On the Spirit That Denies
The Antagonist of Creation
This week brought with it the reminder (thanks to this music video, also below) of the ancient enemy of creativity that lives in each of us. We know it by its tactics of self-sabotage and self-doubt whenever we pursue any creative calling. It is a dark energy field of anti-matter. Antagonist of both Creator and creation, it has a long history of opposing the proliferation of Light and Being.
It’s a voice that does not grow silent as we approach our purpose, but rather gets louder the closer we come. The strength of its repellant grows stronger as we progress on the path of our creative pursuits and work to bring forth what is within us.
It’s the Inner Critic inside me that always finds a way to crawl out of its grave no matter how many times I succeed in burying it. The one I find myself wrestling with daily as I work to finish editing my second book. Regardless of how successful the day before might have been, each dawn brings a fresh set of whispers.
“Your work is pointless and your words are trash.”
“Save yourself the shame and set it aside.”
“Spare yourself the disappointment and discard the drafts while you still have the chance.”
“Who do you think you are to be writing on such things? How about you seal your lips shut up until you’re qualified.”
“Get over yourself. Nobody wants to hear you talk about what you struggle with.”
Whenever the waves of those whispers hit and threaten to overwhelm me, it always helps me to define the force I’m up against and remember I am not alone in fighting it. All creators in all times have found themselves up against this antagonist. And many of my favorite writers went to great lengths to define it in hopes that, by doing so, we might learn how to oppose it.
We start with an ally many are familiar with, Steven Pressfield, who calls the opposition Resistance, a “repelling force…[whose] aim is to shove us away, distract us, prevent us from doing our work.”1 But long before him, Goethe gave it expression in Faust, making the infamous demon Mephistopheles its mouthpiece:
I am the spirit that denies.
And rightly so, for all that comes to be
Deserves to perish wretchedly;
‘Twere better nothing would begin.2
This nature of negation is a trait shared by Dostoevsky’s Devilish “gentlemen” in The Brothers Karamazov, who at one point tells Ivan: “By some pre-temporal assignment, which I have never been able to figure out, I am appointed ‘to negate'…”3 Even older than both of these illustrations is Milton’s Lucifer in Paradise Lost, who announces the stated purpose of all fallen angels as opposing creation:
To lay waste [God’s] whole Creation, or possess
All as our own, and drive as we were driven,
the puny habitants, or if not drive,
Seduce them to our party, that their God
May prove their foe, and with repenting hand
Abolish his own works.4
In these literary classics, we learn something of the negative force that lives in each of us. It is the spirit that negates and denies. The anti-Word that opposes both Creator and creation and wants nothing more than to see us fall silent—to stop participating in the great play and quit contributing to the grand story. It is the anti-Creator that wants to reverse the effects of that first spell which set it all in motion: “Let there be light.”
As the senior demon Screwtape tells his apprentice Wormwood in C.S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters:
We want to suck in, [God] wants to give out. We are empty and would be filled; He is full and flows over. Our war aim is a world in which Our Father Below has drawn all other beings into himself; the Enemy wants a world full of beings united to Him but still distinct.5
Thus the nature of this spirit takes shape, with that infamous spiritual villain we know as Satan serving as a convenient container for some otherwise amorphous energy that lives (even if not in an entity outside us) in us and opposes our creative efforts. Regardless of whether he exists exclusively inside us or also has a home outside us, he gives form to a force which we must all contend with in actuality. He gives shape to the eternal force that prefers we suffocate on the unsaid words it wants us to swallow.
And that which opposes him—this force that denies and negates—becomes an agent of the good, taking orders only from the light. The hero, then, the one who continues to show up and work to bring forth what wants to come out, knowing each day will be a battle that leaves him battered and bruised. But knowing, in the end, that it is war worth fighting:
We were put here on earth to act as agents of the Infinite, to bring into existence that which is not yet, but which will be, through us. Every breath we take, every heartbeat, every evolution of every cell comes from God and is sustained by God every second, just as every creation, invention, every bar of music or line of verse, every thought, vision, fantasy, every dumb-ass flop and stroke of genius comes from that infinite intelligence that created us and the universe in all its dimensions, out of the Void, the field of the infinite potential, primal chaos, the Muse. To acknowledge that reality, to efface all ego, to let the work come through us and give it back freely to its source, that, in my opinion, is as true to reality as it gets.6
That, in my opinion, is the reason we were put on this planet. Children of the Creator called to create. History’s latest outgrowth of the Word tasked with participating in the continued proliferation of the Logos. Songs on the record of Time. Verses in eternity’s poem.
Illuminating the universe, and opposing that which unwills, one creative act of beauty at a time.
—
P.S. The music video “Hi Ren” (below) randomly appeared in my YouTube queue earlier this week and watching it moved me to tears. In it, the artist Ren sings a dialogue between the darkness of doubt and the light of hope inside him. It highlights an inner civil war that I believe many artists (including myself) struggle with more than they admit or talk about. Fondly do I hope and fervently do I pray that you might take the time to watch it. As for me, I’ll be returning to it often whenever I feel alone in the fight (Warning: It does contain explicit lyrics).
At the 4:25 mark, the voice of the inner demon takes over and delivers the following verse:
I was created at the dawn of creation
I am temptation
I am the snake in Eden
I am the reason for treason
Beheading all kings, I am sin with no rhyme or reason
Sun of the morning, Lucifer, Antichrist
Father of lies, Mephistopheles
Truth in a blender, deceitful pretender
The banished avenger, the righteous surrender
When standing in front of my solar eclipse
My name, it is stitched to your lips, so you see
I won't bow to the will of a mortal, feeble and normal
You wanna kill me? I'm eternal, immortal
I live in every decision that catalyzed chaos
That causes division
I live inside death, the beginning of ends
I am you, you are me, I am you, Ren!
For Hope’s response and the spoken outro that inspired my tears, you’ll have to watch the video.
Steven Pressfield, War of Art, p. 7.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, Faust, Part I, lines 1338 - 1344.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, Chapter 9, p. 681.
John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book II, lines 365 - 370.
C.S. Lewis, Screwtape Letters, p. 39.
Steven Pressfield, War of Art, p. 162.