[I thought it time to hear someone else for a change; Abdiel is one of my favorite literary characters.]
Well Done, Servant of God
Anthony Esolen: If you welcome the light as it has been revealed by God and not by the current age, you will begin to think aright, and you will begin to know yourself.
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 13, 2024
There is a scene in Milton’s Paradise Lost that affirms my resolve to fight against bad ideas and the unrealities they assume or help to spread, like a contagion. The seraph Abdiel, whose name means “Servant of God,” has refuted Satan on each point the tempter has made to his followers – for Satan is stirring them up to rebellion against the Son of God.
Abdiel has done so with a combination of precise reasoning and zealous passion. But Satan rejects the truth, mocking both it and its messenger. Rather than concede a single point, he commits himself more deeply to falsehood, going so far as to deny that he is any kind of creature at all.
“We know no time when we were not as now,” he boasts, “Know none before us, self-begot, self-raised / By our own quickening power.” He tells Abdiel to go and deliver the tidings to the Son of God, that war is on the move, and he ends with a threat. “And fly,” he says, “lest evil intercept thy flight.”
Abdiel is not cowed. Thousands and thousands of rebels are encompassed around him, deaf to his words and dismissive of his zeal, which they judge as “out of season,” or “singular and rash.”
But one soul devoted to the truth is mightier than thousands of liars and fools. The rebels have completed their break with truth, and now, says Abdiel to Satan, “Other decrees / Against thee are gone forth without recall.” He leaves their camp alone, scorned by all:
So spake the seraph Abdiel, faithful found,
Among the faithless, faithful only he;
Among innumerable false, unmoved,
Unshaken, unseduced, unterrified;
His loyalty he kept, his love, his zeal,
Nor number nor example with him wrought
To swerve from truth, or change his constant mind
Though single. From amidst them forth he passed
Long way through hostile scorn, which he sustained
Superior, nor of violence feared aught,
But with retorted scorn his back he turned
On those proud towers to swift destruction doomed.
Milton, no doubt, thought of himself as an Abdiel, so deeply committed to what he saw as theological truth, that he could not find it in him to join any particular church; it is this individualism that marks him as the first of the moderns, though in most other ways he is better seen as the last man of the ancient world, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance.
But that biographical wrinkle is not pertinent to the scene and its drama, since Abdiel is not going off to be by himself, nor has he come up with any peculiar doctrine of his own. He leaves Satan’s camp to join the camp of the eternal God, and thus can the Catholic reader in our time see in Abdiel a model for a fuller devotion to the Church as the repository of truth.
But how do you commit yourself to the truth? We have the Scriptures, the Catechism, and magisterial teachings from the Church’s very beginning. Yet it is not always clear how these teachings apply in a current controversy, and people argue about their scope and significance, and human words are powerless to deliver ultimate realities.
Thus are we often in a muddle not entirely of our own making. And then the psychological pressure to go along with everyone near you is intense, and going along involves both assenting to a proposition and taking part in an action, whether actively or permissively.
Action and vision in man are inextricable: we act according to what we see or think we see, and we see, or think we see, according to what we do. We have no direct apprehension of reality apart from ideas, and we have no ideas unaffected by what we do.
This being so, we can perceive that sin and falsehood are intervolved, and thence we may posit several reliable signs to direct us at least away from the quicksand.
Whatever I have come up with on my own is probably false, because it is likely to be partial in both senses of the word: I see only in part, and I am partial to my ideas and to the deeds they will justify.
Whatever depends upon the passions of the hour is probably false, because truth is everlasting and does not alter with the calendar.
Whatever pursues its own way to the exclusion or the ignoring of other considerations is probably false, because one truth illuminates and uplifts another, rather than shrouding it in twilight or darkness.
And of course, whatever leads to absurdity or self-contradiction is certainly false.
To be cavalier about truth is, I think, to reverse what Jesus says about the kingdom of God. The merchant seeking precious pearls finds that one pearl of great price, and he sells all that he has in order to obtain it. The merchant is not content with a shiny rock that is no pearl, nor, I suppose, will he use the pearl as a paperweight or a doorstopper.
It is also to cast contempt on the work of Christ and on the preaching of the apostles. “For you were once darkness,” says Saint Paul to the church at Ephesus, “but now you are light, in the Lord.”
Saint Peter urges every believer to praise God, “who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.” On our own we are all in darkness. Try to see God by your own light, and you will see not even yourself, but an idol of yourself. But if you welcome the light as it has been revealed by God and not by the current age, you will begin to think aright, and you will begin to know yourself.
And then, while all the world is going mad, as the world is wont to do, you can be like Abdiel, and you can be sure that you are not alone, no matter what the world and its proud princes say.
Image: The Fall of the Rebel Angels by Hieronymus Bosch, 1512 – 1515 [Museo del Prado, Madrid]. The entire Paradice Lost is worth reading, but the war is of particular interest. As I remember it lasts three days with Michael playing a significant role at one point. In a sense the opposing forces are more or less equal, but on the third day, Christ takes over and it’s no contest. Christ simply exercises his Godly power and does what you see in Bosch’s image: he delivers a divine blow, a wallop that knocks the evil angels down to Hell. So much for Satan’s pride and lack of wisdom. You might notice in Esolen’s Satan quote that Satan is reduced to uttering foolishness: self-created indeed! As if I was or you were. His speech is utter nonsense and finally in PL he is simply seen as a fool.
