The Work of the Enemy
- FATHER ERASMO LEIVA-MERIKAKIS
The devil's strategy consists in his sowing the seeds of hatred of the light so that, in the slaying of the man Jesus, the inconceivable — deicide — is at length accomplished....
The devil can find an entryway into God's field, the world, only through the exhaustion of creatures ("while men were sleeping," Mt 13:25) and their failure to keep vigil.... The subverter cannot operate openly and honestly but must undermine God's good work by exploiting the vulnerability of God's dear ones....
The demonic seed inoculates our entire being, both intellectual and affective, with an aversion to the truth.... Here, too, lies the deepest reason for Jesus crucifixion: when I choose not to embrace the truth, I must put it out of my world by destroying it. Otherwise I could not bear the glare of its light continually judging the darkness I have made my dwelling place....
The devil has no separate field of his own where to grow his weeds. Evil, as Augustine says, must parasitically feed on what is good, for all of its work is destruction. The devil cannot establish a separate kingdom of his own because God is sovereign, and it is a great error to perceive any real symmetry or absolute duality between God and devil.
First and last, the devil is God's creature. Thus, in order to create his own kingdom, the devil is reduced to vitiating God's. He is permanently confined to being a spoiler of God's good work, and this necessarily inferior and dependent status must greatly fuel his rage against God. Although he aspires to being lord, the Devil has no center in himself, and he leads the purely imitative existence of the negator. This is why he can be lord only of the darkness, of the underside of things, and why he must sneak around like a weasel so as not to betray his insidious presence.
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Acknowledgement
Father Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis. "The Work of the Enemy." excerpt from Fire of Mercy: Heart of the Word: Meditations on the Gospel According to Saint Matthew Vol. 1 (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1996).
Reprinted with permission of the publisher, Ignatius Press.
The Author
Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Theology from Emory University. His areas of interest include liturgy and liturgical texts, Georg Trakl's poetry, the Gospel of Matthew, French and German poetry of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Greek and Roman classics, and Dante. He is the author of Fire of Mercy: Heart of the Word, a two-volume commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, Love's Sacred Order: The Four Loves Revisited, and The Way of the Disciple. He has also translated numerous works for Ignatius Press.