ABSTRACT
In Towards a History of the Idea of Devil in Romanian Mentality, Mircea Paduraru proposes a diachronic approach to the devil-phenomenon putting at work, with a different meaning, a threefold scheme of analysis borrowed from G.B. Vico’s The New Science: a. a mythical stage; b. a legendary stage; c. a popular stage; the fundamental criterion for the three stages being given by the gradual diminishing of the “sacred” (in the sense of Rudolf Otto’s Das Heilige) from the idea of devil.
Working with three types of texts (myth-structured narratives, fairy-tales and simple idioms and proverbs), corresponding to the stages of the working-scheme, Mircea Paduraru draws the attention to three types of images of the devil, which talk not only about three progressive ways of imagining the devil, but also about three understandings of temporality and of three types of relating to the “sacred”.