Christian demonology

What it is

Christian demonology is the branch of Christian teaching that examines demons: where they came from, what they can do, what they look like and how they treat people. It is built on the Bible, both Testaments, read alongside commentary from early Christian thinkers and hermits, plus stories and customs taken over from neighbouring beliefs. In this frame demons are fallen angels, made good and turned evil, who work to draw people into sin. Writers describe them as clever but not all-knowing, powerful but held inside limits set by God. The field has been worked out most thoroughly in the Roman Catholic Church, and other churches also affirm that demons exist and discuss them.

Where it comes from

Demonology was not handed down whole. The first Christians took the existence of demons for granted, and only later did that assumption grow into a detailed field, drawing on Jewish demonology and on Christian scripture. Some traditions treat the gods of other faiths as demons, citing Paul's warning in 1 Corinthians 10 against pouring drink to idols. The Devil's own image developed in parallel, taking on ritual and visual marks of evil. One explanation of where demons come from is set out in the Book of Enoch, a text early Church Fathers used and which remains canonical in the Eritrean and Ethiopian Orthodox Churches: the spirits of the Nephilim, giants born to angels and human women, are the demons.

How it is done

The field advanced by reading and reckoning rather than by rite. Writers pored over particular passages, sometimes in a way called eisegesis, where meaning is pressed into a text rather than drawn out of it; the idea that one third of the angels became demons is described as such a reading of Revelation 12. They also counted and ranked. Alonso de Espina, in 1467, reached 133,316,666 demons. Johann Weyer, in the Pseudomonarchia Daemonum of 1583, sorted 4,439,622 into 666 legions of 6,666 apiece, with 66 princes above them. The Lesser Key of Solomon, in the 17th century, kept Weyer's legions and added more spirits to the list.

Tools and materials

The working materials are documents. The Old and New Testaments come first, then the commentary of early and medieval churchmen: Augustine, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas are all cited. The Book of Enoch supplies the Nephilim passage. Handbooks and catalogues carry the practical side, among them the Malleus Maleficarum of Heinrich Kramer, Weyer's Pseudomonarchia Daemonum and the later Lesser Key of Solomon. Numbers serve as signs in their own right: 666, and figures built from repeated sixes, recur in these schemes. Painters such as Signorelli, Bosch and Goya drew shapes from the written descriptions.

What it is for

The stated aim is to know an adversary. Demons are held to press people toward sin, to tempt them away from the faith into heresy, apostasy or the veneration of idols, and to harass them in body or mind. A demonology that maps these tactics is meant to help clergy teach, warn and, as in the gospel scenes, drive the spirits out. The Catholic Encyclopedia adds a caution: such knowledge is said to be learned from demons, to concern demons and to lead the learner toward them, so curiosity about the subject carries a danger of its own. In the Gospels demons are seen, heard and banished by command.

Who does it

Those who built the field were churchmen and schoolmen: bishops such as Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nyssa, monks such as Raoul Glaber of Saint-Léger in Belgium, and university teachers such as Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas. Preachers and inquisitors wrote handbooks, the best known being Heinrich Kramer's Malleus Maleficarum. Later writers such as Johann Weyer, and the compilers behind the Lesser Key of Solomon, produced catalogues of spirits. No initiation is described; authority comes from office, learning and command of the texts. The Roman Catholic Church is named as the place where the subject is studied most deeply, while many other churches also affirm demons and discuss them.

Peoples and places

Christian demonology travels with Christianity, so no single nation owns it. Two churches give the Enochic account of demonic origin scriptural standing, the Eritrean and Ethiopian Orthodox Churches. In Europe, Raoul Glaber, a monk at Saint-Léger in Belgium, appears to have been the first to write down a demonic visitation, recording it in his Historiarum sui temporis. The theologians who fixed the standard description of demons, and catalogue-makers such as Johann Weyer, wrote within western European church life. Elsewhere Christian communities inherited the same framework through teaching and translation.

What people believe

Behind the study sits a cosmology. Demons are angels who fell; God made them from the same non-material substance as the angels that stayed loyal, so their nature is fixed and does not alter over the centuries. Their knowledge is partial and their power runs only as far as God permits. One strand has a third of the angels falling; another holds that demons cannot reproduce and that their number is constant, while Gregory of Nyssa in the 4th century thought there were male and female demons and that they bred. Whether the Devil can be in several places at once was debated, with an emissary sent in his name offered as one answer.

How scholars and sceptics see it

Much of the surviving discussion is argument among learned writers. Augustine held at first that demons were often imaginary, then accepted that they could take material form; Aquinas followed him and added that the materializing carried a sexual purpose. Ambrogio de Vignati took another line, denying that demons have or can make a body and calling the whole affair a hallucination planted in the mind of someone who had made a pact or lain with an incubus. Ulrich Molitor and Nicholas Remy disagreed over whether a woman could be made pregnant by a demon. These are the terms in which the subject was examined.

Compare and confuse

Christian demonology grows out of Jewish demonology and keeps much of its scriptural frame, while adding the figure of the Devil as later Christian thought shaped him. Its catalogues overlap with the grimoire tradition: Weyer's Pseudomonarchia Daemonum was copied and enlarged in the 17th-century Lesser Key of Solomon, so the same named spirits travel between a scholarly survey and a book of conjuration. The Book of Enoch, canonical for the Eritrean and Ethiopian Orthodox Churches, is not received as scripture everywhere, which gives the Nephilim account of demonic origin different weight in different churches.

Law and persecution

Two kinds of authority bear on the subject. Church canon decides which books count: the Book of Enoch is scripture only for the Eritrean and Ethiopian Orthodox Churches, though early Fathers cited it. Courts, meanwhile, acted on demonological ideas. Men and women charged with witchcraft were tortured to obtain statements, and what they said about the bodies of demons entered the learned literature of the 17th century. Heinrich Kramer's Malleus Maleficarum circulated as a handbook for those handling such cases, and its claims about demons shaped how accusations were framed.

Today

The Roman Catholic Church still studies demonology in depth, and many other Christian churches affirm that demons exist and teach about them, so the framework is not a closed chapter. The old catalogues survive as texts: the Lesser Key of Solomon, which grew from Weyer's 1583 list, keeps the names and legions he set out. The Enochic explanation of demonic origin retains its authority in the Eritrean and Ethiopian Orthodox Churches, while in other churches it is a cited but non-canonical book.

Questions people ask about Christian demonology

Good reading and sources

• Christian demonology on WikipediaEncyclopedia
• Wikidata recordOpen data