By Urban Hannon
The following lecture was delivered at the Pro Civitate Dei summer school in La Londe-les-Maures, France on June 12, 2022.
Listen to audio of this essay here.
Let’s start with a little guided meditation. I want you to imagine a society—a society made up of self-absorbed, atomized individuals—a society in which the various members tolerate each other, because they know they need each other, but only so that each of them can achieve his own private ambitions and desires—a society, moreover, that is in open rebellion against its own origins. Sound familiar yet? Now I want you to imagine that, once upon a time, this society had been noble, and civil, and good—but that its citizens—especially its elite citizens—out of a disordered sense of pride, effected a revolution against that received ancient order. Imagine, if you will, that this revolution had some ironic consequences, such as that, in the name of liberating themselves from being subject to any official king, these citizens wound up creating for themselves an even more oppressive and authoritarian regime—and that their honorable hierarchy, which in their pettiness they would have liked to dissolve altogether, was merely replaced by a dishonorable hierarchy—that they traded an ordered harmony for hostile power relations, and a common good for private vices. Now imagine that this populace—who, again, hate their own heritage and devote all their time and energy to contradicting it, loudly—is in fact deeply unsatisfied, frustrated, lonely, sad. And yet imagine that, despite their unhappiness in this society, they also live in constant, ever-growing fear—fear that this society of theirs, and everything it stands for, is on the verge of defeat. Imagine, finally, that this hysterical anxiety of theirs makes them even more odious and offensive and obnoxious. Probably by now you are not having to imagine, because unfortunately what I have been describing is not imaginary. This is a society—or at least, a “society”—which is very real, which is all around us, and with which we are forced to interact on a daily basis. I am speaking, of course, of the society of Satan and his demons. This is a talk about the politics of hell.
Before we descend into the Inferno, however, I should say one preliminary word of thanks. Now I had hoped that the good Pater Edmund Waldstein might be here with us today, not because he’s who I am thanking, but because I was hoping at this point to get to troll him a bit with acronyms. You see, as some of you might already know, our friend Pater Edmund despises acronyms, complaining that “they impede signification and thought”—and so it is a good thing that Pater lives in Vienna rather than Rome, like me, because in the Eternal City the Church uses a seeming infinity of them. Every document, every dicastery, every degree has its own two- or three-letter abbreviation, and to keep up in conversation you are expected to be familiar with a rolodex worth, else you’re going to be confused by “CDW”—err, “DDW”—and alarmed by “STD.” My favorite Roman acronym, however, is for the Pontificia Academia Sancti Thomae Aquinatis, the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas: P-A-S-T-A: PASTA. And my word of thanks today is for the PASTA president, who, ironically, is a Frenchman. Fr. Serge-Thomas Bonino is a Dominican friar of the Toulouse province, my professor at the Angelicum, and probably the world’s foremost expert on the angelology of St. Thomas Aquinas. (The only person who could maybe compete for that title is Tobias Hoffmann, previously of CUA and now of the Sorbonne, who works on the fall of the demons and its implications for action theory—but I digress.) Fr. Serge-Thomas Bonino teaches in Italian and publishes almost exclusively in French, but his one book that is presently available in English translation is relevant to our topic today: Angels and Demons, of no-not-that-Angels–and–Demons fame. Even more relevant, for those who have French, is an essay Fr. Bonino wrote in Revue Thomiste back in 2013, “Les écailles de Léviathan: ou de l’organisation de la société des démons selon les théologiens du treizième siécle”—“The Scales of Leviathan: Or On the Organization of the Demons’ Society According to Thirteenth-Century Theologians.” Most relevant of all, however, for those who have Italian—and a sabbatical—are Fr. Bonino’s classes in Rome. I was blessed to take one with him this past semester on evil, the final dispensa for which ended up coming in at exactly 666 kilobytes (I don’t think he planned that but I also wouldn’t put it past him)—as well as one on Satan and the demons, fittingly located in Room 6, which you might remember as the name of Christine Taylor’s 2006 horror movie about devil-worshipping doctors. All of this just to say: I will be borrowing heavily from Fr. Bonino in this lecture—which is not to imply that he would necessarily endorse all of its integralist conclusions—and if you are interested in learning more about these things after today there is no better man to turn to than Fr. Bonino. Thus concludes the acronyms-and-acknowledgements section of this talk.
As we turn to consider the demons themselves, I should warn you that we will not really be getting to their politics proper until the second half of this lecture. I hope it is fair to assume that I am not speaking to a room of professional angelologists, so we will have a good amount of ground to cover on our way there, so that we can appreciate what we will find when we arrive. I think it is best to begin by situating demonology within the whole of Christian theology, because there is always a risk of exaggerating the importance of Satan, or of becoming inordinately curious about the workings of the underworld. Don’t get me wrong: The demons are very real, and so is spiritual warfare. But, it turns out, indulging a morbid fascination with the devil is a great way to lose in that spiritual warfare. To steal St. John the Divine’s phrase from his letters to the churches in the Apocalypse: Beware of “scrutinizing the depths of Satan.” The demons have their place in our Catholic doctrine, therefore, but it is important to be clear about what that place is, and not to let them leave it. Here is how Fr. Bonino began our course this year:
The Catholic Church’s teaching on Satan and the demons is not at all the center of Christian revelation. It is a side teaching, a marginal doctrine, that is, a peripheral truth in the hierarchy of revealed truths. It needs to remain so. A preaching of the Christian faith obsessed with the devil would be completely unbalanced. Indeed, the doctrine on Satan must be subordinated to and integrated with the most fundamental truths of the faith: the mystery of God and of his loving plans brought about by the victory of Christ, which frees believers from the powers of evil. Therefore, Satan’s place in the Christian faith is precisely under the feet of the risen Christ.
End quote, and mic drop. Now, obviously I would not be talking about the politics of hell today if I didn’t think there were something valuable for us to learn from it. But the point is that our interest needs to be mortified, limited to what we can know from the science of metaphysics and from sacra doctrina, and exclusively ordered to our Christian beatitude and the glory of God.
Allora, to understand the demons’ politics, which is part of what they do, first we need to know something about the demons’ nature and condition, which is part of what they are. Agere sequitur esse, right?: “Action follows being,” second act follows on first act. We’ll take two different paths to try to get there: from above, and from the side—that is, by considering what these spiritual substances are in general, and by contrasting the demons with their angelic counterparts. Let’s take the first one first, because it is always better to treat common things before particular ones, or else you end up just having to repeat yourself. (That, by the way—short side rant here—is why in the Summa St. Thomas considers the divine essence before he considers the processions of the divine persons, De Deo Uno before De Deo Trino. It was fashionable in the twentieth century to complain that St. Thomas was thereby subordinating the Most Holy Trinity to merely philosophical questions about God’s simplicity and goodness and perfection and infinity and so forth, but the truth is that St. Thomas was just better at methodology than his critics. If he had started with the persons, then in treating the Father he’d have had to talk about the Father’s simplicity and goodness etc., and then have more articles later about the Son’s simplicity and goodness etc., and then again for the Holy Spirit. It should have been obvious that he is beginning not with some deist rationalist God of the philosophers, but rather with what the three divine persons—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—have in common.)
So then, when it comes to the angels and demons, to “angels” considered indifferently, what do they have in common? We get a first clue from St. Thomas’ preferred name for them: not “angels,” which he usually reserves just for the lowest of the choirs, but rather—a term and an idea that originates in Aristotle—“separated substances.” Separated, one might rightly wonder, from what? And the answer, in a word, is: matter. The angels are substances—analogically but truly—beings which exist in themselves and not in another. But unlike any of the substances we experience here below, they have no matter whatsoever, but are pure form. St. Bonaventure would object to this, and indeed he tried to find some kind of non-bodily “spiritual matter” for the angels to have to distinguish them from the totally immaterial God, but St. Thomas will have none of it, since this spiritual matter of Bonaventure’s in principle cannot play the metaphysical role he would need it to play. We can’t enter into the details of that De Ente et Essentia argument (it’s in number 70, if you would like to check it yourself). But in the Thomistic picture—the correct picture—that I am sketching for you today, the angels are going to be totally immaterial. They are still infinitely inferior to God, because their angelic simplicity does not reach to the distinction of being and essence. But in terms of essence itself, the angels really are immaterial and simple.
They are forms, and so minds, and so, by Boethius’ famous definition, persons. Each one is “an individual substance of a rational nature”—or, better, an individual substance which also just is a rational nature—or an intellectual nature, to be more precise. For each of the angels is a species and indeed a genus unto himself, since matter is precisely what multiplies individual instances of a particular species, and the matter-form distinction is the basis of the genus-difference distinction. Lacking matter, every angel is individual and species and genus unto himself, and in the angel there is no real difference between these. It would be as though “James” and “rational” and “animal” were all identical and coextensive—in reality if not in concept—which is wild to try to wrap your mind around. Therefore, the words “angel” and “seraphim” and “separated substance” and incredibly even “substance” itself, when applied to them, do not correspond to essential kinds of things, a common sort of nature shared among many of them. Instead, these names are just convenient designators for us as we try to talk about all of these spirits who are simpler and higher than we are in the great chain of being. Our human knowledge is proportioned to sensible stuff, and so when we think or speak about angels we are already out of our depth, and we cannot see or say precisely what each of them is. So we speak in generalizations, even while knowing that there is nothing general in any of their natures, but only in the order of our minds. This was perhaps the greatest improvement Aristotle made over Plato: the insight that knowledge is in the mode of the knower, which does not necessarily correspond to the mode of the thing known. We men understand and speak of angels as though they were composed of genus and species, but that tells you something about how we think, not about how they are. For each of them is absolutely unique, and completely exhausts what he is, in a way that no individual man or dog or oak could totally actualize all the potencies of its species. In terms of his nature, therefore, every angel is simple and even relatively infinite and, in the proper sense, perfect.
As for the relations between these perfect substances, since each is a species unto himself, no two are alike, and—see Metaphysics Book Eight—therefore no two are equal. Each one is either higher or lower than any other one, such that they all come together to form a great linear hierarchy, a single-file line from the highest seraph down to the lowest guardian angel, with an innumerable multitude in between. On the subject of that multitude: One of the rare times that St. Thomas Aquinas criticizes Aristotle is over the number of these separated substances. Aristotle had been far too stingy in estimating that number, admitting only as many angels as there were distinct and irreducible kinds of motion, each one, he thought, initiated by a different separate substance. In the De Substantiis Separatis, St. Thomas prefers Plato’s much more generous reckoning of the number of angels, going so far as to describe Plato as representing the via sufficientior, in contradistinction to Aristotle’s via manifestior. Aristotle may proceed along “the more manifest way,” taking us by the hand and leading us step by step from things that are better known to us to their lesser-known implications. But Plato offers “the more sufficient way,” harder to see along but arriving at a more sweeping view of the truth of things—in this case, the enormity of the heavenly host. St. Thomas quotes the prophet Daniel for a scriptural warrant here, who says of the Ancient of Days, “Thousands of thousands ministered to him, and ten thousand times a hundred thousand stood before him.” St. Thomas reasons that, in creating, God intends chiefly the perfection of the universe, and so, the more perfect something is, the more of it we ought to expect to find in the created universe. But spirits are more perfect than bodies, so there will be even more angels in creation than there are corporeal substances—maybe vastly more. We might also think of the “myriads of angels” from Hebrews—or of the Church Fathers’ taking the one lost sheep to be mankind, in comparison with the ninety-nine angels. In fact, properly speaking “number” cannot apply to angels anyway, since number follows upon dimensive quantity which presupposes matter. And so the separated substances are strictly numberless. As Thomas quotes Denys as saying of the angels: “Many are the blessed armies of the supernal minds, exceeding the weak and constricted measure of our material numbers.”
What, then, does this numberless hierarchy do—or, we should ask instead: What is it supposed to do? Here we turn from our consideration of separated substances in general to a quick consideration of the good angels in particular, because we want to understand the demons and our weak intellects tend to appreciate things more by contrast with their opposites, but also because evil can only be understood indirectly anyway, in relation to the good. The good angels live peacefully in their hierarchy, etymologically their “sacred principate,” where St. Thomas defines “principate” as “one multitude ordered in one way under the government of a prince.” In this case, of course, the prince of the hierarchy is God himself. Now the angels have three functions in their hierarchy, for the sake of those below them in line: to purge or cleanse, to illumine or enlighten, and to perfect or unite to God. St. Thomas receives this threefold procedure from St. Denys the Areopagite—the “Pseudo-Dionysius,” if you like, and I do not—from his great treatise on the angels The Celestial Hierarchy. (Fun fact: The word “hierarchy” seems to have been invented by St. Denys himself in this very work.) You might recognize this triad from more modern spirituality literature, which tries to divvy up people’s Christian progress into the purgative way, the illuminative way, and the unitive way. I’ll be honest with you: I usually find such attempts unhelpful, too narcissistic and too experientialist, trying to make a science of something that just isn’t scientific, wanting to discern—or impose—a set of universalizable phenomena upon the spiritual life, which doesn’t work, and isn’t the point. But I flag it here just to note that the origin of the purgative, illuminative, and unitive is precisely the angelic hierarchy—and then the ecclesiastical sacraments that are our human participation in it. The good angels are constantly communicating God’s goodness to those further down the hierarchy, drawing them further up and further into the happiness of God, by purifying, enlightening, and perfecting those entrusted to their care.
What form this action takes depends upon where exactly the angel falls in rank. St. Denys had turned to scripture to learn about the various classes of angels within their overall ordering—to Isaiah, Ezekiel, Colossians, Ephesians, Jude—and so it is to St. Denys that we owe the traditional nine choirs of angels: three hierarchies, each with three orders within them: seraphim, cherubim, thrones; then dominions, virtues, powers; and finally principalities, archangels, and angels. (You might remember the scene from Canto 28 of Dante’s Paradiso, where Beatrice recalls that St. Gregory the Great had arrived into heaven, beheld the angelic orders, and been forced to admit that Denys was right and he was wrong, since he—Gregory—had switched the virtues and the principalities. “Di sé medesmo rise,” Beatrice says: “He smiled at his mistake.” But St. Thomas is nicer than Dante, and he gives St. Gregory the Great a way to save face by saying that both accounts are reasonable and that they might even amount to different words for the same teaching.) We will leave aside the details of the incredibly intricate bureaucracy of this ninefold order, which Fr. Bonino joked would be the envy even of the Italian administrative state. In fact St. Thomas says that, if we knew the angels perfectly, we would know it to be even more intricate, because rather than nine generalized choirs, in which the higher ones tend to look up to God and the lower ones tend to look down for creation, we would see that every single angel has his own particular role to play in the hierarchy. Nonetheless, do notice that the word “choir” is especially appropriate here, since the noblest work of all the angels—even more important than their purifying, illuminating, perfecting—is the laus perennis, the praise of God. The action of the good angels is first and foremost a liturgical action—as ours is meant to be too. And indeed, it is for the sake of God’s glory that the higher angels assist those subject to them in the hierarchy, inviting them to worship God and enabling them to do so as beautifully as possible.
We turn, at last, to the demons themselves. I will not say too much here about the fall of the demons, which—in better ages that could sustain serious speculative theology—was always the subject of controversy. For those who are interested in additional reading, I think St. Thomas’ best treatment of the demons’ fall, which corrects certain problems in his earlier attempt from the Prima Pars of the Summa, comes in Question 16, Article 4 of the De Malo, his Disputed Questions on Evil. Suffice it to say that Thomas presents all the separated substances as having been created in grace, with a first moment of natural knowledge and love for God, and after this another moment in which the angels charitably accepted, and the demons pridefully rejected, the call to a supernatural knowledge and love of God. Fr. Bonino explains the devil’s motivation thus:
Satan, in his pride, considered the conditions [of this supernatural invitation] humiliating. He regarded them as evil and therefore preferred to stick to the enjoyment of his own natural perfection insofar as, first, it belongs to him by right of nature as if he were its master, and, second, it distinguishes him from others. He preferred to remain first in the lower order instead of becoming one among others in the higher order. He has experienced the drama of the little boy who has to leave elementary school, where he is the senior, the “boss,” to move on to sixth grade where he would become the smallest among the big boys.
And so Satan spurned God’s invitation to a supernatural destiny, in a kind of diabolical version of Peter Pan Syndrome, with the other rebel angels as his Lost Boys. As punishment for this narcissism—ever since that moment of perfect, eternal demerit—the demons have experienced the pain of loss: the deprivation of the beatific vision and friendship with God, which is the only true happiness. Additionally, as further consequences of that most capital punishment, the demons’ intellects also have been darkened vis-à-vis supernatural knowledge; their wills have been made obstinate; they have suffered grief in the resistance of their wills to the way things are (Fr. Bonino says that they are “allergic to reality”); and they have been cast into hell and the earth’s dark atmosphere as places of punishment for their original—and perpetual—sin.
What is surprising, however—and what will be especially pertinent to the demons’ political arrangements—is just how much stayed the same for the demons despite their fall. Their natures, in fact, are entirely intact. I’m sure everyone here is familiar with the Thomistic adage “Grace perfects nature,” but the flipside of that is that sin does not destroy nature either—for us or for the demons. Both grace and sin are accidental modifications of a stable underlying substance. Otherwise, if grace were to replace nature rather than perfecting it, then among other absurd consequences, converting to the faith would actually be bad for me, because the me there would cease to exist and give way to some totally different person who would step in to take my place. This is not what the tradition means by “putting off the old man.” Now it’s true that grace, as a participation in the divine life of the Most Holy Trinity, is actually nobler in its essence than the human soul. Nevertheless, in its mode of being it is still just an accident, a quality—an “entitative habitus,” if you like—existing in the substance that is man. So likewise, sin is an accidental corruption, not an essential one. This is not to downplay how bad it is: All of our blessedness or wretchedness is a matter of accidents. Only God is happy just by his essence. But it is to say that sin leaves intact the underlying nature of the sinner. And so, whatever the demons possessed by nature in that first prelapsarian moment of grace, they still have today in their state of punishment. St. Thomas constantly repeats this Dionysian principle from the Celestial Hierarchy: “Certain gifts were bestowed upon the demons which, we say, have not been changed at all, but remain whole and most splendid”—“integra et splendidissima.”
The demons are morally bad, therefore, but still naturally good. The reason for this goes back to St. Augustine: Good and evil are not symmetrical. We do not inhabit a dualistic world, with equal and opposite forces of light and darkness warring against each other. On the contrary, all that is, inasmuch as it is, is good. Evil is merely a perversion, a corruption, the privation of a due good in a subject that ought to have it. And so the demons cannot be evil through and through, because evil is a parasite, and it cannot exist except in a good host. Evil is a perversion, and there cannot be a perversion that is not a perversion of something. In the case of the demons, that something is their good nature, and its good natural powers. They are putting these talents to awful ends, but the talents themselves persist. As St. Thomas says, “Although [the demons] do not have the purity that is through grace, nevertheless they have purity of nature”—“puritas naturae.” But being implies order, and therefore something of their original order remains for them as well. We arrive, at last, at the politics of hell.
The primary place where St. Thomas Aquinas discusses the political order of the demons is in the Summa Theologiae, Prima Pars, Question 109. As I hope you know already, the Prima Pars is about God—specifically, the divine essence, the distinction of divine persons, and the procession of creatures from him. Unsurprisingly, Question 109 falls in the third of those, on the procession of creatures, and more precisely within the final division of that part, on the divine governance of creatures. This question has four articles: Article 1 asks whether there are orders among the demons; Article 2, whether there is authority, or precedence, among them; Article 3, whether they illumine one another; and Article 4, whether they are subject to the authority of the good angels. Let’s take each in turn.
The first article asks of the order of hell utrum sit, “whether it is,” whether the demons have any politics at all. The casual reader of the Summa might find that he relates to the objectors more intuitively than usual with this article, since there seem to be good reasons for believing that the demons’ fall from grace would also be a fall from sociability. It is true, of course, that the will of the demons is permanently perverted, and that they are thus incapable of a genuine communion with others. It is also true that the further one descends away from God, the principle of unity, the less cohesion and the more anarchy one will find. Still, anarchy is like evil—indeed, it just is evil in the realm of political order—and so it can never exist in a pure form. Anarchy must always presume some sort of society as its subject. As Fr. Bonino says,
The idea of chaos or of absolute anarchy is as contradictory as the idea of absolute evil. As evil is a parasite on the good, so anarchy is a parasite on order. If ever anarchy were to triumph, it would immediately self-destruct, like Samson under the ruins of his own victory. In the world of the demons, therefore, there remains a certain order which, in the midst of disaster, continues to bear witness to the goodness and wisdom of God. Thus, according to St. Thomas, the demonic world retains the structure of the various angelic orders from which the rebellious angels fell.
Now, the original hierarchy of the angels according to nature was meant to be fulfilled and perfected in the hierarchy of grace—and, unlike us men whose heavenly glory will depend upon our charity over the extended course of this life, for the angels God distributed grace and thus glory simply according to the proportions of their natures, so that, for the good angels, their hierarchy now corresponds exactly to their hierarchy at creation, only without the would-be-demons in between them. The demons, of course, have definitively fallen from that order of grace. But St. Thomas teaches that the gifts of grace provide the formal element of the angelic hierarchy, and natural gifts the material element. Once again, grace perfects what nature disposes. And so the demons, the fallen angels, keep exactly the same order vis-à-vis their fellow demons that they had before the fall, because those natural dispositions, that matter for the hierarchy, has endured unchanged. Fr. Bonino compared this unfulfilled demonic ordering to the foundations of a house whose construction has been halted for lack of money. And this, by the way, makes some sense out of St. Paul’s continuing to refer to the demons by the names of the angelic choirs: “For our wrestling is not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers,” etc. According to St. Thomas, those are the orders to which these demons first belonged, and from which they fell.
There is some question as to whether this ladder of demonic descent still deserves the name “hierarchy.” After all, as we have seen already, “hierarchy” means precisely a holy principate. But the demons are not holy, and neither, especially, is their satanic prince. Nevertheless, St. Thomas is still willing to extend the term “hierarchy” to them, not because the demons’ own wills are holy, abused as these wills are for the sake of evil, but rather because the one who has ordered the demons from their creation is holy: God himself. Moreover, even after their fall, God uses these demonic orders for his own holy ends: to prove the saints and increase their merits, and to exact his divine justice upon the wicked. Even the demons are accounted for in St. Paul’s saying that all things work together for the good of those who love God. And so the demons—despite themselves and their own wicked intentions—somehow still inhabit a hierarchy. There is a twofold ordering of the Inferno: under Satan internally, and under God according to their integration into the general order of divine providence—and this latter satisfies for the definition of “hierarchy.”
Thus everything is still in place, in the demons’ social arrangements, and yet nothing is quite the same. Fr. Bonino suggests two analogies for this phenomenon which are more familiar to our experience:
In a corpse, all order, all structure does not disappear immediately [after death]. Although the soul, the principle of unity for the macrostructure, is absent, nevertheless the microstructures retain their nature, their respective properties as well as their interactions. However, the processes carried out by the microstructures are no longer in the service of the life of the organic whole. Or—to take a less macabre comparison—the collapse of the central political power at the end of the Carolingian Empire did not bring about the disappearance of all social life, but only caused its parceling out and feudalization, with many small local powers. The same happens with the society of the demons. When these angels freely reject their supernatural purpose, still their natural structures, which derive from the ontological relations between the pure spirits, do not disappear. They remain, however, mutilated and perverted.
Even bad men are political animals, and even bad angels are—granted, not animals, but—still political. Their society has an internal coherence and thus a form of unity, meaning that it is undivided in itself and divided from all others. And lest anyone should worry that this is all just Neoplatonists imposing their neurotic cosmic ordering on everything they can imagine, remember that our Lord himself referred to the City of Evil as a “kingdom”—a “βασιλεία,” in the Greek—a “regnum,” in the original language of sacred scripture.
Article 2 of Question 109 concerns the king of this kingdom: the devil, or Satan. Just as the demons’ nature guarantees them some preservation of hierarchy, so it also guarantees them some preservation of headship. The reason, once again, is that agere sequitur esse: “Action follows being”—and since the demons exist in an order, they will act in an order. Satan was the highest of the angels who fell. Whether he was the highest of the angels simply speaking has always been up for debate, with St. Thomas saying probably, but with some Franciscan theologians especially preferring to have Satan as merely the highest of the cherubim so that they might exempt all the fiery loving seraphim from sin—but at the very least we can say that Satan was the loftiest relative to the rest who sinned with him. He sits at the head of their hierarchy, and so he will act at the head of their hierarchy.
He is even, in some way, the cause of the rest of their sin—not by compulsion, which would make their choice involuntary and thus not a choice at all, but by suggestion or exhortation. Recall St. John’s imagery of the dragon sweeping away a third of the stars with its tail—and thus one third as the traditional number of angels who fell: less than half, since sin is against their natural inclination and nature prevails most of the time—but still no meager sum, especially given what we have said already about the innumerable multitudes of separated substances. And all these hordes of demons look to Satan, their model and inspiration, as their master. As St. Peter says in his second epistle, “By whom one has been overcome, of him he is also a slave.” There is a kind of perverse Fourth Way principle here, with the devil as first in the genus of rebel angels, and so, by his example, the cause of the rest of the genus.
St. Augustine and St. Thomas go so far as to speak of the devil’s prelacy as a sick imitation of Christ’s own. Of course with Satan there is no effective ontological link to his demons (or to the damned among men)—he is not the cause of their being, nor does he share his life with them, the way Christ shares his very Sonship by grace. Satan’s is only a moral causality, an evil exemplarity. Still, there is a sort of asymmetrical parallelism between Christ and his Church, on the one hand, and Satan and the City of Evil, on the other. Jesus even refers to “the devil and his angels,” paralleling our Lord’s own good angels. The tradition calls this the corpus diaboli, in explicit comparison and contradistinction to the Mystical Body of Christ. We might think, for example, of the great tympanum of the Premonstratensian church of Conques—the carving of the Last Judgment above the portal of that perfect eleventh-century Romanesque Church, just a few hours’ drive from here in Occitania along the Camino de Santiago (or Chemin de Saint-Jacques), which probably showed up in your high school art history book. In the center of the scene is Christ as Judge, ruling over heaven and earth, but in the lower-right corner is Satan, towering over the underworld in a way that recalls—but pathetically—the majesty of Christ in heaven. Satan is crowned and seated on a throne, directing spirits and souls with his arms—but unlike Christ, with his heavenly halo and mandorla, gesturing in both directions so as to sift according to justice, Satan points only downward into his own fiery kingdom. Christ is robed in glory and attended by angel acolytes; Satan is naked and encircled by snakes. He is not a copy of Christ, but a caricature. All evil can do is ape the good.
Two important objections arise concerning Satan’s authority. First, if Satan is the greatest sinner among them, falling from the highest height and taking the rest down with him, then why is he rewarded by providence with getting to be their king? To this St. Thomas answers that being a leader in evil is “not unto the good of the [leader], but rather unto [his] evil, because since to do evil especially pertains to misery, to excel in evil is to be [even] more miserable.” And so, even if he cannot see it this way, Satan’s rule is really a punishment, greatly contributing to his unhappiness, now and especially at the end of the world.
The second objection is this: Why would any demon choose Satan as his leader rather than God? After all, since the demons’ principal characteristic is their pride, would they not prefer to be subject to one who is infinitely greater, since it seems that much more insulting to pride to have to serve one who is so inferior? As Fr. Bonino puts it, “It is far more humiliating for the proud to submit to a subordinate superior than to the supreme superior. It is more mortifying for the young parochial vicar to obey the petty commands of a dull pastor than to carry out orders received directly from the Holy Father!” St. Thomas responds as follows:
All else being equal, [it is true that] the proud would rather be subject to a superior than to an inferior. But if he should be able to obtain some excellence under an inferior, which he could not obtain from the superior, then he would rather choose to be subject to the inferior than to the superior. And therefore it was not against the pride of the demons that they chose to be subject to an inferior, consenting to his authority, willing to have him as their prince and leader precisely so that they might obtain their ultimate beatitude by [their own] natural power—especially because in the order of nature they were already subject to the supreme angel even then.
Thus, although Satan harbors the illusion that he is like God, an end for others, really the lower demons submit to him not for that reason, but only because they think that submitting to Satan will let each of them become the ultimate end for himself. They too want to be like God, totally self-sufficient. “Non serviam!” is not just the slogan of their rebellion against the old order, but it is also the animating political philosophy of their new order itself. They are not seeking together the common good of the City of Evil, but rather each one is seeking only the affirmation of his own excellence and interest. As far as the demons are concerned, theirs is merely a kingdom of convenience.
Now, you might think that such coordinated self-interest would not be a very strong basis for political unity. You would be right. There is no true concord in the infernal kingdom, for concordia means “a union of hearts,” and the anti-social principle of pride breeds only discord. As Fr. Bonino says, “Pride nurtures a constant preference for its own good to the disregard of the common good.” One thing that does help to unite the demons, however, is their common enemy. They forge a “social contract,” as it were, in order to wage war more effectively against God and man. Thus St. Thomas writes in the reply to an objection:
The concord of the demons, whereby some obey others, is not from any friendship that they have among themselves; but from their common wickedness, by which they hate men, and fight against the justice of God. For it is proper [also] to wicked men that they should join themselves to one another and be subject to those whom they perceive to be stronger, for carrying out each his own individual wickedness.
Among the demons, therefore, there is no mutual affection. There is no internal and moral concord based on civic friendship, but only an external and instrumental alliance. Again Fr. Bonino: “As we know, external politics is an excellent diversion when there are serious domestic political problems. Sacred union against the external enemy is a remedy against internal political divisions. Thus hatred against God and men brings the demons together, and leads them to moderate their hatred of each other.” Of course this is no true political common good, but only a collectively self-interested compact of the sort one might find among a band of thieves. Satan is not so much a monarch as a mob boss.
All of this is the story the demons tell themselves about why they tolerate Satan and one another. They believe that such political bonds are optional but ultimately advantageous. Each one thinks that this social contract will eventually help him to get what he wants for himself—namely to become his own principle of happiness, and to offend God by causing the damnation of men. As Fr. Bonino puts it, “The unity of the society of demons is founded, from the point of view of subjective intentions, on a convergence of misunderstood interests: a caricature of the common good.” But in fact there is a deeper, truer reason why the demons are united in a society: divine wisdom. St. Thomas quotes the book of Wisdom, which tells how this wisdom “reaches from end to end mightily, and disposes all things sweetly.” Such wisdom, Thomas says, “leaves nothing in the universe inordinate,” or without order. As Fr. Bonino writes, “This type of society is viable not so much in virtue of a very unstable balance of interests as in virtue of the permanence within it of a fundamentally good nature, which, although it may be thwarted or even denied, is nonetheless present and a source of what can be positive in the permanence of this society.” Thus the kingdom of hell is ultimately founded not upon the injustice of the demons, but upon the justice of God, ordering all things by nature and his providential care.
The third article of our Question 109 asks whether the demons can illumine each other. To understand the difficulty, remember the threefold act of the angelic hierarchy: purging, illumining, perfecting. Now, obviously the demons are not purging or perfecting their inferiors, purifying them or uniting them to God. But it is less clear with regard to the illuminative way, because the demons really can communicate with one another. They can and do share truths among themselves. However, the answer must be that such communication is not true illumination, for, explains St. Thomas, “Illumination properly is the manifestation of truth according as it is ordered to God, who illumines every intellect.” But the demons’ speech to one another is meant to lead rather away from God, and thus it ends in greater darkness, not illumination. Theirs is not a communion of minds in the truth they behold, unto its source in the First Truth. They are not contemplating and handing on the things contemplated. Instead they have only a practical aim: to transmit useful information to coordinate their actions more effectively, so that they might exclude men from the illumined divinization from which they have already definitively excluded themselves. “The intention from which this communication arises is always perverse,” Fr. Bonino says: “It is consummated by the evil designs of the devil who is always trying to divert others from God, whereas illumination is a communication of truth that comes from God and whose purpose is to lead to God.” Demonic speech, therefore, is not illuminative. It is not even speculative. It is a mere calculation of efficiency: “the primacy of the practical” taken to its most evil extreme.
Article 4, the last of our question, is about the relation between angels and demons. Granted the demons have a hierarchy of their own, how does it stand in regard to the graced angelic hierarchy of the celestial choirs? This is a consoling consideration: All authority comes from God, and so the closer anyone is to God, the more influence that one will have over others. As such, the good angels rule over the bad, because they are nearer to God, participating more fully in his royal majesty. This is just how the cosmic hierarchy plays itself out.
The angels’ authority over the demons is real even now, but it will become especially manifest on the last day, when St. Michael and the glorious armies of heaven march in full force, when the City of Evil is unequivocally defeated, and Satan and his subjects are banished to hell for eternity. We are living now in the last days, as indeed Christians have been ever since the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us—and the demons are not stupid. Deep down they suspect that their days are numbered, that the war will come to an end, and not in their favor—and the dread and anger of this realization makes them to act out with ever greater ferocity. “Woe to you, O earth and sea,” we read in Revelation: “because the devil is come down unto you, having great wrath, knowing that he hath but a short time”—after which he “shall be tormented day and night for ever and ever.” We are witnessing the death throes of the corpus diaboli upon the earth.
This final article, about the angels’ power over the demons, makes sense out of why this question on the society of hell is included in the section of the Prima Pars on divine governance, which might have stuck you as unusual when I first mentioned it. Not even the demons, in their rival city, escape the government of God. “If I descend into hell, thou art present,” chants the Psalmist. Of course the demons do not formally participate in the good of the whole creation, since their entire wills are fixed against it, but materially they cannot escape. All that they do, in their coordinated rebellion, is still ultimately directed by God through his angels. Thus any evil that the angels permit—whether from demons or from men—is always for the sake of some good that follows it. In St. Thomas’ phrase, the angels are “ministers of divine wisdom.” Moreover—and this should be especially comforting, and a nice place to conclude our consideration of the politics of hell—even the very lowest of the guardian angels, even yours or mine, can rule over Satan himself, because “the power of divine justice to which the good angels cleave is stronger than the natural power of the [demons].” Thank God.
I would like for us to return to our thought experiment from the very beginning, now—I hope—with a greater understanding of its implications. I had asked you to imagine a society—a society made up of self-absorbed, atomized individuals—a society in which the various members tolerate each other, because they know they need each other, but only so that each of them can achieve his own private ambitions and desires—a society, moreover, that is in open rebellion against its own origins. Then I asked you to imagine that, once upon a time, this society had been noble, and civil, and good—but that its citizens—especially its elite citizens—out of a disordered sense of pride, effected a revolution against that received ancient order. Next I had you imagine that this revolution had some ironic consequences, such as that, in the name of liberating themselves from being subject to any official king, these citizens wound up creating for themselves an even more oppressive and authoritarian regime—and that their honorable hierarchy, which in their pettiness they would have liked to dissolve altogether, was merely replaced by a dishonorable hierarchy—that they traded an ordered harmony for hostile power relations, and a common good for private vices. You further imagined that this populace—who, again, hate their own heritage and devote all their time and energy to contradicting it, loudly—is in fact deeply unsatisfied, frustrated, lonely, sad. And yet you imagined that, despite their unhappiness in this society, they also live in constant, ever-growing fear—fear that this society of theirs, and everything it stands for, is on the verge of defeat. You imagined, finally, that this hysterical anxiety of theirs makes them even more odious and offensive and obnoxious.
I used to think that St. Thomas Aquinas had never addressed liberalism in his political writings, living, as he did, several centuries before the Enlightenment. I was wrong. He treats it carefully and critically in the text we have just considered: Prima Pars Question 109, on the political arrangement of the demons. It is terrifying how similar St. Thomas’ account of the politics of hell is to Immanuel Kant’s account of the ideal government. Kant even refers to such a state as being perfect for “a population of demons,” secured with general laws for conserving their common accord, laws that pit particular sentiments against each other, so that they might procedurally neutralize the proud egoistic dispositions of each individual. “Kant is here at antipodes with the political thought of St. Thomas Aquinas,” remarks Fr. Bonino. As I expect everyone here will know well, St. Thomas teaches that society arises from the natural sociability of man expressed in civic friendship and ordered to his temporal common good, itself ordered to his spiritual common good attained in and through the Roman Church. It is the Catholic alternative to Kant’s Lutheran individualist state of nature, in—another Protestant’s catchphrase—a war of all against all.
It is the angelic alternative to Kant’s republican rule for a race of demons. For in St. Thomas’ Dionysian worldview, the angelic hierarchy is to serve as the archetype of our human societies, both political and ecclesiastical. James Madison was wrong, therefore, that “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” As we have seen, the angels have an elaborate government, and theirs is meant to be the model for ours. But alas, too often of late, our states have taken the demons for their political inspiration instead, with our citizens driven only by a narcissistic search for their private interest, rejecting all reference to a common good of the moral order, beginning with the transcendent common good which is God himself. Granted, there are dissimilarities here as well: Unlike the angels, our societies are not founded upon essential inequalities, since all men share a single species; and unlike the demons, no human society is definitively fixed in its rejection of God. Nonetheless, the similarities are pronounced, and they are not accidental. Liberalism has traded a hierarchy unto God for an every-man-for-himself tyranny.
We will conclude with one final quotation from Fr. Serge-Thomas Bonino:
The demonic society offers us an interesting theoretical model, for thinking about the not-always-theoretical possibility of a society that either rejects or disregards any reference to the objective moral good, and merely ensures a more or less peaceful coexistence among individuals who are deemed evil and guided solely by the pursuit of self-interest. Reflection on the demonic city confirms our contemporary experience: Such a society is feasible! It survives by virtue of a certain “a-moral,” unjust, and precarious balance that is established between the subjective interests of each of the individuals involved. However, this society survives above all and most profoundly because the natural tendencies that lead each being toward the objective good of its own nature remain active in it, though disavowed and opposed on the reflective level.
In other words—what is old hat for us by now—liberalism survives by exploiting pre-liberal resources, the resources of the very metaphysical order and natural law that it speculatively denies.
By grace, St. Thomas teaches, we are to be taken up into the orders of the angels, perhaps filling out the places in the celestial hierarchy vacated through the fall. And so our politics should be practicing for that ascent, and indeed helping to accomplish it, by ordering us together toward our true good. Whereas liberalism prepares our souls to be slotted into the demonic order of hell, of which it is an alarmingly accurate imitation. May our better angels prevail.
Regina Angelorum, ora pro nobis.
Omnes angeli Dei, orate pro nobis.
