11 ANGELS IN LITERATURE

11 ANGELS IN LITERATURE

Last week we discussed the role of "Soldiers of God" in the ongoing battle between Good and Evil. In that sermon much was said  about Satan's minions, whom we fight ceaselessly with a righteous hatred. Seen as "fallen" angels,  the powers of these servants of Satan may seem super-human, and supernatural--beyond the scope of our understanding; and yet we defeat these fallen Angels daily, with the aid of righteous angels, the good guys.

I would like to spend several weeks thinking about angels, so I will break the subject down into sub-headings, as I have done with various other large subjects. Today we will simply review the literary perspective on angels, and go on from there. This a good way to begin, because, as I have said many times before, heaven speaks to us through thoughts expressed out of our mouths in words; indeed, inspired words can convey spiritual reality into the physical, no matter if they are in the form of holy scripture, or in the form of a poem written by a six-year-old. Thus, the poet may speak as effectively about angelic reality as the priest.

[Sidebar: In this presentation we will be speaking primarily of angels represented in literary works, because words are easier to read than pieces of music or paintings; but the main premise that art transmits Divine Truth to the physical applies equally to all the arts.]

In fact, it is my opinion that artists are able to reveal spiritual truths in ways or in intensities that are uniquely available to them, at the exclusion of other modes of communication, including Holy scripture. All articulate expressions contain kernels of the ultimate truth, but the way this truth is packaged is different from one idiom to another; it is therefore not outrageous to suggest that the artist may make divine truth accessible to men in a way that is often more immediate and potent than the medium of so-called "divinely inspired" writing.

On this subject, Evelyn Underhill has this to say:

"Artists, aware of a more vivid and more beautiful world than other men, are always driven by their love and enthusiasm to try and express, bring into direct manifestation, those deeper significances of form, sound, rhythm, which they have been able to apprehend: and, doing this, they taste deeper and deeper truths, make ever closer unions with the Real. 
    For them the duty of creation is tightly bound up with the gift of love."

   
In all humility, I have always thought of myself, my artist self, as a kind of secular priest, and my music as a kind of sacred ministry. I can only hope that I am not kidding myself.
                                              
As we begin our examination of angels as they appear in literary works, it will come as no surprise to hear that the angelic identity which has, historically, been most attractive to artists, as a character in their fictions, is Satan. Something about Satan excites the imagination--his color, his depth, and his vividness weave an other-worldly illusion, while providing materials for the type of carnal excitation that is a fundamental component of art. Carnal is the word: as the Christ Consciousness incarnated in the body of Jesus, so does the voice of God descend upon us through the physical. Satan, as the ultimate paradigm of  self-obsessed carnality, must therefore necessarily play a part in any honestly human expression. We have heard William Blake repeatedly attest that the personality of Man is comprised of both the white and the dark, in a divine balance, in order to experience the wholeness of life. Also, if art actually does imitate life, and life is a balance between good and evil, then it should be no surprise that, in addition to the good in life, the artist will tend to represent, in firry colors and desperate conflict, his primary spiritual opponent; indeed, Satan, bedecked in archetypal regalia, dominates the foreground of many a dramatic proscenium, as the artist, in his effort to bring the truth of the Christ consciousness into the world, portrays the paradox of life in the articulate language of his chosen medium.

So here is some preliminary background taken from the Angelsreading.com website:

Angels in Literature
"The angel has been an almost indispensable literary symbol for many poets and writers. In particular, one class of them, the Devil and his legions, has provided a vast source of inspiration. Of all Christian characters, Satan has appealed most strongly to the poets of all ages and languages, and it may be said that the Devil, from his minor place in the Holy Scriptures, has dominated most literary forms to the present day. Although writers such as Pedro Calderon, John Milton, Johann Goethe, and Lord Byron were fascinated by this character, the most distinguished poet to dedicate a considerable part of his body of work to the court of Satan was no doubt Dante Alighieri. At the core of Dante’s Divina Commedia is Satan, who dwells in the apex of hell and a multitude of angels who reside in his Paradiso."

[Sidebar: in the Paradiso Dante Alighieri speaks of the spiritual blessings we receive for our portion on the Earth as "bread of angels."

"O you, who in some pretty boat,
Eager to listen, have been following
Behind my ship, that singing sails along
Turn back to look again upon your own shores;
Tempt not the deep, lest unawares,
In losing me, you yourselves might be lost.
The sea I sail has never yet been passed;
Minerva breathes, and pilots me
Apollo, And Muses nine point out to me the Bears.
You other few who have neck uplifted
Betimes to the bread of angels upon
Which one lives and does not grow sated,
Well may you launch your vessel
Upon the deep sea."

We will come back to this idea of "the bread of angels upon Which one lives and does not grow sated" when we get to the subject of angelic language. But, essentially, it seems to me, the whole thing is about packaging--how does divine energy enter the physical? How do we ingest spiritual food? There are so many ways. The bread of life appears on the cosmic grocery shelf in diverse containers.

Back to Angelsreading.com:]

"Belief in the Devil was traditionally accompanied by belief in witchcraft, widely considered a manifestation of diabolical activity, especially during the Middle Ages. Many allusions to good angels assisting in human warfare against demonic powers can be found in the secular literature of the period. An example appears in scene IV of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet when the young prince of Denmark, upon seeing his father’s ghost, exclaims, “Angels and ministers of grace defend us!” Angels are again called upon in the final scene of Hamlet when Horatio, holding the dead prince, offers this farewell: “Good night, sweet prince, / And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!”

Angels all but disappeared from literature with the passing of the Middle Ages, but one can witness their resurrection from the humanistic Renaissance, and their persistence from the sixteenth century down to the present day. However, Satan is not a character that dominates the literature of the Renaissance, in part due to the period’s reaction against medieval thought."

[Sidebar: It is interesting to note that, even as the church has struggled to defeat the mobs of superstitious thoughts that teem in the heads of their congregations, the way the Gospel of Thomas presents demonology is much more in conformity with what most people think, than the doctrine professed by the church fathers. Furthermore, since all mythological expressions require stereotypes, it is interesting that the most popular angelic AND demonic stereotypes were originated by the Church Scholastics of the 1200s.

Back to Angelsreading.com:]

"One of the most significant post-medieval angelologies can be found in the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), who devoted himself to studies arising out of what he claimed to be persistent communications from angels and other agencies in a spiritual world. He used the concept of angels to make the nature and vitalities of the spiritual world come alive to a society that had lost sight of the reality of the spiritual realm. According to Swedenborg, angels are realities far superior to humankind, and are able to communicate wisdom because they are capable of receiving it. In his writings about the angelic world, he asserts that angelic writing is very different from human writing. They express affections with vowels, whereas with consonants they express the ideas springing from the affections. In angelic language a few words can express what it takes pages of human writing to say. He also asserts that angels have no personal power since they are only agents of God, and if an angel doubted the source of his power he would instantly become so weak that he could not resist a single evil spirit."

I would like to emphasize this idea that

"In angelic language a few words can express what it takes pages of human writing to say".

Again, referring back to the previous sentence,

". . .it is my opinion that artists are able to reveal spiritual truths in ways or in intensities that are uniquely available to them, at the exclusion of other modes of communication,"

is it not clear that the angelic truths manifested in art are of a denser, more intense, resolution than other forms of expression, and might this be a key identifier of spiritual truth? Communications from Heaven are constantly manifesting in the physical, but the depth of impression these communications leave on the soul is determined by the unique character of the expression's language. The idea puts me in mind of the famous Mendelssohn quote concerning the SPECIFICITY of musical expressions:

"People often complain that music is too ambiguous, that what they should think when they hear it is so unclear, whereas everyone understands words. With me, it is exactly the opposite, and not only with regard to an entire speech but also with individual words."

This statement clearly makes a case for musical expression as compressed spiritual truth, saying in a flash what words must take pages to say. I think angels must talk faster than we do. (Perhaps thought conveys information at the speed of light?) This reminds me of a central concept in my doctoral thesis: that the moment of intuitive re-centering is preceded by an acceleration of conceptual material in search of a resolved end condition; acceleration always plays a part in spiritual experience. Therefore, the truths expressed in art surely may be thought of as angelic truths, as they feature the same rhythmic and proportional characteristics of angelic language.


As you can see, this discussion has wended its way toward the subject of angelic language. We admit that the expression “spiritual language” is almost an oxymoron, since the truth veiled in the Cloud of Unknowing defies verbal expression; and yet if spiritual language can be transformed and elevated, just as any other spiritual state can be, it may be proper to speak of an angelic language; it is therefore just as proper to speak of angelic language manifested in art.

As we know, Swedenborg had regularly recurring conversations with angels, and was therefore familiar with angelic language. Swedenborg encouraged others to enjoy such conversations. However, according to Swedenborg, we in the natural world can only see angels here when our spiritual eyes are opened. Swedenborg received his revelation by the same process of his spiritual eyes being opened by God. This idea suggests that angelic messages may only be received through super-human dimensions of human intelligence.

On this subject, I found a couple of interesting Swedenborg quotes:

"The angels taken collectively are called heaven, for they constitute heaven; and yet that which makes heaven in general and in particular is the Divine that goes forth from the Lord and flows into the angels and is received by them."

"Man was so created by the Lord as to be able while living in the body to speak with spirits and angels, as in fact was done in the most ancient times; for, being a spirit clothed with a body, he is one with them."

Back to Angelsreading.com:]

"The works of Swedenborg had a significant impact on the mystical poet William Blake (1757-1827). Angels literally abound in Blake’s writings and drawings. Blake, who was probably more familiar with reincarnation and the karmic principal than most Englishmen of his day, regarded angels as the real forces behind the lives of mortal men and women. He was preoccupied with angels, both celestial and infernal, and the struggle between spirits of light and dark took on a vivid reality."

Here is one of the many pictures of angels by Blake; it represents two Guardian Angels hovering over the Baby Jesus.

                                              
I also found this charming 3-line poem by Blake:

"The Angel that presided o'er my birth
Said, 'Little creature, formed of joy and mirth,
Go love without the help of any thing on earth."

Back to Angelsreading.com:]

"Other poets similarly regarded angels as very real forces and called upon them frequently in a number of literary works. Robert Browning, for example, in the poem The Guardian Angel, implores his angel to take charge of the creative process;

"I would not look up thither past thy head
Because the door opes, like that child, I know,
For I should have thy gracious face instead,
Thou bird of God! And wilt thou bend me low
Like him, and lay, like his, my hands together,
And lift them up to pray, and gently tether
Me, as thy lamb there, with thy garment’s spread?"

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow often espoused on the language spoken by the angels. This is from the poem Footsteps of Angels:

"With a slow and noiseless footstep
Comes that messenger divine,
Takes the vacant chair beside me,
Lays her gentle hand in mine.

And she sits and gazes at me
With those deep and tender eyes,
Like the stars, so still and saint-like,
Looking downward from the skies.

Uttered not, yet comprehended,
Is the spirit's voiceless prayer,
Soft rebukes, in blessings ended,
Breathing from her lips of air."

Back to Angelsreading.com:]

"In Victorian literature it was very common to find the use of angels as intermediaries between God and man. An example is a poem by Leigh Hunt called Abou ben Adhem, in which the main character wakens one night to find an angel writing in a book of gold the names of all those who love God."

Another Hunt poem places the angel in the bedroom:

An Angel in the House
"How sweet it were, if without feeble fright,
 

Or dying of the dreadful beauteous sight,
 

An angel came to us, and we could bear
 

To see him issue from the silent air
 

At evening in our room, and bend on ours
 

His divine eyes, and bring us from his bowers
 

News of dear friends, and children who have never
 

Been dead indeed,--as we shall know forever.
 

Alas! we think not what we daily see
 

About our hearths,--angels that are to be,
 

Or may be if they will, and we prepare
 

Their souls and ours to meet in happy air; 

--
A child, a friend, a wife whose soft heart sings
 

In unison with ours, breeding its future wings."

This reminds me of something my son Emlyn said when he was about two years old:

"I fly with the angels at night in my bed."

From the Ascension Research Center:]

"Angels are close to humanity, yet unseen by most. The word "angel" is derived from the Greek word "angelos" and the Latin word "angelus", both meaning "messenger." Angels appear to have wings due to the Light that radiates out in rays or waves that take on an appearance similar to feathers."
Here are some suggested "real" photographs:

"Angels are entrusted with the role of serving the Sons and Daughters of God through the release of powerfully positive feelings and vibrations. The feeling nature of Angels enables them to infuse matter with the constructive aspects of Divine Qualities and Consciousness. . . 

Artistic and Literary Depictions of Angels in Christianity
In art angels are frequently depicted as human in appearance, though many theologians have argued that they have no physical substance. (Hence the frequently recounted tale of Scholastics arguing about how many angels could fit on a pinhead; if angels possess physical bodies, the answer is "a finite number", if they do not, the answer is "an infinite number".) Seraphim are often depicted as six wings radiating from a center — either concealing a body, or without a body.

Beginning in the end of the 4th century, angels were depicted with wings, presumably to convey the idea of swift movement and traveling to and from heaven, or to depict them as spirits. Scholastic theologians teach that angels are able to reason instantly, and to move instantly. They also teach that angels are intermediaries to some forces that would otherwise be natural forces of the universe, such as the rotation of planets and the motion of stars. Angels possess the beatific vision, or the unencumbered understanding of God (the essence of the pleasure of heaven). Furthermore, there are more angels than there are anything else in the universe (although when first written this would have probably not included atoms since atomic structure was not known)."

The image of a universe filled will angels, as benevolent omnipresent agents of good, is very often encountered in literature, as it is in mythology; indeed, the Greek gods, goddesses, nymphs and dryads may be easily identified as angels. Here is a lovely poem by Emily Dickinson about the presence of angels in nature:


"Angels, in the early morning
 

May be seen the Dews among,
 

Stooping -- plucking -- smiling -- flying -- 

Do the Buds to them belong?
Angels, when the sun is hottest
 

May be seen the sands among,
 

Stooping -- plucking -- sighing -- flying --
 

Parched the flowers they bear along."

This poem by Stephen Crane extends the analogy, distinguishing between human activity and angel activity:


"It was wrong to do this," said the angel.
" 

You should live like a flower,
 

Holding malice like a puppy,
 

Waging war like a lambkin." 

"Not so," quoth the man
 

Who had no fear of spirits;
 

"It is only wrong for angels
 

Who can live like the flowers,
 

Holding malice like the puppies,
 

Waging war like the lambkins."

Rabindranath Tagore takes the human/angel comparison even further, emphasizing the NEED for angels in human activity:

The Child-Angel
by Rabindranath Tagore

"They clamour and fight, they doubt and despair,
they know no end to their wrangling.
Let your life come amongst them like a flame of light, my
child, unflickering and pure, and delight them into silence.
They are cruel in their greed and their envy, their words are like
hidden knives thirsting for blood.

Go and stand amidst their scowling hearts, my child, and let
your gentle eyes fall upon them like the forgiving peace of the
evening over the strife of the day.

Let them see your face, my child,
and thus know the meaning of all things;
let them love you and thus love each other.
Come and take your seat in the bosom of the limitless,
my child.

At sunrise open and raise your heart
like a blossoming flower,
and at sunset bend your head and in silence
complete the worship of the day."

In conclusion, let me remind you of the main premise of this sermon: that literary expressions may contain divine intelligence of equal significance to the "divinely inspired" scriptures, and that the language of angels is well suited to the language of art--a language that features compression of ideas and acceleration of experience, not unlike the language of angels as represented by Swedenborg, i.e., "In angelic language a few words can express what it takes pages of human writing to say".

A further thought in Swedenborg calls to me--it is this:

"The angels taken collectively are called heaven, for they constitute heaven; and yet that which makes heaven in general and in particular is the Divine that goes forth from the Lord and flows into the angels and is received by them."

"The Divine that goes forth from the Lord and flows into the angels. . ."

I'm thinking of that mind-boggling idea that the Christ Consciousness can be in a million places at once. Accepting as doctrine, this omnipresent attribute of the Christ Consciousness, we therefore affirm that Jesus watches over all of us and helps us all, all the time. If we accept the idea, as Swedenborg says, that the divine flows down into the angels, then it is easy to accept the idea that there is a Guardian Angel assigned to every human being in the world, continuing the flow on through them down to us. This extravagance of Love flowing from the Father seems natural to us because it is true. My point here is that the omniscient Christ Consciousness transmits its message of mystery to Men through a vast population of conduits called ANGELS.

And, to reprise this point one more time: the language of art reveals Divine Truth in a language that is structured by rhythmic and proportional parameters characteristic of angelic language.

Let us pray: Jesus, thank you for making available to us access to Divine Truths, embedded in the physical, which we extract with Divine Intelligence and Enlightenment. Thank you for the medium of art which represents these Truths in language, and duplicates these living Truths in our hearts. Amen.


10 Good and Evil

10 Good and Evil

Last week I presented the declension "Son of Man/Son of God/Soldier of God", as a reasonable description of how the soul evolves from lower to higher vibrational levels. This discussion led us, irresistibly, to the subject of Good and Evil, of the battle that rages on, all too often behind the scenes, between forces that would affirm the Divinity of Man and forces that would promote death and destruction. Last week we defined a "Soldier of God" as one who stands up in public and openly fights the deceptions of Satan with truth--the truth of the all-encompassing Christ Consciousness. This battle takes place, first, in the abstract, in the world of ideas--ideas which are not representations of reality, but living, conscious reality itself. To fight a "battle of ideas" is a comfortable thought for the lazy man, the man who fights his battles from a prone position in bed; but, unfortunately, as comfortable as all this sounds, the battle must eventually enter the arena of the physical, wherein the Christian is compelled, by fate, to put up his investment in Jesus where his mouth is, and take ACTION in service of this abstract reality.

In his Philosophy of Freedom, Rudolf Steiner spends a lot of time describing the spiritual dimension of THINKING, as opposed to the physical dimension of FEELING. This is an issue peripheral to the subject at hand, but it is worth mentioning because the spiritual dimension of THINKING is manifested in the physical through WORDS. Hence, the importance of thoughts, specifically thoughts given form by speech, is not to be underestimated in our discussion of Good and Evil.

On the subject of the fight for Good in the abstract, fought with righteous thoughts, Nathaniel Hawthorne writes:

"Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them."

On this subject Miguel Angel Ruiz states:

"People like to say that the conflict is between good and evil. The real conflict is between truth and lies."

Calvin and Hobbes have this to say:

To reveal the seminal motivation for this presentation on Good an Evil, let me remind you of what has come before it: we have now looked at the first eight acts of Thomas, and found that more than half of them are about Thomas' involvement with demonic possession, a subject which gets little attention today, but which is clearly a cornerstone of Thomas' doctrine; indeed, in the 4th Act of Thomas, the one where the young man murders his girlfriend, there is a strong implication that ALL evil acts performed by Men, are inspired by Satanic influence. If this is even slightly true, we must concede that a Soldier of God is, by definition, pitted in battle, engaged in direct opposition to infernal minions. Ideal or not, the Truth is on trial every time we open our mouths to SAY ANYTHING, and, just like the CIA, many, many entities are listening.

To be sure, the Hollywood version of demonic possession has forced the subject into a somewhat silly sideways flight into cartoon fantasy; but this does not mean that incarnations of evil are not present in our daily lives, always striving to insinuate their way into our will, and thence into our actions.

At first, we are surprised to find so many stories about demon possession and exorcism in the Gospel of Thomas, since the canonical gospels of Jesus only include a small number of such tales. Did Jesus deal with demons less often than Thomas did, or did the Church Fathers edit out stories of Jesus they thought unsuitable to followers of the Holy Catholic Church? We do not know, with any degree of certainty, how many such stories in the accepted Gospels were cut out by the church fathers, when they were deciding which of the ancient texts to canonize, and which to reject; but, clearly, the Gnostic Gospels, somewhat more than the Canonical Gospels, emphasize the battle between good and evil in a very PERSONAL sense; that is to say: all evil is PERSONIFIED in Thomas by individual servants (shall we say sons?) of Satan. Thomas insists that, no matter how you cut it, it is they whom we are fighting, because:

they are the ones who put all the wrong ideas into peoples' heads, and

it is these wrong ideas that are the root of all the pain and suffering man inflicts upon himself through wrong action.

The role of Satan in these Thought Transactions is real. Therefore, we Christians must look the Devil in the eye, and thus, defeat him with the Truth that radiates from our sense of Being and Identity in the Christ consciousness.

The subject of demons has been so vulgarized by pulp fiction, that the truth of demons has become somewhat obscured from our sight; as scientifically hip, moderne people, we are reticent to participate in anything remotely resembling superstitious behavior. Nevertheless the stories in Thomas, for me, have emphasized something I don't think about nearly enough: that is that we are in a battle for Good, and our actions make a difference. Furthermore, they either promote or defeat the temptations of the devil, as they either promote or defeat our aspirations along the spiritual path.

Philosophy, then, THINKING, is the primary weapon of the Soldier of God; and the devotee seeks to purify his thoughts by focusing on Divinely inspired Truth, expressed in language received from Heaven. WHY he does this is uniquely personal--there is a different reason for every person on the planet--but I must confess that the driving force, behind most of my own philosophical speculations, has always been fear of death. Trying to overcome my fear of death, I inserted myself into many different philosophical scenarios which describe the conquest of death. The idea is that if I can overcome the fear of death in my mind, I should be able to overcome it in outer realities as well. As I have grown spiritually, I have realized that the fear of Death is a metaphor for the fear of Evil. Little did I know that my battle with the fear of death was just the tip of the iceberg--that this one small battle was a single subdivision of a much larger cosmic scenario. I have now come to realize that my battle with death has just been a concealed battle with Satan over the possession of my very soul.

Consider the gargoyles atop the Notre Dame Cathedral, whose purpose is to hasten the people into the church for fear of hellfire. Likewise, I have used philosophy to usher myself into the presence of the divine, just so I can feel better about dying. The irony is that: coming to grips with death has also caused me to come to grips with lots of other things. This level of enlightenment has effected many changes in attitudes that I've upheld my whole life about dimensions of reality. I have made up my mind, and this has brought my heart into much closer contact with the Divine above me, and the Divine within me. Consequently, my life is a lot better now than it ever has been before. I believe Don Juan would classify this state of consciousness as the nagual,  the mind state of someone who has all of his conceptual ducks in a row.


Let us now hear from a few philosophers on the subject of Good and Evil, to see if we can clarify our personal roles in the webwork of interconnected higher and lower realities.

From Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn we read:

"The battle between good an evil runs through the heart of every man."

From The Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell discusses the symbology of a ceremonial mask:

"JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Whenever one moves out of the transcendent, one comes into a field of opposites. These two pairs of opposites come forth as male and female from the two sides. What has eaten of the tree of the knowledge, not only of good and evil, but of male and female, of right and wrong, of this and that, and light and dark. Everything in the field of time is dual, past and future, dead and alive. All this, being and nonbeing, is, isn’t.

This mask represents the middle, and the two represent the two opposites, and they always come in pairs. And put your mind in the middle; most of us put our minds on the side of the good against what we think of as evil. It was Heraclitus, I think, who said,

“For God all things are good and right and just, but for man some things are right and others are not.”

You’re in the field of time when you’re man, and one of the problems of life is to life in the realization of both terms. That is to say, I know the center and I know that good and evil are simply temporal apparitions."

Clearly, from these two preceding quotes, we can accept the idea that on certain plane of existence there is no good and evil--is all one in unity with the Father; however, on the material plane, man creates evil, so evil becomes a force to contend with. The presence of the Satanic minions, trying to manipulate us with false truths, is really represent a side issue, compared to the larger issue of the will of man himself, who chooses to do evil, acting out of his own flawed essential nature. The truth of evil exists in the abstract, but the FACT of evil is incarnated by Man's ACTS of inhumanity to Man.

From The Overcoming of Evil, by Rudolf Steiner--a lecture dated November 4th, 1917, we read:

"Does not the Christ Impulse deal with the great significant problem calling for a super-sensible interpretation of the problems of birth and death in the history of mankind's development? How many discussions there have been among Christians on the birth of Christ, how many thoughts and feelings have already been expended on this problem! How immensely significant is the part played by the death of Christ! The birth and the death of Christ reveal particularly pregnant points in the struggle which went on in human souls in connection with the problem of birth and death.

This struggle existed in human souls, because, I might say, it already existed in a more elemental, physical form in ages past. In ancient epochs men developed forces which had an influence upon birth and death, an influence which greatly differed from the merely natural one. The good and evil forces in man could to a great extent influence the health and illness of other people, and consequently also birth and death; this problem of birth and death was more connected with the human soul.

But during our own epoch, people will have to struggle with evil in the same elemental way in which they struggled with birth and death during the Atlantean age; particularly through the control of the different forces of Nature, the impulses that lead to evil will send their influences into the world in an immense, gigantic form. And the opposite forces, the forces of good, will have to grow out of the opposition to evil, and man will have to draw the strength for this opposition out of spiritual sources. . .

Those who wish to take in spiritual impulses will find the points of attack for the opponent forces and the points of issue for the impulses which have to develop out of the resistance offered to evil. . .

We have already described that ever since the last third of the 19th century the Beings whom I designated as the Fallen Spirits of Darkness are active among men. They belong to the Hierarchy of the Angels. In ancient days they were still servants of the good, progressive Powers. They worked for the establishment of social orders based on human blood-relationships. But now they live in the kingdom of man, and as retarded Angel-Beings they are active in all those human impulses which are connected with blood-relationships, with racial and national relationships, and they assert these in a Satanic way, to the detriment of social and other structures of mankind. . .

To-day these Spirits have begun their work in a forceful way by emphasizing the principle of nationality abstractly. This abstract emphasizing of the principle of nationality, this drawing up of programmes based on the principle of nationality, forms part of the strivings which must be described as the strivings of the Spirits of Darkness."

Reading this paragraph today makes us think of the hysterical Isis group who proclaim nationality over everything and all that we know as good; they have sacrificed every human virtue, that you can name, in service of a pseudo-religious national identity. Contrariwise, reading this paragraph in 1911 would make us think, immediately, of the entangling alliances which led to World War I and, indirectly, to the German fanatical nationalism that led to World War II. It just goes to show Man can figure out how to relate any negative prophecy to any contemporary condition, because the forces of evil always work their will in the same idiom, only with slightly different materials.

From The Etherisation of the Blood A Lecture By
 Rudolf Steiner, Basle, October 1, 1911, we read about the battle between Good and Evil in terms of the multi-dimensionality of Man's divided consciousness:


"The physical body, in its ordinary state, is asleep to what is then and there happening, and we can rightly speak of an awakening of our spiritual senses. In the night, of course, we are asleep in the normal way. It can therefore be said: ordinary sleep is sleep as regards the outer physical world; daytime consciousness at the present time is sleep as regards the spiritual world."

This excerpt suggests that we confront the paradoxes of reality in different modalities of being, at virtually the same time. Further down he gives this summary of these different modalities:

"Thoughts: Shadow-images of Beings of the Astral Plane (Waking)

Sympathy and Antipathy: Shadow-images of Beings of Lower Devachan (Dreaming)

Moral Impulses: Shadow-images of Beings of Higher Devachan (Sleeping)

Moral qualities are revealed distinctly in the particular colouring of the streams which flow into human beings during sleep; in an individual of lower moral principles, the streams are quite different from what is observable in an individual of noble principles. Endeavours to dissemble are useless. In the face of the higher Cosmic Powers, no dissembling is possible. In the case of a man who has only a slight inclination towards moral principles the rays streaming into him are a brownish red in colour — various shades tending toward brownish red. In a man of high moral ideals the rays are lilac-violet in colour.

At the moment of waking or of going off to sleep a kind of struggle takes place in the region of the pineal gland between what streams down from above and what streams upward from below. When a man is awake the intellectual element streams upwards from below in the form of currents of light, and what is of moral-aesthetic nature streams downwards from above. At the moment of waking or of going off to sleep, these two currents meet, and in the man of low morality a violent struggle between the two streams takes place in the region of the pineal gland. In the man of high morality there is around the pineal gland as it were a little sea of light. Moral nobility is revealed when a calm glow surrounds the pineal gland at these moments. In this way a man's moral disposition is reflected in him, and this calm glow of light often extends as far as the heart. Two streams can therefore be perceived in man — the one Macro-cosmic, the other, Microcosmic."

This idea, of microcosmic and macro-cosmic modalities of being, supports the idea that: the shedding of Jesus' blood onto the Earth forged a connection between the Etheric Body of Jesus and the Etheric Body of the Earth, thereby electing Jesus as sovereign ruler over the Earth's inhabitants. Moreover, we have previously affirmed that we ALL exist on Microcosmic and Macro-cosmic levels, and that we can influence Mundane doings through attention of mind, and through the enlistment of Heavenly Angels to come to our aid. It is important for us to keep this in mind, because it is the key to spiritual freedom--it is the key to awakening the Higher Self who sleeps within us.

Also, notice that Steiner's description of the battle for good and evil around the pineal gland is an affirmation of the multidimensional character of man's personality structure. The upshot is this: the battle between good and evil takes place in different modalities of being, and on different levels of consciousness. The battle around the pineal gland indicates that we engage in conflict with that the evil even on an unconscious level.

Steiner's idea of the daytime life of thought, and the nighttime life of will, is exactly like William Blake's theory of contraries:

"Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate are necessary to Human existence.

From these contraries spring what the religious call Good & Evil. Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active springing from Energy.

Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell."

From C. S. Lewis' Mere Christianity we read:

“Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance. The smallest good act today is the capture of a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may be able to go on to victories you never dreamed of. An apparently trivial indulgence in lust or anger today is the loss of a ridge or railway line or bridgehead from which the enemy may launch an attack otherwise impossible.”

From C.S. Lewis', The Case for Christianity, we read:

“God created things which had free will. That means creatures which can go wrong or right. Some people think they can imagine a creature which was free but had no possibility of going wrong, but I can't. If a thing is free to be good it's also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil possible.

Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having. A world of automata -of creatures that worked like machines- would hardly be worth creating. The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water. And for that they've got to be free.


Of course God knew what would happen if they used their freedom the wrong way: apparently, He thought it worth the risk. (...) If God thinks this state of war in the universe a price worth paying for free will -that is, for making a real world in which creatures can do real good or harm and something of real importance can happen, instead of a toy world which only moves when He pulls the strings- then we may take it it is worth paying.”

On the subject of free will Baruch Spinoza has this to say:

"If men were born free, they would, so long as they remained free, form no conception of good and evil."


Friedrich Nietzsche:

"Whatever is done for love always occurs beyond good and evil."

Hermann Hesse:

"If time is not real, then the dividing line between this world and eternity, between suffering and bliss, between good and evil, is also an illusion."

This reminds us of the foregoing quote from Heraclitus:

“For God all things are good and right and just, but for man some things are right and others are not.”

Maimonides:

"One should see the world, and see himself as a scale with an equal balance of good and evil. When he does one good deed the scale is tipped to the good - he and the world is saved. When he does one evil deed the scale is tipped to the bad - he and the world is destroyed."

I mentioned earlier that the battle between God and Evil must inevitably invade the physical plane at some point. This is the point where abstract ideas culminate in physical action. Right action in this context requires the passion for battle we call "hatred". This drama is so beautifully portrayed in C.S. Lewis' Perelandra that I cannot help quoting this great passage again. The idea of a "joyful hatred", is summarized in the last line:

"Then an experience that perhaps no good man can ever have in our world came over him--a torrent of perfectly unmixed and lawful hatred. The energy of hating, never before felt without some guilt, without some dim knowledge that he was failing fully to distinguish the sinner form the sin, rose into his arms and legs till he felt that they were pillars of burning blood. What was before him appeared no longer a creature of corrupted will. It was corruption itself to which will was attached only as an instrument. Ages ago it had been a Person: but the ruins of personality now survived in it only as weapons at the disposal of a furious self-exiled negation. It is perhaps difficult to understand why this filled Ransom not with horror but with a kind of joy. The joy came finding at last what hatred was made for."

Joyful hatred is kind of like humble pride--is is based on a totally REALISTIC assessment of the big picture, synthesizing the roles of Servant and King. As Heraclitus reminds us, there is no flaw in God, but we humans have no recourse but to react to the world in the terms of the world, which means aggressive action driven by Righteous Hatred of Evil, Righteous Hatred of what stands in opposition to the will of the Father.

Coming to an end, it is difficult to achieve a feeling of accomplishment when faced with such a monumental task as saying something meaningful about the Battle between Good and Evil; but this is all I have to say for the present, although I am sure we will return to this subject in future presentations. For now, let us summarize the main points of this discussion:

1. Son of God/Son of Man/Soldier of God,
2. Satan attempts to corrupt the Will of Man at every turn by impressing Wrong Thoughts on his mundane consciousness,
3. every thought that enters our heads, and every word that comes out of our mouths is either an affirmation of Divine Truth or a Satanic Corruption of the Truth.
4. if we personalize this battle, perhaps we can look Satan in the eyes and drive him from our midst.

To reiterate a point made earlier:

The role of Satan in these Thought Transactions is real. Therefore, we Christians must look the Devil in the eye, and thus, defeat him with the Truth that radiates from our sense of Being and Identity in the Christ consciousness.

Let us pray: Jesus, thank you for the Power of Thought, the Thought of Truth, and the Truth of You. Amen.