He disarmed the principalities and powers and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in him. Colossians 2:15
Some scholars speculate that in this verse St. Paul is using the metaphor of a triumphant king’s victory parade, with his captives in tow. (Hahn and Mitch 2051,2106). I am reminded, though, of a scene from C.S. Lewis’s famous story, “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe”, wherein the White Witch executes the Christ-figure Aslan in the place of the treacherous Edmund on the Stone Table. The witch rejoices over what she assumes is her “victory”, but her gloating turns to “terror and amazement” when Aslan rises from the dead and she realizes that she unwittingly undid the dark magic that held the land of Narnia for so long. (Lewis, Ch. 16)
C.S. Lewis could have been drawing from his knowledge of patristic sources when composing this metaphor for the Atonement.
The Ransom
The Sacred Scriptures often describe the Atonement in terms of a ransom, which is completely appropriate as Our Lord himself said, “For the Son of man also came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” (Mark 10:45, and a parallel verse in Matthew 20:28). And he did pay a high price to redeem us. The word for “ransom” used in the New Testament and in the Greek Septuagint, “λύτρον (lutron)”, is open to several meanings. For example, it could be a ransom payment to release captives, a payment to buy a slave’s freedom, or the payment by a kinsman to get a family member released from debt. (Thayer 384)
Who would receive the ransom? The devil? And if so, how could the infinitely good God owe the devil anything? Certain early Church Fathers, such as St. Gregory of Nyssa (335-395 AD) and St. Augustine (354-430), offered some possible interpretations of the scriptural figure of “ransom.”
St. Gregory of Nyssa
St. Gregory of Nyssa’s response can be found in his work, Against Eunomius, in which he describes the incarnated body of Jesus acting as “bait” on the “hook” of the Deity:
in order to secure that the ransom in our behalf might be easily accepted by him who required it, the Deity was hidden under the veil of our nature, that so, as with ravenous fish, the hook of the Deity might be gulped down along with the bait of flesh, and thus, life being introduced into the house of death, and light shining in darkness, that which is diametrically opposed to light and life might vanish; for it is not in the nature of darkness to remain when light is present, or of death to exist when life is active. (Gregory of Nyssa, Ch. XXIV).
St. Augustine of Hippo
St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430), a Doctor of the Church, also proposed the notion that the death of Christ on the cross was a trap for the devil when he taught:
The devil was exultant when Christ died, and by that very death of Christ was the devil conquered; it’s as though he took the bait in a mousetrap. He was delighted at the death, as being the commander of death; what he delighted in, that’s where the trap was set for him. The mousetrap for the devil was the cross of the Lord; the bait he would be caught by, the death of the Lord. And our Lord Jesus Christ rose again. Where now is the death that hung on the cross? (Augustine 220)
And:
He suffered death, he slew death; he put a bait for the lion in the trap. If the fish didn’t want to swallow anything, it wouldn’t be caught with a hook. The devil was greedy for death, the devil was a hoarder of death. The cross of Christ was the mousetrap; the death of Christ, or rather the mortal flesh of Christ, was like the bait in the mousetrap. He came, he swallowed it and was caught. (Augustine 257)
Muscipula Diaboli
The Latin word used by St. Augustine here, “muscipula”, and translated “mousetrap”, is derived from two components: “mus”, meaning “mouse,” and “capio”, meaning “to catch.” David Scott-Macnab argues that the meaning of the word in the Vetus Latina (pre-Vulgate) Scriptures of St. Augustine’s time had changed to mean a generic snare or hunting trap used for birds and other game. (Scott-Macnab 411) If so, and if St. Augustine had intended this broader meaning of the word, then the irony of the passages are only heightened.
In any event, both St. Gregory of Nyssa and St. Augustine have speculated that the devil was caught by surprise by the Resurrection of Our Lord after His Passion. Entrapped even. How could this be?
A Metaphysical Blindspot
We believe that the devil’s power is not limitless (Catechism 395) and it is entirely possible that the devil had a metaphysical blindspot in this regard. After all, self-deification is at the heart of the diabolic which makes it plausible that the full implications of Our Lord’s self-abegnation would have been quite beyond Satan.
There is scriptural evidence, too, of the limits of the angels, fallen or otherwise (Ott 117):
As spiritual essences, the angels possess understanding and free will. The intellect and will of the angels is, on account of the pure spirituality of their nature, more perfect than those of men, but on account of the finiteness of their nature, infinitely more imperfect than the Knowledge and Will of God. The angels do not know the secrets of God (1 Corinthians 2:11), do not possess a knowledge of the heart (1 Kings 8:39) and have no certain foreknowledge of the free actions of the future (Isaiah 46:9 et seq.): “But that day and hour (of the judgment) no one knoweth.” (Matthew 24:36; Mark 13:32).
Conclusion
We have good reason to trust the speculations of these saintly Doctors of the Church when they say that the cross of Our Lord was a trap set for the devil. Another lesson it teaches us is that the powers of evil do seem to be blind to the metaphysical effect of dying to power – that is, deliberately refusing to be subject to the power of evil, to the point of suffering unimaginable loss or even death.
Works Cited
Augustine. Sermons 230-272B on the Liturgical Seasons. Translated by Edmund Hill, edited by John E. Rotelle, New City Press, 1993. The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century, pt. 3, vol. 7.
Catechism of the Catholic Church: Complete and Updated. Crown Publishing Group, 1995.
Gregory of Nyssa. “Against Eunomius.” Gregory of Nyssa: Dogmatic Treatises, Etc., edited by Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, translated by William Moore and Henry Austin Wilson, vol. 5, Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1893, pp. 33-248. Christian Classics Ethereal Library, ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf205/npnf205.xi.ii.xxvi.html.
Hahn, Ph.D., Scott, and Curtis J. Mitch, M.A., editors. The Ignatius Catholic Study Bible. San Francisco, Ignatius Press, 2024.
Lewis, C. S. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. HarperCollins, 2009.
Ott, L. (1974). Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma (J. Bastible, D.D., Ed.; P. Lynch, Trans.). Tan Books and Publishers.
Scott-Macnab, David. “St Augustine and the Devil’s ‘Mousetrap’.” Vigiliae Christianae, vol. 68, no. 4, 2014, pp. 409-15.
Thayer, Joseph Henry, et al. Thayer’s Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament: Coded with the Numbering System from Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible. Edited by Joseph Henry Thayer, translated by Joseph Henry Thayer, Hendrickson, 1996.
