Monday, February 3, 2014

Will The Real Prince Of Darkness Please Stand Up

 
"Paradise Lost is one of those books which the reader admires and puts down, and forgets to take up again.  None ever wished it longer than it is."-- Samuel Johnson, Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, Volume One: Milton, 1779

 
A few days ago, a hike to the road and mailbox brought an anonymous letter addressed to me in handwriting I didn't recognize.  The missive contained a vile little pamphlet alerting me to the fact that Satan gave Roman Catholicism and Islam and evolution to the world so mankind might be deceived and lured into eternal damnation.  This was a fact I hadn’t known and one which I still thankfully do not know...

John Milton's Paradise Lost
 

This venom spewed out in the name of a loving God bore the imprint of an outfit called Chick Publications which offers to send the reader a sample assortment of more titles for a mere $12.95.  The Southern Poverty Law Center considers the firm to be a band of hate mongers and it is hard to disagree with such an assessment after looking at even a single tract.  Page 8 of the pamphlet I received reminded me "Jesus hates Catholicism and calls her the Great Whore".  Additionally, it berates former President George W Bush for urging Americans to distinguish between deeds of terrorists claiming to act in the name of Allah and a faith deeply held by a billion people...


While Jack T Chick's cartoon collection is likely best used as a floor liner for the cage of a diarrheatic ape, he certainly isn't the first English language writer to pontificate on the Prince of Darkness and his misdeeds.  Nor will he be the last...


Paradise Lost, John Milton's epic poem exceeding 10,000 lines of blank verse, tells the story of a rebellion in Heaven against God led by Satan who, along with his followers, is cast down into Hell where he plots to corrupt Jehovah's newly formed Earth and lead our primeval parents Adam and Eve into death and sin by convincing them to eat of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil...

Satan is cast from heaven in Gustave Dore's 1866 illustration
for Milton's Paradise Lost
 

Milton obviously told his story well since many people assume it reflects the Biblical tale of Eden although the poem bears little if any resemblance to the account to found in the Hebrew scriptures.  Genesis tells us in Chapter 3 the serpent who led Adam and Eve to open their eyes and be like divine beings in knowing good and evil was the "shrewdest of all the wild beasts the LORD GOD had made."  Here, the wily snake is a trickster not much different from those in other origin stories found elsewhere in the world...

 

[An identification of Serpent with Satan doesn't appear to have taken place in Judaism until the early part of the Common Era (CE) shared with Christianity.  A Hellenistic work, the Greek Apocalypse of Baruch, which may date to as early as 130 CE, is among the first works to link Eden’s snake to the darkest of angels.  Other scholars believe the earliest hint of such an identification occurs in The Wisdom of Solomon, dating to about two centuries earlier.  Others say the first clear merging of the two figures comes in The Apocalypse of Moses, likely penned in 1st Century CE.]


Satan makes very few appearances in Hebrew scripture.  He never does so as a force even remotely capable of challenging Yahweh's authority.  (Giving him power to do so would encroach on the sovereignty of God Who, in Isaiah 45: 7, clearly claims to form the light and create the darkness and to be author of peace and maker of evil.)...


In the 21st chapter of First Chronicles, Satan arises against Israel and incites David to conduct a census.  God becomes angered by the presumption that God's people can be numbered like cattle and sets pestilence upon the land, killing 70,000 men.  Still filled with wrath, God relents after David looks up to see "the angel of the LORD standing between heaven and earth with a drawn sword in his hand directed against Jerusalem" and begs the Almighty to direct vengeance against him and not the innocent people of Israel...

Emil Jannings as Mephisto in a 1926 film adaptation of the Faust legend
 

Readers familiar with the Bible may recall an older version of this story is to be found in the 24th chapter of Second Samuel.  But, here, it is God who prompts David to "go and number Israel and Judah."  David-- as in First Chronicles-- does the proper kingly thing and asks the Lord to punish him and not his people...


The difference in the two accounts may be explained by when each work was written.  We know the earliest possible date for First Chronicles would be 539 BCE based on the history it records and also that the book was likely put down on a scroll, give or take a decade, circa 300 BCE.  Samuel belongs to earlier times-- three centuries or more-- with its final story taking place during David's reign, or roughly a thousand before Jesus.  Attitudes about God's direct involvement in human misery were clearly evolving during the centuries between the tales told in the Chronicles and the penning of Samuel...   

William Blake: Satan smiting Job with boils, 1826

An unfortunate chap named Job has his own experience with ha-Satan, The Adversary, who presents himself to the Lord alongside other members of the celestial court one fine day. God asks if Satan has come across Job, "a blameless and upright man who fears God and shuns evil" in the course of his roaming across the earth.  The Adversary answers Job honors God because God constantly blesses Job, making him richer and more comfortable with each new day.  "But lay Your hand upon all that he has," Satan counsels the Lord, "and he will surely blaspheme You to Your face"...

 
Marc Chagall's 1960 depiction of the despair of Job


Thus began the tribulations of the righteous man named Job who eventually hears a Voice challenging him out of the whirlwind to gird up his loins like a man and answer where he was when the Lord laid the foundations of the earth or say he can dispatch the lightning on its missions...

 

[Job, incidentally, holds an important place in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.  In the latter religion, he is considered a prophet and Islamic narratives about his misfortunes are broadly similar to the Biblical account.  Shaitan, aka Satan, plays a much more malevolent role in the Koran and Arabic folklore, however: after he overhears angels praise Ayyub as a righteous man, the Devil takes it upon himself to corrupt Ayyub and his wife.  Knowing the two will remain faithful despite any evil worked by Shaitan, Allah permits them to suffer temporarily.

Modern scholars believe Job's story took on its current form between the 6th and 4th Centuries before the Common Era.  Job was likely cobbled together from multiple sources, one of which may have been the product of an Edomite author.  Students of the book cite linguistic constructions and a general lack of Jewish "color" to support arguments the unknown writer lived somewhere south of the Dead Sea.  Other experts suspect early versions of Job's tale date back to to ancient Sumer, the city-state which flourished five thousand years ago in the area of current day Iraq.]

Earlier, we noted a gradual tendency to avoid directly attributing evil to God.  This may have been due to the growing regional influence of the teachings of a Persian prophet named Zoroaster who lived about six centuries before the Common Era.  A vegetarian who condemned animal sacrifices, Zoroaster taught a monotheistic faith in which Ahura Mazda, sole and Uncreated Creator of the universe, constantly battles Angra Mainyu, source of sin and evil and father of demons.  Angra Mainyu may be strong, Zoroaster said, but Ahura Mazda will ultimately defeat evil through the aid of good men...

Angra Mainyu, the force of darkness ever in contention with the force of
light in Zoroastrian thought, attacks the cosmic bull in a carving at Persepolis
(photograph by Mary Loosemore, 2008)


As the new religion of Christianity took root, its chroniclers incorporated an encounter between Jesus and Satan into the Gospel stories.  The writers of Matthew, Mark, and Luke speak of the Temptation of Christ by the Devil as he fasts in the wilderness...

 

 
Understanding the nature of this encounter requires an understanding of the Gospels in which the story appears.  The briefest version is found in Mark, suspected by scholars of being the oldest of the four canonical Gospels.  Written in Greek shortly after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem by Roman legions, Mark seems to be the work of an unknown writer living in Syria.  It dates as early as 70 AD.  This is less than forty years after Jesus' execution-- and may contain accounts of his life that can be linked to a historian's Jesus vs a theologian's Jesus...


[Mark's narrative is a sparse account from the "this is what happened" school.  It does not open with an account of a miraculous Virgin Birth and concludes almost immediately after Jesus is raised from the dead and instructs his disciples to go forth into the world.  Satan appears only indirectly when the writer says the Holy Spirit drove Jesus into the desert for forty days after his baptism at the hand of John the Baptist.  In the desolation, Jesus finds himself tempted by Satan but no other details are provided.

These missing details show up in Matthew (probably written around 80 CE by a person of Jewish birth) and Luke (likely composed at around the same time as Matthew by the same person who recounted The Acts of the Apostles).  It is not likely either man knew the historical Jesus in the opinion of Biblical scholars. 

Matthew's intended audience appears to be Jewish (he doesn't take the time to explain customs referenced in his narrative, implying a belief his audience would be familiar with them) and we can assume his account of Satan coincides in some degree with the thinking of his readers.  During the Temptation episode, Matthew says, Satan presents himself to the Nazarene as an alternative god to Yahweh, offering Christ the kingdoms of the world if he would but fall to his knees before Satan.]

Duccio: The Temptation on the Mount, 1308
 

All three Gospels, we note, were written during a time of barely comprehensible change in the Jewish world, in the aftermath of a horror comparable to the Holocaust... 

The destruction of the Temple in 70 CE effectively ended the Jewish rebellion against Rome.  Caesar's armies were unable to claim total victory until Masada fell three years later but it was a hollow win for the Roman legions since the fortress' defenders chose suicide over submission to tyranny.  Flavius Josephus, a contemporary historian, tells us that over 1,000,000 people died during the siege of Jerusalem and 97,000 more were taken prisoner and enslaved.  Survivors scattered throughout the Mediterranean world...

Mystery religions and Gnosticism flourished in these places where the survivors found new homes...

We can, at a later date, look to the Mysteries for clues as to why the new Christian faith became a child alien to its Judaic heritage.  But it is the Gnostics and their notion of the Demiurge who can help us understand the transformation of Satan from a Counselor of God to the Lord of Hell...

 
Enemies of Freemasonry often assert its followers
worship darkness incarnated in the form of the
Baphomet, a scurrilous allegation repeated in this
late 19th Century illustration


In the early years of Christianity, there were a fair number of sects whose members saw the material world as evil and believed they could find salvation only through gnosis, the knowledge bringing mystical enlightenment and intuitive encounters with God.  Readers interested in studying the Gnostics in detail, be warned: many groups have cosmologies so complex and convoluted that it would probably be easier to wade through graduate texts on subatomic physics armed only with a fifth grade education than to try to quickly understand the world view of more than two or three Gnostic sects...

 

Gnostics also tended to see the material world as the work of a malevolent Demiurge, godlike but inferior to the true God who exists outside the world of stone and wood and flesh.  Most Gnostic sects did not identify Satan with the Demiurge but the Cathars, a 12th Century sect influenced by Gnosticism, believed the Creator God celebrated in the Jewish Bible was the Demiurge whom they called Satanael...

The Jewish Encyclopedia, 1906 edition, sums up early views about the Devil by noting the prologue of Job makes it clear The Adversary has no power of independent action.  And we can elaborate on this by saying, in addition to requiring God's permission to do his work, Satan doesn't have carte blanche in what he does.  He must act within limits specified by God...

Contact with the Persian dualism of Zoroaster and various Gnostic notions modified this early view both among common folk and the intellectual class.  (The 1906 JE offers an opinion that Zoroastrianism may have influenced the account of David's census in First Chronicles as well as a passage in Zechariah where Satan is The Adversary of the High Priest Joshua.)  By the 4th Century CE, the Palestinian Talmud had been compiled and it reflected evolving views about Satan found in the Apocrypha and New Testament.  To some of the rabbis, Satan was synonymous with both Samael (the Angel of Death) and that inclination in the heart of man to do evil...

Lest we forget, let us revisit Paradise Lost briefly.  Occasionally, when pressed to point to textual confirmation in the Bible itself of Milton's story of Satan and his rebellious horde being cast down from Heaven into Hell, devout Christians point to Isaiah 14:12-20.  A careful examination of the text suggests this is a warning to Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, that his days are numbered... 

 
Composer Hector Berlioz musically retold the medieval German legend of
a scholar named Faust who sells his soul to darkness for the pleasures to
be known in this world.  In 1969, the principality of Monaco commemorated
Berlioz with a retelling of his version of the story in stamp form.


The confusion of a wicked king with an evil angel results from the poetic and beautiful language found throughout King James' Version of the Bible.  Literate men who lived in 17th Century England could not read Isaiah's mocking prophecy ("How art thou fallen from the heavens, O Lucifer, son of the morning") and fail to think of Milton's Satan who arrogantly thought to displace God...

In Genesis, we read of Adam and Eve and Serpent in Eden.  We contemplate the Lord God said, "It is not good for Man to be alone; I will make a fitting helper for him" (from the rib of Man as he slept) in the second chapter after creating Man, male and female, in God's image in the first chapter after saying "Let us make Man in our image, after our likeness".  And some of us wonder if these are not two different stories about creation...

We are not alone in such thoughts.  Many a rabbi and common man alike pondered the words of Moses' Torah before proffering a theory: Adam had two wives.  We know who his second spouse was: Ishshah, or Eve in modern English.  Folklore assigned Lilith as the name of Wife Number One...


In contemporary lingo, Lilith was one uppity woman.  She presumed to think that just because she was created in the image of God at the same time as Adam that she was also his equal!  Even worse, Lilith preferred to be "on top" when she and Adam had intercourse out of a theory she should enjoy sex as much as he did!  She tired of her unimaginative husband, the folktales say, and left him.  Then, one day, as she enjoyed the single woman's life outside the Gates of Eden by the shores of the Red Sea, she looked up and saw a handsome Devil out to raise a bit of hell on earth... 

Love at first sight, one supposes, since Lilith went on to become Mother of Demons...           

 

William Blake: The Temptation of Eve by the Serpent, 1799-1800
 

   

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CREDITS

Note: All photographs for this essay were located through Google Images or Wikipedia, without authoritative source or ownership information except as noted: photograph of Angra Mainyu at Persepolis by Mary Loosemore, 2008. Research for topics covered in this essay consists primarily of information from readily available sources such as Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica except as noted: comments citing 1906 edition of the Standard Jewish Encyclopedia on origin and nature of Satan from http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/13219-satan.