As a Luciferian from birth, I listened with interest when word of John Boehner’s recent characterization of the Republican candidate Ted Cruz as “Lucifer in the flesh” got out. Apparently, there’s no worse insult. The Internet exploded after Boehner made his comment, accompanied by the apparently tamer “miserable son of a bitch,” at an interview at Stanford University. Satanists were consulted and properly expressed their horror at being compared with Ted Cruz; the word incarnate, rare among political pundits, was brought out from the closet and dusted off.
Lucifer in the flesh grabs our attention, not just because a former Speaker of the House is calling a sitting Senator a really bad man, but also because both the name and the qualifier have biblical connotations. Other words by which Lucifer is known — Satan and the devil — aren’t exactly synonyms. Satan is “the enemy,” the one who is opposed. It’s that meaning of the word that the founders of the Satanic Temple adopted as “a symbol of man’s inherent nature, representative of the eternal rebel.” It’s Satan, presumably, with whom we wrestle in the wilderness. The devil (or Devil, if you insist) is diabolical, which is to say he’s a slanderer, a false god.
Strictly speaking, Lucifer is an angel. You can trace his origins to the planet Venus, who brings the light in the evening and then falls from the sky. He’s got a story, which is more than can be said for Satan or the devil, and there are those who think the version of the story in which he metamorphoses from angel to devil misrepresents him. What interests me about Boehner’s turn of phrase is that Lucifer comes closest to already having a shape, because poets like Milton gave him one:
… Lucifer from Heaven
(So call him, brighter once amidst the host
Of angels, than that star the stars among,)
Fell with his flaming legions through the deep
Into his place. …
It’s easier to stick horns onto Ted Cruz’s worried forehead when we have Lucifer, rather than the more symbolic Satan or Devil, to contemplate. So what need have we of “in the flesh”? News media quickly translated the phrase to “the living incarnate of Satan.” But not only do most people not know the exact correlation between incarnate (literally, “into” “flesh” or “meat”), most of us don’t detect the doctrinal connotations of the word flesh as it’s used certainly in Boehner’s Roman Catholicism and probably in the biblical focus of Cruz’s Baptism. As Monsignor Charles Pope of the Washington Archdiocese describes it,
Only very rarely does the biblical phrase “the flesh” (ἡ σὰρξ (he sarx), in Greek) refer only to the physical body. … It refers to that part of us that is alienated from God. … The Protestants often call the flesh our “sin nature” which is not a bad term in summarizing what the flesh is. In Catholic tradition the flesh is where concupiscence sets up shop.
Ah. Concupiscence. Our fleshly nature. Visions of Ted Cruz’s college roommate and his innuendos float in the mind. In case we’re in any doubt, the monsignor usefully provides us with biblical texts, including this bit from Galatians:
The acts of the flesh are obvious: sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery; idolatry and witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions and envy; drunkenness, orgies, and the like. I warn you, as I did before, that those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God.
Ouch. Not perhaps, for us secular folk, but certainly for deeply religious Christians like Monsignor Pope, “Lucifer in the flesh” is not simply a devilish fellow visible to our eyes, but that selfish, vainglorious jerk among God’s chosen as he goes about his immature, destructive, and icky sexual business.
No wonder, in his next sentence, that Boehner called Cruz “miserable.” He just reduced him to misery. Miserere ei.