The Devil and the Deep Blue Fear

It is a curious thing that in all the endless books written about the devil, few have noticed his most obvious resemblance: that he is rather precisely like a shark. Not, you understand, in the simple sense of being dangerous, which everybody knows and any child could tell you about either creature, but in the far more instructive sense of how he hunts. This seemingly odd comparison becomes startlingly clear when we examine how both these predators are summoned by the scent of their prey's fear.

The thing that is most remarkable about sharks, as any sailor will tell you, is not that they bite—most things with teeth do that—but that they can smell a single drop of blood in an impossible quantity of seawater. More remarkable still is how this tiny taste drives them into what men who study such things call a "feeding frenzy." The devil, that old swimmer in the cosmic seas, has precisely this same talent for detecting fear, and precisely this same response to its scent.

Here we stumble upon a most extraordinary paradox: that fear, which we think protects us from the devil, actually attracts him. It is rather like a man who, being afraid of sharks, decides to cut himself before entering the water. The very thing he does to prove his cautiousness proves his doom. We do exactly this spiritual self-wounding every time we let fear rule our hearts; we are, in the most literal sense, chumming the waters of our own souls.

But someone will object—as someone always does when any truth becomes too true—that fear is natural and even necessary. They will say, with that peculiar sort of logic that sounds reasonable until you examine it, that we must be afraid because there are things to be afraid of. This is rather like saying we must be wet because there is water, or cold because there is winter. It mistakes the existence of a thing for the necessity of surrendering to it.

The Christian position on fear is far more subtle and far more practical. It suggests not that there are no sharks in the spiritual seas—there certainly are—but that fear is precisely the wrong response to them. Christ did not say "Be not afraid" because there was nothing to fear; He said it because fear is the thing that makes us most vulnerable to the thing we fear. When Peter walked on water, he sank not when he encountered the waves, but when he became afraid of them.

Here we arrive at a truth so practical it appears mystical: the devil, like a shark, does not merely attack what he fears; he fears what he cannot attack. A soul filled with faith, hope, and charity presents to him what the steel cage presents to the shark—a meal he can see but cannot consume. The fearful soul, by contrast, is rather like a wounded fish leaving a trail of blood through dark water.

This explains, perhaps, why the saints were so remarkably unmolested by the devil in their later years. It was not that he had given up the hunt, but that they had become inedible to him. They had developed what we might call a spiritual exoskeleton of faith. The devil, circling these souls shining with holy joy, found no taste of that sweet fear he craves. One imagines him rather like a shark bumping hopefully against a submarine, looking for a way in and finding none.

The practical application of this truth is both simple and revolutionary. To defend against the devil, we must not become more fearful but less so. Every act of trust in God is like washing away the scent of blood from the water; every moment of faith is like climbing into a spiritual diving cage. When we replace fear with faith, we do not merely comfort ourselves—we actively frustrate our enemy.

This is why the Church, in her curious wisdom, has always insisted that the proper response to the devil is not fear but contempt. Not because he is not dangerous—he certainly is—but because fear is his native element, and to fight him there is to fight him where he is strongest. It is rather like trying to outswim a shark. The devil, like any predator, prefers to hunt on his own territory.

But Christ has given us dominion over a different element altogether. We are creatures of the light, meant to walk in faith above the waters where these predators prowl. When we remember this—really remember it, in our bones and blood—we find that fear dissipates not because the sharks have gone away, but because we have stepped out of their domain entirely.

The most perfect picture of this truth can be found in the old story of Christ sleeping in the storm. The disciples, professional fishermen who knew exactly how dangerous the sea could be, were terrified. But Christ slept, not because He did not know about the danger, but because He knew something more important about it. He knew that neither storms nor sharks nor devils can touch a soul that rests in God.

And so we arrive at this splendid conclusion: that the way to avoid the devil is not to fear him more but to fear him less. Every act of trust in God is like rising up out of those dark waters where fear draws predators like blood in the sea. In this way, the most fearless soul is also the most safe, not because it is the most powerful, but because it is the hardest to find.

For the devil, that great shark in the spiritual seas, hunts not by sight but by the scent of fear. And a soul that refuses to be afraid becomes, to him, like a ghost ship on those waters—something he knows must be there, but cannot seem to find. It is the final defeat of the predator: that his prey should simply step into another element entirely, leaving him to circle endlessly in waters grown empty of fear.

 

-The Seeker's Quill

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