Sorathic Sin

A long time ago, I dreamed about a sword. The dream was strange. It was told by the sword.

There was an Arthurian, elven style court. Noble knights and fair ladies who went forth from their shining walls into the happy green land to the sound of music. The king had a magic sword which narrated (?) the dream. They jousted, they chased the deer among the huge boles of the stout old trees. They may have had some foes scattered around that they could fight. (I have it all written down somewhere, but at this time do not recall.)

At one point there was a crack. A kind of restlessness set in. I think it was adultery but it may have been a personal affront. A quarrel. It made people angry. It didn’t really get patched up. The anger and bitterness widened. The knights and ladies started in on each other. There were killings. They fought little wars. The land was ravaged. Eventually the king turned into an orgy of destruction as did everyone who still left alive, destroying just to destroy. The magic sword could unmake things and raging the king unmade. It was the Jaredite end of the Arthurian legend.

Towards the end the big reveal–or maybe I knew it all along–was that the king was Satan and his court his angels who had been reincarnated this way without their memories. Satan recovered his memories enough that his orgy of pure destruction was just rage that anything would be given him by God and refusal to accept any gifts. He was the sole survivor. He unmade what was left of the land. He unmade his own sword. Only the controlling monad or organization of monads that made up the sword’s soul was left. In a final spasm of will Satan unmade himself because he would accept no principle of organization or good. All that was left was one raging, mindless monad which was so himself that it could not be unmade.

Then the soul of the sword which had shown me these things said, “I serve Satan to serve the Lord.” I was made to know that the story had happened many times before and would happen again. All of the monads that made up the land and the bodies and the souls were righteous volunteers there to serve God’s purpose
the mercy of letting the Satanic monads have whatever measure of goodness and joy they could
the mercy of letting the Satanic monads have a chance to repent
the awful justice of letting them experience their own damnation again and again forever

Bruce Charlton recently wrote on the nature of evil.

Evil starts out as a distortion of the good. A virtue crippled by fear or made monstrous by pride. But it doesn’t end there. Panta rhei, all things flow. Evil has no natural stopping place and can only reach a halt by divine intervention and grace.

Without an effort of will by the evil person himself or without divine action, the evil has less and less virtue in it and more evil, until it ends it pure opposition to everything good.

That is what Bruce Charlton writes about. There are three different levels of evil, he says, and the final level is pure negation.

This materialism (positivism, scientism) is the basis of modern bureaucracy; which terms Men ‘human resources’, and generates policy on the basis of numbers and statistics. The individual Man counts only as an integer.

When this world view of negation of the Self, penetrates the soul and has been internalised; we get the Sorathic form of evil.

…Evil as the negation of The Good – any good.

So, evil loses any positive goal and becomes directed-against Truth, Beauty and Virtue; against life and consciousness, against the natural and spontaneous, against Beings and their relationships.

Sorathic evil’s only ‘satisfaction’ (because it has become incapable of ‘pleasure’) is in this destruction of anything that is of-God; anything created, anything capable of creation.

–thus Bruce Charlton