Sympathy for the Devil?

We were speaking of the demand to smash all images of Jesus. Now another clear sign of the true direction of the current winds: in the UK, a demand to delete the image on the Queen’s Medal of the Order of St. Michael and St. George. It shows St. Michael with his foot on the head of Satan. An image of the battle of good against evil.

According to the Guardian, the activists say the badge “resembles a depiction of a white angel standing on the neck of a chained black man.” Tracy Reeve, who has begun an online petition, says: “This is a highly offensive image, it is also reminiscent of the recent murder of George Floyd by the white policeman in the same manner presented here in this medal.”

Any resemblance to the killing of George Floyd is of course coincidental and in the imagination of the beholder. The award dates back to 1818. 

A modern Russian depiction of St. Michael

The image of course comes from the Bible:

“There was war in the sky. Michael and his angels made war on the dragon. The dragon and his angels made war. They didn't prevail, neither was a place found for him any more in heaven. The great dragon was thrown down, the old serpent, he who is called the devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world. He was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him.”

St. Michael’s foot on the Devil’s head is a reference to Genesis:

“Yahweh God said to the serpent, ‘Because you have done this, you are cursed above all livestock, and above every animal of the field. On your belly you shall go, and you shall eat dust all the days of your life.

I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring. He will bruise your head, and you will bruise his heel.’"

It is hard to imagine this was instead about race relations, back in Palestine in the 5th century BC. 

Italian depiction, 1708

Probably the majority of the current knights and commanders of the Order are themselves not “white”: former or present ministers from Africa, the Pacific Islands, the Caribbean, Papua New Guinea.

Sir Simon Wolley insists “the figure … is clearly a black man,” because it “has no horns or tail.”

This claim is blatantly false. The figure does have two horns and a tail. It is a serpent below the shoulders, and has wings.

How accurate is this as an ethnic description of sub-Saharan Africans? Note that Satan’s facial features are, as usually portrayed, sharp, with thin lips and a longish, thin nose. Very European.

Bumi Thomas, a black activist, claims the St. Michael of the portrait is “a white, blue-eyed figure standing on his neck.” 

Another view of the medal.

His facial features are about as European as Satan’s, it is true. His eyes, in the image, are black; his foot is on Lucifer’s head, not his neck. And Michael too has wings. More likely, he is an angel.

The complaints, in sum, seem delusional. They seem paranoid.

It is true that the prone figure of Satan is dark-skinned, and Michael has pale skin. But, given that this is an image of good and evil, the obvious explanation is that darkness represents sin, understood as a stain, and light represents virtue. This is a standard metaphor in the Bible, and in every world culture. Mankind naturally fears darkness and favours the light.

At least, you do if you do not consider yourself on the side of sin. There is that critical passage in John:

“This is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the light; for their works were evil. For everyone who does evil hates the light, and doesn't come to the light, for fear that his works would be reproved. But he who does the truth comes to the light, that his works may be revealed, that they have been done with God."

There seems to be a Freudian inadvertent admission behind it all. Apparently the protestors spontaneously identify themselves with Satan and with evil. They do so even if they have to stretch the evidence beyond credulity to make the notion work.

They do so against the interests of blacks. What could be worse than to identify Africans with Satan and evil personified? They are doing this; not the artist.

If this claim sounds extreme, that the underlying issue here is to declare it wrong to discriminate against evil, this is not the only example. Not by a good measure. Never mind smashing statues of Jesus. “Critical theory,” the academic ideology behind much of the protest we see in the streets, does just this systematically. It loves to take traditional fables and fairy tales, and argue that it is oppressive to portray the villain as being in the wrong. This is “discriminatory.” We must instead take the side of the witches, giants, dragons, and ogres. 

This is significant, because there is no way they can be portrayed as representatives of an oppressed class. To the contrary, the witch, giant, dragon, or ogre is always immensely powerful, and has a cache somewhere of vast riches. Jack, by contrast, is a poor boy; Rapunzel is abandoned by her poor family; and so forth. It is the privileged whom critical theory wants to support.

More significant is that the purpose of the fairy tale or fable is explicitly to teach a moral lesson. Aesop’s fables and Perrault’s collected fairy tales always conclude with a moral. When Hans Christian Anderson chose to publish his own literary tales without an explicit moral, there was considerable popular outcry.

So the real intent of making the villain the hero is to subvert the moral lesson. The villain, the witch or giant, is not human, so that he or she can be a representation of pure evil or vice.

It is evil that must not be “discriminated against.”

Understanding that this is the real problem seems to explain everything. This is why the police are the special focus of anger: whatever their flaws, the essential nature of police is to maintain the right and oppose vice. This is why statues of heroes are a special focus of anger: whatever their flaws, the essential nature of a hero is that he or she displayed some conspicuous virtue or fought some conspicuous vice.

This is why, for decades, the focus of the fight against “discrimination” was gays, and is now transsexuals. Whether or not they have indeed been discriminated against—leaving that aside for a moment—it is odd that discrimination against them has been so central to the public and the cultural agenda for so long. They are, after all, an estimated 1.6% of the population. That figure should probably be halved, since in the real world lesbianism, as opposed to male homosexuality, was never an issue. And, of course, transsexuals would be a much smaller proportion of the population.

The issue cannot, in the end, have been discrimination against gays. It was discrimination against a behavior. Homosexual sex is a behavior. If one can establish the principle that one has an inherent right to do a thing simply because one has a spontaneous urge to do it, this makes any sin a right, and prohibits calling it sinful. Nobody sins except because they have a natural urge to do it; morality consists in resisting natural urges.

There is a reason why they are called “Gay Pride” parades: lust plus pride, two sins publicly celebrated.

We seem close now to the point of perfect inversion, where the very existence of sin is denied; or rather, the only sin is admitting that there is sin.

St. Michael, pray for us.