Devil in Christianity

• 1. Introduction

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  "The Devil is not a myth, but a real person," Pope Francis declared during a morning homily at the Domus Sanctae Marthae in 2013. That statement did not end a debate. It reopened one running for more than two thousand years. Christianity's Devil carries many names: Satan, Lucifer, Beelzebub, the Dragon, the ancient Serpent. He has been described as a fallen angel cast out of heaven, and as nothing more than a symbol of human moral weakness. Did he begin as a cosmic rebel against heaven? Or as something far more ordinary: a title, a heavenly job description? How did a figure ancient texts treated as heaven's prosecutor become the ruler of hell? The answers have shifted in every era, and they are still shifting today.

• 2. The Hebrew Adversary

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  Job 1 and 2 use the title ha-satan eighteen times, always with the Hebrew definite article, marking it as an office rather than a proper name. The scene they describe is a heavenly court. God's assembled attendants present themselves before him, and the Adversary reports he has been roaming the earth. When God asks whether he has considered the righteous Job, the Adversary argues that Job's faith depends entirely on his prosperity. With God's consent, the Adversary strips Job of his family, servants, health, and flocks. Job refuses to curse God. At the end, God restored to Job twice what he had lost.

  Zechariah 3 moves the drama into another heavenly throne room. The recently deceased Joshua the High Priest stands trial, dressed in filthy rags representing the sins of Judah. Satan serves as prosecutor, the Angel of the Lord defends, and God rebukes Satan, ordering Joshua given clean clothing to signify forgiveness. Michael Goulder, writing in 1998, connected this vision to political opposition from Sanballat the Horonite. In both texts, the Adversary operates entirely within God's authority.

  In the early rabbinic literature, Satan is never called "the Evil one, the Enemy, belial, Mastema, or Beelzebul." No Talmudic source depicts him as a rebel against God or predicts his end. Ancient Jewish texts cast him as an agent: a spy, a stool-pigeon, a prosecutor, a hangman. He descends to test virtue and rises to accuse. The parallel term belial, meaning "worthlessness," runs through the Old Testament as a descriptor for those who work against God's order. Deuteronomy 13:14 links it to those who tempt others toward false worship. In Psalm 18:4 and Psalm 41:8, it appears alongside death and disease. Unlike Satan, belial is not an independent being but an abstraction: chaos, death, and opposition to God's order. Thomas Farrar has noted that in all three Old Testament passages where ha-satan becomes ho diabolos in the Greek Septuagint, scholars generally agree the referent is an angelic being. Early Christians would press that reading much further than the texts alone required.

• 3. Watchers and Fallen Angels

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  The Book of Enoch, estimated to date from roughly 300-200 BC to 100 BC, introduces a group of angels called the Watchers. They fell in love with human women, descended to earth, and fathered giant offspring. On earth they taught humanity forbidden knowledge: warcraft, blacksmithing, and sorcery.

  Azazel stands out among the Watchers. The prophet Enoch personally rebuked him, as recorded in 1 Enoch 13:1, for instructing illicit arts. According to 1 Enoch 10:6, God sent the archangel Raphael to chain Azazel in the desert of Dudael as punishment. Shemyaza is also named as eminent among the fallen. Satan appears separately, not as one of the Watchers. The fallen angels are described as "having followed the way of Satan," implying Satan led them toward sin, but Satan and his angels remain clearly in service to God. They tempt, accuse, and finally execute divine judgment as angels of punishment.

  The Book of Jubilees introduced a distinct new figure: Mastema. He asks God to spare a tenth of the demons and assign them to his authority so he might prove humanity sinful and unworthy. Mastema is the first figure to merge what had previously been separate: the accusing function of Satan and the chaotic character of belial. Actions the Old Testament attributes to God directly are transferred to Mastema in Jubilees, including natural disasters and the testing of Abraham. This established a satanic character who acts against God's will while remaining, paradoxically, God's creature. In the end times, the text says, Mastema will be extinguished. The Book of Enoch and the Book of Jubilees are still accepted as canonical by the Ethiopian Church. Many Church Fathers drew on both texts but specifically excluded Satan from the ranks of the fallen Watchers, placing his fall later, after his temptation of Eve in the Garden of Eden.

• 4. The New Testament Devil

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  Religion scholar William Caldwell wrote that the figure of Satan in the Old Testament is "vague," but that in the New Testament one is struck by "the unitariness, clearness, and definiteness" of his outline. The New Testament Greek word satanas appears 38 times across 36 verses. It is not actually a Greek word: it is transliterated from Aramaic, ultimately derived from Hebrew. Scholars agree that "Satan" functions as a proper name throughout the New Testament, always designating a specific being with a distinct personality.

  In the temptation of Christ, recorded in Matthew 4:1-11, Mark 1:12-13, and Luke 4:1-13, the Devil offers Jesus every kingdom on earth. Since Jesus does not contest the claim that these kingdoms belong to him, some scholars read this as the gospel writers believing it to be true. Irenaeus argued otherwise. Since the Devil was a liar from the beginning, Irenaeus wrote, his offer was simply another lie, and all kingdoms in fact belong to God, citing Proverbs 21. John 13:2 states that the Devil entered Judas Iscariot before the betrayal. John 8:40 calls the Pharisees the "offspring of the devil."

  The Epistle to the Hebrews identifies the Devil as the one who holds the power of death, a power defeated through the death of Jesus (Hebrews 2:14). Paul the Apostle, in the Second Epistle to the Corinthians, warns that Satan often disguises himself as an angel of light. The First Epistle of Peter describes the Devil prowling "like a roaring lion" looking for someone to devour. The Epistle of Jude records that the Archangel Michael argued with the Devil over the body of Moses.

  Revelation 12:7-10 describes a battle between a dragon called "the devil, or Satan" and the Archangel Michael, ending in the dragon's fall to earth. Revelation 12:9 draws the dragon, the ancient serpent, the Devil, and Satan together into a single apocalyptic figure. Thomas Aquinas, Rupert of Deutz, and Gregory the Great all read this battle as occurring after the Devil sinned by aspiring to independence from God. According to Revelation 20:10, after 1,000 years the Devil rises again, is defeated, and is cast into the Lake of Fire. Revelation 9:11 names an angel of the abyss called Abaddon as its ruler. This figure, too, was identified with the Devil, adding yet another name to the roster that Christian tradition would need to reconcile.

• 5. Fallen From Grace

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  Origen was probably the first Christian author to use Lucifer as a proper name for the Devil. In his De principiis and in a homily on Book XII, he identified the morning star figure from Isaiah 14:12-15 with Satan. Aquila of Sinope had derived the Hebrew name hêlêl, meaning "morning star," from the verb yalal, meaning "to lament," suggesting a being who mourns its lost glory. Saint Jerome translated hêlêl as Lucifer in his Latin Vulgate. The church fathers then used Jesus's words from Luke 10:18, "I saw Satan fall from heaven like lightning," to fuse the falling star with the fallen angel. Cyprian around 400, Ambrosius around 340-397, and Jerome around 345-420 essentially agreed with Origen's reading. Other church fathers, among them Hieronymus, Cyrillus of Alexandria from 412-444, and Eusebius around 260-340, read Isaiah's text as referring only to a Babylonian king.

  In Origen's cosmology, God created rational creatures first, then the material world. Evil has no independent existence; it is defined by deficits, by absence of being. The Devil is the entity most remote from God, and those who follow him move further from existence toward nothingness. Origen has been accused of teaching salvation for the Devil. Scholars defending him argue this misreads his universalism. It is not the Devil as principle of evil who would be restored, but the original angel who introduced evil, if that angel were ever to abandon its evil will.

  Augustine of Hippo's Civitas Dei, written in the fifth century, became a defining influence in Western demonology through the Middle Ages. It shaped the thinking of both John Calvin and Martin Luther during the Reformation. For Augustine, Satan's rebellion was the first and final cause of evil. He described two cities, distinct and opposed like light and darkness. The earthly city is led by the Devil and inhabited by the wicked and by fallen angels. The heavenly city is inhabited by righteous men and the angels led by God. Because the fallen angels sinned in heaven spontaneously, without temptation or persuasion, they cannot repent. They are, in Augustine's phrase, eternally fixed "in their self-love." Earlier sources, including the Cave of Treasures, had depicted Satan's fall as rooted in envy: he refused to prostrate himself before Adam. Augustine rejected envy as the original sin on logical grounds. To envy someone's happiness, one must first love oneself more than that person. That prior self-love is pride.

  Anselm of Canterbury, in De Casu Diaboli, broke with Augustine on one crucial point. He absolved God from any role in predetermining the Devil's fall. Grace was offered to Lucifer, Anselm argued, and the Devil willingly refused it. All rational creatures naturally desire good, so Lucifer's wish to be equal to God was not itself wrong. The sin was in seeking this through his own power rather than through God's gift. Anselm's work also displaced the ransom theory of atonement, the belief that Christ's crucifixion was a payment made to Satan. In his satisfaction theory, God sent Jesus, both human and divine, because humanity could not pay its own debt. The Devil plays no necessary role. Maximus the Confessor added a further dimension, arguing that the Devil's purpose is to teach humans to distinguish between virtue and sin. He also addressed a puzzle the Book of Job had left open: how the Devil could still speak to God despite being banished from heaven. Since God is omnipresent within the cosmos, Maximus argued, Satan was in God's presence when he addressed Job, without being in heaven at all.

• 6. The Medieval Devil

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  Gregory the Great established the template that would define the Devil for medieval Christians. He described the Devil as the first of all God's creations, originally the highest of the angels, either a cherub or a seraph, before falling the greatest distance into hell and becoming the leader of demons. Gregory placed him at the very top of the angelic hierarchy before the fall, a position the Byzantine writer Pseudo-Dionysius had not granted him. For Gregory, the Devil functions as the tempter who incites. The human will that consents to sin bears the primary responsibility. The Devil is accountable only for the first stage.

  In the Flateyjarbók, Odin is explicitly described as another form of the Devil, worshipped by pagans who had not yet converted. From the fourth through the twelfth centuries, Christian ideas merged with European pagan traditions across the continent. Many pagan nature spirits, including dwarfs and elves, were reclassified as demons. Folk tradition frequently allowed the Devil to be outwitted: in many German tales, he builds a bridge in exchange for the first soul to cross, then a dog passes and he is cheated. Medieval demonology consistently distinguished between Lucifer, the fallen angel fixed in hell, and the mobile Satan executing his will. Theologians sometimes collapsed this distinction; storytellers preserved it.

  Alain de Lille, writing around 1195, accused the Cathars of believing in two gods: one of light and one of darkness. The former Italian Cathar Sacchoni testified to the Inquisition in 1250 that his co-religionists believed the Devil made the entire physical world. Catharism probably rooted in Bogomilism, founded by Theophilos in the tenth century. Bogomilism itself drew from Paulician movements in Armenia and the Near East. The Fourth Council of the Lateran in 1215 formally responded, affirming that God created everything from nothing, that the Devil was created good but turned evil by free will, and that the damned will suffer eternally alongside the Devil. After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, fragments of Bogomil creation myth survived in Balkan folklore. Before the world existed, according to these stories, God meets a goose on an eternal ocean. The goose is named Satanael, and it claims to be a god. Together they scoop mud from the ocean floor to fashion the world. God creates angels; the Devil creates demons. Eventually the Devil attempts an assault on heaven and is cast into the abyss. The Malleus Maleficarum, written in 1486, signaled how intense Christian Europe's engagement with the Devil was about to become.

• 7. Reformation and After

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  Martin Luther taught that the Devil was real, personal, and powerful. Evil, in his view, was not a deficiency of good but an active, presumptuous will against God, his word, and his creation. Luther confirmed the reality of witchcraft while denying the physical reality of witches' flight or bodily metamorphosis, which he regarded as imagination. He also taught that the Devil could possess people, and that the possessed might feel the Devil within, as a believer feels the Holy Spirit. Among his recommendations for resisting the Devil was music: the Devil, Luther said, cannot stand gaiety. His Theatrum Diabolorum lists greater and lesser devils. Greater ones incite to unbelief and heresy; lesser ones tempt toward greed and fornication. Among the named figures is Asmodeus, known from the Book of Tobit.

  John Calvin echoed Augustine's simile: man is like a horse, with either God or the Devil as rider. David Joris, around 1540, became the first Anabaptist to suggest the Devil was merely an allegory for Adam's fall from grace. That view found a small but persistent following in the Netherlands. Thomas Hobbes, writing in Leviathan, treated all references to Satan in the Bible as descriptions of offices or qualities, not individual beings. Daniel Defoe, in The Political History of the Devil from 1726, called such views a form of "practical atheism."

  In 1972, Pope Paul VI expressed alarm about the Devil's influence, saying that "Satan's smoke has made its way into the Temple of God through some crack." Pope Francis brought renewed focus on the Devil in the early 2010s. He said that "The devil is intelligent, he knows more theology than all the theologians together." Arturo Sosa, superior general of the Society of Jesus, declared in 2019 that Satan is a symbol, the personification of evil, but not a person. Four months later, he reversed himself, saying the Devil is real and his power is a malevolent force. The Public Religion Research Institute surveyed Americans in 2025. Twenty-two percent agreed or mostly agreed that Satan-worshipping paedophiles control government, media, and financial institutions in the U.S. Scholars Richard Raiswell, Michelle Brock, and David Winter have described this as a Satanic Renaissance, driven largely by American evangelicals and Christian nationalists since the 1960s. Rudolf Bultmann taught that authentic modern faith requires rejecting belief in a literal Devil. Jeffrey Burton Russell argued that dismissing the Devil overlooks his centrality to the New Testament from its very beginning. The debate Bultmann wanted to close remains very much open.