A Broken Heart, Part II: To Love Even The Devil Himself

Detail from The Apocalypse Tapestry, Angers

Photograph by the author

I touch here on, as I said before, subtle metaphysical mechanisms and philosophies that it could take many weeks or months—perhaps years— to sort through and discuss. Yet the ultimate point is that God is ultimately merciful, and loves all of His creation regardless of its nature. God loves the devil, who, as all other creatures, does His bidding. In this regard the devil cannot be blamed or judged for what he is, for he—like all the rest of creation—is of God. While we resist the devil, both with and without, we owe him that same non-judgmental love that God gives him. He, like the rest of Being, is our neighbor, and one of the finer points of Christ’s great command Thou shalt love thy neighbor is thyselfis that the devil is my neighbor too.

It may sound heretical to say one should love the devil; and yet the devil is always in me, for he is the personification of sin itself. In this regard I understand that I need to respect my sin: indeed, St. Catherine points it that it’s my lack—my sin—that spurs me, if and when I see it in an organic manner (my words, not hers), towards God. No other experience moves me in the direction of the Lord so much as remorse of conscience, which is an instinctive property of Being.

Or at least it ought to be. Yet such instincts are distinctly atrophied in me; it’s only a closer relationship with the molecular properties of the organism and their role in three-centered Being that can open my eyes in regard to this question. The whole purposeof three-centered Being is to open these parts of awareness so that remorse of conscience can be reborn and act within.

If I truly see and sense my sin—all of it, from the beginning—the anguish it produces becomes my friend and ally in my search for the refinement of Being. Nothing concentrates the particles of the Divine so effectively as remorse; if my Being is the crucible for this spiritual alchemy, then remorse is the fire, and my deeds the ore from which a more refined experience of the Lord can be distilled. In this sense I can love the devil, because without his temptation, and my consequent sin, there would be no anguish—no flame, no fire— from which to act.

In this way we begin to see, perhaps, that the flames and fires which the damned are presumed to spend eternity in are quite exactly this thing: my sins, collectively, without the action of remorse of conscience. If remorse does not arise in me, I live eternally, but I live within my sin, which exists cumulatively, durably, and undistilled. The action of remorse doesn’t begin; and the refinement of Being which proceeds from it never takes place. 

This should be contemplated carefully and often, because without an understanding of this my inner efforts are in vain. 

Part III of this seven part series publishes on Nov. 30.

May your heart be close to God, 
and God close to your heart.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.