





































Microsoft Word - Hughes final.docx


[Expositions 11.2 (2017) 91–94]  Expositions (online) ISSN: 1747–5376 
 

Kotsko, Adam. The Prince of This World. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017. 225 

pages. $22.95 (paper). ISBN: 978-1-5036-0020-1. 

 

 

From the opening paragraph of Adam Kotsko’s book, the reader forms a clear impression of the 

trajectory it will follow. Kotsko relates the testimony offered to a grand jury by Ferguson, Missouri 

police officer Darren Wilson after he shot and killed the unarmed Michael Brown. “It looks like a 

demon,” he said. The implication is clear—the depersonalized association of an unarmed black 

man with the demonic shares in the responsibility for his senseless death. This book attempts to 

develop an account of how that demonic simile came to be possible in the mind of a Ferguson cop. 

The attempt takes us back to the Hebrew biblical tradition and then on a whirlwind tour through 

the New Testament, the early church, and into “monasticism and medieval Christianity,” where 

the figure of the “medieval devil” “is essentially the same devil handed down to secular modernity 

and therefore the devil best known to contemporary Western culture” (109). Kotsko then changes 

course; the second half of the book sketches the outlines of the biography of that medieval devil, 

from fallen angel to the “earthly city” to life in hell. This book covers quite a lot of territory in a 

very short time. It therefore skips like a stone through the very deep swell of the waters of Jewish 

and Christian theology, politics, and eschatology. Kotsko writes with wit, intelligence, and the 

sure-footed pace of an author who knows he is right and knows that it matters. This book bears a 

scholarly sensibility, very much in the spirit of Giorgio Agamben, whom Kotsko has frequently 

translated into English. But by the end, it is clear that Kotsko has written his own apocalypse, 

condemning our demonic world order (206) and inviting his readers toward a new vision of that 

world order overturned, of the devil saved. 

Theological and philosophical study in the last twenty-five years has been rife with 

genealogies, from Alasdair MacIntyre’s Whose Justice? Which Rationality? to John Milbank’s 

Theology and Social Theory to Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age and Thomas Pfau’s Minding the 

Modern. What these genealogies share is an interest in the birth of modernity. Kotsko’s genealogy 

aims more narrowly and more deeply, returning genealogy to its Foucaultian roots. He aims to 

unearth the symbolic frameworks and developments that create the Christian demonic imaginary. 

He chooses to write a genealogy instead of an intellectual history because the method of the latter 

“can never allow them to answer the deeper and more urgent question of why such ideas emerged 



Review of The Prince of This World  92 
 

and developed in the way they did” (9). It is essentially an anti-theology, one that Kotsko writes 

with the urgent zeal of an evangelist. “On one level,” he says, “theology has always been a victim 

blaming discourse” (3). He concedes that it has also served as a “weapon against oppression and 

injustice,” but that is not the tradition he is trying to expose, and, to get at this destructive “long 

theological heritage,” “one must learn to read texts as strategies, as interventions in a power 

struggle. It means accepting, with Foucault, that knowledge is not separate from power or even a 

mere tool of power but a form of power—and a particularly powerful one at that” (11). Kotsko 

grounds this discipline and obedience in what he describes as a “methodological credo,” 

Nietzsche’s famous depiction in the Genealogy of Morals. Having articulated these tenets of faith, 

Kotsko is prepared credere ut intellegere, to believe so as to understand. When seen through the 

lens of genealogical faith, the discourses of Satan, of political theology, of the problem of evil, of 

the atonement, of eschatology, all emerge as strategies of power. The task of this book, then, is to 

trace the particular lineaments of these several theologies that, he argues, all center around the 

figure of Satan.  

The shape of the argument, to simplify an account that takes many parallel tacks as it goes, is 

something like this: Monotheistic traditions, given their structure, have to wrestle with the problem 

of evil. This speculation leads to the crafting of a figure of Satan, an adversary to God’s will and 

authority. However, strict monotheism constrains the power of this figure, as Satan cannot in any 

sense be an equal and opposite force to the monotheistic God. So, in the context of Israel’s 

experience of oppression and suffering at the hands of external oppression, first Pharaoh and then 

Antiochus Epiphanes provoke speculation on a hostile other who is both opposed to God and yet 

still subject to God’s authority. Kotsko recasts the standard von Radian division (without citation) 

between “prophecy” and “apocalyptic” as different ways of accounting for this enemy. It is striking 

here that Kotsko does not cite or discuss much of the relevant literature on the development and 

definition of ancient apocalyptic, for which there is an abundant literature that would call some of 

these bifurcations into question.  

The apocalyptic schema, which answers the problem of evil by casting it forward into a final 

conflict and judgment, is transformed in the Constantinian age. (Note, the Edict of Milan, such as 

it is, was written in 313, not 318, as the book reports (72).) The dawn of Christian establishment, 

to Kotsko, mandates the displacement of demonic authority, “the great world-historical reversal 

whereby the devil becomes a tool of the oppressor rather than the oppressed” (75). Kotsko goes 



93  Hughes 
 

on to argue that, in the hands of Athanasius and, even more clearly, much later in Anselm, God 

adopts the role of Satan. He notes, e.g., that Anselm critiques the “rights of the devil” theories of 

atonement, and proposes “the notion that Christ, rather than being a ransom offered to the devil is 

now a sacrifice offered to God” (97). Christ’s death becomes “the ransom paid to God” (96). 

Kotsko does not trouble to consider the differences, cultic and scriptural, between “ransom” and 

“sacrifice,” and instead equates them absolutely. This becomes a pivot point around which “God 

becomes the devil” (103). “In short, the God of medieval Christianity is a God who delights in 

suffering, a God who has become demonic” (103). This medieval God “has become 

indistinguishable from the arbitrary and cruel rulers against whom the apocalyptic tradition 

protested […] he has become the devil” (105).  

And, at the same time, the demonic is displaced onto the marginal and the powerless—onto 

Jews within and Muslims without, onto women, mystics, witches, and heretics within, “but also 

the increasingly repressed and reviled demands of the physical body itself” (105). For Kotsko, this 

is the deep truth of medieval politics and culture. This seems to be the energy that is driving 

Kotsko’s narrative, and the rest of the book is devoted to exploring how this plays out in Western 

culture. These later sections are more explicitly in conversation with Foucault and Agamben, even 

as Kotsko engages Augustine, Dante, and Luther, among others. Here Kotsko has landed on 

something worth exploring, but it is something that has been explored in several venues already. 

R. I. Moore’s Formation of a Persecuting Society comes to mind as perhaps the most significant 

critical challenge. A disappointment of this book is that Kotsko shows no awareness of this 

literature, or much else on apocalyptic thought, Satan, Antichrist, or so many of the other 

dimensions of his argument. Perhaps this could be attributed to Kotsko’s preference for genealogy 

over “intellectual history,” but it leads too often to superficial, cliché, or imprecise descriptions, 

e.g., of the monastic account of the body, of Anselm’s doctrine of the atonement, of predestination, 

and so on. Kotsko’s passion is striking, but the critical power of his argument is often obscured by 

this lack of depth of field. He often will be found reinventing the wheel (say, in his discussion of 

the demonization of the marginalized) or missing fundamental elements of argument (such as 

Anselm’s distinction between ransom and sacrifice). So much time and space is covered, so 

quickly, that it is hard to absorb that critical force.  

To manage a genealogy of this magnitude in one short book is quite a challenge. And, indeed, 

Kotsko has doubled down on the challenge, because, as I mentioned above, the book is composed 



Review of The Prince of This World  94 
 

of two parts, and each is its own sort of genealogy, related to but distinct from the other. That, plus 

the sort of prophetic urgency that suffuses the book, make for an overall sense of compression. 

Kotsko can be incisive and creative in his readings of texts—his typology of political theological 

paradigms in the Hebrew Bible into Deuteronomistic, prophetic, and apocalyptic is both 

provocative and helpful—but every reading seems to move too quickly and without sufficient 

argument. One can appreciate this book as a prophetic cri de coeur, and with the author we can 

desire and hope for a world in which even the devil may be saved. But the roots of that hope are 

sunk just as deeply in the soil of ancient and medieval Christian sources, in the subversive (though 

too often subverted) claim that it is finally Love, and not power, “that moves the sun and other 

stars.” 

 

KEVIN L. HUGHES 

Villanova University 


