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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? ...

Everyone has a proairesis, a faculty of the soul that is an ability to choose, which is free and what makes a human self-determining. Since it is free, neither demons nor God can compel a person’s proairesis. It is entirely within a person’s own control. The devil attacks and deceives, dressing up sins in fancy clothes, and for this reason Christians must be vigilant that they not lose their salvation.8 When Chrysostom uses demonological discourse in places other than these conversations about suffering,
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