The Myth of Satan’s Tear

The Myth of Satan’s Tear Chapter One - Bad Dreams Part One - In which we meet the young novice Christian, who has bad dreams and a troubled past. Hail Horrors, hail Infernal World, and thou profoundest Hell Receive thy new Possessor: One who brings A mind not to be chang’d by Place or Time. The mind is its own place and in itself Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n. ⎯ John Milton, Paradise Lost Turning, tossing, sweating, falling asleep only to reawaken, talking in his sleep, sometimes shouting, and when light sleep finally finds him, so do the bad dreams, nightmarish images of a strange hellish landscape. This is how we meet the young novice Christian, the hero of this story. Hero, really, is too strong a word for Christian. Maybe I should have said ‘antihero,’ in the Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment sense… that is to say he is a modern hero. He shows no proof of bravery, no proof of heroism at all, much the opposite in fact: neuroticism, division, and guilt. Blank stares, irritability, mumbling, almost obsessive hand ringing, lack of eye contact, the active listening of someone mentally preoccupied, these are his symptoms. In the desert monastery he now calls home, Christian struggles with salvation and sanity, the details of which being private via an old and venerable tradition: the confidentiality of the confession. The modern hero is heroic not by virtue of victory on the field of battle, not from the vanquishing of a dragon or a despot. The battle is an internal struggle with one’s own divided self, with one’s own internal contradictions. Individuation. The modern hero conquers himself. Not unlike the hero’s of old the modern hero is chosen. Chosen not by the stars, not by the King’s tests, chosen rather by the simple virtue of being, of being at a certain place at a certain time, chosen by history, much like it was chosen that the young boy Jesus be raised a carpenter. “The myth is the dream of the people, and the dream is the myth of the individual,” Joseph Campbell, the famous comparative mythologist is often quoted as saying, and Christian’s nightmare was of mythic proportion indeed. If we could see inside his bad dreams, we would find ourselves in a hellishly alien landscape: fire and ice, darkness, chaos, a dungeon horrible on all sides round, a legion of fallen angels laying confounded upon a burning lake, and then … the voice. It starts as though a whisper but grows and grows and grows, until it drowns out all other voices, and always the same terrible words of malice are uttered: ‘Fall’n Cherub, to be weak is miserable Doing or Suffering: but of this be sure, To do aught good will never be our task, But ever to do ill our soul delight… Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven.’ At the point in the dream Christian usually awakens in a sweat, seeks the solace of his faith and rituals, or sometimes finds comfort in the reassuring words of the Father Confessor, a monk with a background in psychology. “This dream, is how you express your guilt”, the Father Confessor would quip; no doubt the Father Confessor had also read Freud in addition to his biblical studies. ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’, by Sigmund Freud is required reading for anyone with a serious interest in dream theory. Also, anyone having studied Freud’s theory of dreams is also eventually introduced to the dream theory of Freud’s renegade and outcast disciple C.G. Jung. Despite the fact that the latter’s theory of dreaming has a greater emphasis on spiritual matters the old monk was hesitant to ascribe too much legitimacy to Jung. “Its new age,” he would say, “Jung’s concept of the deification of the self is very close to heresy.” Funny, the old monk was more willing to accept the views of an old Jewish atheist rather than a genuine son of the reformation. Jung’s views on Catholicism are fairly complementary even, and his comments on Protestantism rather harsh. Psychological squabbles aside, both Freud and Jung would probably agree with the Father Confessor. Christian’s bad dreams were an expression of guilt. But even if that interpretation was correct, the nightmares had not ceased; in fact they had become all the more persistent, and if Christian failed to awaken, the nightmare would continue with a strange scene: “A small devil carrying a vial in both hands, looking back and forth with apprehension it seems, scurrying across the lake of fire, unnoticed by the many Legions of Hell.” Even the Father Confessor admitted with humility he wasn’t sure what that part of the dream meant, and would steer Christian away from the whole topic altogether it seemed. “I’m not Joseph! My Son! …What is important, is that you ask Him for forgiveness, and pray.”