 | 0:31:39 | |
"How thou art fallen from Heaven, O Lucifer, | 0:31:39 | 0:31:41 | |
"son of the morning." | 0:31:41 | 0:31:43 | |
Isn't that a reference to the King of Babylon? | 0:31:43 | 0:31:47 | |
Not any more, it isn't. | 0:31:47 | 0:31:49 | |
One of the classics is, people say, | 0:31:59 | 0:32:01 | |
"Where was the Devil in the Garden of Eden, then?" | 0:32:01 | 0:32:04 | |
Cos this idea of Original Sin, | 0:32:04 | 0:32:05 | |
that Eve was tempted by the Devil, | 0:32:05 | 0:32:08 | |
which was one of the things the church was keen on. | 0:32:08 | 0:32:10 | |
You read the story and think, | 0:32:10 | 0:32:12 | |
"There was no Devil there. Ah, but the serpent was there." | 0:32:12 | 0:32:15 | |
I think, by the time you get to the fourth century, | 0:32:15 | 0:32:17 | |
the connection between the serpent in Eden and the Devil | 0:32:17 | 0:32:22 | |
is absolutely entrenched and Christians have actually, then, | 0:32:22 | 0:32:25 | |
got to the stage of working out what kinds of problems that produces. | 0:32:25 | 0:32:29 | |
Was it that the Devil possessed an actual, living snake? | 0:32:29 | 0:32:32 | |
And if so, why did God pronounce a punishment on the snake, | 0:32:32 | 0:32:36 | |
-given that it was the Devil? -Seems unfair. | 0:32:36 | 0:32:39 | |
There's this idea of almost, retrospectively, | 0:32:39 | 0:32:41 | |
going back and finding the Devil in stories, | 0:32:41 | 0:32:44 | |
and all the time, building up the cult of the Devil. | 0:32:44 | 0:32:47 | |
OK, OK, OK. I think we've got this. | 0:32:47 | 0:32:49 | |
Because of man's Original Sin, our Lord Jesus had to redeem, | 0:32:49 | 0:32:54 | |
i.e. buy back, our sins. | 0:32:54 | 0:32:56 | |
-From whom? -Sorry? | 0:32:56 | 0:32:59 | |
Who did he have to buy them back from? | 0:32:59 | 0:33:01 | |
Er, from the Devil. | 0:33:01 | 0:33:03 | |
Yes, until Jesus saved us, we were part of the Devil's dominion. | 0:33:03 | 0:33:09 | |
-Right, with God's punishment? -Oh, don't start all that again! | 0:33:09 | 0:33:13 | |
It all makes the Devil sound very important, doesn't it? | 0:33:13 | 0:33:16 | |
What if Jesus bought back our sins for the satisfaction of God? | 0:33:16 | 0:33:20 | |
Yes, I like that. | 0:33:20 | 0:33:22 | |
So, God sends his son to die for man, | 0:33:22 | 0:33:25 | |
so that God could call it quits with man? | 0:33:25 | 0:33:29 | |
Yes, I think so. | 0:33:29 | 0:33:32 | |
It's all a bit abstract, isn't it? Not sure it'll put bums on seats. | 0:33:32 | 0:33:35 | |
But it's not abstract. | 0:33:35 | 0:33:37 | |
Look, God made the world good, then, man made it bad of his own free will, | 0:33:37 | 0:33:42 | |
by succumbing to the Devil / snake. | 0:33:42 | 0:33:45 | |
But through God's good grace, man can be redeemed | 0:33:45 | 0:33:49 | |
and be freed from the hold of the Devil, who God made good, | 0:33:49 | 0:33:53 | |
but who, of his own free will, turned bad. | 0:33:53 | 0:33:55 | |
So, can the Devil be redeemed? | 0:33:55 | 0:33:57 | |
Now, that's a very good question. | 0:33:58 | 0:34:01 | |
I think most theologians, if you asked them, | 0:34:01 | 0:34:04 | |
would say that he will... | 0:34:04 | 0:34:05 | |
He's damned to the hellfire for eternity, | 0:34:05 | 0:34:09 | |
because that, strictly speaking, is what the Koran says. | 0:34:09 | 0:34:13 | |
Now, he could have been thrown to Hell then and there, | 0:34:13 | 0:34:15 | |
but he asks, you know, | 0:34:15 | 0:34:17 | |
"Can I have respite so that I can basically show you | 0:34:17 | 0:34:19 | |
"how bad these humans that you've created really are going to be? | 0:34:19 | 0:34:23 | |
"And you will see how many people I drive away from you." | 0:34:23 | 0:34:27 | |
It's almost like a challenge to God and God basically accepts | 0:34:27 | 0:34:30 | |
and says, "OK, fine. Do your best." | 0:34:30 | 0:34:31 | |
The story of the fallen angel, who falls from grace | 0:34:31 | 0:34:35 | |
and ends up as sort of governor of Hell, if you like - | 0:34:35 | 0:34:42 | |
can he ever be redeemed? | 0:34:42 | 0:34:43 | |
Yeah, that's a really good question | 0:34:43 | 0:34:47 | |
and one which really comes back again to what we understand as | 0:34:47 | 0:34:52 | |
the Devil's definite rejection of God. | 0:34:52 | 0:34:54 | |
The Devil understood what it meant to reject God. | 0:34:54 | 0:34:58 | |
The Devil understood that by his rejection of God, it would be absolute. | 0:34:58 | 0:35:02 | |
-Right. -And knowing that it would be absolute, and that it would put himself beyond redemption, | 0:35:02 | 0:35:07 | |
the Devil continued to reject God. | 0:35:07 | 0:35:09 | |
So that makes the Devil unique in the sense that he doesn't get cut the slack | 0:35:09 | 0:35:14 | |
-that human beings get cut, does he? -No. | 0:35:14 | 0:35:18 | |
Human beings can be disobedient, rebellious to God, | 0:35:18 | 0:35:21 | |
but they can be redeemed. | 0:35:21 | 0:35:23 | |
Absolutely. As human beings, | 0:35:23 | 0:35:25 | |
we're made in the image and likeness of God. | 0:35:25 | 0:35:27 | |
We have an innate goodness within us, | 0:35:27 | 0:35:31 | |
that enables us to overcome... | 0:35:31 | 0:35:34 | |
But Satan was an angel - he had goodness in him as well. Is his goodness fully extinguished? | 0:35:34 | 0:35:40 | |
The Devil chose to extinguish his own goodness. | 0:35:40 | 0:35:44 | |
But could he not see the error of his ways and be... | 0:35:44 | 0:35:48 | |
be restored to grace? | 0:35:48 | 0:35:49 | |
That's the definitiveness of his rejection of God. | 0:35:49 | 0:35:52 | |
The Devil knew that his rejection of God was absolute. | 0:35:52 | 0:35:56 | |
That his rejection of God would put him beyond redemption, | 0:35:56 | 0:35:59 | |
and yet still he chose to reject God. | 0:35:59 | 0:36:01 | |
It's like he knew at the outset what was in the contract. | 0:36:01 | 0:36:04 | |
Absolutely. It's something that the Devil chose to do freely, and with knowledge of what he was doing. | 0:36:04 | 0:36:09 | |
But if he had no hope of redemption, at least Satan had been given his own kingdom to rule. | 0:36:10 | 0:36:17 | |
MUSIC: "Carmina Burana" by Carl Orff | 0:36:17 | 0:36:20 | |
All right - that's enough of that. We're frightening people. | 0:36:20 | 0:36:23 | |
-There's a real sense of life hanging by a thread. -Yeah. | 0:36:23 | 0:36:26 | |
And I think the Devil very much played into that very pessimistic view of the world, | 0:36:26 | 0:36:30 | |
and I think people basically thought that they were going to Hell. | 0:36:30 | 0:36:34 | |
You hear very little talk of Heaven in that period. | 0:36:34 | 0:36:36 | |
It just feels like Hell dominated people's world view, for all sorts of very good, practical reasons. | 0:36:36 | 0:36:43 | |
Behold, mortal! For you have entered my realm of torment, | 0:36:46 | 0:36:51 | |
and here ye shall languish through all eternity. | 0:36:51 | 0:36:54 | |
For I...am the bringer of destruction. | 0:36:54 | 0:36:58 | |
The Prince of Doom! | 0:36:58 | 0:37:02 | |
EVIL LAUGH | 0:37:02 | 0:37:05 | |
Gosh! | 0:37:06 | 0:37:07 | |
What's the Judaic equivalent of Hell? | 0:37:07 | 0:37:12 | |
Ah, Gehinnom. | 0:37:12 | 0:37:14 | |
There isn't the same kind of picture of fire and brimstone and so forth. | 0:37:14 | 0:37:20 | |
After death we go through a period of evaluation, searching, | 0:37:20 | 0:37:26 | |
questioning, challenging of our past and our failures, | 0:37:26 | 0:37:29 | |
at the end of which time | 0:37:29 | 0:37:31 | |
just about everybody's guaranteed a place in Heaven. | 0:37:31 | 0:37:33 | |
I once thought if you did a Which? Guide to Religions, do you get a place in the world to come? | 0:37:33 | 0:37:38 | |
-we're pretty good on that. -You're quite high. A high rating. | 0:37:38 | 0:37:42 | |
Christian tradition casts Satan as the overlord of the damned. | 0:37:42 | 0:37:46 | |
But Islam places him lower down the pecking order. | 0:37:46 | 0:37:48 | |
He is as much someone who will suffer in Hell as others will. | 0:37:50 | 0:37:55 | |
Right. So he doesn't have the job of being sort of Hell's janitor... | 0:37:55 | 0:37:59 | |
-that he does in Christianity? -No. Absolutely not. | 0:37:59 | 0:38:02 | |
There's actually an angel whose job it is to be sort of the warden of Hell. | 0:38:02 | 0:38:06 | |
-Oh, there's a designated angel? -Yes. There's a totally different person. | 0:38:06 | 0:38:10 | |
Whereas, in the vision of Hell which endures from medieval Christianity, | 0:38:10 | 0:38:15 | |
it's Satan who is very much in charge | 0:38:15 | 0:38:17 | |
of dishing out appropriate punishments. | 0:38:17 | 0:38:20 | |
All right - I admit it was wrong of me to shoot those elephants | 0:38:20 | 0:38:23 | |
and then rip their tusks out for the ivory. | 0:38:23 | 0:38:26 | |
It was greedy. It was brutal. | 0:38:26 | 0:38:28 | |
And it ruined everyone's enjoyment of the circus. | 0:38:28 | 0:38:31 | |
-Mm-hm... -What? | 0:38:31 | 0:38:33 | |
Why are you smiling at me like tha...? | 0:38:33 | 0:38:36 | |
POUNDING FOOTSTEPS Oh, no... | 0:38:36 | 0:38:39 | |
ELEPHANT TRUMPETS | 0:38:39 | 0:38:41 | |
The Devil's army of demons loomed large | 0:38:46 | 0:38:49 | |
in the popular stories of medieval Christendom, | 0:38:49 | 0:38:52 | |
revolving around the lives of the saints. | 0:38:52 | 0:38:54 | |
The life of St Anthony, | 0:38:54 | 0:38:56 | |
in which the Devil and demons appear to Anthony | 0:38:56 | 0:38:59 | |
in the form of horrible beasts, and they beat him up at one point - | 0:38:59 | 0:39:03 | |
I think he makes the sign of the cross | 0:39:03 | 0:39:04 | |
and immediately they all disappear. But he's still left with bruises. | 0:39:04 | 0:39:09 | |
You weren't even safe from the Devil in your bed. | 0:39:11 | 0:39:14 | |
I'm getting quite a lot of flock coming to me, | 0:39:16 | 0:39:18 | |
and confessing that their bodies are committing mortal sins, | 0:39:18 | 0:39:22 | |
without their being able to control them, | 0:39:22 | 0:39:24 | |
whilst they're asleep. | 0:39:24 | 0:39:26 | |
-Yes, I'm getting a lot of questions about that as well. -Hmm. Tricky one. | 0:39:26 | 0:39:29 | |
Can't we just blame it on the Jews? | 0:39:29 | 0:39:32 | |
That's always been our fallback, hasn't it? | 0:39:32 | 0:39:34 | |
-Not really. -Actually there is one avenue... | 0:39:34 | 0:39:37 | |
Do you remember that ancient Jewish demon, Lilith? | 0:39:37 | 0:39:41 | |
Ooh - Adam's uppity first wife? | 0:39:41 | 0:39:43 | |
According to legend, she was a succubus, | 0:39:43 | 0:39:46 | |
who would visit men and women and extract bodily fluids. | 0:39:46 | 0:39:48 | |
Why don't we say, the Devil's got an army of such creatures | 0:39:48 | 0:39:51 | |
who consort with men and women while they sleep? | 0:39:51 | 0:39:54 | |
So it's not a mortal sin - cos the Devil's servants are secretly raping you. | 0:39:54 | 0:39:58 | |
I think our followers will find that explanation comforting. | 0:39:58 | 0:40:03 | |
And yet at the same time... terrifying. | 0:40:03 | 0:40:06 | |
Comforting yet terrifying - the old formula. | 0:40:06 | 0:40:10 | |
When has it ever let us down, eh? | 0:40:10 | 0:40:12 | |
Right, meeting over - let's break out the mead. | 0:40:12 | 0:40:14 | |
I sort of make my living on radio pretending to be the Devil and laughing at him. | 0:40:17 | 0:40:21 | |
Did the early Christians ever laugh at him? | 0:40:21 | 0:40:24 | |
Quite a lot of the time I think there's probably some | 0:40:24 | 0:40:26 | |
psychological need to make something fairly horrendous bearable | 0:40:26 | 0:40:30 | |
by making it humorous or kind of grotesque. | 0:40:30 | 0:40:32 | |
There is a tendency quite often to think of the Devil | 0:40:32 | 0:40:37 | |
and demons as being things that might get inside you. | 0:40:37 | 0:40:40 | |
And the way in which they get inside you is often through ingestion. | 0:40:40 | 0:40:43 | |
There's a very famous story about a nun who eats a lettuce leaf | 0:40:43 | 0:40:49 | |
without making the sign of the cross over it beforehand. | 0:40:49 | 0:40:52 | |
And there's, unbeknownst to her, a little demon squatting on the lettuce | 0:40:52 | 0:40:57 | |
leaf, and so because she's failed to exorcise it or get rid of it, | 0:40:57 | 0:41:00 | |
when she eats the lettuce leaf she also takes in the demon | 0:41:00 | 0:41:03 | |
and has to be exorcised in typically unpleasant fashion. | 0:41:03 | 0:41:06 | |
And that idea that just eating a salad might be something that | 0:41:06 | 0:41:10 | |
which comes with a kind of demonic risk | 0:41:10 | 0:41:12 | |
tells you something quite serious I think about | 0:41:12 | 0:41:15 | |
the ubiquity of the Devil. | 0:41:15 | 0:41:17 | |
But it also suggests a way of telling cautionary tales which | 0:41:17 | 0:41:20 | |
I think does have a sly wink to the reader. | 0:41:20 | 0:41:23 | |
Towards the High Middle Ages the Devil was seen as a figure of fun. | 0:41:23 | 0:41:28 | |
In a lot of churches we see grotesque gargoyles. | 0:41:28 | 0:41:31 | |
-Mmm. -Are they scary, or are they amusing? | 0:41:31 | 0:41:34 | |
A tongue being stuck out, kind of thing. | 0:41:34 | 0:41:37 | |
So what do we mean by that medieval image? | 0:41:37 | 0:41:39 | |
I think we often confuse the medieval image of the Devil | 0:41:39 | 0:41:43 | |
with modernity, | 0:41:43 | 0:41:44 | |
which ties in more really with the Reformation | 0:41:44 | 0:41:48 | |
than the Catholic medieval world. | 0:41:48 | 0:41:51 | |
So, in the stories of the lives of the saints, and in the mystery plays, | 0:41:51 | 0:41:55 | |
people perceive the Devil as both comic and/or scary. | 0:41:55 | 0:42:00 | |
Though it's difficult to be sure | 0:42:01 | 0:42:03 | |
exactly what ordinary people believe. | 0:42:03 | 0:42:05 | |
Especially when much of the evidence comes from what survives of their popular culture. | 0:42:05 | 0:42:10 | |
After all - on that basis, | 0:42:10 | 0:42:11 | |
future historians might conclude that we all believed in vampires. | 0:42:11 | 0:42:15 | |
Pious people in general, by about 1600, | 0:42:15 | 0:42:17 | |
the Devil's a lifelong companion. | 0:42:17 | 0:42:20 | |
He's always there trying to destroy you. | 0:42:20 | 0:42:23 | |
But for ordinary people, he's clearly a physical presence, | 0:42:23 | 0:42:26 | |
which means you can outrun him. | 0:42:26 | 0:42:28 | |
You can overpower him if you're strong enough, | 0:42:28 | 0:42:30 | |
you can tweak his nose with hot tongs, | 0:42:30 | 0:42:33 | |
and you can get the best of him. | 0:42:33 | 0:42:35 | |
It's a kind of simple equation that the more devout you are, | 0:42:35 | 0:42:38 | |
the more seriously you take the Devil. | 0:42:38 | 0:42:40 | |
In northern Europe in the early 16th century, | 0:42:40 | 0:42:43 | |
new ideas emerged which tore Christian Europe apart, | 0:42:43 | 0:42:47 | |
and helped put the Devil even more firmly centre stage. | 0:42:47 | 0:42:51 | |
Ironically, this fear of Satan comes as part of the | 0:42:51 | 0:42:54 | |
overthrow of the Catholic world, | 0:42:54 | 0:42:57 | |
and in the coming of a Protestant and Enlightenment world | 0:42:57 | 0:43:00 | |
in which the world suddenly becomes weirder. | 0:43:00 | 0:43:03 | |
Do you think that there was an element that the Reformation, | 0:43:11 | 0:43:14 | |
because it stripped away all those protective rituals, | 0:43:14 | 0:43:18 | |
that people felt under more pressure, more frightened? | 0:43:18 | 0:43:21 | |
Well, the Devil gets bigger in Catholicism as well | 0:43:21 | 0:43:24 | |
in the same period. | 0:43:24 | 0:43:26 | |
Basically the 16th century is a great age for the Devil. | 0:43:26 | 0:43:29 | |
But you're absolutely right - | 0:43:29 | 0:43:30 | |
Protestants depend on an idea of constant struggle with yourself | 0:43:30 | 0:43:35 | |
to save your soul, | 0:43:35 | 0:43:37 | |
and total reliance upon God. | 0:43:37 | 0:43:39 | |
In other words, it's useless now going out | 0:43:39 | 0:43:41 | |
and founding a monastery to try and save yourself, | 0:43:41 | 0:43:43 | |
it's got to be a spiritual act. | 0:43:43 | 0:43:45 | |
And therefore the Devil inside, the Devil around, | 0:43:45 | 0:43:49 | |
the Devil constantly with you, | 0:43:49 | 0:43:51 | |
becomes a major part of your life, literally a daily event. | 0:43:51 | 0:43:54 | |
The Devil was certainly a fact of daily life for the man | 0:43:54 | 0:43:59 | |
who lit the fuse on the Reformation, Martin Luther. | 0:43:59 | 0:44:02 | |
He was obsessed by the Devil. Martin Luther had terrible bowel problems... | 0:44:02 | 0:44:08 | |
I know. He thought the Devil lived in his bowels. And he saw him constantly... | 0:44:08 | 0:44:12 | |
Threw an ink pot at him in Wartburg Castle, the stain is still on the wall... | 0:44:12 | 0:44:16 | |
He was Devil-obsessed. | 0:44:16 | 0:44:18 | |
So there was no difference here between Catholics and Protestants in all of that. | 0:44:18 | 0:44:23 | |
And it was to do with the way that life was lived, and the frailty and fragility of life, | 0:44:23 | 0:44:29 | |
that the Devil became a very logical explanation. | 0:44:29 | 0:44:31 | |
It sounds mad now that the Devil was a LOGICAL explanation, but I think it was for people then. | 0:44:31 | 0:44:36 | |
Ken Russell's notorious film The Devils | 0:44:36 | 0:44:39 | |
dramatised just one sorry episode in the witch craze | 0:44:39 | 0:44:42 | |
which swelled across Europe and North America | 0:44:42 | 0:44:45 | |
in the 16th and 17th centuries, | 0:44:45 | 0:44:47 | |
and which saw the execution of thousands of people, | 0:44:47 | 0:44:50 | |
most of them women. | 0:44:50 | 0:44:52 | |
So apart from the Reformation, the sectarian hatred, | 0:44:52 | 0:44:55 | |
what other propellants fuelled the witch craze? | 0:44:55 | 0:44:59 | |
There are two reasons why witch trials peak around 1600. | 0:44:59 | 0:45:02 | |
The first is the Reformation and Counter-Reformation struggle going on, | 0:45:02 | 0:45:07 | |
so people are more worried about the Devil | 0:45:07 | 0:45:09 | |
and especially judges and officials are more ready to hear accusations. | 0:45:09 | 0:45:13 | |
But also climate's gone wrong - where it's the nadir, the bottom point, | 0:45:13 | 0:45:17 | |
for an official ice age, in which the weather has got worse for 200 years. | 0:45:17 | 0:45:21 | |
So you can't grow crops now for 30 days in the year | 0:45:21 | 0:45:25 | |
which you could a couple of hundred years before. | 0:45:25 | 0:45:28 | |
And the population's been growing ever since the late 15th century | 0:45:28 | 0:45:31 | |
to a point at which it's outgrowing its resources all over Europe. | 0:45:31 | 0:45:35 | |
There are just too many people. There's too little food, | 0:45:35 | 0:45:37 | |
so people are right on the breadline in a way they hadn't been before. | 0:45:37 | 0:45:41 | |
Witchcraft had once been seen as a minor legal offence. | 0:45:42 | 0:45:46 | |
But now it was the Devil's work. | 0:45:46 | 0:45:48 | |
Neighbour turned on neighbour, and whole communities were torn apart. | 0:45:48 | 0:45:52 | |
But then the witch craze just ran out of steam. | 0:45:52 | 0:45:56 | |
I think that people get tired of religious warfare | 0:45:57 | 0:46:00 | |
and persecution because it isn't working. | 0:46:00 | 0:46:02 | |
And they start inventing scientific laws to take the place of constant faith. | 0:46:02 | 0:46:07 | |
It's basically persecutions and experiments that fails. | 0:46:07 | 0:46:10 | |
And the Devil is part of that experiment. | 0:46:10 | 0:46:13 | |
The witch craze was the Devil's highpoint. | 0:46:14 | 0:46:16 | |
Soon, he would fade into a metaphor. | 0:46:16 | 0:46:19 | |
But writers continued to find him a compelling character. | 0:46:19 | 0:46:22 | |
And none more so than the English Puritan John Milton. | 0:46:22 | 0:46:26 | |
It's Milton who, in Paradise Lost, for the first time | 0:46:26 | 0:46:29 | |
gives you a kind of credible psychological portrait of the Devil. | 0:46:29 | 0:46:35 | |
What Milton wants to produce is a Satan who is created by God and goes bad | 0:46:35 | 0:46:41 | |
and now acts as God's instrument of temptation. | 0:46:41 | 0:46:44 | |
So he's got to be good at his job. | 0:46:44 | 0:46:47 | |
And, in Milton's fantastic verse and with his insight in psychology, | 0:46:47 | 0:46:50 | |
he makes Satan a totally plausible tempter. | 0:46:50 | 0:46:54 | |
Why then was this forbid? Why but to awe | 0:46:54 | 0:46:58 | |
Why but to keep ye low and ignorant | 0:46:58 | 0:47:00 | |
His worshipper; He knows that in the day | 0:47:00 | 0:47:04 | |
Ye Eate thereof Your Eyes that seem so cleere | 0:47:04 | 0:47:08 | |
Yet are but dim Shall perfectly be then | 0:47:08 | 0:47:10 | |
Op'nd and cleerd And ye shall be as Gods. | 0:47:10 | 0:47:14 | |
Milton's Devil in Paradise Lost | 0:47:14 | 0:47:17 | |
is so seductive, so magnificent, so... | 0:47:17 | 0:47:22 | |
You just fall for him. | 0:47:23 | 0:47:24 | |
I really don't believe that John Milton or most people of his time | 0:47:24 | 0:47:29 | |
ever felt sympathy for Satan. | 0:47:29 | 0:47:31 | |
What they do is watch on with horror at how plausible and how good he is. | 0:47:31 | 0:47:35 | |
But it's the modern age | 0:47:35 | 0:47:37 | |
that doesn't have the salvation and damnation mindset. | 0:47:37 | 0:47:40 | |
Milton's Satan is really a hero. | 0:47:40 | 0:47:43 | |
Intentionally or not, Milton humanised Satan, | 0:47:43 | 0:47:46 | |
giving him a complex psychology. | 0:47:46 | 0:47:49 | |
And psychology was where the Devil's future lay. | 0:47:49 | 0:47:52 | |
With thinkers like Jung. | 0:47:52 | 0:47:54 | |
Carl Gustav Jung had this notion that there really was evil. | 0:47:54 | 0:47:58 | |
It wasn't just that there was an absence of good | 0:47:58 | 0:48:01 | |
or that there was something that was a little bit disturbing | 0:48:01 | 0:48:04 | |
or would lead to rising disquiet. | 0:48:04 | 0:48:06 | |
There really was something evil. | 0:48:06 | 0:48:08 | |
Now, this is not very fashionable. | 0:48:08 | 0:48:10 | |
The idea of absolute evil is a very traditional idea. | 0:48:10 | 0:48:13 | |
And I think there's something in it. | 0:48:13 | 0:48:16 | |
An evil that you cannot write out of the script - | 0:48:16 | 0:48:19 | |
something that is there in the universe that is just bad. | 0:48:19 | 0:48:22 | |
Jung may arguably be the greatest psychologist of religion, | 0:48:23 | 0:48:27 | |
but he still struggled with | 0:48:27 | 0:48:29 | |
paradoxes which have troubled religious believers for centuries. | 0:48:29 | 0:48:32 | |
The problem with Jung is he said two things. | 0:48:32 | 0:48:35 | |
On the one hand, he says there's absolute evil that's totally real. | 0:48:35 | 0:48:38 | |
And, on the other hand, | 0:48:38 | 0:48:40 | |
we project all our shadowy personal difficulties | 0:48:40 | 0:48:43 | |
and problems and perversities onto the Devil. So it's both, really. | 0:48:43 | 0:48:47 | |
In you projected outwards | 0:48:47 | 0:48:50 | |
and already out there, waiting to act. | 0:48:50 | 0:48:54 | |
The Devil was disappearing from people's spiritual lives, | 0:48:55 | 0:48:58 | |
melting into an abstract concept. | 0:48:58 | 0:49:01 | |
But he was about to start a new career. | 0:49:01 | 0:49:04 | |
He may have lost his teeth and claws, | 0:49:04 | 0:49:05 | |
but he'd put on a top hat and tails. | 0:49:05 | 0:49:08 | |
When did the urbane Devil first appear? | 0:49:08 | 0:49:11 | |
The urbane Devil first appears in the Renaissance and post that. | 0:49:11 | 0:49:15 | |
There's an interest in the psychology of the Devil for the first time | 0:49:15 | 0:49:20 | |
in a big way. | 0:49:20 | 0:49:22 | |
And that leads through to the nicer, kinder, | 0:49:22 | 0:49:25 | |
more civilised Devil of modern times - | 0:49:25 | 0:49:27 | |
the Devil as a gentleman, the polished Devil, | 0:49:27 | 0:49:29 | |
the Devil as the equivalent to the debauched aristocrats | 0:49:29 | 0:49:32 | |
or the confidence trickster | 0:49:32 | 0:49:34 | |
that fits a smoother kind of society. | 0:49:34 | 0:49:37 | |
And he's the Devil of today, he's the Devil of Bedazzled. | 0:49:37 | 0:49:40 | |
Bedazzled was a comedy filmed at the height of the swinging '60s. | 0:49:42 | 0:49:47 | |
Where Satan took the satirical form of Peter Cook, | 0:49:47 | 0:49:50 | |
seen here mucking about on location with Dudley Moore. | 0:49:50 | 0:49:53 | |
-What sort of things do you do to tempt people? -Nasty things. | 0:49:53 | 0:49:56 | |
For example, if I was tempting you, I'd probably size you up | 0:49:56 | 0:49:59 | |
and see you being of a portly build - forgive me saying that... | 0:49:59 | 0:50:03 | |
Of course. Very nice. | 0:50:03 | 0:50:05 | |
I'd come up to you with a cream bun and say, "Why don't you eat that?" | 0:50:05 | 0:50:09 | |
Thus tempting you to eat the bun and get fat | 0:50:09 | 0:50:11 | |
and fall into the sin of gluttony. It's tremendous work. | 0:50:11 | 0:50:14 | |
Peter Cook's 1967 version of the Devil | 0:50:14 | 0:50:17 | |
added to a movie tradition that was already over 70 years old. | 0:50:17 | 0:50:22 | |
The Devil instantly became a figure in early cinema. | 0:50:22 | 0:50:26 | |
There are movies featuring the Devil well before the turn of the century. | 0:50:26 | 0:50:31 | |
Georges Melies, the French special effects wizard | 0:50:31 | 0:50:35 | |
who was also a conjuror, | 0:50:35 | 0:50:38 | |
depicted the Devil in several films. | 0:50:38 | 0:50:40 | |
He was, I think, the first person to make a film of Faust, | 0:50:40 | 0:50:43 | |
which has been made every 20 minutes ever since. | 0:50:43 | 0:50:46 | |
DRAMATIC PIANO MUSIC | 0:50:46 | 0:50:48 | |
Very often, the cinema treated the Devil as a largely comic figure. | 0:50:50 | 0:50:53 | |
It was only occasionally that it touched upon something more sinister. | 0:50:53 | 0:50:58 | |
Made in 1943, The Seventh Victim | 0:50:59 | 0:51:01 | |
suggested Satanists might be on the loose in downtown Manhattan. | 0:51:01 | 0:51:05 | |
You're a poor, wretched group of people who have... | 0:51:05 | 0:51:09 | |
taken the wrong turning. | 0:51:09 | 0:51:10 | |
Wrong? | 0:51:10 | 0:51:12 | |
Who knows what is wrong or right? | 0:51:15 | 0:51:18 | |
If I prefer to believe in satanic majesty and power, who can deny me? | 0:51:18 | 0:51:23 | |
What proof can you bring that good is superior to evil? | 0:51:23 | 0:51:26 | |
But it wasn't until the late '60s that another film set in New York | 0:51:28 | 0:51:33 | |
took the Devil and his followers to a genuinely disturbing level. | 0:51:33 | 0:51:37 | |
Rosemary's Baby was a game-changer for all kinds of movies. | 0:51:37 | 0:51:42 | |
It was a game-changer for horror films. It also made the Devil scary. | 0:51:42 | 0:51:46 | |
The Devil is here on Earth and his worshippers, | 0:51:46 | 0:51:49 | |
although they look like eccentric old cranks, are dangerous. | 0:51:49 | 0:51:53 | |
In the early '70s, The Exorcist graphically told the story | 0:51:53 | 0:51:57 | |
of a young American girl possessed by a demon. | 0:51:57 | 0:52:00 | |
Box office takings were huge, as audiences queued up to be appalled. | 0:52:00 | 0:52:05 | |
It was disgusting. | 0:52:05 | 0:52:06 | |
Well, I wouldn't take my wife to go and see it. | 0:52:06 | 0:52:08 | |
I just found it really horrible and had to come out. | 0:52:08 | 0:52:11 | |
I couldn't take any more. | 0:52:11 | 0:52:12 | |
It was about the most horrifying film I've ever seen. | 0:52:12 | 0:52:15 | |
-Really horrifying? -Yeah. | 0:52:15 | 0:52:17 | |
It'll give a lot of people a lot of ideas. | 0:52:17 | 0:52:20 | |
What was the Church's reaction to The Exorcist? | 0:52:20 | 0:52:23 | |
The Catholic Church was, on the whole, pretty favourable. | 0:52:23 | 0:52:26 | |
Because? | 0:52:26 | 0:52:27 | |
Because it spoke about... | 0:52:28 | 0:52:31 | |
the presence of evil in the world | 0:52:31 | 0:52:33 | |
and the way in which the Church has a place in...fighting that evil. | 0:52:33 | 0:52:38 | |
Catholic priests... I mean, they're the cavalry in the piece. | 0:52:38 | 0:52:41 | |
Absolutely. | 0:52:41 | 0:52:43 | |
One of these children has been born of the Devil. | 0:52:45 | 0:52:48 | |
Is it this one? | 0:52:48 | 0:52:50 | |
One of these? | 0:52:50 | 0:52:51 | |
Or the son of the United States Ambassador to Britain? | 0:52:52 | 0:52:56 | |
The answer lies in the story of... | 0:52:56 | 0:52:59 | |
The film crew relaxed when they could. | 0:53:05 | 0:53:07 | |
Just what they needed to prepare them | 0:53:07 | 0:53:09 | |
for the dark, tragic, surprising events that were to come. | 0:53:09 | 0:53:12 | |
So, the Devil could be bone-chilling and bone-strengthening. | 0:53:15 | 0:53:20 | |
But, if some have been keen to exploit him, | 0:53:20 | 0:53:22 | |
the major Christian churches seem to have marginalised him, | 0:53:22 | 0:53:25 | |
almost as if he is an uncomfortable relic - | 0:53:25 | 0:53:29 | |
though he still can pop up in person. | 0:53:29 | 0:53:31 | |
Exorcists certainly exist | 0:53:31 | 0:53:33 | |
but, really, they don't figure largely in the life of the Church. | 0:53:33 | 0:53:37 | |
That's not to say they're not important - | 0:53:37 | 0:53:39 | |
it's just not central to what the Church is about. | 0:53:39 | 0:53:43 | |
SCREECHING FROM LAPTOP | 0:53:43 | 0:53:46 | |
This is one place where some people feel they can have | 0:53:46 | 0:53:50 | |
a direct personal encounter with the Devil. It's an exorcism. | 0:53:50 | 0:53:53 | |
Some of you have probably tuned in hoping you might see an exorcism | 0:53:53 | 0:53:57 | |
but there's not much point showing any | 0:53:57 | 0:53:59 | |
because they're basically all the same. | 0:53:59 | 0:54:01 | |
Someone is told that they are possessed, they behave accordingly - | 0:54:01 | 0:54:05 | |
bit of thrashing around, a lot of shouting - | 0:54:05 | 0:54:08 | |
then the Devil appears, always talks... | 0:54:08 | 0:54:10 | |
-LOW-PITCHED CROAKY VOICE: -..in a voice like this. | 0:54:10 | 0:54:13 | |
Never sounds like Joanna Lumley, for some reason. | 0:54:13 | 0:54:17 | |
And, of course, this kind of thing has been going on for centuries. | 0:54:17 | 0:54:22 | |
In the Bible, Jesus performs many exorcisms. | 0:54:22 | 0:54:26 | |
Although, it doesn't mention shackling a girl to a chair. | 0:54:26 | 0:54:31 | |
But this seems to be people's notion of what meeting the Devil | 0:54:31 | 0:54:35 | |
would be like. | 0:54:35 | 0:54:36 | |
It's a sort of...cultural cliche. | 0:54:36 | 0:54:39 | |
Oh, and for what it's worth, next time you're sacrificing an animal | 0:54:39 | 0:54:43 | |
-to the forces of darkness, don't use a tortoise. -TORTOISE GULPS | 0:54:43 | 0:54:46 | |
Quite often, over the years, when I've been having fun playing Satan onstage, | 0:54:46 | 0:54:51 | |
I've caught myself thinking, | 0:54:51 | 0:54:53 | |
"Should I be treating the Devil as flippantly as this?" | 0:54:53 | 0:54:57 | |
Because I know that there are many, many people out there | 0:54:57 | 0:55:00 | |
for whom the Devil is unequivocally real and ever-present. | 0:55:00 | 0:55:05 | |
And there is no denying that some people commit the most horrific acts | 0:55:05 | 0:55:10 | |
while claiming to be under orders from Satan. | 0:55:10 | 0:55:13 | |
Just as some people commit the most horrific acts | 0:55:13 | 0:55:16 | |
while claiming to be combating Satan. | 0:55:16 | 0:55:19 | |
I haven't set out to change anyone's mind about the Devil, | 0:55:21 | 0:55:24 | |
just to tell his story. | 0:55:24 | 0:55:26 | |
The story of how he started out very small and got very big. | 0:55:26 | 0:55:31 | |
And then small again. | 0:55:31 | 0:55:32 | |
But could he ever disappear? | 0:55:32 | 0:55:35 | |
The Devil will always be with us, as long as we have | 0:55:36 | 0:55:39 | |
a post-Christian culture with a lot of Christians in it, | 0:55:39 | 0:55:41 | |
because he's so good to think with. | 0:55:41 | 0:55:44 | |
You can use the Devil as a metaphor, as a personal bogey, | 0:55:44 | 0:55:49 | |
as a joke. | 0:55:49 | 0:55:51 | |
He's really useful. I guess that's why God created him. | 0:55:51 | 0:55:54 | |
Do you think you could have God without the Devil? | 0:55:54 | 0:55:57 | |
I think you could, | 0:55:57 | 0:55:58 | |
but whether you could have a straightforward relationship | 0:55:58 | 0:56:03 | |
between humans and God without the Devil | 0:56:03 | 0:56:06 | |
is a problematic question. | 0:56:06 | 0:56:08 | |
Yes, lots of the things that were ascribed to the Devil in the past, | 0:56:08 | 0:56:12 | |
like illness or disability or lightning, | 0:56:12 | 0:56:15 | |
all of these things - we know what causes them now, and we know it isn't the Devil. | 0:56:15 | 0:56:19 | |
Science has produced quite a lot of answers for things | 0:56:19 | 0:56:22 | |
but there are still things that puzzle us. | 0:56:22 | 0:56:24 | |
If you ask if people believe in the Devil they say no. If you ask them if they believe | 0:56:24 | 0:56:28 | |
there's such a thing as evil, they will often say yes. | 0:56:28 | 0:56:31 | |
Do you think that without the definition of evil | 0:56:31 | 0:56:36 | |
that the Devil supplies, | 0:56:36 | 0:56:38 | |
it would be hard to give a shape to God? | 0:56:38 | 0:56:41 | |
No, because the Church teaches that God existed before the Devil, that good existed before evil. | 0:56:41 | 0:56:47 | |
A lot of us who don't believe in the Devil | 0:56:47 | 0:56:49 | |
would feel we recognise evil when we see it - | 0:56:49 | 0:56:51 | |
we'd be able to point at it. | 0:56:51 | 0:56:53 | |
Did you think that the Devil provides an important face for evil? | 0:56:53 | 0:56:57 | |
No, I think he provides an important excuse for evil, | 0:56:57 | 0:57:00 | |
and that's much worse. | 0:57:00 | 0:57:02 | |
And one of the dangers with the way that the Devil | 0:57:02 | 0:57:05 | |
has tended to be developed in all the religions | 0:57:05 | 0:57:09 | |
in which he is a major force | 0:57:09 | 0:57:11 | |
is that he is used, as it were, as a final answer, | 0:57:11 | 0:57:14 | |
to questions that I believe we should never stop asking. | 0:57:14 | 0:57:18 | |
That may well be true | 0:57:18 | 0:57:21 | |
but, in a sense, the Devil is one of the heroes of our civilisation | 0:57:21 | 0:57:25 | |
because without him, great monotheistic religions would have struggled | 0:57:25 | 0:57:29 | |
to make sense of evil and suffering. | 0:57:29 | 0:57:31 | |
Without him, we'd have missed out on a lot of great literature | 0:57:31 | 0:57:35 | |
and great art. | 0:57:35 | 0:57:37 | |
And without the Devil, we wouldn't have had an alibi. | 0:57:37 | 0:57:41 | |
How was that? | 0:57:43 | 0:57:44 | |
Yeah, yeah, not bad. | 0:57:44 | 0:57:46 | |
-I liked the bit about me being a hero. -Oh, good. Yeah, yeah. | 0:57:46 | 0:57:49 | |
-Only, um... -What? | 0:57:49 | 0:57:51 | |
Well, quite a lot of it seemed to be suggesting | 0:57:51 | 0:57:53 | |
that I might be fictional. | 0:57:53 | 0:57:56 | |
-I found that a bit unsettling. -Oh, I'm sorry. | 0:57:56 | 0:57:58 | |
-Ooh, by the way, you know when you made me sign that contract? -Yeah? | 0:57:58 | 0:58:02 | |
-16 years ago? -Yeah? -You walked off with my pen. | 0:58:02 | 0:58:04 | |
I am ALWAYS doing that. Still got Piers Morgan's biro. | 0:58:04 | 0:58:08 | |
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd | 0:58:32 | 0:58:35 | |
E-mail [email protected] | 0:58:35 | 0:58:39 |