Read The Origin of Satan Online
Authors: Elaine Pagels
Tags: #Religion, #Christianity, #History, #Christian Theology, #General, #Angelology & Demonology
everyone to “submit to the priests,” accepting the penance that
the priest will impose for their disobedience, “bending the knees
of your hearts, and bowing to [the priests’] superiority” (1
Clement
17:1). Perhaps hoping that those who had refused to
obey would now submit, Clement avoids associating them with
Satan, as later leaders would do with more entrenched dissidents.
We do not know the outcome of this dispute; none of the
opponents’ responses survive. But during the second century, as
such controversies plagued churches throughout the empire,
church leaders who identified themselves with the proper
“apostolic succession” widely copied Clement’s letter and
circulated it throughout the Roman world, along with several
other writings they included in a collection called “the apostolic
fathers of the church.” We know little about the process from
which this collection emerged; but we can see that the writings
it includes all tend to emphasize the growing authority of the
clergy and enjoin adherence to detailed and practical moral codes.
Most Christians apparently accepted, along with the emerging
“canon” of the Scriptures, this second “canon” of church
tradition. Several writings included in the “apostolic fathers”
sought to revise and, in effect, domesticate for the new influx of
converts such radical sayings of Jesus as these: “You cannot serve
God and money” (Matt. 6:24); “Give to whoever asks you”
(Matt. 5:42);
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“Sell all that you have and give . . . the money to the poor;
then come, and follow me” (Luke 18:22). Included in the
“apostolic fathers,” for example, is a famous Christian handbook
called the
Teaching of the Twelve Apostles
, which paraphrases
Jesus’ primary teaching as follows: “Love God and your
neighbor; and whatever you do not want done to yourself, do
not do to others.” Weaving together sayings from the Sermon on
the Mount and canny advice, the
Teaching
qualifies Jesus’
categorical command “Give to everyone who asks of you” by
adding, “Let your money sweat in your hand until you know to
whom you are giving it.”10 The
Teaching
adapts and expands
some of the Ten Commandments, declaring that “the Second
Commandment of the apostles’ teaching is this: ‘You shall not
kill; you shall not commit adultery,’ ” and specifying that this
means in practice that “you [masc.] shall not have intercourse
with young boys; you shall not commit fornication; you shall
not steal; you shall not procure abortions; you shall not kill
newborns.”11
Another writing included in the “apostolic fathers,” the
Letter
of Barnabas
, attributes similar moral teaching to Paul's
companion and fellow preacher.
Barnabas
, like the
Teaching
,
invokes a traditional Jewish teaching of the “two ways”—the
“way of light,”consisting of a list of actions that are good, and
the “way of darkness,” consisting of evil actions.12
Barnabas
interprets the Ten Commandments for Christians as requiring at
least forty specific injunctions, including warnings against
“arrogance of power” and “advocating in behalf of the rich”
while denying justice to the poor, as well as the same sexual sins
denounced in the
Teaching
: “[male] intercourse with boys,”
“fornication” (which probably means extramarital sexual activity
of any kind), adultery, and abortion.13 Thus
Barnabas
outlines a
moral code that would dominate Christian teaching for
generations, even millennia, to come.
Barnabas
sets these contrasting ways of life in the context of
God’s spirit contending against Satan during “the present evil
time.”14 Reminding Christians that “the spirit of God has been
poured out on you from the Lord,”15
Barnabas
urges them to
exercise moral vigilance, so that “the devil may have no opportu-
THE ENEMY WITHIN / 155
nity to enter” the church, even though “the days are evil, and the
evildoer is still in power.”16 While encouraging Christians to
accept a modified version of Jewish ethical attitudes and
practices,
Barnabas
warns Christians not to fall into the ways of
the Jews, who, he says, “transgressed because an evil angel was
leading them into error.”17 The new people of God are to “shun
the way of darkness” and embrace the “way of light,” since “over
the one is set the light-bearing angels of God, but over the other,
angels of Satan.”
Although most converts accepted the bishops’ instructions
about what Christians must—and must not—do, some, probably
a minority, questioned the authority of priests and bishops and
rejected such practical moralizing. Around 180 C.E., Irenaeus,
claiming the authority of apostolic succession as bishop of a
congregation in Lyons, wrote a massive five-volume attack on
deviant Christians—whom he called heretics—attacking them as
secret agents of Satan.18 In the opening of his enormously
influential work,
Against Heresies
, Irenaeus acknowledges that
“error is never put forth nakedly,” as blatant folly, but only
“dressed out in clever and ingenious disguises.”19 There are
those, Irenaeus declares, who claim to be Christians, and are
taken by all to be such, who actually teach “an abyss of madness
and blasphemy against Christ.”20 Such false believers “use the
name of Christ Jesus [only] as a kind of lure,” in order to teach
doctrines inspired by Satan, “infecting the hearers with the bitter
and malignant poison of the serpent, the great instigator of
apostasy.”21 Irenaeus suggests that those who resist the bishops’
moral teaching do so because they themselves are driven by
passion; some, he warns, “yield themselves up to the lusts of the
flesh with utmost greed.”22
For nearly two thousand years, most Christians have taken
Irenaeus at his word, believing that many of those he called
heretics were deceptive, licentious, or both. But after many
writings by these so-called heretics were discovered in Upper
Egypt in 1945, near the town of Nag Hammadi, those Christians
whose works the bishops suppressed could speak for themselves,
virtually for the first time in history.23 When we read their
writings, we find in
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some of them beliefs that sound bizarre; others seem to reflect
intense, inquiring minds engaged on a variety of spiritual paths.
One of the most extreme is the
Testimony of Truth
, a text that
raises the primary question that Christian reformers have asked
throughout two millennia, from the second century gnostic
teacher Valentinus through Francis of Assisi, Martin Luther,
George Fox, founder of the Society of Friends, and Mary Baker
Eddy: What
is
“the gospel”? What is the “true testimony” about
Christ and his message? Like other would-be reformers, the
anonymous author of the
Testimony of Truth
begins by
addressing “those who know how to listen, not only with their
ears, but with their understanding.”24 Far from endorsing
licentiousness, the
Testimony
insists that Christians practice
asceticism. This author writes as a guardian of the true gospel; he
believes that the great majority of Christians—those who accept
the kind of leadership and domesticated morality advocated by
the “apostolic fathers”—have fallen into moral error. “Many have
sought the truth and have not been able to find it, because they
have been taken over by the ‘old leaven of the Pharisees and the
teachers of the law.’ ”25
Most Christians, this teacher says, unthinkingly accept the
Genesis account of creation, according to which the creator
“commands one to take a husband or a wife and to beget, to
multiply like the sands of the sea” (Gen. 1:28; 13:16).26 But, this
teacher objects, such Christians fail to realize that the gospel
stands in diametric opposition to the law: “The Son of man came
forth from incorruptibility,”27 and came into the world to end the
old order and initiate the new. He called on those who belong to
him to be transformed: “This is the true testimony: when a
person comes to know himself and the God who presides over
truth, he will be saved.”28 But coming to know God requires that
one renounce everything else: “No one knows the God of truth
except the one alone who renounces all the things of the
world.”29 Renunciation alone enables one to put off the old, false
self, riddled with fear, greed, anger, lust, and envy, and to
recover one’s own true self in God. The true Christian follows a
path shunned by most so-called Christians; such a person, this
author says,
THE ENEMY WITHIN / 157
thinks about the power which flowed over the whole universe,
which comes upon him . . . and he is a disciple of his mind. . . .
He begins to keep silent within himself . . . he rejects for
himself argument and disputation . . . he is patient with
everyone, makes himself equal with everyone, and he also
separates himself from them.30
Christians like Justin Martyr, one of the fathers of the church,
shared such aspirations for self-mastery. Justin wholeheartedly
admired Christians who practiced renunciation and celibacy; he
even singled out for special praise a young convert in Alexandria
who had petitioned Felix, the governor,
asking that permission might be given to a surgeon to castrate
him. For the surgeons had said they were forbidden to do this
without the governor’s permission. And when Felix absolutely
refused to sign such a permission, the young man remained
celibate.31
Origen, also revered as a father of the church, had been so
determined to win his struggle against passion that as a young
man he had castrated himself, apparendy without asking
anyone’s permission, least of all the governor’s.
The author of the
Testimony
never mentions castration, much
less endorses it, but he insists nevertheless that only those who
“renounce the whole world,” beginning with sexual activity and
commercial transactions, ever come to know God. The majority
of Christian churches, from the second century to the present,
have regarded such renunciation as a counsel of perfection,
achieved only by a heroic few—in orthodox churches
throughout the world by monastics, and in Roman Catholic
churches by all priests and bishops, as well as monks and nuns.
The author of the
Testimony
goes much further than Christians
like Justin or Origen, however, when he declares that
renunciation is not only admirable but essential for any true
Christian. He knows, of course, that the great majority of
Christians believe that God created male and female and
commanded all his creatures, animal
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and human, to “be fruitful and multiply” (Gen. 1:28). But the
author of the Testimony, reflecting on his own alienation from
the majority of “worldly” Christians, suddenly believes he
understands Jesus’ warning to his disciples to “beware of the
leaven of the scribes and Pharisees” (Mark 8:15). Jesus’ words are
not to be taken literally, as if they referred only to Jewish
teachers; instead, taken symbolically, they warn against
Christian
teachers like the author of
Barnabas
or the
Teaching of
the Twelve Apostles
, who invoke the Scriptures to sanction
ordinary life.
According to the
Testimony
, the “scribes and Pharisees” and
the “blind guides” against whom Jesus warns (Matt. 23) are none
other than the majority of Christians—Christians who have
been tricked into worshiping not God but supernatural “rulers”
who are less than divine. The author of the
Testimony
takes Jesus'
warning to mean that believers must shun the influence of the
“errant desire of the angels and demons”32—the fallen angels
who fell into error through their own lust. The
Testimony
even
claims that the God whom most Christians worship, the God of
the Hebrew Bible, is
himself
one of the fallen angels—indeed,
the chief of the fallen angels, from whose tyranny Christ came to
set human beings free: for, the
Testimony
declares, “the word of
the Son of man . . . separates us from the error of the angels.”33
What
Barnabas
says of the Jews—that they have been
deceived by an “evil angel”—and what the majority of Christians
say about pagans—that they unwittingly worship demons
spawned by fallen angels—this author says about
other
Christians.
This radical teacher does what millions of disaffected
Christians have done ever since: regarding the majority of
Christians as apostate, he reads them into the gospels as