"who is 'Satan' and where is 'hell' " - By Dr. AK Coomaraswamy

Who is "Satan" and where is "Hell"?
By Dr.
A.K. Coomaraswamy
That in this day and age, when "for most people religion has
become an archaic and impossible refuge," [1] men no longer take
either God or Satan seriously, arises from the fact that they have
come to
think of both alike only objectively, only as persons external to
themselves and for whose existence no adequate proof can be found. The
same, of course, applies to the notions of their respective realms,
heaven and hell, thought of as times and places neither now nor
here.We have, in fact, ourselves postponed the "kingdom of heaven on
earth" by thinking of it as a material Utopia to be realized, we
fondly
hope, by means of one or more five-year plans, overlooking the fact
that the concept of an endless progress is that of a pursuit "in which
thou must sweat eternally," [2] -- a phrase suggestive less of heaven
than of hell. What this really means is that we have chosen to
substitute a present hell for a future heaven we shall never know. The
doctrine to be faced, however, is that "the kingdom of heaven is
within
you," here and now, and that, as Jacob Boehme, amongst others, so
often said, "heaven and hell are everywhere, being universally
extended.... Thou art accordingly in heaven or hell.... The soul hath
heaven
or hell within itself," [3] and cannot be said to "go to" either when
the body dies. Here, perhaps, the solution of the problem of Satan may
be sought.
It has been recognized that the notion of a Satanic "person," the
chief of many "fallen angels," presents some difficulties: even in
religion, that of a Manichean "dualism" emerges; at the same time, if
it be
maintained that anything whatever is not God, God's infinity is
thereby circumscribed and limited. Is "he," Satan, then a person, or
merely a "personification," i.e., a postulated personality? [4] Who is
"he,"
and where? Is he a serpent or a dragon, or has he horns and a
poisonous tail? Can he be redeemed and regenerated, as Origen and the
Muslims have believed? All these problems hang together.
However the ultimate truth of "dualism" may be repudiated, a kind of
dualism is logically unavoidable for all practical purposes, because
any world in time and space, or that could be described in words or
by mathematical symbols, must be one of contraries, both quantitative
and qualitative, for example, long and short, good and evil; and even
if it could be otherwise, a world without these opposites would be
one from which all possibility of choice, and of procedure from
potentiality to act, would be excluded, not a world that could be
inhabited by human beings such as we. For anyone who holds that "God
made the world," the question, Why did he permit the existence in it
of any evil, or that of the Evil one in whom all evil is personified,
is altogether meaningless; one might as well enquire why He did not
make a world without dimensions or one without temporal succession.
Our whole metaphysical tradition, Christian and other, maintains
that "there are two in us," [5] this man and the Man in this man; and
that this is so is still a part and parcel of our spoken language in
which,
for example, the expression "self-control" implies that there is one
that controls and another subject to control, for we know that
"nothing acts upon itself," [6] though we forget it when we talk
about
"self-government." [7] Of these two "selves," outer and inner man,
psycho-physical "personality" and very Person, the human composite of
body, soul, and spirit is built up. Of these two, on the one hand
body-and-soul (or -mind), and on the other, spirit, one is mutable
and mortal, the other constant and immortal; one "becomes," the other
"is," and the existence of the one that is not, but becomes, is
precisely a "personification" or "postulation," since we cannot say
of anything that never remains the same that "it is." And however
necessary it may be to say "I" and "mine" for the practical purposes
of
everyday life, our Ego in fact is nothing but a name for what is
really only a sequence of observed behaviors. [8] Body, soul and
spirit: con one or other of these be equated with the Devil? Not the
body,
certainly, for the body in itself is neither good nor evil, but only
an instrument or means to good or evil. Nor the Spirit -- intellect,
synteresis, conscience, Agathos Daimon -- for this is, by hypothesis,
man's
best and most divine part, in itself incapable of error, and our only
means of participation in the life and the perfection that is God
himself. There remains only the "soul"; that soul which all must
"hate" who
would be Christ's disciples and which, as St. Paul reminds us, the
Word of God like a two-edged sword "severs from the spirit"; a soul
which St. Paul must have "lost" in order to be able to say truly that
"I
live, yet not I, but Christ in me," announcing, like Mansur, his own
theosis. Of the two in us, one the "spark" of Intellect or Spirit, and
the other, Feeling or Mentality, subject to persuasion, it is obvious
that
the latter is the "tempter," or more truly "temptress." There is in
each of us, in this man and that woman alike, an anima and animus,
relatively feminine and masculine; [9] and, as Adam rightly said,
"the
woman gave, and I did eat"; also, be it noted, the "serpent," by whom
the woman herself was first beguiled, wears, in art, a woman's face.
But to avoid all possibility of misunderstanding here, it must be
emphasized that all this has nothing whatsoever to do with a supposed
inferiority of women or superiority of men: in this functional and
psychological sense any given woman may be "manly" (heroic) or any
given man "effeminate" (cowardly). [10]
One knows, of course, that "soul," like "self," is an ambiguous
term, and that, in some contexts, it may denote the Spirit or "Soul of
the soul," or "Self of the self," both of which are expressions in
common
use. But we are speaking here of the mutable "soul" as distinguished
from the "spirit," and should not overlook the extent to which this
nefesh, the anima after which the human and other "animals" are so
called, is constantly disparaged in the Bible, [11] as is the
corresponding nafs in Islam. The soul is the self to be "denied" (the
Greek original meaning "utterly reject," with an ontological rather
than a merely
ethical application), the soul that must be "lost" if "it" is to be
saved; and which, as Meister Eckhart and the Sufis so often say, must
"put itself to death," or, as the Hindus and Buddhists say, must be
"conquered" or "tamed," for "that is not my Self." This soul, subject
to persuasion, and distracted by its likes and dislikes, this "mind"
that we mean when we speak of having been "minded to do this or
that,"
is "that which thou callest 'I' or 'myself,'" and which Jacob Boehme
thus distinguishes from the I that is, when he says, with reference to
his own illuminations, that "not I, the I that I am, knows these
things,
but God in me." We cannot treat the doctrine of the Ego at length,
but will only say that, as for Meister Eckhart and the Sufis, "Ego,
the word I, is proper to none but God in his sameness," and that "I"
can
only rightly be attributed to Him and to the one who, being "joined
unto the Lord, is one spirit." That the soul herself, our "I" or
"self" itself, should be the Devil -- whom we call the "enemy,"
"adversary," "
tempter," "dragon," -- never by a personal name [12] -- may seem
startling, but it is very far from being a novel proposition. As we go
on, it will be found that an equation of the soul with Satan has
often
been enunciated, and that it provides us with an almost perfect
solution of all the problems that the latter's "personality" poses.
Both are "real" enough for all pragmatic purposes here, in the active
life where
"evil" must be contended with, and the dualism of the contraries
cannot be evaded; but they are no more "principles," no more really
real, than the darkness that is nothing but the privation of light.
No one will deny that the battleground on which the psychomachy must
be fought out to a finish is within you, or that, where Christ fights,
there also must his enemy, the Antichrist, be found. Neither will
anyone, "superstition" apart, be likely to pretend that the
Temptations of St. Anthony, as depicted in art, can be regarded
otherwise than as "projections" of interior tensions. In the same way
that Picasso's
"Guernica" is the mirror of Eurpoe's disintegrated soul, "the hell of
modern existence," the Devil's horns and sting are an image of the
most evil beast in man himself. Often enough it has been said by the
"Never-enough honoured Auncients," as well as by modern authors, that
"man is his own worst enemy." On the other hand, the best gift for
which a man might pray is to be "at peace with himself;" [13] and,
indeed, for so long as he is not at peace with Himself, [14] he can
hardly be at peace with anybody else, but will "project" his own
disorders, making of "the enemy" -- for example, Germany, or Russia,
or
the Jews -- his "devil." "From whence come wars and fightings among
you? Come they not hence, even from your lusts (pleasures, or desires,
Skr. kamah) that contend in your members?" (James 4:1)
As Jung so penetratingly observes: "When the fate of Europe carried
it into a four years war of stupendous horror -- a war that no one
wanted -- hardly anyone asked who had caused the war and its
continuation." [15] The answer would have been unwelcome: it was "I"
-- your "I" and mine. For, in the wordss of another modern
psychologist, E. E. Hadley, "the tragedy of this delusion of
individuality is
that it leads to isolation, fear, paranoid suspicion, and wholly
unnecessary hatreds." [16]
All this has always been familiar to the theologians, in whose
writings Satan is simply referred to as "the enemy." For example,
William Law: "You are under the power of no other enemy, are held in
no
other captivity, and want no other deliverance but from the power of
your own earthly self. This is the one murderer of the divine life
within you. It is your own Cain that murders your own Abel," [17] and
"self is the root, the tree, and the branches of all the evils of our
fallen state ... Satan, or which is the same thing, self-
exaltation.... This is that full-born natural self that must be pulled
out of the heart and
totally denied, or there can be no disciple of Christ." If, indeed,
"the kingdom of heaven is within you," then also the "war in heaven"
will be there, until Satan has been overcome, that is, until the Man
in this
man is "master of himself," selbes gewaltic, enkrates heautou. For
the Theologia Germanica (ch. 3, 22, 49), it was the Devil's "'I, Me,
and Mine' that were the cause of his fall.... For the self, the I, the
me
and the like, all belong to the Evil Spirit, and therefor it is that
he is an Evil Spirit. Behold one or two words can utter all that has
been said by these many words: 'Be simply and wholly bereft of self.'"
For
"there is nothing else in hell, but self-will; and if there were no
self-will, there would be no devil and no hell." So, too, Jacob
Boehme: "this vile self-hood possesses the world and worldly things;
and dwells
also in itself, which is dwelling in hell"; and Angelus Silesius:
Nichts anders stuerzet dich in Hoellenschlund hinein Als dass
verhasste Wort (merk's wohl!): das Mein und Dein. [18] Hence the
resolve,
expressed in a Shaker hymn: But now from my forehead I'll quickly
erase The stamp of the Devil's great "I." [19]
Citations of this kind could be indefinitely multiplied, all to
the effect that of all evil beasts, "the most evil beast we carry on
our bosom," [20] "our most godless and despicable part" and
"multifarious
beast," which our "Inner Man," like a lion tamer, must keep under his
control or else will have to follow where it leads. [21] Even more
explicit sayings can be cited form Sufi sources, where the soul (nafs)
is
distinguished from the intellect or spirit (aql, ruh) as the Psyche
is distinguished from the Pneuma by Philo and in the New Testament,
and as anima from animus by William of Thierry. [22] For the
encyclopedic Kashfu'l Mahjub, the soul is the "tempter," and the type
of hell in this world. [23] Al-Ghazali, perhaps the greatest of the
Muslim theologians, calls the soul "the greatest of your enemies";
and
more than that could hardly be said of Satan himself. Abu Sa'id asks:
"What is evil, and what is the worst evil?" and answers: "Evil is
'thou,' and the worst evil 'thou' if thou knowest it not"; he,
therefore,
called himself a "Nobody," refusing, like the Buddha, to identify
himself with any nameable "personality." [24] Jalalu'd Din Rumi, in
his Mathnawi, repeats that man's greatest enemy is himself: "This
soul," he
says, "is hell," and he bids us "slay the soul." "The soul and
Shaitan are both one being, but take two forms; essentially one from
the first, he became the enemy and envier of Adam"; and, in the same
way,
"the Angel (Spirit) and the Intellect, Adam's helpers, are of one
origin but assume two forms." The Ego holds its head high:
"decapitation means, to slay the soul and quench its fire in the Holy
War" (jihad);
and well for him who wins this battle, for "whoever is at war with
himself for God's sake, ... his light opposing his darkness, the sun
of his spirit shall never set." [25] 'Tis the fight which Christ, With
his
internal Love and Light, Maintains within man's nature, to dispel
God's Anger, Satan, Sin, and Death, and Hell; The human Self, or
Serpent, to devour, And raise an Angel from it by His Pow'r. John
Byrom
"Spark of the soul ... image of God, that there is ever in all wise
at war will all that is not godly ... and is called the
Synteresis" [26] (Meister Eckhart, Pfeiffer ed., p. 113). "We know
that the Law is of the
Spirit ... but I see another law in my members, warring against the
Law of the Intellect, and bringing me into captivity.... With the
Intellect I myself serve the Law of God; but with the flesh the law of
sin....
Submit yourselves therefore to God: resist the devil." [27] And
similarly in other Scriptures, notably the Bhagavad Gita (VI.5, 6):
"Lift up the self by the Self, let not self sit back. For, verily, the
Self is both
the friend and the foe of the self; the friend of one whose self has
been conquered by the Self, but to one whose self hath not (been
overcome), the Self at war, forsooth, acts as an enemy"; and the
Buddhist
Dhammapada (103, 160, 380), where "the Self is the Lord of the self"
and one should "by the Self incite the self, and by the Self gentle
self" (as a horse is "broken in" by a skilled trainer), and "one who
has
conquered self is the best of all champions." (Cf. Philostratus, Vit.
Ap., I.13: "Just as we break in skittish and unruly horses by stroking
and patting them.")
At the same time, it must not be forgotten that the Psychomachy
is also "a battle of love," and that Christ -- to whom ye should be
married ... that we should bring fruit unto God" (Rom. 7:3, 4) --
already
loved the unregenerate soul "in all her baseness and foulness," [28]
or that it is of her that Donne says, "Nor ever chaste, except Thou
ravish me." It was for nothing but "to go and fetch his Lady, whom
his
Father had eternally given him to wife, and to restore her to her
former high estate that the Son proceeded out of the Most
High" (Meister Eckhart). [29] The Deity's lance or thunderbolt is, at
the same time,
his yard, with which he pierces his mortal Bride. The story of the
thunder-smitten Semele reminds us that the Theotokos, in the last
analysis Psyche, has ever been of Lunar, never herself of Solar stock;
and
all this is the sum and substance of every "solar myth," the theme of
the Liebesgeschichte des Himmels and of the Drachenkaempfe. "Heaven
and earth: let them be wed again." [30] Their marriage,
consummated in the heart, is the Hieros Gamos, Daivam Mithunam, [31]
and those in whom it has been perfected are no longer anyone, but as
He is "who never became anyone." [32] Plotinus' words:
"Love is of the very nature of the Psyche, and hence the constant
yoking of Eros with the Psyches in the pictures and the myths" [33]
might as well have been said of half the world's fairy-tales, and
especially
of the Indian "pictures and myths" of Sri Krishna and the Milkmaids,
of which the Indian commentators rightly deny the historicity,
asserting that all these are things that come to pass in all men's
experience.
Such, indeed, are "the erotika (Skr. srngara) into which, it seems
that you, O Socrates, should be initiated," as Diotima says, and which
in fact he so deeply respected. [34]
But, this is not only a matter of Grace; the soul's salvation
depends also on her submission, her willing surrender; it is prevented
for so long as she resists. It is her pride (manas, abhimana; oiema,
oiesis;
self-opinion, overweening), the Satanic conviction of her own
independence (asmimana, ahamkara, cogito ergo sum), her evil rather
than herself, that must be killed; this pride she calls her "self-
respect," and
would "rather die" than be divested of it. But the death that she at
last, despite herself, desires, is no destruction but a
transformation. Marriage is an initiatory death and integration
(nirvana, samskara, telos).
[35] "Der Drache und die Jungfrau sind natuerlich identisch"; [36]
the "Fier Baiser" transforms the dragon; the mermaid loses her
ophidian tail; the girl is no more when the woman has been "made";
from the
nymph the winged soul emerges. [37] And so "through Thee an Iblis may
become again one of the Cherubim." [38] And what follows when the
lower and the higher forms of the soul have been united? This
has nowhere been better described than in the Aitareya Aranyaka (II.
3.7): "This Self gives itself to that self, and that self to this
Self; they become one another; with the one form he (in whom this
marriage
has been consummated) is unified with yonder world, and with the
other united to this world"; the Brhadaranyaka Upanisad (IV.3.23):
"Embraced by the Prescient Self, he knows neither a within nor a
without. Verily, that is his form in which his desire is obtained, in
which the Self is his desire, and in which no more desiresor grieves."
"Amor ipse no quiescit, nisi in amato, quod fit, cum obtinet ipsum
possessione plenaria"; [39] "Jam perfectam animam ... gloriosam sibi
sponsam Pater conglutinat." [40] Indeed: Dafern der Teufel koennt aus
seiner Seinheit gehn, So saehest du ihn stracks in Gottes Throne
stehn. [41] So, then, the Agathos and Kakos Daimons, Fair and Foul
selves, Christ and Antichrist, both inhabit us, and their opposition
is within us. Heaven and Hell are the divided images of Love and
Wrath in divinis, where the Light and the Darkness are undivided, and
the Lamb and the Lion lie down together. In the beginning, as all
traditions testify, heaven and earth were one and together; essence
and nature are one in God, and it remains for every man to put them
together again within himself.
All these are our answers. Satan is not a real and single
Person, but a severally postulated personality, a "Legion." Each of
these personalities is capable of redemption (apokatastasis), and can,
if it will,
become again what it was before it "fell" -- Lucifer, Phosphorus,
Helel, Scintilla, the Morning Star, a Ray of the Supernal Sun; because
the Spark, however it may seem to be smothered, is an Asbestos that
cannot be extinguished, even in hell. But, in the sense that a
redemption of all beings cannot be thought of as taking place at any
one time, and inasmuch as there will be devilish souls in need of
redemption
throughout all time, Satan must be though of as being damned for
ever, meaning by "damned," self-excluded from the vision of God and
the knowledge of Truth.
The problem with which we started has largely been solved, but
it still remains to accomplish the harder tasks of an actual "self-
naughting" and consequent "Self-realization" to which the answers
point,
and for which theology is only a partial preparation. Satan and the
Ego are not really entities, but concepts postulated and valid only
for the present, provisional, and practical purposes; both are
composite
photographs, as it were of X1, X2, X3. It has often been said that
the Devil's most ingenious device is to persuade us that his existence
is a mere "superstition." In fact, however, nothing could be more
dangerous than to deny his existence, which is as real, although no
more so, as our own; we dare not deny Satan until we have denied
ourselves, as everyone must who would follow Him who said and did
nothing "of himself." "What is Love? the sea of non-existence"; [42]
and "whoever enters there, saying 'It is I,' I [God], smite him in the
face"; [43] "What is Love? thou shalt know when thou becomest Me."
[44]
Footnotes
[1] Margaret Marshall in The Nation, February 2, 1946.
[2] Jacob Boehme, De incarnatione Verbi, II.5.18.
[3] Jacob Boehme, "Of Heaven and Hell," pp. 259, 260.
[4] "Person cannot be affirmed ... of living things .. bereft of
intellect and reason .. but we say there is a person of a man, of God,
of an Angel" (Boethius, Contra Evtychen 11). On this basis, Satan,
who
remains an angel even in hell, can be called a Person, or, indeed,
Persons, since his name is "Legion: for we are many"; but as a fallen
being, "out of his right mind," in reality a Person only potentially.
Much
the same could be said of the soul, viz. that there is a Person of
the soul, but hardly that the soul, as it is in itself, is a Person.
Satan and the soul, both alike invisible, are only "known," or rather
"inferred,"
from behvior, which is just what "personality" implies: "personality,
that is the hypothetical unity that one postulates to account for the
doings of people" (H. S. Sullivan, "Introduction to the Study of
Interpersonal Relations," Psychiatry, I, 1938).
[5] Plato, Republic 439DE, 604B; Philo, Deterius 82; St. Thomas
Aquinas, Sum. Theol. II-II.26.4; St. Paul, II Cor. 4:16; and in
general, as the doctrine is briefly stated by Goethe: "Zwei Seelen
wohnen
ach, in meiner Brust, die eine will sich von der andern
trennen" (Faust, I, 759). Similarly in the Vedanta, Buddhism, Islam,
and in China.
[6] Nil agit in seipsum: axiomatic in Platonic, Christian, and Indian
philosophy: "the same thing can never do or suffer opposites in the
same respect or in relation to the same thing at the same time,"
Plato,
Republic 436B; "strictly speaking, no one imposes a law upon his own
actions," Sum. Theol. I.93.5; "because of the antinomy involved in the
notion of acting upon oneself" (svatmani ca kriyavirodhat),
Sankara on BG II.17.
[7] "Art thou free of self? then art thou 'Self-governed'" (selbes
gewaltic = Skr. svarat), Meister Eckhart, Pfeiffer ed., p. 598.
[8] "How can that which is never in the same state 'be'
anything?" (Plato, Cratylus, 439B; Theatetus, 152D; Symposium, 207D,
etc.). "'Ego' has no real meaning, because it is perceived only for an
instant,"
i.e., does not last for even so long as two consecutive moments
(naivaham-arthah ksanikatva-darsanat; Vivekacudamani of Sri
Sankaracharya, 293, Swami Madhavananda, tr. Almora, 3rd ed., 1932).
[9] It is unfortunate that, in modern psychology, an originally lucid
terminology and distinction has been confused by an equation of the
"soul-image" with "the anima in man, the animus in woman." The terms
are even more misused by Father M. C. D'Arcy in his Mind and Heart of
Love (London, 1946), ch. 7. Traditionally, anima and animus are the
"soul" and the "spirit" equally in any man or woman; so William
of Thierry (cf. note 22 below) speaks of animus vel spiritus. This
usage goes back to Cicero, e.g., Tusculan Disputations I.22.52, "neque
nos copora sumus ... cum igitur: Nosce te dicit, hoc dicit, Nosce
anumum tuum," and V.13.38, "humanus ... animus decerptus [est] ex
mente divina"; and Lucius Accius (fr. 296), "sapimus animo, fruimur
anima; sine animo, anima est debilis."
[10] In all traditions, not excepting the Buddhist, this man and this
woman are both equally capable of "fighting the good fight."
[11] Cf. D. B. Macdonald, The Hebrew Philosophical Genius (Princeton,
1934), p. 139, "the lower, physical nature, the appetites, the psyche
of St. Paul ... 'self,' but always with that lower meaning behind
it"; Thomas Sheldon Green, Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament
(New York and London, 1879), s.v. psuchikos ("governed by the sensuous
nature subject to appetite and passion"); "anima ...
cujus vel pulchritudo virtus, vel deformitas vitium est ... mutabilis
est" (St. Augustine, De gen. ad litt. 7.6.9 and Ep. 166.2.3).
On the other hand, the "Soul" or "Self," as printed with the capital,
is Jung's "Self ... aound which it [the Ego] revolves, very much as
the earth rotates about the sun ... [its] superordinated
subject" (Two
Essays on Analytical Psychology, London, 1928, p. 268); not a being,
but the inconnumerable and indefinable "Being of all beings."
We are never told that the mutable soul is immortal in the same
timeless way that God is immortal, but only that it is immortal "in a
certain way of its own" (secundum quemdam modum suum, St. Augustine,
Ep. 166.2.3). If we ask, Quomodo? seeing that the soul is in time,
the answer must be, "in one way only, viz. by continuing to become;
since thus it can always leave behind it a new and other nature to
take
the place of the old" (Plato, Symposium, 207D). It is only God, who
is the Soul of the soul, that we can speak of as immortal absolutely
(I Tim. 6:16). It is incorrect to call the soul "immortal"
indiscriminately, just as it is incorrect to call any man a genius;
man has an immortal Soul, as he has a Genius, but the soul can be
immortalized only by returning to the source, that is to say, by dying
to itself
and living to its Self; just as a man becomes a genius only when he
is no longer "himself."
[12] Even the Hebrew Satan, "opponent," is not a personal name.
[13] Contest of Homer and Hesiod, 165, where the expression eunoun
einai heauto = metanoein ("repentance," i.e., "coming to be in one's
right mind"), the opposite of paranoein.
[14] The Self we mean when we tell a man who is misbehaving to "be
yourself" (en sauto genou, Sophocles, Philoctetes 950), for "all is
intolerable when any man forsakes his proper Self, to do what fits
him
not" (ibid. 902-903).
[15] C. G. Jung, The Integration of Personality (New York, 1935), p.
274.
[16] E. E. Hadley, in Psychiatry V (1942), 133; citing also H. S.
Sullivan, op. cit., pp. 121-134: "emphasized individuality of each of
us, 'myself.' Here we have the very mother of illusions, the ever
pregnant
source of preconceptions that invalidate almost all our efforts to
understand other people."
[17] William Law, The Spirit of Love, and an Address to the Clergy,
cited in Stephen Hobhouse, William Law and Eighteenth Century
Quakerism (London, 1927), pp. 156, 219, 220.
[18] Angelus Silesius, Der Cherubinische Wandersmann, V.238.
[19] E. D. Andrews, The Gift to be Simple (New York, 1940), p. 18;
cf. p. 79, "That great big I, I'll mortify."
[20] Jacob Boehme, De incarnatione Verbi, I.13.13.
[21] Plato, Republic, 588C ff., where the whole soul is compared to
such a composite animal as the Chimaera, Scylla, or Cerberus. In some
respects the Sphinx might have been an even better comparison.
In any case, the human, leonine, and ophidian parts of these
creatures correspond to the three parts of the soul, in which "the
human in us, or rather our divine part" should prevail; of which
Hercules leading
Cerberus would be a good illustration.
[22] William of Thierry, The Golden Epistle of Abbot William of St.
Thierry to the Carthusians of Mont Dieu, tr. Walter Shrewing (London,
1930), sections 50, 51.
[23] Kashf al-Mahjub, tr. R. A. Nicholson (Gibb Memorial Series
XVII), p. 199; cf. p. 9, "the greatest of all veils between God and
man."
[24] For Abu Sa'id see R. A. Nicholson, Studies in Islamic Mysticism
(Cambridge, 1921), p. 53.
[25] Citations are from Mathnawi I.2617; II.2525; III.374, 2738,
3193, 4053 (nafs va shaitan har du ek in bud'and); cf. II.2272 ff., V.
2919, 2939. The fundamental kinship of Satan and the Ego is
apparent in their common claim to independent being; and
"association" (of others with the God who only is) amounts, from the
Islamic point of view, to polytheism (ibid. IV.2675-2677).
[26] On the meaning of the "Synteresis," etymologically an equivalent
of Skr. samtaraka, "one who helps to cross over," see O. Renz, "Die
Synteresis nach dem Hl. Thomas von Aquin," Beitraege zur
Geschichte der Philosophie des Mittelalters, X (Muenster, 1911).
[27] Rom. 7:14-23; James 4:7.
[28] St. Bonaventura, Dominica prima post octavum epiphaniae, 2.2.
For the whole theme, see also Coomaraswamy, "On the Loathly Bride."
[29] Pfeiffer ed., p. 288.
[30] RV X.24.5.
[31] SB X.5.2.12.
[32] KU II.18.
[33] Enneads VI.9.9.
[34] Plato, Symposium 210A.
[35] Nirvana, J. I.60; samskara, Manu II.67; telos, H. G. Liddlell
and R. Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, 8th ed., Oxford, 1897, s.v. VI.
2.
[36] E. Siecke, Drachenkaempfe (Leipzig, 1907), p. 14.
[37] For the Fier Baiser see the references in Coomaraswamy, "On the
Loathly Bride." For the marriage, Meister Eckhart (Pfeiffer ed., p.
407) and Omikron, Letters from Paulos, New York, 1920,
passim.
[38] Rumi, Mathnawi IV.3496.
[39] Jean de Castel, De adhaerendo Deo, C. 12.
[40] St. Bernard, De grad. humilitatis, VII.21.
[41] Angelus Silesius, I.143. Cf. Theologia Germanica, ch. XVI: "If
the Evil Spirit himself could come into true obedience, he would
become an angel [of light] again, and all his sin and wickedness would
be
blotted out."
[42] Mathnawi III.4723.
[43] Rumi, Divan, Ode XXVIII. "None has knowledge of each who enters
that he is So-and-so or So-and-so," ibid., p. 61.
[44] Mathnawi II, Introduction.
.

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