A Homily for the Twelfth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Readings: Jeremiah 20:10-13 Romans 5:12-15 Matthew 10:26-33
Ever hear the saying “better the devil you know than the one you don’t”? Here is an early Christian vignette, about devils, that nicely illustrates the adage. It is retrieved in Jamie Kreiner’s new book The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction (2023):
They used to say of a certain saint that he bore witness to his faith during a persecution and was so severely tortured that they sat him on a burning seat of bronze. In the meantime the blessed Constantine became emperor and the Christians were set free. When this saint was healed, he returned to his cell. Seeing it from a distance he said: “O dear, I am coming back again to many woes!” He said this meaning the struggles and battles with the demons.
Wow! To fear intense physical torture less than the psychological. Still, this saint’s story is hard for our contemporaries to credit because they do not believe in demons any more than they believe in Marvel superheroes, though granted, both make for blockbuster movies.
Stories about demonic possession produce scares worth paying for, but the problem with possession—if I may proffer Satan’s point of view—is that too much of it is counterproductive. If we saw undeniable cases of possession frequently, pews would be full. No, as Satan sees it, possession is a tool best used sparingly.
Hollywood markets demons. It does not know what to do with angels. The Christian faith professes belief in both, but the way our culture pictures each group is misleading and downright dangerous. Why? Because our images of angels and demons are too crude. If it were as simple as we make it, our contemporaries would be correct in dismissing supernatural influences as hokum.
Angels and demons are spirits, but as that word conjures up fantasies, replace it with the word “minds.” They are intelligences that do not depend upon what, in biology, we call brains.
Is it possible for our minds to be hacked by a truly alien intelligence?
A few years ago, such an alien intelligence would have been considered the realm of fantasy. Now we cannot avoid articles about artificial intelligence, minds not based in biological brains. So, never presume that atheists are more intelligent than believers. To be frank, both camps run through the spectrum of smarts. No, the better constant is that atheists have less imagination than believers.
Angels and demons are created intelligences. Like humanity, they did not always exist. They come forth from God; the intelligence that has always existed. One group has remained aligned with God; one has not.
Angels and demons communicate among themselves and with us by way of intuition. As St. Thomas Aquinas would have explained it, this is a direct and willed communion between minds without the mediation of matter. Close to a Vulcan mind-meld if you know your “Star Trek.” We cannot do this as humans, though with the advent of the world wide web we are coming closer. This again begs the question: Are atheists less imaginative, more locked in the here and now, which never stays here and is never now?
So, with a better picture of angels and demons, pose this question: Are Christians, and the adherents of many other faith traditions, wrong in supposing that some of our thoughts are alien, that they originate outside ourselves? To put it in contemporary parlance, which constantly likens the human mind to a computer, is it possible for our minds to be hacked by a truly alien intelligence? Is this a reasonable explanation when a given thought or tendency stands too starkly apart from those we reasonably claim as our own?
The issue cannot be reduced to accepting responsibility for our own thoughts. Here is the question: How is it that the mind seems to leap ahead of itself, as though it encountered another intelligence, something truly alien? Again, for those with limited imaginations, why must an alien intelligence come from outer space? Might it not emerge from another dimension?
Kreiner asks:
Where did the monk’s distraction come from? [T]hey identified multiple triggers that will sound familiar, including the business (and busyness) of everyday life, information overload, and other people. These were only proximate causes, however, and monks also proposed metaphysical explanations that took a much longer view. One leading theory was that distractions were demonic. It was already widely believed in the ancient world that cosmic forces exercised influences on human beings. But in early Christian demonology, these vectors became profoundly personalized. In the primeval battle between good and evil, demons deployed intrusive thoughts that were custom-fit to their targets. These weapons seemed so shrewdly designed that, to some monks, it felt like the demons could read their minds.
Perhaps we have made angels and demons a bit more reasonable to the atheist mindset. Notice that I wrote “atheist mindset,” not “atheist person.” For like the Christian faith, atheism is a mindset, a readymade set of assumptions employed to make sense of the world. I have never met an individual mind given wholly over to belief or unbelief. Neither believers nor unbelievers are so fully in possession of themselves. There is a bit of each in all of us.
If angels and demons are not as unreasonable as they once seemed, then push on a bit and remind reason of an ancient question it has still not answered on its own. What is the explanation for our utterly irrational tendency to make enemies from so many of our fellows? How does strangeness slide so quickly into suspicion? Why does disagreement so often desire the death of the other? Antagonism certainly is not foreign to us, but might it be alien to us?
The Christian faith finds the world to be an utterly reasonable and pleasant place. No surprise, as it springs from an infinite intelligence that is entirely good. So, where does our proclivity to the stupid and the sinister come from? We know that the problems that plague our planet begin within ourselves. But reason cannot with certitude identify where the mind begins or ends. Is it not reasonable to conclude, at least to suspect, that our minds are porous, open to alien influences? In short, that we are not alone?
