What is terror? It is a fear so great that it impedes rational thought. That’s why we have the expression “frozen with fear.” Fear is the emotion we experience when we are confronted with an evil which is coming upon us and is difficult to avoid. The emotion we use to overcome fear is the emotion of courage, which moves us to confront the evil and overcome it. If the evil is great and almost impossible to avoid, this fear is called “terror.” Terror is a form of fear so intense that it keeps us from confronting evil with courage. Sometimes we are so terrified that we can’t even flee, so we freeze in our tracks, like the proverbial “deer in the headlights.”
Applying the language and concepts of human emotions to purely spiritual beings like angels and demons can be a tricky business. This is because, in the strict sense, they do not have feelings or emotions like ours. To be sure, they can love (sort of, in the case of demons) and rejoice (kind of, again for demons), and be angry as we do, but they do these things with the simplicity of spiritual beings, in their wills and understanding. There are no sense impressions, imaginations, or memories, no bodily reactions of pleasure or pain or revulsion. Their “emotions” have a kind of focus and serenity ours usually lack.
Now, for us, a demon is a naturally a pretty frightening prospect. They are more powerful than we are by nature, and they are invisible, and they perceive the movements of our emotions and imagination. They can get a lot of information about us from what flits across the screen of our memory, imagination, and emotions. This they use to tempt us. To be sure, they cannot access the deeper, inner, spiritual thoughts and intentions of human beings, but they can see that part of our thoughts and feelings that is directly linked to our bodily senses. Since we have a hard enough time of it as it is to govern our own imaginations and passions, the added instigations of the demons are a trial.
Lest this discourage us, we must consider something else about the demons. They are desperate in their attempts to drag us down to hell with them. We are meant individually to take the place of the demons who fell, so the demons are bitterly jealous of their lost status and don’t want a mere human being to take it. They know that this will happen ultimately, but they have an obsession with trying to find out who will be lost with them on the last day.
This is why they are so intensely interested in what is going on inside us. They want intelligence. They are spies looking for clues against their rivals in eternity. Yet even if they tempt us and we fall, they can never be sure that we really were fully to blame for our sin. They can never see the real state of our soul. Only God can do this, or the saints and angels to whom he imparts this information in order to help us. But they seek the bitter consolation of having greater certitude about a sinner’s likelihood of being lost.
In the light of this little drama of desperate demonic struggle, we can understand why St. Joseph is invoked as the powerful “Terror of Demons.” You see, the greatest of the saints, even as they lived on earth, were impervious to the attacks of the devil on their inner lives. This is because, by a special grace, they had such control over their feelings that the demons would not be able to surmise their inmost thoughts and intentions. Before these great ones, the demons had to stop and reveal themselves in their desperate attempts to get at some information.
Our Lord is the first of these, then Our Lady, then St. Joseph and St. John the Baptist. All those who never had the moral effects of original sin, or who had them removed or bound by a special grace—these had such a serene sense life that there was nothing there that they did not put there. This is very different from the rest of us, who have so many images and memories and feelings beyond our control, whether in whole or in part.
Remember how Satan tempts Our Lord in the desert. He is not able to come away with any useful information. Our Lord sticks to the publicly revealed words of Sacred Scripture and doesn’t give away any of his secrets. The devil can’t be sure exactly who he is or what he is up to, and so he fears him and is determined to overcome him if he can.
Now consider St. Joseph. The great theologians who have reflected on St. Joseph have told us that even though he did not have the singular privilege of being conceived without sin like his all-holy spouse, he nonetheless was free from all actual sin in the course of his earthly life, the whole time, or at least by the time he was betrothed to Mary. What this means concretely is that his imagination and memory and feelings were not accessible to the demons unless he willed to inform them. These powers were completely under the government of his intellect and free will. So even in his earthly life, they feared him as one whom they could not penetrate.
The fallen angels’ knowledge is their principal weapon in attacking the human race. If they are deprived of knowledge, then they have only fear and frustration. Even more, if they perceive that the person whom they cannot figure out seems to be exceedingly close to God, they know that this one will have even more power to confound them.
The intense love and pure inner life of St. Joseph truly frightens the demons, especially now. After all, he is the greatest of the saints after Our Lady, and so probably has taken the place lost by the highest of the fallen angels, Lucifer himself. (This is the opinion of many who have written on St. Joseph, not of faith, but of theological reasoning—but in any case, he is very powerful indeed.)
He terrifies them because they cannot see at all what he is up to—and he is the patron of the universal Church! They can know that you and I are praying to him, but they cannot see his movements, his influence, the tactics of his care for souls. He is, as it were, the most terrifying of mortal enemies: an invisible man! The demons are constantly taken by surprise by his help of sinners. He aids in temporal and bodily needs; he teaches the life of prayer; he directs events for our good.
The saints, especially St. Teresa of Avila and St. Francis de Sales, tell us that his intercession is ready and powerful and perfect. And these are doctors of the Church, whose teaching has a particular authority.
He also obtains for us a more serene inner life, so that we too can be less subject to the wiles of the devil. The most powerful evidence of this is found in what St. Ignatius of Antioch says in his letter to the Ephesians: “The virginity of Mary, and her giving birth were hidden from the prince of this world, as was also the death of the Lord. Three great mysteries which were wrought in the stillness of God.”
Who was witness to all this? Joseph, of course. And yet in him the devil could not find a trace of stray thought or imagination. No wonder that we should entrust God’s deepest plans for us and our innermost desires to his intercession, so they will be protected from the demons, as they flee in terror, unable to act against the “invisible man”!