Europe's inner demons

So far as Aquinas is concerned, the task is already done. More than thirty years ago another American scholar, Charles Edward Hopkin, produced an excellent thesis entitled The share of Thomas Aquinas in the growth of the witchcraft delusion.⁽²²⁾ If this had ever been published, Burr’s dictum would no doubt enjoy less credence; for Hopkin found that the vast work of “the angelic doctor” has no place for anything remotely resembling witches, as witches were imagined at the time of the great witch-hunt.

Admittedly, Aquinas not only accepts that demons exist, he accepts that they can operate as incubi and succubi, i.e. that a demon can take on the form of a man or a woman, and in that form have sexual intercourse with a human being. But then, this was very generally believed, and always had been. Augustine was familiar with the idea eight centuries earlier, and both Augustine and Aquinas give, as their reason for taking it seriously, the general consensus of popular opinion. This is not the place to enquire why the belief in incubi

and succubi was so widespread (a matter to be considered in a later chapter). The point is, rather, that Aquinas never connects incubi or

succubi with maleficium. Nowhere does he even hint that, by mating with a demon, a woman can acquire magical powers, or herself become a semi-demonic being.

To discover what Aquinas thought about magic one has to look at quite different parts of his work; and what emerges then is that for him magic means almost exclusively ritual or ceremonial magic. Here and there he mentions old women who can harm people, especially children, by the evil eye; but these are brief references. Conjuration of demons is what really concerns him. He confronts this new aberration as a theologian, intent on defining its theological implications. In this task of interpretation he draws on a tradition that goes back to Augustine, and beyond Augustine to the Bible itself.

Magicians, says Aquinas, invoke demons in a supplicating manner, as though addressing superiors; yet when they come, they give them orders, as though addressing inferiors — thereby showing that they are deceived as to their own powers. Not that Aquinas doubts that the demons come — if not in the sense of becoming visible, then at least in the sense of answering questions; he even remarks that those verbal replies cannot be imaginary, since they are heard by all within earshot. But why do they come? — Aquinas insists that no demon can really be coerced by a magician; it only pretends to be coerced, for reasons of its own. The formulae and apparatus used by the magician have no power in themselves, but they are pleasing to demons as signs of reverence. In appearing to comply with a magician’s command, a demon is deceiving the magician, who in reality is in a position of subjection. By this show of obedience the demon leads the magician ever deeper into sin; and that is wholly in accord with a demon’s nature and desires.⁽²³⁾

The particular practices which Aquinas attributes to magicians have nothing at all to do with the monstrous deeds that were later to be ascribed to witches. Indeed, in this respect he understates. He says not a word about sacrifices, whether of animals or of the flesh of corpses, and has little to say about maleficium. He recognizes that demons can make a man impotent with his wife, but neither that nor any other form of maleficium much concerns him. His interest is concentrated almost entirely on the practice of divination, i.e. foretelling the future. He insists that any attempt to foretell the future, beyond what can be foreseen by human reason or what has been revealed by God, is sinful. And the reason why it is sinful is that it involves dealing with a demon. It is one example — the commonest — of what Aquinas calls a “pact”.

For Aquinas, any human being who accepts help from a demon, in the hope of accomplishing something which transcends the powers of nature, has entered into a pact with that demon. Such a pact may be either explicit or tacit. It is explicit when the human operator invokes the demon’s help — and that is so whether the demon responds or not; in other words, the act of conjuration involves an explicit pact. A tacit pact is involved when, without conjuration, a human being performs an act with a view to some effect which cannot naturally follow, and which is not to be expected, either, from the intervention of God.⁽²⁴⁾