I'm continuing my way through Elaine Pagels' The Origin of Satan. Over a decade ago, I read Pagels' Adam, Eve, and the Serpent for a class, which talked a lot about Augustine. As I read Pagels in The Origin of Satan
talk about the lives of Justin Martyr and Origen, I was reminded of how
compelling of a storyteller Pagels is in her writing. I felt as if I
were watching a riveting documentary that went into historical figures
in depth, described their historical significance, and highlighted the
tensions they faced (within themselves and with others). (Think American Experience.)
I'll
talk some about Pagels' summary of the life of Justin Martyr, who lived
in the second century C.E. Justin came to Rome from Asia Minor
specifically to study philosophy, and he was impressed at the peace that
he saw in the Christians who were torn by wild beasts in the
amphitheater. Justin was becoming discouraged as he studied philosophy
(i.e., Stoicism, the Peripatetics, etc.) with teachers. He encountered a
Christian old man who told him that his mind was degenerate due to its
infestation by demonic powers, and that Justin needed spiritual
illumination to reach true understanding. Justin came to agree with the
old man on this, and he was baptized. As Justin looked back at the
Platonic cliches that he spouted to the old man, he "realized that his
objections to the old man's arguments derived simply from his blind
acceptance of Plato's authority----not from any conviction of experience
of his own" (page 117).
Justin, who was raised as a pagan by
pagan parents, began to see the world in dramatically different ways
after he became a Christian. He believed that the gods whose statues he
saw on a regular basis were actually demons, and he could appeal to the
moral degeneracy around him to support his view that there was a strong
demonic influence on society----moral degeneracy such as abandoning
children and sodomizing the young. Justin found the so-called gods to
be sinister demons who terrorized people to receive worship. Justin
felt as if he were seeing the world as it truly was----as a spiritual
battleground where people needed Christ to be free from bondage.
Justin
wrote to the emperor and other rulers to protest the mistreatment of
Christians, including a Christian aristocratic woman who wanted to
divorce her morally-degenerate non-Christian husband, and her husband
told the authorities she was a Christian as a result. As Pagels notes,
the rulers most likely archived Justin's letters and did not read them,
but, had Marcus Aurelius read them, he would have considered Justin's
thoughts to be "obscenely grandiose" (page 126). Marcus, after all,
believed that self-control and peace of mind could be attained through
philosophy, which Justin thought was inadequate by itself. Marcus also
did not have a dualistic view of the world, in which there are evil
demons, for Marcus thought that all spirit beings, even the chaotic
ones, "are actually a part of a single cosmic order" (Pagels' words on
page 126). On a related note, the pagan Celsus, who attacked
Christianity, viewed the Christian belief in the devil to be quite
absurd.
I really like it when teachers and writers get into the
personal stories of historical figures. Pagels does that quite well, in
my opinion. My discussion doesn't do her storytelling justice!