Mystic London - Charles Maurice Davies (lightest ebook reader .txt) 📗
- Author: Charles Maurice Davies
- Performer: -
Book online «Mystic London - Charles Maurice Davies (lightest ebook reader .txt) 📗». Author Charles Maurice Davies
The origin of the Devil may thus be traced to the first vain contempt for the eternal laws of nature. The woman, refusing to be a woman, engenders devils; the man, trying to be a God, loses paradise and his innocence, for the element of the supernatural intruded upon him and abstracted his thoughts from this earth. These were the half idealistic and half realistic elements from which the three greatest spiritual incarnations of the Evil Spirit sprung up. Luther took the Evil Spirit as a bodily entity, with big horns, fiery eyes, a reddish, protruding tongue, a long tail, and the hoof of a horse. In this latter attribute we trace at once the Kentaur element of ancient times. Through nearly one thousand three hundred years from Tertullian and Thaumaturgus down to Luther, every one was accustomed to look upon life as one great battle with tens of thousands of devils, assaulting, harassing, annoying, and seducing humanity. All fought, quarrelled, talked, and wrestled with the Devil. He was more spoken of in the pulpits of the Christian Churches, written about in theological and scientific books, than God or Christ. All misfortunes were attributed to him. Thunder and lightning, hailstorms and the rinderpest, the hooping cough and epileptic fits were all the Devil's work. A man who suffered from madness was said to be possessed by a legion of Evil Spirits. The Devil settled himself in the gentle dimples of a pretty girl with the same ease and comfort as in the wrinkles of an old woman. Everything that was inexplicable was evil. Throughout the Middle Ages the masses and the majority of their learned theological teachers believed the Greek and Latin classics were inspired by Evil Spirits; that sculptures or paintings, if beautiful, were of evil; that all cleverness in Mathematics, Chemistry, or Medicine proved the presence of the corrupting Evil Spirit working in man. Any bridge over a chasm or a rapid river was the work of the Devil; even the most beautiful Gothic cathedrals, like those of Cologne and St. Stephen at Vienna were constructed by architects who served their apprenticeship in the infernal regions. The Devil sat grinning on the inkstands of poets and learned men, dictating to the poor deluded mortals, as the price for their souls, charming love-songs or deep theological and philosophical essays. It was extremely dangerous during this period of man's historical evolution to be better or wiser than the ignorant masses. Learning, talent, a superior power of reasoning, love for truth, a spirit of inquiry, the capacity of making money by clever trading, an artistic turn of mind, success in life, even in the Church, were only so many proofs that the soul had been sold to some dwarfish or giant messenger from Lucifer, who could appear in a thousand different forms. Man was, since his assumed Fall, the exclusive property of the coarse and vulgar conception of the Evil Spirit. Luther was full of these ideas, he was brought up in this belief, and though he unconsciously felt that the Devil ought to be expelled from our creed, he did not dare to attempt the reform of humanity by annihilating the mischief-maker: he could not rob man of his dearest spiritual possession; had he thought of consigning the Devil to the antediluvian period of our moral and social formation, he never could have succeeded in his reform. The Devil, in fact, was his strongest helpmate; he could describe the ritual of the Romish Church as the work of the Evil Spirit, produced to delude mankind. The Devil had his Romish prayers, his processions, his worship of relics, his remission of sins, his confessional, his infernal synods; he was to Luther an active, rough, and material incarnation of the roaring lion of the Scriptures in the shape of the Romish Church, walking about visibly, tangibly, bodily amongst men, devouring all who believed in the Pope, and who disbelieved in this stupid phantom of a dogmatically blinded imagination.
The Evolution-theory may be clearly traced in the two next conceptions: Milton's Satan and Goethe's Mephistopheles. They differ as strongly as the periods and the poems in which they appear. Milton's Satan loses the vulgar flesh and bone, horn and hoof nature—he is an epic character; whilst Goethe's Devil is an active dramatic entity of modern times. Milton's representative of evil is a very powerful conception—it is evil in abstracto; whilst Mephistopheles is evil in concreto—the intelligible, tangible Devil, evolved by the power of selection from an antediluvian monster, and transformed through a civilizing process of at least six thousand years into its present form. Milton's Satan is a debased intellect who in his boundless ambition is still a supernatural being. Mephistopheles is the incarnation of our complicated modern social evils, full of petty tricks and learned quotations; he piously turns up his eyes, he lies, doubts, calumniates, seduces, philosophizes, sneers, but all in a polite and highly educated way; he is a scholar, a divine, a politician, a diplomatist. Satan is capable of wild enthusiasm, he sometimes remembers his bright sinless past; "from the lowest deep," he yearns, "once more to lift himself up, in spite of fate, nearer to his ancient seat;"—he hopes to re-enter heaven, "to purge off his gloom;" some remnant of heavenly innocence still clings to him, for, though fallen, he is still an angel! Mephistopheles in his real nature is without any higher aspirations, he argues with a sarcastic smile on his lips, he is ironical with sophisticated sharpness. Satan has unconsciously gigantic ideas, he is ready to wrestle with God for the dominion of heaven. Mephistopheles is perfectly conscious of his littleness as opposed to our better intellectual nature, and does evil for evil's sake. Satan is sublime through the grandeur of his primitive elements, pride and ambition. Mephistopheles is only grave in his pettiness; he does not refuse an orgie with drunken students, indulges in jokes with monkeys, works miracles in the witch's kitchen, delights in the witch's "one-time-one;" distributes little tracts "to stir up the witch's heart with special fire." Satan has nothing vulgar in him: he is capable of melancholy feelings, he can be pathetic and eloquent. Mephistopheles laughs at the stupidity of the world, and at his own. Satan believes in God and in himself, whilst Mephistopheles is the "Spirit that denies;" he believes neither in God nor in heaven nor in hell; he does not believe in his own entity—he is no supernatural, fantastic being, but man incarnate: he is the evil part of a good whole, which loses its entity when once seen and recognised in its real nature; for Mephistopheles in reality is our own ignorant, besotted, animal nature, cultivated and developed at the expense of our intellectual part.
Luther's devil is the outgrowth of humanity in long-clothes. Man, ignorant of the forces of the Cosmos, blinded by theological dialectics and metaphysical subtleties, incapable of understanding the real essence of our moral and intellectual nature, philosophically untrained to observe that evil is but a sequence of the disturbed balance between our double nature—spirit and matter—attributed all mischief in the intellectual as well as in our social spheres to an absolute powerful being who continually tormented him.
Milton's Satan is the poetical conception of man developed from an infant in long-clothes into a boisterous but dreamy youth, ascribing to every incomprehensible effect an arbitrary, poetical cause. Goethe's Mephistopheles, lastly is the truthful conception of evil as it really exists in a thousand forms, evolved from our own misunderstood and artificially and dogmatically distorted nature.
Goethe in destroying the Devil as such, consigned him to the primeval myths and legends of ignorance and fear, and has shown us the real nature of the evil.
What then is the Devil?
The Devil took, as I said in the beginning, his origin in our blinded senses, in an undue preponderance of that which is material in us over that which is intellectual. The moment we look the Evil Spirit in the face, he vanishes as an absolute being and becomes—
Which wills the bad and works the good at every hour.
After having been exposed during several periods of generations to new conditions, thus rendering a great amount of variation possible, the Devil has developed from a monster into a monkey, and from a monkey into a man endowed with the nature of a
Comments (0)