In reading a thread on whether or not our Lord Jesus Christ is actually St. Michael the Archangel (he isn’t), I came across this post, which I felt interesting enough to warrant a thread, as I believe, as did Martin Luther and John Calvin, that this is a grave mistake and also points to one of the few errors in the KJV translation, which is otherwise my favorite English edition of the Bible.
No it doesn’t. Luficer is a Latin word, and none of the Latin church fathers of the Patristic age, including those who interpreted Isaiah 14 as referring to Satan rather than Nebuchadnezzar, used the word Lucifer to refer to the devil.
In fact, there is a fourth century Christian saint named Lucifer! St. Lucifer of Cagliari was the Bishop of Cagliaria in Sardinia, who is venerated in Sardinia for his stance against the Arian heresy. And St. Jerome, the translator of the Vulgate, had a major beef with St. Lucifer over Origen, whom the Sardinian bishop admired and Jerome regarded as a heretic, but never took a low blow against St. Lucifer for that.
Lucifer was not an uncommon name among Romans and I recall reading of a Christian martyr in the second century who was also named Lucifer.
In the middle ages, Roman Catholic demonologists who only used the Vulgate Bible, which by the way does not use Lucifer as a proper noun, since the word literally is the Latin word for “morning star” and was translated correctly by St. Jerome, proposed that Lucifer was a proper name for Satan. Others took the view that Lucifer, Beezlebub and Satan were three different entities.
In the Canaanite religion and several other Semitic Pagan religions had a story of a god or goddess associated with the morning star trying to seize the throne of Baal and being cast down; in Canaanism the deity who attempted this, Attar, failing to assume the thrown of Baal, descended to and ruled the underworld. These stories are likely examples of how the devil spreads confusion by creating religions similiar to Nicene Christianity, or in its pre-incarnational form, the congregation of Israel, and these stories pop up centuries or millenia later to cause confusion. More recent examples of false religions superficially similiar to Christianity are the Bahai Faith, Unitarianism and the Unitarian Universalist Association, the New Church (Swedenborgianism), Spiritualism, the Moonies, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and worst of all, the People’s Temple (Jim Jones, of Jonestown, who poisoned the kool-aid).
So, Dante in his Inferno decided to call the devil Lucifer, and Milton, doubtless referencing that, in his work Paradise Lost employed the same name. Milton also was doubtless influenced by the one of the few major mistakes in the King James Version, which was the translation of “Morning Star” from the Hebrew into Lucifer, instead of “Morning Star”, a rare example of the King James translators departing from the principle of textual equivalence in favor of dynamic equivalence.
This error on the part of the KJV translators has been a disaster, because it has propagated the false belief that Isaiah 14 refers to the devil (due to Milton and Dante), which was rejected by both Martin Luther and John Calvin, not to mention a number of church fathers. It also makes no sense, because why translate from Hebrew into Latin? We can say for certain that even if Isaiah 14 does refer to the devil, Lucifer is not the proper name of the devil, but rather, a mere translation of the name.
Rather, if Luther, Calvin, and numerous church fathers are wrong, and Origen and Tertullian, both anathematized heretics, and the Bogomils and Cathars* (who were Gnostic heretics who also believed that the devil was named Lucifer), are right, then the most correct translation of this alleged original name of Satan would be
Helel ben Shachar, because that is the phrase in Isaiah 14 translated as Lucifer. It certainly would not be a word from a language that the early Church did not even use in worship, or bother translating the Bible into, until the second century.**
I would note the only legitimate Church Father who was not a heretic who considered Isaiah 14 to refer to the devil was St. Augustine of Hippo, who was greatly admired by Luther and Calvin, who nonetheless disagreed with him on this and many other issues, but Augustine never referred to the devil as Lucifer. And why not? Because St. Augustine, being a scholar, would have read Isaiah as much from the Greek Septuagint as from the Vulgate, and also knew the Vulgate was not using Lucifer as a proper noun, but was a mere translation of the Hebrew. And St. Augustine had an even more compelling reason to not refer to the devil as Lucifer, more compelling than respect for St. Lucifero the Martyr and St. Lucifer the Bishop of Cagliari, the fact that John the Baptist and indeed our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ are referred to as the morning star in various ancient Latin hymns, thus, calling them Lucifer, including
Aeterne rerum conditor a hymn written by St. Ambrose of Milan, which refers to our Lord Jesus Christ as the Morning Star, as Lucifer. St. Ambrose of Milan was St. Augustine’s mentor and catechist, who persuaded him to convert to Christianity from Manichaean Gnosticism, and who baptized him into the Church; the two great Latin fathers even wrote a hymn together, the famed
Te Deum Laudamus, which is one of the most popular hymns and is also one of the canticles sung in Morning Prayer in the Church of England.
St. Hilary of Poitiers, another church father, who is considered along with St. Athanasius of Alexandria to be one of the two staunchest opponents of the heresy of Arius, who denied the deity of Jesus Christ and considered him a creature, wrote the hymn
Lucis largitor splendide, which also refers to our Lord Jesus Christ as the Morning Star, in Latin, and thus as Lucifer, which St. Augustine would also have been familiar with, given that the Church during Augustine’s career as a writer in the 5th century regarded Athanasius of Alexandria and Hilary of Poitiers as heroes for their role in fighting Arianism, almost by themselves, during the dark years following the death of Emperor Constantine, when Arianism replaced Christianity as the state religion of the Roman Empire and Athanasius was exiled from his native Egypt to Trier, then the main base of the crumbling Western Empire’s increasingly unsuccessful military operations against invading Germanic tribes, and Hilary of Poitiers was his only deeply committed faithful friend and supporter who absolutely refused the idea of any compromise with the Arians.
In conclusion, based on the entirety of the evidence, we can say that Scripture does not reveal the original name of Satan to be Lucifer. It is possible his name was Helel ben Schahar, but not Lucifer, a Latin word referring to the Morning Star, which was used by two of the most pious Christians of the fourth century, St. Ambrose of Milan and St. Hilary of Poitiers, to refer to our lord and savior Jesus Christ, and a word which St. Augustine, the only orthodox Church Father who believed Isaiah 14 referred to the devil, and not Nebuchadnezzar, did not use when discussing that passage. Because indeed he was catechized and baptized by St. Ambrose, who did refer to our Lord as the Morning Star in a Latin hymn. Rather, as Martin Luther and John Calvin insisted, Isaiah 14 refers to Nebuchadnezzar and has nothing to do with our adversary the evil one, “the prince of the power of the air.”***
Does the devil even have a name? Satan, the accuser, is not really a name. Perhaps one could argue the evil one, having rejected God, has destroyed his person to the point where he has no name, only job descriptions.
* The Bogomils had a false Gnostic Gospel, which survives, in which the devil is referred to as Lucifer:
Book of the Secret Supper - Wikipedia This book was adopted by the Cathars, who were Gnostics who abhorred marriage (a Cathar who received the Consolamenum and became a member of the Perfecti, their spiritual elite, as all who were unmarried were encouraged to do, vowed to not marry, as procreation was a sin in the Cathar faith, a view common to other Gnostic sects such as Manichaeanism.
** The Church in Rome worshipped in Greek until the reign of Archbishop Victor in the late second century AD, who, to reach the less educated Romans, the city’s poor, who did not know Greek, very commendably instituted Latin worship and commissioned the original Latin Bible, known today as the Vetus Latina. This translation was directly translated from the Greek Septuagint and the Greek New Testament and was written in exquisite Classical Latin, and phrases from it remain in use in Christian worship in the Western churches to this day, most notably, Gloria in Exclesis Deo. There were known errors in the Vetus Latina, and as a result St. Jerome was commissioned by his Archbishop of Rome (an office later styled as Pope), to translate a more accurate Latin Bible; Jerome did this, translating directly from Hebrew and Aramaic texts where they were available. His Vulgate is translated into the somewhat more vernacular Latin of the fourth century, which was already in the process of breaking up into four languages which would be the ancestors of French and Waloonian, Spanish and Portuguese, the numerous languages of Italy, and Romanian, Dalamatian and Arromanian. An example of the stylistic decline of the Vulgate vs. the Vetus Latina is demonstrated by it rendering “Glory to God in the Highest” as
Gloria in Altissimus Deo, rather than
Gloria in Excelsis Deo.
*** In some Eastern Orthodox monasteries, this is interpreted literally, and the brethren are strongly discouraged from gazing at the sky, because of the risk of falling into delusion due to the activities of the devil.