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But they are just as badly off as ever: The Evil One is gone, the evil ones remain.1
While the decline in belief in God is discussed with ever new attention and excitement, the decline in belief in the devil has never met with comparable attention. Yet for nearly two thousand years the belief in the devil was an absolute, inseparable component of religion and anyone who doubted the existence of the devil was attacked as an atheist. The Church was not entirely mistaken in its attitude: it understood the danger inherent in the loss of faith in the devil. Schopenhauer came to the conclusion that the devil was highly necessary for Christianity: 'For one cannot remove one pillar from a building without endangering the entire structure'.2
A century ago a German theologian, Georg Gustav Roskoff, published a remarkable two-volume history of the devil, in which he pursued the religious dualism through various civilizations from primitive times to the present.3 He collected a mass of material contributing to understanding of human desires and passions. His conclusion was that there has never been a religion in which both God and the devil did not appear in one form or other as important parts of the faith. Roskoff, like Schopenhauer, observed that all things that constitute the universe determine one another.