The Uses of the Devil: Is there an Absolute Evil?
Transposing a famous maxim about God to the Devil one could say that if there were no Devil, it would have been necessary to invent one. To the credit of the Devil goes much adventure in the odyssey of life including the first one of leaving the Garden of Eden for earth, sharpening of our faculties and capabilities and unfolding of good as he is the principle of resistance, variety and colour in the drama of life and universal drive or march for excellence or assertion of individual talent and ten thousand uses of the ego in the struggle and enrichment of life. It is not only the poet-philosophers such as Goethe and Iqbal who have paid rich tributes to it but great saints and sages of various traditions. In fact the key functions attributed to the Devil such as leading people astray and inflicting loss are in the Muslim Tradition functions of Divine Names ( Al-Mudill, Az-Zar ). Jung in his Answer to Job was not too off the mark in identifying the Devil as the left hand of G...