Europe's inner demons

As for the present habitat of the demons, there was never, in those centuries, any doubt about that. Whereas the angels dwelt in the highest heaven, near the throne of God, the demons were confined to the dark air immediately above the earth. This is the original meaning of Paul's famous phrase about “spiritual wickedness in high places”,⁽²⁵⁾ and the Fathers shared his view. Augustine, for instance, maintained that “the Devil was expelled, along with his angels, from the lofty abode of the angels, and was cast into darkness, that is to say into our atmosphere, as into a prison”.⁽²⁶⁾ It was also agreed that, since angels possessed ethereal bodies, composed of air and light, demons must be similarly equipped. According to Augustine, these ethereal bodies give demons extraordinary powers of perception and enable them to transport themselves through the air with extraordinary speed.

⁽²⁷⁾

From their airy habitat Satan and his demons wage incessant war upon the Christians. That is how Paul imagines them;⁽²⁸⁾ and the Fathers expatiate at length on the various ways in which they persecute the new faith and its adherents. For the Devil, who never knows peace, cannot leave men in peace;⁽²⁹⁾

together with his demons he causes both the sickness of individuals⁽³⁰⁾ and collective disasters such as drought, bad harvests, epidemics amongst men and beasts.⁽³¹⁾ Moreover the demons have now devised new ways to afflict the Church. On the one hand they inspire Roman officialdom to persecute Christians,

⁽³²⁾ and on the other hand they seduce Christians to abandon the true faith, to fall into schism and heresy.⁽³³⁾ St Cyprian even holds that but for the activity of devils there would be no heresies or schisms at all.⁽³⁴⁾

For the Fathers, as for Paul, the demons are also present in the deities of the ancient world. As they see it, if a Christian ventures to criticize new practices or beliefs, after they have received the official sanction of the Church, this must be instigated by a pagan deity, operating as a demon. When a monk called Vigilantius writes against the growing cult of the bones of the martyrs, Jerome retorts: “The unclean spirit who makes you write these things has often been tormented by this humble dust (of the bones of the martyrs). . Here is my advice to you. Go into the basilicas of the martyrs, and you will be cured. Then you will confess, what you now deny, that it is Mercury who speak through the mouth of Vigilantius.”⁽³⁵⁾ The surest proof of the truth of Christianity lies in the ability of Christians to exorcize demons from the human beings whom they have possessed; for each such exorcism represents a victory of Christ over a pagan deity. This is the view of Tertullian and Cyprian early in the third century,⁽³⁶⁾ and it is still the view of Sulpicius Severus in his life of St Martin of Tours, written early in the fifth century: “Each time Martin came to the church, the demoniacs who were there howled and trembled as criminals do when the judge arrives. . When Martin exorcized the demons. . the wretched demons expressed in various ways the constraint they were under. . One would admit he was Jupiter, the other Mercury.”⁽³⁷⁾

Satan’s greatest offence, in fact, lay in the persistence of the pagan religion itself; for all who adhered to it were in effect worshipping demons. Such an interpretation of the ritual of Graeco-Roman religion is like a foretaste of those fantasies of Satan-worship which medieval clerics were to weave around the activities of dissenting sects, a thousand years later.