What fascinates us about Satan is the way he expresses qualities that go beyond what we ordinarily recognize as human. Satan evokes more than the greed, envy, lust, and anger we identify with our own worst impulses, and more than what we call brutality, which imputes to human beings a resemblance to animals ("brutes"). Thousands of years of tradition have characterized Satan instead as a spirit. Originally he was one of God's angels, but a fallen one. Now he stands in open rebellion against God, and in his frustrated rage he mirrors aspects of our own confrontations with otherness... Satan has, after all, made a kind of profession out of being the "other"; and so Satan defines negatively what we think of as human.
Elaine Pagels, The Origin of Satan.
No doubt due to a fairly devout Catholic upbringing, the concept of Satan has always fascinated me. As a child, I expressed a disbelief in the very concept of evil - and along with that, disbelief in sin or Hell. That said, I suppose I've had to reevaluate that over the years.
Now I certainly don't believe in Hell as a physical place with devils and little red pitchforks; I'm a confirmed secular humanist (read atheist for those of you who don't want to look that up) and I think the notion of either god or a devil rather absurd in most senses. I think they're very interesting semiotic referents, however.
The very sense of divinity and devilry - of a god and a devil - is one that intrigues me so deeply that I've decided to dedicate my life to it. I believe not in the literal nature of such things, but in the symbolic value of them. Evil - and Satan - is something that human beings use as a scapegoat: "he's evil, that's why he did it," and that sort of thing. Now evil in the sense of abject cruelty, sociopathic behavior, murder, and so on I can believe in. People who are intentionally sadistic and whose behavior does far more harm than good - if any good at all - most certainly fall under the domain of "Evil."
But that isn't the evil of Satan.
Satan's evil is far more abstract than that and, as my students suggested while reading Paradise Lost, is an evil that arises from the ideology of subjugation. Satan is evil not because he is cruel, but he is evil because he chooses to rebel against godhead. The oppressive state apparatus - to borrow a term from Althusser - of religion uses Satan as a means by which to enforce obedience to their institutional ideology. Of course, there were devils and dark gods long before the rise of the Church, so naturally that isn't where it all begins, but they all seem to serve the same purpose.
But I digress. Pagels' point in the above paragraph is that we see in the figure of Satan a kind of kinship that is - whatever Milton may say about it - not one of superior beings to a lowly and base creature. Satan is not a "brute"; Satan's allure is that he is as human as we are, and yet more than human. He was an angel, the greatest of them, and his disobedience to god caused his demonization. Semiotically speaking, Satan is what we risk becoming when we risk rebellion; any act of subversion or tactic of defiance creates in us a mirror of Satanic behavior. Yet, Pagels suggests, Satan is more than human, as well. He is "a spirit" whose strength springs from "intense spiritual passion... strength, intelligence, and devotion" (xvii); Satan is more than humans can become because he begins as more than we are. Satan is both like us and Other to us; as god - since humans are ostensibly made in god's image - is both like and unlike us, so Satan is both like and unlike us.
Satan seems to me the more interesting of the two. But then, as my advisor tells me, I "do evil." Not brutality or cruelty, of course, but rebellion. And it strikes me that in a nation founded on the fundamental principles of freedom enforced by rebellion, we'd be a little less wrapped up in our righteousness, but that's a rant for another day.
Honestly, though, if you had to choose between godhead and defiance, which would you choose? Me, I'll go with defiance, thanks. Makes things a hell of a lot more interesting.
Besides, who says Satan isn't part of the whole ineffable plan?
2 comments:
and sometimes, but only sometimes, the right choice is simultaneously godhead and defiance. the resulting system may seem natural and obvious to some, horrendous to others, and many will never notice that anything has changed at all. however, the pendulum swings both ways, and those who would shuffle the system had best be ready to face the effects - particularly by being most wary of the machinations of the parties that they have proven to be purveyors of the previous, logically false, conclusions.
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