In the back of a taxi on the way home from a dinner party, I watched the mottled shadows of raindrops dot my friend Peter’s face in the orange glow of streetlamps. We must have been talking about something; Peter is accomplished in the study of cinema and literature, and has a profound theological sensibility. I remember that I asked him, after a pause, how we could conceive of Satan. How can we apprehend him? What is there to know of a creature that is defined by corruption?
Peter said, “Well, we know him by his works.”
Our taxi came to a stop and I climbed out into the dark December rain.
* * *
A few months later Peter would sponsor me as I entered the Catholic Church. And in the time leading up to my Easter confirmation we would have many more conversations about Satan, joined by our mutual friends: in total, English High Church Anglicans and nondenominational charismatics, Norwegian Lutherans, Roman Catholics, some deeply reformed and others only ambiently spiritual.
What a hush comes over the room when he’s brought into conversation, Old Scratch, the Lord of Flies, ancient nemesis of mankind. This is in part, I think, because even among deeply religious circles one can encounter surprising scorn for insisting upon the existence of such a character. Antonin Scalia knew that kind of admission was fit for a conspiratorial whisper when he confessed it, and true to form the blogosphere was all abuzz for a short while at the sheer madness of it. For a brief, infernal moment, all Scalia’s political shortcomings were traceable to that singular belief in the lunacy of the Devil.
Or so came up the collective scoff. A similar murmur of indignation arose when Pope Francis remarked upon the Devil in a sermon; Amanda Marcotte was especially distressed to find the Pope had emphasized the role of Satan in the human struggle for salvation. Others seemed to find the focus quaintly medieval.
And yet, as Jeffrey Burton Russell reminds us in the first words of his volume Lucifer: the Devil in the Middle Ages, “evil is real and immediate.”
Russell then shares a newsclipping recounting a serial murder. We know him by his works.
* * *
It now appears that Elliot Rodger stabbed three roommates to death before going on a shooting rampage that left seven dead (himself included) and seven wounded.
According to the videos and massive written manifesto Rodger left behind, the murders were a performance. In that sense they were different than most murders in that the murdered were essentially collateral damage in a demonstration intended to intimidate and humiliate a particular set of which those killed were incidentally identified as representative of. Terrorism, in other words.
At the moment the coverage is shaping up ugly. Jezebel already has the standard misogynist story up and running. Skepchick has one too, and tumblr is utterly awash with them. Laurie Penny’s is particularly enraged, aggrieved. Even this early in the development of what will come to be our understanding of this event, I’ve sensed the same old gendered hostilities you can find at any time on the internet at lower intensities, which is itself disturbing.
Firstly because I refuse to participate in Rodger’s narrative. Men and women are not operating at contrary purposes, regardless of what he imagines. I’m not going to write as a woman aggrieved by men, because that was in some sense his aim (to harm women as a class) and it was undertaken on false premises. But moreover I fear there’s something deeper than cultural memes at work here. It appears to me that channels exist in our society that have more in common with the order of darkness than the order of light, and that they avail themselves to people like Rodger who are possessed of particularly evil will. And Rodger will was evil, fundamentally, down to its very foundations. How can we know?
Rodger’s thought was dominated — absolutely dominated, to the very core, to the last jot — by self-love. The guy was thoroughly impressed with himself, to the exclusion of all else. Self-obsession absolutely vitiates a person because it routes the possibility of love; love is an act of self-giving, and when self-love is so powerful as to disable one’s capacity to give of oneself, love is no longer a possibility.
Instead, faulty simulators take its place: lust is chief among them. But because lust is an impulse which takes rather than gives, it diminishes its victims: they become less human, less whole, less real in the mind of the pursuer. Who talks about lust as a destructive vice anymore, besides, I don’t know, the nutcase mother in Carrie? It’s quaint, almost medieval.
But we know him by his works.
* * *
Strictly speaking there are different modes of demonic possession. The very idea summons a filmic quality, but it’s not like being bitten by a vampire or catching the flu: one moment a healthy, happy person, the next laid up in bed while a couple of priest shout at you in Latin. If there’s one premise to take away from the world of supernatural cinema that is applicable to human intercourse with the demonic, it’s this: you have to let the right one in.
You can look at fables requiring the invitation of certain supernatural creatures — vampires, usually — to make their admission into homes possible as worthy rules of thumb. It stands to reason that if you can, in a sunlit garden or moment of bliss sense the direction of God, then it is also possible in moments of immense darkness to sense the direction of some other will. In both scenarios the direction of each presence can be sensed but is not forced. Instead you have the option to choose to conform your will with that of the presence at hand or not; when we ask that our will be brought closer to God’s, that’s seeking grace. When we choose to conform our will to some darker force, that, in a word, is possession.
Which is not to say that demonic possession usually occurs as a polite exchange, a la Ivan Karamazov or The Devil’s Advocate. Just as the grace of God isn’t delivered in a golden goblet by an angel in flowing diaphanous robes, the descent into unity with demonic intelligence comes rather in nudges and shades. A thought here, an impulse there, a gradual numbing to moral wrongs. Excuses are made, justifications invented.
Worse yet, it’s contagious. As Pope Francis explains,
“And what does the Spirit of Evil do, through his temptations, to distance us from the path of Jesus? The temptation of the devil has three characteristics and we need to learn about them in order not to fall into the trap. What does Satan do to distance us from the path of Jesus? Firstly, his temptation begins gradually but grows and is always growing. Secondly, it grows and infects another person, it spreads to another and seeks to be part of the community. And in the end, in order to calm the soul, it justifies itself. It grows, it spreads and it justifies itself….”
The ultimate end of demonic possession, then, is not necessarily that the human body is captured like a vessel for a demonic pilot, but rather that the human will is warped in such a way that it comes to conform totally to the will of that demonic intelligence. The human person thus afflicted will use all the powers of the human mind to spread moral disorder, and from that we find twisted systems of thought permeating society. Pre-existing channels (like misogyny) carved through the otherwise healthy tissue of human society become easy conduits for the expression of perverse wills, and the work of Satan is made exponentially smoother.
* * *
On the individual level, Rodger’s complaint was mostly about his station. He believed, through whatever delusion of media or upbringing, that he was entitled to sex with beautiful blonde women and the lifestyle that suggests: fast cars, high status, the respect of peers. On the social level that type of complaint translates to misogyny, racism, hatred of the poor: one class demanding another serve its interests absolutely, even to the point of destruction. On the cosmic level those philosophies are intrinsically evil: they require self-love to the exclusion of real love, the love of others, and the love of God.
In my view, the most senseless thing to do in the coverage of this story is to agree to participate in Rodger’s delusion and claim his murders are evidence of an irreconcilable conflict between the interests of women and the interests of men. The reality is that the vast, vast, vast majority of men do not view women as interchangeable, and do not see us as reducible to hair color and body type. I refuse to tack this story onto recent trends like the “not all men” tag because absolutely everyone’s interests are being ill-served here. The dichotomy here isn’t, I think, between men and women; it’s between people who orient their love outward and those who orient their love inward, in other words good and evil. To lose track of that is to lose track of the source of the moral disorder and instead to get swept up in it.
Which gives some hint as to the solution. Keep loving each other earnestly, support survivors and their families, take an active interest in those around you and strive to involve others in your community. Don’t buy into the sexually licentious culture that involves itself in the business of status and commodity exchange while offering an inauthentic form of unity; you can’t create a union of completion with what isn’t, and the ideology this guy (and some others, sadly) subscribed to absolutely conceptualized women as interchangeable blanks. In that manner of thought, sex is always a sham of itself and genuine union is never fully realized.
We live in a world threaded with various systems (like misogyny) which seem to have arisen from evil impulses, from those which isolate and destroy and oppose self-giving love. These are precisely the sort of obstacles that make faithful discipleship difficult, which is why we’re obligated to oppose them at every turn, challenging as it is, especially in light of their stunning destructive power. These are the infections of community that Pope Francis refers to when he says that vice urged by demonic intelligence can find a place in our communities, where it works to embed and justify itself, offering easy routes for the expression of evil wills like Rodger’s. We can uproot it, of course, if we recognize it.
You know how we know him.