The Fall of the Angels

Some of the created angels turned away from God, and their leader is the being Scripture calls Satan, the devil, the ancient serpent — the fallen “Lucifer” of tradition. This file sets out the doctrine of the angelic fall as pride, its scriptural anchors, and — with the honesty the methodology requires — the fact that the two texts most associated with Lucifer’s fall, Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28, are in their immediate context taunts against earthly kings, applied to Satan by a received spiritual reading. It sets out what the Church holds firmly and what remains the reading of the Fathers.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

A Fall Made Possible by Freedom

The angels were created good, but as creatures endowed with free will they were, by nature, capable of turning — and some of them turned. This is the presupposition worked out in the doctrine of the angelic nature: the angels are immutable in the good now by grace, having freely cleaved to God, while those who freely turned away are fixed in their apostasy (see The Bodiless Nature; John of Damascus, Exact Exposition II.4). St. John of Damascus gives the classic account: the devil was “the first in rank of those angelic powers set over the earthly realm,” entrusted by God with the guardianship of the earth, “not evil by nature but good, and made for good, and receiving from his Creator no trace whatever of evil in himself”; but “he was not able to bear the light and honour which the Creator had bestowed on him, and of his own free choice turned from the natural to the unnatural,” lifting himself up against God, and so became darkness (John of Damascus, Exact Exposition II.4; trans. NPNF II/9). The fall is thus, in the tradition, a fall through pride: the highest of the angels refusing the creaturely place, willing to be as God. With him “a multitude of the angels ranged under him” fell away — the demons (John of Damascus, Exact Exposition II.4).

The Names and the Anchors in the Lord’s Words

The fallen leader bears many names in Scripture: Satan (“the adversary”), the devil (diabolos, “the slanderer”), “that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world” (Revelation 12:9), “the prince of this world” (John 12:31), “the god of this world” (2 Corinthians 4:4), “a murderer from the beginning” and “a liar, and the father of it” (John 8:44), Beelzebub, and the “prince of the devils” (Matthew 12:24). The firmest scriptural anchors for the fall itself are the words of the Lord and the vision of the Apocalypse. Christ says, “I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven” (Luke 10:18); the Apocalypse shows the war in heaven in which “Michael and his angels” cast down “the great dragon… the Devil, and Satan,” and “his angels were cast out with him” (Revelation 12:7–9); and the epistles speak of “the angels which kept not their first estate, but left their own habitation,” reserved “in everlasting chains under darkness” (Jude 6; cf. 2 Peter 2:4). These texts give the doctrine directly: a real fall of real angels, led by Satan, into a fixed opposition to God.

Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28 — Received Reading and Context

The two passages most deeply woven into the tradition’s picture of Lucifer’s fall are Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28 — and here the methodology requires a careful, two-level honesty, because the received spiritual reading and the immediate contextual sense are not the same, and both belong to a truthful account.

Isaiah 14. “How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning [Hebrew hêlēl ben-shaḥar, “Day Star, son of the dawn”]! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations! For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God… I will be like the most High. Yet thou shalt be brought down to hell” (Isaiah 14:12–15). The Latin Lucifer (“light-bearer”), rendering the “Day Star,” became a proper name for the fallen archangel in Western usage; the “I will ascend… I will be like the most High” became the classic expression of the angelic pride. [Disputed: the reference of Isaiah 14:12–15. In its immediate context the passage is an ironic funeral-taunt (a *māshāl*) against "the king of Babylon" (Isaiah 14:4), whose overweening pride and downfall are mocked under the figure of the fallen morning star; this is the primary, contextual sense. The application to **Satan's fall** is a *received spiritual reading*, developed in the Fathers and standard in the tradition, which sees in the king's God-defying pride a transparent image of the archetypal pride of the fallen archangel. Both levels are true to the text as the Church reads it — the historical taunt and the typological disclosure of the angelic fall — and the honest course, per the repository methodology, is to name both and to present the satanic reading as spiritual exegesis rather than as the passage's plain historical referent (on the fourfold Orthodox reading of Scripture, see [The Orthodox Scriptures](../../the-orthodox-scriptures/README.md)).]

Ezekiel 28. The lament over “the king of Tyre” reads: “Thou sealest up the sum, full of wisdom, and perfect in beauty. Thou hast been in Eden the garden of God… Thou art the anointed cherub that covereth… thou wast upon the holy mountain of God… Thou wast perfect in thy ways from the day that thou wast created, till iniquity was found in thee… thine heart was lifted up because of thy beauty” (Ezekiel 28:12–17). The “anointed cherub” who was in Eden, created perfect until iniquity was found in him and cast down for pride, became a second great scriptural image of the fallen angel. [Disputed: the reference of Ezekiel 28:12–17. In context this is an oracle against "the prince of Tyre" and then "the king of Tyre" (Ezekiel 28:2, 12), whose wealth, wisdom, and pride are mocked in imagery drawn from Eden and the cherub of the sanctuary — the primary, contextual sense being the doom of a proud pagan king. The application to **Satan** — the cherub in Eden, created good, fallen through pride and self-exaltation — is again a received spiritual reading of the Fathers, powerful precisely because the imagery (Eden, the created-then-corrupted cherub, the pride of beauty) so aptly figures the angelic fall. As with Isaiah 14, both levels belong to a truthful account, and the satanic sense is presented as spiritual exegesis, not as the oracle's plain historical referent.]

The point of drawing this line is not to weaken the doctrine of the fall, which rests securely on the Lord’s own words (Luke 10:18) and the Apocalypse (Revelation 12), but to keep the tradition truthful about how it reads. The Fathers found in the pride of Babylon’s and Tyre’s kings a mirror of the pride of the fallen archangel — a genuine and fruitful spiritual reading — and the Church prays and preaches from it; but the plain sense of the prophets is the doom of earthly tyrants, and a compendium governed by §4.2 says so. The doctrine and its favorite images are thus each given their proper weight.

A Single, Irrevocable Turning

Because the angelic choice is made with the full clarity of a bodiless intelligence, the tradition holds the fall to be a single, irrevocable turning, not a career of repeated lapses and possible repentances. The Damascene is explicit that for the fallen angels “the fall is to them what death is to men”: as men cannot repent after death, so the fallen angels are fixed in their apostasy and cannot repent (John of Damascus, Exact Exposition II.4; trans. NPNF II/9). This is why the demons are treated as confirmed in evil — not because God withholds mercy, but because the fallen will, in a creature of that nature, is set (Daniélou, The Angels and Their Mission, 1957; and see The Bodiless Nature). It also frames the sober realism of the tradition’s spiritual warfare: the demons are enemies whose enmity is fixed, to be resisted and not reasoned with (see The Demons and Spiritual Warfare).

When Did the Fall Occur?

Scripture does not date the fall, and the Fathers held the question with reserve. The dominant sense places the fall of Satan before the fall of man — the serpent of Eden (Genesis 3) being already the fallen tempter, and the war in heaven belonging to the primal history — so that man was tempted by an already-fallen power (Daniélou, 1957; the connection of the Eden serpent with the fallen Satan is drawn explicitly in Revelation 12:9, “that old serpent”). The precise moment, like the moment of the angels’ creation (see Creatures of the Invisible World), the Church did not define; what it holds firmly is that the fall was real, was through pride, was the free act of creatures made good, and preceded and lay behind the temptation of humanity.

See Also

References

  • John of Damascus. An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, II.4 (“Concerning the devil and demons”). Trans. NPNF II/9. (The devil set over the earthly realm; the fall through pride; the multitude that fell with him; the fall as irrevocable, “what death is to men.”)
  • Scripture: Isaiah 14:4, 12–15; Ezekiel 28:2, 12–17; Luke 10:18; John 8:44; 12:31; 2 Corinthians 4:4; Jude 6; 2 Peter 2:4; Revelation 12:7–9; Genesis 3.
  • Daniélou, Jean. The Angels and Their Mission According to the Fathers of the Church. Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1957. (The fall through pride; the fixity of the fallen will; the Eden serpent as the fallen Satan.)