5. Demoniacs in the Country of the Gadarenes
The Demoniacs in the Country of the Gadarenes Matt. 8:28-34; Mark 5:1-20; Luke 8:26-39
The consideration of this, the most important, and, in many respects, the most perplexing of all the demoniac cures in the N. T., will demand some prefatory remarks on the general subject of the demoniacs of Scripture. It is a subject of which the difficulty is very much enhanced by the fact that, as with some of the spiritual gifts, the gift of tongues, for example, the thing itself, if it still survives among us, yet does so no longer under the same name, nor with the same frequency and intensity as of old. We are obliged to put together, as best we can, the separate and fragmentary notices which have reached us, and must endeavour out of them to frame such a scheme as will answer the demands of the different phenomena; we have not, at least with certainty, the thing itself to examine and to question, before our eyes.
It is, of course, easy enough to cut short the whole inquiry, and to leave no question at all, by saying these demoniacs were persons whom we should call insane—epileptic, maniac, melancholic This has been often said, and the oftener perhaps, because there is a partial truth in the assertion that these possessions were bodily maladies. There was no doubt a substratum of disease, which in many cases helped to lay open the sufferer to the deeper evil, and upon which it was superinduced: so that cases of possession are at once classed with those of various sicknesses, and at the same time distinguished from them, by the Evangelists; who thus at once mark the connexion and the difference (Matt. 4:24; 8:16; Mark 1:34). But the scheme which confounds these cases with those of disease, and, in fact, identifies the two, does not, as every reverent interpreter of God's word must own, exhaust the matter; it cannot be taken as a satisfying solution of the difficulties it presents; and this for more reasons than one.
And first, our Lord Himself uses language which is not reconcilable with any such theory; He everywhere speaks of demoniacs not as persons merely of disordered intellects, but as subjects and. thralls of an alien spiritual might; He addresses the evil spirit as distinct from the man; "Hold thy peace, and come out of him" (Mark 1:25). And the unworthy reply, that He fell in with and humoured the notions of the afflicted in order to facilitate their cure, is anticipated by the fact that in his most confidential discourses with his disciples He uses exactly the same language (Matt. 10:8; and especially Matt. 17:21, "This kind goeth not out but by prayer and fasting" ). The allegiance we owe to Christ as the King of truth, who came, not to fall in with men's errors, but to deliver men out of their errors, compels us to believe that He would never have used language which would have upheld and confirmed so serious an error in the minds of men as the belief in satanic influences, which did not in truth exist. For this error, if it was an error, was so little an innocuous one, such as might be left to drop naturally away; did, on the contrary, reach so far in its consequences, entwined its roots so deeply among the very ground-truths of religion, that He would never have suffered it to remain at the hazard of all the misgrowths which it could not fail to occasion.
And then, moreover, even had not the moral interests at stake been so transcendent, our idea of Christ's absolute veracity, apart from the value of the truth which He communicated, our idea of Him as the Verax, no less than the Verus and the Veritas, forbids us to suppose that He could have spoken as He did, being perfectly aware all the while that there was no corresponding reality to justify the language which He used. And in this there is no making a conscience about trifles, nor any losing sight of that figurative nature of all our words, out of which it results that so much which is not literally true, is yet the truest, inasmuch as it conveys the truest impression,—no requiring of men to examine the etymologies of their words before they venture to use them. It would have been quite a different thing for the Lord to have fallen in with the popular language, and to have spoken of persons under various natural afflictions as "possessed," supposing He had found such a language current, but now no longer, however once it might have been, vividly linked to the idea of possession by spirits of evil. In this there had been nothing more than in our speaking of certain forms of madness as lunacy. We do not thus imply our belief, however it may have been with others in time past, that the moon has wrought the mischief; but finding the word current, we use it: and this the more readily, since its original derivation is so entirely lost sight of in our common conversation, its first impress so completely worn off, that we do not thereby even seem to countenance an error. But suppose with this same disbelief in lunar influences, we were to begin to speak not merely of lunatics, but of persons on whom the moon was working, to describe the cure of such, as the moon's ceasing to afflict them; the physician to promise his patient that the moon should not harm him any more, would not this be quite another matter, a direct countenancing of error and delusion? would there not here be that absence of agreement between thoughts and words, in which the essence of a lie consists? Now Christ does everywhere speak in such a language as this. Take, for instance, his words, Luke 11:17-26, and assume Him to have known, all the while He was thus speaking, that the whole Jewish belief of demoniac possessions was utterly baseless, that Satan exercised no such power over the bodies or spirits of men, and what should we have here for a King of truth?
And then, besides this, the phenomena themselves are such as no hypothesis of the kind avails to explain, and they thus bid us to seek for some more satisfying solution. For that madness was not the constituent element in the demoniac state is clear, since not only are we without the slightest ground for supposing that the Jews would have considered all maniacs, epileptic or melancholic persons, to be under the power of evil spirits; but we have distinct evidence that the same malady they did in some cases attribute to an evil spirit, and in others not; thus showing that the malady and possession were not identical in their eyes, and that the assumption of the latter was not a mere popular explanation for the presence of the former. Thus, on two occasions they bring to the Lord one dumb (Matt. 9:32), or dumb and blind (Matt. 12:22), and in both instances the dumbness is traced up to an evil spirit. Yet it is plain that they did not consider all dumbness as having this root; for in the history given by St. Mark (vii. 32) of another deaf and dumb, the subject of Christ's healing power, it is the evident intention of the Evangelist to describe one labouring only under a natural defect; with no least desire to trace the source of his malady to any demoniacal influence. There were no doubt signs sufficiently clear distinguishing one case from the other; in that of the demoniac there probably was not the outward hindrance, not the still-fastened string of the tongue; it was not the outward organ, but the inward power of using the organ, which was at fault. This, with an entire apathy, a total disregard of all which was going on about him, may have sufficiently indicated that the source of his malady lay deeper than in any merely natural cause. But, whatever may have been the signs which enabled those about the sufferers to make these distinctions, the fact itself that they did so discriminate between cases of the very same malady, proves decisively that there were not certain diseases which, without more ado, they traced up directly to Satan; but that they did designate by this name of possession, a condition which, while it was very often a condition of disease, was also always a condition of much more than disease.
But what was the condition which our Lord and his Apostles signalized by this name? in what did it differ, upon the one side, from madness,—upon the other, from wickedness? It will be impossible to make any advance toward the answer, without saying something, by way of preface, on the scriptural doctrine concerning the kingdom of evil, and its personal head, and the relation in which he stands to the moral evil of our world. Alike excluding, on the one side, the Manichaean error, which would make evil eternal as good, and so itself a god,—and the pantheistic, which would deny any true reality to evil at all, or that it is anything else than good at a lower stage, the unripe, and therefore still bitter, fruit,—the Scripture teaches the absolute subordination of evil to good, and its subsequence of order, in the fact that the evil roots itself in a creature, and in one created originally pure, but the good in the Creator. Yet, at the same time, it teaches that the opposition of this evil to the will of God is most real, is that of a will which does truly set itself against his will; that the world is not as a chess-board on which God is in fact playing both sides of the game, however some of the pieces maybe black, and some white; but that the whole end of his government of the world is the subduing of this evil; that is, not abolishing it by main force, which were no true victory, but overcoming it by righteousness and truth. And from this one central will, alienated from the will of God, the Scripture derives all the evil in the universe; all gathers up in a person, in the devil, who has a kingdom, as God has a kingdom—a kingdom with its subordinate ministers,—"the devil and his angels." This world of ours stands not isolated, not rounded and complete in itself, but in living relation with two worlds,—a higher, from which all good in it proceeds,—and a lower, from which all evil. It thus comes to pass that the sin of man is continually traced up to Satan; Peter says to Ananias, "Why hath Satan filled thine heart to lie to the Holy Ghost" (Acts 5:3)? and St. John, of Judas Iscariot, "the devil having now put into his heart to betray Him" (John 13:2. cf. 1 John 3:8; John 8:44); the Scripture not by such language as this denying that the evil of men is truly their evil, but affirming with this, that it has its ground in an anterior evil. It is their evil, since an act of their will alone gives it leave to enter. To each man the key is committed, with the charge to keep closed the gate of his soul; and it is only through the negligent ward which he has kept that evil has found admission there. At the same time it is the existence of a world of evil beyond and without our world, which links to any remissness here such fatal and disastrous results.
This being so, the question which presents itself is this, namely, what peculiar form of Satanic operation does the Scripture intend, when it speaks of men as possessed, or having devils. Is their evil ethical, or is it merely physical? Merely physical it certainly is not. Doubtless the suffering of the demoniac often was great; yet we should err, if we saw in him, as in the victims of ghastly and horrible diseases, only another example of the mighty woe which Satan has brought in upon our race. Nor yet, on the other hand, is his evil purely ethical; we have in him something else than merely a signal sinner, a foremost servant of the devil, who with heart and will and waking consciousness is doing his work; for this, whatever his antecedent guilt may have been, and often, I should imagine, it had been great, the demoniac evidently is not. But what in him strikes us the most is the strange confusion of the physical and the spiritual, each intruding into the region of the other. There is a breaking up of all the harmony of the lower, no less than of the higher, life; the same discord and disorganization manifests itself in both. Nor does the demoniac, like the wicked, stand only in near relation to the kingdom of Satan as a whole. It is with him as if out of the malignant spirits of the pit one had singled him out for its immediate prey; as when a lion or a leopard, not hunting in the mass a herd of flying antelopes, has fastened upon and is drinking out the life-blood of one.
But the awful question remains, How should any have sunken into this miserable condition? have been entangled so far into the bands of the devil, or of his ministers? We should find ourselves altogether upon a wrong track, did we conceive of the demoniacs as the worst of men, and their possession as the plague and penalty of a wickedness in which they had greatly exceeded others. Rather we must esteem the demoniac one of the unhappiest, but not, of necessity, one of the guiltiest of our race. So far from this, the chief representatives and organs of Satan, false prophets and antichrists, are never spoken of in this language. We all feel that Judas' possession, when Satan entered into him (John 13:27), was specifically different from that of one of the unhappy persons who were the subjects of Christ's healing power. Or, to borrow an illustration from the world of fiction, none would speak of Iago as δαιμονιζόμενος;, however all the deadliest malignity of hell was concentrated in him; we should trace much closer analogies, to this state in some aspects of Hamlet's life. Greek tragedy supplies a yet apter example. It is the noble Orestes, whom the "dogs of hell" torture into madness; the obdurate Clytemnestra is troubled on account of her deed with no maddening spectres from the unseen world. Thus, too, in actual life, the horror and deep anguish of a sinner at the contemplation of Ms sin may have helped on this overthrow of his spiritual life,—anguish which a more hardened sinner would have escaped, but escaped it only by being a worse and more truly devilish man. We are not then, I am persuaded, to see in these cases of possession the deliberate giving in to the Satanic will;,, of an utterly lost soul, but the still recoverable wreck of that which oftentimes was once a noble spirit.
And, consistently with, this, we find in the demoniac the sense of a bondage in which he does not acquiesce, of his true life absolutely shattered, of an 'alien power which has mastered him wholly, and now is cruelly lording over him, and ever drawing further away from Him. in whom only any. created intelligence can find rest and peace. His state is, in the most literal sense of the word, "a possession:" another is ruling in the high places of his soul, and has cast down the rightful lord from his seat;. and he knows this; and out of his consciousness of it there goes forth from him a cry for redemption,, so soon as ever a glimpse of hope is afforded, an unlooked-for Redeemer draws near. This sense of misery, this yearning after deliverance, is that, in fact, which constituted these demoniacs subjects for Christ's healing power. Without it they would have been as little subjects of this as the devils, in whom evil has had its perfect work, in whom there is nothing for the divine grace to take hold of;—so that in their case, as in every other, faith was the condition of healing. There was in them a spark of higher life, not yet trodden out, which, indeed, so long as they were alone, was but light enough to reveal to them their darkness; and which none but the very Lord of life could have fanned again into a flame. But He who came "to destroy the works of the devil, "as He showed Himself lord over purely physical evil, a healer of the diseases of men, and lord no less over purely spiritual evil, a deliverer of men from their sins,—manifested Himself also lord in these complex cases partaking of the nature of either, ruler also in this border land, where these two regions of evil join, and run so strangely and inexplicably one into the other.
Yet while thus "men possessed with devils" is in no wise an equivalent expression for surpassingly wicked men, born of the serpent seed, of the devil's regeneration, and so become his children (Acts 13:10),—seeing that in such there is no cry for redemption, no desire after deliverance, it is more than probable that lavish sin, above all, indulgence in sensual lusts, superinducing, as it often would, a weakness of the nervous system, wherein is the especial band between body and soul, may have laid open these unhappy ones to the fearful incursions of the powers of darkness. They were greatly guilty, though not the guiltiest of all men. And this they felt, that by their own act they had given themselves over to this tyranny of the devil, a tyranny from which, as far as their horizon reached, they could see no hope of deliverance,—that to themselves they owed that this hellish might was no longer without them, which being resisted would flee from them; but a power which now they could not resist, and which would not flee.
The phenomena which the demoniacs of Scripture, especially those now before us, exhibit, entirely justify this view of the real presence of another will upon the will of the sufferer. They are not merely influences, which little by little have moulded and modified his will and brought it into subjection; but a power is there, which the man at the very moment he is succumbing to it, feels to be the contradiction of his truest being; but which yet has forced itself upon him, and possessed him, that he must needs speak and act as its organ; however presently his personal consciousness, may reassert itself for a moment. This, that they have not become indissolubly one, that the serpent and the man have not, as in Dante's awful image,, grown together, "each melted into other," but that they still are twain; this is, indeed, the one circumstance of hope which survives amid the general ruin of the moral and spiritual life. Yet this,, for the time being, gives the appearance,, though a deceptive one, of a far entirer wreck of his inner life, than manifests itself in wicked men, who have given themselves over wholly, without reserve and without reluctancy, to the working of iniquity. In these last, by the very completeness of their apostasy from the good, there is consistency at any rate; there are no merest incoherencies, no violent contradictions at every instant emerging in their words and in their conduct; they are at one with themselves. But all these incoherencies and self-contradictions we trace in the conduct of the demoniac; he rushes to the feet of Jesus, as coming to Him for aid, and then presently he deprecates his interference. There is not in him one vast contradiction to the true end of his being, consistently worked out, but a thousand lesser contradictions, in the midst of which the true idea of his life, not wholly obscured, will sometimes by fitful glimpses re-appear. There is on his part an occasional reluctancy against this usurpation by another of his spirit's throne—a protest, which for the present, indeed, does but aggravate the confusion of his life—which yet contains in it the pledge of a possible freedom, of a redemption whereof he may be a partaker still.
There is one objection to this view of the matter which may still be urged, namely, that if this possession is anything more than insanity in its different forms, how comes it to pass that there are no demoniacs now? how account for the fact that they have wholly disappeared from among us? But the assumption that there are none now, itself demands to be proved. It is not hard to perceive why there should be few by comparison; why this form of spiritual evil should have lost greatly both in frequency and malignity, and from both these causes be far more difficult to recognize. For in the first place, if there was anything that marked the period of the coming of Christ, and that immediately succeeding, it was the wreck and confusion of men's spiritual life which was then, the sense of utter disharmony, the hopelessness, the despair which must have beset every man that thought at all,—this, with the tendency to rush with a frantic eagerness into sensual enjoyments as the refuge from these thoughts of despair. That whole period was "the hour and power of darkness," of a darkness which then, as just before the dawn of a new day, was the thickest. The world was again a chaos, and the creative words, "Let there be light," though just about to be spoken, as yet were not uttered. It was exactly the crisis for such soul-maladies as these, in which the spiritual and bodily should be thus strangely intermingled, and it is nothing wonderful that they should have abounded at that time; for the predominance of certain spiritual maladies at certain epochs of the world's history, specially fitted for their generation, with their gradual decline and total disappearance in others less congenial to them, is a fact itself admitting no manner of question.
Moreover we cannot doubt that the might of hell has been greatly broken by the coming of the Son of God in the flesh; and with this a restraint set on the grosser manifestations of its power; "I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven" (Luke 10:18. cf. Rev. 20:2). His rage and violence are continually hemmed in and hindered by the preaching of the Word and ministration of the Sacraments. It were another thing even now in a heathen land, above all in one where Satan was not left in undisturbed possession, but wherein the great crisis of the conflict between light and darkness was finding place through the first proclaiming there of the Gospel of Christ. There we might expect to encounter, whether in the same intensity or not, manifestations analogous to these. Rhenius, a well-known Lutheran missionary in India, gives this as exactly his own experience, —namely, that among the native Christians, even though many of them walk not as children of light, yet there is no such falling under Satanic influence in soul and body, as he traced frequently in the heathen around him; and he shows by a remarkable example, and one in which he is himself the witness throughout, how the assault in the name of Jesus on the kingdom of darkness, as it brings out all forms of devilish opposition into fiercest activity, so calls out the endeavour to counterwork the truth through men who have been made direct organs of the devilish will.
It may well be a question moreover, if an Apostle, or one with apostolic discernment of spirits, were to enter into a madhouse now, how many of the sufferers there he might not recognize as "possessed. "Certainly in many cases of mania and epilepsy there is a condition very analogous to that of the demoniacs. The fact that the sufferer, and commonly the physician, may apprehend it differently, is not of the essence of the matter; they will but in this reflect the popular notion of the time. Thus, no doubt, the Jews multiplied quite unnecessarily the numbers of the possessed, counting as they did, among cases of possession, many lower forms of disharmony in the inner life; so too I should believe it was in the early Church, and many then, who had not fallen under this immediate tyranny of the devil, may yet have traced up their sufferings directly to him. Now, however, the popular feeling which the unhappy man brings with him into his forlorn state sets the opposite way, and in agreement with this is the language which he uses. But the case immediately before us is one in which no question can exist, since the great Physician of souls Himself declares it one of a veritable possession, and treats it as such; and to this we will address ourselves now The connexion is very striking in which this miracle stands with that other which went immediately before. Our Lord has just shown Himself as the pacifier of the tumults and the discords in the outward world; He has spoken peace to the winds and to the waves, and hushed the war of elements with a word. But there is something wilder and more fearful than the winds and the waves, in their fiercest moods—even the spirit of man, when it has broken loose from all restraints, and yielded itself to be his organ, who brings confusion and anarchy wherever his dominion reaches. And Christ will do here a yet mightier work than that which He accomplished there; He will prove Himself here also the Prince of Peace, the restorer of the lost harmony; He will speak, and at his potent word this madder strife, this blinder rage which is in the heart of man, will allay itself, and here also there shall be a great calm.
In seeking to combine the "accounts given us of this memorable healing, a difficulty meets us at the outset, this, namely, that St. Matthew speaks of two demoniacs, while St. Mark and St. Luke only of one. Many reconciliations of their statements have been offered; as that one was a more notable person in the country than the other, which is Augustine's; or that one was so much fiercer as to cause the other by most persons hardly to be taken note of, which is that of Maldonatus. However we may account for it, one, it is evident, did fall into the background; and, therefore, following the later Evangelists, I shall speak in the main as they do, of the one demoniac who met the Lord as He came out of the ship;—not in the least as though the other was not present: but these accounts, in which there appears but one, being those which, as the fullest, I desire mainly to follow, it would cause much embarrassment to use any other language.
The picture of the miserable man is fearful; and in drawing it each Evangelist has some touches which are peculiarly his own; but St. Mark's is the most graphic of all, adding many strokes which wonderfully aggravate the terribleness of the man's condition, and thus magnify the glory of his cure. The man had his dwelling among the tombs, that is, in places unclean because of the dead men's bones which were there (Num. 19:11, 16; Matt. 23:27; Luke 11:44). To those who did not on this account shun them, these tombs of the Jews would afford ample shelter, being either natural caves, or recesses artificially hewn out of the rock, often so large as to be supported with columns, and with cells upon their sides for the reception of the dead. Being, too, without the cities, and oftentimes in remote and solitary places, they would attract those who sought "to avoid all fellowship of their kind. This man was possessed of that extraordinary muscular strength which maniacs so often put forth (cf. Acts 19:16), and thus all efforts to bind and restrain him (and such had been often repeated) had proved ineffectual (Mark 5:4). St. Matthew alone relates how he had made the way impassable for travellers; St. Luke alone that he was without clothing, although this is involved in St. Mark's account, who tells us that after he was healed he was found "clothed, and in his right mind" sitting at Jesus' feet. Yet with all this, he was not so utterly lost, but that there woke up in him continually a sense of his misery, and of the terrible bondage under which he had come; although this could express itself only in his cries, and in a blind rage "against himself as the true author of his woe; out of which he wounded and cut himself with stones.
From such an one as this did the Lord receive his first greeting on those shores which now, probably for the first time, his feet were treading. This man with his companion starting from the tombs, which were their ordinary dwelling-place, rushed down to encounter, it may have been with hostile violence, the intruders that had dared to set foot on their domain. Or it is possible that they were at once drawn to Christ by the secret instinctive feeling that He was their helper, and driven from Him by the sense of the awful gulf that divided them from Him, the Holy One of God. At any rate, if it was with purposes of violence, ere the man reached Him his mind was changed; "for He had commanded the unclean spirit to come out. of the man" (Luke 8:29), and the unclean spirit had recognized one that had a right to command, against whom force would avail nothing; and, like others on similar occasions, sought by a strong adjuration to avert his coming doom. He "cried with a loud voice, What have I to do with Thee, Jesus, Thou Son of the most high God? I adjure Thee by God that Thou torment me not." Herein the true devilish spirit speaks out, which counts it a torment not to be suffered to torment others, and an injury done to itself when it is no more permitted to be injurious to others. In St. Matthew they say, "Art Thou come hither to torment us before the time?" in which last words, "before the time," is the confession upon their part of a time coming, an inevitable hour, when there shall be an entire victory of the kingdom of light over that of darkness, and when all which belong unto the latter shall be shut up in the abyss (Rev. 20:10), and all power of harming withdrawn from them for ever. All Scripture agrees with this, that the judgment of the angels is yet to come (1 Cor. 6:3); they are "reserved in everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of the great day" (Jude 1:6); and what the unclean spirits deprecate here, is the bringing in, by anticipation, of that final doom.
It is here noticeable, that the first bidding of Christ is not immediately obeyed;—that the evil spirits remonstrate, and do not at once abandon their prey. No doubt the Lord could have forced them to do so, had He pleased; but the man might have perished in the process (cf. Mark 9:24). Even that first bidding had brought on a terrible paroxysm. It was then of Christ's own will, of the Physician wise and tender as He was strong, to proceed step by step. And, first, He demands of him his name,—some say, to magnify the greatness of the deliverance and the Deliverer, by showing, through the answer, the power and malignity of the foe that should be overcome. But, more probably, the question was directed to the man. It should calm him, by bringing him to recollection, to the consciousness of his personality, of which a man's name is the outward expression,—that he was a person, having once been apart from, nor even now inextricably bound up with, those spiritual wickednesses which had dominion over him. The question may thus have been intended to facilitate his cure. But if so meant, either the evil spirit snatches at the answer and replies for himself, or the unhappy man, instead of recurring to his true name, that which should remind him of what he was before he fell under this thraldom, declares his sense of the utter ruin of his whole moral and spiritual being. In his reply, "My name is Legion, for we are many," truth and error are fearfully blended. They were "many;" not on one side only, but on every side, the walls of his spirit have been broken down; and he laid open to all the incursions of evil, torn asunder in infinite ways, now under one hostile and hated power now under another. The destruction is complete; they who rule over him are "lords many." Only by an image drawn from the reminiscences of his former life can he express his sense of his own condition. He had seen the serried ranks of a Roman legion, that fearful instrument of conquest, that sign of terror and fear to the conquered nations, and before which the Jew more especially quailed. Even such, at once one and many, cruel and inexorable and strong, were the powers that were tyrannizing over him. When it is said of Mary Magdalene, that out of her had gone seven devils (Luke 8:2),. something of the same truth is expressed,—that her spiritual life was laid waste, not on one side only, but on many (cf. Matt. 12:45).
And then again, with that interchange of persons which was continually going forward, that quick shifting, so to speak, of the polarity, so that at one moment the human consciousness became the positive, at another the negative pole, the unclean spirit, or rather the man, become now his organ, speaks out anew, entreating not to be sent into the abyss (Luke 8:3), or, clothing his petition in the form of a notion which belonged to the man whom he possessed, "that He would not send them away out of the country" (Mark 5:10). The request is in each case the same, for, according to Jewish notions, certain countries being assigned to evil as well as to good spirits, the limits of which they were unable to overpass, to be sent out of their own country, no other being open to them, implied being sent into the abyss, since that alone would remain for them. This request is in fact a repetition of their prayer that they should not be tormented before the time.
Hereupon follows a circumstance which has ever proved a chief stumbling-block offered by the Evangelical history. The devils, if they must leave their more welcome habitation, the heart of man,, if indeed the Stronger is come, spoiling the strong man's goods, taking his thralls out of his power, yet entreat, in their inextinguishable desire of harming, or, out of those mysterious affinities which evermore reveal themselves between the demoniacal and the bestial, : to be allowed to enter into the swine;—of which a large herd,—St. Mark with his usual punctuality notes that they were "about two thousand,"—were feeding on the neighbouring cliffs. But to the evil all things turn to evil. God's saints and servants appear not to be heard; and the very refusal of their requests is to them a blessing (2 Cor. 12:8, 9). The wicked, Satan (Job 1:11) and his ministers and servants, are sometimes heard, and the very granting of their petitions issues in their worse confusion and loss. So is it now: these evil spirits had their prayer heard; but only to their ruin. They are allowed to enter into the swine; but the destruction of the whole herd follows; and that which they most dreaded came upon them; no longer finding organs in or through which to work, they are driven perforce to that very prisonhouse which they most would have shunned.
The first cavil which has been raised here is this—What right had the Lord to inflict this loss on the owners of the swine?—being the same which has been raised on occasion of the cursing of the barren fig-tree (Matt. 21:19). It might be sufficient to answer to this, that Christ did not send the devils into the swine; He merely drove them out from the men; all beyond this was merely permissive. But supposing that He had done so— a man is of more value than many swine; and if this granting of the evil spirits' request helped in any way the cure of this sufferer, caused them to relax their hold on him more easily, mitigated the paroxysm of their going forth (cf. Mark 9:26), this would have been motive enough for allowing them to perish. It may have been necessary for the permanent healing of the man that he should have this outward evidence and testimony that the hellish powers which held him in bondage had quitted their hold. He may have needed to have his deliverance sealed and realized to him in the open destruction of his enemies; not otherwise to be persuaded that Christ had indeed and for ever set him free; as Israel, coming out of Egypt, must see the Egyptians dead upon the sea-shore before they could indeed believe that the rod of their oppressors had been broken for ever (Exod. 14:30).
But setting aside all apologies, on what ground, it may be asked, is this which the Lord here wrought, made more the subject of cavil than any other loss inflicted upon men by Him from whom all things come, and who therefore can give or take away according to the good pleasure of his will? Men might object with as good a right against the murrain which causes cattle to die; the inundation that destroys the fruits of the field, or any other natural calamity with which God chastens his children, punishes, or seeks to make contrite the hearts of his enemies. For oftentimes his taking away is in a higher sense a giving; a withdrawing of the meaner thing, to make receptive of the better. Thus might it well have been intended here, however the sin of these Gadarenes hindered the gracious design. If these swine belonged to Jewish owners, and we know from Josephus that there were numbers of hellenizing Jews just in these parts, there may have been in this loss, a punishment meant for them who from motives of gain showed themselves despisers of Moses' law.. It must be owned, however, that the population of the Decapolis was predominantly Gentile.; Josephus calls Gadara itself a Greek city.
But the narrative is charged with contradiction and absurdity. The unclean spirits ask. permission to enter into the swine, yet no sooner have they thus done than they defeat their own purpose, destroying that animal life, from which if they be altogether driven,, they have already confessed they will be obliged to betake them to the more detested place of their punishment. It is nowhere,, however, said that they drove the swine down the steep place into the sea. It is just as easy, and much more natural, to suppose that against their will the swine, when they found themselves seized by this new and strange power, rushed themselves in wild and panic fear to their destruction,—the foremost plunging headlong down the cliffs, and the rest blindly following. But in either case, whether they thus destroyed themselves, or were impelled by the foul spirits, there reveals itself here the very essence and truest character of evil, which evermore outwits and defeats itself, being as inevitably scourged in the granting of its requests as in their refusal; which, stupid, blind, self-contradicting, and suicidal, can only destroy, and will involve itself in the common ruin rather than not destroy. And what, if in the fierce hatred of these foul spirits of darkness against the Prince of light and life, they may have been willing to bring any harm on themselves, if only they might so bring on Him the ill-will of men, and thus traverse and hinder his blessed work? And this, no doubt, they did effectually here; for it was fear of further losses, and alienation from Christ on account of those by his presence already entailed upon them, which was the motive for their urging Him to leave their country.
But the point of most real difficulty is the entering of the devils into the swine,—the working, that is, of the spiritual life on the bestial, which seems altogether irreceptive of it, and to possess no organs through which it could operate. I put aside of course here, as both in themselves merely ridiculous, and irreconcilable with the documents as they lie before us, the solutions of Paulus and his compeers, that the demoniac, in the parting paroxysm of his madness, hunted the creatures over the precipices into the lake, or that, while the swineherds were drawn by curiosity to watch the encounter between Christ and the demoniac, or had gone to warn Him of the danger of meeting the madman, the untended herd fell a fighting, and so tumbled headlong over the cliffs. Whatever difficulties this miracle may present, it certainly is not by shifts such as these to be evaded; and, their perplexity at any rate claims to be respectfully treated, who find it hard to reconcile this fact with what else they have been taught to hold fast as most precious concerning the specific difference between man with the whole order of spiritual existences on the one side, and the animal creation on the other. I will only suggest that perhaps we make to ourselves a difficulty here, too easily assuming that the lower animal world is wholly shut up in itself, and incapable of receiving impressions from that, which is above it. The assumption is one unwarranted by deeper investigations, which lead rather to an opposite conclusion,—not to a breaking, down of the boundaries between the two worlds, but to the showing in what wonderful ways the lower is subject to the impressions of the higher, both for good and for evil. Nor does this working of the spiritual on the physical life stand isolated in this single passage of Scripture, but we are throughout taught the same lesson (Gen. 3:17; Rom. 8:18).
"And they that kept them fled, and went their ways into the city, and told every thing, and what was befallen to the possessed of the devils." All three Evangelists record the entreaty of the Gadarenes, so unlike that of the Samaritans (John 4:40), which followed: "And, behold, the whole city came out to meet Jesus; and when they saw Him, they besought Him that He would depart out of their coasts,"—an entreaty which surely had not, as Jerome and others suggest, its root in their humility, was in no respect a parallel to St. Peter's, "Depart from me, for I am a sinful man" (Luke 5:8); but, as already observed, was provoked by the injury which already from his brief presence among them had ensued to their worldly possessions, as perhaps by the fear of greater losses which might. follow. This was their trial. It should now be seen whether the kingdom of heaven was first in their esteem; whether they would hold all else as cheap by comparison; so that in this aspect the destruction of the swine had in regard of them an ethical purpose and aim. But under this trial they failed; it was nothing to them that a man, probably a fellow-citizen, was delivered from that terrible bondage, that they saw him "sitting at the feet of Jesus," or being taught of Him, as this language implies (Luke 10:39; Acts 22:3), "clothed, and in his right mind." The breach in their worldly estate alone occupied their thoughts. For spiritual blessings brought near to them they cared nothing at all; and "they were afraid" being ignorant what next might follow. They felt the presence of God's Holy One intolerable to them, so long as they remained in their sins; and that to them, so remaining, it could only bring mischiefs, of which they had had the first experience already. And having no desire to be delivered from their sins, they entreated Him to go; "for," as St. Luke tells us, "they were taken with great fear." And their prayer also was heard (Ps. 78:29-31); He did depart; He took them at their word, and, as they desired, He let them alone (cf. Exod. 10:28, 29).
But"the healed man, as St. Mark and St. Luke inform us, would fain have accompanied his Healer: and "when He was come into the ship, prayed Him that he might be with Him." Was it that he feared, as Theophylact supposes, lest in the absence of his Deliverer the spirits of the pit should resume their dominion over him, and nowhere felt safe but in immediate nearness to Him?—or did he only desire, out of the depth of his gratitude, henceforth to be a follower of Him to whom he owed this mighty deliverance? Whatever was his motive, the Lord had other purposes with him. He was Himself leaving them who had shown themselves so unworthy of his presence; but He would not leave Himself without a witness among them. This healed man should be to them a standing monument of his grace and power, an evidence that He would have healed them, and was willing to heal them still, of all the diseases of their souls: "Jesus suffered him not, but saith unto him, Go home to thy friends, and tell them how great things the Lord, hath done for thee, and hath had compassion on thee." And the man did so, and not without effect: "He departed, and began to publish in Decapolis how great things Jesus had done for him; and all men did marvel."
Yet this command that he should go and declare the great things done for him, may have found its further motive in the peculiar moral condition of the man. Only by a reference to this moral condition are we able to reconcile the apparently contradictory injunctions which the Lord laid on those whom He had healed:—some being forbidden to say anything of God's goodness to them (Matt. 8:4; Luke 8:56),—this one commanded to publish everywhere the mercy which he had received. Where there was danger of all deeper impressions being scattered and lost through a garrulous repetition of the outward circumstances of the healing, silence was enjoined, that so there might be an inward brooding over the gracious and wondrous dealings of the Lord. But where, on the contrary, there was a temperament over-inclined to melancholy, sunken and shut up in itself, and needing to be drawn out from self, and into healthy communion with its fellow-men,—as was evidently the case with such a solitary melancholic person as we have here,—there the command was, that the man should go and tell to others the great things which God had done for him, and in this telling preserve the healthy condition of his own soul.
Notes on the Miracles of Our Lord.
The consideration of this, the most important, and, in many respects, the most perplexing of all the demoniac cures in the N. T., will demand some prefatory remarks on the general subject of the demoniacs of Scripture. It is a subject of which the difficulty is very much enhanced by the fact that, as with some of the spiritual gifts, the gift of tongues, for example, the thing itself, if it still survives among us, yet does so no longer under the same name, nor with the same frequency and intensity as of old. We are obliged to put together, as best we can, the separate and fragmentary notices which have reached us, and must endeavour out of them to frame such a scheme as will answer the demands of the different phenomena; we have not, at least with certainty, the thing itself to examine and to question, before our eyes.
It is, of course, easy enough to cut short the whole inquiry, and to leave no question at all, by saying these demoniacs were persons whom we should call insane—epileptic, maniac, melancholic This has been often said, and the oftener perhaps, because there is a partial truth in the assertion that these possessions were bodily maladies. There was no doubt a substratum of disease, which in many cases helped to lay open the sufferer to the deeper evil, and upon which it was superinduced: so that cases of possession are at once classed with those of various sicknesses, and at the same time distinguished from them, by the Evangelists; who thus at once mark the connexion and the difference (Matt. 4:24; 8:16; Mark 1:34). But the scheme which confounds these cases with those of disease, and, in fact, identifies the two, does not, as every reverent interpreter of God's word must own, exhaust the matter; it cannot be taken as a satisfying solution of the difficulties it presents; and this for more reasons than one.
And first, our Lord Himself uses language which is not reconcilable with any such theory; He everywhere speaks of demoniacs not as persons merely of disordered intellects, but as subjects and. thralls of an alien spiritual might; He addresses the evil spirit as distinct from the man; "Hold thy peace, and come out of him" (Mark 1:25). And the unworthy reply, that He fell in with and humoured the notions of the afflicted in order to facilitate their cure, is anticipated by the fact that in his most confidential discourses with his disciples He uses exactly the same language (Matt. 10:8; and especially Matt. 17:21, "This kind goeth not out but by prayer and fasting" ). The allegiance we owe to Christ as the King of truth, who came, not to fall in with men's errors, but to deliver men out of their errors, compels us to believe that He would never have used language which would have upheld and confirmed so serious an error in the minds of men as the belief in satanic influences, which did not in truth exist. For this error, if it was an error, was so little an innocuous one, such as might be left to drop naturally away; did, on the contrary, reach so far in its consequences, entwined its roots so deeply among the very ground-truths of religion, that He would never have suffered it to remain at the hazard of all the misgrowths which it could not fail to occasion.
And then, moreover, even had not the moral interests at stake been so transcendent, our idea of Christ's absolute veracity, apart from the value of the truth which He communicated, our idea of Him as the Verax, no less than the Verus and the Veritas, forbids us to suppose that He could have spoken as He did, being perfectly aware all the while that there was no corresponding reality to justify the language which He used. And in this there is no making a conscience about trifles, nor any losing sight of that figurative nature of all our words, out of which it results that so much which is not literally true, is yet the truest, inasmuch as it conveys the truest impression,—no requiring of men to examine the etymologies of their words before they venture to use them. It would have been quite a different thing for the Lord to have fallen in with the popular language, and to have spoken of persons under various natural afflictions as "possessed," supposing He had found such a language current, but now no longer, however once it might have been, vividly linked to the idea of possession by spirits of evil. In this there had been nothing more than in our speaking of certain forms of madness as lunacy. We do not thus imply our belief, however it may have been with others in time past, that the moon has wrought the mischief; but finding the word current, we use it: and this the more readily, since its original derivation is so entirely lost sight of in our common conversation, its first impress so completely worn off, that we do not thereby even seem to countenance an error. But suppose with this same disbelief in lunar influences, we were to begin to speak not merely of lunatics, but of persons on whom the moon was working, to describe the cure of such, as the moon's ceasing to afflict them; the physician to promise his patient that the moon should not harm him any more, would not this be quite another matter, a direct countenancing of error and delusion? would there not here be that absence of agreement between thoughts and words, in which the essence of a lie consists? Now Christ does everywhere speak in such a language as this. Take, for instance, his words, Luke 11:17-26, and assume Him to have known, all the while He was thus speaking, that the whole Jewish belief of demoniac possessions was utterly baseless, that Satan exercised no such power over the bodies or spirits of men, and what should we have here for a King of truth?
And then, besides this, the phenomena themselves are such as no hypothesis of the kind avails to explain, and they thus bid us to seek for some more satisfying solution. For that madness was not the constituent element in the demoniac state is clear, since not only are we without the slightest ground for supposing that the Jews would have considered all maniacs, epileptic or melancholic persons, to be under the power of evil spirits; but we have distinct evidence that the same malady they did in some cases attribute to an evil spirit, and in others not; thus showing that the malady and possession were not identical in their eyes, and that the assumption of the latter was not a mere popular explanation for the presence of the former. Thus, on two occasions they bring to the Lord one dumb (Matt. 9:32), or dumb and blind (Matt. 12:22), and in both instances the dumbness is traced up to an evil spirit. Yet it is plain that they did not consider all dumbness as having this root; for in the history given by St. Mark (vii. 32) of another deaf and dumb, the subject of Christ's healing power, it is the evident intention of the Evangelist to describe one labouring only under a natural defect; with no least desire to trace the source of his malady to any demoniacal influence. There were no doubt signs sufficiently clear distinguishing one case from the other; in that of the demoniac there probably was not the outward hindrance, not the still-fastened string of the tongue; it was not the outward organ, but the inward power of using the organ, which was at fault. This, with an entire apathy, a total disregard of all which was going on about him, may have sufficiently indicated that the source of his malady lay deeper than in any merely natural cause. But, whatever may have been the signs which enabled those about the sufferers to make these distinctions, the fact itself that they did so discriminate between cases of the very same malady, proves decisively that there were not certain diseases which, without more ado, they traced up directly to Satan; but that they did designate by this name of possession, a condition which, while it was very often a condition of disease, was also always a condition of much more than disease.
But what was the condition which our Lord and his Apostles signalized by this name? in what did it differ, upon the one side, from madness,—upon the other, from wickedness? It will be impossible to make any advance toward the answer, without saying something, by way of preface, on the scriptural doctrine concerning the kingdom of evil, and its personal head, and the relation in which he stands to the moral evil of our world. Alike excluding, on the one side, the Manichaean error, which would make evil eternal as good, and so itself a god,—and the pantheistic, which would deny any true reality to evil at all, or that it is anything else than good at a lower stage, the unripe, and therefore still bitter, fruit,—the Scripture teaches the absolute subordination of evil to good, and its subsequence of order, in the fact that the evil roots itself in a creature, and in one created originally pure, but the good in the Creator. Yet, at the same time, it teaches that the opposition of this evil to the will of God is most real, is that of a will which does truly set itself against his will; that the world is not as a chess-board on which God is in fact playing both sides of the game, however some of the pieces maybe black, and some white; but that the whole end of his government of the world is the subduing of this evil; that is, not abolishing it by main force, which were no true victory, but overcoming it by righteousness and truth. And from this one central will, alienated from the will of God, the Scripture derives all the evil in the universe; all gathers up in a person, in the devil, who has a kingdom, as God has a kingdom—a kingdom with its subordinate ministers,—"the devil and his angels." This world of ours stands not isolated, not rounded and complete in itself, but in living relation with two worlds,—a higher, from which all good in it proceeds,—and a lower, from which all evil. It thus comes to pass that the sin of man is continually traced up to Satan; Peter says to Ananias, "Why hath Satan filled thine heart to lie to the Holy Ghost" (Acts 5:3)? and St. John, of Judas Iscariot, "the devil having now put into his heart to betray Him" (John 13:2. cf. 1 John 3:8; John 8:44); the Scripture not by such language as this denying that the evil of men is truly their evil, but affirming with this, that it has its ground in an anterior evil. It is their evil, since an act of their will alone gives it leave to enter. To each man the key is committed, with the charge to keep closed the gate of his soul; and it is only through the negligent ward which he has kept that evil has found admission there. At the same time it is the existence of a world of evil beyond and without our world, which links to any remissness here such fatal and disastrous results.
This being so, the question which presents itself is this, namely, what peculiar form of Satanic operation does the Scripture intend, when it speaks of men as possessed, or having devils. Is their evil ethical, or is it merely physical? Merely physical it certainly is not. Doubtless the suffering of the demoniac often was great; yet we should err, if we saw in him, as in the victims of ghastly and horrible diseases, only another example of the mighty woe which Satan has brought in upon our race. Nor yet, on the other hand, is his evil purely ethical; we have in him something else than merely a signal sinner, a foremost servant of the devil, who with heart and will and waking consciousness is doing his work; for this, whatever his antecedent guilt may have been, and often, I should imagine, it had been great, the demoniac evidently is not. But what in him strikes us the most is the strange confusion of the physical and the spiritual, each intruding into the region of the other. There is a breaking up of all the harmony of the lower, no less than of the higher, life; the same discord and disorganization manifests itself in both. Nor does the demoniac, like the wicked, stand only in near relation to the kingdom of Satan as a whole. It is with him as if out of the malignant spirits of the pit one had singled him out for its immediate prey; as when a lion or a leopard, not hunting in the mass a herd of flying antelopes, has fastened upon and is drinking out the life-blood of one.
But the awful question remains, How should any have sunken into this miserable condition? have been entangled so far into the bands of the devil, or of his ministers? We should find ourselves altogether upon a wrong track, did we conceive of the demoniacs as the worst of men, and their possession as the plague and penalty of a wickedness in which they had greatly exceeded others. Rather we must esteem the demoniac one of the unhappiest, but not, of necessity, one of the guiltiest of our race. So far from this, the chief representatives and organs of Satan, false prophets and antichrists, are never spoken of in this language. We all feel that Judas' possession, when Satan entered into him (John 13:27), was specifically different from that of one of the unhappy persons who were the subjects of Christ's healing power. Or, to borrow an illustration from the world of fiction, none would speak of Iago as δαιμονιζόμενος;, however all the deadliest malignity of hell was concentrated in him; we should trace much closer analogies, to this state in some aspects of Hamlet's life. Greek tragedy supplies a yet apter example. It is the noble Orestes, whom the "dogs of hell" torture into madness; the obdurate Clytemnestra is troubled on account of her deed with no maddening spectres from the unseen world. Thus, too, in actual life, the horror and deep anguish of a sinner at the contemplation of Ms sin may have helped on this overthrow of his spiritual life,—anguish which a more hardened sinner would have escaped, but escaped it only by being a worse and more truly devilish man. We are not then, I am persuaded, to see in these cases of possession the deliberate giving in to the Satanic will;,, of an utterly lost soul, but the still recoverable wreck of that which oftentimes was once a noble spirit.
And, consistently with, this, we find in the demoniac the sense of a bondage in which he does not acquiesce, of his true life absolutely shattered, of an 'alien power which has mastered him wholly, and now is cruelly lording over him, and ever drawing further away from Him. in whom only any. created intelligence can find rest and peace. His state is, in the most literal sense of the word, "a possession:" another is ruling in the high places of his soul, and has cast down the rightful lord from his seat;. and he knows this; and out of his consciousness of it there goes forth from him a cry for redemption,, so soon as ever a glimpse of hope is afforded, an unlooked-for Redeemer draws near. This sense of misery, this yearning after deliverance, is that, in fact, which constituted these demoniacs subjects for Christ's healing power. Without it they would have been as little subjects of this as the devils, in whom evil has had its perfect work, in whom there is nothing for the divine grace to take hold of;—so that in their case, as in every other, faith was the condition of healing. There was in them a spark of higher life, not yet trodden out, which, indeed, so long as they were alone, was but light enough to reveal to them their darkness; and which none but the very Lord of life could have fanned again into a flame. But He who came "to destroy the works of the devil, "as He showed Himself lord over purely physical evil, a healer of the diseases of men, and lord no less over purely spiritual evil, a deliverer of men from their sins,—manifested Himself also lord in these complex cases partaking of the nature of either, ruler also in this border land, where these two regions of evil join, and run so strangely and inexplicably one into the other.
Yet while thus "men possessed with devils" is in no wise an equivalent expression for surpassingly wicked men, born of the serpent seed, of the devil's regeneration, and so become his children (Acts 13:10),—seeing that in such there is no cry for redemption, no desire after deliverance, it is more than probable that lavish sin, above all, indulgence in sensual lusts, superinducing, as it often would, a weakness of the nervous system, wherein is the especial band between body and soul, may have laid open these unhappy ones to the fearful incursions of the powers of darkness. They were greatly guilty, though not the guiltiest of all men. And this they felt, that by their own act they had given themselves over to this tyranny of the devil, a tyranny from which, as far as their horizon reached, they could see no hope of deliverance,—that to themselves they owed that this hellish might was no longer without them, which being resisted would flee from them; but a power which now they could not resist, and which would not flee.
The phenomena which the demoniacs of Scripture, especially those now before us, exhibit, entirely justify this view of the real presence of another will upon the will of the sufferer. They are not merely influences, which little by little have moulded and modified his will and brought it into subjection; but a power is there, which the man at the very moment he is succumbing to it, feels to be the contradiction of his truest being; but which yet has forced itself upon him, and possessed him, that he must needs speak and act as its organ; however presently his personal consciousness, may reassert itself for a moment. This, that they have not become indissolubly one, that the serpent and the man have not, as in Dante's awful image,, grown together, "each melted into other," but that they still are twain; this is, indeed, the one circumstance of hope which survives amid the general ruin of the moral and spiritual life. Yet this,, for the time being, gives the appearance,, though a deceptive one, of a far entirer wreck of his inner life, than manifests itself in wicked men, who have given themselves over wholly, without reserve and without reluctancy, to the working of iniquity. In these last, by the very completeness of their apostasy from the good, there is consistency at any rate; there are no merest incoherencies, no violent contradictions at every instant emerging in their words and in their conduct; they are at one with themselves. But all these incoherencies and self-contradictions we trace in the conduct of the demoniac; he rushes to the feet of Jesus, as coming to Him for aid, and then presently he deprecates his interference. There is not in him one vast contradiction to the true end of his being, consistently worked out, but a thousand lesser contradictions, in the midst of which the true idea of his life, not wholly obscured, will sometimes by fitful glimpses re-appear. There is on his part an occasional reluctancy against this usurpation by another of his spirit's throne—a protest, which for the present, indeed, does but aggravate the confusion of his life—which yet contains in it the pledge of a possible freedom, of a redemption whereof he may be a partaker still.
There is one objection to this view of the matter which may still be urged, namely, that if this possession is anything more than insanity in its different forms, how comes it to pass that there are no demoniacs now? how account for the fact that they have wholly disappeared from among us? But the assumption that there are none now, itself demands to be proved. It is not hard to perceive why there should be few by comparison; why this form of spiritual evil should have lost greatly both in frequency and malignity, and from both these causes be far more difficult to recognize. For in the first place, if there was anything that marked the period of the coming of Christ, and that immediately succeeding, it was the wreck and confusion of men's spiritual life which was then, the sense of utter disharmony, the hopelessness, the despair which must have beset every man that thought at all,—this, with the tendency to rush with a frantic eagerness into sensual enjoyments as the refuge from these thoughts of despair. That whole period was "the hour and power of darkness," of a darkness which then, as just before the dawn of a new day, was the thickest. The world was again a chaos, and the creative words, "Let there be light," though just about to be spoken, as yet were not uttered. It was exactly the crisis for such soul-maladies as these, in which the spiritual and bodily should be thus strangely intermingled, and it is nothing wonderful that they should have abounded at that time; for the predominance of certain spiritual maladies at certain epochs of the world's history, specially fitted for their generation, with their gradual decline and total disappearance in others less congenial to them, is a fact itself admitting no manner of question.
Moreover we cannot doubt that the might of hell has been greatly broken by the coming of the Son of God in the flesh; and with this a restraint set on the grosser manifestations of its power; "I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven" (Luke 10:18. cf. Rev. 20:2). His rage and violence are continually hemmed in and hindered by the preaching of the Word and ministration of the Sacraments. It were another thing even now in a heathen land, above all in one where Satan was not left in undisturbed possession, but wherein the great crisis of the conflict between light and darkness was finding place through the first proclaiming there of the Gospel of Christ. There we might expect to encounter, whether in the same intensity or not, manifestations analogous to these. Rhenius, a well-known Lutheran missionary in India, gives this as exactly his own experience, —namely, that among the native Christians, even though many of them walk not as children of light, yet there is no such falling under Satanic influence in soul and body, as he traced frequently in the heathen around him; and he shows by a remarkable example, and one in which he is himself the witness throughout, how the assault in the name of Jesus on the kingdom of darkness, as it brings out all forms of devilish opposition into fiercest activity, so calls out the endeavour to counterwork the truth through men who have been made direct organs of the devilish will.
It may well be a question moreover, if an Apostle, or one with apostolic discernment of spirits, were to enter into a madhouse now, how many of the sufferers there he might not recognize as "possessed. "Certainly in many cases of mania and epilepsy there is a condition very analogous to that of the demoniacs. The fact that the sufferer, and commonly the physician, may apprehend it differently, is not of the essence of the matter; they will but in this reflect the popular notion of the time. Thus, no doubt, the Jews multiplied quite unnecessarily the numbers of the possessed, counting as they did, among cases of possession, many lower forms of disharmony in the inner life; so too I should believe it was in the early Church, and many then, who had not fallen under this immediate tyranny of the devil, may yet have traced up their sufferings directly to him. Now, however, the popular feeling which the unhappy man brings with him into his forlorn state sets the opposite way, and in agreement with this is the language which he uses. But the case immediately before us is one in which no question can exist, since the great Physician of souls Himself declares it one of a veritable possession, and treats it as such; and to this we will address ourselves now The connexion is very striking in which this miracle stands with that other which went immediately before. Our Lord has just shown Himself as the pacifier of the tumults and the discords in the outward world; He has spoken peace to the winds and to the waves, and hushed the war of elements with a word. But there is something wilder and more fearful than the winds and the waves, in their fiercest moods—even the spirit of man, when it has broken loose from all restraints, and yielded itself to be his organ, who brings confusion and anarchy wherever his dominion reaches. And Christ will do here a yet mightier work than that which He accomplished there; He will prove Himself here also the Prince of Peace, the restorer of the lost harmony; He will speak, and at his potent word this madder strife, this blinder rage which is in the heart of man, will allay itself, and here also there shall be a great calm.
In seeking to combine the "accounts given us of this memorable healing, a difficulty meets us at the outset, this, namely, that St. Matthew speaks of two demoniacs, while St. Mark and St. Luke only of one. Many reconciliations of their statements have been offered; as that one was a more notable person in the country than the other, which is Augustine's; or that one was so much fiercer as to cause the other by most persons hardly to be taken note of, which is that of Maldonatus. However we may account for it, one, it is evident, did fall into the background; and, therefore, following the later Evangelists, I shall speak in the main as they do, of the one demoniac who met the Lord as He came out of the ship;—not in the least as though the other was not present: but these accounts, in which there appears but one, being those which, as the fullest, I desire mainly to follow, it would cause much embarrassment to use any other language.
The picture of the miserable man is fearful; and in drawing it each Evangelist has some touches which are peculiarly his own; but St. Mark's is the most graphic of all, adding many strokes which wonderfully aggravate the terribleness of the man's condition, and thus magnify the glory of his cure. The man had his dwelling among the tombs, that is, in places unclean because of the dead men's bones which were there (Num. 19:11, 16; Matt. 23:27; Luke 11:44). To those who did not on this account shun them, these tombs of the Jews would afford ample shelter, being either natural caves, or recesses artificially hewn out of the rock, often so large as to be supported with columns, and with cells upon their sides for the reception of the dead. Being, too, without the cities, and oftentimes in remote and solitary places, they would attract those who sought "to avoid all fellowship of their kind. This man was possessed of that extraordinary muscular strength which maniacs so often put forth (cf. Acts 19:16), and thus all efforts to bind and restrain him (and such had been often repeated) had proved ineffectual (Mark 5:4). St. Matthew alone relates how he had made the way impassable for travellers; St. Luke alone that he was without clothing, although this is involved in St. Mark's account, who tells us that after he was healed he was found "clothed, and in his right mind" sitting at Jesus' feet. Yet with all this, he was not so utterly lost, but that there woke up in him continually a sense of his misery, and of the terrible bondage under which he had come; although this could express itself only in his cries, and in a blind rage "against himself as the true author of his woe; out of which he wounded and cut himself with stones.
From such an one as this did the Lord receive his first greeting on those shores which now, probably for the first time, his feet were treading. This man with his companion starting from the tombs, which were their ordinary dwelling-place, rushed down to encounter, it may have been with hostile violence, the intruders that had dared to set foot on their domain. Or it is possible that they were at once drawn to Christ by the secret instinctive feeling that He was their helper, and driven from Him by the sense of the awful gulf that divided them from Him, the Holy One of God. At any rate, if it was with purposes of violence, ere the man reached Him his mind was changed; "for He had commanded the unclean spirit to come out. of the man" (Luke 8:29), and the unclean spirit had recognized one that had a right to command, against whom force would avail nothing; and, like others on similar occasions, sought by a strong adjuration to avert his coming doom. He "cried with a loud voice, What have I to do with Thee, Jesus, Thou Son of the most high God? I adjure Thee by God that Thou torment me not." Herein the true devilish spirit speaks out, which counts it a torment not to be suffered to torment others, and an injury done to itself when it is no more permitted to be injurious to others. In St. Matthew they say, "Art Thou come hither to torment us before the time?" in which last words, "before the time," is the confession upon their part of a time coming, an inevitable hour, when there shall be an entire victory of the kingdom of light over that of darkness, and when all which belong unto the latter shall be shut up in the abyss (Rev. 20:10), and all power of harming withdrawn from them for ever. All Scripture agrees with this, that the judgment of the angels is yet to come (1 Cor. 6:3); they are "reserved in everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of the great day" (Jude 1:6); and what the unclean spirits deprecate here, is the bringing in, by anticipation, of that final doom.
It is here noticeable, that the first bidding of Christ is not immediately obeyed;—that the evil spirits remonstrate, and do not at once abandon their prey. No doubt the Lord could have forced them to do so, had He pleased; but the man might have perished in the process (cf. Mark 9:24). Even that first bidding had brought on a terrible paroxysm. It was then of Christ's own will, of the Physician wise and tender as He was strong, to proceed step by step. And, first, He demands of him his name,—some say, to magnify the greatness of the deliverance and the Deliverer, by showing, through the answer, the power and malignity of the foe that should be overcome. But, more probably, the question was directed to the man. It should calm him, by bringing him to recollection, to the consciousness of his personality, of which a man's name is the outward expression,—that he was a person, having once been apart from, nor even now inextricably bound up with, those spiritual wickednesses which had dominion over him. The question may thus have been intended to facilitate his cure. But if so meant, either the evil spirit snatches at the answer and replies for himself, or the unhappy man, instead of recurring to his true name, that which should remind him of what he was before he fell under this thraldom, declares his sense of the utter ruin of his whole moral and spiritual being. In his reply, "My name is Legion, for we are many," truth and error are fearfully blended. They were "many;" not on one side only, but on every side, the walls of his spirit have been broken down; and he laid open to all the incursions of evil, torn asunder in infinite ways, now under one hostile and hated power now under another. The destruction is complete; they who rule over him are "lords many." Only by an image drawn from the reminiscences of his former life can he express his sense of his own condition. He had seen the serried ranks of a Roman legion, that fearful instrument of conquest, that sign of terror and fear to the conquered nations, and before which the Jew more especially quailed. Even such, at once one and many, cruel and inexorable and strong, were the powers that were tyrannizing over him. When it is said of Mary Magdalene, that out of her had gone seven devils (Luke 8:2),. something of the same truth is expressed,—that her spiritual life was laid waste, not on one side only, but on many (cf. Matt. 12:45).
And then again, with that interchange of persons which was continually going forward, that quick shifting, so to speak, of the polarity, so that at one moment the human consciousness became the positive, at another the negative pole, the unclean spirit, or rather the man, become now his organ, speaks out anew, entreating not to be sent into the abyss (Luke 8:3), or, clothing his petition in the form of a notion which belonged to the man whom he possessed, "that He would not send them away out of the country" (Mark 5:10). The request is in each case the same, for, according to Jewish notions, certain countries being assigned to evil as well as to good spirits, the limits of which they were unable to overpass, to be sent out of their own country, no other being open to them, implied being sent into the abyss, since that alone would remain for them. This request is in fact a repetition of their prayer that they should not be tormented before the time.
Hereupon follows a circumstance which has ever proved a chief stumbling-block offered by the Evangelical history. The devils, if they must leave their more welcome habitation, the heart of man,, if indeed the Stronger is come, spoiling the strong man's goods, taking his thralls out of his power, yet entreat, in their inextinguishable desire of harming, or, out of those mysterious affinities which evermore reveal themselves between the demoniacal and the bestial, : to be allowed to enter into the swine;—of which a large herd,—St. Mark with his usual punctuality notes that they were "about two thousand,"—were feeding on the neighbouring cliffs. But to the evil all things turn to evil. God's saints and servants appear not to be heard; and the very refusal of their requests is to them a blessing (2 Cor. 12:8, 9). The wicked, Satan (Job 1:11) and his ministers and servants, are sometimes heard, and the very granting of their petitions issues in their worse confusion and loss. So is it now: these evil spirits had their prayer heard; but only to their ruin. They are allowed to enter into the swine; but the destruction of the whole herd follows; and that which they most dreaded came upon them; no longer finding organs in or through which to work, they are driven perforce to that very prisonhouse which they most would have shunned.
The first cavil which has been raised here is this—What right had the Lord to inflict this loss on the owners of the swine?—being the same which has been raised on occasion of the cursing of the barren fig-tree (Matt. 21:19). It might be sufficient to answer to this, that Christ did not send the devils into the swine; He merely drove them out from the men; all beyond this was merely permissive. But supposing that He had done so— a man is of more value than many swine; and if this granting of the evil spirits' request helped in any way the cure of this sufferer, caused them to relax their hold on him more easily, mitigated the paroxysm of their going forth (cf. Mark 9:26), this would have been motive enough for allowing them to perish. It may have been necessary for the permanent healing of the man that he should have this outward evidence and testimony that the hellish powers which held him in bondage had quitted their hold. He may have needed to have his deliverance sealed and realized to him in the open destruction of his enemies; not otherwise to be persuaded that Christ had indeed and for ever set him free; as Israel, coming out of Egypt, must see the Egyptians dead upon the sea-shore before they could indeed believe that the rod of their oppressors had been broken for ever (Exod. 14:30).
But setting aside all apologies, on what ground, it may be asked, is this which the Lord here wrought, made more the subject of cavil than any other loss inflicted upon men by Him from whom all things come, and who therefore can give or take away according to the good pleasure of his will? Men might object with as good a right against the murrain which causes cattle to die; the inundation that destroys the fruits of the field, or any other natural calamity with which God chastens his children, punishes, or seeks to make contrite the hearts of his enemies. For oftentimes his taking away is in a higher sense a giving; a withdrawing of the meaner thing, to make receptive of the better. Thus might it well have been intended here, however the sin of these Gadarenes hindered the gracious design. If these swine belonged to Jewish owners, and we know from Josephus that there were numbers of hellenizing Jews just in these parts, there may have been in this loss, a punishment meant for them who from motives of gain showed themselves despisers of Moses' law.. It must be owned, however, that the population of the Decapolis was predominantly Gentile.; Josephus calls Gadara itself a Greek city.
But the narrative is charged with contradiction and absurdity. The unclean spirits ask. permission to enter into the swine, yet no sooner have they thus done than they defeat their own purpose, destroying that animal life, from which if they be altogether driven,, they have already confessed they will be obliged to betake them to the more detested place of their punishment. It is nowhere,, however, said that they drove the swine down the steep place into the sea. It is just as easy, and much more natural, to suppose that against their will the swine, when they found themselves seized by this new and strange power, rushed themselves in wild and panic fear to their destruction,—the foremost plunging headlong down the cliffs, and the rest blindly following. But in either case, whether they thus destroyed themselves, or were impelled by the foul spirits, there reveals itself here the very essence and truest character of evil, which evermore outwits and defeats itself, being as inevitably scourged in the granting of its requests as in their refusal; which, stupid, blind, self-contradicting, and suicidal, can only destroy, and will involve itself in the common ruin rather than not destroy. And what, if in the fierce hatred of these foul spirits of darkness against the Prince of light and life, they may have been willing to bring any harm on themselves, if only they might so bring on Him the ill-will of men, and thus traverse and hinder his blessed work? And this, no doubt, they did effectually here; for it was fear of further losses, and alienation from Christ on account of those by his presence already entailed upon them, which was the motive for their urging Him to leave their country.
But the point of most real difficulty is the entering of the devils into the swine,—the working, that is, of the spiritual life on the bestial, which seems altogether irreceptive of it, and to possess no organs through which it could operate. I put aside of course here, as both in themselves merely ridiculous, and irreconcilable with the documents as they lie before us, the solutions of Paulus and his compeers, that the demoniac, in the parting paroxysm of his madness, hunted the creatures over the precipices into the lake, or that, while the swineherds were drawn by curiosity to watch the encounter between Christ and the demoniac, or had gone to warn Him of the danger of meeting the madman, the untended herd fell a fighting, and so tumbled headlong over the cliffs. Whatever difficulties this miracle may present, it certainly is not by shifts such as these to be evaded; and, their perplexity at any rate claims to be respectfully treated, who find it hard to reconcile this fact with what else they have been taught to hold fast as most precious concerning the specific difference between man with the whole order of spiritual existences on the one side, and the animal creation on the other. I will only suggest that perhaps we make to ourselves a difficulty here, too easily assuming that the lower animal world is wholly shut up in itself, and incapable of receiving impressions from that, which is above it. The assumption is one unwarranted by deeper investigations, which lead rather to an opposite conclusion,—not to a breaking, down of the boundaries between the two worlds, but to the showing in what wonderful ways the lower is subject to the impressions of the higher, both for good and for evil. Nor does this working of the spiritual on the physical life stand isolated in this single passage of Scripture, but we are throughout taught the same lesson (Gen. 3:17; Rom. 8:18).
"And they that kept them fled, and went their ways into the city, and told every thing, and what was befallen to the possessed of the devils." All three Evangelists record the entreaty of the Gadarenes, so unlike that of the Samaritans (John 4:40), which followed: "And, behold, the whole city came out to meet Jesus; and when they saw Him, they besought Him that He would depart out of their coasts,"—an entreaty which surely had not, as Jerome and others suggest, its root in their humility, was in no respect a parallel to St. Peter's, "Depart from me, for I am a sinful man" (Luke 5:8); but, as already observed, was provoked by the injury which already from his brief presence among them had ensued to their worldly possessions, as perhaps by the fear of greater losses which might. follow. This was their trial. It should now be seen whether the kingdom of heaven was first in their esteem; whether they would hold all else as cheap by comparison; so that in this aspect the destruction of the swine had in regard of them an ethical purpose and aim. But under this trial they failed; it was nothing to them that a man, probably a fellow-citizen, was delivered from that terrible bondage, that they saw him "sitting at the feet of Jesus," or being taught of Him, as this language implies (Luke 10:39; Acts 22:3), "clothed, and in his right mind." The breach in their worldly estate alone occupied their thoughts. For spiritual blessings brought near to them they cared nothing at all; and "they were afraid" being ignorant what next might follow. They felt the presence of God's Holy One intolerable to them, so long as they remained in their sins; and that to them, so remaining, it could only bring mischiefs, of which they had had the first experience already. And having no desire to be delivered from their sins, they entreated Him to go; "for," as St. Luke tells us, "they were taken with great fear." And their prayer also was heard (Ps. 78:29-31); He did depart; He took them at their word, and, as they desired, He let them alone (cf. Exod. 10:28, 29).
But"the healed man, as St. Mark and St. Luke inform us, would fain have accompanied his Healer: and "when He was come into the ship, prayed Him that he might be with Him." Was it that he feared, as Theophylact supposes, lest in the absence of his Deliverer the spirits of the pit should resume their dominion over him, and nowhere felt safe but in immediate nearness to Him?—or did he only desire, out of the depth of his gratitude, henceforth to be a follower of Him to whom he owed this mighty deliverance? Whatever was his motive, the Lord had other purposes with him. He was Himself leaving them who had shown themselves so unworthy of his presence; but He would not leave Himself without a witness among them. This healed man should be to them a standing monument of his grace and power, an evidence that He would have healed them, and was willing to heal them still, of all the diseases of their souls: "Jesus suffered him not, but saith unto him, Go home to thy friends, and tell them how great things the Lord, hath done for thee, and hath had compassion on thee." And the man did so, and not without effect: "He departed, and began to publish in Decapolis how great things Jesus had done for him; and all men did marvel."
Yet this command that he should go and declare the great things done for him, may have found its further motive in the peculiar moral condition of the man. Only by a reference to this moral condition are we able to reconcile the apparently contradictory injunctions which the Lord laid on those whom He had healed:—some being forbidden to say anything of God's goodness to them (Matt. 8:4; Luke 8:56),—this one commanded to publish everywhere the mercy which he had received. Where there was danger of all deeper impressions being scattered and lost through a garrulous repetition of the outward circumstances of the healing, silence was enjoined, that so there might be an inward brooding over the gracious and wondrous dealings of the Lord. But where, on the contrary, there was a temperament over-inclined to melancholy, sunken and shut up in itself, and needing to be drawn out from self, and into healthy communion with its fellow-men,—as was evidently the case with such a solitary melancholic person as we have here,—there the command was, that the man should go and tell to others the great things which God had done for him, and in this telling preserve the healthy condition of his own soul.
Notes on the Miracles of Our Lord.
