Ancient Explanations of Crime: The Demonological

It went for three reasons. The Church withdrew its participation in the ordeals in the early thirteenth century, which removed their authority in Europe. The rise of centralised royal justice created courts with the capacity to hear witnesses. And the intellectual shift of the Enlightenment made supernatural causation an unacceptable explanation for anything.

That third reason is what makes this chapter necessary. The Classical School, which is the beginning of criminology proper, was a direct attack on a criminal justice system that was still arbitrary, secret and cruel, and whose intellectual foundation was that the offender was wicked in a metaphysical sense. Beccaria's premise, that a person offends because he calculates, is only revolutionary against this background.

The traces it leaves

Do not treat the demonological as safely dead. Three of its features survive.

Punishment as expiation. The idea that the offender must suffer to restore a moral balance is retributive theory in modern dress and demonological thinking in its ancestry.

Purification of the community. Public shaming, and the demand for exemplary punishment after an outrage, do the same work the sacrifice did.

And the language of evil. Public and political discussion of grave crime still reaches for words that place the offender outside the human, and doing so has the same effect it always had: it makes explanation unnecessary.

A worked example

A village in the seventeenth century loses three children to an illness in one month. A woman living alone at the edge of the village is accused of causing it.

On the demonological account the question is not what she did but what she is. Evidence of an act is not required, because the mechanism is not physical. The procedure is an ordeal, and its outcome is a verdict.

Notice what is impossible on this account. There is no way to be acquitted by showing you were elsewhere, because the mechanism does not require presence. There is no way to challenge the finding, because it is divine. And there is no way for the community to be wrong, because the procedure is definitive by construction.

Now change one premise. Suppose illness is caused by contagion. Immediately the questions become empirical: where did the children go, whom did they meet, what did they drink. The woman's character becomes irrelevant and her whereabouts become central.

That single change is the birth of criminology. Once causation is treated as natural rather than supernatural, it can be investigated, and once it can be investigated the explanation can be wrong. Everything in the next twenty chapters follows from it.

Quick revision

• The demonological or supernatural explanation: crime is caused by possession or by evil forces, and it offends a supernatural order that must be purified.
• Procedures: trial by ordeal, by fire, water, poison and the balance; trial by battle; and compurgation by oath-helpers. None asks what happened; each asks for a sign.
• It endured because it produced a verdict, needed no investigative capacity, and commanded belief.
• It ended with the Church's withdrawal from the ordeals in the early thirteenth century, the growth of centralised royal courts, and the Enlightenment's rejection of supernatural causation.
• Survivals: punishment as expiation, public shaming as purification, and the language of evil, which makes explanation unnecessary.
• The Classical School is a reaction against this system, which is why the ancient material has to be understood before it.

Test yourself

1. What is the demonological explanation of crime, and what procedures follow from it? That criminal conduct is caused by possession by evil spirits or by the influence of malign supernatural forces, and that it offends a supernatural as well as a human order. It follows that guilt is ascertained by consulting the supernatural, through trial by ordeal, trial by battle and compurgation, and that punishment serves to expel the evil and purify the community.

2. Why is it important to a criminology paper if it is false? Because criminology begins as a reaction to it. Only when causation is treated as natural rather than supernatural can it be investigated, and only then can an explanation be tested and found wrong. The Classical School's account of the offender as a calculating being is intelligible only as an answer to the demonological system that preceded it.

3. Name three modern survivals of demonological thinking. Punishment as expiation, in which suffering is required to restore a moral balance; the demand for exemplary punishment after a public outrage, which serves to purify the community; and the description of grave offenders as evil or as monsters, which places them outside the human and so removes the need to explain their conduct.