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This article was originally published in the May 2025 print edition of Byline Times
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Perhaps it’s the times we’re living through, but I’ve been thinking a lot about the Devil of late.
I’ve always been intrigued by the number of times the Devil appears in English place names: once you start to notice, Old Nick appears everywhere.
There are Devil’s chimneys, elbows, dykes, ditches, causeways, punch bowls, arrows, quoits, chairs, holes, bridges, pavements, leaps and even pulpits and churchyards.
Being me, I looked for a book on the subject and it turns out there is an excellent one: Cloven Country – The Devil and the English Landscape by Jeremy Harte.
Harte makes the point that the stories that tend to cling to these names are often not much older than the 18th Century and tend to portray the Prince of Darkness as a trickster who is easily outwitted by the ordinary person. This is closer to the Satan of the medieval mystery plays, in which he is often deployed for comic effect, rather than the conflicted fallen angel of Paradise Lost, or the horned and cloven-hooved priapic demon of Catholic imagination.
The idea of evil immanent in a landscape, or of evil concentrated into a single person or being, are probably universal human tropes. The fact that the English landscape’s adoption of diabolic names feels more quaint than unnerving tells us more about the way stories are transmitted than anything profound or disappointing about our culture.
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Harte has a lovely insight into this: “Folklore is not a tree but a lattice; stories are continually crossing over and exchanging motifs with each other, developing new variants or dying out, acquiring fresh heroes and forgetting old ones. Stories that were once sacred mysteries have become children’s entertainments, and stories told for a joke have been made into foundational myth.”
I was thinking about landscapes that still feel genuinely evil when watching Simon Schama’s recent BBC documentary, The Road to Auschwitz. Here, properly, was a vision of hell, and seeing Schama force himself to make the journey, struggling as both a historian and a Jew to look at the disgraceful, degrading evidence, to feel his mounting anger – “screw pity!” he spits out at one point – is to be reminded that evil, palpably, exists and must be resisted.
Appropriately, Schama ends his harrowing film with a testimony of a living survivor, Marian Turski, the Polish-Jewish historian who died earlier this year, aged 98.
“Auschwitz didn’t fall from the sky”, Turski tells us. “Evil comes step by step”.
Schama had prepared his viewers for this by showing how it was the complicity of ordinary Lithuanians in Kaunas (where his mother’s family were from) and the appropriation of the bureaucratic excellence of the Dutch state that had enabled the systematic extermination of European Jews long before the gas chambers had been built.
If you dehumanise people, if you make hatred acceptable, terrible, unimaginable things can happen. Evil comes step by step.
This feels very relevant to the present moment, in which kindness is mocked as a ‘woke religion’ and empathy condemned as a form of moral weakness. The Devil doesn’t start his work with mass executions and the furnaces of hell, but with the quiet temptation of giving in to intolerance and prejudice.
When the great Jewish-American philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote about the trial of the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, coining the phrase that has haunted her reputation – “the banality of evil” – she wasn’t downgrading Eichmann’s guilt or demeaning the suffering of his victims, as some of her critics concluded.
Like Schama, she was animated by rage at the enormity of the Holocaust, at the scale of the moral problem it represented, and by a philosopher’s determination to understand how such reckless evil had been enabled by such a mediocre, self-deluded, human as Eichmann.
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I recently attended a discussion about evil featuring the former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams and the storyteller and mythographer, Martin Shaw. When asked about the Devil, Williams said he didn’t imagine an evil genius but a bore. Shaw agreed: the Devil was a know-all who never listens.
This chimes with Arendt’s portrait of Eichmann: his self-obsession, his inability to think clearly about his actions or to describe his experiences in anything other than the most clichéd terms. It is in such ordinary, everyday soil that evil takes hold.
In 1942, CS Lewis imagined the relationship of two devils working in the bureaucratic superstructure of hell. The Screwtape Letters became an unexpected bestseller. In one letter, Screwtape reminds his young accomplice that “the safest road to hell is the gradual one – the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts”.
This is a historical moment in which we all need to notice the direction of travel – the Devil’s slope – to think clearly, and to resist.
And as Marian Turski, a man who had seen where the journey ended, concluded: “The most important thing is compassion.”