Satan, really, is the romantic youth of Jesus re-appearing for a moment.

The remark treats Satan not as an external, purely evil antagonist but as a psychological or imaginative “double” of the sacred figure—an eruption of the repressed, youthful, romantic, or rebellious energies that orthodox Christianity tends to discipline or exclude. Read this way, “Satan” becomes a momentary reappearance of what a sanctified adult identity has had to renounce: desire, pride, aesthetic self-assertion, or the thrill of transgression. The line also has a characteristically Joycean, ironic edge: it collapses a rigid moral binary (Christ vs. Satan) into a single continuum of human impulses, suggesting that the demonic may be a distorted reflection of the same inner life that produces the holy.