Are Hindu Gods Demons?

the interfaith elephant in the room

Catholics are quite bad at interfaith understanding.

Many clergymen seem to believe that yoga-asanas are all dedicated to demonic beings.

Clearly they have never heard of “boat pose” or “triangle pose”.

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One contested question in the church is whether or not the Hindu gods are demons.

This was especially relevant to me as a Hindu convert.

My parents are Hindu. Are all the deities in our puja cabinet at home actually demons? If they are, how should I make sense of the Hindu practices I used to do? Of the scriptures I read? Of the practices of my parents? Of the practices of one billion people in India and of many of my friends? Of yoga, of meditation, of mantra?

There is little to no available writing on Hindu deities being angels. It seems, despite it being the religion of over a billion people, Catholics do not care to actually address the question of whether or not they believe that Krishna is a demon. Rajiv Malhotra addresses this lack of fundamental engagement in his book, Being Different, which I will review soon.

Because there is no clearly thought out or articulated view, it seems that conservatives quitely believe all of South Asia are worshipping demons, and progressives quietly practice neo-tantra themselves.

To answer this question, I asked a local spiritual director. He thinks it’s all demonic, a view many Catholics seem to share.

I couldn’t believe this because there is obviously wisdom in Hinduism. So I tried to get a second opinion from Francis J. Clooney, a Jesuit and professor at Harvard Divinity School, who specializes in Hindu-Catholic interfaith dialogue.

Here’s what he told me:

I’m grateful he replied, even though 50% of his reply was telling me to talk to someone else (which I already had, Mr. Clooney!)

While he didn’t give me a straightforward answer, and even if he did he is not an authority— Clooney also has his biases and blind-spots— he did leave me with an interesting thread: could Hindu deities be angels or messengers of God?

I’m familiar with this idea only from the work of Rudolf Steiner, who believed the Archangel Gabriel was involved in the Bhagavad Gita, and that Hinduism, along with other pre-Christian spiritual streams, laid the groundwork for the incarnation of Christ.

Before converting, I had gone quite deep into Rudolf Steiner’s thought, even studying at his institution in Switzerland. Part of my conversion was influenced by Valentin Tomberg, one of Steiner’s most prominent disciples, who then renounced all of it, and converted to mainstream Catholicism.

Tomberg wrote a book called Meditations on the Tarot, which is quite sympathetic to pagan wisdom. The interesting thing about Meditations on the Tarot is that the afterward to this book is written by Hans Urs Von Balthasaar, one of the 20th centuries most important Catholic theologians, and a close advisor to Pope’s John Paul II and Benedict XVI.

The afterward shows that present mainstream of calling every stream of non-Christian thought, except for Aristotle, demonic, is not orthodox. The early church fathers, like St. Justin Martyr, respected elements of pagan wisdom, and tried to incorporate the insights of those like Hermes Trismegistus into Christian theology. And 20th century church theologians revived these views.

Balthasaar’s afterward that helped me see that perhaps everything that I have known and tried is not actually demonic, even though some of it might be, and all of it is lacking in a fundamental way.

The Balthasar afterward led me to Cardinal Jean Daniélou, another 20th century theologian. Daniélou was very interested in the idea of the angels of the nations. These angels, referenced in the Old Testament, may have ministered to the Greeks, Persians, Egyptians, and Indians before the incarnation of Christ, and gave them some amount of good guidance and wisdom.

Now, the Bhagavad Gita is clearly not a demonic text. I would love for someone to argue otherwise. And so Krishna, the alleged progenitor of the text, is probably not a demon.

So, what if Krishna was not a demon, but an angel to the Indian nation?

The question is quite nuanced and I have not gone all the way into it. The Bhagavat Purana paint a much more passionate picture of Krishna than the Gita does. Moreover, I haven’t even read the entire Mahabharata. Also, some say the angels of the other nations rebelled against the the angel of Israel.

I’m shocked that these perspectives are so little discussed considering the rapidly growing popularity of Hinduism in the West. I should not be the one speculating on whether or not Krishna was an angel to the Indian nation. I’m just a guy on the internet. But it seems no one else is. If they are, I can’t find them.