DELIVER US FROM EVIL
O LORD, AND GRANT US PEACE IN OUR DAY
O LORD, AND GRANT US PEACE IN OUR DAY
It's not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us
for the success of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the
fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.
What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.
(The Return of the
King,
J. R. R. Tolkien, Ballantine Books, 1965, p. 190.)
I.
CAUTION!
HAZARDOUS TERRITORY AHEAD!
You
are about to enter hazardous territory.
Proceed with caution.
I have written this to introduce the
category of “Deliver Us from Evil” because I believe its overall effect will be
understanding and perspective.
I have also written it with
trepidation. On more than one occasion I
have been cautioned that many people will be offended by the images of Nazis
and their barbaric symbols.
What follows is an excursion into
the first half of the twentieth century.
It was an era dominated by the temporary triumph of evil and the very
able and opportunistic disciple of the Devil, Adolf Hitler (1889-1945)[i]. Such a foray through the dark side of the
human condition may be uncomfortable. My
hope is that insight will accompany discomfort, and that their effects in
tandem will bring awareness that for good to triumph, good people must act to
confront evil.
We cannot begin to hope to heal
human evil until we are able to look at it directly. It is not a pleasant sight. It takes us to our dark side and introduces
us to the very darkest members of our human community – those we judge to be
evil. They are not nice people. But the assessment needs to be made. It is a major thesis of what follows that
those specific people need to be studied – as do their well-intentioned
handmaidens. Not in the abstract. Not just philosophically, but historically. And to do that we must be willing to make our
imperfect, temporal judgments. The accuracy
of such judgments and their relevance for future generations will be probed as
we examine the situations, pre-conditions, and perpetrators generating the
defining evil of the 20th Century.
I ask you for the present to bear in
mind that such judgments cannot be made safely unless we begin by judging,
forgiving, and healing ourselves. The
battle to heal human evil always begins at home. Self-purification will always be our greatest
weapon – our implement for good.
Our approach to the theater of the
macabre will be multi-faceted. Readers
who prefer the simplistic will be uncomfortable. However, the subject of implements and intent
deserves more than incomplete, one-sided understanding. It is simply too large a reality to be
grasped within a single frame of reference.
Indeed, it is so fundamental to the human condition as to be inherently
and inevitably mysterious. The
understanding of the basic reality is never something that we ultimately
achieve. And in fact, like attempting to
capture a cloud, the closer we approach it the more we realize we do not
understand – the more we stand in awe of its mystery.
Then why try to understand good and
evil and the rationale for evil’s seed to germinate in German soil? Why do we learn anything? The answer is that it is better – both more
fulfilling and constructive – to have some glimmer of understanding of what we
are about than to flounder around in total darkness. We can neither comprehend nor control it all,
but as J. R. Tolkien said: “it is not our
part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the
success of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields
that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to
rule.”[v]
[i] Hitler, Adolf
(1889-1945). Adolf Hitler, the man whom Winston Churchill
once described as the "blood-thirsty guttersnipe," was born April 20,
1889, at Braunau in Upper Austria, the son of a minor customs official,
originally called Schicklgrüber, was educated at the secondary schools at Linz
and Steyr and destined by his father for the civil service. The young Adolf,
however, fashioned himself as a great artist and perhaps purposely disgraced
himself in his school leaving examinations. After his father's death he
attended a private art school in Munich, but failed twice to pass into the
Vienna Academy. Advised to try architecture, he was debarred for lack of a
school leaving certificate. His fanatical hatred of all intellectuals and his
later sneers at "gentlemen with diplomas" no doubt originated at this
early period of his life.
He lived as a tramp in Vienna
(1904-1913), making a living by selling bad postcard sketches, beating carpets
and doing odd jobs with his companions whom he, lice-ridden and draped in a
long black overcoat given to him by a Jewish tailor, thoroughly despised. He
worked only fitfully and spent the majority of his time in heated political
arguments directed at money-lending Jews and the trade unions. The Nazi
philosophy candidly expressed in Mein Kampf, with its brutality,
opportunism, contempt for the masses, distrust of even his closest friends,
fanatical strength of will and advocacy of the "big lie," was all
born in the gutters of Vienna.
He escaped military service,
and in 1913 emigrated to Munich, where he found employment as a draftsman. In
1914 he volunteered for war service in a Bavarian regiment, rose to the rank of
corporal and was recommended for the award of the Iron Cross for service as a
runner on the Western Front. When Germany surrendered in 1918, Hitler was lying
wounded and temporarily blinded by gas.
In 1919 and while acting as an
informer for the army and spying on the activities of small political parties,
Hitler became the seventh member of one group, the name of which he himself
changed from the German Workers' Party to the National Socialist German
Workers' Party (N.S.D.A.P.) in 1920. Its program was a convenient mixture of
mild radicalism, bitter hatred of the politicians who had shamed Germany by
signing the Versailles Treaty, and exploitation of provincial grievances
against the weak federal government. By 1923 Hitler was strong enough to
attempt with General Ludendorff's and other extreme right wing factions the
overthrow of the Bavarian government. On November 9, the Nazis marches through
the streets of Munich. The police machine-gunned the Nazi column. Hitler
narrowly escaped serious injury, Göring was badly wounded and sixteen
stormtroopers were killed. After nine months' imprisonment in a Landsberg jail,
during which time he dictated his autobiography and political testament, Mein
Kampf (1925) to Rudolf Hess, he began to woo Krupp and other Ruhr
industrialists. Although unsuccessful in the presidential elections of 1932,
Hitler was made Chancellor in January 1933. Krupp and others believed that they
could control Hitler's aspirations inside the government. Hitler, however,
quickly dispensed with all constitutional restraints placed upon the
Chancellor.
He silenced all opposition,
and engineering successfully the burning of the Reichstag building
February 1933, advertising it as a Communist plot, called for a general
election, in which the police, under Göring, allowed the Nazis full play to
break up the meetings of their political opponents. Only under these conditions
did the Nazi Party achieve a bare majority, Hitler arrogating to himself
absolute power through the Enabling Acts. Opposition within the Party he
ruthlessly crushed by the purge of June 1934 in which his rival Röhm and
hundreds of influential Nazis were murdered at the hands of Hitler's, the S.S.,
under Himmler and Heydrich.
Hindenburg's death in August,
1934 left Hitler sole master in Germany. Under the pretext of undoing the
wrongs of the Versailles Treaty and uniting all Germans and extending their
living space (Lebensraum), Hitler openly rearmed the nation (1935), sent
troops to occupy the Rhineland, established the Rome-Berlin "axis"
with Mussolini (October 1936), created a "Greater Germany" by
annexing Austria (1938), and by systematic infiltration and engineered
incidents engendered a more than favorable situation for an easy absorption of
the Sudetenland, to which France and Britain responded with their policy of
appeasement at Munich in 1938. Renouncing further territorial claims, Hitler
seized Bohemia and Moravia, took Memel from Lithuania and demanded from Poland
the return of Danzig and free access to east Prussia through the
"Corridor." Poland's refusal, backed by both Britain and France,
precipitated the outbreak of World War II, on September 3, 1939.
Hitler's domestic policy was
one of thorough "nazification" of all aspects of German life,
enforced by the Secret State Police (or Gestapo), and the establishment
of concentration camps for political opponents and Jews, who were
systematically persecuted. Strategic roads (Autobahnen) were built,
Schacht's economic policy expanded German exports up to 1936, and then Göring's
"Guns before Butter" four-year plan boosted armament production and
the construction of the Siegfried Line.
Hitler entered the war with
the grave misgivings of the German High Command, but as his intuitions scored
massive triumphs in the first two years of battle, he began to ignore the
advice of his military experts. Peace with Russia having been secured by the
Nazi-Soviet Pact (August 23, 1939), Poland was invaded, and after three week's Blitzkrieg
was divided between Russia and Germany. In 1940, Denmark, Norway, Holland,
Belgium and France were occupied and the British expelled at Dunkirk. But
Göring's invincible Luftwaffe was routed in the Battle of Britain
(August-September 1940) and Hitler turned eastwards, entered Rumania (October
1940), invaded Yugoslavia and Greece (April 1941), and ignoring his pact with
Stalin, attacked Russia and, as an ally of Japan, found himself at war with the
United States (December 1941). The Wehrmacht penetrated to the gates of
Moscow and Leningrad, to the Volga, into the Caucasus and, with Italy as an
ally since 1940, to North Africa as far as Alexandria.
But there the tide turned and
Hitler's strategy faltered. Montgomery's victory over Rommel at El Alamein
(October 1942) and Paulus's grave defeat, through Hitler's misdirection, at
Stalingrad (November 1942), meant the Nazi withdrawal from North Africa pursued
by the British and Americans (November 1942-May 1943). The Allied invasion of
Sicily, Italian capitulation (September 1943) and Russian victories (1943-44)
followed. The Anglo-American invasion of Normandy and the breaching of Rommel's
"Atlantic Wall" (June 1944) were not countered by Hitler's V1 and V2
attacks on Britain.
Hitler miraculously survived
the explosion of the bomb placed at his feet by Colonel Stauffenberg (July 19,
1944), and purged the army of all suspects, including Rommel, who committed
suicide. A counter-offensive launched against the Allies in the Ardennes failed
(December 1944) and the invasion of Germany followed. Hitler lived out his
fantasies, commanding non-existent armies from his Bunker, the air-raid
shelter under the chancellory building in Berlin. With the Russians only
several hundred yards away, he went through a grotesque marriage ceremony with
Eva Braun, in the presence of Göebbel's family, who then poisoned themselves.
All available evidence suggests that Hitler and Eva Braun committed suicide and
had their bodies cremated on April 30, 1945.
Hitler's much celebrated
"Third Reich," which was to have endured for eternity, ended after
twelve years of unparalleled barbarity, in which 30 million people lost their
lives. Twelve million of theses souls lost their lives far from the
battlefield, by mass shootings, forced labor camps, and in gas ovens at Belsen,
Dachau, Auschwitz and Ravensbrück in accordance with Nazi racial theories and
the "New Order." To these atrocities we could add the indiscriminate
torture and murder of prisoners of war, or the uprooting and destruction of
entire villages in Poland, France and Russia. Such horror prompted the
international trial at Nuremberg (1945-46), at which twenty-one leading Nazis
were tried and eleven executed for carrying out the orders of der Führer.
http://www.historyguide.org/europe/hitler.html,
06/01/2005
[ii] Mephistopheles,
The Devil in the Modern World, Jeffrey Burton Russell, Cornell University
Press, Ithaca, New York, 1986, p. 18.
[iii] Eichmann
in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt, 2nd Edition, New York, 1976.
[iv] The
City of God, Saint Augustine, Image Books, 1958, p. 304.
[v] The
Return of the King, J. R. R. Tolkien, Ballantine Books, 1965, p. 190.
II.
REGARDING EVIL
SATAN'S MODUS OPERANDI
The creation of the angels, the trial to
which they were put, and the fall of a great number of them in Satan’s wake
seem to belong to a world totally foreign to our human condition. When thinking of other worlds our visions are
often focused on distant galaxies, inhabited perhaps like ours, inhabited by
other human species similar to our own.
The same might easily apply to angels and demons. It is in a very close relationship to this
physical unity of the material universe and to this moral unity of the spirit
universe that we humans should consider the intervention of the angels and the
devils in our own history.
It
seems to us that god likes to link together each and every part of his
work. He has created interdependence
between the stages of his creation. The
vegetables feed on the minerals, the animals on the vegetables, and men feed on
both and we all sustain life in a common atmosphere. Everything holds together in nature.
Is
it not surprising, therefore, that God likely bound the world of angels to that
of human souls? If other inhabited
planets do exist, a day will doubtless come when the connection between them
and the earth is established in its turn.
Likewise, I feel that in the case of angels and demons it was an
accomplished fact from the outset.
What
use could the Creator make of the fallen angels in relation humans? The devil and his minions serve God’s
purpose. The use that God makes of him
is to take good from evil. Satan was banished
from heaven. He was not banished from
creation. By God’s will an important
part remains for him to play in it. It
is exactly the same part he played in the great battle of the angels. It is inherent in the logic of his
being. In his revolt he seduced a number
of the angels and he will try to seduce the greatest possible number of souls
in this same rebellion. By the very
choice he freely made long before the first man was created, he will be the Tempter.
In
his Essay, In Aid of A Grammar of Assent[1],”
John Henry Cardinal Newman, said that our certainties concerning faith, what he
called “the Grammar of assent,” are derived much more from a convergence of
proofs, from a harmony between laws and things, than from one single rigid
piece of reasoning. The role falling to
the Devil in the history of mankind is simply one of these convergences and
harmonies. Chapter 1:27 of Genesis
relates that before the sun set on the sixth day of creation, “God created man in his own image.” He drew them from the animal stage of
evolution, or if it is preferred, from the clay of the earth and endowed these
beings with a free will, intelligence, love and a reasoning soul. It was right that man should be put to the
great trial
of love just like the angels.
This
trial was necessary. For a free
creature, happiness is only happiness when it is merited, for it is only at
this price that it properly belongs to him who won it in the hard fight. Therefore, humanity required a trial
consistent with its strengths, just as the angels did. It was in this connection that Satan was used
by God, for it is impossible to suppose that he could tempt Adam and Eve
without God’s permission. This temptation
formed part of the divine plan, the whole magnificence of which Satan did not
realize. He could have no notion that
the day would come when his victory over Adam and eve would cause to be sung in
Christ’s Church that wonderfully audacious felix
culpa[2]. He was following his bent. He was obeying his nature by becoming the tempter. However, the word temptation, which to
us in our weakness means something sinister, really only signifies a putting to
the test, that is, a trail. Since this trial was necessary, it offered a
ready-made opportunity for Satan.
Also,
in this battle within the realm of the human condition the “good angels” were
to have their own part to play. They
would be on the side of man, as friends, protectors, and guardians. Thus, the world of angels and devils is even
more closely bound up with the world of souls than is the world of vegetables,
animals and minerals with that of human bodies.
Blueprint for Satan's Operation in the Material World
It
is very probable that the trial imposed upon Adam and Eve was something far
more difficult than those which their descendants have to face. We are the “sons of sin.” Our first parents had just come from God’s
hand. In them the very perfection of
humanity, as it is described by Catholic theology, gave to their trial a more
grandiose and formidable character. The
destiny of mankind was in their hands.
The light that God made to shine within their conscience, by a kind of
infused knowledge, that they received at birth (the complete harmony that
existed between their faculties, the entire subordination of the flesh to the
spirit) in their nature, did not allow their obedience or their revolt to be
commonplace.
In
a fine thesis in the Summa Theological,[3]
St. Thomas Aquinas – and a number of great theologians following him – has
established that they were incapable of committing a merely venial sin. And that gives us an exalted idea of the
strength of their souls endowed by God with the supernatural and preternatural
gifts of which the theologians speak.
Venial sin is a somewhat crude inconsistency. For our first forefathers, there was only one
possible trial, which has been called: For
or Against, or even All or Nothing.
The First Fall of Man
It
is of little consequence that the biblical story of the Fall has been written
in a popular form with obviously mythical elements. It is the substance of things that must be
examined. And that is what Bossuet
expressed in decisive terms in the following passage[4]:
“Of all the beasts which the Lord God had made, there was none
which could match the serpent in cunning.”
Here in the apparent weakness of so strange a beginning to the story of
our misfortunes lies the admirable depth of Christian theology. Everything appears to be weak; we venture to
say that everything in it seems to wear a fabulous appearance; a serpent
speaks; a woman listens; a man so perfect, so enlightened allows himself to be
led astray by a crude temptation; the whole human race falls with him into sin
and death; it all appears senseless. But
it is here that the truth of this sublime saying of St. Paul’s begins: “That which is in god (apparent) folly, is
wiser than the wisdom of men; that which is in god (apparent) weakness, is
stronger than the strength of all men.[5]
It
is reasonable to assume that there is allegory in this story. It is a presentation designed to appeal to
the imagination and, perhaps, features of popular history. But we must go into the heart of the matter,
Satan. It is indeed Satan, and the
Apocalypse clearly denounced him when speaking of the Dragon – who appears to
the first woman in a visible form.
Did
she see him with the eyes of her body or with the eyes of her soul? We do not know. What is certain is that Satan spoke to
Eve. As Bishop Bossuet explains, “He
[Satan] attacks us at our weakest point.” It is what he is going to say that matters to
us. By analyzing what he says to Eve we
can discern what he thinks and so obtain a glimpse of the “diabolical psychology.” There are three phases in the dialogue
between Satan and the first woman which summarizes his entire strategy as the
Tempter. These three phases are exactly
the same as those we all know in this perpetual drama of temptation which is
something so profoundly human.
Phase
One. Satan begins with a simple
question. He asks as if out of kindly
curiosity with apparent indifference, almost in a friendly way: “Did God say,
‘You shall not eat of any tree of the garden?’” [Genesis 3: 1] Here it is simply a matter of opening a
conversation, of insinuating a doubt, if possible, of setting in motion what we
should call the spirit of criticism.
With
this innocent-seeming question the tempter is already questioning a principle. He appears to invite investigation of God’s
command, its limitations and merits.
Remotely he is inducing a frame of mind in which the woman will call in
question the law laid down for her and the authority imposing it.
And
these tactics succeed. The woman enters
into conversation. She answers the
tempter: “We
may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden; but God said, ‘You shall not
eat of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, neither shall
you touch it, least you die.’”
[Genesis 3: 2-3]
Phase
Two. This reply is sufficient
for Satan to judge that the woman is wavering.
(Put into the context of “shoot-don’t
shoot” training at the Houston Police Academy, Eve’s response was “already too much conversation!”) It is apparent to Satan that she is held back
by Fear
and not by Love. If this is
so, she is on the point of falling.
Satan himself knows quite well that true obedience is that of love and
not of fear.
At
once he changes his tone. He no longer
interrogates as if he did not know and required information. He becomes more friendly still, more
pressing. He seems to pose as a
liberator, from insinuated doubt he goes on to a categorical denial. “But the serpent said to the woman, ‘You will not die.”
[Genesis 3: 4] There is a
distinctive trait of satanic psychology:
Satan is the supreme denier and indeed might be defined as the Denier,
or what amounts to the same thing, the Liar.
Phase
Three. Satan does not rest
there. He goes much further and reveals
the very depths of his perversion by his next remark. He must cast the most insulting suspicion on
God himself. He must dazzle the woman’s
mind with his own man dream that caused his downfall. Indeed, what he now says in this Third Phase
is most profound: “For God
knows that you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” [Genesis 3: 5]
Thus,
it is not enough for him to have substituted the most shameless denial for the
most subtle doubt. He makes of God a
jealous and distrustful being. If God
had forbidden the fruit to be eaten, it is because he is afraid of rivals. He wishes to keep us in a state of
dependence. He wishes us to be slaves,
not children!
“You will be like gods!” Such is the diabolical psychology. To make oneself God shall be for men as for
angels the very depth of sin. “Who is like god?” Michael, the chief of the faithful angels,
had replied. It is about God, his
nature, his love, participation in his divinity, that the battle is fought. Jesus also was to promise his followers to
become “gods,” to be, in the words of
St. Peter, “sharers in the divine
nature,” or according to the words of St. John: “we shall be like him.” And
with all their soul the mystics were to seek to immerse themselves so
completely in God that they were but one with him. Enraptured, Paul was to say exactly the same
thing: “I live no more; but it is Jesus who lives in me.”
What
happened in the soul of the woman? The
most alluring temptation does not deprive us of our freedom. It was even more true of Adam and Eve, than
for the fallen, diminished humans we have become through their
disobedience. Jesus was to show later on
how we must answer Satan. But goes on to
tell us: “So
when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight
to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of
its fruit and ate. And she also gave
some to her husband, and he ate.” [Genesis 3: 6]
The
sin was consummated. It was a sin of the
spirit more than of the flesh. Satan had
played an incalculable part in it. He
had obsessed them with the thought which had been the inspiration for his
revolt:
“You will be like god, you will be gods, knowing good and evil.”
This
disordered ambition and the outright disobedience that it provoked constitute a
sin similar to that of Satan himself.
However obscure our own conscience, it is impossible for us not to
realize its gravity.
The
punishment was not slow in coming. Its
effects are still evident. On the part
of infinite Love it has provoked its counterpart. After the fall of Adam came the restoration
in Jesus Christ. The holiness of “the
Son of Man” answered the sin of “the father of man.” The temptation by Satan in the earthly
paradise is therefore one of the most significant factors I the whole of our
spiritual history, the first act of the great drama which we are still living,
and in which each one of us in turn must choose one side or the other.
The
Council of Trent has clearly emphasized that part of the story of Genesis that
must be retained in our faith, in the following definition: “Let him be
anathema who does not admit that the first man, Adam, after having transgressed
God’s commandment, in the earthly paradise, immediately lost his holiness and
the justice in which it had been established, and incurred, by committing such
an offence, the wrath and indignation of God and subsequently death, with which
God had previously threatened him, and with death, captivity under the dominion
of him who, from that instant after that, had dominion over death, that is to
say the Devil, and that Adam, by committing this offense, suffered a fall both
in his body and his soul.”[6]
A
murderer from the first, such is the first definition of Satan. It is he, literally, who put us to death, who
introduced death into the history of mankind.
and the tragedy is that because he said to us: “No,
you shall not die!” that we do die.
He
is therefore a murderer because he is the Father of Lies. Such is the answer to the question asked in
this Essay: Who is Satan? This problem has been constantly before
us. Satan is the author of death because
he is the author of lies. to measure the
satanic reality (i.e., the role Satan plays in our history) we should have to
be able to measure the immensity of three things: concupiscence and sin, lying, death. All who consider it will realize that Satan
is the great protagonist in the human condition.
Between
his role as Tempter and that of Accuser there is an undeniable kinship. In both cases we have a being who does not
love us, who is jealous of us, who would like to drag us to destruction with
him, who, to achieve his purposes, does not hesitate to lie or to inflict the
most dreadful calamities upon us, in short someone who revels in doing harm to
us. He is a murderer from the first, the
Father of lies whom Jesus Christ denounced.
That
such a figure is constantly at work among men is what helps to explain why the
history of mankind should be so full of troubles, disturbances, unrest and
bloodshed and most of the time so inhuman.
If one of the ancients had seen
fit to say that no wild animal has shown itself to be more ferocious than man,
it is largely true because of Satan’s action among men.
The Devil's First Trick is His Incognito
Belief in the Devil has suffered a
regression. It may be true to say that
most intelligent Catholics are unwilling to face up to the Article of their
Faith setting forth the super national creation of God – the angels. Either this or if they think of it they
inwardly take refuge behind a nebulous interpretation of it. Satan is simply a personification of Evil, a
figure of speech. And this attitude has
the serious disadvantage of misrepresenting the nature of the moral struggle
which is the basis of human life on earth.
We are fighting, or so we imagine, against abstractions which, though
seeming very real to us, yet appear only to be static adversaries, and not
intelligent, cunning, spiteful enemies eager to destroy us, to overcome whom we
must call on for help – God, the good angels, and the saints.
Under
a pretext of Realism that enables
us to refuse acceptance of what we hold to be old-fashioned prejudices, we are
forsaking authentic realism. We take no further part in the divinely
planned gigantic struggle which, before man was born, took place between the
faithful angels and the rebels and still continues on earth with the battle
between the righteous and the wicked.
And then we are denying ourselves a clear understanding of original
sin. We are obliged to admit that there
are perverse tendencies deep down within our nature, but we no longer remember
their origin and no longer connect them with the Serpent’s temptation of
Eve. In short, the whole spiritual combat
takes on a different aspect as it loses its clear outline in the grey shadows
of a theoretical argument between our abstract moral principles and our
unthinking instincts.
There
can be no doubt that it is a dangerous minimization of the conditions of the
Christian combat and a modification of the outlook of our faith, if we
underestimate the forces against us, if we forget the presence of what St.
Peter called the “roaring lion,” or if we remain within the misty realm of
reason while a hand-to-hand, or rather a man-to-man battle is being fought not
only within the confines of our individual lives, but also in a great unending
war which, first waged in heaven by the angels, will not cease until the end of
our earthly world.
The
integration of Satan into our personal as well as the global culture takes
three forms: first, as the domination of
the world by Satan; second, as the worship of Satan, and third, as man’s
emulation of Satan’s revolt. It is this
third form which today seems the most menacing.
The more or less secret chapels to Satan around the world where he is
worshiped do not represent the real danger.
Modern Satanism lies in the neglect of God’s rights, the denial of his
name, the theoretical or practical negation of his existence and authority, in
man’s determination to arrange his life apart from God and without God.
Satan
can remain hidden in the wings and preserve what has been described as his
incognito. He is quite prepared for man
to deny him, provided that they also deny God.
He who, as the expression goes, “believes in neither God nor the Devil,”
is just the man for him. This rebellion
on the part of man is a second version of the angel’s revolt. Satan has found imitators. They are numerous at the present time. And like him, these “limbs of Satan” take up
strategic positions, thereby revealing the attitude of the “Father of
Lies.” Perhaps it seemed
incomprehensible that angels created by God could have been capable of uttering
the blasphemous cry: “Quo non ascendam? – To what heights
shall I not rises.
Satan
is indeed worshiped in secret places on all parts of our globe. When people boast of “the autonomy of human
conscience,” or violently denounce all limitations and restrictions of human
personality, when men glorify the delights of total liberty and the absolute
right of human instinct to develop without restraint, it is nothing less than
Satanism. The taste for blasphemy, this
love of irreverence, this quest of the abnormal, by profaning real worship, the
abuse of carnal pleasures, accompanied by parodies of Catholic liturgy are a
form of Satanism, but not the most common form, nor that which causes the worst
havoc in modern society.
We
see in contemporary literature and visual entertainment a heroic affirmation of
Man’s ego defending its absolute integrity.
Much of what is readily accepted as wholesome entertainment and free
expression of man’s liberation from puritanical, Victorian morals have been
developed under the sign of the Father of Lies.
Many contemporary adventure-seeking members of the human race actively
seek to discover Satan – in person or at least in spirit. Many more simply deny his existence and run
their lives on a course of “you only go
around once, so grab all the gusto you can.”
Satan
has no need to make a personal appearance on earth. He is only too well served by those who
profess to believe no longer in his existence.
The devil’s first trick is his incognito. This very denial of the Devil on the part of
a great number of our contemporaries is the surest sign of their subservience
to him. He is the Father of Lies, and
there is no more deadly lie than the refusal to recognize his presence here in
the very heart of human affairs.
Where are we Bound?
Where
are we bound now? Terrifying voices try
to make us believe that God is dead, that there is no God but man himself. No doubt, the wrongdoer must persist in his
deeds of wrong, the corrupt in his corruption.
That is one aspect of our times.
But there is another: As St. John
informs us in the Apocalypse, “The just man must persist in winning his
justification, the holy in his life of holiness.”
So
there will always be the two Cities that St. Augustine saw, the two Standards
described by St. Ignatius Loyola. But
God is not dead! He has nothing to fear
from the paltry “Satans” that hover above our heads, here in the midst of
mankind. He will have the last
word. And this is how St. John described
it:
Patience, I am coming soon; and with me
comes the award I make, repaying each man according to the life he has lived.
I am the Alpha, I am Omega. I am before all, I am at the end of all, the
beginning of all things and their end.
Blessed are those who wash their garments in the blood of the Lamb; so they will have access
to the tree which gives life, and find their way through the gates into the
city. No room there for prowling dogs,
for sorcerers and wantons and murderers and idolaters, for anyone who loves
falsehood and lives in it. . . .
[1] An Essay in Aid of A Grammar of
Assent, John Henry Cardinal Newman,
Longmans, Green, and Company, 39 Pater Noster Row, London, 1903
[2] Felix culpa. A Latin phrase that literally translated
means a “blessed fault” or “fortunate fall.”
The Latin expression felix culpa
derives from St. Augustine’s famous allusion to one unfortunate event, the Fall
of Man, Adam and Eve's fall and the loss of the Garden of Eden, known theologically as the source of
original sin. The phrase is sung annually in the Exsultet of the Easter Vigil: "O felix culpa quae talem et tantum
meruit habere redemptorem," "O
happy fault that merited such and so great a Redeemer." The medieval
theologian Thomas Aquinas cited this line when he explained how
the principle that "God allows evils to happen in order to
bring a greater good therefrom" underlies the causal
relation between original sin and the Divine Redeemer's Incarnation, thus concluding that a higher state
is not inhibited by sin. The Catholic saint Ambrose also speaks of the fortunate ruin of
Adam in the Garden of Eden in that his sin brought more good to humanity than
if he had stayed perfectly innocent. The
concept also comes up in Hebrew tradition in the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt and is
associated with God’s judgment. Although it is not a fall, the thinking goes
that without their exile in the desert the Israelites would not have the joy of
finding their promised land. With their suffering came the hope of victory and
their life restored. The phrase "Oh happy fault!" is used in
colloquial English, especially among intellectuals. In a literary context, the term "felix culpa" can describe how a series of miserable
events will eventually lead to a happier outcome. The theological concept
is one of the underlying themes of Raphael Carter's science fiction novel The
Fortunate Fall; the novel's
title derives explicitly from the Latin phrase. It is also the theme of the
fifteenth-century English text Adam Lay Ybounden, of unknown authorship, and it is
used in various guises, such as "Foenix
culprit" and "phaymix
cupplerts" by James Joyce in Finnegans Wake.
[3] Summa Theologica, Complete English
Edition in Five Volumes, St. Thomas Aquinas, translated by the Fathers of the
English Dominican Province, originally published in English in 1911, by
Christian Classics under a license granted by Benzinger, a division of Glencoe
Publishing Co., Inc., successor in interest to Benzinger Brothers, Inc., New
York, 1948, Prima Secundae, Qu. 89, Art. 3.
[4] Jacques-Benigne
Bossuet (1627-1704). A French
bishop and theologian, renowned for his sermons and other addresses. He has been considered by many to be one of
the most brilliant orators of all time.
Court preacher to Louis XIV of France, he was a strong advocate of
political absolutism and the divine right of kings. He argued that government was divine and that
kings received their power from God.
[5] Elévations Sur Les Mystères,
6th week, 1st élévation, Bossuet, Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 6,
Place de la Sorbonne, Paris, 1962.
[6] Council of Trent Fifth Session Celebrated
on 17 June 1546, Session 5, Canon 1. The Decree Concerning Original Sin: “If anyone does not confess that the first
man, Adam, when he transgressed the commandment of God in paradise, immediately
lost the holiness and justice in which he had been constituted, and through the
offense of that prevarication incurred the wrath and indignation of god, and
thus death with which God had previously threatened him,4 and, together with death, captivity
under his power who thenceforth had the empire of death, that is to say, the
devil, and that the entire Adam through that offense of prevarication was
changed in body and soul for the worse, let him be anathema.”
[7] Revelations 22: 12-15, The Holy Bible, Revised Standard
Version, Second Catholic Edition, Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 1956
III.
.jpg)
Clarifying the concept of Evil,
which is Live spelled backward.
“Take our friend Le Chiffre. It’s simple enough to say he was an evil man;
at least it’s simple enough for me, because he did evil things to me. If he were here right now, I wouldn’t
hesitate to kill him – but out of personal revenge and not, I’m afraid, for
some high moral reason or for the sake of my country.”
Mathis smiled at
Bond. “Continue, my dear friend. Now in order to tell
the difference between good and evil, we have manufactured two images
representing the extremes – representing the deepest black and the purest white
– and we call them God and the Devil.
But in doing so we have cheated a bit.
God is a clear image, you can see every hair on His beard. But the Devil. What does he look like? . . .”
“. . . I’ve been
thinking about these things, and I’m wondering whose side I ought to be
on. I’m getting very sorry for the Devil
and his disciples, such as the good Le
Chiffre. The Devil has a rotten
time, and I always like to be on the side of the underdog. We don’t give the poor chap a chance. There’s a Good Book about goodness and how to
be good, and so forth, but there’s no Evil Book about evil and how to be
bad. The Devil has no prophets to write
his Ten Commandments, and no team of authors to write his autobiography.”
“. . . So, Le Chiffre was serving a wonderful
purpose, a really vital purpose, perhaps the best and highest purpose of
all. By his evil existence, which
foolishly I have helped to destroy, he was creating a norm of badness by which,
and by which alone, an opposite norm of goodness could exist. We were privileged, in our short knowledge of
him, to see and estimate his wickedness, and we emerge from the
acquaintanceship better and more virtuous men.”
Mathis rose to his feet
laughing. “Now about this little problem
of yours, this business of not knowing good men from bad men and villains from
heroes, and so forth. It is, of course, a
difficult problem in the abstract. The
secret lies in personal experience, whether you’re a Chinaman or an
Englishman. . . . You admit that Le Chiffre did you personal evil, and
that you would kill him if he appeared in front of you now?”
“Well, when you get back
to London you will find there are other Le
Chiffres seeking to destroy you and your friends and your country. M will tell you about them. And now that you have seen a really evil man
you will know how evil they can be, and you will go after them to destroy them
in order to protect yourself and the people you love. You won’t wait to argue about it. You know what they look like now and what they
can do to people. [Emphasis
added] You may be a bit more choosy
about the jobs you take on. You may want
to be certain that the target is really black; but there are plenty of really
black targets around. There’s still
plenty for you to do. And you’ll do
it. And when you fall in love and have a
mistress or a wife and children to look after, it will seem all the easier.”
“Surround yourself with
human beings, my dear James. They are
easier to fight than principles.[i]
Satan and Hitler, his shadow on earth, are widely known
symbols of radical evil.
Two final philosophical views
of evil may bring us closer to an understanding of evil in modern times. Kant captures the essence of evil as it
applies to each individual human being.
He regards evil as “self-incurred by each human being. What he calls radical evil consists in a “fundamental misdirection of our willing
that corrupts our choice of action.” In
other words, it is the human free will that gets us in trouble by permitting
choice of alternatives to satisfy our needs.
Too often, man seeks immediate gratification of both sensual appetites
and the need for dominance and control over what is best for the greater good
in the long-run. In Kant’s terminology,
it consists of an “inversion of our maxims” (i.e. governing values), which are
the principles for “action we pose to ourselves in making our choices.” Instead of making the “rightness of actions”
the fundamental principle for choice, we “make the satisfaction of our own
goals take priority in the willing of our actions.”[2] Rather than doing what we ought to do, we do
what our passions demand be done.
Hanna Arendt takes the concept
from the individual to a “system” composed of many human beings, each and all
existing in the human condition.
Regardless of the long line of philosophers who micro-analyze the
concept of evil, nature – and “super-nature” prefers the simple. Likewise, evil is not all that complex. We know it when we see it and its impact on
our society Hanna Arendt defines
“radical evil as the fruit of a system in which human beings are superfluous.”[3]
Satan – the devil – at one
time was the most widely known symbol of radical evil. Lately, Lucifer and his demonic spirits in
hell are still on the “top ten” list, but are falling from the top spot. Adolf Hitler tends to take the dubious
honors. Strangely enough, both are cut
from the same cloth. It is probable that
evil spirits from hell – Lucifer’s minions – have little or no direct power
here on earth. Rather, they are able to
only act through select people, who in turn influence and manipulate millions
of others. In Goethe’s writing, it was
Mephistopheles who appeared because Faust called for his services. We humans become Satan’s shadow here on earth
to kill the spirit and seize the soul of our fellow man. This, then is the essence of radical evil.
On a person-to-person basis,
radical evil expresses itself in behaviors of unfathomable cruelty carried out
by others. The closest we get to the
reality of evil is our own direct experience of evil in ourselves and others. From time to time most of us encounter a
person we judge to be evil. Leaving
Hitler and Stalin aside for the moment, others may surface in our mind: an associate at the office, a bully, a
murderer, a child abuser, or the next door neighbor. There are people out there who act in a hideous
manner to control, dominate, manipulate, others – to seize their zest for
living if not their very spirituality.
Perhaps only sociopaths lack the direct intuition to recognize radical
evil. The actions of Adolf Hitler and
his henchmen (whoever they were) fall within the scope of radical evil since
they initiated action that snuffed out the life of millions of human beings. The actions of the conspirators was equally
representative of evil since they initiated and facilitated the disrespect for
human life that followed. From a law enforcement perspective, anyone, on
either side of a badge, who cloaks the truth of a situation in the
darkness of the lie, are also forcing others into Satan’s shadow. Generally, however, we need not go further
than the morning newspaper for examples.
On 14 November 1984, UPI reported:
Cynthia Palmer, 29, and her live-in-boyfriend, John Lane, 36,
pleaded innocent to burning to death Mrs. Palmer’s 4-year-old daughter in an
oven. The two, who told neighbors
shortly before their arrest that they were “cooking Lucifer,” were arraigned
Tuesday in Androscoggin County [Maine] Superior Court. They were arrested 27 October at their
apartment. Angela Palmer was found
stuffed in the electric oven. The door
was jammed shut with a chair.
Evil, from the point of view
of human welfare, is what ought not to exist.
Nevertheless, there is no facet of human life in which its presence is
not felt. It is the discrepancy between
what is and what ought to be. Clearly,
the Ms. Palmer’s act of “cooking Lucifer” falls into an evil category, perhaps
because most of us are able to close our eyes and experience the child’s horror
in that situation. It would seem as if
no excuse would mitigate that culpability of Ms. Palmer and her boyfriend. A closer look at the nature of evil may
illuminate the forces acting in the case of Angela Palmer.
Evil is of three kinds –
physical, moral, and metaphysical. Physical evil includes all that causes
harm to man, whether by bodily injury, by thwarting his natural desires, or by
preventing the full development of his powers.
Physical evils directly due to nature are sickness, accident, death,
etc. Poverty, oppression, and some forms
of disease are instances of evil arising
from imperfect social organizations.
Mental suffering, such as anxiety, disappointment, and remorse, and the
limitation of intelligence which prevents human beings from attaining full
comprehension of their environment, are congenital forms of physical evil. Moral
evil is the deviation of human free will from the prescriptions of the
moral order and the action which results from that deviation. Such action, when it proceeds solely from
ignorance, is not really moral evil, which is best restricted to the motions of
will towards ends of which the conscience disapproves. Metaphysical
evil is the limitation of one another of various component parts of the
natural world. Through this mutual
limitation natural objects are for the most part prevented from attaining their
full or ideal perfection, whether by the constant pressure of physical
conditions or by sudden catastrophes.
Animals and plants are variously influenced by climate and other natural
causes. Predatory animals depend for
their existence on the destruction of life.
Nature is subject to storms and convulsions, and its order depends on a
system of perpetual decay and renewal.
It is evident that
all evil is essentially negative and not positive. That is, it consists not in the acquisition
of anything, but in the loss or deprivation of something necessary for
perfection. This speaks to the outcome
of evil – the loss or deprivation of something.
However, moral evil is a deliberate willingness to inflict suffering by
one human upon another.
The Devil: Being, Symbol, or “All the Below”
The discussion of
radical evil and the history of the Devil do not mean the history of the
Devil-in-himself, which would be impossible.
It means the history of the phenomenon, the history of the concept of
the Devil. This concept has four primary
facets: (1) a principle independent of
God; (2) an aspect of God; (3) a created being, a fallen angel; (4) a symbol for human evil. These variations, different though they are,
have participated in shaping a tradition over the millennia that gradually
extrudes and excludes some views while retaining others. As the tradition moves along, it does not
necessarily get better – in the sense that a 1687 view of the Devil would be
better than a 1387 view – but it does get fuller. And as the tradition becomes richer, it
approaches truth. The closest we can get
to the truth about the Devil is the examination of the tradition as a whole.
The Devil: A being created by God – a fallen angel
During the seventeenth century
the growth of towns and the middle class encouraged the growth of literacy far
beyond the priesthood. This meant that
the middle classes could now read and interpret the Bible on their own. More important, it meant that increasing
numbers of literate people focused their attention on the concerns of the
secular world: making money, building
businesses, raising families. Added to
these developments was the rise of the secular nation-state with its concerns
for state power and international influence.
A gradual turning of attention from the “other world” to “this world”
followed naturally.
Humanism[6] spread from
Italy into the north in the sixteenth century, bringing with it the beginnings
of skeptical, critical and secular thought.
The nominalist[7] division
between faith and intellect encouraged the growth of empirical, material
science. Another emerging world view was
hermetic magic[8], which for a
century sustained a vigorous and sophisticated competition with science. Until a few decades ago hermetic magic was misunderstood
and muddled with witchcraft. Magic is so
tied in our minds to childish stories, stage conjurers, and sloppy,
anything-may-happen fantasies that it is difficult to grasp how sophisticated a
structure of thought Renaissance magic was.
The underlying idea that the cosmos is a unity whose every part
influences every other part in a vast system of “sympathies” means that no part
of the cosmos is isolated from any other part.
Stars, minerals, plants, and the human body and mind all interact in ways
that are often hidden (occult) but are nonetheless regular, rational, and
discoverable.[9]
Neither the scientific nor the
hermetic view of the world had much room for the Devil. Yet Satan, far from being ready to retire,
reaches his height of power just at the moment when the intellectual structures
supporting him were beginning to shake.
The theology of Luther and the rise of the witch craze both encouraged
the belief in the Devil. And, no one
seemed aware that three radically divergent world views – Christianity,
hermetic magic, and material science – were in conflict.
Faust deals with Mephistopheles
With this conflict as a fuel,
Satan’s power began to grow. As Satan
stepped more fully into the spotlight of daily activities, the legendary figure
of Faustus evolved into a prominent supporting role. Plays, paintings, poems,
novels, operas, and films from the sixteenth to present centuries have featured
Faust and his demonic companion Mephistopheles.
The legend of Faust is based on the life of a historical person. Most likely, he was a philosophy and theology
student turned to hermetic magic and then degenerated into casting horoscopes
and predicting the future. A number of
influential people seemed to have been impressed with his wit. Others recognized him as a charlatan. The historical identity of this person is not
firmly established.[10] The earliest source is Trithemius, who wrote
in 1507. Luther and his followers seemed
to have been chiefly responsible for turning the historical person into a
legendary figure. Luther, who despised
hermetic magic as a vain and prideful attempt to grasp divine knowledge through
the intellect, hastened to link all magic with witchcraft. If a person practiced magic, Luther reasoned,
he can do solely with the help of the Devil.
The first attested link of Faust with the Devil dates from about 1540,
and the first mention of his pact with the Devil as late as about 1580. The more extraordinary the feats that legend
ascribed to Faustus, the more assuredly Lutherans proclaimed that he was in
league with Satan. The first book
devoted entirely to Faust was a mixture of legend and fantasy published by John
Spiess in 1587 under the title Historia
von Dr. Johann Faustus. The Spiess
version became known as the Faustbook
and went into numerous translations and editions all over Europe.
The Faustbook tells how Faustus abandoning philosophy, turns to
magic. Given the anti-scholastic bias of
the Protestant Reformation, it was natural that the Faustbook should make the figure of the man who sells his soul to
Satan a scholar. Faust desires to obtain
knowledge through his own efforts. In
order to master magical lore, Faustus determines to call up the Devil. Going to a crossroads at night, he inscribes
magical circles and characters upon the ground and invokes a spirit (Gaist) by the name of Beelzebub. The spirit appears, taking the form of a
dragon, a fiery globe, a fiery man, and finally a greyfriar.[11] The spirit explains to Faustus that he is a
member of a great hierarchy whose prince is Lucifer. The spirit’s name is Mephistopheles. Faustus explains that he wishes to gain
infinite knowledge and apply all aspects of magic. The spirit informs him that he must first
secure Lucifer’s permission before disclosing secrets of the black arts.
As Faust’s contract with
Mephistopheles proves, it does not pay
to make a deal with the devil.
Mephistopheles goes to Lucifer
and obtains his approval to serve Faustus if the scholar will promise to give
himself up, body and soul, to the prince of hell. Faust makes a written pact in blood, denies
Christ, and promises to be an enemy of the Christian people.
The first great literary
expression of the Faust legend was the Doctor
Faustus of Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593), probably written in 1558 or
1559.[12] In this play, Faustus’ first sin is
pride. In the beginning he imagines that
he can manipulate Mephistopheles to fulfill his own immoderate ambitions. Soon Mephistopheles, using flattery, false promises, and threats,
gains the upper hand. Faust begins to
grasp the enormity of the situation when Mephistopheles shows him hell. Now he succumbs to his final and fatal sin,
despair. He refuses to believe that
Christ can save him because he knows that repentance entails renouncing the
power he has gained and is enjoying too much.
Faustus is a traditional
Christian play making the moral statement that lust for worldly fame and power
leads to destruction. Mephistopheles is,
as Dorothy Sayers remarks, a “spiritual lunatic, but like many lunatics,
he is extremely plausible and cunning.”[13]
I
believe that Adolf Hitler served Satan as his shadow on earth during the first
half of the twentieth century. As such,
the relationship Hitler seductively achieved with those he needed around him –
the Nazi party hacks, the military, the police, the bureaucrats, and most of
the German people as well – was very much like that evolved between Doctor
Faustus and Mephistopheles in Goethe’s[14]
classic tale of evil. The parallels
between Mephistopheles and Hitler, and Faust and the German people are
frightening.
In
rapid succession, Hitler eliminated all of his actual or potential rivals for
power. First the Communist, then the
Social Democratic party were proscribed, their leaders imprisoned. The independent trade unions, with a
membership of four million workers, were abolished and absorbed into the
National Socialist “Labor Front.” The
Catholic Center party, which had supported the enabling law that confirmed the
Führer’s unchallengeable authority, was dissolved and afterward purged of its
more recalcitrant leaders. The
Nationalists were accorded the same treatment, and even lost their cherished
veterans’ organization, the “Stahlhelm”
(Steel Helmet), which had long been one of the mainstays of right-wing
politics.
And,
more to the point of the pages which follow, like his shadow Mephistopheles,
Hitler, as commander in chief of the armed forces, destroys his armies by
committing illusory troops to a hopeless battle, and wastes the lives of his
subjects rather than admit defeat. The
spirit of chaos and disorder in the natural world, he also promotes disorder in
society by corrupting justice and the rule of law. He delights in cruelty and suffering. He tempts and threatens in his efforts to
corrupt and is most pleased with the despair of the innocent. Incapable of grasping what love means, he
promotes coarseness and brutality. He
opposes social reforms and crushes revolutions against tyranny. He regrets his unrepentant past but refuses
to repent, falling into the ultimate final sin of despair. Mephistopheles returns to hell dragging his
patsy, Faustus kicking and screaming down the dark road. Hitler, in a fit of despair kills himself and
likely follows the same path downward, also dragging many of his Faustian
lackeys with him.
[1] The
Heart of Man: Its Genius for Good and
Evil, Erich Fromm, Harper & Rowe Publishers, 1964.
[2] The Critique of Pure Reason, 1781; 2nd
Edition 1787, Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (trans), Cambridge University Press
,Cambridge, 1998. See also: A New
Exposition of the First Principles of Metaphysical Knowledge, John A.
Reuscher (trans), in Lewis White Beck (ed.), Kant’s Latin Writings: Translations, Commentaries, and Notes, Peter
Lang, New York, p. 57-109.
[3] The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt, Meridian Books, New York, 1958. On the modern
nature of Nazism, see Norbert Frei, Wie
modern war der Nazionalsozialismus?, Geschichte
und Gesellschaft, Göttingen, No.3, 1993.
[4] Relativism
consists of various theories each of which claim that some element or aspect of
experience or culture is relative to or dependent upon some other element or
aspect. For example, relativists claim
that humans can understand and evaluate beliefs and behaviors only in terms of
their historical or cultural context.
The term often refers to truth relativism, which is the doctrine that
there are no absolute truths (i.e., that truth is always relative to some
particular frame of reference, such as language or a culture. One argument for relativism suggests that our
own cognitive bias prevents us from observing something objectively with our
senses, and notational bias will apply to whatever we can allegedly measure
without using our senses. In addition,
we have a cultural bias – shared with other trusted observers – which we cannot
eliminate.
[5]
Utilitarianism is the ethical
doctrine that the moral worth of an action or being is determined solely by its
contribution to overall utility. It is
thus a form of consequentialism,
meaning that the moral worth of an action is determined by its outcome. Utility – the good to be maximized – has been
defined by various thinkers as happiness or pleasure (versus suffering or
pain), though preference utilitarians
like Peter Singer define it as the satisfaction of preferences. Carried to a logical inference, a human being
is valued by the degree to which he/she adds value to society as a whole. Elderly or infirmed may be regarded as not
adding value – in fact diminishing value – and ought therefore be euthanized
for the good of the individual and of society.
Hitler’s Nazi pawns employed this logical-sounding philosophy early in
their infection of the hearts and minds of Germans.
[6] Humanism
is a broad category of ethical philosophies that affirm the dignity and worth
of all people, based on the ability to determine right and wrong by
appeal to universal human qualities – particularly rationality. It is a component of a variety of more
specific philosophical systems, and is incorporated into several religious
schools of thought. Humanism entails a
commitment to search for truth and morality through human means in support of
human interests. In focusing on the capacity
for self-determination, Humanism rejects the validity of transcendental
justifications such as a dependence on faith, the supernatural, or allegedly
divinely revealed texts. Humanists
endorse universal morality based on the commonality of the human condition,
suggesting that solutions to human social and cultural problems cannot be
parochial. According to Humanism, it is
up to humans to find the truth, as opposed to seeking it through revelation,
mysticism, tradition, or anything else that is incompatible with the
application of logic to the observable evidence. In demanding that humans avoid blindly
accepting unsupported beliefs, it supports scientific skepticism and the
scientific method, rejecting authoritarianism and extreme skepticism, and
rendering faith an unacceptable basis for action. Likewise, Humanism asserts that knowledge of
right and wrong is based on the best understanding of one’s individual and
joint interests, rather than stemming from a transcendental truth or an
arbitrary local source.
[7] Nominalism. The American Heritage Dictionary, Fourth
Edition, defines nominalism as “the doctrine holding that abstract concepts,
general terms, or universals have no independent existance but exist only as
names.” Nominalism has also been defined
as a philosophical position that various objects labeled by the same term have
nothing in common but their name. In
this view, it is only actual physical particulars that can be said to be real
and universals exist only subsequent to particular things. Nominalism is best understood in contrast to
the form of realism advocated by some medieval philosophers. This form of realism, which is quite distinct
from realism in the modern sense, holds that when we use descriptive terms such
“green” or “tree,” the forms of those concepts really exist, independently of
the world in an abstract realm. Such
thought is associated with Plato.
Nominalism, by contrast, holds that ideas represented by words have no
real existence beyond our imaginations.
[8] Hermeticism
is a set of philosophical and religious beliefs based primarily upon the writings
attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, who is put forth as a wise sage and Egyptian
priest, and who is commonly seen synonymous with the Egyptian god Thoth. These beliefs have influenced Western magic
traditions and focus on the three parts of Hermetic wisdom: alchemy, the operation of the sun; astrology,
the operation of the moon; and theurgy, the operation of the stars. Hermetic magic generally refers to an
essentially scientific approach to magic.
The world is viewed as a collection of impersonal energies which can be
harnessed by the use of special knowledge.
Hermeticism suggests that true knowledge can be acquired through
observation of the material world.
However, it was not at all “scientific” in the modern sense of the
term. The aim of Hermeticism, like that
of Gnosticism, was the deification or rebirth of man through the knowledge
(gnosis) of the one transcendent God, the world, and men. In Hermetic magic, the deification of man is
seen as the practical task, which can be approached through astrology, alchemy,
and other occult sciences. There are few
actual details of magic in the original Hermetic texts themselves, but the
European Hermetic tradition was certainly rife with magical practices.
[9] The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age,
F. Yates, Oxford Press, London, 1979, p. 56.
[10] Faustus. He may have been born c. 1478-1480. It is not even sure that his family name was
Faust, for Faustus (Latin “fortunate”) may have been an assumed classical name
such as was common among Renaissance humanists.
One theory identifies him with a student named Georg Helmstetter. It is as Faustus that he first appears in
sources, and the earliest gives his name as Georg, not Johann.
[12] Doctor Faustus,, 1604-1616 by Christopher
Marlow, W. W. Greg, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1968, 1950, p. 65.
[13] The Faust Legend and the Ideas of the Devil,
Dorothy Sayers, Publication of the English Goethe Society, n.s. 15, 1945, p. 7.
[14] Faust,
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, translated by George Madison Priest with the
illustrations of Harry Clarke, A Limited Edition, The Franklin Library,
Franklin Center, Pennsylvania, 1979.
[15] Berliner
Aufzeichnungen: 1942-1945, Ursula von Kardorff, Munich, 1976. Also,Diary of a Nightmare: Berlin 1942-1945, Ursula von
Kardorff, Ewan Butler (Translator), Rupert hart-Davis Publisher, London,
1965. For amazing personal insights of
Europe during the war years, see also, European
Memories of the Second World War,
Helmut Peitsch, Charles Burdett, Claire Gorrara, Berghahn Books, New York,
1999.
[16] Warthelandisches
Tagebuch Aus den Jahren 1941/42, Alexander Hohenstein, Deutsche
Verlags – Anstalt, Stuttgart, 1961.
[17] Warthelandisches
Tagebuch Aus den Jahren 1941/42, Alexander Hohenstein, Deutsche
Verlags – Anstalt, Stuttgart, 1961.
[18] The
Confessions of Kurt Gerstein, Henri Roques, Institute for Historical
Review, June 1989. Also Kurt Gerstein:
The Ambiguity of Good, Saul Friedländer, Alfred A. Knopf, New
York, 1969.
[19] Bending Spines:
The Propagandas of Nazi Germany and the German Democratic Republic,
Randall L. Bytwerk, Michigan State University Press, 2004.
[20] Memoirs, Franz von Papen, Brian
Connell (Translator), E. P. Dutton and Company, Inc., New York, 1953.
[21] Nihilism
(from the Latin nihil = nothing)
is a philosophical position which argues that the world, especially past and
current human existence, is without objective meaning, purpose, comprehensible
truth, or essential value. Nihilists
generally assert some or all of the following:
there is no reasonable proof of the existence of a higher ruler or
creator; a true morality does not
exist; and secular ethics are
impossible. Therefore, life has no
truth, and no action can be preferable to any other. Frederich Nietzsche defined the term as any
philosophy that results in an apathy toward life and a poisoning of the human
soul – and opposed it vehemently. He
described it as “the will to nothingness.”
The nihilist believes that only “higher” values and truths are worthy of
being called such, but rejects the idea that they exist.
[i] James Bond in Casino Royale, Ian
Fleming, Berkley Publishing Group, New York (1953), 1986, pp. 135-136.
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