The Exorcist: Pedagogy of the Possessed
Whether through serendipity or the gentle hand of divine providence, I watched the two movies that decisively shaped my theological imagination on the same day in June 1995. It was the end of my first year at Saint Ignatius High School in Cleveland, Ohio, and we were allowed to go home early during finals week. To celebrate the start of summer break, I plopped down on the couch, turned on the television, and caught the opening of a movie I had never heard of: The Song of Bernadette (1943), starring Jennifer Jones. Had I not seen the opening quote, “For those who believe in God, no explanation is necessary. For those who do not believe in God, no explanation will do,” I would have changed the channel. So I kept watching the movie about a peasant girl named Bernadette Soubirous, who, in 1858, claimed to have visions of Mary, the mother of Jesus. The grotto where these visions occurred in Lourdes, France, has become a popular destination for sick and disabled pilgrims who believe that “Lourdes water” has miraculous healing properties. Decades later, I remain moved by the portrayal of Bernadette’s faith and perseverance in the face of skepticism and opposition. In Bernadette, viewers catch sight of a living example of Paul’s claim, in his letter to the Corinthians, that “God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength” (1 Cor 1:25).
That night, my dad and I watched The Exorcist. Based on William Peter Blatty’s best-selling novel, which was inspired by the exorcism of a young boy in 1949, The Exorcist was diametrically opposed to The Song of Bernadette. I recall two thoughts that occurred to me. First, I was grateful that I was enrolled at a Jesuit high school, because Fathers Karras and Merrin were members of the Society of Jesus. The movie endowed my Jesuit teachers with an aura of mystery, since I naïvely assumed that learning to perform exorcisms was part of their training. Second, I appreciated the way the film depicted the interplay between faith and doubt. Faith, the film helped me to grasp, was not just content to be memorized (fides quae) but a response and a process of self-commitment (fides qua). Faith was more than a matter of personal taste or private opinion, because it is a holistic way of experiencing the world. For religious faith is an existential act that responds to divine revelation. Although I could not have stated it in 1995, Bernadette and Regan became icons in my theological imagination: Bernadette as an icon of faith, and Regan as a more titillating infernal icon of the corrosive presence of the Dark Transcendent. What those films gave me was a way of grasping why the faith I professed every Sunday in the Nicene Creed—faith in a God who creates “all things visible and invisible”—had real consequences. Faith was not an idea but a way of life, a way of experiencing and interacting with the world.
Fifty years after its release, The Exorcist continues to be lauded as one of the great, if not the greatest, horror films of all time. As we have discussed the metaphysical and theological themes present in other possession films—Insidious; The Exorcism of Emily Rose; The Devil’s Doorway; The Conjuring—I will use this essay to identify and discuss spiritual insights found in The Exorcist by viewing it through the lens of Saint Ignatius of Loyola’s “Rules for the Discernment of Spirits.” In the first section, I introduce the concept of discernment and provide an overview of the plot. Using Ignatius’s rules, attention will be given to how characters “Become Aware” of the metataxis of horror instigated by the demon Pazuzu. Next, we look at how characters “Understand” the way the demonic operates. Finally, we look at how they “Take Action” in response to Pazuzu’s wiles. At the risk of scandalizing (or amusing) my Jesuit confreres, I call this the Ignatian B.U.T.: the faith-filled practice whereby one becomes aware of, understands, and takes action in response to how God works in one’s life. By cultivating a practice of discernment, theological theory can become a theological way of life. The Exorcist, for those with eyes attuned to its theological depths, can become a spiritually instructive “pedagogy of the possessed.”
Become Aware
Let me begin by defining terms from Ignatius’s “Rules.” Discernment comes from the Latin discernere, meaning “to distinguish” or “to separate.” If you have a discerning palate, it means that you can judge qualities that make something good or bad. By spirits, Ignatius does not mean distilled alcoholic beverages, like tequila and gin; he means “positive or negative spiritual influences or dynamisms that we experience within ourselves.” There are two kinds of spirits: good and bad. The good spirit is rooted in and reflective of the Holy Spirit. When we look to the Scriptures, we see God’s Spirit depicted as active and enlivening. The Spirit is present at the world’s creation (Genesis 1:2); empowers prophetic ministry (Isaiah 61:1-3; Luke 4:18); raises Jesus from the dead (Romans 6:10-11); galvanizes the community of believers (Acts 1:1-11); reveals the depths of Christ’s love at the heart of creation (Ephesians 3:14-19); and prays within the hearts of believers (Romans 8:26-27). Christians believe that God’s Spirit continues Jesus Christ’s saving work by inspiring believers to live now as we are called to live in God’s eschatological reign in communion with one another as participants in God’s Triune life. This upbuilding and divinizing action, however, is opposed by the work of what Ignatius regards as the bad, or evil, spirit, the spirit of the “mortal enemy of our human nature.” Ignatius regards the evil spirit as an adversary who subverts human growth in holiness by distorting human desires. For this reason, the practice of “discernment of spirits” is essential. Developing one’s skills in discernment involves becoming aware of how each spirit works; understanding how each helps or hinders our progress as we deepen our relationship with God; and taking action to receive what the good spirit offers while rejecting whatever does not come from God. The general pattern one needs to become aware of is that the good spirit draws us toward God, and the evil spirit drives a wedge between us and God.
The hallmark of the good spirit’s presence, Ignatius continues, is the experience of “spiritual consolation.” By this, he means an interior movement within the soul that leads it “to be inflamed with love of its Creator and Lord. As a result it can love no created thing on the face of the earth in itself, but only in the Creator of them all.” In such experiences, one experiences a harmonization between love for God the Creator and love for what God has created. In a state of spiritual consolation, the entire world seems to radiate and shimmer with God’s love. Bernadette Soubirous, in The Song of Bernadette, is the picture of consolation even when she faces resistance, rejection, and physical suffering. Ignatius contrasts this intimate and enlivening encounter with the Spirit with spiritual desolation. Whereas consolation inspires love and lifts the soul to God, desolation causes “obtuseness of soul, turmoil within it, an impulsive motion toward low and earthly things, or disquiet from various agitations and temptations.” In desolation, the heart feels hopelessness, discouragement, faithlessness, and alienation from God. Regan, possessed by a spirit inimical to love and human flourishing, gives viewers a hyperbolic glimpse of enervating and dehumanizing desolation.
The first stage of discernment, or “becoming aware,” entails beginning to notice how our desires are stirred and how we are moved by them. We are, daily, pushed and pulled in many different directions. Cultivating an awareness of these movements takes patience and attentiveness. One needs to be familiar with the taxis, or “order,” of one’s life—the ebb and flow of desires, habits, moods, etc.—if one is going to become aware of the metataxis caused by the good or bad spirit. One needs to know one’s spiritual climate to be able to recognize whether one’s desires are being oriented and directed toward or away from God. Ignatius notes some characteristic signs of the good and evil spirit:
It is characteristic of God and his angels, by the motions they cause, to give genuine happiness and spiritual joy, and thereby to banish any sadness and turmoil induced by the enemy.
It is characteristic of the enemy to fight against this happiness and spiritual consolation, by using specious reasonings, subtleties, and persistent deceits.
The Spirit and the enemy have characteristic effects that we can learn to recognize. We can, that is, learn to recognize symptoms of their presence because they make a difference in our lives. To repeat William James’s biblical adage, “By their fruits ye shall know them, not by their roots.” The fruits of the Spirit’s presence: being moved by love to love; being inspired to generous and generative acts; being filled with peace, hope, and confidence in God’s providential care. The fruits of the enemy: being unsettled, anxious, and dubious of God’s love and mercy; being fractured and fragmented; being diminished and disintegrated. In the remainder of this section and the next, the pedagogy of the possessed will require us to grow attuned to the ploys of Pazuzu, to understand how they are manifestations of the Dark Transcendent, and to take action to resist the assaults of humanity’s mortal foe.
The Exorcist opens in northern Iraq, where Father Merrin leads an archaeological dig at the city of Nineveh. Amid the ruins, a medal of Saint Joseph is recovered, along with an artifact representing Pazuzu, an ancient demon. The metataxis augured by this discovery announces itself: clocks stop, Merrin is nearly run over by a carriage, and, when he returns to the excavation site, he confronts a statue of the demon. The film leaves no doubt about the impending conflict between good and evil.
The film’s setting shifts to an upscale house in Georgetown, a neighborhood in Washington, DC, where Chris MacNeil lives with her daughter Regan as Chris films a new movie. Here, the metataxis signaling the advent of the Dark Transcendent is announced with increasing intensity. It begins with strange noises in the attic; later, the planchette on a Ouija board moves, which Regan attributes to “Captain Howdy”; and Regan complains of her bed shaking at night. When Chris takes her to see a physician, we see a listless Regan behaving bizarrely in the examination room. During the consultation, Dr. Klein recounts Regan’s vulgar outburst. Regan’s words and deeds manifest that something is amiss, and the doctor surmises that she suffers from a “disorder of the nerves” and prescribes her Ritalin. Shortly thereafter, Regan disrupts her mother’s dinner party when, in a fugue-like state, she tells an astronaut, “You’re gonna die up there,” and urinates on the carpet. She is taken to more doctors and subjected to testing, yet her condition worsens. Her language and actions become more vulgar and violent, her eyes discolored, and her face grows ashen and bears gashes on it. In front of her mother and, later, doctors, she exhibits unnatural physical actions: flying off her bed; abnormal strength; masturbating with a crucifix (talk about a religious sociophobic); spider-walking down the stairs; and her head spinning one hundred eighty degrees. Chris also realizes that the death of her director, Burke Dennings, was caused not by a drunken tumble down the stairs but by Regan throwing him from her bedroom window.
As Regan deteriorates and grows disfigured, all parties involved—Chris, her household, and the doctors—are aware that something is awry. A team of psychiatrists suggest that she might suffer from “somnabuliform possession,” a delusion where a patient believes her body to have been invaded by an “alien intelligence, a spirit if you will.” One doctor snidely suggests the possibility of employing the “shock treatment” of an exorcism. He describes its efficacy:
Clinical Director: It’s a stylized ritual in which rabbis or priests try to drive out the so-called invading spirit. It’s pretty much discarded these days, except by the Catholics, who keep it in the closet as a sort of embarrassment. It has worked, in fact, although not for the reason they think, of course. It was purely the force of suggestion. The victim’s belief in possession helped cause it; and just in the same way, this belief in the power of exorcism can make it disappear.
The doctors’ “experiential framework,” as discussed earlier, requires them to look for a medical or psychiatric cause that “fits” within medicine’s parameters. The religious solution of exorcism “works” on a psychological, not a metaphysical, level. Her experiences of Regan’s symptoms, however, have opened Chris to a non-medical diagnosis: her daughter has been possessed. She expresses this conviction to Father Damien Karras, a Jesuit psychiatrist, to whom she turns for help:
Chris: You show me Regan’s double: same face, same voice, same everything. I’d know it wasn’t Regan. I’d know in my gut, and I’m telling you that that thing upstairs isn’t my daughter! And I want you to tell me that you know for a fact that there’s nothing wrong with my daughter except in her mind! You tell me you know for a fact that an exorcism wouldn’t do any good! You tell me that!
Karras, like his medical colleagues, is skeptical about the possibility of demon possession. Given what he knows about medicine, it fails to “fit” with prevailing medical opinion. Nevertheless, Chris’s pleas move the troubled priest’s heart, and he agrees to visit Regan.
Both of Karras’s meetings with Regan are farragoes of truth and deception. There are hints and signs of demonic presence: she possesses knowledge of foreign languages; knows of events not disclosed to her; parrots Damien’s mother’s voice and the voice of a homeless person he encountered on the subway; and, famously, projectile vomits green bile. At the same time, Regan claims to be “the Devil” and reacts violently when sprinkled with ordinary tap water, both evidence against authentic possession. The demonic spirit, Ignatius would appreciate, makes use of “specious reasonings, subtleties, and persistent deceits” to prevent identification. For Karras, however, the tipping point occurs when he listens to a tape recording of Regan speaking. At first, it sounds like gibberish. But, when he plays the recording backward, he hears several voices speaking in English:
Voices: Give us time! Let her die. I am no one! I am no one! Fear the Priest. Ooh . . . Merrin!
The phone rings. It is Sharon, Chris’s assistant, summoning him to the MacNeil residence. She brings Karras to Regan’s room, opens her pajama top, and they both watch in horror as the words “Help Me” materialize on Regan’s skin. Despite not being wholly convinced of its veracity, Karras tells the cardinal that he has made a “prudent judgment that it meets the conditions set down in the Ritual.” The cardinal agrees but wants an exorcist with experience. The priest to whom they turn is none other than Father Lankester Merrin, home from Iraq and authoring a new book.
Space constraints do not allow an exhaustive treatment of each metataxis in the film. One could profitably discuss the desecrations in a local church, Regan assaulting the psychiatrist and her mother, or the investigation launched by Detective Kinderman. Nevertheless, the narrative arc we have traced reflects a deepening process of discovery or, in the language of discernment, “becoming aware” of how the evil spirit works. Hollywood hyperbole notwithstanding, one can derive spiritual insight from The Exorcist. “Becoming aware” of how the good and evil spirits operate in one’s life necessitates sifting and distinguishing the movements within our hearts and that animate our actions. Apropos of a film about demonic possession, The Exorcist focuses on the evil spirit. But if we peer beneath her makeup, we can find in the face of Regan/the demon an image of how the evil spirit debases humanity. This is not to say, of course, that people’s heads spin around or that they projectile vomit at will. It is to say, though, that there are forces at work in our lives hostile to human flourishing. The evil spirit corrupts and negates what God creates.
If I have learned any lesson about the spiritual life in twenty years as a Jesuit, it is that the “bad” or “evil” spirit targets individuals in personal and personalized ways. There is no one mode of attack, and the metataxis caused by the evil spirit can be recognized only through discernment. Ignatius notes the cunningness of the evil spirit in the way it attacks:
The enemy acts like a military commander who is attempting to conquer and plunder his objective. The captain and leader of an army on campaign sets up his camp, studies the strength and structures of a fortress, and then attacks at its weakest point.
In the same way, the enemy of human nature prowls around and from every side probes all our theological, cardinal, and moral virtues. Then at the point where he finds us weakest and most in need in regard to our eternal salvation, there he attacks and tries to take.
In my struggles, and in those of many I have accompanied, the evil spirit sows doubt and deception. It is as though it whispers, “If others really knew you, they would see that you are a fraud. If they saw the real you, they could not possibly love you. You are an imposter. You do not belong.” People who do splendid work to promote God’s kingdom on earth—priests and religious students and teachers; doctors and nurses; civil servants—are all susceptible to being beguiled that what they do and who they are could not possibly be loved by God. In the eyes of others, their words and works testify to God’s grace at work in the world. Yet, beguiled by the enemy, they simply cannot perceive this, and they despair. The evil one’s lies create a web of metaphysical and theological mendacity: “The God who creates and sustains you out of love is wholly uninterested in you. Pure nothingness is preferable to you.” Such spiritual turmoil has deleterious effects, as niggling doubts alienate one from communion with others, drive a wedge in one’s relationship with God, and leave one in a state of spiritual and social decomposition. But unless we learn to become aware of the enemy’s ploys, unless we learn to discern its movements and cultivate practices to resist it, our vulnerabilities will continue to be exploited, and our capacity for flourishing will not be reached.
Understand
Before we consider the arrival of Father Merrin and the priests’ attempt at an exorcism, and because we have taken the time to gather them, let me note the way The Exorcist presumes and preys on some of our collected fragments. To review:
1. We are made by mystery, for mystery.
2. All that is is because made by love.
3. Feeling horror may not be good for the soul, but it is a sign of soul.
4. To be is to be in triadic communion with the Transcendent.
As a work of horror, The Exorcist portrays a breakdown in its characters’ world by an alien, incomprehensible, and threatening force: Pazuzu. As we become aware of Regan’s possession and watch its progression, our early metaphysical insights are called into question. The demon, by possessing a child whose innocence we have no reason to doubt, undermines confidence in the goodness of creation and its Creator. Moreover, through Regan’s vulgar and often sacrilegious words and deeds, Pazuzu makes a mockery of Christian belief. As seen especially throughout the exorcism, evil seems to have the upper hand, calling into question both the efficacy of the ritual and the sovereignty of God. “Perhaps,” the presence of Pazuzu suggests, “your so-called Almighty is no match for the infernal Abyss.”
In The Exorcist, Pazuzu is a parasitic and dehumanizing demon, who colonizes and contaminates what it touches. In this film, Regan’s possessed body functions as the Dark Transcendent’s anti-sacrament, intended to reveal the meaninglessness of existence. If Christian sacraments reveal how God acts in history to reconfigure it according to kingdom, Regan’s decaying flesh and suppurating wounds manifest the way evil degrades the goodness of creation. Whereas sacraments induct believers into the “mystery of faith” (mysterium fidei), Regan as anti-sacrament discloses the “mystery of evil” (mysterium iniquitatis). But where the sacraments give believers a glimpse of the telos, or purpose, of human history, Regan’s degraded flesh is a sign that there is no divine plan or purpose. Part of what is so jarring is that neither the book nor the film explain why Regan is the victim. Pazuzu’s spiteful drive is to corrupt and annihilate. In the novel’s epigraph, Blatty cites the following testimony from Thomas Dooley’s Deliver Us from Evil:
There’s no other explanation for some of the things the Communists did. Like the priest who had eight nails driven into his skull. . . . And there were the seven little boys and their teacher. They were praying the Our Father when the soldiers came upon them. One soldier whipped out his bayonet and sliced off the teacher’s tongue. The other took chopsticks and drove them into the ears of the seven little boys. How do you treat cases like that?
Tellingly, Blatty prefaces his tale of fictional horror with the mysterium iniquitatis as confronted in history. This mysterium cannot be comprehended or explained; its illogic thwarts efforts to understand or “make sense” of it. In the film, Merrin will conjecture that the purpose of demonic possession may be to sow doubt and enkindle despair, but, as Blatty suggests by citing Dooley, the mysterium iniquitatis confronted in the world is more horrifying than any work of fiction.
Moreso in the novel than the film, Pazuzu orchestrates events to lure Merrin to the MacNeil house: demonic providence. The final conflict between Pazuzu and Merrin, augured in the movie’s opening, begins when Merrin steps out of a taxicab. Dense fog envelops him as he approaches the home, and the film cuts to a sequence of Regan’s expectant and malevolent eyes. When he enters, the demon bellows Merrin’s name. Merrin wastes little time. He sends Karras to collect the religious accouterments necessary for exorcism. Karras demurs:
Karras: Do you want to hear the background of the case first?
Merrin: Why?
Merrin knows that his foe is in their midst. He understands what he faces and how this demon operates. Upon Karras’s return, Merrin admonishes his confrere:
Merrin: We may ask what is relevant, but anything beyond that is dangerous. He is a liar; the demon is a liar. He will lie to confuse us. But he will also mix lies with the truth to attack us. The attack is psychological, Damien. And powerful. So don’t listen; remember that, do not listen.
Merrin’s counsel reflects more than skilled scriptwriting: at its core it contains a key insight necessary for one to effectively discern or distinguish the movements of God’s Spirit from those of the evil spirit in one’s life.
In keeping with Jesus’s description of the devil as “a liar and the father of lies” (John 8:44), Ignatius is attentive to the ways the evil spirit’s lies and deceptions provoke confusion and desolation. In his second rule for discernment, Ignatius envisions persons who are striving to make spiritual progress and identifies the evil spirit’s stratagem:
In the case of persons who are earnestly purging away their sins, and who are progressing from good to better in the service of God our Lord . . . it is characteristic of the evil spirit to cause gnawing anxiety, to sadden, and to set up obstacles. In this way he unsettles these persons by false reasons aimed at preventing their progress.
The enemy tinctures truth with poisonous deceit to impede or reverse one’s striving toward one’s telos, or goal. When I accompany people trying to reform and live a more integrated life, they regularly express a gnawing anxiety that they are deceiving themselves. A voice arises that slyly whispers, “Haven’t you tried this before? Haven’t you always failed? What makes you think this will be any different? Why bother?” In these cases, it is as though some force dredges up past failures and says, “You think you can overcome this? That you’re better than this?”
In Blatty’s book, Karras and Merrin are both assaulted by demonic deception. In the film, Karras endures the most of it. As they pray for Regan’s deliverance and the overcoming of the foe, the demon accuses Karras:
Regan/the demon: You killed your mother! You left her alone to die! She’ll never forgive you! Bastard!
The assault targets Damien’s guilt and doubts about whether he had done “enough,” or could have done “more,” for his mother. The book also brings to the fore the way demonic deceptions mislead Karras and exploit his personal struggle with faith. The demonic tactic seeks to cause Karras to waiver in his convictions. In the novel, Regan/the demon divulges their ploy: “we must give you some reason for doubt! Yes, just enough to assure the final outcome.”
Sandwiched between scenes depicting the Jesuits’ attempt at an exorcism, there is a brief exchange between Merrin and Karras as they rest on the staircase. I quote here from the novel as it offers a slightly more in-depth take than the one depicted in the film. Merrin’s insight into the demon’s machinations, however, is the same:
I think the demon’s target is not the possessed; it is us . . . the observers . . . every person in this house. And I think—I think the point is to make us despair; to reject our own humanity, Damien: to see ourselves as ultimately bestial, vile and putrescent; without dignity; ugly; unworthy. And there lies the heart of it, perhaps: in unworthiness. For I think belief in God is not a matter of reason at all; I think it finally is a matter of love: of accepting that God could ever love us.
Merrin is aware of and understands the demon’s purposes. Pazuzu’s attack, he intuits, is directed not simply against a human but targets humanity itself. Its pestilent purpose, Merrin observes, is to make people appear unworthy of love, whether love from God or from other humans. Can anyone believe in human dignity, can anyone profess confidence in God’s love and mercy, when confronted with the face of evil as revealed by Regan? For us, the question of the mysterium iniquitatis forces one to ask how trusting God’s goodness or providence is possible in a world fractured by so many atrocities and evils. Regan’s body, a satanic anti-sacrament, discloses an inhuman world bereft of faith, hope, charity, redemption, or salvation.
The wisdom of the cardinal’s desire to find an exorcist with experience should be considered. Throughout the film, Merrin is clearly aware of the demonic forces at work in the world and understands how they operate. Introducing students to the practice of discernment is hardly as dramatic as facing off against Pazuzu, but it does require a lot of effort to cultivate an environment where they have the freedom and courage to become aware of the movements within their hearts and to learn how to interpret and understand them. By getting them to reflect on past experiences in a discerning manner, by encouraging them to look at times when they were spiritually consoled and times when they were spiritually desolate, I try to help them distinguish patterns that led them toward and patterns that led them away from God. If I may offer a litmus test: God’s Spirit creates and integrates, the enemy’s spirit annihilates and disintegrates. The Spirit draws us into the communion of God’s reign; the evil one alienates us from it.
The prudential decision to pair the experienced Merrin with the inexperienced Karras offers a good model for spiritual discernment. Although discernment is undertaken personally, it is not undergone privately. Discernment cannot take place apart from one’s spiritual community but only as a part of it: we are, as we have seen, intimately and universally bound together within the community of creation. Every authentic discernment of how God might be calling a person into a deeper relationship cannot fail to have consequences for the whole community. Discernment, consequently, involves two forms of dialogue. There is the sustained dialogue of prayer, wherein one opens oneself to God. Over a period—days, weeks, months—one must have the courage to become aware of the ways one is being pulled and drawn. But to understand these movements, one should have recourse to a trained spiritual director who can help sift through and understand the movements. We all need a Merrin to speak from experience about God’s mysterious ways. A good spiritual director can say, “Yes, I hear your excitement and enthusiasm for this. But have you considered . . . ,” and raise an issue that had been obscured or ignored.
Let me concretize this. In my spiritual life, I find the evil spirit works most craftily and destructively by inspiring within me thoughts of “great initiatives.” Yes, one can be tempted by the good! The evil one knows that one’s excitement for achieving something great and glorious can lead one to act impetuous and without sufficient planning. I have had “inspired” ideas about strategic initiatives at work, about workouts and self-improvement plans, about growing in my faith. Overcome by first fervor, I go all in . . . until I run out of steam, hit a major roadblock, or realize I had not planned accordingly. When everything fails and falls apart, I am left in the rubble of a good idea, discouraged and afraid to try again. What better ploy to prevent people from working for God’s greater glory than convincing them that every time they try, they fail. I am grateful to a very wise spiritual director for pointing this pattern out to me. It doesn’t make it easier to negotiate, but it does give me an insight into one of my spiritual blind spots that the evil one exploits. Things that are not apparent to my eyes—because bedazzled by future glories—appear more clearly to my director’s gaze, and, with great assistance and effort, I continue to make strides to evaluate when “good ideas” are inspired by and lead toward God and when they originate from the evil one.
Spiritual discernment must also take into account one’s historical situatedness. Discernment is never done in a vacuum. And, in an age marked by Haight’s ontic pessimism, we can become so inured to the ubiquitous presence of social evils, environmental degradation, and economic inequality that we are beguiled into accepting this as status quo. Evil is so pervasive, so taken for granted, that it is nearly asymptomatic. We need, as individuals and a society, mentors like Merrin to rouse us from quiescence. We need to learn to recognize and understand the signs of evil that abound. In the novel, Merrin finds signs of possession not in wars or in a rare and dramatic case like Regan’s. He finds evidence of the demonic in the everyday:
I tend to see possession most often in the little things, Damien: in the senseless, petty spites and misunderstandings; the cruel and cutting word that leaps unbidden to the tongue between friends. Between lovers. Between husbands and wives. Enough of these and we have no need of Satan to manage our wars; these we manage for ourselves . . . for ourselves.
The Dark Transcendent discloses its presence less through extraordinary feats than in ordinary interactions. Interactions, I suspect, we all know well: the harsh word; the racist or sexist joke; the label-and-dismiss of those with whom we disagree; our demonization of opponents. Merrin and those of his ilk who have learned well the lessons from the pedagogy of the possessed can help us to understand the way we, too easily and too often, are complicit with demonic and dehumanizing forces within the world.
Take Action
The third aspect of the Ignatian B.U.T. requires one to “Take Action.” For Gallagher, this requires one to “accept and live according to what we have recognized as of God, and to reject and remove from our lives what we have recognized as not from God.” Every discernment leads one to the cusp of an existential decision. “How am I to cooperate and become who God is calling me to be?” That is, how is God calling me to be a sacrament, to be a visible sign of God’s reign breaking into the world? By receiving what God offers—the grace to share in God’s own Triune life—and refusing what leads away from God, I become who God desires me to be.
The Exorcist reaches its climax when Karras enters Regan’s room and finds Merrin cold and dead. Karras pounds on his chest to revive him, but it is of no avail. Regan giggles, inciting his rage. He leaps up, seizes the possessed girl, falls to the floor, and begins to pummel her/it with his boxer’s hands. He addresses the demon, “Take me! Come into me! God damn you! Take me! Take me!” As he speaks, his Saint Joseph medallion is pulled from his neck. His eyes widen, now a ghastly shade of green, and his body jerks backward. He rises and stands over her, his face a rictus of malice. The liberated Regan screams as the now possessed Karras reaches out to strangle her. Suddenly, his body shudders, and for a moment, his face is restored. He cries out, “No!” and hurtles his body through the window. Like Burke Dennings before him, he tumbles down the stairs. His friend, Father Dyer, pushes through the crowd and offers him absolution before he dies. Damien, the priest who struggled with his faith, dies reconciled. In his self-giving sacrifice, Damien becomes the eponymous exorcist.
Now, when the demon accepts Damien’s invitation to “Come into me,” it appears that evil triumphs. For, in an earlier exchange, the demon expressed its desire to experience an exorcism:
Karras: You’d like that?
Regan/the demon: Intensely.
Karras: But wouldn’t that drive you out of Regan?
Regan/the demon: It would bring us together.
The “us” refers to the demon and Karras. And at first, it appears its wish has been granted: it now possesses his body and will be able to dispatch his former host. Damien’s generous and generative action seems destined to fail. But instead of a dyscatastrophe that costs two lives, the film takes a eucatastrophic turn: Damien manages to resist the demon long enough to hurtle himself from the window, his self-sacrifice ensuring Regan’s safety and bringing about the demon’s demise. When all hope is lost, when the Dark Transcendent blots out the last ray of hope, we catch sight of a “gleam or echo of evangelium” in the world as light pierces the darkness and makes a way where, before, there seemed no way. Providence +1, Pazuzu 0.
To make sense of this surprising finale, let me offer a theological gloss on the film’s most famous line, “The power of Christ compels you.” Merrin and Karras proclaim this repeatedly as Regan’s body levitates off the bed. Their intent and desire is to exorcise the demon from Regan’s body, but their prayer is ultimately ineffectual. My sense, though, is that their prayer expresses a deeply sacramental subtext and dynamic. The prayer speaks truly: the power of Christ compels you, meaning it compels Damien to offer himself in Regan’s place. Christ’s power, the grace of the Spirit, empowers Damien through the passio caritatis to mediate Christ’s saving presence. Earlier in the film, we watch Damien celebrate the liturgy of the Eucharist:
He broke the bread, gave it to his disciples, and said, “Take this, all of you, and eat it. For this is my body.” When the supper was ended, he took the cup. Again he gave you thanks and praise, gave the cup to his disciples, and said, “Take this, all of you, and drink from it. This is the cup of my blood, the blood of the new and everlasting covenant, the mystery of faith.”
By Christ’s grace, through the passio caritatis, Damien becomes what he receives. He, the exorcist, confronts the mystery of evil (mysterium iniquitatis) by sacramentally embodying the mystery of faith (mysterium fidei). The mysterium fidei, sung after the consecration of the Eucharist, refers to the mystery of salvation wrought by Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection. Damien re-performs this mystery by giving himself—his body and his blood—in a saving act. Despite doubt and a fear that he has lost his faith, Damien’s final deed incarnates Jesus’s commandment, “love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:12-13). In the novel, moreover, Merrin remarks how lovely he finds Karras’s first name. Chris enquires into the origin of the name “Damien,” and Merrin responds, “It was the name of a priest who devoted his life to taking care of the lepers on the island of Molokai. He finally caught the disease himself.” The mystery of faith, revealed here in Hollywood fashion, is that the same power of Christ that compelled Saint Damien of Molokai to give himself entirely to a community of lepers is the same power of Christ that compels Father Damien Karras to lay down his life for Regan.
The graced fruit of discernment, when one takes action and puts it into practice, is a life that reveals to the world another dimension of God’s love and mercy. Inspired by the Spirit and compelled by the power of Christ, one’s life becomes slowly configured in a Christoform way. This does not mean that one will have nail marks in one’s hands or a spear mark in one’s side. It means, though, that one’s life will be defined not by selfishly grasping but by selflessly giving, not driven by the self-assertive conatus essendi but subtly and providentially directed through the passio caritatis that transforms us into sacraments and signs of God’s kingdom.
Just as physical exercises enable one to grow in strength and stamina, spiritual exercises are undertaken to develop one’s spiritual life. One may not need squats or step-ups to develop an Ignatian B.U.T., but one does need rigorous spiritual practice to become aware, understand, and take action by accepting what God offers and cooperating with it. Through a life of prayerful discernment, one opens oneself to being tutored through a “pedagogy of the possessed” animated not by one of Satan’s minions but through the lives and examples of those possessed and inspired by God’s Spirit. Through this pedagogy, one is invited to allow the metaphysical and theological fragments we have recovered over the course of our pilgrimage to take our flesh and become an embodied theological mosaic. Tutored and enlivened by these fragments, each one of us can become a graced frag-event in a world that continues to hunger for signs of the Spirit that works through our humanity to announce God’s redemptive and recreative activity. Thus, our final fragment: the power of Christ compels us to be frag-events of God’s grace in our world.
EDITORIAL NOTE: This article is excerpted from Theology of Horror: The Hidden Depths of Popular Films (University of Notre Dame Press, 2024). It is part of an ongoing collaboration with the University of Notre Dame Press. You can read other excerpts from this collaboration here. All rights reserved.