Letter from an expert devil to an apprentice tempter: Part 2
By His Infernal Highness Arcibaldo | 11 September 2024
Extract from His Infernal Highness Arcibaldo: letters from an expert devil to an apprentice tempter by Fr Serafino Lanzetta (Calx Mariae Publishing, 2024).
Part 1 of this extract appeared in last week’s Digest.
We will begin by saying that their Jesus at the time of His death and burial, descended, with His soul, into inferno (no, your eyes have not deceived you: not into inferi — that is, to the limbo of the fathers, to free the righteous awaiting redemption), and by an act of pure mercy, liberated the damned souls. He was the only one to be damned because, in a vicarious way, He took upon himself the damnation of others, of all the reprobate. He made Himself sin to the end, to the point of suffering the punishments of eternal condemnation for others. A vicarious satisfaction turned upside down. Their Jesus, therefore, with his descent into inferno, not only did not produce a negative effect on the hell of the damned, confounding them even more, but rather liberated them, just as he had done for the righteous. This is how mercy works. If God is good, why should He not also deliver the damned? If He did not free them, He would not really be omnipotent. If then He is omnipotent and He wants to free them but He does not, He would be lacking in goodness. What say you to this bit of diabo-logical reasoning? Not too bad, eh? Close your eyes for a moment, immerse yourself in mercy and — wham, whoosh, kapow — you’re saved!
From here, then, the discourse can move slowly to the universal salvific will of God. How could we reconcile the fact that God wants all men to be saved (cf. 1 Tm 2:4) with the damnation of one single man? Wouldn’t that be a contradiction in God’s will? They might object that man, however, is free and that God does not force anyone to accept His salvation. And you will answer them like this (with homiletics):
“What man would freely refuse a love that has no end and instead procure for himself the evil of eternal damnation? Only a damned fool.”
Then you will add:
“You men are no fools, so you will certainly not refuse this love. Be open to it and then don’t worry if you close your hearts.”
We will impose on them the love of choice without freedom. In this way we will negate love, but in a subtle way; that is, we will presuppose that their freedom is perfect and not tainted by the evil of sin (that too must disappear in the newspeak of ecclesiastical indoctrination). We will render them all immaculate and preordained to the good and thus we will rid ourselves once and for all of that Woman who claims to be unique and immaculate. Hell exists, though unseen, and woe betide if it did not, for otherwise how would we identify the gratuitous evil committed on earth? At most it will be inhabited by the bad angels — and if you really must insist, by the most heinous criminals and cruellest tyrants in history, while conserving a freedom of opinion regarding this latter proposition. In spite of their Gospel, hell will no longer be a condition and an abode for “workers of iniquity”, incapable of liberating themselves from the evil of sin that inhabits them because they are totally entangled in it. Like a truly artful magic trick (of which we are the experts), it will slowly but surely disappear, to reappear only from time to time, here and there, with some superficial fervour. But to which very few will henceforth be susceptible.
However, we must not neglect the worst of them. If your patients are really hardened saints stubborn in their righteousness, or arrogant traditionalists, there is another, newer doctrine which will do the trick. Pay close attention so as to follow me in more subtle reasoning, worthy of our profound Master, and we will have totally buried the idea of eternal damnation. Hell must not be negated, as we have already stated. Their Jesus speaks of it quite a few times. In fact, He refers to it more than eighteen times in the Gospels. Hell exists; our Enemy forbid we deny it. How could we deny it, who live there from dawn to dusk? But by insisting on the fact that it exists, we can also subvert its presence and transform it into its absence. We will say that hell must exist for the Cross and the Redemption to have meaning. Salvation without hell would be like being saved from death without there being any danger of dying in the first place. The danger is there, but it remains a mere risk, nothing more. A risk not worth taking.
The most tangible image we can offer of this narrow escape is the example of a friend of ours, Judas Iscariot. Judas betrayed Jesus, but in his betrayal there was rather the rejection of an erroneous idea of Jesus, of a distorted idea of God. Judas sold the God of law and rigourist legalism for thirty pieces of silver, as the true God was unknown before the Son revealed Him — because God is love and His love is revealed only and definitively on the Cross. Without the Cross of Jesus, Judas did not know what he was doing. Did Jesus not in fact forgive from the Cross those who knew not what they were doing? (cf. Lk 22:34) Judas — the symbol of each and every man, of the evil and selfishness that is in everyone — had stolen the mystery of divine sonship, the gifts of God. He thought he had pocketed God, as the worldly-wise Pharisaical Christians were wont to do, in order to know perfectly how divine things work. Judas is the sin of the world, the pride of man. But Jesus liberates him through His love for him, through His death on the Cross, so that Judas, like every other man, would finally experience a God who is love and not a legalistic imposition or a mere obedience to precepts. Judas’ sign of salvation — be attentive, this is a masterstroke that I myself learned to my surprise from one of their sacred swindlers, who in reality is our sincere collaborator — was that “morsel” that Jesus dipped into his death and gave him before he went out of the upper room to betray Him (cf. Jn 13:26). Since that morsel is presumed to be the Eucharist, the Bread that makes us aware of the mystery of God, then, with good reason, that Bread “instructed” (cf. Jn 6:45 with reference to Is 54:13) Judas in advance about the true identity of Jesus, the God of love, the Bread of life, the God who saves us through the death of the Son. So Judas was saved, no doubt about it. Hell is not for mortals, not even for that man of whom, until recently, it was thought it would have been better “had he never been born” (Mt 26:24). Hell exists, of course, but we have already put it to the test and overcome it. It is the absence of God who is love but who triumphs through the weakness of the Son. Judas represents each and every one of us. So now, we have love and no longer any hell. Abandoned and alone, it has been reduced to ashes.
A clever discourse, convoluted and profound, in support of a recent exegetical finding, namely that Judas was saved, and is therefore no longer the “son of perdition (Jn 17:12) — a speech that, to our amazement, with slight variations, some senior officials of the Church have been giving for some time now (we have excellent allies within the Church hierarchy, intent on changing the content of the faith without anyone noticing it — an excellent stratagem worthy of his Sublime Profundity). In this way, it was possible to cloud that other passage of John’s Gospel, when Judas took the morsel and left the upper room: “it was night” (Jn 13:30). It was the empire of our night that enveloped him and pushed him to hang himself, his heart being deprived of divine enlightenment. In the night, man gropes in the dark.
Judas is indeed a very interesting figure, to be studied with greater attention in order to convey our message all the better. But I wonder if it is worth presenting Judas with all these mental acrobatics. What I fear is that our excessive reliance on this figure may attract suspicion. After all, this idea of a Judas as a symbol of evil present in all men may come to be seen as simply a rehashing of the theses of the apocryphal (and Gnostic) gospel of Judas, dating back to the beginning of the fourth century and found in a Coptic manuscript in Egypt.
The main idea of that Gnostic text is that, if Jesus is the Saviour of humanity, it is thanks to the betrayal of Judas. If Jesus is who He is, He owes it to Judas. So who is more important, Jesus or Judas? Of course it is Judas, our ally in rendering the mystery of Jesus harmless and laughable. His love becomes yet another way to wipe out the evil in the world with a sponge. The betrayal of one of the twelve simply becomes the opportunity for Jesus to become Himself and to reveal Himself to the world as an ambulance driver who rescues men from the evils of the world. Jesus heals Judas, and so the idea that Judas wanted to overcome a God he had pocketed, to exchange his faith in the law and in a divine order for a faith in a God who heals all wounds and rights all wrongs, has returned with a vengeance and is now being imposed on believers. The beauty of this discourse is that, in this case, Jesus is not the Saviour, is not God, but merely becomes so little by little thanks to mortal men. He is only the rescuer from human miseries, someone they can cry out to when they are in need of help. And what then? Well, then, they can just as well do without him.
So, my dear Polliodoro, I believe that by now, thanks to the help of our colleagues within their ranks, we have really dealt a heavy blow to Christianity and to their Jesus. In this way, evil is not redeemed, it remains as it is. Heaven, hell, and purgatory are all one and the same, and therefore they are no more. Now I leave you to reflect upon this, and I recommend you to be vigilant so that Judas does not play some nasty trick on us.
See you soon, your very affectionate mentor,
Arcibaldo
His Infernal Highness Arcibaldo: letters from an expert devil to an apprentice tempter by Fr Serafino Lanzetta is available to buy from Calx Mariae Publishing.