Philosophical Approaches to Demonology

Benjamin W. McCraw, Robert Arp, Benjamin W. McCraw, Robert Arp

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780367595234
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315466750
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

In contradistinction to the many monographs and edited volumes devoted to historical, cultural, or theological treatments of demonology, this collection features newly written papers by philosophers and other scholars engaged specifically in philosophical argument, debate, and dialogue involving ideas and topics in demonology. The contributors to the volume approach the subject from the perspective of the broadest areas of Western philosophy, namely metaphysics, epistemology, logic, and moral philosophy. The collection also features a plurality of religious, cultural, and theological views on the nature of demons from both Eastern and Western thought, in addition to views that may diverge from these traditional roots. Philosophical Approaches to Demonology will be of interest to philosophers of religion, theologians, and scholars working in philosophical theology and demonology, as well as historians, cultural anthropologists, and sociologists interested more broadly in the concept of demons.

Part I
Demons in Christianity

1
Augustine and Aquinas on the Demonic

Benjamin W. McCraw

Many images and concepts spring to mind when one considers demons. Red in color, cloven footed, tempter/seducer, and perhaps even a pitchfork. There’s much to be said about these images, their origin, and their (in)consistency with certain theological approaches. But, in this chapter, I’m not concerned with any of these popular views or their (in)adequacy. Instead, my focus on the demonic concerns only a relatively small segment of philosophical and/or theological discussions, namely, that of Augustine and Aquinas. Looking toward them, I investigate their philosophical approaches toward the demonic. Many of their views on demons coincide with certain elements of the popular view, but a good many of their views also diverge in some interesting and important ways. I aim to show that their demonologies are philosophically principled absent the caricature we find in popular thought about demons.

Augustine and Aquinas fit into the tradition of Perfect Being Theology. On the barest possible description, Perfect Being Theology is simply the view that there exists a perfect deity. Yet philosophers differ on whether this characterization picks out substantial divine attributes or not.¹ I side with those seeing Perfect Being Theology as substantive. Taking such a view commits one to attributing to God a range of traditional properties like omniscience, omnipotence, and so on. A cursory glance at the philosophical theology of Augustine² or Aquinas³ places them squarely in and, plausibly, paradigmatic of the Perfect Being tradition of theology.

Now I look directly into the philosophical assumptions behind and analysis of the demonic for Augustine and Aquinas. I’ll address concerns for both the nature and existence of demons. In addition, I’ll consider temptation and possession as the main functions of demons as well as their role in moral perversion and negative conversion.

The Nature of the Demonic

Augustine and Aquinas both famously defend a privation account of evil.⁴ On their view, there is no positive substance or nature that is evil in itself. Instead, evil is simply a privation or a lack of the good. Yet evil isn’t merely a negation: something of the form X is not-φ (for any and all φs). But we should reject this association, denying that evil is just equivalent to nonbeing. Instead of thinking of evil as a negation or a simple lacking, we should think of it as a privation—that is, a lack of a certain thing in a certain thing. In this sense, X’s being not-φ, where φ is part of X’s nature (or otherwise appropriate to X). Certainly I lack the speed of a cheetah, but that “negation” isn’t evil for me. What’s evil is when I lack something that I ought to have as part of my human nature. Blindness, using Aquinas’s example, is a privation rather than a negation for it’s a lack of something natural to human beings (Summa Theologica Ia, Q. 48, A. 3). Evil, then, as a privation rather than a negation demarcates a lack of something a being should naturally possess rather than the plain lacking of something simpliciter.

Given all of this, we know that there can’t be any being—even a demon—that can be naturally evil. This means that demons can’t possess a nature that is intrinsically evil as a result of God’s creation or even their own misdirected will and fallen state. If this were possible, then it would impugn the perfect goodness of God in creating such beings and, therefore, be inconsistent with the very heart of Augustine’s and Aquinas’s Perfect Being Theology. Augustine explicitly reinforces this point: “[t]here cannot exist a nature in which there is no good… not even the Devil himself is so evil, in so far as it is a nature; it is perversion that makes it evil” (Civitate Dei 19.13). And, furthermore, he explicitly argues that God doesn’t take away the devil’s original nature or change it entirely. Even though the devil is changed through the Fall and perhaps the divine punishment of such a sin, the devil’s original nature remains at least in part. The same goes for any demon. What is this original nature if not evil?

Augustine and Aquinas all follow the (more or less) traditional story accounting for demons as angels that fell from grace through some evil act of will. Thus, the original nature of the demonic remains the same as any other angelic being though corrupted through their inordinate will. Augustine and Aquinas have a good amount of common agreement on various elements of the angelic nature. Angels, naturally, have reason, a will, and desires. Also, angels possess a rational faculty far outstripping that of humans. Furthermore, the angels have power insofar as they are or extensions of the power of God in various ways. But, at one key point, Augustine and Aquinas diverge on the angelic nature: its material constitution (or lack thereof).⁵

For Augustine, the angels are corporeal beings composed of a body and soul. He argues that demons are not to be placated because of their greater bodies (Civ. Dei 8.13) and that we possess mortal bodies whereas those of demons are eternal (Civ. Dei 9.10). And, finally, Augustine distinguishes the sort of bodies possessed by us and those by demons—arguing that the former are “earthly” whereas the latter are “airy” (De Trinitate 4.3.14). Adopting the traditional view of elements, the airy bodies of the demons are lighter, so that they can live in the air or atmosphere above us, and are finer, allowing them to affect the physical world in a different, subtler way than our earthly bodies can manage. Though demons differ from us in the sort of corporeal substance they possess, it still remains that they have some kind of corporeal existence.

Aquinas, however, strictly denies any sort of corporeality for angels, including fallen ones (=demons). He explicitly argues that no airy or ethereal substance can be alive (De Malo Q. 16, A. 1). First, if any part of the air were alive, then the whole of it must live since the air is homogenous. But this is absurd. Second, Aquinas adopts the Aristotelian point from De Anima that a soul requires a natural body with organs. But an airy or ethereal body can’t have organs because the air would lack limit or shape to distinguish any one organ from any other. And, finally, an airy body couldn’t allow one to perceive because sense perception involves some kind of touch or contact with the medium through which one perceives. Whether we adopt the Aristotelian psychology or the details with which Aquinas applies it makes no difference, for the point is that the Thomistic account of angelic natures explicitly denies that they can have an ethereal body. A fortiori, angels (either upright or fallen) have no bodies at all. Aquinas argues that, for the perfection of the universe, there must exist some incorporeal, intelligent beings (ST Ia, Q. 50, A. 1). God intends for creatures’ goodness, and that is consistency in likeness to God since God is identical to Goodness itself. And God is immaterial and possesses reason. Therefore, somewhere in the order of creation there must exist a class of beings like God in possessing reason incorporeally. Since, for Aquinas, this is the class of angels and we know that the Fall doesn’t change the nature of the demons entirely, demons must be both incorporeal and rational. And it’s Aquinas’s insistence on the rationality of angels that again conflicts with Augustine.

In Augustine’s demonology, though they may possess intellects more powerful than humans, demons are still much more cognitively limited than the upright angels. He claims that in contrast to the good angels, “the demons do not behold the eternal causes of temporal events… but they have much more knowledge of the future than men can have” and that “they are often deceived, while the angels are never deceived” (Civ. Dei 9.22). Thus, the intellect of the demons differs from that of the good angels—what the demons might have known by their original angelic nature is no longer the case in their fallen form. Aquinas disagrees, however, arguing that the natural knowledge possessed by any angel doesn’t differ whether that angel is fallen or remains in grace. Since “devils by sinning did not lose what belongs to their nature,… it follows that the devils cannot have false opinions regarding things that belong to their nature” (De Malo Q. 16, A. 6). Though demons can have different knowledge by virtue of their postlapsarian cognition, what is true of their natural knowledge can’t change and, thus, can’t differentiate them from angels. Foreknowledge is no different. While Augustine suggests that the angels have a greater share of the foreknowledge than the demons, Aquinas is clear that no being other than God can fore-know (De Malo Q. 16, A. 7). Therefore, the foreknowledge of the angels and demons can’t differ since neither possesses it.

While Augustine and Aquinas differ in some key aspects on the nature of demons (and angels), both deny that such a disagreement has any significant theological bearing (see Civ. Dei 21.10 for Augustine and De Malo Q. 16, A. 1 for Aquinas). So, while their arguments and positions are interesting, they don’t have any essential consequences for the core of one’s philosophical theology of either angels or demons. Even if we remain undecided on the corporeality of angels or the respective knowledge of demons, we can still accept enough about their rationality and possession of a will to have an adequate demonology. So, on either count, we can agree that the fall of an angel doesn’t change the original nature of the fallen being essentially but rather only limits, corrupts, or perverts it.⁶

Pride

Augustine and Aquinas agree upon the trait by which the demons fell: pride. So far, they speak with the same traditional answer as the popular view of demons by ascribing their fall to the overwrought sense of self at root of the first evil will. However, to claim that demons, and the archdemon Satan, fell through pride is quite thin and simply avoids the deeper analysis of the specific variant of pride at fault. What exactly do we mean by “pride”, and how does that ground the evil at work in the Fall?

Augustine provides an early analysis of the pride at root of the diabolic Fall. For him, pride (superbia) is nothing “except a longing for a perverse kind of exaltation” and “happens when a man is too pleased with himself” (Civ. Dei 14.13). Elsewhere (De Genesi ad literram 14.14.18), he describes the pride at the root of the fall of the demon as “suburbia sit amor excellentiae propriae” (the love of one’s own excellence). This accords with common thinking on pride: a kind of overreaching opinion of oneself. It borders on obvious but it remains crucial to note that there seems nothing wrong which appreciating oneself appropriately. All things made by God are good and, thus, there seems nothing wrong with appreciating such goodness—even in oneself. What demarcates pride from the appropriate appreciation of the goodness of creation is the extent to which one appreciates the object. When I’m prideful, I tend to see myself as higher than I actually am or as better placed in the great chain of being as befitting my actual status. Thus, the pride at issue here seems to be a kind of subjective idolatry: loving something that isn’t God as one loves or should love God. But Augustine and Aquinas actually get more specific than this and have a more sophisticated notion of pride at work.

The preceding analysis of pride seems to suggest a popular view regarding demonic pride, namely, that the demons fell because, in their pride, they mistakenly love themselves on equal footing with God or view themselves as equivalent to God. Interestingly, Augustine and Aquinas both reject this reading of the pride in question. They both deny that the demons fell through thinking of themselves as equivalent to God. This suggests two questions: (1) Why do they deny this analysis, and (2) how do they understand the specific sort of pride at work in the demonic will in falling from God? Question (1) is easy enough to dispatch. Both agree that demons were originally angels and, as such, had (and still have) a large share of reason. Thus, it would seem necessary that such rational beings would know that it’s both logically and metaphysically impossible to be equivalent (even if not identical) to God. A bit of reasoning about created beings and contingency versus the necessary aseity of God rules out any reasonable belief that one could possibly be God or even relatively God-equal. To think of pride, then, as equivalence to God would be to contradict the rationality inherent in the angelic nature at least prior to the fall, thus Aquinas:

And so we conclude that [the devil’s] intellect could not have understood this equality with God to be within the nature of the possible. And no one strives to what the person understands to be impossible… And so the movement of the devil’s will could not have inclined to desire equality with God absolutely.

(De Malo Q. 16, A. 3)

So, the popular reading of pride as...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• PART I Demons in Christianity
• PART II Non-Christian Conceptions of Demons
• PART III Demons and Epistemological Issues
• PART IV Demons in Moral and Social Philosophy
• Notes on Contributors
• Bibliography
• Index