Part IV, Chapter XLV, 1

OF DEMONOLOGY, AND OTHER REMNANTS OF THE RELIGION OF THE GENTILES

The impression made upon the organs of sight by luminous bodies, whether along one direct line, along many lines reflected from opaque bodies, or refracted as they pass through transparent ones, produces in living creatures to whom God has given such organs an image of the object from which the impression comes. This image is called sight; and it seems not merely an image but the body itself outside us. In the same way, when someone presses his eye violently, a light appears before him outside, visible to no one else, because nothing of the kind is actually outside him. It is only a motion in the inner organs, pressing outward against resistance, that makes him think so. The motion caused by this pressure, continuing after the object that caused it is removed, is what we call imagination and memory, or, during sleep and sometimes when sickness or violence gravely disturbs the organs, a dream. I have already spoken briefly of these matters in the second and third Chapters.

The ancient claimants to natural knowledge never discovered this nature of sight; still less did those who gave no thought to matters so remote from immediate use as such knowledge is. It was therefore hard for people to conceive of the images of fancy and sense as anything other than things actually existing outside us. Some, because these images vanish without our knowing how or where, hold them to be altogether incorporeal, that is, immaterial: forms without matter, color and figure without any colored or figured body. They say these forms can put on airy bodies like garments whenever they choose to become visible to our bodily eyes. Others say they are bodies and living creatures, but made of air or other finer, ethereal matter, which they condense when they wish to be seen. Both parties, however, agree in giving them the common name DEMONS. It is as though the dead of whom people dreamed inhabited the air, heaven, or hell, rather than their own brains; as though they were ghosts rather than phantasms. They might as reasonably claim to see their own ghost in a mirror, or the ghosts of the stars in a river; or call the ordinary appearance of the sun, about a foot across, the demon or ghost of that great sun which lights the whole visible world. Thus people came to fear these beings as possessing unknown and therefore unlimited powers to help or harm them. This in turn enabled the rulers of heathen Common-wealths to regulate that fear by establishing DEMONOLOGY—in which poets, as chief priests of heathen religion, were especially employed or honored—as necessary to public peace and the obedience of subjects on which peace depends. They made some demons good and others evil: the former a spur to obedience, the latter reins to restrain violations of the laws.

What kinds of things were called demons can be seen partly in the genealogy of their gods written by Hesiod, one of the oldest Greek poets, and partly in other histories, a few of which I have already noted in the 12. Chapter of this discourse.

Through colonies and conquest the Greeks carried their language and writings into Asia, Egypt, and Italy, and necessarily with them their demonology, or, as St. Paul calls it, “their doctrines of devils.” From there the contagion spread also to Jews in Judaea, Alexandria, and other lands where they had dispersed. Unlike the Greeks, however, the Jews applied the name demon only to evil spirits, not to good and evil alike. Good demons they called the Spirit of God, and regarded those into whose bodies they entered as prophets. In short, every remarkable quality, if good, they ascribed to the Spirit of God; if evil, to some demon, a kakodaimen, an evil demon or devil. Thus they called those we call mad or lunatic, or those subject to epilepsy, demoniacs, or people possessed by the devil. They said the same of anyone whose words they thought absurd because they could not understand them. They would say, too, that a notoriously unclean person had an unclean spirit; that a mute man had a mute devil; and that John the Baptist (Math. 11. 18.) had a devil because his fasting was extraordinary. Of our Savior, because he said that whoever kept his words would not see death In Aeternum (John 8. 52.), they said, “Now we know you have a devil; Abraham is dead, and the prophets are dead.” Again, when he said (John 7. 20.) “They are trying to kill me,” the people answered, “You have a devil; who is trying to kill you?” Plainly the Jews shared the same opinion about phantasms: that they were not phantasms, images of the brain, but real things independent of the fancy.

If this doctrine is false, someone may ask, why did our Savior not contradict it and teach the opposite? Indeed, why did he so often speak in ways that seem to confirm it? I answer, first, that when Christ says, “A spirit has not flesh and bone,” though he shows that spirits exist, he does not deny that they are bodies. When St. Paul says, “We shall rise spiritual bodies,” he acknowledges the existence of spirits, but of spirits that are bodily; this is not hard to understand. Air and many other things are bodies, though not flesh and bone or any other coarse body visible to the eye. But when our Savior speaks to the devil and commands him to leave a man, is this not improper language if by devil he means a disease such as frenzy or lunacy, or a corporeal spirit? Can diseases hear? And could a corporeal spirit inhabit a body of flesh and bone already full of vital and animal spirits? Must there not, then, be spirits that have no bodies and yet are more than mere imaginings? To the first question I answer that our Savior's address to the madness or lunacy he cures is no more improper than his rebuke to a fever, or to wind and sea; these do not hear either. Nor is it more improper than God's commands to light, the firmament, the sun, and the stars to come into being, since they could not hear before they existed. These expressions are not improper, for they signify the power of God's Word. It is likewise proper to command madness or lunacy to leave a person's body under the name of devils, as they were commonly understood at the time. To the second question, concerning their incorporeal nature, I have not yet found any passage of Scripture suggesting that anyone was ever possessed by a corporeal spirit other than his own, by which his body is naturally moved.

Immediately after the Holy Ghost descended upon our Savior in the form of a dove, St. Matthew (Chapt. 4. 1.) says that he was “led by the Spirit into the wilderness”; and Luke (Luke 4. 1.) relates the same event in these words: “Jesus, being full of the Holy Ghost, was led in the Spirit into the wilderness.” Evidently Spirit here means the Holy Ghost. This cannot be interpreted as possession, for Christ and the Holy Ghost are one and the same substance; one substance or body cannot be possessed by another when they are the same. And when the verses that follow say that he was “taken by the devil into the Holy City and set on a pinnacle of the Temple,” must we conclude that the devil possessed him or carried him there by force? Again, he was “carried from there by the devil to an exceedingly high mountain, from which the devil showed him all the Kingdoms of the world.” We must not believe that he was possessed or forced by the devil, or that any mountain is high enough, in the literal sense, to show him even an entire hemisphere. What else can this passage mean, then, but that he went into the wilderness of his own accord, and that his being carried back and forth from the wilderness to the city and from there to a mountain was a vision? St. Luke's phrasing agrees with this: Jesus was led into the wilderness not by but in the Spirit; yet Luke speaks of his being taken to the mountain and to the pinnacle of the Temple as St. Matthew does. Such language suits a vision.

Again, where St. Luke says of Judas Iscariot that “Satan entered into him,” and that he then went and conferred with the chief priests and captains on how to betray Christ to them, the entry of Satan—that is, the Enemy—may be understood to mean Judas's hostile and treacherous intention to sell his Lord and Master. For just as Scripture frequently uses Holy Ghost to mean the graces and good inclinations given by the Holy Ghost, so the entry of Satan may mean the wicked thoughts and designs of Christ's adversaries and his disciples' adversaries. It is hard to say the devil entered Judas before he formed any hostile design; and it is pointless to say that Judas first became Christ's enemy in his heart and that the devil entered him afterward. The entry of Satan and his wicked purpose were therefore one and the same thing.

But if there are no immaterial spirits, and no corporeal spirit possesses human bodies, one may again ask why our Savior and his Apostles did not teach the people this in words so clear as to leave no doubt. Such questions are more curious than necessary to a Christian's salvation. We might equally ask why Christ, who could have given everyone faith, piety, and every moral virtue, gave them only to some; why he left the search for natural causes and sciences to human reason and industry instead of revealing them supernaturally to all people, or to anyone; and many questions of the same kind. Probable and pious reasons may nonetheless be offered. When God brought the Israelites into the Promised Land, he did not secure them by subduing all the surrounding nations, but left many there like thorns in their sides, to rouse their piety and industry from time to time. Likewise our Savior, in guiding us toward his heavenly Kingdom, did not remove every difficulty of natural inquiry, but left such difficulties to exercise our industry and reason. The sole purpose of his preaching was to show us this plain and direct road to salvation: belief “that he was the Christ, the Son of the living God, sent into the world to sacrifice himself for our sins, and at his return to reign in glory over his Elect and save them from their enemies forever.” The belief in possession by spirits or phantasms does not block that road, though for some it offers an occasion to leave it and follow their own inventions. If we demand that Scripture answer every question that might trouble us as we perform God's commands, we might as well complain that Moses did not record the time when such spirits were created, along with the creation of earth, sea, people, and beasts. In conclusion, I find in Scripture that there are angels and spirits, good and evil; but not that they are incorporeal, as are the apparitions people see in darkness, dreams, or visions, which the Latins call spectra and took for demons. I find too that there are corporeal spirits, though subtle and invisible; but not that they possess or inhabit anyone's body. Such, moreover, shall be the bodies of the saints: spiritual bodies, as St. Paul calls them.

Nevertheless, the contrary doctrine, that there are incorporeal spirits, has prevailed so strongly in the Church that exorcism—the expulsion of devils by conjuration—has been built upon it, and, though practiced rarely and feebly, has not yet been wholly abandoned. That there were many demoniacs and few mad people or sufferers from other unusual diseases in the early Church, whereas today we hear of and see many mad people and few demoniacs, arises not from a change in nature but from a change of names. Why the Apostles and, for a time after them, the pastors of the Church cured these unusual diseases when pastors are not now seen to do so is another question. So is why every true believer now lacks the power to do all that the faithful then did: as we read (Mark 16. 17.), “In Christ's name to cast out devils, speak with new tongues, take up serpents, drink deadly poison without harm, and cure the sick by laying hands upon them,” all with no words other than “in the name of Jesus.” It is probable that these extraordinary gifts were given to the Church only for as long as people trusted wholly in Christ and sought their happiness only in his coming Kingdom. When they sought authority and riches instead, relying upon their own subtlety for a kingdom of this world, those supernatural gifts of God were taken from them again.

Another remnant of paganism is the worship of images. It was established neither by Moses in the Old Testament nor by Christ in the New. Nor was it newly introduced from the Gentiles; it remained among them after they had taken Christ's name. Before our Savior preached, the Gentiles generally worshipped as gods the appearances left in the brain by external bodies impressing themselves upon the organs of sense. These appearances are commonly called ideas, idols, phantasms, or conceptions, since they represent the external bodies that cause them but possess no more reality of their own than the things that seem to stand before us in a dream. This is why St. Paul says, “We know that an idol is nothing.” He did not mean that an image of metal, stone, or wood was nothing. He meant that the thing honored or feared in that image and held to be a god was a mere fabrication, with no place, dwelling, motion, or existence except in the motions of the brain. To worship these with divine honor is what Scripture calls idolatry and rebellion against God. For God was King of the Jews, and his lieutenant was first Moses and afterward the High Priest. If the people had been allowed to worship and pray to images—the representations of their own fancies—they would have depended no longer on the true God, to whom nothing can be likened, or on his chief ministers, Moses and the High Priests. Each would have governed himself according to his own appetite, utterly overthrowing the Common-wealth and bringing destruction on themselves for lack of union. God's first Law, therefore, was “not to take for gods ALIENOS DEOS, the gods of other nations, but only the true God, who consented to speak with Moses and through him give them laws and directions for their peace and their deliverance from their enemies.” The second was “not to make for themselves any image of their own invention to worship.” For a king is equally deposed when his subjects submit to another king, whether that king is set up by a neighboring nation or by the subjects themselves.

ON DEMONOLOGY AND OTHER REMNANTS OF THE RELIGION OF THE GENTILES

Bright objects make an impression on the organs of sight. Their light may travel in a direct line, reflect off opaque objects, or bend while passing through transparent objects. In living creatures to whom God has given organs of sight, this impression produces an image of the object that caused it. We call this image sight. It seems to be not merely an image, but the actual object outside us. In the same way, a person who presses his eye hard sees a light outside, in front of him, that nobody else sees. No such light exists outside him. Motion inside his organs presses outward against resistance and makes him think it does. When the motion caused by such pressure continues after the object that caused it has gone, we call it imagination or memory, and, during sleep or sometimes when illness or violence badly disturbs the organs, a dream. I have already discussed these things briefly in Chapters 2 and 3.

The ancient people who claimed knowledge of nature never discovered how sight works. Those who do not consider matters so far removed from their immediate needs were even less likely to discover it. So it was hard for people to think of the images in their imagination and senses as anything but real things outside themselves. Some thought these images, because they disappear without anyone knowing how or where, must be wholly incorporeal or immaterial: forms without matter, colors and shapes without colored or shaped bodies. They thought the images could put on airy bodies like clothing when they wanted to be visible to our physical eyes. Others called them bodies and living creatures made of air or some still finer, ethereal matter, which thickened when they wanted to be seen. Both groups gave them the general name demons. It was as though the dead people they dreamed about lived not in their own brains but in the air, heaven, or hell; as though they were ghosts rather than mental images. This makes as much sense as saying that you see your ghost in a mirror, the ghosts of the stars in a river, or the demon or ghost of the immense sun that lights the visible world when you see its usual image, apparently only a foot wide. People therefore feared these images as beings of unknown, and thus unlimited, power to help or harm them. This allowed the rulers of heathen Common-wealths to control that fear. They established demonology—an enterprise in which poets, as the leading priests of heathen religion, were especially employed or honored—to serve public peace and the obedience of subjects needed for it. They classified some demons as good and others as evil, using the first as a spur to obey the laws and the second as reins to stop people from breaking them.

What they meant by demons can be seen partly in the genealogy of the gods written by Hesiod, one of the earliest Greek poets, and partly in other histories. I noted a few examples earlier, in Chapter 12 of this book.

Through colonies and conquests the Greeks spread their language and writings to Asia, Egypt, and Italy. Inevitably they also spread their demonology, or what St. Paul calls “their doctrines of devils.” The belief then spread to Jews in Judea, Alexandria, and other places where they lived. But unlike the Greeks, the Jews used “demon” only for evil spirits, not for both good and evil ones. They called the good ones the Spirit of God and regarded the people they entered as prophets. In short, the Jews credited any unusual good trait to the Spirit of God, and any unusual evil trait to a demon—a kakodaimen, or evil demon, meaning a devil. Thus they called people whom we would call mad or mentally disturbed, and people with epilepsy, demoniacs, or possessed by the devil. They said the same of people who said things that seemed absurd to them because they did not understand them. They said that a notably unclean person had an unclean spirit, and that a mute person had a mute devil. They said John the Baptist had a devil because of his unusual fasting (Matthew 11. 18). They said of our Savior, because he said that anyone who kept his sayings would never see death (John 8. 52), “Now we know you have a devil. Abraham died, and the prophets died.” And when he said, in John 7. 20, that people were trying to kill him, the people answered, “You have a devil. Who is trying to kill you?” Clearly the Jews had the same view of such appearances: they thought these were not mental images produced by the brain but real things independent of the imagination.

If this teaching is false, someone may ask, why did our Savior not contradict it and teach the opposite? Why did he sometimes speak as though confirming it? My first answer is that when Christ says, “A spirit does not have flesh and bones,” he shows that spirits exist but does not deny that they are bodies. When St. Paul says, “We will rise with spiritual bodies,” he too recognizes spirits, but as bodily spirits. That is not difficult to understand. Air and many other things are bodies, though they have neither flesh and bones nor any other coarse substance visible to the eye. But when our Savior addresses the devil and orders him out of a man, would his words not be inappropriate if the devil meant a disease such as madness or mental disturbance, or a bodily spirit? Can diseases hear? Can a bodily spirit enter a body of flesh and bones that is already full of the spirits that sustain its life and movement? Must there not, then, be spirits that are neither bodies nor mere images? To the first question I answer that our Savior’s command to the madness or mental disturbance he cured is no more inappropriate than his rebuke of a fever or of the wind and sea. These cannot hear either. Nor is it more inappropriate than God’s command to light, the firmament, the sun, and the stars to exist: they could not hear before they existed. Such words are appropriate because they express the power of God’s Word. It is equally appropriate, then, to order madness or mental disturbance to leave a person’s body, using the name “devils” by which people commonly understood these conditions at the time. As for the second question, whether the spirits were incorporeal, I have found no passage of Scripture suggesting that anyone was ever possessed by any bodily spirit except his own, which naturally moves his body.

St. Matthew says that immediately after the Holy Ghost descended on our Savior in the form of a dove, he was “led by the Spirit into the wilderness” (chapter 4. 1). Luke 4. 1 puts it this way: “Jesus, full of the Holy Ghost, was led in the Spirit into the wilderness.” Clearly “Spirit” here means the Holy Ghost. This cannot mean possession, since Christ and the Holy Ghost are one and the same substance, not one substance or body possessing another. In the following verses he is said to be “taken by the devil into the holy city and placed on a pinnacle of the temple.” Should we conclude that the devil possessed him or carried him there by force? Again, he is said to have been carried by the devil to an extremely high mountain, from which the devil showed him all the kingdoms of the world. We should not believe that the devil possessed or forced him, or that any mountain is literally high enough to show someone a whole hemisphere. What can this passage mean except that he went to the wilderness himself, while the journeys from the wilderness to the city and from the city to the mountain took place in a vision? St. Luke’s wording fits this: he says that Jesus was led into the wilderness not by the Spirit but in the Spirit. About being taken to the mountain and the pinnacle of the temple, Luke speaks as Matthew does. This fits the nature of a vision.

Again, St. Luke says that “Satan entered” Judas Iscariot, after which Judas went to discuss with the chief priests and captains how to betray Christ to them. Satan means the enemy. His entering Judas can mean Judas’s hostile, treacherous intention to sell his Lord and Master. Scripture often uses “the Holy Ghost” to mean the graces and good inclinations the Holy Ghost gives. Likewise, Satan’s entry may mean the wicked thoughts and plans of Christ’s and his disciples’ enemies. It is hard to say that the devil entered Judas before Judas had a hostile plan. But it makes no sense to say that Judas first became Christ’s enemy in his heart and the devil entered him afterward. Satan’s entry and Judas’s wicked purpose were therefore the same thing.

But if there are no immaterial spirits and no bodily spirit can possess a human body, someone may again ask why our Savior and his Apostles did not teach the people this plainly enough to remove all doubt. Such questions, however, are more speculative than necessary for a Christian’s salvation. One might as well ask why Christ, though able to give everyone faith, piety, and every moral virtue, gave them to some and not all. Or why he left the study of natural causes and sciences to human reason and effort rather than revealing it supernaturally to everyone, or anyone. Many other such questions could be asked, and probable, devout answers could be given. When God brought the Israelites into the Promised Land, he did not secure it by subduing every surrounding nation. He left many nations there as thorns in their sides, to stir their piety and effort from time to time. Likewise our Savior, while guiding us toward his heavenly Kingdom, did not eliminate every hard question about nature. He left them for our reason and effort to tackle. His preaching aimed only to show the plain, direct path to salvation: belief “that he was the Christ, the Son of the living God, sent into the world to sacrifice himself for our sins, and that when he returns he will reign gloriously over his elect and save them forever from their enemies.” Belief in possession by spirits or mental images does not block that path, though for some it becomes a reason to leave it and follow their own inventions. If we demand that Scripture answer every question that might trouble us while we obey God’s commands, we might just as well complain that Moses did not give the date when such spirits were created, as he did for the creation of earth, sea, people, and animals. In short, Scripture tells me that angels and spirits, good and evil, exist. It does not tell me that they are incorporeal like the appearances people see in the dark or in dreams or visions, which the Romans called spectra and took for demons. I find that bodily spirits exist, though they are fine and invisible, but not that any human body was possessed or inhabited by them. And the bodies of the saints will be such bodies—spiritual bodies, as St. Paul calls them.

Nevertheless, the opposite teaching, that incorporeal spirits exist, has been so influential in the Church that exorcism, the expulsion of devils by an incantation, is based on it. Though now practiced rarely and without much conviction, exorcism has not entirely disappeared. People spoke of many demoniacs and few mad people or sufferers from other unusual diseases in the early Church. Today we hear about and see many mad people but few demoniacs. Nature has not changed; the names have. Another question is why the Apostles and, for a time after them, the Church’s pastors cured unusual diseases when pastors now do not appear to do so. Likewise, why can’t every true believer now do everything believers did then? We read in Mark 16. 17 that believers could “cast out devils in Christ’s name, speak in new languages, pick up snakes, drink deadly poison without harm, and heal the sick by laying their hands on them,” using no words beyond “in the name of Jesus.” Probably these extraordinary gifts were given to the Church only while people trusted wholly in Christ and looked for happiness only in his coming Kingdom. When they sought authority and wealth and trusted their cleverness to obtain a kingdom in this world, God took back those supernatural gifts.

Another remnant of Gentile religion is the worship of images. Neither Moses in the Old Testament nor Christ in the New established it. Nor was it newly imported from the Gentiles; it remained among them after they called themselves Christians. Before our Savior preached, Gentiles generally worshipped as gods the appearances that external objects impress on the senses and leave in the brain. These are commonly called ideas, idols, mental images, or conceptions. They represent the external objects that cause them, but are no more real in themselves than things that seem to stand before us in a dream. This is why St. Paul says, “We know that an idol is nothing.” He did not think that an image made of metal, stone, or wood was nothing. He meant that the thing people honored or feared in the image and treated as a god was an invention. It had no place, home, motion, or existence except as motions in the brain. To give these inventions divine honor is what Scripture calls idolatry and rebellion against God. God was King of the Jews, with Moses and then the high priest as his deputy. If the people had been allowed to worship and pray to images—representations of their own imaginings—they would no longer have depended on the true God, whom nothing can resemble, or on his chief ministers, Moses and the high priests. Instead each person would have governed himself according to his appetite. This would have completely destroyed the Common-wealth and, through lack of unity, the people themselves. So God’s first law was that “they must not take ALIENOS DEOS, the gods of other nations, as gods, but only the one true God, who chose to speak with Moses and through him gave them laws and directions for peace and salvation from their enemies.” The second was that “they must not invent any image for themselves to worship.” A king is equally deposed when people submit to a new king set up by a neighboring nation or to one they set up themselves.