By GEORGE A. KENDALL
I am alarmed at the tendency of the contemporary Church to minimize the phenomenon of demonic possession, insisting that true possession is very rare, and that most such cases are “merely” mental illness, fully explainable by modern science without resort to the supernatural. As a result, in many cases, the Church refuses to give permission for exorcism where possession is suspected, seeming to require that first we need to prove beyond any doubt that there is no natural explanation for the phenomenon, a burden of proof that for logical reasons cannot possibly be met.
One of the things that disturbs me about this is that, given that there is such a thing as possession, there are two practical errors that the Church can make in regard to it.
The first is to attribute phenomena which are obviously explainable by natural causes to supernatural ones and, accordingly, to perform an exorcism where medical or other natural treatments would be expected to work and exorcism would be expected to fail.
The second is to attribute to natural causes something which is actually attributable to supernatural ones and accordingly not to perform an exorcism, which might free the afflicted person from his sufferings, but to treat by natural means a condition which cannot possibly be affected by these means.
Both errors leave the victim in his suffering. Now the Church seems correctly concerned that doing an exorcism to treat a condition which is not supernatural will arouse false hope while leaving the victim in his misery and thus do great harm. But she seems, at least in some instances, less concerned about the opposite error — that is, failing to do an exorcism on someone who is truly possessed, leaving that person to the horrible sufferings that Satan can inflict on mankind.
The Church needs to become much more sensitive to this possibility, rather than throwing these victims under the bus in order to avoid offending secularists.
There are also some serious philosophical issues about exactly how and where we draw the line between the natural and the supernatural. In a strict sense, nothing is purely natural — explainable in purely natural terms — because everything is only by virtue of God’s creating and conserving action, which is supernatural.
When we speak of natural causes, we mean secondary, created causes which have the power to cause other creatures to be the way they are — to form them, and so on. Modern science limits the idea of natural causes to the laws and structure of the material universe. So when science tells us that demonic possession can be explained purely in terms of natural causes, what it means is that it can be explained in terms of the material world alone.
But on what grounds do we assert this? Do those who investigate cases of possession actually look for causes beyond the material world and, on failing to find any, conclude that natural causes alone account for the phenomenon? Or do they start right out with the premise that the supernatural is impossible? In general, they do the latter, and that is likely to include many of those who investigate on behalf of the Church.
The truth is that modern intellectuals wedded to the ideology of scientism start from the premise that there is no such thing as the supernatural, then reach the conclusion that a particular event, possession, does not occur. They are making a part of their conclusion one of the premises of the argument, saying in effect that there is no supernatural because there is no supernatural.
The explanations given for possession by the debunkers of the supernatural always incorporate the dogmatic premise that there is no supernatural, so these “explanations” will never admit the possibility of supernatural causes. And they will never explain anything.
Regarding the assertion that possession is rare, that doesn’t make any sense to anyone who is paying attention. In the first place, more and more people live outside the spiritual protection of any form of Christian faith, and more and more are not even baptized. People raised in Catholic families (real, nominal, or somewhere in between) drift away in adulthood from whatever faith they may have had, and go through life without the supernatural protection of the sacraments against evil.
More and more people are involved in occult beliefs and practices which provide portals for demonic influences to enter into their lives. And of course, when people live lives of habitual, unrepented sin, that too opens them to demonic influence.
So, given that a large number of unprotected souls are being offered to Satan on a silver platter, why would he and “the other evil spirits who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls” restrain themselves from feasting on them?
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As man is an incarnate being, a composite of matter and spirit, so marriage, the central relationship that joins mankind into community, creating the family and ultimately all other forms of community, has to involve such a composite.
The bodily aspect, known as the sexual relationship, is thus by its nature indissolubly united to the spiritual aspect. If we try to separate the two, we distort both, with destructive effects. The spiritual aspect becomes saccharine and sentimental, the physical becomes “merely biological” (as if there were such a thing), something we may use as we wish for our own selfish purposes.
The idea of self-giving love disappears from the relationship. This might even be thought of as an aspect of Jesus’ teaching that “what God has joined together, let no man put asunder.”
We try to split everything in the world into its component parts, and act surprised when these parts, in isolation from the whole, behave differently.
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Psychiatrists and psychologists like to speak of a patient being in contact with reality or not in contact with it. But it’s more complicated than that. I can be in contact with reality in more than one way — by accepting it and trying to live in accord with it, by rejecting it, by denying it, and so on. These are all forms of contact. When two armies meet in battle, they are in contact with one another (better they were not).
We need to think in terms, not of contact with reality, but of one’s relation to reality, and we need to substitute being for reality, and talk about the person’s relationship to being. A person can love being, can hate it, can rebel against it, rejecting the order of being, which is the order of creation.
On this basis it would be possible to build an ontological psychology, not just a utilitarian one — one which sees mental illness as a spiritual disease, grounded in a distorted relationship of the person to being.
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Are Catholics superior to other Christians? Maybe, maybe not. I can’t answer this. I definitely know Protestants who are better Christians in many respects than many Catholics I know, myself included.
What I am certain of is that because, in our teaching and in our worship, we have the whole of the truth, the whole of the Christian Tradition, and not just parts or fragments of it, we ought to be better Christians, and, if we are not, we have no excuse. When I speak of having the whole of the truth, I don’t mean having the full depth of understanding or appreciation of it, but only that all the essential elements are there.
We have been given more; hence more is required of us.
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When people say, regarding Christianity, that “I don’t need that,” what they really mean is, “I don’t want that,” that is, l reject it, because if I accepted it, I would have to acknowledge my need of it. To say that I don’t need God is to say that I can be my own God, and that entails rejection, and hence hatred of the real God. Of course it is likely that many who use this hackneyed expression are saying it with little attention to what it means, simply because it’s something people say.
So those who just say it thoughtlessly may not yet be rejecting God, but sooner or later they need to think it through and decide where they stand. As St. Ignatius said, there are only the two standards — Christ and Satan, and we must follow one of them.
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(© 2017 George A. Kendall)
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