Prosecuting the Devil in Asia, Africa

“If she says you don’t love her
Don’t praise her perceptiveness.”
From Trolley Sermons by Bachchoo

The new Pope, Francis, in his first month in office, has been reported to have warned of the Devil’s earthly presence, influences and temptations on three public occasions. Soon after his election he told the College of Cardinals not to “give in to pessimism, to that bitterness that the
Devil places before us every day”.
It was Thomas Aquinas who urged us to believe that a substantial portion of religious pronouncement was, because of the limitations of the human consciousness, phrased as metaphor. So the Devil of the Pope’s sentence may have been intended as a common noun denoting the diurnal trials of life.
More startlingly and with no metaphors in mind, in his first sermon as the Pope, the press reports that he quoted Leon Bloy, a French Catholic writer of the early 20th century, who said, “He who does not pray to the Lord, prays to the Devil.” I don’t suppose he meant that those of us who don’t pray are active Satanists, but simply that the neglect of worship is the Devil’s work.
Pope Francis believes in the malign force working in the world of politics. When he was a cardinal in Buenos Aires, the Argentinian government passed a law legalising same-sex marriage. He denounced the move as the work of the Devil: “At stake is the total rejection of God’s law engraved in our hearts. Let us not be naive; this is not simply a political struggle, but an attempt to destroy God’s plan. It is not just a bill but a move of the Father of Lies who seeks to confuse and deceive the children of God.”
The Catholic Church and other Popes before Francis have persecuted what they deemed heretical sects such as the Cathars whose “Christian” beliefs in the 12th century were influenced by Gnostics and by the Zoroastrian heresy of Manichaeism.
The Cathars believed that the world was ruled by God and by the equivalent power of the Devil and paradoxically Pope Francis seems to believe the same.
In fact, by calling the Devil the Father of Lies, his statement harks back to the first monotheistic Zoroastrianism whose Prophet Zarathustra in his hymns, the Gathas, does not identify a personified anthropomorphic “devil” but calls this evil force in creation “The Lie”.
Later Zoroastrianism gave rise to the Zurvanist heresy in which Zurvan, or Time itself, is the father of both God (Ahura Mazda) and the Devil (Ahreman).
The belief in this duality, with God being sometimes in absolute charge and the Lie or the Devil being a subservient creature and in some doctrines sharing the universal stage with his opposite in a Ying-Yang disposition, passes through most religions.
I say most, because though there are bad gods and angry gods, malign rakshases and demon avatars in the Hindu epics and books, there is no singular controlling Devil. If there is a single God it is Shankara’s ocean of final energy with no dark matter hidden in the interstices. What is remarkable about the baddies of Hinduism is that they display a certain power and even nobility. They are in every instance, as is Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost, dramatic and dramatised creatures.
Ravan of the Ramayana and Duryodhan of the Mahabharata are not all bad. They give the heroes and the avatars or sons of gods a good run-around, but they are perfectly capable of behaving with generosity, nobility and loyalty.
So it’s strange that the Indian and Western cinematic traditions seem to be at variance with their Eastern and Western theological beliefs.
What the hell do I mean? I have been these last few weeks teaching a course in script-writing to eager film-students in Dhaka. I began the course with pointing to the different dramatic traditions of Hollywood with Europe and Bollywood with the Orient. In the sophisticated dramas of the West, right and wrong are progressively defined as the drama develops. Characters are not all black or all white — most are represented, following the tradition of novels, in shades of grey. (Please ignore any echo of the deliberately misleading Fifty Shades of Grey which is only named after the baddie of the piece whose name is “Grey”.)
In Bollywood there are “positive” and “negative” characters. So also in kung fu films. The good vanquish the bad. That’s what people pay ticket-money to see.
These distinctions are not absolute. In one strand of Western mythological films — the Batman, Spiderman and Bond variety — the world and characters are divided into good and evil: on the side of the Truth and on the side of the Lie.
This is the strand that Bollywood seems to want to imitate and yet retain sequences in which hundreds of extras in outrageous costumes perform set dances to modern choreography. It’s strange that Bollywood doesn’t feel it can represent gay relationships with truth, depth, sensitivity or approval, and yet the “heroes” in their grinning, jiggling dances seem to be as camp as a row of tents.
Pope Francis’ contentions about the Devil subscribe to the simple mythologies of good vs evil, Batman vs the Joker or Shah Rukh Khan vs all sorts of irredeemably “negative” characters. This view of the world doesn’t allow for an examination of or debate about ethics. It is by definition traditionalist and subscribes to moral rigidity and even absurdity. Gay marriage or gay relationships are on the side of darkness. Contraception is the work of the Lie.
Since Western consciousness, except for the very backward within it, has abandoned the idea of the Devil as a person or presence, Pope Francis is obviously appealing to the Catholics of South America, Asia and Africa who are more inclined to believe in Satan as the Old Testament’s Book of Job and the New Testament’s St. Matthew’s gospel have it. Good strategy, questionable modern theology.