Demonic wails, shouts and chants haunt the monastic literature of late- antique Egypt, wreaking havoc in the lives of monks.

An anecdote from The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, for example, tells of a monk called Moses, who is tempted to commit fornication and dare not remain in his cell. His spiritual advisor instructs him to look into the western sky, and there he sees hordes of demons, causing a stir and making an uproar for the purpose of waging war on the holy (“καί ησαν τεταραγμένοι, καί θορυβοΰντες τοΰ πολεμεΐν”).^[457] ^{^[458] Moses is then told to look towards an innumerable multitude of angels in the east, who bring support to the saints.}

He discovers that although the demons fight against the inhabitants of the desert, a greater number of angels are with them to offer help. The anecdote ends with Moses returning to his cell, reassured. Yet the account leaves us with a question: how was demonic sound thought to affect the souls of the virtuous?

One of the richest sources of information about the relationship between demonic sound and spiritual disorder is The Life of Antony, by Athanasius of Alexandria.^[459] Composed in Greek between 356 and 358, the hagiography soon grew in popularity and was translated into Latin around the mid-point of the 370s. The narrative of Antony, a hermit in the Egyptian desert, tells us much about the way in which demons sought to distress monks. Antony comes up against his raucous adversaries at every stage of his asceticism, and delivers a speech to his brethren about demons, based on his personal experience. In this delivery, Antony dismisses demonic sounds as empty threats, a sign of the impotency of demons. Yet, he also admits that weak ascetics may be troubled by noisy apparitions: demons “create disturbances” (QopufioQai) and cause a stir (TqpdTTouor) so that they may deceive the simple.^[460]

The cacophonous nature of demons in the Life of Antony has often been mentioned in passing.

David Brakke, for instance, notes that sound is part of demons' arsenal of external attack, causing fear, and, for the monk suffering a moment of weakness, a reason to doubt his faith.^[461] In his study on Athanasius's asceticism, Brakke draws an analogy between Antony's description of demonic disruption and the charge that Athanasius levels against heretics, who, like demons, create confusion in an effort to lead Christians astray.^[462] Brakke is justified in detecting a political slant to Athanasius's portrayal of demonic disruption. Athanasius's anti-Arianism no doubt pervaded the Life of Antony,^[463] and fifth-century evidence illustrates the important role that sound, particularly psalmody, played in the conflict between Arians and orthodox Christians. The historical writers, Socrates Scholasticus and Sozomen, record how Arians in fourth-century Constantinople performed antiphonal psalms and songs that illustrated their doctrinal beliefs. This served to aggravate the bishop of Constantinople, John Chrysostom, who sent out his own flock to perform hymns in counter-attack. The performance, however, ended in chaos, with fighting breaking out between the two sects.^[464]

Interpreting demonic sound solely in this light, however, gives little room for exploration of how demons, and their aural assaults, work on the individual soul. Athanasius's concern with the effect of sound is demonstrated in his Letter to Marcellinus, which discusses in detail the beneficial effect of singing psalms. Paul Kolbet has argued that Athanasius envisions singing psalms as a therapeutic activity, which restores order (TaHic) to the soul, allowing the worshipper to regain knowledge of God that had been lost through the Fall. This, he explains, leads to re-unification with the divine and cures the sickness of human nature.^[465] Kolbet's paper sheds light upon the relationships between the soul, the cosmos, song and health.

It does not fall within the remit of Kolbet's article to investigate how the harmony between these elements may be disrupted by demonic sounds. By pursuing this neglected line of enquiry, I will show that demonic anti-music is a chief means of throwing Christians into a state of disorder. I use the term “anti-music” to denote the sounds made by demons that are not only defined against the psalmody of Antony, but are a perversion of the harmony that can be perceived throughout creation.^[466]

This paper will first of all consider how the relationships between the health of the soul and harmony and, conversely, illness and disorder, were formulated in antiquity, with special reference to the Pythagoreans, Platonism and Stoicism. Having established this intellectual and philosophical background, I will demonstrate that Athanasius's treatise, Against the Heathen, depicts the cosmos and the human soul as complex structures of relations, comparing them to musical instruments. I will then discuss how demons seek to upset these relations, and thereby cause sickness of the soul, in the Life of Antony. Finally, I consider the implications of these findings for the study of monastic literature of the late antique era and beyond.

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Source: Bhayro Siam, Rider Catherine (eds.). Demons and Illness from Antiquity to the Early-Modern Period. Leiden, Boston: Brill,2017. — xiv, 434 p.. 2017

Demonic wails, shouts and chants haunt the monastic literature of late- antique Egypt, wreaking havoc in the lives of monks.

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