The Prince of This World

by Adam Kotsko

The most enduring challenge to traditional monotheism is the problem of evil, which attempts to reconcile three incompatible propositions: God is all-good, God is all-powerful, and evil happens. The Prince of This World traces the story of one of the most influential attempts to square this circle: the offloading of responsibility for evil onto one of God's rebellious creatures. In this striking reexamination, the devil's story is bitterly ironic, full of tragic reversals. He emerges as a theological symbol who helped oppressed communities cope with the trauma of unjust persecution, torture, and death at the hands of political authorities and eventually becomes a vehicle to justify oppression at the hands of Christian rulers. And he evolves alongside the biblical God, who at first presents himself as the liberator of the oppressed but ends up a cruel ruler who delights in the infliction of suffering on his friends and enemies alike. In other words, this is the story of how God becomes the devil—a devil who remains with us in our ostensibly secular age.

Genres: Religion, Philosophy, Theology, History, Nonfiction, Christianity

238 pages, Paperback

Published October 26, 2016

About the author

Adam Kotsko (b. 1980) is an American writer on theology, philosophy and popular culture, also known for his contributions to the blogosphere. His printed works include Why We Love Sociopaths (2012), Awkwardness (2010), and the authoritative Žižek and Theology (2008). Kotsko joined the faculty of Shimer College in Chicago in 2011, teaching the humanities component of Shimer's Great Books curriculum. Kotsko earned his BA at Olivet Nazarene University, and his MA and Ph.D. at the Chicago Theological Seminary. (from Shimer College Wiki)

Reviews

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

Frankly, I'm feeling like these are the times for political theology. Maybe get this for all the Rump=voters in your fambly.

[xDEAD ENDx · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm having a hard time writing a review because this book is so awesome.

I more or less see it as an extension of Agamben's theological thinking (as context, the author is also the main English translator of Agamben). Through the lens of a genealogy of the devil, this book explores, bare life, oikonomia, and the ever-elusive inoperativity. It's a pretty convincing take on the secularization of theology governing the modern world. Also, the conclusion of hell being the uncontrollable place of inoperativity is sort of fascinating especially when read alongside the Foucaultian analysis of the prison system.

Agamben takes advantage of this observation to make a rare joke: "from the perspective of Christian theology, the idea of eternal government (which is the paradigm of modern politics) is truly infernal." In other words, the modern secular world, governed indefinitely by the providential apparatuses of economy and democracy, is a living hell. From the perspective of the unspeakable crimes of modernity, this quip may seem inappropriately glib–yet insofar as it posits that the "normal" run of things is also fundamentally hellish, it suggests that the hell could be the staging ground for a radical critique of secular modernity as a whole. In order to assess this claim, however, we will need to spend much more time in hell than Agamben does.

[Jacob · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book does a wonderful job presenting its argument in a clear, succinct manner. Drawing upon the tradition of political theology (the stream begun by Schmitt), Kotsko weaves together a genealogical account of the devil to show how the figure goes from representing the demonic elements of worldly authority (in the Pharaoh and Antiochus IV, specifically), to being the figure of the oppressed (Michael Brown being called a demon by Darren Wilson). This inversion is shown to be an inversion in the God/Devil dialectic, where Christianity theology seems to invert the role of God in their assimilation into Roman society.

This book is well worth the read if one is interested in genealogy, political theology, and similarly related discourses.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kotsko takes up Agamben's claim that the current secular (Western) order has taken up into itself many Christian theological structures and secularized them in its self-constitution. That this has happened without acknowledgment does not prevent those structures from operating upon us, and (Kotsko and Agamben both argue) in dangerous ways. (It should be noted that K and A both draw heavily from Carl Schmitt (rather an interesting old Nazi), too, and his similar ideas.)

Kotsko does a convincing deep genealogical dive into the Devil, his gradual emergence through different biblical texts and epochs, and his eventual prime place in medieval theology. The genealogical argument is involved and presented with clarity (you should really read this thing) but part of the upshot is that if the kind of God you've heard about lately seems a little prideful, a little too devoted to demanding fealty or else you will be eternally punished... well, that happened gradually and as a result of certain moves in theology as various prophetic and then apocalyptic views washed over the Jewish and then Christian communities. What's more, Kotsko rather convincingly argues that after the Devil was slowly introduced and turned into a figure who fell but who could not repent but who also could be punished (and punish those who followed him) justly for all eternity, that something had been lost at the same time in such a conception of God.

I'm not doing it justice. I should have written this earlier in the day. (Perhaps I'll try again tomorrow.)

All of this has quite the sting in the tail once you realize (and Kotsko explains) just how explanatory it is about our currently (deeply depraved) system, and the ways it works so hard to lock in certain groups of people not only in a certain kind of hell but also locks in a logic that presents them as both deserving of that hellish punishment despite the fact that they really could not have done much differently. If you've found yourself wondering why the white Christian church in the US is quite so comfortable with the now obvious spate of police murders of unarmed black men and boys, well, it's because of the congruence between the demons who cannot repent and yet are tormented for all eternity and the demonized Other upon which the US structure is founded. (Kotsko kicks off his book with quotes from actual testimony by one such killer cop who literally calls his victim "it" and "a demon". You can't make this stuff up.)

Kotsko does leave much of the task of how we then shall adjust and create anew some less corrupted way of being in the world, but this diagnosis of his is convincing and a useful starting point to the conversations we must have.

[Ryan Ward · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant! Kotsko has to be one of the most impressive theological/philosophical/political thinkers currently working. Here he tackles the problem of evil and the genealogy of the devil. He shows how the concept of the devil evolved from being identified with oppressive political leaders during the time of ancient Israel, to being identified with enemies of the church in the Middle Ages. In an utterly ironic reversal, God went from being on the side of the oppressed to being on the side of the oppressors. God, in other words, turned into the Devil. Good Christians would be able to enjoy not only their own salvation, but this would be made even more sweet by viewing the sufferings of the damned in hell (Jews, Muslims, witches, and any other heretical group) for eternity in a sadistic voyeurism.

He traces this genealogy of the devil, particularly of medieval thinking and development of the ideas around how the devil fell at the beginning of creation and how he and his demons are situated as unable to change and doomed to torment evil humans forever. This theological evolution, he argues, is the basis for the political evolution of the concepts of free will and choice being used as a means to assign blameworthiness to individuals or groups who call into question the morality of the current political order or threaten its perpetuation. He argues that the only way to change our society and humanity is to stop othering and viewing others as irredeemable and forever responsible for their own misery. In other words, we need to allow for a political theology that makes room for the devil himself to be saved.

[Jack · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wish it were more focused on Satan and not just theology and theory surrounding Satan. It also easily slips into anachronism, and often gets too deep in the critical theory weeds. The author seems more familiar with medieval theology and postmodern theory than Satan as such.

[Jamie O'Duibhir · Rating 5 out of 5]

A detailed analysis of the formation of Satan and God as figures of liberation and evil (respectively, interchangeably, and reversed). The first quarter of the book is beautiful and transgressive tale of how ancient Jewish people wrestled with the problem with evil. The middle half the book is an exhaustive look at how this problem of evil was thoroughly twisted, in order to inoculate God from culpability in human suffering and Original Sin, while the last quarter of the book ties up the first three portions of the book into a cohesive and well-structured argument.

This is an academic text, well-befitting an alumnus of Chicago Theological Seminary, that delves deep into the ideas of Medieval theologians in order to understand exactly how the problem of evil became what it was and what mental gymnastics were exercised in order to save God from the responsibility of evil that people regularly contended with. Furthermore, Kotsko deftly shows in the final portion of the book why a secular modern world even cares about these forgotten theological debates, even if it never mentions those thinkers by name.

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

The authorities Adam Kotsko adduces in this genealogy of God's ever-present shadow, the devil – eminent philosophers and theologians, apostles and patriarchs – will be instantly recognizable, at least in name, to anyone with even a passing familiarity with the intellectual history of Christendom. It is by the way in which they are uniquely brought together, however, that Kotsko illuminates the historico-political contexts of tectonic shifts and polar reversals within the Hebrew-Christian continuum of theologies of evil, and the socio-political ramifications of those very theologies. Central to Western modernity's economic and political conceptualizations no less than to the Christian theology upon which they were built, we find questions of free will, original sin, and eternal damnation. These political-theological co-formations arise, in Kotsko's observation, from the fact that theodicy, the problem of evil, is fundamentally the problem of human suffering – visceral suffering within the concrete world of human relations, every theological response to which must attempt to justify God within limits circumscribed as much by realpolitik as by logic.

[Lawrence · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting, if fluid, meditation on the history of Western thought on evil, Kotsko's genealogical approach allows for a great discourse-heavy examinatiom heavy om history and framing that somehow avoids being too bogged down in theory and academic citation.

Most of the book is a solid history and then Kotsko becomes notably excited drawing parallels to modern society, particularly Christian-centred neoliberalism and its focus on choice (as theory on Satan emphasized choice in the assignation fof sin).

The narrative begins to run away and branch out beyond Kotsko's pages. It's no surprise that his next book more fully explores the idea he begins to develop here.

Two books in one, the first much more thorough, it's still an eminently readable format that communicates clearly the evolution of Judeo-Christian thinking before running off into modern fields a bit recklessly. It still manages to establish a very solid base to jump off from.

[John Adams · Rating 3 out of 5]

An imperfect but thought-provoking argument about the position occupied by the devil in Christian theology from Augustine through Aquinas and how that position remains even in largely secularized modernity.

[Sarah Jaffe · Rating 5 out of 5]

The problem of evil has never seemed more relevant--and the question of whether we can free the devil from our need for him even more so. I enjoy Adam Kotsko as a thinker generally but this book in particular.

[Mills College Library]

235.4 K876 2017