By Charles Mathewes, Ph.D., University of Virginia
Consider Thomas Aquinas’s representation of the satanic moral psychology; he had a wonderful description of what he thought it was like for Satan to have convinced himself that he was going to get somewhere in rebelling against God. This is mostly around Aquinas’s glossing of the idea that Satan wanted to be like God.
To Be or Not to Be Like God
What does it mean to be like God for Satan? There is sin in this sort of desire. What’s interesting here is that Thomas Aquinas had to agree that there would have been a way to want to be like God that was appropriate.
Because all rational creatures are supposed to imitate God in some way, at least in the exercise of their reason, the idea that humans and angels are supposed to be like God is not in itself a terrible idea; the problem is how they are going to be like God.
On some description of what rebellion against God is, Aquinas was saying, if someone actually thinks it through properly, they would come to the conclusion that this kind of rebellion is nothing more than a longing for suicide, which is precisely why Satan doesn’t want to come to that conclusion. That’s where direct desire is impossible for Satan; he can’t form that thought in a coherent way.
This is a transcript from the video series Why Evil Exists. Watch it now, on Wondrium.
Waiting for God to Give or Getting It Yourself?
It was in another way that Satan desired to be like God—by desiring, as his ultimate end of beatitude, something that he could attain by the power of his own nature, desiring as his ultimate happiness something that he could get on his own, turning his appetite way from the supernatural beatitude that is obtained by God’s grace.
That is, the Devil re-described the end he was seeking so that he could now imagine achieving it on his own. That’s one possibility for what the Devil was doing. Or, if he desired as his ultimate end that likeness of God that is bestowed by grace, he thought to acquire that likeness by the power of his own nature and not from divine aid as God-ordained.
Here, Aquinas was saying, it’s possible for the Devil to keep the end of ultimate happiness in his head as an idea that he will still try to attain, but now he will convince himself that he can get it by his own efforts, rather than receiving it from God as a gift; that he would reach out and grab it rather than accepting it as a gift.
Learn more about the nature and origins of evil.
Moral Psychology of Evil According to Aquinas
The nature of evil is a kind of desire, one kind of desiring to be like God and not another. It explains the character of Satan’s motivations in rebelling against God: There’s a resentment that God is higher than Satan, envy at that superiority, and a feeling of deserving to be like God, and all of that slathered over with a kind of self-deception, an ability by Satan to convince himself that he, in fact, can get to what God is.
This explained for Aquinas also the nature of the allegiance of the infernal creatures with one another; that is, this helped understand the moral psychology of communal evil. All of the fallen angels worked together in a way, but each one for their own private good; each one pursued their own solitary end; each one wanted to be their own God.
Learn more about Enuma Elish—evil as cosmic battle.
Connection Between Privacy and Evil
For the Latin theologians, there was a connection between the Latin word privatzio and evil. Evil is most of all privative, like depriving reality of being in some ways; but it did this by shrinking back from being connected to the rest of reality. In other words, evil is an attempt to be private.
For Augustine and Aquinas, these people thought that the notion of radical privacy is actually theologically problematic.
Augustine’s monastery was a place where no one held anything privately; everyone held all goods in common. Aquinas, in being a Dominican, lived in an order that was committed to poverty and to refusing the goods of the world insofar as those goods were to be held by them as possessions of their own.
Both of them thought that the notion of private property or private being were ways of participating in a certain kind of practice that inevitably led to evil.
Learn more about Greece—tragedy and the Peloponnesian War.
Tension Between Premodern and Modern Worlds
This is really interesting in comparison to the modern world, and it identifies a pretty profound tension between the premodern world and the modern world because people today believe deeply in privacy; people today believe that each person is an individual who should be left in some fundamental way alone or should be allowed to be alone.
People today believe that in a picture of the ideal character of the human that Anselm, Aquinas, Augustine, and a lot of these premoderns would have thought sounded a lot more like the satanic psychology than it did anything appropriately Christian or normative.
There is, in fact, a really profound way that these earlier thinkers really challenged not just some of the beliefs but the very way people have organized their society, politically, socially, and culturally. For them, the society itself looked like it’s a society in a strange way that Satan designed.
Common Questions about Moral Psychology of the Devil and of Communal Evil
Aquinas thought that because all rational creatures are supposed to imitate God in some way, at least in the exercise of their reason, the idea that humans and angels are supposed to be like God is not in itself a terrible idea; the problem is how they are going to be like God
For the Latin theologians, there was a connection between the Latin word privatzio and evil. Evil is most of all privative, like depriving reality of being in some ways; but it did this by shrinking back from being connected to the rest of reality. In other words, evil is an attempt to be private.
According to Aquinas and the moral psychology of evil, Satan had the ability of self-deception so that he could convince himself that he could get to what God is.
