The sympathetic devil trope has become such a mainstay of popular fiction as to be a Pop Cult zombie meme. Audiences – even pro writers – now take for granted that a demon could choose to do good or even repent and gain salvation.
Few people see anything weird about that idea, which is featured prominently in the works of Nail Gaiman and Arthur C. Clarke, but attained full cultural penetration through anime and manga.
“So what?” many of you are asking right now. “It’s fantasy. Anything’s possible! Why can’t our demons be different?”
For one, let’s remember that a lot of the same folks who claim the fantasy genre gives carte blanche to make archetypal villains sympathetic get up in arms over heroic orcs.
Because the exact same dynamic is at work behind the script flipping that portrays demons and orcs – traditional agents of the forces of evil – as redeemable.
“You’re not the fiction police!” some readers are shouting at their screens. “Who are you to decide what people can and can’t write?”
And they’ve got a point.
By my own admission, I am not the Grand Inquisitor in charge of the Index of Forbidden Tropes.
Yet.
But that’s neither here nor there, since I’m not presuming to declare simping for fictional demons off limits to authors.
Nope, the author hat is off, and the conical theologian hat is on.
Because spinning fanciful yarns that include little men with horns and pitchforks running around in red underwear and having the occasional pang of conscience isn’t the issue.
The point at which humanized fantasy demons become a problem is when you start getting high on your own supply and substitute your invented demonology for defined Church teaching.
It shouldn’t be hard to see why pulling that switch is risky.
But in case it’s not obvious why a writer rejecting Scripture, Sacred Tradition, and the Magisterium in favor of his own inventions poses him a spiritual hazard, let’s explore what demons are and why their intrinsic nature makes it impossible for them to repent.
Here are a few fun facts to remember next time you’re reading that pseudo-Gygaxian manga series with that saucy but lovable succubus …
Demons are real
We not only know for a moral certainty that demons exist based on Scripture, their existence is a logical conclusion from the hierarchy of being. Here we have nonliving matter (rocks and stuff), living but non-sentient material beings (plants), living, sentient, but non-sapient material beings (animals), living, sentient, and sapient matter-spirit composite beings (men), and the Spirit of Life, Logos, and Being Himself (God).
Sharp readers noticed a major gap in that progression. Nature abhors a vacuum. And just as a missing atomic number on the periodic table is a sure indicator of an as-yet undiscovered element, a blank space in the spectrum of being isn’t empty. We just can’t see what’s there.
And what’s there is living, sapient, purely spiritual being.
AKA angels.
And as every second-grader before the Millennial generation used to know, demons are evil angels.
But it’s to be hoped that none of my regular readers needed that exposition, because anyone who still thinks demons aren’t real is too oblivious of what’s happening around him to make it.
Demons are pure intellect and will
As pure spirits, demons don’t have senses, which are faculties of the flesh. That means they don’t obtain information the same way humans do.
Think of your mind like a wad of Silly Putty. Your senses impress images on it, like newsprint the putty’s pressed against. Your intellect then performs a process called abstraction that derives concepts from the particular sense impressions you take in.
The key takeaway there is that humans learn by abstracting from particulars to generalities. So you learn what a dog is by seeing enough four-legged, wet-nosed, barking critters to grasp the mental category of “dog” and file particular dogs under it.
Angels and demons work in reverse. They’re created with infused knowledge of all the categories they need to fulfill their original purpose. So St. Raphael was created knowing what “fish” are and from his infused knowledge of that category was able to identify the particular fish whose burned organs could ward off Asmodeus.
That also means your guardian angel has, since the moment of his creation, known everything about you as it pertains to your sanctification. Make sure to say hi to him now and then.
The flip side of that coin is if the angel originally created to be your guardian angel refused the job and fell. In that case, it’s a good bet he’s now your tempting demon. Who still knows your full potential for sin and the exact buttons to push to tempt you.
Get why these things aren’t to be taken lightly yet?
Demons can’t change their minds
Since demons are 100% composed of intellect and will, it follows by necessity that once they make a decision, they can’t change it freely.
The quick and dirty reason is that since intellect and will are the faculties responsible for decision making, demons make every decision with their full being. Their wills are undivided by fleshly passions, unlike ours.
Think about it. There are really just two reasons you change your mind about a decision you made:
- You didn’t have full use of your reason at the time (you were tired, drunk, high, in the heat of passion, etc.)
- You lacked sufficient knowledge of all the factors involved in the decision and its full consequences (unintended bad outcomes gave you second thoughts).
If you’ve followed the post so far, you can already see why neither of those conditions can apply to demons.
- They are their reason, so it’s always firing on all cylinders.
- They’re created with infused knowledge of everything they need to know – especially all the details and consequences of their first choice to serve God or not.
So it’s not like during its first microsecond in Hell, any fallen angel thought This is way worse than I expected! I want a do-over.”
Nope. Every demon knew, in precise detail, just what rejecting God would mean.
But they did it anyway.
And given the chance, they’d do it again.
Because they’re evil.
It’s a sad state of affairs that folks need the concept of evil explained to them, but here we are.
Demons are damned forever
Since every demon’s first choice upon creation was to reject God, that choice damns them, and they cannot – and would not if they could – change that choice, they’re all stuck with the consequences for all eternity.
“OK, smart guy,” some Redditors are mouthing through cheeks stuffed with Dorito paste, “that’s nice speculation, but you got references to back it up?”
Just kidding. What they’re mashing into their phones is really “Source? SOURCE!?”
And yes.
First up, from The Catechism of the Catholic Church:
- 391 Behind the disobedient choice of our first parents lurks a seductive voice, opposed to God, which makes them fall into death out of envy. Scripture and the Church’s Tradition see in this being a fallen angel, called “Satan” or the “devil”. The Church teaches that Satan was at first a good angel, made by God: “The devil and the other demons were indeed created naturally good by God, but they became evil by their own doing.”
- 392 Scripture speaks of a sin of these angels. This “fall” consists in the free choice of these created spirits, who radically and irrevocably rejected God and his reign. We find a reflection of that rebellion in the tempter’s words to our first parents: “You will be like God.” The devil “has sinned from the beginning”; he is “a liar and the father of lies”.
- 393 It is the irrevocable character of their choice, and not a defect in the infinite divine mercy, that makes the angels’ sin unforgivable. “There is no repentance for the angels after their fall, just as there is no repentance for men after death.”
- 414 Satan or the devil and the other demons are fallen angels who have freely refused to serve God and his plan. Their choice against God is definitive. They try to associate man in their revolt against God.
“But Catechism not infallible! Muh Eastern Schism! Muh Reformation! You got that scripturally justified?”
Yep.
Then he shall say to them also that shall be on his left hand: Depart from me, you cursed, into everlasting fire which was prepared for the devil and his angels.
-Mt. 25:41
(Emphasis mine)
As Catholic Answers lead apologist Jimmy Akin points out, it’d be pretty weird for the all-knowing God to prepare everlasting punishment for Satan and the demons if He wasn’t gonna need it.
In fact, Jimmy explains the whole business in far pithier terms than me in this video:
“Big deal,” goes the final objection. “Fantasy demons don’t have to be 1:1 matches for demons IRL. Authors can make them redeemable if they want.”
Of course they can. Authors could write stories in which elephants are giant spacefaring mollusks.
But none of them do.
When they come up with fantastical critters that differ so fundamentally from real-world beings, SFF authors think up original names for them.
As others have pointed out, the Sympathetic Demon trope has now become rather cliché.
It’s Star Trek gluing spoons to actors’ heads and calling them aliens.
A story with an eons-old being powerful enough to throw planets around who made one terrible choice he’s too proud to ever renege on, and which renders him implacably evil, is far more compelling than a busty bat-winged waifu the beta MC can save with hugs.
But all of those literary demerits pale before final nail in the Sympathetic Demon meme’s coffin …
It’s subversive.
As one Twitter skeptic so helpfully put it …
That’s the frame a writer must at least tacitly accept to justify his stories about redeemable demons.
A worldview that acknowledges the cosmic hierarchy sketched above can’t accommodate it. Positing demonic repentance in Current Year requires adopting some degree of materialism.
Again, is this me ordering people not to write stories with this trope? No. Am I calling anyone who does an avowed materialist? No.
Modernist thought has just made materialism so pervasive that everyone takes it in by osmosis. Most of us aren’t conscious of it.
What I am saying is that the greatest trick the Devil pulled wasn’t convincing the world he doesn’t exist.
It was tricking the world into simping for him.
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The problem writers come across when you present a new creature/ being/ monster to the audience, is that you have to explain why it exists and what its motive is.
If you wish to present a concept like “demons” (and I use the term as loosely as they do) to them then you have to think out the implications on both your story AND the world it takes place in. If they are not demons like Christianity and the West knows them and has known them for thousands of years then you have to then explain how they shaped the way things are now. And this is where these stories always fall apart for me.
If demons aren’t what we know them as, then the world would objectively not be like the one we live in today. This is why shows like Buffy or Supernatural were so aggravating for me to watch. None of the mythology they try to establish works because it is completely incompatible with how our world has played out. You can even see it within their own poorly thought out rules how they struggle to remain internally consistent to the point that they’ve become memes for decades. Modern writers in the West that choose this path have a rough road ahead of them, and not for much in the way of return.
Some might use the “Japan did it” excuse, but Japan’s framework for their trope isn’t Christianity but their own culture. Their “version”, yokai, are a race of scary monsters who live in a dark and frightening world bordering ours. They aren’t demons, even if the word has been incorrectly translated as such. The Japanese also aren’t deliberately doing it to sneer at Christians or Mom and Dad to prop up their lame 2007 subversive tropes. Yokai could potentially be redeemed, depending on how they are portrayed. Demons cannot because they are not yokai. The clever set would do well to understand that mashing these together doesn’t work because they are not the same thing. You cannot mash these together in a coherent way, which is why no one has managed to make it work.
At this point, I’m just begging people to stop taking bad and incoherent ’00s TV as inspiration for their spiritual thought and injecting into their stories. It was stupid then and it’s just as stupid now.
It’s been said before, but it seems the beatings must continue until morale improves. The current crop of new authors – and sad to say, Newpub isn’t immune – just haven’t read deeply or broadly enough to establish a solid foundation of influences.
Newpub needs a successor to Gene Wolfe, not yet another Naruto x Angel – but based! – mashup.
JD, I agree the demonology in Buffy and Angel is incoherent. I’d say, tying into your other point, they’re really much closer to being yokai (or aliens) than anything recognizable as demons. The no-soul-therefore-evil definition of demons is a narrative “because I said so,” and doesn’t even really hold up over the long term. I can’t recall any actual angels in Angel, so there’s no data for comparison there.
The ones that annoy me are D&D’s devils, which fall into numerous errors at the same time:
–Bringing them down to materialistic levels, and in later material suggesting many of them were once human souls.
–Trying to eat their cake and have it too with the tempter/ruin of souls elements mixed into D&D’s own bizarre cosmology.
–Actually using the name Asmodeus and elevating him to a super-Satanic figure. (I don’t blame Gygax himself so much for this, since, as a Jehovah’s Witness, he may have been ignorant of Asmodeus’ Scriptural provenance. But it’s morbidly amusing to see WotC make so much of “cultural sensitivity” on the one side and pump up a real demon on the other, and a little offputting when they start producing idols–I mean, Funko Pops–of him. 🙂 )
I’m glad you saved me the time of trying to explain that the Japanese oni/yokai tend to get translated as “demon” but aren’t really the same thing. In a lot of Japanese fiction, these are almost more like another race, more akin to elves and dwarves than angelic beings. Sometimes things get muddled a bit when Japanese media incorporates Christian intellectual property as window dressing; the religion and supernatural beings in the Dragon Quest series of games, for instance, probably falls into this category, though others are a lot more explicit about glorifying/glamorizing demonic imagery and ideas; I think you could still argue that a lot of the time there’s the distinctly Japanese conception beneath it all, which is probably lost on the average western entertainment consumer.
Where things get a bit complicated is when you consider that a lot of newer fiction creators are probably themselves influenced by the Japanese usage and aren’t even particularly literate in the Christian conception of angelic beings to begin with. So while some are undoubtedly being subversive, I suspect others are just flowing with the narrative current into which they were creatively spawned.
One thing that helps clarify what “youkai” means is to realize that multiple works (like Urusei Yatsura or Gegege no Kitaro) have classified things like Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster, witches and gremlins as “western youkai.”
You may be interested in how demons are depicted in the Frieren Journey’s End/At the Funeral manga/anime.
They are pure predators that mimic human emotions to prey on them but it’s more than clear they have as much understanding of the human condition as a fish understands airline schedules. They’re smart and dangerous and completely alien and it’s really something.
I’ve been watching the anime. Got to that episode and my first reaction was “Oh, jeez, not another ‘demons are just like you and me and want to get along!'”
And then it wasn’t. It so wasn’t.
Just goes how tired the trope is when something returns to the roots it’s a surprise.
“Few people see anything weird about that idea, which is featured prominently in the works of Nail Gaiman and Arthur C. Clarke, but attained full cultural penetration through anime and manga.”
Mike Mignola’s “Hellboy” is another prominent and influential example.
“Of course they can. Authors could write stories in which elephants are giant spacefaring mollusks.”
To be fair, some writers have done something akin to this when it comes to demons, wizards, etc.
The heroes of E. R. Eddison’s highly influential classic “The Worm Ouroboros” are “Demons” living in “Demonland”, but they are more or less human.
J. R. R. Tolkien did something similar with his “wizards” dwarves” “elves”, etc, which did not correspond to the existing definitions of the words, which he admitted could lead to false associations in the minds of readers. As he put it in his letter to Robert Murray on November 4, 1954:
“But ‘wizards’ are not in any sense or degree ‘shady’. Not mine. I am under the difficulty of finding English names for mythological creatures with other names, since people would not ‘take’ a string of Elvish names, and I would rather they took my legendary creatures even with the false associations of the ‘translation’ than not at all. Even the dwarfs are not really Germanic ‘dwarfs’ (Zwerge, dweorgas, dvergar), and I call them ‘dwarves’ to mark that. They are not naturally evil, not necessarily hostile, and not a kind of maggotfolk bred in stone; but a variety of incarnate rational creature. The istari are translated ‘wizards’ because of the connexion of ‘wizard’ with wise and so with ‘witting’ and knowing. They are actually emissaries from the True West, and so mediately from God, sent precisely to strengthen the resistance of the ‘good’, when the Valar become aware that the shadow of Sauron is taking shape again.”
I think that what separates Tolkien and Eddison from Gaiman, Mignola, etc, however, is that the Demons in “The Worm Ouroboros” are so obviously something other than fallen angels that no one would misinterpret them as such, and almost any reader of Tolkien’s works will understand that Gandalf is not a warlock or sorcerer. One cannot say the same for “Good Omens” or “Hellboy”, which deliberately evoke demons in the traditional definition of the term but portray them as sympathetic or redeemable.
To be fair to Hellboy, Hellboy himself is the only demon ever shown to be redeemable, and he explicitly does not have any memories before being raised on Earth. He only made his choices at that point.
But of course having said that, this only gets us into more incoherent territory, such as Hellboy being born into hell despite not having rejected God, Hellboy being “born” at all, Hellboy having a human mother, etc.
I tend to think of the Istari as angels because they were all Maiar. Sauron, as one of the Maiar who followed Melkor in revolt against Eru Iluvatar would therefore be a demon. Of course, the Valar themselves would be a higher class of Angel, so to speak.
Heck even Tolkien couldn’t stick to the “angels make their choice in the first moment of their existence” thing, see Saruman.
Also see how even Manwe thought Melkor was redeemable.
The moral of the story there being that Manwe was wrong.
By your pardon, I’m going to plug my own book here. My heroes, many who are Christian of various denominations, battle Legion in a scifi setting. And I mean Legion of the New Testament. There is no redemption arch for Legion, they are evil through and through, Hell-bent on destroying all of humanity. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01IE5JMCO
It’s an ongoing series, part two is out, and I’m working on the third book and I’ll need at least one more to tie everything up.
Was the title a typo, or deliberate?
That would be telling.
I imagine that part of this is caused by the simple fact that such an existence is entirely alien to us as humans. We cannot imagine what it would be like to be an unchangeable being of disembodied will and intellect, so our thinking about the topic is inevitably going to slide towards thinking of them as changeable material beings like us, simply because that’s the only frame of reference we have.
Good point. Anthropomorphizing spirits is a persistent temptation.
The pervasiveness of humanism in the 20th century and prior went a long way into making muh “Demons are just like you and me” drivel possible and acceptable.
As is inevitable when one raises humanity to an absolute.