The Origin of Satan (27 page)

catastrophe, or human brutality? Here Origen chooses to be

inconsistent. Such

SATAN’S EARTHLY KINGDOM / 141

difficult problems, he says, are insoluble, “matters of deepest

and most inexplicable insight into the whole administration of

the universe.”86 Unlike many later Christians, Origen refuses to

attribute the sufferings of the innocent simply to “God’s will,”

for, he says, “not everything that happens happens according to

God’s will, or according to divine providence.” Some things, he

says, are “accidental by-products” of the works of providence;

others occur when human beings—and, for that matter,

supernatural beings as well—violate the divinely ordered

administration of the universe and intentionally inflict harm.

Many instances of human evil, as well as certain seemingly

gratuitous natural catastrophes, like floods, volcanoes, and

earthquakes, are instigated by “evil
daimones
and evil angels.”87

Celsus would have found such suggestions profoundly

disturbing, for as a Platonist philosopher he claims to revere “the

one god who rules over all.” Here the pagan Celsus argues for

monotheism against what he sees—quite accurately—as the

Christians’ practical dualism:

If one accepts that all of nature, and everything in the

universe, operates according to the will of God, and that

nothing works contrary to his purposes, then one must also

accept that the angels and
daimones
, heroes—all things in the

universe—are subject to the will of the one God who rules

over all.88

Celsus urges Christians, too, to worship the one God and to

revere everything that providence brings as manifestations of his

goodness.

In advocating such monotheism, Celsus agrees not only with

other philosophically minded intellectuals like Marcus Aurelius,

but also with millions of people all over the empire—the vast

majority of them illiterate—who worshiped the gods. The

hymns that they heard intoned at the temples of Isis, the

liturgies celebrated at the great altars of Serapis, the incantations

chanted during processions honoring Helios or Zeus, and the

prayers intoned at the festivals of Hecateten often identified the

particular deity they had come to worship with the whole of the

divine

142 / THE ORIGIN OF SATAN

being. By the time of Marcus Aurelius, the classicist Ramsay

MacMullen says, many took for granted the unity of all the gods

and
daimones
in one divine source.89

What divided pagans from Christians, then, was not so much

monotheism, since many pagans also tended toward

monotheism, as the pagans’ essential conservatism. Pagan

worship binds one to one’s place in the world, and asks the

worshiper to fulfill whatever obligations destiny, fate, or “the

gods” have decreed. As we have seen, Marcus continually

reminds himself that piety means taking a reverent attitude

toward his familial, social, and national responsibilities. Musing

on whether the gods concern themselves with individual

destiny, Marcus declares:

If the gods took counsel together about me, then their counsel

was good . . . and even if they have no special thought for me, at

least they took thought for the universe; and I ought to

welcome and accept everything that happens as a result. And

even if the gods care nothing for human concerns, my own

nature is a rational and political one; I have a city, and I have a

country; as Marcus I have Rome, and as a human being I have

the universe; consequently, whatever benefits these

communities is the only good I recognize.90

We have seen how hard Marcus struggled to accept his

obligations, aware as he was of his privileges and

responsibilities, but many of his contemporaries found less

incentive to do so. As the empire continued to expand and

pressures of inflation and war increased, the advantages Roman

citizenship had offered to millions of people diminished;

furthermore, an increasing number of people found themselves

excluded from its benefits while being enormously burdened by

taxes and conscription. Emperor Caracalla, in 213, issued an edict

that extended citizenship to all inhabitants of the empire, but

what actual effect this had is difficult to determine.

The Christian movement offered a radical alternative—

perhaps the only genuine alternative besides Judaism in the

Roman empire. What the Roman senator Tacitus complained of

in the Jews was doubly true of these breakaway sectarians:

SATAN’S EARTHLY KINGDOM / 143

The first thing they do when they get hold of people is to teach

them to despise their gods, neglect their cities, and hate their

families; everything that we know as piety they neglect.91

We have seen that Christians did teach converts not only that

the bonds of family, society, and nation are not sacred, but that

they are diabolic encumbrances designed to enslave people to

“Roman customs,” that is, to demons.

What makes the Christians’ message dangerous, Celsus

writes, is not that they believe in one God, but that they deviate

from monotheism by their “blasphemous” belief in the devil.

For all the “impious errors” the Christians commit, Celsus says,

they show their greatest ignorance in “making up a being

opposed to God, and calling him ‘devil,’ or, in the Hebrew

language, ‘Satan.’ ” All such ideas, Celsus declares, are nothing

but human inventions, sacrilegious even to repeat: “it is

blasphemy . . . to say that the greatest God . . . has an adversary

who constrains his capacity to do good.” Celsus is outraged that

the Christians, who claim to worship one God, “impiously

divide the kingdom of God, creating a rebellion in it, as if there

were opposing factions within the divine, including one that is

hostile to God!”92

Celsus accuses Christians of “inventing a rebellion” (
stasis
,

meaning “sedition”) in heaven to justify rebellion here on earth.

He accuses them of making a “statement of rebellion” by

refusing to worship the gods—but, he says, such rebellion is to

be expected “of those who have cut themselves off from the rest

of civilization. For in saying this, they are really projecting their

own feelings onto God.”93 Celsus ridicules Paul’s warning that

Christians must not eat food offered to the gods, lest they

“participate in communion with
daimones
” (1 Cor. 10:20-22).

Since
daimones
are the forces that energize all natural processes,

Celsus argues, Christians really cannot eat anything at all—or

even survive—without participating in communion with

daimones
. Celsus declares that

whenever they eat bread, or drink wine, or touch fruit, do they

not receive these things—as well as the water they drink and

the air they breathe—from certain various elements of

nature?94

144 / THE ORIGIN OF SATAN

Therefore, he adds,

we must either not live, and indeed, not come into this life at

all, or we must do so on condition that we give thanks and

offerings and prayers to
daimones
who have been set over the

administration of the universe; and we must do so as long as

we live, so that they may be well disposed toward us.95

Celsus warns Christians that just as human administrators,

whether Roman or Persian, take action against subjects who

despise their rule, so these ruling
daimones
will surely punish

those who prove insubordinate. Celsus ironically agrees, then,

with Christians who complain that the
daimones
instigate

persecution; he argues that they have good reason to do so:

Don't you see, my excellent sir, that anyone who “witnesses” to

your [Jesus] not only blasphemes him, and banishes him from

every city, but that you yourself, who are, as it were, an image

dedicated to him, are arrested and led to punishment, and

bound to a stake, while he whom you call “Son of God” takes

no vengeance at all upon the evildoer?96

Origen admits that this is true and concedes that at such

moments one might imagine that the evil powers have won. “It is

true,” he says, “that the souls of those who condemn Christians,

and those who betray them and enjoy persecuting them, are

filled with evil,” being driven on by
daimones
?97 Yet for martyrs,

suffering and death are not the catastrophic defeat they seem. On

the contrary,

when the souls of those who die for the Christian faith depart

from the body with great glory, they destroy the power of the

demons, and frustrate their conspiracy against humankind.98

The demons themselves, perceiving this, sometimes retreat,

afraid to kill Christians, lest they thereby ensure their own

destruction. It is for this reason, Origen says, that persecution

SATAN’S EARTHLY KINGDOM / 145

occurs only intermittently. But when the
daimones
recover their

boldness and rage again at Christians, “then again the souls of

the pious will destroy the army of the evil one.” The
daimones’

awareness that Christians win by dying manifests itself, Origen

declares, in the attitudes and actions of human judges

who are distressed by those who endure the outrages and

tortures, but glad when a Christian is overcome [and yields].

And it is not from any philanthropic impulse that this occurs.99

Origen had experienced this firsthand when he was arrested at

Caesarea during Decius’s persecution in 251. When he refused

the judge’s demands to renounce his faith, Origen endured

repeated torture. He was chained in a dark cell. His torturers first

wrenched his limbs apart and chained him into stocks; at other

times they burned him and threatened him with terrible forms

of execution. One of his grieved companions, moved by the old

man’s courage, writes that Origen’s ordeal ended only after “the

judge had tried him every way at all costs to avoid sentencing

him to death,”100 not out of compassion, but hoping to get him to

publicly recant his faith. Failing this, the judge released him; but

the torture and exposure Origen suffered in prison hastened his

death.

Celsus warns that the “insanity” that impels Christians to

“refuse their religious obligations, and rush headlong to offend

the emperor and governors,”101 actually may ruin the empire,

eclipse the rule of law, and plunge the world into anarchy. Celsus

demands that Christians do instead what all pious and patriotic

citizens should,

namely, help the emperor in his effort to provide for the

common good, and cooperate with him in what is right, and

fight for him, if it becomes necessary.102

Origen dismisses such suggestions with contempt. He

answers that Christians
do
help the emperor through their

prayers, which “conquer all
daimones
who stir up war and . . .

disturb

146 / THE ORIGIN OF SATAN

the peace . . . so, although we do not believe in being fellow

soldiers with him, we do fight on behalf of the emperor.”103

(Tertullian, writing in North Africa, declares that many

Christians
do
serve in the army; such practices varied,

apparently, from one circumstance to another.)104 As for taking

public office, Origen says, “we recognize in every land the

existence of another national organization”—God’s church.

Origen knows that he is fighting over souls to help diminish the

power of Satan; and he ends his polemic against Celsus by

saluting his patron Ambrose, who ten years earlier had stood

trial and endured prison and torture.

Persecuted Christians like Origen forged a radical tradition

that undermined religious sanction for the state, claiming it

instead for the religious conscience—a tradition that would

enormously influence subsequent Western government and

politics. Baptism opened access to vast new dimensions of

reality—to the Kingdom of God, where God's people find their

true home, and to the dominion of Satan, perceived as the

ultimate moral reality underlying “this present evil age.”

Although unbelievers like Celsus ridiculed Christians for

believing absurd and childish fantasies, many converts found in

their vision of God’s kingdom a place to stand, and new

perspectives on the world into which they had been born.

This does not mean that Christians were the seditious

conspirators that Celsus imagined. Justin and others staunchly

insisted that most Christians were good citizens, most of whom,

no doubt, wanted to avoid confrontation with the authorities,

and attempted to follow the precepts expressed in New

Testament letters like First Peter, which translates into Christian

terms ancient conventions of civic virtue:

For the sake of the Lord, accept the authority of every human

institution, whether of the emperor, as supreme, or of