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“Travis Proctor’s Demonic Bodies is a fascinating and original work, one that will be of interest to many scholars of early Christian ideas on demons and the body. Its sophisticated analysis of numerous early Christian texts using the lens of disability, ecological, and post-humanist studies makes an important contribution to the field. His overarching argument that regardless of whether ancient thinkers argued for the incorporeality/immateriality of demons or for their embodiment, the development of their arguments were inseparable from their development of early Christian anthropologies is a compelling one.” — Heidi Marx, Professor, University of Manitoba
Steve Campbell, Author of Historical Accuracy:
“Or the embodiment of demons” — beyond mere personifications of deviance, do demons exist?
Angels “report to” God. Do demons report to Satan or some other entity and does Satan or this entity exist?
In the Bible, Jesus was tempted by Satan. That could have been merely the personification of temptation.
Peter, for a moment, was Satan, a personification of the adversarial “don’t harm yourself.”
So, “evil” thoughts in consciousness are writ large as having personhood; holy positive thinking can be writ large as the Holy Spirit.
“Christian authors constructed the bodies that inhabited their cosmos–human, demon, and otherwise.”
To inhabit means to exist.
Travis Proctor
I think that *eventually* within Christian thought demons do come to be something like “metaphors” or “personifications” for deviance or interior sins.
But among earlier Christian authors, such as the ones I cover in my book, they did hold to a rather “literal” sense of demons existing autonomously – with their own bodies, personalities, etc.
This slowly shifted, due largely to the influence of monastic writers in late antiquity, who “interiorized” the demonic to align with the interior struggle of the monk.
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