359 - Satan: A Theological Meditation

Satan: A Theological Meditation
By Lawrence S. Cunningham

"Evil has never been experienced in a vague, abstract form … Evil has a definite physiognomy, even though it may be concealed behind masks and disguises."
Leonardo Boff

"Satan sows without knowing if he will reap."
Abba Sisoes of the desert

The task before me is to think, as a theologian, about whether there is a personal evil being (called in the tradition Lucifer, Satan, the Evil One) as the Christian tradition has traditionally understood him (it? her?). That the tradition does, in fact, understand there to be such a creature (never a god; a creature) is patent, as anyone knows who has read, even cursorily, in the Christian tradition. Satan occurs in the written sources and is a stock figure in religious iconography. Whether the terms "satan," "lucifer," and "demon(s)" are all manifestations of one reality is a complex issue. I will let satan stand as a synecdoche for the Evil One.

The new Catechism Of the Catholic Church (for it is within the Catholic tradition that I operate) deftly sums up the traditional understanding of Satan in two different places.¹   In the doctrinal section of the Catechism, it stipulates that angels did fall from grace through a rebellion against God and, further, that Satan operates in the world but not in an infinite manner; the work of Satan is circumscribed by the power and sovereignty of God. There are, in short, evil powers in the world and they are connected to traditional angelology. Satan does spiritual harm and, indirectly, can do physical harm. The section ends with the comforting

Lawrence Cunningham is Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame. He has written several studies of the Catholic faith, including Faith Rediscovered: Coming Home to Catholicism (1987) and Catholic Prayer (1989).

¹At the time this essay was written, the English translation of the catechism was not available. I consulted the Catechisme de l'Eglise Catholique (Paris: Mame/Plon, 1992).

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observation that God's permission to allow satanic activity in the world is a "great mystery" but that inevitably God's will for those who love God (see Rom. 8:28) is greater than the power of evil.

In another place, commenting on the petition of the Lord's Prayer "Deliver us from (the) Evil (one)," the Catechism notes that this petition personalizes the power of evil; evil is not an abstraction but a person

“When we think about Satan, then, we have to begin to think of two important but not necessarily connected data: the nature of evil and the character of an angel. "

whom the Catechism identifies with the primordial murderer, liar, and father of lies (Jn. 8:44) who is the seducer of the entire world (Rev. 12:9).

When we think about Satan, then, we have to begin to think of two important but not necessarily connected data: the nature of evil and the character of an angel. Frustratingly enough, both topics trigger imaginative flights since, theologically, we typically think of evil as a kind of nothingness, while angels, we say, are spirits, that is without bodies. To put it another way: We have to think of evil as a nothingness and the incarnation of that evil as a something (Someone) who can only be imagined since angels are bodiless. Any image of the devil, in short, is an imaginative construction.

EVIL

As he made plain in the Confessions, the reality of evil tortured the young Augustine. He thought of evil as something, and that led him to think of evil as some amorphous blob that had an independently malignant existence. If it was something, however, it had to be created or, following the logic of the Manichees to whom he had once been attracted, something existing independently of the creative power of God and creating in its own right. In the former case, God is the author of evil; in the latter, one must (as the Manichees did) subscribe to a dualistic cosmos in which Evil and God compete interdependently. God, in this latter scenario, is diminished in power since God had to compete with another power.

In a famous moment, Augustine sees the solution to his conundrum: Whatever is, is good. For God, "evil does not exist." Evil must be understood as a negation, a lack, a disproportion among all that is created. ²

This concept of evil as a negativity, a nothingness, or a privation has held a privileged place in the Christian tradition ever since its articulation

² The Confessions, Book VII, Chapters 13 and 14 provides the locus classicus on the nothingness of evil.

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by Augustine although, as is clear, closer analyses have not always hewed exactly to the Augustinian analysis.

ANGELS

In the great chain of being, angels rank between humans and God. Their perfection is to be found in that they are not located in space because they are not hampered by the limitation of a material body. They are "pure spirits" who are less than God precisely because they are created. The sheer speculative possibilities inherent in thinking of angels as pure disembodied intellectual spirits goes a long way in explaining why the index to Aquinas' Summa lists 356 entries on angels, although rhythmic movements on pinheads is not one of the topics that the Angelic Doctor takes up.

Simply restricting ourselves to the above reflections explains why it is understandable that, historically, people have imagined angels, good or bad, in some kind of sensible form. Christian iconography has borrowed from pagan sources (for example, the putti) to depict angels, just as biblical iconography borrowed from Assyrian monumental sculpture to "flesh out" pictures of the cherubim and seraphim as, for example, in the famous theophany in Isaiah 6.

IMAGES OF SATAN

The question that deserves a moment of reflection is this: What do the imaginative pictures of Satan or Lucifer tell us about the understanding of personified evil?

Let us begin with that expert in matters hellish, Dante Alighieri. Dante's Satan, depicted in Canto 34 of the Inferno, is a great drooling three-headed beast who sits half immersed in a lake of ice in the pit of hell. He ineffectually beats his massive wings attempting to extricate himself from the frozen lake but only managing, in the process, to generate more wind, which further freezes the lake of Cocytus.

Everything about Dante's Satan is designed to act as an antitype to redemption. His three heads are a parody of the Trinity, and his location, directly under the center of the world (that is, Jerusalem) is situated at the farthest place in the universe from the warming love of God. Finally, as John Freccero has pointed out in a brilliant essay, Satan is an iconographical parody of the redemptive work of Christ on the cross; the four flapping wings similar to the wind driven medieval mill (molino) is cruciform, while the three emblematic colors of white, red, and black would have reminded the medieval reader of the cursed mulberry tree of the Gospel, as the glossa ordinaria on Luke 17:6 makes abundantly clear. ³  Dante signals this parody by introducing his canto with a parody of the hymn Vexilla Regis, which was sung in honor of the cross.

³ John Frecerro. "The Sign of Satan," in Dante: The Poetics of Conversion, edited by Rachel Jacoff. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. 167-179.

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Why Dante depicts Satan as a stupidly inert beast and not as a Screwtapian tempter or a Miltonic rebel is clear when we recall that, at the beginning of the Inferno, Virgil tells Dante that the inhabitants of the infernal region are those who have "lost the good of intellect." Dante, in other words, sums up, as it were, the sum and substance of evil: the loss of humanity, intelligence, good will, and the capacity to love.

Milton's Satan in Paradise Lost is, of course, quite different. A promethean figure in hell, he is the picture of intelligence, malice, and evil who, despite the restraints of God, is, nonetheless, in a constant state of rebellion. He sussurates temptation into the ear of Eve and takes delight in the consequences of his success. This, he manages, while appearing as a serpent that.. given the lushness of Milton's language, gives an almost hypnotically erotic air to him.

The modern imagination, of course, prefers the Miltonic to the Dantesque picture of Satan. Our popular culture is replete with images of the slick wiles of the Tempter who wishes to lead us astray. C. S. Lewis immortalized that view of Satan in the Screwtape Letters, while the putative Satan worshippers have gussied up their "rites" with a potpourri of iconography and symbolism that has popular roots in medieval culture. Their emphasis is not so much on temptation as it is on acquiesence to a

“ . . . Dante depicts Satan as a stupidly inert beast and not as a Screwtapian tempter. . . "

power that permits them to be evil, as they imagine people should be. Most of this involves torturing domestic pets, listening to execrable music, and sporting pentagrams. The worship of Satan, however, does echo the Miltonian notion that there is an intelligent monarch who reigns over Pandemonium. To worship such a Being is to extend experience a notch further, and, let us be frank here, in so doing one is able epater le bourgeois.

SATAN AND THE DAMNED

I must confess not to be much impressed with the current interest in the epiphenomena of exorcism, satanic cults, and so on. Most of what passes for this sort of thing is simply sociopathic behavior tricked out with ersatz religious symbolism.

What I would like to argue, however, is that Dante's Satan (minus the imaginative trappings) deserves another look. Satan is in the pit of bell because he has fallen from heaven and, in the fall, excavated the underworld cosmos in which the damned are held. The more important issue, however, is that Satan represents the damned in general. To repeat: In the Inferno, when Dante blanches at the sight of bell and asks his guide

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who lives there, Virgil responds that its inhabitants are those who have lost the "good of intellect."

That simple phrase means that those damned souls are the ones who have failed to reach their full human destiny of knowing (and loving) to the full in the presence of God. By a similar logic, the fallen angels are in the same situation since they were created and their telos was God. Made in the image of God, they have turned to something less than God as a final choice, and God, respecting their free will, gives them exactly what they choose: something less than God. The damned and their paradigmatic figure, Satan, are de-formed and de-graded through their desire for a completely naked attempt at absolute autonomy. Monika Hellwig puts the matter nicely when she notes that "the tenacity with which church teaching has held on to the doctrine of hell testifies to the deep conviction that everything in the outcome of a human life is really at stake in the way each person uses human freedom." ⁴

Damnation, then, can be conceived as the fruit of a desire to erase those human boundaries beyond which lurk chaos, destruction, hatred, and abandonment. The damned, in general, and their archetype, Satan, in particular epitomize the erasure of what it means to be made in the image of God; they lack a telos to which they had been oriented precisely because they utilized the instrument that would guarantee they reach that end. In that sense, Milton's Satan represents the perverted striving for that autonomy at all costs ("Free and to none accountable/Preferring hard liberty before the easy yoke of servile pomp"), while Dante's Satan stands for the end condition of such a choice. Thus, the Dantesque and Miltonian depictions of evil are complementary rather than antagonistic.

THE REALITY OF SATAN

Now this theoretical construction does leave us with a question: Is there a Satan or is Satan a symbol of something that only gets personalized in the human religious imagination? Who is this satan-accuser (Ps. 109:6) who becomes a personified evil force in the biblical tradition (Job 1:6 and Zech. 33:1)?

From a traditional point of view, Satan is a personal power who is active in the world. That conviction is summed up in a scriptural text that is read in the liturgical office every evening at night prayer: "Be sober. Be watchful. Your Adversary the Devil prowls around like a roaring lion seeking someone to devour. . . " (1 Pet. 5:8).

Will that do?

It is at the level of popular language that we might get a clue to help us. We have often heard of people who do the most outrageous acts of vandalism or of violence and, when asked why they lash out with such seemingly senseless energy, respond: "Just for the hell of it" or "I just don't give a damn; I just did it," Those phrases are telling. When we parse

⁴ In Systematic Theology: Roman Catholic Perspectives, edited by Francis Schussler Fiorenza and John P. Galvin. vol. 2 (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991), p. 368.

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them a bit carefully, we see something hollow at their center. What those phrases say, in fact, is something like this: I do not heed the consequences; I admit that what I did is "senseless," that I wanted to hurt or destroy or terrorize. At extreme levels, we simply cannot fathom (that is, reason) why such acts would be. Such impulses seem to be beyond or below the boundaries of the human.

In fact, as Peter Berger once argued in his elegant little book A Rumor Of Angels (1969), the human desire for some sense of equity and justice is a root reason why we can extrapolate a need for retribution beyond this world. We sense in extreme malice a challenge to our whole order of justice, equity, and the righting of wrong. Is that not why we say that

"Damnation … can be conceived as the fruit of a desire to erase those human boundaries beyond which lurk chaos, destruction, hatred, and abandonment. "

certain acts "cry out to God for vengeance"? Berger thinks that the human instinct for punishment beyond this world is rooted in a very deep conviction (a "signal of transcendence," as he calls it) that there is evil in the texture of things and a concomitant belief that ultimately justice will right the balance. Human forms of punishment just do not seem to "balance" the enormity of the crimes of a Stalin or a Pol Pot.

But-and here is the central point-we all know that in this world there arc voids of evil that bring forth the most heinous violations of the human project. At times, these acts (one thinks of the Final Solution executed by the Nazis) seem to derive from a certain mad logic (Chesterton once said that the madman is the one who has lost everything but his reason) taken to its most hideous extreme. At other times, such evil erupts from dark forces that defy or fly away from what we see as common humanity.

In either case, when we confront such monstrosities acted out by humans, we are forced to confront something that mere reductionism to psychological or sociological or genetic formulations just will not satisfy. We may not have the words to articulate what the evil is, but we know it is in our world, that it is a terrible deformation of what we think ought to be, and that it can erupt into our common culture in many forms both social and individual. It is that power, often encased in personal terms and symbolic disguises, that we call Satan. As Flannery O'Connor once said with her astringent conviction of faith: "When I write about the devil I want people to know that it's the devil I mean and not this or that psychological tendency."

The problem, of course, is that words like Satan, Lucifer, Devil, and the like carry so much imaginative baggage with them that it is often easy to forget Evil as we demystify the iconography in which Evil appears. To see behind the iconographical inheritance of words like "satan" is not to

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erase the notion of evil but to detach it from the cultural baggage that adheres to it.

When we begin to do that, it seems to me, we can articulate two general truths that are sustainable in any coherent Christian theological system.

First, there is evil (I speak here of moral evil, not physical evil) in the world of the human, which is to say that there are gaps, fissures, lacunae, and negative energies in our cultural constructs and personal lives that profoundly militate against the fundamental biblical notion that we are created in the image and likeness of God. These are forces that are destructive of the humanum. We can surely see that in a construct like National Socialism (Nazism), which we would not like to reduce to the working out of the demonic imagination of a single person, even if that person is a Hitler; Nazism was a systemic evil.

It has been the burden of the liberation theologians, for instance, to analyze and describe structural evil in social constructs so as to avoid the temptation to privatize all injustice and evil in the world. While this has been a much debated issue, it is worthwhile to note that even Pope John Paul 11 (in Sollicitudo Rei Socialis) speaks of the "structures of sin" in human culture.⁵

"Is there a Satan or is Satan a symbol of something that only gets personalized in the human religious imagination?"

Secondly, the privation that is sin can forcefully coalesce into the actions of a single person so as to transform a human personality into something that does evil as a regnant drive in that life. I leave aside the deep motives for such drives but only note that our human language reaches out for "demonic" language to describe the driven nature of our serial killers, maniacal leaders, and the like.

Now, it strikes me that it is because of this second fact that we are tempted to incarnate evil in the guise of a person when it comes time to explain the sense of evil around us. We need a person both to level the odds (this is a one on one duel) and also to give some sense to what, in other circumstances, would be terrifyingly inexplicable. This is surely the role of the demonic in the New Testament where Jesus, in his announcement of the kingdom, overcomes the "powers" of the world and bests the devil who operates in the interstices of the cosmos and the humanum. Susan Garrett has drawn a powerful portrait of that struggle in the world of Luke-Acts where "even passing references to exorcisms and healings

⁵ On the notion of structural sin, see Mysterium Liberationis: Fundamental Concepts of Liberation Theology, edited by Ignacio Ellacuria and Jon Sobrino (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1994), pp. 536-542.

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ought to be interpreted as earthly, visible signs over the invisible spiritual Enemy." ⁶

In the final analysis, there are a few fundamental notions that we need to hold in creative tension:

(1)There is moral evil in the world caused by the human misuse of the will.

(2)The evil of a person can ramify in a way that creates a structural presence of evil in culture. "Such systems," Luke Timothy Johnson writes, transcend private sin and give evil an urgent power greater than the free disposition of any individual, even though such systems are sustained by the free choice of their participants." ⁷

(3)At times, we can personify the magnitude of that evil by reaching for quite concrete nouns such as "Powers" or "Principalities" or "Satan" or the "Evil One."

(4)We need to be cautious in making such personifications that we do not shift the onus of responsibility away from the free choosing individual to the personified power: "The devil made me do it."

In the final analysis, the urgent and continuing task of the Christian is to affirm that there is evil in the world and that evil can mount to such a pressure point for a person or a culture that it seems to take on a personality of its own. Against that power (and let's call it by its true name: Evil) we stand with the assurance of the gospel that the redemptive power of Christ is greater than the evil palpably present in the world because God "has delivered us from the dominion of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son" (Col. 1: 13).

⁶ Susan R. Garrett. The Demise Of the Devil: Magic and the Demonic In Luke's Writing (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1989), p. 59.
⁷ Luke T. Johnson. Faith's Freedom: A Classic Spirituality For Contemporary Christians (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1990), p. 160.