The Myth of the “Fallen Angel” in Western Culture

Abstract

The “fallen angel” is a nickname for a mythical being known in Western culture by many names – Satan, Lucifer, the Devil – to whom, during the Christian mega-epoch, responsibility was attributed for humanity’s fall and for the existence of evil in the world. A still not fully interpreted reversal in this understanding occurs at the threshold of the nineteenth century, when a generation of Romantic poets, fascinated by the sublime figure of Milton’s Satan, read the epic Paradise Lost against the author’s own Christian intentions to. In their rebellion against the Christian image of the world, the Romantics recognized in the “fallen angel” a kind of Prometheus, a figure that itself, during the great project of overcoming Christianity, also played the role of a capital metaphor of cultural progress. It turns out, however, as we will show in this study, that the similarity between the “fallen angel” and Prometheus, the “light-bearer” and the “thief of fire,” did not need to be invented or constructed. The oldest myth of the “sons of God” in the Book of Enoch, the first “fallen angels,” testifies that the mythopoetic destinies of these two rebellious figures are intertwined and mutually conditioned. In this respect, the emergence of the “fallen angel” as a specific version of Prometheus can be viewed through the lens of Assmann’s theory of the “Mosaic distinction” (Die MosaischeUnterscheidung), which explains the difference between the monotheistic Imago Mundi and polytheistic cultures. In a broader cultural horizon, the mutually conditioned histories of these two mythopoetic relatives, from the ancient “distinction” between them to the modern, seemingly unsuccessful attempts to establish a syncretism between Lucifer and Prometheus, may help us understand two different ideas of rebellion in the epoch of Western modernity: one conducted under the banner of civilizational progress, and the other unfolding within the domain of decadence.