St. Augustine, The Exorcist, and the Idolatry of Self

By Andrew Petiprin

In September 2023, Apple CEO Tim Cook released a video on social media declaring an ambitious program for the tech behemoth’s elimination of carbon from its manufacturing operations. To dramatize the self-congratulatory announcement, Apple produced a skit featuring professional actors, including Academy Award-winner Octavia Spencer playing “Mother Nature.”

When Mother Nature arrives, Cook asks anxiously, “How was the weather?” She stridently replies, “The weather was however I wanted it to be!” The employees then rattle off all the ways they have made progress toward the environmentalist ideals their visitor may have in her mind. But their intentions are never pure enough, nor are their efforts strong enough: Mother Nature is impossible to please. Despite assuring her of plastic-free packaging in carbon-neutral consumer goods, which have hit the market way ahead of schedule, Mother Nature stands before this group of sycophants as a parent whose children can never measure up. The implicit message is that humans are always the problem with the world. “Don’t disappoint your mother,” the deity declares on her way out, as everyone in the room breathes an audible sigh of relief.

One critique of the Apple skit is its lip service to environmentalism, an always vague and ever-changing ideology. Replacing the older virtues of conservation and stewardship, environmentalism prioritizes the earth itself over its suitability for humans to use what it provides to meet our needs.

As we saw in the last chapter, ideologies are boxes that inherently limit our outlook on everything, as contrasted with the holistic vision of reality proposed by the Catholic Church from generation to generation. Environmentalism is a good example of how ideology functions as religion, complete with a new god rebranded out of an old one—e.g., Mother Nature. Therefore, in this chapter, we shall build on our critique of ideology and examine the more troubling phenomenon of the proliferation of non-Christian and anti-Christian religious views, particularly by people who are avowedly non-religious.

Societies that have been Christian for a long time are now becoming pagan again, dusting off and opening up old boxes, with effects sometimes reminding us of Pandora’s infamous box. The Catholic Church could try—and, some might argue, has tried—to meet this new challenge by competing for religious space in a crowded market of things to worship. Or the Church could respond by being what it has always been, not unreflectively striving to become what it cannot be—namely, a religion in competition with other religions, old and new. Indeed, Christianity as it has been experienced and taught in the Catholic Church for over 2,000 years is more than a religion, and Catholics today should never settle for an explanation of the faith as merely a religion, even if the best one. Instead, the Catholic faith is the revelation of God in Christ, who is all in all, and therefore the answer to all the questions of the philosophers and the only hope for healing and wholeness.

Philosophy Is Better than Religion

The religions of antiquity offered basic explanations for certain phenomena, but they had no coherent theological worldview. There was usually a hierarchy of gods, each with different powers and purviews, and they vied not only with one another for influence, but also made allies and enemies among human beings. The old gods were competitive, like humans, only inhabiting a divine space rather than an earthly one. They demanded favors, which they did not explain, and they were happy to keep their distance from people when they had no need of them or were satisfied by what they were offered. The worship of these gods required sacrifice, but the gods offered no mercy in return. Moreover, the duties of human piety were usually synonymous with the perfunctory rituals of civic life, even among the impious.

In 399 B.C., the famous ancient philosopher Socrates was given the death penalty for thinking differently about religion, the gods, and God. In Plato’s Apology, we learn that Socrates has been brought up on charges “of corrupting the young and of not believing in the gods in whom the city believes, but in other new spiritual things.” We learn more about what these “new spiritual things” are in another of Plato’s dialogues, Euthyphro.

The question at the heart of Euthyphro is “What is piety?” The dialogue’s namesake, Euthyphro, has brought his own father up on charges of murdering a servant. In ancient Athens, both murder and betraying one’s parents were considered violations of the will of the gods. So, according to the logic of ancient Athenian religion, Euthyphro should be considered just as impious for turning in his father as his father is for murdering a servant.

Justifying himself, Euthyphro notes that Zeus, “the most just of the gods,” bound and castrated his father, Cronos, for swallowing his sons. Socrates’s interest is piqued. How can the gods themselves transgress laws of piety? And by extension, what are we to make of the gods’ disagreements about basic concepts like justice, goodness, and beauty?

As usual with Plato’s dialogues, the discussion between Socrates and Euthyphro ends in aporia, which is the word for confusion or doubt used for rhetorical effect. Nonetheless, it is easy to conclude that there must be an ultimate source of meaning beyond the gods—indeed, outside the universe itself. Right is right, and wrong is wrong. Truth transcends the gods.

Where Truth Leads

In yet another of Plato’s dialogues, Phaedo, Socrates’s conviction is at least partly related to the crime of teaching that the immortal human soul becomes one with Being itself, and therefore that there is something more powerful than the Greek pantheon.

Socrates’s final words to Crito before he succumbs to hemlock poisoning are “I owe a cock to Asclepius; do not forget to pay it.” Asclepius was the Greek god of medicine. By remembering that he owes a sacrifice to a god, Socrates reveals his willingness to participate in pagan religion as a formality, even though he taught an ultimate reality beyond routine sacrifices. There was God, who is an altogether different being from gods. And the critical discipline of philosophy, rather than the conformist practice of civic religion, shows us the way to him.

The death of Socrates is illustrative in our study of what religion is and our assertion that the Catholic Church is something more than religion. In Socrates’s teachings, preserved and expanded by his student, Plato, we see the limitations of mere religion, also known as cult, in light of a larger framework of transcendent truth. And just as “cult” is the root of “culture,” society goes wrong when it places ultimate meaning in things that are “penultimate,” or secondary to the fullness of truth. Things like environmentalism. Things like any merely civic or this-worldly religion.

Real truth—the truth—is always worth dying for. In Socrates’s case, but also among most of the other non-Jewish peoples of antiquity, we see how the religion of the gods per se was not worth dying for at all. Rather, people understood that their local gods warred and wooed and consumed—in other words, did the same sorts of things they did, only on a cosmic scale. They were comfortable worshiping pagan deities as part of their duties, but no one looked to Rah or Zeus or Odin for a revelation of all truth. In fact, the best-case scenario for paganism was always that the gods would simply stay away. Think again of the relief our twenty-first-century environmentalist Apple techies express when Mother Nature finally leaves them alone.

Rather, in the ancient world, when it came to questions of ultimate meaning, it was to philosophy, not religion that people turned. Socrates says in the Phaedo dialogue that someone who turns to the transcendent truth of God that philosophy proposes “is probably right to be of good cheer in the face of death and to be very hopeful that after death he will attain the greatest blessings yonder.”

Although the Greeks were famous for philosophy, the relatively little-known people of Israel had a unique way of life that combined philosophy and liturgy in ways other religious competitors did not. One of the most important aspects of early Christianity was its natural integration of Greek and Hebrew thought and worship. Although Christianity, like Judaism, was and is a religion with initiation rites, sacrifices, prayers, priests, and holy sites, it was and is also the continuation of and fulfillment of the entire ancient philosophical tradition.

It is of the utmost importance, therefore, that when the Messiah of Israel came into the world, he was understood to be Logos, the incarnate Word or Reason—the God of philosophy made flesh. It was those who were real seekers after truth, represented by the three Magi from the East, who anticipated Christ even before his arrival. Therefore, as the second-century Christian philosopher Justin Martyr put it, “those who lived in accordance with Reason are Christians . . . fearless and unperturbed.” To see how the Catholic Church that Justin died for in A.D. 165 remains the guardian and promoter of the Word down to the present day, let us return to the question of the gods versus God.

The Old Gods and Monsters

In the Bible, there are a few instances where we see sorcerers and wonder-workers wielding real power. In the book of Exodus, for example, in the midst of the ten plagues, Moses’ brother Aaron throws down his rod, which becomes a serpent in the presence of Pharaoh. Pharaoh’s magicians are able to transform their rods, too, “by their secret arts” (Exod. 7:11). Likewise, Pharaoh’s religious leaders can replicate turning water into blood (v. 22) and conjure up frogs (8:7). It is only with the third plague, turning dust into gnats, that the Egyptians can no longer compete. “This is the finger of God,” they declare (v. 19). Even Israel’s enemies recognize that the Israelite deity is of a wholly different nature from the capricious entities of everyone else’s religious systems.

When really put to the test, God permits no rivals. We learn of God’s omnipotence in his ultimate deliverance of Israel from Egypt through the Red Sea, but the gods of the nations persist despite being vanquished repeatedly.

The most famous of the ancient deities opposed to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is one variety or another of Baal, the Canaanite god of weather and fertility—a Mother and Father Nature. In 1 Kings, we find the story of Baal’s defeat, which leads to a long exile perhaps only recently ended. Sometime around the middle of the ninth century B.C., there reigned over Israel the notoriously wicked King Ahab, who erected a temple and an altar to Baal for his foreign wife, Jezebel. As punishment for Israel’s unfaithfulness under Ahab and Jezebel, the prophet Elijah proclaimed a drought and went into hiding.

Eventually, God ordered Elijah to return to Ahab to announce God’s willingness to open the skies and send rain to the earth again. Before that could happen, however, God had to display his sovereignty by sending Elijah to Mount Carmel to face “the four hundred and fifty prophets of Baal and the four hundred prophets of Asherah, who eat at Jezebel’s table” (1 Kings 18:19). Unlike Aaron and Moses at Pharaoh’s court, Baal’s servants are completely powerless to match the wonder-working of God’s servant Elijah. In shocking fashion, the failed prophets of Baal become raving mad in their impotence, mutilating themselves with sharp weapons as a symbol that all false religion ultimately leads to despair. Finally, Elijah puts them out of their misery, killing them.

The point here is not that Christians should follow Elijah’s lead and kill people of other religions. Not at all. Rather, we take note that in the Bible, servants of the true God never forget that God has competition from the gods of various cults, nor do they doubt that God will ultimately subdue and dominate these errant entities. As St. Paul finally declares about God’s triumph in his Messiah: “Christ is all, and in all” (Col. 3:11). On this side of God’s final victory in the Second Coming, however, the weapons of God’s enemies are not always without an edge, even if their effects are only temporary.

Fast-forward several centuries to the early days of Christianity, where we meet St. Augustine of Hippo, the greatest philosopher-theologian of the Patristic era.

Augustine was a zealous convert to Christ and the Church but also a lifelong admirer of Plato, trained in the highest arts of Roman rhetoric. Augustine saw the Roman Empire crumbling, and he looked out on an uncertain future, synthesizing a wide array of knowledge into the biblical imagination of a Catholic bishop. There were all sorts of religious offerings to sift through, including traditional paganism, Manicheism, various Gnosticisms, animisms, philosophical systems, syncretistic hybrids, and heretical forms of Christianity like Donatism and Pelagianism.

There was also Platonism, the expanded teachings of Socrates and Plato. But for all that Augustine admired Plato, and for all that we have demonstrated here how Socrates’s philosophical worldview is more like Christianity than the ancient pagan religions, Platonism, like all -isms, is insufficient to understand all of reality.

Amid a busy and dangerous life visiting his far-flung congregations as a bishop in rural northern Africa, Augustine both diagnosed his society’s ills and prescribed an abiding remedy in his monumental work City of God, published in the aftermath of the sack of Rome in 410. Many pagans blamed Christianity for undermining their ancient deities and compromising the common good. Augustine thought otherwise.

Augustine saw the situation quite differently from the pagan intellectual elite of his age, noting that “Rome had sunk into the dregs of the worst immorality well before the coming of our heavenly king.” The blame for Rome’s demise lay not with the new Christian God, but with the inherent weakness of the venerable old pagan pantheon tasked with preserving the virtue of the Romans. In one place in The City of God, Augustine points out that the Roman scholar Varro feared that “the gods may perish, due not to any enemy invasion but to the sheer indifference of the citizens.”

Likewise, Augustine explains, Virgil’s hero Aeneas “is said to have saved his household gods from the fall of Troy”—a telling illustration of the impotence of idols to sustain or save, since they turn out to need saving by human beings instead. But these gods are not nothing. Rather, they are real, Augustine argues, but they “are actually pernicious demons.” Augustine warns pagans to turn and accept the gospel, because their religion is deeply harmful both to their individual souls and to society at large. Augustine says of the pagan gods, “They are malignant spirits for whom your eternal happiness is punishment.”

Few people today, including devout Christians, pause to consider the possibility that the resurgence of non-Christian religion in its various forms—nature-worship, yes, but everything else from the protest rituals of wokeism to outright Satanism, too—may be a return of the demonic entities of the past. That is, non-Christian religion is not just a distraction from humans’ quest for truth in the world, but a menace to their immortality. In the vacuum left by a once-Christian society that has opted for illusions of public neutrality and private faith, the old gods have kicked open the door and begun preying on our vulnerable souls as in ancient times.

“You Speak Latin?”

We find a horrific cinematic proposal about the effect of the return of the old gods in the 1973 film The Exorcist. Directed by William Friedkin with a screenplay adapted by William Peter Blatty from his own novel, The Exorcist is the story of a young girl, Reagan MacNeil, whose thoroughly secular mother, Chris, a famous actress, finally realizes that demonic possession is the only explanation for her daughter’s shocking and unnatural behavior. Chris finds a Jesuit priest named Damien Karras, who is also a psychiatrist, and he reluctantly agrees to investigate whether Reagan may indeed be suffering from demonic possession instead of mental illness. Fr. Karras is assisted by a mysterious older priest named Fr. Lankester Merrin, and the pair are finally successful in delivering the demon from Reagan, but both men die in the process.

Now, most viewers of The Exorcist appreciate the film as fiction, pure and simple. Demons are just one of many types of scary monsters that filmmakers put on screen to sell tickets. And Friedkin and his team of cinematic technicians used effects in The Exorcist never before seen in a mainstream movie, causing some theatergoers to become ill. There were even rumors that pregnant women were sent into premature labor by the trauma of watching the movie.

Some people of faith today, however, find The Exorcist frightening precisely because they have studied the reality of spiritual warfare. Demons are real, and the Church has the power from Christ to defeat them. But there is more to the story, and even devout Catholic viewers of The Exorcist miss an important plot point relevant to our navigation of today’s religious landscape.

The Exorcist begins with a somewhat discordant prologue, where Merrin, played by the eminent Swedish actor Max von Sydow, discovers an ancient talisman while on an archaeological dig in northern Iraq. In writing the original novel and the subsequent screenplay, Blatty based Merrin partly on the famous French Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who was a Darwinian scientist and a mystic philosopher. Although Merrin does not play a large role in the film adaption, Blatty and Friedkin subtly make it clear in The Exorcist that Reagan’s possession is directly related to what the old priest unearthed and brought back to America.

In this way, The Exorcist is really the story of Merrin’s—and, by extension, the Church’s—ongoing struggle with an ancient evil long buried but not yet vanquished for good. And this evil’s origin in the sands of modern Iraq points us to the ancient conquerors of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah: Assyria and Babylon—the same deity or deities that Elijah temporarily defeated on Mount Carmel in the Old Testament.

The Exorcist presents a rare worst-case scenario for a person who is vulnerable to evil influences that have remained in the world, despite the best efforts of Christians over the centuries to minimize their effects. Reagan is just a kid, who does not deserve what happens to her. Nonetheless, her suffering illustrates how the old gods plague not just the people who either naïvely or maliciously invite them in. Rather, because the world is fallen, the Enemy’s victims do not always bear a one-to-one correspondence to guilt or innocence.

When Jesus heals the man born blind, he rejects the premise of the question “Who sinned, this man or his parents?” (John 9:2). What matters instead is how the triumph of God’s power in one person’s life may be an example to the world.

All About Me

At the end of The Exorcist, we are left to wonder whether Reagan’s ordeal will turn the hearts of those around her toward the truth of Christ. But whether a person is possessed by a demon or not, and what such activity may mean in any particular case, the way we think about ourselves today is an invitation to idolatry and bad religion. After all, only at the bitter end of the quest to find out what is wrong with Reagan do her mother, her doctors, and even Karras turn to the possibility that the menace lies outside Reagan’s own body and mind. They check all the other boxes first, and look outside ready-made answers only as a last resort. Such is our instinct in the modern West—for better or for worse, it’s all about the individual experience.

On this point, St. Augustine may guide us again toward a better way—the Catholic Church’s way. He can speak to us in particular from the perspective of trying to find meaning for himself, but via the philosophical method of self-criticism in light of revealed truth. Like all of us, Augustine was once blind and came to see. But unlike most of us, he described his embrace of truth in language destined to be remembered for centuries.

Backing up a couple of decades before he wrote The City of God, we encounter in the pre-Christian Augustine a prototype of the modern Western person: smart, successful, and miserable. He has tried a variety of religions, but he is still left with the realization that he can do everything except save himself. Just before his Christian conversion in a garden in Milan, Augustine reminds us in his Confessions, “This debate in my heart was a struggle of myself against myself.” Augustine’s greatest theological debate is not with a foreign opponent, but with his competing identities. He remembers his mistaken view of Christ as “a man of excellent wisdom which none could equal.” Jesus was important, but ultimately he was just another god to take or leave as one wished.

For a while, Augustine embraced a dualistic religion called Manicheism, which is in some ways similar to a modern mishmash of Eastern and Western spiritualities of good versus evil. Augustine ultimately found Manichaeism untenable. More miserable, he returned to philosophy and progressed to some extent toward truth. But not even Plato could take him all the way to wholeness.

Platonism did show Augustine how God’s Son, who is God’s wisdom, could be by nature the same thing as God himself. But nowhere in the ancient Greeks did he find the definition of Christ from St. Paul’s hymn in Philippians 2:6-11—the Christ who was pulling Augustine ever toward him is God and man, who “humbled himself being made obedient to death” and at whose name “every knee should bow.” In the full revelation of Christ, therefore, we see the deficiencies of even the best philosophy, but we also recognize the truth philosophy is finally striving to find.

As we saw at the start of the chapter with the example of Apple’s skit about Mother Nature, Western society is now in a crisis caused by jettisoning the totalizing vision of Christianity and turning back to mere religions. And although these religions take many guises, bringing back ancient evils and overlapping with all the -isms we explored in the last chapter, the self is at the center of it all. Sadly, today’s obsession with self lacks the critical examination characteristic of philosophical inquiry in Socrates’s famous statement from Plato’s Apology: “The unexamined life is not worth living.” To the Christian, the examined, individual life is the forum for what St. Paul calls “God’s handiwork” (Eph. 2:10).

The Kids Aren’t Alright

In the span of just a couple of decades, humans have become subject to a barrage of influences that turn them inward while completely jettisoning the self-critical apparatus of philosophy that turns them outward to God and neighbor. The result is the worst kind of non-philosophical religion, with individualized principles and practices detached from ultimate, universal meaning. Our late Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI, offered an analysis of this monumental shift, and his analysis holds up even better now than when he offered it back in 2004.

On the eve of his election as pope, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger noted in a now famous homily at Mass for the College of Cardinals that “we are building a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one’s own ego and desires.” These words were controversial, and they have proved prophetic. In less than two decades, this relativism has morphed into complete atomization in Western society and a religious dictatorship of our making.

Indeed, the most pernicious religiosity these days is not merely prioritizing opinions above doctrine or refusing to commit to the one true religion over other false ones (or none). Christianity is not merely competing with the return of the demonic gods of paganism (which it is), nor is Christianity merely failing to articulate its exclusive truth claims amid other faiths and philosophies that discourage people from staking an exclusive claim (which, again, it is). Rather, social media now allow each of us to play God for himself, constructing false identities ex nihilo and then worshiping them in one dopamine-hit scroll after another after another.

These gods of self, like all the gods of the imposter religions, are out to destroy us.

In her illuminating 2018 book iGen, psychologist Jean Twenge has shared unprecedented data about loneliness, disconnection, and depression in the generation that came of age in Pope Benedict’s pontificate, which corresponds to the advent of the smartphone. Between 2011 and 2015, there was a 50-percent increase in major depressive disorders among young people. The suicide rate for twelve- to fourteen-year-olds has doubled since 2007. Older generations are not immune. Even standing with thousands of other people at a sporting event, museum outing, or pilgrimage, the goal becomes capturing and customizing rather than receiving and experiencing. “Sharing” becomes a click of my finger on a screen for followers or fans “out there” rather than choosing awareness of and connection to the people standing next to me.

Today’s fragmented souls need more than religion—a fact that early Christians knew well, but we have mostly forgotten. In an essay he wrote as pope emeritus, Benedict XVI pointed out this fact of the past and our need to rediscover it today. He wrote, “In the mission that developed in Christian antiquity, Christianity did not conceive of itself as a religion but, rather, in the first place as a continuation of philosophical thought, in other words, of man’s search for truth.” Neither the civic paganism of Augustine’s day nor the self-tailored online existence of the twenty-first century offers the vision of the fullness of truth that the Church describes.

Down with Promiscuity, Up with Truth

Then, there’s morality. Behavior, and particularly sexual behavior, was the touchstone in Augustine’s day that made Christianity seem so radically different from other religions. It still is. On the one hand, the Pew Research Center show that young people have more problems than ever with the Church’s teachings about sexual morality. And there are nearly as many expressions of sexual identity as there are people to express them. But on the other hand, as journalist Kate Julian demonstrated in an article in The Atlantic in 2018, sexual promiscuity is strangely way down among this same demographic of younger people, even as the use of pornography is way up.

What a mess. But today, as in Augustine’s time, only Christianity offers liberation from both promiscuity and the slavery of self-gratification, in much the same way that it offered a path out of the pagan orgies and the culture of libertinism of ancient Rome. The Church now, as then, offers “life in Christ,” which is the official term the Catechism of the Catholic Church uses to describe morality. What Catholics hold as definitive moral teaching, therefore, is precisely not a set of arbitrary dos and don’ts.

One can almost feel the longing in people today for the will to put down their phones, individual glowing boxes, and find real connection—to know themselves, to know and be known by a lifelong spouse or remain celibate rather than jump from partner to partner or gratify themselves with pornography. Who knows how many members of a new generation of unhappy young men and women may be unwittingly praying at this moment, as Augustine once did, “Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet”? And yet, eventually, Augustine discovered life in Christ as his way out of the bondage of sins of the flesh, and he therefore felt and experienced salvation even on this side of eternity. Augustine’s submission to the Church not only overcame for him what he could not achieve on his own, but also taught him in the end to be himself—ironically, the purported but never-realized goal of the “dictatorship of relativism.”

Neither Jupiter nor demons nor household gods nor a Manichean demiurge nor the ego nor the iPhone nor a one-sided Jesus offers to help a person become whole. Only the real Christ, God and man united, provides unity amid diversity, eschews the priority of any category of identity above “son of God,” and promotes universal brotherhood and the common good. The real Christ, who is perfect God and perfect man, offers us in the Catholic Church a unity of individuality and belonging.

In the embrace of this truth, the Catholic Church can never be a mere religion. God is with us as one of us—in the Church, and not simply up there or out there or maybe somewhere. In this regard, it is important to realize that the Church as Christ founded it exists right now. The authentic Church has not ceased to be and is not waiting to come into existence in the right form. This reality makes all the difference to our lives and to the life of the world.

This essay is adapted from the chapter "The Religion Box" from my 2025 book The Faith Unboxed: Freeing the Catholic Church from the Containers People Put It In," available from Catholic Answers Press or wherever you buy your books.