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Article: Mephistopheles: the devil in the modern world.
- Article from:
- National Review
- Article date:
- July 17, 1987
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1987 National Review, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Mephistopheles: The Devil in the Modern World
by Jeffrey Burton Russell (Cornell,330 pp., $24.95)
"THE DEVIL IS the best-known symbolof radical evil,' writes the historian Jeffrey Russell, and "The existence of radical evil is clear to anyone not blinded by current relativism.' From these clear and true words, this book moves with sustained seriousness and brilliance across five centuries, from Luther's time to our own. This is the fourth and final volume of Russell's series on the history of conceptions of the devil, and, although it has all the virtues of great intellectual history, it is explicitly rooted in a profound moral analysis of our own era.
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