by Неизвестный
So also his creatures, the spirits, were made by him and ordained by him to be in an intimate relationship with matter-place, time, objects, humans. The destiny, powers, personal interest of these spirits, their very being, in its deepest instincts and ramifications were and will remain forever intimately focused on this human universe, on all this universe contains, and—above all—on Jesus as the source of that universe's meaning.
Christian tradition thus assigns to these spirits the role of intermediaries. They were and are bodiless-like God. They were and are creatures-like humans. In the piecemeal working out of God's overall decision through time and space, and in the individual minds and hearts of billions of human beings surrounded by material things, the spirits were given functions at which we can only guess. These functions were related to the human universe and to God's decision to become a member of that universe.
At this point of our understanding about spirit, we are somewhat helped by side-comments of Jesus. He spoke once or twice rather mysteriously but quite succinctly about the important personage among those created spirits who revolted, Lucifer.
Rebutting those who harassed him on the streets of Jerusalem and who reviled him as an evil man, Jesus said fiercely: “You belong to your father, Satan. And you are eager to gratify the appetites which are your father's. He, from the beginning, was a murderer. And, as for truth, he has never taken his stand on it. When he utters falsehood, he is only doing what is natural to him. He is all false. And it was he who gave birth to falsehood [emphasis mine].”
On the lips of a Jew of that period, the term “murderer” did not have the legalistic meaning we have attached to it. The word had more the connotation of our “blasphemy” or “desecration.”
The second aspect of Lucifer's rebellion, Jesus adds, was one of falsehood. Again, on the lips of Jesus, this word referred not so much to lying by words, to fibbing, as to what we call “pretense,” “deception,” “false claims.”
The emphasis of Jesus is quite clear. Lucifer was and is the originator of all blasphemy and deception in the universe of spirit which God had created—to the point that all those who practice deception and who commit the ultimate blasphemy are merely reproducing Lucifer's appetites for falsehood and blasphemy. In some mysterious way they share in and augment Lucifer's falsehood and blasphemy. “You belong to your father, Satan.”
Jesus adds a few more details. “From the beginning” seems to indicate that the rebellion was instantaneous with the creation of Lucifer's intelligence. There never was a fraction of his existence when Lucifer opted for God. Furthermore, Lucifer is “all false.” It is “natural” for him to deceive and blaspheme. These are stark and simply effective terms used by Jesus to describe total evil. Not merely a totally evil being, but a being who is the source of all evil in the world of mankind.
From these few details we can only guess at the nature of Lucifer's rebellion in which he was joined by unnumbered other spirits. It involved blasphemy and deception. It concerned Jesus as God and as the savior of mankind; and it concerned men and women as participants in the fullness of Jesus' humanness.
Did Lucifer falsely claim to be higher, more noble than the man Jesus? And, in doing so, did he blaspheme by claiming that he, Lucifer, a bodiless spirit, the supremest angel, should be regarded as higher than Jesus, who, like all humans, was part spirit, part matter? He, an angel, worship a mewling baby at Bethlehem and a bleeding half-animal groaning in death throes on Calvary?
Or did Lucifer revolt because he and the other angels were destined to help elevate human beings beyond the merely material and human, beyond even the status of the angels, right to the status of sharing God's life?
Or did Lucifer reject God's decision integrally? That is to say: did he reject God's decision to ordain and relate everything-God's own being and the spirits God created—to a human universe? And, if so, was this because Lucifer rejected the prime trait of that decision, a universe of beings—humans—who would need compassion, and mercy and help and sustainment? The spirits were to be servants of that compassion and instruments of that help to an unmerited glory for those creatures.
Or did Lucifer, with angelic intelligence, foresee a destiny of human beings yet hidden from our human eyes—that after eons of development, when outer space is colonized in billions of galaxies, mankind will progress and evolve in spirit to a status we now know nothing of, and in which men and women will enjoy a freedom from matter but still be able to enjoy the beauty of this material world?
Jealousy? Ambition? Pride? Scorn? We can only surmise.
Whatever Lucifer did, he blasphemed against God's unique divinity, and he made false claims. Punishment was immediate. Jesus, in an overt reference to his personal memories of this revolt, spoke of that one quick, terrible moment of degradation and punishment of Lucifer and of those spirits who followed his lead. Jesus said: “I saw Lucifer falling like lightning from heaven.” Again, in the style of Jesus, we have a stark evocation of the sudden flash of Lucifer's brilliant intelligence in the clean skies of creation's dawn; then the moment-long glare of Lucifer's claimed glory; and, finally, the immediate humiliation of utter defeat and rejection by God, as Lucifer plummeted from the clarity and brightness of love and changeless beauty down past the rim of happiness into the pit of eternal exile from all good and all holiness.
In this revolt and punishment, the natural orientation of Lucifer and of those spirits who were part of his rebellion remained. They were by their very essence in intimate relation with the human universe. They were powerless to free themselves of it. Their powers of will and intelligence remained. Only now, those wills and intelligences were twisted by revolt and their unchangeable state as the condemned ones. Their love for God, for Jesus, and therefore for mankind became hate. Their need to move in a human universe and to be in relationship with matter remained; but it now became a need to disrupt, to soil, to destroy, to make ugly, to deform.
Their knowledge of truth became solely the means for an exercise in distorting the truth. Their reverence became mockery and contempt. Their lovely desires became gross threats. All their light became a confusing darkness. And their primordial destiny to be the helpers of Jesus became a living and baleful hate of him, of his love, of his salvation, and of those who belong to him.
They were, in other words, conditioned through and through by the diabolic “twist,” that peculiar upside-down, disjointed, askew existence, covered in deception and falsity, which we always detect in the morally evil person, in the war-filled world of a Michael Strong, and in the frightful topsy-turvy world of every possessed human being.
The nearest we can come to gauging the degree of Lucifer's ugliness is in the overtones of the totally insane who laugh all day uproariously at their own dreadful aberrations-their spasmic violence, their treasured filth, their self-mutilation. We pity them as out of control, as beside themselves, as unconscious of their tragedy. But in them and in every grin of our own Schadenfreude we can detect an echo of Lucifer's very own accents, his signature, that uproarious burst of reasonless laughter mocking his own self-delusive and deliberately chosen state of absolute hate.
“Good” and “evil” as applied only to human beings, therefore, must bring us into direct, daily, practical relationship with the influence of Jesus and the influence of Lucifer. Furthermore, “good” and “evil” as applied only to human beings must bring us into direct recognition of our own individual wills. For whatever the invitations offered by Jesus, whatever the blandishments offered by Lucifer, we each make our choices, even as Jesus, even as Lucifer. We choose.
Much of what we know from our direct experience with evil spirits dovetails with what we would expect, based upon what we know or can glean of their origin.
The most notable and, for many modern minds, contradictory aspect of such spirits is that each spirit seems to be a personal and intelligent being, but that it has no physical existence. It is bodiless. This is a constant and primary datum of Christian
belief about such spirits and is borne out by evidence from exorcisms.
In modern psychology the terms “personality” and “person” have been tied to psychophysical consciousness. “Personality” is taken to be a complex of psychophysical acts-emoting, willing, desiring, thinking, imagining, remembering—and the exterior actions that are motivated or colored by such “internal” acts. All of them can be quantified. A “person” is somebody with a more or less consistent and definable complex of such acts and actions.
Thus, a “person” of unbalanced “personality” is one in whom that complex of acts and actions lacks the ordinarily observed and socially acceptable type, tension, and frequency. Of course, there is no room in our minds for any consideration of bodiless personal spirits if we accept this modern terminology as correct and all-inclusive. For “person” and “personality,” in this terminology, are material, fractionated, dimensional, measurable, and finally perishable.
The classical Christian thought and belief about “person” and “personality” is very different. And it echoes the natural persuasion of most men and women.
“Person” in Christian thought is a spirit. As a spirit, it is imperishable and indestructible. It can will and think. It is freely responsible for what it thinks and wills and does. And it is capable of self-awareness. In Christian thought, “personality” is another word for the total individuality of the person. The diminution or reduction of this internal and self-aware center of responsibility of the self to a tidy bundle of arbitrary divisions-something called “thinking” and something called “willing” and something else called “acting,” etc. etc.—is itself insanity. For these concepts of “person” and “personality” are applied to God and to bodiless spirits as well as to humans.
In our human condition the individual and personal spirit is destined to exercise its willing and thinking and all its power by means of psychophysical activity, rarely by passing that quantifiable arena.
The evil spirits in question are not personal in that sense. Being bodiless, their individual identities do not depend on a bodily identity. Christian teaching is that they think, will, act, and are self-aware and exercise their power purely, simply, and directly without the use of the psychophysical.
Experiences with evil spirits in exorcisms bear this out. In virtually every exorcism, at a crucial point, the possessing spirit will refer to itself interchangeably as “I” and “we,” and as easily refer to “my” and “our.” “I'm taking him.” “We are as strong as death.” “Fool! We're all the same.” “There's only one of us.” All this was hurled at Michael Strong by the one spirit at Puh Chi in Nanking—“I,” “me,” “all,” “one,” “us.” Individuality in any human or even remotely bodily sense is not operative here.
The fact that the spirits described in the exorcisms of this book finally responded to names (“Girl-Fixer,” “Smiler,” “Tortoise,” etc.) is no indication of separate identity. They are names assumed apparently in view of the means or the strategy used by the spirit as it possessed the person in question. When Father Mark pressed Ponto's “superior” for its name, the response was “We are all of the Kingdom.” “No man can know the name.” When Mark insisted, the spirit replied: “Multus, Magnum, Gross, Grosser, Grossest. Several times. Seventy-seven legions.” The names they give are clearly ad hoc names and, for all we know, may change for the same spirit in relation to different victims. What the exorcist is after in pushing for such names is not personal identity, but a name the spirit will respond to. “In Jesus' name, what name will you obey?” was Mark's crucial question in this regard.
Nevertheless, the behavior of spirits, in endless variations, in exorcism after exorcism, does suggest some coagulating common identity of a kind that leaves evil spirits distinct in their personalities while unified and, indeed, one in their responsibilities and intentions.
Somehow closely linked to this identity of spirits and contributing to it is the obvious gradation of intelligence that one observes in different possessing spirits. Jamsie's “familiar,” Uncle Ponto, for example, was clearly of a lesser intelligence than Tortoise, who possessed Carl, or then Smiler who held Marianne captive. Ponto's gimmicks never went beyond the grotesquely comic. He never showed the subtlety of Smiler or the sophistication of Tortoise. Each of these used clever arguments and intricate games to further their purposes and in general displayed a penetration of mind absent in Ponto.
Yet, while Ponto was deferential in the extreme in front of his “superiors,” Girl-Fixer, who possessed Richard/Rita, and Mr. Natch, who possessed the two priests, David and Yves, also showed a marked deference to “superiors.”
At one point in the exorcism of Marianne, when Smiler was losing the battle, Father Peter began to feel the change in level of intelligence of his enemy, as “another” (to use our human terminology of separateness) spirit came to Smiler's aid in the final attack on Peter. Father Gerald felt the opposite in his exorcism of Richard/Rita. As it became clearer that Gerald was going to be successful and that the end of the battle was near, Gerald felt that some strand of evil had faded and that he was suddenly dealing with a lesser intelligence.
In this most intimate of all confrontations, with mind pitted directly against mind, will against will, a sudden shift in the intelligence of one's adversary is unmistakable—more so than in a confrontation so unsubtle that words are needed.
This difference of spirits from one another on the basis of intelligence seems to culminate in the servile, almost wooden allegiance of all to “the Lord of All Knowledge,” as Tortoise called him. “Those who accepted, those who accept the Claimant, have his will,” Uncle Ponto's superior, Multus, told Father Mark. “Only the will. The will of the Kingdom. The will of the will of the will of the will of the will.”
This servility and allegiance to Lucifer among evil spirits is matched in constancy and overshadowed in intensity only by their craven fear of and hatred for Jesus, freely and undisguisedly displayed at any mention of his name or at the sight of objects and people associated with Jesus.
A possessing spirit of whatever skill and intelligence will pronounce the name of its leader repeatedly, and the sense one has is of obedience, fear, and recognition of a superiority that will not be questioned. But no evil spirit seems able to bring itself to pronounce the name of Jesus. “The Other,” he will be called, or “The Latter,” or “That Person,” or “The Unmentionable,” or any of a whole dark litany of such names.
Nor will an evil spirit hear the name of Jesus without protesting. Knowledge of this fact can be a principal weapon for the exorcist, for the evil spirit will often be forced to answer questions or tell its “name” out of an obvious desire not to have to hear again the phrase of total faith, “In the name of Jesus,” from the lips of the exorcist.
The curious quality of unity, almost a coagulation, which one sometimes feels can be glimpsed in these areas of personality and intelligence of evil spirits, also gives us an interesting perspective on another constant among spirits-their attachment to place.
Again, it is clear from experience that possessing spirits are intent on finding a “home” (as Ponto put it simplistically) in the possessed person. But it is not a question of one lonely and homeless spirit. For the possessing spirit, the “home” or person belongs to all the “family” of that spirit—the coagulated mob of evil spirits, headed and governed by the shadowy leader, “The Claimant.” It is a macabre version of “Mi casa, su casa” hospitality, and was mirrored long ago on the lips of Jesus when he told of “the unclean spirit which has possessed a man and then goes out of him, walks about the desert looking for a resting place, and finds none; and it says: 'I will go back to my own dwelling from which I came out.' And it comes back. . . and brings in seven more other spirits more wicked than itself to bear it company; and together they enter in and settle down there.” Seven is the biblical formula for any multitude.
We will always have intense intellectual difficulty understanding how we c
an talk of personality or intelligence when there is no physical brain, or of hearing a voice when there is no throat to produce that voice, or of seeing a flying plate when there is no hand to throw it and sustain it in midair. But these are problems that will be doubly perplexing so long as the modern mind-set holds sway with its insistence on the materiality of all that exists.
All in all, for example, it is very bothersome that we cannot speak of these spirits as having gender, sexuality, or individuality like that of human beings. Individuality alone is a terrible problem for the computer society. Identity for us is always linked to physical separateness. If we say there are 217 million Americans, we mean 217 separate and therefore distinct bodies.
But, from all we know, it seems obvious that trying to number or count spirits on the basis of physical separateness is not going to get us very far. And our denying that spirits exist because they literally will not “stand up and be counted” does not seem to impress them.
Even when we get past all those difficulties and can begin to think about the identities of these bodiless creatures, there is another problem. We tend to think all the bizarre and violent happenings that occur at exorcisms are somehow the evil spirit. In our understandable fascination with the screams and the flying objects, with the smells, the tearing wallpaper, and the banging doors, our tendency is to mistake those events for the spirit itself. That is a little like mistaking the baseball for the pitcher.
Better clues to the identity of individual spirits seem to be based and rooted in the strongest quality we can discern among them: that curious and undulating hierarchy of intelligence and power of will that links even the lowest “familiar” to Lucifer himself.
Because of these different powers of intelligence and will among spirits, their activities are different. They remain unified, as we said, in their responsibilities and their intentions. They remain always subordinate to “the will of the will of the will of the will of the will.” But their activities—the way they go about what they do—seems directly related to their differing levels of intelligence and the differing force of their single-focused wills.