The Origin of Satan (24 page)

Christians engage in atrocities, including ritual eating of human

flesh and drinking blood from freshly slaughtered infants. Only

thirty years earlier, even such a sober-minded official as Pliny,

governor of Bithynia in Asia Minor, having satisfied himself by

torturing Christians that they were not guilty of criminal acts,

had decided that they deserved the death penalty, if only for

their sheer “obstinacy.”33

But why does the mere mention of the Christian name arouse

such violent, irrational hatred? Reflecting on this question,

Justin finds clues in what he calls the apostles' memoirs (which

we call the gospels). There Justin reads that after God's spirit

descended on Jesus at baptism, Satan and his demonic allies

fought back, opposing Jesus, and finally hounded him to his

death. So also now, Justin realizes, when the spirit descends on

those who are baptized, the same evil forces that fought against

Jesus attack his followers. The gospels show Justin how spiritual

energies, demonic and divine, can dwell within human beings,

often without their knowledge, and drive them toward

destruction—or toward God. Now Justin understands the

Pauline warning that

our contest is not against flesh and blood, but against powers,

against principalities, against the world-rulers of this present

darkness, against spiritual forces of evil in heavenly places

(Eph. 6:12).

The conviction that unseen energies impel human beings to

action was, of course, nothing new; it was universally accepted

throughout the pagan world. A thousand years earlier, Homer

had described how such energies played upon human beings—

how Athena had inspired Achilles to heroic warfare, and how

Aphrodite had seized and possessed Helen of Troy, driving her

into the adulterous passion that led her people into war. Recall-

124 / THE ORIGIN OF SATAN

ing the death of Socrates, Justin realizes with a shock that

Socrates himself had said the same thing the Christians are

saying—that all the gods Homer praises are actually evil energies

that corrupt people, “seducing women and sodomizing boys,”

and terrorizing people into worshiping them as gods.34 It was for

this reason, Justin says, that Socrates denounced traditional

religion and was charged with atheism. These same demonic

powers, furious with Socrates for threatening to unmask them,

drove the Athenian mob to execute him. This universal demonic

deception, Justin realizes, accounts for the irrational hatred that

the mere presence of Christians arouses among pagans—not

merely for the violent passions of the ignorant and unruly mob,

but also for the criminalizing of Christians, approved even by

the most enlightened emperors who ever ruled Rome.

Justin boldly addresses an open letter of protest to these

rulers—the emperor Antoninus Pius and his two sons, the Stoic

prince Marcus Aurelius, whom he calls “truest philosopher,”

and “Lucius the Philosopher”—appealing to them as fellow

philosophers, hoping, he says, to open their eyes. Justin declares

that he writes on behalf of "those people of every nation who are

unjustly hated and slaughtered; I, Justin, son of Priscus and

grandson of Bacchius, of Flavia Neapolis, myself being one of

them."35 By publicly identifying himself with those whom the

demons seek to kill, Justin initiates a public challenge that will

end not with amnesty but, as he admits he fears, with his own

arraignment and execution.

Although Justin begins by honorifically addressing the

emperor Antoninus Pius and his sons, he soon tells them bluntly

that despite their philosophic aspirations, they are not even

masters of their own minds. “Even now,” Justin warns the rulers

of the Roman world, “these demons seek to keep you as their

slaves, by preventing you from understanding what we say.”36

Their irrational public hatred of Christians proves, Justin says,

that their minds have been captured by the same evil spirits who

incited the Athenians to kill Socrates; now, for the same reason,

these spirits are driving them to kill Christians.

SATAN’S EARTHLY KINGDOM / 125

Not long after Justin wrote to the emperors (and apparently

received no answer) he heard of a case involving the arrest of an

aristocratic woman convert. Before conversion, Justin says, she

had participated with her husband in drunken liaisons with their

household slaves and other people; but after baptism, she

became sober, refused to participate in such acts, and wanted to

divorce him. Her friends persuaded her to stay with him, hoping

for a reconciliation, and, Justin says, “she violated her own

feeling and remained with him.” But when she heard that her

husband, on a trip to Alexandria, had behaved worse than ever,

she demanded a divorce and left him. Her husband denounced

her to the authorities as a Christian, and although she succeeded

in delaying her own trial by appealing to the emperor, her

husband turned in fury against Porphyry, her teacher in

Christianity, and had him and several others summarily arrested

and executed.37

Alarmed and distressed by this judgment, Justin wrote a

second letter of protest, this time addressing himself to the

“sacred Senate.”38 Sometime later Justin himself was accused,

arrested, and interrogated. Rusticus, prefect of Rome, ordered

Justin and those of his students who were arrested with him to

“obey the gods and submit to the rulers.” When he was offered

acquittal from the death penalty if he sacrificed to the gods,

Justin defiantly refused: “No person in his right mind turns

from piety to impiety.” Rusticus again warned the accused of the

consequences, and then, finding them adamant, pronounced

sentence:

Let those who have refused to sacrifice to the gods and obey

the commands of the emperors be beaten and led away to

suffer the punishment of beheading, in accordance to the

laws.39

Having lost their case in the Roman court, Justin and his

companions walked toward the flagellation cell, consoling

themselves that they had nonetheless won the decisive battle;

they were triumphing over the demons, who wielded terror—

fear of pain and death—as their ultimate weapon.

Had the rulers whom Justin addressed actually read his petitions

(it is more likely that an imperial secretary deposited them

126 / THE ORIGIN OF SATAN

in a government archive), they would have regarded Justin’s

vision of the spiritual world with contempt.40 Marcus Aurelius,

well known from the writings preserved in his private journal,

probably would have detested Justin’s “Christian philosophy” as

obscenely grandiose—the opposite of what Marcus regarded as

the hard-won truths he himself had gained from philosophy.41

Marcus, revered during his reign as master of the civilized world

(c. 161-180), valued more than his imperial wealth and honors

the religious philosophy that helped him bear his responsi-

bilities and sustained him through loneliness, disappointment,

and grief. In his daily round of duties, Marcus constantly

invoked philosophic reflection to remind himself that he, like

everyone else, was subject to the forces that rule the universe.

Marcus was raised by his father, the emperor Antoninus Pius,

to rule. Reluctantly Marcus gave up philosophy, his first love, to

study such practical activities as martial arts, public speaking,

riding, and building a character suitable for an emperor. Marcus

praises his father as his greatest model of human character, and

praises the gods for all the circumstances of his life, especially for

his divinely given capacity “to imagine, clearly and often, a life

lived according to nature,” and for the “reminders—and, almost,

the instructions—of the gods,” who embody the forces of

nature.42

Although Marcus often expresses himself in the language of

traditional piety, he had adapted for himself the reflections of

certain Stoic teachers such as Musonius Rufus, who had

reinterpreted the “old gods”—Zeus, Hera, Aphrodite, Apollo—

as elements of the natural universe. In the process of demytholo-

gizing the ancient myths, Stoic philosophers tended to diminish

the uncanny, capricious, and hostile qualities that the ancient

poets Homer, Sappho, and Hesiod attributed to the gods.43

Marcus had come to believe that all gods and
daimones
(“spirit

beings”), however chaotic or even conflicting they appear, are

actually part of a single cosmic order.44 Alone, at night, writing in

his journal, perhaps in a tent encamped with his soldiers in the

alien wilderness along a tributary of the Danube or on the Hun-

SATAN’S EARTHLY KINGDOM / 127

garian plain, Marcus often expresses awe mingled with a clear

sense of the vulnerability of our fragile species. Yet he believes

that piety consists in willingly submitting to
nature, necessity,

and destiny,
terms Marcus regards as interchangeable. In his

mind there is no question but that we all are subject to these

cosmic forces; the only question is whether we can submit

ourselves to them with equanimity.

Speaking as a man trying to tame the passions of anger and

grief, Marcus continually reminds himself that “death, like

birth, is a mystery of nature,”45 each necessarily complementing

the other:

Everything that happens is as ordinary and predictable as the

spring rose or the summer fruit; this is as true of disease,

death, slander, and conspiracy as anything else. . . . So, then, if

a person has sensitivity and a deeper insight into the things

that happen in the universe, virtually everything, even if it be

only a by-product of something else, will contribute pleasure,

being, in its own way, a harmonious part of the whole.46

Recalling gladiatorial fights and shows featuring people being

torn to death bv wild animals, Marcus reflects that a true

philosopher

will look upon the actual gaping jaws of wild animals with no

less pleasure than upon artistic representations of them; and

will be able to appreciate, in old people, both men and women,

the quality of age, and look with tempered wisdom on the

erotic beauty of the young.47

Marcus speaks of “the gods” as the vast universal powers

through which our own individual lives are woven into the

fabric of existence, into which our elements eventually will

dissolve:

The human soul is most arrogant [
hybrystes
] when it becomes,

so far as it can, a kind of abscess or tumor in the universe. For to

complain at anything that happens is a rebellion against

nature.48

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Acutely aware that catastrophe and good fortune “fall without

discrimination on those who are good and those who are evil,”

Marcus struggles to make sense of this fact. Does the universe

simply function chaotically, “with no design and no direction”?49

Does honesty require us to become atheists? But he rejects the

idea that life is meaningless, and says instead,

It is not a flaw in nature, as if nature were ignorant, or

powerless, or making mistakes, that good and evil things fall

without discrimination upon those who are good and those

who are evil.50

On the contrary, this indiscriminateness shows that “living

and dying, reputation and disgrace, pain and pleasure, wealth

and destitution, actually are neither good nor evil”; instead, all

alike are simply part of “nature's work.” What
does
involve good

and evil, however, is how we
respond
to what nature does:

The only thing that makes the good man unique is that he

loves and welcomes whatever happened, and what has been

spun for him by destiny; and . . . does not pollute the divine

daimon
within . . . harmoniously following god.51

Intent on transcending his own natural responses to betrayal

and loss—anger, self-pity, and grief—Marcus directs his whole

moral energy toward the discipline of practicing equilibrium,

often returning to what the ancients called “the unbearable

grief,” the loss of a child. Marcus and his wife, Faustina, like so

many of their contemporaries, experienced this repeatedly;

eleven of the fourteen children born to them had died in infancy

or childhood. During one of these crises Marcus wrote to

himself, “I see that my child is ill. I see. But I do not see that he is

in danger”52—since his philosophy insists that dying is

equivalent to living. Marcus chides himself harshly for his

impulse to pray, “Let my child be spared”53; even to long that his

child live and not die, Marcus believes, is to “complain against

nature.” Marcus consoles himself with the words of Epictetus,

one of the great Stoic masters: “When you are kissing your

child, whisper under your

SATAN’S EARTHLY KINGDOM / 129