Christ’s victory over Satan and the powers of evil took place on the Cross when the powers of evil were pitted against him, but he never faltered and the moment he died was the moment when he was glorified. What he received at that moment enabled him to be united with his Father where he was able to contemplate his infinite glory. He returned to the place he had occupied from all eternity, but on his return, he took with him his human nature that had been victorious over the powers of evil. This, his human nature was now not only able to contemplate the Father, but also to transmit the love he received and experienced in return to other human beings.
This theme that begins in the scriptures with Christ being led into the desert continues through the first centuries and is to be found in its clearest manifestation in the teachings and the sayings of the Desert Fathers. In his remarkable life of St Antony, St Athanasius makes it clear that Antony and his followers went there precisely to confront and defeat Satan, as Christ did at the outset of his public ministry. As the great spiritual theologian Père Louis Bouyer puts it in his History of Christian Spirituality:
In primitive monasticism, the retreat to the desert is in no way a simple desire for tranquillity, for leisure or for extended contemplation in the sense this is understood in Greek Philosophy. If a monk buried himself in the desert it was with the desire of fighting the devil in what was considered his usual dwelling place.
The monk was a person possessed by a holy impatience to seek perfection. That is why he goes with all speed to the place where he can expect to fi nd face to face and vanquish the spirit of evil, so that the spirit of love can possess him and rule where evil ruled before. It would be naive to believe that this battle was primarily a physical battle fought in the wilderness. It was the wilderness that created the utter solitude that forced the monk to face the demons within. However, before going any further I would like to say something about the devil by way of clarification. That the devil exists is the teaching of the Church. That he is seen to have attacked Christ is clear from scripture, but from the outside. It must be quite clear that the Evil One could not get inside Christ either when he was on earth or in heaven, which is good news for us. For although the Devil is the ultimate personification of Evil he cannot enter into the glorified body of Christ, so those who enter into his mystical body are safe from direct confrontation with him. Therefore, although we may be assailed by powerful temptations in the Dark Night, we are safe from direct confrontation with the Evil One. When I speak of the “demons within” I am using the phrase metaphorically. I am therefore referring to the unruly passions and urges, the consequences of original sin that keep threatening to destroy us. I am not referring to demonic creatures, agents of the devil, that dwell within us like pernicious gremlins gleefully plotting to destroy us. This is an important distinction that must be made as, beginning with the Desert Fathers this distinction can become blurred so that you cannot always tell when a person is speaking literally or metaphorically. In what follows below I will be using the expression the “demons within” metaphorically, as used in common parlance today by religious and non-religious people alike.
Nonetheless, the spiritual combat is for all who are baptised into Christ who have responsibilities that prevent them following people like Antony into solitude. They too are called to union with Christ, and they too are called to take up arms against the “demons within” so that love may rule where evil once ruled before. Once a spiritual novice passes through the first fervour that all serious searchers experience in any age, they find themselves in a spiritual desert that is located deep down within them. Here, like the monk, they have to face the demons that dwell there. No one is free of the seven deadly sins that keep their victims earthbound. The very idea that a person ruled by their demons from within can be united with the Risen Lord is totally unthinkable. It is for this reason that, once first enthusiasm has evaporated we have to undergo the purification that entails first seeing the demons that separate us from Christ, and then with God’s help, vanquish them. The ensuing purification is mentioned everywhere in the writings of the early Fathers of the Church, but it is to be found in far greater detail later in the writings of St John of the Cross. He explicitly states that after first fervour, that in his day took place most commonly in a person’s personal prayer life, a “novice” would have to face the sinfulness and the selfishness within. In the first chapters of The Dark Night of the Soul, he enumerates all the faults and failings that so far remained unseen, for the beginner is too occupied with the intoxicating vapours of sweetness and light to notice the demons within that have to be rooted out before being rooted into the life of Christ.
This can be testing at times almost beyond endurance. When at the end of a particularly painful period in his purification St Antony had a vision of Christ, he complained to him with the words, “Where were you?” Christ answered, “Antony, I was present at your side. But I waited, observing your fight. And since you have resisted so bravely, I will now always be at your side.” The mystic way is a spiritual combat in which the forces of evil within have to be defeated. This purification is not always painful for there are times of joy too, when after periods of purification there are moments of spiritual delight when the one who has been actively purifying us makes his presence felt. It is then that his love can suddenly transport us to high states of spiritual experience, as St Teresa of Ávila describes in her masterwork, Interior Castle. In addition to St Athanasius’ famous book on St Antony, we come to know more of the spirituality that St Antony and other spiritual masters taught their monks through the writings of Evagrius Ponticus (AD 345–399), a learned monk who synthesized their spirituality for posterity.
Speaking of the purification which Antony and his fellow monks had to undergo on their way to union with Christ, Evagrius called the aridity in which they found themselves after first fervour Accidie, and the experience of presence that follows it Apatheia. St John of the Cross details the characteristics of Accidie in The Dark Night of the Soul whilst St Teresa of Ávila does likewise for Apatheia in her masterwork, Interior Castle. Through a sort of spiritual hide-and-seek, believers are purified by the alternating experiences of absence and presence, light and darkness, convincing them that it is God and not they who are in control of their spiritual destiny. At times they are cast into the depth of all but despair, at other times they are raised to the heights of ecstatic joy and to almost every state between the two before purification is complete. Then, what the early Fathers called Theosis or Divinisation, and their spiritual descendants called the Transforming Union or the Spiritual or Mystical Marriage takes place enveloping the whole person, body, and spirit as they are possessed ever more fully by the same Spirit who possessed Christ and raised him from the dead. This is preceded by the “Spiritual Betrothals”, when you can experience for some of the time what is experienced for most of the time in the Mystical Marriage itself. I hope this makes it clear that the mystic way, as experienced by the first Christians was no different from the mystic way as explained by St John of the Cross and St Teresa of Ávila, nor for that matter is it any different for those travelling along the mystic way today.
It is in this purification that the primeval desire for the fullness of love which can only be found in God is gradually purified to enable this desire to be fulfilled. However, no matter how perfectly it is honed for this purpose, human love alone can never rise to enter into God. When the purification has been sufficiently completed the Holy Spirit who has been actively involved in the whole process draws the person into Christ more deeply than ever before to be fitted into his contemplation of the Father. For it is only in, with and through him that it is possible to be united with God the Father. That is why Jesus once said, speaking of John the Baptist, that no man born of a woman was greater than he, but even the least in the Kingdom of God is greater than him. Why? Because it was only after the outpouring of the Holy Spirit that took place after the death of John the Baptist that the new people of God could be drawn up and into Christ’s mystical body so that union with God could take place through him. It was only in and with him that everyone could draw close to and enter into God their common Father and their final destiny.
Sadly at the end of the Age of the Martyrs two pernicious heresies would attack the divinity of Christ and consequently, his love, the Holy Spirit. This would have disastrous consequences on the God-given spirituality that Jesus introduced to our first Christian forebears for many centuries to come.
This essay is chapter fifteen of The Primacy of Loving and is published here by gracious permission of the author.
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The featured image is “The Voice in the Desert (La voix dans le désert)” [between 1886 and 1894], by James Tissot, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
