Pints With Aquinas - What Can Demons Do? | Fr. Gregory Pine, O.P.

Episode Date: March 16, 2024

Fr. Pine asks questions about demonolgy and spiritual warfare that can help us balance our attention of the paranormal against the attention we pay to God and the good. 🟣 Join Us on Locals (before we get banned on YT): https://mattfradd.locals.com/ 📖 Fr. Pine's Book: https://bit.ly/3lEsP8F 🖥️ Website: https://pintswithaquinas.com/ 🟢 Rumble: https://rumble.com/c/pintswithaquinas 👕 Merch: https://shop.pintswithaquinas.com 🚫 FREE 21 Day Detox From Porn Course: https://www.strive21.com/ 🔵 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mattfradd 📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mattfradd  

Hello, my name is Fr. Gregory Pine and I'm a Dominican friar in the province of St. Joseph. I teach at the Dominican House of Studies and I work for the Thomistic Institute and this is Pines with Aquinas. In this episode I'd like to talk a little bit about demons. So we recently hosted a retreat, a Thomistic Institute retreat at the House of Studies for students at the Catholic University of America about angels and demons. And it fell to me to describe the influence of the demons. And in kind of researching for it and then presenting the themes, it struck me that

this is helpful for our own spiritual maturation and growth. Not in the sense that it represents the most important part of our life of faith, certainly not, but that it represents a part of our life of faith. And if we don't address it it There's a kind of risk that we ignore it or fear it or otherwise fall prey to it So let's think a little bit about how the demons are at work in our world and how they might be at work in our life Here we go Okay, so I want to address a kind of temptation at the outset. I think that sometimes people fear that they're missing out on the substance of their spiritual lives because they're missing an integral part.

It's like there's some secret that they haven't learned or there's some key that they haven't picked up. So they might say to themselves, you know, I'm praying, I'm making good use of the sacraments, I'm engaging in Christian friendship, I've introduced some penance into my life, I'm studying the faith, but like, there's not there, right? I'm just not not really firing on all cylinders because I'm not feeling it and I'm not experiencing it as delightful and Dot-dot-dot, you know, you can think about the way in which people describe their spiritual lives So people go looking for this secret or they go looking for this key and I think sometimes people happen upon the demonic

Or the world of demons as the thing that they've been missing out on. And then they begin to train their mystic sights on all things demonic. Not that they want to get involved in them, but they want to oppose them, right? They want to cleanse themselves of them. But then they end up dedicating too much time and too much energy to the effort, which can introduce a kind of imbalance into their lives. So there's some people who are occupied with these types of things on a full-time basis, like exorcists, for instance. And there might be other people who have these realities kind of presented to them with frequency because of some kind of mischief or because of some kind of problem that they're confronting or that

they're dealing with. But I think for most of us, we assign a proportionate place, like a kind of appropriate place to the demonic or to the world of demons. Not assigning, yeah, too great a place to it, because we want to think about God, we want to think about His Christ, His Church, His sacraments, all of the many means that He has provided for us such that we can attain to our end, namely salvation in Him. So we start there with God, who is Father, right? Who is good, who is provident, and who has not permitted us to be tested beyond our strength, who if anything should befall that were a kind of temptation or a pitfall, that He provides for us a way through or a way out. So I think this pertains to our understanding of demons, to our belief in the demonic or

the world of demons, namely that, yeah, there are demons and that, yeah, they do tempt us or they do afflict us, but that God protects us from them by, you know, His grace, by the various means that He puts at our disposal, by the angels, one of whom is assigned to us as a guardian, by the prayers of the saints, by many things besides. And even when it comes to, like, the activity of demons, God uses that, right, for our growth, for the kind of testing and proving of the just. And He also uses it for punishing the demons themselves, right, for tormenting them. So they're constantly confronted

by the fact that even though they rebelled against God, they're implicated in God's plans. Okay, so that's like the big setting, sunburst. Then let's think a little bit about what demons can do and then what we, by contrast, or what we, by response, or I can't formulate my thoughts, what we can do in turn. Okay, so I like to divide up amongst the physical, the emotional, the psychological, and the spiritual. Obviously there's going to be some overlap because there are physical dimensions to the emotions and physical and emotional dimensions to the psychological, and there are... you get it. But I just kind of like to build it up from the foundation, our kind of bodily foundation, into the spiritual, various spiritual dimensions of our life. Okay, so

thinking about the physical, St. Thomas will teach that angels and demons, so demons retain the powers of angels unless those things are taken away with a loss of grace or as a result of being kind of darkened or obscured in their intellect. But in general, we can affirm of angels and of demons, similar things because they're both spiritual substances, each of their own species, but spiritual substances. So with respect to the physical, St. Thomas will teach that angels and demons can kind of arrange the elements so as to take on a physical appearance. So St.

Thomas is just trying to make sense of the sacred scriptures of divine revelation. And I'll notice that in the scriptures, angels appear to several people at once. You can think here of like the book of Tobit. How do you account for that? Well it seems like the simplest explanation is that the angel assumed an appearance. Alright now, there's also the possibility that angels can directly influence or directly manipulate your sense powers. Okay so you think about like the common sense, the imagination, these interior senses whereby we kind of pull together and whereby we project our sense experience.

So St. Thomas will say that angels have access to that because it's a bodily feature of our life and they can manipulate it such that we perceive that they are present. So angels are immaterial, non-material, they don't have a body. So they're not going to be in a place in the way that a bodily thing is in a place, but they can be in a place in the sense that they exercise power there. So that's kind of what we mean when we talk about them appearing to

us in this way. So that'd be the physical. Next is the emotional. And here we can appreciate how very bodily our emotional experience is. It's kind of complicated what an emotion means in St. Thomas Aquinas. He doesn't really talk about emotions, he talks about passions. So setting that aside, let's just say that in every emotion there's a bodily dimension and then there's a kind of sense dimension and whether that's, well whatever, bodily dimension and then a sensitive dimension. So the bodily dimension is just some movement, some change in our body.

So when you get angry, your heart starts pounding and you start seeing red and other things besides. So as a bodily part or physical part of our life, angels are gonna be able to control that or manipulate that, or demons I should say are gonna be able to control that or tinker with that. But then when it comes to the sensitive appetite, they're going to be able to propose certain objects of sense.

So like we might have various sense objects before us and they might kind of push one forward or direct our attention to one, thereby making it appear more alluring or more tempting. So you've got Sour Patch Kids over here and you've got A Good Conversation over here and you've got The Worship of God over here, angels can kind of propose sense objects and stir us up in response to sense objects such that we get all kind of, yeah, whatever it is, confused emotionally. And then, third and finally, we've got the psychological dimension. So of course, you don't leave behind the physical or the emotional, so there's this brain chemistry

piece, right, which is part of our bodily life, and we're just going to have to deal with that. I'm assuming that demons are going to kind of make little sorties in that dimension. But then we also have this dimension of conceptual thought. And once you get to the immaterial, the angels aren't, or the demons, I should say, aren't directly interposing at that level because they don't have access, really, or the demons I should say, aren't directly interposing at that level because they don't have access really to the material or they don't have access directly and immediately to our most interior life.

So what they can do is they can propose certain objects as a way by which to influence our thinking and they're really good at kind of deducing what it is that we're thinking and how we might be led to think in another direction or in their preferable direction. It's like if you've ever seen those scenes or read those scenes in Sherlock Holmes where Sherlock watches Watson and like what he's looking at and then his expressions and then what he eventually does and he'll deduce the whole line of thought. Demons are like that, except times a billion, so they have great sensitivity to our various kind of manifestations, as it were, of our interior life, and they can deduce on the basis of those manifestations what's going on in our interior life,

and then they can propose objects of sense which correspond to the easiest way to derail us, or the easiest way to deflect us, disperse us, whatever else. Okay. So physical, emotional, psychological, and then spiritual. Here, I mean in the sense like our highest powers, namely intellect and will, are spiritual powers. So they transcend our bodily life. You know, like they're going to work through our bodily life, but they transcend our bodily life, so they're immaterial and that's the reason for which we're immortal.

And the demons don't have access to our spiritual life directly or immediately only God has access to our spiritual life as creating it and sustaining it and being and as inhabiting it as one inhabits a temple you know so by the life of grace so God preserves us kind of as an inviolable sanctum into which he himself enters. Yeah, so you can have that kind of confidence. So I think that when it comes to kind of demonic intervention, what we have here is a sense that, all right, there's going to be some physical, some emotional, and some psychological attack or opposition, and that we can expect that, and that we can be ready for that. But that we have the certainty which comes to us from our understanding of our human

nature and of God's creative and recreative action in our life that we don't have to worry about them coercing us or making us choose something. We remain free and God as the giver and the blesser of our freedom sees to that. So then this helps us to get a sense for like what we can do in turn. So I think it's in part to attribute importance where importance ought to be attributed. So what matters is what we choose. What matters is how we direct the course of our life in response to God's offer of Himself and of His grace. the course of our life in response to God's offer of Himself and of His grace. And if we kind of get bewildered or bemused physically or emotionally or

psychologically, yeah, we want to rectify that, we want to tend to that, but it's not the most important thing. Okay, so your life isn't just a life of physical integrity or of emotional equilibrium or of psychological balance, it's a life of spiritual flourishing. And those things stand to be healed and grown by a life of spiritual flourishing, but they're stand to be healed and grown by a life of spiritual flourishing, but they're going to take a back seat to what drives the car, which is how we respond to God by choice, right? How we see intellectually and how we choose volitionally. So yeah, I think it just means having a keen sense of what's most important and then what's

less important. And then when it comes to temptations by which we're confronted, I think that we interpret them, but we don't over-interpret them. So obviously opposition comes from various corners. We'll talk about the world and the flesh and the devil. And in our experience of temptation, we might not be able to discern amongst, all right, does that come from the world or from the flesh or from the devil? But at the end of the day, it's not the most important thing to verify from whence it comes. What is important is that we want to oppose those temptations or kind of move beyond those temptations. So there are going to be certain temptations which it's best to confront directly, right? Like a temptation to unforgiveness or to resentment. You want to choose

back into that. Choose love, choose forgiveness, ask God for the grace. And then there are going to be temptations like that you're going to want to flee, like sexual temptations would be a classic example. You don't want to engage with that because you'll just get more bound up in the logic of it. So you just want to turn and run, change the scene, do something else. Okay? So we're gonna respond to temptations in a pretty uniform manner regardless of where they come from. So we don't want to like say there's no demonic going on here because there's probably some demonic going on here.

Nor do we want to say, it's all demonic going on here because it's probably not all demonic going on here. So we don't want to like banalize it or trivialize it, but we also don't want to like hyper-predinaturalize it. Those are words that, nevermind, just keep going, Father Gregory. Okay, so that's just to have a good head on our shoulders and to be spiritually sensitive to what's going on and to interpret our experience

in a way that's adequate or in a way that best reflects the reality given what we know and what we're competent to actually register. So then, what can we do? I think in general it's good just to have as a principle, talk to heaven and not to hell. Okay, so talk to heaven, talk to God, talk to the saints, talk to the angels, and don't bother talking to hell too terribly much because you don't want anyone to get involved in that conversation because you can get kind of bound up or implicated in that conversation. The next is to lay claim to your baptism. So you recall at the beginning of the baptismal rite that the priest instructs the parents

and the godparents after he himself signs the child on the cross, excuse me, on the forehead with the cross. So the priest signs the child on the forehead with the cross, with a sign of the cross, and then the parents and godparents do so as well, with the sense that you've been claimed from this present evil age, you've been claimed from, you know, the dominion of of fell things for the dominion of of blessed things, of like godly things. So you've been claimed for Christ by the sign of his cross. And in the rite of baptism there are exorcisms and you know anointings which precede the baptism as way by which to prepare for it. So you have a kind of baptismal grace and

authority over your spiritual life and you act out of that baptismal grace and authority which is redoubled by confirmation which suits you for spiritual combat all right so you've been marked with a character of confirmation which equips you to do battle with everything that would oppose your you know spiritual life and So so have confidence in that and then have confidence in the ordinary like means which God puts at your disposal because they all have an exorcistic power to them. So prayer and the sacraments and penance, those all have a kind of exorcistic power. And so we don't need to look for a bunch of new and novel things that we haven't heard of before. We can just rely upon the ordinary means of Christian life because they're powerful

and they're potent. So yeah, I just want to direct your attention to that, all right? And now it's also good to have in mind like certain prayers that you can say or certain practices that you can employ which are further kind of helps in this manner. And a cleansing prayer, it's like know a good cleansing prayer or to know a good prayer litany of protection is helpful in this regard. So like one cleansing prayer would be, Lord Jesus Christ, I cover myself in your most precious blood and I bind and send to the foot of the cross the spirit of anxiety or the spirit of insomnia that you may do with it there what you will.

Okay? So you claim your baptismal authority, you cover yourself in the Lord's precious blood, you bind whatever it is that's plaguing you, and then you send it to Jesus and He's gonna do with it what He does with it. It's not for you to like start determining what's gonna be done with it because that's probably not part of our competence, okay? And then when it comes to like what you suspect might be the demonic at work in other people's lives, obviously exorcists, you know, they have a power. I mean, priests, all priests have a certain power and exorcists have a higher power in that regard. And there's some conversation over what type of role lay Catholics can play in exorcisms or lay Christians can play in exorcists have a higher power in that regard. And there's some conversation over what type of role lay Catholics can play in exorcisms

or lay Christians can play in exorcisms. And it seems to be the case that, yeah, you have a baptismal authority over yourself. You probably have a kind of baptismal authority over demons elsewhere or otherwise, but the church has counseled you not to exercise that because it can get you involved in things which might be terrifying or which might be bewildering. Okay, so there's a document in the 1980s which instructs that you not kind of directly address demons in the life of another person for fear of manifestation or for fear of opening up a conversation which you might not be ready to host or to see through to its end.

So it strikes me me as like, you have the right, as it were, but the church has limited that right on account of certain prudential concerns. Now, that's like a big conversation in the church, and I think it's ongoing. I'm not especially advanced in my study of this issue, so I've just kind of posed it, but I don't intend to resolve it. So just so that you know. So in general, talk to heaven and not to hell. You have an authority with your baptism. The ordinary means of Christian sanctification have an exorcistic power. And then you might want to employ a cleansing prayer at particular times in your spiritual

life when you feel yourself perhaps under an especially difficult attack. But you can know this, that God makes all things work to the good for those who love him and are called according to his purpose, and that the Lord will not permit you to be tested beyond your strength and for every temptation that does befall, he'll provide for you a way out or a way through. So I would say, you know, don't worry about discovering the secret or laying hold of the key in these particular matters. You can trust that God is good, that he is provident, that He has provided you with the means which will see to your sanctification provided only that you consent to and cooperate with them, and that, yeah, He'll work out the details.

So that's what I had hoped to share, and please God, that's of some service to you. This is Binds with Aquinas. If you haven't yet, please do subscribe to the channel, push the bell, and get sweet email updates when other things come out. Also, I contribute to a podcast called God's Blending. If you haven't yet, please do subscribe to the channel, push the bell and get sweet email updates when other things come out. Also I contribute to a podcast called God Splitting. We just had a guest on, Ryan Bethea, who hosts the Exorcist Files with Father Carlos Martins. So you can check out God Splitting on that particular point.

Also Matt has had a couple of exorcists on the channel. So I'm thinking of Father Vincent Lampert and then also Father Carlos Martins. And so you can check out those episodes as good resources for determining what you should do or what you should study up on when it comes to these matters. And I think that's it. So know of my prayers for you, please pray for me, and I'll look forward to chatting with you next time on Pines with Aquinas.