The Anti-Word Made Flesh

Toward the end of his piece on The Left's Great Lie and the pervasive threat it poses, Solway muses that

Sometimes I feel that evil is a reified force, not just a figure of speech or metaphor for affliction or a word to describe human malevolence, but an existential power that is discernibly afoot in the world.

Consistent with what we've been saying over the last several posts, this force "is implacably destructive in causing human misery through the operation of the Lie incarnate" (ibid.).

The Lie incarnate. We'll come back to that, because you will have no doubt noticed that lies -- or truth, for that matter -- are impotent unless they are embodied and therefore capable of action.

Let us stipulate that there is an existential power of falsehood afoot in the world. What shall we call it? I think "Satan" is a fine name, but it is so overloaded with preconceptions that I wonder if we need a new term?

They say that Satan's greatest trick was convincing people he doesn't exist. This is to not give him enough credit, for he has made his own name ridiculous, such that if you so much as mention it, you become the object of ridicule.

Indeed, this mechanism resembles an early form of political correctness, which is at bottom a war on noticing. If you do notice Satan, you thereby denounce yourself as a lunatic, or fanatic, or primitive. Neat trick! Through it Satan is able to marginalize anyone who takes him seriously.

This is critical, because Satan can accomplish nothing without human participation. He cannot be embodied unless or until a human being provides the meat and muscle. Though the body, the lie is enacted.

But just as there is a Body of Christ, we might say that there exists a "counter-body" of Lies. Human beings are irreducibly intersubjective, even if they pretend otherwise, so the Lie can't really ever affect just one person. Humans are compelled to communicate and share, which spreads the Lie like a virus; thus, "when the Lie becomes coterminous with the very world in which we have our being,"

in electoral politics, in education, in the entertainment industry, in the media print and digital, in publishing, in the censoring Big Tech platforms, in mass movements sweeping the planet like feminism and “climate change” and Islamic appeasement and identity politics and renewed socialism and Globalism -- and when it lays down the latitude and longitude of our thinking so that there is scarcely any place left to locate our inner coordinates, it forms, as the ancient Gnostics believed, a wholly demonic environment, a false Creation. It is no accident that the devil is called the Father of Lies (ibid.).

Yes, yes, and yes: a false "creation," a demonic environment, and a reality tunnel that we simultaneously project and inhabit (exactly like the structure of dreaming, whereby we are contained in our own container).

Note that we place creation in scare quotes, because Satan cannot create, period. Genuine creation is reserved for God only, so the best Satan can do is mimic it. He can only work with pre-existing materials, and the finest material available is obviously the human being.

People naturally wonder how God could become incarnate in Jesus. By virtue of what principle is this possible? We'll leave that to the side for the moment, but perhaps we can learn something about it by considering its perverse mirror image -- that is, how the Lie becomes flesh and walks around on two legs in our world. Jesus -- the Way, Life, and Truth -- is one with his Father. And Jesus himself calls Satan the father of lies, so this looks like more than a hint; rather, a 54 ounce hickory cluebat upside the head.

But again, "Satan" is so loaded a term. We might symbolize him (-T), in contrast to (T), but this poses the danger of setting up a cosmic dualism and elevating (-T) to equal status with (T). However, (-T) is not the opposite of (T), but a privation of it. (-T) is always a paradoxical "substance of nothing," which might explain why it so desperately needs our material substance in order to not just be something, but more importantly, to do something. Again, only man can do the bidding of (-T).

From the Satanic perspective, everything about the human is material to work with, grist for the dark mill. Thus, it is easy enough for him to hijack the virtues and turn them against the very good to which they are properly ordered. Dávila says it best:

The devil can achieve nothing great without the thoughtless collaboration of the virtues.

Boom. But this presupposes an ability for the Father of Lies to incarnate in human beings. No worries. The Aphorist has that covered:

Many think that the devil died, but he merely walks around today disguised as a man.

The leftist will insist that it is naive to believe in such childish terms as good and evil. Evil doesn't exist. Here is a fine example of how the cosmic heretic is half-correct, in that, as outlined above, evil doesn't properly exist. Rather.

Evil only has the reality of the good that it annuls.

Thus, through embodiment in a human being, we might say that (-T) engenders (-R) -- i.e., the "minus reality" of the demonic environment mentioned above by Solway. (The thought occurs to me: One small misstep for Adam, a giant fall for mankind.)

The final irony -- the irony that cannot surpass its own irony -- is that

Where religion is secularized, Satan becomes the last witness to God (Dávila).

Now, leftism is the most successful political religion of all time. Remember what we said a few posts back: that belief in a materialist metaphysic is not a cause of leftist politics; rather the secular religion of leftism evokes the materialist metaphysic it needs in order to justify and sustain itself.

So, as Satan is the last witness to God, we could equally say that godless leftism is the last witness to the God-fearing republic created by the founders. Adam Schiff is the last witness to George Washington: as the Father of our country figuratively "couldn't tell a lie," the father of impeachment literally can't stop lying. Anti-word made flesh and beamed into your -- ironically -- living room.