In the first article, we considered how angels and demons act upon the material world and how their spiritual existence differs from both human life in time and the eternity of God. We now turn from their influence upon the world around us to their influence within us, where distinguishing imagination from intellect, passion from will, and temptation from consent is essential to understanding both their power and our freedom.
Can Angels and Demons Compel Us to Act?
The more delicate question concerns what angels can do within us. Here Aquinas begins from a truth about the human person that modern thought sometimes obscures: we are neither pure spirits nor merely bodies. We are embodied rational creatures. Our intellectual life ordinarily begins through sensation. We see, hear, remember, imagine, feel attraction or aversion, and then judge and choose.
Because imagination and the passions are bound up with our embodied condition, angelic creatures may act upon them indirectly. St. Thomas is explicit: “both a good and a bad angel by their own natural power can move the human imagination” (ST I, q. 111, a. 3). A good angel may therefore dispose the imaginative and sensitive powers toward what is true and good, while a demon can exploit the same vulnerable terrain, stirring images and passions in ways calculated to draw us toward an apparent good. But this influence has a decisive limit. Although an angel can arouse the passions and thereby incline the will, Thomas insists that the will “ever remains free to consent to, or to resist, the passion” (ST I, q. 111, a. 2). The demon can tempt; he cannot turn temptation into consent.
Aquinas treats this explicitly when asking whether the devil can induce a person to sin of necessity. His answer could hardly be clearer: the devil “can nowise compel man to sin” (ST I-II, q. 80, a. 3). He can disturb the imagination, stir the sensitive appetite, and make an apparent good seem unusually compelling; but where reason remains free, the person remains capable of resisting. If reason is altogether impeded—as Thomas notes can occur in an extraordinary case such as possession—the resulting act is not thereby imputed to the person as sin.
This distinction has profound pastoral importance. A person can experience a horrifying thought without desiring it. Sin requires consent. This is why “the devil made me do it,” amusing as the phrase may be, is bad moral theology. A demon may tempt me to do something. He may deceive me regarding the apparent good involved. He may exploit weaknesses I have cultivated through years of bad habits. But my morally responsible act remains mine.
Can Demons Read Our Minds?
The distinction also helps answer another question I encountered repeatedly in Malaysia: Can demons read our minds? Not as God does. God knows the human heart because He is the Creator and sustaining cause of the human person. No creature possesses that intimacy of knowledge.
Aquinas makes the distinction carefully. A secret thought may be known through its effects, and in that sense an angel can infer far more than we can. But thoughts insofar as they remain within the intellect, and affections insofar as they remain within the will, are known directly to God alone (ST I, q. 57, a. 4).
Yet it would be a mistake to conclude from this that demons know very little about us. They possess angelic intelligence. They observe, infer, and notice patterns. Human beings do this imperfectly all the time. A mother knows from a child’s face that something is wrong. A confessor begins to recognize patterns in a penitent’s spiritual life. A skilled interrogator notices hesitation. A friend knows what remark will provoke laughter—and what remark will wound.
Now imagine the observational power of an intelligence superior to our own and possessing long experience of human behavior. A demon need not read the depths of the soul directly in order to know which temptations have repeatedly succeeded. He watches what makes us angry. He sees what attracts our attention. He notices which injuries we refuse to forgive. He observes the habits we reinforce. He can therefore make remarkably intelligent inferences without possessing divine omniscience.
And this leads to a deeper insight into temptation itself. Evil rarely approaches us simply as evil. The will moves toward what appears good. Temptation therefore ordinarily works by detaching a genuine but partial good from the larger order that gives it meaning. Pleasure is good. But pleasure detached from love becomes destructive. Freedom is good. But freedom detached from truth turns against the person who exercises it. Justice is good. But justice separated from mercy can become vindictiveness. Zeal is good. But zeal severed from charity can become cruelty. Identity is good. But identity detached from nature and communion can close the person within the self.
The demonic strategy is therefore often one of fragmentation. Things meant to exist together are forced apart. Imagination is set against reason, passion against prudence, freedom against truth, justice against mercy, the individual against communion. The temptation rarely begins with the words “Choose evil.” It begins much more seductively: “Take this good thing, but take it without the order that would make it truly good.”
In this sense the ordinary spiritual battle is considerably less theatrical than popular culture suggests. The most important demonic work may have nothing outwardly extraordinary about it. A resentment carefully fed for ten years may be spiritually more devastating than a spectacular phenomenon that lasts ten minutes.
Responsibility for Sin
This is also why the Church’s traditional language of the world, the flesh, and the devil remains so balanced. Not every temptation comes immediately from a demon. “The flesh” does not mean that the body is evil. It names instead the wounded condition of human nature in which appetite and reason are no longer perfectly ordered. “The world” names the web of social pressures, cultural habits, false values, and structures that can make vice appear normal and virtue strange. The devil can exploit both, but neither requires his direct intervention at every moment.
Sometimes we sin simply because we have trained ourselves to sin. This is not a reduction of spiritual warfare. It is a protection against superstition. Blaming the devil for everything can become another way of refusing responsibility for anything. The same sobriety should govern our approach to extraordinary demonic phenomena. The Church recognizes the possibility of severe forms of demonic activity customarily described with terms such as oppression, obsession, or possession. But alleged cases demand discernment, and that discernment includes appropriate medical and psychological evaluation.
There is nothing un-Catholic about this. Catholicism has never required us to choose between natural and spiritual causality as though admitting one automatically excluded the other. Grace does not destroy nature. Nor does the possibility of spiritual causality permit us to ignore natural explanations.
Even in possession, the demon does not become the soul of the person. The person remains the person. The spiritual faculties remain his. A demon may exercise extraordinary influence over bodily, imaginative, or sensitive powers, but moral responsibility continues to depend upon knowledge and consent.
Here the discussion should return to the good angels, because an account of angelic activity that becomes fascinated principally with demons has already lost its center. The guardian angels whom the Church celebrates in October serve precisely within this order of divine Providence. Aquinas explains that because human knowledge and affection can fail from the good in many ways, angels are given to us “in order to regulate them and move them to good” (ST I, q. 113, a. 1). Their guardianship does not abolish freedom; it assists freedom toward its proper good.
Their influence respects human freedom rather than bypassing it. Good angels do not replace prudence, conscience, or sacramental grace, nor do they compel repentance or faith. Their ministry is ordered toward truth, humility, charity, peace, and the proper harmony of the person under God. This gives us a useful criterion of discernment: whatever fosters fascination with secret knowledge, vanity over extraordinary experiences, or a sense of spiritual superiority is already moving away from the character of genuine angelic ministry. The angel serves; he does not draw attention to himself. He points beyond himself and belongs entirely to the order of Providence.
Satan Is Not a God
This brings us to the truth with which every Christian treatment of demons should end. Satan is not a rival god, nor does he possess anything resembling divine omnipotence, omniscience, or omnipresence. He cannot create, he cannot know the future as God knows it, and he cannot compel the human will. His power is real, but creaturely and limited; his rebellion is radical, but it never frees him from dependence upon the Creator whose order he resists. He remains a fallen creature operating within the limits of divine Providence.
The Gospels understand this perfectly. The demons may resist Christ morally, but they never appear as His metaphysical equals. They recognize His authority, recoil before it, and finally obey His command. Christian spiritual warfare therefore unfolds entirely within the already established sovereignty of God.
Perhaps this is what I found most useful when the seminarians in Kuching kept pressing me with their questions. We began by asking what demons could do, but Aquinas kept directing us toward the more important question: what can they not do? They cannot abolish nature, overturn Providence, or become gods. Nor can they take from us the terrible and magnificent responsibility of being free. The Christian should therefore neither mock the spiritual world nor fear it irrationally, but seek to understand it with sobriety and faith. And once we understand its proper limits, we should remember that every angel, every demon, every human act, every temptation, and every victory takes place within a creation whose first and final word belongs not to the devil, but to God.
Image from Wikimedia Commons
