By Alexander Schmemann
In the baptismal rite, which is an act of liberation and victory, the exorcisms come first because on our path to the baptismal font we unavoidably “hit” the dark and powerful figure that obstructs this path. It must be removed, chased away, if we are to proceed. The moment that the celebrant’s hand has touched the head of a child of God and marked it with the sign of Christ, the Devil is there defending that which he has stolen from God and claims as his possession. We may not see him but the Church knows he is here. We may experience nothing but a nice and warm family “affair,” but the Church knows that a mortal fight is about to begin whose ultimate issue is not explanations and theories but eternal life or eternal death. For whether we want it or not, know it or not, we are all involved in a spiritual war that has been raging from the very beginning. A decisive victory, to be sure, has been won by God, but the Devil has not yet surrendered. On the contrary, according to the Scripture, it is when mortally wounded and doomed that he stages the last and most powerful battle. He can do nothing against Christ, but he can do much against us. Exorcisms therefore are the beginning of the fight that constitutes the first and essential dimension of Christian life.
We speak to the Devil! It is here that the Christian understanding of the word as, above all, power is made manifest. In the desacralized and secularized worldview of the “modern man,” speech, as everything else, has been “devaluated,” reduced to its rational meaning only. But in the biblical revelation, word is always power and life. God created the world with His Word. It is power of creation and also power of destruction, for it communicates not only ideas and concepts but first of all spiritual realities, positive as well as negative. From the point of view of a “secular” understanding of speech, it is not only useless, it is indeed ridiculous to “speak to the Devil,” for there can hardly be a “rational dialogue” with the very bearer of the irrational. But exorcisms are not explanations, not a discourse aimed at proving anything to someone who from all eternity hates, lies and destroys.
So many Christians are convinced that there is nothing basically wrong with the world and that one can very happily accept its “way of life,” all its values and “priorities,” while fulfilling at the same time one’s “religious duties.” Moreover, the Church herself and Christianity itself are viewed mainly as aids for achieving a successful and peaceful worldly life, as spiritual therapy resolving all tensions, all conflicts, giving that “peace of mind” which assures success, stability, happiness. The very idea that a Christian has to renounce something and that this “something” is not a few obviously sinful and immoral acts, but above all a certain vision of life, a “set of priorities,” a fundamental attitude towards the world; the idea that Christian life is always a “narrow path” and a fight: all this has been virtually given up and is no longer at the heart of our Christian worldview.
The terrible truth is that the overwhelming majority of Christians simply do not see the presence and action of Satan in the world and, therefore, feel no need to renounce “his works and his service.” They do not discern the obvious idolatry that permeates the ideas and the values by which men live today and that shapes, determines and enslaves their lives much more than the overt idolatry of ancient paganism. They are blind to the fact that the “demonic” consists primarily in falsification and counterfeit, in deviating even positive values from their true meaning, in presenting black as white and vice versa, in a subtle and vicious lie and confusion. They do not understand that such seemingly positive and even Christian notions as “freedom” and “liberation,” “love,” “happiness,” “success,” “achievement,” “growth,” “self-fulfillment”—notions which truly shape modern man and modern society, their motivations and their ideologies—can in fact be deviated from their real significance and become vehicles of the “demonic.”
And the essence of the demonic is always pride, pompa diaboli. The truth about “modern man” is that whether a law-abiding conformist or a rebellious non-conformist, he is first of all a being full of pride, shaped by pride, worshiping pride and placing pride at the very top of his values.
To renounce Satan thus is not to reject a mythological being in whose existence one does not even believe. It is to reject an entire “worldview” made up of pride and self-affirmation, of that pride which has truly taken human life from God and made it into darkness, death and hell.
And one can be sure that Satan will not forget this renunciation, this rejection, this challenge. “Breathe and spit upon him!” A war is declared! A fight begins whose real issue is either eternal life or eternal damnation. For this is what Christianity is about! This is what our choice ultimately means!
~Adapted from Alexander Schmemann, “Preparation for Baptism,” in Of Water and the Spirit, pp. 21-30
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