Delivered From Evil
Alexander Riley on The Exorcist, 50 Years Later
The American film director Bill Friedkin died in August of last year. In one of those coincidences that make it difficult not to believe that things are being purposefully organized, the film for which he is most known, The Exorcist, an adaptation of William Peter Blatty’s best-selling novel, celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in December.
There was another recent death among the central players in the making of that important and often misunderstood film. Max von Sydow, one of the outstanding screen actors of his generation, passed away on March 8, 2020, at the age of 90. The towering, gaunt, intensely emotive Swede is perhaps best known to world cinema fans as the crusader knight Antonius Block in The Seventh Seal. But he also portrayed one of the greatest religious characters to appear in a Hollywood film, Father Lankester Merrin, the character referred to in the title of The Exorcist.
But as superb as Friedkin’s film is, and notwithstanding the scintillating acting by von Sydow and by Jason Miller as the story’s second priestly protagonist, Fr. Damien Karras, one must look to Blatty’s novel to find the full development of the Christian narrative at the story’s heart. (And isn’t it always the case that the novel is superior to the film?)
Blatty created the Merrin and Karras characters as complex priestly archetypes, heroic warriors for God against evil who were nonetheless themselves struggling with serious internal weaknesses and contradictions. It is a complex and honest Christianity that is depicted in this novel and the film based on it. One almost never finds such a depiction in American popular culture today, which may explain why The Exorcist is widely misapprehended by the general American public as merely a horror story.
Consumed by Doubt & Guilt
At the center of the narrative of The Exorcist is an exploration of the nature of religious faith in a modern world that presents endless seemingly rational reasons to disdain Christianity’s metaphysical claims about the nature of evil. Thus, when actress Chris MacNeil’s teen daughter Regan begins to behave strangely, Chris does what all modern parents would do as a first move: she consults medical science for an answer. When the doctors cannot resolve the problem, however, it is they who suggest an exorcism.
Of course, they do this not because they accept the supernatural basis of such a rite but because Regan’s behavior suggests to them that she is suffering from an auto-suggestive pathopsychological syndrome. In the medical experts’ view, the girl has become convinced of the reality of demonic possession. Consequently, in her fear, her unconscious mind has latched on to this idea in such a profound way as to produce the conditions of her illness: “[Exorcism] used to work, in fact, although not for the reason they thought, of course. . . . The victim’s belief in possession helped cause it . . . and in just the same way his belief in the power of the exorcism can make it disappear.”
So Chris consults Fr. Karras, whom she knows socially, but the priest, who also has a medical degree in psychiatry, informs her that the church has moved away from the rite. “Many educated Catholics . . . don’t believe in the devil anymore,” he says. Karras is perhaps, at this point in the novel, among those educated Catholics. We encounter him in the midst of a serious crisis of faith, and he is considering leaving the priesthood altogether. His elderly mother, who lived in abject poverty in New York City, which on his priest’s salary he could do nothing to alleviate, has just died, and he is consumed by guilt. If he had gone into medicine instead, he could have made a good living and taken her out of the city. As her funeral concludes, her brother tells him, “Never mind, she’s in heaven now . . . she’s happy.” In desperation, Karras thinks, “Oh, God, let it be! . . . Oh, God, please be!” We know, though, that he is agonizingly unsure of it.
The demon that has possessed Regan is a cunning exploiter of human psychological weaknesses and is especially talented at determining the chief areas of vulnerability in an individual human soul and then launching a terrifying assault at just these weak points. In the cat-and-mouse game of Karras’s effort to discover the root of the problem with Regan, the malevolent entity uses the priest’s doubts about the existence of the supernatural to mislead and confound him. Moreover, the game is designed to amplify Karras’s skepticism regarding God and thereby to separate the priest from him still further.
During one exchange between Karras and the possessed girl, the demon proves capable of carrying on a conversation in Latin. Karras immediately notes to himself mentally that knowledge of a previously unfamiliar language is one of the signs of possession accepted by the Catholic Church. But the demon quickly taunts the scientifically trained priest by suggesting that there might be an explanation consistent with a purely medical explanation; he then watches Karras’s disappointment and indecision with malicious relish: “That is why I’m fond of you,” the demon cackles. “That is why I cherish all reasonable men.”
Beset by Pride
In contrast to the young Karras, Fr. Merrin is an elderly and much-respected priest-intellectual, the author of scholarly books in archaeology and rock-solid in his faith. Yet he, too, is presented by Blatty as humanly complicated and sinful, struggling with aspects of his character that are patently antithetical to the spirit of the Christian faith. The demon that has possessed young Regan is an old enemy that Merrin, an experienced exorcist, has faced before. Some of the novel’s most theologically sophisticated material concerns the demon’s efforts to give the old priest reason to despair about his worthiness of salvation. Merrin struggles with a moral weakness that he shares with a goodly number of his intellectual tribe. It is pride, the demon knows, that has played a central role in driving his intellectual career and that has led to his inability to mingle easily with men who are not scholars and writers, with their mundane interests and their incomprehensible lack of concern for intellectual matters.
Pride, the original sin, is perhaps the most widespread human failing, and Blatty displays it to us in Merrin, the novel’s hero, to emphasize his humanity, his connection to all of us who seem demonstrably smaller in accomplishments and mastery. Merrin understands that this is the part of his personality that most inclines him to his own ruin, and the demon uses it as the efficacious and deadly weapon it is for him. “Your abode is in a nest of peacocks, Merrin! Your place is within yourself! Go back to the mountaintop and speak to your only equal!” the demon thunders at him. Merrin knows, despite his pride, that he is called to find a way to act in affirmation of his fellows, in magnanimity toward them, even if he of necessity mostly lives apart from them. They are children of God, of moral worth equal to his own.
Redemptive Acts of Love
It is not well-enough known by the general public—most of whom are familiar only with the film, and some not even with that but only a second-hand knowledge of the story through the broader popular culture—that both priests eventually, after a difficult spiritual struggle, triumph over their weaknesses and bring the demon down to defeat.
Karras comes to a new understanding of the reality of spirit after nearly giving in to the deceptions of the demon. During the exorcism, the latter mimes Karras’s deceased mother scolding him for his abandonment, and Karras’s violent response requires Merrin to send him from the room to gather himself. While Karras is resting downstairs, he sees a framed poem written by Regan to her mother for Mother’s Day:
If instead of just clay
I could take all the prettiest things
Like a rainbow,
Or clouds or the way a bird sings,
Maybe then, Mother dearest,
If I put them all together,
I could really make a sculpture of you.
This child’s narrative of the irreducibly spiritual essence of love—no purely materialist explanation can effectively account for a mother’s love for her child or the child’s reciprocal feeling—strikes Karras like a thunderbolt. He begins trembling as he thinks of the outrage of “the suffering of children and the frailty of the body . . . the monstrous . . . corruption of death.” He regains his priestly calling to minister to his afflicted fellows, and he ascends the stairs back to the room in which the demon, who has killed Merrin in his absence, awaits him.
Religious rage at the obscene violence of evil gives Karras the power to vanquish the demon, first by provoking it to try to possess him, and then by hurling himself through the window, causing his own death but thereby exiling the demon. Just before he dies, Karras is able to make his final confession to a priest friend who has arrived on the scene at just the right moment. We are assured that his soul is safe.
We know, that Merrin, too, has overcome his principal spiritual affliction because of a brilliant monologue he delivers in response to a question from Karras during the exorcism. What, Karras asks, is the point, from the perspective of the devil, of possession, since the possessed victim’s will is not touched by the possession and she is therefore guilty of no sin?
Merrin’s response is the entire religious message of Blatty’s book in abbreviated form, and it merits recounting at length:
Who can really hope to know? . . . Yet I think the demon’s target is not the possessed; it is us . . . the observers . . . the point is to make us despair; to reject our own humanity, Damien: to see ourselves as . . . ultimately vile and putrescent; without dignity; ugly; unworthy. . . . And there lies the heart of it, perhaps: in unworthiness. For I think belief in God is not a matter of reason at all . . . it is finally a matter of love; of accepting the possibility that God could love us . . . [T]he demon knows where to strike. . . . Long ago I despaired of ever loving my neighbor. Certain people . . . repelled me. How could I love them? . . . It tormented me, Damien; it led me to despair of myself . . .and . . . very soon, to despair of God. My faith was shattered . . .
[A]t last I realized that God . . . was asking that I act with love; that I do unto others; and that I should do it unto those who repelled me, I believe, was a greater act of love than any other . . . [E]ven from this—from evil—will come good . . . in some way that we may never understand or see. . . . Perhaps evil is the crucible of goodness. . . . And perhaps even Satan—Satan, in spite of himself—somehow serves to work out the will of God.
Though both priests perish physically, their spiritual heroism puts the demon to flight and saves the child. More, the struggle has, as a consequence, led to the recovery of Karras’s faith and the saving of his soul. It is clear that Merrin has overcome his pride, and his martyrdom at the hands of the demon is what ultimately provokes Karras’s own act of courageous compassion in calling the demon out of the child.
In Greek tragedies, such as Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, the hero can only triumph by accepting his usually awful destiny without blinking. However admirable such a response to the abyss was for ancient Greece, this is not the logic of Christian drama. In Christian plays and novels, the individual always has the choice between good and evil and, even though he may die, if he makes the right choice, death loses its terrible sting. In The Exorcist, Christian faith is accepted as the means of transcending the mortal condition. The deaths of Karras and Merrin are redemptive and sacrificial acts of love, and this is the final message of The Exorcist.
Catholic & Ecumenical
Blatty was Catholic, and so the particulars of the framework of his novel run through Catholicism. But there is Christian ecumenism in the backstory. The Exorcist was inspired by the 1949 case of a then-14-year-old boy pseudonymously known as Roland Doe. The boy, whose real name was Ronald Hunkeler, was from a German Lutheran family living in Cottage City, Maryland. The family reported odd noises and levitating furniture (there is, of course, a famous scene in the film in which Regan’s bed floats off the floor) connected to the boy’s presence and asked their Lutheran pastor to investigate. The pastor, Luther Miles Schulze, had Roland spend a night at his home for observation and then advised the family to seek a Catholic priest. He apparently believed an exorcism was in order and that Catholics were the experts in this matter.
Ultimately, the shared Christian understanding of the metaphysical reality of evil and the spiritual means of combating it makes up the heart of the story of The Exorcist. It is a startling and encouraging fact that such a story could still be told from the very heights of American popular culture only fifty years ago.
Alexander T. Riley is a senior fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization and a member of the board of directors of the National Association of Scholars.
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