THE WORK OF THE ENEMY “The devil’s strategy consists in his sowing the seeds of hatred of the light so that, in the slaying of the man Jesus, the inconceivable – deicide – is at length accomplished. . . . The devil can find an entryway into God’s field, the world, only through the exhaustion of creatures (‘while men were sleeping,’ Mt. 13:25) and their failure to keep vigil . . . . The subverter cannot operate openly and honestly but must undermine God’s good work by exploiting the vulnerability of God’s dear ones. . . . The demonic seed inoculates our entire being, both intellectual and affective, with an aversion to the truth. . . . Here, too, lies the deepest reason for Jesus’ crucifixion: when I choose not to embrace the truth, I must put it out of my world by destroying it. Otherwise I could not bear the glare of its light continuously judging the darkness I have made my dwelling place. . . . The devil has no separate field of his own where to grow his weeds. Evil, as Augustine says, must parasitically feed on what is good, for all of its work is destruction. The devil cannot establish a separate kingdom of his own because God is sovereign, and it is a great error to perceive any real symmetry or absolute duality between God and the devil. First and last, the devil is God’s creature. Thus, in order to create his own kingdom, the devil is reduces to vitiating God’s. He is permanently confined to being a spoiler of God’s good work, and this necessarily inferior and dependent status must great fuel his rage against God. Although he aspires to being lord, the Devil has no center in himself, and he leads the purely imitative existence of the negator. This is why he can be lord only of the darkness, of the underside of things, and why he must sneak around like a weasel so as not to betray his insidious presence.” --Father Simeon
Posted on: Sun, 20 Jul 2014 15:13:27 +0000
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