I think that talking about the devil has always caused discomfort and still does: for some it is fear, for others fascination, for others respect, for others rejection, for many more, silence.
It’s not strange: for centuries, evil has been lived as something so real, so painful and so disconcerting, that human beings needed to explain it, and not only explain it, but put a face, a name, and an intention to it. Thus was born the understanding of the devil: not as a whim, but as a human response to an experience that, with the schemes available at the time, did not find sufficient explanation in the schemes of man.
These lines do not arise to deny evil—that would be naive—nor to soften its gravity. They arise from profound and uncomfortable questions: what are we really saying when we talk about the devil? What image of God and of the human being emerges from that way of understanding evil?
If, as the Gospel says, “No one has ever seen God” (John 1:18), then all reflection on God, evil, or the devil necessarily passes through human experience, history, and conscience. Thinking about evil outside of that realm risks reassuring us too soon, displacing outwards what we might need to look at honestly within.
This writing proposes a serene shift: from demonology to anthropology; not to diminish the weight of evil, but to attempt to understand it differently, more seriously; not to dilute responsibility, but to fully embrace it within human reality and not to lose God, but to free him from images that make him, certainly, morally problematic.
This understanding does not intend to correct the faith of the past nor to invalidate the ways other generations comprehended and interpreted evil. Rather, it seeks to read them from a historical consciousness that has certainly grown in understanding. Fidelity to tradition does not consist of repeating its answers formulated centuries ago, but of assuming the same question with the lucidity that time, and the effort to better understand, has given us.
I Evil: a universal human experience
Evil is not a theory; it is a real experience for everyone. It appears in everyday life: violence, injustice, betrayal, abuse… In the cruelty that baffles precisely because it contradicts what we intuitively consider to be the most human thing we possess. There is no culture or era that has not had to face it and rationalize it and explain it with its schemes and words.
Faced with this experience that is born with man himself, human beings not only reacted morally, but also intellectually. They sought explanations, and when available reason was not enough, symbolic language appeared: myths, narratives, personifications. Not as the elaboration of a deception, but as the most honest possible attempt to say the incomprehensible, the unspeakable.
The figure of the demon arises in that context. Personalizing and objectifying evil allowed, for centuries, to give narrative coherence to a reality that surpasses us: to point out a cause, preserve the primordial conviction that good was original and desirable, and that the origin was not evil.
But every explanation is conditioned by the culture that produces it. Demonology did not fall from the sky already finished: **it was historically elaborated**, dialogued with concrete worldviews, and reflected the limits of understanding of each era.
Recognizing this doesn’t trivialize evil; on the contrary: it forces us to ask ourselves whether those inherited categories still help today, or, without us realizing it, **begin to obscure our search for God more than they illuminate it.**
II The devil in history: from symbol to materialization
All ancient cultures developed figures of evil: adverse forces, hostile spirits, rival gods. Myth – understanding in its historical moment – does not falsify reality; it attempts to explain it when there is not yet sufficient conceptual language.
In the biblical sphere, this evolution is visible: Israel did not come into being with a developed demonology. In its earliest stages, evil was understood within the context of divine action and human history. Over time—and certainly also under external cultural influences—more defined figures began to appear, eventually leading to Satan as instigator, accuser, and opponent.
This gradual understanding and conceptual development should not be read as a progressive revelation of data about the “spiritual world,” but as growing symbolic elaboration of the experience of evil in man. As theology, anthropology, and moral consciousness become more refined, so do their explanations.
The problem arises when those explanations, that symbolic language, are absolutized; when what was born as an attempt at understanding becomes a closed explanation, immune to revision and disconnected from real human experience.
Here appears a paradox: **the more detailed the descriptions of the demon become, the more evident its conjectural nature becomes.** One speaks with precision about that which, by definition, cannot be experienced, observed, or verified.
And this literalization has consequences: when evil is located outside of man, responsibility is diluted and human beings appear more as a battlefield —God who cares for us and the devil who intends to knock us down— than as responsible subjects of their own history.
III Jesus and the displacement to man
Jesus does not live outside of his cultural context; he shares the language of his time. That is why he speaks of demons and spirits, but speaking in the available language —in his time and for Him— does not mean thinking in the same way.
Jesus does not theorize about the demon, does not develop a demonology, and does not describe spiritual hierarchies or natures. Jesus possibly cannot completely detach himself from the interpretation of his time, but seeks to better understand and emphasizes the man.
What he does is shift the understanding of the origin of evil.
Faced with a comprehension that places the origin of evil outside of man, Jesus affirms something of enormous anthropological scope: “From the heart of man come forth evil thoughts…” (Matthew 15:19)
With this phrase, evil ceases to be primarily explained as external influence and instead is understood as a reality that emerges from within the human being. Evil is not minimized: it becomes personal and makes us responsible, not victims.
Even in the biblical stories of exorcism, the center is not the expelled entity but the restoration of the person. Jesus does not dramatize evil nor turn it into a spectacle. He returns the concrete man to his word, his dignity, his possibility of reintegrating into the community.
Seen this way, so-called exorcisms do not prove a literal demonology, but reveal something deeper: human fragility. Many of those experiences can be understood today as extreme expressions of suffering, trauma, or personal disintegration, named with the understanding and language available in their time.
Jesus is not so interested in knowing “what spirit is it?”, but “what is happening to you…?”
He does not fight invisible enemies: he heals the historical reality of the person. This reading does not pretend to exhaust the mystery of extreme suffering, but to avoid explaining it hastily through categories that displace attention from the care, accompaniment, and real healing of the person.
IV From Demon to Man: Responsibility and Freedom
When evil ceases to be explained as the action or influence of an external agent, a central question emerges: human responsibility.
This shift does not enclose the human being within itself nor does it leave it alone facing its fragility. Relocating evil within the realm of human freedom does not mean expelling God from the horizon, but understanding Him differently: not as an absentee; rival, tempter, or strategist of evil, but as the silent and constant foundation of good that sustains freedom from within. God does not substitute human responsibility; He makes it possible, He makes it real.
For centuries, the figure of the demon has fulfilled an ambiguous function: it protected the image of God, but at the same time alleviated the moral burden of man: evil could be explained as temptation or deceit, diluting personal responsibility.
The price has been high: freedom and responsibility, which is the most valuable center of the person, were weakened.
The anthropological displacement proposes another reading: if evil arises from the human heart, then freedom is not a battlefield of the demon against our conscience, but the very place of personal, free, and responsible decision.
This does not imply a guilt that overwhelms and paralyzes us, on the contrary: responsibility, understood as our real capacity to respond, liberates us. Guilt immobilizes; responsibility opens paths, propels us towards our wholeness.
Evil ceases to be an inexplicable fatality and becomes a human and everyday task. Not something that happens “in spite of us,” but something that occurs from our natural freedom and responsibility: it happens “within us and with us.”
V Evil as a human process
Evil is not a substance or an entity; it is a failed form of relationship: it is a human possibility.
It does not exist in itself, but as a distortion or absence of a possible good. It appears in poorly resolved processes, in unintegrated wounds, in immaturities inherent to the man’s process.
Thinking of evil in this way does not trivialize it: it makes it human and transformable. If it were an external, autonomous force, we could only resist it. If it is part of a wounded human process, it can be worked on and healed.
The characteristics attributed to the demon—deception, division, accusation—are not alien to man: They are actually unintegrated human possibilities. The figure of the demon has often functioned as a symbolic mirror of that shadow.
Understood in this way, human life is not a struggle against evil, but a free, responsible—and fallible—process of personal fulfillment.
VI Original goodness and structural well-being
If evil is not in any way the foundation of being, then the starting point is not corruption, but goodness.
Speaking of original goodness is not idealizing man, it is affirming that **being is good in its root**, and that evil does not prove a failed creation, but a free and ongoing one.
Evil does not exist because man is bad, but because **he is not yet fully made**: He is free, unfinished, and called to grow.
From here, ethics ceases to be obsessive surveillance and becomes pedagogy of the good. It is not about extirpating a supposed original corruption, but about accompanying processes of maturation of the person, of each of us.
VII God as Father, not as strategist of evil
This shift directly affects the image of God. A God who allows the action of a powerful demon to “test” his children inevitably ends up being morally a problematic god; a father who lovingly cherishes his children does not educate through testing or harm.
This displacement is neither comfortable nor immediate. Assuming responsibility without resorting to external scapegoats demands a maturity that we are not always willing to sustain. But adult faith is not measured by the tranquility it offers, but by the truth it allows us to inhabit.
Jesus always presents God as Father, and this is not a pious metaphor, but an ontological and anthropological key: the relationship is not founded on mandate, but on a real bond, a bond that constitutes us.
Man’s love for God does not arise from obligation, but from the recognition of having been loved first by Him. A mature faith does not need miracles to believe nor demons to sustain itself. It relies on trust, not fear: we have a real Father who behaves like a real father.
This displacement is not only anthropological but also theological.
VIII Structures, religion and historical responsibility
Evil is not only individual, but is “embodied” in human structures —economic, cultural and religious— that in many cases normalize injustice, so that man finds himself immersed in an environment that does not facilitate or lead to good.
Here the concept of “structures of sin” makes sense, provided it does not become a **new excuse**. Neither the “personal demon” nor the “systemic demon” can substitute human responsibility.
A religion that displaces evil towards an external force runs the risk of disabling critical awareness, but a mature religion illuminates reality to transform it with human consciousness and freedom, not to spiritualize it.
From Fear to Maturity
This text does not aim to close the mystery of evil, but to live it and inhabit it differently.
Removing the devil from the center does not impoverish the understanding of evil: it makes it more human. It restores to man his dignity as a responsible subject and frees God from images that cannot be ethically sustained.
Removing the demon from the center doesn’t always produce immediate relief: sometimes it leaves the human being more exposed, more bare before their decisions and their own history. But that harshness isn’t abandonment: it’s the space where freedom begins to be real, true.
Evil does exist, yes, but it is not absolute. History isn’t broken, but is always open to the understanding, freedom, and action of humankind. Faith doesn’t need defenses, but understanding.
Good is always our natural horizon and our possibility.
And perhaps that’s where the deepest peace is born: not the one that ignores evil, but the one that knows that we are authentically free, and that there are no external threats, but that we are responsible for our own wholeness.
Alfonso Núñez Chávez
alfonsonunez.blog@gmail.com
English version translated with AI