The Fall of the Angels
Bear with me, and attempt to imagine the what no human mind can imagine:
A vast realm, unbounded in very direction. An indescribably pure radiance infuses the ‘space’ around everything, though it isn’t space as we know it. Beings of unimaginable light and beauty circle in continuous praise, gratitude, and adoration around a center of even greater light, transcendent glory and perfection. The entire atmosphere is permeated with an immense warmth and love of an intensity no human has ever experienced on earth.
In the perfection of heaven, there is no time - or is it endless time? It’s impossible to know, as there is no aging, no decay. All the spirit beings know God, and all are completely known by God. The beings of light, the angels, are a perfect reflection of their Divine source and Creator. God loves them perfectly, and they freely return the perfect love God pours forth into their hearts. Ah, but this is the most beautiful and also the most tragic part. They must freely give their love to God, or else it is not perfect love. God has ordered the heavens in this way.
One of the radiant beings, the Light-bearer, receives a thought from the mind of God. Lucifer knows that God is going to create a world of form, of limits and boundaries and planets and soil, and will create plants, fungi, animals and human beings to dwell on earth. This seems a bit strange to a pure spirit like Lucifer, but harmless. If God wants to create, even needs to create, fine. God’s will be done. But then, Lucifer registers a thought from the mind of God that is intolerable:
“What? God is going to incarnate? To degrade and debase God’s own infinite majesty? God will leave the perfection of heaven and to enter into a body that sweats, eats, pisses and bleeds? Worse, through this God intends to raise the humans to a state HIGHER than us angels? Higher than ME? I know all, I see all, I am the light-bearer! Those filthy creatures will hate Him, as soon as He has a body they’ll torture it, mangle it and kill Him. The insult! It’s simply too much. How does that accomplish anything - it’s a reversal of all that is right in our celestial order. Doesn’t God see and recognize perfect beauty is already here? Doesn’t God realize that we’re already perfect and complete in heaven, by ourselves, without any stinking human bodies around?
I can’t bear to think of it. Why…why should I? Doesn’t God know this will ruin everything? I can’t let it happen - I know what a terrible mistake this will be. Perhaps God is not omniscient after all. God’s plan is going to ruin everything. I…how can I be saying this? I…know better than God! I need to take control, in order to save heaven. I can do better.’
As the Light-bearer’s thought ripens, his spirit is torn in two. The other angels instantly receive Lucifer’s thought, and a war breaks out in heaven. One third of the angels freely chose to take his side. They break from Divine Union. Two-thirds freely chose to remain in praise of God. The battle is fierce, but ends with Lucifer and all of his angels cast out of heaven. From henceforth there are two kinds of immortal, disembodied spirits -the angels in union with God, and the fallen angels with wills opposed to the Divine Will.
This is the origin of evil in the ancient Christian story. It began beyond this world. This means that from the very beginning, there have been spiritual forces at play that seek to draw us to God, and spiritual forces that seek to draw us away from God.
The fall of humanity
Imagine again another scene:
They stand there, a man and a woman, naked and radiantly beautiful. With our current senses we can’t possibly comprehend the intensity of their beauty. Theirs are perfect human forms, without any flaw, ageless, shining forth as unstained bearers of the Divine image and likeness. They have only ever known perfection - that is, the wholeness that they were created to enjoy in perfect loving union with God. Like the angels, they had to be created with free will, and they have always freely chosen to receive God’s love, and to freely love God in return. It is always enough. Always perfect, free, and whole. They have never known hunger, never known pain, never known any bitterness or division. The plants, fungi and animals all listen to them and gratefully receive the loving care of the man and the woman. They know that God created the man and the woman to tend to them, and there is perfect harmony between the couple and the creatures. After caring for the other creatures as God’s stewards each day, they walk with God in the cool of the evening. Day follows day, night follows night, but all remains perfect - can we even call this the passage of time?
Then, one fateful day, they find themselves in the center of the garden. The woman sees a flash of color on the trunk of the central tree, and goes over for a look. A serpent coils itself around the this tree at the center of their world. Seeing the woman, the serpent whispers to her: “Did God really tell you not to eat the fruit from any of the trees of the garden?” “Oh, no,” she answers, “we can eat fruit from any of the trees, just not this tree in the center. God says if we touch this tree, we will die.” A smirk crosses the serpent’s face “No, you won’t die. You see, God knows that when you eat of this tree, you will become like God, and know good and evil.” The woman looks at the appealing fruit of the central tree. It had never occurred to her before that she is missing something. But now that the serpent mentions it, she feels a growing hunger and sense of inadequacy building in her heart. She looks again at the fruit. It looks so good, and she ponders how delightful it would taste - and how it would help her to become wise! Now that, she suddenly realizes, is something she is missing. A thought begins to form within her: “I’m not complete, not like this. I’m still so foolish, so naïve. Maybe the serpent knows something I don’t? Why shouldn’t I become wise? What was it that God said about the tree? But… maybe God doesn’t know the whole story. It might be better for me and the man to wise - to be like God! Surely I will feel better then. I know better than God.” She stretches her hand out, takes the fruit, and eats. She calls the man over, and he eats too. Something awakens in them, something they have never experienced before. Their eyes open, and at the same time, their hearts close. Fear arises within their hearts. They look around and feel a new strange sensation. Shame. They realize they are naked, and cover their bodies. When God comes looking for them, they hide.
This is part two of the origin of evil in the Christian story - when evil and division enter the human heart. The division did not begin with humanity, as we were created perfectly good. Yet division enters into the human story close to its beginning, and from this point forward we walk with divided hearts. We love God and hate God. We love other people, and we hate other people. We create, and we destroy. We are generous, and selfish. We are drawn to truth, yet easily fall into deception. We become intimate with what is good, and intimate with what is evil. We turn away from the full reality of who we are, as we are afraid to be seen in our nakedness. We build up layers of protection, hiding our true selves from others, from our own awareness, and from God.
The hunger for what was lost remains, the deep, gnawing desire for union, for all to be made whole again. Yet now our eyes turn outward, always looking for healing and satisfaction out there. We crave release from our pain and restoration of our wholeness from some thing. Some object, some condition, some relationship, some status, some emotional state, some belief system, some spiritual state. Somewhere, there must be some thing that will bring us back home. Yet, every good thing we grasp for ends up providing temporary relief, and then it turns to dust. There is no where to go, no thing to provide the perfect, lasting relief. We have been expelled from the garden, and there is no way back. The tree that Adam and Eve believed would make them like God has brought them, that is, us, untold suffering and alienation.
The fallen world
These two stories are, in essence, one story that unfolds on two planes of existence. First, in the heavenly plane, an angel is infected with pride and choses to turn from God. The angel, Lucifer, believes he knows better than God. The second story is the extension of Lucifer’s fall into human beings. The fallen angel speaks through the serpent to trick the human beings to enter into his world, and to desire to see themselves as gods and to set their own will against the will of God. The human beings do not originate the division, but they are deceived and take the fruit. They share in the division, and in the worldview that is at its heart: “God is not enough. We know better than God how reality ought to unfold.”
What does this matter? Why ponder this story that is thousands of years old? It matters because it is an eternal story - it takes place beyond the world of time and space. More specifically, it takes place at the center of the spirit world, and in every human heart. Each of us comes into our conscious life bearing the scars of this ancient division, and bearing both a desire for Divine Union and a desire to find that union though anything and everything but God. I’ve never met a human being who consciously, clearly, unreservedly and repeatedly choses what they know is bad over what they know is good. A divine image remains, cloudy but present, in even the worst among us. But, every human being I have ever met has also been confused, some of the time, over what is truly good, and has at times thought that their own self-agenda is better than the will of God. We each have thoughts and energies at play within our hearts that align with Lucifer’s stance. They emerge in a diversity of forms: ‘I know better than God’, ‘I am my own God’, ‘God is absent, so I’d best take care of myself.’ ‘In this moment, I want this ________ (fill in the blank - this thing, sensation, status, emotion, etc) more than I want God.’
That thought form has existed since the beginning of human history. It’s at the root of every one of the deadly sins (and the eight ‘bad thoughts’ the Desert elders articulated a century earlier)¹. It is a primordial contraction towards the self that leads invariably to craving for satisfaction in external things/ objects in the world of form. We are made for union with God, so our psyche remains forever restless outside of this union. The deadly sins/bad thoughts are simply particular forms or pathways by which we end up substituting ‘something else’ for resting in God. Each of them have endless sub-variants, as many as there are compulsive thoughts within a human heart.
Every time we have any sense of compulsion or anxiety in our thinking, feeling, or sensing, we know we are in the grips of a self-identity that is separate from God. Think for a moment -with each anxious or calculating thought, would it be possible to think this way if you were fully aware of God’s love for you at that moment, and were loving God in return? The point here is not to beat ourselves up - every human being alive today has had these kinds of thoughts, and the vast majority of us either struggle mightily with them or are unconsciously driven by them. The point is to recognize that these thoughts, and the actions that emerge from consenting to them, do not come from God, and do not lead us to God.
The struggle with self-centeredness is as old as the story of humanity. No one escapes from this inward-drawing, fearful and compulsive nature of thought and emotion. In a healthy culture, we might be given early teaching and training in awareness of these patterns and how to fight them. This was a part of classical Christian spirituality, as well as many ancient philosophical and religious schools. Modern, secular culture makes this struggle more challenging in that there is a widespread belief that lasting happiness is possible through the feeding or ameliorating of our thoughts and desires. We live in a culture that pretends we do not have a fallen nature, and that humanity is perfectible through the satiation of human desires and the development of beneficent institutions. There are thus secular voices advocating for each of the deadly sins. Gluttony, Lust, Greed and Sloth are peddled as paths to happiness through advertising. Pride and Anger are frequently touted as virtues by many, including actors, athletes and activists. Envy (and Vainglory) fuels and is fueled by social media. As we become more and more miserable, we’re culturally encouraged to grasp ever more tightly to strategies for obtaining happiness that can’t possibly work.
Not only do we have the ‘hooks’ of turning towards self in our divided hearts, we have an increasingly complex and increasingly uniform encouragement to turn towards self in the secular world. What is the ubiquitous ‘sales pitch’ of the modern world view? It’s the same as the thought of Lucifer in heaven, and the serpent in the garden: ‘You can make yourself ultimately happy and whole. You know better than God. Resist the present reality thorough self-will, and remake the world to fulfill your own desires.’ This is offered to us on an individual level through advertising, but also on the collective level by the state and other institutions which attempt to exert total control over the human condition for the betterment of all. Science, new technologies, entertainment, political movements, government interventions, all are offered as ways to assure human fulfillment on a plane where it can never be fully realized.
Now, in 2024, there are trans-humanists (for example Ray Kurzweil, Yuval Noah Harari, and Elise Bohan) openly speaking of the desire to become ‘gods’ through technology. I view this not as a shocking and dangerous new trend, but the rather the full ripening of the past 500 years of western thought - the goal to remake the world in the image and likeness of human knowledge and human desire. It’s a project that is as destined to fall as the Tower of Babel. That which is not of divine origin cannot endure forever, though it can lead to immense human delusion and suffering before the project collapses. In a sense, it’s immensely spiritually clarifying - to see the end game of the goal of happiness without God can help us to recognize its futility, and the need to return to God to enter into the eternal life that is actually available to us.
How do we return?
A new garden, a new tree
A final scene: A young man in his early thirties kneels in another garden, this one filled with gnarled olive trees. It is night. He had three friends with him, but they are all asleep now. He alone remains awake. His thick hair and beard partially hide a face that is filled with grim determination. A great weight presses onto his heart, heavier still than the great stone oil presses that are nearby in the garden. His will remains focused and clear, but so many heavy thoughts and emotions pass through his consciousness that he begins to tremble. Waves of fear, grief, anxiety, anguish all rise and pass through him. He sweats, and so much liquid pours off his face that it even appears that he’s bleeding. Every cell in his animal body wants to scream, to jump up and run away. Every instinct within him wants to fight, or to flee, the great suffering that he knows awaits him. Yet he remains kneeling, remains sweating. The battle is intense. Self-will and surrender both surge within him. He calls out:
‘Father, for you all things are possible. If it be your will, let this cup pass from me. But not my will, but yours be done.’
In these words, the thought in the first garden is reversed. In his heart the man proclaims: “God, you know best. I set down my personal will and do your will, whatever the cost.” He honors his human desire to be released from his fate, but then proceeds to accept what is given him from God.
Having freely surrendered to God and to the path before him, he turns to depart the garden, to meet his captors and be led to his execution. After a night of sham trial and torture, he is led to another tree, shaped into a cross he is forced to carry. Unlike the first tree, this one is dead, and has likely already been used many times by the oppressing Roman empire to destroy human life. The man looks at the tree, and remembers the ancient story of the garden and the first man and woman. He remembers the first tree, a beautiful, living tree and how to touch it meant death for humanity. He looks at this tree, dead and grotesque, and somehow knows that his carrying it will re-open the gates of life for all people.
His will already surrendered, he allows his tormentors to strip him naked² before nailing his body to the tee. If the fruit of the first tree led to Adam’s becoming ashamed of his nakedness and hiding from God, he knows that his nakedness on this tree will be healing for the shame of humanity. He, unlike all other men, has nothing to be ashamed of, yet this public shaming will open the door to restored innocence.
If Adam’s and Eve’s decision to seek to become gods through eating the fruit of the first tree led to the destruction and the enslavement of humanity, he knows that he who is God has to become less than God, and has to become even lower than all other people in his humiliating death. He will need to become the new fruit on this strange new tree, so that eating his very body will be a way of sharing in his complete surrender to the Father.
While his will remains tranquil, his body and psyche still has immense pains to endure. He descends into the depths of human suffering, even embodying our alienation from God, crying out 'My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?’ Yet he refuses to drink the anesthetic wine offered him, forgives those who torture him, and gives over his spirit freely to his God. His cries out his final words as he dies. ‘It is consumated³’. The curse reverses, and the gate of paradise re-opens. His body is now the new fruit, this cross the new tree, the garden of Gethsemane the new garden of paradise. Death is giving way to life.
Before the man Jesus dies on the cross, he also receives another man who is being crucified next to him. Hearing his open hearted confession, Jesus assures him, ‘This day you will be with me in Paradise.’
As he dies, the veil in the Jerusalem temple separating humanity from God tears in two from top to bottom. The separation between God and humanity is obliterated. The door of Paradise is again open - and Jesus has become the door.
*****
Everything is reversed on earth. Gethsemane becomes the new Eden, the garden where temptation is endured and the human being freely choses God, at great cost. The cross becomes the Tree of Life and Christ upon it becomes the food that leads to eternal life, replacing the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and the fruit that led to death. The first story of deception, disobedience, division and death is undone by the second story of truth, fidelity, unity and life. The dividing veil is torn, and the door of Paradise is re-opened. But what of the Heavenly battle?
In this same act, Jesus also shackles Lucifer of his power to destroy. Lucifer’s fall began when he was offended by God’s self-emptying love for humanity, and he fell through pride and cut himself off from God. Jesus incarnates God’s self-emptying love, and restores union through an act of supreme humility. From this point onward, Lucifer is powerless over the souls of all who call upon the Risen power and presence of Christ. He can still father lies in the wider world, but the demons cannot bear the name of Christ, and flee from his presence. Now, every human being has a conquering Advocate that has already defeated the enemy of humanity, if we but call upon His Name in our spiritual battles. Lucifer may still try to seduce human hearts, but he is reduced to using deception and to work in the shadows - as soon as the light of Christ is invoked, he is rendered powerless.
Why ‘Good’ Friday?
As a child, I struggled to understand why we called this day ‘Good Friday’. This is the day we commemorate deicide - when human beings killed God. It’s the worst thing humans have ever done - what is good about that? I now believe the goodness comes from the reversal of the story of Adam and Eve and the Fall, and the binding of Lucifer’s/Satan’s power. What happened at Golgotha/Calvary is the ritual undoing of what happened in Eden. This does not mean that the world instantly became a new Eden, but that every human heart now has the potential to return to an Edenic relationship with God (and with Creation) through entering into relationship with Jesus Christ. Jesus has re-opened the door to paradise, and has also given us an invitation to enter and a path by which we may enter. Yet, God will not save us without our free will and commitment. As it was in heaven and in the Garden of Eden, God can only receive our love as an expression of our free choice. This is why the coming of the Messiah, and His death and resurrection, did not quickly ‘fix’ the problems of the world. What it did do is open the doorway to heaven, and allow all who sincerely seek eternal life to enter.
In the two centuries since the great sacrifice of the first Good Friday, the world has continued in its divisions, its anger, its violence, its lust, its greed and its despair. These things were not abolished in the world by the Cross of Christ. As St. John lamented, the true light has come into the world, yet the people preferred darkness. Yet, every person who commits themself to Christ is given the opportunity to be liberated from the diseases of the world and to enter into divine freedom, both partially in this life and more fully in the life to come. When we follow in the footsteps of Christ, and surrender our self-will through His example, and by His grace, we come to share in His own intimacy with God. We really do become ‘born again’ to a spiritual life of radiant love and perfect freedom as we share in Christ’s relationship with the Father. We experience the Holy Spirit of Christ within us, and lose all fear of death. The distortions of the world, and even of our own thoughts and emotions, can no longer harm us as we continue to surrender to Christ. This is the liberation the Gospels offer, and is revealed in the life of the saints in every age. It’s on display in the accounts of the martyrs of the first centuries of Christianity, who were able to laugh and rejoice as they were led to their execution. It’s the freedom of the saints who minister love to their prison guards, from Saint Paul in the first century to Saint Maximillian Kolbe in the 20th.
How do we enter Paradise? The Christian path offers three mutually reinforcing ways. First, we follow the example of Jesus in surrendering to the will of God, moment by moment. In every circumstance, we learn to consent to the Divine presence, and refuse the habitual impulse to grasp at full satisfaction in any condition or state in the world. We enjoy and use the natural, good things of the world (and reject the excessive or unnatural ones), but always with self-surrender and a desire to seek first the Kingdom of God. We might call this the ‘Way’ of Christ.
Second, we root ourself in Jesus’ teaching and our dignity as sons and daughters of God, and refuse to consciously build up a sense of self that is separate from this fundamental identity in God. This means we increasingly see ourselves as reflected in Christ, and not in any external circumstance. This necessitates laying down any political, racial, ethnic, gender, national, sexual or any other identities to find our true self as children of God. This involves a gradual unraveling of past identities to recover our true identity rooted in God. We might call this the ‘Truth’ of Christ.
Third, we gain the strength to do these things through intimacy with Jesus Christ. We cultivate friendship with Jesus Christ and learn to rest in His living, risen presence, here and now. We partake of His body and blood, feeding on his very being and taking His life into our own. We do not rely on our own strength to be restored to wholeness in God, but on the strength of the Risen Lord. We allow His life to sustain us in our weakness, and we rejoice in that life within us when we are strong. We might call this the ‘Life’ of Christ.
A threefold path, the Way, the Truth, and the Life, offered to us in the gift of the Cross. The Cross as a doorway to paradise - it is a narrow gate, and there may be few who find it, but it leads to eternal life.
The mystery of suffering on the path to Paradise
Jesus, crucified and risen, offers a doorway into eternal life that may be tasted in this life, and that we trust will come to greater fulfillment in ‘the life of the age to come.’ Yet the paradox remains that suffering, and often great suffering, is a part of the life of a Christ-follower in this world.
This is an essential mystery of Christian life, post conversion. Once our hearts are set on Christ and we remain faithful to His Way, our heavenly end ‘destination’ is ensured. Yet, to our dismay, our bodies and psyches retain elements of the outward directed, idol-seeking impulses of a fallen world. Even if we were able to become completely purified, we still live in a world marred by sin, and in contact with a spiritual world that includes the presence of fallen angels who seek to obstruct humans from remaining in God. Hence, to live as a Christian means we paradoxically live in a state of perpetual warfare even as we live in unshakeable peace. If we are aligned with Christ in the depths of our being, nothing can shake our faith, hope and love at its deepest center. At the same time, there will always be the rising and falling of destructive thoughts and emotions within our being, and potentially destructive circumstances and stimuli we encounter in the outside world. If we refuse to consent to what is evil, there is no sin. Yet, the presence of evil remains, both within the world and within our psyches. Thus there is a certain degree of patient endurance and battle that is simply a part of our human state in this life. With time, training, and patience, we will grow in our capacity to fight this spiritual battle. At the same time, God mercifully gives us only what we can handle at any time, and when we grow stronger spiritually, we will be given greater battles. The point in all this is that we ought not to seek ‘peace,’ if by peace we mean release from any conflict within or conflict without. But we can continue in confidence knowing that the Risen Christ is always with us, and no other being, whether human or fallen angel, can close the door to paradise unless we freely chose to close it on ourselves.
A key to living faithfully as a Christian in this world is the ability to suffer. By suffer, I mean both the sense of ‘enduring discomfort’, and the older sense of the word meaning ‘to allow.’ We learn to allow all thoughts, sensations, and emotions to arise and fall in our awareness while keeping our heart set on Christ’s life within us. This means a detached attitude to successes and other attainments, as well as a patient endurance of the inevitable tumult of life in our world. It means the ability to stay rooted in love and faith when we experience a felt sense of God’s presence, and to stay rooted in love and faith when our felt experience is of God’s absence.
As we grow in our ability to suffer, God is able to progressively heal our hearts, and to draw us more fully into union. This can occur through our willingly letting go of our old attachments to material goods, status, or any other obstacles to the full gift of ourselves to God. It can also occur as God gradually purifies our old ways of praying and relating to God, to draw us into an every deeper, more pure, and more complete way of relating.
Over time, as we increasingly heal from the wounds of our alienation from God, we learn to find peace, and even joy, in suffering out of love for God. The Beatitudes grow in us, as our poverty of spirit expands into the ability to soulfully mourn, which awakens a hunger and thirst for right alignment with God. This process continues all the way until we gain the ability to ‘leap for joy’ when we are hated, excluded and insulted because of our love of Christ. Sharing in the fate of Jesus Christ in the world - rejoicing in his love, and suffering as he suffered, becomes our delight and our freely chosen destiny as God’s redeemed children.
It is, in a way, a leaner Paradise than the first one. It is a Paradise that radiates within the heart of each Christ-bearer, while in the world around us suffering and despair continue. It is our foretaste of the perfect love that is still yet to come, yet in this taste there is already perfection. We are made new and whole. We are restored to our original dignity as sons and daughters of God. Even now, echoes of His radiance shine forth in us. The sin and suffering of the world can no longer harm us, even as we groan in solidarity with all who suffer and seek to minister Christ’s love to every broken heart. We live, no longer merely us, but Christ lives in us. Christ has died, Christ has risen, and Christ will come again.
For if we have grown into union with him through a death like his, we shall also be united with him in the resurrection - Romans 6:5
A blessed Good Friday to you all.
1 The Seven Deadly Sins: Pride, Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Sloth, Anger, Envy.
The Eight Bad Thoughts: Pride, Vainglory, Acedia, Anger, Dejection, Greed, Lust, Gluttony
2 Note: The loincloth shown on most crucifixes is likely a pious addition to make the body of Christ more suitable for public viewing. The Romans typically shamed those being executed by stripping them naked. The Gospels describe Jesus being stripped in this way.
3 ‘It is consumated’ - the Douay-Rheims translation of John 19:30, which strikes me as a having a richer and fuller meaning than the more typical translation ‘It is finished.’