October Month of the Holy Angels

The sky is black. The great moonless arch sweeps from horizon to horizon, high over the zenith. It is black, and utterly unlit except for a golden shimmer, a dust of light, which is less light than radiance, as it were a bloom upon the grape of darkness. Here and there against this background of darkness and dim bloom, the nearer constellations swing their homely shapes—the chair, the horse, the plough; and high across the heavens is the span of that great road, track of the sun’s chariot astray in mortal hands, the road of stars, where they lie like dust.

Looking up into the sky, into the blackness lit by radiant dust, we almost forget the earth under our feet. It shrinks in all this hugeness of space, and we ourselves shrink with it till we cry the age-long cry of those that watch the stars—“What is man that thou art mindful of him, or the son of man that thou visitest him? Thou madest him a little lower than the angels....”

We see the earth as one of the smaller planets revolving round one of the smaller of the myriad suns that are as small dust in the small corner of the universe that is before our eyes. We see mankind as one of innumerable forms of life, some known, some unknown. Important in his small sphere, what is he in the spaceless immensity of the stars? Where does he rank in the scale of being, with its hierarchies that tower above him into eternity? Is he only a little lower than the angels?

We cannot count the suns we see—we cannot imagine the counting of the suns we do not see. We cannot count the miles, nor the years of the sky. We can only gaze upon it as it hangs above us in this moment of time, and use for our homely ends the faint glimpses we have down here of its wonderful order....

A red star suddenly cleaves the heavens. It appears to fly through them, though in reality it is far below them, burning because of its contact with the earth’s atmosphere, and only for that reason visible. It streaks the sky with a fading crimson gleam—then sinks among the woods and is lost.

“How art thou fallen, O Lucifer, son of the morning,”

It is easier to drop the counting of years and go outside time. Created will exists, and has power of itself. In part it has made the evil choice, it has turned away from the Creative Will which is both its source and goal. It has become evil. It is at war with good. There is war in heaven. Michael and his angels fight against the dragon; and the dragon fights and his angels, but they prevail not, neither is their place found any more in heaven. “And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil and Satan ... he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.... Woe to the inhabiters of the earth, and of the sea: for the devil is come down unto you, having great wrath, because he knoweth that he hath but a short time.”

Evil, in itself, must die, since life subsists alone in God. Therefore every existence cut off from him must end. The dragon must perish apart from the Lord and Giver of life, his only hope is to establish an indirect and factitious union with his God in time. This he achieves through the material universe with which he is able to ally himself and which itself is sustained by God. He maintains his life through the elements—he becomes the Prince of the Power of the Air.

He enters the cycle of evolution, and we can follow his trail through natural law—in the cruelty and futility of nature, which we cannot believe formed part of her Creator’s original design. As life develops, becomes more subtle, rich and various, we see the adversary’s growth more explicitly revealed, till at last in animal consciousness, with its capacity for fury and pain, he attains a new power and satisfaction. The world is like a beautiful tree with a worm gnawing at its roots—twisting, stunting, and warping it, so that the fruit shrivels among the wilting leaves. Jömungund gnaws at the root of Yggdrasil.

But a new wonder happens upon the earth. To consciousness is added mind and will. Created will makes a new appearance—in time. Here is a great new opportunity, both for good and evil. If the adversary can obtain power over this new form of conscious will, he can prolong indefinitely his own life and activity—perhaps even obtain once more a holding in eternal things, by means of this new creature which has been made in the image of God. On the other hand, man may by a right use of his free will redeem the world, save nature from her curse of cruelty and futility, and set her free to return to the kingdom of God. Then the evil one and his angels would fail and perish—they would be cast out of earth as before they were cast out of heaven, and be unable to maintain any longer through creation their illicit hold on life.

These were the issues, and the myths of many races tell us how mankind failed to rise to his high calling. Instead of devoting the sword of his free will to the service of good, and assuring thereby the overthrow of evil in time as it had been overthrown in eternity, man, thinking thereby to serve himself, turned it to the service of evil. Thus evil, defeated in eternity, became victorious in time. The adversary’s power, till then bound by the limited consciousness of animal life, was enormously increased by its new hold on human mind and will. He was now the Prince of this World, its ruler and potentate, and would inevitably have destroyed it if the Almighty King of Heaven had not decided that evil should not triumph even in time—that mankind’s lost battle should be fought over again, and won.

By assuming our manhood, God fought our lost battle over again in his own person, and won it for us, redeeming not only ourselves but the kingdom of nature which we had betrayed. The serpent’s head was bruised—he lost his kingdom. He has no more real power even in time—he is bound by time and must end in time. The Prince of this World is judged.

This is only a dream of good and evil, of the mystery of their conflict. It is only a theory, a guess at the explanation of the apparently distorted processes of nature, and the slavery of mankind to the elements of the world. The eternal issues between good and evil have been fought outside time, by beings of a different nature from ourselves, in that symbolic heavenly war wherein Michael and his angels triumphed over the devil and his angels. In that conflict the victory is already won by the forces of good. Evil is already cast out of the eternal sphere, neither is its place found any more in heaven. There is no dualism in the Christian religion, no setting of Satan against God as Ahriman is set against Ormuzd in the Persian myth. For evil is definitely cast out and trampled under the foot of triumphant Godhead. It has only a secondary and limited existence—in time; whereas good is primary, unlimited and eternal.

In time, the forces of good are in conflict with the forces of evil, though outside time their victory is won. Michael and his angels still have need to succour and defend us on earth, and their power lies in the fact that they also do continual service in heaven. Their power is not secondary and limited by time as is the power of their adversary and ours—it derives from an eternal source, it is the same power that overthrew the Dragon on the plains of heaven—the power of God.

The power of the dragon lies in the life he is able to absorb from creation—from ourselves—just as the meteor owes its light to its passing through our earth’s atmosphere. In one of Dr. M. R. James’s ghost stories there is a spectre which makes itself a body out of some bedclothes, but is unable to injure its victim, as its strength lies entirely in the medium it has chosen, which is merely a bundle of linen. So the harm that evil can do is merely a question of the body it acquires. It rests with us whether it embodies itself in our highest thoughts and strivings or can do no more than frighten us with a bogey made of our discarded primitive instincts. Its most common embodiment is in the elements of our human psychology which we inherit from our animal ancestors—the grave clothes that the risen man has cast aside.

In our fight against evil we fight against what is merely temporary, parasitic and doomed, and on our side are forces which are primary, self-existing and eternal. On our side are the unchanging stars in their order, and our adversary is only the meteor that streaks the sky for a moment of earth-derived brightness, falls and is lost.