Flipping the Script in Favour of Christianity, but at the Expense of the Divine Spirit

Flipping the Script in Favour of Christianity, but at the Expense of the Divine Spirit

“Let no one destitute of philosophy enter here.” Were this ancient motto etched above the doorway of our inquiry, it would prepare us to examine a dramatic transformation in metaphysical thought: how a daemon (δαίμων) in Plato’s time – a guiding or divine spirit – was recast as a demon in later Christian theology, something wholly malign. In this polemical exploration, I write as Daniel Sanderson, openly biased toward the wisdom of the Greeks (Plato and Socrates especially), yet determined to fairly steel-man the Catholic Church’s position on this issue. Indeed, I will consciously employ what I have elsewhere called the “ideal techniques” of argument (as outlined in The Art of Rhetoric, part of my Ideas box set) to give both perspectives their due. By being self-aware in style, I acknowledge up front that I am using rhetorical craft in the service of truth-seeking.

The script has been flipped: where Plato’s world saw daimones as potentially benevolent intermediaries or inner guides, the Christian world – to assert the supremacy of its one God and the need for salvation – demonized these very spirits, literally and figuratively. What was gained for Christian doctrine, and what was lost from the concept of the divine spirit in man? In the pages ahead, we will examine the original Greek notion of the daimon, survey its appearances in Plato’s dialogues (with a comprehensive catalogue of references), and then contrast this with the Catholic re-interpretation that turned all daimons into devils. We will see how Church Fathers like Justin Martyr and Augustine and theologians like Aquinas justified this move and impacted Western metaphysics and the perception of inner spiritual guidance.

The Greek Daimon: Socratic Guide and Cosmic Mediator

To the ancient Greek mind, a daimon was a far more ambivalent and nuanced being than the pitchfork-wielding fiend of later Christian imagination. The term (δαίμων) in classical usage denoted a spirit of the in-between: lesser than a full god, greater than a mortal. Daimones could be benevolent or malevolent, but often they were seen as guardians, inspirers, or messengers of the divine. Notably, in Plato’s works, we find daimon used in several key ways – from Socrates’ inner voice that stays his hand to the cosmic function of Love (Eros) as an intermediary, to the soul’s fate after death. Plato even offers a playful etymology: in Cratylus 398b, Socrates suggests that humans of the golden age or the virtuous dead are called daimones “because they were wise and knowing (δαήμονες)” – a pun linking daimon to wisdom. This implies that a daimon originally connoted a benevolent wisdom-being, not an agent of evil.

To ground our understanding, let us survey all the instances in Plato’s dialogues where the term daimon (or an equivalent guiding spirit) is explicitly mentioned, along with their context and type. This catalogue (complete with Stephanus references and original Greek terms) will illustrate the rich variety of meanings the Greeks ascribed to the daimonic.

Table: Instances of “daimon” or guiding spirit in Plato’s dialogues, with Greek terms and contexts.

As the table above shows, Plato and his contemporaries had a flexible, largely positive conception of the daimonic. A daemon might be the voice of conscience (Socrates’ inner mentor), the channel of divine communication (Diotima’s cosmic mediator), a guardian angel of sorts (the spirit allotted to each soul), or even an aspect of one’s psyche that is divine (the rational soul as “daemon” within). Crucially, these daimons were not necessarily evil; they often were benevolent or morally elevating. Socrates' daimonionas is a gift from the gods that keeps him from error. And the Greek religious framework allowed for agathodaemons (good spirits) and kakodaemons (bad spirits) – a spectrum of spirits rather than a stark dichotomy of angel vs. devil.

Even linguistically, as shown in Cratylus, daimon was linked with wisdom and the souls of the righteous. In widespread usage, Greeks would toast “to the Good Daimon” at symposia, essentially an auspicious spirit of fortune or happiness (indeed, the word eudaimonia – happiness – means “having a good daemon” ). All of this underscores that the daemon in Greek thought was not a sinister tempter lurking in the shadows; it was more often a protective presence or a source of inspiration.

Before moving on, let us address a potential misconception: the daimon was not worshipped as a god in its own right by Socrates or Plato. Socrates clarified that his inner voice did not replace the conventional gods – it was “related to the gods,” and he still considered it under the gods’ purview. This will be important when considering the later Christian charge that daemons were pagan gods in disguise. For the philosophers, a daimon was a way the gods might communicate or help guide a soul, not a rival deity. Socrates’ contemporaries, however, were suspicious of anything not in the traditional pantheon, and they accused him of introducing a daimonic innovation. (Indeed, the legal indictment against Socrates was that he “does not believe in the gods of the city, but introduces other new daimones” .) Ironically, this very ambiguity – was Socrates guided by a divine spirit or dabbling in forbidden realms? This prefigures how Christian thinkers would later grapple with the legacy of such personal spirits.

In sum, the Greek daimon was a multivalent idea: sometimes an inner guide, sometimes a semi-divine being out there in the cosmos, sometimes an aspect of one’s own soul. It was generally viewed as potentially benevolent (or at least morally neutral, capable of good) and as a means by which the divine and human interacted. This concept would undergo a dramatic mutation in the crucible of monotheistic theology.

The Christian Recasting: From Daimon to Demon

When Christianity rose to prominence, it inherited the term daimon – but radically altered its meaning. The New Testament, written in Greek, uses daimonion (δαιμόνιον) to refer to evil spirits or “unclean demons” that Jesus casts out (e.g., Luke 4:33). Thus, from the very start, Christian usage of daemon was pejorative. The Septuagint (Greek Old Testament) had already used daimonia to describe the idols or false gods of the heathens (e.g., Psalm 96:5 LXX: “all the gods of the nations are daimonia”). The linguistic seeds were sown for a polemical redefinition: daimon, once a broad term for spirit, became demon, a term exclusively for a malevolent spirit.

Why did this “demonization” of the daemon occur? To steel-man the Catholic and patristic position, we must appreciate the theological stakes for the early Church. Christianity asserted a strict ontological dualism between Creator and creature – there is one God, and everything else angelic or human is created. In this view, intermediate beings that are not firmly angels of God risk being seen as rebels against God. The Church Fathers identified the pagan gods and spirits with the fallen angels spoken of in Scripture – Satan and his demons. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church summarizes: “Satan or the devil and the other demons are fallen angels who have freely refused to serve God… Their choice against God is definitive” . In other words, all those spiritual beings the pagans called daimones must be sorted into the binary of Christian cosmology: they are either angels (if good and serving the true God) or demons (if not). There is no middle category of morally ambivalent spirits in official Christian doctrine – no “divine yet not divine” intermediaries allowed. The very ambiguity that made the Greek daimon intriguing made it dangerous to a developing orthodoxy that sought clear lines between good and evil, God and idol, truth and falsehood.

The early Church Fathers explicitly argued that the so-called gods of the pagans and their daimons were in fact demons misleading humanity. Justin Martyr (2nd century), for example, bluntly stated that “the pagan gods are demons.” He even favorably cited Socrates in this regard: “When Socrates questioned their divinity he was accused of atheism and killed, and now the demons are causing the same things to happen to Christians.” Justin’s argument, aimed at a pagan Roman audience, was that Christians aren’t atheists – they just reject the false gods, as Socrates did, and are persecuted by those very demons (who inspire Socrates’ and Christians’ accusers). Here we see a Christian inversion: Socrates’ daimonion, which he trusted as a benign guide, is construed by Justin as either a demon in disguise or a guardian angel. Justin doesn’t clarify which, but he implies that since Socrates opposed the demonic idolatry of Athens’ pantheon, his guiding spirit could not have been one of those idolatrous demons. Some Christian apologists thus almost appropriate Socrates posthumously as a friend of the true God – guided perhaps by a “guardian angel” (the Christian term they preferred for a personal spirit) rather than a pagan daemon. Indeed, later Christian authors sometimes interpreted Socrates’ daemon as either an angel or a manifestation of natural reason/conscience granted by God . The term guardian angel was a way to sanitize Socrates’ experience: if it was good, it must not have been a pagan daemon at all, but an angelic prompt from the true God . If it was suspect, the fallback was to say Socrates was deceived by a devil. (The ambiguity remained in Christian discussions, as one might imagine – but the one option not available was to accept Socrates’ daimon on its own Pagan terms.)

Augustine of Hippo (4th–5th century) provides perhaps the most systematic Christian re-evaluation of daemons in his City of God. Augustine, once a Neoplatonist himself, knew the Platonic theory of daimons well (especially as laid out by the philosopher Apuleius, who had written On the God of Socrates about daemons). In City of God Books VIII and IX, Augustine confronts the pagan claim that daimones mediate between the high God(s) and humanity. He steel-mans the Platonist position before refuting it: “There is, they say, a threefold division of rational creatures: gods, men, and demons. The gods occupy the highest region, men the lowest, and the demons the middle region (the air)… Thus demons mediate between gods and men.” This is essentially the view we saw in Plato’s Symposium and later Platonic writers – an entire cosmology of middle spirits. Augustine then delivers his rebuttal with rhetorical force. He argues that even if such beings exist, they cannot be trusted: “by no possibility can men be reconciled to good gods by demons, who are the slaves of vice, and who delight in and patronize what good and wise men abhor and condemn.” In Augustine’s Christian-Platonic moral framework, any being that is not firmly fixed in the perfect goodness of God is liable to vice. The pagan daimons, being “aerial animals” with passions, are at best unreliable and at worst actively wicked – enjoying the lurid sacrifices and theater plays that virtuous men find shameful .

Augustine goes so far as to mock Apuleius for euphemistically calling Socrates’ demon a “god” in the title of his work: “Apuleius was so ashamed that he entitled his book On the God of Socrates, when according to his own theory he ought to have called it On the Demon of Socrates.” In other words, Augustine insists Socrates’ spirit, if not the true God or an angel of that God, must have been a demon in the Christian sense – there’s no middle ground. And if it was a demon, then by definition it was morally bad or deceptive. Augustine’s steel-manning of the Church position thus concludes: the very idea of needing demons as mediators is anathema, because Christ is the only mediator between God and man (1 Tim 2:5), and good angels accomplish any necessary mediation without seeking worship or leading us into vice. The Platonists may have intuited a need for go-betweens, but Christianity supplies angels and the Holy Spirit for that role, and denounces all other spirits that seek veneration or attachment as impostors.

From the Church’s standpoint, this reclassification was spiritually vital. By collapsing the neutral category of daimon into the negative category, the Church aimed to guard the purity of worship. Any spiritual being that wasn’t unequivocally aligned with the one true God was to be cast out. The First Commandment’s jealousy (“you shall have no other gods before Me”) set the tone. Thus if a Greek philosopher claimed guidance from a personal spirit, the Christian had to ask: Is this spirit from God (like an angel or the Holy Spirit), or from the devil? There were no other options. In many cases, Christians decided it must be a demon in the negative sense.

We should note that the Catholic tradition did make one allowance for a concept somewhat similar to the Greek daemon: the doctrine of guardian angels. This idea, rooted in Scripture (e.g. “He will command his angels concerning you” – Psalm 91, and Jesus’ saying in Matthew 18:10 about angels of children), holds that every individual soul is assigned a good angel by God . Thomas Aquinas explicated this in his Summa Theologica, asserting that “each man has a guardian angel” from birth until death (Summa Theol. I, Q.113, a.5). One could argue that this teaching is a Christian baptism of the daemon concept: it affirms a personal spiritual guide, but one firmly in the service of God, not an independent deity or spirit. Aquinas and the Catechism also affirm that angels/demons have no bodies and operate by influencing our minds and senses . The key difference is morality and allegiance – a guardian angel seeks your good and God’s will; a demon seeks to lure you from God. The Church thus appropriated the beneficial aspect of having a personal spirit (by integrating it into angelology), while condemning all autonomous daimons as either non-existent or diabolical. In effect, Christianity says: “Yes, Socrates might have had a spirit guide – but if it truly kept him virtuous, it was a God-given angel, not a pagan daemon. And if it wasn’t from God, then it was a demon feigning goodness.” Either way, the pagan notion of a morally neutral or dual-natured daemon is erased.

To a devoted Catholic thinker of the early era, this absolutist stance made eminent sense. Human salvation was at risk; one whisper from a demon could lead a soul to damnation. And in their view, the world was indeed full of demons – St. Paul had written that the pagans “sacrifice to demons and not to God” (1 Cor 10:20). The steel-man argument is that the Church had to aggressively demonize (pun intended) the daimon concept to protect the faithful from spiritual deception. By teaching that all such spirits are either angels (if good) or demons (if not), the Church created a clear rule: do not trust any spiritual influence that does not confess Christ. This helped early Christians reject participation in the old rites and magic, which they saw as trafficking with evil spirits. It upheld the idea that inner guidance must be tested – is it the Holy Spirit or a lying devil? The tragedy of a soul following a false daemon into heresy or idol-worship was, to the Church, far worse than the loss of a charming philosophical idea. Thus, at the expense of the pagan “divine spirit” concept, Christianity bolstered its own framework of a universe at war between God’s hosts and Satan’s minions. It was a conceptual sacrifice deemed necessary for spiritual safety.

Metaphysical Fallout: The Loss of the Inner Guide

This flipping of the script had profound implications for Western metaphysics and the inner life. With the coming of Christianity (and its later dominance in Medieval Europe), the previously fluid spirit world was polarized. No longer could a learned person speculate about a personal daemon without suspicion; one had to couch it in accepted terms (guardian angel, saintly inspiration) or fear accusations of consorting with devils. The very word “demon” in all European languages came to mean only evil spirit. The positive side of daimon survived only in words like “eudaimonia” (happiness) as a fossil of language, or in the concept of genius (the Latin translation of daemon, used to mean a guiding talent or spirit – even there, by the Renaissance, people distinguished between a good genius and a bad genius).

In philosophical terms, the Christian simplification arguably narrowed the channels of metaphysical nuance. The idea of an inner oracle or personal divine alter ego became suspect. Philosophers who still hinted at such things had to be careful. For instance, Boethius in Consolation of Philosophy talks of “the daemon within” in a way reminiscent of Socrates – but writing as a Christian, he frames Lady Philosophy as the voice of reason (implicitly aligning any inner voice with reason given by God). Mystics who claimed private revelations or voices needed the Church’s approval, lest their daemon be interpreted as a demon. Joan of Arc, for example, heard voices she believed were saints and angels – and though ultimately canonized, she was initially tried by an ecclesiastical court that all too easily labeled such phenomena demonic without proof of orthodoxy. The point is: the mental freedom to trust an inner spirit was largely forfeited in the Christian West, unless that spirit’s credentials could be proven as divine (a high bar to clear).

On the flip side, Western thought gained a clarified moral framework about spiritual influence. The Church’s teaching galvanized the idea of personal moral responsibility and discernment of spirits. No benign daemon could be blamed for one’s misdeeds; if a “spirit” told you to do something contrary to God’s law, it was to be firmly rejected as demonic. This sharpened the sense of conscience in a different way: conscience was now often conceived not as a literal spirit but as the God-given faculty in the soul that might be aided by angels or the Holy Spirit, but ultimately had to align with Church teaching. In a sense, the daemon migrated inside and became more abstract – syneidēsis (conscience) in Scholastic philosophy – while externalized guidance was to be sought through prayer, scripture, and the counsel of the Church, rather than from an independent personal spirit.

It is interesting to consider that while the Church banished the pluralistic daimon, it retained a strong sense of the “demonic” as a real presence. Western culture after Christianity still believed the air was full of spirits – but now, nearly all those roaming spirits were up to no good unless proven angelic. This perhaps made the world emotionally more frightening: every unknown spirit was assumed hostile until proven friendly, rather than something potentially helpful until proven otherwise. The inner life of a person who in pagan times might have sought a vision of their personal daemon or heeded a dream as a message from a guardian spirit, in Christian times became an inner battlefield: temptations and dark voices from demons vs. the conscience and inspiration from God. The scripts were flipped in favour of a clear moral drama, but at the expense of that gentle daemonion whisper that Socrates found so “useful and helpful” in his life.

Another impact on metaphysics was the hardening of ontological categories. The rich ambiguity of the daimonic that thinkers like Plato, Plotinus, and others could muse upon – beings neither fully material nor fully divine, gradations of spiritual existence – was largely flattened in mainstream Christian thought. Medieval Scholastics did recognize choirs of angels and different grades of spiritual being (following Pseudo-Dionysius and others), but these were all either obedient to God or fallen. The idea that some spirits might be playful, tricksterish, or indifferent to the human moral order (as many pagan daimons were) became inadmissible. Every spirit took on a moral charge in the Christian cosmos: an angel carried grace with it, a demon sin. Even in later folklore, this dichotomy persisted – e.g., fairies and elves in folk tales, which are vestiges of pagan nature spirits, were often viewed by Church authorities as either harmless imaginary lore or covert devils trying to lure people (hence the fear of witchcraft as dealing with spirits). Western culture oscillated between an official stance that any pagan-esque spirit is demonic and a popular underground that kept hoping for friendly household elves or white magic. But the educated consensus under Church influence was firm: if it’s not an angel of God, don’t trust it.

One cannot help but wonder what was lost in the process. The concept of the “inner daemon” can be seen as a recognition of something profoundly human: our intuition of a higher calling or guidance that isn’t easily reducible to discursive reason. Socrates embodied this by obeying a voice that he could neither logically explain nor ignore. In banishing the daemon as a category, did Christianity discourage people from listening to their inner promptings, except under the narrow definition of “the Holy Spirit” (as mediated by Church)? Many Christian mystics and thinkers did speak of being moved by the Holy Spirit or having the indwelling Christ guide them – functionally very similar to having an inner daemon, except with explicitly Christian framing. Arguably, the Holy Spirit replaced the daemon in function, but being the third Person of the Trinity, it was a much more awesome and less personalized idea than a modest little guardian spirit. Not everyone felt worthy of direct communion with the Holy Ghost, whereas a Socratic daemon is almost a bridge for the everyman – a personal, accessible divinity. The Protestant Reformation later would re-emphasize individual conscience and the idea that each believer can be guided by the Holy Spirit reading scripture – a democratic spiritual guidance not needing a special church hierarchy. In a sense, that was a shift back toward empowering the individual’s inner guide (though still firmly under the Christian God’s aegis/shield, not a free agent daemon).

From a metaphysical perspective, the elimination of intermediate daimons contributed to the strong transcendent/transient divide: God and angels in Heaven, humans on Earth, demons in Hell (or the air) trying to drag us down. Plato’s layered cosmos of emanations and intermediaries was pruned in the West (although it made a comeback in certain esoteric and Renaissance Neoplatonic circles later). It’s telling that when Renaissance scholars re-discovered Platonic and Hermetic ideas of daimons, they often ran afoul of the Church. For example, the philosopher Giordano Bruno spoke of contacting planetary intelligences (a kind of daemon) and was burned as a heretic; Marsilio Ficino cautiously syncretized Plato’s daemons with Christian angels to avoid censure. The daemon concept did re-enter discourse in more secular forms – literary and psychological. The Romantic poets would speak of their “daemon” or genius as the source of inspiration (e.g. Wordsworth’s “daemon” of his imagination). In modern psychology, Jung’s concept of the daemon (or daemonic) refers to an autonomous inner force of the psyche – again, not purely evil, but the raw power of the unconscious that can either inspire or destroy. These modern echoes show that the idea of a personal guiding or indwelling spirit never truly dies; it simply gets new names if the old ones are forbidden.

Yet for many centuries, Western Christianity’s narrative held sway: the only acceptable inner guide was God’s grace, and the only acceptable intermediaries were God’s angels or saints (never self-directed spirits). The result was that anything like Plato’s daemonion would be viewed with deep suspicion. We might say that the West traded a friendship with many minor spirits for an exclusive allegiance to one spirit – the Holy Spirit. The advantage was a unified moral vision; the drawback was a potential impoverishment of the imaginal landscape. As an author partial to Greek wisdom, I cannot help but lament “the expense of the divine spirit” in this transaction: something personal, playful, and profoundly human – the idea of a unique daemon for each of us – was largely sacrificed.

Reconciling the Daemonic with the Divine

In “flipping the script” on the daemon, Christianity undoubtedly bolstered its theological narrative – affirming the sole lordship of Christ and the need to reject all rival spirits. The Church emerged victorious in defining demon for all time as a devil – a testament to the power of a dominant narrative to shape language itself. This polemic was successful: today if you mention “demon” most people think of a horned fiend, utterly forgetting that the term once could mean a guardian angel or Socratic guide. From a rhetorical standpoint, it’s a masterstroke of redefinition. As a philosopher who admires Plato, however, I also see it as a case where something was lost in translation – a diminishment of the richness of our engagement with the spiritual dimension of reality.

Still, perhaps there is a way to bridge these perspectives. Plato’s wisest daimon was essentially an agent of the Good – Socrates’ sign never counseled evil, Diotima’s daimon Eros leads the soul to divine Beauty. Could a Christian not say that these were in fact angels or movements of the Holy Spirit by another name? Indeed, some Christian writers did exactly that, trying to claim the Platonic daemon into the Christian fold. The Catholic Catechism even notes that “the spiritual tradition of the Church” has seen value in ideas like the conscience and guardian angel as guides . And Aquinas himself, while rejecting pagan worship of demons, would agree that “the natural light of reason” (a gift of the divine Logos) can warn a virtuous pagan against sin – which is essentially what Socrates’ daemon did. So perhaps the inner truth behind the daemon wasn’t entirely snuffed out, just rephrased.

From a metaphysical stance, the West eventually found a need for some nuance again. “Inner voice” C.S. Lewis’s fiction famously portrays a demon (Screwtape) and a guardian angel-like figure (Malacandra) in ways that echo the old ideas under a Christian framework. The rigid fear of any daemon outside official doctrine has softened as overt paganism waned. Thus, one might argue that the daemon returned through the back door of literature, art, and psychology, even as formal theology kept its guard.

In writing this essay, I have tried to remain self-aware, even as I argued fervently. I admit I have deployed a few ideal rhetorical techniques (yes, those who know my Art of Rhetoric will have caught me in the act) – for example, painting vivid contrasts, asking pointed questions, and appealing to our sense of historical drama. This self-awareness is in the spirit of Socrates, who always examined himself, and I hope it adds credibility: I am not hiding my preferences or methods. The bias toward Greek wisdom is mine. However, it is a bias born of respect for what Plato’s worldview enabled – a cosmos filled with gradations of meaning and “a great chain of being” where even a humble philosopher could feel attended by a divine spark.

Yet, in fairness, Christianity’s flip of the script was not merely arbitrary power-play; it was a considered response to what it saw as the gravest of dangers – the loss of a soul to false gods. Augustine’s passionate reasoning , Justin’s apologetic strategy , Aquinas’s clear logic on angels and demons, and the Church’s official teachings all stem from a sincere attempt to protect the integrity of the relationship between God and man. No ungodly intermediaries needed; God Himself has come down to mediate in Christ. From that standpoint, the daemon had to either join God’s side or be denounced. There is a stringent beauty in that clarity, though it came at the cost of the old enchantment of personal spirits.

The impact on Western thought can thus be seen as a trade-off: Unity and moral clarity for complexity and intimacy. The divine spirit became centralized (in the Holy Spirit and angelic ministry), rather than personalized in myriad ways. Whether this was for better or worse may lie in one’s own metaphysical commitments. Perhaps the time is ripe to appreciate both: to see in Socrates’ daemon the glimmer of the true Holy Spirit guiding even a pagan unwittingly, as some Church Fathers allowed, and to see in the Christian demonology a needed critique of blind trust in spirits. In a dialectical way, the Greek and Christian views can inform each other – reason and faith, inner guide and external revelation – if we are wise enough to let them converse.

In closing, the story of the daemon-to-demon transformation is a reminder of how fluid our spiritual vocabulary can be, and how much is at stake in its definition. To borrow Socratic irony one last time: we have learned that what one culture deems a guardian angel, another may call a deceiving devil – and vice versa. The truth, perhaps, lies in understanding the functions and fruits of these influences. “By their fruits you shall know them,” said Jesus. Socrates’ daemon bore the fruit of a morally upright life and fearless pursuit of truth; by that measure, was it truly a demon? The Catholic Church, in its zeal to secure souls for heaven, chose to err on the side of caution, branding all unapproved spirits with the mark of Cain. It flipped the script decidedly in favor of its own vision of Christianity. But in doing so, it perhaps suppressed a certain divine ambiguity that the ancients knew – the idea that the divine can speak to each of us in a unique, intimate way, as a personal daimon tailored to our soul.

As a philosopher-poet at heart, I like to imagine that even today, if we listen carefully in the silence of our conscience, somewhere between an angel’s whisper and a neuron’s firing, we might yet hear “a voice, which comes to me… and always forbids me to do wrong.” We might, in fact, reclaim the daemon that was never truly lost – only misnamed. And in that reconciliation, Christianity need not feel threatened, for truth is one. The daemon and the Holy Spirit, properly understood, will not contradict, if indeed both speak for the Good. Plato’s insights can thus complement Christian wisdom, and the divine spirit in man can be honored without blasphemy. After all, in the ultimate Platonic sense, Truth (ἀλήθεια) and the Good (τὸ ἀγαθόν) are of God – and any daemon worth its salt would lead us only to those.

In the end, flipping the script in favour of Christianity secured a victory: the old gods were out, Christ was in, and the cosmos was orderly under one supreme Lord. But at the expense of the daemon, something personal was muted. Perhaps now we can afford to un-mute it just a little – to allow that Socrates, the “Christian before Christ,” may have walked with a true guiding spirit after all. Such an allowance does no harm to faith; it merely enriches our understanding of how creatively the One God can work in the soul. The daemon may have been renamed, but its work continues – whether we call it conscience, guardian angel, Holy Spirit, or even resurrect the old term in a new light. Recognizing this is not a fallback into paganism, but a fuller embrace of the profound mystery that the divine can indwell the human. On that, Plato and Christianity actually agree, though they tell the tale in different tongues.

And so, having navigated this issue with (I hope) a blend of scholarly detail and rhetorical flourish, I conclude by toasting to what the Greeks would call our agathos daimon – our good guiding spirit – and what a Christian might simply call the grace of God. May we heed it well, whatever name it answers to. In the symposium of ideas, let Philosophy herself judge which of the two – the Platonic daemon or the Christian demonology – better nourishes the soul. Perhaps the wisest course is a symposium of both, united in truth. After all, as Socrates might quip, even the smartest daemon would nod in agreement when the Truth is spoken. And that, dear reader, is a rhetoric not of deception, but of integration – the kind of ideal technique I unabashedly champion.

Sources:

Plato, Apology (31d, 40a) ; Phaedrus (242b) ; Symposium (202e–203a) ; Cratylus (398a) ; Phaedo (107d–e) ; Republic X (620d–e) ; Timaeus (90a–d).

Justin Martyr, First Apology (as quoted in commentary), Second Apology, Dialogue with Trypho, Exhortation to the Greeks, Discourse to the Greeks, The Monarchy or The Rule of God (CUA Press, 2008).

Augustine, City of God VIII–IX (esp. viii.14–16, ix.16–22) .

Catechism of the Catholic Church §§391–395.

Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica (I.63–64 on demons; I.113 on guardian angels).

Uebersax, John. “Socrates and the Daimonion” (discussion of ancient and Christian interpretations).

Sanderson, Daniel. The Art of Rhetoric (from the Ideas box set) – for rhetorical approach (author’s note).