The Medieval Proverb was “The Devil is an Ass”

Indeed, they were fond of portraying him with an ass’ ears, as Michaelangelo does in his “Last Judgment” (a painting that does double duty mocking both the devil and a meddlesome priest who kept pestering Michaelangelo with helpful art advice and who got his face immortalized on said demon for his troubles):

The conviction of Christendom for centuries was that Satan was the primordial clever fool inasmuch as he was jiu jitsued by divine grace into throwing all his malignant power and ingenuity into destroying himself by laboring to murder Jesus on the Cross–only to have that victory made into Satan’s own ruinous defeat in the Resurrection that not only raised the Son of God from the dead, but saved the whole Satan-enslaved human race along with Him. It remains, in Christian understanding, the pattern of reality because by cutting creatures off from the source of all Wisdom, sinful creatures inevitably make themselves fools, whether they be men or angels.

Given that sin makes you stupid and grave sin makes you gravely stupid, I think about this passage a lot when I ponder why, of all the people on planet Earth for Trump to trust, he picks Vladimir Putin. It’s from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle and is one of the finest portraits of the mystery of stupid evil ever written in its darkly funny, ironic, and deeply true analysis of Stalin:

But he could not trust even this understandable Abakumov [minister of state security]. Mistrust was Iosif Djugashvili’s determining trait. Mistrust was his world view.

He had not trusted his mother. And he had not trusted God before whom he had bowed his head to the floor for eleven years in his youth. Later he did not trust his own fellow Party members, especially those who spoke well. He did not trust his fellow exiles. He did not trust peasants to sow grain and reap harvests unless they were coerced and their work was regularly checked on. He did not trust workers to work unless production norms were set for them. He did not trust members of the intelligentsia not to commit sabotage. He did not trust soldiers and generals without the threat of penalty regiments in their rear. He did not trust his intimates. He did not trust his wives and mistresses. He did not trust his children. And he always turned out to be right.

He had trusted one person, one only, in a life filled with mistrust, a person as decisive in friendship as in enmity. Alone among Stalin’s enemies, while the whole world watched, he had turned around and offered Stalin his friendship.

And Stalin trusted him.

That man was Adolf Hitler…

We’ll continue pondering the weird psychology of evil tomorrow. Meanwhile, the main thing to do about it is not to waste time trying to understand evil (hint: you can’t, because it is fundamentally irrational since Satan’s defiant cry in PARADISE LOST, “Evil be thou my good!” includes the idiotic proposition “Nonsense be thou my sense!”). Rather, the key is to reject evil, preferably with a laugh inspired, not by your superiority to the devil, but by Christ’s superiority to the devil. Satan is a fool compared to Christ because Christ is the power and wisdom of God who humbled himself. Compared to us in the absence of grace, Satan is immeasurably clever and we always fall for his tricks in our pride. That’s because predators don’t have to be the smartest creature in the universe. They just have to be smarter than their prey. Satan is way smarter than us apart from grace. But, under grace, we can by grace laugh at him and reject him.

He hates that, because, as St. Thomas More said, “The devil, the proud spirit, cannot endure to be mocked.”