Demons

by Bishop Chrysostomos of Oreoi

[Later Metropolitan of Etna]

 

 

“The Church has two aspects, one positive —love, unity, and communion of immortality with each other and with the Saints in Christ; and one negative —the war against Satan and his powers.”

Father John Romanides

 

When I was ordained to the Priesthood, fresh from the academic and intellectual life, I had not yet come to an understanding of evil in the spiritual life. I had, of course, grown out of a mere intellectual understanding of God. By the time I was tonsured a monastic, I had already come to understand that God, who is beyond what is and what is not, who is wholly transcendent, can be captured neither in human doubts about His existence nor in human affirmations of His being. True knowledge of God is revealed in the heart, in that “repository” of the spiritual life, as St. Gregory Palamas calls it. To know God spiritually is to stand in awesome wonderment before His transcendence and in passive amazement that this same God, who is beyond all that is, also indwells, energizes, and gives life to everything that we can comprehend and reckon to have existence—even our very selves.

At this earlier stage in a spiritual life which is still underdeveloped and poor, had I been asked about demons, I might have responded that, indeed, there is an evil force in the universe. Any reasonable person can argue for this hypothesis. For every physical force there is an equal and opposite force. For every spiritual good there is also a spiritual evil. Just as the laws of thermodynamics posit that there are forces in the physical universe which work toward order and constructive ends as well as those which cause disorder and destruction, so in spiritual laws we see the operation of the goodness of God’s creative plan and the evil of Satan’s pernicious schemes. The very theses and antitheses that underlie certain dialectical systems of thought are reflected in a universal struggle between good and evil: Christ and Hitler, Saints and sinners, Heaven and Hell. These stark antipodes of a universal kind are always with us philosophically and metaphorically, if not physically and literally.

To have thought as a young Priest, however, that evil dwells with in the self, that the vile power of Satan takes personal form, and that evil, too, is a personal spiritual force—such thoughts, though a few personal experiences might have led me to the brink of toying with them, I relegated to the realm of uncomfortable speculation. Only increased experience has at last convinced me that internal growth, that growth which accompanies the search for self within a life dedicated to God, involves a literal struggle between the Christ within us and evil spiritual beings which literally wish to—and often do—possess the human being. Only with experience have I learned that the great struggle with evil described in the lives of our ascetic Saints is, to be sure, a literal fight, not a metaphorical conflict. In the struggle which we Christians undertake in uniting ourselves to God, in becoming “sons of God within the Son of God,” as one Father describes this process, the opposing force which we encounter is that of evil spiritual beings seeking not only the cessation of our growth in God, but our very spiritual destruction. Motivated as they are by envy, jealousy, and an intense hatred of human transformation, these beings aspire to possess both the human body and spirit and, in this effort, to bring the body to destruction and the soul to torment.

As we progress in the spiritual life, we must be constantly aware of the battle that we wage with fallen human nature, dominated as it is by the negative emotions and intentions of spiritual beings of an evil nature. It is in our failure to be so watchful in the spiritual battle that we often fall to plane, or spiritual delusion, thus being led to believe that we are developing in a positive spiritual direction, when, in fact, the heinous forces of evil have revealed to us a world that, while spiritual indeed, is negative and destructive in nature. And so we have the witness in Patristic literature of many spiritual aspirants who, fully deluded and elated by their ecstatic visions and experiences in the spiritual world, become the victims of spiritual forces that lead them from enlightenment to metaphysical and ontological darkness. We Christians are constantly warned in the spiritual literature against the wile of these evil spirits, which appear in the form of Angels and even Christ Himself, filling us with tantalizing sensations and revealing to us their “mysteries.” How many great spiritual crusaders, thinking themselves champions in some spiritual life brought to them by their folly, know that they are the victims of haughtiness, pride, and vainglory, led to the sacrifice by evil beings in the negative realms of spiritual reality? How many gurus, teachers, and even “Orthodox” holy men have actually mistaken the negative spiritual world for the world of positive Christian spirituality? How many Christians and seekers after God have been overwhelmed by the power of these evil spirits over the things of this world, which is their domain, never to have thought that the quiet, subtle, deeply passive world of positive spirituality, which leads to eternal bliss in a place beyond places, is something quite different?

With regard to open and obvious possession of the human being by these evil spirits, few Orthodox or other Christians in the West have seen or recognized such a thing. When we do encounter the subject of possession, it is usually in the form of Hollywood-created illusions (which, oddly enough, parallel the real thing in some ways) or in the context of obvious fakery and chicanery. In a society that has dulled our belief in the spiritual and which has led us to stupid, drunken beliefs in the “here and now,” evil spiritual beings have no need to reveal themselves in order to do their work. Our spiritual demise and the triumph of evil have already come to fruition in our social views, morals, and personal philosophies. In fact, were evil to manifest itself in an obvious, personal form, it would bring unbelievers into belief; for, as an old maxim has it, the living reality of the Devil presupposes the living reality of God. The closest thing that we have to an overt revelation of evil in contemporary Western society is in the world of psychic experiences, where evil beings deceive the spiritually inexperienced into thinking that these spirits are Saints, Christ, Angels, or the departed “souls” of loved ones. Moreover, the vast majority—though certainly not all—of these experiences are themselves bogus and designed more to pry away the “pocket book” than the soul.

In Orthodox countries, where spiritual faith still survives despite persecution (whether by communism, political ecumenism, or other forms of repression), the demonic possession of individuals is not so unusual. It is especially common among those who suffer from various psychological disorders, in that the impairment of the intellect or emotions corresponds to a loss of mental control and the consequent invasion of the psyche by evil forces and evil beings. (Thus it is that we Orthodox pray each day in our services and in our personal devotions for the restoration of our reason, for the ability to think in an undebauched way, and for the power to watch over ourselves with a quickened mind.) Moreover, and again especially in Orthodox lands, those who engage in slander and embrace jealousy, hate, and pride are often overwhelmed by the evil forces which produce and thrive upon these emotions, these forces in turn often mocking the very person whom they possess. One may even see such beings attack, combat, and assault the victims whom they control—especially when the victim, coming to his senses and exercising his rational faculties, approaches a Church or seeks out spiritual help.

Services of exorcism are not uncommon in Orthodox lands and are not conducted in the frenzied atmosphere of the “exorcisms” which we have attributed to the Hollywood stage. The prayers of exorcism are usually read in a liturgical setting, often accompanying a service of supplication to Saints who are particularly venerated for their powers of intercession on behalf of the possessed or afflicted. We find such services regularly conducted on Feast Days (such as Pascha, when the effulgent Grace of this Feast evokes strong resistance from evil) and in places where spiritual life is particularly intense. It is especially among those who seriously engage in spiritual activities that evil forces work against human reason and the divinization of fallen man, just as they attack the psychologically weak, the young, the lonely, and those beset by negative ways of life (negative, that is, in terms of the dictates of the Gospel and the Church with regard to upright, “positive” life). When exorcisms are read over possessed individuals, the beings that occupy them often speak with knowledge of the future or with supernatural insight, compelled as they are to enter into dialogue with the cleric reading the Church’s traditional prayers, which prayers have dominion over the evil powers. As a challenge to any open-minded scientist, whether a believer or not, I will cite an example of such things in an exorcism which I witnessed at the Holy Monastery of Sts. Cyprian and Justina, near Athens in Greece.

As a young Priest was reading one of the prayers of exorcism written by the great Church Hierarch, St. Basil the Great, I stepped out of the altar to observe the young woman over whom the prayers were being recited. I was rather amazed at the strange sounds and noises that she was making under the Priest’s stole, which was covering her head. As I stepped out, she began to growl and scream (in Greek), “Get him out of here. I don’t want the Bishop. I don’t want the Bishop.” It should be noted that I had never seen or met the woman, nor she me. And despite the fact that I was dressed as a simple monk and had not taken part in the Church service, whatever spoke from this woman knew that I was a Bishop. Since I had only just been Consecrated, there was absolutely no way that she herself could have known this or identified me from among the many monks in the Church at the time. This incident was witnessed by a number of clergymen and the hundreds of Faithful who were at the front of the large monastery Church.

If the reader should find it curious that a reasonable man with a background in psychology should believe such things, I am not alone. A good scientist believes what he sees and does not seek explanations that are more bizarre than the inexplicable data that he observes—the principle of scientific parsimony. Such good scientists have noted that, beyond the bogus psychic world, there are good pieces of data to suggest that multiple dimensions of experience do indeed exist and that positive and negative psychic forces are observable. Moreover, any good psychologist, as he stands unable to control a wildly psychotic patient engaged in violent combat with unseen beings or forces, is perfectly aware that—whether we explain this by chemical imbalances in the brain, a personality defect, or social conditioning—the individual is possessed by something other than what we call adaptive behavior patterns and acceptable behavioral goals. No amount of nonsense about future discoveries, empirical limitations, or scientific advances can remove the observable fact that humans who claim to see, talk with, and be used by evil forces fill our mental institutions. Let us note the words of Dr. M. Scott Peck, author of the nationwide best seller, People of the Lie (Simon & Schuster, 1983), a Harvard-trained psychiatrist whose non-denominational Christian beliefs led him to view some of his patients from a different perspective:

Being convinced of the reality of demonic possession, however rare, I am equally certain that clergy and psychotherapists and human-service institutions are seeing such cases, whether they know it or not. (pl 84)

Perhaps the phenomenon of possession is rare in non-Orthodox countries, but walk with a Priest wearing his epitrachelion (stole) through the wards of a mental hospital one day. The effect is startling. That many are too narrow-minded to see such is perhaps the greatest victory of evil. The greatest triumph of Satan is that of convincing humans that he does not exist. When science, which is dedicated to empirical observation, ceases to see data simply because those data are compromising, the transformation of man and human reason, not to mention the evolution of human thought, have come to an end. They have succumbed to evil. This is but the demonic counterpart of the blindness that befalls those who, possessed by the psychic, mistake it for God.

The greatest spiritual Fathers of the Orthodox Church, who have spiritual eyes and to whom the very nature of things has been revealed, have seen evil spirits, Satan himself (who, unlike God, is a creature of limit and who needs material stuff to carry out his pernicious work), and the evil which lurks in the souls of others. Many ascetic Fathers, in fact, have gone through trials and struggles that resemble those of the psychotic, the fundamental difference being that the Fathers engage evil spirits, not out of psychological weakness, but in spiritual combat and with spiritual strength. We of lesser spirituality have also seen these things. Have you ever known that web of human deceit in which one man comes so to hate another that his hate begins to feed on a justification of hate itself, the innocent object of hate becoming a repository for every possible, albeit false, attribution of evil intentions and malevolence? Have you ever seen the envy of an evil man directed against the innocence of an upright man, that envy finding its force in the evil man’s inability to tolerate the goodness of the innocent? Have you ever seen individuals intensely hate others because of the color of their skin, their beliefs, or their physical form? Have you ever observed the vicious jealousy of those who have little for those who have more? If you have seen any of these things—and few of us have not—, then you have seen not human fault, but demons: face to face! And if in yourself you have found envy, pride, hate, or anger, then you have been possessed in some form by that which seeks to combat and expunge the goodness, purity, love, sacrifice, and image of God that bespeak the true nature of man. If we see and know these things, evil cannot prevail. It fears knowledge and discovery. When we have the humility to see those things which are wrong in us, evil must flee. It cannot possess us. Its greatest weapon is our ignorance of its existence and our deluded misapprehension of its nature.

As sure as God exists within the heart, giving us tears of contrition and divine love, demons exist all around us, at times possessing us and leading us into fits of hate, jealousy, and pride. Let none of us doubt or forget this.

 

Source: Orthodox Tradition, Vol. III (1986), No. 2, pp. 57-62.