BY SEAN WALSH
It strikes me as strange that people can believe in God but at the same time say that they are sceptical about or indifferent to the existence of angels and demons – purely spiritual beings (composed exclusively of intellect and will), the former being His messengers, the latter in permanent rebellion against Him.
Why have God without the supernatural trimmings, the bits that make faith so mysterious and so fascinating? You can think that the “book of everything there is” is written in the technical language of the natural sciences, but that is to settle for an imperfect and very reductionist theism.
It is like insisting that whilst you are happy to concede that there is such a thing as love, its heartbreaks and mysteries are in fact no more than the playing out of a reproductive imperative, and can be usefully set aside or written off as an irrelevance.
The Christian, and most especially the Catholic, theology is that the secrets of Heaven are refracted “through a glass darkly” here on Earth; that there are invisible and visible things; and that the supernatural and the natural intertwine with unfathomable intricacy.
There is a superabundance of acknowledged supernaturalism within the Christian tradition. We believe (or we are at least invited to believe) not just in the angelic and the demonic but in miracles, an order of timeless and objective moral truth, intercessory prayer and the immateriality of the human soul.
We think (or we are at least invited to think) the most unthinkable of things: that God became matter and entered time for no other reason but to rescue us from ourselves.
What of demons, then? What is the basis for any Christian to be hesitant when it comes to accepting that they exist when both Scripture and natural theology make clear that they do?
We read of the existence of demons in, among other passages, Genesis 6; Matthew 25; Hebrews 1, etc. In Jude 1:9 the Archangel Michael chastises Satan by invoking the name of Our Lord:
But even the archangel Michael, when he was disputing with the devil about the body of Moses, did not himself dare to condemn him for slander but said, ‘The Lord rebuke you!'”
Additionally, we know it through witness: documented and contemporary cases of demonic interference and possession.
We are lucky, as it happens, to live at the time of the celebrity exorcist. Prominent among these is Fr Carlos Martins, whose The Exorcist Files makes for an unusual work diary and an illuminating anthropology of the dark (and occasionally quite tedious) practices of Satan and his fallen companions.
Demons, he reminds us, are pettily legalistic and can make mischief or capture souls only to the extent that they can claim to have been given permission to do so – by human sin.
The demons like it when you flirt with them, and what seems to humans to be just a meaningless hook-up they will insist is actually a long-term commitment. The flirtation might seem harmless enough – a drunken evening with a Ouija board, excessive yoga (yes, really), casual cursing – but that is often their “in”.
And always avoid cheap metaphysical platitudes. If you say, with a straight face, that you are “spiritual but not religious” then you almost certainly will get their attention.
The job of the exorcist is to rescind the “rights” of the demon to interfere with the lives of those they vex, oppress or (in some cases) physically possess.
How does the priest achieve this? By acting in persona Christi and by engaging the enemy with His weapons of spiritual warfare: prayer, Confession, Holy Water, liturgical rites, etc. To put it another way, the exorcist serves a sacramental eviction notice.
The evidence, then, is all there. Why do even the most sacramentally energetic believers – the daily Mass people – nevertheless continue to be so selective when it comes to Christian supernaturalism?
The best answer to this is to say that they have every right, theologically speaking, to their scepticism. The Christian faith is a relationship more than it is a collection of beliefs. In science it can be an error – intellectual and moral – to refuse to believe something for which there is plenty of evidence. Faith is different: there is no “calculus of required assent” which applies to spiritual physics.
A metaphysical commitment is not just the acquisition of a new belief or practice. It is always transformative – an episode in the ordering of the soul in the direction of God.
Revelation is the bringing into the open of hidden things according to God’s timeline. It applies to the Church and to the individual. You can read a million or more stories about this demonic attack or that miracle. They will become integrated into your faith life only when – if – God thinks you can handle it.
Such is the mysterious alchemy of His grace. Which is another way of saying that God knows when you cannot yet handle the truth.
The Christian life should be strange and should pay tribute to the supernatural, in part to push back against the spiritual entropy that comes with secularism. Contradictions are bad (not even God can contradict Himself) but mystery is given to us as a gift.
So, yes, it is strange that people come to believe in God but take a pass when it comes to the angelic and demonic. But only by the standards of purely worldly ways of thinking.