Fallen Angels and the Origins of Evil (35 page)

Certainly we do not imply that the Church Fathers were themselves fallen angels, but that the “convoluted logic” (to borrow a term) in which they managed to get themselves entangled had its origin in sources they were ill-equipped to deal with. One might say, “fools rush in where angels fear to tread.”

One can forgive them for being duped (even for duping others), but to prolong the error once Truth has dawned places a dark cloud in the sky of our heavenly aspiration. No doubt the bigoted defense of the personages and principles of Error while in the presence of the towering figures of Christ and his true apostles in every age will ultimately disclose on which bank of the river our leaders are encamped.

Therefore we ‘condemn’ not, lest we be ‘condemned’. For with what judgment we judge, we shall be judged: and with what measure we mete, it shall be measured to us again. For even “Michael the archangel, when contending with the devil ... durst not bring against him a railing accusation, but said, The Lord rebuke thee.”

The fact that someone has erred—“to err is human, to forgive, divine”—does not mean he is evil. The frailty of the mortal state is such in saints and sinners alike. Sainthood is not won by intellectual prowess, but by a humble heart and true love for the brethren in Christ—by receptivity to the chastening hand of the Spirit, no matter who or what the instrument, and by a willingness to be God-taught and to surrender one’s most cherished concepts when they are proven erroneous by the enlightenment of the Holy Spirit.

The spirit of scientific inquiry and investigation, the setting aside of former theories outlived and outworn, ought to permeate the world of religion as it does science. For only when we go forward on both fronts with an objective, empirical, as well as spiritual approach can these two pillars of our civilization bear witness to each other’s lasting strength to uphold the temple of self-discovery in ever-succeeding ages—ages in which we push back the barriers to our cosmic self-awareness.

Now let us put the past with its limited and self-limiting conclusions in the flame of Truth. By transmutation and love, not condemnation, let us walk together on the pathway to the Sun.

We can, by our God-given conscience and free will, reject the premises of the fallen ones and demand that our representatives in church and in state give us the whole Truth and nothing but the Truth. And if they do not, we will give the Truth to them. And the Truth shall awaken many, as the Lord told Daniel: some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt of that Christ Truth and his messengers.

Thus shall the betrayers of the people be exposed by their actions and their consciousness, and the facts and the alternatives be made clear. And all people bond and free shall be able to choose Life and not death—and to accept the consequences of their choices.

But we are not on a witch-hunt. No, never! Let God deal with the proud and the unruly. Has he not said, “Vengeance is mine; I will repay”? Our Armageddon is in the arena of the heart and the soul—and the seat of the conscious mind. When we know the Truth and preach the way of righteousness, the true followers of God as his dear children will believe and will be set free from the philosophical snares, both political and religious, of these archdeceivers.

It is not the latter whom we would convince or convert. Their judgment is already set in the Book of Enoch. It never was in our hands. But the matter of salvation unto the sons of God is. With our Lord Jesus Christ we must go after the lost sheep and return them to the true Shepherd and his fold.

The legacy of Truth vouchsafed to us by our Father Enoch, by John the Baptist and Jesus Christ, and by Origen of Alexandria—all of whom taught us an essential lesson of fallen angels incarnate among men—is our birthright. They recorded knowledge we were supposed to have had all along.

We have endured mist-covered centuries of lies and half-truths because, left to their ignorance, men lacked the tools of self-knowledge to fully disclose the nature of the Liar and his lie.

But as Enoch foresaw, the time would come when, sword of Truth in hand, we would take to ourselves the shield of the Lord’s wisdom and his counsel and go forth to fight for that soul liberation which only the living Truth can deliver.

The time is now. See the Faithful and True, with his armies and his saints, marching across the continents of the world, delivering the innocent-of-heart in every nation from the long night of self-ignorance, artificially (i.e.,
with artifice
) prolonged by the Watchers and the Nephilim.

“And none can stay his hand, or say unto him, What doest Thou?”

Cambridge scholar and author C. S. Lewis wrote about the modus operandi of “bad angels” in his renowned
Screwtape Letters
. His psychological analysis of these bad angels is keenly descriptive of embodied Watchers.

The commonest question is whether I really “believe in the Devil.”

Now, if by “the Devil” you mean a power opposite to God and, like God, self-existent from all eternity, the answer is certainly No. There is no uncreated being except God. God has no opposite. No being could attain a “perfect badness” opposite to the perfect goodness of God; for when you have taken away every kind of good thing (intelligence, will, memory, energy, and existence itself) there would be none of him left.

The proper question is whether I believe in devils. I do. That is to say, I believe in angels, and I believe that some of these, by the abuse of their free will, have become enemies to God and, as a corollary, to us. These we may call devils. They do not differ in nature from good angels, but their nature is depraved.
Devil
is the opposite of
angel
only as Bad Man is the opposite of Good Man. Satan, the leader or dictator of devils, is the opposite, not of God, but of Michael.

I believe this not in the sense that it is part of my creed, but in the sense that it is one of my opinions. My religion would not be in ruins if this opinion were shown to be false. Till that happens—and proofs of a negative are hard to come by—I shall retain it. It seems to me to explain a good many facts. It agrees with the plain sense of Scripture, the tradition of Christendom, and the beliefs of most men at most times. And it conflicts with nothing that any of the sciences has shown to be true.

It should be (but it is not) unnecessary to add that a belief in angels, whether good or evil, does not mean a belief in either as they are represented in art and literature. Devils are depicted with bats’ wings and good angels with birds’ wings, not because anyone holds that moral deterioration would be likely to turn feathers into membrane, but because most men like birds better than bats. They are given wings at all in order to suggest the swiftness of unimpeded intellectual energy. They are given human form because man is the only rational creature we know....

In the plastic arts these symbols have steadily degenerated. Fra Angelico’s angels carry in their face and gesture the peace and authority of Heaven. Later come the chubby infantile nudes of Raphael; finally the soft, slim, girlish, and consolatory angels of nineteenth century art, shapes so feminine that they avoid being voluptuous only by their total insipidity—the frigid houris of a teatable paradise. They are a pernicious symbol. In Scripture the visitation of an angel is always alarming; it has to begin by saying “Fear not.” The Victorian angel looks as if it were going to say, “There, there.”...

I like bats much better than bureaucrats. I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of “Admin.” The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid “dens of crime” that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the offices of a thoroughly nasty business concern....

On the surface, manners are normally suave. Rudeness to one’s superiors would obviously be suicidal; rudeness to one’s equals might put them on their guard before you were ready to spring your mine. For of course “Dog eat dog” is the principle of the whole organisation. Everyone wishes everyone else’s discrediting, demotion, and ruin; everyone is an expert in the confidential report, the pretended alliance, the stab in the back. Over all this their good manners, their expressions of grave respect, their “tributes” to one another’s invaluable services form a thin crust. Every now and then it gets punctured, and the scalding lava of their hatred spurts out....

Bad angels, like bad men, are entirely practical. They have two motives. The first is fear of punishment: for as totalitarian countries have their camps for torture, so my Hell contains deeper Hells, its “houses of correction.” Their second motive is a kind of hunger. I feign that devils can, in a spiritual sense, eat one another; and us. Even in human life we have seen the passion to dominate, almost to digest, one’s fellow; to make his whole intellectual and emotional life merely an extension of one’s own—to hate one’s hatreds and resent one’s grievances and indulge one’s egoism through him as well as through oneself. His own little store of passion must of course be suppressed to make room for ours. If he resists this suppression he is being very selfish.

On Earth this desire is often called “love.” In Hell I feign that they recognise it as hunger. But there the hunger is more ravenous, and a fuller satisfaction is possible. There, I suggest, the stronger spirit—there are perhaps no bodies to impede the operation—can really and irrevocably suck the weaker into itself and permanently gorge its own being on the weaker’s outraged individuality. It is (I feign) for this that devils desire human souls and the souls of one another. It is for this that Satan desires all his own followers and all the sons of Eve and all the host of Heaven. His dream is of the day when all shall be inside him and all that says “I” can say it only through him. This, I surmise, is the bloated-spider parody, the only imitation he can understand, of that unfathomed bounty whereby God turns tools into servants and servants into sons, so that they may be at last reunited to Him in the perfect freedom of a love offered from the height of the utter individualities which he has liberated them to be....

“My heart”—I need no other’s—“showeth me the wickedness of the ungodly.”

The Screwtape Letters

Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil.

And when he had fasted forty days and forty nights, he was afterward an hungred.

And when the tempter came to him, he said, If thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread.

But he answered and said, It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.

Then the devil taketh him up into the holy city, and setteth him on a pinnacle of the temple,

And saith unto him, If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down: for it is written, He shall give his angels charge concerning thee: and in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest at any time thou dash thy foot against a stone.

Jesus said unto him, It is written again, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.

Again, the devil taketh him up into an exceeding high mountain, and sheweth him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them;

And saith unto him, All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me.

Then saith Jesus unto him, Get thee hence, Satan: for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve.

Then the devil leaveth him, and, behold, angels came and ministered unto him.

Matthew 4:1–11

In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made he him;