Rejecting the Devil

Panel from the Apocalypse Tapestry

Angers, France

Photograph by the author

Rejecting the Devil

As long as we’re living in the world, we all walk midway between heaven and hell. Therefore we’re in an equilibrium. We can freely choose to look either upward to God or downward to hell. If we look upward to God, we recognize that all wisdom is from God and that in our spirits we’re actually with angels in heaven. If we look downward (as we inevitably do if we have false thinking from an evil heart), in our spirits we’re actually with devils in hell. 

—Emmanuel Swedenborg, ibid, p.90

When we follow the divine design in the way we live we are in God, because God is omnipresent in the universe and in everything within it at the inmost level, since things on the inmost level are in the divine design. Things that go against the divine design are all outside that inmost level. 

On the outer levels God’s omnipresence takes the form of an ongoing struggle with things that are against the divine design, and a constant effort to restore them to the divine design. The more we allow ourselves to be restored to the divine design, the more thoroughly pres- ent God is in each of us; consequently to a greater extent God is in us and we are in God. 

—Emmanuel Swedenborg, ibid, p.91

In a universe of strong laws, the devil is given free reign. Although angelic, he’s a creature of the lower realms, and hence in direct contact with earth and its denizens. The devil is the driver of temptation, and hence sin. 

Yet the devil answers to man; as we well know, Christ commands him (get thee hence, Satan—Matthew 4:10), and Swedenborg successfully defends himself as well:

To the things he (the devil) said I made this reply: “It’s also a law of the divine design that by our own work and power we are to gain faith for ourselves by means of truths from the Word, yet we are to believe that our faith comes from God and not a grain of it from ourselves. Likewise, by our own work and power we are to become justified, yet we are to believe that our justification comes from God and not even a jot of it from ourselves. We have been commanded to believe in God, to love God with all our strength, and to love our neighbor as ourselves. Think about it and tell me how God could command these things if we had no ability to obey and do them?” 

At that the satan’s face changed. It went from white to a sickly yellow; then it soon turned completely black, and with a pitch-black mouth he said, “You’re speaking paradoxes against our paradoxes!” 

Then he immediately sank down toward his own people and disappeared. 

We note that Swedenborg here contradicts Gurdjieff’s classic adage, man cannot do; he does, by defending himself against a powerful metaphysical creature of the hells. Let’s remember the strong Christian tradition, by the way, of the power of men—especially the clergy, but by inference even the ordinary Christian—to compel the devil. This is achieved, in Christian practice, by invoking the power of Christ (God within man.) The belief extends itself further into darker territory in the presumptive actions of black magic, which allow humans to compel the creatures of hell for their own selfish reasons—although always at the cost of the soul. 

One ought to carefully consider what this metaphor means in terms of the practical day-to-day aspects of one’s spiritual practice in even the simplest of terms. 

Even Mr. man-cannot-do Gurdjieff believed that man could do enough to banish the evil in himself, with sufficient effort. Swedenborg’s concept of redemption bears a strong relationship to Gurdjieff’s teachings on doing:

The divine design is that we arrange ourselves for receiving God and prepare ourselves as a vessel and a dwelling place where God can enter and live as if we were his own temple. We have to do this preparation by ourselves, yet we have to acknowledge that the preparation comes from God. This acknowledgment is needed because we do not feel the presence or the actions of God, even though God is in fact intimately present and brings about every good love and every true belief we have. This is the divine design we follow, and have to follow, to go from being earthly to being spiritual. 

—Emmanuel Swedenborg, ibid, p.139.

Readers will be reminded of Gurdjieff’s Stumpfsinn and Blödsinn; both German words meant to indicate the fact that man no longer feels the presence of God.

Swedenborg conceives of the first stage of spiritual redemption as an emptying out of what is human; this is also a persistent theme in Meister Eckhart’s sermons:

If I should have gone out of myself and were entirely empty, then indeed the Father would bear His only­ begotten Son in my spirit so purely that the spirit would bear him back again. 

—Meister Eckhart, The Complete Mystical Works, P. 399

Thus for the soul to be united with God or to become so, she must be divorced from all things, she must be all alone as God is all alone, for a work wrought by God in an empty soul is better than heaven and earth. 

—Ibid, p. 41

Thus no vessel can hold two separate kinds of drink. If it is to contain wine, we must pour out the water; the vessel must be bare and empty. And so, if you would receive divine joy and God, you must pour away creatures… In short, to take in, to be receptive, a thing must be empty. 

—Ibid, p.534

Gurdjieff’s principal teaching on this matter consists of the idea that a man or woman must recognize their own nothingness. This adage is, in its essence, a reformation of the idea that we must empty ourselves to prepare ourselves for receiving God in Being. And, of course, in Gurdjieff’s teaching the aim is to acquire Being; yet we see from the various relationships here that the Being Gurdjieff refers to is that selfsame regenerated Being, one with God, which Swedenborg and Eckhart allude to. 

This acquisition of God’s Being is a de facto conquering of Satan. Satan, in Swedenborg’s cosmology, equates to untruth:

People who have made falsity so strong in themselves that it becomes their belief are called “satans.” People who have made evil strong in themselves by living it are called “devils.” 

—Emmanuel Swedenborg, ibid, p.115.

This is reflected in Gurdjieff’s picture of a “human” being as a person filled with nothing but lies. Swedenborg’s conception is more nuanced that Gurdjieff’s devil; Swedenborg’s devil has a master (satan) which on the surface of things appears to be a more logically and theologically sophisticated concept than Gurdjieff’s. Conflating the two, as Gurdjieff does, obscures the motive force behind the devil on man’s one shoulder, which Swedenborg calls satan. 

Gurdjieff’s satan (the willful force behind our evils) is, however, self-interest; and this is entirely consistent with Swedenborg and Eckhart’s configuration: that which is not-God is of the personal self, i.e., it is selfish. 

We come, here, to the point that Gurdjieff renamed his essay on Pure and Impure Emotions to The Meaning of Life: that which is of the personal self has already strayed. This only makes sense in the context of Swedenborg’s redemption and Eckhart’s rebirth of the soul in God (which Swedenborg also explains at some length in The Lord the redeemer.)

Man has, in other words, at the very least a potential to overcome the devil, or, temptation and sin. This is true even in a universe of strong laws. All three authorities present a strong, but ultimately redemptive, cosmology in which man can reject the devil. 

I was asked yesterday by my son Adriaan what Gurdjieff meant by the phrase, “the devil, you can trust.” I explained this by reminding him that you can always trust your enemies more than your friends: this, for the simple reason that your enemies can never betray you. One can be certain, that is, that one’s enemies will act against one; and there is a subtle philosophical point here worth examination: one trusts the devil because he has been appointed to test us and mislead us. One can, in other words, use one’s inner devil as a consistently reliable compass that points us towards true north: all we have to do is go in the other direction. The reason that Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil features as the last (and perhaps most important) request one makes of God is because temptation is always with us. It refers, furthermore, to Swedenborg’s distinction between satan (the will to evil) and devils (evil deeds themselves, that is, the will made manifest in the material). Satan and the devil are, in other words, neat reflections of Swedenborg’s parallel spiritual and material words: satan is spiritual evil, the devils material evil. 

In Gurdjieff’s cosmos, selfishness connotes satan: the impulse toward’s one’s devil. We can go one step further: when Gurdjieff says, like what it does not like, the word it signifies selfishness, or satan. Instead of using metaphysical or metaphorical terms to denote satan, he has turned the question into a practical inner action which indicates the goal without invoking the image of the incubus. In this sense he has objectified an action which Eckhart and Swedenborg also pointed to.     

May your heart be close to God, 

and God close to your heart.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.