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“Never forget, when you hear the progress of the Enlightenment being praised, that the devil’s cleverest ploy is to persuade you that he doesn’t exist.”
— Charles Baudelaire
Archbishop Charles Chaput (USA), O.F.M. Cap. writes:-
"Leszek Kolakowski was an unusual man of letters. A fierce critic of
the Church as a young man, he was a leading Marxist philosopher in
Poland until he asked too many awkward questions about Soviet life under
Stalin and got exiled to the West. He went on to become a fan of John
Paul II and one of the great scholars of the last century.
Exactly 30 years ago, Kolakowski gave a lecture at Harvard entitled
“The Devil in History.” Early in the talk, the mood in the room became
restless. Many of the listeners knew Kolakowski’s work. They knew he
could be playful and that he had a wicked sense of irony. But they
couldn’t figure out where he was going with his lecture.
Present that day were the historians Tony Judt and Timothy Garton
Ash. About 10 minutes into the talk, Ash leaned over to Judt and
whispered incredulously: “I’ve got it. He
really is talking about the devil.” And in fact, he was.
[1]
It was a moment when the little bigotries of our intellectual class
were laid bare. Apart from Judt and Ash, the audience was baffled that
an urbane public intellectual, fluent in five languages, could really
believe in “religious nonsense” like the devil and original sin. But
that’s
precisely what Kolakowski did believe. And he said so again and again in his various works:
An example:
“The devil is part of our experience. Our generation has seen enough of it for the message to be taken extremely seriously.”[2]
And:
“Evil is continuous throughout human experience. The point
is not how to make one immune to it, but under what conditions one may
identify and restrain the devil.”[3]
And:
“When a culture loses its sacred sense, it loses all sense.”[4]
Kolakowski saw that we can’t fully understand our culture unless we
take the devil seriously. The devil and evil are constants at work in
human history and in the struggles of every human soul. And note that
Kolakowski (unlike some of our own Catholic leaders who should know
better) was not using the word “devil” as a symbol of the darkness in
our own hearts, or a metaphor for the bad things that happen in the
world.
He was talking about the spiritual being Jesus called “the evil one”
and “the father of lies” — the fallen angel who works tirelessly to
thwart God’s mission and Christ’s work of salvation.
This is why the evangelization of culture is
always, in some
sense, a call to spiritual warfare. We’re in a struggle for souls. Our
adversary is the devil. And while Satan is not God’s equal and doomed to
final defeat, he can do bitter harm in human affairs. The first
Christians knew this. We find their awareness written on nearly every
page of the New Testament.
The modern world makes it hard to believe in the devil. But it treats
Jesus Christ the same way. And that’s the point. Medieval theologians
understood this quite well. They had an expression in Latin:
Nullus diabolus, nullus redemptor.[5] No
devil, no Redeemer. Without the devil, it’s very hard to explain why
Jesus needed to come into the world to suffer and die for us. What
exactly did he redeem us
from?
The devil, more than anyone, appreciates this irony, i.e., that we
can’t fully understand the mission of Jesus without him. And he exploits
this to his full advantage. He knows that consigning him to myth
inevitably sets in motion our same treatment of God.
So what’s the point of my column this week? Jeffrey Russell, who wrote a remarkable four-volume history of the
devil, noted that the Faust character is the most popular subject in
Western paintings, poems, novels, operas, cantatas and films after the
characters of Jesus, Mary and the devil himself.
[6]
That should tell us something. Who is Faust? He’s the man of letters
who sells his soul to the devil on the promise that the devil will show
him the secrets of the universe.
Faust is the “type” of a certain species of modern man; a certain
kind of artist, scientist and philosopher. Faust doesn’t come to God’s
creation as a seeker after truth, beauty, and meaning. He comes
impatient to know, the better to control and dominate, with a delusion
of his own entitlement, as if such knowledge should be his birthright. A
prisoner of his own vanity, Faust would rather barter away his soul
than humble himself before God.
There’s a lesson in Faust for our lives and for our culture. Without
faith there can be no understanding, no knowledge, no wisdom. We need
both faith and reason to penetrate the mysteries of creation and the
mysteries of our own lives.
That’s true for individuals, and it’s true for nations. A culture
that has a command of reason and the byproducts of reason — science and
technology — but lacks faith has made a Faustian bargain with the (very
real) devil that can only lead to despair and self-destruction. Such a
culture has gained the world with its wealth, power and material
success. But it has forfeited its soul."
***
[1] Tony Judt, “Leszek Kolakowski (1927-2009),”
New York Review of Books, September 24, 2009
[2] Leszek Kolakowski,
My Correct Views on Everything (South Bend, IN, St. Augustine’s Press, 2005)
, 133
[3] Ibid., 128
[4] Ibid., 271
[5] Jeffrey Burton Russell,
Mephistopheles: The Devil in the Modern World (Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1986), 33.
[6] Ibid., 58
See Archbishop Chaput's blog at:-
http://catholicphilly.com/2017/06/think-tank/archbishop-chaput-column/sympathy-for-the-devil/