Beliefs V: Principalities and Powers

Satan

For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.

- Ephesians 6:12.

Regardless of speak of such things in the New Testament and of a paranoid, crazed obsession with such things during the Middle Ages, I do not believe that demonic forces sway and affect the actions and emotions of men.

There are, however, ‘forces’ at work within the universe, within our psyches, within our very natures and within our social surroundings which distract us, alter us and affect us: but it is primitive and superstitious – when believing such things to be literally true – to give these subtle and great powers and forces names, personalities, motives, physical features and dominion over legions of lesser forces.

Yet, as will become evident below, I can kind of understand why these destructive forces of worldliness, empty pleasantry and distraction have often been personified in such ways: and I can also understand how such personifications can lead to a greater understanding of the forces that they are supposed to represent. In addition to that, I also rather like the idea of giving a symbolic and aesthetically inspiring physical form to abstract, bodiless principles because they act as good emotional, visual, thought provoking (and sometimes entertaining), reminders of the ugliness or dangers attached to certain behavioural weaknesses and obsessions.

The main problem in personifying these forces came from the common beliefs that external “demonic" forces were to blame for our inabilities to behave as virtuously as we wish to. Despite having a flawed nature – because of our inherent and unavoidable imperfection as a species – the choice to act as we should or should not, according to our consciences, is entirely our own. Not even ‘Satan’ can enslave us to a state of negated free-will.

‘Satan’, I have ultimately concluded after years of dicing with him, is a symbolic figure. He is the symbol of the general force of decay and anomie that pervades the universe. He symbolises the force that causes all things, whether physical, cultural, interpersonal, biological or spiritual, to fall into rot, to decline and to pass away. He symbolises the ways and means by which man, as a species, became fallen and so lost sight of his inherently spiritual nature. He symbolises the force of forgetfulness, blindness, stupidity and thoughtlessness in our behaviour and the sense of despair and tragedy that dogs all of our endeavours. He symbolises the stain that brings every kind of injustice, falsity, inconstancy, infidelity, imbalance, destruction and agony into being. He is, essentially, the symbol of Godlessness. In men his influence is that which facilitates the void state of unbeing and emptiness – damnation – that we fall into when we lose all sense of the divine in our lives.

Yet, despite my repeated use of the word ‘he’ in the above paragraph, in my reasoning, ‘Satan’ exists in the universe purely as a mindless, mechanical and non-conscious (though ubiquitous) force . As such, it has no more personality, will, intellect or humanoid form than Mother Nature, Jack Frost or Old Father Time do. Yet, despite my portrayal of Satan as a largely allegorical symbol of non-being or undoing, I do believe that the essential force that lies beyond that symbolism is real even if it is not actually directed by a dualistic, oppositional, conscious force of ‘evil’. Just as nature, frost and time exist without really having anthropomorphic, conscious forms, so too can the force that is commonly symbolised by the name Satan.

But, as I have stated already, we are not slaves to this force – powerful though it is – and it can never completely overwhelm us unless we allow it to. Despite the obstacles and temptations it may put in our paths or in our desires and emotions, we can, like Job and like Christ in the desert, choose to fight that force of misfortune, despair and obliteration. Although it can prove difficult and painful in the short term, we can, if we have the will and the strength, choose to refuse the destruction that walking the narrow, egoistic path of this force leads to.