DEMONOLOGY

Demonology, the theory of beings intermediate between the divine and man, begins in European thought as a collection of religious and philosophical ideas. In general, classical and Hellenistic Greek thinkers ordered these ideas in relation to the philosophical concept of the One, while Jewish and Christian thinkers ordered them in relation to the religious concept of a unique Creator God. These two principles of order interact, Neo-Platonic speculation influencing angelology, as in the dependence of Pseudo-Dionysius' On Celestial Hierarchy (ca. 500) upon Proclus, and the reverse, as in the progressive degradation of the pagan gods to demons. Greek demonology includes the following religious ideas. There are incorporeal beings differing in rank but all requiring human respect to insure their favor. There is a being called a daimon who is either identical with theos or is the power or agency of theos (Homer). The souls of the dead who are distinguishedeither for great goodness, as the men of the Golden Age (Hesiod, Works and Days), or for great evilsurvive and have an influence upon the living. Some part of man's consciousness is akin to the divine, can be purified of sensual attachments and become a higher being

668 called a daimon (Pythagorean). A daimon is a divine sign given to an individual (Phaedrus, 242B) or it is a guardian spirit that acts as a conscience. The Pythagorean philosophical idea that there are spirits who are the necessary intermediaries between the gods and men, because the divine will not mingle directly with the human, is expressed by Diotima in Plato's Symposium (203A) and is developed by successive Neo-Platonists. It is combined with the notion of the survival of the souls of the dead in the Xenocratic philosophical theory of daimones who are capable of good and evil, are suprahuman but limited, and who dwell near Hades and under the moon. Plato contributes the notion that the heavenly bodies are moved by divine souls, which develops into Aristotle's theory that the planets and stars are moved by intelligences (later called separated substances in medieval thought) which are perfect and incorporeala philosophical answer to the question of the origin of the movement of the heavenly bodies. The idea of a hierarchy of corporeal and incorporeal beings between earth and the outermost border of the world is a philosophical theory of the cosmos in the pseudo-Platonic

Epinomis (ca. 347 B.C.?) and later works of the NeoPlatonic school. In the Judaic religious tradition the concept of mal'ak, a messenger of the one God, entirely subject to his will, is found in the Old Testament, carried on in the New Testament, and developed as a theological idea in Christian thought. Also found in the Old Testament is the statement that certain sons of God (later interpreted as fallen angels) intermarried with women and gave birth to giants (Genesis 6:1-5). A satan (adversary) or Satan is included in Jahweh's council of angels and functions as tempter of Job and David in the Old Testament (Zechariah 3:1; Job 1 and 2; I Chronicles 21:1). Alien national or nature gods are real though inferior spiritual powers in the Old Testament from 700-600 on. In the Septuagint (200-100), the Greek angelos translates mal'ak, while daimon (or neuter daimonion) with the meaning a spirit less than divine translates the Hebrew for idols, alien gods, some hostile natural creatures, and natural evils, and theos is used for the one God. Hence, the hitherto morally ambivalent or neutral word daimon acquires an almost exclusively evil connotation in the monotheistic context. At nearly the same time the idea of the angelos develops in Hebrew Rabbinical commentary as a source for the explanation of the origin of evil. The sons of God in Genesis 6 are interpreted as angels who had descended of their own will and given birth through women to evil spirits in this world. Sammael, chief of these rebel angels had entered the serpent in Eden to tempt man. Subsequently, the Jewish Pseud-Epigrapha and Apocalyptic literature elaborate on the angelic rebellion and descent to earth, the origin of evil spirits, the hierarchical ranking of the angels, their habitations, their physical and moral affliction of men, and their temporal and final punishment, as well as that of the evil spirits born of their union with women. The chief rebel angel is variously called Semjaza, Azazel, Mastema, Beliar, Satanail, Sammael, or Satan in this literature. The context of Jewish religious thought lies behind the frequent New Testament references to Satan, to the diabolus (adversary), and to daimones and daimonia. Also the idea of the evil spirits who issued from the union of angels and women and who remained on earth to plague mankind probably lies behind the New Testament concept of possession by disease-causing demons. Greek and Judaic traditions mingle inextricably in the synthesizing comment of Philo Judaeus (20 B.C.-A.D. 50) on Genesis 6:1-5: It is Moses' custom to give the name of angels to those whom other philos-

ophers call demons (or spirits), souls that is which fly and hover in the air (De gigantibus, Loeb trans.). In equating biblical angelos with daimones and in peopling the upper divisions of the universe with spirits, Philo anticipates the subsequent adaptation of Greek philosophical speculation to Christian exegesis, a most important result of which is On Celestial Hierarchy, which becomes in turn the basis for most medieval scholastic doctrine on angels. The blending of traditions persists throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance; as late as 1621 Robert Burton writes: Substantiae separatae and intelligences are the same which Christians call angels, and Platonists devils, for they name all the spirits daemones, be they good or bad angels (Anatomy of Melancholy, Part I, Sec. ii, Mem. i, Subsec. 2). Under Platonic influence Philo varies from the Hebrew view that the gods of the Gentiles are evil daimones, treating them as good subsidiary powers. He sees (De somnium) these intermediary spirits allegorically in the angels who ascend and descend the ladder in Jacob's dream (Genesis 28:11-13), a figure that parallels in Christian thought Plato's ladder of Love in the Symposium and becomes one of the most influential in Christian speculation and art. Both Philo and Plutarch (De defectu oraculorum) anticipate the Christian Apologist Justin Martyr in explaining pagan myth, ritual, and oracles as the actions of daimones, but Justin's interpretation of them as deceits of the fallen angels and their offspring demons (Dialogue with Trypho, A.D. 155) is the background for Saint Augustine's treatment of the pagan gods in The City of God, Books 1-X.

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The idea of a hierarchy of grades of being among the various spiritual beingsgods, daimons, heroes correlative to their positions in the physical universe seems to originate with the Neo-Platonists. In the schematic order of spirits in Epinomis the greater the degree of participation in matter, the lower the status of the being. Between the stars (which are made of fire and are either gods or images of gods) and men are the daimons made of aether, air, and water. Like Plato's Eros in the Symposiumonly in a physical sensethey fill the gap between gods and men and communicate in both directions. More abstractly, Xenocrates theorizes that daimonic souls exist between the divine and the human on the analogy of the isosceles triangle existing as a semi-perfect form between

the equilateral triangle (perfect) and the scalene triangle (imperfect). The schematization of grades of being is even more abstract in Plotinus, where it takes the form of the doctrine of emanation of all grades of being from the One, who is beyond being. In Plotinus, there is a subdivision of species of intelligences within the Intelligence, which is the first of the degrees emanating from the One. In Proclus' Platonic Theology (ca. A.D. 450) the hierarchical entities are correlated with the gods, goddesses, daimons, and heroes of Hellenistic religion. It can be said that in rationalizing thus their deities the Neo-Platonists developed a theology, but their concept of theos, as a being less than the Good, the One, or some other philosophic principle, limited their theology to a demonologya system dealing with beings less than the highest being or principle. In Platonic Theology, Proclus correlates his gods with the intelligibles organized hierarchically under the Plotinian One. He has no reason to rank any of them on a level with the One, the first principle of reason, as Christian theology ranks its unique Creator God. In Christian thought the Creator is, philosophically speaking, the first principle, existing beyond nature but not beyond being; and there is created nature, which includes both angels and demonsall things except God. The anonymous Christian thinker called Dionysius the Areopagite adapts Proclus' schema of incorporeal beings to the various angels of Judaic-Christian revelation. In his Celestial Hierarchy he places in the highest triad the Seraphim (OT), Cherubim (OT), and Thrones (NT); in the second, Dominations (NT), Virtues (NT), and Powers (NT); in the third, Principalities (NT), Archangels (NT), and Angels (OT, NT). The fusion of the philosophic idea of beings who are pure intellect with the religious idea of angelic messengers is complete when Dionysius says of the angels that their life is only intellection. In Dionysius each rank contains in a simpler mode, and governs the functions of any rank inferior to it. Saint Thomas Aquinas carries speculation on the angelic nature to its theological conclusion, using Aristotle's notion of the intelligences that move the spheres, Neo-Platonic ideas about pure spirits as degrees of being, and Scriptural accounts of angels and demons. Rejecting the early notion of their union with women, he affirms their incorporeality, and to the question of how to distinguish angels if they have no matter to provide a basis for distinction, numerical or otherwise, he replies that each is a species unto itself. More importantly, in order to distinguish them from

God, Thomas discerns composition in them in that their immaterial form remains in potentiality in what concerns its actual existence, its own proper esse. Only in God is there no difference between his esse and his essentia, between the act-of-being and what God is. Thus Thomas places angels definitively within a Godcreated universe. Between God and creation there is discontinuity in the way the act-of-being is possessed although there is continuity of order of both knowing (becoming more and more simple reaching up to God) and of being (becoming more and more pure) (Gilson, 1957). Accepting the Judaic idea of the pre-Adamic fall, Thomas deals with the problem of the angels' sin as with the case of man's: the angels have liberty of choice. One fell through pride and envy in seeking to have final beatitude of his own power. Others, from all ranks (Saint Gregory) or from only the lower ranks (Saint John Damascene) followed the first; some are punished in hell and some in the cloudy atmosphere where they serve God by tempting men (Summa theologica, I, 63, passim). The idea of beings intermediate between the divine and man changes definitively with the definition of God and his relation to nature in the Thomistic philosophy of being. In withdrawing from nature true divinity, Thomas redefines the border between the natural and the supernatural, not placing it between the corporeal and the incorporeal but between created nature and the Creator. Hence, created nature, having been made by a God who freely bestows existential reality though not the divine capacity for self-existence, becomes philosophically assured of the reality of its being and of its complete accessibility to human reason and experimental investigation. In Renaissance Christian thought it is clear that the divine is not locatable in anything short of God, whose essence is unique, but the revived Neo-Platonism of Cornelius Agrippa, Marsilio Ficino, and Giordano Bruno brings with it the old gods and demons located in the stars, planets, and elements and the theurgy associated with them in the Hermetic tradition. Making

670 use of the emanationist theory of the origin of being and the Pythagorean idea that man's soul is akin to the divine, they attempt to carry on the old idea of gods and demons in nature who are manipulatable by man. In the seventeenth century demonology becomes for some a mistaken line of defense for Christianity based

on the equation of the incorporeal with the supernatural. The power and reality of the devil were defended by polemicists such as Joseph Glanvill, Sadducismus triumphatus (1681) and Richard Baxter, The Certainty of the World of Spirits (1691) as if God's existence itself were involved. On the other hand, for rationalists such as Descartes the Thomistic distinction remains clear and demons themselves dwindle into sophisticated rhetorical figures, as for example in Meditation I of his Discourse on Method, where the first step in systematic doubt is to entertain the possibility that all perceptions are the delusive work of a malignant demon. Such rhetorical use is echoed in J. C. Maxwell's nineteenth-century figure of a demon who plays a logical role in his thought-experiment in statistical thermodynamics. In the nineteenth century, Renaissance demonology together with its Neo-Platonic philosophical foundations survives in the use of the old nature gods and demons, with their Judaic-Christian accretions, as sources of feeling in romantic and symbolist literature. Concurrently, the history of demonology is used by some historians of religion for their theory that moral dualism may be inherent in all historic religions.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Denys L'Aropagite, La hirarchie cleste, eds. R. Roques, G. Heil, M. de Gandillac (Paris, 1958). Marcel Detienne, La notion de damn dans le pythagorisme ancien (Paris, 1963). E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley, 1968). Gilbert Franois, Le polythisme et l'emploi au singulier des mots dans la littrature grecque d'Homre Platon (Paris, 1957). tienne Gilson, Being and Some Philosophers, 2nd ed. (Toronto, 1952); The Christian Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, trans. L. K. Shook (London, 1957). Francis X. Gokey, The Terminology for the Devil and Evil Spirits in the Apostolic Fathers (Washington, D.C., 1961). Soren Jensen, Dualism and Demonology (Munksgaard, 1966). Edward Langton, Essentials of Demonology (London, 1949). Proclus, The Elements of Theology, rev. ed., trans. E. R. Dodds (Oxford, 1963). Erwin Rohde, Psyche, trans. W. B. Hillis (New York, 1925). Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (New York, 1969).