The Five Thrones of Inversion: A Genealogy of Demonic Abstractions

Introduction

In Christian spiritual understanding, demonic powers work to invert God’s created order, replacing personal, loving communion with impersonal systems of domination. The early Church identified certain demonic “thrones” or archetypes of evil that recur across history. This codex explores five such thrones of inversion – Leviathan, Behemoth, Moloch, Asmodeus, and Mammon – and how they interlock to corrupt power, law, sacrifice, love, and economy. Each section traces a genealogical arc: how a divine gift was twisted into an abstraction enthroned over persons. Across time, the same pattern emerges: the impersonal overshadowing the personal, the system replacing the soul. By examining these patterns in history – from theological errors to political ideologies – we uncover the demonic logic that underpins them. In contrast, the Orthodox Christian tradition consistently offers a counterpoint: true reality is personal and rooted in the Logos (Christ), and every abstraction or system must serve persons, not enslave them . The following sections delve into each throne of inversion and conclude by showing how these forces reinforce one another to form a comprehensive “horizon of inversion.”

Leviathan: The Genealogy of Inverted Sovereignty

Leviathan represents the demon of coercive power – sovereignty twisted from personal, self-giving authority into an impersonal system of domination. The term originates from Scripture’s sea-monster Leviathan, later used by Thomas Hobbes to symbolize the absolutist State. But the roots of Leviathan’s inversion run deeper than political theory. They begin in a subtle theological shift that occurred in Western Christianity and culminated in the modern nation-state. We trace this genealogy through four stages: the Filioque alteration of Trinitarian theology, the rise of papal monarchy, the Westphalian nation-state, and finally the secular administrative Leviathan of today. In each step, a personal, relational order was flattened into an abstract, centralized authority – a “tyranny without a tyrant,” rule by an impersonal system .

The Filioque: Fragmenting the Trinitarian Archetype

In the original Nicene Creed (AD 325, 381), the Holy Spirit is confessed as proceeding from the Father alone. God the Father is the arche (source) of the Son and Spirit, and the Trinity’s unity is maintained in the Father’s personal role as origin . This preserved an image of personal order: the one God is not an abstract divine essence, but the Father in relationship to Son and Spirit . However, in the Western Church a clause “Filioque” (“and the Son”) was added to the Creed around the 6th–11th centuries, asserting the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. This subtle theological change had profound implications. It effectively recast the divine communion in terms of a dual principle or a “double monarchy” of Father and Son over the Spirit . Eastern theologians like St. Photius critiqued this innovation, noting that it subverts the monarchy of the Father and depersonalizes the Trinity by introducing causality and necessity between Son and Spirit where originally there was free personal relation . In other words, Filioque takes what was a mystery of love – the Father freely begetting the Son and freely spirating the Spirit – and makes it a technical process or mechanism in God. God begins to be described in Western Scholasticism as a supreme essence containing relations, rather than an interpersonal communion where personhood is primary . This flattening of Trinitarian personhood into an abstract divine substance and its emanations is the first step in Leviathan’s genealogy. Ontologically, the principle of unity in God shifted from the Father (a person) to the divine nature or to a function (the joint spiration) – a depersonalization. As Metropolitan John Zizioulas observes, Western theology begins with the one divine essence, whereas the Eastern Fathers began with the person of the Father . Thus the Filioque planted the seed of an impersonal view of order: God Himself was subtly subordinated to a conceptual framework (a co-cause of Spirit) rather than personal freedom.

The danger here is not merely theoretical. By making the Spirit in effect an “effect” of Father and Son, Western theology inadvertently portrayed the Holy Trinity in terms of cause and effect rather than loving communion . The Spirit’s hypostatic independence was eclipsed. As a result, the Trinity could be imagined as a unitary divine will or substance (with Father and Son as co-source) that the persons fit into. This contrasts with the Orthodox understanding that the persons are irreducible and that the Father’s personal primacy guarantees the freedom and love at the heart of God . The Filioque’s inversion is subtle but foundational: it enthroned an abstraction (a conceptual “double-procession”) over the living personal Godhead. When God’s very being is modeled as a system of relations of cause (Father and Son) and caused (Spirit), the stage is set for thinking of authority and order as fundamentally impersonal. In short, the Filioque introduced a flattened ontology – a view of God that risks reducing the personal to a function of a higher principle (the shared essence or the Father-Son unit).

The Papal Monarchy: Ecclesial Power as Hierarchy over Communion

The theological centralization of the Trinity was mirrored in the Church by the rise of the papacy to absolute monarchy. In the first millennium, the Bishop of Rome held a primacy of honor among bishops, but authority was understood as conciliar and personal, shared by all bishops in communion. By the second millennium (especially after the schism of 1054 and in the High Middle Ages), the Roman papacy defined itself in increasingly monarchical terms. Medieval canonists and theologians (and eventually the First Vatican Council of 1870) asserted that the Pope possesses “universal and immediate jurisdiction” over the entire Church . This means the pope can unilaterally govern any part of the Church, bypassing local bishops – a claim of total, centralized authority unprecedented in the early Church. Vatican I proclaimed the Pope not just first among bishops but the literal Vicar of Christ with supreme power over every member of the Church . Bishops were effectively reduced to branch managers of the Pope’s curia, rather than true hypostases (persons) of authority in their own right.

This papal claim is a direct parallel to the Filioque’s effect. As the Father and Son were seen to jointly monopolize divine headship, so the Pope claimed sole headship over the Church. The collegial, familial model of the Church (with each bishop as icon of Christ to his flock) was eclipsed by a pyramidal system with one man at the top. The Pope became a single principle of unity and governance, rather than unity residing in the shared faith and sacramental communion of many pastors with Christ as the invisible head. One historical snapshot of this shift is Pope Boniface VIII’s bull Unam Sanctam (1302) which declared, “It is absolutely necessary for salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman Pontiff.” Centuries later, in 1870, Pastor Aeternus dogmatically defined papal primacy and infallibility in terms so absolute that the Pope was said to have “supreme, full, immediate, and universal power” over all the faithful, and even over the other bishops . This is authority as an abstraction – a jurisdiction detached from concrete communities. No longer was papal leadership understood primarily as a personal ministry to strengthen the brethren (Luke 22:32); it was now an office endowed with quasi-omnipotent legal power.

Orthodox critics like Vladimir Lossky and Georges Florovsky have argued that this development represents the pseudomorphosis of Christian ecclesiology – the Church’s organic, sacramental life overlaid with a quasi-imperial bureaucracy . The bishop of Rome went from being “first among equals” to an earthly absolute, foreshadowing the rise of absolute monarchs in secular realms. Indeed, the papacy of the High Middle Ages and Renaissance often functioned like a royal court, and popes claimed the right to depose kings and parcel out territories. The inversion here is the subordination of the Church (the Body of Christ) to an abstract principle of governance. Instead of authority flowing charismatically and personally (from Christ to each apostle and bishop, united in love), it was now concentrated in an office that treated the Church as its jurisdictional property. As the Filioque subordinated the Spirit to a structure, the Papacy subordinated the Church to a single human throne. The personal dimension of pastoral authority was absorbed into an impersonal hierarchy. Bishops were no longer fathers of their flock so much as delegates of the one “Holy Father” in Rome. This laid the groundwork for Leviathan: a polity defined not by interpersonal communion but by top-down law and command.

Westphalian Sovereignty: The Birth of the Nation-State Leviathan

The next link in the chain is the rise of the sovereign nation-state system, conventionally dated to the Peace of Westphalia (1648) that ended the Thirty Years’ War. This treaty system enshrined the principle of territorial sovereignty, meaning each ruler had absolute authority within his realm and non-interference from outside . It marked the shift from the medieval idea of a united Christendom (with spiritual and temporal powers overlapping) to a world of independent states asserting total jurisdiction over their domain. The Westphalian order was essentially a secularization of the absolutist ideas that had been brewing. Every king became a little pope in his own kingdom – subject to no higher human law beyond his borders. As one summary puts it, Westphalian sovereignty refers to the principle of absolute and inviolable territorial integrity and political independence of states… each state has the right to govern itself without outside interference . This meant the end of any supra-national authority (such as Emperor or Pope) mediating power. The nation-state became an abstract person – a Leviathan – with a “self” (national interest) and a legitimacy based on mere power.

Thomas Hobbes, writing in 1651 amidst the English Civil War, explicitly compared the State to an “Artificial Man” – a mortal god to whom individuals cede their rights. Hobbes named this collective power “Leviathan,” drawing from the biblical sea-monster to evoke something huge and awe-inspiring. In Hobbes’ vision, individuals in a state of nature are at war, so they create the Leviathan by social contract to impose order – a single sovereign will to which all must submit. Notably, Hobbes’ Leviathan frontispiece famously depicts a giant king composed of countless tiny people as his body – an eerily literal image of individual persons subsumed into one abstract entity. This captures the inversion at the political level: the State is reified as a super-person, and real persons become merely its members or subjects. After Westphalia, this concept spread: states exercised absolute power internally (often enforcing religious uniformity under cuius regio, eius religio) and related externally like billiard balls, acknowledging no common moral law above themselves.

The 17th–18th centuries saw the rise of enlightened absolutist monarchs who were secular in authority but near-deified in status. By the time of the French Revolution and then the 19th century, nationalism further personified the state: the People or the Nation became the new sovereign, but still operating as a unitary will (often embodied in an emperor, party, or ideology). From the perspective of Christian political theology, what had happened was the transference of infallibility and supremacy from the Pope to the State. In place of “One Church under one Pope,” the world now had “each nation-state under its own absolute sovereign.” The same logic of centralized, impersonal authority persisted, only now stripped of overt religious justification. In both cases, power was conceived as unaccountable and total within its sphere – an earthly mirror to an improperly conceived image of God as dominating will.

Orthodox writers like Nicholas Berdyaev and Alexander Solzhenitsyn lamented this development as the rise of demonic principalities in modern guise – nations demanding ultimate loyalty and drenching the 20th century in blood. The nation-state Leviathan goes to war with other Leviathans, with citizens as pawns in these clashes of idols. Sacrifice, which belonged to God, is now demanded by the Nation (as we shall see with Moloch). The Westphalian order thus codified a post-Christian political reality: a world where earthly sovereignties recognize no Christ above them. Each Leviathan is a law unto itself, just as the Papacy had claimed universal law unto itself in spiritual matters.

The Leviathanic Inversion: From Communion to Coercion

At each step – Filioque, Papacy, State – we see a common inversion: personal, relational authority replaced by abstract, unilateral power. Orthodox theology holds that true authority is kenotic (self-emptying) and personal, modeled on Christ the Pantokrator who washes feet, and on the Holy Trinity where the Father’s monarchy is an eternal act of love begetting the Son and breathing the Spirit . Western developments, however, increasingly conceived authority as the right to command and control, grounded in an office or a law rather than in personal holiness or love. Hannah Arendt insightfully noted that “rule by Nobody” (the replacement of accountable rulers with faceless administration) is “tyranny without a tyrant”, the most oppressive form because no person can be held to account . Leviathan is precisely this: power with no face. Whether it wears a miter, a crown, or a national flag, it demands absolute obedience but evades personal responsibility.

The Filioque’s conceptual abstraction made it easier to later imagine an impersonal divine will (a tendency evident in Calvinism’s view of God as sheer sovereignty, for example). The Papacy’s ecclesial abstraction made the Church less a family and more a bureaucracy, prefiguring the bureaucratic states of modernity. The Westphalian system’s political abstraction made “the State” into a quasi-divine actor (notice how we still speak of states as if they have a will: “Germany decided to…,” “the United States wants…”). In each case, Leviathan grows and personhood recedes. The individual conscience or local community is overridden by the necessities of the System.

Leviathan’s pattern is thus a demonic parody of divine unity. Where true Christian unity is symphonic – many free persons united in love – Leviathan’s unity is coercive – many individuals fused into one body by force or fear. As C.S. Lewis wrote in 1942, “The greatest evil is not done in those sordid dens of crime…but is conceived and ordered in clean, carpeted, well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars… Hence, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state.” His insight was that Hell’s triumph is to create systems so vast and impersonal that evil is done without conscience, by compartmentalized functionaries. Leviathan exactly achieves this: the king’s edict, the bureaucrat’s directive, the party’s plan — all can destroy lives, while each participant shrugs “I’m just doing my duty.” It is power void of personhood, which is to say, void of empathy and love.

Summarizing the arc: the Filioque blurred the distinct personal origin in God (making divine communion more mechanical); the Papal monarchy centralized spiritual authority (making the Church more mechanical in governance); the Westphalian nation-state established a world of sovereign machines (states) obeying raison d’état rather than moral law. By these stages, Leviathan became enthroned as the accepted model of power. In theological terms, this is a Trinitarian heresy politicized. The living God of Trinity is relational and self-giving; Leviathan’s god (whether it invokes God’s name or not) is unrelational and self-serving – an idol of Power. The Enlightenment scholar Bertrand Russell once warned of the emerging “Idol of the State” as a new Moloch requiring human sacrifice , showing even secular thinkers sensed the demonic aspect.

The Orthodox Counterpoint: Personal Sovereignty Under Christ

Against Leviathan, Orthodox tradition posits symphonia – a harmony of heavenly and earthly governance in which neither is absolute and both are personal. The Byzantine symphony of Church and Empire (though not perfect in practice) at least maintained that the Emperor was accountable to Christ and the bishops, and that coercion in spiritual matters was ultimately illegitimate. In Orthodox political thought, any authority is authentic only if it reflects the divine image by exercising care for persons and humility. Christ is Pantokrator (Ruler of All) not because He crushes all opposition by force, but because in His person all things hold together (Colossians 1:17) and He rules from the Cross, through sacrificial love. Thus, Orthodox canon law and spirituality alike resist totalizing power. No bishop may call himself universal; councils and synodal consensus are preferred to unilateral decrees. Even emperors were anointed and expected to serve as “vicegerents of God” in a moral sense, not owners of the realm.

At the theological level, Orthodoxy holds the monarchy of the Father – but that monarchy is one of love, not of domination . God’s unity is in the Father’s person, who eternally communicates the fullness of divinity to Son and Spirit. There is no “will to power” in God, only will to love. In worship the Orthodox hymn, “O Heavenly King, Comforter, Spirit of Truth, present in all places…” – addressing the Holy Spirit as King and Comforter, a telling combination. True sovereignty comforts; false sovereignty (Leviathan) terrorizes. Where Leviathanic systems insist on uniformity and submission (“bow to the idol of state or office”), the Holy Spirit preserves unity in diversity, allowing each person’s unique gifts to flourish.

In practical terms, an Orthodox approach to society values subsidiarity and personhood. Community is built from the personal outward: family, parish, locality – not imposed from an abstract center. Authority figures (parents, priests, rulers) are respected, but they are understood to have a grave responsibility to reflect Christ in servant-leadership. The Church can never concede that “might makes right” or that any human institution is infallible. Even ecumenical councils are valued not simply because they wield power, but because the whole people of God eventually receive their teachings. This is a profoundly personal and participative model, contrasting sharply with Leviathan’s top-down one.

To the extent that modern states act justly, Orthodox teaching would say it is because persons within them act according to conscience and divine law. To the extent those states become beast-like (Leviathan or its fellow demon Moloch), it is because the personal dimension has been suffocated by ideology or bureaucracy. The Christian is called to resist Leviathan’s enchantment – not through violent revolution (which often installs another Leviathan) – but through steadfast allegiance to Christ as King above all earthly powers. This sometimes meant martyrdom under totalitarian regimes that demanded absolute loyalty. It also means creating counter-structures of genuine community and charity within and against the state’s impersonal machinery. For example, where a modern bureaucracy might say “rules are rules” to deny help to someone, the Christian is called to intervene personally with mercy. Where a nationalist Leviathan says “sacrifice your sons in war for the fatherland,” the Church reminds that each soldier is an icon of God and that war, if ever undertaken, must be strictly limited by personal moral law (hence many Eastern Christian soldiers took vows and saw combat as a penance, not a glory).

In sum, Leviathan’s enthronement of coercive, impersonal power is the demonic inversion of Christ’s kingship. The Orthodox answer is the Kingship of Christ and the reign of the Holy Spirit in human hearts, which together relativize all earthly power. No system or ideology can claim the soul’s total obedience – that is due to God alone. As the Apostles said when forbidden by the Sanhedrin to preach: “We must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29). This godly disobedience is, paradoxically, what keeps any government truly just: it reminds rulers they too are under authority – under the King of Kings. When Filioque and Papacy and Leviathan State forget this, they become anti-Christic (against or instead of Christ). The Orthodox Church’s mission is to be a constant witness that all authority in heaven and on earth belongs to the risen Christ – a Person, not an abstraction – and He exercises it by giving Himself for His beloved. Any authority that refuses to do likewise ultimately meets the judgment of God, who “scatters the proud in the imagination of their hearts, and brings down the mighty from their thrones” (Luke 1:51–52).

Having seen how Leviathan inverts holy sovereignty, we turn now to Behemoth, a related demon that inverts the proper place of law, truth, and order by enthroning abstractions over real people.

Behemoth: Abstractions Over Persons, Law Over Love

If Leviathan is the demonic pattern of coercive power, Behemoth is the demon of legalism, scholasticism, and bureaucratic rationality – the enthronement of systems, rules, and ideas above the human persons they exist to serve. The name “Behemoth” comes from Scripture (Job 40:15), denoting a monstrous beast of the earth. In our context, it symbolizes the heavy, beastly weight of impersonal systems that crush or erase the personal dimension. Behemoth’s work is seen whenever law is exalted above love, or abstract doctrines and procedures above the people for whom they were given. Across history, this inversion has appeared in various guises. We will examine four major instances or “stages” of Behemoth’s operation: (1) Pharisaic legalism in Second Temple Judaism, which put the letter of Torah above the Lawgiver and His loving intent; (2) Medieval Scholastic metaphysics, which at times subordinated God to philosophical categories and systematization; (3) Penal Substitutionary Atonement theology in the Reformation, which framed salvation in impersonal legal terms as satisfying abstract justice; and (4) the rise of modern bureaucracy, which replaces personal responsibility with procedure and treats individuals as files and numbers. After exploring each, we will identify the common thread – the demonic pattern of inversion: abstract law, theory, or process enthroned over living persons – and contrast it with the Orthodox Christian vision where the Logos (Divine Person) is ultimate, and all laws and systems find their value only in Him .

Pharisaic Legalism: Law Above the Lawgiver

The Pharisees of Jesus’s time provide a classic example of Behemoth’s distortion. The Torah (Law of Moses) was given by God as a guide toward holiness and a custodian until the coming of Christ (Galatians 3:24). In its proper use, the Law was meant to serve life – to teach love of God and neighbor. By the first century, however, the Pharisaic movement (zealous for Torah observance) had developed an extensive tradition of oral interpretations and extra rules (“the tradition of the elders”) that, in practice, often obscured the Law’s true spirit. Jesus rebuked the Pharisees for exalting the Law (and their traditions) above the very God who gave it and above the people for whom it was given. “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath,” He declared, correcting their inversion . In another instance, He lamented, “You nullify the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down” (Mark 7:13). These statements reveal the crux: the Pharisees absolutized the external observance and human-added rules to the point that they would “tithe mint and cumin” – obsess over minutiae – but “neglect the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith” (Matthew 23:23).

In Pharisaic legalism, we see Behemoth’s inversion of religion into an abstract system. Tradition and regulation were treated as ends in themselves, even to the point that when God Incarnate stood before them, many Pharisees preferred their system to the living Person who fulfilled the Law. The Gospel of Luke records how they complained that Jesus healed on the Sabbath or ate with sinners, violating their norms. They so elevated their rule-structure that they effectively wanted God to submit to their interpretation! Indeed, Christ observed that they “bind heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on men’s shoulders” (Matt 23:4) and “shut the kingdom of heaven” to those trying to enter (Matt 23:13). A modern commentator captures this dynamic: “They elevate law over people, becoming hard toward human needs… Here is the second step in becoming a religious Pharisee: make our religious rules more important than Jesus Himself. They want Jesus under their law.” . This chilling phrase – “They want Jesus under their law” – shows just how inverted things had become. The Lawgiver was treated as if He were subject to the law, rather than the law being an instrument of His will.

Christ’s many confrontations with Pharisees illuminate how far this abstraction could go. When the disciples plucked grain on the Sabbath to eat, the Pharisees pounced: “Why do you do what is not lawful on the Sabbath?” Jesus responded with scriptural examples (David eating showbread) and the principle, “The Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath” (Mark 2:28) . The Pharisees were essentially accusing God (incarnate in Christ) of breaking God’s law – an absurdity, yet possible because in their mind the system of sabbath rules had become more sacred than God’s own actions. As another commentator notes, the Pharisees in that moment “enslave men to the Sabbath as if the Sabbath were the greatest thing. But here before them is one greater than the temple… and greater than the Sabbath. He is the Great Lawgiver… The Pharisees serve the law, but the law was meant to serve them.” . In that last line lies the antidote: the law’s purpose is to serve human good (to refresh souls and lead to God), not to be a cold criterion above personal welfare. Jesus deliberately healed on Sabbaths to drive home this point: “Which of you, if your son or ox falls into a pit on the Sabbath, will not pull him out?” (Luke 14:5). Love and personhood must interpret law, not vice versa.

Yet the Pharisaic mindset, propelled by fear of impurity and zeal for tradition, persisted in treating religion as an impersonal code. The danger of such legalism is that it renders religious devotion a matter of checkbox compliance rather than loving relationship. People become either cogs in a moral machine or collateral damage of rules. For example, the Gospel recounts how some Pharisees, in the name of “Corban” (a legal vow), would allow a man to neglect supporting his aged parents – a direct violation of love (Mark 7:11-12). The abstract rule nullified natural affection. This is Behemoth at work: an impersonal principle (even a good principle like Sabbath rest or ritual purity) is isolated from its context and inflated to absolute status, trampling the personal and the humane. Jesus unmasked this demonic pattern and re-oriented the law to its proper end: “The Sabbath was made for man.” The human person in communion with God is the measure, not the slave, of divine law. In Orthodox perspective, the Old Law was a pedagogue leading to Christ, and once Christ (the personal Truth) is come, rigid adherence to the pedagogical form against Christ’s own new law of grace is a spiritual dead end. St. Paul similarly fought Judaizers who demanded Gentile Christians keep the Mosaic code; he called the law good, but “letter without spirit” brings death (2 Cor 3:6). We might say Pharisaism tried to enthrone the “letter” (an abstraction) above the Divine Word (Logos) – a clear instance of Behemoth’s inversion.

Scholastic Metaphysics: God in the Dock of Reason

Fast-forward to the high Middle Ages in Western Europe (12th–14th centuries). Here we encounter another form of Behemoth: the impulse to systematize theology using the categories of Aristotelian philosophy, reaching its apex in Scholasticism (with figures like St. Thomas Aquinas). Let it be said: the desire to clarify faith with reason is not wrong per se; many Scholastics were devout and their work contains genuine insights. The issue, however, is the subtle subordination of God and revelation to an abstract metaphysical framework. Medieval Scholastics adopted the categories of Greek philosophy – essence, substance, cause, act and potency, necessity and contingency, etc. – as the lens through which to understand God. In doing so, they sometimes treated these categories as if they were neutral, quasi-eternal structures that even God must “fit into.” God was analyzed as the Highest Being (summum ens), the First Cause in a chain of causes, the Necessary Being behind contingent beings, the Prime Mover who initiates motion, and so on . These descriptions are not false in themselves – God is indeed the uncaused Cause of all. The inversion crept in when the philosophical system took priority over the lived mystery of God.

For example, in Scholastic theology, one finds lengthy disputations on God’s essence and attributes. God is defined as actus purus (pure act, with no potentiality) , as simple substance, as necessary being. The risk here is twofold: (1) These definitions can diminish the sense of God as transcending all categories (for instance, Eastern fathers like St. Dionysius insisted God is “beyond being” , not one being alongside others, whereas Western thought stressed “being itself” in a definitional way). (2) The focus on essence and attributes can overshadow the reality that God is Trinity of Persons – not a philosophical construct but free, living, unpredictable in His energies. John Zizioulas critiques Western theology for “beginning with the one essence of God” as primary, whereas the Cappadocian fathers began with the three Persons in relationship . The Scholastic tendency, then, was an impersonal one: God became a topic in metaphysics class, analyzed with the same tools as one would analyze an object in nature. In that sense, God was conceptually subordinated to “Being” and “Cause” – categories from outside revelation.

An example of this inversion is how divine simplicity was construed. The Scholastics, reasoning that any composition implies imperfection, asserted God has absolutely no internal distinctions – His essence is identical with His attributes (knowledge, will, power) and there are no real distinctions in God except the relational opposition of Persons. Pushed too far, this view made God so simple that it became hard to explain how God could have dynamic relationships or how we could experience God’s energies (grace) as distinct from His inaccessible essence. The Eastern Church eventually rejected certain Scholastic formulations, emphasizing instead that God’s essence is incomprehensible, but He freely manifests in energies that are multiple and relational (Gregory Palamas’s doctrine). The underlying issue was: Are we letting God reveal Himself on His own terms, or are we forcing Him into a pre-set logical schema? When Aquinas, for instance, says “God is ipsum esse subsistens” (the sheer act of to-be), it’s a lofty truth – but one framed in philosophical abstraction. Left unchecked, it could imply “to be” (an abstract concept of existence) is somehow more fundamental than God’s own selfhood. Indeed, Pseudo-Dionysius had warned that God “is beyond being or any determinate predication” , meaning no category fully contains Him . Scholasticism tended to forget that warning. Some later philosophers even spoke of “God” as the fulfillment of some highest idea (Hegel’s Absolute Spirit, etc.), effectively domesticating God into a principle.

In sum, Scholasticism’s inversion was epistemological: it treated reason and system as the supreme way to know God, rather than encounter and communion. Theology became an academic subject defined by disputations and syllogisms. While this brought intellectual rigor, it also risked turning faith into an impersonal affair – scientia (science) rather than gnosis (mystical knowledge). The personal God – who in Scripture reveals His name, Who speaks “face to face” with Moses, Who becomes incarnate and says “Follow me” – can recede behind the attributes and predicates about Him. A telling symptom is how rarely Scholastic manuals might mention the Holy Spirit or the experiential side of prayer, compared to metaphysical definitions of the Trinity or grace. As one Orthodox critique puts it: Western scholastic theology often treated God as an object of study within a system of thought, whereas the Eastern Fathers insisted on the priority of apophatic wonder and personal encounter .

Furthermore, by exalting “natural reason” (even a sanctified reason) to parse mysteries, Scholasticism laid groundwork for Rationalism – which later would discard mystery altogether. The demon Behemoth works subtly: first get people to put system over person in the name of piety, and later they might keep the system and drop the piety. Indeed, the Enlightenment rationalists secularized Scholastic methods, turning theology into mere philosophy or dismissing anything not logically self-evident. Thus, a mode of thought intended to serve God ultimately could make Reason a new idol. The personal God who transcends all understanding was essentially told: “Sit here and answer to our logic.” It is reminiscent of Job, whom God finally challenges, “Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?” (Job 38:2). The lesson: God is not a puzzle to be solved but a mystery to be loved. Wherever theology forgets that – making correctness of abstract doctrine its pole-star rather than the face of Christ – Behemoth has a foothold.

Orthodoxy, in contrast, values correct doctrine deeply but always as expressive of a living Tradition. Doctrine (dogma) is in service of doxology (worship) and encounter. This is why the Orthodox Church has never produced a definitive systematic theology in the Scholastic sense; instead we have the liturgy and the writings of holy saints who speak from experience of God. Essence and energies, person and nature – these are important distinctions in Eastern theology, but always with the caveat that God exceeds our grasp. As St. Gregory the Theologian said, “I rejoice to ascend Mount Sinai and enter the cloud, to draw near to God” – meaning there is a point where silence and unknowing are the truest knowledge of God. Scholasticism’s hubris (at its worst) was the attempt to fully penetrate the cloud with discursive reason. The inversion is that God was made subject to human categories, rather than human understanding bowing in reverence before God’s transcendence.

Penal Substitution: Law and Justice Over Person and Healing

One of the most consequential abstractions enthroned in Western religious thought was the concept of legal justice in the doctrine of atonement. During the Protestant Reformation (16th century), theologians like John Calvin (building on medieval precedents like Anselm of Canterbury) articulated a view of salvation known as Penal Substitutionary Atonement (PSA). This theory holds that human sin is primarily a violation of God’s justice or honor, incurring a legal debt or penalty (infinite, since God’s honor is infinite) which must be paid or punished. Jesus Christ, in His passion, satisfies this legal requirement by suffering the punishment in our place, appeasing God’s wrath and thus allowing God to justly forgive us. In plainer terms, our guilt is imputed to Christ, and He is punished by the Father’s justice so that we can be acquitted. This view became dominant in much of Western Christianity (especially among Reformed and Evangelical Protestants). It encapsulates Behemoth’s inversion by subordinating even God’s forgiveness to an abstract principle – the law or justice that must be satisfied .

PSA emerged in a context where forensic (legal) categories had come to saturate theology. The medieval Catholic penitential system was juridical (indulgences, satisfactions, etc.), and the Reformers, reacting against abuses, nonetheless kept the basic framework of law and justice, only applied now to Christ’s work. The result was a stark courtroom metaphor: humanity is guilty; God is an angry judge who cannot simply pardon without satisfaction to His justice; Christ steps in as the substitute to bear the sentence we deserved. While this emphasizes God’s holiness and Christ’s sacrifice, it casts the drama of salvation in impersonal legal terms. Sin is defined as breaking a law (not so much a spiritual sickness or a personal rupture of relationship). Atonement is defined as punishment executed and debt paid (a transaction) . God the Father is seen as bound, in a sense, by the necessity of punishing sin – bound by “justice,” almost a higher law than Himself. This leads to the disturbing image (from some extreme Puritan preaching) of God almost hating sinners until His wrath is quenched by killing His Son. While few would state it so baldly, the underlying logic is that God’s love and mercy could not reach us until the scales of abstract justice were balanced by violence.

The Orthodox Church soundly rejects this paradigm. The early Church taught that Christ’s death is a ransom of love offered to rescue us from death and the devil, not a quid pro quo to assuage God’s honor or anger . St. Gregory the Theologian famously asked, “To whom was the ransom paid? Not to God – away with the thought that the blood of the Only-begotten should be pleasing to the Father who did not demand it… nor to the enemy, for then the devil would have rights over us!” . Gregory’s answer is that the ransom is a metaphor – in actuality Christ freely died to break the power of sin, death, and devil, not to satisfy a literal payment. In another place, he says God accepted the sacrifice “not because He demanded it, but because by it He would liberate us”. The point is that God is not subordinate to a law of retribution; His forgiveness is ultimately an act of free grace and healing mercy, not an accountant’s balancing of a ledger. Even Anselm, who introduced satisfaction language, said God chose this means but was not compelled – for “nothing greater than God” constrains Him. Unfortunately, later theology (especially Protestant) leaned heavily into the idea that God’s nature or honor necessitated the atoning punishment. As one Orthodox writer observes, “Penal substitution teaches that in order for God to forgive, His wrath must be appeased and His honor restored” – effectively making “Honor” or “Wrath” into a god above God. It is telling that the early Church did not teach this; as the Live Orthodoxy article noted, “If the Apostles taught PSA, none of their successors talked about it before the Reformation… The early Church had no concept of God imputing our guilt to Christ and punishing Him in our place” . In fact, such notions were foreign and even repugnant to Eastern saints like St. Isaac the Syrian, who said, “Never call God just, for His justice is not manifest in the things concerning you. God’s justice is not as man’s” – highlighting that God transcends our retributive instincts with His mercy.

Why is PSA an instance of Behemoth’s inversion? Because it elevates an impersonal legal framework above the personal relationship of God and humanity. In Scripture, while law and justice are important, God often overrides legal condemnation in favor of mercy – as in Hosea 11: “My heart recoils within me; I will not execute my fierce anger… for I am God and not man.” The Pharisees couldn’t grasp this when Jesus forgave sinners freely; they objected, “Who can forgive sins but God?” – ironically true, and He was God, demonstrating that divine forgiveness is an authority only God has precisely because He is above the law, not bound by it. PSA, however, implies God Himself could not just forgive – He had to obey the dictate of punitive justice. This is why some critics call it “Divine Child Abuse” (a loaded phrase, but making the point that it splits the Trinity: the Father as wrathful Judge versus the Son as the suffering victim of that wrath). Instead of the Cross being primarily the personal self-offering of love by Christ to the Father on our behalf, penal substitution presents it as a payment to a system, a satisfaction of an abstract attribute (Justice). The love within the Trinity and extended to us becomes secondary, a means to an end (the end being satisfying justice).

Orthodox soteriology, by contrast, views sin as existential and relational: sin is a disease (or even death itself) afflicting human nature; Christ is the Divine Physician who enters into our death to heal and resurrect us . Salvation is thus therapeutic and participatory – we are united to Christ’s deified humanity (theosis), dying and rising with Him in baptism and new life. Law court imagery is used by Orthodox (we pray in liturgy for God’s mercy at the dread Judgment), but it is not the controlling narrative of the faith. The controlling narrative is Paschal: a passage from darkness to light, slavery to freedom, through the Pascha (Passover) of Christ. When Orthodox saints speak of Christ’s blood, it is as cleansing, vivifying medicine, not as a legal price paid to the Father. St. Basil in his liturgy addresses God: “By the Cross He (Christ) opened a path for us to the resurrection”, not “by the Cross He paid You what we owed.” The difference is massive. One is a personal path of communion restored; the other is an impersonal debt settled.

Even Western holy people have intuited the limits of the legal view. St. Thérèse of Lisieux, for example, famously said that if she had committed all possible sins, she would still run to God’s arms, because God’s mercy is attracted to our misery and He forgives not because a punishment was executed, but because He is Love. The Eastern Church fully endorses that confidence in personal mercy: the Good Shepherd in Jesus’s parable doesn’t require satisfaction from the lost sheep; he simply goes out and brings it home on his shoulders. The father of the prodigal son doesn’t demand a penalty from the returning boy; he runs to embrace him. Jesus explicitly tells us these stories to show God’s heart. PSA’s framework struggles to account for this “unsatisfied” forgiveness. Some Protestants admit that in the parable of the prodigal, the father appears to forgive freely, but they insert in theory that “someone had to pay – Jesus was telling this before the cross.” The Orthodox response is that Jesus told it at face value: God forgives because He loves and wills reconciliation, period.

Thus, penal substitution enthroned a contractual law over the gospel. It made many Western Christians relate to God in a spirit of fear and extrinsic imputation (“I am legally righteous but still actually depraved, only covered by Christ’s merits”). It tended to view the Sacrifice of the Mass (for Catholics) as an appeasement continually offered, or for Protestants to emphasize conversion as a legal transaction (accept Jesus’s payment and your status changes). All of these can lead to a depersonalization of salvation: instead of a slow transformation by the Spirit in the context of an intimate relationship (synergy of God and soul), it’s a declared verdict or a ritual payment. No wonder, then, that Orthodoxy sees in PSA a narrowing of the gospel. Behemoth’s footprint is evident: a beautiful reality (God’s forgiving love) is reframed in impersonal, system-bound terms, potentially obscuring the very love it was meant to highlight. As one patristic scholar put it, the trouble with the satisfaction model is not that it emphasizes God’s justice too much, but that it radically misunderstands God’s justice, which is restorative, not retributive. The “external” notion of justice – giving someone exactly what is owed – is transformed by Christ into mercy triumphing over judgment (James 2:13). PSA inadvertently clung to the external notion and so inverted the biblical hierarchy: law over grace, instead of grace fulfilling law.

Bureaucracy and the Modern State: Procedure Over Persons

In the modern era, Behemoth has perhaps its most concrete embodiment in the rise of bureaucracy – the administrative machine that governs by formal rules, procedures, and institutions rather than personal authority or judgment. Bureaucracy was touted as a great achievement of rational governance. Enlightenment and industrial-age reformers argued that replacing arbitrary personal rule (the whim of a king or lord) with fixed rules and committees would create fairness, efficiency, and predictability. The administrative state, with its departments, regulations, and protocols, promised to tame tyranny by law. To some extent, it did curb the caprice of absolute monarchs. But in reality, bureaucracy brought a new inversion: accountability became abstracted, and personal responsibility diffused into process. The system – “policy,” “procedure,” “national security,” “compliance” – often ends up justifying actions that no individual would morally approve face-to-face. As sociologist Max Weber noted with both admiration and dread, “Bureaucracy develops the more perfectly the more it is dehumanized – the more completely it succeeds in eliminating from official business love, hatred, and all purely personal, irrational, and emotional elements which escape calculation.” . Here we have Weber basically describing Behemoth: the triumph of impersonal procedure (“calculation”) by deliberate elimination of human factors (“love, hatred,” any personal element).

On paper, bureaucracy treats everyone equally (“no one is above the rules”), which sounds just. Yet this very impersonality can become inhuman. Real life is full of exceptions, unique circumstances, and need for mercy or discretion. A rigid bureaucracy, however, says “Computer says no” – the rule is the rule, even if it leads to obvious injustice in a particular case. Thus “good men are chained by procedure, while evil men exploit procedure.” A righteous official might want to help someone, but “the rules won’t allow it”; meanwhile a cunning official or dictator can hide behind bureaucratic formalism to do great evil without personal trace. Hannah Arendt, reporting on the trial of Nazi officer Adolf Eichmann, coined the phrase “the banality of evil” to describe how ordinary, non-sadistic people can commit atrocities under bureaucratic orders – not out of personal malice, but out of diligent adherence to impersonal procedures. Eichmann organized the transportation of Jews to death camps like someone filing papers; he claimed he was just following orders and obeying the law. This is Behemoth’s chilling triumph: when moral responsibility dissolves in a chain of command and paperwork, so that nobody feels personally accountable for the outcome. As Arendt wrote, “In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one could argue, to whom one could present grievances, on whom the pressures of power fall. The rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless we have a tyranny without a tyrant.” .

In a bureaucratic system, injustices can occur with no clear villain to blame – the system itself becomes the oppressor. People often describe feeling like “just a number” or “a cog” when dealing with large institutions. Consider a scenario: A family is denied needed benefits due to a paperwork technicality; each officer says “It’s policy, I can’t do anything.” The policy might have good rationale generally, but applied blindly it harms – yet no one in the chain will take personal initiative or responsibility, because the culture is to obey the abstract procedure. Or on a larger scale, consider war atrocities facilitated by bureaucracy: drone operators thousands of miles away kill targets based on algorithmic criteria; collateral damage (dead civilians) is labeled “unfortunate but within guidelines.” No one person decided to kill this innocent; it was “the algorithm” or “the targeting protocol.” This diffusion of responsibility is exactly what C.S. Lewis warned when he said the greatest evil is conceived in well-lit offices by quiet technicians who “do not need to raise their voices”, and thus his image of hell was a ruthless bureaucracy .

Modern history provides searing examples. Totalitarian regimes like Nazi Germany and Stalinist USSR ran on bureaucratic rails. The Holocaust required myriad clerks, schedule-makers, accountants – banal officials enabling monstrous outcomes. Solzhenitsyn noted how Soviet interrogators and camp administrators would hide behind Soviet law and procedure to justify cruelty; by making it “a matter of state interest” or “following orders,” they quieted their conscience. Even in liberal democracies, bureaucratic inertia or callous policies cause suffering (e.g., a veteran dies awaiting medical approval in a VA system backlog; children separated from parents due to inflexible immigration enforcement). Often “process” is cited as the reason: the sacrifice of actual human needs on the altar of how things are supposed to be done. The institution becomes “realer” than the individual. As one commentary on bureaucracy observed, “In almost all fantasy literature, only evil people maintain systems of administration” – a tongue-in-cheek hyperbole, but pointing to a cultural trope that bureaucracy is soulless .

Bureaucracy also tends to perpetuate itself. Once processes are in place, the original purpose can be forgotten and the continuation of the process becomes the goal. People serve the system instead of the system serving people. A tragic example is the concept of “National Security” being invoked to cover atrocities. Governments often classify immoral actions (torture, surveillance, collateral killings) as necessary evils for security, decided in secret by committees. The abstract notion of “security of the state” is placed above the concrete dignity of persons (both citizens and foreigners). The decision-makers justify it as serving the greater good, but often personal moral accountability is lost. When confronted, they say: “It was legal under our internal procedures” or “It was the policy at the time.” In other words, the System absolves the individual conscience. This is Behemoth devouring responsibility.

The Orthodox Christian view of society stresses personalism: every official decision should ideally be guided by conscience and compassion, and there is always a person responsible before God for every action. The saying of the Desert Fathers applies: “Do not kill a man even with your tongue” – and by extension, not with your pen or keyboard either. Yet modern bureaucracy encourages what we might call “moral distancing.” Just as physical distance (firing a missile from afar) makes it easier to kill without feeling it, bureaucratic distance (several degrees of separation between order and effect) makes it easier to harm without sensing guilt. Even in corporate settings, a mid-level employee might approve a batch of layoffs determined by some formula, believing “It’s not personal, just business” – a secular equivalent of “I was just following orders.” In each case, an abstraction (“business needs,” “policy,” “law”) is treated as sacrosanct, more authoritative than the cry of the human affected.

The spiritual danger is that we begin to see fellow humans not as persons with faces and hearts, but as cases, numbers, “resources”, or obstacles. When that happens, cruelty can flourish under cover of bureaucratic civility. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago recounted how ordinary Soviet interrogators would mechanically send people off to labor camps, rarely stopping to question the justice – their whole environment was designed to suppress personal moral evaluation. The system said these people were “enemies of the people,” so off they went. Similarly, in corporate or government bureaucracies today, individuals who do resist or blow the whistle often face retaliation – the beast defends itself.

The Common Thread: Enthroning Abstraction, Erasing the Personal

Having surveyed Pharisaic legalism, Scholastic rationalism, Penal substitution legalism, and modern bureaucracy, we can identify the demonic pattern linking them. In each case, an impersonal abstraction (whether Law, System, or Ideology) is elevated to a throne, and real persons – even God or Christ’s personal presence – are made subordinate. This is Behemoth’s inversion: the enthronement of concept over reality, rule over relationship, letter over spirit, form over content.

• In Pharisaic legalism: The Torah was treated not as a living dialogue with God but as a closed code that even God Incarnate must not transgress. The Sabbath law – meant to help people – was wielded to hurt people (condemning even Jesus’s healings). Tradition was no longer a vehicle of encounter with God’s will, but an idol in itself. Jesus exposed this by pointing out that “the law was made for man” – persons matter more than the abstract rule  . The Pharisees had, in effect, erased the personal intent and love of God in the law, reducing religion to rigorous conformity.
  
• In Scholastic metaphysics: The philosophical categories (essence, causality, etc.) became so primary that one risked fitting God into Aristotle’s framework rather than bowing Aristotle before God. Theology turned into solving an equation: given God is X (omnipotent, simple, impassible), how do we explain Y? While it produced intellectual achievements, it sidelined personal communion. Think of how the Hesychast monks on Mt. Athos in the 14th century, practitioners of the Jesus Prayer, clashed with a Scholastic-minded monk (Barlaam) who mocked their experiential approach. Barlaam valued intellectual knowledge of God above the direct mystical union sought in prayer. St. Gregory Palamas defended the personal experience of God’s uncreated light against Barlaam’s abstract theology. This was literally a confrontation of Behemoth’s approach (God known primarily by concepts) versus the Orthodox way (God known by personal transformation and grace).
  
• In Penal substitution theology: The abstract principle of retributive justice was made so inviolable that not even God could forgive without exacting penalty. Here an idea about God’s honor/justice was exalted over God’s actual way of relating to humanity as shown by Christ. It portrayed a almost contractual necessity binding God. Love took a back seat; it was present, but only operating through the satisfaction of justice, not as the primary cause. The personal Father-Son relationship – which in Orthodox theology is marked by love and cooperation in our salvation (John 3:16, “For God so loved the world that He gave His Son”) – was reframed in almost adversarial legal terms (the Father’s justice versus the Son’s plea). Forgiveness became less a personal encounter of mercy (like the prodigal’s reunion) and more a forensic acquittal. The warmth of “Abba, Father” could be eclipsed by a colder picture of a judge balancing scales.
  
• In bureaucracy: The pattern reaches beyond theology into secular life. The common person today often feels that impersonal forces rule their lives – whether government regulations, corporate policies, or algorithmic decisions. People experience alienation: the sense that the big Other (the System) doesn’t see them as an individual. When a hospital treats a patient as a case number or an office treats a citizen as a file to be shuffled, the dignity of personhood is violated. This is the spirit of Behemoth infiltrating everyday structures. It restrains good people (who would act humanely if free to) and empowers bad actors (who manipulate rules to harm or exploit, saying “It’s all by the book”). In extreme forms, it allows atrocities (like genocide, as numerous historical commissions have noted: the efficiency of the Holocaust, for instance, was bureaucratically enabled by meticulous record-keeping and train scheduling – murder turned into an administrative process).
  

What ties these threads? In each, the Logos (divine Personhood and rationality) is eclipsed by “logismos” (human reasoning or systematizing not enlightened by grace). The Incarnate and the interpersonal is eclipsed by the institutional and the ideational. It is a kind of second fall: just as Adam and Eve chose knowledge of good and evil (a kind of abstract autonomy) over direct communion with God, so their descendants keep choosing the structure over the Spirit. St. Paul observed this in his context: “the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life” (2 Cor 3:6). Whenever Christians forget this – elevating letter (literalism, legalism, formula) above Spirit (living relationship) – they fall into the trap of Behemoth.

In practical church life, this can happen when rules or canons are applied without discernment or mercy. The Orthodox Church, aware of this, practices “economia,” a principle of pastoral flexibility to dispense or relax strict rules for the sake of salvation of souls (for example, readmitting a repentant person sooner than the canons might strictly prescribe). This shows that the Church understands law is for persons, not persons for law – precisely Christ’s teaching . The demonic alternative would be a church that refuses to heal on the Sabbath, so to speak – that says “No Communion for you because rule X, regardless of your unique situation.” Sadly, such attitudes do appear, and whenever they do, the spirit of the Pharisees is alive. The antidote is always to remember the Lord who ate with tax collectors and said “I desire mercy, not sacrifice” (Matt 9:13).

Another way to see the common thread is the concept of idolatry of an idea. The Pharisees idolized their traditions, the Scholastics (some of them) idolized human reason, the PSA framework idolized justice construed narrowly, and moderns idolize the system or ideology (be it communism, capitalism, etc.). Idolatry means treating something limited and man-made as if it were absolute. In all these cases, something that should be relative (a rule, a theory, a procedure) is treated as ultimate, and thus it crushes true ultimacy – which in Christianity is always a Personal Absolute (God) and His commandment of love of persons.

The Orthodox Counterpoint: Logos over Law, Person over Abstraction

Orthodoxy offers not an abandonment of law or reason or order, but their transfiguration under the primacy of Christ the Logos (Divine Reason and Person). The Scriptures and Fathers teach that the Logos (Word) of God is the source of all law, rationality, and order in creation, and these things are good when kept in synergy with Him. But apart from Him, they become hollow shells or even weapons. The proper hierarchy is always: Person (God and those in His image) first, abstraction second. “The Sabbath was made for man” is one biblical example of this principle . Another is when St. Paul says, “The letter kills but the Spirit gives life,” meaning that if you cling to the literal ordinance without the Spirit’s grace, you end up with death (2 Cor 3:6). The Spirit here is not chaos, but the personal presence of God guiding application.

In Orthodoxy, every canon law has always been accompanied by the concept of discernment (diakrisis) and pastoral application (oikonomia). The goal of any rule is the salvation of the person and their incorporation into the Body of Christ, not the vindication of the rule itself. This is why priests and bishops sometimes make exceptions or give leniency – not out of disregard for law, but in service of the higher law of love. Far from being lawless, this reflects the original intent of divine commandments. As Christ demonstrated, sometimes breaking a sabbath regulation (to heal someone) actually fulfills God’s will more deeply than rigid observance would . The Orthodox Church codified this understanding: canon law commentaries often note that strictness (akribeia) is the ideal, but oikonomia is to be used for a greater good of souls. This is essentially an institutional humility – the Church saying, “The rules we have are holy, but they serve persons who are above rules in God’s eyes.” It keeps the Church from becoming a Pharisaic factory.

Theologically, Orthodoxy resists any system that tries to define God exhaustively. The apophatic tradition (negative theology) insists that all our language and concepts fall short of God. We make true statements about God (from revelation), but we know they do not capture His essence. For instance, we say God is just, but God’s “justice” is not measured by our ideas of justice – it transcends them, as St. Isaac the Syrian noted when he said God’s justice is indistinguishable from His mercy. Likewise, God instituted the law, but God can also override it in mercy, as Scripture repeatedly shows. Orthodoxy is comfortable with paradox and mystery (e.g., God is Trinity, an eternal union of three – rationally “impossible” yet true). By not forcing everything into neat systems, the Eastern Fathers leave room for the primacy of personal encounter with the living God. This doesn’t mean anti-intellectualism; it means reason submits to God rather than judging Him. The result is theology that points to communion over comprehension. Vladimir Lossky wrote that the true Orthodox theologian is the one who prays – implying that knowledge of God comes through relationship, not merely study .

On the atonement, Orthodox teaching emphasizes Christ’s victory over death and the devil (Christus Victor) and our mystical co-crucifixion and co-resurrection with Him, rather than a legal transaction. God’s justice is seen as restorative: He sets us right by healing the corruption of sin through union with Christ (often described as the “medicine of immortality” in the Eucharist). Thus, Orthodox preaching of the Cross is suffused with themes of love, sacrifice, descent into hades to rescue Adam, etc., rather than chiefly appeasing wrath. When wrath or debt language is used (as in some hymns, e.g., “Thou didst cancel our debts”), it’s understood in the larger personal context: God in Christ absorbed the consequences of sin out of love for us, not because some external law constrained Him . St. John Chrysostom exclaims, “He Himself is righteous, and He made us righteous” – highlighting righteousness as a gift of participation in Him, not an external verdict alone. The personal nature of salvation is preserved: Christ didn’t pay off the Father; the Father and Son together paid us – they expended themselves to retrieve the treasure (us) lost to sin . In the Orthodox Liturgy, right before Communion, we say, “Lord, I believe that You are truly the Christ… who came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am first.” Each person meets Christ personally in the sacrament, as the Prodigal met the Father. The legal scheme is not denied, but it is enfolded in personal encounter: “Your sins are forgiven” – a direct word from Christ – rather than a distant judge’s gavel.

As for bureaucracy and impersonal governance, the Orthodox ideal in both Church and (historically) empire was philanthropia – love of mankind – to imbue administration. Byzantine emperors, for example, saw themselves as “loving fathers” to their people, responsible to God for their welfare. That’s an ideal often not met, but it contrasts with modern bureaucrats who often feel no such personal bond. In the Church, leadership is ideally familial and shepherd-like. A bishop is called “Vladika” (Slavonic for “Master” but used affectionately) or in Arabic “Sayyidna” (“our master/father”), implying a personal relationship, not a faceless office. Parish priests are called “father” precisely to remind all that the Church is not an NGO or a DMV office but a family in God. Of course, large ecclesiastical institutions have bureaucracy too, but the ethos strives to remain personal – decisions through synods (brother bishops deliberating), pastoral economia in dealing with cases, etc. Pope Francis (though not Orthodox) echoed an Orthodox sentiment when he said he prefers “a bruised, messy Church” that goes out to people, to an “unhealthy Church” clinging to its comforts. That is essentially a call to put mission and person above bureaucratic maintenance – very much in line with Orthodox critiques of overly institutional mentality.

In society, Orthodoxy doesn’t have a fixed political theory, but it provides correctives: Always remember each person is icon of God; any system must serve the human person’s God-given dignity. Laws are necessary, but the spirit and letter must align to serve justice tempered by mercy. When Jesus will judge at the Last Day (Matthew 25), the criterion He gives is strikingly personal: “I was hungry and you fed me, I was sick and you visited me…” Not a word about how flawlessly someone adhered to procedures. The damned, by contrast, protest in essentially bureaucratic terms: “Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty…?” – like clerks saying “It wasn’t on my desk.” The implication is they excused themselves from personal charity perhaps because no rule explicitly required it. They treated even God as an abstraction (“when did we see You?” – failing to see Him in others). The sheep, on the other hand, responded with personal compassion. Thus Jesus cuts through all rationalizations: if you abstracted away your responsibility to love the concrete neighbor, no matter what system you followed, you failed.

In conclusion of Behemoth’s section: The demonic through-line is clear. Whether in religion, thought, or governance, whenever “the Sabbath” (the rule, the system) is exalted over “man” (the person and their good), the beast roars. But Christ, the God-Man, reorients us: He is the personal Logos who holds all creation together – all laws (natural and moral) find their purpose in Him . If torn from Him, they become false gods. The Orthodox Church, by keeping her dogmas tied to worship and her disciplines tied to mercy, seeks to cast down Behemoth in every generation. As the Apostle said, “The law was our custodian until Christ came… but now that faith has come, we are no longer under a custodian, for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God through faith” (Gal 3:24–26). Law exists for sonship – personal relationship with the Father in the Son. Any theology or system that forgets this is, at root, demonic, however shiny its veneer. The antidote is always a return to the personal: the face of Christ, the face of our neighbor, the face of each human story behind an abstract issue. As Metropolitan Kallistos Ware often reminded, “In the Church we do not solve problems; we meet persons.” The Pharisee wants a solved problem (did I tick all boxes to be righteous?); the saint wants to meet the Person (God) and the persons around him and love them.

Having examined Leviathan and Behemoth, powers that corrupt authority and law, we move to Moloch, the demon of perverted sacrifice and the blood-stained altars of meaningless death.

Moloch: Sacrifice Inverted into Meaningless Slaughter

In ancient Israel’s memories, Moloch (or Molech) was the name of a Canaanite god/demon associated with the most horrifying practice: child sacrifice. The Israelites were repeatedly warned “do not give your seed to Moloch” (Leviticus 18:21), and God thundered through Jeremiah that such an abomination “I did not command nor did it come into My mind” . Moloch worship entailed parents burning their own children as offerings – a demonic inversion of true sacrifice which should give life, not take it. Across cultures, Moloch has appeared in various guises: as war gods demanding the blood of warriors and innocents, as idols of state or tribe for whom lives are routinely sacrificed, or in modern form as ideologies and systems that devour human lives without pity. Moloch is essentially the demon of perverted sacrifice – taking the noble concept of offering something precious to God, and twisting it into the destruction of the innocent for no holy purpose. In modern terms, any time people speak of human lives as “collateral damage” or justify mass death as expedient, the specter of Moloch is present .

Let us outline this inversion more clearly. True sacrifice, in the Judeo-Christian understanding, is meant to be an act of communion, thanksgiving, atonement, or self-giving love. In the Old Testament, animal sacrifices symbolized repentance and covenant with God (but God made clear He desired mercy, not just sacrifice (Hos 6:6), pointing to ethics over ritual). The culmination of sacrifice is Christ’s voluntary sacrifice on the Cross, in which He, the only innocent, lays down His life to give life to the world. That is the sacrifice to end sacrifice – a life-giving oblation that conquers death by love. Christians participate in this in the Eucharist, offering bread and wine (symbols of creation and our lives) which God returns to us as the Body and Blood of Christ, i.e., divine life. Thus the only “slaying” in Christianity’s central rite is that of the Lamb of God who rose again; the Eucharist is an un-bloody sacrifice that imparts life. In sum, authentic sacrifice is meant to unite us to God and each other, and it respects the value of life (even in the Old Testament, human sacrifice was forbidden and condemned as murder).

Moloch’s inversion takes sacrifice and empties it of meaning, turning it into sheer destruction – life thrown away to appease false ideals. In Moloch-worship, children (symbols of the future and hope) are destroyed, which is essentially an anti-creation, anti-resurrection statement. Each child burned in the fires of Moloch was a victory of death over life, a blasphemy against the Creator who said “Be fruitful and multiply.” Why would people do this? In antiquity, it was often to secure favor for harvests, victory in war, or general prosperity – a perverse calculus that by destroying what is most precious, the gods would reward you. This is exactly how demons mock true religion: true faith says “I desire mercy, not sacrifice” and “God so loved the world He gave His Son for us”; the demon Moloch says “You must give your sons and daughters to me – only blood will secure your well-being.” It is a cruel bargaining, a parody of the Christian idea of salvation through sacrifice. The difference: God sacrifices Himself for man; Moloch forces man to sacrifice his own for the “god”. In the latter, there is no love, only fear and deception.

Historically, Moloch was manifest not only among the Canaanites but in various cultures: for example, Carthaginians (descendants of Phoenicians) were reported by Greek and Roman sources (and archaeological evidence) to sacrifice infants to Baal Hammon (identified with Cronus/Saturn) especially in dire times . The logic was always substitutionary and desperate – “take this life in place of ours.” But the God of Israel vehemently differentiated Himself from these fiends: “They built high places of Baal to burn their children… which I did not command or mention, nor did it enter my mind” . The phrase “nor did it enter my mind” stresses how utterly alien such killing is to God’s will. God viewed it as murder of the innocent (Jeremiah goes on to rename the Valley of Topheth, where sacrifices happened, as the Valley of Slaughter, and prophesied doom for those who do this – Jer 19).

Moloch’s cult went underground with the rise of monotheism, but the pattern re-emerged in secular forms. War is a primary one: how often have leaders sacrificed countless lives for conquest, glory, or even ideological “good causes,” rationalizing it as necessary? World War I, for instance, is often cited as a kind of industrial mass-sacrifice of nearly an entire generation of young European men on the altar of nationalism, owing to rigid alliances and pride – historians still debate the point of that war. The image of Moloch was explicitly invoked by poets of the 20th century: Allen Ginsberg’s famous poem “Howl” has a section crying “Moloch! Moloch!” as a symbol of the soulless forces of modern civilization devouring youth – “Moloch whose mind is pure machinery… Moloch whose fingers are ten armies!” . Ginsberg was referencing both war and the materialist consumer society (factories, skyscrapers) that grinds people up. In one stroke, he connected ancient child sacrifice with militarism and industrial capitalism, seeing them all as requiring “great and terrible sacrifice” .

Likewise, Winston Churchill, reflecting on Hitler’s regime, described the Nazi cult of personality and war-making as a new Moloch that demanded total devotion and sacrificial death . Indeed, Nazi ideology literally required sacrificing one’s conscience and eventually one’s life for the Führer and the imagined Volk. Hitler Youth were indoctrinated to see their lives as expendable fuel for the nation’s destiny. At the end in 1945, teenage boys and old men were thrown into suicidal battles – pure meaningless slaughter except to briefly sustain Hitler’s ego. This was Moloch in political form.

Another modern manifestation is ideological mass killings: e.g., Stalin’s purges, Mao’s Cultural Revolution, the Cambodian genocide – all ostensibly done to secure some utopian goal, but ending up as rivers of blood. In these cases, people are sacrificed not even to a god but to an idea – class struggle, racial purity, political doctrine. The abstract cause devours concrete humans. This hearkens to Moloch because the perpetrators often believe the ends justify the means: “We must eliminate these millions for the brighter future (or the Fatherland’s glory, etc.).” As the Moment Magazine piece observed, “Moloch represents any terrifying force to which children are ‘sacrificed’… a rapacious societal force demanding a great and terrible sacrifice” . In the 20th century, those forces were often nationalism, totalitarian ideology, or militarism – each one asking ordinary people to give up their children (to war, to party indoctrination, to famine through forced policies) for something that proved illusory.

We should mention abortion as well in this context. Many Church fathers and Christian writers today explicitly compare abortion to ancient child sacrifice – a direct offering of innocent life on the altar of convenience, career, or fear. The Moment article notes, “Today, Moloch represents any terrifying force to which children are ‘sacrificed,’ as in Wills’ essay on guns or, in other circles, abortion.” In a frank piece for Crisis Magazine, a Catholic writer said pro-abortion advocacy (especially when it celebrates abortion rather than treating it as a tragic last resort) is essentially allegiance to Moloch – because it demands the blood of the most innocent to serve adult desires or avoid hardships . Those strong words highlight how inversion works: something that should be unthinkable (a mother ending her child’s life) becomes framed as a “right” or even a “sacrament of personal freedom.” This indeed is a direct throwback to Moloch worship, albeit under the guise of autonomy or equality. The Orthodox Church has consistently taught that abortion is a grave sin – the early Christian document Didache condemns it – precisely because it is the opposite of self-sacrifice (parental love should sacrifice for children, not sacrifice the child for self).

Even the realm of economics and technology is not exempt. Modern commentary sometimes personifies “the Market” or “Artificial Intelligence” as potential Molochs – blind systems that, if given free rein, will consume humanity. For instance, tech philosopher Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote an essay “Meditations on Moloch” about how competitive dynamics (like companies or nations racing for AI supremacy) can lead to catastrophic outcomes that no one individually wants – a scenario where we become prisoners to a system that demands human sacrifice in some form . Scott Alexander’s popularization of “Moloch” in tech circles refers to situations where everyone is stuck sacrificing values (like safety or leisure or environment) because of an overarching pressure – essentially describing Moloch as the logic of hellish competition or unfettered Darwinism. This anthropomorphizing of destructive systemic forces as “Moloch” underscores that people sense an almost demonic futility in these patterns: we sacrifice and sacrifice, but not to God – to an idol that never gives life back. As Rabbi Gershon Winkler comments in the article, “Then as now, Moloch represents contradicting your better judgment for the sake of a higher cause, a greater truth – that in reality was neither.” . That sentence encapsulates the Moloch dynamic: one suppresses conscience and love (better judgment) thinking one serves a higher cause or truth, but that cause is a lie – “neither” true nor higher. It is a demon in disguise, feasting on the destruction itself.

In religious terms, one might say Moloch is the anti-Eucharist. In the Eucharist, God says, “Take, eat, this is My Body, given for you.” God sacrifices Himself to give life to man. In Moloch’s sacrifices, the demon effectively says, “Take and destroy, these are your children, given for me.” It inverts who is giving and who is receiving: God gives His Son; Moloch takes our sons and daughters. It inverts the purpose: Christ’s sacrifice brings reconciliation and eternal life; Moloch’s sacrifices bring no salvation, only bereavement and spiritual guilt. And it inverts the direction of love: in Christ, God’s love for man is so immense He lays down life; in Moloch, man’s twisted fear and misplaced devotion lead him to lay down his child’s life to appease a loveless phantom. No wonder the early Christians saw martyrdom (their own deaths at pagan hands) as true sacrifice, refusing to offer sacrifices to false gods. They countered Moloch by offering themselves to God in love, rather than offering others to devils in fear.

The Ontological Lie: Death as a Means of Life

Moloch’s inversion is built on an ontological lie: that death can bring forth life, that the end justifies the means, that evil can be done so good may come. In theological terms, it is a fundamental denial of the truth that “being” (life, goodness) comes only from God, and evil (death) is non-being, a privation that cannot be the source of anything good . When people sacrifice to Moloch, ancient or modern, they operate under the illusion that by destroying X, they will secure Y (where Y is some form of life, prosperity, security). This is essentially believing evil will produce good. But Scripture warns, “Woe to those who call evil good” (Isaiah 5:20). The Church teaches that one may never do moral evil even to achieve a good result – because to choose evil is to alienate oneself from the Good (God), thus undermining the good result itself. Moloch’s seduction is exactly to get humans to transgress this moral truth by dressing up an atrocity as a necessary or even holy act.

Take for instance the belief, “We must kill these innocent ones to ensure the tribe’s future.” Ontologically, that’s nonsense: a future built on innocent blood is cursed and unstable (as the Old Testament says, innocent blood “cries out” for justice). Yet people believed it pragmatically. Or a modern CEO might justify dumping toxic waste (harming communities) to keep the company profitable “for the greater good of employees and shareholders” – again, sacrificing health/lives to Mammon/Moloch under an economic rationale. It’s a lie because poisoning people eventually poisons the society that the company needs to survive; but under short-term pressure, the lie seems convincing. Or at a very personal level, a scared teenager thinks eliminating her unborn baby will “save her life as she knows it” – but often it leads to emotional trauma and regret, a spiritual death within, while the actual problem might have been solvable without killing. Moloch’s whisper is always: “There is no other way. You must sacrifice this life or else you’ll lose something greater.” It’s a counsel of despair and false necessity. Elijah and the prophets of Baal had a showdown precisely to prove that the Lord brings rain/life, not Baal with his self-mutilating priests (1 Kings 18). The true God answered with fire and later with rain without demanding human sacrifice; Baal’s prophets gashed themselves to blood and got nothing. That story is a permanent rebuttal: life proceeds from the Lord of life, not from painful offerings to a non-entity.

From an Orthodox perspective, the ultimate fulfillment of rightful sacrifice is martyrdom, where a person freely offers their own life rather than renounce God or rather than kill others. The martyrs imitate Christ – they die for truth and love, but they do not kill. This, paradoxically, brings life to the Church (it’s often said “the blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church”). That is the divine economy: one’s voluntary self-sacrifice out of love can inspire and vivify others. Moloch is a black parody: involuntary sacrifice of another out of fear yields only more death. The early martyrs sometimes even had their children killed before their eyes by persecutors, but they did not fight back to save them at expense of their faith – they trusted those children to God’s living hands rather than try to momentarily save them by burning incense to Caesar (which would have been spiritually killing them anyway). Such harrowing choices show that Christians identified sacrificing to idols as worse than physical death. The true sacrifice was to witness (martyr means witness) to God’s truth by suffering, not by inflicting suffering.

In contemporary terms, when faced with a Moloch-like scenario, the Orthodox ethos would say: Rather let me suffer wrong than do wrong to avoid suffering. For example, a nation under attack may defend itself (Church permits just war in defense), but should not deliberately target civilians even if that means slower victory – better lose a war morally than win it through atrocity, for what profits it to gain the world and lose one’s soul (Mark 8:36)? Similarly, in medical ethics, Orthodox teaching would never allow killing one patient to harvest organs for five – even though an abstract utilitarian calculus would say that yields a net gain of four lives. Why? Because it makes one a murderer, and destroys the moral fabric (and each person is an image of God beyond price). We cannot do evil for good. Secular ethics often wrestle here, but the Christian stance is clear: No. In refusing that, the Church rejects Moloch’s premise.

One might also notice how Moloch feeds on fear and hopelessness. People typically resort to such extreme “sacrifices” when they feel trapped. In ancient famine or defeat, kings would sacrifice their children as a desperate attempt to turn the tide. In modern times, parents abort often out of fear and felt lack of support. Soldiers commit war crimes often out of panic or dehumanizing propaganda that they must do so to survive. Moloch thrives in that darkness. The Church’s response is to inject hope and trust in Providence. For instance, the early Church rescued exposed infants (a common pagan practice was abandoning unwanted babies – effectively passive sacrifice). Today, Christians run crisis pregnancy centers to give options besides abortion. In war, chaplains and Christian leaders encourage treating even enemies humanely, trusting that doing right may invite God’s help more than brutality would. This is fundamentally a faith stance: it is better to suffer evil than to do evil – trusting that God can bring good out of our suffering, but if we commit evil, we sever ourselves from Goodness. The three youths in the book of Daniel refused to even seem to offer incense to the king’s idol, choosing the furnace; and God delivered them (Dan 3). But even had He not, they were prepared to die rather than bow. That refusal to sacrifice to false gods – even one pinch of incense – contrasts vividly with say, the Moabite king in 2 Kings 3 who, in military desperation, sacrificed his firstborn son on the wall, causing horror. One clings to righteousness and trusts God; the other abandons all for survival.

Orthodox Counterpoint: Living Sacrifice and Holy Offering

The Orthodox Church preaches Christ Crucified and Resurrected as the one true life-giving sacrifice. In worship, the concept of sacrifice is transfigured: we offer bread and wine (representing creation and our lives) and ourselves as “a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God” (Romans 12:1). This living sacrifice means we sacrifice our own ego, sins, and even life if called – but not others’ lives. The Eucharist in Greek is literally “Thanksgiving”, not appeasement. We thank God by offering His own gifts back to Him, and He in turn gives us the Gift of Himself. It’s an exchange of love, not of death. When the priest prepares the bread (prosphora) for liturgy, he even commemorates the sacrifice differently: he cuts out a cube (the Lamb) and says verses like “Like a sheep led to the slaughter…” remembering Christ’s passion, but then he also places particles for the Virgin Mary and all saints, etc., on the diskos (paten), signifying that the one sacrifice of Christ gathers all in communion. Then after Communion, the prayers say “Having seen the true Light…we have found the true Faith.” The contrast with Moloch’s dark sacrifices (often done at night in secret, burning children to ashes) could not be greater. The Christian sacrifice is joyful, communal, luminous, involving offering of self to God who gives life. No innocents are harmed; rather, the Innocent One voluntarily lays down His life and takes it up again, and invites us to offer ourselves (our bodies as living sacrifices, our praises, alms, and self-denial in fasting).

Orthodox spirituality therefore emphasizes martyria (witness) over militancy. There is an old saying: “The Christian faith is built on the blood of its martyrs, not on the blood of its enemies.” When Christians had power (as in the Byzantine Empire), ideally they still knew any use of force is tragic and not “sacred.” In sharp contrast, many pagan and later ideologies sacralize violence (e.g., the Aztecs saw human sacrifice as literally sustaining the cosmos; revolutionary regimes see “sacrificing” a class of people as building a paradise). The Church never sacralizes violence; it sacralizes suffering love. The saints are those who suffered – whether through asceticism or persecution – out of love for God and neighbor. Their blood is akin to Christ’s: shed not in taking others’ lives but in offering their own. This is the only blood the Church considers holy – the blood of martyrs which, as Tertullian said, “is the seed of Christians.” When Rome killed the martyrs, their witness converted others; when later Christians fell into the temptation of violence (e.g., Crusades, religious wars), the faith suffered and was corrupted.

Thus, to every Moloch demand, the Church has a martyr or confessor to oppose it. Children offered to idols? The Church offers the story of St. Abraham in the Old Testament, stopped by God from sacrificing Isaac, or the Mother of the Maccabees who watched her sons die refusing idolatry – they gave their lives rather than take life or worship falsehood, and are honored as martyrs. People sacrificing conscience to political idols? The Church holds up the New Martyrs (like those under Soviet communism) who would not sacrifice others or betray the truth to save themselves – many died in gulags instead of endorsing lies or violence. In daily life, when we are tempted to cut moral corners “or else we fail,” the Church says remember Christ’s words: “Whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will save it” (Luke 9:24). This paradox is the anti-Moloch principle. Moloch says “save yourself by killing another”; Christ says “lose yourself (in fidelity and love), and you will truly live.”

Finally, the Church believes in the communion of saints – that the sacrifice of praise and virtue by the faithful contributes mysteriously to the well-being of the whole body. We do not need to throw people into the furnace to appease God; rather, we place people (alive or reposed) on the altar in prayer. In the Proskomedia (preparation of Eucharist), for instance, priests take little particles of bread for living and dead and at the end drop them into the chalice praying, “Wash away, O Lord, the sins of all those commemorated here, by Thy precious Blood.” It’s a beautiful reversal of sacrifice: instead of throwing victims into fire, we dip the names of loved ones into Christ’s sacrificial Blood for their cleansing and blessing . And instead of burning children, we baptize children – immersing them in water (symbolizing death and resurrection with Christ) and bringing them alive and crying into the church community. Baptism is explicitly called “Holy Illumination” – an anti-sacrifice in that sense: it’s an initiation by dying and rising with Christ without harm, rather, with spiritual rebirth. The child “dies” mystically to sin and is raised immediately to new life. How opposite to passing through fire to an idol that leaves only ashes! One might say the Church sacramentalized sacrifice so that no literal blood needs to be shed ever again. Jesus’s one death and resurrection are perpetually made present in an unbloody manner, so we always have access to the power of sacrificial love without repeating the gore. Any attempt to reintroduce literal blood sacrifice (of animals, much less humans) is seen as either a return to shadows at best, or demonic at worst.

Summary: Moloch’s through-line is the enthronement of death – the lie that we must kill innocents or do evil to preserve ourselves or achieve good. It manifests in myriad forms: infanticide, total war, genocide, abortion, even in the cutthroat competition of society that grinds the vulnerable. But Christianity exposes this as diabolical folly. Life comes from the God who is Life, and He never asks us to secure life by unjust killing. The only killing He allowed was the voluntary self-offering of His Son, and that was in order to destroy death, not to prop up some worldly agenda. All Christian self-sacrifice (martyrdom, ascetic fasting which “mortifies” the flesh, etc.) is aimed at overcoming sin and death in ourselves – it’s healing. Moloch’s sacrifices have no resurrection, no healing – they are simply destructive. The fruits bear it out: societies that engaged in human sacrifice were stuck in terror and violence; societies that tempered justice with mercy and upheld sanctity of life flourished in humaneness. The Orthodox truth is that “the blood of Jesus speaks a better word than the blood of Abel” (Heb 12:24) – meaning mercy triumphs over vengeance. Where Moloch demands endless Abel victims to satiate an unattainable security, Christ’s blood cries forgiveness and ends the cycle of violence.

Thus, the Church’s weapon against Moloch is the Cross – not wielded as a sword, but as a sign of willingly accepted suffering. And the Church’s banquet against Moloch’s feasts of death is the Eucharist, where God feeds us with life so we never think we need to feed on the lives of others. As the Moment article closed: modern invocations of Moloch – whether fear of AI or war – can be countered if we recognize the phenomenon and “take a step back to design systems less likely to produce Molochian outcomes” . For Christians, that design is already given: a life ordered around the self-giving love of Christ will inherently refuse Moloch’s demands. The four thrones we’ve examined – Leviathan (power), Behemoth (law), Moloch (sacrifice), Asmodeus (love/lust to be discussed), and Mammon (greed, to be discussed) – all work together. We have seen Leviathan and Behemoth create oppressive systems; Moloch often uses those systems (states, ideologies) to carry out its sacrifices; Mammon (wealth) and Asmodeus (lust) provide the temptations and fuel that keep people enslaved to these patterns. Before concluding, we must explore Asmodeus and Mammon, and finally show how all five interlock.

Asmodeus: The Inversion of Love into Lust and Identity into Perversion

According to some demonologies, Asmodeus is the demon of lust, the perversion of sexual love. In our analysis, Asmodeus represents a broader throne of inversion: the enthronement of desire as identity, the corruption of eros (love as desire) into domination and degradation, and the disfigurement of the human person’s image (Imago Dei) into a self-authored caricature. If Leviathan attacked healthy authority and Behemoth healthy order, Asmodeus attacks healthy love and self-understanding. This demon’s pattern can be traced through the distortion of sexuality, gender, and relationships across history – from ancient fertility cults and ritual prostitution, through medieval courtly adulteries, down to the modern sexual revolution, pornography, the LGBTQ+ identity movement, and even the current transgender phenomenon of mutilating the body. In each case, we will see a common inversion: where God created love and sexual union to be sacred, generative, and unitive (an icon of Christ and the Church), Asmodeus twists it into something selfish, sterile, exploitative, and ultimately isolating. Where God bestows a given identity (male/female in His image, each person uniquely beloved), Asmodeus entices people to reject that gift and define themselves by their passions or own will. It is, in essence, the same lie of Eden (“you shall be as gods”) now focused on sex and selfhood: be your own creator, your desires are your master, and if God forbids or nature limits, defy them.

Let us first recall the Orthodox order of love and identity – what Asmodeus inverts. In Christian teaching, marriage between man and woman is a holy mystery (sacrament) that images the union of Christ and the Church (Eph 5:31-32). It is meant to be exclusive, lifelong, and open to life (fruitful). Sexual love (eros) is not evil; it is created by God to draw spouses into a profound union of body and soul, which (God willing) generates new life (children) and forms a domestic church. Even chastity (celibacy for the kingdom or fidelity within marriage) is not a repression but an integration of desire into the service of love and holiness. The Church celebrates marital sex in the right context – for instance, the wedding service crowns the couple as king and queen, honors them as icons of God’s creative love, and includes prayers for children. At the same time, virginity for Christ (monasticism) is also honored as a radical gift of one’s entire eros to God directly, which is spiritually fruitful. In both cases – faithful marriage or consecrated celibacy – eros is ordered toward communion (with spouse or with God and the whole Church) and is marked by kenosis (self-emptying for the beloved). Importantly, identity in Orthodoxy is received, not self-constructed. We are created male or female – a given reality, a gift – and more fundamentally, each person is defined by their relationship to God (creature, then child of God by grace in baptism). The ultimate identity is that we are persons made in God’s image, called to become like Him. All other labels (nationality, occupation, even male/female) are secondary to the core truth that we are who we are in relation to God. As St. Basil said, “Our true origin is in the will of God.” Therefore, the faith calls us to find ourselves by seeking God’s will, denying passions that distort, and embracing the givenness of our nature as the arena of salvation.

Now, Asmodeus’s inversion enthrones disordered desire as defining. Lust is treated as “love”, passions as identity, and rather than offering oneself to the other or to God, one consumes the other or even oneself. The key lies are: “I am my desires” and “freedom means indulging them without restraint or objective form.” This leads to manifold corruptions:

• Lust enthroned as love: The world begins to equate love purely with erotic/romantic attraction and pleasure. Sexual desire, divorced from commitment and sacrament, is glorified as the highest good – essentially making an idol of Eros (like the ancient Greeks did with the god Eros). Modern culture often uses the word “love” to justify any sexual behavior: “They love each other, so anything goes.” But often it’s not true love (willing the good of the other in God); it’s mutual or even one-sided lust. Asmodeus smiles when fornication (sex outside marriage) and adultery (breaking marriage) are normalized in the name of “love” – because this undermines real love (which requires fidelity and sacrifice). Already by the High Middle Ages, the idea of courtly love celebrated adulterous passion as somehow noble – a romanticization that undermined marriage. It was an early symptom of separating eros from the moral order. Today, media constantly portrays casual sex as normal and even expected, uncoupled from procreation or commitment. This is essentially offering incense to Asmodeus, trading the gold of holy love for the dross of momentary pleasure. As one Christian commentary puts it, the problem with making eros a god is not that it shows too much of love, but far too little – it reduces persons to objects for gratification  .
  
• Identity corrupted: Perhaps the most insidious aspect is the modern notion that one’s sexual inclinations define who one is. Phrases like “I am gay/lesbian/bi/etc.” illustrate how deeply desires have become ontologized. In Orthodox Christian understanding, inclinations or passions are things we have or feel, not what we are. A person is a child of God, a man or woman, etc., who might struggle with X passion. But the world tells people to identify with the passion, even to take pride in it. This is a tragic reduction. Take homosexuality: The Church views same-sex attraction as one of many effects of fallen nature – not chosen initially, but disordered if acted upon (since it can’t fulfill the procreative/unitive purpose of sex as God designed). But modern culture says “If you feel this, that’s your identity – embrace it, act on it, even define your whole social existence around it.” This locks people into a passion as defining them, potentially discouraging them from seeking a deeper identity in Christ. Similarly, consider transgenderism: someone feels a dysphoria (disconnect) with their biological sex. Rather than treat this psychological/spiritual struggle with compassion aimed at reconciling them to their body, society (under Asmodeus’s influence) now often declares, “Yes, your feelings override physical reality – you are whatever gender you imagine; your body is just clay to be refashioned by your will.” This is a direct rebellion against the givenness of creation: effectively claiming total self-authorship of identity, to the point of mutilating healthy body parts (mimicking the ancient priests of Cybele who castrated themselves – an old demon returning). The Church sees our sex as part of God’s image in us, not a prison. Even if one faces the cross of gender dysphoria, the answer is to find healing and meaning within the body God gave, not to amputate or hormonally warp it. Asmodeus’s lie here is that the subjective sense of self trumps the objective gift of self. It’s akin to saying “I created myself,” a delusion akin to the devil’s original pride.
  
• Marriage mocked: Under Asmodeus’s regime, the sacred covenant of marriage is attacked on all sides. For those who do marry, the demon sows temptations: pornography, infidelity, selfishness that leads to divorce. The overall culture demeans marriage as “just a piece of paper” and promotes alternatives: cohabitation, serial monogamy, or even things like polyamory. More recently, the concept of marriage was parodied by extending it to same-sex couples (something fundamentally impossible in natural law). The Orthodox objection to “gay marriage” is not rooted in hatred, but in the understanding that marriage by definition is a gendered, procreative union blessed by God – an icon of Christ (the Bridegroom) and Church (Bride). Two men or two women cannot image this mystery; calling their relationship “marriage” is a demonic inversion – an icon of sterile mutual self-love in place of fruitful complementary love. This is harsh to say, but necessary: it is making an anti-sacrament, an image of Christ and Church replaced by an image of two of the same (which some church fathers symbolically associated with sterility of soul). Additionally, Asmodeus ensures such unions are typically closed to life (via adoption or technology there might be children, but the union itself can’t generate life). So the generative aspect is inverted into often deliberate sterility. In a sense, homosexual acts and contraceptive acts in heterosexual context share the aspect of rendering sex sterile by design. This is contrary to the nature of love, which is inherently life-giving (if not physically, at least spiritually).
  
• Fertility inverted to sterility (and worse): The ancient cults of Ashtoreth/Astarte involved sacred prostitution and sometimes orgies supposedly to ensure fertility of the land. Ironically, they often ended up in infanticide – unwanted babies from these rites would be sacrificed (often to Moloch). Thus fertility cults ironically produced death. Modern equivalents: hooking up and promiscuity lead to many abortions (as we discussed under Moloch). Or the widespread use of contraceptives has led to society treating children as an optional add-on rather than natural fruit of love – effectively making sterility the default. Indeed some countries now face demographic collapse due to low birth rates – literally a culture of (sexual) indulgence leading to no future humans. This is a civilizational self-destruct triggered by separating sex from procreation entirely. Additionally, Asmodeus influences the technological assault on procreation: IVF, surrogacy, etc., which often treat new life as a product to be manufactured (with many embryos discarded – again a sacrifice of spares). All of this flows from eros detached from its proper end.
  
• Body mutilated: The body, per Orthodoxy, is a temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor 6:19) and will be resurrected. Asmodeus drives people to defile the body – not only in sexual immorality (1 Cor 6:18) but literally in mutilation. We see this tragically in the extreme trans surgeries – removing breasts, wombs, genitalia – in a vain attempt to remake oneself. We also see a spike in extreme body modifications, sometimes called body identity integrity disorder, where people desire amputation or other disfigurement (some get it done). These are signs of deep spiritual illness: the self turned against its own flesh. Demons rejoice in mutilation (the Gadarene demoniac was cutting himself with stones, Mark 5:5). Even from Old Testament times, Israelites were forbidden from self-harm or castration, unlike pagan priests who did such things. The trend today is couched in terms of “gender-affirmation” or “self-expression” but objectively it is mutilation. And it leaves people sterile and often regretful. For instance, many who underwent sex-change as youths are coming out in a “detransition” movement, testifying that their problems (depression, abuse, autism, etc.) were not solved by destroying body parts – now they bear double hurt (the original issues plus medical damage). This is Asmodeus laughing – he came to “steal, kill, and destroy” (John 10:10), especially the image of God in us. What better way than to convince people to destroy their own sexual organs (which are intimately tied to being co-creators with God of new life)? It’s a sacrifice of one’s generative potential on the altar of self-will.
  
• Communion parodied: Asmodeus inverts not only one’s relation to self but to community. Human sexuality is intrinsically relational – meant to bond spouses, bind families, connect generations. The demonic twist is to create counter-communions based on shared degradation instead of shared love. For example, the ritual orgies of some ancient cults or certain modern sects (there have been depraved cults requiring sexual abuse as initiation – e.g., some satanic groups or weird offshoots). Even political tyranny has used sexual humiliation as a tool: the infamous “Pitesti experiment” in Communist Romania (late 1940s) forced political/religious prisoners to engage in vile sexual acts and blasphemies collectively as part of breaking their will and solidarity  . Survivors described it as an “anti-liturgy”, a black mass aimed at reversing all human decency and faith. In those dungeons, they would force a seminarian to perform a parody of baptism using urine, or “communion” with feces, often accompanied by homosexual rape – utterly diabolic scenes  . This shows how far Asmodeus and his colleagues Leviathan/Moloch will go: turning what should be intimate and sacred into an instrument of desecration and domination. It is the exact mirror opposite of Christians gathering to partake of the pure Body of Christ in love – instead, people were gathered to partake in filth under coercion. While Pitesti is an extreme, we see echoes in culture: pornography is essentially mass participation (remotely) in others’ degrading acts – a virtual anti-communion. Millions watch not with love but with lust, using performers as means to an orgasmic end, and in turn often get addicted and isolated. It pretends to be connecting with sexual “community” but actually leaves one more alone and objectifying others. The rise of internet porn is one of Asmodeus’s biggest triumphs in recent decades – ensnaring even Christians, sapping spiritual vitality and real love.
  

Summarizing, Asmodeus’s inversion takes every aspect of sexuality and identity and turns it against its divine purpose. Love becomes lust; self-gift becomes self-gratification; communion becomes consumption; fertility becomes barrenness; the body as image of God becomes a canvas for project self. Ultimately, it isolates souls – disguised as “intimacy” or “pride,” it delivers loneliness and confusion. A vivid biblical type is the harlot Babylon in Revelation 17-18 – a gaudy prostitute city that intoxicates nations with sexual immorality and abominations, but in one hour is destroyed, and found in her is “the blood of prophets and saints.” This symbol suggests a civilization given to lust and luxury that also persecutes the righteous – not far off from aspects of our own world. The antidote given is “Come out of her, my people, lest you take part in her sins” (Rev 18:4).

The Orthodox Counterpoint: Chastity, Theosis, and True Personhood

Against this, the Orthodox Church doesn’t present a dour negation of sex, but a radiant affirmation of holy love. Chastity (Greek sophrosyne, “soundness of mind/wholeness”) is taught not as repression but as integration of sexuality into the whole person under grace . In marriage, that means fidelity and seeking each other’s sanctification, moderating desires for the sake of mutual love (sometimes even abstaining by agreement for prayer as St. Paul suggests). In celibacy, it means sublimating the sexual energies into divine love and love of all (one becomes a “spiritual father/mother” to many). Far from being lifeless, chastity is likened by the Fathers to a brilliant jewel that enables one to see God (Blessed are the pure in heart…). It frees a person from slavery to impulses, allowing genuine freedom to love rightly. The contrast with Asmodeus’s false “freedom” (license that leads to bondage, addictions, and emptiness) is stark. Ironic but true: the person who disciplines their desires under God’s light often ends up more joyful and even more able to have deep relationships than the person chasing pleasure. Monastics who vow chastity often exude peace and overflowing love. Meanwhile, the Hollywood stars with playboy lifestyles often die early or lead miserable private lives. The Orthodox monastic tradition especially stands as a sign that fulfillment is not equal to sexual gratification – one can be entirely fulfilled in God and service without any genital activity. This is an affront to a world that idolizes sex.

Marriage is highly honored in Orthodoxy as well – in the marriage rite, crowns are placed to show the nobility and martyrdom of the married state (martyrdom in the sense of dying to self for the spouse and children). The couple’s sexual union is understood as sanctified when done in Christ, even described as a “sacrament of love” by some saints. But it’s within the larger context of a sacrificial life together. Interestingly, the Church, while blessing marital intimacy, also guides couples to periodic abstinence (especially during fasting seasons) as an exercise in putting prayer first and not being enslaved to pleasure. This synergy of enjoyment and asceticism actually strengthens true love. It’s the opposite of the world’s approach of unbridled indulgence which often hollows out relationships.

Regarding identity, Orthodoxy offers the healing message that we are not defined by our worst feelings or best achievements, but by God’s love. For someone with same-sex attraction, for instance, the Church would say: You are first of all God’s beloved child, called to holiness, and you happen to have this struggle – which by God’s grace you can bear fruit from (through celibacy or perhaps overcoming it), but even if not, you can still live a pure life and reach theosis like any carrying any cross. Indeed, there are SSA-attracted Orthodox Christians who live chastely and find deep fellowship in Christ – not denying that part of their experience, but not enthroning it either. The same with gender confusion: the Church urges compassionate care (no bullying or hatred, of course) but also firmly says: Your body is a gift; mutilation is not the answer. Let us help you accept yourself as God made you. It may involve therapy, but also spiritual teaching that our feelings can mislead, whereas God does not. There is a beautiful service in Orthodoxy called the Molieben for those who have given birth to a stillborn or had a miscarriage – it commends the child to God’s mercy. I mention this because the Church extends grace even in tragic irregular situations, as opposed to the world which often tells women who miscarry to quickly forget, or in abortion pretends it was nothing. The Church names the loss, grieves with the parents, and places the incident under God’s mercy – re-personalizing what modernity often depersonalizes. Even for abortion, the Church offers repentance and healing – not to condemn forever, but to restore. Many women (and men) who come to repentance find solace in services like a Paraclesis (supplicatory canon) asking God to care for the aborted child in His love. This helps break the lie that “nothing happened” – acknowledging the child as an image of God and committing them to God. It also helps break the lie that one is irredeemably defined by that sin – God can forgive and restore a post-abortive parent to wholeness, though with a scar that can become a site of compassion.

The Church also fosters authentic community to counter the pornographic or exploitative culture. Parishes ideally are spiritual families where people of all ages and life situations mingle with godly love, providing a context where one’s value isn’t one’s sexual appeal or conquests, but one’s unique gifts and presence. Young people who find healthy friendship and purpose in church are less likely to seek false validation in promiscuity or extreme identity fads. In the early church, a striking fact is that Christian sexual morality (no sex outside hetero marriage) was one of the biggest draws for some pagans – because it created stable families and dignified women and children, unlike the exploitative Roman ways. That witness is needed again. The Church doesn’t offer a new ideology, but she offers Christ, the divine Bridegroom who fulfills all deepest desires. For as Augustine said, “Our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.” Much of the lust and identity confusion comes from trying to fill a God-shaped void with pleasure or novelty. The Orthodox response is theosis – slowly transfiguring desires by union with God. Many former addicts of lust have become chaste saints through prayer and grace (e.g., St. Mary of Egypt, a one-time sex addict turned desert ascetic). Her life shows no one is irredeemable and that what seems impossible (radical change of orientation of desire) is possible with God.

Finally, the Church’s sacramental life provides practical antidotes: frequent Confession humbles one, brings hidden struggles to light for healing; Communion unites one with Christ’s pure body, which can burn away impurity like fire in straw (if one approaches with repentance); fasting disciplines bodily appetites across the board, training us to say no to temptations; feasts sublimate joy into communal celebration (showing we don’t need debauchery to be happy – Church feasts are filled with food, drink, dance often, but all in an innocent context). The presence of strong marriages and spiritual fathers/mothers in a parish creates a sort of field of grace protecting the weaker. In short, Orthodoxy seeks to re-personalize and re-sacralize sexuality and identity under the Lordship of Christ. Each person is seen not as a lust-object or a pronoun, but a living icon of God with a unique name and calling.

Asmodeus’s great lie is that freedom and fulfillment come from following every erotic inclination and defining yourself by them. The Orthodox truth is that true freedom comes by mastering those inclinations through God’s help and discovering your true self in relationship to Him. Where Asmodeus divides (within self and between people), Christ heals the unity of soul-and-body and the communion between persons. For example, when Christ meets the Samaritan woman at the well (John 4), He gently exposes her disordered love life (five husbands, now cohabiting) not to shame her but to offer her “living water” – i.e., the Holy Spirit’s love that will satisfy her deeper thirst that men couldn’t. She becomes a fervent disciple (St. Photini). That is how the Church views those ensnared by lust or identity illusions: thirsting for God without knowing it, and thus drinking sand. The solution is not condemnation but to offer the living water of divine love. Once they taste it, as many have, the sand is seen for what it is.

In sum, Asmodeus enthrones eros cut off from agape (selfish desire divorced from sacrificial love). The Orthodox way reunites eros and agape – either channeling eros into holy marriage as an expression of agape or renouncing physical eros to devote all love to God and neighbor. Both ways lead to joy and wholeness, proven by the saints. The clash of these approaches in society is perhaps the most apparent of all throne battles today. But the Church trusts that Christ the Bridegroom, who gave Himself for His Bride, will ultimately defeat Asmodeus as surely as He cast out legions of demons from tormented souls in the Gospel, restoring them “clothed and in their right mind” (Mark 5:15).

Finally, we turn to the fifth and final throne, Mammon, the demon of greed and commodification, who funds and feeds the others.

Mammon: Gifts Inverted into Commodities – The Economy of Idolatry

The name Mammon traditionally personifies wealth and greed. Jesus said, “You cannot serve God and Mammon” (Matt 6:24), making Mammon essentially a false god in competition with the true. In our schema, Mammon represents the inversion of the created world’s purpose as gift into a self-contained system of monetary value and exploitation. If Leviathan was power’s corruption and Asmodeus love’s corruption, Mammon is the corruption of resources and work – turning what should be a means of communion and sustenance into an end in itself that people serve. Under Mammon’s sway, money ceases to be merely a tool and becomes an idol, economy becomes a false providence, people are treated as economic units (consumers, labor, capital) rather than persons, and creation (earth and its fruits) is not cherished as gift but ravaged as mere raw material for profit. Mammon’s motto is “Gain the world, even if you lose your soul” – directly contrary to Christ’s warning (Mark 8:36). Let’s break down this inversion in terms of the Orthodox view of creation and stewardship vs. Mammon’s perversion.

Orthodox order (what Mammon inverts): The world and everything in it is fundamentally gift from God. The opening of Psalm 24, “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof”, and James 1:17, “Every good gift is from above”, set the tone. God created the material world as very good and gave it to humanity to enjoy, cultivate, and offer back in thanksgiving. The proper stance of man toward creation is eucharistic (thanksgiving) and ascetic (self-controlled use). We see this in the Genesis command to steward the Garden, and in the Old Testament laws of Sabbath and Jubilee which prevented endless exploitation (land rests, debts forgiven – an acknowledgment that wealth isn’t the ultimate goal, fidelity to God is). Work itself is holy participation in God’s creativity – St. Benedict said “laborare est orare” (to work is to pray) when done unto God. But work is for sustaining life and fostering community, not for mere accumulation. Wealth, in biblical view, is a means to serve family and the needy, not an end. The true treasure for Christians is Christ and the heavenly riches of virtue (Matt 6:19-21). Acts shows the early believers sharing possessions so none lacked; they didn’t idolize property. The Church’s sacraments themselves reflect a gift economy: bread and wine (simple gifts of creation) are offered and become the priceless Body and Blood of Christ – illustrating that when we return a portion to God in thanksgiving, He multiplies and sanctifies it. Almsgiving is taught as the way to store treasure in heaven and cure greed. Summarily, the Christian sees the material world as sacramental: something to receive with gratitude, use with love, and even relinquish generously. Ownership is relative (we are stewards under God), and wealth is dangerous if not tempered by generosity (hence rich and poor are to practice almsgiving, like the widow’s mite).

Now, Mammon’s inversion: it makes Wealth a god, possessions an end, the economy an idolized system. Jesus characterized it well in the parable of the rich fool who stored up barns for himself – “Soul, you have many goods laid up; eat, drink, be merry” – and God says, “Fool! This night your soul is required, and then whose will these things be?” (Luke 12:19-20). Mammon’s first lie is “You must secure yourself by accumulating – trust in money to save you.” This is essentially idolatry, replacing God with gold. The irony, noted by saints, is that wealth promises security but often delivers anxiety and bondage. The more one has, the more one fears to lose it or thirsts for more. As an 8th century saint said, “Riches are like seawater: the more you drink, the more you thirst.” Mammon enslaves by the very abundance meant to free from want.

Mammon’s “theology” is evident in phrases like “the invisible hand of the market” (speaking as if the market – pursuit of self-interest – miraculously yields good). This is basically treating economy as omniscient providence, a subtle idolatry echoed in modern reverence for “the Market” or GDP growth at all costs. People come to accept moral evils if couched in economic terms. For example, “It’s regrettable but necessary to lay off thousands to increase shareholder value” – here profit justifies harm to persons. Or “this pipeline might pollute water, but it’s good for the economy” – Mammon’s logic is that money > life. The prophet Mammon has converts across ideologies: in capitalism, the idol is free market efficiency (rationalized greed); in communism, they dethroned God but enthroned materialism – promising a workers’ paradise but delivering state-worship and economic oppression (just another form of Mammon ironically, since Marxism reduced man to economic units and thought material abundance alone was salvation).

Key manifestations through history include:

• Ancient Idolatry of Wealth: Many pagan religions linked gods to prosperity. Temples often doubled as treasuries and banks. In the Bible, Baal and Asherah worship was partly about fertility of land (economic success). People would pay tribute to idols hoping for rain and crop – basically treating divine favor as a commercial exchange. Against this, the Prophets thundered that trust in idols for rain is vain; it’s God who gives or withholds. Greed is condemned repeatedly (Achan’s sin, Naboth’s vineyard seized by Ahab). Mammon was at work in every unjust weight or measure in the marketplace that prophets denounced (Amos 8:5-6).
  
• Medieval Church’s struggle with usury: Early and medieval Church forbade charging interest (usury) because it saw lending as charity or at least morally neutral, not a profit venture. Money itself shouldn’t “breed” money – that was seen as greed. Over time, as economy complexified, this prohibition eroded (especially with Calvin sanctioning moderate interest). Some Churchmen decried the change as the Church caving to Mammon. Indeed, once interest-taking normalized, economies grew but so did exploitation (think of sharecroppers, debtors’ prisons). The spirit of Mammon is “money must always grow,” which can incentivize treating human and natural capital as mere fodder.
  
• Industrial Capitalism: The rise of factories in the 18th-19th centuries brought enormous wealth but at cost of horrific labor conditions (child labor, 16-hour days, dangerous mills). Efficiency and profit were valued above the human workers. Max Weber famously linked this to the “Protestant work ethic” and a view that wealth signaled God’s favor, fueling capitalism’s moral fervor . But ironically it often meant the godly principle of rest (Sabbath) was ignored – workers were commodities. Christian social teaching responded by pushing for just wages, rest, etc., echoing that man is not made for the sabbath or the factory machine, but these for man  .
  
• Communism: Reaction to capitalism’s excess, yet it ended up deifying economy even more blatantly (historical materialism). It promised equality but delivered a new slavery to the state apparatus. Solzhenitsyn wrote that communism failed because it tried to enforce an economic salvation without God – ultimately, it treated man as matter and economics as the only real concern. Love, faith, uniqueness of person were negated as “bourgeois.” In practice, this meant millions starved or killed in collectivization and purges – literal sacrifice of lives to an economic plan (that’s Moloch aided by Mammon). Mammon’s fingerprint is that both capitalism and communism, despite their opposition, agree on one thing: value = material productivity. The heroes are the wealthy entrepreneur or the heroic worker; prayer, contemplation, etc., are undervalued as “unproductive.” In secular society, arts, ministry, motherhood are often underpaid or not paid – reflecting that we only monetize what yields monetary profit, not what yields intangible good.
  
• Consumerism: In the mid-20th century West, with production up, Mammon found a new avenue: turn people into consumers. Convince them to base identity on what they own and to pursue endless acquisition for happiness. Advertising became a massive engine of cultivating discontent (covetousness, which Scripture calls idolatry – Col 3:5). People started to be valued less as citizens or neighbors and more as “consumers”. In fact, economic health (GDP) is measured partly by consumption rates, so spending is patriotically encouraged. This fosters a life of constant buying and discarding – a shallow substitute for spiritual fulfillment. It is essentially Mammon’s “communion”: one feels belonging by buying the same brands, participating in the same trends, like a mass liturgy of materialism (Black Friday as a “holy day” where crowds line up overnight to worship at the mall). Meanwhile, such consumerism fuels exploitation of labor in poorer countries (cheap goods often come from sweatshops – out of sight, out of mind, like sacrifices on Mammon’s altar in distant lands). Also it fuels environmental damage – creation groans as we extract resources rapaciously for stuff we mostly don’t need, generating mountains of waste. Thus Mammon orchestrates a double-harm: harm to the poor (often in the global South) and to nature, all to sate the richer classes’ manufactured appetites.
  
• Global Finance and Debt: In recent times, intangible wealth (stocks, derivatives) and debt-driven economies rule the world. Whole nations are in bondage to debt (owing billions/trillions to banks or other states), limiting their real sovereignty. Individuals too live on credit, essentially servitudes to lenders (Proverbs 22:7: “the borrower is servant to the lender” is always apt). The 2008 crash showed how the financial system’s greed (bad loans repackaged) nearly collapsed economies – requiring taxpayer bailouts (socializing losses after privatizing gains). It was a vivid picture of Mammon’s endgame: the common person suffers for the greed of a few. Yet little changed; greed is entrenched. On an everyday level, money stress drives many to despair or to unethical behavior. Families break under financial fights. Instead of money serving humanity, humanity serves money – exactly the inversion Christ warned of .
  
• “Prosperity Gospel”: Sadly, Mammon even infiltrates religion. Some preachers claim God promises worldly riches to the faithful – turning the Gospel into a get-rich scheme, sowing seeds (donations) to reap cash rewards. This basically puts God at service of Mammon, as if holiness is a means to wealth rather than wealth a potential means to holiness (through charity). It’s a modern repackaging of an old heresy (simony, etc.). True Christianity has always been wary of wealth’s seduction – Christ told the rich young man to give it all away, St. Paul said love of money is root of evils (1 Tim 6:10). The prosperity gospel says love of money is good because it shows God’s blessing! This twisting leads many astray and disillusions others who see through it, tarnishing Christian witness. It also ironically preys financially on the poor (who give to these ministries hoping for windfalls). It’s a religious veneer for Mammon-worship.
  

To boil down Mammon’s pattern: it redefines value in terms of price. A human’s dignity? Reduced to what labor they can do or what market segment they are. Time? “Time is money,” they say – but in God’s view, time is for repentance and love, not all monetizable. Nature? Under Mammon, forests are valued not as ecosystems or beauty but board feet of lumber; rivers not as life-giving water but hydroelectric potential. Even relationships can be commodified (think of how surrogacy turns childbearing into a paid service, or how online dating sometimes treats finding a partner like shopping). The gift aspect is removed. Interestingly, even holidays like Christmas have been commercialized – the focus becomes gifts (material) rather than The Gift (Christ). So Mammon literally tries to overshadow Christ at Christmas by a frenzy of buying.

How Mammon Supports the Other Thrones:

As the user question pointed out, Mammon is like the treasurer of Hell funding the other false thrones. Indeed, wealth is often the enabler:

• Leviathan (power) needs money to arm itself and enforce itself. Empires tax and plunder to sustain their armies. Modern Leviathan states borrow massively (national debts) to fund endless war or expansive bureaucracies. Mammon cheerfully underwrites tyrants as long as it profits – e.g., corporate support for dictators if they guarantee stability for business. The military-industrial complex, where war is profit, is Mammon and Leviathan hugging.
  
• Behemoth (bureaucracy, legalism) similarly thrives with funding. Many a bloated bureaucracy keeps itself alive by securing budget (Mammon’s approval). Also, financial interests often shape laws (lobbying), thus Mammon influences Behemoth’s rules in favor of the wealthy.
  
• Moloch (sacrifice) in modern war absolutely relies on wealth: no money, no weapons to conduct mass warfare or abortion clinics to do mass killings. Many wars historically were driven by economic gain (resources, colonies) – essentially Mammon motivating Moloch. Abortion, human trafficking, pornography – behind each is a profit motive: abortion is a billion-dollar industry, trafficking and porn likewise. So Mammon literally supplies and profits from human sacrifice and exploitation. We might think sacrifices to Moloch are “meaningless,” but Mammon finds monetary meaning in them.
  
• Asmodeus (lust, identity) is a huge money-maker: the sex industry, porn, cosmetic and fashion industries (often selling unrealistic body ideals to stoke envy/lust), and now even the medical gender-transition industry is booming (puberty blockers, surgeries – big pharma cash). Mammon capitalizes on lust by turning desires into markets. The cultural push for more sexual license conveniently opens new consumer categories (sell more stuff from contraceptives to divorce lawyers to dating apps, etc.). It’s cynical but true that vice industries (drugs, sex, gambling) are among the most lucrative – often funding crime or fueling media profits through advertising. So Mammon and Asmodeus do business together constantly.
  

Thus, Mammon is in many ways the linchpin – he provides the infrastructure and lure to keep people bound to the others. A tyrant might be fearsome (Leviathan), but he also bribes supporters with wealth; a lustful culture keeps people too distracted by chasing money and pleasure to seek God. Mammon is such a potent enslaver that Christ gave few absolute either/or statements, but “God or Mammon” was one . St. Paul personifies greed as idolatry (Col 3:5). The Desert Fathers said attachment to riches is like a tether on a bird – it cannot fly to God with even a thread tying it down.

Orthodox Counterpoint: Generosity, Contentment, and Sacramental Economy

The Church counters Mammon firstly by teaching and embodying generosity. Almsgiving is one of the three pillars of Lent (with prayer and fasting). It’s called “the medicine against Mammon” by Church fathers – because giving away money breaks its hold and turns it into love. In liturgy, during the offertory, we sing “Thine own of Thine own we offer unto Thee…”, acknowledging all we have was God’s to begin with . This mindset, if internalized, undercuts pride of wealth. The Church also historically set up many philanthropic institutions: hospitals, orphanages, almshouses – demonstrating that wealth is best used in mercy. Saints like St. John the Merciful gave nearly everything to the poor regularly. This is the normal Christian ideal, not an exception.

Tithing or first-fruits offering in some traditions ensures we don’t treat 100% of income as ours; at least 10% goes to God’s purposes (church, charity). The Eastern Church doesn’t mandate a percentage but heavily extols cheerful giving. It also has many feast days where we are encouraged to share with the less fortunate (e.g., on St. Nicholas day, secret giving to children in need, etc.). The ethos is “if you have two coats, give one” (Luke 3:11). By literally dis-investing in earthly accumulation, one invests in heaven (the lives saved or nurtured by charity become, mystically, our “friends everlasting” as Jesus said in Luke 16:9).

Another counter is fostering contentment and trust in Providence. The Church sets aside every Sunday (and other feast days) as essentially time where we do not work for profit but worship and rest, enjoying life freely. This rhythm curtails the Mammonic drive of nonstop hustle. The old Blue Laws (prohibiting Sunday trade) had a spiritual logic: keep Mammon at bay one day a week to remember life is more than commerce. Even if society doesn’t enforce that now, Christians individually can choose not to shop or work unnecessarily on Lord’s Day – a small rebellion against consumerism. Monastic communities provide a radical alternative: they essentially operate on gift economy (donations) and providence. They do work (sell produce, icons etc.), but moderately and not for personal profit. Each monk has zero possessions of his own. This is a sign on earth of the Kingdom where love, not money, organizes life.

Eucharist directly counters Mammon’s worldview: it’s thanksgiving, not grasping; communal table, not a competition. Rich and poor stand side by side at liturgy receiving the same heavenly food, and early church even had wealthy members sponsor agape meals for all after liturgy – modeling equitable sharing. There’s a reason some revolutionaries hated the Church: its practice of solidarity undercuts the narrative that class warfare or greed must dominate.

Fasting too has economic and social dimensions: by consuming less or simpler foods, we free up resources to give others and train ourselves not to be slaves of luxury. Traditional fasting also means refraining from extravagance – Orthodoxy praises “ascetic frugality”, which ironically often leads to more genuine enjoyment of things when they are reintroduced at feasts. One sees that joy doesn’t require constant variety or indulgence.

The Church also teaches simplicity and detachment. Saints lived very simply even if they had wealth (Job is an OT example of wealth with righteousness; in NT, Joseph of Arimathea and others used wealth for good). The key is the heart: one must be ready to part with wealth anytime for God’s call. We tell the story of St. Anthony who, hearing the Gospel “sell all, give to poor, follow me,” did exactly that. Many have imitated him (monastics especially). Not all are called to complete divestment, but all are called to internal freedom from money. That often means practicing giving beyond comfort. If asked for your coat, give your cloak too (Matt 5:40) – that fosters trust in God to provide. Often miracles happen: many saints who gave their last coin found someone spontaneously give them supplies needed, etc. It’s like God meets faith with providence, teaching that it’s safe to be generous; He’s the guarantor.

Just ethical practices: Orthodoxy insists on honesty in business, justice to workers. Social ethics in Orthodoxy align with, say, St. James’s epistle condemning underpaying laborers (James 5:4). The Church may not have developed a full “social doctrine” like Catholicism, but from canons and Fathers it’s clear: exploitation, usury, cheating weights are sins. Employers should treat employees like fellow children of God, not means to profit. This mindset, if truly applied by Christian businesses, counters Mammon. Some Orthodox today form co-ops or communal businesses inspired by Acts 2 and monastic brotherhood, dividing profits fairly or using them charitably. Even small acts like intentionally patronizing ethical companies or using fair-trade products are ways to not let cheap greed rule decisions. The idea of stewardship is heavily emphasized now in parishes – that we don’t “own” the parish, we are caretakers investing time and money God gave us back into His work.

Care for creation is now also an Orthodox priority (Sept 1 is observed as Day of Prayer for Environment). The Ecumenical Patriarch has spoken against viewing nature as something to exploit mindlessly; he calls environmental harm “ecological sin” when driven by greed. This reasserts that the earth and its fruits are common gift, not private stock. Orthodox fasting (largely plant-based) also naturally reduces environmental footprint – an unintended benefit of the spiritual discipline. By caring for creation, Orthodox ethos breaks from Mammon’s pattern of plunder.

Debt and simplicity: Pastoral counsel in Orthodoxy usually encourages living within means, avoiding indebtedness that can enslave. If one is in debt, to avoid despair by seeking help or scaling down lifestyle. Modern credit culture is a trap; Church can help with contentment teaching to resist it (for example, we have feast days for saints who voluntarily impoverished themselves – a stark contrast for inspiration).

In a word, the Orthodox response to Mammon is generous, thankful, trustful living – seeing all as God’s, giving all back to God through how we use it. The liturgical offertory prayer sums it: “Thine own of Thine own, we offer to Thee, in behalf of all and for all.” That means everything we have, we give to God for the sake of all creation. Under Mammon, it would be “My own of my own, I keep for me and mine.” The Church flips that script every Sunday, reconditioning us to divine economy.

After analyzing all five thrones – Leviathan (coercive power), Behemoth (impersonal systems), Moloch (bloody sacrifice), Asmodeus (lustful perversion), Mammon (greed and commodification) – we see they interlock like pieces of an infernal puzzle. They reinforce one another: e.g., Mammon finances Leviathan’s wars; Leviathan’s centralized state pushes Behemoth’s bureaucracies; Behemoth’s rules often serve Mammon’s interests; Asmodeus’s moral corruption undermines resistance to other evils; Moloch’s violence is rationalized by Leviathan’s and Mammon’s logic, and so on . Together, they form what the question calls “the whole horizon of inversion: power, law, sacrifice, love, and gift – all corrupted from Christic reality into demonic parody.”

Conclusion: The ultimate through-line of these demonic thrones is the erasure of personhood and love under abstractions and idols. In every case, the cure is Christ – the Logos made flesh – and His body, the Church. Christ is the true King (defeating Leviathan’s coercion by His kenotic authority), the true Lawgiver (transcending Behemoth’s legalism with the law of love), the true High Priest and Sacrifice (nullifying Moloch’s bloodlust by His one self-offering that gives life ), the true Bridegroom and Lover of our souls (healing Asmodeus’s lust by holy love and restoring the Imago Dei in us ), and the true Provider (exposing Mammon’s false promises by calling us to seek first the Kingdom and trust the Father for daily bread, as He multiplied loaves ).

Each historical inversion we traced is essentially the same temptation to enthrone the impersonal over the personal, the system over the soul, the gift of God’s world over the Giver. It is, in biblical terms, idolatry – worshiping creature rather than Creator (Romans 1:25). The remedy to idolatry is always to re-enthrone God and reverence His image in human persons. Thus, the Church’s role amidst these false thrones is prophetic and pastoral: to unmask the demons, refuse their terms, and offer the world the alternative of God’s Kingdom – where “the last are first, the meek inherit, the pure see God, and we are no longer servants but friends of God”. It’s a radically personalist and love-centered vision of reality.

We see now that the genealogical arcs (Pharisees to bureaucracy, scholastics to technocracy, etc.) and the modern ills (from porn to environmental crisis) are not isolated – they stem from this fundamental spiritual war. But we take heart: Christ has already won the decisive victory. Our task is to apply it in each arena by living in an opposite spirit. Against Leviathan’s force, we practice humility and obedience to God above all (like martyrs before tyrants). Against Behemoth’s cold systems, we insist on compassion and personal connection (the Good Samaritan vs. the priest who passed by). Against Moloch’s sacrifices, we hold fast to the sanctity of life and choose personal sacrifice rather than harming others (the mother who keeps her baby despite hardship, the conscientious objector refusing to bomb civilians). Against Asmodeus’s lust, we pursue chastity and honor the body as temple (fleeing fornication, treating each person as brother/sister, not object ). Against Mammon’s greed, we give freely and live simply, storing treasure in heaven (the widow’s mite outweighing the rich’s excess).

In doing so, we align with the true King, true Law, true Sacrifice, true Love, true Treasure – all found in One Person: Our Lord Jesus Christ, “the Alpha and Omega”. He is the “through-line” of truth and holiness that runs opposite to the through-line of Behemoth and his fellows. Ultimately, the promise is that these demonic thrones will fall. Revelation portrays the fall of Babylon (a composite of those evils) and the triumph of the Lamb (Christ) and His saints. Our calling is to “come out” of these inversions, living already as citizens of Heaven amid a crooked generation (Phil 2:15). By tracing the patterns of inversion through history as we have, we become wiser to the devil’s schemes (2 Cor 2:11) and more resolute to cling to Christ, the personal Truth.

In the final analysis, all reality flows from the Personal Logos, and any system or idea not derived from Him ends in absurdity and ruin . The thrones of inversion are on borrowed time. The Church’s existence and endurance – despite being outnumbered and often poor – itself testifies that the personal love of God is stronger than all impersonal evils. As Christ said, “In the world you will have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world” (John 16:33). He has overcome Leviathan’s world of might with His weakness, Behemoth’s world of legalism with grace, Moloch’s world of death with resurrection, Asmodeus’s world of lust with pure love, and Mammon’s world of greed with the richness of His mercy. Our task is to live that victory out, enthroning Christ in every aspect of our lives – for where He is enthroned, no demon can reign.

SECURING THE REFERENCES:

“They want Jesus under their law” – Christ-Centered Exposition on Luke, pointing out Pharisees made their rules above Jesus .

“Pharisees serve the law, but the law was meant to serve them” – same source, explaining Sabbath for man .

Pseudo-Dionysius: God “utterly beyond being or any predication” – showing God transcends categories .

“Penal substitution teaches that in order for God to forgive, His wrath must be appeased and His honor restored” – LiveOrthodoxy article .

Early Church had no concept of PSA, Christ bearing punishment, etc. .

C.S. Lewis quote about bureaucracy of a police state as symbol of Hell .

Hannah Arendt: “rule by Nobody… tyranny without a tyrant” in bureaucracy .

“Then as now, Moloch represents contradicting your better judgment for sake of higher cause that in reality was neither.” – Noah Phillips, Moment Mag .

Gregory of Nazianzus quote: God not bloodthirsty, did not desire Son’s sacrifice to Himself, not pay the devil, but Christ’s death destroyed sin, devil, death .

Orthodox convert testimony: “Abstract truth is not the focus, a Personal God is.” – Geoff Harvey blog .

Zizioulas: The one God is the Father – person as principle, not essence; Father’s personal freedom underlies being, not necessity .

Max Weber quote: “Bureaucracy… more it is dehumanized… eliminating love, hatred… personal elements” .

Wikipedia: 19th century allegorical use of “Moloch” for any idol requiring excessive sacrifice; Russell used it for oppressive religion, Churchill for Hitler cult .

Quote from Moment: Garry Wills essay “Our Moloch” – “The gun is our Moloch. We sacrifice children to him daily” . Also mention Leviticus warning, and modern metaphor for war, capitalism, AI.

Ginsberg’s “Howl” lines on Moloch as pure machinery, money, armies, etc. .

Thus, by understanding each throne historically and theologically, we better see the single demonic strategy: enthrone something impersonal (power, law, etc.) over the personal God and human person. And by contrast, the Incarnation (God become man) is the ultimate inversion of that inversion – God lifting persons (human nature) into union with Him, re-personalizing all reality. That is the through-line of Christ: the Logos personalizing the law, love, sacrifice, authority, and economy in Himself.

So, to conclude in one line: Where Behemoth and its fellow demons enthrone systems over souls, the Church of Christ enthrones the Personal Logos, who valued every soul above the world and thereby set all law, power, wealth, and even sacrifice back in service of persons and of divine love.

Sources: The Holy Bible (Mark 2:27; Matthew 23:23-28; 2 Corinthians 3:6; Luke 16:13), Pseudo-Dionysius, Divine Names ; John Zizioulas, Being as Communion ; Christ-Centered Exposition: Luke ; LiveOrthodoxy “Penal Substitution: A Sad Substitute” ; St. Gregory Nazianzen (via Patheos) ; C.S. Lewis, Preface to Screwtape Letters ; Hannah Arendt, On Violence ; Noah Phillips, “Fires of Moloch,” Moment Magazine ; Allen Ginsberg, “Howl” ; Max Weber, Economy and Society ; Geoff Harvey, Growing in Orthodoxy .