Glimpses of the Devil by M. Scott Peck

Author:M. Scott Peck
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 2004-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Finally, I am left wondering about the reality of those demons who were named Damien, Tyrona, Josiah, and Emil.

Each of them represented a specific fallacy. After being introduced to the heresy of Docetism by Father O’Connor, I discovered Jersey to be a walking textbook of heresies. “An idea that seriously undermines the essence of Christian belief” is the narrowest of possible definitions of heresy. I have addressed the subject more deeply in The Different Drum.* Religions other than Christianity have their heresies. There are heresies shared among different religions. And there are some heresies that are purely secular. In its broadest definition, a heresy can be defined as any fallacious way of thinking.

The heresy of Damien was the belief that our safety as human beings is solely determined by our own personal cleverness and strength without any outside assistance whatsoever.

The heresy of Tyrona was that all of existence can be explained by a simplistic formula so that there is no mystery left in the world.

The heresy of Josiah was that love is whatever you choose to call it and that there is no requirement for love to have any operational definition—that love need not be manifested in behavior or judged by its fruits.

The heresy of Emil was a similar lack of requirement of any operational definition, only this time in relation to science instead of love. Emil’s thesis was that science was whatever you want to call science and need not be subject to any external verification.

Each of Jersey’s four lesser demons was a fallacy or heresy given a particular name and the suggestion of a personality. I doubt seriously that Jersey herself could have invented particular names or shadowy personalities for the separate fallacies in her own thinking. One of the team members happened to be an atheist. Following Jersey’s exorcism, he concluded that these demons “were nothing more than the creations of a little girl’s imagination.” Beyond stating that conclusion, however, he was unwilling and obviously uncomfortable about discussing the exorcism any further. Jersey was a little girl at the time, in reality more of a twelve-year-old than a twenty-seven-year-old, but I find it difficult to believe that a little girl could create such entities—and to what end?

So it is my belief—not wholly scientific—that these demons did have a kind of existence of their own, independent of Jersey’s imagination. What I am less certain about was whether they had any existence of their own independent of Satan. Were they true demons in their own right or were they four separate reflections of the One we found behind them, the One who has been called the Father of Lies? I do not know the answer. Demonologists through the centuries have made special note of the fact that demons seem to exist within a very tightly organized hierarchy and hence seem to have remarkably little individual freedom of action or independence.

Most cases of demonic possession reported in the literature are not reported as cases of satanic possession. Indeed, I had to ask Malachi whether he had ever encountered Satan in the course of an exorcism.

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