Hence the devil remained outside the Trinity as the “ape of God” and in opposition to it. Medieval representations of the triune God as having three heads are based on the three-headedness of Satan, as we find it, for instance, in Dante. This would point to an infernal Antitrinity, a true “umbra trinitatis” analogous to the Antichrist. The devil is, undoubtedly, an awkward figure: he is the “odd man out” in the Christian cosmos. That is why people would like to minimize his importance by euphemistic ridicule or by ignoring his existence altogether; or, better still, to lay the blame for him at man's door. This is in fact done by the very people who would protest mightily if sinful man should credit himself, equally, with the origin of all good

A glance at the Scriptures, however, is enough to show us the importance of the devil in the divine drama of redemption. If the power of the Evil One had been as feeble as certain persons would wish it to appear, either the world would not have needed God himself to come down to it or it would have lain within the power of man to set the world to rights, which has certainly not happened so far

REAL DEVIL FIRST APPEARS

If we disregard the specifically Persian system of dualism, it appears that no real devil is to be found anywhere in the early period of man's spiritual development. In the Old Testament, he is vaguely foreshadowed in the figure of Satan. But the real devil first appears as the adversary of Christ, and with him we gaze for the first time into the luminous realm of divinity on the one hand and into the abyss of hell on the other. The devil is autonomous; he cannot be brought under God's rule, for if he could he would not have the power to be the adversary of Christ, but would only be God's instrument. Once the indefinable One unfolds into two, it becomes something definite: the man Jesus, the Son and Logos. This statement is possible only by virtue of something else that is not Jesus, not Son or Logos. The act of love embodied in the Son is counterbalanced by Lucifer's denial

Inasmuch as the devil was an angel created by God and “fell like lightning from heaven,” he too is a divine “procession” that became Lord of this world. It is significant that the Gnostics thought of him sometimes as the imperfect demiurge and sometimes as the Saturnine archon, Ialdabaoth. Pictorial representations of this archon correspond in every detail with those of a diabolical demon. He symbolized the power of darkness from which Christ came to rescue humanity. The archons issued from the womb of the unfathomable abyss, i.e., from the same source that produced the Gnostic Christ

THE ORIGIN OF ALL EVIL

In the diagram below, Christ and the devil appear as equal and opposite, thus conforming to the idea of the “adversary.” This opposition means conflict to the last, and it is the task of humanity to endure this conflict until the time or turning-point is reached where good and evil begin to relativize themselves, to doubt themselves, and the cry is raised for a morality “beyond good and evil.” In the age of Christianity and in the domain of trinitarian thinking such an idea is simply out of the question, because the conflict is too violent for evil to be assigned any other logical relation to the Trinity than that of an absolute opposite:

Son

Devil

In an emotional opposition, i.e., in a conflict situation, thesis and antithesis cannot be viewed together at the same time. This only becomes possible with cooler assessment of the relative value of good and the relative non-value of evil. Then it can no longer be doubted, either, that a common life unites not only the Father and the “light” son, but the Father and his dark emanation. The unspeakable conflict posited by duality resolves itself in a fourth principle, which restores the unity of the first in its full development. The rhythm is built up in three steps, but the resultant symbol is a quaternity ( CW11: par. 258 )

The dual aspect of the Father is by no means unknown to religious speculation. This is proved by the allegory of the monoceros, or unicorn, who symbolizes Yahweh's angry moodiness. Like this irritable beast, he reduced the world to chaos and could only be moved to love in the lap of a pure virgin. Luther was familiar with a deus absconditus. Murder, sudden death, war, sickness, crime, and every kind of abomination fall in with the unity of God

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