The words of the New Testament and of early Church Fathers are familiar to Christians. We hear the words repeated in liturgy and prayer. If we have some further education we may be familiar with some of their theology or hagiography. We consider their words to be instructive, and in some sense authoritative. In many ways, the life of the ancient Christian must have been very similar to ours. They needed to eat and drink, support a family, deal with illness and death, and relate to other people. They prayed, sang, danced, produced works of art, built roads, and paid taxes. Yet the world view of the Scripture and the early church often seems distant and foreign. Many miraculous healings and happenings seem to us to strain credibility. Our treasured New Testament is filled with healings, miracles, visions, appearances of the dead, and demon possession. Other literature of the early Church is just as strange. Ascetics fast for longer than seems plausible to us, speak with demons and angels, and do such strange acts as living atop pillars. The death-defying tortures of martyrs are described in grisly detail, yet the martyr seems to suffer not the slightest inconvenience.
Contemporary readers often choose to ignore or downplay the stranger parts of Christian literature. Patristic theologians focus on the doctrinal discussions of the Fathers rather than their more bizarre accounts of miracles and the supernatural. Other readers may seek to find the “real” meaning. A given story of a miraculous healing is read as “really” about faith in Christ, or some other abstraction more plausible to us. Perhaps a great number of contemporary readers dismiss the stories and associated religion altogether. A fourth group may piously read the narratives as literal and keep a lookout for demons, angels, and healings at every opportunity.
The worldview of the early Christians is often not fully understood or taken into account. To understand it, we might learn from the discipline of anthropology, whose practitioners are in a similar position to so-called primitive cultures they study as we are to the early Church. In one study of the mythology of Native North American religion, the Robin and Tonia Riddington write, “Mythical cosmologies are not the attempt of savages to explain in fantasy where empirical knowledge is absent, but are rather the opposite—statements in allegorical form about knowledge of the interrelations between what we would call natural (objective), psychic (psychological), and cultural (learned adaptational) aspects of reality.”
[1] Mythic narrative, or if you must, stories of the supernatural, conveys knowledge, not fantasy. It stands at the intersection of three things: sensory observation of the world, inner psychological experience, and social expression. Presumably, human sensory perception, the phenomena they observe, and human emotions are more or less the same as they always have been. The learned response and expression of those things is what differs. In order to understand the strange stories of the early Christians, it is helpful to listen respectfully and sympathetically to the mythic narratives they produced.
One aspect of early Christianity that is not well understood is the widespread belief in demons and other malevolent spiritual beings. There are a number of familiar yet strange Gospel stories of Jesus casting out demons, and less-familiar discussion of “principalities” and “spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places” in the writings of Paul.
Demons also play a prominent role in the literature that arose from what is called early monasticism. Men and women began to move into wilderness areas of Egypt and Palestine in the third and fourth centuries to devote themselves more fully to Christian practice. They prayed, fasted, performed works of mercy, and tried to cultivate the Christian virtues. Broadly speaking, two forms of literature arose from this movement: narrative and exposition. Evil spirits appear in both types of writing. In one story about Macarius the Great, the saint sees Satan walking to the desert with a number of small flasks. Each flask contained “food for the brethren to taste.” Satan explains, “…if a brother does not like one sort of food, I offer him another, and if he does not like the second any better, I offer him a third; and of all these varieties he will like one at least.”
[2] As the narrative continues, we find that Satan is seen as the source of a particular monk’s sexual temptation, to use our term for it. As the story continues, Macarius suggests certain practices that will relieve the monk of that temptation. In this example, language of the demons is not mere superstition, but provides a way to deal with a specific moral or psychological problem, sexual temptation.
In expository literature, demons and evil spirits are also seen, as in the following example by Evagrius.
"All thoughts inspired by the demons produce within us conceptions of sensory objects; and in this way the intellect, with such conceptions imprinted on it, bears the forms of these objects within itself. So by recognizing the object presented to it, the intellect knows which demon is approaching. For example, if the face of a person who has done me harm or insulted me appears in my mind, I recognize the demon of rancor approaching… [A]ll thoughts producing anger or desire in a way that is contrary to nature are caused by demons. Thus it cannot receive the vision of God."
[3]
This example describes a common psychological phenomenon. Within a person’s thoughts a memory is produced of someone who has wronged him appears, and anger is rekindled. We might call this resentment. Evagrius suggests that the initial remembering of the old enemy is produced not by the some part of the person’s mind but by an external cause: “the demon of rancor.” The person responds to the thought or image of the old enemy and is thereby culpable for that anger, but the provocation or temptation to anger is produced by a demon. The initial cause of this evil is external and unnatural to humankind. Moreover, even if the provocation does not produce angry behavior, the attachment to anger itself is enough to hinder the “vision of God.”
Within the mythic cosmology that was widespread in the ancient Mediterranean, those early desert Christians explored the extremities of human psychology and adopted practices and rituals in order to transform and heal those who practiced them. Our Christianity is poorer if we neglect the treasure that these saints left for us. Yet due to the difference in world view, this literature is often neglected, misunderstood, or used for a source of proof texts.
To learn from the desert fathers we have to listen carefully to what they have to say about the healing of the human soul, with all due care to historical and theological method. Hopefully, we can communicate that message to the contemporary reader who does not share the worldview of the ancient Mediterranean so that we may share the fruits of the spirit from those who have labored for them in the desert.
[1] Robin and Tonia Ridington. "The Inner Eye of Shamanism and Totemism." Tedlock, Dennis Tedlock and Barbara, eds. Teachings from the American Earth: Indian Religion and Philosophy. (New York: Liveright, 1975), p. 191.
[2] Benedicta Ward. Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1975, p. 126.
[3] Evagrios Pontikos. “Texts on Discrimination in respect of Passions and Thoughts” in St. Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain and St. Makarios of Corinth, eds., The Philokalia, G.E.H. Palmer, et. al., trans. and ed., London: Faber and Faber, 1979, pp. 38-39.
.jpg)
