The Little Red Blog

Saturday Lecture: On the Nature of Demons

{Demonology and angelology are sadly neglected subjects in our modern woke universities. It’s no wonder that, as Richard Weaver pointed out, it has been all downhill since the 14^th century.}

"I saw Satan fall like lightning from heavens." (Luke 10:18)

Norman Cohn, from Europe’s Inner Demons:

Throughout the history of the early church, Satan and the lesser demons continued to be imagined very much as they were in the New Testament; with the elaboration of a Christian theology, however, their theological significance became more clearly defined. Gradually they were integrated into the central doctrines of Christianity, the fall of man, original sin, and man’s redemption through the crucifixion of Christ.

In the first century before Christ, the Book of Enoch hinted that it was one of a number of “Satans,” conceived as followers of the chief Satan, who had led Eve astray. In the first century after Christ, Satan was at last brought explicitly into relation with the serpent in the Garden of Eden; either the serpent was Satan disguised, or Satan acted through the serpent. The Books of Adam and Eve, composed late in the first century, elaborated on the part played by Satan in the fall of man. To deceive Eve, Satan hung himself on the walls of Paradise, looking like an angel and singing hymns like an angel. ¹ He persuaded the serpent to let him speak through its mouth. ²

This same Satan had once been one of the angels of God, but he disobeyed God’s commands and led other angels to disobey, with the result that he and his followers were cast out of heaven. In the main, this view of the fall of Satan and the fall of man was adopted by the Fathers of the Church, from the second-century apologist Justin Martyr onwards. The only point of dispute concerned the fall, not of Satan himself, but of the lesser angels. Earlier sources held that these angels had fallen because they desired the daughters of men; it followed that, unlike Satan, they had not fallen until well after the fall of man. This difficulty was circumvented by the third-century theologian Origen, who proclaimed that the passage in Genesis about the sons of God and the daughters of men must be taken allegorically; the true fall of the angels had taken place before the creation of the world. ³

By the end of the fourth century, it was generally accepted in East and West alike that the fall of man was part of a prodigious cosmic struggle which had begun when some of the heavenly host had revolted against God and had been cast out of heaven. As for the habitat of the demons, there was never, in those centuries, any doubt about that. Whereas the angels dwelt in the highest heaven, near the throne of God, the demons were confined to the dark air immediately above the earth. This is the meaning of Paul’s famous phrase about ‘spiritual wickedness in high places.’  The Fathers shared his views. Augustine, for example, maintained that ‘the Devil was expelled, along with his angels, from the lofty abode of heaven, and was cast into darkness, that is to say, into our atmosphere, as into a prison.’

It was also agreed that, since angels possessed ethereal bodies, composed of air and light, demons must be similarly equipped. According to Augustine, these ethereal bodies give demons extraordinary powers of perception and enable them to transport themselves through the air with extraordinary speed. From their airy habitat, Satan and his demons wage incessant war upon the Christians; for the Devil, who never knows peace, cannot leave men in peace. Together with his demons he causes both the sickness of individuals and collective disasters such as drought, bad harvests, epidemics among men and beasts. They also seduce Christians to abandon the true faith, to fall into schism and heresy. St. Cyprian even held that, save for the activity of devils, there would be no heresies or schisms at all. ⁴

Not for a moment do demons cease from their plaguing and tempting of mortals. Demons are filled with such hostility towards mankind that it is a miracle that any human being survives. 

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¹ Paradise had walls? Apparently so.

² Ventriloquism having been, in the day, one of Satan’s many talents.

³ The creation stories in Genesis do not mention either Satan or angels. It is only after Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden that we are told “On the east side of Eden, God placed cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.” The cherubim, whatever their original function(s), were quite literally deployed as guardian angels.

⁴ Norman Cohn notes that “In the days of the Fathers, the church was still full of optimism, still sure of its faith and of the triumph of that faith. Satan might be strong, but it was within the power of any Christian to resist him.” However, he adds, “Gradually, over the centuries, new and terrible anxieties began to make themselves felt in Christian minds; by the later Middle Ages, Satan and his demons had become far more powerful and menacing.”

Saturday Lecture: The Devil's Birth Certificate

{Seriously, I am done with the Devil after this...}

Gerald Messadie (from The History of the Devil):

Some four millennia ago, hordes of horsemen from the south of present-day Russia descended through the passes of the Caucasus to settle on the fertile plains of Iran. They exchanged the shores of the Black and Azov seas for those of the Caspian and the Persian Gulf; some of their tribes headed for Greece and Anatolia, while others pushed toward southern Scandinavia and Finland and, eventually, around 2000 BCE, reached the British Isles.

Among the baggage they carried with them was one of the most volatile explosives ever imagined. It was nothing at first, a few beliefs symbolized in the form of little statues and amulets, but it bore the seeds of the Devil. These emigrants, a collection of warriors and shepherds known today as the Kurgan people (from the Russian word for ‘barrow’), were to found the first religion in the world that pitted a unique Devil against an equally unique God.

These people have come to be called the Indo-Europeans, after the community of languages, all related to Sanskrit, they spoke. All the cultures that today we call ‘Western’ arose out of the Indo-European invasion. Many of the systems we rely on to interpret the world, including our deities, would not exist if the Kurgan people had not seized the Near and Middle East (as well as almost the whole of Europe). The Indo-Europeans were probably the most significant factor in the development of ancient religions, the greater number of Eastern and eastern Mediterranean ones having been influenced by both the geographical expansion that ensured the civilization’s safety and by its advanced political organization. Indo-European influences can be found, for instance, in Greek Orphism. Post-exilic Judaism, the various strains of Jewish and Christian Gnosticism, Christianity and Shiite Islam all bear its mark to some degree.

It can be argued that much of the monotheistic theology that founded modern cultures was formed within the Iranian matrix; our Jewish, Christian, and Islamic angels and archangels, and consequently our Devil, were born there. Pre-Zoroastrian Iranian Vedic belief revolved around two main groups of supernatural entities, the ‘ahuras’ or higher deities and the ‘daevas’ or lesser ones. These groups were ruled by two principal gods, Ahura Mazda and Mithra, who together governed the course of the sun, the moon, and the stars. There was no known counter-god or demon comparable to the Devil.

One fundamental Vedic belief, however, was that of salvation, an entirely new idea in the history of religions which suddenly came to assume great importance. The Devil would find fertile ground in this idea—because if you say ‘salvation’ you also say ‘damnation,’ and once you’ve said ‘damnation’ you’ve already said ‘the Devil’. The concept of salvation inherently entails that of sin. The salvation theme appears even more clearly in the myth of Mithra, a savior who, like the Christian one, is announced by prophets and whose birth, recalling that of Jesus, takes place in a cave, with the miraculous arrival heralded by the appearance of a mysterious star. Mithra is the celestial intermediary between two antagonists, Ahura Mazda (the Good One) and Ahriman (the Bad One), the governors of the universe. 

The Iranian religion, which remained in existence until the third century CE, did far more than any other religion to mold the Devil. Iranian polytheism made up a centralized celestial government that, like earthly government, hinged upon a provisional balance between Good and Evil, and promised to disappear only after the ultimate victory of Good in an envisioned future.

And then came Zoroaster (c. 628-551 BCE). Anticipating the temptation of Jesus in the desert by more than six centuries, it was said that Satan tried to entice Zoroaster into abandoning his faith; after a struggle with demons, Zoroaster triumphed and drove them away. The books that speak of him are filled with tales of wonder and miraculous healings. Both in his own day and over later centuries, Zoroaster was considered not just a prophet but a supernatural being, which has led some to call him a myth—the fate of many a prophet.

We know enough about Zoroaster to sketch out a portrait of the man: a poor and temperamental poet, nonviolent, sensitive, perhaps a shaman, and someone who bore grudges. He hated cruel aristocrats, and he attacked with particular virulence those who engaged in bloody sacrifices, even though such rites traditionally characterized men’s cults. The religion which Zoroaster shaped had to distinguish itself, through its rigor and simplicity, from the polytheisms of the day. It had to impose itself not by the magnificence of its rites, its sacrifices, or the power of its adherents, but by its inner hold on the individual—and, to create that, it had to foster a feeling of urgency about what was at stake: the entering of or exclusion from Heaven, salvation or eternal disgrace.

Zoroaster’s restructuring of Iranian Vedic religion began as a reform, seemingly moderate and conciliating. It was only later that it became an outright revolution, with monotheism well and truly established. Ahuru Mazda became the one and only god worthy of veneration as the creator of Heaven and Earth, of the spiritual and material worlds. He was the sovereign, lawmaker, supreme judge, master of day and night, the center of nature, and the inventor of moral law. The relationship among Zoroaster’s Mazdaism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is obvious.

Ahura Mazda’s twin brother, Ahriman (the Bad One), became the God of Evil, whose worshipers were the ‘followers of the lie,’ led astray by untruth. Iran thus witnessed the first appearance of the Devil, a specific and unambiguous God of Evil. Ahriman was the peer of Ahura Mazda, and the two were destined to battle mercilessly. In some apocalyptic texts, it was foretold that a great war would come to pass during which Heaven would send down Mithra the Savior to destroy the forces of Evil by fire and sword.

In Zoroaster’s modified religion, the great prophetic tenets of monotheism appeared for the first time. Good and Evil became transcendent principles, and the ambiguities associated with older, pragmatic interpretations of existence vanished. Zoroaster made the dualism of Good and Evil official; both were immanent and preexisting, and their conflict was not to be resolved until the end of time.

Zoroaster’s conception of the world was so close to Christianity that one wonders if the church Fathers had perhaps read the Iranian texts: life is only a passage in which each thought, word, and action determines the individual’s fate in the hereafter, where the God of Good will punish the wicked and reward the virtuous. At the end of time, the dead will be resurrected; the Last Judgment will condemn the bad to Hell, while the good will live in Paradise for all eternity.

Under Zoroaster, the framework of the three ‘Abrahamic’ monotheisms had been erected. The Devil’s birth certificate was filled out by an Iranian prophet.

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Know Your Enemy (Part Four)

{Let us conclude (for now) our brief inquiry into Satan, this time by means of excerpts from Albert Reville’s 1877 work, The Devil: His Origin, Greatness, and Decadence}

In the late 19^th century, Albert Reville surveyed for his readers the havoc which Satan waged upon God’s good creation:

Satan sought to spoil the work of creation and waged war on men whose innocent happiness was insupportable to him. It was he who introduced death with all its horrors.  A multitude of diseases, those especially which through their singularity and the absence of external symptoms defied natural explanations, as madness, epilepsy, St. Vitus's dance, dumbness, certain forms of blindness, &c., were attributed to his agents. Millions of fiends, obedient to his commands, were supposed to stream constantly from the depths of hell, and like the night demons of the old faith preferred, for their haunts, deserts and wildernesses. But there they grew weary, they were thirsty, they wandered about and found no rest; and their great resource was to take up their abode in a human body, that they might absorb its substance and refresh themselves with its blood. Sometimes many of them would occupy the same frame. Hence the demoniacs and the possessed of whom we read so often in the gospel narrative.

Reville, known as an ‘extremist liberal’ theologian, pointed out one of the peculiarities of Christian doctrine: though Satan had been conquered by Christ, he was still running amok and raising, well, hell on earth. As Reville noted:

Nothing did more to increase fear of Satan than vague descriptions of the immensity of his power, and of the risk run by exposure to his attacks; especially as, by a singular contradiction from which the ancient theology never succeeded in extricating itself, the devil, although declared vanquished, overthrown, and rendered powerless by his victor Christ, did not the less maintain his infernal sway over a large majority of mankind. The saints alone could count themselves safe from his ambushes; and, according to the legends which now began to spread, great was the prudence and energy they required to escape him. Everything turned upon this constant state of watchfulness. Baptism dwindled into an exorcism. To become a Christian, was to renounce the devil with his pomps and works. Expulsion from the fold of the Church, whether for immoral behavior or for heterodoxy, was being "delivered over to Satan."

Did the first followers of Jesus consider baptism to have been an exorcism? It was a washing away of sins; it was a public repentance; and it was an infusion of Christ’s Spirit that would start the believer on the path to holiness and immortality. Pauline Christians, though, insisted that Satan ruled the world and held men and women captive from birth, the consequence of Original Sin. Satan therefore had to be evicted from the soul before Christ’s pneuma would deign to enter.

At this point, Albert Reville has had enough of what he sees as theological and doctrinal nonsense:

The truth is that the devil is ridiculous. That being who is presented to us as so cunning, so malicious, so cleverly selfish, who strives unceasingly to carry on the troublesome business of corrupting men's souls, turns out to be very foolish. When, brought down from the heights where poetry and mystery have sometimes succeeded in placing him, he is subjected to close inspection and confronted with plain truth, Satan becomes a mere absurdity; and ever since this has been clearly seen it has become impossible to honor him by acknowledging his real existence.

Like his fellow Frenchman Gerald Messadie, Reville admits the historical influence of the Devil while denying the reality of such an entity. He cites modern cosmologies as having ruled out, once and for all, Satan’s existence:

Ever since a true knowledge of the constitution of the universe has dissipated the allusions which formed an indispensable frame to the picture of the Satan of olden time—a fixed dome above, an earth in the midst, and a hell under the earth—ever since we have been compelled to see God's presence live and move in all things, there is no more room left in the world for the devil. Satan is still tolerated as an expression, a type, a symbol which the language of religion has sanctioned; and this is all. But to allow him any place in civil or domestic codes, to admit him into actual life, this is now quite out of the question: non possumus, “we cannot”.

In other words, if, as the gospels tell us, Jesus defeated Satan, it was an empty victory over an imaginary enemy. Evil remains and will always be with us, as Reville reminds us:

This doctrine of the devil did not solve the problem of the origin of evil; the truth is that it solved nothing. It carried into heaven the problem that seemed insoluble on earth. The mainstay of faith in the devil, or the one constituent of that faith, is the power of evil in and around us.

If, as many believe, God is a projection of our ideals, then Satan is a projection of our dark impulses; both the Deity and his rival, the anti-Deity, are no more than spiritual phantoms conjured from our own imaginations. Maybe, suggested Reville, it's time we stop scaring ourselves to death.  

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Albert Réville - Wikipedia “Albert Réville (1826—1906) was a distinguished French Protestant theologian, known for his ‘extremist’ liberal views.”

Boo!

Wednesday with Pascal: Know Your Enemy (Part Three)

{Pascal the existential Russian blue cat is eager to jump on the ‘Let’s talk about the Devil’ bandwagon. As an antidote to the somewhat smug perspective of C.S. Lewis, Pascal has turned to the late Gerald Messadie’s polemical ‘History of the Devil’.}

Gerald Messadie had no doubt about what the Devil represents, and he was not shy about calling him out on his poor character:

The Devil represents bread without sweat; he has become the god of effortless gain through speculation, drug trafficking, smuggling, prostitution, and theft. At the most fundamental level, he is thus the god of laziness, of sin, of incompetence, and of indifference. He is the secret god of presidents and ministers who consult their astrologers to see what tomorrow will bring. He is the god of businesspeople who rely on insider trading to earn profit.

For Messadie, the Devil seeks to undermine the work ethic, reversing, as it were, the punishment which God inflicted upon Adam and his progeny in Eden. “Bread without sweat” recalls the incident, recounted in the Christian gospels, when Satan tempted Jesus to prove his power by turning stones into bread, which Jesus refused to do either because it would have been too easy or because he wanted to show that Satan wasn’t the boss of him. ¹

For all the opprobrium he heaped upon him, though, did Messadie believe that Satan is real, or does he merely personify behaviors and attitudes that Messadie disliked? ²

Satan has become, at the most elevated level, the inspirer of systematic deconstruction, of derisiveness, of ‘the Void,’ of philosophers who say that reason has been abolished and of aesthetes who say that talent is inferior to the lack of talent (and who, wanting to provoke but succeeding only in revealing the truth about themselves, say that a bicycle wheel is equal to an Attic masterpiece, that a series of recorded door squeaks is equal to a Beethoven quartet—even that a blank canvas is equal to a Veronese.) Satan is the god of nihilism and despair. This is where true Satanism lies—not in the hypocrisies of California sects but in those of the elite.

Messadie here associated Satan with postmodern deconstructionists, cynics, and cultural relativists, which would surely have endeared him—Messadie, not Satan—to conservative culture critics. But, um, again—is this Satan real?

As it turns out, not exactly:

In a singular inversion of roles, after having been born as the defender of the absolute power dreamed of by the Zoroastrian priests, the Devil became the ultimate antisocial agent. The pillar of Christian theologies, he became by his very existence the destroyer of democracies and the precursor of totalitarianism. Having created the figure of Satan, then having that mythology appropriated by modern philosophers, Western religions now find themselves in the position of the sorcerer’s apprentice. They are maintaining a fundamentally pagan myth which was once a totalitarian tool and is, today, an essentially nihilistic portent of revolution. Religions upholding the myth of Satan are sawing through the worm-riddled branch they themselves are supported by—that is, the social order.

Messadie concluded that Satan is in every way the worst possible being imaginable, his only saving grace being that he does not exist. Messadie seemed satisfied that the evidence, or lack thereof, confirmed the mythical nature of the Devil:

Should we believe, then, in the reality of Satan, of demonic possession, of the so-called ‘paranormal’ phenomena that are so abundantly (and smugly) described by Satanists, exorcists, and supernaturalists of every ilk? To consider the supernatural as such: can immaterial forces manifest themselves, and, if so, do they include evil powers? To this day, there is not a single piece of concrete proof for the intervention of such forces, benevolent or malevolent, into history; the most famous historical incidents can be explained without recourse to the supernatural.

Whereas C.S. Lewis suggested that demons had been responsible for a good deal of history, Messadie insisted that “Human beings are responsible for history, and the intrusions of religion into history have all, from the Crusades on, been disastrous. Believing that one defends one’s God with the sword, humanity has spilled oceans of blood—it has done Satan’s work and offended, as deeply as possible, the God of mercy and life. Every religious war is essentially Satanic, as is every act of exclusion. In fact, it is profoundly Satanic to believe in the Devil.” ³

In concluding, Messadie issued a blunt challenge:

We live under the sign of a nonexistent deity cobbled together twenty-six centuries ago by power-hungry Iranian priests. We live under the sign of Satan. Is this our destiny? Are we to let an imaginary monster devour us forever? ⁴

Well--are we? Or should we keep praying to an imaginary Savior to rescue us?

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Gerald Messadié - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

¹ Yet, later in the gospels, we learn that Jesus miraculously fed a crowd of thousands from a few loaves of bread and a handful of fish, thus conceding, despite having told Satan that “Man does not live by bread alone,” that bread, and some fish, were not entirely unnecessary; also conceding, at least implicitly, that he wasn't above the occasional bit of showy magic.

² “We are all someone else’s devil,” wrote Messadie.

³ You see what he did there, right?

⁴ The next band I form will be called Imaginary Monster.

Please allow him to introduce himself...

Know Your Enemy (Part Two)

{In our quest to better understand the Old Enemy, we now turn to one of the great diabologists of recent times, Mr. C.S. Lewis. Lewis' knowledge of demons was displayed most famously in his book 'The Screwtape Letters,' although, sadly, Lewis never revealed his sources.}

“Of devils, Lewis said that there are two equally serious errors: disbelief in them and an “excessive and unhealthy interest in them.” (Bruce Edwards)

C.S. Lewis was one of the most influential Christian apologists of the 20th century, as Bruce Edwards made clear:

The September 8, 1947 cover of Time Magazine improbably depicted the demure C. S. Lewis accompanied by a fiercely impish devil poised on his left shoulder, a caricature of Lewis’ infamous fictional protagonist, Screwtape, AKA, Senior Tempter of Hell. Such was the notoriety and impact of Lewis. Few people in 1947 were writing about demons and their ilk, and still fewer believed in them enough to bother speculating on this question: What if we could see what the temptation of our souls looks like through the eyes of the other side? In other words, what if we could interview a demon? ¹

So far as I know, Lewis did not literally interview a demon, much less Satan himself; but he did offer some perspective on the spiritual Adversary against whom each and every one of us must struggle. For one thing, Lewis reported that “The Devil is a deceiver whose first deception was self-deception. Over time Satan has fallen deeper in delusion, a victim of his own lies and deceptions, and seeks only to devour those who would similarly choose to believe his lies and the lies about themselves that he plants and nurtures.” To be honest, this revelation was old news, at least for Christians, since Jesus had outed Satan as a liar long ago. Did Lewis have anything more interesting to offer?

Well, for one thing, Lewis debunked the notion that Satan was God’s adversary. “Satan is not God’s nemesis,” Lewis explained, because God, as the supreme eternal being, can have no nemesis, no rival. Instead, according to Lewis, Satan was at best an antagonist “of Michael the archangel,” in addition to being the chief source of mankind's woes. 

While Satan's supposedly rebellious nature has earned him admirers (e.g., Saul Alinsky and Hillary Clinton), Lewis insisted that any such admiration would be misplaced: “To admire Satan is to give one’s vote not only for a world of misery, but also for a world of lies and propaganda, of wishful thinking, of incessant autobiography. Yet the choice is possible. Hardly a day passes without some slight movement towards it in each one of us.”

But if Satan is so insignificant and, compared to God, so powerless, what is his appeal? What does he have to offer, and why are so many of us so quick to sign (even in blood) on the dotted line? Perhaps Satan knows us better than we know ourselves, although why that should be the case is unclear; why would God allow Satan access to our hearts and to our hearts' desires? Regardless, in Bruce Edwards’ rephrasing of Lewis, “Temptation is essentially a campaign of distortion, exaggeration, manipulation, lies that tempt the individual one way or another to focus on the self, to become selfish, self-important, preoccupied with one’s own appearance, one’s own standing, a constant appeal to vanity—the beginnings of hell on earth.” 

Lewis’ Satan, then, is not so much terrifying as he is annoyingly and persistently manipulative, less given to cinematic demonic possession than to clever nudges and insinuations, late-night pillow talk, and random acts of temptation. He is sly, perhaps, in that he only offers us what we already want; whether he can deliver it, of course, is the point. Bob Dylan seemed to grasp Satan’s allure: “He's a great humanitarian, he's a great philanthropist / He knows just where to touch you, honey, and how you like to be kissed / He'll put both his arms around you, you can feel the tender touch of the beast / You know that sometimes Satan comes as a man of peace.”

Think of Satan as inflicting damnation by a thousand paper cuts. If that is his strategy, C.S. Lewis believed it has been surprisingly effective:

Demons’ effect on human history has been far greater than that of microbes, though, of course, equally unrecognized. In the light of what we now know, all history will have to be rewritten. ² The real causes of all the principal events are quite unknown to historians; that, indeed, is why history has not yet succeeded in becoming a science.

Demons and microbes are both invisible to the naked eye; the latter, however, can at least be seen through microscopes. In any case, if demons are somehow running the human show, as Lewis suggested, then it's a wonder we have survived this long.  

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The Devil and Mr. Lewis - Official Site | CSLewis.com

¹ Interviewing a demon sounds almost as interesting as interviewing a vampire! I wonder if Tom Cruise would be interested…

² A fair question for Mr. Lewis would have been, "In the light of what we now know about what?"

Screwtape portrait by AfizethArt at Deviant Art

Know Your Enemy (Part One)

{Diabology--the study of the origins, nature, and purposes of the Devil--is a discipline sadly neglected in modern times. While "rationalists" will consider Satan nothing but a projection of our darker impulses, traditional Christianity insisted on the reality of God's eternal archenemy against whom Jesus battled. The Christian gospels claim that Jesus won those battles; two thousand years of subsequent history suggest, however, that the war is not yet decided. In any case, who among us does not find Satan, real or not, an intriguing figure?}

“The Devil has a considerably greater share in the affairs of the world and of the human spirit than is generally believed.” (Giovanni Papini, The Devil)

“Know your enemy” is a maxim attributed to Sun Tzu, author of The Art of War. If one believes—as did Giovanni Papini—that “the human soul is the daily battlefield between God and Satan,” and if one believes as well that the soul is simultaneously “the dwelling of the Divinity and the target of the Evil One,” then one is well advised to know as much as possible about whichever of the protagonists one considers the Adversary. ¹

With that in mind, Papini’s splendid book The Devil assayed to provide much needed intelligence about Satan (aka Old Nick, Lucifer, the Devil, etc.), the better to combat his wiles. The first thing to understand, wrote Papini, was that the Devil rules over this world and possesses human beings as his slaves, prisoners, and hostages. He cited the theologian Matthias Joseph Scheeben: “Through Adam’s sin, humanity became the prisoner and slave of the Demon. Humanity today is subject to him, belongs to him, and constitutes his kingdom on earth.” Papini admitted that the situation described by Scheeben seems to outrage the conscience—at least, the conscience of those who lack discernment. “It will strike simple minds as unthinkable that a loving and merciful Father should hand over to his Enemy those who were created and destined by Him for salvation. They will be shocked at the thought that the Evil One has received as his absolute property, as slaves and hostages, all the progeny of that man, Adam, who so miserably fell.”

Like it or not, said Papini, we had best face the facts:

The astonishment of simple people carries no weight before the mysteries of inscrutable divine law. Men are prisoners and slaves of the Devil; this world is the Kingdom of Satan. There is no help for it; whoever does not consider and believe himself to be subject to the Demon cannot be called a Christian. For this imprisonment, this enslavement of ours was not entirely done away with by the Redemption; even today, almost all of mankind, including the greater number of so-called Christians, is the slave and prisoner of Satan. This is confirmed a thousand-fold by events happening in the world today, where the heralds and couriers of the Antichrist have already appeared.

“So-called Christians”? To whom was Papini referring? “Among those who call themselves Christians,” he asked, “how many are there who are Christians in name only? The majority of those baptized [as Christians], upon reaching adulthood, do not keep faith with the baptismal promises made in their name; in one way or another, they give in to the blandishments and temptations of Satan.”

And those blandishments and temptations are literally everywhere, like Satan himself:

The Devil is everywhere. Who does not remember the famous lines from the medieval writer Carducci: ‘Does the poor little nun long for a stalk of endive? In that stalk dwells Satan. Is the monk beguiled by a little bird that sings outside his solitary cell? In that song lurks Satan.’ ² If the Devil is everywhere hidden and present, who will be able to save men from contact with him, from his contagion, his poisonous breath? Satan can be nesting even inside the prayer books and in the image painted above the altar.

Papini then reminded the understandably terrified reader that God, too, is everywhere, meaning that “the One and the Other may be side by side, even within the same subject, even within the very soul of man. But,” Papini wondered, “is such a cohabitation of opposites in every part of the universe thinkable, or even possible?” Papini knew that he, like every Christian thinker before him, was treading perilously close to the dangerous ground of metaphysical dualism, espoused by Zoroaster and by the ancient Gnostics, and expressed in modern times by Philip K. Dick: “One Mind there is, but under it two principles contend. The Mind lets in the light, then the dark, in interaction, and so time is generated.”

If, as Scripture says, we are created in the image and likeness of God, can it be that the duality within our souls reflects a fundamental duality within God Himself, and that the battle we wage daily between our good and evil impulses is nothing but a microcosmic reenactment of God’s own existential struggle?

I have encountered stranger notions. 

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Giovanni Pipini, The Devil (1954)

¹ Far be it from me to take sides!

² Full disclosure: I do not remember Carducci’s “famous lines”. For that matter, I have no idea who Carducci was nor any interest in finding out.

Saturday Lecture: Our Cultural Car Wreck

{According to myriad informed sources, it has been all downhill since the French Revolution, or the Enlightenment, or the Reformation, or William of Ockham. There are even scholars who argue in all seriousness that Western culture peaked with the 12^th-century Scholastics, which is one of the many reasons I am content not to be a scholar.}  

Roland Stromberg, from After Everything (1975)

“The intellectual culture of the modern world is exceptionally bewildering.” (Roland Stromberg)

It has been said that the nineteenth century invented all the ideas and ideologies that the twentieth century tried out, and that ‘modernism’ in the widest sense was born between 1880 and 1900. One might easily go further. Underneath the innumerable epiphenomena of contemporary history, there is good reason to believe that we are still living in the epoch opened by the French Revolution—an age only very inadequately described by the terms ‘capitalism’ and ‘bourgeois society,’ though they get at a part of it; a complex age characterized in at least some of its aspects by Henry Maine’s discerned shift ‘from status to contract,’ by Auguste Comte’s Positivism and ‘Age of Facts,’ by Thomas Carlyle’s Mechanical Age and Maurice Barre’s ‘deracination’. The age is also marked by democracy and legal equality, by urbanization and political aggregation, and by the increase of power and the loss of individuality.

This modern epoch has seen the destruction of ‘traditional society’ and the emergence of what Wyndham Lewis called Cosmic Man. It has been corroded, according to Walter Lippmann, by ‘the acids of modernity,’ by intellectualism and skepticism; along with its social simplicity, it has lost its religious faith and thus succumbed to ‘anomie’. It has forced art to the margins of society and ‘rationalized’ everything. At the same time, it has created, by reaction, a defiant individualism, a romantic egoism, and a Promethean intellectual pride, which is the response of outraged human nature to the ravages of this strange modernism.

Intellectual processes at work today have been going on for two centuries. Today, art moves toward its dissolution. Life and knowledge break apart. The age of books is over. The age of obscenity begins. The barbarians rise from the grave. Ancient authorities dissolve. Science and technology turn sour. Political reason decays. All is absurd. The superabundance of achievements and novelties, pouring in as never before on the individual exposed to them, staggers the brain. Apocalyptic feelings abound.

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After Everything was Roland Stromberg’s summary history of the West from 1945 to 1975. He did not necessarily subscribe to the views he described, but neither did he dismiss them.

Roland Stromberg (1916-2004) | Perspectives on History | AHA (historians.org)

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Christopher Booker, from The Neophiliacs (1969):

The view generally accepted today is that the last two centuries have witnessed man stretching up toward his true kingdom on earth, breaking free of centuries of primitive dependence on nature and religion and divinely ordained hierarchical systems, at last exercising himself to master his environment and to shine the clear light of science into every corner, while artists and thinkers penetrated a whole realm of consciousness of which their ancestors had never dreamed.

Of course, at the same time it is recognized that this process has brought with it terrible growing pains—the horrors of nineteenth-century industrialism, the two most destructive wars in history, increasing noise, ugliness, frustration, and neurosis, the fragmentation of knowledge, the disintegration of the arts, and so forth. But one of the most prominent characteristics of these years has been the growth of a sort of general schizophrenia, whereby the whole process has seemed so vast and inevitable that we have come to accept its dream and its nightmare aspects simultaneously, without ever fully equating the two. Our attitude to what is happening to mankind has been ultimately based on a dimly sensed and open-ended assumption that someday it would all work out for the best, or that even if it did not, at least that day lay comfortably far off.

It is only by looking at the overall picture that one may see the true relationship between modernity’s technological nightmare and its libertarian dream: that it is the former which, by distorting man’s view of his place in nature and reducing his civilization to an ever more unnatural, mechanical conformity, produces the latter, made up of all the individual and group fantasies of a society in disintegration, and which expresses the urge to social self-destruction latent in the first.

[Dream or nightmare, modernity is built on fantasy.] The more one stands outside of fantasy, the more obvious it becomes that all its forms are part of the same phenomenon. Not only do they all spring from the same root, but, from the standpoint of reality, they are interchangeable with each other.

All fantasy works like a drug—whether it takes the form of addiction to power or sex or television or revolutionary politics, it is all progressively addictive and leads, in the end, to frustration. All fantasy is a gamble—a temporary jump out of reality without much calculation of the probable consequences. And ultimately all fantasy is a form of sickness or madness—a disturbance of our mental equilibrium with the reality of the world around us.

In fact, what I describe as fantasy is what was known to former ages as evil. Nowadays, we have lost any exact sense of what we mean by the term ‘evil’. We use it either vaguely, as a suggestive epithet, or we use it to describe things which are not evil itself but only its consequences—Hitler’s concentration camps or the Moors Murders. But the idea that evil is some kind of contagious psychic force in the world, that it is omnipresent both in society at large and in every one of us individually, something that can affect us all the time in even the smallest, most everyday ways is one that has been all but abandoned as a relic of that superstitious and primitive past from which we have so painfully emerged. The idea that evil might even by perceptible and measurable in objective, scientific terms is altogether alien to our modern way of thought.

It is perhaps surprising that modern science and psychology should have made so little effort, if not to provide a reinterpretation of the meaning of evil, at least to explain in psychological terms why it was that our ancestors placed so much importance on the idea. We freely pay our respects, for instance, to Shakespeare, Pascal, and Plato as among the profoundest observers of human nature; and yet we somehow manage to overlook that, to any of them, the force of evil, whether classified as sin, delusion, or just vanity (that revealingly double-edged word implying both self-centeredness and illusion) was something specific and tangible, and that without a recognition of its insidious power it would be impossible to make sense of the human condition or to see man’s plight in perspective.

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Christopher Booker, a British journalist, wrote The Neophiliacs just as the Sixties were ending. He was greatly distressed by the nihilism and debauchery of that decade (especially in London!), not to mention the music, the fashions, and the hairstyles. He considered the entire decade to have been a psychic and cultural catastrophe. Since his book made no mention of Altamont, I assume the manuscript was completed prior to that era-defining event, one which surely confirmed Booker’s worst fears about the Sixties (after all, no one was ever murdered at a Lonnie Donegan concert). In any case, one reviewer calls The Neophiliacs “a masterpiece which must be read by anyone who wants to understand how we’ve ended up in the cultural car wreck that is Modern Britain.” Whatever your take on the Sixties, I think we can all agree that “Neophiliacs” would be a great name for a band.

Christopher Booker - Wikipedia

Wednesday with Pascal: A Marxism State of Mind

{Pascal the existential Russian blue cat all but begged me to assign him the task of commenting on the latest demagogic rant from ex-President Dunning-Kruger. I agreed, but I can see now I should first have asked Pascal exactly what he planned to say.} 

At CPAC 2023, perpetually cranky former Toddler-in-Chief Donald Trump spoke these words:

I said it many times that we would never be a socialist country, I shouted it out loud and I was right, because that train has passed the station, long ago, of socialism; it never came close to stopping, frankly. We’re now in a Marxism state of mind, a communism state of mind, which is far worse. We’re a nation in decline; our enemies are desperate to stop us because they know that we are the only ones that can stop them. They know that.

We had a Republican party that was ruled by freaks, neocons, globalists, open border zealots, and fools, but we are never going back to the party of Paul Ryan, Karl Rove, and Jeb Bush. We have no choice. If we don’t do this, our country will be lost forever. People are tired of RINOs and globalists; they want to see ‘America First,’ that’s what they want, it’s not too complicated.

We’re not a free nation right now. We don’t have free press; we don’t have free anything. In 2016, I declared, ‘I am your voice.’ Today I would add, I am your warrior. I am your justice, and for those who have been wronged and betrayed: I am your retribution, I am your retribution—not gonna let this happen, not gonna let it happen. I will totally obliterate the Deep State, I will fire…[applause stops him mid-sentence]

If only he had added, “I am become Shiva, destroyer of worlds!” this would have been a speech for the ages; as it stands, it’s a speech for ages approximately 5—8.

Surprisingly, a fitting response to President Person, Woman, Man, Camera, TV can be found in the scriptures (the Book of Job) with only a slight revision. Rather than “Job laments that he was ever born,” it is now “America laments that Donald Trump was ever born”:

Let the day perish on which he was born,
and the night that said, ‘A man-child is conceived.’ ¹
Let that day become darkness;
may God not seek it from above,
nor may daylight shine on it.
Let darkness and deep shadow claim it;
let clouds settle on it;
let them terrify it with the blackness of day.
Let darkness seize that night;
let it not rejoice among the days of the year;
let it not enter among the number of the months.
Look, let that night become barren;
let no joyful song enter into it.
Let the stars of its dawn be dark;
let it hope for light but let there be none,
and let it not see the eyelids of dawn
because it did not shut the doors of his mother’s womb.

Why did he not die at birth? ²
Why did he not come forth from the womb and expire?
Why were there knees to receive him
and breasts that he could suck?
For now he should lie down, and we would be at peace;
He would be asleep; and we would be at rest.
Or why was he not hidden like a miscarriage,
like infants who did not see the light?

I am but a mere cat ³, but even I shudder to imagine how long it will take America to live down the ignominy of having elected such a buffoonish, petulant man to the highest office in the country—not to mention the further ignominy of having to explain how 75 million Americans voted to give him a second term in office. To avert further national disgrace, I propose that the Environmental Protection Agency declare former President Dunce Cap a pollutant and a public health hazard, and quarantine him immediately.

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¹ “Man-child” could also be translated as “big baby” or “overgrown infant”.

² Seriously—why? Why did the heavens not darken? Why did the angels not cry themselves a river? Why did the earth itself not swallow him up? Why did Satan’s triumphant laughter fail to awaken God from His long sleep and alert him to the fact that something had gone terribly wrong! Why did the patented “Antichrist Early Warning” system fail to function? 

³ Not really; I am, as has been clearly and frequently stated, an existential Russian blue cat. Besides which, meerkats aren’t even cats; they are mongooses, which I am not.

CPAC 2023

Saturday Lecture: Deconstructing Virtue

{Is all so-called virtue merely ‘virtue signaling’? Are we all entitled to benefits based on our 'perpetual moral disabilities'? Such were the arguments made some 1600 years ago by Bishop Augustine of Hippo, the man who invented the introspective conscience of the West. ¹ For Augustine, human reason, passion, and will were an unholy trinity that ruled over the human soul; neither individually nor in any combination could they be trusted. What was left? Faith, of course, and divine grace; in what follows, however, there is little of those. Instead, and what makes this essay of such interest, E.J. Hundert explains how Augustine ruthlessly applied a hermeneutic of suspicion to every human action, motive, and virtue; we learn that Augustine was a pioneer of deconstruction (of human behavior) and unmasking (of human moral pretensions). You might even refer to Augustine’s moral reasoning as CMT: Critical Moral Theory.}

“Reason is and must always be the slave of the passions.” (David Hume)

“All human acts cry out to be deconstructed…” (E.J. Hundert)

E.J. Hundert on Augustine’s understanding of "the divided self":

Augustine argued that reason itself, rather than providing suitable criteria for moral choice in rational beings, only functions instrumentally in self-interested creatures. Reason offers to human actors strategies for the attainment of their ends, but in no way can unaided reason provide efficient guidance to an agent for the choice of these ends themselves, since they are always objects decided by the passions alone.

Augustine’s reasoning explains how beings who were created in God’s image and who retain, even in their fallen state, the capacity for rational choice, are nevertheless drawn to the evil they properly despise. When Augustine disobeyed his parents and teachers as a boy, he did so not because he wanted to do something better with his time but from no other motives but frivolity and competitiveness. When he and his friends stole some pears from a neighbor’s orchard, they did so not because they wanted to eat but for the singular desire to be wicked: the act of theft itself made the indifferent fruit delicious.

Most evil deeds appear rationally unintelligible because the satisfactions they bring bear no necessary relation to the intrinsic worth of their objects. They remain inexplicable if considered within the context of the traditional moral argument that sought in reason’s governance a bridle to passion’s power. Augustine claimed that the impulse to evil cannot be accounted for by bodily or social circumstances external to the soul, just as his own experience demonstrated (he insisted) that evil acts were not the consequence of false beliefs induced by fallacious reasoning. The paradox of evil derives from the fact that it appears fully formed and fully effective even in the young and well-nurtured child whose will could not plausibly have been so perversely shaped by the environment in which he lived.

Augustine isolated the paradox which lies behind all purely mortal achievements by bringing into sharp focus the final emptiness of human virtues. Every worldly action, regardless of its apparent grandeur, must in fact properly be reduced to its elemental, self-regarding sources if it is to become morally comprehensible; and none more so than the apparent ‘loftiness’ of the great and the seemingly charitable acts of the mighty. Indeed, all human acts cry out to be deconstructed into the merely outward expressions of unacknowledged inner needs, the forever incomplete and so active attempts at happiness by morally blind sensibilities living under the dominion of their overpowering and incomprehensible wills.

Such moral rigorism was the conceptual foundation of an ongoing project developed by Augustine’s early modern successors. If the proper account of action depended on an exact evaluation of emotions, then the moralist had before him an enormous, virtually never-ending task of psychological decoding. Just as vice sought by dissimulation to parade as virtue and so cried out for exposure, almost all apparent virtues were themselves only the residue of one hidden, self-interested passion checking another. Self-deceived but ever seeking to deceive their fellows, men resembled nothing so much as actors consumed by the performative requirements of the parts they played.

It was possible to conceive of an individual’s life as a journey of self-discovery; even so, any presentation of the self within this life was an act tainted by self-regard. Obsessive seekers of the world’s applause, men were obliged to conceal from the gaze of others those signs of pride whose exposure would reveal as unobtainable the ‘delights’ they compulsively sought from society.

Thus, after Augustine, the bringing to consciousness of hidden impulses through the activity of unmasking became for Christian intellectuals a duty, one of placing before a properly chagrined consciousness the otherwise concealed evidence of the self’s perpetual moral disabilities.

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Augustine and the Sources of the Divided Self on JSTOR (Original publication 1992)

¹ Credit for that invention had long been given to Paul the apostle, but Krister Stendahl debunked that claim decades ago.

Sunday Sermon: Job at the Circus

Stanley Diamond, from “Job and the Trickster”:

The Book of Job, generated by an archaic civilization, no longer primitive, represents the origins of our own conceptions of good and evil. It is, so to speak, an ideological pillar of our civilization. Like Plato’s ‘Republic,’ which was composed at roughly the same time, ‘Job’ is bent upon denying human ambivalence and social ambiguity; it insists upon the obliteration of injustice. Plato tells us that, in this world as we know it, there is no remedy for injustice. The Book of Ecclesiastes makes the same point: ‘There is a vanity that takes place on earth, that there are righteous men to whom it happens according to the deeds of the wicked, and wicked men to whom it happens according to the deeds of the righteous.’ The Book of Job is an effort to understand and come to terms with the blind injustice of the world; it represents the religious conscience of western civilization. ¹

In ‘Job,’ the relationship between good and evil is obscured, perhaps deliberately; for God apparently commands Satan, but is distinguished from him. Evil is being segregated as a principle from the principle of good. ² At the same time, since God can ultimately control Satan, He is omnipotent and yet (as Jean Calvin formulated) not responsible for the evil that men choose to do through the mediation of the devil. ³ Therefore, the concrete ambiguity of the human condition is denied; good and evil have a dual origin rather than, as in the complex unity of primitive consciousness, a single source.

In the Book of Job, integrated acts have been disintegrated into contrasting ideas; human actions are now seen as representing and being driven by principles that are abstracted from the reality of actual human behavior. Real behavior is never wholly good nor wholly evil; such purity is never encountered, least of all in primitive societies. It is only with the civilized reversal of principles and persons that such an attitude becomes conceivable; the abstract principle becomes a weapon against the person.

Job’s civilized failure may be defined as the refusal to understand and to accept the relationship between good and evil, and its expression in human ambivalence. That ambivalence is incorporated into the myths and rituals of primitive peoples to an extraordinary degree. The mythic personification of ambivalence (since we are dealing with primitive perceptions and not abstract conceptualizations) is most directly realized in the figure of the trickster; but with the advent of civilization, the trickster’s concrete and ramifying image becomes a segregated and vicarious aspect of human existence, acted out by the clown as an entertainment. At the same time, the trickster is epitomized abstractly in the civilized assumption that evil, reified, befalls good men; put another way, the concrete image of the trickster is transformed into the problem of injustice.

The circus that surrounds and depends upon the clown is a diminished setting, then, for a moral struggle. The grotesque inversions of the clown, the defiance of death, the terrifying reality that seems to overflow the circus ring itself only to recede to a totally alien experience the next moment, and the superhuman skill of the performers—these are serious matters indeed. Laughing at a circus demands the capacity to laugh at oneself, to identify with the risks and reversals of identity that take place before our eyes; and this laughing at oneself means accepting the ambivalence of the human condition, for which civilization gives us little instruction or opportunity. Thus, the strange gravity of audiences, particularly the expressions on the faces of the children, encountered at circuses.

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¹ Diamond also notes (as do other commentators) the “embarrassing denouement” of the Book of Job: “Job restored to health, property, and domestic felicity, over and above his original affluence.” For Diamond, Job is to be contrasted with the “integrity” of similar tales from more primitive cultures “in which the peculiar delusions and pathologies of civilization have not yet become evident” and in which no such felicitous postscript betrays the narrative.

² It was not always so. According to Isaiah, “I form the light and create darkness; I make peace and create evil; I the LORD do all these things.” (The classic translation was “I make weal and create woe.”) Also, the prophet Amos: “Shall there be evil in the city, and the LORD has not done it?” As much as exegetes try to take God off the hook, He insists on His responsibility for the complete catastrophe.

³ Just as “The devil made me do it” is no defense for humanity, neither can the devil rely on “God said I could do it” to exculpate himself.

Job: "There must be a pony in here somewhere..."