Reading between the lines of the few things the apostle Paul has to say about the angelic hosts, we find that when Satan and his cohorts rebel it is not against God per se, but the divine proposal of creation. The moment God sets his in-Spirited Word forth as creation, the incarnation of God begins. That God intends, as scripture has it, that the Word not go forth without accomplishing its end, the divine intention is patent. The act of creation is teleological and not simply causal. God wills his incarnation into the created to the end that it will reach a pivotal point wherefrom it will turn, and proceed back into God. The moment of first light, the Fait Lux [Let there be light] aims toward its manifestation as Lux-mundi [Light of the world], the God-man. It is in the Lux-mundi that creation begins to apprehend the truth of its origins and purpose, and so is empowered to turn toward that moment when sun and moon are no longer givers of light, but when the Lux-mundi becomes before all enthroned within the Godhead from whom than proceeds all light. This is both the resolution of the divine incarnation that began with Fiat Lux and its superseding, the new creation, the new heaven and earth.[i]
That God so wills the progress of creation is the story of salvation. There is no trace in scripture of a God who sets out to be a mere demiurge, no God who is the disinterested inventor of a self-sustaining cosmos-machine. There is more than judgement when God pronounces his work good. God is good. God walks with Adam, and his dialogue with man continues through Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and the prophets, priests and saints that follow. God is a living God, a personable God, a social God, an involved God because God has a personal stake in creation. He has set into it his soul—his Word and his Spirit.
Satan, that quizzical and dark side of heaven wherein he bears the title “son of God,” is a gnostic, one who holds materiality in contempt. Compared to the spiritual realm he knows as home it is something inferior into which God ought not to venture, into which God ought not to descend. For Satan the spiritual world is about an untouchable purity. God creating and becoming involved in a material world is a travesty, a perversion. Thus, Satan and his cohorts seek ever to destroy it, and who better to enlist toward that end than the creature with bendable will and purpose, man? What better to be the richest target than the community of men who proclaim the divine plan, the church? While the constancy of the light of God inflames spirits and souls, Satan’s light, ever in free-fall, but ignites a firestorm of desire and passion. Thus the icons of God and Satan are contraries: sun and a flash of lightening.
All great iconography arises as a psychic message, a subliminal message from the soul. Satan is the shadow side of heaven, of man, of the Christ, and of the church (the mystical body wherein God and man touch). The shadow’s power emerges whensoever it is overlooked or ignored. It bubbles, hisses, and emerges through every and any crack. It is at the ready for a moment of weakness, as when the consciousness is distracted by crisis or trial. As the psychic power which is both the obverse and counter-balance of the Christ-light, it needs to be acknowledged, confronted, and risen above. It needs to be met in serious examination of soul and will, of motive and drive, of conscience, and it needs to be confessed as assuredly as is Christ and his light. There can be no washing away of darkness unless darkness is first reduced to cinders in scorching insight and seriousness. Absolution but washes away the dust of the darkness thus reduced. Absolution follows confession, and confession is but the broken heart’s contrition enunciated. Unless Satan had been honestly met hell could not have been shattered, and Christ could not have been risen into glory. “That he descended is that he ascended (Ephesians 4).” That Christ could only enter hell’s darkness in death speaks about the level of self-honesty and self-sacrifice repentance demands. In this we need be mindful that the shadow within is cast both outward onto others and inward over the threshold of the grace within. There, indeed, resides in the depth of us a godly power, but that gracious and creative gift is not to be found if we muster no more than a cursory “sorry” to dissipate the darkness shielding its seeing. The iconography of church, the rituals of church, cannot ignore these psychological truths.
There is here no advocation of an asceticism of extremes. One need not retreat into desert or monastery. One need not resort to flagellation, fasting, or hairshirts. One does, however, need to come to blunt honesty about oneself and one’s character. That honesty needs be held up, in scriptural terms “lifted up,” before the grace and the possibilities present. That honesty needs healthily mourn every moment of Paradise lost and wasted, and equally hope and resolve to not again walk away from the truth, and the potentials of self.
Satan represents a psychological fact of the human soul. It is from that which we ignore within, that which we supress and that which we repress, that hell, its lord, and its powers arise. We need ever to be humble about who we are, honest about our hopes and expectations and the world we but share. When we are not, when we allow ourselves to live in the dark, we allow the subterranean forces within to emerge in distorted and archaic forms. To live in the dark about the truth of self is to literally let loose hell upon ourselves and the world. John writes: “If we say we have no sin, we lie to ourselves.” If we deny there is within us shadow and darkness, we deceive ourselves. The psyche cannot tolerate being deceived. It will react with that which can only be described as an infantile anger that emerges into life unconsciously. The blinded ego, the ego standing in its own shadow, sees in itself only light, and so vainly imagines itself an untouchable god. But this god is primitive, cretinous, simplistic, vacuous. It is all power and pump with only the dazzle of a fractured and scattered light. Here is the anti-god who creates not, neither saves. Here is the anti-god who destroys souls. On the grander scale, here is the anti-god full of bombast and bombs who literally destroys the world, its religions, its institutions of state, its every aspect of truth, civility, and civilization.
I have no wish to conjure a metaphysics of hell or of Satan. I am simply making note of a phenomenon, an experiential reality. I am acknowledging the reality of evil. Evil is no mere “privation of the good” as some are wont to call it. It is a real. We know this from the world about us. We hear of it everyday in the “news.” Murders, wars, thefts, deceptions, wanton acts of greed, malicious acts of every type wreck a havoc upon the earth and upon us each. Who can deny the reality of evil? Perhaps we are stymied in our apperception of evil because we have so long been set off-course by a philosophical prejudice that has seeped into the bones of society. Since ancient times we have been beset by a metaphysics that teaches God is the highest good, the Summum bonum. The problem here is that this is not a metaphysical statement. It is a moral statement.
It is interesting that Jung in writing about the God-image refers to it not only as the creative centre, but as “empty.” As an icon, as a symbol of the grace within, it is neither good nor evil, yet because every symbol has a propensity to circularity, it can iconically morph into opposites. Thus civilization has long had to wrestle with a good God who can allow evil, or an Evil that can challenge the Almighty. We find this iconicized in the idea of the two hands of God, the good and the evil, the Christ and Satan, mercy and wrath (Clement of Rome). Yet, if we are to talk of God metaphysically, God is neither good nor evil. God is beyond good and evil, beyond division. God is in se complete, actualized. God is whole, wholeness, the One, the Holy. But we can only speculate about items in metaphysics. We can only experience psychologically, and in that only experience according to the limits of the human psyche. We, ever since Eve and Adam, ever since we became a self-conscious species, can only know reality from this side of the great primal differentiation, the “knowing of good and evil.” In brief, good and evil belong to our world, not to God in se. When we look to the imago Dei, to the God-image within, we can only see through a fractured lens in need of redemption, restoration, resolution. Shadow and darkness mar its purity, persona and ego mask its power. The God-image–which symbolically appears to be at once the Christ archetype and the Self that summons integration of self and world—is akin to the God of metaphysics: a pure creativity ever present and so temporal and relative, and the eternal and everlasting and so fully one in actualization. Between that temporality, that incarnate-identity, and that eternality it is, in a sense, phenomenologically neutralized, visibly “empty.” It is open to interpretation. Does such touch upon the inexplicable pleroma of the Godhead, is it the divine coincidence of opposites, of wrath and mercy, is it the kenotic action, or is it that which has been termed the hidden God, the God who hides his face from us, the Deus absconditus? It is only through the icon of the Christ that the God and Father of Jesus Christ and of us all is revealed, and so reveals to us the truth of the Self, the power of the God-image within, and allows us the grace to incarnate and outwardly project in evolving clarity, in unfolding revelation, that imago onto the world for both the well-being of self and world. That projection alone allows for any metaphysics to speak of God, and gives religion a groundwork upon which to set out its great spiritual icons: its narratives, doctrines, rites, and rituals.
Let us pause and take a step back. In the sacred narrative of creation, on that first day when God separates light and darkness, only the light is judged good. On the second day, God creates the heavens, separating them from the primordial sea. It is the only day of creation that has no judgment upon it. Differentiation is not blessed. Light is good, darkness is not judged, the separation of heaven from the primal mass is not judged. God is treading into division, and for He who is One it is a precarious move. This is of note because the “knowing of good and evil” which plagues man is found here to have a proto-existence in the origins of creation itself. Existence, which literally means “standing out,” is a differentiation. It is something other than The One. It, in a sense, is “two,” something divisible, something that carries the fault-line that will evolve into myriad divisions. The groundwork of creation becomes then a weave of contrasts. It becomes a warp and weft through which we see creation, see ourselves, see God. It is the veil of “reality” distorting vision. It is thus that the final judgement of man is not by God, but by the God-man, Christ. In his humanity he knows and carries the existential marks of our nature, and maintains them in his divinity. The Risen Christ bears still the marks of the sacrifice of his self, which is also the sacrifice of The One. Yet, it is said that in the final judgment he will separate the good from the evil. How then does God become “all in all?” Does the God of creation intervene before the God of salvation who has spent his history intervening for creation? Of that hour only the Father-Creator knows.
God is never known, comprehended, understood. God is believed. God is believed in. God reveals himself, and in that reveals man to himself. We may experience the voice and action of grace, of the God-image within. We may speculate about God and the divine nature. But God in se is not found in speculation. Furthermore, in our experience of God within, and in our philosophical speculations about God, we must realize we are part of the experience and speculation. Whensoever a man says “I experience x” he must be aware that “x” has become an object of his experience. It is no longer simply “x,” but “x” as taken into his experience. While a man may touch upon “x,” his touch is in a sense holding it, not merely grasping it, but in that grasp changing it, at least its visibility. Furthermore, there is to every soul and to every thing something that is fundamentally unknown or unknowable. Everything God has made contains a trace of Him who is the Mystery.
Theoretically there can be no differentiations in God. God is One. Good and evil do not exist in God. Whatsoever we may find as opposites belongs to man; in God they are eternally resolved, dissolved, united, conjoined. For man that divine internal tensor remains, virtually by definition of the terms, the mystery of his omnipotence, his eternal dynamic and power. It is man in his budding self-consciousness who espies and lives out of opposites and differentiations. It is only because God relates to man, because God sets his soul into his work, that such differentiations can be projected onto God, or at least onto the God-image within. While that God-image may dwell within the collective unconscious of man, man must be aware that consciousness and unconsciousness are also differentiations applied to the psyche. God in se is thus neither conscious nor unconscious. When certain philosophical schools refer to God being all-knowing or being unknowing of some events, we must recognize that here are attempts to relate to God, to relativize God to the human level of knowing. They are engaged in anthropomorphism. Thus only in faith do we, can we, come before God. That is a passive virtue: I trust. It is the first of the trinity of theological virtues, the primal virtues that reflect the triune God. From trust proceed hope and love.
In Satan we are faced with the icon of one who refuses to accept the terror of God’s creative love. Satan wants isolation, a radical abortion of the proposed physis [material nature] in favour of a racially pure and enisled world of spirit, of spirituality. He shows himself here not only the gnostic, but the naïve romanticizer of spirituality. Love is always a risk, and there is decidedly a terror to love. Love means freely and unconditionally opening oneself up to both self and other, and giving oneself forward. It is a sacrifice of self. That is the venture of God that makes us. Love has no surety. In our everyday world we have well insulated ourselves from the terror of love. We are guarded about what we do, and say, and are before our selves and others. We have devised our psychological masks of ego and persona to shield ourselves from the pain of being unreservedly open and giving of self. We are adept at supressing and repressing things about ourselves we dislike. We delimit ourselves to spare ourselves. We can rely upon friendships because they carry a certain surety of acceptance. We have evolved an emotional elation to accompany falling in love, to partially anesthetize us to the operation of love, to the complexities of conjoining two souls. Beyond that we have learned to use perfunctory fascination and sugar-coated notions of romance to dull the terror of marital commitment, at least until the night before the nuptials when couples descend into jitters and second-thoughts, and ritualized distractions.
In our ever so distracted world too often is the soul allowed to unconsciously look to another to compensate for a felt hollow in oneself—some quality of appearance, affectivity, intellect, status. If there abides a sufficient honesty and trust in each other and in self there are times when such reliance upon another can stimulate and foster the deepening of self-honesty that allows that which is absent in self to come to light, and thence with proper care and work to grow and develop into something vital. Statistically today, more often than not, there is not. The recalcitrancy of ego turns stones in the path of development into boulders. There comes forth a hardness of heart projected outward. Society unhappily encourages us to get naked but not to bare our soul. Thus, the socially acceptable solution is to give up, run away. There is a reason the church has long considered confession and marriage sacraments. Sacraments give us a guarantee of divine aid in the face of the stark honesty and the nakedness of self both confession and marriage entail. Yet the truth of the matter stands: there can be no unity of self and no union with other without depth, and there is no reaching depth without cutting away the surface and making clear the path.
There is a difference between using another as a compensation for something within lacking, and entering into a complementary relationship. The latter allows for growth. The former usually ends in becoming a sink-hole. That which usually then comes to the surface unconsciously is the un-integrated and therefore negative aspects of the opposite sexual identity—the anima, the animus. The negative aspects of these facets of psyche can be summed up in one word: animosity. In brief, the anima then appears not as a soul-nurturing (mother) figure, but as the manipulative harpy. The animus appears not as the learned world-navigating (father) figure, but as the domineering blowhard. Too many complain of their work environments because they provide ample ground for these beasts to create their petty but potent kingdoms.
For them that can read between the lines, there is here a clue to the relationship of Satan to God. Satan once thought God could complete him, did complete him. Then Satan found in God an adventurousness which he could not abide. That adventurousness was toward the Advent of Christ, the procreation of himself into a material world as a material man, a man before whom Satan would need bow. Satan turned his anger and frustration with his own un-adaptability, his own unrepentant self-ishness outward. He turned away from this too open-minded, this too fertile God, the God upon whom he now projected his frustration and anger. That God would have that projection seen for what it is, we need only to read Job and consider God’s great soliloquies as addresses, not to Job, but to Satan, consider them not admonishments of Job but calls to Satan to face the shadow he had become and how he was projecting it.[ii] In this regard we need to shift inward and consider the evolution of our apprehension of the divine and spiritual. As we do in the mass of ancient tales telling of the gods, we find in Job that neither God nor Satan seem to think. Thoughts come to them. They here reflect a level of man’s evolving self-consciousness.[iii] Indeed, God’s revelation of self depends upon man’s evolving self-consciousness. They work in tandem. It may be dazzlingly simple and defyingly quizzical at the same time, but God’s relativity to us, his relatability to us, hangs on his being relative to us. That is the very core of what salvation history and the sending of the Spirit “who will teach you all things” means. Thus, in his dealings with Job we discover the God who begins to think about himself, what he does and why. God moves from the ego-throne of defense and bombast to slowly sensing Job’s anguish is also his. God finds his ability to reflect upon himself, and so here is a climacteric moment in the incarnation of God into the world. Here God’s reflection on himself begins to impact human life, here his ultimate reflection, his Logos, begins to emerge into its humanity, into humanity. It is in Christ’s anguish on the cross that God’s self-refection reaches the decisive moment in which the Spirit of God itself is given up, and breathed out into the world. The eternal spiration of the Godhead is set into matter.
Satan, however, remains locked into himself and “his way”, into his primal form, his primitive self. He cannot accept God’s creative love and where it might lead because he cannot accept himself, cannot accept more to himself than his ego-identity, cannot face that in him is the possibility of vulnerability. God’s vulnerability hung upon the cross of the God-man is for him the ultimate travesty. He despises it. He cannot even look upon it. He is proud of himself because he is full of his precious and very non-material “thoughts.” He is unaware that he is fundamentally unthinking. He is the coward in the face of love who can only react in infantile manner. He teases. He taunts. He is of himself not so much the tempter as a temper. That is why he needs to get into man. He needs to use the intelligence of man to become cunning. He needs to be cunning to get what he wants. He needs man to be the projection of his unthinking, his frustration, his anger, his lack of anima and animus (relatability and reflection, eros and logos). He needs man to be the projection of his complete identification with shadow. He needs man’s materiality, man’s body, to reach his coveted goal: the total destruction of God’s so loved world. While God manifests that he can evolve with man in becoming man, that he can set aside his wrath, can repent, can change his heart and open himself to man, can love man, even man the sinner, Satan remains infantile and in a seemingly eternal tantrum until he can reduce creation to its archaic state of non-materiality.
Consider the symbols of God’s relation to, his relativity to, creation found in the Sistine Chapel. In the depiction of the creation of Adam there stands behind God a female figure. Is it the soon to be created Eve in the back of God’s mind, is it a projection of the father-God’s feminine side, or is it–and this may be the same thing–the holy Wisdom (Sophia) that scripture says resides with God from the beginning, and who is God’s inner enlightenment and the font of his omni-science? In the depiction of the last judgement we find the same figure beside God’s Christ. Is it Mary as the counter-Eve, or Mary as symbol of the Church and mother of the saved, or is it Mary as the new holy Wisdom of humility before and obedience to the God who dwells within her womb? Symbols are meaning-filled. They carry a wealth of meanings. The question is always: why does and how does this symbol speak to me today? Symbols arise from the unconscious, from the mystery within, from the creative God within. God is always relevant, his acts always propitious. The soul, thus, needs to discern. Yet, even discernment needs to be discerned, needs rules. Had Eve taken the time to discern rather than reason! Consider the depiction of Satan in Paradise–a creature part human, part serpent wrapped around a tree like a giant question mark. Indeed his first utterance to man is a question: “Did God say…?” But where is Satan in the depiction of the final judgment? His cohorts are there driving souls toward hell. Charon and Minos are there ferrying and judging the doomed. Like the darkness of the first day, is Satan not to be judged? Is he hiding in that fiery hole at the very bottom, the pit hidden from view by the base of the crucifix that rises up from the altar of sacrifice? Satan is a spiritual being, yet he is not elevated and free, but sunk down into an ironical invisibility by the weight of the materiality he so vehemently hates. He is hidden behind the cross he refuses to look upon, refuses to understand even now as he stands under it.
Too often today we are shielded from the mystery of God by the one-sided proclamation of his compassion and mercy. But the passion and the gruesome crucifixion of the Christ are eternally a part of the heart of God, the constitution of God. We are more than comfortable to sentimentalize love, but the Good Shepherd and the fearsome Christ-Pantocrator are both faces of God. Power, energy, comes from a tension, a fusion, a friction of opposites. That God is the Almighty reveals to us that in God there resides the re-solution of the ultimate tension, of the constant inter-dynamic of the fundamental opposites. They spin about each other like an eternally locked double helix that seems to our faltering too human logic a series of contradictions. In Jesus we see the wrath of Yahweh turn into the love of God, our Father. Yet for all the mercy and compassion of the gospels the texts of Christian scripture end with the vision of the Lord from whose mouth proceeds the double-edged sword, the Lord who sets out upon the earth, upon the soul, terrors and plagues, and evils of every sort, the Lord who saves but a rarified few. Albeit, these apocalyptic visions are about a spiritual journey rather than a history of the future. Nevertheless, the two aspects of God endlessly speak to us of our vulnerability, of our culpability before the Almighty, before the terrifying love of a God who is willing to give himself away as creation, as his-self crucified, indeed, as us. Before the Mystery of that trans-cosmic wholeness, that holiness, a soul ultimately either stands or falls, grows or falters, worships or runs. What can mortal man do—fall on God’s mercy in repentance of sin, bow in submission before so great a power, prostrate in unworthiness of so great a vision, hold firm in faith and with Job utter: “I know my Redeemer lives,” or like Satan, eternally run in an un-enunciated, unconscious anger that this is and always has been God’s world, not mine? Or, do we look to that other divine attribute, to Omniscience, and allow God to be God, and to deal with us as from before we were he has—with his own divine and abiding Wisdom who speaks ever in his ear of creativity and love?
[i] The new heaven and earth indicate an individuation. It is the individuation of God, a process that begins as creation, and it is the individuation of the man who comes to ultimate term with the inexhaustible creative God-within.
[ii] I am indebted to Carl Jung for this insight into Job. It is his analyses of the soul that have long inspired my thinking. The Preface to this forum has from the beginning acknowledged that fact. Yet, as the years have progressed I have become the more assured that his analyses of the soul, his archetypal psychology, gives Christianity the format in which to interpret into the world its sacred narratives, doctrines and rites. Those narratives, doctrines, and rites cannot go on being parceled out to the world today as if we all still live in twelfth century Europe. Somewhere between then and now there happened the renaissance, enlightenment, and industrial revolution. Man can and does experience the churning of the depths of self, as indeed he always has, but he no longer looks to a meta-physics or a super-nature for explanation of himself. Jung’s analyses present man with an explanation of the inner most workings of himself, of his soul. It is the idea of an autonomous power at the psychic core (at once the creative God-image, and the Christ archetype of personhood and individuation) propelling him to wholeness. Such a phenomenology of God-within can well serve to elucidate the meaning, the meaningfulness, set out in Christianity’s sacred writings, teachings, and rites.
[iii] Job dates from a time when man’s consciousness of self, his self reflecting, is taking an evolutionary move forward. From China, through India, and into the Middle East we find a move away from a tribal-mind to an individual-mind. There arise questions about self, about individual meaning, responsibility, culpability. Man no longer merely has “thoughts,” he is thinking about them. He is on the cusp of becoming Confucius, Laozi, Buddha, Zoroaster, Socrates, Ezekiel. Such self-reflection is mirrored in man’s understanding of the divine. Theology changes because anthropology has changed. Man stands in a new place, and from thence he sees in new ways.