Day: March 20, 2022

“If I cast out devils by the finger of God, no doubt the kingdom of God
hath come upon you”

We cannot free ourselves from what enslaves us to ourselves. Nor is it enough simply to be released from the obsessions that possess our minds and our thinking. Today’s remarkable and terrifying Gospel speaks  to our divided world and our divided selves. We are divided against ourselves in the confusion and conflict of opinions and emotions, in a whirlwind of fears and anxieties that pit us one against another about what is good and what is evil. At stake is any real passion for the absolute, for God, not just a freedom from what possesses us but a freedom to God in his openness to us.

To say that the world, whatever that means, is united in the demonizing of Putin with respect to the invasion of Ukraine only points to another division especially when it extends to the demonizing of all Russians and all things Russian including the music of Tschaikovsky! We need the wisdom of such Russian writers as Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn to help us think more deeply about evil and particularly about the Devil. Rowan Williams’ rich examination of the novels of Dostoevsky includes a chapter called “Devils,” subtitled, “Being toward Death,” which aptly captures the problematic of evil in today’s Gospel. “The triumph of the diabolical,” Williams suggests, “is when we cannot bear to see what we cannot deny is truth, in ourselves and in the world – the systematic cruelty and the humiliating world of inner fantasy and revolt against ‘good’.” “If there is no God, all things are permitted”, it is famously said in The Brothers Karamazov, but as Williams observes “the devastating truth is there is no escape from the diabolical”. “If there is no God to pass judgment, there is no acquittal or release either”. The self is immobilized in self-hatred and in denial of the principle of its own freedom and being. Such is possession.

Freedom perverted is the essence of the diabolical for Dostoevsky as Williams sees it. “The Devil is the enemy of any real freedom … since he is the spirit of destruction” (p. 93), thus “being toward death” which is the deeper contradiction which the Gospel dialogue brings out. The contrast in the Gospel and the Epistle is between “being toward death” and “being toward life.” Paul exhorts us in Ephesians to be “followers of God” and to “walk in love,” “walk[ing] as children of light,” while recognizing that we “were sometimes darkness, but now are [we] light in the Lord.” Light and life triumph over darkness and death.

The pericope ends with what may be an early Christian hymn in an adaptation of Isaiah’s “Surge, Illuminare” (Is. 60.1). “Arise, shine, for thy light is come, / and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee” is transformed into “Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead,/ And Christ shall give thee light.” It sounds a positive note in contrast to the dark and negative picture of “the last state of that man.”

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