{Though some may dispute the relevance of Satan, he has been in the news lately thanks to Republicans like Marjorie Taylor Greene, who stated that the Catholic Church is “controlled by Satan,” and Georgia gubernatorial candidate Kandiss Taylor, who is explicitly running against the “Satanic Elites,” the “Satanic Regime,” and the “Luciferian Cabal”. My own interest in Satan is less political, but I applaud Greene and Taylor for their audacity in standing up to the Prince of Darkness. Yesterday, I offered an excerpt from Mark Twain in which he discussed his own lifelong curiosity about Satan; since that excerpt exhibited a streak of irreverence, today I provide a more orthodox perspective.}
It is good to know one’s enemies. For Christians, the primary enemy is Satan, and Christian scholars through the ages have expended much effort (and much ink) to explain Satan, his diabolical nature, and his malevolent intent. 1
According to Denis de Rougemont (The Devil’s Share), “The Bible informs us that Lucifer is an angel fallen from heaven.” In fact, the Bible says little if anything about Lucifer, but de Rougemont takes Jesus’ statement “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven” as definitive.
I have no idea how de Rougemont knows so much about Lucifer/Satan, but I can assure you that none of what follows can be sourced to the Bible:
Angels are spiritual creatures living and functioning on the frontiers of the Eternal and the Creation, of eternity and time. They are divine intentions, messengers, servants flying on lightning wings, whose speed is that of thought, and this is why they are invisible to us; intelligences without fraud, participating in the omniscience of the Creator, and this is why we have difficulty in understanding them. At the summit of the angelic hierarchy are the Archangels. One single Archangel betrayed his mission, his message, and his very being, and this is Lucifer, the bearer of Light. Satan rebelled, he refused to serve, he refused to transmit his divine message, he wished to become original, the author of his own destiny, the bearer of his own light. And immediately, by the very laws of Being, he fell from heaven, which is the region where God’s intention reigns absolute. Lucifer became his own messenger, and as he is but a pure spirit, once the source of the Spirit was cut off, he became the messenger of Nothingness and its mysteries.
Though fallen, he has kept the nature of a pure spirit. Like an artist who has lost his genius and who no longer believes in painting, but who has kept his ‘knack’ and his eagerness to belong to the vanguard, Satan still knows Spirit and spirits, but no longer the end and the glory to which they are destined.
The dazzling and consuming act of pride which transformed the Angel of Light into an Angel and Prince of Darkness condemned him to a limitless and therefore desperate imperialism. The entire world could not fill the void which the consciousness of having left his rightful place in the world forms in the heart of a creature. Having fallen from the eternal, Satan wants the infinite. Having fallen from Being, he wants Having. But his problem is forever insoluble. Everything that he annexes to himself he destroys. To be sure, he can have everything, since he is called Prince of this World in Scripture—but he will never have anything but this world. He will never reconquer Heaven, which is properly the soul of the world; of the universe, he will have only the material carcass. It is from the debris of this disaffected Mansion that he will make the firewood to kindle his Hell.
He knows it full well. This is why his desire and his rabid jealousy focus on individual souls. He prowls around us like a roaring lion in quest of his prey. He prowls around us like a gangster obsessed by kidnapping. His victories will always be sterile, for one does not become a father by kidnapping a child; one can steal the child, but not paternity. One can steal power, but not authority. Satan can steal this world, not its divinity.
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1 Ink is known to possess anti-demonic properties. Martin Luther once routed the Devil by hurling an inkwell at him.
Denis de Rougemont was a Swiss author and “cultural theorist” best known for his classic study Love in the Western World. He won a defamation suit in 1982 against a journalist who accused de Rougemont, in print, of advocating “French Fascism” and who compared him to the Vichy collaborators in World War II.
Denis de Rougemont - Wikipedia
Rougemont 2.0: Denis de Rougemont's complete online — Rougemont 2.0 (unige.ch)
English translations of de Rougemont’s works are available online, for free, at www.archive.org
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