The Prince of the Demons Holds Court

That unclean spirits are ruled over by worse powers and are subject to them, we learn not only from the passages of Scripture recorded in the Gospels, when the Pharisees slandered the Lord and he answered, “If I cast out demons by Beelzebub, the prince of the demons…” We are also taught it by clear visions and by many experiences of the saints. [a]

One of our brothers was making a journey in this desert. As the day was already ending, he found a cave and stopped there, meaning to say his evening office in it, and midnight passed while he was still singing the psalms. When he had finished his office, he sat down for a little while before refreshing his tired body. Suddenly he began to see countless troops of demons gathering from every side. They came forward in an immense crowd and a long line, some going before their prince and others following him. At last the prince arrived, taller and more dreadful to look at than all the others. A throne was set, and he sat down as on a lofty judgment seat and began to look into what each of them had done, with a searching examination. Those who said that they had not yet been able to get the better of their opponents he ordered to be driven out of his sight with shame and disgrace as idle and lazy, rebuking them in angry fury for wasting so much time and throwing away their labor. But those who reported that they had deceived the ones assigned to them he sent off before them all with the highest praise, amid the cheering and applause of everyone, as the bravest of warriors and the most renowned example to all the rest.

Among these, one most evil spirit came forward, delighted to have some magnificent triumph to report. He named a very well-known monk and declared that after attacking him without letting up for fifteen years, he had at last got the better of him, so as to destroy him that very night by the sin of sexual immorality. For he had not only driven him to commit adultery with a virgin consecrated to God, but had actually persuaded him to keep her and marry her. Shouts of joy went up at this story, the prince of darkness praised him to the skies, and he went away crowned with great honors. At daybreak the whole swarm of demons vanished from the brother’s eyes. He doubted the unclean spirit’s claim. He thought rather that the spirit had wanted to entice him by an old and customary deceit, and to brand an innocent brother with the crime of incest. For he remembered those words of the Gospel, that “he did not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own, for he is a liar, and its father.” So he made his way to Pelusium, where he knew that the man lived whom the evil spirit had declared destroyed, for that brother was very well known to him. When he asked, he found that on the same night on which that foul demon had announced the man’s downfall to his company and his prince, the man had left his former monastery, gone to the town, and gone astray in a wretched fall with the girl in question.