The devil he is

If the devil exists, he pesters you with doubts. One of his tricks, if he exists, is to get to you to doubt even his existence. In which case, if he doesn’t exist, then attack was merely a projection of something in you. He has no power; it is a toothless attack. Ha!

But wait. Weren’t you just a minute ago convinced that he, or something like him, was real? Didn’t you hear him speaking to you, as sure as eggs? Now you say he doesn’t exist! Can you trust yourself, then, to know reality from fantasy? Isn’t it you, in fact, who is unravelling?

You’re on a roll now. Did that dark thought you had never conceived before emerge from the sweaty locker rooms of your own soul? That plausible devil: he’s your own creation, then?

These are the wiles of the devil or some of ‘em.

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Put on the whole armour of God, so that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. (Ephesians 6:11-12)

If only the experience of wrestling with doubt was as dramatic as it sounds in Ephesians 6. Paul makes us imagine the Christian striding out like Luke Skywalker to clash light sabres with the devil. He is easy to spot because he wears black and rides a Harley, and has some serious tattooing on his right arm about how he'll dismember the mothers of those who stand in his way.

But that's not how it goes. The devil – if it is him - always comes in disguise. Even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. Or, as something less than an angel of light. He speaks reasonably to reasonable people. He makes a good deal of quiet sense, in a completely perverse way. His talk has, (as Rowan Williams puts it) an 'Escher-like quality, landscapes turning inwards on themselves in visual but plausible absurdity.' It's the kind of remorseless, undefeatable logic that drives you to insanity.

Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov is the most rationalistic and agnostic of the three Karamazov brothers in Dostoyevsky's great novel, The Brothers Karamazov. Yet it is he who has a nightmarish encounter with the devil. The devil comes to him in the guise of a rather ingratiating and certainly not very frightening middle-aged man, looking a little down on his luck. He's a ‘banal devil’, a 'sponger'. Is he a vision, or is he real? Does he have an independent existence, or is he a parasite (a ‘sponger’) on Ivan's fevered imagination? Does he come from within Ivan, or from some source without? Ivan says to him:

I sometimes don't see you, and don't even hear your voice, as last time, but I always guess what you're driveling because it is I, I myself who am talking and not you!'

So, the challenge is for the devil to produce a thought in Ivan that he has never thought before. He says:

Though I am your hallucination, even so, as in a nightmare, I say original things, such as have never entered your head before, so that I’m not repeating your thoughts at all, and yet I am merely your nightmare and nothing more.

He is prepared to concede to not existing, for then he would have triumphed.

Paul dramatises the battle in Ephesians 6 exactly because this clash doesn't look obvious. He calls it a war because it looks like a friendly chat. It is hard to see it for what it is. The nature of this confrontation is that it always makes you wonder whether there actually is a confrontation. It talks to you of your own hysteria.