Hello, friends, and welcome back to The Moral Vision of Jesus Christ, the most in-depth Gospel study you'll ever read. If this is your first time here, you might go back to the Introduction and start there. If you're a repeat reader, I love you.
Today, we will finally finish our six-part series about the origins of the modern "Satan."
It's been a long six weeks, and I'm grateful to all of you for hanging in there with me.
Before we start the last leg of this study-within-a-study, I'd like to recap some of the most important points we've learned over the last few installments. To review:
1 - Devils, demons, and snakey supernatural creatures of malevolence exist in some of the oldest written human literature known - literature that predates Jewish traditions by a wide margin.
2 - The Jewish scriptures use the word "satan" with an article in front of it - "the" or "a." The word is not capitalized in the Jewish scripture as a proper-noun would be, because "satan" is not a name in the Jewish scripture. "Satan," in the Jewish scripture, always means "adversary," "accuser," or, as in Job, "one of a council of divine beings who exist in heaven with God and who have no power or authority outside of God."
3 - We can't find a story in The Old Testament about Satan being a lead angel who was kicked out of heaven for the sin of pride and then forced to administer a torture realm called "hell." This is because "Satan" and "hell" didn't exist to the Jews of the Biblical era. The concept of hell, and of an angelic fall from heaven, began to emerge during the Intertestamental Period, especially in The Book of Enoch.
4 - The New Testament features thirty-some references to "the devil" and thirty-some references to a "capital-S" Satan. The New Testament doesn't describe the creature, but rather assumes the reader's familiarity with this "Satan." Nowhere in The New Testament are we given any background information about this creature. Nowhere in The New Testament are we given the story of Satan as a lead angel who was kicked out of heaven for the sin of pride. Thus we can say unequivocally that The Bible is not where modern Christians get their concept of Satan.
That's it. Those are your "must-remembers" thus far. And now, without further ado, Part VI of our study.
Understanding the Origin of Modern Common Conceptions of The Devil in Christianity
Part VI
The Development of the Devil since the First-Century
Recently, a friend and I were discussing the issue of suffering in the world in the context of a God that is all knowing, all loving, and all powerful. In philosophy, this topic is known as "The Problem of Evil." My friend said something to the effect that "we suffer and get sick and sin and experience the frailties of flesh not because of God, but purely because of Satan.*" My friend was expressing a view that is prevalent in Americans today. This prevalent understanding of the universe is intellectually lazy in every sense of the word, and generally served as the impetus for this six-part study.
The blaming of the suffering of the world on an extremely powerful, but not-quite-Godlike, scapegoat called Satan is a clear attempt to have one's cake and eat it, too. Rather than address The Problem of Evil head on, the modern Christian has eroded his God's power by giving a large share of it to this "Satan," essentially turning his monotheism*** into a bitheism****, with the devil playing the role of God Number Two.
The devil that my friend and the multitudes of American Christians believe in is, according to them, responsible for all discomfort, conflict, illness, and evil in the world. The Devil that Modern American Christians believe in is omnipresent and omniscient, and can literally ensnare and control humans who do not resist him through a living appeal to God.
The devil that American Christians believe in is snakey, tailed, horned, and pitch-fork-bearing. He is frequently thought to be red in color when manifested physically. Modern artistic depictions of the devil are almost always cartoonish, but Christians still believe that this character is directly responsible for the prevailing winds of cultural history.
Ultimately, Satan has evolved into the modern Christian's excuse for his complete unwillingness to imitate Christ. People's egos keep them from accepting fault for almost anything, so it is hedonistically soothing to believe that all of one's mistakes and misfortunes come from the supernatural administrator of hell.
This is the true purpose of the story of Satan: he is an excuse for human weakness.
This is the true purpose of the story of Satan: he is an excuse for human weakness.
"The devil made me do it."
Today, to wrap up our study, we will track the short-distance-evolution of the New Testament Satan into the Satan we know in cartoons today. To this end, we'll first glance at the writings of Origen of Alexandria.
Origen was a "Church Father," or an ancient theologian writer. He was the most prolific writer of the early Church Fathers. Origen was known in his time for preaching that God had created the souls of humanity before he created the universe, and that at the end of time, all souls might be redeemed to God. Both of these concepts would later be seen by the Church as heretical.
Origen was also known by a rumor that he had paid a doctor to surgically remove his testicles, either because a phrasing in The Book of Matthew recommends it***** or because Origen wanted to remove any doubt in the Alexandria community about his motivation in tutoring women as well as men in Christian theology. Some historians speculate that he may have been accused of some impropriety early on in life, which might have spurred this action, if it did in fact occur.
One of Origen's most important and enduring works was On the First Principles, written between 220 and 230 AD, wherein he attempts to lay out his understanding of Christian theology in a very regimented and precise fashion. Origen speaks of the Devil and human free-will in the preface of this text:
This also is clearly defined in the teaching of the Church, that every rational soul is possessed of free-will and volition; that it has a struggle to maintain with the devil and his angels, and opposing influences, because they strive to burden it with sins; but if we live rightly and wisely, we should endeavour to shake ourselves free of a burden of that kind.Shortly thereafter, in the same text, Origen continues:
Regarding the devil and his angels, and the opposing influences, the teaching of the Church has laid down that these beings exist indeed; but what they are, or how they exist, it has not explained with sufficient clearness. This opinion, however, is held by most, that the devil was an angel, and that, having become an apostate, he induced as many of the angels as possible to fall away with himself, and these up to the present time are called his angels.So, one of the most literate and educated Church Fathers of all time himself admits that the Christian Church as he knew it had failed to sufficiently explain the cosmology of Satan. The question is then begged: if the cosmology of Satan was not sufficiently explained in 225 AD, how can modern Christians be so sure about what they know about Satan today?
Time seems to have been a salve for this uncertainty.
St. John of Damascus, regarded by the Catholic Church as a "Doctor of the Church," wrote a text known as An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith near the turn of the eighth century AD. An Exact Exposition was a summary of the theological writings of the Church Fathers that had gone before St. John. Like On the First Principles, it was designed to be a systematic elucidation of the sum of Christian theology.
About Satan, in An Exact Exposition, St. John writes:
...[he] was not made wicked in nature but was good, and made for good ends, and received from his Creator no trace whatever of evil in himself.He continues, in talking about the dominion of Satan and his angel minions:
Hence they have no power or strength against any one except what God in His dispensation hath conceded to them, as for instance, against Job and those swine that are mentioned in the Gospels.St. John was both eating and having some delicious cake when he was writing this. According to him, Satan was made good by God, but of his own volition turned evil. However, in his evil, Satan has no power except that allotted to him by God. So evil is all ultimately controlled by God, but, simultaneously, God can wash his hands of all the evil. The chasm existing in the middle of this logic is mind-bendingly wide.
Unlike Origen, St. John of Damascus appears to find the Church's explanation of Satan at least sufficient, as he is very confident throughout An Exact Exposition about the nature of all things metaphysical. His confidence is apparent even in the title, by his use of the word "exact."
Moving on, I would call your attention back to the Fourth Lateran Council, which we mentioned previously. Recall that the text of Lateran Council IV, written in 1215 AD, said the following:
The devil and the other demons were indeed created by God good by nature but they became bad through themselves; man, however, sinned at the suggestion of the devil.The Fourth Lateran Council was one of the most significant ecumenical councils ever to be held, and the dogma spelled out therein would have been understood by most any Christian during the late middle ages. By the spread of the dogma of this council, most Christians in the subsequent centuries came to believe that, at the time of the final judgment, all humans "may receive according to their merits, whether good or bad, the latter eternal punishment with the devil, the former eternal glory with Christ."
Moving along in time, we come to the 13th-century Codex Gigas, also known as The Devil's Bible. This book, a manuscript of The Bible with some additional Christian literature, is known as The Devil's Bible because of its inclusion of a particularly mesmerizing full-page illustration of the devil. The illustration, which can be found easily on the internet, depicts a devil that has two red horns, a forked or double tongue, a round, green head, sharp, menacing teeth, and four-fingered hands with vicious claws at the ends of their digits. We mention the Codex here to illustrate the evolution of the visual imagery of Satan.
As we now know, Satan's physical appearance is not described in The Bible. What you may not know is that we have no record of people visually depicting Satan until the middle ages. Most of the earliest depictions of Satan in art have him looking a lot like the Greek fertility god Pan: goat-legged, cloven hooved, bearded, pointy-eared and goat-tailed. Medieval depictions also gave Satan his trident, which was most certainly borrowed from the Greek god Poseidon. Again we emphasize: any physical description of Satan is extra-scriptural.
Finally, we would be remiss if we didn't take a moment to look at the treatment of the devil towards the end of Dante's Inferno, the indescribably important 14th-century epic poem by Italian writer Dante Alighieri.
In Inferno, Dante is led through the concentric circles of hell, toward its very core, by the spirit of the poet Virgil, who wrote The Aeneid. At the core of hell, Dante encounters a devil that is gigantic in proportion, and sits frozen in ice up to its chest. The creature has three evil faces and three sets of bat-like wings. The flapping of its wings freezes all the other inhabitants of that final inner-circle of hell. As Dante walks by the frozen victims, he notes the positions they are suspended in. Some on toes, some turned up on their heads, some bent over like a bow, heads toward their toes. A creepy scene.
The writing is really too interesting to miss, so here you go - Dante's description of the devil:
Were he once as beautiful as now he’s ugly
(And yet he raised his fist against his Maker!)
Well may all our grief come down from him!
Oh how much wonder was it for me when
I saw that on his head he had three faces:
One in front — and it was fiery red —
And two others, which joined onto this one
Above the center of his shoulder blades,
And all three came together at his crown.
The right face seemed halfway white and yellow
While the left one looked the color of the race
That lives close to the source of the Nile.
Beneath each face there sprouted two large wings,
Suitably massive for such a bird of prey:
I never sighted sails so broad at sea.
They had no feathers but looked just like a bat’s,
And he kept flapping these wings up and down
So that three winds moved out from in around him:
This was the cause Cocytus was all iced.
With six eyes he wept, and from his three chins
Dripped down the teardrops and a bloody froth.
In each mouth he mashed up a separate sinner
With his sharp teeth, as if they were a grinder,
And in this way he put the three through torture.
For the one in front, the biting was as nothing
Compared to the clawing, for at times his back
Remained completely stripped bare of its skin.
"That soul up there who suffers the worst pain,"
My master said, "is Judas Iscariot —
His head within, he kicks his legs outside.
Little about Satan has changed significantly since Dante, except that he had to face off with a chain-smoking Keanu Reeves at some point very recently.
What can we say then, in conclusion, now that we've thoroughly beat this dead horse?
We can say this: Satan is the Christian's intellectually dishonest escape from The Problem of Evil. Concerns about Satan are not present in the moral teachings of Jesus Christ. The modern understanding of Satan does not come from The Bible. There is no reason, in all of history, to believe that Satan is any more real a figure than Zeus or Angra Mainyu or Darth Vader.
There is no reason to believe in the modern Satan, except that humanity requires a scapegoat for its folly, as it is fundamentally incapable of admitting its own fault.
The devil made me do it?
No, no, friend. I made me do that.
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Matthew 4:15 through Matthew 4:17
15 “Land of Zebulun and land of Naphtali,
the way to the sea, beyond the Jordan,
Galilee of the Gentiles,
16 the people who sit in darkness
have seen a great light,
on those dwelling in a land overshadowed by death
light has arisen.”
17 From that time on, Jesus began to preach and say, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”
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Jesus Saying #5! And what an important one it is! The words in Matthew 4:17 mark the beginning of Jesus' ministry. It is at this moment he declares one of the fundamental tenets of his philosophy: that a "heavenly kingdom" is just around the corner, and that humanity needed repentance before the arrival of that kingdom.
So, to what exactly did Jesus refer here when he said "the kingdom of heaven?"
There are many ways to interpret this phrasing. We will come across this terminology several times in Matthew, so we will have ample opportunity to discuss all the possibilities.
Being a rationalist, I would like to start with a rationalist reading of Saying #5. I would like to suggest that the "kingdom of heaven," as spoken about by Jesus in The Gospel According to Matthew, is not the preferable half of a bipolar afterlife, but rather a time of unrivalled peace and bounty that Christ anticipated to be coming (with our hard work) to the physical realm; to the real world.
We will have plenty of time to discuss alternative readings, and we will have plenty of chances to see that one's interpretation of this saying doesn't have any bearing on Jesus' moral prescriptions. Those of you who find my rationalist reading preposterous will get yours in coming installments.
So, then, what did Jesus mean when he said "repent?"
In the simplest terms, "repent," in the ancient world, meant "to feel regret about one's misdeeds and to have a desire to live better." This is certainly how the word is generally used in The Old Testament. Since we have no reason to stray from this general definition, we can interpret "repent" to simply mean "reform yourselves whole-heartedly!"
"Repent." This is the first word we read in The Bible that can be considered part of Christ's Ministry. His first prescription for behavior. Perhaps the first real clue to his morality, that sweet morsel we pine after. "Repent," he says. "Reform."
What does he want reformed?
You'll have to come back to find out.
Thank you so much for reading. Please share this writing.
Love.
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* Shortly after saying that Satan was the cause for all disease, my friend insisted that "you can't trust scientists," and that "the universe is only a few thousand years old."**** My friend is a voting man. :-(
*** Belief in the existence of only one God.
**** Belief in the existence of only two Gods.
***** ...which it certainly does....
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To read what came prior to this, click here.
For the index of Christ's words, click here.
