Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Rod Dreher on Fr. Carlos Martins, Spiritual Warrior

Dreher quotes Martins:

Between these two goals—tempting man and gaining him for eternity—there is another evil desire that the Devil aims to satisfy: the possession of his victim. Possession is the state where the victim is under demonic control from the inside. The demon takes over the body of the one he possesses. During possession, a victim’s consciousness is suppressed, and the demon animates his body as his own. 

Given that demons exist outside of time and space, how can a demon be “inside” someone during demonic possession? While a demon’s lack of physicality frees him of the limitations to which physical objects are subject and gives him access to everything in the physical universe simultaneously, he does not have power over all things equally. When the Devil possesses a victim—and is now “inside” him—the Devil has gained legal jurisdiction over him in such a manner that he can bully and manipulate the victim from the inside. The legal control a possessing spirit has is so great that the body he possesses appears to be his own. 

I'd like to hear more about this legal jurisdiction. If the possessing demon has a legal right to occupy and use the body of the human being who is possessed, from where does the demon get this right? Suppose some children are quite innocently fooling around with a Ouija board. Are they thereby inviting demons into their lives, and granting them the legal right to oppress or possess them?  Would a good God allow these kids to be ensnared in this way? I should think not.  Is there the makings here of an anti-theistic argument from evil? My Ouija board example is quite different in obvious ways from the Faust legend or the story of Robert Johnson at the crossroads, a variant of which is here.

Dreher too is intrigued by the the legal aspect of possession, oppression, and the milder forms of demonic influence. "To me, the most fascinating aspect of this phenomenon is the legalistic one. Every experienced exorcist will tell you that the demons are extremely effective lawyers."  From 'Demons are effective lawyers' it does not follow that effective lawyers are demons, though many will be 'tempted' to embrace that non sequitur. Remember Michael Avenatti? But I digress.

Dreher quotes some more:

An exorcist must focus not on the demon but on why the demon is present. Stated differently, if a demon inhabits someone, he has been granted the right. Demons live and breathe legalism. As long as the demon enjoys the legal right to possess, he is not required to leave because he is inside a dwelling that is his. Just as someone who owns a deed to a property cannot be evicted from it, an exorcist cannot evict a demon from a victim over whom he has gained the right to possess. 

Uncovering demonic rights is challenging and can be the most difficult part of an exorcist’s work. A victim himself often does not know how he has acquired demons. In the case of Jeremy, this was not the case. He knew exactly why he had a demon: he had agreed to a pact with him. But it is often not that easy. An exorcist will probe a victim’s experience, personal history, and psyche to locate the legal claims a demon may have. The demon will do everything he can to remain hidden. 

I plan to return to these questions after I read the book by Martins which I expect to arrive in early December.

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Bill Vallicella

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18 responses to “Rod Dreher on Fr. Carlos Martins, Spiritual Warrior”

  1. Vito B. Caiati Avatar
    Vito B. Caiati

    Bill,
    You write, “If the possessing demon has a legal right to occupy and use the body of the human being who is possessed, from where does the demon get this right? … Is there the makings here of an anti-theistic argument from evil?”
    After reading these passages from Martin’s book this morning, I had the same thought. Your example of the kids and Ouija board really should trouble a thinking theist. If we imagine a world without evil spirits with preternatural powers preying on man, granting for the sake of argument the role of the Evil One in the original Fall but requiring the destruction immediately afterward of him and his minions, we find that “the assaults of the flesh and the world are enough for man’s exercise. But God permits His elect to be assailed that they may be exercised. Therefore, there is no need for them to be assailed by the demons” (Aquinas ST, I, q. 114, Art. 1. Obj. 3). In such a fallen world, one marked by suffering and death, the tendency to sin is well planted in man, whose original nature has been “wounded (Eliot),” as is the subsequent need for the Incarnation and Atonement, thus preserving the grand soteriological scheme of Christianity. Why the continued presence of the demons? Aquinas, of course, has a response to this objection, arguing that “the assault of the flesh and the world would suffice for the exercise of human weakness: but it does not suffice for the demon’s malice, which makes use of both the above in assailing men. But by the Divine ordinance this tends to the glory of the elect (ST I, q. 114, Art. 1. Ad.3).” But I am not satisfied with this response, since it assumes that that God must keep the evil ones in existence, adding further suffering, including to the innocent (the Ouija board kids), to a species of beings already prone to sinfulness, just so that the few may be saved, But why would those who conquer sin in a fallen world without demons be less worthy of glory? In short, one could argue that there is something evil in this arrangement of things.
    Vito

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  2. Joe Odegaard Avatar
    Joe Odegaard

    Hi Brother Bill
    There is a Ouija board story in my family; My Dad’s mom, Gertrude Maley Odegaard, was really good at the Ouija Board; her catholic priest told her to stop, so she threw the thing into the backyard incinerator (this was in the late 1930s, about, either in Marysville, or Nevada City California); and when the fire got to it, it exploded with a really, really, really loud bang.

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  3. EG Avatar
    EG

    Hi Bill,
    While I am sympathetic to discussions like these, I do not liken this to physicists talking about sub-atomic particles, which while invisible to the senses, in themselves, can be measured with some rationally compelling tools that extend the senses, and by their effects and affects.
    What instruments (“measuring” tools) are being used to probe the spiritual, and more so those things external to the self? So to say, you do not need to believe in sub-atomic particles, but if I put you in a room with high radioactive particles, like anyone exposed to a nuclear reactor core breach, or even more mundane things like exposure to high-saturation CO in a room, will quickly not be in doubt about how invisible things can be dangerous.
    Yet, I do not think we actually have rationally compelling knowledge, in your sense, about things like demons, or other spiritual beings. Speaking for myself, I do have a sense of the supernatural, and I think there are things that go bump in the night, but if you pressed me to be more specific, at best I could speak in myths–and perhaps this comes to another “barrier” or “lack” born of our mortal nature, a certain natural “spiritual blindness” or perhaps myopia, and infirmity. Thus, to speak of the legalistics of demons and their rights is I think to take a step too far in what is genuinely knowable, you may believe it but it isn’t rationally compelling.

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  4. BV Avatar
    BV

    That’s one HELL of a story, Joe. I believe it. So the demons didn’t like being thrown back into the fire!
    In all seriousness, one ought not eff around with the occult, even in jest; you are playing with, uh, FIRE.
    You are lucky your grandmother didn’t get too deep into this stuff since some exorcists believe that possessions and oppressions are sometimes passed down to offspring. One has to wonder about the ‘Kennedy Curse.’ But it may be that the Kennedys are just congenitally reckless. Thus the expression, one of my favorites, ‘reckless as a Kennedy.’

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  5. BV Avatar
    BV

    Vito writes, >>But I am not satisfied with this response, since it assumes that that God must keep the evil ones in existence, adding further suffering, including to the innocent (the Ouija board kids), to a species of beings already prone to sinfulness, just so that the few may be saved, But why would those who conquer sin in a fallen world without demons be less worthy of glory? In short, one could argue that there is something evil in this arrangement of things.<< Why doesn't God just destroy the demons? He could since they are creatures and thus contingent beings. Perhaps he keeps them around to suffer the consequences of their rebellion. Parallel question: why doesn't God just destroy human evildoers at death?

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  6. Vito B. Caiati Avatar
    Vito B. Caiati

    Bill,
    Your answer as to why God does not destroy the demons is certainly possible. However, is it not true that the cost of keeping them in existence permits the propagation of more evil than if they had been destroyed? Perhaps, God has a reason for allowing such evil, and in particular that which they inflict on the innocent, but it is puzzling.
    As to why God does not destroy evildoers at death, some argue that he does, denying the existence of hell. I am not endorsing this view, but it is seriously proposed.
    I have no answer to either the issue that I raised in my original comment or to the questions that you raised in response, since none of us have access to the possible greater good that God seeks in permitting a world with demons, but I can’t help raising them.
    Vito

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  7. Joe Odegaard Avatar
    Joe Odegaard

    Here is RFK jr in his own words, showing how he beat the Kennedy Curse.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMYo0SNjB5g
    We are witnessing a real sea change in in our country.
    (Big rain and wind storm here; power has been out, which has delayed this post for about 6 hours).

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  8. BV Avatar
    BV

    Joe,
    That is a very rich video just bursting with blog fodder. Thanks! Our man’s understanding of Jung and synchronicity is faulty, but what he says about the pragmatics of faith is not that far from my own position.
    Hot damn! How could anyone be bored in these exciting times? I hope your better half was not too put out of sorts by Trump’s electoral college landslide. He won the pop vote too but I wouldn’t call that win a landslide.

    Reply
  9. john doran Avatar
    john doran

    I understand demonic possession in the manner of the Book of Job: demon’s acquire the “right” to inhabit certain human bodies because God gives them the (temporary) right to do so, presumably, in some instances, for reasons that passeth all understanding.
    That said, there are also, again presumably, more mundane reasons, such as the eventual glorification of God’s sovereign majesty in the event of a successful exorcism, and/or the salutary effects of the spiritual learning gained by the victim from the experience (a la Job).
    As for why God doesn’t destroy devils or sinful humans, the traditional (Thomistic) answer is that it is in the nature of such entities to have everlasting existence, and God does not act contrary to the natures of the things that he has ordained to be thus and so.

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  10. BV Avatar
    BV

    Good comments, John. Talk about synchronicity! Joe above sends us to a video in which RFK, Jr. speaks of Jung and synchronicity. And now you refer us to Job. So I pulled Jung’s ANSWER TO JOB off my shelf, and opened up quite at random (??) to a footnote in which Jung lays into Aquinas and his “nonsensical doctrine of the privatio boni (p. 21, fn 13)
    Very curious inasmuch as earlier this morning I was mulling over Vito’s comment @ 4:49. That mulling caused me to ‘levitate’ in thought up to the logically prior questions about the origin of evil given that the Absolute (God) is all-good.
    I was going to say to Vito that my long-held view is that reason in us is infirm (Cf. Pierre Bayle, et al) and that this is due to its ineluctable discursivity which insures insolubility of the problems of philosophy. This insolubility transfers onto the theological conundra because a theological problem is just a philosophical problem that arises from specifically theological data, the data of revelation, e.g.
    And so your “passeth understanding” remark is apropos: it all tapers off into mystery in the end. But of course one man’s mystery is another man’s bullshit. I go with the former, not the latter.
    Your third paragraph relates to something else I was thinking about this morning, namely, the question whether God could annihilate angels and fallen angels (= demons), including the Big Guy, Joe Satan.
    Here then is a theological puzzle:
    1) All creatures are metaphysically contingent: “possible to be and possible not to be” as Aquinas puts it.
    2) Every demon is a creature. Therefore:
    3) Every demon is metaphysically contingent. Therefore:
    4) No demon is metaphysically necessary.
    5) Every demon is everlasting.
    6) The metaphysically necessary is not the same as the everlasting.
    7) God has the power to annihilate demons. (from 3)
    8) An omnibenevolent God would annihilate any angel the instant he rebels and ‘comes out’ as a demon .
    9) But he doesn’t do this. Therefore:
    10) God as classically conceived by Aquinas at al. does not exist.
    Which premise will you reject?

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  11. john doran Avatar
    john doran

    I would reject both 7 and 8.
    7 goes because God does not have the “power” to undo something that He has already done: if God creates x, and “x is everlasting” is true, then God can’t annihilate x without making it false that “x is everlasting”.
    8 goes because it is alethically equivalent to something like, “an omnibenevolent God would not allow freely choosing beings, freely to choose to do evil”, or perhaps, “an omnipotent god would be able to create a rock heavier than He could lift”.

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  12. BV Avatar
    BV

    John,
    Thanks for the response. I plan to beef up my argument into a separate entry and try to respond to your points.

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  13. Joe Odegaard Avatar
    Joe Odegaard

    I think it is worth remembering that the demons of which we are speaking here, were NOT created as demons; they were created as angels with free will, and of their own will decided to rebel. Demons they are, but as demons, they are self-made. So they are in hell; but no one is required to go there. And we humans on earth have free will also, but what would be the point of having free will, if there were no grave choices to make with our will? Thus the demons running around here to tempt us. The question of the demonic is very tied in with freedom. And in the end, according to the mystic Julian of Norwich, “All will be well.”

    Reply
  14. Hector Avatar
    Hector

    Bill,
    Have you written about Jung anywhere? I’d be very interested to read your assessment of him. I read quite a lot of him a few years ago after ignorantly assuming for years that he was a crank, this view partly the result of a very bad introductory book I had read. Reading his own writings and some of the better exegetical material available I found that much of the popular understanding of his ideas is erroneous or half-understood, though perhaps less so nowadays since Jordan Peterson has disseminated a more accurate reading to a wider audience.
    As for the demon question, your theological puzzle appears to be leaving out at least two crucial issues – is hell eternal? And are demons redeemable? If all things are eventually redeemed as Joe’s quotation of Julian of Norwich could be interpreted as implying, and as various theologians such as Isaac of Nineveh and Johannes Scotus Eriugena have argued that this redemption includes Satan and his demons, doesn’t that alter how we perceive God’s apparent toleration of at least some demonic activity? We could argue something like the following: no creature, however fallen, will ultimately resist God’s redemptive love for all eternity; therefore, even the demons will one day be redeemed, but they cannot be redeemed without being allowed their free will which they abuse by malevolently preying on humans (and animals if we think of the Gadarene swine). So if God destroyed the demons he would destroy the great good which is their eventual return to Him.
    Universalism has its own problems of course.

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  15. BV Avatar
    BV

    Joe,
    Nobody here thinks that demons were created to be demons. Demons are fallen angels.

    Reply
  16. BV Avatar
    BV

    Hector,
    I haven’t published anything here or elsewhere about Jung. But I have read a fair amount of his work. At the moment I am re-reading his Answer to Job. Maybe I’ll blog some of that.
    As for demons, I think you missed the question I was asking. The question I was asking, and Vito was asking too, was how a wholly good God could allow demons to oppress or possess (these are different) children who are just innocently playing around with Ouija boards and such. See the O.P. And then Vito cited Aquinas. But to lay this all out clearly would require a separate post.

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  17. Joe Odegaard Avatar
    Joe Odegaard

    “The world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck.”
    — William James, “The Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902. (page 50).
    Longer; for context:
    “But such a straight identification of religion with any and every form of happiness leaves the essential peculiarity of religious happiness out. The more commonplace happinesses which we get are ‘reliefs,’ occasioned by our momentary escapes from evils either experienced or threatened. But in its most characteristic embodiments, religious happiness is no mere feeling of escape. It cares no longer to escape. It consents to the evil outwardly as a form of sacrifice — inwardly it knows it to be permanently overcome. … In the Louvre there is a picture, by Guido Reni, of St. Michael with his foot on Satan’s neck. The richness of the picture is in large part due to the fiend’s figure being there. The richness of its allegorical meaning also is due to his being there — that is, the world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck.”
    From my rather old and fragile copy. printing of 1903.

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  18. Hector Avatar
    Hector

    Bill,
    I don’t understand how I missed the question. It seems to me that what I was saying was pertinent to your ‘theological puzzle’ and your original point: that you can perceive the makings of an antitheistic argument from the evil of demonic oppression/possession that is not warranted by the innocent behaviour that led to it (assuming this does happen). My basic point was that clarifying the ultimate purpose of demons in the divine plan requires us to understand their place in a wider scheme of salvation, and what that scheme is alters how we perceive the permissibility of a wholly good God allowing those awful things to happen to innocents. I don’t think the question appears in the same light under universalism. I’m saying that the demonic will needs to be understood in the broader context of its purpose for the demon itself too; just as we consider the importance of the free will of a human malefactor. I’m saying that your premises 8 and 9 depend on whether God would be more benevolent in destroying a demonic malefactor if that destroyed its own chances of reconciling with God. Vito suggests that there appears to be something excessive about allowing this supernatural evil in addition to the human and natural evils of the world; I’m arguing that that may be so, but it (partly) depends on whether the demons also have a chance to be redeemed.
    I’m not suggesting any of this resolves this problem in a satisfying way.
    If I am still not understanding something please explain what I’ve missed!

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