• Aedis@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    17
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    4 days ago

    Probably not a serious answer, but as a tangent, iirc St. Thomas Aquinas believed that angels were not actual beings or messengers and didn’t posses a soul. They are direct extensions of god, as we would have arms and legs as extensions or apendages, angels are the “arms and legs” of god.

    Edit: because some people have shown interest, the idea that angels at some point rebelled against god and Lucifer became their leader is from a 1667 poem called Paradise Lost by John Milton.

    Its an amazing work of fiction that ties in to some already existing mythos at the time (like the hierarchy of angels, from cherubs to seraphim) but it has nothing to do with what’s in religious texts, either Jewish, Christian or Muslim.

    • ImWaitingForRetcons@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      3 days ago

      No, that’s not true, I’m pretty sure the Quran does state that Lucifer rebelled against God (justifying it by making him a djinn instead of an angel), showing that the idea was already floating around at least Arabia around his time.

      • Aedis@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        2 days ago

        I’m not super familar with the Quran, but I wouldn’t say Iblis is the same entity as Lucifer. I think Iblis is even less independant than Lucifer in that aspect, they are a tool that god uses to teach about evil.

        • ImWaitingForRetcons@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          2 days ago

          This is not true; even using only the Quran and not the Hadith or later traditions, Iblis is a jinn and is a conscious and morally independent being, in contrast to angels, who have no ability to violate God’s commands.

          • Aedis@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            1 day ago

            There’s some mentioning of angels rebelling in the Jewish Bible and the book of Enoch as well. Which Aquinas attributes to it being very early in the creation of angels and that they weren’t perfect beings yet.

            It’s kinda obvious that when we go deeper into the study of texts referencing angels, there’s all sorts of tellings of these stories.

            In that sense I think you’re right and the idea of angels having a will of their own has existed for a long time before Milton’s Paradise Lost.

            Mythology is really hard to follow and is definitely not clear cut as history.

            I remember a teacher, a priest from the order of mercy, told me on a course I took ages ago: “You’d be a fool to take religious texts literally and as an accurate account of what happened.”

            The one example he used was that according to customs that were common in the region and things that were told of Jesus of what he did or saw happen. He’d be roughly 300 years old to have experienced them all not 30.

    • Rooty@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      4 days ago

      That makes the whole story of Lucifer being the rebellious angel moot. Tools do not rebel.

      • Aedis@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        7
        ·
        4 days ago

        They don’t. The Lucifer rebellion against god is from Paradise Lost by John Milton (1667) and is not mythology or in any texts. Pure fiction, pretty amazing at that, but definitely doesn’t have the same origin as the angels.