How did belief in Satan influence religious experience and identity in early modern Scotland? An example from the life of James Fraser of Brea, longtime minister of a parish near Fife, provides a good place to begin answering this question. Born in 1639, Fraser reportedly experienced a great deal of demonically induced turmoil prior to his conversion experience at age nineteen. In his memoirs, he told how, as a youth, he had committed “the dreadful sin of blasphemy” during a heated game of cards.Footnote 1 One night after speaking these unspecified abominations, Fraser struggled, and failed, to pray. He wrote, “[I] could not get my mouth opened; there did a number of blasphemies and cursings run in my mind with great horror and against my will, which I thought was like the devil in me.”Footnote 2 Though the Lord temporarily relieved his troubles, a year later he heard a sermon that led him to recall and profoundly regret his prior sin of blasphemy: “I saw in God's countenance terror, wrath, hatred, and vengeance . . . I was in an hourly expectation [of] when Satan should come and take me away; and it was beaten upon me with a mighty impression that I was delivered to the devil.”Footnote 3 This language of Satan's overwhelming presence pervades Fraser's memoirs. Even eventual confidence in his election did not bring spiritual ease. At various times, he believed that he “smellest already of hell,” referred to himself as “a bitter enemy to God, and a toad full of poison and venom,” and even wrote that he had “devil in him.”Footnote 4 Far from unique, such language appears frequently in the spiritual diaries, sermons, and theological works of Reformed Protestant Scots.
Beliefs about the Devil informed Scottish piety in a myriad of ways. Personal, internalized struggles with Satan existed on a spectrum; they could serve as a hopeful metric of one's godliness or as a trenchant reminder of the natural depravity of postlapsarian man. Though the experiential reality of the Devil usually fell between these extremes, the bleaker, despairing end of the spectrum often prevailed. This article focuses on this dark side of demonic struggles as revealed in the writings of godly Scots able and inclined to record their religious beliefs and experiences. It identifies a process of profound anxiety and self-identification as evil that occurred during introspective, personal engagement with Satan, which I have loosely coined “internalizing the demonic.” This process reveals the close and consequential relationship between the clerical promotion of self-surveillance and the widely internalized belief in the Devil's natural affinity with the “evil hearts” of men and women.
In the last few decades, the Devil has been ushered to the forefront of early modern historiography.Footnote 5 The experiential relationship between Reformed theology, the clerical promotion of self-examination and demonic belief, however, has yet to be fully examined, not least in the context of Scotland.Footnote 6 While historians have conducted illuminating studies of the place of the Devil in early modern England, their arguments and research have remained confined to national boundaries.Footnote 7 Yet just as political historians of early modern Britain have embraced J. G. A. Pocock's decades-old call for British history that is transnational and inclusive, historians of British cultural and religious history have increasingly begun to look beyond borders to better understand how ways of believing and behaving developed and evolved across time and space.Footnote 8 The study of Satan demands the same approach. The goal of this article, then, is first to explore the development and expression of demonic beliefs and experiences in Scottish self-writings. Second, through examination of the circulation of English texts in Scotland and brief comparison with Reformed communities in England, it aims to demonstrate how transnational discussions of sin, Satan, and human nature informed personal religious experience.
The role played by Satan in the internal world of Scottish piety might also be viewed as an instantiation of the broader relationship between demonic beliefs, lived religion, and Reformed Protestantism. The demonic experiences of Scots appear to have been unique not in kind, but in degree and frequency. Though the break with Rome was neither seamless nor absolute, in 1560 the Scottish people experienced a comparatively peaceful, thorough, and lasting Reformation.Footnote 9 In the decades to follow, Scotland became a bulwark of Reformed Protestantism and would remain so for much of the seventeenth century and beyond.Footnote 10 As Alasdair Raffe has recently demonstrated, after the Restoration some Episcopalians began to reject the orthodox Calvinist emphasis on sin and salvation, as well as the highly introspective piety of their Presbyterian counterparts.Footnote 11 This, however, did little to alter the demonic experiences of the Scottish people—at least those who recorded their ideas about and personal struggles with the Devil. Well into the early eighteenth century many Scots continued to articulate a deep and anxious concern for the Devil's involvement in their internal lives, though their emphasis on strict predestinarianism seems to have declined. This lasting focus on Satan, within the context of a Reformed community awash in apocalyptic anticipation, makes Scotland emblematic of the more general and often dramatic relationship between the Devil and Protestant piety.
TERMINOLOGY
The term “internalizing the demonic,” used throughout this article, is an imprecise one. Here “demonic” is used to connote a spectrum of ideas about the Devil, his involvement in earthly affairs, and his relation to humankind—ideas that were often internalized by Scottish men and women anxious about their sinful selves and the possibility of eternal damnation. In internalizing the demonic, Scots conceived of themselves primarily as deserving recipients of intrusions and assaults by Satan rather than as active agents of their own religious experiences. This neither means that these demonic struggles were not purposeful or purposely constructed in Scottish piety, nor that the despair that attended them could not bear fruit. On the contrary, the recognition of sinfulness and even the self-identification as evil served as preconditions for submission to God, conversion experiences, and entrance into the community of the elect.Footnote 12 Yet internalizing the demonic remained a mostly painful and passive process, the result of clerical and cultural discussions of Satan and self-examination that were intended, as Louise Yeoman has put it, “to convince men that their everyday selves were irremediably evil.”Footnote 13 In the religious experiences of the godly in Scotland and beyond, internal struggles against the Devil were intimately bound up with the anguished recognition of one's evil nature and spiritual impotence.
The process of internalizing the demonic is revealed primarily through “self-writings”—the range of first-person, usually autobiographical, writings, including letters, spiritual diaries, memoirs, and personal covenants—composed by an influential minority of literate Scots.Footnote 14 Though these men and women experienced Satan according to individual personalities and histories, this process usually entailed four distinct phases. First, Reformed Scots clergy promoted the necessity of introspection—an idea predicated on human depravity—from the pulpit and in print. Second, the godly (or would-be godly) placed their thoughts, words, and deeds, past and present, under intense scrutiny. More often than not, this introspection involved the perception of assaults by Satan and the recollection, at the Devil's prodding, of past transgressions. Third, during these internal struggles against the Devil, the godly would begin to self-identify as evil or even demonic, feeling helpless, hopeless, and sometimes suicidal.Footnote 15 Last, and only through the mercy of divine intervention following moments of prayer and beseeching, this period of internalizing the demonic would come to an end.
This process was neither guaranteed nor homogenous. Just as Reformed theology contained remarkable diversity over time and space, so too did the demonic experiences of the godly, even amongst the zealous Protestants that populated the Anglophone world.Footnote 16 Some Scots simply recognized the presence of demonically induced doubts, while others became suicidal at the thought of their own reprobation. These experiential differences were deeply informed by both personal proclivities and specific communal expectations. This diversity of experience notwithstanding, Scottish men and women actively drew from a “shared pool of cultural meanings” about the Devil, a pool deeply shaped by the ideas about human sin and predestined salvation promoted from the pulpit.Footnote 17 Throughout this article, the labels “Reformed Protestant” and “godly” have been employed to indicate those individuals in Scotland and throughout the Anglophone world whose religious views and self-identification placed them in this zealous Protestant camp.Footnote 18 Terms such as “Presbyterian” and “Puritan” have been avoided, as these, at least for much of the early modern period, conveyed distinctions of politics rather than piety.Footnote 19
THE DEVIL REFORMED
At the heart of internalizing the demonic lay the theology and practice of Reformed Protestantism. For many Scots, the Reformed faith entailed, in both theory and in exercise, a complex and often anxious process of questioning the self. This internal questioning stemmed from a potent mix of ideas about the Devil, innate depravity, and double predestination (the doctrine that God has foreordained both those who will be saved and those who will be damned). The collision of these doctrines with experiential struggles against Satan caused the self-identified godly in Scotland, in moments of intense scrutiny, to believe the very worst: that they were irrevocably evil, even demonic, and destined for an eternity in hell.
The findings here concur with numerous studies that have traced the development of a distinctly Protestant demonology focused primarily on the intrusion of the Devil into one's internal life. As Nathan Johnstone has argued, for many Protestants, the Devil's power “to enter directly into consciousness” became the “archetype of his agency.”Footnote 20 Though profoundly physical consequences sometimes attended demonic experiences, temptation and subversion became Satan's greatest weapons. This does not mean, however, that the adoption of Reformed Protestantism during the Scottish Reformation occasioned the abandonment of medieval ideas about Satan or the production of a new, exclusively Protestant demonology. The continued corporeality of the Devil in cases of Scottish witchcraft attests to the coexistence of a range of conceptions of Satan.Footnote 21 Certainly, as a number of historians have correctly pointed out, Catholic and Protestant demonologies had many similarities, thanks to, among other things, a shared Augustinian heritage and the mutual reliance on Scripture.Footnote 22 These important similarities notwithstanding, the introduction of Protestantism to Scotland produced a set of beliefs about and self-conscious experiences of the Devil predicated upon the Reformed emphases on total human depravity and predestination. Despite important debates over theology and ecclesiology, both within and beyond Scottish borders, the embrace of ideas about salvation and sin proved formative in shaping how many Scots understood the Devil and themselves.Footnote 23
The relationship between Satan and predestinarian theology, yet to be thoroughly unpacked by historians, raises a perplexing yet crucial question about the Devil's role in the Reformed Protestant world: If Satan could never alter salvation, then how does one explain the intense preoccupation with demonic temptation and subversion that plagued many Protestants in Scotland and beyond? Partly, the concern for and vigilance against Satan were driven by the pervasive desire among the godly to purify themselves and the world around them. The Scottish Reformation, like Reformations elsewhere in Europe, provoked a renewed interest in Satan's earthly activities and his relationship to mankind that was hastened by growing apocalyptic fervor.Footnote 24 The long shadow cast by the Apocalypse, which many believed to be imminent, heightened the preoccupation with the Devil's actions. As Revelation 20:7–10 foretold, Satan would be loosed from his chain in hell during the Last Days. To those who viewed the world through this eschatological lens, evidence of demonic activity and the need to combat it seemed more abundant and urgent than ever. In Scotland, this apocalyptic vision of society propelled Satan into a central role in the internal religious experiences of the godly.Footnote 25
Moreover, double predestination, espoused from pulpits throughout early modern Scotland, taught that God alone possessed knowledge of an individual's impending afterlife. Within the Reformed tradition, of course, thoughts about predestination differed in terms of presentation and precise definition. Nonetheless, as Richard Muller has argued, “the basic premise of the doctrine, whether formulated as a single or double decree or in infra- or supralapsarian terms, is that salvation rests on the free and sovereign elect of God and damnation results from human sin.”Footnote 26 Some assurance of faith might be gained through a conversion experience, but election remained ultimately and frustratingly unknowable. In the search for assurance amidst this unknowability, active resistance against Satan was often perceived not only as an inherent duty, but also a metric of one's predetermined election.Footnote 27 The real threat posed by the Devil thus did not lie at the end of salvation but rather on the journey to it, during which interactions with Satan would exploit not only anxiety over salvation, but also struggles with one's innately depraved nature.Footnote 28 The internalization of these theological ideas lent the Devil primacy of place in the personal religious experiences of many Scots.
SATAN AND SELF-EXAMINATION
Scottish divines predicated their encouragement of introspection, especially in the face of demonic assaults, on the belief in the innate and total depravity of all men and women, elect and reprobate alike. This obsession with human sin, which invariably directed theological and pastoral discussions of Satan, assumed extreme forms in the Reformed communities of Scotland. Here, warnings about the Devil—found in sermons, theological writings, spiritual diaries, and pamphlet literature, among other sources—frequently coincided with remarks about man's evil heart and the attending need for self-examination and continued surveillance. Many Scots, accordingly, considered their naturally evil thoughts to be as bad as the performance of evil deeds.Footnote 29
This led, for the godly, to an intense desire to control their inner worlds. Such control would require not only self-examination, but also constant self-surveillance. It was not enough to recognize past sin; future evils needed prevention as well. This was a daunting task, for it was concurrently asserted from the pulpit that the depravity of man rendered such control impossible. At the same time, Scottish divines stressed that though their audiences could not adequately and independently fulfill the laws of God, this was no excuse for not attempting to do so.
This focus on the sinfulness of humanity and the need for self-examination and surveillance had a long heritage. Saint Augustine of Hippo had considered human behavior to be the ultimate evidence of Satan's presence in the world, more than any general mischance or misfortune.Footnote 30 Like Augustine, John Calvin ruminated about demonic activity primarily because of its connection to the sinfulness of all men and women. Even the elect, he wrote, remained subject to “the flesh, the world, and the devil” because they were “besprinkled only with a few drops by the Spirit.”Footnote 31 This Augustinian heritage profoundly shaped how those in the early modern Anglophone world understood the nature of humanity. As the English clergyman John Downame wrote in 1634, all progeny of Adam were “made backward unto all good, and prone unto all evill.”Footnote 32 Even children, many Reformed Protestants averred, were totally corrupted “limbs of Satan.”Footnote 33 In his farewell community address given in the early eighteenth century, Thomas Locke, a Scottish schoolteacher, warned of the susceptibility of children to Satan's wiles. “Are there not some children,” he implored, who “before they can well speak they have the devill in their mouth? . . . By nature we are of our father the devil, and his works we will do as natively as fire casteth forth heat.”Footnote 34 The only means of combating such innately depraved tendencies, these divines avowed, was through extreme self-examination and surveillance. It was during this intense introspection that internalizing the demonic occurred.
The English pastoral tradition spread the focus on self-examination north of the border in printed sermons and devotional guides.Footnote 35 The practice of diary keeping in England began in the 1580s and 1590s, thanks to its promotion by the Protestant divine William Perkins. The keeping of spiritual diaries proliferated in England in the early seventeenth century, when Protestants of the staunchly Calvinist ilk increasingly found themselves in the minority and sought to record their experiences in the face of persecution.Footnote 36 This practice spread to Scotland a few decades later and would hasten during the religious upheaval created by the Restoration, as many covenanting Scots took up the pen in hopes of documenting their struggles, finding solace in writing, and providing example for others.Footnote 37
Perkins, as the most frequently reprinted English author between 1590 and 1620, became the wellspring for much of Reformed Protestant thinking throughout the Anglophone world. His ideas—particularly his focus on predestination and the necessity of introspection—found quick acceptance in post-Reformation Scotland. Here, the Perkins brand of practical, reflective divinity undoubtedly influenced the composition of self-writings, a genre to which the Scots appended their particular focus on covenanting.Footnote 38 Perkins' A Case of Conscience was printed in Edinburgh as well as London in 1592. In it, he recognized the fears propagated by the doctrine of predestination, and to this end he advised his readers that they must confess their sins in order to experience any sense of salvation.Footnote 39 As he penned in his influential catechism, “all men are wholly corrupted with in through Adam's fall, and so are become slaves of Satan.”Footnote 40 Closeness to God could only be achieved through recognition and confession of this innate depravity.
Another English devotional guide that left its mark on Scottish piety was Lewis Bayly's Practice of Piety, Directing the Christian how to walk that he may please God.Footnote 41 Originally written in 1611, Practice of Piety was perhaps the most popular devotional guide in England during the first half of the seventeenth century. It was reprinted in Scotland at least six times between 1630 and 1667, and it is very likely that copies from London circulated in Scotland prior to these dates.Footnote 42Practice of Piety encouraged, in a systematic way, the introspective process that could lead to internalizing the demonic. As Bayly wrote in his introduction, first man had to know God, and then to know his own “state of Corruption.” “And forasmuch as there can be no true piety without the knowledge of God,” he explained, nor could there exist “any good practice without the knowledge of a man's own self.”Footnote 43 Bayly went on to compare the glories of God's election with the terrible state of those individuals who lived without redemption, whom he described as existing for eternity in a “bottomless lake of utter darkness” where the reprobate would “always weap for the paine of the fire, and yet gnash [their] teeth for the extremity of the cold.”Footnote 44 The works of English divines such as Perkins and Bayly were intended not only to encourage readers to recognize and record their own depravity, but also to equip them with the necessary tools—in the form of prayer and general devotion—to combat the inevitable temptations of Satan.
PREACHING ON SATAN, SIN, AND SCRUTINY
These English devotional works accorded with the sermons of Scottish ministers, who encouraged introspection through recurrent discussions of human wickedness and the need for self-surveillance.Footnote 45 One mid-century minister described the tyranny of man's “original and natural corruption” as a “universall disease and poyson runing throw, and infecting both the utter and iner man, defiling all the faculties of our souls, and members of our bodies.”Footnote 46 To combat this innate tendency towards evil, the Glasgow minister Andrew Gray preached that “Christians should be full of eyes within to examine themselves and to see their own corruptions. There are many who have eyes without to take notice of other peoples carriage, but they have no eyes to look within to themselves.”Footnote 47 The sermonic focus on internal weakness championed among parishioners an introspective turn that ministers hoped would result in a more pious, self-aware population. As John Welch of Ayr, son-in-law of the famed Reformer John Knox, bluntly preached in the early seventeenth century, “the book of your conscience must be opened or you will go to Hell.”Footnote 48 Even James VI and I took heed. In his advice to his son, the future king Charles I, he included this telling (and, in hindsight, ironic) verse: “Looke to your selves, what Conscience you have; For Conscience shall damne, and Conscience shall save.”Footnote 49
To this end, the Devil was a favorite topic of Scottish ministers, who intertwined their discussions of the powers of Satan with the understanding of humankind as irrevocably debased. In a sermon delivered in 1591, Robert Bruce described how demonic temptation could manifest itself in a variety of tangible and intangible ways, all of which collaborated with preexisting human corruption. As he put it, Satan “insinuates himself in our affections by reason of the corruption that is in us.”Footnote 50 Alexander Henderson preached in 1638 that “if [it] so be that we had a right heart, then Satan nor his temptations would not prevail over us. But it is a pitiful thing that he has darts, and shoots them at poor souls, and we are ready to receive them, and then we cannot get them out again.”Footnote 51 Satan did not just prey on individual spiritual weakness; human frailty provided both the impetus and the means for demonic assaults. As the covenanting minister Robert Baillie warned the Presbytery of Irvine, men must “pray to God for our cause and Church: God will help us against all, men and devills: No man is to be trusted; the best is naturallie false.”Footnote 52 In highlighting innate depravity in the context of experiences with Satan, Scottish clergymen encouraged their audiences to recognize their absolute dependence on God.
Like their Scottish counterparts, Reformed preachers in England sought to convince their parishioners of their “wretched state by nature”—a phrase common in sermons throughout the Anglophone world—and the attending need for introspection.Footnote 53 In an evocative mid-century treatise on Revelation, John Cotton cautioned his fellow believers against spiritual confidence or complacency against Satan: “the Devil, you say you defie him, and did renounce him in Baptisme . . . But if there were not a strong power of Satan in us, how comes it that the blood of Christ must be shed, to destroy him that had the power of death.”Footnote 54 Such sentiments were likewise promoted across Scotland and internalized by anxious parishioners. One example comes from an anonymous late seventeenth-century diary, whose eighteen year-old author wrote of his shame when contemplating the errors of his past: “All my sins were laid before me. . . . My whole life was like ane act of sin, and that Hell was to receive me I said that I have deserved the hottest place in it. . . . I have nothing that was good in me, a poor sinfull creature, what is there in me that God should pardon me?”Footnote 55 In the eyes of many like-minded Scots, the main difference between them and Satan lay not in any innate goodness, but in the death of Christ, who gave humankind a chance at redemption.
Perhaps the most interesting element of Reformed sermons on human corruption was the insinuation, implicit or explicit, that Satan was actually within men and women. From the pulpit, Scottish preachers frequently used the language of the Devil being inside the individual hearts and minds of men and women, a presence against which they must constantly battle. In a 1589 sermon, Robert Bruce told his audience that they must be vigilant, “for we have to do with principalities and powers, with spiritual wickedness, which are above us and within us also. For he is not that has corruption within him, but Sathan is in him; So we cannot be half walkrife [wakeful], ever studying to cast out the devill, to renounce our selfs, and to submit to the obedience of Christ.”Footnote 56 Alexander Hume echoed these words in a late sixteenth-century treatise on the human conscience when he wrote that “the devil was never lother to come out of the person whom he possesseth, nor naturall vices will be to come out of mans hart, where they have once taken deepe root.”Footnote 57As Andrew Gray lamented in 1628, “I think many of us may be afraid that the devil dwels and keeps possession in many of our hearts, and alace! He is like to be a possessor of some of them perpetually.”Footnote 58 Samuel Rutherford couched this internal presence of the Devil in horticultural terms, stating that “Satan findeth his own Seed in us by Nature.”Footnote 59 James Durham, minister of Glasgow, wrote about this internal demonic presence in his wonderfully titled sermon, “The great corruption of subtile self, discovered, and driven from it's lurking-places and starting-holes.”Footnote 60
The presence of the Devil within rendered the battle against evil both an internal as well as external one. As John Welch explained, “the godly, because God and the devil, light and darkness, righteousness and unrighteousness, a Jacob and an Esau are within them, therefore they cannot be without warfare.”Footnote 61 Gray echoed this duality when he told listeners that “a man that hath two hearts, a part of his heart goeth to God, and a part of his heart goeth to the devil.”Footnote 62 Such language was not unique to Scotland. In England, Thomas Goodwin wrote that “a man's heart is like those two-faced pictures, if you looke one way, you shall see nothing but some horrid shapre of a devil, or the like; but go to the otherside . . . and you shall see the picture of an Angell.”Footnote 63 Time and again, Reformed clergymen described the opposition and contrariety usually reserved for the demonization of others in a profoundly personal, internal way.Footnote 64
Did these preachers actually mean that Satan was within the hearts of postlapsarian men and women, or were they using the Devil to connote evil and corruptions more symbolically? According to Reformed theology, the Devil and human corruption both existed and operated in tandem. Reformed Protestant theologians, most notably the Swiss Reformer and friend of Calvin, Pierre Viret, had long articulated the idea that all human beings, due to their innate depravity, were possessed by the Devil.Footnote 65 The implantation and enactment of sin was, after all, Satan's greatest weapon, and people had sinfulness in spades. As such, it is possible that some Scottish divines would have indeed averred that the actual presence of Satan could be found in the hearts and minds of the elect and reprobate alike. This was not, of course, the type of physical, total possession that overtook a very small number of demoniacs—only eleven in total—in Scotland at the turn of the seventeenth century.Footnote 66 Yet due to their innate sinfulness, demonic possession was, in a spiritually inherent sense, a constant component of the lives of all men and women. To many Scottish clergymen, it seemed that demonic forces resided in the human heart in an ongoing attempt to remove any drops of goodness from postlapsarian man.
INTERNALIZING THE DEMONIC
Given this sermonic emphasis, it is hardly surprising that in their self-writings many Scots identified their own depravity and Satan as intimate bedfellows. After months, years, and even decades of hearing about human depravity and the necessity of self-surveillance from the pulpit, many Scots became acutely aware of—and sometimes obsessed with—their own sinfulness. Satan, and his ability to impede any spiritual progress or peace, served as a trenchant reminder of personal frailty and failings. In moments of compulsive introspection, these godly men and women began to fear that they were, due to their “evil hearts,” in league with the Devil, even themselves demonic, and beyond the pale of salvation. Some began to feel that Satan was within them, a likely consequence of the sermonic rhetoric discussed above. The self-writings of Reformed Scots thus reveal the profound effect that demonic belief, paired with the promotion of self-examination, could have on how early modern men and women understood themselves and their place in the cosmos.
It bears noting from the outset that the writings revealing the process of internalizing the demonic are fraught with problems for the historian hoping to sort fact from fiction. Members of the Reformed Protestant faith generally presented their lives, and indeed their encounters with Satan, in a very self-conscious and stylized way. They tried to fashion themselves as the deserving godly they hoped to be. As David Mullan has argued, in Scottish spiritual narratives “self-imagining is very much part of the story—the genre depends upon a strong sense of the self as worthy of exemplification, or at least as representing a story worth telling, under the watchful eyes of a holy God.”Footnote 67 Yet even if such demonic encounters were purposefully constructed, these spiritual accounts nonetheless illustrate what educated early modern men and women believed—and indeed felt, sometimes with great terror—about themselves and Satan's involvement in their hearts and souls. Moreover, the patterns in and expectations of such demonic experiences are themselves revealing of how Reformed Scots felt they should perceive and present themselves and their inner lives.
One particularly illustrative example of Scottish demonic experiences comes from the narrative of Mistress Rutherford, a young woman who in the early seventeenth century chronicled the spiritual experiences that had dominated her life.Footnote 68 Orphaned early in life and raised in Edinburgh by her strict grandparents, she was from her youth plagued by a profound fear of Satan. This demonic apprehension was so consuming that she suffered insomnia and even suicidal thoughts: “I could not sleep for fear of him. . . . Many a time wished I for wars to come into the kingdom, that I might have been slain so being that I had been guilt of doing it myself.”Footnote 69 Later in life, Rutherford wrote that the Devil convinced her that she had committed the sin against the Holy Ghost—an unforgivable, eternal sin by which salvation becomes impossible.Footnote 70 Tormented by guilt and fear at this thought, she again considered suicide, writing that “Satan tempted me to put violence hands in my self, making me think it so far from sin, that it would be looked on as good service to God to execut his justice on such a traitor.”Footnote 71 For Mistress Rutherford, who had her own conversion experience at a young age, faith equaled neither confidence nor spiritual ease, as the Devil remained her constant antagonist.
John Stevenson, a farmer in Carrick in the early eighteenth century, composed a deathbed letter to his family that detailed a similar experience of fear and trembling at thoughts of sin and Satan. He wrote that once, while he was recalling the sins and misdeeds of his youth, the Devil flooded his mind with fearful thoughts: “[Satan] violently suggested to my soul that some time or other, God would suddenly destroy me as with a thunder clap. Which so filled my soul with fear and pain, that every now and then I looked about me to receive the divine blow, still expecting it was a coming; yea, many nights I durst not sleep, lest I had awakened in everlasting flames.”Footnote 72 Such fear and hopelessness were common parts of religious experiences of Scots, resulting from a combination of demonic beliefs and pastorally encouraged introspection.
Elizabeth Blackadder, the daughter of a covenanting minister, spoke similarly of demonically induced sleepless nights and expectations of divine retribution. She told how, at the age of six, she “had a very early conviction of sin and terrors of hell, even to that degree, that when I had gone to bed, I could not sleep but sorrow and weep under the fear of God's wrath.”Footnote 73 Whether these were truly the fears of a child or their interpretation by a self-conscious adult, such accounts illustrate that in early modern Scottish society, no one, regardless of age, sex, or occupation, was considered free of innate sin and Satan's attending snares.
Scottish self-writings reveal, at times, lengthy explorations of the natural affinity between man and Satan. On July 5, 1640, minister John Forbes of Corse wrote that “because by sin [man] had lost his primitive dignitie . . . so the whole posteritie of Adam is subject to the bondage of Satan, and the course of his world is to walk according to the prince of the power of the air. . . . He that commiteth sin is of the devil for the devil sinneth from the beginning.”Footnote 74 Adam, like Satan, fell from grace due to sin and foolish pride. Nearly a century later, in 1728, layman John Stevenson told how he came to realize that man was “the only creature, excepting devils, that ever disobeyed his holy, just, and good commandments, on which the depraved state of fallen man, and my own in particular, was more fully laid open to me than what I could well conceive before.”Footnote 75 The innate similarities between the Devil and men and women, reiterated in both sermons and self-writings, reinforced an image of God as forgiving and merciful. If humans were not so debased, God's grace would not have been so extraordinary. Reformed Protestantism was a faith in which the sovereignty of God reigned supreme, and it is unsurprising that ruminations of sin and Satan should serve not only to humble believers but also to exalt God.
Pastorally encouraged self-scrutiny and discussions of the relationship between Satan and sin also directed how Scots reacted to trauma and allocated blame. In the late seventeenth century, Katharine Collace spoke of a moment of profound guilt after the accidental death of her young son. She reported that Satan had whispered in her ear that she herself had caused the babe's demise, upon which “a hell arose in my conscience for blood-guiltiness. . . . I roared through the disquietness of my heart, and Satan was also let loose upon me. . . . Thus I continued in extremity for eight days, much without sleep, crying out against myself.”Footnote 76 The perception of demonic assaults compounded her already devastating loss, causing Collace, in her grief, to be overcome with both anguish and self-reproach.
In a confession written in the late seventeenth century, a layman named James Gordon described all of the sins he had committed since his youth. The explicit purpose of such an account—written “for the glory of God and my own conviction and self-abhorrence in the sight of a pure and holy God”—indicates from the outset that he had internalized admonitions about human depravity. Such ideas found easy expression in his discussions of sin and Satan. Gordon reported that his first “heinous” transgression occurred at the tender age of four: “I being a young cheild was left at home on the Sabboath day and playing with the neighbouring children in the next house was caused by the eldest of them to imitate man and wife with a young femal cheild. Therefore . . . I myself so early made to be one of Satans servants makes me to fear lest he have power given him by God to tempt me to this or the like sin.”Footnote 77 This was undoubtedly a traumatic and incomprehensible event for a four year old. Gordon attributed his actions to Satan (who was under the direction of a just God) and his own corruptions, with no blame placed on the older boy who orchestrated the whole thing. Belief in an intimate relationship between the Devil and human depravity, contrasted with the pure goodness of God, had shaped his hindsight and informed his interpretation of such an event.
The dangers of such introspection and demonic interaction did not go unnoticed by the ministry in Scotland. In 1688, the Scots minister Robert Rule delivered a revealing sermon that detailed how the Devil manipulated man's natural proclivity to fear and doubt. “Of all the creatures,” he began, “man is apt to torment and afflict himself with fears.”Footnote 78 Rule explained that external threats were not “so dangerous as the fears that arises from within a mans self,” for the Devil used these internal tendencies to cast men and women “into despondency, and unbelief and distrust of [God's] promises.”Footnote 79 The weakness of the mortal mind cooperated with Satan by allowing and even inviting such fears to enter. Only reliance on God could bring deliverance. R. A. Houston has argued that in Scotland, though invocations of the Devil were rare in understandings of actual suicide, it was not uncommon for Calvinist self-writings to contain discussions of suicidal thoughts.Footnote 80 Overcoming such thoughts served as a reflection not of the strength of the afflicted, but of the power of God's merciful intervention.
As historians have demonstrated, Satan also figured prominently in the internal experiences (and subsequently, the spiritual diaries) of the godly in England.Footnote 81 A dramatic, yet telling, example comes from John Bunyan's Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, published in London in 1666 and in Scotland in 1697. Grace Abounding would be republished in Scotland no less than eight additional times over the course of the eighteenth century.Footnote 82 Here, Bunyan recounted his past wickedness and detailed the turmoil that wracked his heart as he wrestled with sin and Satan, especially in his youth: “I should, at these years, be greatly afflicted and troubled with the thoughts of the fearful torments of hell-fire; still fearing, that it would be my lot to be found at last among those devils and hellish fiends, who are there bound down with the chains and bonds of darkness.”Footnote 83 Driven to desperate episodes of psychological struggle against Satan, he remembered crying in bed late into the night, until he was breathless and exhausted. “Oh!” he lamented, “The diligence of Satan! The desperateness of man's heart!”Footnote 84 Later in life, before his conversion, Bunyan became convinced he had sinned beyond redemption. He began “to shake and totter under the sense of the dreadful judgment of God, that should fall on those that have sinned that most fearful and unpardonable sin.”Footnote 85 In both English and Scottish spiritual diaries, disturbing thoughts of atheism often appeared in the minds of the godly in the midst of demonic experiences—including the unpardonable sin—leading them to obsess about grace and the threat of damnation.
Another noteworthy English example comes from the diary of navigator and surveyor Richard Norwood.Footnote 86 In it, he wrote that even after his conversion experience at the age of 26, Satan remained a constant antagonist. At one point, in considering the sins of his past, Norwood entered into a panic over his possible reprobation. His desperate state was exacerbated by the sense of Satan overcoming him physically as well as spiritually: “It is hard to express the manner of it, but sometimes he [the devil] seemed to lean on my back or arms or shoulder, sometimes hanging on my cloak or gown.”Footnote 87At one point, he questioned if he himself was a Devil.Footnote 88 Norwood's experiences with Satan made him worry that “the Lord had or should utterly cast me off,” exemplifying the extreme despair and estrangement from God that characterized the internalization of the demonic.Footnote 89
Despite the many similarities in the darker sides of Scottish and English demonic encounters, one interesting difference bears noting: the lack of detailed descriptions of the Devil in Scotland. In England, Protestant authors recorded their beliefs about and experiences with Satan in “a remarkable variety of forms,” recounting the sights, smells, and sounds of their demonic encounters. In one particularly colorful account, the preacher John Rogers reported how Satan and his helpers had tormented him “in severall ugly shapes and forms (according to my fancies) and sometimes with great rolling flaming eyes like sawcers, having fire-brands in one of their hands, and with the other reaching at me to tear me away to torment.”Footnote 90 In Scotland, however, internal encounters with Satan generally lacked such visual imagery, involving instead the words, and occasionally the sounds, of the Devil. Satan often whispered in godly ears, but appeared less frequently as a vision or corporeal entity. When Scots did claim to have seen the Devil, they usually did so in a dream or in a fever, and provided only terse descriptions of Satan in their accounts.Footnote 91
This divergence comes, in part, from the fact that Scots were exposed to far fewer images of the Devil than were their English counterparts. The hyper-iconoclasm of Reformed Protestantism in Scotland led not only to whitewashed church walls but also to a dearth of images from the printing press. Part of this was logistical, as the Scottish print industry lagged behind England, producing little popular “cheap print” until the latter half of the seventeenth century.Footnote 92 Even after 1700, printed broadsides still contained very few images. The lack of demonic imagery during such internal experiences was also due to the fact that Scotland's break with the Catholic Church was more abrupt and thoroughgoing than England's. Scotland lacked the persistence of medieval depictions of the Devil and of Hell, which continued to appear in printed woodcuts even after the Reformation in England.Footnote 93 The Protestant de-emphasis of the physicality of the Devil bled into spiritual diaries, as reduced exposure to images of Satan combined with the emphasis on internal demonic threats to create a dearth of colorful descriptions of the Devil.Footnote 94 This distinction notwithstanding, the godly throughout early modern Britain shared the tendency to internalize messages about Satan and sin, messages that found dramatic expression during periods of stress and self-examination.
THE ENEMY WITHIN
As historians have long acknowledged, Reformed Protestantism set the bar for living very high. The challenge lay in not only controlling one's actions and words, but also one's thoughts. This was no easy task for Scots who had been constantly reminded, from a very young age, of their own moral and mental frailty. While imprisoned in 1667 for opposition to Charles II, the Covenanter Sir John Chiesly found himself overcome by concerns for the aberrations of his heart and soul. “O my soul,” he lamented, “thou art become so sloathfull in following the Lord, why dost thou so wander in prayer, and thy heart is not fixed . . .”Footnote 95 He wondered whether this spiritual laxity was a result of his own nature or of God's letting the Devil rouse him to sin. “O my soul,” he implored, “is the lord become better and thou worse, or doest thou but see more of thy own naughtiness then formerly, or doth the Lord let Satan ever more lose and not restrain thy corruptions as formerly? O what a vast wilderness of sin and wickedness do I see in my heart.”Footnote 96 In his own wandering thoughts, he perceived an experiential muddle of Reformed Protestant convictions: the greatness of God, his own spiritual feebleness, and the powerful wiles of Satan.
Darren Oldridge has suggested that the fact that the Devil could inject evil thoughts into human minds provided an opportunity for the godly to profess their secret doubts and desires without the risk of appearing to be the author of these thoughts.Footnote 97 Yet even if Satan was identified as the source of such transgressions, men and women in their infinite weakness were still to blame for allowing demonically induced notions into their minds. One letter, anonymously written in Scotland in 1698, explained that while the Devil often introduced blasphemous thoughts, the human heart was equally to blame, for “there is the root of all sins in [the] heart” that “yields many times” to the suggestions of Satan.Footnote 98 Moreover, as Nathan Johnstone has argued, “diabolic intrusion did not separate subversive thoughts from the conscience. . . . Protestant writers never intended that it should, but rather that is should do the reverse, forcing a self-conscious and often sustained engagement with the experience of sin, guilt and the demonic.”Footnote 99 When Scottish men and women recorded their improper thoughts in self-writings, they did so with anxiety and often shame, regardless of whether these thoughts had demonic origins. They had heard many times from the pulpit that Satan and human corruption were two sides of the same coin, and they often wrote of the dual threat of “the devil and an evil heart.”Footnote 100
This is a despairing picture of the darker side of Reformed piety. It must be kept in mind that internalizing the demonic was not a consistent, universal process. Not every godly Scot underwent this process to the same degree, or at all. Moreover, Reformed piety also entailed the comforting aspects of God's promise of victory and the unity embedded in both the highs and lows of election.Footnote 101 The covenanting minister John Welwood echoed this sentiment in a 1676 letter when he wrote that the elect “have need of trials and afflictions to purge out our corruptions, and this hath been the lot of all his people in all ages.Footnote 102 Some Scots may have even found comfort in the knowledge that struggles with Satan and the self, often popularized in printed spiritual diaries, were part of the larger, communal plight of the elect. Because there was no recourse to good works as a means of achieving grace, the most that Reformed Scots could do was to examine themselves with fear and repentance, struggle against the assaults of Satan, and acknowledge that this was part of their godly fate.Footnote 103
Accordingly, some historians have focused on the hopeful, constructive side of demonic experiences and rejected a more despairing interpretation of Reformed Protestantism. Nathan Johnstone has argued that the experience of the Devil was “far more differentiated than the historical emphasis on the darker psychological implications of predestinarian theology suggest.”Footnote 104 Jeremy Schmidt points out that despite the scholarly emphasis on the psychologically negative consequences of Calvinist predestinarianism, it should not be overlooked that for Protestants and Catholics alike, moments of despair were thought of as “both common occurring features of the Christian life and as spiritually healthy, or at least health-inducing.”Footnote 105 Recently, Alec Ryrie has suggested that Protestants in Reformation Britain were even attracted to spiritual warfare against Satan because it entailed the promise of absolute and final victory.Footnote 106
While the hopeful, communal elements of spiritual warfare are crucial to understanding the varied realities of Reformed piety, the negative ways in which the emphasis on sin, Satan, and salvation shaped lived experiences cannot be discounted. As Margo Todd has written, the problem of human sin created in the redeemed a tension through that “puritan self-fashioning” was both a constructive and a destructive process; the creation of the godly self entailed the purging of the innately evil self.Footnote 107 This experiential “purging” often entailed a heavy dose of self-scrutiny and self-loathing during traumatic encounters with Satan.
Moreover, it should not be assumed that the majority of Reformed men and women, in the face of such despairing experiences, would have found solace in unity or the doctrine of election. Messages of grace themselves were imbedded with uncertainty. Conversions, demonic assaults, and the innate desire to live a godly life were noteworthy signposts of election, but even with these assurances, grace was not a guarantee. Moreover, many Scots, like James Fraser of Brea, John Welwood, or Mistress Rutherford, continued to struggle against Satan long after their conversion experiences. As demonstrated above, it was the acute awareness of one's own sinfulness as much as anxiety about election that led many of the godly into intense periods of personal despair and even suicidal thoughts.
Of course, neither insecurity over salvation nor acknowledgement of personal depravity explains why some Scots experienced Satan more palpably and dramatically than others. The question of why the Devil drove some Scots to suicidal despair, troubled but did not confound others, while barely leaving a mark on the lucky ones begs further inquiry. What accounts for this variety of demonic experiences? Despite shared patterns in their encounters with Satan, one cannot discount the influence of personality, past experience, and present affliction in informing how Scots perceived and responded to demonic assaults. Exposure over the course of a lifetime to dramatic sermons on Satan, spiritual depravity, and damnation clearly informed the internalization of certain ideas. It is thus unsurprising that many of the Scots who encountered the Devil in the most dramatic fashions were the wives, children, or members of the Scottish clergy. This was not only the literate group most likely to keep spiritual diaries, but also those most exposed both to discussions of theological issues and, in the later part of the seventeenth century, religious persecution.
Past trauma or illness also attended many accounts of internalizing the demonic. Mistress Rutherford, a woman orphaned at a tender age, reported being very ill just before the worst of her encounters with Satan. For Kathleen Collace, the height of her demonic anxiety occurred just after the untimely death of her young bairn. Undoubtedly, the combination of past and present suffering with periods of physical or mental weakness rendered some Scots especially susceptible to a dangerous obsession with the Devil and depravity. While it is important to note that women were more apt to record periods of emotional distress in greater detail, in general their experiences of Satan had much in common with their male counterparts. This is an area that needs further attention and exploration.Footnote 108 For those men and women unable to keep spiritual diaries, it is difficult to assess to what extent ideas about Satan influenced their conceptions of self. It seems unlikely, though, that the frequent sermonic discussions of the Devil's relationship to human depravity would have completely escaped the attention of ordinary and educated parishioners alike. What is clear is that for a significant number of individuals, introspective anxieties about sin, Satan, and salvation collided, often dramatically, in the process of internalizing the demonic.
“A DEVIL WEAKLY FETTERED”Footnote 109
The close relationship between Satan and human nature, within the context of predestinarian thought, undergirded and necessitated the Reformed practice of intense introspection in early modern Scotland. The contemplation of ideas about the Devil, innate depravity, and salvation resulted in powerful internal struggles and self-loathing, culminating in some individuals with internalizing the demonic. This process was by no means confined to Scottish borders; it occurred among Reformed Protestants in England and, though beyond the scope of this article, New England.Footnote 110 Throughout the anglophone world, an obsession with Satan, human sin, and the attending need for introspection was championed from pulpits and internalized by earnest and anxious Protestants.
Was the process of internalizing the demonic unique, at least in frequency, to the Anglophone world? David Mullan has examined the differences between French and Scottish Calvinism in order to test whether or not the versions of Reformed piety present in the British world “might have encouraged a ‘hotter’ type of Protestant—perhaps more energetic in the performance of personal duties, including an Augustinian, introspective self-analysis.”Footnote 111 While rightly rejecting any clear-cut delineation of “hot” versus “lukewarm” Protestantism, Mullan points out that French diaries and memoirs reflected religious commitment but were “not designed as self-examination nor as a means of revealing the inner person with all of its attendant conflicts.” He also notes that, unlike their Scottish counterparts, French Huguenot ministers do not appear to have “exploited” this focus on introspection and its ensuing melancholy.Footnote 112 Further comparative research into the demonic experiences of Reformed Protestants on the Continent would reveal fascinating insights into how a focus on introspective piety might shape the place of Satan in lives and communities throughout the early modern world.Footnote 113
Rather than making the Devil more remote, demonic interactions in Scotland ultimately relocated the struggle against Satan to the terrestrial realm—within the human heart and mind. This does not mean that the early modern period ought to be viewed as some sort of cosmic halfway house on the way to the Enlightenment and the “disenchantment” of the world.Footnote 114 In post-Reformation Scotland, Satan certainly retained his supernatural status, as men and women of all sorts continued to view him as a powerful non-human entity. Reformed Protestantism, however, eroded any rigid divide between the supernatural evil of Satan and the natural evil of man. The godly in Scotland, thanks in large part to the clerical promotion of self-surveillance, increasingly attributed all evil to the internal cooperation and coexistence of the Devil and human depravity. For these members of Reformed faith, then, the battle against Satan was not taking place in the cosmos, with God and the Devil vying for human souls. This war had become an earthly one, and the depraved human heart provided a fertile battleground.
For many Scots, the unwavering emphasis on the intimacy of Satan and humankind's “evil hearts” profoundly shaped their religious experiences and personal identities. When Robert Louis Stevenson wrote in 1885 that “man is but a devil weakly fettered by some generous beliefs and impositions,” he expressed a conviction recorded by many of his fellow Scots centuries before him: postlapsarian men and women would struggle with Satan throughout their lives on earth, not only as a necessary part of the path to salvation, but as an integral piece of their deepest selves.Footnote 115
