Radical materialism and arrant superstition alike are common enough in this world – so much so, in fact, that they may often be found side by side in the selfsame person. Yet some who consider themselves orthodox believers seem to carry within themselves a kind of hidden or closet materialism that fosters superstition and worse; this manifests itself in a fixation on the preternatural – even the demonic – as confirmation for the “enchanted” world in which they wish to believe.

This should not be an issue for faithful Catholics, though it all too often is. Recent popes (and their predecessors throughout history) have been unified and consistent in identifying in the devil a genuine, personal adversary. About this there can be no doubt; the existence of a real being, created in innocence and fallen irrevocably through freely-chosen disobedience was defined authoritatively in the Fourth Lateran Council, and has been reasserted countless times since.

One modern iteration: Pope St. Paul VI attributed to the interference of Satan the frustration of the joy-filled flowering which he had expected in the natural course of things to follow from the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. Facing uproar from the media at his diagnosis, the pontiff declared during a general audience in June of 1972 that “evil is not only a privation but a living, spiritual, corrupt and corrupting being.” By the late fall of the same year he returned to the theme, emphatically stating:

“The devil is the enemy number one, the source of all temptation. Thus we know that this dark and destructive being really exists and is still active; he is the sophisticated perverter of man’s moral equipoise, the malicious seducer who knows how to penetrate us (through the senses, the imagination, desire, utopian logic or disordered social contacts) in order to spread error…”

More recently – a few weeks back, to be precise – our current Holy Father taught at a general audience: “He [the devil] is astute: he makes us believe that he does not exist, and in this way he dominates everything.”

The idea of a real, irrevocably fallen, immutably malicious personal being is fully biblical and traditional; it cannot be transposed to a symbolic archetype, merely emblematic of human sin.

In theological terms, the Church’s authentic teaching on the demonic is indispensable. I would like to suggest, as one reason for this, the centrality of the concept of personhood.

Metaphysically speaking, a strong case can be made that the very essence of spiritual being as spiritual is relationality. The source and ground of all being is a communion of Persons, and all that flows therefrom must analogically bear this mark. Joseph Ratzinger has offered an excellent formulation: “It is the nature of spirit to put itself in relation, the capacity to see itself and the other… Being with the other is its form of being with itself.” Thus, for all their rebellion, infernal beings are ineluctably relational, by dint of the laws of being. Angelic infernal being is unmixed spirituality. Note the Cardinal’s words, it is not simply in relation, but puts itself in relation; it would seem in this case that the drive to be with the other manifests as a kind of psychotic compulsion. The deficient mode of “being with” is a co-slavery of mutually inflicted destruction.

…which leads us to a series of fairly stringent admonitions. The same authority which urges us to take seriously the existence of Satan unfailingly reminds us – on that very basis! – to maintain a healthy distance. Analogously, it is precisely inasmuch as I believe that dangerous viruses exist that I avoid them, hope never to encounter them, and would regard any blithe incaution or morbid fascination with them – above all in a medical practitioner – as sheer madness. In the case at hand, one must add that the pestilential spawn of Hell possesses both intelligence and the abovementioned perverse relationality; thus, a firmly and fixedly maintained disposition of avoidance towards them is only the more crucial.

Pope Francis shows the wisdom of the Church, warning against deducing evidence from the presumed demonic; the smoke of Satan hardly affords, let us say, pellucidity:

“By this route… it is practically impossible to reach, in individual cases, the certainty that it is truly him [the devil], given that we cannot know with precision where his action ends and our own evil begins. This is why the Church is so prudent and so rigorous in performing exorcism, unlike what happens, unfortunately, in certain films!”

A more sharply worded reprimand against errant demonology is attributed to St. Albert the Great: “It is taught by the demons, it teaches about the demons, and it leads to the demons” – a thought which should give pause to the most intrepid would-be demon hunter. Sed contra: God alone must remain the locus of our contemplation, lest we become captivated by the very evil we seek to expunge.

A passage from The Ratzinger Report displays the level-headed balance of the tradition. While solicitous that the reality of malicious angelic spirits be affirmed to the faithful, Ratzinger appeals to a far more fundamental truth. As journalist Vittorio Messori recounts:

“The Cardinal urges us to be aware of the opposite danger of ‘too much’: ‘Truth casts out fear and thus enables us to recognize the power of evil. If ambiguity is the mark of the demonic, the essence of the Christian’s struggle against the devil lies in living day by day in the light of faith’s clarity.’”

Evil is darkness; it is dispelled by light, not by shadow. St. John of the Cross teaches that, of all the terrors of the passive purifications, one of the most vexing and abhorrent is the spiritus vertiginis, through which souls are “filled with a thousand scruples and perplexities,” such that they cannot be reached. Demons are vectors of confusion; those who boast of their expertise, their familiarity with the ins and outs of chthonic arcania, are hardly less so. Whatever validity (or lack thereof) their claims may have, they serve only to lead the ordinary believer to the dizzying edge of a treacherous cliff. Such preoccupation with evil, by vesting it with an exaggerated importance, subtly works to its magnification.

The saint cautions souls to “take care into whose hands they entrust themselves”; the qualities modeled by those who give direction will be replicated in those whom they direct, “for… as is the father, so will be the son”. There are many spiritual masters – masters, that is, as regards their office (or celebrity, as the case may be) – who “cause great harm to a number of souls.”

Surviving documents show an instance where John of the Cross made short work of a nun claiming extraordinary favors and attainment. She had won the esteem of the experts tasked with evaluating her case – all except John, whose full and sharp censure comprises a mere seven paragraphs. Among other defects in her spiritual comportment, he notes that “she is too secure in her spirit and has little fear of being mistaken.” When someone appears to have a bit too much secret and inside knowledge, it may do well to apply this criterion. Clearly, though the name was still centuries in coming, our medieval forebears were not immune to the Dunning-Kruger cognitive bias. But “where this fear [of being inwardly mistaken] is absent, the spirit of God is never present to prevent the soul from harm…” Nor was John impressed by her insistence to others regarding the multiplicity of her unusual experiences. He cites, however, the absence of humility as the crux of the issue: “When favors are genuine… they are ordinarily never communicated to a soul without first undoing and annihilating it in the inner abasement of humility.” Those who would approach angelic spirits of existential force greatly exceeding their own with a mien of bullying confrontationalism or militaristic belligerence are inviting calamity on themselves and their followers.

Not that the world’s supposed indifference or scoffing is any less detrimental. As Pope Francis notes, the suppression of conviction regarding the devil’s existence has actually spawned a hydra-headed manifestation of the fetishizing of spiritual evil:

“And yet our technological and secularized world is teeming with magicians, occultism, spiritualism, astrologers, sellers of spells and amulets, and unfortunately with real satanic sects. Driven out the door, the devil has re-entered, one might say, through the window. Driven out of faith, he re-enters with superstition. And if you are superstitious, you are unconsciously conversing with the devil. One does not converse with the devil.”

This resurgence of pagan darkness among contemporary unbelievers should have been predictable; returning to the metaphor of disease, is it not the conspiracist who disbelieves in the existence of viruses who is likeliest to get sick?– note that the forces of spiritual evil operate especially through the imagination, and there is no shortage of toxic content for the imagination in today’s world.

For instance, I need only look out my window to attest that the porches and lawns of my own neighborhood (perhaps yours, as well) currently teem with a veritable infestation of weird decor.

Mind you, I live for Halloween; I have never had much patience with the fundamentalist-inflected hostility to the holiday. Few things delight me more than the modest stampede of costumed, mostly underprivileged children who arrive on my property in trusting confidence of my generosity. And I spoil them summarily: candy, stickers, school supplies, glow sticks (often the most coveted swag of the lot). Besides, a little mockery of our fallen condition, a bit of the risus paschalis imported to the encroaching cold and dark in celebration of the vigil of the feast of Heaven is not out of order, to my mind. But why are we stockpiling “adornments” of grotesquery measured by the non-biodegradable metric ton, multiplied by manufacture and shipping, as the earth is breaking? As infants, children, the helpless elderly die by the thousands and tens of thousands under relentless bombardment? The few square yards in front of many tiny starter homes here in my neighborhood are laden with literally dozens of plastic headstones and inflatable dragons, among things too gruesome and undignified to describe. Not a few of these eyesores rise to twelve feet or better, costing hundreds of dollars each.

Here, we are the American working class and, yes, the poor; I take pride in this reality, but these displays are to our shame. In a prosperous suburb, I drove by a huge tableau depicting the strangulation of a child. How is this even legal? Can ideation of child abuse fail to dispose the disturbed to the real thing? In the affluent county to the south, I saw mock plastic religious statuary mixed in among what would already have been quite abnormal and alarming enough without it. And what’s with the skeletons, particularly this last year or two? Them dry bones by the hundreds of thousands? What are the archeologists of the future to think – or, for that matter, the factory workers of the global South who earn their few dollars a day manufacturing such detritus for us in the rich world? What of the children of famine and blockade, whose bones cling to their skin from hunger? What explains the thanatos that finds in the depersonalizing forces of corruption an idle luxury? And, for all this, I have encountered members of the household of faith who recommend commerce with the macabre and the demonic as salubrious, on the basis that experimental contact with the creepy will scare humanity straight – or perhaps simply cover over their own materialistic insecurity, as suggested above. Yet Pope Francis, in the same general audience cited before, joyfully proclaimed the contrary: “The strongest proof of the existence of Satan is found not in sinners or the possessed, but in the saints!”

Indeed, sanctity is the privileged witness to truth, to any truth and all truth. It is sanctity alone which allows us to know evil most truly: according to the mode of its having been overcome, utterly overcome, denuded of its ersatz sheen of power. Hence the saraph serpent; hence the Cross.

So how are we to see evil, in the light of truth? At one point in the interviews that make up The Ratzinger Report, the cardinal states:  “The reality opposed to the categories of the demonic is the third Person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit…” This passage goes on to include one of the only places I know of where Ratzinger can be cited for linguistic imprecision, in calling the devil the Spirit’s “exact opposite”. The same Lateran Council which teaches on the existence of the demonic realm also firmly establishes the infinite superiority of God vis à vis his creatures. Of course, the cardinal knows this; he is depicting the devil as a sort of anti-image or photographic negative of God’s original preferential will, a privative existential space, hollowed out against the contours of what should have been, according to the true order.

He goes on to call the Holy Spirit “the absolute ‘mediator’ who guarantees the relationships in which all others are rooted and whence they spring: the trinitarian relationship by which the Father and Son are One, one God in the unity of the Spirit.” The action of the Holy Spirit effects the restoration of right order in relation, a true spiritualization of the world. This perfecting grace, rather than being alien, occultic or strange, makes things what they truly are. This pneumatization of the Holy Spirit floods all rightly ordered being with divine light which it then may claim as if it were a native inner radiance, utterly unlike the ephemeral glamour of evil which distorts and disfigures those who bear it. Thus the light of grace casts out all fear.

Later, as Pope Benedict XVI, Ratzinger would write: “To exorcize the world – to establish it in the light of the ratio (reason) that comes from eternal creative reason and its saving goodness and refers back to it – that is the permanent, central task of the messengers of Jesus Christ.”

Human psychology, grounded as it is in a pregiven and encompassing structure, cannot seem to escape the laws of being; even those who in theory would reject such a vision cannot evade their intuitive grasp of ontological relationality. We tend to personify the things and forces with which we interact, as if by instinct. Even outside of the terms of Catholic theology, the specter of sin, absent an adversary, is projected onto a God who is either incapable or overcoming evil or positively attached to it – and who on either account is not God. Or, turning away from God, we hate in the human form the effigy of pain, suffering and death, and offload our outrage on demonized and dehumanized others – or on ourselves. Nor can those who reject the reality of sin altogether, deny that evil does exist, unless they are willing in the same motion to reject goodness, meaning and personhood and reduce the existence of humankind to just another random fluctuation among the blind forces of the material universe, just a moment in the same dissolution and entropy which will one day cause the sun to burn out and the universe to collapse – and yet those who claim to believe such things rarely act as if they truly did so.

Christianity, as the religion of the Logos, brought liberation from the native and pervasive fear of the demonic. A post-Christian world is reverting, for whatever it believes or does not believe at the propositional level, to a pagan ethos of myth, of names and figures, symbols and stories – contrived, reclaimed or appropriated. We seem unable to resist constructing icons of the unnamed malevolence that presses in from every side, thereby paying it backwards homage. In such a cosmos as will not be ruled by Christ, the deadly foe, unsubdued, is also thereby re-mysticized.

The central task of Christianity remains, now as ever, joyous commitment to reason and to the light of day, against every gnosticism, esotericism and undue fear. Truth, light, and the fruits of the Spirit: these witness to the salutary, deeply relational, unitive power of love – the power of our God. “If we belong to him,” as Pope Benedict writes, “everything else loses its power; it loses the allure of divinity.”

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Image: Adobe Stock. By alexkich.