The Origin of Satan (23 page)

incapable of reaching that goal; the mind cannot understand God

through its own efforts.

When the old man first challenged him, Justin vehemently

objected, repeating Platonic cliches. Later, retelling the story,

Justin acknowledged the irony of his earlier naïveté: he found

himself repeating the phrase “Plato says . . . and I believe him.”

Feeling increasingly foolish, Justin realized that his objections to

the old man’s arguments derived simply from his blind

acceptance of Plato’s authority—not from any conviction or

experience of his own.

As Justin and the old man talked, he saw for the first time that

he had stumbled into a process much deeper than the intellect

could fathom. Justin had assumed that he possessed a mind free

to think rationally about everything, including the divine. Now

he heard the opposite: that the mind itself is infested with

demonic powers that distort and confuse our thinking. Before

he—or anyone else—could achieve understanding, the old man

said, Justin would have to receive the divine spirit—a power far

greater than our comprehension, a power that “illuminates the

mind.”10 But first Justin would need to undergo exorcism, a

ritual in which the celebrant, himself filled with the divine

spirit, would invoke that spirit to drive out the demonic powers

inhabiting the candidate’s mind and body and holding him, like

all the unbaptized, captive to confusion and ignorance.

After heated argument with the old man and considerable

internal struggle, Justin became convinced that Christians had

discovered access to great power—divine power, which was

always there, waiting to break through the clouds, and which

was brought to earth by the Christians’ powerful rituals,

beginning with baptism.11

118 / THE ORIGIN OF SATAN

Before the old man left him, Justin says, he admonished the

young man to

“pray that, above all things, the gates of light may be opened to

you; for these things cannot be perceived or understood by

everyone, but only by the person to whom God and his Christ

have given wisdom.”12

After he left, Justin says,

immediately a flame was kindled in my soul, and a love . . . of

those people who are friends of Christ possessed me; and,

while turning his words over and over in my mind, I found this

philosophy alone to be safe and profitable.13

Seeking out other “friends of Christ,” Justin asked to become a

candidate for the rite of baptism. He does not tell us the story of

his own baptism, but other sources suggest the following:

Having fasted and prayed to prepare himself, Justin would await,

probably on the night before Easter, the rite that would expel the

indwelling demonic powers and charge him with new, divine

life. First the celebrant would demand to know whether Justin

was willing to “renounce the devil, and all his pomp, and his

angels”; Justin would ritually declare three times, “I renounce

them.” Then Justin would descend naked into a river, immersing

himself to signify the death of the old self and the washing away

of sins. Once the divine name was pronounced and the celebrant

had invoked the spirit to descend on him, he would emerge

reborn, to be clothed with new white garments at the shore and

offered a mixture of milk and honey—babies’ food, suitable for a

newborn.14

Justin said that he had received in baptism what he had sought

in vain in philosophy: “this washing we call illumination;

because those who learn these things become illuminated in

their understanding.”13 He later explained to other potential

converts, “Since at our birth we were born without conscious-

ness or choice, by our parents’ intercourse, and were brought up

in bad habits and evil customs,” we are baptized “so that we may

no longer be children

SATAN’S EARTHLY KINGDOM / 119

of necessity and ignorance, but become the children of choice

and knowledge.”16 His ritual rebirth to new parents—God and

the holy spirit—enabled Justin to renounce not only his natural

family but the “habits and evil customs” they had taught him

from childhood—above all, traditional piety toward the gods,

whom he now saw as evil spirits. Having entered the stark and

polarized Christian world, Justin joined those brave, illiterate

Christians whose bloody death he had witnessed in the Roman

amphitheater. Now Justin, like them, saw the entire universe as a

battleground where cosmic forces clash.

Justin believed that his eyes had suddenly been opened to the

truth behind the most apparently innocuous appearances: the

marble statues of the goddesses Fortuna and Roma that he saw

every day in the marketplace, the image of Hercules that

presided over the public baths, and those of Dionysus and

Apollo at the theater. Behind those familiar chiseled faces Justin

now recognized “spiritual forces of evil in heavenly places.”

Justin suddenly understood, as Paul had, that the forces that play

upon a helpless humanity are neither human nor divine, as

pagans imagined, but demonic.

Justin’s pagan parents had brought him up in traditional piety,

revering the forces of nature as divine. For pious pagans, as the

classicist A. H. Armstrong says,

the old gods have the beauty and goodness of the sun, the sea,

the wind, the mountains, great wild animals; splendid,

powerful, and dangerous realities that do not come within the

sphere of morality, and are in no way concerned about the

human race.17

Pagan worship mingled awe with terror of the vast forces that

threaten our fragile species. The oracle at Delphi warned

worshipers, “Know yourself,” not as an invitation to lofty

contemplation or introspection, but as a blunt reminder that

they were mortal,
ephemeral
, literally, “creatures of a day,”

propelled toward living and dying by the interplay of cosmic

forces far beyond their comprehension.

From the sixth century B.C.E. onward, philosophers reflected

upon those cosmic forces in various ways. Plato spoke of “neces-

120 / THE ORIGIN OF SATAN

sity,” others of the powers of “destiny” or “fate” that govern the

universe. Later Stoic philosophers “demythologized” the old

myths and reinterpreted the gods themselves—Zeus, Hera,

Aphrodite—as representing elements of the natural universe.

Some suggested, for example, that Hera represents the air, Zeus

the lightning and thunder, Eros and Aphrodite the erotic

energies that drive us into copulation, and Ares the aggressive

energy that impels us into war.18 Many classical philosophers

agreed that these gods were neither bad nor good in themselves;

although the gods might appear to be capricious—sometimes

benevolent, sometimes hostile—most pagan thinkers agreed that

such judgments had nothing to do with the gods themselves, but

only with human reactions to specific events.

For Justin, conversion changed all this. Every god and spirit he

had ever known, including Apollo, Aphrodite, and Zeus, whom

he had worshiped since childhood, he now perceived as allies of

Satan—despite the brilliant panoply of their public processions,

their thousands of temples and glittering priesthoods, despite

the fact that they were worshiped by the emperor himself, who

served in person as their
pontifex maximus
(“greatest priest”).

Born again, Justin saw the universe of spiritual energies, which

pious pagan philosophers called
daimones
, as, in his words, “
foul

daimones.”19 By the time the Christian movement had swept

across the Western world, our language would reflect that

reversed perception, and the Greek term
daimones,
“spirit

energies,” would become, in English,
demons
.20 So, Justin says,

we, who out of every race of people, once worshiped Dionysus

the son of Semele, and Apollo the son of Leto, who in their

passion for human beings did things which it is shameful even

to mention; who worshiped Persephone and Aphrodite ... or

Asklepius, or some other of those who are called gods, now,

through Jesus Christ, despise them, even at the cost of death. . . .

We pity those who believe such things, for which we know

that the
daimones
are responsible.21

Philosophers who say that “whatever happens, happens

according to fatal necessity” are proved wrong, Justin says, by

the evi-

SATAN’S EARTHLY KINGDOM / 121

dence of those “born again to God”; for in them we see “the

same person making transition to opposite things.”22 Justin says

that he found that “the words of Christ” have a “terrible power

in them that can inspire those who turn away from the right

path”23; now he and his fellow Christians, once driven, like most

others by passion, greed, and hatred,

stand apart from demons and follow God; . . . we, who once

took pleasure in fornication, now embrace self-control; we,

who . . . valued the acquisition of wealth and possessions above

everything else, now put what we have into a common fund,

and share with everyone in need; we, who hated and killed one

another, and would not share our lives with certain people

because of their ethnic differences from us, now live

intimately with them.24

Justin sees in his own life and the lives of Christians all

around him evidence of divine power that enables them to live

“beyond nature.” Just as those Christians he watched die in the

amphitheater overcame with their inspired courage the instinct

to survive, so, he says, may others have overcome the tyranny of

instinctual drives:

Many among us, both men and women, who have been

Christians since childhood, have remained pure at the age of

sixty or seventy; and I boast that I could produce such people

from every race. . . . and what shall I say of the innumerable

multitude who have reformed intemperate habits?25

Justin mentions those in whom powerful compulsions—for

example, for strong drink—have been broken. Many others,

Justin says, “have changed their violent and tyrannical

dispositions,” overcome by the astonishing forbearance,

patience, and unwavering honesty they have found in their

Christian neighbors.26

Celebrating the new society formed by these “reborn”

people,27 Justin now sees the old society as evil—a society that,

for example, abandons infants to die or to be raised by

opportunists, who train them as prostitutes and sell them on the

slave

122 / THE ORIGIN OF SATAN

markets “like herds of goats or sheep.”28 As a privileged

philosophy student, Justin might have displayed moral

indifference; instead he is indignant about those abandoned

children, and castigates moral relativists who pride themselves

on their philosophical sophistication: “The worst evil of all is to

say that neither good nor evil is anything in itself, but that they

are only-matters of human opinion.”29

Justin’s life now has a moral direction. He contrasts the natural

life he once lived as passive prey to demons, with the spirit-

infused life he lives now:

We have learned to find God . . . and we believe it is impossible

for the evil or envious person, or the conspirator, or for the

righteous person—to escape God's notice; and every person

goes to eternal punishment or salvation according to the value

of his works.30

In his new life, Justin sees his role in the universe enormously

enhanced; the stand he takes and the choices he makes not only

decide his eternal destiny but engage him at present as an active

combatant in the universal struggle between God’s spirit and

Satan.31

Yet Justin realizes the irony—and the terror—of his new

situation: receiving divine illumination has ripped him out of all

that was familiar, alienated him from his family and friends, and

uprooted him from much of his culture. Most frightening, it has

stripped him of all security. His baptismal exorcism placed him

in opposition to the gods he had worshiped all his life and in

potentially lethal conflict with virtually everyone he had ever

known—above all, with governmental authorities. He now

belongs to a group that the Roman majority and government

magistrates regard with suspicion and contempt, despite all the

evangelists’ efforts to calm their fears.32 Those publicly accused

of allegiance to Christ are liable to arrest and interrogation, often

under torture; to "confess" means immediate condemnation to

death, by beheading, if one has the good fortune to be a Roman

citizen, or, if not, by prolonged torture and public spec-

SATAN’S EARTHLY KINGDOM / 123

tacle, including condemnation
ad bestias
—that is, being torn

apart by wild animals in the public sports arena. Justin knows of

cases in which believers or their slaves, including women and

children, had been tortured until they “admitted” seeing