The Devil's Envy: On Christ as Angelic Justifier and Demonic Stumbling Block

At least since Augustine, Christian theology, especially but not only in the Latin West, has been dominated by an account of angelic origins in which the Incarnation was a response to humanity’s fall, itself occasioned by the prior angelic fall, whose cause in turn was the proud desire to be like God. (We’ll call this the ‘pride-account’). Nonetheless, that Augustinian view has been balanced from the beginning by an ‘envy-account’, which stresses instead Wisdom’s claim, ‘Through the Devil’s envy, death entered the world’ (Wisd. 2:24). The earliest extra-biblical versions of the envy-account – developed in the Latin, Syriac, and Arabic ‘Life of Adam and Eve’ traditions – take the object of Satan’s envy to have been Adam in particular. In the thirteenth century, however, Robert Grosseteste, as part of his extended defense of the idea that the Son would have been incarnate even without sin, argued instead that the Devil and his angels fell in rejecting the to-be-incarnate Christ, whose merits serve to ‘justify’ not only unfallen humanity, but even the holy angels. On this view, which arguably has biblical roots in Hebrews 1 and Revelation 12, and which reached its apogee in Milton’s Paradise Lost, ‘the Devil’s envy’ was directed at the God-man in particular.