(Last week I briefly discussed Catherine Nixey’s controversial “The Darkening Age,” a book in which she accused the Christian Church, circa the 4th and 5th centuries, of destroying a good deal of ancient culture. From its theological point of view, however, the Church would have been perfectly justified in doing so; paganism and all its works, Christianity claimed, were the inventions of demons, who sustained themselves on pagan sacrifices while rejoicing in pagan immorality. As Christianity came to power, its self-appointed task amounted to nothing less than the exorcism of the entire Roman empire.}
In The Darkening Age, whether Catherine Nixey was right or wrong about her main thesis—that the triumphant Christian Church was responsible for the destruction of ancient Roman culture—she accurately highlighted the importance of Christianity’s continued emphasis on (and its very literal conception of) spiritual warfare. When it came to conflict between Christianity and its numerous religious rivals, writes Nixey, “This was a war. The struggle to convert the empire was nothing less than a battle between good and evil, between the forces of darkness and those of light. It was a battle between God and Satan himself.”
Without doubt, Nixey acknowledges, “Talk of demons, at the distance of a millennium and more, can sound trivial, almost comical. It was not. Nor was it mere rhetoric. It concerned the salvation and damnation of mankind, and nothing could be more important.” The centrality of demons to the early Christian worldview can hardly be overestimated; in fact, it has been deliberately swept under the rug over the centuries, as Christianity emerged, reluctantly, into the modern world where explicable natural forces took the place of the older supernatural beings.
In the ancient world, demons were real, and early Christians spent considerable energy concocting “complex demonologies that explained everything from how these creatures were created (a Miltonian fall from grace) to their stench (revolting); their geography (Rome was a favorite haunt); the feel of their skin (deathly cold) and even their sexual habits (varied, imaginative and persistent). Everything was considered, including the ways in which the demons planned to overcome the logistical and linguistic difficulties involved in world domination. ‘We should not think that there is one spirit of fornication that seduces a person who, for example, commits fornication in Brittany,’ wrote one ancient observer, ‘and another for the person who does so in India.’ Instead, he explained, there were innumerable spirits, a whole ‘abominable army’ that, under its leader, Satan, harasses the entire world enticing it to sin.
The demons, being spiritual creatures, possessed formidable abilities:
Part of the demons’ power was their astonishing swiftness: they could appear almost anywhere, at any time. Like the angels that they had once been, these demons were winged and so able to travel astonishing distances at great speed to do their evil work and generally alarm the populace. One man awoke to find a swarm of demons flying in his face like a flock of crows. ‘They are everywhere in a moment,’ wrote one ancient chronicler. ‘For them, the whole world is but a single place.’ Demons, warned other writers, made terrible noises: they might shriek, howl, hiss or even (most insidious of all) speak. They could beat, punch, bite, burn, and make marks on the skin 'as if made by a cupping glass’. Most foul of all was these creatures’ aim: nothing less than ‘the subversion of mankind.’
The ancient world, as the above passage indicates, was not the world with which we are familiar, not the cosmos in which we live. It was, Nixey explains, “another country, and they did things differently there.” There, the supernatural intruded upon the natural with surprising regularity: “It was a time when a monk might talk personally with Christ, walk with John the Baptist, and feel the tears of a prophet fall from heaven onto his skin. The world then still glimmered with miracles: the blind were still healed, the faithful still resurrected from the tomb, the holy still walked on water. It was a strange, ethereal place; a William Blake-ish world where the doors of religious perception lay wide open; a world in which a holy man might transform into a flickering flame, travel on a shining cloud, or single-handedly lay low a host of barbarians, armed solely with a flaming sword.
The supernatural sword, however, cut both ways:
This was a world of evil apparitions too, not just holy ones: a place where Satan might walk past you in the road and a demon might sit down next to you at dinner; a world in which your immortal soul was in perpetual peril. The barbarian hordes that were beginning to nibble at the edges of the empire paled in comparison to the hideous army of demons that, according to Christian writers, was already swarming, slithering, and loping across it.
The temptations with which demons inflicted individual Christians were “numerous and varied.” At times, “they appeared as wolves and scorpions. At other times, they might appear as apparently innocuous, even pleasant, forms: as beautiful women, as naked boys, or even as angels. One elderly monk found himself ‘beset’ by naked women sitting next to him at dinner; while another found a demon sitting on his lap in the form of an Ethiopian girl he had once seen as a young man. For the majority of mankind, however, demons conducted their work through the more pedestrian yet insidious means of incitement and enticement, putting ideas into men’s heads that they were seemingly unable to resist.”
Pedestrian as most demonic temptations were, they were abetted and exacerbated by the demonic institutions, religious and civil, of a pagan empire. According to Catherine Nixey, the demons clustered, “teeming like flies on a corpse, around the traditional gods of the empire. Jupiter, Aphrodite, Bacchus, and Isis; all of them, in the eyes of Christian writers, were demonic. Christian preachers and writers repeatedly reminded the faithful that the ‘error’ of the pagan religions was demonically inspired. It was demons who first put the ‘delusion’ of other religions into the minds of humans, these writers explained. It was demons who had foisted the gods upon ‘the seduced and ensnared minds of human beings.’ Everything about the old religions was demonic. As Augustine thundered: ‘All the pagans were under the power of demons. Temples were built to demons, altars were set up to demons, priests ordained for the service of demons, sacrifices offered to demons, and ecstatic ravers were brought in as prophets for demons.’
In fairness, the demons were only trying to survive:
The demons’ motivation in all of this was simple: if they had human followers, then they would have sacrifices and these sacrifices were their food. To this end, Christian writers explained, demons had created the entire Greco- Roman religious system so that ‘they may procure for themselves a proper diet of fumes and blood offered to their statues and images’. It wasn’t merely a question of nourishment, though: the demons also feasted on the very sight of people turning aside from the true Christian God.
For both sides, then, it was a matter of life and death—not just this temporal, earthly, life, but eternal life with (or, terrifyingly, without) God. No quarter could be asked or given; it would be winner-take-all and unconditional surrender. If some classic books had to be burned in the process, some ancient temples looted, some impressive statues smashed, and some irreplaceable artwork vandalized: well, war is hell, and hell was the appropriate place for such demonically inspired creations.
Posted by: |