The Puritans believed that the Native Americans were worshippers of Satan and described them as “children of the Devil”. John Winthrop claimed that the Devil made rebellious Puritan women give birth to stillborn monsters with claws, sharp horns, and “on each foot three claws, like a young fowl”. The German Inquisitors Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger argued in their book Malleus Maleficarum, published in 1487, that all maleficia (“sorcery”) was rooted in the work of Satan.
Characteristics of Satan & the Personification of Evil
For Martin Luther the Devil was not a deficit of good, but a real, personal and powerful entity, with a presumptuous will against God, his word and his creation. From the beginning of the early modern period (around the 1400s), Christians started to imagine the Devil as an increasingly powerful entity, actively leading people into falsehood. In the Book of Revelation, a dragon/serpent “called the devil, or Satan” wages war against the archangel Michael resulting in the dragon’s fall. In response, Jesus says that a house divided against itself will fall, and that there would be no reason for the devil to allow one to defeat the devil’s works with his own power. Jesus’s adversaries claim that he receives the power to cast out demons from Beelzebub, the Devil. Christianity describes Satan as a fallen angel who terrorizes the world through evil, is opposed to truth, and shall be condemned, together with the fallen angels who follow him, to eternal fire at the Last Judgment.
The vast majority of people who thought they were possessed by the Devil did not suffer from hallucinations or other “spectacular symptoms”, but “complained of anxiety, religious fears, and evil thoughts”. This theory holds that Satan was tricked by God because Christ was not only free of sin, but also the incarnate Deity, whom Satan lacked the ability to enslave. The name Heylel, meaning “morning star” (or, in Latin, Lucifer),c was a name for Attar, the god of the planet Venus in Canaanite mythology, who attempted to scale the walls of the heavenly city, but was vanquished by the god of the sun. Pergamum was the capital of the Roman Province of Asia and “Satan’s throne” may be referring to the monumental Pergamon Altar in the city, which was dedicated to the Greek god Zeus, or to a temple dedicated to the Roman emperor Augustus. The Book of Revelation represents Satan as the supernatural ruler of the Roman Empire and the ultimate cause of all evil in the world. According to James H. Charlesworth, there is no evidence the surviving book of this name ever contained any such content.
Theology traditionally responds to this by asserting it is the devil who tempts humans into sin, but who would have tempted the devil? The story of fallen angels, proposing a second independent power in heaven, was at odds with later Rabbinic Judaism. Islamic theology (kalam) does not discuss the role of Iblis in as much as related to angels and demons (jinn and shayāṭīn), but rather in his role as the principle of evil. While whisperings tempt humans to sin, the devils might enter the hearth (qalb) of an individual. Iblis is merely a tempter, notable for inciting humans into sin by whispering into humans minds (waswās), akin to the Jewish idea of the devil as yetzer hara. The rational creatures are divided into angels and humans, both endowed with free will, and the material world is a result of their evil choices.
The former are credited with tempting the latter to sin and away from God’s path. Many Salafi strands emphasize a dualistic worldview between believers and unbelievers, The unbelievers are considered to be under the domain of the Devil and are the enemies of the faithful. It is only God who has the right to say “I”, since it is only God who is self-subsistent.
- Daimonion — an evil spirit, a demon …
- /…/aquinas/summa theologica/whether the devil is directly.htm
- Of Hebrew origin (satan); Satan, ie The devil — Satan.
- An unsurpassed guide for researchers in any discipline to the meaning, history, and usage of over 500,000 words and phrases across the English-speaking world.
- Giuseppe Tartini was inspired to write his most famous work, the Violin Sonata in G minor, also known as “The Devil’s Trill”, after dreaming of the Devil playing the violin.
Word of the day
Job’s friends all come to comfort him and convince him that he must have sinned because God is a god of justice. In Genesis, God speaks to his court, “the sons of God”, the angels, as he proceeds to create the earth. The sin of Adam and Eve brought on the greatest evil, death. They are capricious and chaotic and created humans simply as slaves to offer them sacrifices. In the Mesopotamian creation myth, the Enuma Elish, the gods themselves are responsible for evil.
In the few references to ha-Satan, he opposes humans, not God. ‘ Job is humbled and concedes the prerogatives and power of God. Throughout, Job insists that he never sinned; God has unfairly punished him. Israelite tradition, however, rejected this behavior as this mixing could lead to the great sin of idolatry. Many pantheons had gods who mated with women, particularly Zeus in Greek mythology.
But if the devil devil had no free-choice, the devil could not have been held accountable for his actions, since he had no free will but was only following his nature. However, Kant denies that a human being could ever be completely devilish, since a human does not act evil for the sake of evil itself, but for is perceived as good, such as a law or self-love. The devil must have known his sin would lead to doom, thus the devil was not knowing, or the devil did not know his sin will lead to doom, thus the devil would not have been a rational being. Yazidis adhere to strict monism and are prohibited from uttering the word “devil” and from speaking of anything related to Hell.
Judaism
Niccolò Paganini was believed to have derived his musical talent from a deal with the Devil. Tartini claimed that the sonata was a lesser imitation of what the Devil had played in his dream. Giuseppe Tartini was inspired to write his most famous work, the Violin Sonata in G minor, also known as “The Devil’s Trill”, after dreaming of the Devil playing the violin. Based on the Biblical passages portraying Satan as the accuser of sin, Blake interpreted Satan as “a promulgator of moral laws”.
On the third day of the Hajj, Muslim pilgrims to Mecca throw seven stones at a pillar known as the Jamrah al-’Aqabah, symbolizing the stoning of the Devil. The Muslim historian and theologian Al-Tabari, who died in around 923 AD, writes that, before Adam was created, earthly jinn made of smokeless fire roamed the earth and spread corruption. Another Persian scholar, al-Baydawi, instead argues that Satan was an angel in essence, but behaved like the jinn. The primary characteristic of Satan, aside from his hubris and despair, is his ability to cast evil suggestions (waswās) into men and women. The Arabic equivalent of the word Satan is Shaitan (شيطان, from the triliteral root š-ṭ-n شطن). According to a 2013 poll conducted by YouGov, fifty-seven percent of people in the United States believe in a literal Devil, compared to eighteen percent of people in Britain.
- John Calvin repeated a maxim from Saint Augustine that “Man is like a horse, with either God or the devil as rider.”
- Yahweh acquiesces to this request and Mastema uses them to tempt humans into committing more sins, so that he may punish them for their wickedness.
- The Qur‘anic iteration of the story of the Garden of Eden, prompted Sufi authors to view aspirations to a state of no-passion (of an angelic state as valued in some Christian circles) as satanic temptation.
- Satan is traditionally understood as an angel (or sometimes a jinnī in Islam) who rebelled against God and was cast out of heaven with other “fallen” angels before the creation of humankind.
- Belief in the power of Satan, however, remained strong among traditional Christians.
Satan
Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. “Resist the devil and he will flee” (James iv. 7). /…//christianbookshelf.org/aquinas/summa theologica/whether to tempt is proper.htm OF THE ASSAULTS OF THE DEMONS (FIVE ARTICLES) Whether to tempt is proper to the devil? /…/aquinas/summa theologica/whether the devil is directly.htm OF THE GRACE OF CHRIST, AS HE IS THE HEAD OF THE CHURCH (EIGHT ARTICLES) Whether the devil is the head of all the wicked?
Thus, it is the I that is regarded as evil, and both Iblis and Pharao are present as symbols for uttering “I” in ones own behavior. Yet it is not a dualism between body, psyche and spirit, since the spirit embraces both psyche and corporeal aspects of humanity. Since psyche drives the body, flesh is not the obstacle to humans but rather an unawareness that allows the impulsive forces to cause rebellion against God on the level of the psyche. Like Iblis, disbelievers are also held to be misguided by God, for, as it has been demonstrated in the case of Iblis, belief and unbelief depend on God’s will not on the individual. Thus, the Devil, as embodiment of evil, is an example on the fate of the disbelievers (kuffār), rather than an independent principle. One major concern of Muslim theologians was to disprove cosmological dualism, the idea that the Devil partakes in the creation of the world, i.e. that God creates goodness and the Devil creates evil.
The Garden of Eden by Thomas Cole
Muslims do not regard Satan as the cause of evil, but as a tempter, who takes advantage of humans’ inclinations toward self-centeredness. Instead, the “indwelling” view has become more accepted, which stipulates that the Antichrist is a human figure inhabited by Satan, since the latter’s power is not to be seen as equivalent to God’s. By the early 1600s, skeptics in Europe, including the English author Reginald Scot and the Anglican bishop John Bancroft, had begun to criticize the belief that demons still had the power to possess people. Cotton Mather wrote that devils swarmed around Puritan settlements “like the frogs of Egypt”. John Calvin repeated a maxim from Saint Augustine that “Man is like a horse, with either God or the devil as rider.”
Word History
Muslims believe that Satan is also the cause of deceptions originating from the mind and desires for evil. Muslim tradition preserves a number of stories involving dialogues between Jesus and Iblis, all of which are intended to demonstrate Jesus’s virtue and Satan’s depravity. The hadith teach that newborn babies cry because Satan touches them while they are being born, and that this touch causes people to have an aptitude for sin.
/…/aquinas/summa theologica/whether the devil was wicked.htm THE MALICE OF THE ANGELS WITH REGARD TO SIN (NINE ARTICLES) Whether the devil was wicked by the fault of his own will in the first instant of his creation? /…/simpson/days of heaven upon earth /april 4 resist the devil.htm
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As such, the Devil was conceptualized as a fallen angel; a being brought forth as good first, but then turned evil by abandoning goodness. While Zorastrianism sacrificed God’s omnipotence for God’s benevolence, thus giving rise to a principle Devil as independent from God, Christianity mostly insisted on the Devil being created and mildly dependent on God. Judeo-Christian tradition differs from earlier monistic beliefs by limiting the power of their Godhead through an evil principle or force, introduced by Zorastrianism. Spirits found to align with the new sole deity then became the Godhead’s servants (i.e. angels). Unfortunate souls, who find themselves in the domain of the evil spirits after death (i.e. in hell), are also tortured by the demons.
In the apocryphal Book of Jubilees, Yahweh grants the satan (referred to as Mastema) authority over a group of fallen angels, or their offspring, to tempt humans to sin and punish them. According to the Quran, Iblis is “one of the jinn”, which can refer to all sorts of invisible beings, including angels, demons, spirits, and devils. God created his fiery angels from the right part of a flint rock, and the Devil created his demons from the left part of the flint.
The identification of this serpent as Satan supports identification of the serpent in Genesis with the devil. The devil is described with features similar to primordial chaos monsters, like the Leviathan in the Old Testament. Satan is conceptualized as a heavenly being hostile to humans and a personification of evil 18 times in Job 1–2 and Zechariah 3. Genesis 3 mentions the serpent in the Garden of Eden, which tempts Adam and Eve into eating the forbidden fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thus causing their expulsion from the Garden. God requests that the devil then dive to the bottom of the sea to carry some mud, and from this mud, they fashioned the world. In the Gospel of the Secret Supper, Lucifer, just as in prior Gnostic systems, appears as an evil demiurge, who created the material world and traps souls inside.
Ha-Satan & The Book of Job
In Christianity, the devil or Satan is a fallen angel who is the primary opponent of God. Only a few theologians from the University of Paris, in 1241, proposed the contrary assertion, that God created the devil evil and without his own decision. For example, the devil builds a bridge in exchange for the first passing being’s soul, then people let a dog pass the bridge first and the devil is cheated. As servants of the destructive spirit, the demons were believed to follow only evil; inflicting pain and causing destruction.