The Devil has stalked the pages of journalist Randall Sullivan’s and Ed Simon’s books, a whiff of sulfur apparent across the pages of their writing. Both authors have long been concerned with theodicy, with the question of evil; how such misfortune and wickedness is possible in a world created by a benevolent and omnipotent God. Central to that question has been a preoccupation with ultimate evil, the manner in which absolute and metaphysical malignancy has been represented across the Abrahamic traditions, and in the modern world.

Sullivan, a former contributing editor for Rolling Stone and Men’s Journal, has long explored issues of belief, such as in his Pulitzer Prize-nominated 2007 account The Miracle Detective: An Investigative Reporter Sets Out to Examine How the Catholic Church Investigates Holy Visions and Discovers His Own Faith, in which he covered the apparitions associated with the “Our Lady of Medjugorje” in Bosnia during the wars following the dissolution of Yugoslavia. Now he has turned to questions of the demonic in his latest book, The Devil’s Best Trick: How the Face of Evil Disappeared, a historically and philosophically-inflected journalistic account that takes him from small-town Texas to Bosnia, Rome to rural Mexico, in an investigation of what Satan might mean now, but how regardless “the word ‘evil’ was an essential part of the human vocabulary.”

Simon, editor of Belt Magazine who is an academic specialist one early modern apocalypticism, has similar traipsed the borderlands between faith and doubt, considering the Satanic in books such as Pandemonium: A Visual History of Demonology and Heaven, Hell and Paradise Lost, and particularly in his upcoming book Devil’s Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain in which he writes that the “Devil’s hoof-prints can be found across the wide swatch of history, in our willingness to embrace power and engage in exploitation, to summon self-interestedness and to conjure cruelty.” What follows is a discussion between the two writers on such subjects infernal, as conducted in April of 2024.    

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Ed Simon: There was something really interesting to me early in your book, on the second page of the preface, in fact. You write about Mirjana Soldo, a religious visionary affiliated with a Bosnian Croat "peace center" named Medjugorje, who you got to know while covering the unimaginably brutal wars that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia, and which provide any number of grim verifications of evil's existence. You explain how at this time, your own faith wavered, in part because of the sorts of things you witnessed and heard about, but there is this fantastic clause when you describe your conversations with Soldo, when you say that she had convinced you that "the Devil, at least, was real.' I'm fascinated by this "at least," because I wonder how much of our culture's interest in evil - though not necesarily the Devil as the subtitle of your book would indicate - is that evil in someway confirms the existence of the metaphysical, of the beyond? Do you think that some of our attraction towards evil - in horror movies, true crime podcasts, and so on -  is that it allows for an acknowledgement of the sacred, where we think of that as meaning something apart from our own material existence? Does evil share in the numinous? 

Randall Sullivan: I think the answer to that is a discomforting yes. Immanuel Kant wrote that he rejected religion until observation led him to believe that evil is a universal reality, one that could never be eradicated by education or any other plan for social improvement. Evil was beyond the scope of the human mind and could never be explained, Kant concluded. Without evil, the universe might be seen as a perfectly functioning mechanism. But evil existed. Therefore, the Devil existed as an a priori concept. And if the Devil existed, so did God. 

Horror movies, which are now the most reliably profitable product Hollywood puts out, regularly play on the fact that even those who say they don’t believe in God are afraid of the Devil. That fear is a reminder to the audience that they sense a supernatural reality, because they wouldn’t be afraid of the Devil without at least some suspicion that the Devil is real.  And like Kant said, if the Devil is real, so is God. Those films offer a tenuous but real connection to spirituality, whether they intend to or not. 

Weren’t you saying something akin to this when you wrote in Devil’s Contract that no one believes more in God than the Devil?

SIMON: I've always been fascinated by this idea of the "faith" of the Devil, if you could put it that way. By definition, Satan could never be an atheist because he knows for a fact that God is real (though it'd be fair to say that "faith" and "knowledge" are also two different things, I suppose). I'm curious how much of this kind of acknowledgement of supernatural evil, or ultimate, absolute evil, whatever we want to call it, in things like horror films is a case of "giving the Devil his due?" One of the things that very much struck me in The Devil's Best Trick, among those whom you meet in Mexico that believe in and fear the brujas, for example, or in the terrifying accounts of Emma Schmidt's exorcism in the 1920s, is that there is a utility in knowing the Devil, whether to avoid him or its opposite. Do we need to know the demons' names in order to exorcize them? 

SULLIVAN: The distinction between knowledge and faith is the crucial point. Of course the Devil has full knowledge of the nature of existence. But refusal of “faith” is what makes the Devil the Devil. In the Old Testament, the Jewish books of the Bible, the character of Satan seems to gradually fall away from God.  Satan first appears in Numbers as ha-satan, a lower case “obstructor” serving God. By Zechariah, Satan (upper case now) is the prosecuting attorney in the Lord’s court.  Even in Job, Satan goads God but does not openly defy him. It’s only in Isaiah that Satan is the fallen angel who tried to place his throne above God’s.  In the Judeo-Christian tradition, and in Islam, the Devil is the first being who chose separation from God. The English poet John Milton captured the essence of what defines the Devil when he wrote in Paradise Lost that Satan would rather rule in Hell than serve in Heaven.  

In my book, I begin in 1995 during the war in Bosnia with my recognition of evil as something so radical that I felt it must have a supernatural source—something in the universe that chose to place itself utterly apart from good.  In other words, a Devil. That leads me by the end of the book, twenty years later, to the Mexican jungle, to the village there that is the epicenter of black magic and devil worship south of the border.  The climax, for me, is my meeting with the daughter of the most famous brujo, or black witch, in Mexican history, a man who, along with his mentor, still inspires terror in the people there decades after their deaths in 1968 and 1980.  Her description of how her father explained to her that his powers, and the powers of every true brujo or bruja, come entirely from selling their souls to El Diablo, and then how he introduced her personally to the Devil was a kind of tipping point for me, one that forced me to acknowledge what I didn’t want to acknowledge, at least not publicly: I had come to believe the Devil existed.

The utility, to use your word, of knowing the Devil is the ability to not be deceived by him, and especially not to be deceived by his best trick, which has been to convince most of the world that he doesn’t exist.  As to needing to know the demons’ names in order to exorcise them, I can only tell you that the priest who performed the exorcism in the Emma Schmidt case, the most thoroughly documented exorcism in the history of the Catholic Church, interviewed, for lack of a better word, each of the demons involved in the woman’s possession and got each of them to identify themselves by name and to tell how and why they went to Hell.  Only when he knew their names was he able to force them to leave.  

SIMON: This question of knowledge - when it comes to how we speak about the sacred more generally but metaphysical evil in particular - is so interesting to me, especially as it relates to the idea of the symbolic. Maybe you've had this experience as well, as a journalist who covers issues of religion and belief, but I'm sometimes amused by how readers try and figure out what exactly it is that I think about these things, even though I try to be clear, or at least as clear as is possible for me. I've written a book about demonology, Milton, and now Faust, but sometimes folks will still refer to me as an "atheistic writer," which I'm clearly not. 

Maybe the closest appraisal I saw was somebody who said that I seem religious but not spiritual! I guess that I yearn towards faith, but of knowledge I have nothing. And that's where my question of the symbolic in relation to the real comes through. In my book Pandemonium I write that when it comes to absolute, ultimate evil, I believe that there is a "something," but part of me feels that it's very difficult, if not impossible, to totally circumscribe it in language, in logic. Indeed that's part of the absolute, ultimate, metaphysical nature of it. 

In The Devil's Best Trick, the portions of your narrative which I think most fully affirmed my belief that there is this something was in your accounts of the serial killers Lawrence Bittaker and Westley Allan Dodd. I'll confess that it was really difficult reading for me, I had to stop several times and gather myself, but it was effective in the sense that after finishing it, any doubts about the existence of the Satanic as a real and tangible thing are dispelled. 

Such aberrant cases seem to serve a purpose of demonstrating how all rational explanations are extricated - social, cultural, economic, medical justifications for such acts - that there is something malignant and ugly and evil that still operates. But how does this relate to the narratives that various religious faiths tell about that evil? Do we understand the story of Lucifer's fall, for example, as a literal explanation of that evil, or is it a symbolic representation of what's still a real thing? 

SULLIVAN: Representations of the Devil—and of God for that matter—are limited by the scope of the human mind.  Of course God is not a great bearded man in the sky and the Devil is not a hoofed hominid with horns and wings.  Cynics and atheists like to use those images to debunk the supernatural, as if believers take them literally (and some, I’m afraid, probably do).  These symbolic images of both the sacred and the diabolical are just what work best for people to relate to the ineffable.  We naturally comprehend God and the Devil as persons, and so they may appear to us that way. 

I included the Bittaker and Dodd cases, horrific though they are, because they compel people to recognize that evil has no synonym. Bittaker and Dodd weren’t “sick.” They didn’t have some disease that could be treated and maybe someday cured. They were evil and did evil.  The Dodd case is the more significant because of his supposed conversion in prison. One of the best pieces of reporting I did in the book was to find the prison chaplain who took him through that conversion, and who was there with him at the end, when he became the last person in the U.S. to be executed by hanging.  It’s very difficult for me to accept that anyone who did what Dodd did to children could ever be “saved.” But if I don’t allow that possibility, then I’m not sure I can hope to be forgiven for my own sins.  

SIMON: This question of redemption, salvation, and forgiveness is so crucial of course, maybe the most important theological issue that's conceivable. Part of me is really attracted to that idea of apocatastasis, of the Church Father Origin and others' idea that God's love is so all-encompassing that eventually even Satan himself will be forgiven and redeemed. 

Intellectually there's something so satisfying about that to me, but that's as mediated through the poetry of mythology. When it comes to the particulars of absolute evil as experienced in our world, my attraction to that concept falters. With Dodd, for example, it was hard for me - probably impossible - to countenance that he was in any way saved. Maybe that's a failure of moral imagination on my part, maybe it's a residual cultural Catholic preference for works over faith, but it seemed like the discussions and conversion he had with the chaplain didn't really do anything in terms of restitution and amends. 

Often that very Protestant, very evangelical model of conversion strikes me as so individual, almost selfish. The chaplain conveys how God has forgiven Dodd, but he notably didn't rape and murder God, and the parents of the serial killers' victims didn't forgive him. It's impossible for me to know what's in his hear obviously, but part of me wonders why it matters what's in his heart, cold as that might sound. I guess I'm curious why it's important to allow for the possible redemption of someone like Dodd when it comes to conceiving of the forgiveness of your own sins? Can't those things be seperated? 

SULLIVAN: I completely understand and identify with your feelings about Dodd, and your inability to accept that he was somehow redeemed by a religious conversion.  It’s easy for me also to see it as selfish and convenient. And you’re right: He made no restitution. That wasn’t possible; there was no compensation he could ever provide that would be enough.  As for amends, I see some effort there in his warning that people like him were incurable, that he needed to die to protect others. I think the early Christians who struggled with questions like this—Clement and Origen in particular—sensed that, since we all require a path to redemption, and need forgiveness to achieve salvation, any line drawn between those who qualify and those who don’t is ultimately arbitrary. At a minimum, it’s not up to us to decide.  I’m attracted to the concept of apocatastasis also, because it seems as if the only way all could be made right, in the end, is the return of all—including the Devil—to God. But the Church insisted that no, people and angels alike could choose permanent separation. And that insistence was based on the things Jesus says in the Gospels.  The thing I dislike about that most is the idea that I could be shut out of Heaven myself.  

SIMON: What I find really attractive about the idea of an inscrutable salvation, or of being forgiven through a grace that transcends reason or logic, is that it does emphasize the sheer "otherness" of the sacred, the ways in which the metaphysical realm is manifestly different from the profane and the quotidian. I think in a broader sense that gets back to what we were talking about earlier concerning the relationship between radical evil - and I suppose radical good as well - with the experience of the sacred. You really convey an aspect of what the experience of that sort of otherness feels like in your book - I'm thinking of the exorcism you witnessed in the Balkans, or of the ominous dapper gentleman who had about him the whiff of the Satanic who encountered while in Rome. I've had a handful of these sorts of experiences myself, this kind of inexplicable interaction with what-ever-it-is that lay beyond the veil, where on a cellular level you know that there is something transcendent of everyday reality happening, but which might not necessarily look as such to people who aren't privy to that feeling. I was wondering if you could elaborate on those sorts of experiences? Have you had other encounters similar to the ones you talk about in the book?

SULLIVAN: I’ve never had any experience that was comparable—or even close—too what happened on the Piazza Navona that afternoon in Rome.  It was as if that…creature and I were suspended in time and place.  But then I’ve never had any experience that was close to what I observed during that exorcism in Bosnia only a week earlier.  For reasons beyond my understanding, the membrane between the natural and the supernatural seemed to have evaporated for a short time all those years ago.  I have a sense of some sort of expectation that those should be enough, that I got my fair share of whatever that was.  The nearest thing to a corollary was that anonymous letter I received twenty years later that is the beginning of Part Two of The Devil’s Best Trick.  I’m curious what you thought of that.  It continues to haunt me with a feeling of having failed to complete some sacred assignment, even though at the same time I feel that’s completely ridiculous.  

SIMON: Your experience in Rome very much reminded me of this strange interaction I had back when I was still a drinker. I was at my local bar on a Sunday night, when things were always more laidback and the crowd was smaller, and this young couple came in who were way too well dressed, not just for the bar, but the town. They were young, fit, attractive, and just, off. When they went to the bar, they asked for drinks to go, which was illegal here, and then settled for boilermakers which they rapidly drank three in quick succession. They didn't talk - to each other or anyone else, and their entire countenance was this eery kind of mocking humor. They were smiley in this inhuman way. I remember it being like the air was completely still, that the volume on everything had gone down. As if everybody was holding their breath. They were in there for maybe ten minutes, and the moment they left everybody exhaled, and the normal clamor started up again, and I remember talking to others around me and the bartenders if they felt what I did as well, and everybody did. 

It's such a strange story, and I honestly feel nuts telling it sometimes, but in a really deep and intrinsic way the two felt not human, they felt vampiric. My hair went up the same way when you're in the woods and you think there is something watching you, that you're being stalked by a predator. When I read your Rome story, it instantly reminded me of that interaction, and I think that a lot of people have similar experiences, maybe even most, but that enforced urge to a type of disenchanted secularism pushes it out of peoples' minds. 

I was very much struck by your account of the letter you received. I confess that had it been me, I would have been an anxious puddle for a long time. I don't do well with those sorts of things. What was even more striking about the anonymous, religiously inflected letter you received is that it was well written in some ways, it had almost a Blakean poetry about it. In particular, especially after the more lurid stories of evil, I was struck by the letter writers' claim that the Devil is fed by all of "the unkindnesses, the pettiness and unfair acts of spite that we mete out to one another every day. It is in the prideful judgments we make of one another and our inability to forgive even ourselves." I wonder if that's a bridge to Dodd, the connection between these admittedly lesser sins and great evil, but all of them a species of evil more in difference of degree than kind. Do you think that there is more of this sort of wickedness today, more unkindness, pettiness, and unfair acts of spite? 

SULLIVAN: Your ambivalence about what you experienced in that bar in Pennsylvania reminds me that there’s a big difference between thinking and knowing. You think it’s a little foolish of you to have been so affected by that couple, but you know you were right to have been.  Intelligence and rationality are not identical.  I think you’re right that people have been conditioned by the culture not to trust the intuitive aspect of their intelligence, and every time we see somebody who goes overboard with belief in their intuition (maybe the Devil is egging them on) that conditioning is confirmed.  

I’m glad you’re sympathetic to the distress that letter caused me.  It was one of the most upsetting experiences of my life and I’ve had to put on some psychic armor to deflect it. Of course that armor may be an obstacle to my own intuitive intelligence. It’s a conundrum.

People have always been petty and mean but I think it’s far less restrained these days—one more bad effect of social media and the isolation that feeds the nasty tribal partisanship of our epoch. I think the Devil's a big fan of Facebook.

SIMON: I've noticed a lot of people, anecdotally at least, who seem to detect a new meanness, a type of cavalier cruelty out there. I think that you're right that social media has something to do with it, as well as maybe the generally apocalyptic tenor of our times. 

The distinction you make between knowing and feeling is really well taken. There's something that you describe effectively in the book whereby there is a perception that folks like us - authors who write for national publications or the sorts of books that attract a particular type of reader - might have a cringe when it comes to issues of religion. My own complicated feelings about faith aside, I have historically found that there is a difficulty in pitches and proposals that read to some editors, agents, publicists and so on as about too much God-stuff. It feels like some national publications have their quota of religion pieces a year and it's not a big one. I was thinking about your anecdote from the great scholar of the history of Satan, Jeffrey Burton Russell, when he talked about how an audience member gasped when he unironically referred to something as evil. Do you have similar sorts of experiences in this way?

SULLIVAN: Of course I’m familiar with people who think of themselves as sophisticated or intellectual turning away from if not turning their noses up at anything that smacks of religiosity.  I think my publisher has been quite surprised at the level of interest in TDBT, astonished, really, that, for instance, The Next Big Idea Club chose it as a “must read”, since that’s usually reserved for things with a scientific or technological bent, the next Walter Issacson book or whatever.  Maybe the Devil’s of more general interest than God these days.  

I get exasperated by people—idiots—who talk as if you have to choose between science and religion, like there’s some sort of dichotomy, smart people on this side, dumb ones on the other. The monk Gregor Mendel pioneered genetics. The Belgian physicist who first proposed the Big Bang Theory, Georges Lemaitre, was also a Catholic priest. The chief discovery of science at the cutting edge, quantum mechanics, is that matter is an illusion, that existence is, in fact, immaterial. Science doesn't contradict faith; it tests it.

SIMON: We share a real admiration, respect, and dare I say reverence for Jeffrey Burton Russell as a scholar, I think. His multi volume series on the history of the idea of Satan, particularly the last volume Mephistopheles: The Devil in the Modern World, are so perfect that I feel like anything I can write on the subject has already been so immaculately rendered by Russell. Something that always intellectually appealed to me in his methodology was that he was clear his approach would be phenomenological, that he would bracket out positivist questions and write about peoples' experience of such things, where it can be conclusively said that people live their lives as if the Devil and God were real (or at least in most places and for much of human history they have lived that way). Russell has always seemed to me the consummate scholar of religion in this way, taking belief and faith seriously while also approaching the subject with analytical rigor. I was delighted to read the portions of The Devil's Best Trick where you recount meeting him, in part because my only experience of him otherwise is through his books. I was wondering if there was anything in your conversation with him that you wished to have included, but that for whatever reason ended up on the cutting room floor?

SULLIVAN: I’m sad that Jeffrey didn’t live long enough to enjoy the tributes we each paid to him in our new books.  He was terribly under appreciated during his lifetime.  I think I was able to include the main focus of my conversations with him in TDBT, which did center, as in the book, on the role the Marquis de Sade played in challenging the presumptions of The Enlightenment. I was especially pleased to be able to describe in my book how Jeffrey arrived at the realizations that led to Inventing the Flat Earth, maybe the best expose ever of the intellectual prejudice that has reigned during the past two centuries.  If there’s anything I regret omitting it probably has to do with the hurt and anger he felt about being either attacked or ignored by fellow academics who simply weren’t as literate or as thoughtful as he was. Jeffrey was a living reminder to me of the most painful lesson I’ve learned over the course of my working life, which is that the truth does not always out. History really is written by the victors, and the victors often lie.  

Jeffrey was very helpful and generous to me, and I think he had a hope that I would be able to reach a wider audience with my exploration of the subject of the Devil, which I could never have accomplished without him.  

SIMON: Russell's critique of how Enlightenment individualism is able to degenerate into something relativist and antinomian is, along with Roger Shattuck, really invaluable in terms of thinking about the ways in which the Devil can pull his best trick, to paraphrase your title by way of Baudelaire. 

Something that I've been thinking about is how we make a cognoscente critique of evil, especially when distanced from its most lurid examples, when it comes to systemic, structural, bureaucratic, political evils. I recall Russell writing about nuclear weapons, which is something that I've written about quite a bit myself, which by definition is almost an incomprehensible evil - the ability to destroy the world several times over. Yet the people responsible for the invention of the atom bomb were not evil, in fact many of them were motivated by a sense of justice and goodness, even if the result is this sort of ultimate evil. 

Structural evil in the form of all kinds of ills - institutional racism, climate change, whatever - are so much bigger than any one individual, and we're all culpable in those things to varying degrees. So I guess my question is, how do we parse the moral arithmetic of evil when it's something that individual agents might be conduits of, more than the responsible parties of? Or at least not in the same way responsible as a serial killer or something might be. 

SULLIVAN: That’s higher math than I’m capable of, but I’m reminded of something I wrote in the last paragraph of TDBT about knowing “my own guilt.”  I think the recognition that we share culpability connects us and humbles us and makes us wary of imposing judgements on others. 

I think the Devil enjoys inculcating a sense of moral superiority. C.S. Lewis got at that in The Screwtape Letters, when he had the demon tell his student that, “The great thing is to direct the malice [of a man] to his immediate neighbors whom he meets every day and to thrust his benevolence out to the remote circumference, to people he does not know. The malice becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary.” I’m afraid I see a lot of that in people who campaign against climate change and systemic racism. Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be cognizant of those larger issues, but we should be careful about assigning blame. Leave that to the lawyers. 

SIMON:  For sure I think that there is a possibility of moral superiority bleeding over into any denunciation of wickedness, particularly structural issues where culpability is more diffuse, more evenly distributed, than with what are obviously heinous crimes. But today there are few things that seem more an example of vaingloriousness and covetousness than the possibility of destroying the planet so that a handful of billionaires can get richer.

I suspect that many of those billionaires (though not all, obviously) are probably perfectly pleasant people, who do good things in their own community, who donate to charity, and so on, but that doesn't change the sinfulness of the system itself. That's the attitude of Pope Francis in Laudato Si when he writes that if "we want to bring about deep change, we need to realize that certain mindsets really do influence our behavior," that there is something malignant in our unthinking alteration of the environment. So I'm wondering if the rhetoric of evil might not be useful precisely in being applied to things like anthropogenic climate change, if not the folks most directly responsible (or at least not all of them), than the attitude and philosophy that allows such a thing to become a problem in the first place? 

SULLIVAN: Well, I can’t argue with you about that, or that climate change is coming at great cost. I live next to the Pacific Ocean and the effects of the sea warming and filling up with plastic are felt by everyone here.  I don’t blame just billionaires, although no doubt some of them are the ones profiting most from our collective depletion of the planet, and the ones most guilty of the conspicuous consumption that accelerates it. But we’re all invested to varying degrees in using up what we have here on Earth, and all responsible to try to slow that process down. The primary problem, in my mind, is that we’ve made money God. Who does that make happy?

SIMON: I'm totally with you on that, and I don't think that I have a good answer either. I'm always really cognizant with how much of my own life is really implicated in these things so much larger than us, where to even make yourself independent of them is an impossibility for the average person, thinking about the exploitation baked into the system where we don't have a choice, in many ways, but to be a small part of that exploitation. Which leads me to what's really my last question, and that's one of demonization. In my own work, I've always argued that the vocabulary of calling things evil - of "naming the demons" if you will - serves an important purpose, but then often I'm disturbed by how the long history of doing so has often times been used to generate the very evil one is ostensibly trying to avoid. So how do we make sure that we see the Devil, but that we're identifying the right Devil, if that makes sense?

SULLIVAN: You're right. Nothing has been more abused in the course of history than demonization. The Inquisition and the witch hunts that ensued are an ultimate example. It struck me reading about those events that it all worked out beautifully for the Devil, because concern with or even belief in his existence dropped off dramatically due to the excesses of that insanity. There was a similar result from the "Satanic Panic" of the 1980s. People who see the Devil around every corner cause other people to think there's nothing to see. Maybe that is the Devil's best trick. 

A big part of what's wrong with the country right now is that so many are so prone to demonize those they disagree with. Donald Trump's been the lightening rod for that. Maybe it would help to remember that the Devil is against us all, that we share a common enemy, one that encourages our violence and venality, that celebrates  the resentment or outright hatred we feel toward one another.  Maybe the Devil could be made to serve a useful purpose.