Demonology, Angelology, and the Problem of Evil: Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson Against Modern Christian Amnesia

One of the quiet scandals of modern Christianity is its effective abolition of the unseen world. Angels are reduced to metaphors, demons to psychological projections, and evil to a matter of subjective preference. In doing so, Christianity has not become more rational; it has become cosmologically illiterate.

Gurdjieff’s Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson stands as a deliberate provocation against this flattening of reality. It restores a thick, hierarchical universe—populated, governed, and strained by real intelligences—without lapsing into crude myth or sentimental superstition. What emerges is neither naïve demonology nor romantic angelology, but a rigorously functional cosmology in which Good and Evil are objective realities rooted in cosmic law.

A Universe Governed, Not Imagined

In Beelzebub’s Tales, the universe is not a moral theatre constructed for human psychology. It is a lawful, structured system governed by impersonal yet sacred principles—most notably the Law of Three and the Law of Seven. All beings, from the lowest to the highest, participate in this order according to their level of development and responsibility.

Beelzebub himself—whose name is deliberately chosen to scandalize Christian sensibilities—is not a symbol of evil, but a high cosmic being, exiled for a grave error committed in conscious opposition to divine order. His exile is not metaphorical. It is ontological and historical within the narrative. He rebels, he is banished from the “Most Most Holy Sun Absolute,” and he is eventually restored—not through sentiment, but through conscious understanding and service.

This alone should trouble modern theological habits. Gurdjieff assumes that high spiritual beings possess real freedom, and therefore real capacity for error. In this cosmology, angels can fall—not because they are mythological, but because intelligence without obedience to cosmic law is dangerous at any level of being.

Angels and Demons as Functional Categories

Gurdjieff never presents angels and demons as cartoon figures locked in a melodrama of good intentions versus bad intentions. Instead, he presents types of beings defined by function.

So-called “angelic” beings are those who participate consciously in the maintenance of cosmic order. Their goodness is not moral sentiment but lawful alignment. They serve because they understand necessity.

Conversely, what appears as “demonic” is not primarily malevolent intent, but misalignment with objective cosmic purpose. Beings who operate contrary to universal law—whether knowingly or through crystallized ignorance—become destructive not by desire, but by function. This is where Gurdjieff’s concept of the Hasnamuss serves as a good example.

The Hasnamuss: Evil Without Romance

A Hasnamuss is not a demon in the medieval sense. It is something more terrifying: a being who has crystallized intelligence without conscience. Such beings can exist at multiple levels of the cosmic hierarchy, including humanity.

This is crucial. Evil, in Beelzebub’s Tales, is not an external force attacking humanity from without. It is a state of being—a definitive inner configuration that produces objectively destructive effects in the universe.

The Hasnamuss is capable of reason, strategy, organization, even creativity. What it lacks is participation in what Gurdjieff calls Objective Conscience—the divine impulse that binds intelligence to responsibility. This is why evil, in Gurdjieff’s system, can be efficient, persuasive, and socially dominant. It is not stupid. It is cut off from God.

Objective and Subjective Good and Evil

Here Gurdjieff draws a distinction that modern Christianity has almost entirely lost. Objective Good is that which serves the lawful processes of the cosmos—the transformation of energies, the maintenance of balance, the fulfillment of higher purposes beyond personal preference. Objective Evil is that which disrupts these processes, whether intentionally or through structural dysfunction.

By contrast, subjective good and evil—the moral categories humans argue about endlessly—are psychological reactions. An act is called “good” because it feels right or is socially rewarded. It is called “evil” because it provokes guilt, fear, or punishment. These subjective categories are not meaningless, but they are secondary. They often obscure rather than reveal objective reality.

A society can normalize objectively evil structures while feeling morally righteous. A person can commit objectively destructive acts while experiencing themselves as virtuous. This is not hypocrisy; it is ignorance of cosmic law.

Why Modern Christianity Cannot See This

The demythologized Christianity of the modern West cannot accommodate Gurdjieff’s cosmology because it has already abandoned the idea that reality itself makes moral demands.

Once angels and demons are reduced to symbols, evil becomes a matter of opinion. Once evil becomes opinion, salvation becomes therapy. And once salvation becomes therapy, Christ becomes a life coach rather than the Logos through whom all things are ordered.

Gurdjieff does not deny Christ. He assumes Christ. But he situates Christ within a universe that is dangerous, structured, and unforgiving of unconsciousness and conscience-less. In such a universe, salvation is not legal acquittal. It is ontological transformation.

The Scandal of Beelzebub

Beelzebub is offensive because he exposes how thin our theology has become. He forces us to confront the possibility that:

• Spiritual beings are real.

• Moral failure has cosmic consequences.

• Evil is not merely psychological.

• Intelligence without conscience is catastrophic.

• Redemption requires conscious participation.

This is not anti-Christian. It is pre-modern Christian in the deepest sense—closer to the cosmic seriousness of the Gospels than to the therapeutic moralism that now passes for faith. If Christianity is to recover its power, it must recover its cosmos. And Beelzebub’s Tales—however unsettling—forces that recovery upon us. Not by comforting us. But by reminding us that the universe is watching.