The Naughting of the Fiend

...The cunning which the mediaevals attributed to the fiend was always a low and vulgar thing...

...For twenty years she sat and pondered, going deeper and deeper into the mystery...

...But, none the less, our own delicate day needs a reaction against the respectful attitude of many pious folk toward the person obliquely alluded to as "the evil one...

...They refused to regard him with awe, treating him, instead, with contumely...

...It was the recluse in her cell who laughed at the devil, apart from his horns...

...But there came, with the wondrous revelation of the Passion, this vision of the futility of the machinations of the fiend: And he [the fiend] hath as much sorrow when God giVeth him leave to work, as when he worketh not: and that is for that he may never do as evil as he would...

...On the other hand, it may be readily granted that it is easy to be sentimental and belittle the powers of one whom Christ Himself called "the prince of this world...

...If sin has darkened the understanding of man, how must it have played havoc with the understanding of Lucifer...

...He is a kind of super-Sherlock Holmes, but he is not an evil deity...

...We have a classical instance of this "setting at naught of the fiend" in Dame Juliana's Revelations of Divine Love...

...Being still possessed of an angelic intelligence, though a debased one, his feats in this direction are of a superhuman order...

...The drolleries of the Ingoldsby Legends were based, not on a scorn of the devil, but on a scorn of the belief in his existence...

...It is the generation which has no overweening desire to have "more true mind in the Passion of Christ" which has become so reverential toward the fiend...

...for his might is all taken into God's hand...

...Evil remains to be accounted for, and it is easier to turn and mock at a mythical being, although it may be an unparliamentary form of argument, than to explain the existence of evil without a faith in Juliana's "great privity," in the final revealing of which "all shall be seen to be well...

...The en, emy of mankind can be treated with contumely only under given conditions...

...spectacle of the fiend chasing his tail, or running round a tree in the hope of catching sight of his own back...

...The fiend's intellectual limitation which makes him unable to learn that God can't be circumvented, that in the end his every action must work out in good, shows how miserably distorted is the intelligence which seeks the ruin of souls...

...The logical conclusion was this: Since God is stronger than the devil, and since all things are made to work together for good, the fiend's most strenuous action amounted to a strenuous trouncing of himself...

...The Protestant has his own reasons for sobriety...

...I see game that the fiend is overcome...

...They might, indeed, be disposed to urge that the naughting of the fiend is a gesture too reminiscent of the brutal pastimes of a bull-baiting age to be repeated in our own day...

...The age whose sense of humor was tickled by the antics of a dwarf or of a drunken man instinctively included the devil amongst its mountebanks...

...He is as evil as he can be—he would be delighted to be infinitely evil, but his power, his might, i^ "locked in God's hand...

...They would demur at agreeing with the suggestion that when Luther made a present of his ink-pot to the devil the latter in his turn passed it on to the author of Paradise Lost...

...Saint Paul admits that principalities and powers have the advantage over the wits of man, but he also reminds us that there is that in man, redeemed and sanctified...

...Our rude ancestry realized that the fiend cut a ridiculous figure...

...and he carved them on the backs of the seats of the men who rose at night to pray...

...Of the fiend she says: I saw Our Lord scorning his malice and naughting his unmight...

...God alone can read the future, and communicate His knowledge to His seers and prophets...

...The spiritual deformity of the fiend made cause for mirth...

...And this brings us to the great secret of the naughting of the prince of darkness, the author of all the evil which makes men's hearts stand still with fear and their souls sicken within them...

...This is a Protestant reformed Satan, but many Catholics would seem to have a sneaking regard for him...

...The vulgar mind is more untheological in its conception of the fiend today than when it placed credence in his horns and hoofs...

...Today the fiend is implicitly credited by certain devout folk with God's own attribute of infinity...

...Love was its meaning...

...The fiend's intelligence must have become inconceivably debased by malice...

...After her laughter Juliana tells us that she became serious, saying to her maidens: I see three thing?, game, scorn, and earnest...

...Theologians tell us that he can do neither...

...So Juliana of Norwich received her permission to laugh at the "unmight" of the fiend, and it is surely a weakness of our age that we cannot laugh with her, like the maidens round her bed...

...He was depicted with horns and a tail to show what an absurd creature he was...

...The devil, they likewise tell us, can only get at what we are thinking by a process of deduction...

...Juliana's whole revelation was concerned with the Passion of Our Lord...

...In this spectacle the mediaeval mind would see something essentially humorous, and in an uncouth age which found entertainment in the grotesque the devil would not fail to get his due as a mirth-provoker, and this not only from the yokel audience at a miracle play, but from the saints and mystics themselves...

...It is quite common for pious Catholics to believe that Satan can read the future, and that he can read the hearts of men...

...It is faith, a very courageous faith, which "sees game" when the fiend's gyration is fast and furious...

...So long as we see earnest, so long may we see game and join in the infectious laughter of the anchoress...

...They believe him to be infinitely evil, whereas he isn't infinitely anything—^he is a finite being, like other creatures...

...and He will that we do so...

...Yet there are Catholics who do not realize this...

...The men and women who treated Satan with contumely were men and women who were forever meditating on the Passion of Christ...

...For this sight I laughed mightily, and that made them to laugh that were about me, and their laughing was a liking to me: I thought that I would that all my) even Christians had seen as I saw, then should they have laughed with me...

...The old monastic artists carved his likeness on the backs of the choir seats, or painted it on the margins of their prayer-books in the form of a fox with a bird's head...

...He is even named with a fear which Mother Juliana might scornfully have termed a "reverent dread...

...The acute intelligence failing to grasp what every human child can learn in the first article of the Creed, was a grimace at which to make merry...

...He is constantly credited with the divine attribute of omniscience, and with the knowledge which the unfallen angels and the saints, by virtue of their cleanness of heart, are allowed to see mirrored in the mind of God...

...He is a master-trickster...

...After all, it was the monk, the man who knew something about renunciation, about fasting and penance, who carved his comicalities in church...

...Certainly a species of respect is paid to him by those who do not laugh at him as well as at his horns...

...Other sight or showing she desired none "save to have more true mind in the sufferings of Christ...

...A devil who can no longer be often dismissed with the sign of the Cross and a sprinkling of holy water merits to be treated with respect by those who still believe in his existence as an isolated supernatural entity standing out from the sentimental or allegorical creations of the middleages— a kind of god of evil...

...Those symbols were faithful ones, at any rate...

...I saw not Christ laughing but I wot that the sight that He showed me made me to laugh j for I understood that we may laugh in comforting of ourselves and joying in God for that the fiend is overcome...

...His guesses at the future may be equally shrewd ones, communicated to his friends, the fortune-tellers, but he does not represent evil in the same way that God represents good...

...Juliana, the woman who laughed at the fiend until others laughed with her from the sheer infection of it without themselves seeing anything, had asked for a bodily sickness that she might have more feeling in the Passion of Christ "for I would be one of them that suffer with Him...

...which must make him the victor...

...God's permission, for His own private reason, lay behind the most terrifying activities of the devil, whose weapon was always a boomerang which returned to strike the thrower...

...then she arrived at its meaning...

...And although Our Lord does not laugh Himself (for after all the fiend is His creature) we may understand that we may laugh in comforting ourselves and in joying in God that the fiend is overcome...

...There is outstanding evidence that our ancestors treated the fiend with contumely, and this not because they regarded him as a myth, as the modernist does, but from a reason which had a sound theological basis, and from which was drawn a logical conclusion which is the mediaeval's apology for the comic devil of the mystery play and cloister art...

...God is infinitely good, but the devil is not infinitely evil...

...Satan is crafty where Lucifer was intellectual...

...Modernism has banished a belief in a personal devil...

...Much mockery of the devil goes on today, but it is the antithesis of the great mediaeval joke...

...The recluse lady describes there the vision seen as she lay in what in the course of nature should have been her death agony...

...the very last thing except sanctity that a mediaeval would have connected with the fiend...

...Milton gave Satan dignity...

...His ever-renewed attempt to achieve the impossible was a contortion...

...Hence: the bigger the boomerang the nastier the ultimate blow...

...and to the love which can suffer is linked the laughter which makes merry over the naughting of the fiend...

...It is faith which can see in the larger calamities of life, in its sorrows and circumventions, the...

...I see scorn that God scorneth him . . . and I see earnest that he is overcome by the blessedful passion and death of Our Lord Jesu Christ, and that was done in full great earnest and with sad [serious] travail...

...Where Lucifer had knowledge he has sleight, or cunning...

...The devil running away with a monk in his mouth was an elementary joke, but it was not a cheap one...