Hell exaggerated: When "exorcism" is degraded to sensationalism and prurience (gratis post)

with C. S. Lewis, Fr. Emmanuel Lemelson, and the monks of Valaam

“Exorcists” are in the limelight. Not long ago, it was the late Fr. Gabriele Amorth who made the headlines with his sensational and often bizarre claims. Before him, it was Malachi Martin (an Irish former Jesuit who mingled scholarship and blarney in equal measure). Currently, one can find interviews with Fr. Chad Ripperger online, who provides all sorts of dubious “insider” details about the demonic realm and its “hierarchy,” naming names and providing arcane details that only demonological “experts” are trained to glean (such clerical “experts,” it should be noted, seem to have little hesitation about “dialoguing” with unclean spirits, gathering “information” from them, and accepting as “fact” at least some of what these entities tell them). To put it mildly, this sort of thing is spiritually unhygienic. As Fr. Emmanuel Lemelson indicates in one of the links below, it’s potentially dangerous and serves to increase, not alleviate, the darkness. Better to follow the tradition of the old Ascetic Fathers, who avoided all discussion with demons, but instead sent them packing just as quickly as possible.

Not too long ago, a French filmmaker captured a “typical” exorcism at the Russian monastery of Valaam in a documentary. The English subtitles on YouTube are a bit uneven. But, that caveat aside, beginning at the 46:12 time stamp, one can view the exorcism below. Whatever else might be said about the event recorded, the calmness of the monks carrying out the healing is notable. This is, I would say, the true Orthodox style, rooted in the ancient (not late medieval Latin) ascetical tradition — calm, collected, not showy, and with no info-gathering “dialogue” with devils:

I recently recommended C. S. Lewis’s classic, The Great Divorce, to a friend. No doubt, that’s why it’s fresh in my mind now. It’s my favorite of Lewis’s books. Indeed, when it comes to moral and ascetical Christian literature and the advice they give, and the conviction they instil in the earnest soul, I can think of no two writers — one ancient and one modern — whose practical insights can be bettered. One is St. John Cassian (his Conferences especially) and, as you might have guessed, Lewis is the second. Different they surely are, but I have found their wisdom complementary in my life, and have turned to both frequently for more decades than I care to enumerate.

In The Great Divorce, Lewis gives us a parable about damnation and salvation. It tells of a bus holiday to heaven for those dwelling in the “Grey City” of hell (a refrigerium, in other words). Those who choose to remain in heaven as an act of their own determination are allowed to do so. The majority of those whose dialogues with heavenly friends and angels are recounted decide to cling to their petty evils and remain in hell, preferring them to the supreme joy being offered (if you haven’t read the book, do; it can be read in one sitting, or one can listen to it here).

Near the conclusion of the book, Lewis illustrates for the reader the “relative size” of evil, the demonic, and “hell” as compared with Reality. By “reality,” he means the glorified and resurrected creation that shares ultimately in God “all in all.” Evil, as we have noted throughout the current “Demons and Exorcism” series, is defined as utter deficiency. It begins and ends in nothingness. It has no real or lasting existence; darkness has no chance of ever swallowing up the light. We must take evil seriously as long as we are in this life, while its gravitational pull on our wills towards nonexistence lasts. And, indeed, it is our wills that have been divinely positioned as the crux between the upward call and the downward drag.

I share, then, a short passage that illustrates the relative “size” of good and evil (including the devil and all his minions) strikingly. George MacDonald, the great 19th-century Scottish theologian and novelist, is Lewis’s mentor — his “Virgil/Beatrice/Bernard” — in the book, who acts as his guide in the dream. He shows Lewis a tiny crack in the ground, which is a doorway down to “hell” — the sort of fissure through which the minuscule bus of self-damned souls has emerged — itself less in size than an atom:

My Teacher gave a curious smile. “Look,” he said, and with the word he went down on his hands and knees. I did the same (how it hurt my knees!) and presently saw that he had plucked a blade of grass. Using its thin end as a pointer, he made me see, after I had looked very closely, a crack in the soil so small that I could not have identified it without this aid.

“I cannot be certain,” he said, “that this is the crack ye came up through. But through a crack no bigger than that ye certainly came.”

“But — but,” I gasped with a feeling of bewilderment not unlike terror. “I saw an infinite abyss. And cliffs towering up and up. And then this country on top of the cliffs.”

“Aye. But the voyage was not mere locomotion. That bus, and all you inside it, were increasing in size.”

“Do you mean then that Hell — all that infinite empty town — is down in some little crack like this?”

“Yes. All Hell is smaller than one pebble of your earthly world: but it is smaller than one atom of this world, the Real World. Look at yon butterfly. If it swallowed all Hell, Hell would not be big enough to do it any harm or to have any taste.”

“It seems big enough when you’re in it, Sir.”

“And yet all loneliness, angers, hatreds, envies and itchings that it contains, if rolled into one single experience and put into the scale against the least moment of the joy that is felt by the least in Heaven, would have no weight that could be registered at all. Bad cannot succeed even in being bad as truly as good is good. If all Hell’s miseries together entered the consciousness of yon wee yellow bird on the bough there, they would be swallowed up without trace, as if one drop of ink had been dropped into that Great Ocean to which your terrestrial Pacific itself is only a molecule.”

When we consider hell, then, or exorcism or the demonic, we must keep that “scale” in mind. There is never any call to extend the darkness or the “Grey City,” no need for us, or anyone (including “experts”), to know about the demonic except how — daily and practically — to cast it out of our thoughts and lives. That will be the subject of my forthcoming posts on “pragmatic exorcism.”

I will conclude here, though, by recommending the video from Fr. Emmanuel Lemelson posted below (happily, Fr. Lemelson is a reader of this Substack, as I am of his). It’s worth listening to what he says carefully. In it, he takes on, with restraint but due seriousness, what Fr. Chad Ripperger promotes in his (no doubt well-intentioned but deluded) demonological teaching. I heartily recommend both Fr. Lemelson’s YouTube channel (give it a “like” and subscribe) and his Substack page.