For We Are Many
In the readings of Monday of this week, the Gospel reading recounts Jesus’ encounter with the Garasene demoniac. This was the person possessed by the legion of demons who, when commanded by Jesus to identify itself, responded with the famous line “I am Legion, for we are many” (Mk 5:9), before being cast into a herd of pigs, which promptly throw themselves off a cliff and drown.
With an account as dramatic as this it would, at least first blush, tricky to find any contact point between the reading and our regular experience of life. We do not (at least I hope that we do not) get possessed on a regular basis; nor do we see a pig, let alone a couple of thousand pigs, get possessed and commit mass suicide on a regular basis.
As I reflected on this for my Lectio Divina, my mind kept going back to the most oft quoted line “…for we are many…”. Again, because this was a quote from a demon, it would at first be difficult to find it applicable to our own lives. Yet, the longer I reflected on it, the more thought it was exactly that line, and precisely because it was said by a person possessed by a demon, that makes it is most applicable to our own lives, and we is applicable in two ways.
The first point of contact becomes evident when we consider the ascetic writings from Christian Egypt, in particular those of Origen and Evagrius of Pontus. The latter, in talking about the life of prayer, was very cognisant of the role that demons played in one’s thought. This is most apparent when speaking of the vices in his Praktikos, all of which we moderns might call “bad things people do”, but Evagrius would label as “bad things people do as a result of the influence of demons”, the deadliest of which was the demon of acedia. Origen’s inflection comes from his famous line: Where there is sin, there is multiplicity. Though not directly correlated with his writings on demons (which he covers in his Against Celcus), Origen does suggest a crucial link with Evagrius about the fallout of sin: the life of sin, brought about by the influence of demons, leads us to an internal division wherein we end up with multiple versions of ourselves.
In his City of God, Augustine spoke about the life of sin as a libido dominandi, or the lust for domination. For Augustine, sin is borne out of a desire to transcend our vulnerability and contingency, and embrace a life that overcomes and dominates even Nietzsche’s Übermensch, with no vulnerability or committment. The subtlety that Augustine identifies is that this person that lusts to dominate entertains not a real version of self, but a mirage of the self, which competes with and overcomes not just others, but the real self as well. Augustine had a pithy phrase to describe this process: the curving in upon oneself. We see this subtly demonstrated in the demoniac himself who, in his multitude, is only recorded as attacking not others, but his own self, as he “howls and gashes himself with rocks”.
The story of the demoniac is thus applicable in our daily lives, for we bear within ourselves the potential to become saints as well as demoniacs, and the path to the latter is paved with myriad subtle, almost mundane, possibilities. It is possible everytime we encounter and resist any unpleasantries brought about by circumstance or the actions of others. The moment my desire drives me to strike back at these, however justified, my desires generate a multiple of myself. Also, if we are honest with ourselves, we often take pleasure in thinking about multiple ways in which to strike back, thereby multiplying the versions of ourselves into a legion infected by the lust to dominate. In doing so, as Augustine wrote, our lust for domination ends up in our being dominated by that very same lust. This is why Rene Girard calls evil “the mystery of a pride which, as it condemns others, unwittingly condemns itself”.
At the same time, however, not all is lost, as not all is doom and gloom in this Gospel account. On a surface level, we can see this in Jesus’ taking of the Legion and casting them into the swine. It is not a simple taking out of a demon, but also a taking out of the lust to dominate, as well as the capacity to multiply versions of the self. Commenting on this passage in an interview with Michael Triguer, Girard had this to say:
That is why he is called Legion - in a way he is the embodiment of the crowd. It is the crowd that comes out of him and goes and throws itself off the cliff. We are witnessing the birth of an individual capable of escaping the fatal destiny of collective violence.
Support Awkward Asian Theologian on Patreon, and help make a change to the theological web.
