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Chrysostom’s Devil: Demons, the Will, and Virtue in Patristic Soteriology is unavailable, but you can change that!

For many Christians today, the notion that demons should play a role in our faith—or that they even exist—may seem dubious. But that was certainly not the case for John Chrysostom, the “golden-tongued” early church preacher and theologian who became the bishop of Constantinople near the end of the fourth century. Indeed, references to demons and the devil permeate his rhetoric. But to what end? ...

Chrysostom’s account of the demons’ powerlessness in the face of the Christian’s proairesis becomes clear.19 Humans have the ability to choose good and to resist the devil and thus to “defeat” him. The devil cannot harm a human being; a human being can only harm himself by choosing to follow the devil, that is, by choosing to do evil, to sin. Chrysostom draws on what appear to be Stoic categories for discussing “harm” to humans, distinguishing between true and apparent harm. The only true harm, he
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