Twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost

Thoughts for the Week - Fr. R. Taouk 
21st October 2018

The Master Stroke of Satan
by Rev. Fr. P. Lucien-Marie of St. Joseph O.C.D.

The Devil disputes the possession of the soul with God, and after his own fashion, seeks to outbid God. But as against the plenitude of God's being and His infinite reality, what has he to offer? One thing and one only, dressed up however, in many different guises; a simulation, of the being of God. He is the bankrupt who decks himself out in the garb of the wealthy. He is the relative that mimics the Absolute. Any masks will serve, provided only it deludes a soul into believing that the total satiety for which she hungers can be found there. And since he cannot, like God, act as the sovereign master of the soul, he turns to suggestion as his favourite weapon; and, to sharpen it, avails himself of any means that lie to hand, even those most foreign to the spiritual nature.

The worst evil that the Devil can do to a soul is not by any means simply to frighten it by appearing in some repulsive form; it is to prevent that soul from cleaving to God. To deprive it of God, even temporarily, to halt it on the road towards union no matter what pretext; to deceive it by appearances, even pious appearance, and so to distract it from the reality which is God; that is what the Devil is after; and that is what the soul, for her part, has to fear.

All his temptations are aimed at reducing these two essential points in the soul's defences; faith, on the one hand, which is the root of all theological life; and humility on the other, which plays a similarly fundamental part in the moral domain. Faith sets before us the very reality of God. The whole effort of the Devil is therefore aimed at bringing about a loss of faith, and feeding us instead with the illusions to which our sensibility is only too prone. Humility is a just appreciation of our real status as dependent creatures; and here it is of our own reality that the Devil would denude us, filling us with complacency before a mask that conceals from us our own true features. Thus, in the worship of everything that is other than God attained by faith, and in complacency with something other than ourselves as justly appreciated by humility, the Devil prevents us from adhering to reality, to truth, to Being, and feeds us with illusions, with the simulated, with the artificial. All this can be summed up in one sentence: The precise point of the Devil's attack on the soul lies in preventing her from attaining to possession of the plenitude of the Being of God, in luminous faith and loving humility.
 

The light of faith, which gives us God as He really is, albeit obscurely, is more than darkness for the Devil. Into this domain reserved for God alone, the Devil cannot enter, and the soul that lives by faith is wholly beyond his grasp. It is thus easy to see how deep an interest the Devil has in barring the road to the soul and forbidding her entrance into this life of faith which thus reduces him to impotence.