Down with the buffered self
The belief in angels and demons is arguably not seriously held even by Christians. In many circles little reference is made to them, and in daily life I do not imagine they occupy the attention of (especially) modern, Western Christians, or anybody who has been formed by the modern West. In my experience it is more difficult to believe in the existence and everyday activities of angels and demons than it is to believe in the existence of God. My internal critic has often viewed these kinds of beliefs with a kind of sad pity for anyone still in the grip of these “superstitions”. I believe that we have a tendency to downplay any mention of demons in particular for fear of incurring labels ranging from “fundamentalist” to “mentally unstable”. Furthermore, I think this has led to an inability to understand the outside world and the internal self. I will defend these beliefs, but firstly I will talk about why they need defence - and this is not as straightforward as one might imagine. Finally, I will discuss what Charles Taylor calls the “buffered self” - why I have this mental facade and why I want to take it apart. To summarise my key arguments (which I hope will make more sense on reading the full essay):
Unbiblical imagery biases us against belief in supernatural beings.
Historically, demythologising church reform overran its course due to the allure of an objective, detached stance Charles Taylor calls the “buffered self”.
Although we believe we are “buffered” from supernatural influence, this belief won’t help us if angels and demons exist.
To believe in “spiritual warfare”, angels and demons is not a grand narratival stretch away from our implicit beliefs; we believe something similar already.
Breaking our “buffered self” in the context of a secure relationship with a loving God may be incredibly freeing.
Firstly, any belief in supernatural beings is vulnerable to the fact that in a post-Christian age, fictional representations of these beings dominate our construal of them. The word “angel” evokes a human figure with any combination of strap-on, floppy wings, white leotards and a wobbly halo. However, biblical imagery does not depict angels with wings¹, or halos² but instead, men whose appearance ranges from unremarkable³ to terrifying⁴. Other beings mentioned feature a bizarre collage of animal limbs, eyes, wings and wheels⁵. This original imagery better affords angels a level of gravitas and mystery that would naturally be appropriate to categories of being that are somewhat alien to us, and is therefore more believable. On a related note, in the bible Satan (as a fallen angel) and his demons (angels which he brought with him on the way down), do not look like the Satan we often picture (a red, cloven footed, horned man, although there is a red dragon with horns in Revelation⁶). This should go without saying, but God is also not biblically depicted as a man with a white beard in the sky⁷. Even this image does not take hold completely in the public imagination because it is so completely baseless. These caricatures, often used for comedic purposes after the Christian faith lost its universality in the West, make it hard to even begin the process of thinking about angels and demons, since thought is often imagistic. At least in the West, if we were to imagine angels and demons interfering in our lives, we would imagine them to act with the utmost subtlety. For this reason any simple, crude caricature grates against our experience and leads to a reflex rejection of the idea that supernatural beings could exist. Turning now to the behaviour of Christians (an important furnishing in the public image of Christianity) one habit which has historically been categorised as “enthusiasm” or “fanaticism” also serves to diminish the credibility of the supernatural. This is what many modern churches call “speaking in tongues”. Far from the New Testament ideal of using other languages to communicate better to the world, this manifests as something completely alien - a language which in reality no human being can understand! This last addendum to the list of supernatural caricatures is unfortunately propagated by the church itself. However, no matter where these images have come from, we need to sweep away anything that according to the Christian faith is not justified. “Miracles” by C. S. Lewis gives a deeper commentary on seemingly implausible images that are actually valid biblically. But we can’t hope to ask about a host of angels if we allow ourselves to be distracted and misled by a host of caricatures.
Secondly, as a result of a Christian attempt to demythologize the cosmos, we find it very difficult to believe in spiritual beings. While Christians might technically hold on to a belief in God, angels and demons, I think that the reluctance to mention them too often in many conservative churches reveals a deeply rooted doubt. Due to the enlightenment we have built an ethic around being detached, objective, rational, unbiased, scientific, and so on. There is much to commend about such attitudes when it comes to science. However, unfortunately we take methodological naturalism (the assumption of such attitudes when practicing science) and expand it into naturalism in general (the belief that this scientific, detached ethic is the only posture appropriate to the gaining of knowledge about the world). The reason we do this is because science itself carries with it the prestige of objectivity and unmotivated clarity, and the idea of applying this attitude elsewhere is quite compelling. This is the power of the enlightenment, not just as a technical revolution but as an all-encompassing virtue. Charles Taylor elaborates on this process at length - the creation, in effect, of new virtues that results in our feeling compelled to dismiss supernatural claims. Counterintuitively, it started within Christianity. Church leaders tried to reform the masses and, as part of this, root out pagan influences - particularly superstitions that had their roots in other religious traditions. However, this demythologizing impulse gathered a momentum of its own. After some time it became common knowledge in elite circles that God had created a clockwork universe that was subject to none of this bizarre behaviour previously attributed to spirits, angels and demons. The disenchantment of the world came alongside the creation of what Taylor calls the “buffered self”. This was a mind that was immune to psychological influence that could previously have been wrought by gods and sacred objects. For the first time we were independent from such things. We could choose whether or not and how to react to the physical world around us. Nothing in the outside world could force an emotional or psychological response from us. Similarly, superstitious rituals were done away with.
This reform, although starting admirably, went too far. Theologically we should all agree that angels and demons can loom too large in our thinking. Christians should not be driven by superstition, or live in fear of the supernatural world outside of God. We should consider God’s superlative power relative to these beings and only fear him. In the bible angels also back away from featuring themselves too prominently, asking human beings not to worship them. According to anybody that views the bible as a cohesive, narratival document, there is one God who has dominion over the host of angels, as well as those that have fallen. This rejection of superstition and false worship is a good thing according to Christian theology. But according to Taylor these helpful reforms over-corrected the problem of superstition. And what are we left with now? Due to this “buffered self” we have successfully become impermeable to any influence from outside us - at least, in our imaginations. When I say “we”, I mean non-Christians and to a large extent Christians too! It might be somewhat reasonable to believe in a God that mirrors our buffered self; i.e. is all powerful, completely just, completely rational, and completely truthful - all consistent with the ethic of the buffered self. This is no doubt why this belief was held for so long past the dawn of the enlightenment by many elites . However, angels and demons are too inelegant, too unpredictable, and too much like the smorgasbord of superstitious influences church leaders had been trying to eradicate from the minds of the peasants for all those years. There is a deep history behind our instinctive withdrawal from discussion of these topics.
This has more than just academic implications. I don’t think either Christians or non-Christians have “buffered selves” in reality. If we believe in a buffered self, that is no protection at all against a possible reality in which we are actually porous. How convenient it would be for a demon that we believe demons don’t exist! This was playfully brought out in “The Screwtape Letters” by C. S. Lewis, but I wonder if we have relegated that book to the category of “amusing fiction” alongside Rowan Atkinson’s “Welcome to Hell” sketch. What are the real ramifications of this? If demons exist, and if God allows them, they are free to create any sort of haze around us, plant illusions in our minds, and/or encourage us to forget what we resolved to do yesterday. One natural response to this is “How irresponsible of you to shift blame like this!” Keep in mind that there is no question of one’s own responsibility to keep good resolutions. However, if angels and demons do exist, then it could just as easily be seen as irresponsible to ignore them, and thus allow them more power to shift our intentions around. I apologise if this reads like a tidy rationalisation of an insane person - but the lens of the “normal”, the “sane”, the “ordinary” and the “predictable” involves exactly the type of stigma all of us must resolve to push back against in order to maintain a healthy skepticism of all dominant narratives, occasionally questioning them seriously to maintain some level of intellectual honesty. You must also wonder why a demon would bother to do any of this petty misleading and derailing, but part of biblical social cosmology (to invent a term) is the earth as a stage, with angels and demons “longing to look into”⁸ the matters of humanity and God’s dealings with us. In the book of Job, Satan walks back and forth along the earth, and the heat of the conflict is revealed. God wants human beings to respond to him out of love, reverence and a knowledge of what is right. Satan wants to force this picture apart. As such, if angels and demons exist, a proxy war is being fought.
We might object: isn’t this just an entertaining narrative which makes our lives feel more meaningful? In response, it must be said that our lives are already widely agreed to have meaning, and I believe that this narrative does not significantly change the meaning that we already feel ourselves inhabiting. Firstly, we must explain the objection. In “Man’s search for meaning” Victor Frankl claims that we can get through suffering, provided we have a narrative which gives structure and meaning to the suffering. Perhaps in setting up this idea of a “spiritual proxy war” I am simply creating a dramatic narrative which adds interest and also renders our suffering meaningful. Someone (let’s call him “Liam” may have a mundane life as a supermarket worker soon to be replaced by AI and forced to retrain in a low-level programming or data cleaning role, still eating the same frozen supermarket meals and thereby sacrificing any self respect I had at the altar of desperation. (Even the religious language of an “altar” just used infused this vignette with drama.) How much better, if in overcoming personal despair and laziness, Liam is fighting back demons on God’s behalf? Now to respond: I think this objection would have more force if all of life were clearly mundane. We will start with the obvious: there are such forces, whether we call them emergent social structures or group pathologies or whatever else, that already exist in truly demonic capacity. We do not have to look much further than Frankl’s own context, the holocaust. Looking into German weapons, and attending any war museum, can highlight the horror of human ambition and ideology. Is it too much further to suggest that there may be more at play?
I honestly cannot stand to write this. I strain and squirm against the idea that I am going to be interpreted as a conspiracy theorist. However (on a more local/individual level), I have experienced in my own life a wilful and unbelievably regular forgetting of what I have learned, and at times a malicious intent towards God. Can I explain this using psychology? Perhaps to some degree, using cognitive dissonance between independence and trust, belief and unbelief, the brokenness of the church and the beauty of God, etc, or a subconscious anger at the limitations imposed by religion capable of steering me away from remembering and applying what I have learned. However, there is no reason why psycho-physical processes cannot themselves be caused or influenced by something else. What I am trying to say is that it is really not as great a leap as might be assumed, to suggest that perhaps human beings are one part of a broader spiritual context and struggle between God and Satan. We must challenge a view that says that supernatural beings are simply “medieval”,“romantic” or “dramatic”. You could just as easily argue that life itself seems “medieval”, “romantic” and “dramatic” with enormous weight behind an “impression” or “reading” of morality, right and wrong and every gradation in between, into the world that we see. Even the mundane is affected by this. If we return to the image of “Liam” who is stuck in a cold, dead world of AI and repetitive work, we must see that this picture is sad and lonely. In fact, despite a secular cultural scene in the west, a movie or book which depicted Liam’s predicament with emotional resonance would be seen as “truthful” in an important sense. Something about his world is frequently viewed as “wrong” in a moral sense. To ascribe agency to this sense of “wrongness” is not, in my view, such a stretch.
As human beings, we are more expansive than this buffered self allows, and we are more porous than we would often like to admit. To this date, even a conservative Christian seems reluctant to talk about angels and demons. The stigma attached to such outbursts has existed ever since those reform efforts to dismiss pagan rituals, and later what was called “enthusiasm” and “fundamentalism”. But we need to break these buffered selves by willing to be protected only by God’s goodness. I don’t mean to break our mental defences and allow in both good and malignant spiritual forces. I mean that we must be honest about our present, real vulnerability, and learn to make a way through it instead of trying to suppress it. Perhaps this will open us up to more overt spiritual attack, but I am willing to dive into those waters. Recently there has been widespread concern over the craze of developing tics, compulsions and other traits associated with poor mental health on Tiktok⁹. Before that, there was unease about how desirable depression became on Tumblr - how it was romanticised and glorified¹⁰, and how increasing numbers of individual users presented as depressed on the online platform. My point here is that many of us seem to experience an involuntary excursion outside of our invulnerable “buffered selves” or even a longing to do so, however unhealthy the manifestations of this desire might be. Even though horror movies are much more widely accepted as a normal interest, I sometimes wonder why we risk getting into some more difficult mental states through watching them. But at other times, I understand. Sometimes I feel an ache to explore somewhere unknown, to get lost, to obsess over unrequited or impossible love, or to fall into some hole or other. I am beginning to wonder whether I and other people are actually longing to break open the buffered self - to open myself up to the world more fully - to escape that prison of emotions, that feeling of invulnerability, that cold, clinical, scientific outlook on life. That feeling that the natural world was something “out there” but not something that could interfere with me. That feeling that anything foreign was repulsive. That fear of the dark, of bugs, of silent pain, freezing to death. The repression of these potential intrusions of the outside world, necessarily accompanied by a repression of emotion. In a perverse way, this invulnerability and repressed emotion slowly brews its own anxieties, which in turn are unhelpfully repressed further. Distractions, hedonism, consumerism, all hardening the concrete. Still, we naturally expand and feel the restrictions around us. The buffered self was never adequate. It would be more natural to break it and reform another way.
I wonder if there is any other pathway than into the pain of vulnerability. Diving into the water in pitch darkness. This is a dangerous idea without the protection of a powerful and loving God; but with that protection, I wonder what freedom is possible. To use the incredible imagery of Lewis’ “Perelandra”: the protagonist at one point finds himself floating over the endless seas at night, far away from land, hunting a demon-possessed man. Exploring the strange sights. Transported to Venus in a coffin. All of this interacting symbology - chaos, the ocean, the unknown, death - magnificently inverted. The reason this is a liberating image is that Venus (or Perelandra as it is called in the book) is a place imbued with rejuvenating, refreshing, emboldening life. In the same way, opening up the “buffered self” does not have to mean life in fear and paralysis. It might mean trusting in the goodness of God to protect and defend against these forces.
In conclusion, I am tired of holding back my beliefs in the supernatural. I don’t expect them to overwhelm my writing, because it is still too much for a secularised culture to read. However, personally, I am ready to take these beliefs seriously and acknowledge the reality of spiritual warfare. Simple things like church, bible reading and prayer are natural re-orientation towards God and protection from being misguided. More than that, I want to deconstruct this buffered self. I wonder if this concrete wall against the admission of something external and malicious is the biggest cause of anxiety today, at least for a Christian. If I dive into the black water of indifference and alienation, grief and pain, I imagine I will open myself up to a world that engulfs the play acting of laziness, Instagram reels, consumption. At the risk of being excessively autobiographical, I must suggest that it is not simply loneliness or self-loathing that is my problem, somehow. It is the existential situation, but even more, me hiding myself from it. Exposure is a wave of grief, but also a wave of freedom. Because at the bottom of the blackest hole, at the source of the twinkling emptiness of space, is a God who will catch and hold me, and ultimately in whom I can rest - vulnerable, protected, free.
References
¹ https://bibleproject.com/articles/what-does-the-bible-say-about-angels-and-cherubim/
² https://www.britannica.com/art/halo-art
³ Genesis 18
⁴ Daniel 10
⁵ Ezekiel 1:4 - 24
⁶ Revelation 12:3
⁷ The Lord’s prayer: “Our Father, who art in heaven” most likely inspired the religious art which then could be described as “an old man in the sky”. Devoid from this image is the background context - God was also viewed as the pillar of fire and smoke, creator and ruler of the Leviathan, the armies of angels, and the world as a whole. It is by this context that “father” gains its true implications as an extraordinary condescension.
⁸ 1 Peter 1:12
⁹ https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/tics-and-tiktok-can-social-media-trigger-illness-202201182670
¹⁰ https://www.swarthmorereview.com/posts/9-16-2021-is-everything-okay
