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Hail and welcome to a Satanist Reads the Bible.
Ever since I transitioned this project from being primarily a blog to being primarily a podcast, I’ve been using the tagline, “Exploring the Bible, Christianity, and other religions and sacred texts through the lens of Satanism in order to reinvent religion for myself.” Aside from some of the early creative and constructive work, I’ve mostly emphasized the exploration part of that tagline, but this episode and the next will be focusing more on the invention aspect. My intention here is to construct a sketch of a Satanic theology, and to that end, I’ll be discussing what theology means, both in general and in relation to the specific source I’ll be drawing from; discussing some of the potential qualities that a Satanic theology would have; and offering some preliminary results. A proper and complete Satanic theology would be better suited to something the length of a book, and perhaps that’s a book that I’ll write one day, but given the space available to me here, I’ll have to confine myself to a more limited collection of ideas. I’ll also be introducing the approach I’ll be taking next episode, which will likewise be a theology, but a very different one and much more experimental in character.
The literal meaning of the word theology is “the study of God.” More broadly, it could be understood as the study of divinity or the divine in general, and often takes the form of rational explications of the nature of God and of the various properties that God possesses, as well as the nature of the religion in question (typically Christianity or Islam). Theology is distinct from philosophy of religion, which is general philosophical inquiry into religion. Questions about, for example, the epistemology of religion, such as whether certain religious claims are knowable or not, would fall under philosophy of religion rather than theology. Theology is also distinct, though less markedly so, from religious philosophy, which is general philosophical inquiry from a religious perspective. So a study of, for example, metaethics, from a Buddhist perspective, would be religious philosophy but not necessarily theology. One might think of religious philosophy as overlapping with theology to some degree; or, theology could be conceived of as a particular approach to religious philosophy. The difference between the two is that, while religious philosophy can be approached from a neutral or outsider perspective—a Christian studying Buddhist ethics, for example—theology accepts the fundamental truth of the religion as a given and proceeds from that standpoint, perhaps arguing persuasively for that truth but not doing so from the investigative standpoint taken by philosophy.
I’ll be giving more attention to the line between philosophy and theology further on.
My primary source in doing this work has been the Systematic Theology of Paul Tillich, published in three volumes between 1951 and 1963. Hundreds of theologies have been written and published over the millennia; I picked this one because of my general respect for Tillich as both a philosopher and a Christian. His understanding of Christianity is quite unorthodox, but while I have many disagreements with him—which would hardly be surprising given my own standpoint relative to Christianity—I’ve found his ideas both interesting and useful. His book Dynamics of Faith (1956) was valuable in contributing to the formulation of my own ideas, and in general serves as a strong example that religion can take forms that are reasonable and thoughtfully-considered, in contrast to the more common rigid, dogmatic, and irrational views by which religion is often dismissed by more skeptical thinkers.
Tillich sees theology as being a function of the Christian church which serves the needs of the church (1951, p. 3). I don’t belong to any Satanic church or organization, but nevertheless wish my theology to serve the needs of the Satanic community, as conceived in the broadest possible sense. Given the general diversity of Satanic thought, which includes both theistic and atheistic worldviews, this will be a challenging role to fill, and all the more difficult given that my own views are peculiar and unorthodox even within the broader context of Satanism. But I think I do the best in that regard by proceeding honestly from my personal experiences and the consequential standpoint of those experiences, which focuses on an aspect of Satan that is neglected, vital, universal, and, in the ontological sense, real. Tillich stipulates two needs for any theological system: to state the truth of the message and to interpret that truth for the given audience (1951, p. 3), so my Satanic theology must both assert the truth of my own standpoint and interpret it in the context of Satanism in general and, to such a degree as is possible, the contexts of specific Satanic religions.
Tillich describes the theologian as being one who “acknowledges the content of the theological circle as [their] ultimate concern” (1951, p. 10), which gives us a few things to unpack. “Ultimate concern” is a concept that appears throughout Tillich’s work and it’s fairly literal and straightforward. “Ultimate” here means final and fundamental and “concern” simply means a matter of importance, so one’s ultimate concern is that which is most fundamentally important to them. This ultimate concern is, according to Tillich, the specific object of theological study. “Content of the theological circle” is a somewhat thornier matter. For Christian theologians the content of the theological circle is the Christian message of salvation by the vicarious sacrifice of God to himself. Being that, to my knowledge, nothing of this sort has ever been attempted before, and being that the Christian message is itself the result of theology and Christology, part of my job as a theologian will be to determine what exactly the contents of my theological circle are, and this makes the theological process, appropriately enough, a circular one. My hope as I worked through these problems in my initial drafts of this essay was that I could leave that as an unknown and see if I could backfill it, so to speak, as I worked through the theological process. That turned out not to be viable, for reasons that will become clear a little further on. But first, a few more items regarding the nature of theology itself.
Tillich also describes theologies as being ontologies of the ground of being, which again gives us some things to unpack. Ontology is the philosophical discipline that studies being, and the body of knowledge that has resulted from such study. Questions about what kinds of things exist and what properties they have are questions of ontology. Ground of being is another concept that appears throughout Tillich’s work.
Tillich presents us with the following argument concerning God’s existence:
- If God were a being, then God would be dependent on being.
- There is nothing on which God is dependent.
- Therefore, God is not a being.
The argument is valid, and its premises are both quite strong. The second is stipulative but reasonable: if there was something on which God was dependent, wouldn’t it make more sense to call that God? And the first seems irrefutable: anything that exists is contingent upon what it means for something to be in the first place. So I’m inclined to accept the argument.
Two possible stances can result from this. One is the atheistic stance: God cannot be a being, therefore God does not exist. Tillich takes the other position, which posits God as the only thing on which all things are dependent but which is itself dependent on nothing: being itself. The second of our premises could be restated “God is that which is dependent on nothing,” and if we’re to take it as being stipulative, then Tillich’s theistic stance is entirely sensible. So we then have theology as a study of the nature of being itself as it can be understood as divine. While this may seem arbitrary, it correlates quite strongly with the understanding of the divine posited and documented in the 1902 book The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James, which we discussed last week. Throughout the text, James offers documented examples of religious experiences which demonstrate how the “abstract divineness of things, the moral structure of the universe” (1982, p. 57) may be understood as being worthy of worship.
Tillich ties the concept of the ultimate concern to ontology as well: “Our ultimate concern is that which determines our being or not-being. Only those statements are theological which deal with their object [i.e. the ultimate concern] in so far as it can become a matter of being or not-being for us” (1951, p. 14, emphasis is Tillich’s).
Elsewhere, Tillich stipulates a further requirement for a theology: it must respond to the “totality of [human] creative self-interpretation in a special period,” by which he means “the scientific and artistic, the economic, political, and ethical forms in which [humans] express their interpretation of existence” (1951, p. 3-4). Lofty as this sounds, the important thing for our purposes is that a theology, in Tillich’s view, must respond to the context of contemporary, rather than historical, human self-understanding. It must speak to humanity as we understand ourselves in this particular era, rather than to how we may have understood ourselves in the time periods in which our sacred texts were written. This is not to say that history and historical understanding cannot be part of a theology—Tillich specifically includes history as one of the parts of his theological system—but that it must be history as a product of and in relation to our contemporary humanity. Theology is, of course, necessarily concerned with the infinite and eternal, and so theology exists in tension between these two poles, between “the eternal truth of its foundation and the temporal situation in which the eternal truth must be received” (1951, p. 3).
With these stipulations and requirements as prelude, Tillich offers three questions concerning the source material for theological study
- What are the proper source materials?
- In what medium are these source materials received?
- What are the norms concerning their interpretation?
For Tillich, the obvious source material is the Bible, but he does not restrict theology to this source alone.
The biblical message cannot be understood and could not have been received had there been no preparation for it in human religion and culture. And the biblical message would not have become a message for anyone, including the theologian himself, without the experiencing participation of the church and of every Christian…. Systematic theology, therefore, has additional sources beyond the Bible.
1951, p. 34-5
Given that I am not tied to a prior religious tradition, all of the sacred texts of history are available to me as sources for my theology, in addition to the “sources beyond the Bible” that Tillich describes: “the material presented by the history of religion and culture.”
The medium in which these sources are received, as Tillich describes, is the medium in which all sources are received, that of human experience. Tillich describes three “uses” of experience for theology; I’ve come to think of them, rightly or wrongly, as three channel of experience through which the source material comes to the theologian: the ontological, the scientific, and the mystical. The ontological concerns the experience of what exists, as we’ve discussed. The scientific “articulates” that reality and determines its structure. The nature of the mystical as an experiential channel for theological source material is more difficult to pin down. Tillich describes it both as “experience by participation” and as having the possible form of “the inspiring presence of the Spirit,” that being simultaneously the ultimate source of theology (1951, p. 45). Returning to William James (whom Tillich cites in places) and The Varieties of Religious Experience, mystical states of consciousness are ineffable experiences which involve the dissolution of concepts, including the self (1982, p. 417), so it’s understandable that they would be difficult to discuss. Elsewhere, Tillich describes a “mystical a priori” that directs the rational process of theology, “an immediate experience of something ultimate in value and being of which one can become intuitively aware,” (1951, p. 9), and cites several examples of how this mystical a priori has manifested in the work of prior theologians and philosophers: for example, “universal substance” in Spinoza, “beyond subjectivity and objectivity” in William James, and “absolute spirit” in Hegel. I have to admit that I’m confused by Tillich’s use of “a priori” here and I have to wonder whether he’s using the term correctly; a priori means “knowable through reason alone,” in contrast to a posteriori, meaning “only knowable through experience,” and mystical experience is indeed something which is experienced rather than something knowable through reason alone, so “mystical a posteriori” would seem the better term, but perhaps he means that these are things knowable through reason which then become the foundation for mystical experience. But regardless of its designation, I understand that Tillich is talking about mystical experience as the starting point of theological exploration and will proceed using his terminology of “mystical a priori.”
The norm of Christian theology is what Tillich calls the “New Being” in Jesus; this is the criterion to which all source material in Christian theology—even the Bible, Tillich says—must be subjected. As with the matter of the contents of the theological circle, here the lack of precedent in this work puts me at a disadvantage. There being no prior Satanic theology, there can be no extant norm. Tillich derives his norm from the contemporary existential situation of humanity and the answer to the questions that situation poses according to the Christian narrative. My job, then, will be to likewise start with the contemporary existential situation of humanity and see where its questions link up with answers in the Satanic narrative.
This process illustrates Tillich’s method of correlation (1951, p. 62-3), the method that defines his system in his systematic theology, and this will be the last thing I’ll have to cover before moving on to the theology itself. The method of correlation has two steps:
- Analyze the human situation out of which existential questions arise
- Demonstrate that the relevant religious symbols are the answers to those questions
Tillich, of course, specifies that it is the symbols of the Christian message that must be demonstrated as the answers, so I’ve had to generalize from that standpoint. Tillich divides his analysis of the existential questions of the human situation into five categories, which form the five parts of his theology (1951, p. 66-7):
- Human finitude
- Human self-estrangement
- Humans as living beings
- Humans as rational beings
- Humans as historical beings
Tillich also delineates the sources of answers to these questions within the Christian narrative; for example, Jesus is the source of answers for human self-estrangement in Tillich’s theology.
The foregoing presents the Satanic theologian with quite the task, one which will require considerably more time and words than I have immediately available. I may tackle it in a series of future episodes, or I may literally write an actual book, but in the time remaining to me, I’ll be addressing the outstanding foundational questions that have arisen in the course of this introduction.
The central question remaining is that of the contents of the Satanist’s theological circle and the status of those contents as my ultimate concern. My initial plan to approach this was to follow Tillich’s suggestion and look to my source material, as received by my experience and what I would designate as my “mystical a priori,” the inspiring presence of Satan the Accuser.
As I described in my last essay, the abstract divineness and moral structure of the universe exist for me as the quasi-sensible, apprehensible realities of God and Satan. These two aspects are distinct but at the same time not strictly delineated or separable, and nor are they separable from my own self-experience but rather continuous with what I understand to be the higher part of myself. I have no means of further explaining or justifying this experiential understanding—in the words of William James, it is a “face to face presentation of what seems immediately to exist” (1982, p. 424)—but I know that it arises in this particular form as a result of my religious and cultural conditioning. Awareness of this conditioning connects my experience to my theological sources, which correlate my experience with that of other historical experiences of the sacred throughout history. My initial plan was to use these sources to perform a kind of theological dialectic triangulation and circumscribe the underlying principles that form the common ground from which these experiential phenomena arise, using the method of correlation to answer theological questions and expecting that this process would, in turn, clarify and delineate the contents of the theological circle.
With all that theory in place, this left me with the difficult matter of what questions to start with. Tillich wrote that “Being and God,” his explication of the Christian answers to questions of human finitude, would be a preferable starting point, but that part of his theology and all the others required support from the epistemology that would be explicated as part of the answers to the questions arising from humans as rational beings (1951, p. 67-8), and so he began his theology with “Reason and Revelation,” which addressed those questions. But the matter of where to start is all the more difficult for me because Satanism is not, and nor is it intended to be, a universal religion. Tillich begins with the nature of reason and the universal existential questions that arise from reason and responds with universal answers from the Christian narrative, answers which he believes identify Christianity as the highest form of religion for all people. I argue in general for religious pluralism—different kinds of people need different kinds of religion, but Christian universalism is at least internally consistent: from the Christian perspective, it is sensible to conceive of Christianity as the one true religion for all people, however bigoted and misguided that conception seems from the outside. Satanists think quite differently about their own religion: no Satanist desires Satanism for all, and the notion of Satanic universalism is incoherent. What would a world of Satanists stand opposed to?
So if I’m to begin with reason, I must do so not in terms of its universal questions that arise from humans as rational beings but rather the particular questions that arise for Satanists as rational beings. But this itself presumes delineations of what Satanism is and who Satanists are, delineations which must themselves arise from the theological process! It’s another circle, one which returns us to the question of the contents of the theological circle. I have to wonder if Tillich chose that term not only because it reflects a delineation between inside and outside but because it also evokes the circularity of reasoning that surrounds it. Tillich himself says in his Systematic Theology that “Every understanding of spiritual things… is circular” (1951, p. 9). I had thought that I might be able to circumvent that circularity but I was mistaken. One might see this as precluding all theology, but remember that reason itself cannot be rationally justified without circular reasoning and so must be assumed—a rational argument that reason is a valid justification for knowledge must assume the truth of its conclusion in order for it to be a valid argument in the first place.
In my last essay I mentioned a book by the philosopher Charles Taylor, The Varieties of Religion Today (2002), which responds to The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James (1902) on the centenary of its publication. Taylor explicates a matter that is implied in James’ book and explored more fully in one of his other books (The Will to Believe, 1896): that some truths “will be hidden from us unless we go at least halfway towards them” (Taylor 2002, p. 46). Taylor provides the following by way of example:
Do you like me or not? If I am determined to test this by adopting a stance of maximum distance and suspicion, the chances are that I will forfeit the chance of a positive answer. An analogous phenomenon on the scale of the whole society is social trust; doubt it root and branch, and you will destroy it.
2002, p. 46
And this in turn brought me back to one of my favorite books, Fear and Trembling, the luminary explication of the nature of faith published by Søren Kierkegaard in 1843. Although Kierkegaard never himself used the phrase that is often attributed to him, that of the “leap of faith”, it does describe (or intends to describe) one of his central ideas. But I think that Kierkegaard’s “leap of faith” as it is often used in common parlance misunderstands his idea. If one were to speak to, for example, an evangelical Christian about the leap of faith, one would expect that their account is that they took the leap from reason to faith and, from that point forward, just believed the matter in question, end of story. But I think that Kierkegaard may have intended what he called the qualitative leap to be something more akin to the leap we must make into reason, or into friendship. The leap, in this account, wouldn’t be an end but rather a beginning, a place from which to start. Reason cannot justify itself but its usefulness for gaining knowledge is entirely clear once one has made the leap. Similarly, I think that it is incumbent upon the one who makes the leap of faith to then have a good look around and see where they’ve landed and whether they perhaps ought to leap back in the other direction. Thus we have doubt as something not inimical to faith but rather intrinsic to it, and this concords with Tillich’s words in Dynamics of Faith: “If doubt appears, it should not be considered as the negation of faith, but as an element which was always and will always be present in the act of faith. Existential doubt and faith are poles of the same reality, the state of ultimate concern” (1956, p. 25).
And so I make my own leap of faith into the theological circle of Satan the Accuser.
If I’m to follow Kierkegaard, my task becomes even more difficult. Kierkegaard wrote Fear and Trembling as if from the perspective of another person whom he called John of the Silence, and as translator Alastair Hannay explains in his introduction to my copy of the book
We might… suppose that Kierkegaard has wanted his pseudonym to tell us that if someone genuinely has faith, as Abraham the father of Isaac is said to have proved by his willingness to sacrifice Isaac, then that person has in that respect exiled himself from the realm of human discourse. His faith is an affront to humanity as we generally understand this, that is as a more or less well-defined set of dispositions that we expect or recognize in each other and value.
1985, p. 11
So perhaps faith itself isn’t something that I can speak about—or at least not reason about, which helps to justify the more poetic approach I’ll be taking in the next episode. But having made the leap, I will attempt an account of the contents of my Satanic faith, the contents of the theological circle, from which I will henceforth be working.
In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.
Genesis 1:1-5, NRSV
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.
John 1:1-5, NRSV
“Word” in the verses from John is translated from the Greek Λόγος, Logos, for which the following translations are possible:
- That which is said: word, sentence, speech, story, debate, utterance.
- That which is thought: reason, consideration, computation, reckoning.
- An account, explanation, or narrative. (Λόγος – Wiktionary, n.d.)
In these two passages, central to the Jewish and Christian faiths, we find manifest Principium Luciferi, the principle of Satan as he is believed—by one who has taken a Satanic leap of faith—to be Lightbearer. William James speaks of the “abstract divineness and moral structure of the universe,” Tillich of the “ground of being.” What I present here is indeed an ontology of these things: I once retranslated John 1:1 as “In the beginning was the Story. God was telling the Story, and God was the Story that was being told” (Bilsborough, 2018), and in examining the biblical text from this standpoint we can see the structure of being itself unfold.
In the beginning there was void and darkness upon the face of the deep, and being that the light had not yet been created, we know that God was of the darkness. In darkness there is a lack of apprehension, and in the beginning, in conceiving of God in Their primordial darkness—a darkness in which there was Story but nothing to tell, a darkness in which there was Reason but nothing to reason about—we are likewise confronted by a void in which nothing can be said of anything. What is there to say when all is one, and all shrouded in darkness? We need not imagine a literal God for this to be comprehensible as an ontology; indeed, what I am describing here is not a being but rather being itself. We need only understand the dialectic, the necessity of there being opposites and opposition for us to be able to talk about anything at all.
“God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light.” Satan is the one whom we call Lightbearer, and it is in the context of this new light that discourse and reason become possible, even as these are the very things from which these principles arise. In this way, God and Satan are integral—the principle of Λόγος which defines God necessitates Satan—even as Principium Luciferi stands in opposition to God.
I’ll conclude here. I’ll be returning to Tillich’s systematic approach to theology at some point, but next week I’ll be continuing with my theological investigations using the form of postmodern theopoetics. Theopoetics approach theology not through systematic reasoning but rather through a more poetic and expressive style often influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche, structural linguistics, and Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction approach to textual analysis.
I hope you’ve found this piece interesting and informative. If you’ve enjoyed it, I encourage you to look at some of my other essays, and if you find my approach to philosophy and religion at all valuable, I hope that you’ll stop in at my Patreon page, which features bonus content for patrons, and that you’ll stop back by to check on my new content.
Works Cited and Referenced
Bilsborough, T. (2018, December 22). Satanism, Christmas, and the Birth of Christ Jesus. A Satanist Reads the Bible. https://asatanistreadsthebible.com/satanism-christmas-and-the-birth-of-christ-jesus/
James, W. (1982). The varieties of religious experience: A study in human nature (M. E. Marty, Ed.). Penguin Books.
Kierkegaard, S. (1985). Fear and trembling. Penguin Books ; Viking Penguin.
Taylor, C. (2002). Varieties of religion today: William James revisited. Harvard University Press.
Tillich, P. (1951). Systematic theology, volume one. University of Chicago Press.
Tillich, P. (1967). Systematic Theology. University of Chicago Press.
λόγος—Wiktionary. (n.d.). Retrieved July 21, 2020, from https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%BB%CF%8C%CE%B3%CE%BF%CF%82