Entertaining demons

How to fight superhuman forces

“Wrestling with demons” is a common metaphor. We tend to personalise it: I’m wrestling with my demons, she’s wrestling with her demons, and so on. That way, we psychologise the demons, make them something internal to us. But we persist in calling them demons, because we recognise that within us, whatever “we” are, there are aspects that seem out of our control, that seem to have a will of their own. It is as though within me, there are different selves, different wills vying for control. Or, as St Paul writes to the church in Rome (7:15, 17), “what I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I,” because “it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me.”

Even moderns can see these “demons” at work in ourselves. What we are less comfortable with doing, but the ancients were quite content to, is to see the same malicious wills at work externally, not limited to the human heart, but active within the wider cosmos. Because our worldview is based on materialist presuppositions, we are sceptical of the notion of immaterial, invisible intelligences, independent of the human brain. Even the Church is nowadays loth to speak of angels and demons, limiting spiritual intelligence to God alone. This is the outworking of the historic Protestant reluctance to invoke the prayers of the saints and the desire to emphasise that Christ alone is the world’s mediator and advocate. But it leads to a zero-sum cosmos, opposing a fundamentally unspiritual, un-graced creation against the Creator. In God alone resides all grace, and He bestows that grace immediately, directly and miraculously at His will, without mediation.

There are unfortunate consequences to this two-dimensional worldview. The saints are left waiting passively in heaven for the Resurrection. The angels, whose work is thought to be complete with the transmission of the Gospel, are relegated to a harmless but unnecessary distraction. Their fallen brethren, the demons, are psychologised away as a primitive way of interpreting what we now understand to be material reactions within the human body. However, such a spiritually impoverished view of the cosmos is unbiblical, does not reflect the experience of the vast majority of humans for the majority of history, whatever their spiritual tradition, and does not accurately reflect our day-to-day experience as moderns, if we think about it.

Ironically and rather sadly, it is easier from our present standpoint to start thinking about invisible, extra-mental intelligences in terms of the demonic, rather than the angelic or saintly. We live in a world of crippling hysterias which drive people to violence against themselves and one another. Consider the surge of teenage girls professing a desire to mutilate their bodies, and the activist “support” groups who spur them on, some with good intentions, but others less obviously so. Self-hatred spreads like a virus, but without the need for any material germs. So does the hatred of others. Take antisemitism as a topical example. There are many well-meaning and well-informed protesters who are horrified by the plight of Palestinian civilians, and those who have reasoned complaints against past and present actions of the state of Israel. But among those taking to streets and campuses, it is hard to deny that there is a virulent strain of simple and undisguised hatred against Jews. No amount of reasoning will moderate these people’s views: there is no debate to be had. They are possessed by an idea. And it is an old one, a recurring hatred that has simmered and surged for two millennia. It has lived far longer than any human. We cannot simply internalise it in the mind. It has its own, independent continuum of existence and agency. Certainly, there are concentrated moments where particular hatreds and hysterias take a more specific form: the form, say, of a Stalin or a Hitler, or any one of the modern spate of lone wolf terrorists and killers. We write them off as mentally ill or obsessive, try to limit their contagion. Yet these individuals are animated by spirits of hatred far greater and older than anything that lies exclusively within themselves. They are the agents of greater powers.

These are what the ancients called demons. Pagans, Jews and Christians all believed that those demons could work through material things. When God calls for the destruction of idols, it is not because they are merely empty things of no significance. It is because they mediate evil spirits who falsely claim to be gods. In the Old Testament, they drive people to rape, incest and child-sacrifice. So, when Scripture tells us that the idols are not gods, it does not mean that they are nothing. They are the vessels of real spirits which must be fought. These spirits are invoked through material things, but are themselves immaterial, spiritual, and external to the human mind. The fight with them is therefore a spiritual fight, but the theatre of war spreads to the physical realm. There are physical idols that have to be destroyed. The Berlin Wall, for example, in itself could cause no harm once the political reality it represented was overthrown, but people rushed to tear the physical thing down. Likewise with statues of Lenin and Saddam Hussein. These things, like the idols of old, were possessed of an intolerable spirit. They had to be destroyed to be robbed of their power.

But let’s take this a stage further: if great evils can work through idols of wood and stone, through a wicked wall, or for that matter through a red flag or a swastika, what is to stop them working through other physical things? Such as glass and silicon? Or through the arcane servers that enshrine the spirits of AI? What of these black icons that most of us now carry around with us religiously, pawing at them and gazing in slavish devotion at the wretched things most of our waking hours? It is not far-fetched to see the potential for these to be used as vehicles for larger-than-human forces, bigger than any particular human mind, external to any particular human brain, to enslave us to their inscrutable ends. It is happening already.

Our spiritual battle with the demons that afflict the world today doubtless takes place on the battlefield of the human heart, but it is waged by physical weapons. We need to be careful to limit as far as we can the potential for a security leak, as it were. We have to cut off the Enemy’s routes of advance and watch for subterfuge. This means extreme caution in our use of technology. I am not calling for a Luddite destruction of smartphones (tempting though it be), but for a much more proactive discernment in the time we spend with them and the ways we use them, which must be in a way that sanctifies the online world rather than acquiesces to the demonic powers which seek always to occupy the no-man’s land. We also need to rethink the extent to which we give them to our children. For through these portals, we may entertain demons unawares.

We are oppressed by superhuman forces which are driving us to violence and to war. Our attempts to fight these forces by human ingenuity alone have so far proven futile. Happily, we are not alone. For if one accepts the reality of the dark forces at work in the world, one can be open to the far greater reality of the forces of light. Darkness, after all, is nothing but the absence of light. It is parasitical. Evil has no proper existence of its own, but feeds on the good. And just as the evil spirits work through material things, so do the good. The saints and angels do have power in this world. The rallying power of the sign of the Cross in the skies over the Milvian Bridge, the power of the Blessed Sacrament in healing and strengthening against evil, the appearances of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the power of holy relics of the saints are well-attested. St Bede gives several examples, which he verified with eye-witnesses. Similar stories are told today, more often in less materially developed parts of the world, where perhaps the spirits have freer reign. We might want to trust those stories more than we have in recent centuries. Even in the modern West, I have heard from a trustworthy source of a case when relics, carried hidden, have caused reactions in those suspected of demonic possession. We should not be surprised when evil spirits infiltrate the Church and undermine her from within. The corruption of the holy is their most potent propaganda. But despite our failings, through the ministry of the Church both here and in heaven, Christ works for the healing of the world and for victory over the evil spirits that assail us.

“Onward, Christian soldiers” may be unfashionable now among clergy hesitant at its military tenor, but that is what we who follow Christ are called to be. That is the meaning of the angelic veneration of God as “Lord of Hosts,” Dominus Deus Sabaoth, at every Eucharist. The “hosts” are armies, legions of angels. When we celebrate Mass, we are tuning into the perpetual worship of God that the saints and angels offer in heaven. We are taking our part in their ranks, joining the spiritual warfare that Christ, as King of Angels, continues through them and us to wage here on earth. When we participate in His Holy Sacrifice, invoking His presence in the material things of bread and wine, we take part in His priestly work of hallowing and consecrating the material cosmos, casting out the demons that occupy and infect it. The Mass is no mere memorial, nor is it merely the personal Communion between me and my God, though that in itself is a mighty miracle. Rather, through the angels and the saints in heaven who have taken their fallen brethren’s place, and through the angelic bread given through the Church on earth, Christ our God continues to vanquish the ancient foe. This mediation in no way compromises the unique efficacy of His sacrifice on the Cross, the sovereignty of God or the free gift of His grace. All the good in heaven and earth is God’s, but He works it through creatures. This is the remedy St Paul gives the Galatians (2:20) to the problem he described to the Romans. For when we, the saints and the angels do Christ’s work, it is no longer we who live, but He who lives in us.

To conquer the demons that wage war in our soul, we must invite Christ to dwell there. But it is not solo combat. We are part of a great army in a great war. We have brothers and sisters at arms who will come to our aid in times of need. Our Lord works through them, through the saints in heaven and on earth and through the holy angels. That is why we need to consolidate, to get together as communities animated by the Holy Spirit through the Eucharist. We need to make the Mass the centre of our lives, the ration that sustains us for the fight, and fight with joy. We need to meet and celebrate the victories of our sisters and brothers, the martyrs, on the days when they won their part in the glory, with glorious worship and joyous feasting. We need to teach our children their stories and help them aspire to sainthood, not celebrity. We need to bless our homes with holy water and the sign of our salvation. We need to prize the shiny black icons from our hands and grasp the Rosary or prayer rope, to spend time in prayer, to trust more in the silence of God than the noise of committees and synods. And we need to pray strategically, collectively, like a well-disciplined regiment, with common intent, to muster all the power of co-ordinated prayer.

Together, we can defeat far more than the demons within, fierce enemies though they are. With Christ as our Head, under the banner of the Cross, we can conquer the greater demons, those ancient forces that keep marshalling their legions throughout the world, driving souls to violence, torture, slavery and death. The angels are on our side. But whatever our part in the battle, or theirs, the victory remains Christ’s alone.