Christian Faith and Demonology
The Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has commissioned an expert to prepare the following study, which the Congregation strongly recommends as a sure foundation for the reaffirmation of the teaching of the Magisterium on the theme: Christian Faith and Demonology.
The many forms of superstition, obsessional preoccupation with Satan and the demons, and the different kinds of worship of them or attachment to them have always been condemned by the Church (1). It would therefore be incorrect to hold that Christianity, forgetful of the universal Lordship of Christ, had at any time made Satan the privileged subject of its preaching, transforming the Good News of the Risen Lord into a message of terror. Speaking to the Christians of Antioch, Saint John Chrysostom declared: “It certainly gives us no pleasure to speak to you of the devil, but the teaching which this subject gives me the opportunity to expound is of the greatest use to you” (2). In fact it would be an unfortunate error to act as if history had already been accomplished and the Redemption had obtained all its effects, without there being any further need to conduct the combat spoken of by the New Testament and the masters of the spiritual life.
A present-day difficulty
This scorn could well be today’s error. On many sides, in fact, people are asking whether there should not be a revision of doctrine on this point, starting with the Scriptures. Some hold that it is impossible to take any standpoint. Asserting that Scripture does not permit an affirmation to be made either for or against the existence of Satan and the demons, they imply that consideration of the question could be suspended. More often the very existence of the devil is frankly called into question. Some critics, believing that they can define Jesus’ own position, claim that none of his words guarantees demonic reality. They assert that affirmation of the existence of this reality, where it is made, rather reflects the ideas of Jewish writings, or is dependent on New Testament traditions, but not on Christ. Since it does not form part of the central Gospel message, the existence of demonic reality, they say, no longer has a call on our faith today, and we are free to reject it. Others, who are at the same time both more objective and more radical, accept the obvious sense of the statements about demons in the Scriptures, but they immediately add that in today’s world such statements would be unacceptable, even for Christians. And so they too discard them. For still others, the idea of Satan whatever its origin may have been, has lost its importance. If we were to continue to insist upon it, our teaching would lose all credibility. It would cast a shadow over our teaching about God, who alone merits our attention. For all the above, finally, the names of Satan and of the devil are only mythical or functional personifications, the significance of which is solely to underline in a dramatic fashion the hold which evil and sin have on mankind. They are only words, which it is up to our times to decipher, even at the cost of having to find another way of inculcating into Christians the duty of struggling against all the forms evil in the world.
Similar ideas, repeated with a wealth of learning and spread by journals and some theological dictionaries, cannot fail to disturb people. The faithful, accustomed to take seriously the warnings of Christ and of the apostolic writings, feel that this kind of teaching is meant to influence opinion. Those among them who are knowledgeable in the biblical and religious sciences wonder where this demythologizing process entered upon in the name of hermeneutics will lead.
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In the face of such assertions and in order to reply to the position which they take up, we have first of all to consider briefly the New Testament, in order to call upon its testimony and authority.
The New Testament and its context
Before recalling the independence of spirit which always characterized Jesus with regard to the opinions of his time, it should be noted that not all of his contemporaries had that common belief in angels and devils that seems to be attributed to them today, and upon which Jesus himself is claimed to have depended. A remark in the Acts of the Apostles, clarifying a dispute which had arisen among the members of the Sanhedrin concerning a statement made by Saint Paul, shows us in fact that, in contrast to the Pharisees, the Sadducees admitted “neither resurrection, nor angel, nor spirit”, which, as good exegetes understand it, means that they no more believed in angels and demons than in the resurrection of the body (3). Thus, on the subject of Satan and demons, as on that of angels, contemporary opinion seems to have been clearly split into two diametrically opposed views. How then can it be claimed that Jesus, in exercising and in conferring the power to cast out demons, and after him the New Testament writers, were only adopting in this matter, without any critical evaluation, the ideas and practices of their times? There is no disputing the fact that Christ, and even more so the Apostles, belonged to their times and shared the current culture. Nevertheless, because of his divine nature and the revelation which he had come to communicate, Jesus transcended his milieu and his times: he was immune from their pressure. Moreover, a reading of the Sermon on the Mount is sufficient to convince one of Jesus’ freedom of spirit as much as of his respect for tradition (4). This is why, when he revealed the meaning of his Redemption, he obviously had to take into account the Pharisees, who, like him, believed in the world to come, the soul, spirits and the resurrection of the body; but he also had to take into account the Sadducees, who did not hold these beliefs. Thus when the Pharisees accused him of casting out devils with the help of the prince of the devils, he could have found a way out by taking the standpoint of the Sadducees. But had he done so he would have denied both his mission and his being. Therefore, without denying belief in spirits and in the resurrection of the body, which he held in common with the Pharisees, he had to disassociate himself from the latter, no less than to oppose himself to the Sadducees. So, to assert today that Jesus’ discourse on Satan was only a borrowed doctrine without importance for universal belief, seems, even at first sight, to be an ill-informed opinion on the times and on the personality of the Master. If Jesus used this way of speaking, and if above all he put it into practice by his ministry, it is because he was expressing a doctrine which was necessary, at least in part, for the notion and reality of the salvation he was bringing.
The Personal Witness of Jesus
The principal episodes of healing possessed persons were also accomplished by Christ on occasions which are presented as decisive ones in the accounts of his ministry. His exorcisms posed and oriented the problem of his mission and of his person; the reactions which they evoked sufficiently prove this (5). Without ever placing Satan at the centre of his Gospel, Jesus nevertheless only spoke of him on what were clearly crucial occasions and by means of important pronouncements. In the first place it was by submitting to being tempted by the devil in the desert that he began his public ministry: Mark’s account, by very reason of its sobriety, is as decisive as the accounts of Matthew and Luke (6). It was again against this adversary that he put his listeners on their guard in the Sermon on the Mount and in the prayer which he taught to his followers, the “Our Father”, as is admitted today by a good many commentators (7), who are supported by the agreement of several liturgies (8). In his parables, Jesus attributed to Satan the obstacles encountered by his preaching (9), as also the cockle discovered in the householder’s field (10). To Simon Peter he foretold that “the powers of death” would try to prevail against the Church (11), that Satan would sift him like wheat, and the other Apostles as well (12). As he left the Upper Room, Christ declared that the arrival of “the prince of this world” was imminent (13). In Gethsemane, when, the band of Soldiers laid hands on him to arrest him, he said that the hour of the “reign of darkness” had come (14). Nevertheless he already knew, and had stated in the Upper Room, that the prince of this world had already been condemned (15). These facts and these declarations – which are well placed, repeated, and in harmony with one another – are not the result of chance. They cannot be treated as fables to be demythologized. Otherwise one would have admit that in those critical hours the mind of Jesus, whose lucidity and self control before the judges are attested to by the Scripture accounts, was a prey to illusory fantasies, and that his word was devoid of all firmness. This would be in contradiction to the impression of the first hearers and of the present readers of the Gospels. There is a necessary conclusion. Satan, whom Jesus had confronted by his exorcisms, whom he had encountered in the desert and in his Passion, cannot be simply the product of the human faculty of inventing fables and personifying ideas, nor can he be an erroneous relic of a primitive cultural language.
It is true that when Saint Paul sums up in broad outline in the Letter to the Romans mankind’s situation before the coming of Christ, he personifies sin and death, showing their redoubtable power. But this is just an instant in his teaching, an instant which is not the effect of a literary play on words but of his acute consciousness of the importance of the Cross of Jesus, and of the necessity of the option of faith which he demands. Moreover, Paul never identifies sin with Satan. In fact he sees in sin first of all what it essentially is, a personal act of men, and also the state of guilt and blindness which Satan seeks effectively to cast them into and keep them in (16).Thus he makes a clear distinction between one and the other, between Satan and sin. The Apostle, who in face of the “law of sin” which he feels in his members confesses first of all his powerlessness without grace (17), is the same who, full of decisiveness, exhorts us to resist Satan (18), never to give him a foothold (19) and to crush him beneath our feet (20). For Satan is for him a figure of importance, the “god of this world” (21), a foe ever on the watch, as distinct from us as from the sin which he suggests. As in the Gospel, the Apostle sees him at work in the history of the world, in what he calls the “secret power of wickedness” (22), in the lack of belief which refuses to recognize the Lord Jesus (23), and also in the Aberration of idolatry (24), in the seduction which threatens the fidelity of the Church to Christ her Spouse (25), and finally in the eschatological aberration which leads to the worship of man set up in the place of God (26). Satan certainly leads on to sin, but he is distinct from the evil which he causes to be committed.
As for the Book of Revelation, it is obviously first and foremost the grandiose panorama in which the power of the Risen Christ shines forth in the witnesses of his Gospel. It proclaims the triumph of the immolated Lamb. It would however be a complete error on the nature of this victory if one did not see in it the end of a long struggle, with the intervention, through the means of human powers opposed to the Lord Jesus, of Satan and his angels, as distinct from one another as from their human agents. It is in effect the Book of Revelation which by revealing the enigma of the different names and symbols of Satan in Scripture definitively unmasks his identity (27). He is active in all the centuries of human history, under the eye of God.
It is not surprising therefore that in Saint John’s Gospel Jesus speaks of the devil and calls him “the prince of this world” (28). Of course his action on man is interior. Nevertheless, it is impossible to see in his figure only a personification of sin and temptation. Jesus can undoubtedly recognize that to sin is to be a “slave” (29); but he does not identify with Satan himself either this slavery or the sin which is shown in it. The devil exercises over sinners only a moral influence, which is moreover measured to the welcome which the individual gives to his inspiration (30). If people carry out his desires (31) and do “his work” (32), they do so freely. Only in this sense and to this extent is Satan their “father” (33). Between him and the human person’s consciousness there is always that spiritual distance which separates his “lie” from the consent which we can give or deny to it (34), just as between Christ and ourselves there always exists a gap placed by the “truth” which he reveals and proposes and which we have to accept by faith.
This is why the Fathers of the Church, convinced from Scripture that Satan and the demons are the adversaries of the Redemption, have not failed to remind the faithful of their existence and activity.
General Doctrine
As early as the 2nd century Melito of Sardes wrote a work “On the Devil” (35), and it would be difficult to cite a single Father who has kept silent on this subject. As is to be expected, the most diligent in illustrating the devil’s action were those who illustrated God’s plan in history, notably Saint Irenaeus and Tertullian, who respectively opposed Gnostic dualism and Marcion. Later came Victorinus of Pettau, and finally Saint Augustine. Saint Irenaeus taught that the devil is an “apostate angel” (36), whom Christ, recapitulating in himself the war waged on us by this enemy, had to confront from the beginning of his ministry (37). In a broader and more forceful way Saint Augustine showed him at work in the struggle of the “two cities”, which have their origin in heaven at the time when the first creatures of God, the angels, declared themselves faithful or unfaithful to their Lord (38). In the society of sinners he saw a mystical “body” of the devil (39), and this idea recurs later in Saint Gregory the Great’s
Moralia in Job (40).
The majority of the Fathers, abandoning with Origen the idea of a sin of the flesh on the part of the fallen angels, saw the principle of their fall in their pride – the desire to rise above their condition, to affirm their independence, to make themselves like God. But side by side with this pride, many Fathers underlined the fallen angels’ malice towards man. For Saint Irenaeus the devil’s apostasy began when he became jealous of God’s new creature and sought to make the latter in his turn rebel against his Creator (41). According to Tertullian, Satan used the pagan mysteries to plagiarize the Sacraments instituted by Christ, in order to thwart the Lord’s plan (42). Patristic teaching therefore substantially and faithfully echoed the doctrine and directives of the New Testament.
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