Before saying the little I can about this group of miracles, I want to guard against a misunderstanding. The question of possession has nothing to do with whether there exists a personal, conscious power of evil, the great adversary of the kingdom of heaven, commonly called Satan or the devil. The two questions are distinct, and either can be argued without alluding to the other.
Many think the recorded cases show only the symptoms of well-known diseases, whose exceptionally painful character, with loss of reason, convulsive motions and other abnormal phenomena, led the imaginative and unscientific Easterns to attribute them to a foreign power taking possession of body and mind. They say our Lord did not come to correct men’s psychological or physiological theories, and adopted the common way of speaking, but cast out the evil spirits simply by healing the diseases attributed to them.
I see nothing unchristian in this interpretation. All diseases may well be regarded as inroads of evil powers on the temples of God, where only the Holy Spirit has a right to dwell, and to cast them out is as great a marvel as to expel the intruding forces to which the Jews attributed some of them. Yet I cannot admit that this solution meets all the appearances of the difficulty. I say appearances because I know too little to be dogmatic. But I do not find the marvellous incredible, provided it is itself worthy. I have no difficulty receiving the old Jewish belief about possession, and I think it explains the recorded phenomena better than the growing modern opinion; the action of matter on mind may well be a greater mystery than the action of one spirit on another. That a man should rave because a cell or two in his brain is out of order is no more within man’s understanding than that an evil spirit, getting close to the fountain of his physical life, should disturb all its goings on, even to appalling moral phenomena. In either case an external power acts on the man.
“But we do not even know that there are such spirits, and we do know that a diseased brain is enough to account for the worst of the phenomena recorded.” I will not insist that we do not know a diseased brain is enough; grant it. The explanation still does not fit the statements of the record, and we know so little of what is that any hint of unknown possibilities should be welcomed, even as a stranger, with contemplation and conjecture, so long as it involves no moral contradiction. The man who will not speculate can make no progress. Thinking about the possible is as lawful as the severest induction, and experiment itself must follow sober conjecture, for if we already know, what is experiment for?
There seems nothing unreasonable in supposing spirits who once had bodies like ours and, having abused embodiment, are condemned for a season to roam bodiless, mourning the loss of the only pleasures they care for and craving them in imagination. Out of hate for those who have what they lost, or eagerness to come as near a body as they can, such spirits might well seek to enter into a man. This is consistent with the recorded facts, and possibly with some forms of the madness of our own day, though all its forms are now put down to physical causes alone.
The first dispossession recorded, by St Mark and St Luke, took place at Capernaum, among his earliest miracles, before the cure of Simon’s mother-in-law. While he taught in the synagogue on the Sabbath, a man with an unclean spirit cried out. This cry is far more intelligible on the old theory than the new. The speaker, using the man’s organs, brain and all, recognizes a terrifying presence and addresses it as the Holy One of God. He would propitiate it by entreaty and flattery, hoping to be left undisturbed in the usurpation and cruelty by which he fed his own shadowy self-indulgence. Could anything be more consistently diabolic?
What other word could Jesus address to such a being than “Hold thy peace, and come out of him”? It could not be allowed to converse with the Saviour, for it recognized no salvation but the continuance of its own pleasures at another’s expense. The rebuke plainly assumes that someone in the man, not the man, had spoken. The narrative says the devil threw him down, tore him and cried with a loud voice, then came out and left him unhurt. The people asked among themselves, “What thing is this? It is a teaching new, and with authority: he commandeth even the unclean spirits, and they obey him;” [Footnote 8: St Mark, i. 27. Authorized Version revised by Dean Alford.] connecting his power over unclean spirits with his teaching, as our Lord later associates power over demons with spiritual condition. It was the truth in him that made him strong against the powers of untruth.
The next recorded case is the man, dumb according to St Luke, blind and dumb according to St Matthew, who spoke and saw as soon as the devil was cast out. With unerring instinct the people concluded that one who did such deeds must be the Son of David; the devils themselves, according to St Mark, acknowledged him as the Son of God. Only the scribes and Pharisees, the would-be guides of the people, refused the witness, and, eager for any theory that would explain the facts without acknowledging a divine mission in one who would not admit their authority, attributed to Beelzebub himself the deliverance of mortals from evil.
Regarding the kingdom of God as a matter of externals, they were fortified against seeing in Jesus or his teaching any sign that he was Satan’s enemy, and might even persuade themselves that such a cure was one of Satan’s tricks to advance his kingdom with the many by a partial emancipation of the individual. But our Lord traces their false conclusion to its true cause: not incapacity, nor over-refined suspicion of Beelzebub’s chicaneries, but a preference for any evil that would support them in their authority with the people, itself an evil. They shut out the Spirit of God, and forgiveness was not offered them; they must pay the uttermost farthing. Yet they were the accredited authorities in the church of that day, and whoever does not realize this does not understand the battle our Lord had to fight for the people’s emancipation. It was for the people’s sake, not their own, that he called the Pharisees hypocrites, for how should he argue with men who taught religion for their own aggrandizement?
Note that our Lord recognizes the power of others besides himself to cast out devils: “By whom do your children cast them out?” Did you ever say of them it was by Beelzebub? Why say it of me? He had no tinge of jealousy of rival teaching, as if truth could be two, which makes so many of his followers grasp at any waif of false argument. He knew that all good is of God, not the devil, and that all were with him who destroyed the devil’s power.
Those who were cured, and those in whom self-worship was not blinding the judgment, had no doubt he was fighting Satan on his usurped ground: torture is what one expects of Satan, healing of God. The signs that followed witnessed the reality of the healing, and that the man was lost, morally as well as physically, to the kingdom of evil. Our Lord rests his argument on the fact that Satan had lost these men.
Next, St Luke tells of certain women who followed him, healed of evil spirits and infirmities, among them “Mary, called Magdalene, out of whom went seven devils.” No wonder a woman so delivered devoted her restored self to the one who had recreated her. Hers is a curious instance of the worthlessness of what some think high-minded to regard alone, the opinion of posterity. Without a fragment of evidence, she has been almost universally regarded as impure. But what is that to her! In this squabbling nursery of the race her name may be degraded even to a subject for pictorial sentimentalities, but she herself is with the Jesus who set her free. They may call her what they please; to her it is worth a smile of holy amusement, and posterity’s applause is just as worthless. To God alone we live or die. Let us fall, as thank him we must, into his hands, and let him judge us. Posterity may be wiser than we, but it is not our judge.
We come now to a narrative with more of the marvellous than all the rest. It took place on the south-eastern side of the lake; St Matthew says two demoniacs were involved, St Mark and St Luke only one. The man, possessed of many demons, was ferocious, of marvellous strength, breaking chains and fetters, untameable. It is impossible to say which phenomena were the man’s own actions and which the demons’; externally all were the man’s, some part, I presume, from his own poor withered will, far the greater from the demons’ urging. So too with a man driven by passion: the lower nature he ought to keep in subjection, once it has the upper hand, becomes a possessing demon. He met the Lord worshipping and, as in a former instance, praying for such clemency as devils can value. Did the devils urge the man into the Lord’s presence? Was it not rather the spirit of the Father in him, which a legion of the wicked could not drive from him, bringing him, ignorant, fearing, yet perhaps vaguely hoping, to the feet of the Son? He could not keep away, drawn or driven. But the words of his prayer were moulded by the devils: “I adjure thee by God that thou torment me not.” The indwelling demons forced the prayer into this shape, wanting him to pray for indulgence for them. But the Lord heard the deeper prayer, the man’s need and misery, the horror that made him cry out and cut himself with stones, and commanded the unclean spirit to come out. St Mark says they begged not to be sent out of the country, probably because its inhabitants’ condition gave them unusual opportunities for their coveted pseudo-embodiment. St Luke says they begged not to be commanded into the deep, which to such beings is awful chiefly because there they must be alone, afar from matter and its forms; such loneliness would fill a good man with the presence of the living God, but they would be aware only of their greedy, hungry selves, desires without objects. No. Here were swine. “Send us into the swine, that we may enter into them.” Denied their preferred abode and debarred from men, swine would serve. But even the swine, created to look unclean as a type of humanity’s greed, could not endure their presence. The man in his misery had cut himself with stones; the swine in theirs rushed into the lake and were drowned. The evil spirits, I presume, having no further leave, had to go to their deep after all.
The destruction of the swine must not be regarded as miraculous. But there must have been a special reason, in the character and condition of the people of Gadara, for his allowing this loss of their property; I suppose that although it worked vexation and dismay at first, it prepared the way for some later reception of the gospel. Now, seeing the former maniac at Jesus’s feet, clothed and in his right mind, and hearing what had happened to the swine, they were afraid and asked the healer to leave.
But who can imagine the man’s delight when that wild troop of maddening, defiling demons vanished! Scarcely had he time to know he was naked before loving people, ruled by the good Spirit, were taking off their own garments to put on him. He was a man again, among men with human faces, hearts and ways, and the supreme face of the one who had set him free bound them all into one holy family. Now he could pray of himself the true prayer of a soul that knew what it wanted. He sat like a child at his healer’s feet, and when Jesus, yielding at once to those who wanted rid of him, went down to the boat, he followed, praying to be with him; for what could he desire but to be near the power that had restored his divine self, his own true existence, what God was thinking of when he made him?
But he would be nearer the Lord doing his work than following him about. It is remarkable that while more than once our Lord charged the healed to be silent, he leaves this man as his apostle, his witness to those who had banished him from their coasts. Some, in preaching him, would also preach themselves, but this man was not such. More likely, the reason lay in the condition of the people. Judaea was in an unhealthy excitement about him that must not be fanned; in some places the Lord would not speak at all, and through some he would pass unknown. He had destroyed these people’s swine and they had asked him to leave; if he took from them this one sign of his real presence, of the love that heals rather than the power that destroys, it would be to abandon them.
It is very noteworthy that he sent the man to his own house, to his own friends, who would be most open to such a message from the lips of their own flesh and blood. He had been raving in tombs and deserts, tormented by a legion of devils; now he was one of themselves again, with love in his eyes, adoration in his voice, help in his hands, reason supreme on the throne of his humanity. He obeyed, and published in Gadara and the other cities of Decapolis the great things, as Jesus called them, that God had done for him. For God had done them; he was doing the works of his Father.
One more instance remains, likewise with peculiar points of difficulty, and so of interest.
When Jesus was on the mount of transfiguration, a dumb, epileptic, lunatic boy was brought by his father to the disciples awaiting his return.
But they could do nothing. To their disappointment, and probably chagrin, they found themselves powerless over the evil spirit. When Jesus appeared, the father begged of him the aid they could not give: “Master, I beseech thee, look upon my son, for he is mine only child.”
Whoever has held in his arms his child in delirium, calling to his father as if from far away and beating the air in wild, aimless defence, will be able to enter a little into this man’s trouble. To have a great abyss between him and his child, across which the child’s cry comes but no answering voice reaches the sufferer, is terror and misery indeed. But imagine here the intervals too: the vacant gaze, the hanging lip, the pale, flaccid face and bloodshot eyes, idiocy alternating with madness, only the animal babble of the uneducated dumb, and his falling down anywhere, now in the fire, now in the water. The divine shines out here as nowhere else, for the father loves his only child even to agony.
What was there in such a child to love? Everything: the human was there, else whence the torture of what was not human? whence the pathos of those eyes, hardly up to a dog’s in intelligence, yet all-powerful over the father’s heart? God was there. The misery was that the devil was there too. “Rescue the divine; send the devil to the deep” was the father’s unformed prayer.
Before replying to his prayer, Jesus uttered words that could not have been addressed to the father, who was neither faithless nor perverse. To whom then? “How long shall I be with you? How long shall I suffer you?” I have thought it was the bystanders, but they had surely not reached the point of such rebuke. I have thought it was the disciples, whose pride and lack of faith in God left them unable to cast out the demon; but the form of address does not seem theirs, and generation hardly applies to those he had chosen out of it. I have thought, and gladly would I still think if I honestly could, that the words were meant for the devils who tormented his countrymen; but for St Mark’s story I might have held to it. He gives one point neither St Matthew nor St Luke mention: when Jesus came to his disciples “he saw a great multitude about them, and the scribes questioning with them.” The multitude were greatly amazed at the sight of him, perhaps because he came just when his presence was needed to answer the scribes pressing his disciples for failing to cast out the devil. These scribes, accredited men of education who arrogated to themselves mastery over the people’s faith yet were opaque to the light of truth, I do think were those he addressed as “faithless and perverse generation.” His request to the father that followed, “Bring him unto me,” was the one answer to their arguments.
A fresh paroxysm was the first result. But repressing all haste, the Lord will care for the father as much as for the child, and will help his growing faith.
“How long has he been like this?”
“From a child. Often it has thrown him into the fire and into the water to destroy him; but if thou canst do anything, have compassion on us and help us.” [Footnote 9: Again the us—so full of pathos.] “If thou canst?” [Footnote 10: The oldest manuscripts. (Dean Alford). “If thou canst have faith—All things,” &c. (“New Translation of the Gospel of St Mark.” Rev. F.H. Godwin).] All things are possible to him that believeth.”
“Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.”
Whether Jesus’s words “him that believeth” meant himself as believing in the Father, and so gifted with all power, or the man as believing in him, and so able to receive that power’s effects, I am not sure. I incline to the former. Either way, the man settles the question practically and personally: what was needed in him should be in him. “I believe; help thou mine unbelief.”
In the honesty of his heart, lest he say more than was true (for how could he be sure Jesus would cure his son, or measure his own faith?), he appeals to the Lord of Truth for all he ought to be, think and believe: “Help thou mine unbelief.” It is the very triumph of faith. Unbelief itself, cast like any other care on him who cares for us, is the highest exercise of belief, the greatest effort in the man’s power. No man can help doubt; only the faithful man can appeal to the Truth to enable him to believe what is true and refuse what is false. How this applies to our own time is easy to see; of all prayers it is the one for us.
Possibly our Lord might have talked with him further, but the people came crowding about. He rebuked the foul spirit: “Thou dumb and deaf spirit, I charge thee, come out of him, and enter no more into him.” The spirit cried out and tore him badly and came out, and he lay as one dead, so that many said he was dead. But Jesus took him by the hand and lifted him up, and he arose.
“Why could we not cast him out?” his disciples asked as soon as they were alone.
“This kind can come forth by nothing but by prayer and fasting.”
What does this answer imply? The prayer and fasting must clearly be on the part of those who would heal; they cannot be required of one possessed by a demon, for if he could fast and pray, the demon would be gone already.
It implies that great purity of soul is needed to master the powers of evil. I take prayer and fasting to mean a mind raised above the cares of the world and the pleasures of the senses, in close communion with the God of life, and so, by its very purity, an awe and terror to unclean spirits. The expulsion would appear to be the result of moral, and so natural, superiority, a command resting on oneness with the ultimate will of the Supreme, as an evil man is sometimes cowed in the presence of a good one. The disciples had not attained this lofty faith.
This leads me to think that the words “All things are possible to him that believeth” apply to our Lord himself. The disciples could not help the child; “If thou canst do anything,” said the father; “All things are possible to him that believeth,” says our Lord: he can help him. St Matthew, giving our Lord’s reply more fully, says explicitly that the disciples’ lack of faith made it impossible for them: “Because of your unbelief,” he said, and added that faith could remove mountains.
But the words “This kind” suggest the case had its peculiarities. It would appear, though I am not certain of this interpretation, that some kinds of spirits, or at least some cases of possession, required more of God’s presence in the healer for their cure. The Lord asked how long he had been ill and was told, from childhood. The demon, to use the language of our ignorance, had had time in the boy’s undeveloped condition to lay thorough hold on him, and when it yielded to the Lord’s superior command it left him as dead, so close had the possession been that the natural powers, long usurped, maltreated and exhausted yet falsely sustained, could not for a time work without it. The disciples, though they already had power to cast out demons, could not cast this one out and were surprised. If we admit demons at all, there is no absurdity in admitting that some had greater force than others, whether called courage, obstinacy or grasp on the captive.
In all these stories there is much comfort for the friends of the insane and for those aware of their own partial or occasional insanity. For such sorrow as that of Charles and Mary Lamb, walking together toward the asylum when the hour had come for her to go, is there not some assuagement here? It may be answered that we have no ground to hope for such cure now. I think we have; but if our faith will not reach so far, we may at least, like Athanasius, recognize the friendship of Death, the divine cure of many ills.
But we all need like healing. No one who does not yet love the truth with his whole being, who does not love God with all his heart, soul, strength and mind, and his neighbour as himself, is in his sound mind or can act as a rational being, except approximately; this is as true of us as if we were possessed by spirits other than our own. Every word of unkindness, God help us, every unfair, hard judgment, every trembling regard for the outward and fearless disregard of the inward life, sides with the spirit of evil against the spirit of good, our lower and accidental selves against our higher and essential, true selves. The spirit of good would set these free from all possession but his own, for that is their original life. The evil spirits can go out of us only by that prayer in which a man draws near to the Holy, and we can have power over the evil spirit in others only in proportion as by such prayer we cast it out of ourselves.