Of The Enemy

I think many people sense the great confrontation happening in the world. Excerpt of Anthony Esolen's Know The Enemy

“Such phenomena as joy, splendor, power, happiness, fortune, and strength magically attract the man of ressentiment,” says Scheler. Like Milton’s Satan, spying upon the naked couple in Eden, he has to look even while he wants to avert his eyes, because he still longs to possess those good things and yet he knows he cannot. The true apostate does not simply turn from one belief to another, but “is motivated by the struggle against the old belief and lives only for its negation.” No “improvement” will satisfy him. The apostate nun may say she wants only that women might serve as priests. Give her that, and watch the enmity grow. The person whose values have been deformed by ressentiment “does not want to cure the evil: the evil is merely a pretext for the criticism.”

If you let Satan dwell in Eden rather than in Hell, that won’t satisfy; he wants to destroy it, because he cannot share its goodness. “In Heaven much worse would be my lot,” says Satan. He lives only for the enmity; if God should forget about him, he would find it unendurable. If you allow people who cannot share a great good to pretend that their simulacrum of it is also good, you will not satisfy; they know it’s a sham, and as long as there are ordinary and healthy people around, the bare nerve will fire.