The nature of Satan and of matter

1. Say I: "You will find an explanation of all that is still incomprehensible to you in the book handed to you by the youth through Ruban. Moreover, opposites such as spirit and matter, life and death, love and hate, truth and falsehood should serve you as a little hint that there must be a reason for their coming into existence, as otherwise they could never manifest perceptibly.

2. How could evil enter into man's thinking unless there was some reason for its coming into existence? You with your trained intellect should be able to perceive that for all this — such as truth and falsehood and other opposites — the supreme and most benevolent Deity cannot be blamed.

3. Or can you presume that God, being Himself the supreme and most profound truth, should have laid a deceitful tendency into man's heart which would make him sin against God's order and render him filthy in all his speech and actions? Oh, far from it! God did create man in His spiritual image, thus pure, truthful and good.

4. Since the future existence of the spiritual man implied the way through the flesh, he had to take the flesh from the earth's matter according to the decree of the supreme Spirit of God; and a counterweight is laid into the flesh for the probing of man's spirit, which is called temptation.

5. However, this rests not only in man's flesh but in all matter; and matter, which is not what it appears to be, is to the man probing himself falsehood and deceit, thus a phantom spirit which is there and is not there. It is there, because the tempting matter is there for the flesh of man; but since matter is not what it appears to be, the phantom spirit can also be said not to be there.

6. Behold and understand this correctly. This spirit of deceit, which in itself is falsehood through and through, is the spirit of all the world of matter and precisely that which is called 'Satan' or 'the principal of all devils'. What is called `devils' are the specific evil spirits out of the universal evil spirit just shown you.

7. Therefore, a man who seizes with love all sorts of matter and becomes actively anchored in it, commits a sin against God's order which exposed him for a time to matter for the sole purpose that he combat it and, by using his completely free will, strengthen himself for immortality. And the consequence of sin is death, or the annihilation of all that man's soul has appropriated out of matter, because matter, as I have shown you, is not what it appears to be.

8. Therefore, if you love the world and its hustle and bustle and want to gain its treasures, you are like a fool who has been introduced to a well-adorned bride whom he does not want and for whom he does not long. He nevertheless throws himself with the ardor of a blind fanatic onto the shadow of the bride caressing it beyond measure. When the bride leaves the fool, surely her shadow will go with her. And what will remain for the fool? Evidently nothing.

9. How the fool will lament having lost what he loved so much! But he will then be told: 'Blind fool, why did you not seize the full truth instead of its shadow which was evidently nothing?' What else can the shadow be but a lack of light on that side of a dense form which is opposite the light, because the light-ray cannot penetrate the firm and dense body.

10. What your shadow is to you while you are standing or walking in the light, which is all matter, together with its treasures, to the spirit. It is of necessity a delusion and in itself a falsehood, because it is not what it appears to be to the senses of the body.

11. This is the very judgment of falsehood and deceit, namely that it has to reveal itself before the eyes of the spirit as something transient and merely as an outer, corresponding shadowy image of an inner, profound truth, whereas in the blind worldly love of the soul it would prefer to remain in reality what it seems to be.