CANTERBURY BOOKS

THE DEVIL
by

WALTER FARRELL, O.P.
BERNARD LEEMING, S.J.

and others

SHEED AND WARD - NEW YORK

SHEED AND WARD, INC.
84O BROADWAY

NEW YORK 3

Nihil Obstat : Joannes M. T. Barton, S.T.D., L.S.S.
Censor Deputatus

Imprimatur: E. Morrogh Bernard
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Westmonasterii,

die

6a Maii, 1957

Manufactured in the United States of America

CONTENTS
Page

Introduction

?

By Charles Moeller
I.

The Devil Himself

11

By Walter Farrell, O.P.

Π.

37

The Adversary

By Bernard Leeming, S. J.
ΠΙ.

Demoniacs

in the

Gospel

By Mgr. F. M. Catherinet

5

72

INTRODUCTION1

By Charles Moeller
is the father of lies and a murderer from
the beginning. Falsity and violence—these two
features are only too tragically typical of the
present century. And of these two diabolical mani­
festations, it is arguable that falsity is the more
essentially Satanic. We shall here attempt to show
why this is so.
Contemporary man, confronted by the problem of
Satan, is divided against himself by a twofold re­
action, apparently self-contradictory. He is on the
one hand fascinated by this mysterious personage,
and on the other hand almost totally sceptical as to
his existence and influence on the course of events.
His morbid preoccupation with every species of the
abnormal and the sensational, his insatiable need
for ever more violent stimuli, his restless curiosity
regarding the metaphysical and the occult—all these
things are further degradations of an already super­
stitious religiosity. The devil, who is a past-master
in the bizarre, cannot help but be a source of fascina­
tion; besides, he has staged a dazzling come-back in

S

atan

1 This introduction is based upon an article published in the
diocesan review of Malines, Collectanea Mechliniensia, March
1949.

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INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION

modern literature. At the same time, there is an
almost total scepticism as to his actual existence: he
is bundled away into the attic of discarded myth­
ologies. Of course nobody believes any more in the
pantomime demon king flashily got up in horns, red
tongue and eyes of coal, rather as a confidence
trickster in his working clothes; on the contrary, his
trappings are in the latest fashion. But his influence
has been watered down to a series of dangerous re­
pressions within the personality. Cases of possession
are accounted for on purely psychological grounds;
the books of Janet—De ΓAngoisse à VExtase, for
instance—are for many people the final explanation
of diabolism in its entirety. The poet Valéry even
goes so far as to make his Faust assure the devil
that men no longer need his help in order to damn
themselves. Let him who can fathom this paradox
of the modern consciousness—that the majority of
those who will read this book believe no longer in
the devil.
What is the situation among Christians? We may
speak frankly: whether among the laity, priests or
religious, there is to be found a scepticism not far
removed from negation. Though one may not
question the actual existence of the devil—which
would indeed be difficult, since it forms a part of
revelation—one entirely fails to put into practice the
conclusions to be drawn from it. “The devil exists,
of course; but there is a happy medium between
saying this and seeing his influence everywhere. We
can leave all that side of it to the professional
8

exorcists. For practical purposes—as far as we are
concerned—men are only too adept at working out
their own damnation. ”
No one disputes that genuine cases of possession
should be left to the ministrations of those ordained
by the Church to that purpose. And it is no less
certain that we should be wary of detecting the
devil’s influence here, there and everywhere. But
to leave matters thus and allow no place in the
Christian world-picture for an exact theological
assessment of Satan—this can scarcely be called
logical. It remains true to say that there are a certain
number of central theological problems which
assume an entirely different aspect according to
whether or no one takes seriously the existence and
influence of the devil. Consider, for example, such
a problem as the interpretation of history. The whole
perspective will change inasmuch as one either gives
full weight to the texts concerning anti-Christ and
the final struggle of the Church against the devil, or,
for all practical purposes, ignores them. Granted
that it is perhaps a little hasty to say with certain
theologians, however eminent: “Fundamentally, the
problem of evil is the problem of the devil. ” For the
metaphysical concept of evil viewed as a deficiency
of being retains its validity; there is no need to dis­
miss the abstract aspects of the problem. But does
this dispose of the problem of the devil? If, behind
the world’s evil, there lies a personality—if, in a
sense which we must carefully define, evil is per­
sonified—it must be admitted that the point is an
9

INTRODUCTION

important one; and this not only with reference to
the non-temporal aspects of theology but also in its
pastoral applications: what priest has not had ex­
perience of the devil in the conflict which he has
undertaken to save this soul or that? There is
scarcely a missionary who cannot further document
the case with accounts which give one food for
thought. There is something strange in the unavowed
rationalism revealed by those who find something
amusing in the words of St. Peter on the devil who
as a roaring lion goeth about seeking whom he may
devour.

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THE DEVIL HIMSELF

By Walter Farrell, O.P.
ucifer,

the bearer of light become the prince of
darkness, has earned his name of Satan, “the
J adversary ”. He is the enemy of God, of man,
of all that is good. It is no part of wisdom to under­
estimate an enemy. It is stupidity to cultivate an
ignorance of the enemy to the point of blindness to
his existence; for in such blindness it is impossible
to face an enemy, let alone hold him at bay or
conquer him. This is to invite defeat, to welcome
slavery, to yield supinely to a conquest that in this
case is radical, irrevocable, eternal.
Under pain of such fatal underestimation of the
devil, we must know something of his angelic splen­
dour, of the intensity of his malice, and of the agony
of his punishment. Yet it will be difficult to see any
of these things unless the splendour of Satan is seen
silhouetted against the sun of the perfection of God,
and in constant contrast with the limited capacities
of man. In this light, one can see something of the
angelic splendour (dwarfed though it is by the infin­
itude of divinity), and nearly all of the hatred, des­
tructiveness and wickedness which feeds on despair.
In a world that is uncertain of God and ignorant of
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man, the Enemy of all that is good is perfectly dis­
guised, safe from counter-attack; he is unknown.
Men’s terror of Satan throughout the ages has had
solid basis in the devil’s angelic powers and the
malice of his will; that malignancy of the evil one is
not shackled by ignorance, rather its full fury is
unleashed on the world.
This chapter, then, is by way of a reconnaissance
report on the Enemy who challenges so bitterly our
every step towards perfection. What is he like, what
are his resources, what are the foundations of his
bitter opposition, what is his morale, what are the
chances of his collapse before our defence or our
attack?
It is of faith that Satan is a fallen angel.1 That
definitive description contains all the essential truth
about him; fully analysed, it tells nearly the whole
of the frightening story of the Enemy. As an angel,
Satan is pure spirit, much closer to God than man/
The spiritual is not something foreign to us. We see
it breaking through the material veil of men’s bodies,
its lustre making the difference between a vibrantly
'Fourth Lateran Council (cap. 1, “Firmiter”): “. - · qui
[Deus] sua omnipotenti virtute simul ab initio temporis utram­
que de nihilo condidit creaturam, spiritualem et corporalem,
angelicam videlicet et mundanam: ac deinde humanam, quasi
communem ex spiritu et corpore constitutam. Diabolus enim
et alii daemones a Deo quidem natura creati sunt boni, sed
ipsi per se facti sunt mali” (Denzinger, Enchiridion Symbo­
lorum, n. 428).
'
2 This is abundantly clear from Holy Scripture narrating
angelic actions which demand this inference as to their nature,
and explicitly describing angels as spiritual, intellectual sub­
stances superior to man. Cf. E. Hugon, Tractatus Dogmatici,
vol. i, pp. 572-4.

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living man and an inert mass of decaying flesh. By
his spiritual soul a man lives, breathes, reaches out
to horizons that far outstrip the world of the animals;
by it he is established as completely different from
every other creature. Here, in Satan, there is no veil
to hide the splendour of the spiritual, to limit or
threaten its life-giving power, to cut down its
horizons; here is a life-principle unfettered, a pure
form flowing out into activity without hindrance or
dependence. God Himself is a pure spirit, but the
uncreated pure Spirit of limitless perfection; all that
we know in this world, indeed all there is of life, of
beauty, of goodness, are imaged shatterings of that
majestic perfection. Of all these created fragments,
the angel is the most sublime, the most nearly com­
plete replica of the inimitable Source of them all.1
Perhaps one of the most startling characteristics
of the devil, to us who savour drops of time so
thirstily, is his agelessness. It staggers us to see him
as young now as when the world was born, with all
the undiminished energy and dynamic vigour of full,
young maturity. Yet the fact is plain enough: a
spirit doesn’t grow up any more than it grows down;
there is no way in which an angel can age, no
moment in which it does not possess the full strength
of its angelic life. From the very first instant of his
existence down through the whole length of eternity
the devil lacks nothing of his angelic perfection.
He has watched the world grow old and the genera­
tions of men and women pass in unending procession
1 Cf. E. Hugon, Tractatus Dogmatici, vol. i, pp. 572-4.

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from birth to death; when the last of that long file
has passed and the sun has set for the last time,
Satan will still be young.
By his angelic nature, the devil enjoys the inde­
pendence distinctively characteristic of a pure spirit.
For ourselves, we glory in the freedom that stands
out in a physical world as brightly as a fire in the
darkness of night; yet it is only in the inviolable
choices of our will that we approach the angelic
mastery. Satan’s life is independent of food, air,
sleep, or any other thing ministered by the world
beneath him. In God there is independence in
knowledge, which is omniscience, in power, which
is omnipotence, and in life, which is eternal, selfsufficient being. In the angel’s pure spirit that inde­
pendence is complete relative to everything but God
Himself : its life can come from no other but God,
for a spirit is not born but created; in regard to the
material universe, it is completely independent, the
master, in no sense the subject or servant, and a
master that has no need for even the humblest
ministrations of the material.
Among the vivid consequences of this angelic
independence of the devil is his immunity to injury,
to pain, to sickness, to death; indeed, he is even
immune to the human discomfort of being crowded !
Like God, and unlike man, he has no body. There
are in him, then, no parts to be dismembered, no
possibilities of corruption and decay, no threat of a
separation of parts that will result in death. He is
incorruptible, immune to the vagaries, the pains, the
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limitations of the flesh, immortal. Only God, by His
almighty power, could destroy Satan, recalling the
borrowed existence by which the devil lives; and
this God will not do.1
There are no geographical difficulties in the way
of the devil’s activity. Since all reality depends every
instant on the divine support by which it exists, God
is wherever there is reality, He is everywhere; for
God is where He works. The devil, a created spirit,
is in place in the same way: the angel is where it
works.2 Unless this particular task exhausts the
power of the angel, several material places can be
the focus of angelic operations and together make
up one place for the angel; the fact that he is busy
in New York is no hindrance to his bustling in
Moscow. His movement from material place to
material place is accomplished with no more effort,
and in no more time than it takes to shift the mind
from one subject to another. The speed of light is
a snail’s pace compared to the speed of angelic
movement; nothing in the world can escape the devil
by flight.3
An interesting difficulty presents itself here from
1 The conclusions stated in this and the preceding paragraphs
follow immediately from the purely spiritual nature of the
angels. Their purely spiritual nature is made clear in Holy
Scripture where they are called spirits (Eph. vi. 12), opposed
to flesh and blood (Luke xxiv. 39), described as living a life and
performing works impossible to a material being (Tob. xii. 19;
Matt, xviii. 10). This interpretation is universal among the
Greek Fathers from the fourth century on ; among the Latins,
Augustine would still consider the matter doubtful, a doubt
that persisted as late as Peter Lombard.
2 St. Thomas, Summa Theologica, par. la, q. 52.
3 St. Thomas, ibid., par. la, q. 53.

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the pages of Holy Scripture itself. Angels have no
bodies, yet they have appeared to men in physical
form, have talked with them, journeyed the roads
with them fulfilling all the pleasant tasks of com­
panionship. But after all, if they are independent of
all save God, masters of all beneath them, the angels
can assume, and have assumed, the appearance of
bodies; but they have not, as the souls of men do,
become the life principle of these assumed “bodies”.
They have not, in other words, denied or cast off
the purely spiritual character of their natures.1 These
apparent bodies of the angels could not act vitally:
even under the guise of a physical form, the angel
could not eat, digest, see, or hear, generate children.
These “bodies” were tools of the angels, not a
living part of them. The angel’s mastery over the
physical world is not at all to be compared to God’s
sovereignty. The angels’ is a ministerial mastery,
not a creative one; they can put to use the powers
and principles implanted in nature by God, they
cannot call those powers or principles into being.'
We see the devil, then, because of his angelic
nature as a pure spirit, ageless, independent, im­
material, a life principle complete in itself, a pure
form integrally whole in itself. He is dependent on
God and independent of all things else: mirroring
the divine resplendence in all its purity, the created
‘St. Thomas, Summa Theologica, q. 51. The fact of the
assumption of bodies is stated again and again in Holy Scrip­
ture; the non-living character of these bodies seems clear from
the archangel Raphael’s words to Tobias (Tob. xii. 19).
2 Ibid., q. 114, art. 4 et ad 2 urn.

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pure spirit reflecting the incandescent beauty of the
uncreated pure spirit who is God.
The perfection of angelic nature, the angel’s prox­
imity to God and superiority to man, finds its full
clear statement in the sublimity of angelic action.
Ordinarily we think of angelic action in terms of
what the angels have been known to do in the
material world and to the men who inhabit it; for
that, after all, is our world, the world we know at
first hand. Thus, we recall the avenging angel
striking down the first-born of Egypt, giving the
devastating answer to a profanation of the temple,
going before the armies of Israel to strike terror to
the heart of the enemy; or the tales of magic rites
and diabolic wonders that ooze out of the dark
depths of the history of devil-worshippers. Actually,
all this activity is no more than froth on the surface
of an angel’s life. As in the uncreated pure Spirit
the eternally intense activity is immanent subsistent
Knowing and Loving which makes up the Trinity of
the Godhead, so in the created pure spirits the un­
ceasing dynamism of life is an entirely immanent
thing made up of knowing and willing whose in­
tensity is undiminished by time, not delayed by the
necessity of a multitude of vegetative and sensitive
activities as in men : an intense activity that is a
stranger to fatigue.1
1 This is the more common doctrine which limits the faculties
of the angels to two, namely, intellect and will ; as against those
who follow Suarez in arguing for a special spiritual faculty,
distinct from intellect and will, by which the angels move
bodies.

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For ourselves, we gather the crumbs of truth like
beggars trying to reassemble a loaf of bread from
discarded fragments. Our minds wander the world
sniffing like bloodhounds at the traces of First Truth
which make up the world of things about us, often
enough losing the trail or dashing off on false trails.
We know God through His reflections in things;
indeed, we come to a knowledge of our own soul
only through observing the activity of that soul in
our actions. What we know, all that we know
naturally, comes to us from a scrutiny of things be­
neath us or around us. God’s knowledge is im­
mediate and utterly independent; knowing Himself,
He knows all things, for He is the cause of them all.
His knowledge is not from below nor from above,
but from within Himself. The angel, mirroring that
immediacy and independence, has its knowledge, all
of it, from the first instant of its life; not from a
scrutiny of other things, but directly from the source
both of truth and of things. The angel’s knowledge
is by infused concepts, had entirely from above,
from God Himself; in fact, the greater the perfection
of the angel, the fewer, more universal, are the con­
cepts by which it knows all natural things. In its
knowledge of itself, the angel perfectly images the
divine, for it knows itself not by reflection as we do,
not by infused concepts as it knows all else, but by
immediate presence of its spiritual self to its per­
fectly proportioned intellect.
The angel’s knowledge is, then, perfect, for it
comes from God. It is immediate, since there is no
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need to gather it bit by bit through a search of the
world. The angel has no need of the delay and
labour of study; there is in it no room for error; there
is not even the possibility of the obscurity with which
passion so often clouds our knowing. There is no
need in the angel for the caution so essential to our­
selves as we pick our precariously slippery way down
from the heights of principle to the levels of con­
clusions, or for the labour that alone will bring us
to the heights of principles from the level of observed
facts; for an angel knows, not by reasoning, but
intuitively, plunging the sharp point of its intellect
into the heart of a principle by one swift stroke that
lays bare every trace of truth contained in it.
In view of that faultless angelic knowledge, we
would expect a roaring fire of love in the angels; for
it is the mind that furnishes fuel for love’s fire,
though in us often enough we neglect to put the fuel
on the fire. Even at its best our love is a disappoint­
ing thing and in the depths of our hearts we are
bitterly aware of it. The ignorance that blinds us to
evil opens the way for the disillusionment and death
of love; the momentary enticement of some new,
bright thing makes fickleness a perpetual threat. Our
love finds the path for its footsteps more by faith’s
obscurity than by the light of vision; reasonably we
go to love’s surrender with hesitant steps, slowly,
almost fearfully, afraid to give too much or too
quickly yet remorseful that we can give so little.
Not so the angels. Following that perfect knowledge
of theirs, the angels’ surrender to love is immediate,
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unwavering, utterly whole and completely irrevoc­
able. The fire of an angel’s love is not built up
slowly; it has no stages of mere smouldering, nor
agonising moments of dying embers; rather the angel
is immediately a holocaust, a roaring conflagration,
aflame with a love that will never lessen.1
All this is true of the very least of the angels. With
no more than this before our eyes, we are like a man
breathless at the majestic lines of a cathedral seen
through a haze, for we have seen only the blurred
outline of Satan’s angelic magnificence. For a fuller
appreciation of the radiant perfection of our Enemy,
we must keep well in mind the serried ranks of
graduated perfection that make up the hierarchy of
angelic choirs.2
This is a stupendous truth consequent on the
purely spiritual nature of the angels. If you were to
walk down a street in Chicago or New York and
every one you met were to give back a reflection of
divinity as startlingly different as we see now be­
tween roses and elephants or worms and men, you
would have achieved some little insight into the
world of the angels. Multiply this by the millions of
citizens in Chicago and New York and you would
1 This exposition of the knowledge and love of the angels is
the common teaching following St. Thomas, Summa Theologica,
par. la, qq. 55, 58, 60.
2 There have been no definitions of the Church relative to the
number or nature of the angelic choirs. The names themselves
are to be found in the Scriptures, their use and order is sanc­
tioned by the liturgy, while tradition has solidly approved the
angelic hierarchy. Cf. Hugon, op. cit., pp. 726 ff.

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be walking through a world staggering in its variety,
its beauty, its perfection; where the mind and heart
would find no such breathing space as is offered by
the sameness of men. There would be no need for
sharp alertness and sympathy to catch the beauty of
individual differences; rather the heart and mind
would be reeling under these differences that would
be pounding at us every moment and from every side.
The angels, as pure spirits, have no bodies. There
is, then, no question of generation among the angels,
of angelic families or relatives. Each stands apart
as a direct creation of God; and, as a pure spirit,
specifically complete as an individual. In plainer
language, one angel possesses more perfections than
the one immediately beneath him by a step higher
than that which separates a man from a dog. Each
angel is a pure form; any differentiation in that form
means a differentiation in species. Among ourselves,
there is no such specific differentiation; we are all
members of the one human species, differing as
individuals by physical, moral or intellectual per­
fections that still leave us substantially, specifically
the same as all other men. If a difference could be
introduced into the substance of the soul of man,
which is the human form, then the result would not
be a man but something substantially different from
all members of the human species.1
This is true of the lowest choir of angels; that
choir consists of -multitudes of pure spirits, each pos1 This is the common opinion of Thomists and many other
scholastics. Summa Theologica, par. la, q. 50, art. 4.

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sessing more perfections than the next, in that sub­
stantial way. This, however, is only the lowest rung
of the angelic hierarchy. To complete that first hier­
archy, it would be necessary to mount through the
more numerous multitudes1 of the Archangels, and
go on to the even greater multitudes of the Princip­
alities, each individual spirit, you understand, spec­
ifically more brilliant in perfection than the next.
There would still be the second hierarchy consisting,
in the ascending order, of Powers, Virtues, Domina­
tions; and, towering above that, the third and
supreme hierarchy of Thrones, Cherubim and Sera­
phim.2 These last, the Seraphim, are, then, the most
perfect creatures God has made, their very name
indicating something of the burning ardour, the
sharp brightness, and clear consuming flame of a
love that matches the most perfect mirroring of
divine knowledge in creation. Of this countless host
of the Seraphim, each specifically, substantially
higher in perfection than the next, Lucifer was the
highest; the “morning star”, the “bearer of light”,
holding his rightful place at the very peak of created
perfection.3
It is almost beyond our powers of comparison to

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balance one against the other the highest of the
Seraphim with the lowest of the angels. Yet we must
do more than this, we must see in contrast the highest
of the Seraphim and our own feeble selves if we are
to see something of the battle in which we are en­
gaged. Satan was the highest of the Seraphim. He
lost his title to that name of love by his fall, but he
lost nothing of his natural supremacy of that multi­
tude in the highest choir of the highest hierarchy of
the angels. Seeing beneath him all the rest of that
innumerable choir, and on down through the other
eight choirs flashing back at divinity the infinite
facets of its sublime mirroring, we see something of
the Enemy we face throughout our lives.
Even this breathless height of perfection does not
tell us from what heights Satan fell; it tells us only
the perfection he carried with him into darkness.
For a fuller appreciation of the venom of this
Enemy, we must remember that these natural heights
of perfection were only foothills of the perfection
which the generosity of God called into being for the
angels. Satan, like all the other angels, was created
in grace, i.e., from the first moment of life, he was
lifted to the supernatural plane.1 His natural life
was divinely perfected by the participated divine life
which we call sanctifying grace; the wide horizons
of his angelic mind were opened to the horizons of

1 That the number of angels is exceedingly great can be seen
from Holy Scripture (Job xxv. 3 ; Dan. vii. 10; Luke ii. 13-14;
Apoc. v. 11). There have been numerous estimates by Fathers
and Doctors, all of whom agree on the greatness of the numbers
of the angels. St. Thomas thought that the angels incomparably
exceeded in numbers all material substances (Summa Theo­
logica, loc. cit., art. 3).
2 See footnote on p. 20.
3 The more common opinion, tracing back to Tertullian and
Gregory the Great (Summa Theologica, loc. cit., q. 63, art. 7).

1 It is of faith that sanctifying grace is necessary for salvation,
and any works efficacious for salvation. Second Council of
Orange, can. 5-7 (Denzinger, op. cit., nn. 178-80); Council of
Trent, sess. vi, can. 1, 2, 32 (Denzinger, op. cit., 809, 811, 812,
842). That such grace was given the angels at their creation is
the common theological opinion.

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divinity by the supernatural habit of Faith, letting
him see through the eyes of God; his will was
divinized by a charity and hope that would enable
him to love God in a divine fashion and to stretch
forth in eager confidence of divine help to goals that
are possible only to God. St. Thomas' maintains that
these supernatural gifts, necessary to every intelligent
creature who would come home to God, were given
to the angels in exact proportion to their natural
gifts; in other words, the highest of the angels was,
then, given the greatest perfection of charity, of faith,
of hope, the most abundant share in the divine life
of grace. Here was the mountain top of perfection,
natural and supernatural, from which Lucifer
plunged to his eternal doom by an act of his own
free will.
Something of the terrifying powers of our Enemy
is apparent from his natural perfection. We must
grasp something of the tragedy that saw the light of
such faith extinguished, and utter blackness descend
to hide for ever the secrets of God; that turned the
flame of that charity into the ashes of hate; that
closed for ever the gates of hope and opened the
flood-gates of despair; for only then can we begin to
suspect the consuming rancour that hurls those
diabolic powers against all that is good, and with
no surcease.

The dazzling quality of angelic perfection would
seem to preclude the very thought of sin. Yet the
1 Summa Theologica, par. la, q. 52, art. 6.

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ennobling fact is that heaven is not only given; it
is also earned. Lucifer was created in sanctifying
grace to crown his natural perfection; he was, that
is, fully equipped to win the prize of heaven, but lie
still had to win it.' Because he could win, he could
also lose. Like our own, his freedom was reverently
respected by the action of God; and, like ourselves,
if he were to have heaven he would have to merit it
by the goodness of a free act, by his own free choice.
Because the gates of heaven were thrown open to his
efforts it became possible for him to go to hell. In
this supreme test, the devil did not win heaven but
lost it; or rather, he freely and deliberately turned
his back on it. He was the first; all others who joined
his hordes, whether from among the angels or from
among men, were volunteers, haunting the halls of
hell only because they so chose.
Yet that tragic choice of Lucifer does seem to
present serious difficulties. Lucifer’s free choice
could not have been deflected by any preceding
ignorance or error either in his natural knowledge
(which was perfect from the first instant) or in the
supernatural knowledge he had by infused faith, a
gift greater in him than in any other angel and a per­
fect gift since it came directly from God. In him there
could have been no rush of passion such as blinds
men to the path to happiness, for passion is a move­
ment of sense appetite, a thing impossible to a purely
spiritual creature. Moreover, his will could entertain
no least desire for evil since there was no disorder
'Summa Theologica, par. la, q. 52, arts. 1—4.

25

THE

DEVIL

in the will and no mistaken judgment of the intellect
to mislead it. How, then, did Lucifer commit sin?
The difficulty mounts when we remember the
intense degree of sanctifying grace by which Lucifer
lived a supernatural life, the superb perfection of his
infused faith, hope, and charity. Actually, the diffi­
culty can seem insurmountable only if we forget the
sovereign will that God has given to angels and men;
if we forget that regardless of the stupidity of sin,
regardless of the perfection of intellect and will,
angel or man can be evil if he so chooses. The
question, then, is not so much how could an angel,
particularly the highest of the angels, commit sin;
rather it is, in the name of our curiosity, what was
the sin of the angels and what was the process of
that sin’s commission?
For ourselves, we know that there are seven
avenues of invasion open to sin attacking the soul
of a man, the avenues which we name when we list
the seven capital sins. It is immediately obvious that
we must strike five of those out of our consideration
when we investigate the angelic sin. Only the purely
spiritual sins of pride and envy were possibilities to
creatures who had no bodies, who had no use for
money, no susceptibility to injury, no tendency to
fatigue. Since envy demands pride as an absolute
prerequisite, it becomes clear that the sin of the
angels would have to have been pride.
This conclusion is today the common theological
opinion. Among the early Fathers, chiefly because
of the assumed authority of the Book of Enoch, it
26

THE DEVIL HIMSELF

was thought that perhaps the lower angels sinned by
lust for the women of the world; yet even when
restricted to lower angels, the opinion chafed, for it
was obviously difficult to find a place for lust in a
bodiless spirit. By the time of Origen the apocryphal
character of the Book of Enoch was clear, and the
flat conclusion to the impossibility of lust in the
angels was explicitly stated.1 Envy as the angelic sin
has had its champions, and with an apparent reason­
ableness. Lucifer might have been envious of the
future exaltation of human nature by its union to
the Son of God in the Incarnation; or of the future
exaltation of men to angelic, nay to divine heights
by sanctifying grace and the promise of heaven. But
there the possibilities are exhausted; and it still re­
mains true that pride must precede envy. There was
nothing else for Lucifer to be envious of. He was the
highest of created beings, there was nothing above
him but God Himself and he could not be envious
of God; for, as St. Thomas says, only a fool can be
envious of what is so far above him as to be impos­
sible of attainment. Lucifer was no fool. When it
is said that he desired to become like God this must
not be understood in the sense of a desire to attain
divine nature or to dethrone God; but rather to be,
in his own order, as God is in the divine order. As
we shall see, that comes down to a desire for selfsufficiency that is not possible to creatures.2
‘Confer Dictionnaire de Théologie Catholique, vol. iv,“ Démon
d’après les Pères”, cols. 339-49.
2 Scotus and Suarez disagree with St. Thomas on the precise
nature of this sin of pride. To Scotus, the sin was not so much

27

THE

DEVIL

On the score of pride, surely Lucifer had more
reason than any other creature; and his example, plus
their own spotless perfection, would give plausible
reasons for pride to other angels. Still, that pride
had to find its way into the angelic world with none
of the preparatory work of ignorance, error or
passion. How did it happen? If we take a sinful
act in its most obvious sense of a disordered act, it
is clear that the disorder is immediately introduced
by a choice of something evil, that is, by embracing
a thing, like incest or murder, which is disordered
in its very nature. It is not less clear that such a
thing could not be done by an angel; we might
mistake such a thing as good, or as having so much
good about it as to be worth preferring to the divine,
or, quite simply, because of the disorder already
present in our own desires from the sinful heritage
Adam has left us. There was none of this in the
angels. With our long familiarity with sin, it is not
hard for us to see another possible source of sin’s
disorder: perhaps we do not choose evil in this
particular sin, but we choose a good badly. Take,
for example, the matter of human love. Certainly
there can be no question of its inherent goodness;
but suppose we choose it evilly, suppose a husband
does literally adore his wife, give her the worship,
a desire for excellence as a disordered love of self pushed to
the point of hatred of God : and hence should be called a kind
of spiritual lust rather than pride. Suarez considered Satan’s
sin as properly one of pride, but would have it consist in a
disordered desire for a hypostatic union between the Word of
God and his own angelic nature.

28

THE DEVIL

HIMSELF

service, and preference that belong to God alone,
suppose in actual fact his love does not go beyond
his wife to the God who made her and in whom
alone the marital love can stand—is there any
question of the evil of this idolatry? Ύ et the husband
has not chosen evil; he has chosen good evilly.
It is in this way that St. Thomas1 analyses the sin
of Lucifer and his angelic followers. Caught by the
undeniable beauty, perfection, goodness of his own
angelic nature fully comprehended, Lucifer loved it;
that was as it should be. But his love refused to
budge a step beyond this, refused to look beyond
the angelic perfection to its divine source; he insisted
upon resting in that beauty to find there the fullness
of happiness, to be sufficient unto himself. As is
the way of pride, Lucifer isolated himself, even from
God. The sin, then, is to be found in his wilful
ignoring of the further order of his own perfection
to divinity; ignorance in the sense of lack of con­
sideration was in the sin, surely, but in not preceding
it, a part and parcel of the free choice that sent the
angelic hosts into hell. Lucifer’s sin consisted in
loving himself (as pride insists) to the exclusion of
all else; and this with no excuse : without ignorance,
without error, without passion, without previous dis­
order in his angelic will. His was a sin of pure
malice.

Because of his exalted perfection an angel who
sins falls far; because of the perfection of the angelic
1 Summa Theologica, par. la, q. 63, art. 1 et ad 4 um.

29

THE DEVIL

will, the angel who falls, falls but once. His love,
you will remember, is not the faltering, hesitant,
fickle thing that ours is; his choice is final, his em­
brace eternal, nothing further enters into his con­
sideration to bring about repentance. The instant
that irrevocable choice of pride was made, Satan
entered into his eternal punishment, stripped in an
instant of the supernatural life of grace, of the light
of faith, of the loving union of charity, of the
horizons of hope; cast out into the exterior darkness,
and for ever.1
The essential punishment of Satan, as for the
damned of the human race, is called by theologians
the pain of loss. This means that the damned have
lost for all time the goal for which they were created,
the end which would have brought them eternal hap­
piness; that they have failed beyond recovery, that
there is no tomorrow with any less of despairing
emptiness than today has held. They have lost God.
We can understand a little of this hopeless emptiness
from the crashing impact that destroys the lives of
men who have cnosen false goals; we must look to
the false goals, for only these are irrevocably lost
while man yet lives. To a man who has made health
the goal of his living, an incurable disease destroys
life’s meaning and he pleads for extinction; the
greedy to whom money is God, plunge to their deaths
1 Both Scotus and Suarez agree that none of the fallen angels
repented ; but both are of the opinion, contrary to St. Thomas,
that repentance was a possibility to them and the time was
given for it. Both agree that during that interval Satan and his
followers committed other sins.

30

THE DEVIL HIMSELF

after a market-crash; the pleasure-seekers cannot
face old age, and so on. In the case of Satan, the
loss was irrevocable, and it was a loss of the true
end for which all his splendid gifts were created;
moreover, he knows sharply and clearly that nothing
else can ever bring happiness, that it was this for
which he was made, for which he was equipped, it
was this that gave all meaning to every moment of
his existence. It is lost; hopelessly, eternally lost.
His despair measures up to the perfect insight of his
great intellect; darkness is necessarily the colour of
his days, bitter, self-despising darkness that strikes
out at all light yet despises itself in the very striking;
for this was not the fault of any other but himself.
Paralleling the pain of loss which is the answer to
sin’s choice, there is the pain of sense proportioned
to the disordered indulgence of self-will. That pain
of sense is inflicted on the damned by the fire of hell.1
It is, of course, utterly impossible to bum a pure
spirit, or to inflict an injury upon a bodiless creature;
yet so material a thing as real fire could be an instru­
ment of divine justice even against the fallen angels,
as so material a thing as water can be an instrument
of divine mercy to the spiritual souls of men. In
each case the instrument is acting above itself to pro1 Summa Theologica, par. la, q. 64, arts. 1-3. It is of faith
that punishment of the demons is eternal, that they are ex­
cluded from the vision of God and that they are tormented by
fire. Cf. Fourth Lateran Council (Denzinger, op. cit., n. 429);
Constitution “Benedictus Deus” of Benedict XII (Denzinger,
op. cit., n. 530-1); and Council of Florence (Denzinger, op. cit.,
n. 714). All of these characteristics of the punishment of hell
are also clear from the Scriptures.

31

THE

DEVIL

duce the effects of the divine agent using that instru­
ment; but this is to say no more than that these
things are indeed instruments, for that is exactly
what happens with every instrument we ourselves
make use of. St. Thomas' thought that the punishing
effect of fire on Satan and his angels was one of con­
finement, that is, by the divine power this fire placed
definite physical limits to the activity of the devil
and his angels. That may seem a small thing until
it is remembered that the angels are naturally masters
of the physical world, supremely independent of all
beneath them and superior in power to all the
physical world can offer; and that the cause of their
downfall was a pride that could not brook dominion
even by God. Here, in the fire of hell, they are sub­
jected to the meanest scale of physical being, sub­
jected to a humiliation divinely proportioned to the
exaggeration of their pride.
There you have Satan in his kingdom: engulfed
by the blackest despair, bitterly hating himself for
his plight and all else that escapes that same plight,
yet hating himself yet more for this burning opposi­
tion to all that is good; beyond mercy and beyond
asking for it; still consumed with the pride that
hurled him here and subjected to humiliation beyond
all bearing by the confining walls of hell’s fire. With
him in his rebellion against dependence on God
were angels from every choir of the heavenly hier­
archy/ moved by his example and entranced by their
1 Summa Theologica, supplementum, q. 72, art. 3.
2 This is the very nearly universal doctrine of theologians.

32

THE DEVIL HIMSELF

own perfection they followed Satan in his pride and
now make up the élite of hell’s company.
What is the social life of the demons’ community?
The answer to this question gives us the final, awful
insight into the agony of Satan’s punishment and the
gnashing hatred that makes any good thing or
thought an impossibility to him.
The sin of pride destroyed nothing of the natural
perfections of the fallen angels, with the result that
there is a kind of hierarchy in hell. There are two
ghastly notes about that hierarchy?' first there is
nothing of peace about it but rather the violence
of superior power that is at the same time galling
to pride and merciless to inferiors; second, that
supremacy is always a supremacy in evil and so a
still greater source of disorder and the misery of dis­
order’s realisation. Satan, as the prince of darkness,
is more bitterly punished by the very fact of his
supremacy in evil, as, in the physical order, a man
is not made happier or more perfect by having a
worse disease than his fellow sufferers?
Pride is a complete barrier to social life, to com­
mon effort and common goals; for pride holds all
else in contempt in defence of one’s own excellence.
It insists on being alone and being blind. So, the
only bond of union in this diabolic community is
the embrace of evil and the detestation of good. It
is hard for us to appreciate the full vileness of this
for, of course, we never meet any such unadulterated
evil in this world. There is something of a parallel
' Summa Theologica, par. la, q. 109, art. 2 et ad 3 urn.

33

THE

DEVIL

in the impossible supposition of a group of men
bound together only by the foulness of their common
disease; not, you understand, by their common suffer­
ing and a merciful appreciation of the misery of the
other, but by the one factor of foulness. Obviously,
this would be no community at all, for the very foul­
ness would repel any intimacy; and this is literally
true of hell; it is not so much a community as a
horde of the damned. It is not only that eyil is no
bond of union but a barrier to all intimacy; there is
the even more intrinsic impossibility imposed by
pride. Each of these demons is in hell because of the
sin of pride; and pride, of its very nature, is self-love
to the exclusion of all others, an imprisoning, isolat­
ing thing that is completely successful social suicide.1
In hell, with its violent subjection devoid of peace
and its double barriers of evil and pride, it would
be foolish to expect much of social communication;
but it is hard for us to conceive the degree of
communication’s perversion that adds to the chaos
of hell. In heaven, there is the constant sharing of
truth by the superior angels to the inferior ones; and
the constant speech which opens up the rich person­
alities of the inferior angels to the superior ones; but
all this is the overflow of goodness and happiness,
of treasure too great to be dammed up in any one
creature. In hell Satan refuses to share his superior
knowledge; hatred, bitterness, despair, detestation
of all others combine to urge him on to any dis­
tortion of truth open to him, and away from any

THE DEVIL

HIMSELF

least trace of justice. He is indeed the father of lies.
As for the personalities of speech, it is unthinkable
to one consumed by pride to open the doors of his
heart to any of these others whom he so detests, or
to reveal to another the horrors of guilt and despair
that flood the depths of his being.1
We have begun to suspect something of the utter
misery of individual life and the total destruction of
social life where men are fed on a diet of lies instead
of being nourished on truth, where the driving force
at work is hatred instead of love, and where accom­
plishment is denied to the individual or held in
theory and practice to a level beneath his powers.
Yet, in the very worst of these circumstances, the lies
must wear the guise of truth, love cannot be totally
excluded, and there is heaven ahead for the most
hopeless prisoner. In hell, truth, love, accomplish­
ment have no place; there the lie holds full sway,
hatred is in full command, complete and rampant
injustice makes every individual a relentless enemy
of all, and despair is the air everyone breathes. For
a mind made for truth, a will made for goodness,
and an existence that has looked to far, full goals
there is no more complete, abysmal failure; and so
no more devastating punishment.
It is true that within the merciful limits of divine
permission the devils do tempt men, serving as
exercise boys to the practice of virtue or executioners
of divine justice.2 It is also true that their conquests

1 Summa Theologica, par. la, q. 109, art. 2 et ad 2 um.

1 Summa Theologica, par. la, art. 3.
■ Ibid., q. 114, art. 1 et ad 1 um.

34

35

THE

DEVIL

of men or rather men’s surrender to their blandish­
ments can add human souls of men to the diabolic
company. But this is by no means a kind of antidote
for diabolic misery, a relief from unalloyed agony,
or a release from the double pain of hell. There is
no joy in hell’s conquests, but only greater disgust,
greater self-detestation, greater despair. The drun­
kard or the libertine can assure us at first hand that
victory in evil does not diminish the evil but in­
creases it, and the shackles of slavery to sin are not
loosened by sin’s accomplishment, but made more
heavily secure. The malignant power and ruthless
hatred of Satan are seen most clearly perhaps in just
those terms : he has been more victorious in evil than
any other creature, he has steadily maintained the
most execrable accomplishment of sin. He is the
Enemy of God, of man, of all that is good because
he has been the greatest enemy of himself; no one
knows that better than the devil himself.

THE ADVERSARY
By Bernard Leeming, S.J.
warns us that there is a disem­
bodied intelligence which is malignant and
ceaselessly hostile to men. If one asks whether
this disembodied intelligence is a person—is there a
personal devil?—the answer must be, that according
to general Christian teaching the devil is not a person
in the same sense as the Holy Ghost is a Person, nor
in the same sense as you or I are individual persons;
but he has real personality, in some sense compar­
able to divine and to human personality, but by no
means the same as either. The Fathers of the Church
often speak of the devil very much as they speak of
sin and of death; and in many passages in their
writings one could use the words sin or death or the
devil indifferently.1 It is not so much that the devil
is made a personification of the death-principle and
the sin-principle, as that death and sin are rather
made the embodiments, in the temporal order, of
what the devil is in the spiritual, and provide the
aptest imagery in which to picture the devil. The
devil is certainly not a man with horns, hooves and
evelation

R

1 Cf. for instance, St. Athanasius, De Incarnatione Verbi,
ch. 25.

37

THE

DEVIL

a tail. Nevertheless, Scripture constantly uses per­
sonal pronouns of the devil; and though one must
beware of attributing to that malign purposive in­
telligence the qualities we generally associate: with
a human person, the devil, according to the Christian
faith, in some true sense is personal. Lactantius calls
the devils spiritus tenues et incomprehensibiles, thin
and unseizable spirits, referring to their physical
nature; but he might justly have meant that they
must appear thin and incomprehensible to our
minds.1
It cannot be repeated too often that the devils are
spirits and that consequently we simply cannot
imagine them. Pictures of demons, insofar as they
represent beings ugly and hateful, may convey some­
thing of the truth; but we must be very careful not
to allow the imaginative image to limit our thinking
or our faith. A spirit has no body, and hence cannot
be photographed or subjected to any experimental
proof.2 We know what is a spirit of hatred, or of
cynicism, or of pessimism : it is intangible and im­
palpable, yet most real, like “morale” in an army
or a nation. Each of the demons is a special kind
of spirit of hatred, of cynicism and of pessimism,
an intelligence and will which opposes charity and
hope and faith in the goodness of God. “The devil”
is the chief of such intelligences and wills.
Could we know of this hostile intelligence apart
* Div. Inst., ch. 15.
2 For an excellent simple exposition of the nature of spirit,
see F. J. Sheed, Are We Really Teaching Religion?, London,
1953, pp. 36 ff.

38

THE ADVERSARY

from revelation, that is, abstracting from Scripture
and the teaching of the Church? Evidence might be
alleged from a variety of sources: the amount of
evil in the world, the cross-grainedness of conflicting
good purposes, the wickedness which seems some­
times more than human; then various phenomena
associated with possessed persons, the practice of
black magic, alleged pacts with evil spirits, the
deleterious effects produced on those who dabble in
certain forms of spiritism; the temptations to which
the best of men are subject; and, lastly, the very
wide agreement among so many different races of
men. To estimate the value of these reasons would
be long and tedious, and I incline to think that the
difficulty of excluding unknown forces of nature,
and the liability of the human mind to error, makes
any definite conclusion somewhat hazardous.
In fact, Christians believe in the devil because it
is revealed doctrine, which involves mysteries; and
it is revealed not only in explicit statements of Holy
Writ—innumerable texts can be cited—but in the
whole of the Christian outlook relative to what is
called by St. Paul “the mystery of iniquity” and its
practical bearing on human conduct and human
destiny. For the sake of convenience the following
four headings may be made :
First: against all forms of dualism, Christianity
denies that evil is as ultimate as good, that an evil
principle is as necessary and eternal as God. Evil
rose not from the nature of things, but from the free
choice of a creature of God.
39

THE DEVIL

Second: against Pelagianism, Christianity denies
that man’s present state, as we know it by experience,
is the only possible state in which man can exist.
Man, by God’s goodness, need not inevitably be
destined to interior struggle, self-division, and to
death; and so our concept of man must be derived
from Adam and from Christ, both of whom were so
constituted that inclinations to disloyalty to God
could only arise from without and never from within
themselves. It was through the devil that man sinned
and spoiled the nature God had given him.
Third: the doctrine of the Redemption affirms
that the Word of God took flesh in order to “destroy
the works of the devil” (1 John Hi. 8), “that, through
death, he might destroy him who had the empire of
death, that is to say, the devil” (Heb. ii. 14).
Christian writers speculated much about the exact
manner of this destruction; but about the fact there
was never the slightest doubt.
Fourth : the doctrine of the need of grace affirms
that without grace no man is capable of “overcom­
ing the wiles of the devil and the concupiscence of
the flesh” except by daily help from God.1 This
touches the practical matter of guidance in the
spiritual life, and of Christian humility.
To deal more at length with each heading :
1 indiculus Caelestini, in the year 431 ; cf. Denzinger, En­
chiridion Symbolorum Definitionum et Declarationum de Rebus
Fidei et Morum, ed. 24, Herder, Barcelona, 1946, η. 132.

40

THE ADVERSARY
DUALISM AND THE CHRISTIAN CONTEMPT FOR SATAN

Why Christians Mock the Devil
Dualism took many forms, but in all its forms it
tended to belittle human nature. Generally, matter
was regarded as bad and spirit good; hence the union
of matter and spirit in man was looked upon as, at
best, a transitory expedient, from which the spirit
must escape in order to live its own proper life.
Very often also the devil was identified with the
eternal spirit of evil. The Priscillianists of the sixth
century held that the conception and formation of
the human body was the work of the devil, con­
demned marriage, and had a horror of procreation
in all its forms. They rejected the resurrection of the
body. In practice, they either inculcated unreason­
able asceticism, self-mutilation and even suicide; or
encouraged fleshly indulgence, since, as the body
was in any case evil, nothing that happened in it
really affected the soul. The Priscillianists were only
one instance of those endless varieties of dualistic
tendency from the Docetists of the first century, the
Manichees of the second, third, and fourth, down
to the Albigensians of the twelfth and thirteenth,
against which so much of Christian controversy
raged, and so much of Christian doctrine was formu­
lated.'
‘For the Priscillianists, cf. Denzinger, op. cit., nn. 238, 241,
242; the Albigensians, Denzinger, op. cit., nn. 401, 402, 428.
On Dualism and Gnosticism no one is more penetrating than
M. C. D’Arcy, The Mind and Heart of Love, London, 1945, pp.
47-54.

41

THE DEVIL

Against them, the Christian position was that evil
originated in the free choice of a created spirit, and
that matter was not eternal nor made by the evil
spirit, but was created by God; and against them the
final Christian argument was always the Incarnation,
which at once showed that flesh and blood were good
since God made them His own, and that the evil
spirit could be overcome by man.
In the Christian scheme, the enemy to be over­
come was not matter, nor even principally the desires
of the body, but the spiritual power of a malignant
but finite spirit. To the Christian, the devil had
sinned by trying to be equal to God; but to the
Dualist the devil quite literally was like God, indeed,
not only like God, but another kind of ultimate God,
making darkness and disorder and hate and vileness
and falsehood as eternal and as powerful as God.
For this reason he is by Christians made a figure of
contempt, and the faithful were taught to despise
him. In St. Athanasius’s Life of St. Anthony, which
was written probably about 357, and became excep­
tionally popular and influential, we read the ancient
saint’s exhortation :

When the prince of demons appears like this, the
crafty one, he tries to strike terror by speaking great
things, as the Lord revealed to Job, “he counteth iron
as straw, and brass as rotten wood, yea he counteth
the sea as a pot of ointment, and the depth of the
abyss as a captive and the abyss as a covered walk”
[Job xli. 18 ff.J. And by the prophet, “I will grasp the
whole world in my hand as a nest, and take it up as
42

THE ADVERSARY

eggs that have been left” [Isa. x. 14]. Such are their
boasts and professions that they may deceive the godly.
But not even then ought we, the faithful, to fear his
appearance or give heed to his words. For he is a liar
and speaketh of truth never a word. In spite of his
big words and his enormous boldness, there is no
doubt he was drawn with a hook by the Saviour, and
as a beast of burden he had his nostrils bored through
with stakes, and as a runaway he was dragged by the
ring in his nose, and his tongue was tied with a cord
[Job xl. 19 ff.]. And he was bound by the Lord as a
sparrow, that we should mock at him.1

This tradition, especially when any form of dual­
ism appeared dangerous, was manifest in the whole
history of the Church; and our English mystery plays
of the Middle Ages provide instances of it. In them
the devil is a comic figure : comic because his big­
ness and struttings and threatenings are quite futile.
Hence perhaps in Gothic architecture the devils are
made grotesque; they appear under multitudinous
shapes and forms of men and animals, distorted and
terrifying in isolation,2 but as subsidiary ornaments
‘Athanasius, Life of St. Anthony, in Wace and Shaft, Select
Library of Nicene and Post Nicene Fathers, vol. 4, Parker &
Co., Oxford, p. 202. Cf. also the translation with useful notes
by Robert T. Meyer in the “Ancient Christian Writers” series,
no. 10 (general editors Quasten and Plumpe, Longmans being
the English publishers).
2 The late Henri Bremond in his introduction to Jean Bre­
mond’s Les Pères du desert, (p. xxviii) says that the early
Fathers did not picture the devils as monsters, such as became
the fashion in the Middle Ages. But in this he is quite in­
accurate, for in the Life of St. Anthony there is explicit men­
tion of the devil appearing masquerading as a woman, as a
black boy, and appearing like “horses, beasts and reptiles”, cf.
nn. 5, 6 and 39.

43

THE

DEVIL

harmoniously contributing to the glory of God's
building.
Satanic Envy of Mankind
But in the patristic writings against dualism, the
devil is not only an instance proving the sovereign
goodness of God, the fallibility of every created will,
and the futility of opposition to God; he becomes a
very proof of the dignity of man. Wearisome be­
comes the Fathers’ insistence that the reason for the
devil’s antagonism to man is envy and jealousy.
They admit that a spiritual being is, in itself, in a
higher grade and kind of being; nevertheless, God
so endowed man that he roused the envy of the fallen
spirit; indeed, the very fall of that spirit is not im­
plausibly explained as caused by envy of man rising
from pride. Various reasons are suggested for this
envy of man. St. Cyprian,1 St. Gregory of Nyssa"
and others suggest envy, because a corporal creature
is made to the image of God; St. Basil,3 because man
is made like the angels; St. Maximus the Confessor
and Anastasius Sinaita, because man has dominion
over the earth and control of matter, which the devil
wished to have as his exclusive prerogative;4 St.
Athanasius quotes St. Anthony, because the devil did
not wish men to go up thither whence he had fallen.5
1 De Zelo et Livore, ch. 3, n. 4 ; Migne, Patres Latini, 4, 640.
' Oratio Cat., ch. 6; Migne, Patres Graeci, 44, 456.
3 Quod Deus non est Auctor Malorum, 8-10; P. G. 31, 352-4.
4 Maximus, Capitula, 4, n. 48; P. G. 90, 1325; Anastasius
Sinaita, Quaest. ad Thass., 31 ; P. G. 89, 568.
5 Athanasius, Life of St. Anthony, n. 22, op. cit., p. 200. This
is the earliest hint I have found of the view common in St.

44

THE ADVERSARY

St. Augustine says that in his day several—“non­
nulli”—held that the first sin of the devil had been
envy of man; and rejects the view on the ground that
envy really rises from pride and not vice versa,1 in
which Cassian, and later St. Thomas, follow him.2
St. Irenaeus has an enigmatic phrase, that the devil
found in man “the beginning and occasion of his
apostasy”;3 and some theologians conjecture that
the occasion of the devil’s pride had something to
do with a revelation of the Incarnation. Suarez cites
John viii : “You seek to kill me . . . you are of your
father the devil and the desires of your father you
will do. He was a murderer from the beginning and
he stood not in the truth”, and argues that the pride
of the devil led him to desire the hypostatic union
for himself; a view rightly disproved by the argument
St. Thomas had given long before, that no one can
really wish to cease to be, which a desire for the
hypostatic union would involve. Nevertheless, Scheeben and Boyer modify this view of Suarez by con­
jecturing that possibly the devil’s pride led him to
object to God’s uniting Himself personally with
human nature, which would have diminished his
own glory as an angel.4 This would indeed explain
Thomas’s time that men were created to take the place of the
fallen angels; which St. Thomas respectfully rejects as not
revealed; cf. Summa Theologica, par. 1, q. 23, art. 7.
1 De Genesi ad Litteram, ch. 11, n. 14.
2 Cassian, Coll., 9, 10; P. L. 49, 736; St. Thomas, Summa
Theologica, par. 1, q. 63, art. 1.
3 “Initium et materiam apostasiae habens hominem,” Contra
Haereses, 3, 23 ; P. G. 7, 965.
* Cf. Boyer, De Deo Creante et Elevante, ed. altera, 1933,
p. 517.

45

THE

DEVIL

the devil’s envy of man, and is not contrary to St.
Thomas’s mind, since he holds that Adam before
his sin had a revelation of the Incarnation, not in its
'
reparative purpose, but as it was the crown of glory,
and the angels may well have been granted some
’
similar revelation.1
When the Jews were seeking to kill Christ (John
i'
viii. 40), Our Lord accused them of acting under the
instigation of the devil, who “was a murderer from
II
the beginning”. Now St. John also says that the
I ,i
devil “sinned from the beginning” (1 John iii. 8).
I
I
Perhaps in Our Lord’s words about the devil’s being
I I
a murderer from the beginning there is a comI i
penetration of truths: the reference is to the death
I 1his malignancy brought upon Adam and Eve, anti
(i j
to the death of Abel, which is a figure of the death of
I'li
Christ (cf. Matt, xxiii. 35; Heb. xii. 24), and also to
i j|
his first sin, which set up the first separation from
j *I
the living God, in whom alone creatures have true
π j
life. However that may be, it is manifest that the
/
devil’s mind was murderous, and hence hostile to
' : i
man, from the beginning either of man, or of his
! I
own rejection of God.
I
Thus, against dualism, the Church reduced the
1 , 1
devil to his proper status as a creature of God,
1 ,
defended the essential soundness of composite human
j!
nature, and asserted the superiority of man without
i
sin to the evil spirit, who even envied man.

■
I
I
Ij
I
|H
IΙΠ
II
II

i

jj
I'

1 Summa Theologica, par. 2—2, q. 2, art. 7.

46

THE

ADVERSARY

PELAGIAN DISBELIEF IN THE DEVIL

The Emperor of Death
The essential error of Pelagianism was that it
denied the need of redemption, and bound God
within the limits of nature as we experience it. Death
is not only natural, but inevitable; sin is merely the
decision of a will balanced in perfect equilibrium:
the devil gave bad example, and, in fact, has small
power over man, since man, if he wishes to use his
free will, can avoid all sins. Grace is a mere extrinsic
help, the giving of the law, the giving of an inspiring
example by Christ; original sin is simply bad social
environment, leaving man’s nature and his capacity
for good quite intact; the Church and a sacramental
system are helpful for instruction but give no interior
impulse to man’s mind and will. Julian of Eclanum
argued bitterly against Augustine, that to say that
man is in any way under the domination of the evil
spirit was unworthy of God and of man alike;
and accused Augustine of Manichaeism because
he held the inherited weakness of humanity. In
Julian’s view, all that is needed is to change the
outward framework of man’s life, to urge man to use
his own free will, and humanity can save itself.1
In this scheme, there is no need of a divine
Redeemer; and, as Bishop Gore neatly remarked:
1 Perhaps the best exposition of Pelagianism is by Anthony
Cassini, in the appendix to vol. 4 of Petavius’s well-known work
on patristic theology. Julian’s arguments are found in St.
Augustine’s Opus Imperfectum Contra Julianum, Migne, P. L.
45.

47

THE DEVIL

“The Nestorian Christ is the fitting Saviour of the
Pelagian man. ”
Now if one takes Pelagianism upon the purely
natural ground, it is superficial. It does not account
at all for the empirical prevalence of evil and of
human failure as manifest in history. It does not
account for individual and social heredity and its
influence upon man : on Pelagian principles, each
man is born undetermined by his heredity. It does
not account for the sense that all men have in
general, and the saints more particularly, of the sad
divergence between their ideal and their actual ac­
complishment. Lastly, it does not account at all for
the inexpressible quality of grief on the death of
loved ones, nor for those yearnings after a better life
here, and for complete immortality, which are mani­
fest in the hearts of men; and it reduced God to the
status of a remote Law-giver.
Whatever, however, be the philosophic objections
to Pelagianism, it was clearly not the traditional
Christian faith. According to that faith, the world
and man as we experience them are not the world
and man as God made them, or as God intended
them to be; if one looks at man historically, one will
not conceive a right idea of the human nature which
God made, but only an idea of the human nature
which has been flawed and warped by evil. The
only idea of man as God means him to be is to be
found in Christ, and in Adam, the two really typical
men who embody God’s idea of man : and it is only
by reference to them that man is to be judged, just
48

THE ADVERSARY

as it is by mysterious unity with them that man fulfils
his destiny. The sin-principle, the death-principle,
both of which symbolize the spirit of evil, as they
in turn are symbolized by him, entered from without
into God’s making of man, and marred the work
which God had made; man lives in “the empire of
death” and none save the divine Saviour can destroy
him who has the empire of death, “that is to say, the
devil” (Heb. ii. 14).
It is common among Christian writers to speak
of man as the captive of the devil, or even as under
the dominion of the devil; the Council of Trent
speaks so: man through sin incurred death, “and
with death, captivity under his power who thereafter
held the kingship of death, that is, the devil”.1 Now,
as to the exact nature and quality of this servitude
to the devil, the Church has issued no formal defini­
tion; but it may safely be said that in the concrete
it consists in man’s inability to keep God’s law and
to avoid sin; without being joined to Christ through
grace, man in fact will inevitably be joined to the
devil, for, as St. John says, “he that committeth sin, is
of the devil; for the devil sinneth from the beginning.
For this purpose the Son of God appeared, that he
might destroy the works of the devil” (1 John iii. 8).
Now this inevitability of sin lies in man’s present
nature. The Greek Fathers spoke of it as φθόρα, a
corruption, a principle of dissolution, in man,2 a
corruption which was at once physical and moral,
1 Sess. 5, can. 1 ; Denzinger, op. cit., n. 788.
' Ct. St. Athanasius, De Incarnatione Verbi, ch. 6.

49

THE

DEVIL

a general tendency to split up and divide ail the
forces of man, both in himself, and with regard to
God and to his fellow men. Wars and strifes are a
result of this corruption, and all the sins enumerated
by St. Paul in his first chapter to the Romans.1 The
Latins called it “concupiscentia”, drawing upon St.
Paul’s seventh chapter to the Romans, and meant
that surge of passion, by no means necessarily of a
sensual kind, though perhaps most obvious in sensual
temptations, which makes man divided in himself,
finding “a law in my members, fighting against the
law of my mind and captivating me in the law of
sin that is in my members” (Rom. vii. 23); or, as
Mgr. Knox translates: “I observe another disposi­
tion in my lower self, which raises war against the
disposition of my conscience, and so I am handed
over as a captive to that disposition towards sin
which my lower self contains. ” The lower self has
more than a sneaking weakness for the devil, and
in this sense man is captive of the devil; Christ, and
Christ alone, rescues us “from the power of dark­
ness and transfers us to the kingdom of [God’s]
beloved son” (Col. i. 13).
The Enemy Within the Citadel
The Pelagians, notably Bishop Julian of Eclanum,
maintained that man by his very constitution as man
was meant to die, and was meant to have the struggle
between appetite and reason; and held that to speak
of “concupiscence” as being of the devil was effect1 Cf. St. Athanasius, De Incarnatione Verbi, chs. 4 and 5.

50

THE

ADVERSARY

ively Manichaean, and implied that human genera­
tion was evil, in as much as it brought forth beings
for the devil. No modern naturalistic philosopher
could have argued more vehemently, or more acutely,
than this heretical bishop of the fifth century; and
no modem reporter could be more scrupulous than
St. Augustine in giving the fullest exact rendering of
the arguments and very words of the pleader. Those
who look upon the Christian attitude towards sex
as somehow morbid or unduly repressive can find
argument after argument set forth in St. Augustine’s
painstaking enumeration of Julian’s reasoning, to­
gether with his refutation of them, though Augustine
never fears to let it be seen when Julian scores a
point. Augustine’s fundamental and almost weari­
somely repeated argument is the need of redemption:
if men are wholly good, if nature is completely un­
injured, if self-control is within man’s natural power,
if infants are unaffected by their origin from sinful
mankind, then what is the need for a Saviour, what
need for rebirth in Christ, what need of grace, of
baptism, of the Eucharist, of prayer? In particular,
what is the need of baptism and what is the reality
behind the exorcisms in the ceremonies of baptism?
If the child is born in the state in which Adam was
bom, what need has it of baptism? Is not Christ
the Saviour of infants? St. Paul says that Christ
died for all: is this really true? And is it true that
all died in Christ’s death? And if all died with
Christ, then, as St. Paul says, “being alive no longer
means living with our own life, but with his life who
51

THE DEVIL

died for us and has risen again ”. But, on Pelagian
principles, what is the sense of speaking of a new
life in Christ? Presumably our old life, being good,
would be good enough.
From this universal need of redemption, Augustine
draws the inevitable conclusion that “all who are
born with sin, by God’s judgment, are under the
devil, unless they are reborn in Christ”;1 and "we
assuredly say the reason why those who are born are
under the devil until they are reborn, is the contagion
of sin from their origin”/ Is this a Manichaean view,
as Julian so often asserted? Augustine answers that,
on the contrary, Julian’s view is Manichaean, since
he holds that the amount of evil in the world arises
purely from the nature of things, and would have
existed even in Paradise. On Augustine’s teaching,
evil is an intrusion into a better plan made by God;
something which arose from the refusal of created
wills to co-operate with their Creator. Evil rose first
in the overweening pride of a created spirit, and then
in man’s weakened will, which the devil exploits;
evil need not have been, and consequently need not
be, since Christ gives power to overcome the re­
bellious forces within the citadel of man’s soul.
Augustine’s doctrine of concupiscence as a sickness
in the heart of man must be taken together with his
correlative doctrine of the healing power of the grace
of Christ. Evil desire, sin, death, all these bind men
'De Nuptiis et Concupiscentia, lib. 2, cap. 12, n. 25; Migne,
P. L. 44, 451.
'Contra Julianum Pelagianum, lib. 3, cap. 5, n. 12; Migne,
P. L. 44, 708.

52

THE ADVERSARY

to the devil, since they are the realm of the spirit
hostile to God; but He who originally “made man
right” (Eccles, vii. 30) “will form this humbled body
of ours anew, moulding it into the image of his
glorified body” (Phil. iii. 21).1
This “corruption” in man’s nature, or “concu­
piscentia”, must be referred back to God’s original
making of man, when his mind was subject to God,
the lower powers of his soul to the rational mind,
and his body to his soul.2 The breaking of this
harmony, this integrity, by the first sin, left man
divided in himself, and left openings for the devil’s
entrance into the dark and mysterious spheres of
psychological conflict; before sin, the devil’s sug­
gestions were only from the exterior, afterwards they
can enter into the mind itself, since the mind is no
longer completely whole and properly ordered in its
relations to God and within itself.3 Similarly, the
temptation of Christ could only be by exterior sug­
gestion, not by any interior influence upon Christ’s
imagination; for the latter presupposes some sinful­
ness, that is, some flaw in the integrity of the man,
which could not be in Christ.4 However, discussion
' On Augustine’s doctrine of original sin and its effects, the
two works in English which are best known are J. B. Mozley,
The Augustinian Doctrine of Predestination, and N. P. Williams,
The Ideas of the Fall and of Original Sin. It may be doubted
if they correctly represent St. Augustine ; and of more recent
days they have been sharply criticised, as have so many of the
“ liberal ” theologians, by the neo-Lutheran school, notably by
Reinold Niebuhr in his The Nature and Destiny of Man.
2 St. Thomas, Summa Theologica, 2-2, q. 164, art. 2.
3 St. Thomas, ibid., q. 165, art. 2, ad 2.
4 St. Thomas, ibid., q. 41, art. 1, ad 3.

53

THE DEVIL

of the nature of diabolical temptations must be re­
served for the fourth heading.
THE DOCTRINE OF THE REDEMPTION AND THE DEVIL

Christ’s Victory Through Defeat
In Genesis the absolute opposition between Christ
and the devil, and Christ’s triumph, is foretold: “I
will put enmities between thee and the woman, and
thy seed and her seed : she shall crush thy head, and
thou shalt lie in wait for her heel ” (Gen. iii. 15). The
reference is to Christ and to His Mother, although
this does not exclude a reference to the whole of the
human race, since Christ is the representative man,
the Son of Man.1 The opposition is manifest at the
beginning of Christ’s public life, when the man pos­
sessed by an unclean spirit cried out: “Why dost
thou meddle with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Hast thou
come to make an end of us?”3 In the parable of
the tares sown in the field, the tares are the “sons
of the wicked one”, and “the enemy who sowed
them is the devil” (Matt. xiii. 39); while in the
parable of the sower “the devil comes and takes
away the word from their hearts, so that they cannot
find faith and be saved” (Luke viii. 12). The opposi’ Cf. Pius IX, in his Bull on the Immaculate Conception,
Acta Pii IX, t. 1, 607.
2 Mark i. 24; and cf. Mark iii. 11; v. 1-20; vii. 25; Luke
iv. 33; Matthew viii. 28; ix. 32; xvi. 21. It may be remarked
in passing that possession in some sense by an evil or unclean
spirit by no means excludes a natural disease, but rather affirms
it ; the devil being a spirit of disorder, his influence more or
less direct is to be found wherever there is disorder, and par­
ticularly in the mental and spiritual fields.

54

THE ADVERSARY

tion of the Jews to Christ was inspired by the devil,
as Christ repeats more than once: “You belong to
your father, that is, the devil, and are eager to gratify
the appetites which are your father’s. He, from the
first, was a murderer; and as for truth, he has never
taken his stand upon that; there is no truth in him.
When he utters falsehood, he is only uttering what
is natural to him; he is all false, and it was he who
gave falsehood its birth” (John viii. 44). The Jews
declared that He overcame devils by the power of
the devil (John x. 20), and was Himself possessed by
the devil.
The encompassing of His death Christ explicitly
assigns to the devil. St. Luke puts it: “But now
Satan found his way into the heart of Judas, who was
also called Iscariot, one of the twelve” (Luke xxii. 3);
and Christ says : “ Have I not chosen all twelve of
you? And one of you is a devil” (John vi. 71). And
at the supper, “ the devil had already put it into the
heart of Judas, son of Simon, the Iscariot, to betray
him”, and, a little later, “the morsel once given,
Satan entered into him; and Jesus said to him, Be
quick on thy errand”.1 When chief priests and
1 John xiii. 2, 27. It should be remarked that Judas’ treachery
was real and had disastrous effects upon Christ’s efforts to con­
vert the Jewish people ; He knew the authorities dare not take
Him by day, and hid Himself at night, thus showing that His
prophetic knowledge of what in fact was to come by no means
led Him to act so as to bring about fulfilment. Quite the con­
trary : He condemned Judas precisely because his betrayal was
disastrous. It is an interesting question what would have hap­
pened if Judas had not betrayed Him ; human conjecture is
baffled, but that is no reason for imagining that Christ auto­
matically acted for the purpose of fulfilling the prophecies, just

55

.

THE

DEVIL

temple officers came to arrest Him, He said : “But
this is your hour and the power of darkness” (Luke
xxii. 53). His crucifixion was to mean that “sentence
is now being passed on this world; now is the time
when the prince of this world is to be cast out. Yes,
if only I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all
men to myself. In saying this, he prophesied the
death he was to die” (John xii. 3Iff.). And again:
“He who rules this world has had judgment passed
upon him already” (John xvi. 12). “One is coming
who has power over the world, but no hold over me”
(John xiv. 30). Although these sayings are myster­
ious, still it is luminously clear that Christ regarded
His death as instigated by the prince of this world,
and that His death was to bring condemnation and
judgment upon this prince, the devil.
St. John and St. Paul refer to the triumph of Christ
over the devil, as to a thing well known: “For this
purpose the Son of God appeared, that he might
destroy the works of the devil” (1 John iii. 8). “Be­
cause the children are partakers of flesh and blood,
he also himself in like manner hath been partaker of
the same : that, through death, he might destroy him
who had the empire of death, that is to say, the
devil” (Heb. ii. 14). And in Colossians St. Paul
speaks of the triumph of Christ over the powers of
evil : “ Christ . . . blotted out the handwriting that
was against us, with its decrees; lifted it clean away,
as the fact of the prophecies themselves in no wise relieves
Judas or the Jews of their dreadful responsibility for their free
choice of evil.

56

THE ADVERSARY

nailing it to the cross, and despoiled the principalities
and powers, and put them to open shame, and led
them away in triumph through the cross.”1 St. John
in his vision in the Apocalypse says in resounding
words :
"The great dragon, serpent of the primal age, was
flung down to earth; he whom we call the devil, or
satan, the whole world’s seducer, flung down to
earth, and his angels with him. Then I heard a voice
crying aloud in heaven, The time has come; now we
are saved and made strong, our God reigns, and
power belongs to Christ, his anointed; the accuser
of our brethren is overthrown. Day and night he
stood accusing them in God’s presence; but because
of the Lamb’s blood and because of the truth to
which they bore witness, they triumphed over him,
holding their lives cheap till death overtook them.
Rejoice over it, heaven, and all you that dwell in
heaven” (Apoc. xii. 9-12).
In view of this clear teaching of Scripture, it is
not surprising that the Church has always taken for
granted that “Christ became man in order to free
us from the yoke of the devil”, as the Council of
Sens put it in 1140 against Abelard. The Council
of Trent, in the preface to the statement upon justifi­
cation, says that any understanding of the doctrine
of justification, that is, of grace, must set out from
the acknowledgment that, because of the sin of
1 Colossians ii. 14. The above translation is my own; the
passage is most troublesome for translators, as a comparison
of the Douay, Westminster, Knox, Authorised and Revised
versions will show.

57

THE DEVIL

Adam, all men “were to such an extent slaves of sin,
and under the power of the devil and death” (Rom.
vi. 20), that neither the force of nature nor the Law
of Moses could enable them to be freed therefrom;
and this in spite of the fact that free will was not
done away with, but only weakened in its forces and
biased.12

A Ransom Paid to Satan?
The practical bearing of this doctrine is that Christ
died for all (2 Cor. v. 15), and His death is the
objective cause why all receive grace enough to resist
both their own weakness and the temptations of the
world and of the devil.3 But, if theoretically one
asks: "How did Christ free us from the power of
the devil? What precise aspect or relation in Christ’s
death referred specifically to the devil, so as to over­
come him and release men from his domination? ”
then the answer becomes disconcertingly difficult
and troublesome. The Fathers of the Church picture
the thing as a struggle between God and the devil
for the souls of men; and in that struggle the devil’s
weapons are lying, deceit, hatred, calumny, instiga­
tion to violence and to murder. God’s weapons are
truth, justice, love, praise, meekness and humility;
and God conquers in the struggle. In depicting the
conflict, however, the Fathers and ecclesiastical
1 Denzinger. op. cit., n. 793.
2 This is effectively defined doctrine, since the condemna­
tions of Jansenism by Innocent X in 1653, and by Alexander
VIII in 1690; cf. Denzinger, op. cit., nn. 1092, 1096, 1294,
1295, 1296.

58

____

THE ADVERSARY

writers sometimes use language which has caused
scandal to some who have taken it too literally;
Origen, for instance, says : “We were sold to sin, He
redeemed us with His own blood from him who had
bought us. . . . We term ransom that money which
is paid to the enemy to free the captives he holds.
The human race was such a captive, having been
vanquished in the conflict with sin, and taken
prisoner by the devil. Christ became our ransom,
that is, He delivered Himself to our enemies. He
shed all His precious blood for which the devil
thirsted. ”* The devil had bought us with a special
kind of currency : “ His coin, the coin which bears
his image upon it, is murder, adultery, thieving, and
in general all forms of sin. Such is the devil’s money,
of which his treasury is, alas, all too full. With this
money he bought us and received a deed of owner­
ship over us”—the “handwriting against us” of
which St. Paul speaks in Colossians ii. 14, which
Christ affixed to the cross. As a ransom price, the
devil demanded the precious blood of Christ;2 God
gave him this price by allowing him to kill Christ.
Nevertheless, the devil deceived himself; because
Christ could not be held in the realm of death, and
in rising from the dead, Christ broke the power of
death and the gates of hell, and made us all partakers
in His resurrection.’
Often the Fathers, v.g. St. Gregory of Nyssa,4 St.
1 In Rom. 3, 7 ; Migne, P. G. 14, 945.
2 In Matt. 16, 8 ; Migne, P. G. 13, 1397.
3 Ibid., col. 1116.
1 Oratio catechica magna, 26 ; Migne, P. G. 26, 68.

59

THE

DEVIL

Jerome,1*34Pacian of Barcelona,' St. Augustine/ and
many others, speak of the “rights” of the devil over
mankind, and picture the redemption in such terms
that it appears as a kind of legal transaction in which
God had to respect the devil’s rights and pay him
his just due before man could be rightly liberated.
But the real thought, as has often been pointed
out by Catholics and non-Catholics alike/ is that
through sin man belongs naturally to the kingdom
of death and of the devil; and that in freeing man­
kind from sin and death and the devil, God’s plan
was not to make violent irruptions into the natural
consequences of things, but rather to accomplish
the redemption with a wisdom which respects
the natures He has created. St. Thomas faithfully
sums up the basic thought of the Fathers, when
he places among the reasons which made the
death of Christ a suitable manner of redemption the
following :
Liberation through the death of Christ redounds
more to the dignity of man, so that, as man had been
deceived and conquered by the devil, it should be a
man who should conquer the devil, and as man had
merited death, so it should be man who by dying
overcame death.
1 Ep. 72; Migne, P. L. 16, 1245.
" Sermo de Baptismo, 4 ; Migne, P. L. 13, 1092.
3 De Libero Arbitrio, lib. 3, cap. 10, 29—31 ; Migne, P. L. 32,
1285 ff.
.
o ,o
4 Cf. v.g. Petavius, De Verbo Incarnato, lib. 2, cap. 5, 8—18;
Thomassinus, De Incarnatione Verbi Dei, 1, 3, 1—19; and more
recently Gustaf Aulén of Lund, in Christus Victor, trans. A. G.
Hebert, London, S.P.C.K., 1931, p. 64, etc.

60

THE ADVERSARY

And to the objection about the devil’s “rights”,
which he puts thus :

He who violently and unjustly retains something,
rightly is despoiled of it by power of a superior. But
the devil had no right over man, whom he deceived
by fraud and by a sort of violence kept in subjection.
Therefore it would seem more suitable that Christ
should have despoiled the devil by a mere exercise
of power without enduring death,

he answers :
Although the devil unjustly had seized upon man,
nevertheless man because of sin had justly been left
by God in servitude to the devil; and hence it was
most suitable that by justice man should be freed from
servitude to the devil, Christ making satisfaction in His
passion. For it was most suitable “in order to over­
come the pride of the devil, who is a traitor to justice
and a lover of power, that Christ should overcome
the devil and free man, not by the sheer power of the
Deity, but also by the justice and humility of the
Passion” as Augustine says in bk. 13 of the Trinity,
ch. 13, 14 and 15.1

There undoubtedly, as unprejudiced reading will
show, is the fundamental thought of the Fathers:
God’s providence in allowing man to be subject to
the devil’s wiles and assaults was fitting and proper;
and the manner of the Redemption by Christ’s death,
which enables man to overcome them, was equally
fitting and proper. The struggle between Christ and
the devil is naturally depicted by popular preachers
1 Summa Theologica, par. 3, q. 46. art. 3.

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THE DEVIL

in vivid style, and with embellishments which are not
meant to be taken literally. Thus the cross of Christ
is often called a fish-hook upon which the devil was
caught: in avidity to swallow up all men in death,
he seized upon Christ, who in fact was deathless and
broke the power of the demon to drag men to death.
The breaking of the devil’s power sometimes consists
in Christ’s entrance into Hades, smashing the doors
and permitting all the prophets of old to escape: and
sometimes the metaphor of the devil being a dragon
is pursued to the extreme of saying that the cross of
Christ pierced a large hole in the dragon’s jaws,
through which all Christians who are seized in death
by the devil, and would be wholly swallowed, can
escape.1 Sometimes the devil’s power is said to be
broken because he had a right to draw all other men
to death, but when he caused Christ to be killed, he
exceeded his rights, and therefore was justly deprived
of his power over other men. St. Augustine even
suggests that the cross of Christ was a kind of mouse­
trap in which the devil was caught, the bait being
Christ’s humility and obedience.
To pursue this aspect of the Redemption in its
1 Cf. v.g. the many citations given by Riviere in his The Doc­
trine of the A tonement, vol. 2, pp. 111 if. This book, although
containing much invaluable matter, by no means speaks the
last word on the Atonement. Rivière’s other volumes on the
devil and the Redemption are marred by an attention to Turmel
unmerited save by the necessities of local controversies and
conditions. Aulen's Christus Victor does better justice to the
thought of the Fathers ; but it, too, is marred by an excessive
desire to fit everything into categories, the great danger of the
attempt to discover one leading “motif” in wide historical
sweeps.

THE ADVERSARY

historical development, and its theoretic implica­
tions, would take far longer than the limits of this
paper permit. One thing might be added: the
Fathers do not regard Christ as merely one indi­
vidual Man, but as somehow embracing in His
humanity the whole of mankind. There is a mys­
terious union of all men with God by the mere fact
of the Incarnation; and a further and still more
mysterious union of those in grace with Christ as a
result of Christ’s atonement. Hence, in the struggle
with the demon, it is not Christ alone who struggles
and overcomes, but, so to speak, human nature itself,
which is somehow universalized in Christ. In Christ
the idea of man becomes changed from an idea of a
being necessarily subject to sinfulness and death,
and so to the spirit of evil, to an idea of a Being
sinless, deathless and essentially victor over the spirit
of evil.
Dr. D. M. Baillie, in his stimulating book God
was in Christ, well says : “When we contemplate the
story of Jesus we are bound to speak of the suffering
and victory as successive phases; and so does St.
Paul: ‘Christ being raised from the dead dieth no
more; death no more hath dominion over him. For
the death that he died, he died unto sin once; but the
life that he liveth, he liveth unto God.’ But the same
chapter gives us Paul’s mystical doctrine of the union
of the believer with the dying and rising Christ; with
the implication that in some sense the passion and
the resurrection are not simple episodes in the past,
but are, both together, a present reality, an eternal
63

fi

i'
THE

DEVIL

:i

conflict with evil which is also an eternal victory”
(pp. 199-200).
THE POWER OF THE DEVIL TO TEMPT US

j

j

j
i
i

That we are tempted not only by the world and
the flesh but also by the devil, is clear both from
Scripture, and from the common teaching of the
Fathers and of spiritual writers.1 St. Paul puts what
has ever been the Christian outlook in a passage in
his letter to the Ephesians, superlatively translated
by Mgr. Knox :
“Draw your strength from the Lord, from that
mastery which his power supplies. You must wear
all the weapons in God’s armoury, if you would find
strength to resist the cunning of the devil. It is not
against flesh and blood that we enter the lists; we
have to do with princedoms and powers, with those
who have the mastery of the world in these dark
days, with malign influences in an order higher than
ours. Take up all God’s armour, then; so you will
be able to stand your ground when the evil time
comes, and be found still on your feet, when all the
task is over. Stand fast, your loins girt with truth,
the breastplate of justice fitted on, and your feet shod
m readiness to publish the gospel of peace. With all
this, take up the shield of faith, with which you will
be able to quench all the fire-tipped arrows of your
wicked enemy; make the helmet of salvation your
1 A host of patristic references will be found in E. Mangenot’s
article, “Démon d’Après les Pères”, Dictionnaire de Théologie
Catholique, vol. 4, 339—84.

64

THE

ADVERSARY

own, and the sword of the spirit, God’s word. Use
every kind of prayer and supplication; pray at all
times in the spirit; keep awake to that end with all
perseverance; offer your supplication for all the
saints” (vi. 10-18).
If one may say so, it is an ideological warfare
which seems envisaged : and truth, justice, faith, the
word of God, apostolic zeal are the Christian’s
weapons. St. Peter says much the same:
“Be sober and watch. Your adversary the devil
goeth about like a roaring lion, seeking to devour;
whom withstand ye, steadfast in the faith, knowing
that the selfsame sufferings are being endured by
your brethren throughout the world” (1 Pet. v. 8, 9,
Westminster version).
Here the immediate reference appears to be to
calumnies or persecutions against Christians, and
not to interior temptations of individuals, though
these are not excluded.1 The devil tempts to anger
(Eph. iv. 26), to impurity (1 Cor. vii. 5), to refusal
to forgive (2 Cor. ii. 10, 11), to resistance to the
truth (2 Tim. ii. 25, 26), to abandonment of the
faith (1 Tim. iv. 1), to pride (1 Tim. vi. 6); riches
can be a snare of the devil (1 Tim. vi. 9), and the
devil can transform himself into an angel of light,
the better to deceive and ensnare (2 Cor. xi. 14).
In Matthew iv. 3 and 1 Thessalonians iii. 5 the devil
is named “the Tempter”, almost as designating his
function.
1 Cf. Holzmeister, Commentarius in Epistolas SS. Petri et
ludae, par. 1, Lethielleux, Paris, 1937, p. 404. The text was a
favourite one of the Fathers, especially of St. John Chrysostom.

65

THE DEVIL

Indeed, Christian tradition considers subjection
to temptation by the devil as much a part of present
human nature as is death itself. This is the reason
assigned by St. Gregory the Great, and cited by St.
Thomas Aquinas, why Christ Himself was tempted:
“It was not unworthy of our Redeemer to be willing
to be tempted, He who came to be killed; for it was
right that just as He came to overcome death by His
death, so likewise He should conquer our.tempta­
tions by His temptations.”1 Here undoubtedly is
latent the thought that Christ is the representative
man; and St. Thomas approves St. Ambrose’s reason,
somewhat mystical, why Christ was tempted in the
desert, namely, that Christ went into the desert “in
mysterio”, so that He might free Adam from the
desert into which he was driven after his sin, by con­
quering the devil also “for me” or in me—mihi
vicisset. Other reasons for Christ’s temptation by
the devil are given : to warn us all that no holiness
exempts from temptation, to teach us how to conquer
temptation, and to give us confidence in Christ’s
compassion since He Himself has been assailed/
Why Does God Allow It?
And here the question naturally arises: “Why
does God give power to the devil to tempt men?”
This question is answered by St. John Chrysostom
in his famous letter to his friend Stagirius, who was
grievously tormented by diabolical temptations; and
1 Summa Theologica, par. 3, q. 41, art. 1.
2 Ibid., q. 41, art. 1 ad 2.

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THE ADVERSARY

his answer comes to this : that if God were obliged
to destroy all beings which occasioned evil, He
would have to destroy practically everything : our
eyes and mouth and hands and feet, all of which
can lead us to sin; and even the heavens and the stars
and the firmament, which also can be an occasion of
sin. Now, effectively the devil is only an occasion
of sin; because we can overcome all his wiles and
snares, which in diverse ways are to man’s benefit:
they stimulate man to virtue, keep him vigilant,
humble, united to God by prayer; and, lastly, they
add to man’s glory by enabling him to overcome an
adversary superior in intelligence and power. And
St. John Chrysostom ends by the very quotable
remark: “God would never have allowed you to be
deprived of so much comfort, nor His servants to
be so shamefully afflicted, unless He had known it
would redound magnificently to your advantage and
glory. And thus what seems a sign of God’s abandon­
ment of you, is really a sign of His affection and
care. ”l
St. Thomas gives what seems the ultimate reason
why God permits the devil to tempt men; divine
providence, he says, secures the good of inferior
beings through superior beings. Now the angels hold
a middle place between God and man, and hence
it is fitting that they should help men to God. This
can take place in two ways, either by direct help,
such as the good angels give, or by stirring men to
good by attacking them. This latter the wicked angels
1 Migne, P. G. 47, 424—48.

67

THE DEVIL

are allowed to do, “this helping the good of men,
lest after their sin the wicked angels should be lost
to the utility of the natural order. ”* This reason, of
course, presupposes the native tendency and will of
the devil to envy mankind and to try to encompass
their ruin; and God allows the natural order of things
to take its course.2 To abolish the influence of
spiritual forces, both good and bad, in human life
would be as violent and as capricious an interference
with the normal effects of the causes God has created,
as it would be to prevent the law of gravity operating
when someone fell down the shaft of a lift. The in­
fluence of good and bad spirits upon us is as natural
as is the influence of good and bad men’; the exist­
ence of evil, indeed, raises questions which ultimately
we cannot answer, but granted that problem, the
permission by God to the devil to tempt us raises no
particular difficulty, though it may, perhaps, sharpen
or intensify to certain minds the general problem.

The Demon’s Psychological Influence
As to the manner of the devil’s temptations, it is,
of course, part of the faith that he can only do what
God allows, as indeed is the case with wicked men.
There is common agreement, too, that the devil does
not know the secret thoughts and intentions of men,
except in so far as they are disclosed by some move­
ment of the brain or nervous system or body; and
the reason is that Scripture and the Fathers take
1 Summa Theologica, par. 1, q. 64, art. 4.
2 Ibid., q. 114, art. 2.
3 Ibid., pars. 2~2, q. 165, art. 1.

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THE ADVERSARY

knowledge of men’s hearts to be a sign of divinity:
“The searcher of hearts and reins is God.5,1 Indeed
in an English court, with reference to undisclosed
intentions, Lord Blackburn cited the quaint judg­
ment of Brian, C. J., during the reign of Edward IV:
“It is common learning that the thoughts of a man
are not triable, for the devil has not knowledge of
man’s thoughts. ”2
Very generally it is held by theologians that the
devil has power to exert influence upon the imagina­
tion, the nerves, glands and physical organism, but
not directly upon the will. This is St. Thomas’s view,
and he is followed in it by Suarez and the majority
of more recent theological writers,3 although the
reasons assigned are not always concordant, and
depend upon theories more or less well-grounded
about the exact nature of angelic power. The view
has considerable patristic authority behind it, notably
St. Cyprian, St. Athanasius and Cassian; the Fathers
very frequently attribute to the devil visions, impres­
sions, emotions, especially of depression, and weari­
ness in well-doing. It must be observed that this view
of the power of diabolic influence over men seems
to imply that the influence will be unobservable by
feeling, ordinary consciousness, and perhaps even
1 Ps. vii. 10; and cf. Jer. xvii. 10; Apoc. ii. 23; and com­
ments upon Matt. xii. 25 ; John ii. 25 and xiii. 11, where Christ’s
knowledge of men’s secret thoughts and of the future are urged
as proof of His divinity.
2 Cited in Cheshire and Fifoot, Cases on the Law of Contract,
Butterworth & Co., London, 1946, p. 322.
3 Cf. Suarez, De Angelis, lib. 8, cap. 18, n. 8; Pesch, Prae­
lectiones Dogmaticae, vol. 3, p. 278; Hugon, Tractatus Dog­
matici, vol. 1, p. 740.

69

THE DEVIL

unobservable by reason unless enlightened by faith.
We are not normally aware by feeling or natural
reason of the working in us of God’s grace; and
indeed it is only by reflection and reason that we
know our own spiritual soul. Hence, it is not sur­
prising that the influence of the evil spirit can
normally be known to us only by the principles of
faith applied to deducing his action from the effects
produced in our feelings, inclinations and convic­
tions. Here we enter the field rightly left to spiritual
directors, who follow the general norms accepted for
the discernment of spirits.1
One last question with which to end. Does the
devil find any satisfaction when he is successful in
tempting us to sin? And if so, how is this consistent
with the general doctrine that the devil is even now
in hell? If, on the other hand, he finds no joy or
satisfaction at a victory over us, why does he exert
himself to tempt us? Here we are face to face with
our inability to imagine a purely spiritual being, in
whom there can be no joy or sorrow such as we
experience; but only, in the devil, as St. Thomas puts
it, the “recoil of the will against all that is, and
against all that is not ” (renisus voluntatis ad id quod
est vel non est). Hence theologians more com1 Aldous Huxley, in his The Devils of Loudun, (London,
1952), is eloquent in denouncing superstitious belief in devils.
The evils of such superstition, manifest in sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century witch-hunting, are obvious enough. But
it may be a greater, though more subtle, superstition to believe
that unaided human reason is capable of finding a remedy for
all the evils in the universe. Racialism, for instance, in its
multiform ramifications, is a threat to human happiness with
which mere human wisdom seems unable to deal.

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THE ADVERSARY

monly admit some kind of “fantastical satisfaction”
—so St. Thomas—or wretched joy at the power he
has to induce men to sin; which very satisfaction in
evil, as St. Augustine thinks, is part of his punish­
ment. But St. John Chrysostom says roundly that
the devil is in a frenzy—a mania1—and to try to
reduce to reason the madness of inveterate hate and
envy is an impossible task.2
Revelation tells us that there are disembodied
forces which are evil, which are powerful, and which
are permitted by God to play their part in human
destiny. The world is as it is and not as we might
like it to be; it contains cobra snakes, cancer, atomic
bombs, just as it contains ideological antagonisms,
stupidity, greed, pride. It also contains the devil.
Faith assures us that there is a means of victory:
trust in Christ and the power of His cross, with the
hope and charity which they alone guarantee. But
if we reject or neglect these sole means, the prospect
is bleak : the reign of falsehood, hypocrisy, hatred,
cruelty, proud despair, unreason, death and unend­
ing corruption.
1 Ad Stagirium a daemone vexatum, Migne, P. G. 47, 425.
2Cf. the discussion of Suarez, op. cit., lib. 8, cap. 15 per
totum.

71

DEMONIACS IN THE GOSPEL
By Mgr. F. M. Catherinet

episode in Christ’s struggle
against Satan—a struggle whose vast pro­
portions we know—is set before us in the
Synoptic Gospels : the deliverance of individua
possessed by the devil. We shall consider in turn
(1) the facts, (2) the problems they raise, and (3) the
principles proposed by theology for their solution.

A

remarkable

I. THE FACTS

(1) A preliminary series of texts affirm, in a
general way, that the possessed were restored to
normal health by Jesus. These possessed are dis­
tinguished from the merely sick; but these first texts
give us no detailed description either of the trouble
afflicting the patients or of the means employed to
free them from it.
Jesus “was preaching ... in Galilee and casting
out devils” (Mark i. 39).1 Before the Sermon on the
Mount “a very great multitude of people . . . [came]
to hear him and to be healed of their diseases. And
they that were troubled with unclean spirits were
1 We follow the historical order as set out by the synopsis of
Lagrange-Lavergne and here cite the texts as given m the
Douay version.

72

DEMONIACS IN

THE GOSPEL

cured” (Luke vi. 18); for “they presented to him all
sick people that were taken with divers diseases and
torments and such as were possessed by devils and
lunatics and those that had the palsy : and he cured
them” (Matt. iv. 24).
When the emissaries of John the Baptist came to
ask Jesus whether He was really the Messiah, before
replying, “ he cured many of their diseases and hurts
and evil spirits : and to many that were blind he gave
sight” (Luke vii. 21).
During His public life Jesus was commonly accom­
panied by the Twelve, and by “ certain women who
had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities”
among whom were “ Mary who is called Magdalen,
out of whom seven devils were gone forth” (Luke
viii. 2; cf. Mark xvi. 9).
When Jesus sent the Twelve to preach the King­
dom of God in Galilee, He charged them to “heal
the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out
devils” (Matt. x. 8), thus giving them “power and
authority over all devils and to cure diseases ” (Luke
ix. 1; cf. Mark vi. 7). In the course of this or another
such mission John “saw a certain man casting out
devils in thy name ” (i.e., in Jesus’ name), and, taking
offence at this, forbade him “because he followeth
not with us”. The Master disapproved of this rather
narrow-minded zeal, but did not deny the fact of the
expulsion of the devils: “Forbid him not; for there
is no man that doth a miracle in my name and can
soon speak ill of me” (Luke ix. 49 and Mark ix. 38).
The seventy-two disciples received a mission
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THE

DEVIL

similar to that of the Twelve, to preach the coming
of the Kingdom of God in Galilee and Judaea. They
“returned with joy, saying: Lord, the devils also are
I
subject to us in thy name”. And He approved of
1
them, saying: “I saw Satan like lightning falling
from heaven. Behold, I have given you power to
ί
tread upon serpents and scorpions and upon all the
power of the enemy: and nothing shall hurt you.
But yet rejoice not in this, that spirits are subject
unto you: but rejoice in this, that your names are
written in heaven” (Luke x. 17-20).
When the Pharisees let Him know of Herod’s
threats, He replied: “Go and tell that fox: Behold
I cast out devils, and do cures today and tomorrow,
and the third day I am consummated ” (Luke xiii. 32).
The power thus exercised by Jesus was to become
the prerogative of the apostles after His death. “And
these signs shall follow them that believe: in my
name they shall cast out devils. They shall speak
with new tongues . . . They shall lay their hands
upon the sick : and they shall recover ” (Mark xvi.
17-18). And so indeed it came about, as is testified
in the Acts of the Apostles (viii. 7; xvi. 16-18; xix.
12-17).
Let us note before we go further that it is not
simply the evangelists who here speak of casting out
devils, but Jesus Himself who (1) claims the power
to cast them out and distinguishes it from that of
i healing diseases, (2) appeals precisely to this power
! to vindicate His Messiahship, and (3) hands it on
expressly to His disciples as having a special place
74
■
1

DEMONIACS IN THE GOSPEL

among the miracles they are to work in His name.
We shall have occasion to return to these remarks.
Now let us turn to the more detailed descriptions
of the expulsions of devils.
The first occasion on which Jesus met a demoniac /J'
is highly dramatic. It took place in the synagogue
at Capharnaum, at the beginning of His public life.
"And in the synagogue there was a man who had
an unclean devil : and he cried out with a loud voice,
saying : Let us alone. What have we to do with thee,
Jesus of Nazareth? Art thou come to destroy us?
I know thee who thou art, the Holy One of God.
And Jesus rebuked him, saying : Hold thy peace and
go out of him. And when the devil [having “ tom ”
or convulsed him—Mark i. 26] had thrown him into
the midst he went out of him, and hurt him not at
all” (Luke iv. 33-5; cf. Mark i. 23-6).
Similar scenes are mentioned in the Gospel record
of a day spent by the Saviour at Capharnaum. He
healed the sick. “And devils went out from many,
crying out and saying: Thou art the Son of God.
And rebuking them he suffered them not to speak
[and to say who he was] for they knew that he was
Christ” (Luke iv. 41; cf. Mark i. 34; Matt. viii. 16).
St. Mark, speaking of like happenings, tells us (iii.
11-12): “And the unclean spirits, when they saw
him, fell down before him : and they cried, saying:
Thou art the Son of God. And he strictly charged !
them that they should not make him known.”
It was by action from a distance that the devil was
cast out of the daughter of the Syrophenician woman.
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THE DEVIL
The mother, a Gentile, came to Jesus and fell at His
feet and besought Him, without allowing herself to
be put off by two rebuffs; and Jesus said to her at
last: “For this saying [that the whelps may eat of
the fallen crumbs of the children! go thy way. The
devil is gone out of thy daughter. And when she was
come into her house she found the girl lying upon
the bed and that the devil was gone out” (Mark vii.
25-30; cf. Matt. xv. 21-8).
In the case of the deformed woman cured in the
synagogue on the sabbath, we must attend carefully
both to the description of the infirmity and to its
attribution to the devil by the evangelist, St. Luke,
and by Jesus Himself.
And he was teaching in their synagogue on their
sabbath. And behold there was a woman who had
a spirit of infirmity eighteen years. And she was
bowed together : neither could she look upward at all.
Whom when Jesus saw, he called her unto him and
said to her : Woman thou art delivered from thine
infirmity. And he laid his hands upon her, and im­
mediately she was made straight and glorified God.
And the ruler of the synagogue (being angry that Jesus
had healed on the sabbath), answering said . . . And
the Lord answering him, said : Ye hypocrites, doth
not every one of you, on the sabbath day, loose his
ox or his ass from the manger and lead them to water?
And ought not this daughter of Abraham, whom Satan
hath bound, lo, these eighteen years, be loosed from
this bond on the sabbath day?” (Luke xiii. 10-17).1
1 Here, in this study of the Gospel narratives, and following
the practically unanimous voice of the exegetes, we shall desig-

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DEMONIACS IN THE GOSPEL

To this case of possession, whose effects, as des­
cribed, are strikingly similar to the symptoms of a
local paralysis, we must add two others in which
the descriptive analysis is more picturesque and
more complete. Both are reported by the three Syn­
optic Gospels, by St. Matthew with sobriety, by St.
Luke with precision, and by St. Mark with a wealth
of vivid detail that seems to come straight from life.
We shall reproduce St. Mark’s accounts, completing
them here and there when necessary with the
bracketed matter from the other evangelists.
nate as possessed all those subjects said by Jesus to have a
devil i a devil producing a disturbance of health which ceases
on his expulsion. The proof of this active presence of the
devil lies in the word and attitude of the divine Master. The
modem exorcist, guided by the Ritual, is deprived of this in­
fallible support in judging the case submitted to him. He has
to begin by establishing the presence and activity of the devil,
by noting the preternatural phenomena which indicate this
presence and this activity. He has to avail himself here of the
“principle of economy”, which very rightly demands that the
diabolical explanation shall not be entertained if any natural
explanation is adequate. But in the Gospel the question is
settled already : the presence and action of the devil is a datum.
Even in the case of the deformed woman, where it is not
explicitly stated that the devil is here and now present in the
patient, and from whom he is not, in so many words, cast out,
the cause of the malady is nevertheless said by St. Luke to have
been “ a spirit of infirmity ” who had afflicted her for eighteen
years; and Jesus Himself goes on to say that the spirit’s name
was Satan, who had “bound her, lo, these eighteen years”—
and “ought not this daughter of Abraham to be loosed from
this bond on the sabbath day? ” Père de Tonquédec is quite
justified in remarking that for a present-day exorcist there is
here no case of a possession (in the modern and full sense of
the term) that could be strictly demonstrated by the tests at his
disposal ; but in the Gospel, nevertheless, the malady is pre­
sented as due to the devil, and the cure as a rupture of a bond
established and maintained by Satan. That is why the Gospel
commentators commonly reckon it among the cases of “pos­
session”.

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DEVIL

Here first is the case of the possessed of Gerasa.
Jesus lands on the eastern side of the lake of
Genesareth, in the country of the Gerasenes.
And as he went out of the ship, immediately there
met him out of the monuments a man with an unclean
spirit, who had his dwelling in the tombs : and no
man could bind him, not even with chains. For having
been often bound with fetters and chains, he had
burst the chains and broken the fetters in pieces : and
no one could tame him. And he was always day and
night in the monuments and in the mountains, crying
and cutting himself with stones. [He had gone un­
clothed for a long time—Luke.]
And seeing Jesus afar off, he ran and adored him.
And crying with a loud voice he said : What have I
to do with thee, Jesus the Son of the most high God?
I adjure thee by God that thou torment me not. For
he said unto him : Go out of the man, thou unclean
■' spirit. And he asked him : What is thy name? And he
saith unto him : My name is Legion, for we are many.
And he besought him much, that he would not drive
him away [into the Abyss—Luke] out of the country.
And there was there near the mountain a great herd
of swine, feeding. And the spirits besought him, say­
ing: Send us into the swine, that we may enter into
them. And Jesus immediately gave them leave. And
the unclean spirits going out, entered into the swine.
And the herd with great violence was carried head­
long into the sea, being about two thousand, and were
stifled in the sea.
And they that fed them fled and told it in the city
and in the fields. And they went out to see what was
done. And they came to Jesus. And they see him that

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DEMONIACS IN THE GOSPEL

was troubled with the devil, sitting clothed, and well in
his wits : and they were afraid. . . . And they began
to pray him that he would depart from their coasts.
And when he went up into the ship, he that had been
troubled with the devil began to beseech him that he
might be with him. And he admitted him not, but
saith to him: Go into thy house to thy friends, and
tell them how great things the Lord hath done for
thee, and hath had mercy on thee.

And this he did not only in “the whole city”
(Luke), but “in Decapolis” (Mark v. 20).
Of all the Gospel narratives this is the one that
gives us the clearest characterisation of the devils in
possession of a human organism. There they create
and maintain certain morbid disturbances not far
removed from madness. They possess a penetrating
intelligence, and know who Jesus is. They prostrate
themselves before Him unblushingly, beseeching,
adjuring Him by God not to send them back to the
Abyss, but rather to allow them to go into the swine
and take up their abode there. Hardly have they
entered into the swine, than with a display of power
not less surprising than their versatility, they bring
about the cruel and wicked destruction of the poor
beasts in which they had begged refuge. Craven,
obsequious, powerful, malicious, versatile and even
grotesque—all these traits, here strongly marked,
reappear in varying degrees in the other Gospel
narratives of the expulsion of devils.1
1 The ridiculous, vulgar and malicious side of diabolical pos­
sessions appears also in the narratives of the Acts, notably in
xix. 13-17, where at Ephesus we meet with “some also of the

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The demoniac whom Jesus found at the foot of
the Mountain of the Transfiguration, and whose
malady baffled the apostles, displays, along with
deaf-mutism, all the clinical indications of epilepsy.
Here once more we shall have to turn to St. Mark’s
account (ix. 13-28):
And coming to his disciples he saw a great multitude
about them and the scribes disputing with them. . . .
And he asked them: What do you question about
among you? And one of the multitude, answering,
said : Master, I have brought my son to thee, having
a dumb spirit. Who, wheresoever he taketh him,
dasheth him: and he foameth and gnasheth with the
teeth; and pineth away. And I spoke to thy disciples
to cast him out : and they could not. Who answering
them said : O incredulous generation, how long shall
I be with you? How long shall I suffer you? Bring
him unto me. And they brought him.
And when he had seen him, immediately the spirit
troubled him; and being thrown down upon the ground,
he rolled about foaming. And he asked his father:
How long time is it since this hath happened unto
him? But he said : From his infancy. And oftentimes
hath he cast him into the fire and into waters to
destroy him. But if thou canst do anything, help us,
having compassion on us. And Jesus saith to him : If

Jewish exorcists who went about [and] attempted to invoke
over them that had evil spirits the name of the Lord Jesus. . . .
And there were certain men, seven sons of Sceva, a Jew, a
chief priest, that did this ”, They had cause enough to rue it,
for one fine day one of those possessed replied : “ Jesus I know:
and Paul I know. But who are you? And the man in whom
the wicked spirit was, leaping upon them and mastering them
both, prevailed against them, so that they fled out of that house
naked and wounded.”

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thou canst believe, all things are possible to him that
believeth. And immediately the father of the boy cry­
ing out, with tears said : I do believe, Lord. Help my
unbelief.
And when Jesus saw the multitude running together,
he threatened the unclean spirit, saying to him: Deaf
and dumb spirit, I command thee, go out of him, and
enter not any more into him. And crying out and
greatly tearing him, he went out of him. And he
became as dead, so that many said : He is dead. But
Jesus, taking him by the hand, lifted him up. And he
arose. [And Jesus restored him to his father—Luke.]
And when he was come into the house, his disciples
secretly asked him : Why could we not cast him out?
And he said to them : This kind can go out by nothing
but by prayer and fasting.
II. THE PROBLEMS

How find the correct interpretation of these data?
(1) Although the evangelists sometimes use the
word “heal” or “cure” in connection with the de­
liverance of the possessed by Jesus,1 the contexts
themselves suggest that this “healing” has to be
taken in a special sense. Thus the woman with the
bent back is represented as “delivered from her in­
firmity” in Luke xiii. 12, after having been “bound
by Satan these eighteen years”, and now she is to be
"loosed from this bond” (verse 16). So also the
epileptic is "cured” but precisely because the “un­
clean spirit” has been “cast out” (Luke ix. and
parallels). The fact is that the deliverance of pos­
sessed persons, in all cases where it is related in any
1 Cf. Luke vii. 21 ; viii. 2 ; ix. 43, etc.

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detail, is presented under conditions which clearly
differentiate it from the cure of mere disease.
j
To be precise, the plight of the possessed is
' attributed to “the devil”, a hidden, malicious being,
capable of tempting even Jesus; a being who is “the
power of darkness”, and has “his hour” during the
events of the Passion; who acts with as much deceit
and wickedness as intelligence. He “enters” the
possessed, he “dwells” there, and “cômes back”;
he “enters” into the swine. The possessed “has a
devil”, an “unclean devil” (Luke iv. 33); he is an
“unclean spirit” (Mark i. 23). The devil “goes out”
of the possessed, and into another place, into the
I ■; desert, into the swine, into the Abyss; and that prei cisely because he is “driven”—that is the word most
commonly used. When Jesus approaches he shows
“terror”, he “falls down”, “beseeches”, declares
that he “knows” the supernatural status of Jesus.
The latter “speaks” to him, “questions” him, gives
him “commands” and “permissions” and imposes
silence. Not one of these traits can be found in the
behaviour of the merely sick towards Jesus, nor in
the way in which Jesus sets out to cure them.
(2) The attitude of Jesus in the presence of the
possessed does not allow a Catholic, nor even any
attentive historian, to think that in acting and speak­
ing as He did He was merely accommodating
Himself to the ignorances and prejudices of His con­
temporaries.
What is in question here is no mere current mode
of speech (as when we describe the sun as “rising”
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from the horizon, and “going up” towards the
zenith), but a doctrine that expresses an essential
aspect of the mission of the God-man in this world:
“For this purpose the Son of God appeared, that he *
might destroy the works of the devil” (1 John iii. 8).i
On points of such importance touching the super­
natural world Jesus could by no means indulge in
tolerant equivocations. He never used them. Look
at the ninth chapter of the Gospel of St. John. There
we have the case of the man born blind. The
disciples, either personally mistaken or possibly
sharing the views of the Essenes or some other
Jewish sect, asked the Master: “Who has sinned,
this man or his parents, that he should be born
blind?” They were not alone in putting down his
blindness to sin. When the man, now cured, was
standing up bravely to the interrogation of the San­
hedrin, they cut him short with : “Thou wast wholly
born in sins, and dost thou teach us? ” Here, then,
we are certainly in the presence of a prejudice or
error common among the contemporaries of Jesus.
But since this error touched the supernatural order
Jesus allowed Himself no conformism; He would
entertain nothing but the simple truth, and put it
without compromise: “Neither hath this man sinned
nor his parents; but that the works of God should
be made manifest in him. ”
Now Jesus, who would not so much as once let
pass a mistaken word dropped on matters of religion,
never corrected His disciples’ expressions on the
subject of demoniac possessions. And He spoke of
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them Himself in identical terms, strictly squaring His
action in the matter with the ideas and language
of His countrymen. It is plain that He simply held
them.
What is more, He took up a position of His own
on the point and defended it. The controversy is set
out in all three Synoptic Gospels (Luke xi. 14-26:
Mark iii. 22-30; Matt. xii. 22-45). Jesus had cast
out a devil who had made his victim blind and dumb.
The Pharisees accused Him of driving out lesser
devils by the power of Beelzebub, “Prince of the
devils”. The occasion was a good one to let them
know that there was here no question of demoniac
possession but only of disease. Jesus did not seize
it. The devils, he said, do not cast each other out;
if they did, they would long ago have put an end to
their own “kingdom”. . . . No, they are driven out
because they have now come up against someone
“stronger than themselves”, and their defeat is the
sign that “the kingdom of God is come upon you”.
This defeat will not prevent Satan from launching a
counter-offensive, and it may even have a striking
success in some cases, since the devil driven out will
come back “with seven other spirits more wicked
than himself”. That is because human bad faith,
such as had just been shown in the Pharisees’ accusa­
tion of Jesus, constitutes that voluntary and obstin­
ate blindness called “blasphemy against the Holy
Ghost”, and opens the way to the definitive return of
the reinforced enemy. Here then, as elsewhere, and
even more clearly than elsewhere, it is evident that
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Jesus speaks of the devil and of possession by the
devil as realities, and that on this point He finds no
errors to dispel either among His disciples or His
adversaries.
The true problem raised by these possessions does
not lie there. We must now try to formulate it in
precise terms and see whether this may suggest some
line of thought on which its solution may be found.
(3) Let us abstract for the moment from the
method that Jesus adopts in delivering the possessed
and consider only the symptoms of their state as
given in the more or less detailed descriptions pre­
served in the Gospels. It can hardly be doubted that
a study of the morbid symptoms, and of these alone,
would lead every doctor to see in the deformed
woman a paralytic, in the energumen of Gerasa a
furious madman, in the child healed on the morrow
of the Transfiguration an epileptic—and so on.
Moreover, *each possession that is individually set
before us is accompanied by an infirmity : the devil
strikes his victim dumb (Matt. ix. 32; xii. 22; Mark
ix. 16; Luke xi. 14); deaf and dumb (Mark vii. 32);
dumb and blind (Matt. xii. 22); “lunatic” (Matt,
xvii. 14); he provokes convulsive crises (Mark i.
26; Luke iv. 35; and especially Mark ix. 18-20 and
parallels above cited). From a purely medical stand- \
point all these morbid phenomena are closely con­
nected with a diseased state of the nervous system.
We can readily appreciate how a psychiatrist might
be tempted to isolate these phenomena, to base his
whole judgment on nothing else, and to conclude
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that under the name of “possession” the Gospels
present us simply with cases of neurosis. Now al last
we face the problem of demoniac possession in all
its force.

(4) But to set out to solve this problem from a
purely medical standpoint is to follow a false trail.
Only a part of the facts could be thus explained.
How do these neurotics recognise and proclaim the
Messiah? How could their disorders be instant­
aneously transferred to a herd of swine and bring
about its destruction? How comes it that the wonder­
worker here acts by threats not directed against the
patient himself, but against another? How is it that
He always effects by one brief word a cure that is
instantaneous, complete and final? Think of the
time a modern psychiatrist needs, the slow and
laborious methods of persuasion he employs, in
order to “cure”—when he does cure—or even to
ameliorate the disorders of his pitiable clientèle.
These questions become still more pressing when
we remember that all the ills enumerated above—
dumbness, deafness, blindness, paralysis, apparently
due to the same neuropathic cause—are often met
with in the Gospel unaccompanied by any mention
of the devil, and are cured by means that have
absolutely nothing in common with these imperious
and threatening exorcisms, or with conversations
with an interlocutor who is other than the patient.
We must cite some examples of this.
Here is the case of the deaf-mute of Mark vii. 32—5
(the Greek text makes him a “ deaf-stammerer ”
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which still more clearly indicates the nervous char­
acter of the trouble).
And taking him from the multitude apart, he put
his fingers into his ears : and spitting, he touched his
tongue. And looking up to heaven, he groaned and
said to him: Ephpheta, which is, Be thou opened.
And immediately his ears were opened, and the string
of his tongue was loosed, and he spoke right.

No mention of the devil, no threats, only a few
symbolical gestures with a word expressing their
meaning. It is simply a miraculous cure of a nervous
malady. It is not the expulsion of a devil.
Everybody remembers the cure from a distance of
the paralysed servant of the centurion of Capharnaum who declared himself unworthy to receive
Jesus under his roof (Matt. viii. 5—13; Luke vii.
1—10); also that of the paralytic whose zealous friends
uncovered the roof of the house where Jesus was
teaching, and let down the bed with the patient
at Jesus’ feet; and whom the Master cured with a
word affirming that “the Son of Man hath power on
earth to forgive sins” (Mark ii. 1-12 and parallels).
Once more, no threats, no exorcisms, but words
full of kindness for both centurion and paralytic,
with no attribution of the illness to the malice of
the devil.
And here is the cure of the blind man1 as related
by St. Mark (viii. 22-6) :
1 It is not certain whether this
be put down to nervous causes:
blind demoniac (Matt. xii. 22)
shows at least that blindness,

particular case of blindness can
unlike the case of the deaf and
noted above. The comparison
whatever its immediate cause,

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And they came to Bethsaida; and they bring to him
a blind man, and they besought him that he would
touch him. And taking the blind man by the hand,
he led him out of the town : and spitting upon his eyes,
laying his hands on him, he asked him if he saw any­
thing. And looking up, he said: 1 see men as it were
trees, walking. After that again he laid his hands upon
his eyes and he began to see and was restored, so that
he saw all things clearly. And he sent him into his
house.

Here, if we do not mistake, is the sole case in the
Gospels of a “progressive ” miraculous cure, effected,
however, in a few moments and without any of the
long and complicated methods of modern psychiatry.
! But here again are no devils, no threats, no com­
mands to “go out of him”, and no exorcism.
It will be seen from these texts that the two notions
of “nervous malady” and “diabolic possession”
do not always coincide exactly. The Gospel presents
possessions accompanied by neuroses, and neuroses
pure and simple. The means used to restore the
patients to their normal state also differ according to
which of these two categories the subjects belong
to. Any simple identification of possession with a
nervous malady is incompatible with the Gospel.
After all these explanations and detours we can now
at last condense the enunciation of the real problem
raised by these Gospel narratives into the following
formula :
whether nervous or other, was sometimes taken by Jesus for a
disease to be cured without exorcism, and sometimes for the
result of possession, to be put an end to by expelling the devil

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Whence comes it that diabolical possession is
always accompanied in these descriptions by the
characteristic clinical signs of an abnormal state of
the nervous system? Can we furnish an explanation,
or indicate the cause, of this strange but none the
less regular concomitance?
HI. PRINCIPLES OF THE SOLUTION

To the question thus precisely put, mystical theo­
logy (falling back on dogmatic theology and on
scholastic philosophy) provides important elements
of the answer. We must now bring these elements
together into some kind of synthesis. If, in so doing,
our language seems at times a trifle technical, we
trust the reader will excuse it.
Scholastic philosophy distinguishes two groups of
faculties within the one indivisible human soul. One
group belongs to the sensible order—imagination
and sensibility; and the other to the intellectual—
intelligence and will. When all is duly ordered in a
human soul its activity is directed by the will, which
commands both the imagination and the sensibility,
according to the lights it receives from a reason in­
formed by the truth. But reason, in its turn, under
the normal conditions of its exercise here below, is
only capable of attaining to the truth if the sense
faculties provide it with a suitable aliment that they
themselves have prepared. This interaction between
the faculties affects also the will, whose decisions
may be influenced, even very strongly, by the attrac89

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THE DEVIL
tions brought to bear on it from the side of the
sensibility. However, the hierarchy of the faculties
remains, and the will alone sovereignly decides the
free act, which it can carry out, postpone or omit as
it chooses.
But—still following the teaching of scholastic
philosophy—it is the above-mentioned spiritual soul
that gives life to the body, animates or “informs ” it.
There are not two souls in man, one spiritual and the
other corporeal, but one only. Now it is precisely
by its lower powers, by the sensibility, that the im­
material soul puts out its hold on the body. In the
one unique but composite being of the human
individual, it is here that we find the point of
junction. If we approach this indivisible point from
the side of the spiritual soul, we shall call it the
sensibility; if we approach it from the side of the
life of the body, we shall present it as the vital move­
ment proper to the nervous system. This very close
union between the nervous system, which pertains to
the body, and the sensibility, which is a faculty of
the soul, permits the transmission of the commands
of the will to the body and its movements. It is this
union that is dissolved by death. It is this union that
is weakened by mental disorders; for these are de­
finable as disorders of the nervous system, carrying
ipso facto a disorder of the same importance into the
sensibility, and resulting at the limit in madness.
Then the will finds all the machinery of command
put out of action and no longer controls either the
sensibility or the nervous system, which are both
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abandoned to their only two alternatives of dazed
depression or of furious excitement.
Now it is precisely at this point of intersection
and liaison between soul and body that theologians
locate the action of the devil. He cannot, any more
than other creatures, act directly on the intelligence
or the will: that domain is strictly reserved to the
human person himself and to God his Creator.1 All
that the devil can do is to influence the higher
faculties indirectly, by provoking tendentious repre­
sentations in the imagination, and disordered move­
ments in the sensitive appetite, with corresponding
perturbations in the nervous system, synchronized
as it is with the sensibility. Thereby he hopes to ;
deceive the intelligence, especially in its practical j
judgments, and still more especially to weigh in on ?
the will and induce its consent to bad acts. As long j
as things stop there we have “temptation”.
But—with God’s permission, accorded for the
greater supernatural good of souls, or to put no
constraint on the freedom of their malice—things
need not stop there. The devil can profit from a!*
disorder introduced into the human composite by a>
mental malady. He can even provoke and amplify'
the functional disequilibrium, and take advantage of
1 This doctrine is developed ex professo by St. Thomas, Sum.
Theol., i, q. Ill, arts. 1 and 4, synthetised in I—II, q. 80, art. 2,
and often recalled throughout the II Pars, (for example, in
I—II, q. 9, art. 6). In mystical theology it is classic, see for
example Schram, Theol. mystica, vol. 1, §208-25 and especially
§208 : Quid daemon in possessis possit, 5. The mystics claim to
have direct experience of this impotence of the demon, see e.g.
St. Teresa, Life, ch. xvii.

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it to insinuate and install himself at the point, of least
resistance. There he gets control of the mechanism
of command, manipulates it at his pleasure, and so
indirectly reduces to impotence both the intelligence
and, above all, the will; which for their proper
exercise require that the sensible data shall be
correctly presented and that the means of trans­
mission shall be in good working order. Such are
the main lines of the theory of diabolic possession
worked out by Catholic theology. Let us note that
if death, and so also the ills that prepare it, came into
the world, this was “by the envy of the devil ” turned
against our first parents (Wisd. ii. 24), a thing that
justifies the title by which he was stigmatised by
Jesus: “A murderer from the beginning” (John
viii. 44). By fastening, in possession, on the precise
point at which body and soul are knit together but
can be disassociated, he maintains the line of opera­
tions that he chose from the start in order to wage
his war against humanity.
If all this is correct, we shall have to infer with
the theologians that all true diabolic possession is
accompanied, in fact and by a quasi-necessity, by
mental and nervous troubles produced or amplified
by the demon, and yet having manifestations and
symptoms which are practically and medically
identical with those produced by neuroses. The psy­
chiatrist, therefore, is free to study these symptoms,
to describe these mental troubles, and to indicate
their immediate causes. There he stands on his own
ground. But if, in the name of his science, he pre92

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i
i
j
ί
•
I
1
!

IN THE

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tends to exclude a priori, and in all cases, any transcendent cause of the anomalies in question, then he
trespasses beyond the bounds of his special competence. Precisely by confining hirnself to his own
methods he automatically foregoes any inquiry of
this kind. Never will he find the devil at the term of
his purely medical analysis, any more than the surgeon will find the soul at the point of his scalpel,
or any more than the dog, seeing his master in anger,
can estimate the moral or immoral character of these
strange gesticulations: all that belongs to another
order. But the doctor who wants to remain a com­
plete man, above all if he enjoys the light of the faith,
will never exclude a priori, and in some cases may
well suspect, the presence and action of some occult
power behind the malady. He will hand over its
investigation to the philosopher and the theologian,
allowing himself to be guided by their methods; and
he will have enough modesty to remember that where
his medical science, brought to bear on a woman
who cannot hold herself up straight, will see nothing
but a partial paralysis of eighteen years’ standing,
the penetrating and infallible glance of Jesus dis­
cerned and asserted the presence of the devil putting
forth all his hatred against a daughter of Abraham.
With this, then, we return to the Gospel and to
its diabolical possessions, ft is precisely to account
for it all that Catholic theologians have elaborated
the theory sketched above. It is the business of the
psychologists and the doctors to complete the sketch
by providing it with all the precise analyses and
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formulae which the progress of modern science per­
mits and requires, ft is also for them to say whether
it would not be very advantageous, for the medical
profession and theologians alike, to drop the attitude
of suspicious isolation in which they stand to each
other, and to unite their efforts and methods with a
, view to obtaining a truly adequate interpretation of
facts relating to several complementary branches of
human knowledge—facts such as the diabolic pos­
sessions of the Gospel and their healing by Jesus.

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