Star v Star

A crash course in warfare, Part 1

Satan does not desire brothers or friends, much less children. Satan desires only slaves.

Father Gabriele Amorth

Exorcism was a defining feature of early Christianity. Peter Brown described exorcism, without exaggeration, as ‘possibly the most highly rated activity of the early Christian church.’

Francis Young

In college there was this girl we’ll call Diana. She had the soul of an apostle and so, while her peers embarked upon short-term mission trips to glamorous locales, she visited the overlooked places. Not beaches, but small West African villages ruled by competent witches and the ghosts of the slave trade. She did good work, and so it was probably to be expected that, upon her return, her health fell apart and the nightmares came.

Our college was not, in all honesty, a sympathetic place. There twenty-somethings vigorously debated the attributes of the Deus absconditus the way kids at a party debate the nature of alternate dimensions. They are interesting, to be sure. But not relevant.

Fortunately there was also this guy we’ll call Jack. He wore a pocket protector. His glasses had aircraft-grade aluminum frames. He’s a successful surgeon now, though still a mystic, and at that time he came to me and said “I think we ought to do something for Diana.” I agreed.

Several nights later we sat down together. Jack had this enormous white binder of deliverance prayers and when we began he leaned in and said, with great sincerity, “Diana, Jesus has heard you.” Then he opened the binder and said, “Spirits that are causing this affliction, in the authority of the Lord Jesus, I order you to be still and come to attention.”

Within thirty minutes, the warfare was gone, and Diana was free to get on with her life.

For more than a week I’ve been trying to get into this piece on spiritual warfare. Folks seem to need it.

Just this morning I got a call from a single mom friend. She’d been chatting with a sincere but immature disciple who made several alarming claims about witchcraft and deliverance prayer. Warned by a feeling in her gut, she asked me “Is that how it works?”

“No,” I told her, though some of the information was almost accurate.

Earlier this week a clerk I know said his housemate had been manifesting, leering over the clerk’s bed and staring into his face with pale, ceramic eyes. I was paying for my groceries at the time. “What did you do?” I asked.

“I called on the name of Jesus,” he told me, “but I think I should know more.”

In that case I agreed.

This post is the first installment in a crash course in the Spirit Realm. I’ll tell you the good news first.

Spiritual warfare is not complicated.

I say that with confidence, though over the years I’ve seen some very complex cases.

There was a woman, for example, who saw her deceased and depraved grandfather staring at her out of a mirror in the old family home, wearing his old Navy uniform. After seeing him, her life fell apart, and it took us quite a while to find out what distant family members had done to make that unwelcome vision possible.

Spiritual warfare is not complicated because the unseen realm abides by certain principles.

In other words, it has rules.

When I say that, I don’t mean there is no mystery—the unseen realm is primarily mysterious, vast, and other.

“Even though part of the universe,” wrote the Catholic scholar Pascal Parente, “the Angels really constitute a world to themselves, the spirit world, so exalted and so different from our visible, material world.”

“The amazing swiftness of their movements,” Pascal elsewhere observed, “the devastating power of destruction which they manifest when God employs them as avenging Angels, are in reality ordinary exploits of the Angelic nature; yet they appear like miracles to us.”

The unseen realm is strange. It cannot be made otherwise.

Also, I don’t mean that the unseen realm can be controlled, as many sorcerers foolishly believe. You cannot draw the glyphs and say the spells and learn the magical alphabets and expect to rule the spirit realm. Whatever may be written on water is not for you to read, and a rulebook for witches is a case study in lies.

What I mean is that the unseen realm, as disclosed by Jesus of Nazareth, exists within a certain architecture.

That architecture informs the work of the Church and can help you make sense of your life.

A word of warning: At this point, I’m not sure what most disciples of Jesus take for granted. So I don’t know how much of what follows will be new.

The material here may be painfully obvious. I hope it is, because my goal is to reflect the core assumptions of Christianity. When it comes to Christian teaching on the unseen realm, nothing is secret or esoteric. In fact, the offer of secret knowledge is a classic demonic strategy, a tell, like scammers misspelling your name. In stark contrast, Jesus (and the writers of the New Testament and the leaders of the early Church) is transparent about the essential points.

And so, in this post, I’m going to name four facts of nature.

In the next, I’ll name the two foundational strategies of spiritual warfare.

Almost every case can be reduced to some expression of these facts and strategies. If you’re able to metabolize the information here, you’ll ride strapped.

Fact 1: There is an Unseen Realm

Though all cultures have their skeptics, ours is the first to reject the plain fact of the numinous at scale and there will be hell to pay. In fact there already has been. The spirit realm intrudes upon the human experience. It meddles, for reasons that will soon become clear.

In the beginning God founded the cosmos, and while there’s a lot to be mined from Genesis 1, the first facts it cares to convey are these: 1. God made everything. 2. The everything we’re talking about is grounded in one of two realms. “In the beginning,” says Genesis 1:1, “God created the heavens and the earth.”

There is nature, which God made; nature is composed of two parts: the seen and the unseen. You can describe those domains in a number of ways—the spiritual and the material, the noetic and the somatic, the heavens and the earth—but it always boils down to the same understood polarity: two realms.

Survey the Bible and you’ll find that assumption reflected by every character on almost every page, though there is an unmistakable progression of knowledge as the Bible goes on. “There was a ladder,” Jacob dreamed, “set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven” (Genesis 28:12). “When we heard of it,” Rahab said, “our hearts melted in fear and everyone’s courage failed because of you, for the Lord your God is God in heaven above and on the earth below” (Joshua 2:11). “The heavens,” says the Psalmist, “are the LORD’s, but the earth he has given to the children of man” (Psalm 115). “For by him all things were created,” Paul agrees, “in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him” (Colossians 1:16).

You see the point: two realms. It is as if the cosmos itself were a magnificent icon, proclaiming in its totality as much as in its minutest detail the Jesus who though fully God took unto himself a fully human nature.

It is interesting that, in the Christian worldview, spirits are not, properly speaking, supernatural. To be supernatural is to be outside of nature, which only God is. The spirits are preternatural: their manner of existing is not exactly like ours.

That being said, the dividing lines between the seen and unseen are never in a systematic way established. Instead, the realms overlap, like fabric. They are imbricated, like shades of meaning. When Naaman the Syrian was cleansed of leprosy, he took home a wagonload of dirt (2 Kings 5:15-17), understanding that the earth itself was connected with God’s spiritual dominion. When God descended on Sinai, touching the mountain had the same effect as touching God (ditto the temple) (Exodus 19:12).

This whole overlapping realms thing is easiest to see in the sacraments because sacraments participate in the spiritual realities to which they point. Make a marriage covenant and you really become one flesh; get baptized and you really die with Christ. But we’re talking about more than a sacramental worldview; we’re talking about a sacramental cosmos.

I mean, look at the spiritual life of the Patriarchs: Sometimes they engage the spirit realm through the material realm—they build altars, make sacrifices, fast, feast, and circumcise. Other times they engage the physical realm through the spiritual realm—they intercede, bless, and curse. Take Jacob: He actively shaped the future of Israel for more than 2,000 years, and he did it with those blessings in Genesis 49.

“In this visible world,” wrote Gregory of Nyssa, “nothing can be achieved except through invisible forces” (Dialogues, IV.5).

“What did you see?” Ambrose asked, “Water, certainly, but not water alone…the presence of the Godhead is there.”

(For another example of this whole inexact-dividing-lines-thing, look at Paul’s anthropology, which is still enthusiastically debated. How many parts are there to a human being? Two? Three? What’s the difference between the spirit and the soul, and the spirit and the mind, or the inner being, and the heart? The answer is Paul does not for all appearances care. “Paul uses over a dozen terms to refer to what humans are and what they do,” writes N.T. Wright, “and since he nowhere either provides a neat summary of what he thinks about them or gives us clues as to whether he would subsume some or most of these under two or three heads, it is arbitrary and unwarranted to do so on his behalf or claim his authority for such a schema.” For Paul, the only thing that seems to matter is that we humans have material and immaterial parts and Jesus wants to redeem them all).

Humans in particular are always spilling across dimensional lines. Whether it’s by contemplating Platonic forms, using syllogisms, or especially by loving, we can’t stay material.

“Every now and then,” wrote Mary Karr, “we enter the presence of the numinous and deduce for an instant how we're formed, in what detail the force that infuses every petal might specifically run through us, wishing only to lure us into our full potential. Usually, the closest we get is when we love, or when some beloved beams back, which can galvanize you like steel and make resilient what had heretofore only been soft flesh.”

Right you are, Mary Karr: Our edges blur. We’re always getting into the spirit realm and the spirit realm is always getting into us. According to the witness of the scriptures, this is because humans are endowed by God with a special status: We image Him.

Fact Two: The Unseen Realm is Inhabited

Many people wish that were not so but emptiness is not God’s thing: He is the God of 10,000 crocuses in the city park, of stars spawning like monarch butterflies, of photons pummeling the void like tropical rain.

The unseen realm is replete.

“The church fathers,” wrote priest and scholar Serge-Thomas Bonino, “assumed that in-between humans and God there exists a vast society of intelligent, free, spiritual beings whose behavior significantly impacts human existence. The early fathers are all in general agreement that the key to understanding evil in a world that has been created and is yet sustained by an all-good and all-powerful God is to understand this ‘world-in-between’.”

Thanks to the good work of initiatives like The Bible Project and Word on Fire, the structure of Genesis 1 is better and more widely understood than was the case a decade ago, but in case you haven’t heard, it’s good to know that the creation account of Genesis 1 is structured into two panels: Days 1-3 and Days 4-6. Those panels correspond to the situation outlined in Genesis 1:1, in which the earth is formless and void; days 1-3 address the formless problem and days 4-6 address the void. Moreover, the days correspond: 1 to 4, 2 to 5, and 3 to 6.

When do the spirits come in? Most scholars would say on Day 4.

And God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night. And let them be for signs and for seasons, and for days and years, and let them be lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light upon the earth.” And it was so. And God made the two great lights—the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night—and the stars. And God set them in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth, to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, the fourth day.”

It is interesting to note that the stars of Genesis 1:14 are commissioned—it’s their job to separate the day from the night, which is what God was doing in Genesis 1:4. But that’s getting ahead of ourselves. For now, it is enough to note that the stars are the ancient world’s go-to image for spirits. There are at least three reasons for that: the stars are majestic, they are unchanging, and they are numerous.

Those attributes matter and it is easy to underestimate them.

Take, for example, the number. There are a lot, as the great scholars of the Middle Ages observed.

“It is then on the data of revelation that we must depend in order to give some vague idea of the transcending vastness of the spirit world. These data actually suggest a multitude of Angels that is beyond all our power of comprehension. Saint Thomas holds that the multitude of the Angels ‘far exceeds every multitude of material creatures,’ quoting to this effect from Pseudo Dionysius who wrote: ‘The scriptural tradition regarding the Angels gives their number as thousands of thousands, multiplying and repeating the very highest numbers we have, thus clearly showing that the Orders of the Celestial Beings are innumerable for us. So many are the blessed Hosts of the Supernal Intelligences that they wholly surpass the feeble and limited range of our material numbers.’”

The spirit realm is vast, and it is majestic. Whenever the prophets behold it, they are reduced to the largest numbers and greatest descriptions of power they know.

“Then I looked, and I heard around the throne and the living creatures and the elders the voice of many angels, numbering myriads of myriads and thousands of thousands, saying with a loud voice, ‘Worthy is the Lamb who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing!”

Even Jesus describes it that way: “Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels?” (Matthew 26:53). Now, the number twelve is kind of a big deal, but for Jesus the point seems to be that it would be a small thing for God to instantaneously deploy a force the size of the Roman Army.

(One more good line from Parente: “Far more numerous than all the stars of heaven, all the flowers of spring, and all the children of men are God's Angels, the blessed citizens of the spirit world, the fulgid, glittering morning stars of creation.”)

The scale is going to be relevant when we talk about spiritual warfare but we should name a few more angelic attributes while we’re here.

The spirits are personal beings. They celebrate (Luke 15:7), feel curiosity (1 Peter 1:12), express frustration (Daniel 10:13), argue (Jude 1:9), worship (Revelation 5:12) and, in the estimation of the Fathers, love.

That last point is especially intriguing: The spirits that remained allegiant to Jesus love as intensely as the enemy hates.

“The fire of an Angel's love is not built up slowly” declared Parente, summarizing the tradition. “It has no stages of mere smoldering, no agonizing moments of dying embers; rather the Angel is immediately a holocaust, a roaring conflagration, aflame with a love that will never lessen…They love man because he is made to the image and likeness of God, is a partaker of the Divine nature, redeemed by the Son of God and destined to live with them in heaven.”

You know who has great thoughts on this point? C.S. Lewis. At the end of his novel Perelandra, Ransom, the protagonist beholds two high-ranking spirits and describes the vision this way:

“One single, changeless expression—so clear that it hurt and dazzled him—was stamped on each and there was nothing else there at all…What this one thing was he could not be certain. He concluded in the end that it was charity. But it was terrifyingly different from the expression of human charity, which we always see either blossoming out of, or hastening to descend into, natural affection. Here there was no affection at all: no least lingering memory of it even at ten million years' distance, no germ from which it could spring in any future, however remote. Pure, spiritual, intellectual love shot from their faces like barbed lightning. It was so unlike the love we experience that its expression could easily be mistaken for ferocity.”

It can be reassuring to remember that the cosmos is not for the most part a cold environment of violent negation. It is for the most part a symphony of exaltation, a staggering, glorious, emphatic exchange of love.

Also, there is the matter of the angelic intellect.

We do not, for philosophical reasons, know how it feels to be a spirit. But we do know that as pure spirits their intellect exceeds all human powers, all AI, everything material.

“Although an Angel's intellect is not his own substance, just as our intellects are not our own substances, yet he possesses such penetration, that he is able, at one glance, to take in the whole field of science lying open to his perception, just as we, at a glance, can take in the entire field of vision lying exposed to our eyes.” (Parente again. But the insight is Augustine’s).

(Nota bene: It wasn’t until comparatively recently that anyone thought being made in the image of God meant reason, as if imaging God was a matter of brainpower. The ancients knew that they shared the universe with other intelligences, and that those intelligences far surpassed their own power. In other words, AI wouldn’t bother a medieval peasant, but he certainly wouldn’t try to make it work for him; he’d know AI was there to make him a slave.)

But they don’t know everything. They do not possess what scholars call cardiognosis (the secret knowledge of the heart). They don’t know your thoughts, though they can usually guess, and they don’t know what God will say to you, which is almost impossible for them to predict.

In fact to a demon God is inscrutable. He’s so unlike them. Jesus forgives, shows mercy, lives humbly, takes on the nature of a servant, dies, rises, and reigns. He could end the universe but does not. He could make the rain fall only on the righteous but does not. He could withdraw common grace but does not.

All of that is so unlike the demonic will, it baffles them and there’s an important takeaway: If you want to baffle the devil, act like God! Forgive, repent, bear reproach, bless your enemies, pray for those who persecute you, take up your cross. Fast, give, keep silent, seek solitude, all of it. It will catch the enemy off guard 100% of the time.

One more thing: While rebellious spirits are exceedingly intelligent, they can also be exceedingly stupid. Thomas Aquinas figured that one out, explaining that, basically, being evil makes you dumb. Pride is about the negation of reality, and as proud intellects the rebel spirits often do inane things.

Fact Three: The Inhabitants of the Unseen Realm Have Jobs

Tim Mackie, Michael Heiser, Stephen De Young, and a little militia of related scholars have done the Church great service in recent decades by unearthing what has come to be called Divine Council theology.

Divine Council theology means God delegates. He shares His authority with His creatures, and He allows those creatures to govern on their own initiative. That government is not in any way chaotic. Just as earthly governments accomplish their purposes through vast administrations so God’s heavenly host accomplishes his will through the operations of a vast invisible hierarchy.

Remember what we said about Genesis 1:14, how the stars were separating light from darkness?

That’s God’s job and He shares it.

More to the point, in Genesis 1:16 and 18, the sun and moon and stars are ruling.

On this subject the Church Fathers are marvelous.

“The Maker and Framer of the world distributed and appointed…a multitude of angels and ministers…to occupy themselves about the elements, and the heav­ens, and the world, and the things in it, and the godly ordering of them all,” wrote Athenagoras of Athens, in the second century. “Just as with men, who have freedom of choice as to both virtue and vice…so is it among the angels. Some—free agents, you will observe, such as they were created by God—continued in those things for which God had made and over which He had ordained them; but some outraged both the constitution of their nature and the government entrusted to them” (A Plea for the Christians, 10).

“We indeed also maintain with regard not only to the fruits of the earth, but to every flowing stream and every breath of air that the ground brings forth those things which are said to grow up naturally — that the water springs in fountains, and refreshes the earth with running streams — that the air is kept pure, and supports the life of those who breathe it, only in consequence of the agency and control of certain beings whom we may call invisible husbandmen and guardians,” added Origen of Alexandria, not long afterward (Against Celsus, 8.31).

“Then surely the All-Good, the King of kings, the Supreme, God Almighty, so that the men on earth might not be like brute beasts without rulers and guardians, set over them the holy angels to be their leaders and governors like herdsmen and shepherds,” wrote Eusebius of Caesarea, intellect of the imperial church and Constantine’s fanboy. “He set over them all, and made the head of all His Only-begotten and Firstborn Word. He gave Him for His own inheritance the angels and archangels and the divine powers and the immaterial and transcendent spirits” (Demonstration of the Gospel, 4.6-8).

The spirits have jobs.

They are, in fact, identified by their job.

"The Angels are spirits," said Augustine, "but it is not because they are spirits that they are Angels. They become Angels when they are sent, for the name Angel refers to their office, not to their nature. You ask the name of this nature, it is spirit; you ask its office, it is that of an Angel.”

The spirits are, moreover, organized into a hierarchy, a great celestial government, a “living diamond,” says Parente, “whose myriads of facets reflect constantly and harmoniously the divine splendors of the eternal Glory of God.”

“In the Scriptures,” writes Father Stephen De Young, “the hosts of angels, archangels, thrones, dominions, virtues, principalities, powers, cherubim, and seraphim are predominantly described using one of two metaphors. The first…is that of the ‘heavenly hosts.’ This reference to the multitude of angelic beings is tied to one of the names of the God of Israel in the Old Testament: Yahweh Sabaoth, the Lord of Hosts…The phrase ‘Lord of Hosts’ is not merely pointing to the large number of angelic beings, but to their regimentation. This is properly speaking a martial title for Israel's God and is most often used within military metaphors to describe Yahweh as commander of armies and mighty in battle.”

I must say, even if we grasp this fact, most of us fail to acknowledge the scale of that government.

Remember that line from Origen I referenced earlier in this post? “The water springs in fountains, and refreshes the earth with running streams—that the air is kept pure, and supports the life of those who breathe it, only in consequence of the agency and control of certain beings whom we may call invisible husbandmen.”

The authors of the Bible and the Church Fathers saw all of creation as under the influence of spirits. More to the point, they saw corruption not the result of impersonal forces but as the activity of malignant spiritual beings:

“These spirits certainly have great abilities for mischief,” wrote Tertullian, “and that they do it is apparent, though the manner of effecting it is invisible, and out of the reach of human senses; as, for instance, when a secret blast nips the fruit in the vine blossom or the bud, or smites it with an untimely fall just upon its maturity, or when the air is infected by unknown causes, and scatters the deadly potions about the world” (Apology 22).

In the Biblical imagination, cities and nations, weather and seasons, battles and wars, all these were overseen and administered by spiritual governors.

They were right.

Fact Four: Not All the Spirits Are Doing Their Job

Everyone’s heard of the devil and your neighbor’s familiar with the satan but the descriptions of demonic evil in the Bible are chilling. I mean, look at this recollection from Ezekiel 28:

You were the signet of perfection,
full of wisdom and perfect in beauty.

You were in Eden, the garden of God;
every precious stone was your covering,
sardius, topaz, and diamond,
beryl, onyx, and jasper,
sapphire, emerald, and carbuncle;
and crafted in gold were your settings
and your engravings.

On the day that you were created
they were prepared.

You were an anointed guardian cherub.
I placed you; you were on the holy mountain of God;
in the midst of the stones of fire you walked.

You were blameless in your ways
from the day you were created,
till unrighteousness was found in you.

In the abundance of your trade
you were filled with violence in your midst, and you sinned.

That is a sickening revelation: some spirits rebelled. One, first, then others—from across the ranks of heaven a fall occurred.

And they are Just. So. Gross.

“The ruin of mankind is their whole employment,” Tertullian said.

“The men themselves do not persecute,” Lactantius likewise observed, “but those unclean, abandoned spirits to whom the truth is both known and unwanted, insinuate themselves into their minds and incite them, unwitting, to fury.”

A spiritual war would be alarming news on its own terms. If The New York Times admitted that a multitude beyond human calculation with powers beyond human comprehension was currently opposing the mission of Jesus and, in fact, seeking to destroy the cosmos, I think most of us would want to know how to resist that effort.

But it’s not the whole problem.

Humanity, we know, also rebelled.

In fact, in Genesis 3, humanity rebels in response to demonic instigation, and that means that humanity became both a casualty and combatant in a demonic war against God.

“We are born,” wrote Kallistos Ware, “into an environment where it is easy to do evil and hard to do good; easy to hurt others, and hard to heal their wounds; easy to arouse men's suspicions, and hard to win their trust. It means that we are each of us conditioned by the solidarity of the human race in its accumulated wrong-doing and wrong-thinking, and hence wrong-being. And to this accumulation of wrong we have ourselves added by our own deliberate acts of sin. The gulf grows wider and wider.”

“...the line dividing good and evil,” observed Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “cuts through the heart of every human being.”

The rebel spirits have managed to hook themselves into the world and into human nature. They have great powers for mischief and can contribute to extraordinary suffering.

Into this scene came Jesus of Nazareth.

He conquered sin, death, and the devil; he is seated at the right hand of the Father; his Church is even now rolling back the works of the evil one.

But that, of course, points to the next post.