St. Augustine on Demons, with Seamus O'Neill, Ph.D. (Ep. 19)

As we look forward to the end of this week, we see Halloween, All Hallow's Eve, and I don't know about your neighborhood, but mine is marked by all sorts of spooky sights, decorations and what have you. It's become commonplace this time of year to conjure ghoulish scenes meant to give one a sense of the eerie, or fire the latent gothic imaginations of both young and the not so young. 

And what's a Catholic to think of all this? Some embrace it wholesale, though with little sense of its place in the Catholic imagination. Others reject out of hand seeing it as trading in the dark arts. And yet neither of these responses are adequate or satisfying. We can't ignore the whole of human experience and be authentically Catholic, and within that we have to have at least some account of the spooky, spectral, and potentially sinister things that go bump in the night. 

And so in this episode we'll look at the ways in which St. Augustine considered the demonic in his life and work. Helping us do so is Seamus O’Neill, who is Associate Professor of Ancient and Medieval Philosophy at The Memorial University of Newfoundland. His main philosophical interests are Ancient and Medieval Philosophy generally, Metaphysics, and the Philosophy of Religion. His current research deals with St. Augustine and other thinkers such as Plotinus, Boethius, St. Thomas Aquinas, and St. Bonaventure and their relation to the Neoplatonic tradition, specifically concerning the question of human and divine mediation. 

He is co-editor of Neoplatonic Demons and Angels and has published articles and book chapters on figures such as St. Augustine, Boethius, St. Anselm, St. Thomas Aquinas, and Dante, and on the history of Platonic thought, demonology, the problem of evil, and the relation between ancient and scholastic thought and contemporary philosophical trends. 

Currently, he is writing a book-length manuscript on the results of this research while working on the demonology of St. Thomas Aquinas and its philosophical import. 

1. Dr. Seamus O'Neill, Ph.D.
2. Neoplatonic Demons and Angels, co-edited by Seamus O'Neill

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