If the demonic is fate, then it can happen to anyone. There is no denying this, even if in our cowardly age everything possible is done by way of diversions and the brass band of loud enterprises to keep lonely thoughts at bay, just as in the American forests wild beasts are kept off with torches, shouting, and the beating of cymbals. This is why today people learn so little about the highest spiritual trials but all the more about those cringing conflicts between man and man, and between man and woman, that a refined society- and soirée-life brings with it. If true human sympathy is to have suffering as its guarantor and surety, then it must first become clear about to what extent it is fate and to what extent guilt. And this distinction must be drawn up with the troubled but also energetic passion of freedom, so that a person dares hold fast to it though the whole world collapses, though it might seem that, through his own firmness, he brought about irreparable harm.
The demonic has been viewed in ethically condemnatory terms. The frightful severity with which it has been pursued, identified, and punished is well known. In our time we shudder at these accounts, and we become sentimental and emotional at the thought that in our enlightened age we do not act in that way. That may well be so, but is sentimental sympathy all that more praiseworthy? Here it is not for me to judge or condemn that behavior, only to observe it. The very fact that ethically it was so severe shows that its sympathy was of a better quality. Identifying itself in thought with the phenomenon, it had no further explanation than that the phenomenon was guilt. It was therefore convinced that when all is said and done, the demoniac, according to his better possibility, should wish for all the cruelty and severity to be employed against him. Was it not, to take an example from a similar sphere, Augustine who recommended punishment, even the death penalty, for heretics? Was that because he lacked sympathy? Or was it not rather that his behavior differed from that of our own time because his sympathy had not made him cowardly, so that of himself he would have said: God grant that if it should come to that with me, there would be a Church that did not abandon me but would use all its power. In our day, however, people are, as Socrates somewhere says, afraid of letting themselves be cut and cauterized by the physician in order to be healed.