Deliver Us from Evil

We continue our deep dive into THE HEART OF CATHOLIC PRAYER.

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Years ago, I heard a Pentecostal pastor in Spokane talking about a time he and some other local non-denominational pastors had been asked by a family they knew to come and pray for their granny who, her family said, “had an evil spirit.” One of the pastors was of a more modern attitude—the sort that fancies itself “open-minded” by closing itself off to the very possibility of the supernatural ever actually occurring. He somehow found himself invited to this meeting of pastors who were going to the house of this family to pray for granny. The modernist pastor reluctantly agreed and joined the circle as they gathered round granny and began to ask God to intervene on her behalf.

The doubting pastor happened to have taken up a position right behind granny, perhaps due to his reluctance to look at her face during what he considered to be a hugely superstitious bit of medieval hocus-pocus. Granny submitted to the prayer, but as it went on she began to act oddly and, quite suddenly reached behind her (over her shoulders), seized the doubting pastor and lifted him clean off the ground. “That kind of thing changes your theology,” observed the Pentecostal pastor drily.

Belief in the existence of the angelic and demonic is not limited to Pentacostals. The Catholic Church agrees that, “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy”[2] and, accordingly, admits the possibility that there may be something in tales of the supernatural. She does not instantly credit them as true, of course, but is open to investigation and, if the facts point to the reality of such tales, to accepting them as factual. Chesterton sums this approach up quite nicely in Orthodoxy:

The believers in miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly) because they have evidence for them. The disbelievers in miracles deny them (rightly or wrongly) because they have a doctrine against them. The open, obvious, democratic thing is to believe an old apple-woman when she bears testimony to a miracle, just as you believe an old apple-woman when she bears testimony to a murder. The plain, popular course is to trust the peasant’s word about the ghost exactly as far as you trust the peasant’s word about the landlord. Being a peasant he will probably have a great deal of healthy agnosticism about both. Still you could fill the British Museum with evidence uttered by the peasant, and given in favour of the ghost. If it comes to human testimony there is a choking cataract of human testimony in favour of the supernatural. If you reject it, you can only mean one of two things. You reject the peasant’s story about the ghost either because the man is a peasant or because the story is a ghost story. That is, you either deny the main principle of democracy, or you affirm the main principle of materialism—the abstract impossibility of miracle. You have a perfect right to do so; but in that case you are the dogmatist. It is we Christians who accept all actual evidence—it is you rationalists who refuse actual evidence being constrained to do so by your creed. But I am not constrained by any creed in the matter, and looking impartially into certain miracles of mediaeval and modern times, I have come to the conclusion that they occurred. All argument against these plain facts is always argument in a circle. If I say, “Mediaeval documents attest certain miracles as much as they attest certain battles,” they answer, “But mediaevals were superstitious”; if I want to know in what they were superstitious, the only ultimate answer is that they believed in the miracles. If I say “a peasant saw a ghost,” I am told, “But peasants are so credulous.” If I ask, “Why credulous?” the only answer is—that they see ghosts. Iceland is impossible because only stupid sailors have seen it; and the sailors are only stupid because they say they have seen Iceland.[3]

The disbeliever in the devil, like the disbeliever in God, has no facts or evidence to go on in support of his categorical denial, merely bigotry and a profoundly unreflective arrogance. Indeed, in the case of the devil, the mere skeptic who worships the intellect rather than using it is in an even dicier position than normal. For with God you at least have the fig leaf of the problem of evil to lend a cast of hard thought to your breezy skepticism masquerading as rationalism. Every time something suggests the ominous possibility that You Know Who actually exists and is good, you can always trot out your favorite Horrible and say, “Oh yeah? Would a good God permit this?”

But there’s not much point in asking, “If the devil exists, why does he allow bad things to happen?” So you have to more or less shout the whole subject down and simply never ask yourself if there is any solid testimony to the existence of supernatural evil.

The witness of the gospel–and of countless people who have struggled with such evil over the centuries–is that there is. Indeed, the confrontation between Christ and Satan is something that has had no small influence on the missionary activity of the Church. People come to Christ, at least in part, because he breaks the chains of evil that are destroying their lives. We see this already in the New Testament itself, when Jesus exorcises various people, or heals them, or otherwise liberates them from evil and they become his followers as a result (cf. Mark 5:1-20). Like the pastor said, “That sort of thing changes your theology.” The Blind Man Jesus healed becomes a follower of Jesus, not because somebody offered him a diagram of the Trinity or a theory about justification by grace through faith, but because there was one thing he knew for certain, “I was blind, but now I see” (John 9:25).

The mission work of the Church down through the ages has offered something very similar. While the Church does not go looking for demons under every rug, she is, as Paul was, “not unaware of his schemes” (2 Corinthians 2:11) and has always preserved, in her liturgical life, her catechesis, and in the lives of her saints, the awareness that demonic powers are real and we are engaged in a war that involves more than the merely human.

The only reply modernity has to this is empty claptrap like “But this is the 21^st Century!” One might just as well say, “But this is Friday!” It does not alter the fact that the Church, following Jesus, has always taught that there exist angelic beings (i.e., incorporeal rational beings created by God) who have abused their free will and made themselves enemies of God and of his creatures. There’s no conceivable way science can have anything to say against that proposition and there is plenty in our history, as well as in revelation, to support it, not only reaching back to the roots of the Christian tradition and its numerous accounts of exorcism, but even further back to the story of the Fall and of the mysterious Dark Presence who is already in the Garden before Adam and Eve get there.

Jesus, of course, takes the devil for granted as a fact, as do his apostles. As the Catechism reminds us the devil is:

“A murderer from the beginning, . . . a liar and the father of lies,” Satan is “the deceiver of the whole world” (John 8:44; Revelation 12:9). Through him sin and death entered the world and by his definitive defeat all creation will be “freed from the corruption of sin and death.”[4] Now “we know that anyone born of God does not sin, but He who was born of God keeps him, and the evil one does not touch him. We know that we are of God, and the whole world is in the power of the evil one” (1 John 5:18-19). (CCC 2852)

In the Christian tradition, evil is therefore more than merely misfortune or misunderstanding. It is not an illusion. It is real and, when it comes to that sort of manifestation of evil we call “sin” it is paradoxically personal and depersonalizing. Consider the great icon of evil in our time—the Nazi slaughter of the Jews. This act of barbarism required something no beast was capable of: extreme and prodigious amounts of organization, foresight, rational planning, and careful thought. It was, in a word, something only persons, not animals, could have achieved. Yet the whole point and effect of the thing was to reduce human persons to numbers and, ultimately, to ashes. The devil’s work always has this creepy quality to it because in sin both angels and men are using all the gifts God gives them to “assert their nothingness” as Augustine puts it. Part of the lust of the demons is what C.S. Lewis describes as the aggressive desire to “extend Hell—to bring it bodily, if they could, into Heaven.”[5]

Of course, Hell cannot harm God in the slightest. So Hell does what all cowards do; it attacks those whom God loves. That would be us, as well as the rest of the created order wherever possible. This is the sum of the Christian picture concerning our relationship with the forces of darkness. They hate God, us, and even themselves since they owe their existence entirely to God and are utterly dependent upon him for what goods they still retain such as existence, power, and will. The drama of our existence is carried out in the strange arena of a created order in which God permits such beings to act, within limits, and permits us to resist or succumb to their lies as we choose.

That’s a vision of reality that is markedly more luminous and frighteningly more dark than we generally care to face. A universe where devils and men are free to conspire to visit the horrors of the crucifixion on the Creator of the Universe is not a universe where we lack freedom. It is a universe where we face such terrifying and prodigious freedom that we are constantly inventing foolish little systems of order to try to rein in our radical capacity for evil.

Jesus’ response to the radical capacity for evil of fallen angels and their human stooges is, first and foremost, prayer. On at least one occasion, he speaks of prayer as the Big Gun against the devil, instructing his disciples who had failed to cast out a demon that “This kind cannot be driven out by anything but prayer and fasting” (Mark 9:29). When was the last time you saw Christians fighting other obvious evils in this world by this means? For us, prayer is often the last, not the first resort. It would be a striking change indeed if our culture first went to prayer instead of to court, to war, or to fisticuffs. But when this is actually recommended while the blood is up and everybody is in a frenzy of war fever, those who recommend prayer as the first option tend to get dismissed as unrealistic pious wimps who don’t understand what it takes to oppose “real evil.” Jesus would politely dissent from the view that demons don’t constitute “real evil.”

At the opposite extreme from the materialist skeptic is the person who believes in the devil—and takes too keen an interest in him. People can poison their souls with Satanism, the occult, and the worship of devils.  Just as you can err by foolishly rejecting any belief in the devil at all, so you can also “believe in” the devil too much by cultivating the incredibly dangerous notion that you can ride the tiger by trying to “call spirits from the vasty deep.”[6] This may strike those of a secular cast of mind as ridiculous and lurid, but it is worth noting that there is nothing in human history which particularly forbids us from supposing that a certain percentage of the population is drawn to the ridiculous, the lurid and the occult. Certainly there have arisen, from time to time, groups of people who embrace the notion that they can do what they themselves know to be gravely evil in order to achieve some good result, usually with the excuse that they are being “realistic” and “practical.” Chesterton gets at this mindset quite accurately when he writes in The Everlasting Man of the monstrous practices that have arisen from time to time in various decaying civilizations:

But with the idea of employing the demons who get things done, a new idea appears more worthy of the demons. It may indeed be truly described as the idea of being worthy of the demons; of making oneself fit for their fastidious and exacting society. Superstition of the lighter sort toys with the idea that some trifle, some small gesture such as throwing the salt, may touch the hidden spring that works the mysterious machinery of the world. And there is after all something in the idea of such an Open Sesame. But with the appeal to lower spirits comes the horrible notion that the gesture must not only be very small but very low; that it must be a monkey trick of an utterly ugly and unworthy sort. Sooner or later a man deliberately sets himself to do the most disgusting thing he can think of. It is felt that the extreme of evil will extort a sort of attention or answer from the evil powers under the surface of the world. This is the meaning of most of the cannibalism in the world. For most cannibalism is not a primitive or even a bestial habit. It is artificial and even artistic, a sort of art for art’s sake. Men do not do it because they do not think it horrible; but, on the contrary, because they do think it horrible.[7]

Such embraces of evil do not always have an explicit occult cast to them. Sometimes we coat them with a scientific or realpolitik veneer as we relish the frisson of evil we are embracing for the sake of “realism.” Quite often we wrap the embrace of evil in the language of “courage” and tell ourselves we are being brave in our choice to do evil “for a good cause.” So, for instance, Heinrich Himmler, in a secret speech given to SS troops carrying out the Holocaust, invokes precisely the language of brave, silent courage to describe the hardness of heart and painful searing of conscience committed by those carrying out the unspeakable slaughter “for the glory of the Fatherland”:

Most of you will know what it means when 100 bodies lie together, when there are 500, or when there are 1,000. And to have seen this through, and — with the exception of human weaknesses — to have remained decent, has made us hard and is a page of glory never mentioned and never to be mentioned.[8]

But no matter how loudly the mortal sinner lies to himself, there remain things we can’t not know—which was why Himmler found it necessary to give the speech in order to silence the screaming consciences of his murdering goons–but also to give it in secret.  In the end, we still know that we are saying “Let us do evil that good may come of it” whether the evil we happen to be embracing is murder, theft, adultery, torture, genocide, or anything else the devil delights in. Any of these sins will damn us, just so long as we go on explaining to God why he is hopelessly unrealistic and we are, in our pride, right to commit them. Of course, all these sins can, like billions of others, be forgiven if we simply repent them and ask for the Mercy.

There is also another way of “believing in” the devil that has an odd affinity with direct dabbling in the occult. This is the paranoid way that some Christians can take with “spiritual warfare,” which is actually a sort of terrified fascination with the devil that can supplant the worship of God. I have known Christians whose every waking hour was spent studying the darkness, “researching” the occult, and consuming hours, days, months, and years feverishly “making connections” between this and that feared occultic quack or movement, all in the barren and fruitless notion that they were somehow doing some good and not merely feeding an endless paranoid appetite for conspiracy. I have watched as such Christians have imprisoned their lives in little psychic hells in which no one could be trusted, the devil lurked behind every good thing including the Mass itself and the universe appeared to them to be barren of God. The problem lay, not in God’s absence, but with their persistent and stubborn choice to give Satan the glory by devoting all their waking thought to fearing him instead of loving God. It is a tragic choice, but one which we can all make in our own ways, whenever we opt to give fear, anger, doubt, and suspicion pride of place in our hearts. The irony is that Satan is quite as happy with those who neglect obedience to God in order to sup on the fear of devils as he is with those who dabble in the occult. In the end, it comes down to the same thing: prioritizing the amount of time you spend focusing on the devil over the amount you spend focusing on God. The point is to distract you from God. If that is accomplished by devil-fearing rather than devil-worshiping, Old Scratch doesn’t care, just as long as it’s not God-loving.

In contrast to all this is the healthy way of “believing in” Satan: namely, to accept his existence as part of The Way the World Is, much the way you accept the fact of COVID, earthquakes, and bee stings while taking care to avoid or minimize their danger. There’s no use crying over it or curling up in a helpless ball about it. Best to get on with life and follow Jesus by being aware of the devil’s schemes so that when he attacks you are not blind-sided. But don’t obsess about it either. Recall that “Greater is he who is in you than he who is in the world” (1 John 4:4) and get on with the life of being a disciple of Jesus.

This is why “Deliver us from evil” is the last, not the first, of the petitions in the Our Father. It is suggestive of the place that fear of the devil should have in our lives. On the one hand, we should be aware that, apart from grace, we are not adequate to deal with the Prince of this World. That’s why it’s a petition in the Our Father. As the song says,

For still our ancient foe
doth seek to work us woe;
his craft and power are great,
and armed with cruel hate,
on earth is not his equal.

Did we in our own strength confide,
our striving would be losing,
were not the right man on our side,
the man of God’s own choosing.[9]

The “man of God’s own choosing” is not you, empowered by your sense of self-worth. It is not Buffy the Vampire Slayer, who overcomes evil through girl power and the affirmation of her circle of friends. It is not any of the heroes of pop culture who invariably look deep within themselves at their darkest hour and find that they have what it takes to be heroes. It is not anybody in Millennial America, filled with the notion that, with faith in the goodness of the American people, Democratic capitalism, white power, the wealth of Donald Trump, sufficient firepower, and therapeutic moralistic deism, we shall prevail.

That man is Jesus Christ and him only. To be sure, by grace, we can participate in his glorious humanity and, by the Spirit, find the strength within to overcome evil, but only by grace, not because of our native and intrinsic wonderfulness. That is why he teaches us to pray to God the Father through him to deliver us from evil. Because we cannot deliver ourselves, whatever Yankee myths about Daniel Webster outwitting the devil we may have been taught. Apart from Jesus Christ, we can do nothing (John 15:5).

That said, however, the Christian and Catholic tradition is surprisingly light-hearted about the devil, whom medieval piety breezily called an ass and the ape of God. This attitude is right there in the apostolic DNA, when Paul tells us Jesus “disarmed the principalities and powers and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in him” (Colossians 2:15). The Catholic tradition concerning the devil tends toward taking him seriously, but holding him lightly. It is the confidence of a tradition founded on the belief that the worst thing that could ever conceivably happen is not in some future apocalypse, but in the past. After all, the worst thing that could ever happen is the murder of God, and God has already been murdered in the most brutal way possible. Yet this monstrous crime only served to bring about the greatest blessing God has ever wrought: the destruction of death and our incorporation into the life of the Blessed Trinity. Having wrought such an epic fail, the devil becomes, quite rightly, a figure of fun in the Christian tradition and Catholics have a certain divinely won right to laugh in his face. We are of the Church of Peter and the gates of Hell (a defensive image from ancient siege warfare) shall not prevail against us.

Of course, this petition, like the whole of the Our Father, is corporate. “Deliver us from evil.” Our prayer necessarily involves the whole of the Church in all its suffering and in both heaven and earth, including the angels. Because there are devils, the Church has, from its inception, understood our deliverance from evil to involve the participation of both the saints and angels. Revelation 12, in particular, associates the battle against the ancient Dragon, who is called the Devil and Satan, with the Blessed Virgin Mary and with St. Michael the Archangel. Similarly, our prayers for those who are still being cleansed of the effects of sin and evil in their lives in Purgatory are absolutely crucial because we are, as Paul points out “members of one another” (Romans 12:5). The interconnectedness of the communion of saints is precisely one of the things the devil loathes the most because it is the opposite of pride, which is the sin that made the devil the devil.

Ultimately, our prayer to be delivered from evil is a prayer to be delivered from sin. The devil can throw all sorts of awful stuff at us and some people have suffered horrible cruelties inspired by his malice. But if we do not break our communion with God by sinning against him, the critical aspect of the devil’s mission has utterly failed. His goal is always to persuade us to imitate him in his rebellion. God can and does, when it is for our good and his glory, “deliver us from evil” in the sense of protecting us from hurts the devil may want to inflict on our circumstances. But sometimes, God will allow the devil to inflict grievous blows on this world and his saints, just as, in his own case, he allowed the lash, the crown of thorns, and the nails. But we can expect that when our Hour comes, though “you will be hated by all for my name’s sake” nonetheless “he who endures to the end will be saved” (Matthew 10:22).

So we pray: Deliver us, Lord, we beseech you, from every evil and grant us peace in our day, so that aided by your mercy we might be ever free from sin and protected from all anxiety, as we await the blessed hope and the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ.[10]

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[2] William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act I, Scene V.

[3] G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (Available online at http://www.leaderu.com/cyber/books/orthodoxy/orthodoxy.html as of September 16, 2011).

[4] Roman Missal, Eucharistic Prayer IV,125

[5] Lewis, The Great Divorce, p. 80.

[6] William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 1, Act 3, Scene 1.

[7] G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man (Available online at http://www.wikilivres.info/wiki/The_Everlasting_Man as of September 16, 2011.)

[8] Heinrich Himmler, Poznan Speech to the SS, October 4, 1943.  (Available on-line at http://www.holocaust-history.org/himmler-poznan/speech-text.shtml as of September 17, 2011.)

[9] Martin Luther, A Mighty Fortress is Our God.

[10] Roman Missal, Embolism after the Lord’s Prayer, 126