MINUCIUS FELIX
Minucius Felix was a contemporary of Tertullian who penned Octavius (c.AD 210) as a feigned dialogue between a pagan and a Christian.[1] In his writing, he describes the work of demons at several points, describing both their possession and mental attacks.[2] He also describes in detail how the demons are connected with idols, statues, mediums, oracles, and predictive signs.[3] He argues that demons “are both deceived, and they deceive.”[4] These false spirits “weigh men downwards from heaven, and call them away from the true God to material things.”[5] Felix vividly describes demonic possession, exorcism, and dialogue as well, explaining how they have communicated themselves as the gods of the Greeks and seek to keep unbelievers away from Christians.[6] Overall, Felix describes a plethora of power-encounter type approaches to spiritual warfare while reinforcing that their goal is to deceive and distract humanity away from the truth of God.
[1]A. Cleveland Coxe, “Introductory Note to Minucius Felix” (ANF 4:169), accessed December 30, 2013, http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/anf04.iv.ii.html.
[2]Minucius Felix, Octavius (ANF 4:173), accessed December 30, 2013, http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/anf04.iv.ii.html.
[3]Minucius Felix, Octavius (ANF 4:190).
[4]Ibid.
[5]Ibid.
[6]“They disturb the life, render all men unquiet; creeping also secretly into human bodies, with subtlety, as being spirits, they feign diseases, alarm the minds, wrench about the limbs; that they may constrain men to worship them, being gorged with the fumes of altars or the sacrifices of cattle, that, by remitting what they had bound, they may seem to have cured it. These raging maniacs also, whom you see rush about in public, are moreover themselves prophets without a temple; thus they rage, thus they rave, thus they are whirled around. In them also there is a like instigation of the demon, but there is a dissimilar occasion for their madness. . . . A great many, even some of your own people, know all those things that the demons themselves confess concerning themselves, as often as they are driven by us from bodies by the torments of our words and by the fires of our prayers. Saturn himself, and Serapis, and Jupiter, and whatever demons you worship, overcome by pain, speak out what they are; and assuredly they do not lie to their own discredit, especially when any of you are standing by. Since they themselves are the witnesses that they are demons, believe them when they confess the truth of themselves; for when abjured by the only and true God, unwillingly the wretched beings shudder in their bodies, and either at once leap forth, or vanish by degrees, as the faith of the sufferer assists or the grace of the healer inspires. Thus they fly from Christians when near at hand, whom at a distance they harassed by your means in their assemblies. And thus, introduced into the minds of the ignorant, they secretly sow there a hatred of us by means of fear. . . . Thus they take possession of the minds and obstruct the hearts, that men may begin to hate us before they know us; lest, if known, they should either imitate us, or not be able to condemn us.” Ibid.