Section VI

the tempter

No reciprocal action is more delicate, mysterious, and important than that of spiritual forces in the ethical department of life. As long as this reciprocal action is overlooked-as long, therefore, as the doctrine of sympathies and antipathies is not more developed than it has hitherto been, there can be no satisfactory development of the doctrine of good and evil in the world. Every spiritual individual must be regarded as a spiritual power, operating not only by speaking and acting, but by his very existence, presence, and disposition, and especially by his will, and thus influencing other individuals in the elements of social life. But the greater the power of the individual, so much more important will be his agency.

In the human world these silent forces of individual power and disposition are at work incessantly in every direction. Powerful effects proceed from powerful characters, and form greater or smaller nets in which a multitude of weaker characters are caught. There are spirits that rule in the air (Eph 5:12).

The history of battles will teach us the mighty power of sympathetic relations. The panic which causes the loss of a battle, is entirely a sympathetic fright. When a little group of gallant hearts, who form the flower of a regiment, flinch and give way, the whole regiment may be lost, and with that the whole army. And so, on the other hand, the heroic self-sacrifice of a single man may rally a whole wavering host, and even, flashing like lightning through centuries, may rekindle in a nation the flame of a holy enthusiasm. The pillars of fire of genuine human heroism are the noble lights of history, which make us feel at ease even while sojourning among spectres, and horrors, and graves.

But antipathy is not less powerful than sympathy, and, taken together, they contribute one phenomenon, which may be designated psychical life-communion. Of this phenomenon, sympathy forms the positive and antipathy the negative pole; and the latter consequently is, in its kind, as powerful as the former. It is easier to sail against the wind than to withstand or break through strong antipathies. We call, and there is no echo. ‘My word,’ said the Saviour, ‘hath no place in you,’ Joh 8:37. We address ourselves to human hearts, and it is like running against heaps of stones. It is a hard matter to be cheerful, and keep up one’s spirits, when soul does not answer soul. Christ withstood the antipathy of the whole world. This conflict especially was His chief labour in Gethsemane and on Golgotha. He trod the wine-press alone. And since His victory, the preponderance of His strong heart goes in triumph through the world, and, amidst fearful reactions of the antipathy of the old world-nature, it causes, by the thunders and lightnings of sympathetic action, all things to bow which are in heaven, and on earth, and under the earth.

It lies in the nature of this relation, that evil as well as good can enter into the moving power of sympathy, and as the checking power of an antipathy. Those who have been overcome by the power of evil, strengthen its operation by the attraction of sympathy; but it confronts the good as a magically obstructive and repressive antipathy. Who has not experienced the depressing influence of evil in its silent and most secret operations? In Gצthe’s Faust, Margaret makes the discovery that she cannot pray in the presence of Mephistopheles. Every material spark, however small, has its effect: it glows, it gleams, it threatens to kindle a fire. But far more powerful is the operation of a spark of evil. Evil in the heart of our neighbour speaks to us through the mere power of its existence: if he does not express it in words, it is impressed upon us in some most occult way, and can make a language for itself, intelligible to our hearts and imaginations.

But there are some minds so very obtuse, that they are not sensible of evil unless it comes before them palpably in words and deeds absolutely immoral. They know no alarm at the demon-like power of evil. Such persons are in truth very poor demonologists.

Many others see the boundaries of evil where crime, and vice, or gross immorality cease in their immediate circle; but they have no feeling of the power of evil lying at a greater depth, working in concealment, or acting at a distance. These likewise are weak demonologists.

But there are also other spirits, purer, deeper, and of greater moral sensibility,—souls liker Cassandra, who feel the action of the curse breaking forth in the misdeeds of domestic life; or like Thecla, who experience an internal horror when a dark spirit goes through their house. These souls are the true moral philosophers, while technical moral philosophy is sometimes in the hands of ethically callous spirits.

Lastly, there are heroes of world-wide reputation with moral feelings of the highest order; souls that can perceive an ethical agency of prodigious power where an ordinary man would scarcely notice anything; souls that would see a conflagration where the latter would hardly detect the smell of fire. Such a distinguished example of moral perception Christ proved Himself to be, when Peter so urgently dissuaded Him from the dangerous journey to Jerusalem (Mat 16:22). But these heroes, as prophets of the ethical depths of the world, have, with their feeling and penetration, discovered that moral corruption has penetrated through the blood and marrow of humanity from generation to generation. In this fearful discovery Moses and Sophocles meet one another. But a thousand little moralists smile over this theory of the curse, and find, forsooth, that such a doctrine is against morality, though founded on a thousand agonies and griefs of profound and faithful souls.

But this pretended morality does not trouble the moral chiefs of the world. In the depths of their ethical life-spirit they listen to the slightest footsteps of seduction in the house of Adam, in humanity. They gauge the power of the ethical antipathies which counteract their prayers, and vows, and godly deeds. But in this survey they arrive at the disclosure of a vast relation, since the spirit of divine revelation co-operates with their own foreboding. They announce the fact, that evil in the human world has not merely sprung up in human hearts; there are other stranger, stronger agencies of evil in this region of the universe; there is a devil.¹ The doctrine of the devil proceeds, therefore, from a prophetic and profound ethical knowledge of the world. It might be said that the doctrine of evil demons unfolds itself from the demoniacal depths of ethical foreboding. But it is unfolded with the development of the manifestation of ethical life in humanity; and those points which may be regarded as articulations in the development of this doctrine coincide with critical moments in the history of the human race. But those who look upon this doctrine as a representation derived from Parsism, and engrafted on the Hebrew faith, have not discerned the difference, wide asunder as the poles, between the idea of an evil God and of a fallen created spirit. The evil God is lord over the substance of half the world—indeed, the proper materiality of the whole world belongs to him, and the good God is scarcely able to overpower him. The fallen evil spirit, on the contrary, as he makes his appearance in the book of Job, is a poor Satan, who cannot call an atom of the material world his own; who everywhere can only do just so much as power is granted him for by God, whose supremacy controls him, and who turns all his projects to everlasting confusion. How can any one confound the idea of Ahriman with that of Satan—the idea of the wicked one, in whom evil is one with sin—with that idea in which evil is the punishment of sin, its annihilation through substantial life?

Attempts, indeed, have been made to prove that the idea of Satan involves contradictions; but the observations in support of this view have been very wide of the mark—they apply to the conception of Ahriman, not to that of Satan. It is certainly inadmissible that evil can be absolutely identical with a substantial Being, that such an one can become Evil personified, or that ‘persevering wickedness should be able to exist with the most distinguished insight.’ But whence has the theologian learnt that ‘the most distinguished insight’ is attributed to the devil in the Bible? Does not true insight presuppose a harmony with the moral order of the world? Thus insight makes its appearance in the Bible. The theologian is unfortunate in his appeal to it; for all insight is denied to the devil by the Bible. He comes forward, indeed, as a great genius, equipped with a power of understanding refined to superlative craftiness; but his demoniacal cunning appears as moral stupidity, and on all points in which he manœuvred against humanity he is decidedly foiled by the action of the divine insight, especially in the history of the fall, in the trial of Job, and in the history of Jesus. As soon as the theologian has freed himself from confounding Parsism with the pure biblical theology, he will find that no conception is more firmly established than that of the devil. We proceed from this point, that, even before the fall of man, a fall had taken place in a spiritual sphere of the world. A host of spirits, belonging to the train and retinue of a powerful spirit of their own kind, fell with him into sin, and apostatized from God. There is nothing contradictory in this fact. The fall of men proves the possibility of the fall of other spirits. But the manner in which great and highly gifted men have fallen most deeply, and even within the life of humanity have been able to exhibit the demoniacal in evil, throws light on the supposition, that in that pre-human disorder in the spirit-world the greatness in the fall of their chief bore some proportion to the original greatness of his nature. But though the notion of such a region of pre-human fallen spirits cannot be impugned, yet it may seem difficult, not to say monstrous, to admit an agency of these spirits on the human world. The representation, that in ancient times a familiar colloquial intercourse existed between men and devils, has always given offence. How should Satan as such be able to come near men? Here is the proper place for pointing out the significance of the doctrine of the great life-operations in the world, which appear in the antagonism of sympathies and antipathies. Just as the cosmical lights from star to star operate through the wide creation, so, but to a greater degree, do the psychical moods of spirits both good and bad. Thus humanity in its primal innocence had to encounter the action of a fallen spirit-sphere, which depressed the inspiration of its undeveloped ethical life-feeling. The moment of its first trial happened at the moment of such a psychical depressing influence of Satan. Thus the trial became a temptation; and in the elements of this temptation the natural allurements which in every trial operated on man, became a colloquial address of the spirit of temptation. We saw above how the influences of pure spirits can become plastic in the human soul—how they create in its inward tuition an appearance, a language, a conversation. The same holds good of the powerful operations of Satan. The more sensitive, tender, and vigorous a man feels, so much the more every evil influence gains over him, as soon as he wavers in his moral standing, a plastic distinctness which it had from the first in its inner nature, and becomes an appearance, or a discourse, or, in fact, a speaking appearance.

The action of the fallen spirit-world on the first human world may be easily explained, even though it be considered as the action of an extra-mundane sphere. But if it be supposed that in Satan’s kingdom spiritual traces appear of a shattered earthly spirit-kingdom anterior to man, this hypothesis gains important confirmation from analogous traditions of a physical kind, which send us back to such a shattered pre-human primitive world. We are led by these ruins, in their relation to the doctrine of Satan, to the supposition that that sphere of colossal serpents, lizards, and other monstrous amphibia had been formed round the centre of an ethically free giant-spirit and his associates, and that this spirit constituted the spiritually conscious centre of his insular world, in the same sense as man, in the present organic form of the earth, exists as the life-principle comprehending and glorifying all organisms in conscious spirit-life. According to this construction of that giant-world in which the amphibious type predominated, we understand why the spiritual chief of that sphere after his fall is designated as the Dragon.

According to this, in demonology the complement of the physical ruins would appear, quite naturally, in a parallel of ethical ruins. In this connection Satan may be contemplated as the ethical giant-fossil from the age of the pre-human earth-formation. The creation of the human earth unfolded itself out of the judgment that preceded on the demon-earth. But though that demon-earth has been judged and set aside by the formation of the human earth, yet as smothered Chaos it has in various ways an influence on the tone of the present world’s history. From time to time the tones of that insular antiquity break forth. The billows again roar, and mingle sea and land, and miasmata are exhaled from the swamps. In particular juices of nature the traces appear of the potencies of that far-gone age—poisons, which are, so to speak, the spirit-sounds of that buried nature, which reverberate in the present.² The amphibia exhibit the animal type which was predominant in the kingdom of that fallen spirit-chief; and the serpent, in the forms under which it has come forth in the new earth-sphere, has become the symbol of his nature and agency. It could formerly pass through the air in various shapes, winged as a dragon; but under the present economy it is sentenced to crawl on its belly, and to eat the dust. Its existence, which was prominent in the former economy, and stood near the demon-chief of the globe, is now degraded to the lowest dust compared with that of the higher animals; and the regions in which the spirits of that condemned original population of the earth have taken their residence, are the wastes, the deserts, and stormy winds, by which the effects of their former power are symbolized. But these fallen spirits themselves have, by their sympathetic influence on young humanity, converted the trial which it had to stand, into a dangerous temptation which it has not withstood. Since that time, the continued action and movement of their tones in the earthly world form the special centre of gravity and demoniacal depth of all evil on the earth. On this account, according to the view of all God’s moral heroes in holy writ, the whole kingdom of sin appears as a kingdom of Satan.

We must not overlook the fact, that the actual effects which proceed from the region of these demons are symbolically conceived and represented in a twofold way. First of all, they are made use of with poetic liveliness to describe all evil. On the one hand, evil is called simply devilish, because human evil has been called forth by devilish evil, though evil is as human as it is devilish, and throughout creaturely, in the definite mood of a fallen creature, or rather the positively worthless and pernicious which makes man a sinner, and the demon a devil. It is also called ‘devilish,’ as being the most concrete and powerful expression to designate evil. On the other hand, the devilish is called evil, as if Satan were the ideal chief of evil, identical with evil, although he is only in a historical sense the first, most powerful chief of evil. But Satan is designated simply as the evil one, because the religious feeling takes cognizance only of the destructive ethical side of his life, and stands in no immediate relation to his nature-side. This symbolic in its application to the doctrine of Satan should be thoroughly understood, lest, without intending it, we should make an Ahriman of Satan.

The kingdom of Satan naturally stands in constant antagonism to the kingdom of God. It is developed till the completion of its judgment, confronting the kingdom of light. The manifestations of salvation and of the divine life on earth are encountered by the outbreaks and disclosures of the powers of darkness. They come forward in manifold masks, adapted to the circumstances of the times. But the ethical spirit of humanity ever casts a penetrating glance through all disguises, and detects and rejects the old enemy who is a murderer from the beginning. The first man learnt, not in his sin, but in his repentance, that a crafty demoniacal power had ruined him by its temptation. In the last times of the present course of the world, the true Church, in conflict with ‘the beast out of the sea,’ and with ‘the beast out of the earth’ which ‘had two horns like a lamb,’ will discern that it is the dragon who speaks through all the beasts (Rev. 13.) Christ in the wilderness, after His baptism, had to encounter a great critical temptation; He discerned the tempter behind the temptation.

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Notes

It must here be stated in most explicit terms, that we carefully distinguish between the doctrine of the devil in itself and the view just given, according to which the fall of the devil is regarded as the fall of the moral central being of the pre-Adamite earth. We are desirous not to make this doctrine dependent, in its general form, in the slightest degree on our hypothesis. But it will not escape the unprejudiced reader how very much this hypothesis is fitted to bring about a harmonious religious view of earthly-cosmical relations. Jacob Bצhm, in his visionary speculation, seems to have gained an image of this view, but his image was necessarily obscured and distorted by the influence of his gnostic principles. Thus much he saw, that in the present form of the world, a conflict of two forms of the world appeared, and that particularly ‘Man is and signifies that other host which God created instead of Lucifer’s host expelled from Lucifer’s place.’³ But in this Adam three principles were from the first active—‘the kingdom of hell, the kingdom of this world, and the kingdom of paradise,’ although originally his life commenced in the paradisaical principle. The passage, Gen 1:2, is explained by the adherents of Böhm’s system in the same way, since it is regarded as a description of the ruined world of Lucifer. But that desolation and void may be regarded as the consecrated fermentation of the world in process of formation, over the dark depths of which the Spirit of God moved with creative energy. If we wished to find the contrast between the purely demoniacal and the Adamic earth in the contrast of the insular and continental type, that pre-Adamite world-history, with its fall of the spirits, would come in between the second and third day’s work of creation, Gen 1:8-9.

1) Schleiermacher, in his Glaubenslehre, i, 219, believes that the doctrine of the agency of the devil may be deduced from a defective knowledge of sin, in contradiction of the opinion that it owes its origin to the profoundest knowledge of evil. But he has seldom reasoned more weakly than when he begins to argue against this doctrine (p. 209). The sophistry and worthlessness of most of his arguments directly appear when we put them to the proof and apply them to the moral relations of men, For example, the first argument asserts that only such motives can be given for the fall of good angels as perhaps pride and envy, which presuppose such a fall. This amounts to saying that the fall of a pure spiritual being is altogether inconceivable. His second argument caricatures the biblical doctrine of the devil: we shall return to this in the sequel. Further, human evil must be identical with possession; besides, the doctrine of Satan must declare that he lost his understanding by the perversion of his will, And ‘how is it to be conceived that some angels have sinned and others have not?’ If we apply this argument to human relations, we shall find that it equally amounts to nothing, Is it necessary to enter on the proof of this? The exegesis of biblical passages which relate to the doctrine of the devil is not much better, in the aforesaid demonstration, than the philosophical discussion of the question. Besides, the leading assumption is false, that Christ and His apostles only made use of this representation because it was in vogue among the people. How could the popular representation necessitate our Lord to mark such a great mysterious experience of His life as that given in the history of the temptation, as a temptation of Satan? [Renan (Vie de Jésus, p. 41) adduces it as an instance in which Jesus was not more enlightened than His countrymen, that ‘il croyait au diable, qu’il envisageait comme une sorte de génie du mal,’—ED.]

2) See K. Snell, Philosophische Betrachtungen der Natur, the Essay on the occurrence and significance of poisons in nature, p. 23, especially pp. 36-48. ‘ Prussic acid gives us a representation of a state of matter which we must call living death, and of which, without it, we could form no conception. This state was certainly at one time general and predominant in nature,’

3) Bauer, die christliche Gnosis, p. 591.