In my days as an atheist, I was under the impression that supernatural occurrences were essentially of three kinds: the effects of natural principles not understood, the effects of hucksterly greed working on the minds and pocketbooks of the naive, and the effects of LSD.

Everyone seemed to agree. Some people believed in God, the sentimental believed in angels, and the immature believed that there were witches, but on the whole, people seemed to be enlightened, rational and unsuperstitious.

I did have a large supernatural skeleton lurking in my own closet, but as it seemed to have been a temporary matter, accompanied by various more mundane psychological disturbances, I was content to accept that I had briefly gone insane.

Not wanting others to look at me askance, I kept quiet.

It was not until years later, when I started to tentatively speak of my experience, that I realized how common encounters with the supernatural are. The vast majority of people that I have spoken to have had some sort of experience for which there is no natural explanation: whether it is a rosary that miraculously turned to gold, a visitation by a deceased relative, the disastrous fall-out from an experiment with a Ouija board or a prophetic dream warning them of a future disaster.

My own experience began at the age of 15, when I was staying at my grandfather’s cottage. I saw a vision of a man in black looking over the water: a being that slowly entered my life, claiming to be my soul-mate. I had always longed for mystery and magic and was easily swept up in the Gothic Romanticism of such an idea. But as my life became increasingly wrapped up in him, I began to suffer — loss of appetite, lack of joy in ordinary things and sleepless nights plagued by terrifying presences. Eventually he began trying to convince me that I should take my own life in order to escape the dreariness of life, and join my soul forever to his.

This consumed my life for about eight months until, standing on a pier in Venice, I had the unspoken sense that he was going to have to leave. I didn’t understand why, but when I looked up at the dark sky, I was struck by the sight of a certain stone angel that stood above us, blowing the trumpets of dawn against the night.

This may sound incredible or delusional, but such happenings are not uncommon. On the contrary, they are an element of human experience that has occurred in all times, and in all places. Yet today they are rarely spoken of, even by those with first-hand experience.

This is partially because over the last few centuries the idea of a spiritual reality has been losing credibility in intellectual circles. If you look at past philosophers — even at empiricists like Locke and Bacon whose work is foundational to the scientific revolution — you find that the idea of angels is treated quite seriously.

Few modern scholars, on the other hand, would dare to entertain the notion that the universe may be populated not only with atoms and ribonucleic acids, but also with angels and demons.

The result is something like the emperor’s new clothes, but in reverse. Educated people reassure each other that ghosts and monsters are medieval spooks, taken seriously only by idiots, madmen and illiterate hicks. They celebrate the triumph of our age over such superstitious tomfoolery, and then quietly hope that no one will find out when they see something that gives the lie to the prevailing atmosphere of materialism.

Indoctrination into anti-supernaturalism begins young, and it begins with the best intentions.

Parents do not like to see their children frightened, so they attempt to create a safe world in which evil is kept far at bay. The ubiquitous children’s stories in which an apparently supernatural occurrence turns out to be the wind in the trees or a sock under the bed ensures that the majority of people grow up with the idea that if something strange occurs, it must have a perfectly natural explanation.

This often leads to improbable and unscientific theories being accepted as rational alternatives to the “irrationality” of faith.

The anti-supernaturalist, in order to avoid believing in the perfectly coherent notions of angels and miracles, accepts the incoherent notions of mass-hallucination, psychosomatic stigmata and world-wide Catholic conspiracies to manufacture miraculous images and incorrupt saints.

Such errors are not confined to the secular world. Many people within the Church join in the frenzy of demythologization, but whereas the materialist must account only for widespread tales of ghosts and faith healing, the Christian modernist must radically reinterpret both Scripture and Tradition. He must believe, for example, that when Christ cast out demons, he was really only curing the mentally ill. Such explanations make nonsense of the Gospel: Tourette’s syndrome does not cause its sufferers to immediately recognize the Son of God and shrink from him in terror, and epilepsy does not ask to be allowed to go into a herd of pigs.

Such anti-supernaturalist explanations are not merely sins against faith, they also lead to offenses against charity. When a person suffering from demonic interference, such as oppression or possession, is subjected to anti-psychotic drugs that severely retard the personality, or confined indefinitely in the walls of a mental hospital, this constitutes serious damage to their dignity and to the salvation of their soul.

It also prevents the Church from being able to do the work that Christ set her. The real business of religion is not to make “good people” or “just societies” or to bring about material good in the world. The Church is here not to fight against poverty and abortion, but against Moloch and Lilith.

St. Paul is quite clear about this: “For we are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 6:12).

These spiritual forces cannot be fought with pamphlets, political campaigns or high-profile television ads. These things become useful only when they have a sort of para-sacramental quality — when they are the physical manifestations of spiritual acts.

A simple, poorly written pro-life tract can be enough if it is distributed by a holy woman who has prepared herself in front of the Blessed Sacrament, while millions of dollars can be squandered supporting political candidates who are deeply opposed to same-sex “marriage” but have no real relationship with God.

The laity is called to sanctify the world, not by forcing it under the yoke of the law, but by leading it to life in the Spirit. This cannot be done if we deny spiritual reality.

So why do we deny it? The ultimate reason is pride: the silly vanity of those who do not want to appear foolish, and the pride of scholars who wish to think themselves more intelligent that St. Thomas Aquinas, more perceptive than Augustine and better able to answer the great questions than Our Lord himself.

Intellectual pride abominates everything that it cannot know. Not only the supernatural — ghosts and angels, demons and miracles — but also things that science could not possibly disprove: alien encounters, secret societies, Sasquatch. What all of these things have in common is not their existence or lack thereof, but the fact that they suggest an entire world that is unknown and inexplicable: a world in which there are not only species of field mice uncatalogued by science, but leviathans who live by rules wholly unknown to it.

This is not to say that I have something against scholars. On the contrary, it is the scholars in whom lies the hope for the remedy of this problem.

If there is going to be a renewal of interest in angels — a glorious and mighty image to replace our maudlin infant cherubim — it is going to have to begin with the scholars. It is they who are called to apply the tools of psychology, physics and philosophy to the teachings of the Thomists to deepen our understanding of the angelic ranks.

The result will not be a return to ages of darkness and superstition, but a strong, new light that will drive away the shadows of modern superstition and restore man to his place in a bright-blazing cosmos, filled with the wondrous and half-comprehended, replete with mysteries, and ablaze with the power of God.

The work must begin somewhere, so next week we’ll take a look at what we can know about the angels and demons that haunt our world.

Melinda Selmys is a staff writer

for VulgataMagazine.org