The Demons and Spiritual Warfare

The demons are fallen angels, and the tradition treats them with a striking combination of seriousness and sobriety: real, malicious, and to be resisted — but strictly limited, unable to compel the will, without bodies and without foreknowledge, and already conquered by Christ. This file sets out what the demons are and, above all, what they cannot do; introduces the desert tradition’s demonology (deferring its depth to the desert and Philokalic collections); and describes the sober, unsensational spiritual warfare of the Fathers. The toll-houses and the phenomenon of prelest are deferred to the collections that treat them.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

What the Demons Are

The demons are not a second race, nor evil spirits co-eternal with God, nor gods of a dark pantheon; they are fallen angels — creatures made good who turned from God through pride and are fixed in their apostasy (see The Fall of the Angels; John of Damascus, Exact Exposition II.4). This is the first and most liberating thing the tradition says about them, because it dethrones them: they are creatures, finite, conquered, and permitted to act only within limits set by God. The Fathers insist that the demons have no independent kingdom and no power God does not allow; the book of Job, where Satan can touch the righteous man only by God’s permission and within bounds (Job 1–2), is the paradigm. Whatever the demons’ malice, they remain creatures on a leash.

Their nature is the fallen form of the angelic nature described earlier (see The Bodiless Nature): bodiless intelligences, circumscribed and finite, retaining the natural powers of angels — swiftness, subtlety, knowledge of much that is hidden from us — but turned wholly to malice, and stripped of grace. “Their nature,” the Damascene says, they retain; the grace and the glory they lost (John of Damascus, Exact Exposition II.4).

What the Demons Cannot Do

The pastoral heart of the tradition’s demonology is the enumeration of the demons’ limits, and it is here that the Fathers labor most, precisely to disarm fear. Three limits are decisive.

They cannot compel the will. This is the cardinal point. The demons can suggest, tempt, frighten, and deceive, but they cannot force a rational creature to consent to sin; the human will remains free, and no demon can make it choose evil. The whole ascetic tradition rests on this: temptation is a suggestion (prosbolē) that the person is free to accept or reject, and the demon’s power reaches no further than the door of the will (a commonplace of the ascetic Fathers; see Evagrius and the analysis of the logismoi below, and The Demons and the Passions). The demons can knock; they cannot enter without consent.

They have no foreknowledge and cannot read the heart. As fallen angels they share the angelic limit on knowledge (see The Bodiless Nature): foreknowledge belongs to God alone, and the reading of hearts is God’s prerogative. The demons’ much-feared “predictions” are therefore guesswork, inference from what they observe, and sometimes lies, not true knowledge of the future; and their apparent knowledge of our thoughts is inference from our expressions and habits, not a direct sight of the soul (John of Damascus, Exact Exposition II.4, that the demons “have no foreknowledge, but they foretell things sometimes by conjecture, sometimes deceitfully”). This is a great weapon against the fear of them: the demon’s threats and prophecies carry no authority, because it does not know.

They have no bodies of their own and no creative power. The demons cannot create, cannot work true miracles, and have no bodies with which to act directly on the world except as God permits; their “wonders” are illusions, deceits, and the manipulation of what already exists, not genuine creation (John of Damascus, Exact Exposition II.4, that the demons work no true creation but only deceits within God’s permission). They are, in the tradition’s estimate, weaker than they pretend — bullies whose chief weapon is the fear they inspire, which is why the Fathers counsel that the demon exposed and unafraid-of is a demon largely disarmed.

The Desert Tradition — Introduced and Deferred

The richest Orthodox demonology is the ascetic one, forged in the desert, where the monks met the demons as the chief obstacle to prayer. Two sources define it.

St. Antony the Great, in the Life written by St. Athanasius, is the great teacher of demonic combat. Athanasius’s Antony insists on exactly the sobriety described above: the demons are real and malicious, but they are cowards, their apparitions are bluff, they cannot compel, and they flee before the sign of the Cross, the name of Christ, faith, and a fearless soul; their terrors are permitted by God for the athlete’s testing and crown (Athanasius, Life of St. Antony 21–43; trans. NPNF II/4). Antony’s counsel — “do not fear the demons,” discern the spirits, and meet them with prayer and the Cross rather than with fascination — is the charter of Orthodox spiritual warfare (see The Desert Fathers).

Evagrius of Pontus systematized the analysis of the demonic logismoi — the tempting “thoughts” through which the demons wage their war — into the scheme of the eight principal thoughts (gluttony, lust, avarice, sadness, anger, listlessness/akēdia, vainglory, pride) that would become, through St. John Cassian, the Western “seven deadly sins” and, through the Philokalia, a permanent tool of Orthodox ascetic discernment (Evagrius, On the Eight Thoughts / Praktikos; and see The Philokalia). The depth of this analysis — how the thoughts work, how they are discerned, and how they are resisted — belongs to the collections built for it and is deferred there; here it is enough to mark that the Orthodox understanding of the demonic is above all an understanding of the thoughts, and that the battlefield is the interior of the praying heart (see The Philokalia; The Desert Fathers).

Sober, Not Sensational

The tone of the tradition is the opposite of the sensational. The Fathers do not encourage the hunting of demons, the fascinated cataloguing of their works, or the fearful attribution of every misfortune to direct demonic assault; such preoccupation is itself, they warn, a snare, and can tip into the delusion (plani / prelest) that mistakes the imagination’s productions for spiritual reality. That whole danger — spiritual delusion, false visions, the deception of the one who seeks experiences — is treated where it belongs, in the collection on the Jesus Prayer, and is deferred here: the sober rule is to keep to prayer, humility, and the guidance of a spiritual father, and not to seek or fear the demonic directly (see The Jesus Prayer: Prelest and the Need for Guidance). Likewise the demons’ role at the hour of death — the disputed teaching of the aerial “toll-houses” — is treated fully and even-handedly in the eschatology collection and is not re-argued here (see Orthodox Eschatology: The Toll-Houses).

What the tradition puts in place of sensation is confidence in Christ. The demons are a defeated enemy: “having spoiled principalities and powers, he made a shew of them openly, triumphing over them” in the Cross (Colossians 2:15); the strong man is bound (Matthew 12:29); the “prince of this world is cast out” (John 12:31). The Christian’s warfare is real — “we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places” (Ephesians 6:12) — but it is waged in the strength of an already-won victory, with the “whole armour of God” (Ephesians 6:11–17), the name of Jesus, the Cross, prayer, fasting, humility, and the sacraments. The demon’s one real power is over the will that consents to it; guard the will, keep to Christ, and the enemy, for all its malice, cannot prevail (Athanasius, Life of St. Antony; Daniélou, The Angels and Their Mission, 1957, on the demonology of the Fathers).

See Also

• The Fall of the Angels — how the demons came to be, and the fixity of their fall
• The Bodiless Nature — the finitude and lack of foreknowledge the demons share
• The Desert Fathers — Antony and the ascetic demonology, in depth
• The Philokalia — Evagrius and the analysis of the demonic thoughts
• The Jesus Prayer: Prelest and the Need for Guidance — spiritual delusion (deferred)
• Orthodox Eschatology: The Toll-Houses — the demons at the hour of death (deferred)

References

• John of Damascus. An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, II.4. Trans. NPNF II/9. (The demons as fallen angels retaining their nature; no foreknowledge except by conjecture; no true creation; acting only within God’s permission.)
• Athanasius. Life of St. Antony 21–43. Trans. NPNF II/4. (The demons real but cowardly; their apparitions bluff; they cannot compel; they flee the Cross and the name of Christ; “do not fear the demons.”)
• Evagrius of Pontus. Praktikos and On the Eight Thoughts. (The demonic logismoi and the eight principal thoughts — deferred to the Philokalic collection.)
• Scripture: Job 1–2; Matthew 12:24, 29; John 12:31; Colossians 2:15; Ephesians 6:11–17.
• Daniélou, Jean. The Angels and Their Mission According to the Fathers of the Church. Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1957. (The demonology of the Fathers; the demons’ limits.)