Only in Destroying

It is the fateful morning when Satan will tempt Eve with the fruit that is supposed to make her like the gods. He beholds the beautiful earth around him, but he can take no delight in it—because it is good and he is not. He knows very well that if he corrupts the first human couple, the world that God has made for them must likewise suffer change; and he knows that his own state will be worse than it is now. But he cannot help himself. He is driven from within by the compulsion to evil:

But neither here seek I, no, nor in Heaven
To dwell, unless by mastering Heaven’s Supreme,
Nor hope to be myself less miserable
By what I seek, but others to make such
As I, though thereby worse to me redound
For only in destroying I find ease
To my relentless thoughts.

The poet, John Milton, has well expressed the restlessness of evil, quite compatible with sloth, the sin of spiritual torpor, the willed incapacity to rejoice in the good and to celebrate it, to rest in it. Good has an aim; it is going somewhere. As the Psalmist so splendidly puts it, “I shall go in unto the altar of God, of God, who brings joy to my youth.” It also rests in the action of celebration, of feasting. So when God reveals to the angels his only-begotten Son, under whom they will be “united as one individual soul / Forever happy,” the angels engage in action which is its own joyful end: “That day, as other solemn days, they spend / In song and dance about the sacred throne.”

Evil is a warped, frustrated, meager, disappointing parody of good. Its congregation is a mob. Its dance is the spasms. Its songs are shouts through a bullhorn. Its Sabbath is a day of restlessness, filled up with things to get done, and with much noise, lest the truth come to the fore, that there is in fact nothing to do. Its aspiration is ambition, literally to go round and round; the Latin word described the unseemly act of canvassing for votes. Evil fouls its nest, then complains of the smell. It is like an old woman bedridden with sores, tossing and turning, and finding no comfort.

You cannot compromise in principle with evil and hope to settle in at a certain bad state of affairs, because the floor will not hold. It is an ever-opening and devouring crater. Let the latest attack on a Christian baker stand for an example—a woman in California who won’t take orders that are pornographic, or that celebrate paganism, divorce, or homosexuality. Why can she not be left alone? Why must she face years of headache to keep her small business her own, doing something pleasant, without committing herself to wicked things? Why must the juggernaut of government come lumbering down the road, spreading ruin? You might as well call up the United Federation of Planets to adjudge a dispute at a lemonade stand.

In my book Defending Marriage, I predicted that there would be no end to the unraveling, not until people reject the false premises: that masculine and feminine are trivial or unreal; that men and women are not made for one another; that marriage is not, by its physical nature and cultural dynamism, a reality that transcends the generations, but rather may be whatever we like, according to our romantic or sentimental feelings. The conclusion from such premises is that, outside of coercion or deceit, there is no right and wrong in sexual matters. That conclusion is absurd and poisonous to human society.

But we err if we assume that acceptance of any particular aberration from sexual morality was ever the goal of the revolutionaries. That, I said, is because the principal desire was to transgress, to gain the thrill of the forbidden, to scandalize others, to make them squirm, or to enjoy their enjoying a vicarious pleasure in seeing, if not performing, the forbidden action. Such transgressors find allies in those who also transgress but not so far or so flagrantly. They run interference for them; they make them feel better about themselves. The fornicator can say, “At least I act according to nature.”

No rest, then. No matter where you draw that line, the temptation to transgress will assert itself, instigating the transgressor to venture out even farther to gain the same thrill. Sure enough, we have collapsed into what anyone two minutes ago would have considered bizarre, monstrous, and insane—not only permitting children to mutilate themselves, rendering them sterile for life, gelding boys and spaying girls, caught up in the howling lie that you can change your sex, but demanding that you approve it, lest the state enter with all its brainless and irresponsible power to seize such children from the custody of the sane, especially when one estranged parent leverages the state against the other, for revenge, couched in terms of loving care for the child. 

We are making the polygamous Mormons of the late 19th century seem like paragons of sanity and responsibility. We once demanded that Mormons repudiate polygamy as a condition for Utah’s statehood. Now we demand acceptance of, connivance at, and participation in evil. Off with your sanity, or else.

I have used the example of spiraling madness in one area of the moral life, but for other people in other times, it might be money, bloodshed, the thirst for power, or blasphemy that sets its evil tentacles in the brain. Nor must the evil always assume the form of excess. There is a certain pride in the bold transgressor. Envy is his sickly twin. No rest here, either, but the destruction is wrought by smothering and stifling. Whenever something wholesome and lively appears, whenever our God-given nature reasserts itself, the envious must kill it. 

I am reminded of a woman at Providence College who taught a course in folktales. She hated them. Just when she thought that they were buried for good, she said to us in the English department, taking for granted that we would all see things her way, up would pop some Beauty and the Beast, or Cinderella, and that would set her again at work, to kill them off, to ruin them for students who took an innocent pleasure in them.

Or I think of the animus that certain clergy have against the faithful whose piety disturbs them. We err in supposing that every man of the cloth desires that people should think more about God, that they should spend more time in prayer, that they should feel more devotion to the Sacrament. Many wish rather to dampen, to bring everyone down to their own half-faith; it is why they derive satisfaction in managing decay and closing parishes.  

I am not saying that all or even most clerics in such situations are motivated by envy. But some are. Whenever there is a public controversy involving those supposedly too pious, or, in our time, too masculine or too feminine, these poor envy-ridden priests rush to judgment against the members of their own flock. As for some practice of the faith that succeeds, avoid it, slander it, or squelch it.

So one of the bands of fallen angels, trying to find some place in Hell that is not as bad as what they’ve seen and waiting for Satan to return from his venture to earth, “With shuddering horror pale and eyes aghast, / Viewed first their lamentable lot, and found / No rest.” How can they, when the restlessness is as much within them as without? So it is with Satan, venturing toward the new world he aims to ruin:

Horror and doubt distract
His troubled thoughts, and from the bottom stir
The Hell within him, for within him Hell
He brings, and round about him, nor from Hell
One step no more than from himself can fly
By change of place.

No rest. Learn the lesson, fellow believers.