The Encyclopedia Of Demons And Demonology

Satan 223
The early church fathers did more to cement the identity
of Satan with the Devil and the tempter in the Garden
of Eden, and with Lucifer. In the second century,
Justin Martyr was the first to identify Satan with the
serpent. He said the fall of Satan at the hands of Christ
was predicted in Isaiah in the description of the fall of
Lucifer. Justin also linked Satan with the Sons of God, or
WATCHERS, and associated the powers and principalities
(two orders of angels) of the Epistles with pagan gods
and demons.
Other church fathers, such as Theophilus and Tertullian,
also placed Satan as tempter in the Garden. According
to Cyprian, the Devil was once a beloved and intimate
angel of God, who perished at the beginning of the world
out of envy over humanity. In losing his own immortality,
he took away the immortality of humans. Irenaeus
echoed this view.
Origen (ca. 185–250) was the first church father to reinterpret
Satan within the context of Lucifer.
The Life of Adam and Eve, a pseudepigraphal text
written around 100 A.D., states that the angel Satan was
ordered by the archangel Michael to bow down and worship
Adam, made in the image of God, but he refused
because Adam was inferior, saying that Adam ought to
worship him. The angels under Satan also refused, and
Satan and Jesus (AUTHOR’S COLLECTION)
God cast them all out of heaven. Muhammad was influenced
by this text and retells the story in the Qur’an
10 times; the Devil is named IBLIS, who is head of the
DJINN.
The idea that Satan was cast down because of his refusal
to worship Adam did not take hold in Christianity, however.
Satan is jealous of humans, but only after his fall.
Satan later became identified with gods of paganism.
The idea was developed that Satan had rights over humanity
and the world because of the sin of Adam and
Eve; redemption was made through Christ, who paid off
the debt with his own life. According to St. Augustine,
Adam’s sin meant that the whole of humanity fell under
the servitude of Satan.
In the Middle Ages, legends and hagiographies of the
saints were popular, offering many stories of saints besting
the Satan and his demons and curing DEMONIACs of
their POSSESSION.
St. Thomas Aquinas, one of the greatest and most influential
theologians of the church, saw only one Devil,
Satan, and never referred to “devils” in the plural unless
he was quoting other writers. Aquinas said that the only
two sins angels can commit are pride and envy, for all
other sins are related to physical appetites. According
to Aquinas, demons have no possibility of redemption
and can only go to hell (where they torment the dead) or
Smoggy Air (where they torment the living). He said human
beings deserved to be turned over to Satan because
of Adam’s sin.
At some point—the origins are unclear—Satan became
the ruler of hell and the chief tormenter of souls of
the dead. From the 16th century on, his primary role was
tempter of humanity.
The artist William Blake saw Satan as the imagination,
a view also held in Sufism.
Even by the 18th century, Satan seemed an outdated
superstition to some theologians, among them the influential
Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher (1768–1834), a minister
in the Reformed Church. The concept of the Devil was
unenlightened, he argued, pointing out that Jesus and the
disciples made few direct references to Satan. Schleiermacher
argued that Satan does not exist and is used as a
convenient metaphor for evil.
Since the mid-20th century, belief in Satan has risen,
in part the result of the rise of fundamentalism, and of
interest in demonic POSSESSION.
FURTHER READING:
Kelly, Henry Ansgar. A Biography of Satan. New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2006.
Pagels, Elaine. The Origin of Satan. New York: Random
House, 1995.
Russell, Jeffrey Burton. Mephistopheles: The Devil in the Modern
World. Ithaca, N.Y., and London: Cornell University
Press, 1986.
———. Satan: The Early Christian Tradition. Ithaca, N.Y.,
and London: Cornell University Press, 1981.