CHAPTER XLV. OF DEMONOLOGY, AND OTHER RELICS OF THE RELIGION OF THE GENTILES. 45. of demonology. THE impression made on the organs of sight by PART IV. lucid bodies, either in one direct line, or in many lines, reflected from opaque, or refracted in the The original passage through diaphanous bodies, produceth in living creatures, in whom God hath placed such organs, an imagination of the object, from whence the impression proceedeth; which imagination is called sight; and seemeth not to be a mere imagination, but the body itself without us; in the same manner, as when a man violently presseth his eye, there appears to him a light without, and before him, which no man perceiveth but himself; because there is indeed no such thing without him, but only a motion in the interior organs, pressing by resistance outward, that makes him think so. And the motion made by this pressure, continuing after the object which caused it is removed, is that we call imagination and memory; and, in sleep, and sometimes in great distemper of the organs by sickness or violence, a dream; of which things I have already spoken briefly, in the second and third chapters. This nature of sight having never been discovered by the ancient pretenders to natural knowledge; much less by those that consider not things so remote, as that knowledge is, from their present use; it was hard for men to conceive of those images in the fancy and in the sense, otherwise, than of 45. PART IV. things really without us: which some, because they vanish away, they know not whither nor how, will The original have to be absolutely incorporeal, that is to say of demonology. immaterial, or forms without matter; colour and figure, without any coloured or figured body; and that they can put on airy bodies, as a garment, to make them visible when they will to our bodily eyes; and others say, are bodies and living creatures, but made of air, or other more subtle and ethereal matter, which is, then, when they will be seen, condensed. But both of them agree on one general appellation of them, DEMONS. As if the dead of whom they dreamed, were not inhabitants of their own brain, but of the air, or of heaven, or hell; not phantasms, but ghosts; with just as much reason as if one should say, he saw his own ghost in a looking-glass, or the ghosts of the stars in a river; or call the ordinary apparition of the sun, of the quantity of about a foot, the demon, or ghost of that great sun that enlighteneth the whole visible world and by that means have feared them, as things of an unknown, that is, of an unlimited power to do them good or harm; and consequently, given occasion to the governors of the heathen commonwealths to regulate this their fear, by establishing that DEMONOLOGY, (in which the poets, as principal priests of the heathen religion, were specially employed or reverenced,) to the public peace, and to the obedience of subjects necessary thereunto; and to make some of them good demons, and others evil; the one as a spur to the observance, the other as reins to withhold them from violation of the laws. What kind of things they were, to whom they 45. attributed the name of demons, appeareth partly PART IV. in the genealogy of their gods, written by Hesiod, one of the most ancient poets of the Grecians; and What were partly in other histories; of which I have observed of the ancients. some few before, in the twelfth chapter of this dis course. the demons doctrine How far by the Jews. The Grecians, by their colonies and conquests, How that communicated their language and writings into Asia, was spread. Egypt, and Italy; and therein, by necessary consequence their demonology, or, as St. Paul calls it, (1 Tim. iv. 1) their doctrines of devils. And by that means the contagion was derived also to the Jews, both of Judea and Alexandria, and other parts, whereinto they were dispersed. But the name of demon they did not, as the Grecians, attribute to spirits both good and evil; but to the evil only : and to the good demons they gave the name of the spirit of God; and esteemed those into whose bodies they received entered to be prophets. In sum, all singularity, if good, they attributed to the spirit of God; and if evil, to some demon, but a κakodáμwr, an evil demon, that is a devil. And therefore, they called demoniacs, that is possessed by the devil, such as we call madmen or lunatics; or such as had the falling sickness, or that spoke any thing which they, for want of understanding, thought absurd. As also of an unclean person in a notorious degree, they used to say he had an unclean spirit; of a dumb man, that he had a dumb devil; and of John the Baptist (Matt. xi. 18), for the singularity of his fasting, that he had a devil; and of our Saviour, because he said, he that keepeth his sayings should not see death in æternum, (John viii. 52), Now we know thou hast a devil; Abraham is dead, and the 45. PART IV. prophets are dead and again, because he said (John vii. 20), They went about to kill him, the people answered, Thou hast a devil; who goeth about to kill thee? Whereby it is manifest, that the Jews had the same opinions concerning phantasms, namely, that they were not phantasms, that is, idols of the brain, but things real, and independant on the fancy. Why our Which doctrine, if it be not true, why, may some trolled it not. Say, did not our Saviour contradict it, and teach the contrary? Nay, why does he use on divers occasions such forms of speech as seem to confirm it? To this I answer, that first, where Christ saith, (Luke xxiv.39) A spirit hath not flesh and bone, though he show that there be spirits, yet he denies not that they are bodies. And where St. Paul says, (1 Cor. xv. 44) we shall rise spiritual bodies, he acknowledgeth the nature of spirits, but that they are bodily spirits: which is not difficult to understand. For air and many other things are bodies, though not flesh and bone, or any other gross body to be discerned by the eye. But when our Saviour speaketh to the devil, and commandeth him to go out of a man, if by the devil, he meant a disease, as phrensy, or lunacy, or a corporeal spirit, is not the speech improper? Can diseases hear? Or can there be a corporeal spirit in a body of flesh and bone, full already of vital and animal spirits? Are there not, therefore spirits, that neither have bodies, nor are mere imaginations? To the first I answer, that the addressing of our Saviour's command to the madness, or lunacy he cureth, is no more improper than was his rebuking of the fever, or of the wind and sea; for neither do these hear; or than was the command of God, 45. to the light, to the firmament, to the sun, and stars, PART IV. when he commanded them to be; for they could not hear before they had a being. But those speeches are not improper, because they signify the power of God's word; no more therefore is it improper, to command madness, or lunacy, under the appellation of devils by which they were then commonly understood, to depart out of a man's body. To the second, concerning their being incorporeal, I have not yet observed any place of Scripture, from whence it can be gathered, that any man was ever possessed with any other corporeal spirit, but that of his own, by which his body is naturally moved. do not teach Our Saviour, immediately after the Holy Ghost The Scriptures descended upon him in the form of a dove, is said that spirits are by St. Matthew (chapter iv. 1), to have been led incorporeal. up by the Spirit into the wilderness; and the same is recited (Luke iv. 1) in these words, Jesus being full of the Holy Ghost, was led in the Spirit into the wilderness; whereby it is evident that by spirit there, is meant the Holy Ghost. This cannot be interpreted for a possession; for Christ, and the Holy Ghost, are but one and the same substance; which is no possession of one substance, or body, by another. And whereas in the verses following he is said to have been taken up by the devil into the holy city, and set upon a pinnacle of the temple, shall we conclude thence that he was possessed of the devil, or carried thither by violence? And again, carried thence by the devil into an exceeding high mountain, who showed him thence all the kingdoms of the world: wherein we are not to believe he was either possessed, or forced by the devil; nor that any mountain is VOL. III. TT |