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Why the Devil Fell: A Lesson in Spiritual Theology From Aquinas's Summa Theologiae

2006; Cambridge University Press; Volume: 87; Issue: 1010 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/j.0028-4289.2006.00155.x

1741-2005

Jeffrey McCurry,

Medieval Philosophy and Theology

Many theologians today remain unwilling simply to demythologize the devil and leave him behind as a relic of religious primitivism, and yet the vast majority still avoid the subject of the devil. Yet the great theologians of the Christian tradition expressed no such reticence. The devil's identity, his fall from grace, his mischief and destructive interference in the world, and his eternal destiny are some of the significant theological loci covered in works by Origen and Aquinas and Anselm, Luther and Barth, not to mention the lay classic Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis. The texts of Thomas Aquinas, in particular, treat the devil with a seriousness that might embarrass us. In the sixteenth disputed question of De Malo and the sixty-third and sixty-fourth questions of the Prima Pars of the Summa Theologiae he looks at the devil's identity, the character of his fall from grace, and his malevolence in the spiritual lives of men and women. I will not undertake a full sketch of Aquinas's theology of the devil in this essay – though to do so might prove a fascinating project for a soul more morbid than even my own. I do want to meditate on Aquinas's interesting answer to one question: Why did the Devil fall? In the ‘Treatise on the Angels’ in the Summa Theologiae Aquinas reflects on the chief sin of the devil, the sin by which the devil banished himself from heaven – the sin by which he left the state of sanctifying grace in which he had been created by God.11 An un-customary note regarding pronouns: I will use masculine pronouns to refer to the devil in this essay, not because the devil is male any more than he is female but since masculine pronouns have traditionally been used to refer to the devil. Furthermore, this is a case where feminists, I am sure, will be happy to forego their very valid concerns to allow the sexism of pronouns in theology. Sanctifying grace, of course, is distinct for Thomas from consummating grace, the grace of glory, the grace that enables a vision of the Word's essence as it is in itself (for we should never forget that for Aquinas the vision of God is the vision of the Word, eternally begotten of the Father). Sanctifying grace is the principle of supernatural knowing and loving of God as trinity that God imparts as a gift into the created soul, a gift that creates an ability or disposition beyond what natural knowing and willing are capable of – whether the mind and will be angelic or human. In sanctifying grace God enables humans to come to share in the divine life in this initial way, a way that will be fulfilled in the vision of the Word, which is glory and perfect bliss. Why ask such a question? Surely there are more cheerful areas of theological research. Did Aquinas have a morbid fascination with demons, a fascination that we moderns have wisely abandoned? Perhaps or perhaps not. Yet to get to the heart of Aquinas's concern in this section of the Summa Theologiae, we need to read his investigation of the devil's identity and sin not merely as an investigation of the devil and his fall, but as a lesson in how to navigate the Christian spiritual life. In other words, we need to read Aquinas's treatment of the fall of the devil as an exercise of spiritual pedagogy. Aquinas looks, ingeniously, at the devil's fall to clarify some fundamental points about the logic of the spiritual life of those who are already justified by grace, who are beginning to be made holy, but who are not yet transfigured into glory. By looking at the devil's sin, his rejection of God's gift of sanctifying grace that is the beginning of the road to glory, we can better understand the logic of our own journey towards the consummation into glory that is our destiny in God – and better understand the ways that we can turn away from God's gifts. This essay centers therefore on a single article in the Summa Theologiae, which asks whether the devil wanted to be like God.22 STh I.63.3. All citations of Aquinas in this essay will come from the five-volume, misnamed Summa Theologica(New York: Benziger Brothers, 1948) translated by the Dominicans of the English Province in the early twentieth-century. But before we engage that question, we should look at a few points in Aquinas's discussion about angels in general. In STh I.62.1 Aquinas asks if God created the angels in beatitude; in other words, were the angels in the state of eschatological bliss that comes from gazing at God's essence from the first moment of their creation? Aquinas responds that there are two kinds of beatitude. First, there is a beatitude that is a rational nature's perfect operation, i.e. its perfect knowing and loving of created truths and goods; this is what we might want to call natural happiness. For rational natures this means the contemplation of God as creator. Yet this beatitude is incomplete – it does not have a vision of God in his essence as trinity. Hence besides this happiness, Aquinas avers that ‘there is still another … whereby we shall see God as he is.’ This bliss ‘is beyond the nature of every created intellect.’33 STh I.62.1, corpus In other words, there is the happiness that created rational – that is to say knowing and willing – agents are able to enjoy when they take as their perfect object the best truth, goodness, and beauty that can be engaged in the created order. Yet this kind of engagement occurs without supernatural grace, without God's additional assistance to the powers of intellect and will to give them a capacity and object higher than that which their ordinary created natures could aspire to be open towards. This is a happiness for an angel that consists simply in being fully an angel, in operating the angelic mind and will in acts of knowing and loving towards an object that perfectly engages these faculties as created. But there is another happiness, which an angel cannot experience simply by flourishing fully as an angel from the resources of his natural created powers; this is a happiness that comes from seeing God's essence. This happiness ‘the angels did not have from the beginning of their creation … because such beatitude is no part of their nature, but its end.’44 STh I.62.1, corpus There is an activity of mind and will, a process of knowing and loving, that no created nature can give to itself by virtue of its own rational or appetitive powers. God's essence is an ‘object’ that the created mind and will, qua created and natural, can in no way understand or love. For an angel to see God as he is in himself, to have ‘the knowledge of glory, whereby he knows the Word through his essence,’55 STh I.62.1, ad 3 requires a gift beyond the first gift of a created nature – a second gift of deification in which the angelic mind and will turn to God as their perfect truth and good, surpassing any created truth and good. It seems strange to speak of angels being made deiform in glory, but this is what Aquinas is saying. Seeing God in the vision of glory means ‘turning to the good.’66 STh I.62.1, ad 3 In article two of the same question Aquinas further unpacks how this turning occurs. How is an angel to turn to the supreme good, God himself, when this good radically exceeds the reach of his natural powers to know or love? By grace, Aquinas answers. Angels cannot know and love God as he is unless God himself moves their minds and wills to know and love him as an object – however problematic such a way of phrasing it. The angels’ bliss requires them to focus their knowing and loving on God himself as he is in his essence, and yet because their created powers of knowing and willing cannot ascend to such an object of knowledge and love something external has to open up the possibility. ‘The angels stood in need of grace in order to turn to God, as the object of beatitude.’77 STh I.62.2, corpus For ‘the will's natural inclination is directed towards what is keeping with its nature. Therefore, if there is anything which is above nature, the will cannot be inclined towards it, unless helped by some other supernatural principle.’88 STh I.62.2, corpus The other happiness, the one coming from knowing and loving God in the vision of his essence, is what Aquinas calls the ‘ultimate beatitude’ of every rational intellect, every knowing and willing agent, human or angelic. As Aquinas puts it: Now it was shown … that to see God in his essence, wherein the ultimate beatitude of the rational creature consists, is beyond the nature of every created intellect. Consequently no rational creature can have the movement of the will directed towards such a beatitude, except it be moved thereto by a supernatural agent. This is what we call the help of grace. Therefore it must be said that an angel could not of his own will be turned to such beatitude, except by the help of grace.99 STh I.62.2, corpus The created soul in its powers of intellect and will has the ability to know and love created truths and goods. But its final and full happiness are contained in a good and truth beyond creation and therefore beyond its created powers. So the angel is in a bind: he has the ability to know created truths and love created goods, in short to exercise his intellect and will fully and thereby flourish as a creature; and yet his final eschatological happiness exceeds his created abilities. The flourishing that is available to him as a created angel is not sufficient; there is a further joy that is the angel's final and full joy, yet it is not a joy that the angel can give to himself. So the angel is to have an object of knowing and willing that his knowing and willing cannot attain. Here is where the logic of deification begins to become evident. The angel needs to be able to know and love God in order to be fully in bliss, and yet his powers of knowing and willing are impotent to take him to such a state. We might say that God has to open up the capacities of mind and will beyond their created abilities. God has to extend their reach. God extends the range of intellect and will to enable in them a kind of knowing and loving of the divine essence that, without this extra assistance by God, they could never achieve. Indeed it is misleading to speak of ‘achieving’ such a knowledge and love. It is more a phenomenon of experiencing, of the angelic intellect and will being enfolded into the divine intellect and will, their created knowing and willing getting caught up into the divine knowing and willing that is God's eternal life. God chooses, we might say, to know and love himself through the knowing and loving of the angels. He chooses in his freedom to allow the angels to be a medium through which the current of the divine knowing and loving will flow. I think we can understand what Aquinas means when he speaks of the will being turned to the ultimate good by a supernatural agent. The only supernatural agent is God, of course, since the angels, even though not corporeal, are as natural and created and as in need of the theological virtues as humans. So God takes abode in the soul of the angel, which means God's knowing and loving, his very self, takes into its current of life the angelic knowing and loving, so that the angel can know and love God like God knows and loves himself. This is what it means to see the divine essence, to have the angelic mind become deiform, to enjoy the ‘perfect love of God … the possession of God.’1010 STh I.62.2, ad 3 So the angelic mind and will when it possesses glory is fully in act as angelic mind and will, and yet it is riding the crest of the divine knowing and willing, knowing and loving as God knows and loves, having the divine essence in-form the angelic mind and will by God's gift. Yet between these two states, the created state of angels’ natural happiness and the eschatological state of angels’ final bliss in glory, there is a middle state, viz. being in the state of sanctifying grace. In this state the angels have received the ability to know and love God in a way that goes beyond natural capacity, but does not yet enjoy the ability to see him in his essence. In human beings this would be called the soul's life of faith, hope, and charity. The angel knows in this state that God is triune, but he does not see it for himself, his mind and will have not yet been taken into God and made deiform. So Aquinas speaks of stages in the rational creature's (including an angel’s) journey to glory, the vision of God's essence. Angels are ‘created in sanctifying grace,’1111 STh I.62.3, corpus the grace that allows the angels from the very moment of their creation to know and love God as trinity, not just as first cause. So this state of sanctifying grace is the mid-point between the ‘purely natural’ created life of the angel – which exists for Aquinas in theory alone – and the vision of glory that is the angels’ eschatological destiny. How does this work? Sanctifying grace is like a seed, which, if created freedom assents to its promptings, will eventually deliver the created angelic soul into the bliss of the vision of God. Sanctifying grace is rather God's act of putting himself as an object to the soul, to be known and loved. This is grace because the soul could never ‘find’ the triune God as an object of knowing and willing on its own. Yet this giving by God of God's self to be known and loved by the created rational nature does not guarantee or force the mind and will into knowing and loving God. For this grace, Aquinas notes, can be resisted, since grace frees the will and gives it liberty to know and love God as triune but does not coerce it into doing so.1212 STh I.62.3, ad 2 In order for the created mind to be able to know and love God, there must be the possibility that the created mind will reject such knowledge and love – otherwise the created mind would be mechanical, not free. If an angel receives God's gift into his soul, God's giving of himself as an object to the soul to be known and loved, and if the angel lives into this possibility of knowledge and love, then the angel begins to merit beatitude.1313 This paragraph is indebted to Prof. Reinhard Hütter of Duke University. Questions of merit are justly suspicious to many Protestants, so it is worth taking just a moment to get at exactly what Aquinas means. Merit is used in a very particular sense in Aquinas: God rewards the creature for an act – charity – that God himself has enabled. God rewards, in other words, his own gifts.1414 On merit in Aquinas see the crucial work by Joseph Wawrykov, God's Grace and Human Action: ‘Merit’ in the Theology of Thomas Aquinas(Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame, 1995). So charity merits beatitude, but grace gives the will the ability to be charitable. ‘An angel did not merit beatitude by natural movement towards God; but by the movement of charity, which comes of grace.’1515 STh I.62.4, ad 2 Beatitude, the vision of God, the making of the mind and will deiform by in-forming them with the divine essence, comes as a gift of God, but one that involves the created will and can be rejected by the created will. What is crucial to remember here, though, is that the bliss of the vision of God cannot be attained without the prior gift of God: grace, as God's gift of himself to the created intellect and will, enables the intellect and will to know and love God. Key here is the way in which the mind and will are fundamentally responsive powers – so again while the mind and will are active it is less a matter of them moving themselves ex nihilo than letting themselves be drawn into knowledge and love of God as God gives himself as an object to the mind and will. So it is responsive in a way that transcends the dichotomy between passivity and activity. The angelic soul to whom God gives himself as an object of knowledge and love needs, in a sense, to do nothing at all, to simply relax and not resist the movement of its mind and will from flowering into love and knowledge. When one hears a piece of beautiful music, one does not force one's will to love it. The music elicits love, which is really the activity of a person, but it is not generated de novo in any ordinary sense; it is elicited, it responds to a gift of the good present in the music. In the same way, the life of grace is a life of relaxing, letting one's mind and will be taken into the activities of knowing and loving God in response to God's gift of himself as an object to the divine will – the ultimate end of this responsiveness is for the angelic mind and will to become deiform, to be deified, in-formed by the divine essence in perfect bliss of seeing God, contemplating and delighting in the Word.1616 For the notion of the Christian life as a kind of relaxing, I am indebted to conversations with James Alison. For the mind to be so in-formed is for the angelic mind and will to be caught up into the divine mind and will, for the angelic knowing and loving to take on the form, to share in, the divine knowing and loving that is God's life. Angels attain to God's likeness, become like God, when they allow their minds and wills to respond to God's gift of himself to such a degree that they become sharers of the activity of the divine mind and will. It is to allow the angelic mind and will to respond fully to God's gift of himself as an object of willing – a gift that is fulfilled when the angel's subjective knowing and willing takes on the very form of the eternal life of knowing and loving that is God's essence. At this point the angel has become like God, but only by letting his mind and will grow into total response and assimilation – without merging – to the divine gift. In one sense, this is the angel's own action of knowing and loving; but in another sense it is not a self-generating action, it is a wholly responsive action. The angel cannot take credit for knowing and loving God, just as it would seem odd for someone to take credit for loving a Beethoven symphony. Truth and goodness elicit love and knowledge; perfect truth and goodness elicit perfect love and knowledge. Sanctifying grace is the seed that frees the Angelic mind and will to love and know and enjoy God in the bliss of the vision of the Word. All the angel needs to do is to allow the seed to continually draw out his knowing and willing towards the source of everything that is, a source that desires to share its own bliss with the angelic nature. Yet since love and knowledge are free actions, they can be rejected. An angel can turn from the gift, reject the seed implanted. This may seem like lengthy prolegomena to the central discussion of this essay, but we needed to set the table, so to speak, to be able to understand the main dish. Now we turn to the risks involved in the angels’ desire to know and love God freely. To the tragic story of one angel's fall we now turn. Because angels were created in sanctifying grace, but not that fullness of grace which would merit them complete beatitude, it was possible for the angels to reject the gift of grace, the seed that would flower and lead them into perfect bliss in the vision of God's essence. This is where ‘we must consider how angels became evil.’1717 STh I.63.Prologue What was the sin that caused some of the angels, and pre-eminently the devil, to fall from grace? At a basic level, Aquinas thinks it is pride. He has what may initially appear to be a rather austere definition of pride, one that seems ‘medieval’ in all the worst ways. ‘The sin of pride [is] not to be subject to a superior where subjection is due.’1818 STh I.63.2, corpus Is Aquinas setting forth a brutal theory of what we could call knowing one's place, not rocking the boat, a kind of spiritual slavery? No. Submission to God here means receiving a gift. For an angel to know himself as a creature under the lordship and providence of God is to know himself first of all as a receiver of gifts: the gift of creation and the second gift of sanctifying grace, which, if not resisted, will flower into deification. For the angel to know himself as a creature is to know himself as a gift and a receiver of gifts and to know God as the giver of gifts, the chief of which is his own divine life given when he makes creatures deiform. So the sin of pride is the refusal to receive the gifts that God wants to give, the stubborn and utterly mistaken belief that God has not structured creation to be under his lordship and providence in a way that is supremely beneficial to the creature; for God did not create the world for his own pleasure, but for creatures’ pleasure. Indeed we see the way in which the sin of pride is exercised by the devil in the following question: ‘Whether the Devil Desired to be as God?’1919 STh I.62.3 To begin with, Aquinas does not even argue over whether the devil's sin was to want to be like God – it is assumed. But there are two ways in which an angel might want to be like God. The devil could have wanted to be like God ‘by equality’or‘by likeness’.2020 STh I.63.3, corpus What is the difference? To seek to be like God by equality would mean to want to become God himself. While this may have seemed attractive, it would have meant the devil's own annihilation as an angel in his own right. ‘There exists in everything the natural desire of preserving its own nature.’2121 STh I.63.3, corpus The devil, we might say, cannot desire to be like God by equality, to become God himself, because on the one hand he knew this was impossible – since even the devil knows that God is God and that he, the devil, is not – and because on the other hand to will to become God would be to will his own annihilation as an existing subject in his own right, something Aquinas believes no creature is willing to do, according to the logic of self-preservation. If the devil did not want to become God himself, what did the devil want? The second way to become like God is by likeness. And there are two ways for a creature to desire to be like God by likeness. ‘In one way, as to that likeness whereby everything is made to be likened unto God. And so, if anyone desires in this way to be Godlike, he commits no sin; provided that he desires such likeness in proper order, that is to say, that he may obtain it of God.’2222 STh I.63.3, corpus So for the angel, the desire to become like God in the way appropriate to the angel, for the angelic intellect and will to become deiform and be enfolded into the divine knowing and willing that is God's self, is perfectly appropriate. Indeed the angel is created to desire such a supernatural end. But we need to note that Aquinas also believes that there is a logic to attaining this deification, this being transformed into the likeness of God. Creatures have to want to become like God in the right way, and the right way means that creatures have to want to become like God by means of receiving God's own giving of the ability to become like God. Creatures, especially rational creatures, can desire to become like God, to see the beatific vision, but they must desire to receive this vision as a gift, not as an achievement or possession that they can cultivate or attain on their own. For the creature ‘would sin were he desire to be like God even in the right way,’ that is to become like God by becoming deiform, ‘as of his own, and not of God's power.’2323 STh I.63.3, corpus To try to seize glory by the creature's own power, to try to give oneself the gift that only God can give, is sinful, and indeed the sin of pride: it eliminates the distinction of creator and creature, of the giver of gifts and the receivers. And this is precisely the sin of the devil. It is worth quoting Aquinas at length here as he explains the two ways in which we can understand the devil's sin as a belief in self-sufficiency in two different ways. It was in this way that the devil desired to be as God. Not that he desired to resemble God by being subject to no one else absolutely; for so he would be desiring his own not-being; since no creature can exist except by holding its existence under God. But he desired resemblance with God in this respect – by desiring, as his last end of beatitude, something which he could attain by virtue of his own nature, turning his appetite away from supernatural beatitude, which is attained by God's grace. Or, if he desired as his last end that likeness of God which is bestowed by grace, he sought to have it by the power of his own nature; and not from divine assistance according to God's ordering. This harmonizes with Anselm's opinion, who says that ‘he sought that to which he would have come had he stood fast.’2424 STh I.63.3, corpus So there are two possibilities for the reason why the devil fell from grace. Each involves an unwillingness to recognize that God as God is the giver of gifts and that the devil as an angel is primarily the receiver of gifts, gifts that God gives in God's good order. In the first case, the devil simply does not believe that he needs the gift: he believes he can find his final happiness within himself, from his own resources of knowing and willing merely as an angel. Aquinas is making a serious Augustinian point: the soul that believes it can give its final happiness to itself is sorely deceived. A rational soul's final bliss can only come as a supernatural gift; any thought of a self-sufficient ability of a rational creature, angelic or human, to give itself perfect bliss, is mistaken and prideful: it represents an unwillingness to be a creature, to submit to the order of creation and providence, wherein God is the giver of the gift of our final bliss and in which we are gracious recipients. The devil believes he can give the gift of beatitude to himself, believes that he does not need God to be happy. Even though his first answer has a great deal of power, his second answer is even more interesting. Here the devil's sin is precisely his desire to claim deification for himself, to become like God by means of his own resource. Sanctifying grace is, we remember, a seed, the presence of God that will ultimately lead to deification if it is allowed to make intellect and will flower, if it is allowed to pull the mind and will towards an ever deeper knowledge and love of God, a journey consummated in the vision of God. Created knowing and willing are enfolded into divine knowing and willing in an experience of ecstasy. But in this journey the mind and will of the angel have to be led and drawn into the bliss of the beatific vision – the vision of the Word is not something the angelic soul can possess of its own power or resource. So the sin of the devil is precisely that he wants to deify himself, he wants to give himself the gift of becoming like God, of making his own knowing and loving be taken into the divine knowing and loving in the devil's time, not God’s. But, as we have seen, this is the sin of pride, the unwillingness to accept one's place in the created and providentially guided order. It is the refusal of the devil to see himself as he is – a creature who is receiving the blissful gifts of God – and the refusal to see and acknowledge God for who he is – the giver of every good and perfect gift, even and perhaps especially when these gifts are given in the time and order of God's providence, a time and order we may not understand.2525 James 1:17 The devil wants to claim his highest bliss, his own deification, by his own resource, his own power of knowing and willing, and this is precisely his tragic sin. In refusing to allow the gift of deification to be the flowering of the seed of sanctifying grace the devil refused to see himself as the angelic creature that he was, and he refused to see God as the giver of bliss that God is. His failure to know himself and his failure to know God threw him from God's presence and prevented him from receiving the gift of beatitude in the vision of God that would have been his, had be been content to wait for it to come to him. The devil desired to be like God, to see the vision of God's essence for himself, but he was not willing to wait for this gift to come to him as a gift. His aspirations were nothing but noble – to see God as he is in his essence and to enjoy perfect bliss – but his means challenged the very identities of himself and God; indeed, had he succeeded in grasping what only God could give, he would have annihilated not only himself but God as well. And hence God had to cast him out of heaven, for his own sake and for God’s. Yet it is not enough to say that the devil fell through pride. We need to look behind the sin of pride. What is the impetus for the devil's pride? I would like to suggest that, for Aquinas, it is a lack of patience. The devil began to think he could seize the beatific vision for himself because he could not wait to receive it from God's hands. The devil could not wait in God's time, rejected the gifts that God was giving him at the present moment, refused to wait in hope and faith for the ultimate gift of the beatific vision that God was planning to give to him in the time of God's providence, the logic of time that is supremely good for creatures. God had every intention of giving the gift of the beatific vision to the angel who became the devil, but the devil had to try to seize the gift in his own time. Rather than living in God's providence and its time, he tried to take God into his own time, to manipulate God. But what he did in truth was to refuse the gift that God wanted to give him. The way he lost the gift of the beatific vision was paradoxicall