God and his magical powers

I thought article 36 in Witchcraft in Europe was very interesting and I like how it was presented in class today.  This article also goes along with articles 40 and 41 in chapter 8.  From articles 40 and 41 you see that God has complete command over the devil.  The devil and his demons cannot do anything without Gods permission.  God uses this to punish people who have strayed form the right path and show them how straying from the path only results in darkness.  So the sorcerers apprentice goes through his ritual with his daughter and summons the devil.  This was the first sign that the man was going to get in trouble.  The devil had promised him gifts of treasure and they were not given to him and the devil makes excuses as to why they are not there such as the apprentice was doing a part of the ritual wrong.  This beating around the bush is another symbol that nothing good can coming form trusting something other than God. The devil then begins to give the  apprentice the name of a monk who could help him but in the end the monk turns the apprentice and his entire family over to the church and has them imprisoned.  And this was all because the apprentice tried to use powers that do not belong to a human.  These are things of the gods and people who try to use them always end up getting caught and punished for it.  At the end of the article Erasmus states, "Are we ourselves surprised that new plagues come upon us every day, when each day, by fresh wickedness, we provoke the Lord our God..." (236).  He is basically asking, why are we surprised that history is repeating itself?  They are not learning from their past mistakes and the mistakes of others and therefore are making them again and getting into the same problems.  Society can not move forward and up if people do not see the problems they are creating and own up to it and fix it.  Everyone was failing to realize that they were offending God and leaving him and this lead to them being punished by the church.

I also liked the two questions asked at the end of the presentation today: Why didn't God strip the devil of all of his power when he withdrew his grace? And if God is the source of all magic then how can magic be considered blasphemous?  To the first question, I think that God did not strip the devil of all of his power because he was going to need the devil.  The devil is temptation, in a way.  He is there to test people.  To see if people have the strength to keep believing in God no matter what happens, and the devil is there for when they fail.  And to the second question, I think that the magic is blasphemous only when when humans use it.  It was not meant for us to use and that is why it often fails for people such as the sorcerers apprentice in article 36 and the many articles before it.  Magic is something for God and he makes it apparent by the fact that it does not work for anyone else.  Humans were not meant to use it and therefore when they try to use it it is as if they are disgracing God for even trying to be like him in that manner because they should not have that power.