On Angels, Demons, and Mind

If you ask a typical modern “normie” if they believe in demons, they will likely respond with laughter. The idea of a goat-footed creature invisibly creeping around wreaking havoc with pitchforks and bad suggestions is ridiculous on its face. That there would be an opposing force of winged angels – also invisible – tasked with thwarting their efforts is doubly ridiculous.

But historically, not believing in spiritual influence is an oddity of modern materialism. Why would something taken for granted throughout global history be abandoned by the modern West? Why would angels and demons seem to us “obviously” absurd?

One reason is our misunderstanding of the word “spiritual.” Modern people misunderstand the concept because they try to think about the invisible realm in visual terms. In other words, they think that when Christians talk about demons, they mean something like the red-skinned goat-man from a Bugs Bunny cartoon or some invisible monster from a horror film. But this is a misleading way to think.

The Creed says that God the Father is the creator of all things “visible and invisible.” This is a distinction often lost in a materialist paradigm, because we think that invisible things should still have some objective existence in material space, including spirits. But spirits are not invisible in the same way that oxygen is invisible. What we mean when we say that they belong to the invisible realm is that they don’t exist as objects “out there;” they don’t by nature take up space or have describable physical features. Even if we try to think of them as a mist or an ether, we are still off-base.

Certainly, even in religious art, angels and demons both are depicted in visual terms: angels as humans-with-wings, demons as malicious beasts. But this does not reflect the nature of angels and demons, only the nature of depiction: If you’re going to paint a picture of a demon, it has to look like something. But that’s very different from saying that spirits by nature have an appearance. They don’t. As René Magritte pointed out with his famous Pipe painting, we have to be conscientious of the difference between representation and reality.

A better way of thinking about spirits is what we mean when we talk about high school or college students having “school spirit.” A disparate group of individuals begins to experience a strange sense of unification: they wear the same colors, sing the same songs, cheer together, laugh together. School spirit is not some outside material object that infests the room. It is immaterial, but manifests in the way that these students act.

Similarly, schoolteachers will tell you that each class of students they teach takes on a character of its own. Each of the individuals in the class brings their own idiosyncrasies, but they all combine into an ineffable overarching dynamic, sometimes fun, or productive, or antagonistic, or downright dysfunctional. Again, the way in which parts come together and interact is what is meant by spirit. This “way” can take on a character of its own, almost a trans-personal personhood.

So while we can see the effects of immaterial spirits in the material world, their native terrain is consciousness itself. A spirit is not a concrete being but a relational one. It comes into material expression when the material world moves or unfolds in accordance with it.

This is why angels are sometimes referred to as intelligences. They order the universe and govern the material motion within it according to purposes, so that nothing is random or happenstance. In the Bible and extra-biblical sources like the Book of Enoch, we see angels put in charge of the movements of the planets, of winds and storms, or of nations. Just as cheering students move according to a kind of school spirit, the movements of the planets unfold according to their governing spirit. And the effects of these spirits were not limited to the heavens, either.

In The Discarded Image, C.S. Lewis explains at length that medieval people, before the dominance of materialism in popular thought, had no trouble connecting the movements of stars and planets with other effects on earth. The appearance of Mars would have a martial influence in human affairs, Venus a venereal one, etc (though there was a firm Christian insistence that astrological influence is not irresistible, because we are still fundamentally free and not victims of fate).

The movement of the planet Mars is one material manifestation of the Martial spirit, but the martial effects we see here on earth – negatives like war and strife, but also positives like discipline and determination – are likewise movements according to that spirit. (Oddly, the appearance and use of iron is likewise associated with the martial spirit.)

The pre-materialist medieval mind didn’t need to come up with some material connection between a planet and human action because causation for him was understood in spiritual terms. Why couldn’t one force of consciousness underlie all these effects simultaneously? The spiritual world is not a clockwork mechanism that clunks forward one step at a time but more like a modern communication network: a web of simultaneous effects that moves at the infinite speed of thought. A spirit can affect both a planet and my neighbor as easily as I can think about both a planet and my neighbor.

This idea is loony from a materialist perspective: What would the gravitational movement of a rock like planet Mars possibly have to do with what happens on earth? All materialist explanations have to be rooted in material causes, which leaves astrology out of bounds.

But materialist assumptions are now being subjected to intense scrutiny in physics and philosophy, even as materialist cultural has led many into a meaning crisis. The modern idea that the material world precedes and gives rise to consciousness is coming off the rails, unable to answer basic questions about how that could possibly work.

Many are beginning to turn to the natural alternative, that consciousness precedes the material world. This not only answers difficult philosophical conundrums, but also offers a genuine escape from the meaning crisis that the secular world faces. The preeminence of consciousness opens the door to meaning and purpose, a moral compass that transcends my own preferences.

This turn is being labeled “re-enchantment” by some. And here again, by acknowledging a pre-material and super-material invisible realm, we are rediscovering the ancient sense of “spirit.” We can escape the silly idea that spirits are invisible cartoons and accept that, in all of our thoughts and actions, we are not atomized individuals but acting always in participation with some spirit – a spirit that is more of a “way” than an object.

It has been said before that, ultimately, there are only two spirits that we can cooperate with: the Holy Spirit, or the other one. And the path of participation in these spirits leads endlessly up or down.

In the stories of the saints we see the upper reaches of the Holy Path, and it looks far richer than our watery ideas of mere moral goodness. By participating in the intent and work of the Holy Spirit with diligent focus, the material world around the saints transforms in surprising ways. Their faces seem to glow; they radiate a sense of peace to those around them; their prayers bring miracles (effects that happen at the speed of thought again); even wild animals are brought back to a Edenic harmony with them.

We may be more familiar with the opposite. We approach the world with an unholy desire to take what we want, what looks good, what will fill us. We are encouraged by culture to do so, to never give up our rights, to dwell always on what we are owed, how we should be treated. When you look at the world with this spirit, it appears differently. Everything and everyone becomes a commodity, our power becomes a self-serving instrument, all other powers become threats. The more we cooperate with this evil spirit, the more power it gains over our selves and our world.

In a way opposite of the saints, those who progress furthest down this path transform the world around them in surprising ways. Their surroundings are always filled with strife – angry even by themselves on the drive to work. Their relationships inevitably shrivel, unable to sustain the weight of their consuming ego. But it gets worse than that.

In 1896, serial killer H.H. Holmes remarked that when he looked into the mirror, he knew that his participation in evil changed even his face. His visage reflected the demonic evil that he always obeyed in his brutal murders. In Devil in the White City, Erik Larson recounts words written by Holmes in prison shortly before his execution: “I am convinced that since my imprisonment I have changed woefully and gruesomely from what I was formerly in feature and figure… My head and face are gradually assuming an elongated shape. I believe fully that I am growing to resemble the devil—that the similitude is almost completed.” (p 383)

Those who would retort that this transformation was likely not “literal” but only in his mind are still missing the point. In a deeper sense than we may appreciate, we see and act within the world always through some spirit. The spirit is not some lens we place over an “objective” outer world – it is the spirit that is actually primary. The pieces of our world congeal into form in participation with it. This is true whether we are looking at news headlines, the difficulty of our own circumstances, or the face in the mirror. And over time, in ways beautiful or terrifying, our world further reflects, further manifests, that spirit.

If two people experience the same traumatic event, it can have a wildly different effect on each of them according to the spirit through which they view it. The event itself does not have an objective existence. The event truly “is” only material a spirit can use to create our reality. We can tune into a spirit that tells a story of bitterness and despair, and the traumatic memory will fall into line with that image. Or we can tune into a spirit that tells a story of overcoming difficulty, of forgiveness and bright hope for the future. These two people effectively live in different worlds, and their lives will continue to conform to the spirit that they give ear to. This is not a “technique,” but something that we already do, whether we realize it or not.

So we can let go of our embarrassment of talking about spirits. Appreciating their reality is both ancient and now cutting edge. It has always been the Christian perspective that human consciousness is a unique nexus between the invisible and visible worlds – that our thoughts converse with angels or demons, but then become manifest in a material world of pleasure and pain, food and hunger, friend and enemy, life and death. The demonic isn’t something that breaks through only in a haunting or a horror film. It is there with every selfish thought, every bit of grudge or gossip.

This is why, if we want to make the world a better place, if we are deeply concerned with all the evil in the world, the most important thing we can do is participate with the highest possible spirit. It is a path that can transform our communities, our families, our homes, even our faces.