In the same way the Christian ascribes to the Evil One man’s first taste of wisdom—the knowledge of good and evil—and believes his first step above the brute to be a fall.
In the Parsî religion that fall of man, by a lie, was recovered from by the creation of a new man. But in Christendom man has not recovered from his fall, nor can he ever recover from it so long as he disregards the new man’s word, “Be wise as serpents,” and continues to confuse his wisdom with diabolism.
Only through the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and of the eternal antagonism between them, can the tree of Life be reached.
In a Gnostic legend Solomon was summoned from his tomb and asked, “Who first named the name of God?” He answered, “The Devil.”
Did reason permit belief in a personal devil, one might recognise his supreme artifice in thus sheltering all the desolating cruelties of men, all the discords and wars that have degraded mankind into nations glorying in their ensigns of inhumanity, under a divine order. Thenceforth the enemy of man became God’s Devil, and whoso accuses the scourges of man accuses the scourges of God.
Under the teaching of the Second Solomon his personal friends could see in his tragical death a blow of the Devil aimed at God, who was trying to subdue that lawless one, for whose existence or actions God was in no sense responsible. But this was a transient glimpse. The Devil’s God was soon seen on his throne above the murderers of the great man; the stake set up by the lynchers was shaped into a symbolical cross; and all the cowardly, treacherous, murderous leaders, and the vile lynchers, are raised into agents and priests of God, presiding at a solemn rite and sacrifice for the salvation of mankind.
Instead of salvation a curse fell on mankind with that lie, and there are no signs of recovery from it. By the combination of Church and State there has been evolved a new man—a Christian restoration of deceived Yima—and no theological development touches that misbeliever in every believer. The Unitarian, the Theist, in their doctrine of a divine cosmos, the optimist, the pantheist, do but rehabilitate and philosophically reinvest the lie that the diseases and agonies in nature and in history are parts of a divinely ordered universe. They, too, must see Judas and the lynchers carrying out the plans of God. What then can they say of our contemporary betrayers of justice, the national lynchers, who are crucifying humanity throughout the world? These, too, carrying along their missionaries, are projecting God into history! But it is the God who was first named by the Devil, as the risen Solomon said, not the “Eloi,” the source only of good, whom the great friend of man saw not in all that wild chaos of violence amid which he perished, and his sublime religion with him.
When Jahveh swears “by his holiness” (as in Ps. lxxxix. 35, Amos iv. 2), this holiness is not to be interpreted as moral, or in any human sense. It relates to ancient philosophical ideas concerning the spiritual and the material worlds. The supreme head of the spiritual world is so far above the material world in majesty that he cannot come in contact with matter, though this august “holiness” has nothing to do with his moral character. Indeed deities were in all countries considered quite above the moral obligations of men. Jahveh’s “holiness” required the employment of mediators in creation—the Spirit of God brooding over the waters, Wisdom the “undefiled” master-builder, the Word—in each of whom is some image of his quasi-physiological “holiness,” his transcendent immateriality.
It was amid these ancient conceptions that the various cults arose which attempt to please and conciliate gods by ceremonial observances, runes, recited formulas of petition or adulation, all based on the awful “holiness” that doth hedge about a god, and concerned with points of heavenly etiquette, without any implication of a moral nature in those distant celestial beings. In Euripides’ “Iphigenia” (line 20) it is said: “Sometimes the worship of the gods, not being conducted with exactness, overturns one’s life.” In the same vein Koheleth (Ecclesiastes, v. 1, 2): “Keep thy foot when thou goest into the house of God; for to draw nigh to him with attention is better than to bring the sacrifices of fools who know not that they are (? may be) doing wrong. Be not rash with thy mouth, and let not thy heart be hasty to utter a word before God; for God is in heaven, and thou on earth; therefore let thy words be few.”