`The Death Of Satan': Where Did Evil Go?

----------------------------------------------------------------- "The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil" by Andrew Delbanco Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30 -----------------------------------------------------------------

The Prince of Evil, it once was felt, strutted mockingly behind the terrible deeds he initiated. Then we get to today.

Ominous and fascinating in its swirling historical lore, "The Death of Satan" circles like a hawk over America's ever-shrinking concept of evil - a hawk that swoops down but comes up empty. Evil has ceased to be an explanation for anything bad happening at all.

Other justifications prevail. In modern culture, evil and Satan have no basis in objective fact, no legitimacy in public rationale.

Andrew Delbanco, the Levi Professor of Humanities at Columbia University, contrasts the overwhelming evidence of what would have once been called Satan's handiwork - child abuse, political torture, genocide, family murders - with the inability of our language to convey infernal events. He quotes the unprisonable omnivore Dr. Hannibal Lector gloating in "The Silence of the Lambs": "Look at me, Officer Starling. Can you stand to say I'm evil?"

Having defined the contemporary problem as acute incomprehension and incapacity, Delbanco looks to our nation's history for an explanation. His particular forte is literary history, specifically the Puritans (his "The Puritan Ordeal" won the 1990 Lionel Trilling award).

Delbanco credits Jonathan Edwards for his early diagnosis "that the principal doctrine of the Christian faith - the doctrine of original sin - was not being assimilated by the Enlightenment mind, that it was disappearing along with the vivid creature - Satan - who had once symbolized it." Also, Delbanco asserts, the Salem witch trials made Satan look ridiculous, "something that educated men could not believe in."

Religion's turf was gradually becoming obliterated by rationalists like Ben Franklin, whose scientific successes offered the world astounding practical consequences. Sin and responsibility were dismissed in the excitement over electricity.

Delbanco uses literary sources to depict evil the way a pathologist might use microscopes and dyes to isolate malignant cells in our blood. Hawthorne, Melville and other 19th-century authors charted how evil could subtly numb a society to its pernicious effects, finally creating a state of moral paralysis.

As long as Delbanco sticks to history and writers, suspense builds, and his pages fly by. It's like reading a thriller on a serious subject. Yet unavoidably he introduces and concludes his historical material with his own analysis - and here, at the beginning and end of his book, he artfully evades any ethical arguments or pressing issues of our day.

His jejune injunctions for a renewed understanding of Satan are as convincing as a cereal commercial. (Alasdair MacIntyre's profound book, "After Virtue," also deals with contemporary moral dissolution but doesn't shy from attentive philosophy.)

In history and literature, Delbanco presents a compelling, indeed exhilarating case that somehow evil really exists and our disbelief makes that evil worse. Sadly, he's of little help when it comes time to act.