> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://atangleofviews.ghost.io/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # On Satan - URL: https://atangleofviews.ghost.io/on-lucifer/ - Published: 2024-01-31T16:43:32.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-05T05:36:56.000Z - Author: heedless I cannot think of a better argument on behalf of Buddhism than Satan. Sorry, I couldn't help myself there. It's a provocative line and the basis for exploring whether Buddhism's cosmology accounts for the rise and fall of the arch-villain of the Abrahamic faiths. Five centuries before the founding of Christianity, the Buddha had laid out the causes and conditions for heavenly tumbles. What goes up... Here I will treat Lucifer and Satan as being one and the same since that is how they are generally understood in Christianity. Ray Hermann has an [article](https://outlawbiblestudent.org/satan-the-devil-and-lucifer-are-they-one-and-the-same/) that delves more deeply into the origin of the appellations, one that traces the Prince of Darkness to an actual historical figure from ancient Babylon. The Old Testament started out as stories, perhaps inspired by quasi-historical events or figures, and were later pulled from their moorings and made more abstract. The abstractions were not about this particular evil king, but about any evil king who stands against God. When Netanyahu quoted Samuel 15:3 on the eve of the IDF's ethnic cleansing of Gaza, he made the modern Palestinians a stand-in for the Amalekites of old. When you constantly reinterpret your present circumstances in terms of something that may or may not have happened 3,000 years ago, it's to be expected that progress in humane things will be slow at best. --- Lucifer means "light bearer" (*Lux, lucis*/*fero* for you Latin hounds out there), and the name we have comes from St. Jerome's Vulgate, the standard Latin edition of the Catholic Church's Bible for centuries. Jerome's translation is from a Hebrew equivalent and, at least to my unscholarly eyes, seems accurate even if the whatness is missing. Did he carry torches? Was he in charge of keeping heaven lit? In English, the "uh-fur" sounds the same when we say Christopher – the Christ Bearer. It seems "ifer" and "opher" are phonetically and definitionally the same across Latin and Greek. Satan is mentioned sparingly in the Hebrew Bible and usually comes across as a free-roaming spirit whose mission is to accuse and tempt. He is a corruptor of men and nations. As we get into the New Testament, he becomes a much bigger deal. He tempts Christ in the desert and, when he fails, realizes the stakes have been raised and that his days flitting about the earth are numbered. He has misjudged the carpenter's son and so, for the rest of the New Testament, becomes the boss of an evil army which seeks to destroy the Church and upend creation. Hell is losing souls to Jesus. We turn to the Old Testament to get Satan's origin story. Ezekiel 28:11-19 refers to a cherub arrayed in every kind of finery and given pride of place in the divine pecking order. He is free to move about as he wishes, just as in the Book of Job (1:6). His freedom of movement associates him and his cohort with the medium of air in the New Testament and now, with UAPs. > 15 Thou wast perfect in thy ways from the day that thou wast created, till unrighteousness was found in thee. If hell has its discontents, heaven is not without its critics as well. You can have it all and still be afflicted. Clearly, Lucifer was *not* perfect simply. On this side of the grave, we wonder at what exactly eternity would look like in practical terms. For the theologically minded, the question becomes: What caused Lucifer, who conducted himself in perfection, to give notice and go independent? If there is free will in heaven, does that mean the saintly souls who wash up on celestial shores will themselves follow in Lucifer's path in a few eons? What does free will even mean for creatures who have achieved perfection? What could possibly be better than being top dog in heaven? Will eternity be a never-ending struggle against temptations that, when succumbed to, restart the whole damn cycle over? V. 15 says "till unrighteousness was found in thee." Implied here is that the unrighteousness was already there, waiting to hatch. It was not something Satan picked up in his travels. Or maybe it was. There's not enough information. Maybe he got strange ideas from talking to other beings in parts of the cosmos we know nothing about. If his ways were perfect, it was all an outer sham that eventually gave way to the inner rot. We see a creature with a defective will whose weakness overcomes his superlative nature, thereby cracking the facade. There is a flaw in him, same as in every sentient being, no matter the stature. A little further, we read: > 17 Thine heart was lifted up because of thy beauty, thou hast corrupted thy wisdom by reason of thy brightness: I have cast thee to the ground, I have laid thee before kings, that they may behold thee. The brightness of the light bearer exceeded his wisdom, and we see a practical Exhibit A of the warning found in Proverbs 16:18: > Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall. This was [compressed](https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/pride+goeth+before+a%2fthe+fall) into the English truism, "Pride goeth before the Fall." He was not a torchbearer or the guy who switches on lights in the heavenly palaces and stadiums. The brightness that defined him emanated from himself. The passage says that Lucifer corrupted himself before he became the defiler of others; the cause was not external to him. To borrow from Buddhist cosmology, his good karma began to run out, and eventually he lost his footing. From Ezekiel and Isaiah, we have the picture of a heavenly being self-seduced by his own haughtiness to the point that he was expelled along with his entourage from heaven. From a Buddhist perspective, the story illustrates the impermanence of states within samsara (the endless wandering) and that there is nothing so good this side of Nibbana that it can satisfy thoroughly, putting the heart at complete rest. Thomas Aquinas would later have to hide the seam by positing the absence of a Beatific Vision as the precondition for the fall. In Version 2.0, with the new Beatific Vision installed in the break room next to the Keurig, the possibility of ever falling again vanishes. The inherent weakness of *environment* which made the Fall possible will be removed in the distant future. Here, the reader is invited to consider whether the Christian is smuggling in the *unconditioned* – Nibanna – in a deep bow to the problem of impermanence. This cannot happen again; otherwise, the linear arc of creation turns into an Indian cosmic series of perpetual cycles. This was one of Origen's errors: the theory of cyclical fall-redemption. In Revelation 12:7-9, the origin story is embellished to include Satan taking down one third (12:3-4) of the heavenly choir with him into the Pit. This is like a disgruntled top performer quitting a national advertising firm, taking whatever talent he can with him, to start a new outfit. I think this is, in fact, a subplot in one of the later seasons of *Mad Men*. Those who followed Satan into rebellion were like their boss, dissatisfied. Say what you want about heaven, dukkha is no respecter of man, angel, or beast. Christians will invariably say that the demonic is so by choice; it skirts the question about the kind of object that could draw one away from a beautiful existing focus. Who leaves these other objects lying about anyway that distract from the Beatific Vision? In different metaphysical systems, devas are made of a subtle body that exists in varying degrees of refinement. Put another way, they have bodies, and what is a body but a boundary between this and that? Once you enter the realm of subjects & objects, I & thou, you are in the formed, the created and the compounded – samsara. Here is the playground of dukkha. Nibbana, on the other hand, is the unformed, the uncreated, the timeless, the deathless. There is either Nibbana or samsara. Heaven is firmly fixed in samsara as the scriptures of the traditions tell us. Nibbana once obtained can never be lost. Ever. According to Aquinas, the quality of the new heaven in which the Beatific Vision is shared with the elect is such that no mind, no will, can ever turn away from it and thus leave the eternal safety bubble and wander away into a lower existence, where sin and rebellion become options. Heaven is a big glowing ball of light – a front porch light if you will – and the saints and angels are but moths enraptured by its radiance. This glow can never fade; the creatures who formerly had flawed wills no longer have the capacity to exercise it *freely* because they've been captured by beauty itself. The problems of sickness, old age, death, and rebellion followed as a consequence of sin, and only its eradication grants a possibility for eternal well-being. We are told in Matthew 18:10 that the angels of the little ones are so fleet of foot that they watch over human children while also looking into the face of Yahweh. The angels loyal to Yahweh were granted the Beatific Vision but still had earthly duties to look after humans. Satan fell from grace because he didn't have the big giant porch light; he was no light-drunk moth held in thrall by it, nor were his mates. The original heaven was, like the earthly creation that came later, defective from the start. The angels split into different armies in an instant, in a flash, and then were cast down into darkness. Imagine springing into existence as Lucifer, as the exquisite triumph of Yahweh's new universe, only to fall the next second – per Milton's poem – into the pit of hell on account of an act of rebellion. Who is made from the get-go in a state of rebellion against his father? Angels, we are told by the theologians, are unlike humans in that they can make one act of will and thereby choose for themselves either heaven or hell. Now, if you review the Ezekiel and other quotes from earlier, you might find Thomas's rendering of the fall to be a little strained. Understand that Christian faith requires you to rationalize incongruities, to cover over narrative fractures to save the greater theological meta-system. Theology is mental gymnastics par excellence, with always a finishing tumble at the end onto the mat of "divine mystery." Thomas knew that Christ himself said the angels see Yahweh, and if Yahweh is so great, how did any of them ever fall? Thomas believed, like Aristotle, that man was a rational animal, but he has to *rationalize* in places because the gaps are just too glaring. Therefore, neither angel nor man ever saw their maker at the time of their instantiation. So the creation of the angels is, a split second later, attended by a great downfall of many of them, a third of the hosts as the good book says. Yahweh's first experiment with a creature ends up with a mixed result, a lab experiment gone awry, with some of the specimens – well, one of them at least – finding a way into a lovely garden populated by animals and two humans. This is the second lab experiment, and it too fails directly as the result of the first. There were no firewalls between the two experiments, but in the new heaven, Beatific Vision means no more laboratory fuck-ups. Nope. Yahweh is all done with those; thank you very much! A future barrier is installed, and it amounts to the cessation of free will, the thing theologians, preachers, and philosophers praise in humans as the foremost power, the one which distinguishes them from animals and angels. Angels could only choose once, in that primordial flash, and then never again. Humans get decades to live with the burden of choice, and then, at the end, it is taken away. In its absence, they experienced eternity as "equal to the angels" (according to Scripture) and thus, having no will, no capacity to choose other than Yahweh; or more likely, as prisoners of hell. If you are an unbaptized infant, you get no power of choice and are still confined to eternal suffering, albeit in a milder form. The pitiful creatures burning in lakes of molten lava lose free will as well. This capacity is then, like the theological virtues of faith and hope, a transient good that vanishes in the afterlife. The Christian heaven can only work passably if a Nibbana element is brought into it. Perhaps the nibbana dhatu of Buddhist scholasticism crept into Christendom by unknown means. The very possibility of future change, of heavenly downfall, would mean that Christ had died in vain. Unlike Nibbana, however, the Christian saint is still distinct, still individual, locked up and sealed off in a Tupperware container for all eternity, always held in an I-Thou relationship to the godhead. In his book *The Big Picture*, the American physicist [Sean Carroll](https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/) summarizes the view of heaven presented by the English novelist [Julian Barnes](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian%5FBarnes) in his book *A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters*: > A man, who had been a working-class Englishman, wakes up after his death in a new environment, where everything is wonderful. He can have anything he asks for, with one implicit catch: he has to have the imagination to ask for it. Being who he is, he has sex with countless attractive women, eats meal after amazing meal, meets up with famous celebrities and politicians, and becomes so good at playing golf that he scores a hole in one more often than not. > Inevitably, he begins to grow fidgety and bored. After inquiring a bit from one of heaven’s staff members, he discovers there is an option to simply end it all and die. And do people in heaven actually choose to die, he asks? > “Everyone takes the option,” the staffer answers, “sooner or later.” Carroll observes, "You don’t really want to live forever. Eternity is longer than you think." There is only so much sensuality that one can enjoy before it drives you to seek something else. The first bite of the gourmet-confectioned chocolate mousse is delicious; the second is yummy too. By the seventh and eighth bites, the artisanal dessert has lost its charm, and there is just a mopping up of residue. Hormones signal satiation. In Barnes' story, the boredom of the saints gives way to a desire for sweet Eternal Oblivion, while with Satan, it fuels the ambition to rule, to be in first position in the lowest realm: > What matter where, if I be still the same, > And what I should be, all but less then he > Whom Thunder hath made greater? Here at least > We shall be free; th' Almighty hath not built > Here for his envy, will not drive us hence: > Here we may reign secure, and in my choyce > To reign is worth ambition though in Hell: > Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav'n. > —Milton, [Paradise Lost](https://poets.org/poem/paradise-lost-book-i-lines-221-270) In either case, there is a dissatisfaction with the way things are. Dukkha is always there in the background and, like gravity, acts as a weak, perpetual force that eventually wins out. Barnes shows us a sensual heaven that is relatable, to varying degrees, to the one described by the major world religions. It is a place of objects and identities, this and that, nama-rupa. Both Barnes and Carroll have the right intuition about the theoretical realm of heaven, although they find Annihilation the natural, inevitable end of this life. Permanent Oblivion can be desirable because *to be* is to be incomplete, always wanting, always hungry, never satisfied. For the Buddha, Annihilation and its contrary, Eternalism – the belief that there is an everlasting soul that transmigrates across different forms over innumerable lifetimes, or that there are simply emanations of One Everlasting Self – are both wrong views which keep people lost, wandering in samsara. The *never-satisfied* is the fuel powering the engine of becoming. The skeptical Westerner may look askance at the claim of multiple lives and Nibbana, but there is no way to escape the empirical evidence of dukkha held in our own minds. Perhaps we know people who have wealth and status, but clearly suffer from insecurity. We ourselves, no matter how low or high, are always on the verge of a fall. At least our minds suggest this from time to time.