The philosophical history of evil as a constitutive element of this world: from the fall of Lucifer to the interpretations of the personal experience of evil in the modern era.

In Christian culture and spirituality Satan is a historical figure, present in every moment of the life of individuals and peoples. He is not just the tempter who leads men to sin with his protean manifestations. He is literally ‘the lord of this world’, he who guides history in the eternal struggle between the City of God and the City of the Devil.
It was he who was behind the persecutions of the early centuries, the medieval heresies, and the great enemies of the Church, from Nero to Mohammed to Frederick II. Satan with his army of demons occupies a vast space in the writings of the early centuries. Once Christian unity was sundered, it was Satan who fuelled Luther and the Pope’s reciprocal accusations of being the Antichrist. At the dawn of modernity, it was again Satan who engendered secular, atheist and libertine ideologies and who would be embodied by Niccolò Machiavelli. Even modern philosophy would be obliged to deal with Satan: for Descartes he was the ‘evil genius’, the devil, who cast doubt on the very existence of the physical world. And Satan’s presence – with the whole host of witches and demons that accompanied him at the dawn of modern civilization – would continue throughout the 1600s… up to the middle of the century, when Cyrano de Bergerac would include all the demonic doctrines in his Gazette of fools.