Into the Lenten wilderness with one eye on Satan

At Easter we are asked, as we renew our baptismal promises, whether we renounce Satan: we dutifully reply: “I do.” During the rest of the Church’s year, mentions of Satan at Mass are few and far between – although he appears quite often in St Mark’s Gospel – but perhaps we would benefit from paying more attention to what Jesus Himself tells us about Satan’s role in the universe.

This may help us towards better answers to two troubling questions. First, why, if God is omnipotent, does He permit evil – not only moral evil, but also the evil of physical pain? And secondly, in the light of modern scientific discoveries, no one would sensibly claim that Genesis is to be understood as a science manual giving a literal account of Creation. How, therefore, are we to understand its teaching on the Fall?

Let us think first about what Jesus wanted people to know about Himself. Did He want to be known as a miraculous healer? No: He cured sick people because He felt for them and wished to increase their faith. He asked them (usually unsuccessfully) to keep quiet about it, because healing the sick was not the central purpose of His mission. Contrast this with the 40 days that Jesus spent in the wilderness, which we commemorate in Lent.

No other human witnessed those 40 days, so the accounts that we read in Mark 1, Matthew 4 and Luke 4 must derive from Jesus Himself. He clearly regarded it as important that His followers should know about His encounter with Satan, and so we need to take its implications seriously.

Mark’s account is sketchy, but Matthew and Luke go into detail. They both tell us that Satan took Jesus up to a high mountain from which all the kingdoms of the world could be seen. “All these have been given to me,” says Satan, “but I will hand them over to you if you do homage to me.” How does Jesus reply?

“Satan is sometimes called the Prince of Lies,” you may think to yourself, “and this must be an example of his deceitfulness. Surely Jesus will reject with contempt Satan’s claim to rule the whole world.” No: Matthew and Luke both tell us that Jesus implicitly acknowledges that Satan has some degree of power in our fallen world. Instead, Jesus merely points out that, according to Scripture, one should do homage to no one except God.

This devilish usurpation sounds shocking. Surely an omnipotent God could prevent it. Of course He could. But if the world belonged securely to God and God alone, because He had prevented all humans from ever doing wrong, what sort of freedom would we enjoy? God would be treating us all as babies. God created us in His own image, we are told, but whatever exactly that means, it is certainly not consistent with permanent babyhood. In order to treat humans as adults with free will, God must also allow us to make mistakes.

Little children are not morally blameworthy – which is why, in Matthew 19, Mark 10 and Luke 18, Jesus says that we must be like little children in order to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. But to be like a child is not the same as to be a child.

Satan has a second line of attack, however: “Why don’t you supply irrefutable proof that you are more than human? Then people will be forced to believe that you are who you say you are, and will follow you. For example, why don’t you throw yourself off the roof of the Temple in Jerusalem, and let people see how you are saved from death by angels?” Again Jesus refuses, but for a reason that may at first seem strange: “You shall not put God to the test.”

“Putting God to the test” implies saying: “I will consent to believe in Jesus provided He performs some miracle to prove that He really is who He says He is.” Many early converts were seemingly attracted to Jesus on this sort of basis in Galilean towns such as Capernaum, Bethsaida and Chorazin, where He preached and performed miracles of healing. In the eyes of those Galilean converts, Jesus passed just the sort of the test that Satan had suggested. But human memories are short, and many of these converts reverted to their old habits soon after Jesus had gone away. This provoked Jesus’s sad denunciation of the Galilean towns recorded at Luke 10.13-15 and Matthew 11.21-24. “Tests” such as Satan proposed do not lead to solid, long-term conversions.

The conclusion from thinking about Satan and Jesus in the wilder ness seems clear. God could, if He wished, preserve us humans from moral evil and the pain associated with it, but that would come at the cost of treating us as children throughout our lives. Instead, He pays us the compliment of allowing us to grow up and behave as adults, taking responsibility for what we do. Fortunately, He loves us so much that He is prepared to pay the price Himself for what we do wrong.

But what about Satan in the Garden of Eden? It is impossible to reconcile that biblical account of human origins with what we now know on the basis of paleontology and Darwinian evolutionary theory. Grasping at straws, we might try to suggest that, even if humans evolved physically in the way that anthropologists now claim, there was a particular day in prehistory when Satan did indeed intervene to lead astray one man and one woman from whom we are all descended, with or without some genetic contribution from that couple’s human contemporaries. Fortunately, perhaps, we need not puzzle over this scenario further, because it has one fatal drawback: it ignores what the Catechism calls “physical evil” (CCC 310), including pain.

Pain existed in the world for millions of years before humans evolved: think of the pain inflicted by the famous Tyrannosaur us rex, or those fly larvae which burrow inside their hosts (such as caterpillars) and eat the internal organs slowly, keeping the host alive for as long as possible. How can this kind of evil be blamed on our earliest human ancestors? This objection appeals to plain common sense.

We are inside time, and we travel through it in only one direction: towards the future. But this ignores a crucial respect in which we differ from God and the angels as well as Satan and his fellow devils. They, not being part of the physical universe, are not constrained by the time dimension that applies within it. God, at least, is aware of all times simultaneously, and it is reasonable to assume that angels and devils are similarly unrestricted – a point made by CS Lewis in The Screwtape Letters.

Human constraint does not apply to God or to the purely spiritual beings He has created.

A human action may be seized upon by Satan so as to have consequences not only later but also earlier, in time-bound human terms. So human acceptance of devilish suggestions may indeed be what has enabled Satan to introduce pain into the universe, including pain suffered by creatures that existed millions of years before humans evolved.

The account of creation in Genesis fits in well with what I have said about pain: it is a poetic account, but not wrong in important respects such as Creation ex nihilo and the general order of created matter. On the sixth day, God provided seed-bearing plants and fruit as food for humans, and plant foliage for birds and animals (Gen 1.29-30). Thus, if the world had not been corrupted by the Fall, it would have contained no meat-eaters. No antelopes would have suffered the pain of being eaten by lions, and no unfortunate cater pillar would have been killed slowly by an internal parasite. That world without physical evil will be replicated (so Isaiah says) when the Messiah comes: “The lion will eat hay like the ox…the baby will put his hand into the viper’s lair” (Is 11.7-8).

The idea of herbivorous lions sounds quaint. As Newman put it in his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine: “If beasts of prey were once in paradise, and fed upon grass, they must have presented bodily phenomena very different from the structure of muscles, claws, teeth, and viscera which now fit them for a carnivorous existence.” But this just goes to show how unimaginably different an unfallen world would have been from the world as we know it. It would be akin to the new heaven and the new earth described by the author of Revelation as what believers can look forward to, thanks to Christ’s death on the Cross (Rev 21.1).

We should indeed admire the splendour of the physical world that God has created. We are often reminded of this by the Church. But if we pay more attention to Satan’s existence, we will no longer feel so perplexed by this physical world’s imperfections.

Imperfections, both physical and moral, do not show that God is weak or indifferent. Rather, they remind us that we have a bitter enemy whom God Incarnate helps us to fight. It is an important lesson for Lent.

(Photo: iStock.)

Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy is a former professor of linguistics at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand.

This article appears in the Lenten March 2025 edition of the Catholic Herald. To subscribe to our award-winning, thought-provoking magazine and have independent, high-calibre and counter-cultural Catholic journalism delivered to your door anywhere in the world click HERE.

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