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Hello metmom! Thank you oh so very much for sharing these insights re: The Enemy. I will not dignify him by naming him here. Suffice it to say he is the Enemy of God and Man, from the beginning. He boasts that his greatest temptation of man, his greatest achievement, has forever been to convince man to believe that he, man's implacable Enemy, the Evil One, does not exist. In our post-modern age, he appears to have enjoyed much success in this regard. But that belief is absolutely fatal to man....

I recently read a wonderful essay by Whittaker Chambers, entitled "The Devil" (1948), which appeared in Chamber's astounding book, The Ghosts on the Roof. It is comparable in many ways to C. S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters. I'd like to share some excerpts with you and your readers here:

"The Devil," said Satan, "Likes to have it both ways. And how the little monsters [we human beings] snapped at the bait! In less than a century I had undone the work of more than a thousand years and knocked the studs from under the religious culture of Europe. Why? Because Evolution explained the universe without Him. They wanted to get rid of Him. Then I knew the secret longing of their nasty hearts. Then I knew I had them.
"The rest followed as a matter of course: the growth of factories to supply the huge demand for material goods which were the only values secular man could really feel; the growth of cities and slums, the corruption by the cities of the countryside which in other times had been the reservoir from which exhausted cultures replenished their faith and forces; the inhuman industrial oppression of men, women and children whose dependence found expression in the inhuman horrors of communism, socialism and anarchism; the debasement of all standards of conduct and taste as God was forgotten and with Him the only absolute standard; finally, the world wars with millions of men dying by all the horrors conceived by secular genius. Consider for a moment the miracle of the flame-thrower; or the spectacle of a government physically destroying millions of people in whose interests it was created to govern. Do you doubt my triumph when you stop to think that the mind of man conceived the concentration camp? Then came the atomic bomb — my ultimate perversion of the highest powers of the human brain and scientific good for the purpose of total destruction."

Here's the part I really love:

"Poor Devil," said the pessimist.
"Poor Devil?" said Satan, plainly taken aback.
"Doomed by the dialective of creation continually to make new good out of old evil. For God, being perfect, would be incapable of further creation were it not for you who, by disturbing the equipoise of His perfection, restore to Him the necessity of new creation. In our time Arnold Toynbee has perhaps best formulated this great concept in his Study of History: In the language of Mythology, when one of God's creatures is temped by the Devil, God Himself is thereby given the opportunity to re-create the World. By the stroke of the Adversary's trident, all the foundations of the great deep are broken up. The. Devil's intervention has accomplished the transition from Yin [perfect stillness] to Yang [dynamic creative activity], from static to dynamic, for which God has been yearning ever since the moment when His Yin-state became complete, but which it was impossible for God to accomplish by Himself, out of His own Perfection." [i.e., What is perfect is incapable of improvement, even by the Perfect Being — arguably, this is the only limit on God.]
A shade of slightly malevolent annoyance crossed the Devil's face. "I have been watching the man Toynbee and his followers for some time.... [A]nd, as a trained theologian, I should like to challenge his proposition with a question: May not there be an end even to dialectics? What you and your dialectical friends may tend to overlook is the fact that I have brought man to the point of intellectual pride where self-extermination lies within his power. There is not only the bomb.... There are the much less discussed delights of bacteriological annihilation. And it is only a question of time until whole populations can be driven ultrasonically insane in time of war by sound which their ears cannot hear but their nerves cannot bear. It would be an amusing paradox if the babble of the cosmic argument were ended once and for all by an ultrasonic silence...."
The. Devil's voice grew less harsh, and he dropped his hand to his side in a gesture of weariness. "Goodness," he said, "is a perpetual benediction, the seed within the minute husk which is the promise of summer, the unmultiplied image of the harvest. Not to know goodness is not to understand creation. In no way is my mark more clearly felt on the modern world than in the death of the creative imagination.
"And yet it is at this very point that man, the monstrous midget, still has the advantage on the Devil: he suffers. For at the heart of all human suffering is the anguish of the chance that the creative seed of goodness, that little flash of inward light, however brief, may not perpetuate itself, that a man can leave this life, this light, without communicating that one cell of himself which is real. [This} is the seal of his divine commitment — this suffering which I cannot feel because of that light which in me is dark. Intellectually I can understand it since, by my origin, I share the intellect of angels. But I cannot feel it or I would not be the Devil. That is the source of my frustration and root of my rage against the breed. That is why I shall never cease working to entangle man in evil until the world becomes one universal graveyard whose lifeless peace is broken only by my shriek of triumph as I plunge into a deeper pit than Hell. For only One knows better than I that should I succeed in making man destroy himself, I will destroy myself with him, having destroyed my function. It still lies with man to make the choice (after all, the filthy beetles have free will): a skeleton beside a broken wall, on a dead planet purged of all suffering because purged of all life; or Him, with all that entails. Personally...I have never felt my chances to be so good."

God bless you, dear metmom!