
" ... as Jesus arrived at the country of the Gadarenes, there met him a man from the city who had demons; for a long time he had worn no clothes and he lived not in a house but among the tombs" (Luke 8.26).
The problem of demons takes full attention in this frightening Gospel story. It is important to read this passage with “fresh eyes,” because when we listen to well-known old stories, we often remember them in broad outline, but we disregard important details
And there are extremely important details in this episode of the Lord’s earthly ministry.
Demons should never be talked to or even addressed
First, notice that the demons have no name. The Lord asked the poor man his name, and he answered “Legion.” “Legion” is a term for a Roman military unit like “battalion” or “regiment,” and in this case it was a designation for a thousand soldiers. So this crazed, victimized individual was infested with too many demons to count. The point that needs to be emphasized here is that “Legion” is not any name. A “name” is something that only a person can bear. In turn, a “person” is someone that only a human being or an angel can be, and this is assuming that the person has accepted their “creaturely calling” — which is to accept and reflect the Divine Nature of Love. Obviously, Satan and his rebellious colleagues reject this calling, and thus have rejected their “names.” It should be noted that “Satan” and “Devil” are not names but functions. “Satan” means “adversary,” “persecutor” or “accuser” (the complete opposite of Paraclete, which means “Advocate” and “Comforter”). “Devil” means “slanderer.” Before his rebellion, Satan had a proper name: “Lucifer” (i.e., “Morning Star”). But he bears that name no longer — according to Orthodox Tradition, that title now belongs to the Forerunner, John the Baptist.
Practically, this means that Christians (and everyone else) are never advised to ask the names of demons, despite what you see in the movies and on television, which are quite horrible sources of information. There is also, in popular media, a splurge of books, articles, and web sites on “demonology” which delve into demonic names and hierarchies: such study is not only dangerous but is completely fabricated. What truth could ever be gained from a source known to be the root of all lies and deceptions?
The Lord indeed performed an exorcism in this episode. But notice the complete absence of spectacle. And note, too, that the Lord asked the man his name: He did not ask this of the demons.
Demonic intelligence is stupid (St Dionysios said this)
Secondly, the demons “begged him not to command them to depart into the abyss.” This shows the undeniable (for all bodiless powers, demons and angels) fact that the entire angelic order is committed and drawn to Creation. There is no bodiless power that is not connected to Creation and its salvation. Despite the fact that Satan and all the demons rejected God’s love, and the call to reflect the Divine Nature, they were still “linked” to the material world. We see this powerfully demonstrated by the demons’ desperate plea (“they begged Him”) to not be evicted into the non-material world of rejection (i.e., “the abyss,” or in other Scripture texts, “waterless places,” “the outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth”).
Of course, for demons, this desire for the physical world is perverted. Where the faithful angels delight in human faithfulness to God, the demons are attracted (like maggots) to human sin and darkness. They seem to “feed” off of human sinful passion, like gluttony, lust, greed, rage, and most of all, pride (e.g., “I am the most important”). There is also a process where one demon’s perverse pleasure in human passion attracts the presence of others. The Lord speaks of this in Luke 11.24-26: “When the unclean spirit has gone out of a man, he passes through waterless places seeking rest; and finding none he says, ‘I will return to my house from which I came.’ And when he comes he finds it swept and put in order. Then he goes and brings seven other spirits more evil than himself, and they enter and dwell there; and the last state of that man becomes worse than the first.”
Here, the demonic is not depicted as an evil mastermind like Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost, or C S Lewis’ Screwtape, or David Bentley Hart’s effete, sophisticated demon in “The Devil and Pierre Gernet.” Much as I enjoy two of these writers, their depiction of the demonic assumes too much of demonic intelligence. A more accurate view is from St Dionysios the Areopagite: “Demonic intelligence stupidly has no idea how to obtain what it really wants and indeed does not want it.”
The demonic — just because it is so thoroughly “anti-Wisdom” (i.e., “anti-Sophiological”) — is completely insane. And that it why it is better to think of the demonic as a chaotic swarm, or as a gangrenous infection.
What we know, and what we cannot know
This brings us to our third observation: there is no clear line between demonic possession and demonic obsession. In fact, these are Western “scholastic” terms that try to impose rationalistic and clinical categories onto the problem of demons. However, this problem cannot be rationalized by human science. There is much that cannot be known or predicted when it comes to any of the bodiless powers, whether they are angelic or demonic. One “unknowable” is the relationship of Satan to the rest of the demonic powers. We know that he is not “in charge” or immediately present and active, as he is “bound in the abyss” by the Trinity in the Resurrection (actually, on Great and Holy Saturday). We know, however, that the demonic “spirit of the Antichrist” is very much active now. What exactly is the relationship between the spirit of the Antichrist and the demoniac is, on one hand, and Satan himself , on the other, we do not and cannot know.
But we can know some important facts. Holy Tradition — especially Scripture — tells us that the demonic spreads throughout society, from person to person, and within the person’s soul and body, mainly through language. Recall that “Satan” means “accuser,” and “Devil” means “slanderer.” The Lord Himself called Satan “the father of lies.” To some people who were thinking, darkly, that he “had a demon,” the Lord said this: “You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and has nothing to do with the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies” (John 8.44).
This fact — that the demonic spreads through language, thought and speech — is one of the most important themes of Jesus’s own “prayerbook,” which is the Psalter of King David. Throughout the Psalms, the “Enemy” is not human but the demonic, which is constantly at work to slander the faithful, to corrupt human society, and ultimately to claim that God is not real, or worst of all, that God is evil and cruel. The deep and powerful mystery of the Psalms is that the faithful, repeated singing of the Psalms is precisely exorcistic — praying the Psalms, the way Jesus (and the Theotokos and the Apostles) did, can drive the demonic away.
Another “unknowable” is precisely how the demonic influences a human victim. Can the demonic be explained away by dismissing it as pre-scientific superstition? Other cases of demonism in the Gospels are explicitly associated (especially by modern English translations) with epilepsy (e.g., Matthew 17.15, in this case “lunatic,” or literally, “moon afflicted”). So can we say that just because we can detect modern pathologies like epilepsy, or in today’s Gospel story, schizophrenia, that this is “all” the Gospel writer meant and we can dismiss the problem of demons?
No. I do not think we can make such a tidy, modernistic dismissal. Just because we might be able to make a psychiatric or neurological diagnosis does not at all discount the presence and the filthy insanity of the demonic. As a clinician (and as a priest), I will never call someone “demon possessed.” But I will notice the effects of the demonic, and will try to “have faith the size of a mustard seed” and try to move mountains (Matthew 17.20).
Passions and human participation
The “demonic” (and I use that term because we will never be able to identify individual or groups of demons, because they come only in chaotic swarms, like flies) is present as at least an “influence” in all occurrences of sinful passion. If the passion is allowed to get strong enough, then in can break out into actual behavior and action. If amplified by the demonic to an extreme, it can even motivate behavior that is injurious to others and to self. We see this in the pitiful episode of a father who described his victimized son to Jesus: “he suffers terribly; for often he falls into the fire, and often into the water” (Matthew 17.15).
In the worst historic cases, the demoniac is most obviously active in horrendous acts of human evil. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot come easily to mind as examples of deliberate human participation in the demonic. But I would also suggest that the industrialized West’s oppression of slaves and the poor, and its consumeristic sacrifice of millions of unborn infants, is also demonized. And this is also true, on a smaller scale, but even more poignant, of the cases of physical and sexual abuse that infest modern society, along with the recent uptick in mass shootings, especially against school students..
In this sort of demonic action, human participation was fully voluntary. The demonic is obviously present, since this sort of extreme inhumanity can only come about with demonic assistance. Human nature by itself — even fallen human nature — is simply incapable of such horror.
But there is another sort of demonic action, where human participation is involuntary — as in the case of the poor boy who tried to throw himself into fire and water.
For my own part, in clinical experience, I have rarely witnessed such egregious self-destruction in a child, but I know it can occur, and in those rare cases I recognized the demonic perverse delight in the defilement of human beauty.
That sort of involuntary human participation is and always will remain a horrific mystery to me. I do not want to ever understand this.
Demonic motivation
In any case, we can come to understand demonic motivation and process. Recall that demons are angels who have rejected God’s love, and they refuse to reflect the Divine Nature of love, wisdom, harmony, balance, wholeness, and peace (qualities that the Fathers summed up in one term: divine apatheia). The main problem here about demons is that they are rejecting their own essence. They are like organisms that completely resist and reject their own DNA. Demons depend, utterly, upon God’s Love for their own existence, and yet they set their own existence completely against God’s Love. The fatal misery of such an existence defies all thought and explanation, and frankly, I’m glad I don’t have to even try.
But unfortunately, I am able, and responsible, to say that the demonic is utterly enslaved, miserably, to the satanic mission of destroying any and every appearance of God’s Wisdom in Creation.
In the story of the Gadarene Demoniac, that toxic and filthy destruction is underscored by the terrifying sight of swine hurling themselves into a watery death. The reason they did so was obvious: they, being pigs, could not tolerate, or accommodate, the revolting presence of the demonic.
Obviously, this means that the demonic will try to deface and pervert every single sign of Divine Nature in Creation: “They said in their hearts, all of them bound together: Come, let us completely destroy all God’s feasts on the earth” (Psalm 73.7 LXX). But more immediately (and in psychology), the demoniac tries to pollute and disable human nature. They will destroy the possibilities of intact human thought, memory, and control of human emotion and behavior.
Anyone who has wrestled with human psychology and its problems (and this is everyone) has already wrestled with the presence, influence and effects of the demonic.
The problem is much, much worse than the spectacular (and dubious) portrayals in movies like “The Exorcist” and its many imitations, and YouTube recordings of exorcisms (even in Orthodox settings, these moments should never, ever be recorded and broadcast). I am professionally and spiritually skeptical about all such dramatic spectacles. Better the simple, private, peacemaking approach of the Lord (and His Apostles) than the stuff shown in theaters and on megachurch and televangelist TV.
The cure
But the problem is also much more solvable in Orthodox Tradition. The Apostles tell us that the demonic cannot abide the Name of Jesus Christ, and the very thought of His coming in the flesh, manifesting Divine Nature on the Cross, and achieving complete victory over sin and death in the Resurrection. Mention this, and believe this, and pray this, and the demons will run.
The Lord Himself said that that it takes the mustard seed faith that moves mountains (Matthew 17.20) to confront the demonic — that faith which is qualitative, non-quantifiable (hence the Parable of the Mustard Seed and the Mountain) is the full recognition-and-reflection of the Divine Nature — the Presence of Christ in the Spirit … precisely what the demonic refuses to do.
We should remember that in the Byzantine Church of Constantinople, over a hundred exorcists were employed. Interestingly, they were the “catechists,” i.e., the Sunday School teachers, the teachers of doctrine and theology — the teachers of Wisdom.
The conviction that the Byzantine Church had, before the downfall of thought in the so-called “Enlightenment” of the modern age, was simply this: the best way to fight the demonic is through the learning and practice and prayer of the Wisdom of Christ and the Holy Spirit. A clear mind and heart, wise and fully open to the Father’s Love and rooted in Eucharist, is utterly closed off to the pernicious infection of the demonic.
Let us be wise then, “clothed and in rightness of mind.” Pray in Jesus’ Name. Commune in Sacrament, Word, and Spirit. Love, be at peace. Be a mirror of Divine Nature. Become what the devil refused to be.