Doing Bad Things with Good Gifts

It wasn’t until the seventeenth century that anyone in Christendom produced a systematic study of vampires. So when the Catholic theologian Leo Allatius (1586—1669) included a discussion of vampires in his treatise On Certain Modern Opinions among the Greeks (De Graecorum Hodie Quirundam Opinationibus, 1645), the subject of vampires became a matter seriously discussed by Western theologians for the first time. Writing at the height of the European witch craze, during which thousands of accused witches were put on trial, tortured, and executed for having consorted with Satan and his demons, Allatius argues that Greek vampires could be real creatures made possible by the work of demons or the arch-demon Satan. Allatius seems to have been unaware of the virus theory propagated by the vampires in Charlaine Harris’s Southern Vampire Mysteries, according to which vampires are human beings infected with a virus that, among other things, makes them appear dead for a few days and leaves them allergic to sunlight, silver, and garlic.¹ He was, however, aware of the infamous Hammer of Witches (Malleus Maleficarum), written in 1486 by Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger, two leaders of the Inquisition in Germany.² The Hammer of Witches, which supplied Allatius with some of his arguments, was written to refute the claim that witchcraft doesn’t exist, to spell out the dangerous powers of witches, and to describe how to prosecute them. There’s probably a copy somewhere in Steve Newlin’s library. This handbook for witch hunters and inquisitors was itself heavily undergirded by theological arguments from the great medieval theologian and philosopher Thomas Aquinas (1225—1274).

Like many medieval Christians, Aquinas believed that evil demons really exist and can exert a sinister influence on human affairs. But how could these creatures bent on evil exist if everything was created by a perfectly good and all-powerful God? Aquinas’s answer was simple: free will. Aquinas shared the belief of many Christian theologians that evil was, strictly speaking, nothing or no-thing. According to this view, evil isn’t something that can really be said to exist inherently in something, like fangs in a vampire’s mouth or lust in Jason Stackhouse’s loins. These things, like everything else that exists, were created good and retain their goodness for as long as they’re used in proper ways. God doesn’t hate fangs or sex or even the silver chains that the Rattrays used to bind Bill Compton in order to drain his blood. But neither does God approve of all the ways these things are used. So why then doesn’t God prevent their improper use? Why does God let people “do bad things”?

God created everything good, and one of those good things is the free will given to selected creatures—angels, human beings, and possibly others who weren’t on Aquinas’s radar screen, such as vampires, shapeshifters, weres, fairies, and maenads. Free will permits human beings (and similarly endowed creatures) to choose between good and evil; that is, between honoring God by treating others right or doing just the opposite. Unfortunately, many of us make the wrong choices.

Aquinas believed that among the creatures who made bad use of God’s gift of free will were some of the angels. Because they honored themselves more than they honored God, they fell from grace and became the evil angels or demons. Demons differ from the good angels in saying to God “my will, not thine,” instead of “not my will, but thine,” as they should be saying. In rebellion against God, they also seek to ruin the lives of human beings. Lettie Mae Thornton, whose belief in the traditional Christian teaching about the reality of demons leaves her vulnerable to Miss Jeanette’s con job, may well believe that it was one of these rebellious angels that possessed her and caused her addiction to alcohol.³ But Aquinas emphasized that God didn’t create these demons to be evil, any more than God created Miss Jeanette to be a con artist. To the contrary, God created them good and even endowed them with one of the greatest of all goods, free will. Their evil results from misusing God’s good gift.

“Through the Virtue of Demons”

Aquinas never got around to addressing the topic of vampires, who in any case wouldn’t become well known in Catholic Christendom until several centuries later, but he did have some interesting things to say about witches that would influence Allatius’s later writings on vampires. Granting that demons may exist and that they may have human followers that include witches, do witches and their kind have any real power? Aquinas believed witchcraft was indeed a real power but that it required three key components in order to work: a demon, a witch, and the permission of God.⁴

Even after being rejected by the demons, God continues to respect their free will. Just as God didn’t prevent Rene Lenier from killing Adele Stackhouse, God sometimes permits demons to do what they want. Unfortunately for the rest of us, that means that demonic powers can disrupt our world, often in the form of diseases, storms, and other calamities that Aquinas believed were sometimes, though not always, the work of demons. More relevant to True Blood, demons can also enter into contracts with human beings who have misused their free will and rejected God. People can thus acquire powers “through the virtue of demons” that surpass the powers of normal human beings.⁵

Aquinas might have proposed human-demonic complicity as an explanation of how Maryann Forrester the maenad acquired her extraordinary powers and longevity. According to the vampire queen Sophie-Anne of Louisiana, Maryann started out human, perhaps as “a wild young girl who’s married to some jerk who treats you like property,” and was drawn to the worship of Dionysus, a “religion that encourages you to get hammered, run naked through the woods, have sex with whoever, whatever, and it’s all part of getting closer to God.”⁶ Since many of the early church fathers regarded the pagan gods as demons, it’s very likely that Aquinas would have heard in Sophie-Anne’s remarks about Maryann confirmation that the maenad’s god was really one of those demons, if not actually Satan himself. Maryann’s disciple, the shapeshifter Daphne, certainly doesn’t shy away from that equation. “Dionysus, Satan,” she rhapsodizes. “It’s really just a kind of energy. Wild energy, like lust, anger, excess, violence. Basically all the fun stuff.”⁷ Fun stuff—like human sacrifice and cannibalism! Aquinas would have no hesitation in declaring this fun stuff to be the work of demons.

Allatius believed that vampires were possible in much the same way that Aquinas believed witches were. Remember that for Aquinas all that was required for witchcraft was a demon, a witch, and the permission of God. The same holds for vampires, according to Allatius, except that a dead body takes the place of the witch. The result is an animated but soulless corpse, controlled by and possessing demonic power. The demon-controlled vampire is associated with many of the same things the Hammer of Witches associates with the demon-controlled witch, a few of which are:

• A perverse sexual appetite, which is undoubtedly how an old-fashioned guy like Allatius would describe the appetites of True Blood vampires who get a sexual charge from biting their victims

• Sterility, infertility, and even child murder (think of Godfrey, from Living Dead in Dallas, the second book of the Southern Vampire Mysteries), for if God is associated with life, those who oppose God must be associated with barrenness and death

• Shapeshifting, something True Blood vampires don’t do, having left that to the shapeshifters and the Weres

• The need to be invited in, for just as a witch must invite the demon to possess her, the vampire must be invited before entering a person’s home

• Darkness and night, for if one of the most potent metaphors for God is light (just ask the Fellowship), it makes sense to associate darkness with those who hate God

• Bloodlust—or, we might even say, True Bloodlust

Being strongly linked to demons, vampires also shared their strengths and weaknesses, in particular, their powerful aversion to everything associated with the Christian God—images of the cross, holy water, Eucharistic wafers, and so on. As with demons, the vampire’s chief foe was the Catholic priest, the true priest of the true God. Non-Christian religious symbols were useless against vampires, although “baptized” pre-Christian things, such as silver and garlic, were thought to be effective deterrents, silver because it cost Judas his life and garlic because of its well-known curative, and hence life-giving, properties.⁸ Interestingly, the vampires of True Blood, despite being immune to the power of Christian symbols, still retain the traditional vampiric allergies to silver and garlic.

“We Vampires Aren’t Minions of the Devil”

The last century has seen an enormous outpouring of vampire literature, much of it influenced to various degrees by secularism and religious pluralism. Vampires have been depicted as space aliens, the product of scientific experiments, highly evolved humans, and any number of other things that amount to a rejection of the medieval Christian view that vampires are corpses animated by demons. The questions surrounding God, evil, and vampires have also changed, and one of the best examples of this is the HBO series True Blood, based on Charlaine Harris’s Southern Vampire Mysteries.

The events of True Blood take place only a few years after vampires have first “come out of the coffin” and begun campaigning for equal rights with human beings. The human protagonists of the show aren’t heroic vampire slayers fighting to rid the world of nocturnal bloodsuckers but mostly open-minded people who view vampires as rational creatures worthy of the same rights as human beings. That’s a far cry from the era when vampires were lumped with demons and thought to be so far beyond the grace of God that they were to be neither tolerated nor treated with patient respect, but simply exorcized and exterminated.

What has changed? True Blood vampires are associated with neither demons nor obvious demonic power. They’ve become a unique race of beings, not simply instruments through which demons press their ongoing rebellion against God and everything good and right. “We vampires aren’t minions of the Devil,” explains Bill Compton. “We can stand before a cross or a Bible or in a church.”⁹ Bill proves this assertion by doing the very thing that Christians like Allatius would have deemed impossible, standing before a cross in church while addressing a meeting of the Descendants of the Glorious Dead. For the most part, only the Fellowship of the Sun, which Harris has called a Christian “hate group ... based on fear and misunderstanding,” would agree with Allatius’s view of the vampire as a soulless demon-possessed corpse.¹⁰ But the Fellowship’s belief that these “creatures of the darkness [vampires] are undoubtedly the children of Satan” flies in the face of all of the evidence we see on the show that, like human beings, vampires have the freedom to choose to do good, even if, just like human beings, they don’t always exercise it well.¹¹

Vampires may no longer be associated with demons, but that’s not to say that Christianity and its philosophical questions don’t factor in to True Blood. Charlaine Harris is an active Episcopalian, and it’s not hard to see how her own beliefs have influenced her writing of the Southern Vampire Mysteries and, through that source material, the show True Blood. For example, Harris says that one of the reasons she’s an Episcopalian is that it’s “an inclusive church,” one that welcomes all people, including those whom other churches have excluded in the past, such as gays and lesbians.¹² Sookie Stackhouse and her grandmother are Methodists, but their attitude toward vampires reflects the same inclusivitism that Harris admires in her own Episcopal Church. Sookie tells her Gran, “I don’t think Jesus would mind if someone was a vampire.”¹³ Gran completely agrees, presumably because she believes that vampires, no less than human beings, were created by God and not by rebellious demons squatting inside human corpses. “There is a purpose to everything God makes,” she says, “even a vampire.”¹⁴

The inherent goodness of vampires as vampires explains why explicitly Christian symbols are useless against them, as we learn when Sookie quizzes Bill on some of the vampire’s rumored vulnerabilities.

Sookie: Holy water?

Bill: It’s just water.

Sookie: Crucifixes?

Bill: Geometry.¹⁵

Harris says that Christian symbols don’t work on vampires because “a symbol can only be effective against someone who believes in its power.”¹⁶ Her point is that there’s no uniquely holy power in any material object—presumably not even the Eucharist (contrary to the position of the Episcopal Church)—such that they would repel creatures that have utterly rejected Christ. According to this view, Christian symbols are ineffective against vampires not because the Christian God doesn’t exist (as Anne Rice argued in her early vampire novels), but because God just isn’t all that concerned about endowing symbols with special holy power.

If vampires, just like angels and human beings, were created by God to fulfill a good purpose, then the only way they can become evil is in the same way that angels and human beings can—by misusing their free will. But there’s no reason that a vampire who makes proper use of his or her free will can’t be as morally upstanding as any human being. Bill, for instance, is a pretty good guy, not without his faults but certainly superior in many respects to morally reprobate human characters like the Rattrays, Sookie’s uncle Bartlett, and Rene Lenier. Moreover, there doesn’t seem to be any reason that a vampire, who’s perfectly capable of entering a church and standing before a cross, couldn’t actually become a Christian, although none of the vampires on True Blood actually are. The closest we come is Bill, who says he “was a Christian.”¹⁷

Maybe he would consider becoming one again if there were fewer Christians like the members of the Fellowship of the Sun.

NOTES

1 Charlaine Harris, Dead until Dark (New York: Ace Books, 2001), p. 2.

2 Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger, The Hammer of Witches: A Complete Translation of the Malleus Maleficarum, trans. Christopher S. Mackay (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2009).

3 Of course, the alcoholic’s blaming her addiction on a demon is an old story. Lettie Mae’s story is unique in that her belief in demons seems to have actually contributed to her recovery rather than just serving as an excuse to stay drunk.

4 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, vol. 5, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (Allen, TX: Christian Classics), 1981, pp. 2767-2768 (Suppl., Q. 58, Art. 2).

5 Kramer and Sprenger, Hammer of Witches, p. 92.

6 Episode 211, “Frenzy.”

7 Episode 207, “Release Me.”

8 Matthew 27:5.

9 Episode 105, “Sparks Fly Out”

10 Charlaine Harris, e-mail message to the author, October 25, 2009.

11 Episode 201, “Nothing but the Blood.”

12 Charlaine Harris, e-mail message to the author, October 25, 2009. In 1994 the General Convention of the Episcopal Church passed a resolution stating that no one would be denied membership based solely on “marital status, sex, or sexual orientation.” In 2009 the Council of Bishops officially opened ordination to all levels of the ministry to gays and lesbians, although the first openly gay bishop, Gene Robinson, had already been elected to his office six years earlier, in 2003. Not all members of the Episcopal Church have supported these moves, however, and many Episcopalians have left their church because of this controversy.

13 Episode 102, “The First Taste.”

14 Episode 103, “Mine.”

15 Episode 107, “Burning House of Love.”

16 Charlaine Harris, e-mail message to the author, October 25, 2009.

17 Episode 110, “I Don’t Wanna Know.”