Something wicked this way has come, and we are in the fight of our lives. How, or even whether, we choose to fight it is not the subject of this book. The subject is why we must.
And fast by hanging in a golden Chain
This pendant world, in bigness as a Star
Of smallest Magnitude close by the Moon.
Thither full fraught with mischievous revenge,
Accursed, and in a cursed hour he hies.
— Paradise Lost, Book Two
Rage is the salient characteristic of Satan and of the satanic in men. There are others, including guile, deceit, and temptation. But at the heart of Satan’s mission is an overwhelming animus against God and the godly. In the second book of Milton’s epic poem, Satan has a conference with his fellow demons, determined to loose the bonds of Hell, where he has been chained, and carry the fight to the Principal Enemy (the name, let us recall, that the Communist Soviets gave to the capitalist United States during the Cold War) in the only battlefield that remains open to him: Earth.
Miraculously, God lets him do it. Passing the twin guardians of Hell’s gate—Satan’s offspring, Sin and Death—he launches himself upward “like a pyramid of fire.” Directed by Chaos, Lucifer traverses the void, leaving in his wake a bridge from Hell to Earth, to provide a pathway for the demons who will surely follow upon its completion.
Since this poetic moment—itself derived from the oldest Western foundational narrative of them all, Genesis—the war, the fight, the struggle, the Kampf has raged essentially uninterrupted. It is Genesis that first lays out the ur-Kampf, the primal conflict, with which we are dealing even to this day. One may deny the specifics of Genesis; the cult of “science” has made that easy to do. But what one cannot do is deny its poetry, which resonates deeply within our souls. And poetry clearly precedes science, so which is more likely to be truer to the human soul?
Please note that I am not making an “anti-science” argument here but merely questioning the modern notion of the supremacy of science over its antecedents, poetry and drama. Science has much to teach us, but its primary function is incremental, not universal (no serious scientist pretends that it is). There is no “settled science,” but there is a settled ur-Narrative, no matter how much or how often the Left may inveigh against it and try to substitute new norms for it. Before we were aware of the movements of the sun, moon, and stars, we were aware of the movements of our hearts.
Conflict is the essence of history, but also of drama. Without conflict, there can be no progress, without progress there can be no history, without history there can be no culture, without culture there can be no civilization. And—since nothing in this world, or any other possible world in the universe, is or can be static—without the cultural artifact of drama, there can be no civilization. The least dramatic place on earth was the Garden of Eden. Then Eve met the Serpent, and the rest is history. From Genesis, Chapter Three:
1 Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?
2 And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden:
3 But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.
4 And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die:
5 For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.
6 And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.
In other words, to Eve’s question “Why?” the Serpent responded, in classic Frankfurt School/Critical Theory fashion: “Why not?” All our troubles stem from this crucial moment, this crucial choice, this key “plot point,” when the protagonist (in this instance, Eve) must make a choice—but, crucially, at this point in the story, without enough information and backstory (Who is this Serpent? How does he speak like a human being?) to make an informed choice. So she takes a bite. Why not? Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.
This is, to put it bluntly, one hell of a claim, delivered right at the beginning of our recorded history. Satan is promising Eve, the ur-Mother, that she can transcend her human perfection (sinless, immortal) and become godlike by knowing both good and evil. One might observe that Satan ought to know, since evil comes into the world through his rebellion. And yet, paradoxically, it is her transgression—her Original Sin in reaching for the Godhead—that makes her, and us, fully human. Would we want it any other way?
As Milton reminds us in the Areopagitica:
Good and evil we know in the field of this world grow up together almost inseparably; and the knowledge of good is so involved and interwoven with the knowledge of evil, and in so many cunning resemblances hardly to be discerned, that those confused seeds which were imposed upon Psyche as an incessant labour to cull out, and sort asunder, were not more intermixed. It was from out the rind of one apple tasted that the knowledge of good and evil, as two twins cleaving together, leaped forth into the world. And perhaps this is that doom which Adam fell into of knowing good and evil, that is to say of knowing good by evil.
What, after all, was wrong with the Garden? It was perfect. But its very perfection made it imperfect. Would you, as a human being, rather be human or angelic? Surely, the angels could not have been jealous of a subspecies such as Homo sapiens if humans were not potentially superior to the angels, precisely because of their free will, which endows them with the capacity to live a heroic narrative. (Is St. Michael a hero or merely the instrument of God’s divine will? And, if so, does that make him less heroic than, say, Cincinnatus or Horatius?) Is worshipping God at the foot of his throne, as the angels do, the true destiny of humans? Or does Milton’s Satan make a valid point when he says that it is better—more human—to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven? Is Satan’s assertion not one of the most human statements ever penned? (The compellingly heroic Satan of Arrigo Boito’s opera Mefistofele could not have put it better.)
To the Devil his due; he won a kingdom; he has a purpose. He even appears heroic, with one crucial exception: He cannot die fighting. He has no real skin in the game. His war with God—which by definition he cannot win—is an illusion. Is it therefore a test? Of whom? God? Satan? Us?
The yearning for a prelapsarian state of grace is present in all cultures; the Fall of Man is one of our most potent stories. It is at once retroactively aspirational (a restoration of the status quo), religious (Jesus saves), and comfortingly childlike (was the Garden of Eden really filled with ever-ripe fruit trees?). Did we, via Eve and the apple, bring the Fall upon ourselves, or was it engineered by satanic forces; and, if so, why did God not stop it? The simple answer to the last question is: because then there would be no freedom, no drama. No choice (to use a current leftist buzzword).