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Special Portuguese Spanish    

Year 3 - N° 124 – September 13, 2009

ROGÉRIO COELHO
rcoelho47@yahoo.com.br 
Muriaé, Minas Gerais (Brasil)
Translation
Marcelo Damasceno do Vale - marcellus.vale@gmail.com
 

 

How born the Devil

2ª part

Life legend and really anti-hero, the Demon remains hitherto in the Christian imaginary

“(…) Believe that God had created one being eternally gone back to the evil, constant spoiler of your work, it is a frank posture which edges the most sordid blasphemy..” - François C. Liran


According to Carlos Roberto Nogueira, the concentration of the evil in a personage is only visible in the New Testament. Then satan (substantive) passes the being Satan (proper noun). From opponent, he changes to Opponent. The model of Jesus' enemy's, that puts His kindness to the proof, is composed.

Greeks - With the religious unification accomplished by Rome in the century 4 d.C., the Christianity, of a pursued sect (remember that Paulo to have his divine vision in the Syrian desert, he was a Jewish rabbi that hunted Christians), starts to pursue: it becomes the official and obligatory cult of every Empire. Full of divergent currents in his beginning, wins the closed and general aspect of the Catholicism more and more (Catholic = universal).

It passes the being Pagan all, the past and the present, strange to the Roman Empire.

With the crescent Christian Latin might, we have a case to the part: the attempt of extermination of all the Greek cultural tradition. Some manifestations are easily visible as the destroyed oracles and the noses and broken arms of the greek sculptures, just as they made it in recent past the "religious" leaders from Afghanistan, destroying the enormous representative statues of the Buddhism. Any forms of linked parallel cults to the fecundity and the nature, as the sacred rural parties of the spring, they start to be forbidden categorically. Only that the interdiction many times it was without success. For not getting to restraint those practices in the way how it would like, the Christianity uses the enemy's weapons. He maintains only God up there, but it produces a multiplicity in a lower level: the saints."

It is evident that the saints today are the substitutes of pagan idols, once the Church didn't get to eradicate the idolatry. It is the old history: If it is not able to her with the enemy, best to join to him. Not even the old rural parties stopped happening: they were substituted by the urban parties that they survived until today, It is enough to see what happens around of the Catholic Churches the months of May and June.

Then, actually, what has nowadays doesn't differ than the pagans had at his time. It was, in fact, - absolutely - necessary the "promised Consoler's" coming to put order in the Planetary House that welcomes us. 

Tomás of Aquino potentiates the devil's illustration in a such order that invents a science to combat it: the demonology

In spite of the growing prominence that the demon is going winning inside of the Christianity, to this point God’s victory over Devil is considered unanswerable. This last one exists in the world to be overcome and to give more glory to the celestial absolute power. The situation only seedling in a very subsequent historical moment with another one big theoretical of the Christian religion: He was St. Tomas Aquinas.

We are in the century XIII and the Catholic

Church leaves the heyday of her territorial domain, political and economical. To maintain like this, she needs to demonstrate her power with more and more visibility, we could say: with dared and it forces ostensibly. In that context, and in that imperious need of the Church to sustain her slavocrat domain, St. Tomas Aquinas potentiates the devil's illustration in a such order that, starting from the symbologies of the popular folklore, it invents a science to combat it: the demonology. In that ignorance festival the Catholics still get to be overcome by those that are Evangelical (Protestant) where the "Mise en scène" of the shepherds, excels for the violence in the attempt of expelling the devil of the body of the terrified sheep of their docile flocks of filled reasoning.

Thus, they start to exist very defined rules for the characters of the evil identification, very defined rules are created for the characters of the evil identification, which could only be defeated with the indispensable help of the Christian faith. In that way devil wins outline more necessary physicists, besides with the great painters help that they worked to the Church with exclusiveness, not saving the resources to color with the strong colors of the ignorance the infernal panels destined to frighten.

"The hybridism “man/animal" – explains Laterce1 - "forms of the old oriental people represent the supernatural, it will be essentially the base to compose an illustration deformed. An appealing presence is the male goat paws, that was the chosen animal for many pre-Christianic cultures for sacrifice rituals and praise to the gods (then the expression scapegoat).

Besides, a particularly threatening Greek god for the dogmas of the Christianity was Dionysus, patron of the dance, of the music, of the theater and of the binge; in other words, the own disorder of the chaotic effervescence of the artistic creation. And which is the most outstanding characteristic in the appearance of Dionysus?   Their male goat paws. The presence of those inferior members in the imaginary popular, would help to put, of only one time, the greek religious tradition and oriental in an intimate connection with the evil forces.  

One family was condemned to the bonfire by the
“Saint” Inquisition because they changed the
bed linen on one friday

Then, the devil sees an omnipresent obsession and it is going stopping being an individual to characterize as a group of combatants (demons' legion) and, therefore, anyone anywhere can "be possessed", and consequently needy of the help exorcist of the Church.

The "Saint" Inquisition's persecutions everyone those that diverge of the pre-certain pattern of Christian, and that in the opinion of the attentive ecclesiastical authorities had part with the demo. Any bursts philosophical that began to bloom and to blunt above the rigid context dogmatic tax was fast and mercilessly harvested. The accusations that invariably took the convict to the death, they were constituted in the more absurdities, banal and arbitrary booklets: A family was condemned to the bonfire by changing the bed linen on one Friday; auburn persons have in the color of the hair a sign of the relationship with the fire of the hells and deficient physicists constitute, for analogy, deformed spiritual and forgotten of God, therefore, bonfire in them!

In the century XIV, a movement "incensed" by the Church to increase her might towards the East, the Crusades (the drawing of the Nazi swastika is constituted by two crosses superimposed, that is: "crusades". Coincidence?!...), had as a slogan the concept of Saint War against the paganism and as object the expulsion of the Arabs of the area, where was born and Jesus lived. The devil's composition wins new items: little beard and tone of skin darkness, characteristic of the Moors. It is like this, nurtured by the placenta of the ignorance and of the unconfessable subordinate interests, the devil goes being decorated until reaching his/her current "status."

The model monarchic absolutist of the Middle Ages helps to compose the leader's of the whole demoniac army idea: Satan is now the Prince of the Darkness, Christ's reverse, the Antichrist, that one day would reign on the Earth.

However, there was still one more too important reason – economical - that navigated in the underground currents of that emphasis of the demoniac forces: the lucrative sale of the indulgences.

Let us explain: The biblical Apocalypse seemed to be if rendering because of the installation of the wars and of the appearance of the plague. And with the infernal panels being painted of the high of the pulpits with the strong paints of the terror, was there created the necessary dependence of the which the Church was used richly to obtain profit: guaranteed passages for the Sky could be bought starting from the sale of the indulgences to weigh of gold for the noblemen. There we have the devil nominated minister of the economy of the Church. Without him, there would not be terrorism and nobody would be interested in the precious "passport."

To gravitate for God, here is the Humanity's objective
 and three things are it necessary: the justice,
 the love and the science

However, as there isn’t situation that lasts forever, starting from the century XVI, with the progress of the modern science and the new concepts philosophical humanists, we have a decrease of the importance of the religion in the daily life. With that, the devil also lost space...

Today, in spite of our world more and more rationalist and unreligious, he is present in rituals of some Protestant currents, in satanic cults and in the world of the fiction in a reasonable number of films of doubtful quality, among which survive "The Baby of Rosemary", of Roman Polanski, and "The Exorcist", of William Friendkin."

Laterce concludes1 with philosophical wisdom: The Devil's Reading in the imaginary Christian takes to think that our will always go to transport the evil for a distant world of us, transcendent, only that more and more have evidence that he is really of the human order."

In the conclusion of "THE Book of the Spirits", St. Paul of Tarsus left the following message for all of us, Christians of the present time:

"Union with the Divine Being is the aim of human existence. To the attainment of this aim three things are necessary-knowledge, love justice: three things are contrary to this aim-ignorance, hatred, injustice. You are false to these fundamental principles when you falsify the idea of God by exaggerating His severity; thus suggesting to the mind of the creature that there is in it more clemency, long-suffering, love, and true justice, than you attribute to the Creator. You destroy the very idea of retribution by rendering it as inadmissible, by your minds, as is, by your hearts, the policy of the Middle Ages, with its hideous array of torturers, executioners, and the stake. When the principle of indiscriminating retaliation has been banished for ever from human legislation, can you hope to make men believe that principle to be the rule of the Divine Government ? Believe me, brothers in God and in Jesus Christ, you must either resign yourselves to let all your dogmas perish in your hands rather than modify them, or you must revivify them by opening them to the beneficent action that good spirits are now bringing to bear on them. The idea of a hell full of glowing furnaces and boiling cauldrons might be credible in an age of iron; in the nineteenth century it can be nothing more than an empty phantom, capable, at the utmost, of frightening little children, and by which the children themselves will no longer be frightened when they are a little bigger.”

The sole aim of  hastisement is rehabilitation; and therefore, to assume the eternity of chastisement is to deprive it of all reason for existing.

By your persistence in upholding mythic terrors, you engender incredulity, source of every sort of social disorganisation; and I tremble at beholding the very foundations of social order shaken, and crumbling into dust, for want of an authoritative code of penality. Let all those who are animated by a living and ardent faith, heralds of the coming day, unite their efforts, not to keep up antiquated fables now fallen into disrepute, but to resuscitate and revivify the true idea of penality, under forms in harmony with the usages, sentiments, and enlightenment of your epoch.

"What, in fact, is 'a sinner' ? One who, by a deviation from the right road, by a false movement of the soul. has swerved from the true aim of his creation, which consists in the harmonious worship of the Beautiful, the Good, as embodied in the archetype of humanity, the Divine Exemplar, Jesus Christ.

"What is 'chastisement' ? The natural, derivative consequence of that false movement; the amount of pain necessary to disgust the sinner with his departure from rectitude, by his experience of the suffering caused by that departure. Chastisement is the goad which, by the smarting it occasions, decides the soul to cut short its wanderings, and to return into the right road. The sole aim of  hastisement is rehabilitation; and therefore, to assume the eternity of chastisement is to deprive it of all reason for existing.

"Cease, I beseech you, the attempt to establish a parallelism of duration between good, essence of the Creator, and evil, essence of the creature; for, in so doing, you establish a standard of penality that is utterly without justification. Affirm, on the contrary, the gradual diminution of imperfections and of chastisements through successive existences, and you consecrate the doctrine of the union of the creature with the Creator by the reconciliation of justice with mercy." (PAUL, APOSTLE)

Servant with lucrative ends and to assist to the anguish of dominance of a breed it sponges, the devil was died and buried by the spiritualistic knowledge that informs us in a limpid and crystalline way not to be believable that our Celestial Father, God of Love and Kindness, it can create a being to be voted for eternally to the evil, affirming, on the other hand, that all the Spirits are created simple and ignorant, being the bad simply evolution Spirits still incipient, however susceptible to raising the highest positions of the spiritual hierarchy in elapsing of the infinite of the times.

(The first part of this article was published in the edition 123 of this magazine.)


[1]
- Sávio Laterce is master degree in Philosophy by IFCS-UFRJ.

 


 


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