Possessed by the Holy Spirit?

Well, no...

Hermes from “The Souls of Acheron” 1898 by Adolf Hiremy-Hirschl)

As a follow up to my last piece introducing the problem of agency, The Spirit or the Kick Drum?, I thought I’d share a video clip from one of my favorite contemporary Christian thinkers, Jonathan Pageau, about the Christian understanding of agency as it relates to “possession.” This is from a Q & A Jonathan did back in January. The question he’s answering here is a bit obscure, so allow me a moment to catch you up.

In January, Jordan Peterson had a conversation with fellow Canadian psychologist John Vervaeke on his own podcast. He entitled the conversation Daemons, Demons, God, and the Meaning Crisis. Both John and Jordan were members of the University of Toronto psychology department at the same time (John is still there). The conversation covered everything from the meaning of the sacred to the bridge between morality and meaning to the nature of Socrates’s “daemon,” a spirit/voice which Socrates believed had been given to him as a gift from the gods to guide and direct his thinking. But the moment that stood out to a lot of people, especially Christians, was around the 58:00 mark where John Vervaeke begins to describe a kind of seance-like experience in which he was in spiritual conversation with the Greek god Hermes. Neither Vervaeke nor Peterson are professed Christians, though the philosophical/psychological work of both men (separate from one another!) has drawn them both much closer to the Christian frame. This has led many Christians (including myself) to be interested in their work. But needless to say, a purposeful encounter with an ancient pagan spirit for the sake of gaining wisdom is head-turning for most of us Christians.

Anyway, Jonathan Pageau (who, again, is a Christian) happens to be friends with both of these men. So, during his January Q & A, the question was posed to him (I’m paraphrasing), “Some Christians felt scandalized by Vervaeke’s clip about talking to demons. How do you see it?” The clip below is Jonathan’s response…

Jonathan Pageau on Agency & Possession

Jonathan is answering off-the-cuff here (impressively so). But I think there’s a moment near the beginning that needs some clarification. Then I’ll let him do most of the talking. When he says, “The idea that you can be possessed by a [principality] is a deeply non-Christian thing,” what does he mean exactly? Does he mean that Christians believe it is not possible to be possessed? Obviously not. His next few statements make clear that this is very possible. Does he mean simply that being possessed by a principality is bad? I mean, he does obviously believe that. But no, that’s also not what he’s saying. What I think Jonathan means is this: “The idea that you can be possessed [in a good way] is a deeply non-Christian thing.”

Thus he immediately goes on to say,

There’s a reason why Christians don’t do things like seances. They don’t do things like channeling. They don’t have the type of divination that you find in the ancient pagan world…Christianity doesn’t have that. And it’s because of the way in which we understand Love to be the foundation of reality…The way that God acts in the world is in a manner that never overwhelms our consciousness and experience at the level we exist, but rather works through that consciousness and agency.

In other words, it’s obvious to Christians why being possessed by a demon or channeling a dead person’s spirit is a bad thing. But what if you’re possessed by the Spirit of God? Wouldn’t that be a good thing? Why don’t Christians hold ceremonies or seances to call upon the Spirit of God to possess them? (Now, you might be thinking, “Some do.” And well, that depends on what you mean. Certainly, we might want to proceed with caution if our worship services are starting to feel more like conjuring the Spirit than communing with him. And for what it’s worth, I have definitely noticed an uptick in what might be called “conjuring language” in our modern worship songs over the last number of years. But we’ll table that discussion for the moment.) Anyway, Jonathan’s point here is that, in the Christian way of thinking, love does not work that way. God does not ravish; he woos. He made us as conscious, willing beings with real agency, not unlike himself. And he called this “very good.” His desire is not simply to override the way he made us. Rather, his desire is that our conscious wills would be submitted freely to his. That is love. Anything else would just be another form of force, mere physics on a higher scale.

Jonathan continues…

And so what happens is annoying for a lot of us, which is that you can be possessed by your passions, you can be possessed by a demon, you can be possessed by all kinds of ideologies. They will sweep you into themselves. They will make you disappear into them in a way that you are now just a body or a mouthpiece, like someone channeling some dead person...But none of that exists in Christianity, because Christianity is way harder, because it says your will has to submit to the higher will. If you want to manifest God’s glory, if you want to manifest the kingdom of God, if you want to participate in the divine energies of God in the world, then you have to do it by your own will. You have to do it by submitting your will, consciously and willingly, to the divine will.

But then God will act through your will—won’t overpower it, won’t take you over, won’t make you do things just because they’re good. You know, sometimes we wish that. Couldn’t God just take this desire away from me? Couldn’t God just take this sin out of my life? Why do I have to deal with this passion, with this problem?

And the answer is: It’s because that’s how the world works. That’s actually literally how the world works, through this fractal thing [think: stacked reality]. If we want the world to exist both in its unity and in its multiplicity simultaneously in love [think: mixed agency with God as the composer], then it means that you have to obey God. It’s not going to happen through some magical thing.

Sometimes we can have special graces where all of a sudden it’s easier to do that, where we feel like things are coming together and it’s easier to vanquish this sin or to do what’s right. Sometimes it is. But that’s not going to last forever. This sounds weird, but at some point, God’s going to make it harder for you. He’s going to make it harder for you to follow his will, to obey what he wants for you. And why? Because he wants to make you a participant in his being. But you have to participate…

So when St. Paul says, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ that lives in me,” he doesn’t mean that now Christ has possessed him and he is just watching his body act. It means that he is fully submitted to the divine logos and that Christ is flowing through him into the world. This is super important. This is a difference in worldview that is really primary.”

The problem of salvation—the problem which the Father has been working on since the Garden, which Jesus came into the world to solve—is not so much positional as personal. God did not simply need to move us from point A to point B. Nor simply to forgive sin. Nor simply to destroy evil. He needed to destroy sin and evil in us, even as we yet live. He needed to change our hearts, to transform our loves, which is no simple mission.

Jesus stated the problem perhaps most succinctly to Nicodemus: “This is the judgment: the light has come into world, but the people loved the darkness rather than the light…” (John 3:19). In other words, it was not enough for him simply to come. Even the Light Himself cannot solve the problem simply by being the light, if we still love the darkness. Rather, he must find a way for us to love the light rather than the darkness—even though it may blind us at first, even though it exposes us—and to walk in the light as he is in the light. To love him as he loves us. To participate in him. It is not enough for him merely to die and be raised if we do not die with him (and are therefore raised with him). This is the complex problem Jesus came to solve. Think of his Parable of the Sower. The seed of the word is simple and plenteous, but the soil of the human heart is complex and problematic. Paths and rocks and thorns must be dealt with. The ground must be patiently, even painfully, tilled. And Jesus has proven himself the Master Soil Tiller. But can we keep on trusting him to be so for us? Sometimes he will pull gently at the weeds. Sometimes he will take a bulldozer to the path.

Jonathan Pageau is an Eastern Orthodox Christian. I highly recommend his work (here’s a good intro). But for some of us, his language may seem a little foreign. So I thought I’d leave you with a good old Protestant, talking about the same exact problem (agency and possession). This is from Chapter 8 of C. S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters. If you’re unfamiliar, the narrator here is Screwtape, a fictional demon, who is sending letters to his nephew from hell regarding how to win his human over from “the Enemy” (God) to “Our Father Below” (the devil). For the skimmers among you, see the BOLD section in my transcript below for the highlights.

C. S. Lewis & The Law of Undulation

MY DEAR WORMWOOD,

So you “have great hopes that the patient's religious phase is dying away”, have you? I always thought the Training College had gone to pieces since they put old Slubgob at the head of it, and now I am sure. Has no one ever told you about the law of Undulation?

Humans are amphibians — half spirit and half animal. (The Enemy's determination to produce such a revolting hybrid was one of the things that determined Our Father to withdraw his support from Him.) As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time means to change. Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation — the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks. If you had watched your patient carefully you would have seen this undulation in every department of his life — his interest in his work, his affection for his friends, his physical appetites, all go up and down. As long as he lives on earth periods of emotional and bodily richness and liveliness will alternate with periods of numbness and poverty. The dryness and dullness through which your patient is now going are not, as you fondly suppose, your workmanship; they are merely a natural phenomenon which will do us no good unless you make a good use of it.

To decide what the best use of it is, you must ask what use the Enemy wants to make of it, and then do the opposite. Now it may surprise you to learn that in His efforts to get permanent possession of a soul, He relies on the troughs even more than on the peaks; some of His special favourites have gone through longer and deeper troughs than anyone else. The reason is this. To us a human is primarily food; our aim is the absorption of its will into ours, the increase of our own area of selfhood at its expense. But the obedience which the Enemy demands of men is quite a different thing. One must face the fact that all the talk about His love for men, and His service being perfect freedom, is not (as one would gladly believe) mere propaganda, but an appalling truth. He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself — creatures, whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like His own, not because He has absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to His. We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons. We want to suck in, He wants to give out. We are empty and would be filled; He is full and flows over. Our war aim is a world in which Our Father Below has drawn all other beings into himself: the Enemy wants a world full of beings united to Him but still distinct.

And that is where the troughs come in. You must have often wondered why the Enemy does not make more use of His power to be sensibly present to human souls in any degree He chooses and at any moment. But you now see that the Irresistible and the Indisputable are the two weapons which the very nature of His scheme forbids Him to use. Merely to over-ride a human will (as His felt presence in any but the faintest and most mitigated degree would certainly do) would be for Him useless. He cannot ravish. He can only woo. For His ignoble idea is to eat the cake and have it; the creatures are to be one with Him, but yet themselves; merely to cancel them, or assimilate them, will not serve. He is prepared to do a little overriding at the beginning. He will set them off with communications of His presence which, though faint, seem great to them, with emotional sweetness, and easy conquest over temptation. But He never allows this state of affairs to last long. Sooner or later He withdraws, if not in fact, at least from their conscious experience, all those supports and incentives. He leaves the creature to stand up on its own legs — to carry out from the will alone duties which have lost all relish. It is during such trough periods, much more than during the peak periods, that it is growing into the sort of creature He wants it to be. Hence the prayers offered in the state of dryness are those which please Him best. We can drag our patients along by continual tempting, because we design them only for the table, and the more their will is interfered with the better. He cannot “tempt” to virtue as we do to vice. He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand; and if only the will to walk is really there He is pleased even with their stumbles. Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger, than when a human, no longer desiring, but intending, to do our Enemy's will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.

But of course the troughs afford opportunities to our side also. Next week I will give you some hints on how to exploit them,

Your affectionate uncle,

SCREWTAPE

That’s it. I couldn’t have said it better.

Funny side note: When I wrote earlier in the post that, “God does not ravish; he woos,” I hadn’t consciously thought of Screwtape yet and had no idea that I was accidentally copying Lewis almost word-for-word(!) from this chapter. I truly thought those were my own words. Ha! This makes me wonder just how often I am blatantly copying Lewis and not noticing. Oh well. I am indebted to him for most all my thoughts anyway.

Blessing to you all.

— Ross