Sympathy for the Devil

By Howard G. Chua-Eoan

Can creatures who can appear soft and cherubic be capable of evil? Those who say they travel with angels are loath to admit it. "Reports of evil angels are legion," acknowledges Eileen Freeman, publisher of the newsletter AngelWatch, but she says, "I refuse to give them any free publicity." Only last week in a Binghamton, New York, court, a man pleading "not responsible" claimed that an angel had told him to molest the five-year-old boy he was babysitting. No less an authority than St. Paul warned the faithful, in his second letter to the Corinthians, that Satan could be "transformed into an angel of light." For Satan was once an angel -- indeed, one of the most exalted as well as the most complex and the most human.

The celestial being who would become Satan had many names in heaven. Most of Western tradition identifies him as Lucifer, the Morning Star, the most brilliant of all the denizens of the empyrean. He is Sammael, according to the rabbinical literature of the 4th and 5th centuries A.D., highest of those who flit around the throne of God, created above the seraphim and distinguished from others by the fact that he possessed twice the maximum allotment of wings: 12. To Muslims, he is Iblis, a word perhaps derived from the Greek diabolos, the proudest of all God's creatures. And it was pride that would lead to Satan's rebellion and eventual expulsion from heaven. But even in the depths of hell, he retained an awe-inspiring dignity. In the words of Milton's Paradise Lost, "With grave aspect he rose, and in his rising seemed a pillar of state . . . princely counsel in his face yet shone, majestic though in ruin."

It is that irrepressible pride that has given the chief of the fallen angels such power to tempt humankind. If humankind was created just a little lower than the angels, what are we to make of an angel who has failed? Is he then not just like us -- yet immortally so? For poets like Milton, Satan was the archetypal antihero, the rebel waging eternal guerrilla warfare against his Creator. "To reign is worth ambition though in hell: Better to reign in hell than serve in heav'n." Indeed, to some, Satan even provides lessons in piety. The Sufis, the mystics of Islam, imagined that the pride of Iblis may have been blind ideological purity, a supremely flawed political correctness. According to one account, when he was asked to bow before Adam, God's newest and best-beloved creation, Iblis refused. "There is only one God," he declared, "and I will make obeisance only to Him." More of a monotheist than God himself, Iblis was banished from Heaven.

Christian legends are different. Lucifer vaingloriously sought to overturn the regime in heaven and waged war against God's loyalists. Defeated by the Archangel Michael, the angel who would be God was cast into his inferno, to brood in the darkness, "hatching vain empires." With him went about a third of the heavenly host, a horde of fallen angels.

As late as the sixth century A.D., in a mosaic in Ravenna depicting the Last Judgment, the devil was still portrayed as a haloed, winged being, standing at the left hand of Christ. Satan is dressed in blue, not red, robes. (Red was the color of the upper ether, closest to God, from which Satan was expelled; blue, the color of the closest heaven humankind could see.) By the Middle Ages, however, Satan had become a beast. His horns and hooves come from his commingling with beliefs banished by a victorious Christianity. The devil's appurtenances derive from the great Greek god Pan -- half-man, half- goat -- and from association with the cult of the forest deity Cernunnos of northern Europe. Relegated to the shadows, the pagan gods were absorbed by the master of darkness, the demigod on the margins.

There is no possibility of redemption for Satan and his minions. Unlike Adam and Eve, the fallen angels were not tempted to sin but chose it out of untrammeled free will. They have no excuse for disobedience. And as the ages roll, heaven grows further away. "Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell," Satan moans in Paradise Lost. Even in majestic ruin, Satan is certain only of the dark path he is doomed to pursue with seraphic fortitude. "Farewell remorse," says the angel who can no longer look homeward to heaven. "All good to me is lost; Evil, be thou my good."

With reporting by Sam Allis/Boston