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In Father James's two talks, you already saw a kind of methodology, which I'm going

to elaborate on in the two talks that I give.

So angels, as created by God, as coming from God and returning to God, are worthy objects

of contemplation because they reveal God's intelligence, they reveal God's goodness, they reveal

something of the plan of salvation at work in our midst. So you notice how Father James was

talking about the angels, but also comparing, as it were, to God and to man.

That is to say, kind of situating our lives vis-à-vis the angels and then directing our gaze from their ministrations, from there being sent to God himself.

And we're going to perform a similar task here with demons.

But by comparison to the angels, the demons don't admit of the same type of kind of contemplative fruit or the same

type of contemplative insight because their natures have been obscured, because their natures

have been darkened. So whereas with the angels, you can kind of gaze upon the angels and never be, you know,

satisfied with the luminosity that you have taken in.

With the demons, right, there's a kind of contrary experience where you don't want to be

sucked in by their relative obscurity, right, by their relative darkness.

So we advert to the demons as a

feature of our faith, creatures, spiritual creatures, the existence of whom or in who we believe,

but then we kind of use them as a way by which to pivot to certain anthropological insights,

and then to certain insights about God himself.

...