The Vision Rejected by the Builders

It’s a risk that God takes that he gives freedom to both angels and men. The angels too are created with free will, and they choose or reject the will of God for them at the moment they are created. Satan is traditionally understood to have rejected God.

Some theologians and the Fathers of the Church have taught that the fall of Satan was the consequence of his having rejected the Beatific Vision. This differs from the more popularly held idea that Satan turned away from a God that he saw directly. It is rather the proposal that he rejected the privilege of seeing God in the first place.

These same teachers hold that Satan and the evil spirits who fell with him rejected the Beatific Vision because to see God is to be beholden to Him, whereas these angels preferred rather the authority of their own licentiousness.

The fall of man would follow shortly after, because the human person (the relationship between man and woman) is a reflection of the Beatific Vision, and Satan so resents himself for having rejected the vision of God that he hates the image of God in man. He therefore does everything in his power to distort the image of God in the human being, most effectively these days by alienating man and woman from one another.

Satan is most especially pained by the image of God reflected perfectly in the humanity of Jesus and Mary. How tremendous a victory then is Christ crucified with the Blessed Mother standing beside Him as His perfect helpmate - the New Adam and the New Eve - and from them both, the Church. +