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Twelfth-century daemons
The Dragmaticon of William of Conches is a discourse on created
substances, visible and invisible.
25
Discussing the latter can poten-
tially jeopardize his monotheism, so he begins with a confession of
faith:
We believe that there is one creating substance, immense beyond
measured length or width or thickness, wise and just with application
or disposition, compassionate and pious without suffering, moving
everywhere without being moved, existing in every place essentially,
neither expanded nor contracted, always present without past and
future, omnipotent, omniscient.
26
Plato is declared to be in agreement with Christian doctrine. The duke,
the addressee of the dialogue, responds: ‘if the opinion of a pagan is
to be cited, I prefer you to quote Plato than other, for he accords bet-
ter with our faith’.
27
William then describes the Timaean five regions
of the universe: the heavens are the region of the fixed stars; ether –
which he considers as pure fire,
28
a notion rejected by Aristotle
29
– is
the region stretching from the fixed stars to the lunar circle; air is the
upper half of the atmosphere, the moist region is the lower half; the last
is earth.
30
Each region or sphere is occupied by ‘rational living beings’.
What follows is a paraphrase of the sections concerned with these beings
or daemons in Calcidius’s Commentary on the Timaeus (Chapters 127–36),
written during the second half of the fourth century and which accom-
panied his partial translation of Timaeus 17a–53c.
31
In the heavens there
are the stars that are visible, rational, immortal and impassible; and on
earth live human beings, visible, rational, mortal and passible. Between
these outermost regions the daemons reside.
32
They are intermediate
Celestial Souls and Cosmic Daemons
177
creatures, invisible, rational, immortal and passible, who occupy the
ether, air and the moist regions.
33
The daemon of ether is superior in
dignity and knowledge and rules over the daemon of the air who ‘runs
between God and men as a mediator and reveals the will of God to men
through a voice, a dream, imagination, or visible signs. He reports the
prayers of man to God.’
34
These two higher classes have a natural goodness and sympathy for
human beings. The lower daemon of the moist regions is wicked and
sex-crazed, delighted by the distress of human beings.
35
He is the devil
in the Christian sense; ‘he fell through his pride from the very place to
which man ascends through humility’.
36
The duke then contests that
it is a contradiction to refer to good classes as ‘daemons’ which he
understands traditionally as devils. William answers:
You think, as I infer from your words, that a demon is the same as a
devil, which is not the case. For a demon is said to be any invisible
being using reason, as if knowing. Of these the two high orders are
called calodemons, that is, ‘good knowing ones’, the lower order is
called cacodemon, that is, ‘evil knowing one’, for calos means ‘good’,
cacos ‘bad’.
37
William shows that the Platonic tradition considers calodaemons
as angels according to the place they occupy in the cosmic hierar-
chy, whereas – in reference to pseudo-Dionysius’s Celestial Hierarchy –
Scripture divides them into nine classes according to rank.
38
Calcidius
explains that the holy angels are the ethereal class of beings ‘extend-
ing obedience towards divine things, with the highest wisdom, aiding
human affairs prudently, also serving as investigators and executors,
[they are] called demons, I think, as they are “daemones” (
= experts);
the Greek call men knowing all things “daemones” ’.
39
As for the stars, William of Conches rejects the Aristotelian fifth ele-
ment and argues that the celestial bodies are composed of the four
elements, for how can the Sun be the source of all heat if it is not itself
hot?
40
They are moved by their fiery nature and thus their causation
is purely natural.
41
William is reticent regarding the doctrine of celestial
souls, unlike Calcidius who cannot conceive a universe in which human
beings in the lowest region of the universe have souls and the stars far
superior and perfect do not.
42
In his translation and study of Calcidius’s
discussion of daemons, Boeft posits that Calcidius is here equating the
celestial souls with the daemons of the highest region, rendering them
as angels, as a way of establishing a metaphysical credibility to an issue
178
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