Nehming Names (@ShemNehm)

**The Fruits of the Anti-Spirit** I was reflecting on the fruits of the spirit enumerated in Galatians 5: love, joy, peace, patience, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, and temperance, and a thought occurred to me, if such fruit is divinely inspired, what are those that flow from a diabolical spirit? To answer this question, let me crib a notion from @AnnBarnhardt. She notes that there are a class of people, whom she calls diabolical narcissists, who, like demons have willingly purged every ounce of charity from their souls.  This results in a diminution of the normal range of emotion the soul experiences, reducing it to limited palette of hatred, arrogance, envy, despair, and fear. It seems to me that these are the fruits of the anti-spirit, but not only these.  They also include those that a direct consequence of such a diabolical bearing.  One such consequence derives from despair. Among other things, this leads to a spiritual indifference, one in which one presumes that nothing really matters, so why not do whatever one wants? In fact, we see the attribute of indifference discussed in the deuterocanonical book of Wisdom, chapter two, in which those "not thinking rightly" conclude that because that "For by mere chance were we born, and hereafter we shall be as though we had not been", "no venue should be free from our wantonness". The immediate fruits of this wantonness are those worldly vices of gluttony and lust, two of the carnal vices from the traditional list of capital vices, as well as a kind of moral disinhibition and inversion. But despair coupled with hatred, fear, arrogance, and envy breeds other vices: apathy, distrust, anxiety, and a deep existential sorrow, as embedded deep in man's soul is the desire for his life to have meaning, through his loves, experiences, and works. Returning to the Book of Wisdom, the author points out that this disregard for the eternal nature of one's soul does not stop worldliness and apathy but progresses further toward malice, where the only path to satisfaction for the loveless runs through spite, the desire to hurt another for its own sake and through lawlessness, the desire to defy the divinely created order for the jejune thrill of the defiance of authority. So what then are the fruits of the anti-spirit? These would have to be the diabolical inversion of the fruits of the spirit: Hatred, despair, anxiety, lawlessness, wrath, malice, apathy, pride, and wantonness.