I’m working on a game that pits the Demons typically associated with the 7 Deadly Sins against the Angels associated with the corresponding Virtues. The Demons are easy because a book from the 16th Century already identified the main culprits as:
Matching an associated Archangel would be ideal but if they don’t fit I’ll take any known heavenly “personality” (including saints, seraphims, etc. but not including God). As a last resort I would take the arch-enemy of the corresponding demon.
Hmm. I’ll start you off with one. I’d say Forgiveness= Uriel, since that angel is usually associated with repentance. I’ll look some more at some of eschatographic texts lying around my house, but one is better than none.
I have read that Cassiel is considered the Archangel of Temperance although he isn’t one of the 7 Archangels.
I’ve been considering using Michael for Forgivensess since he is considered the archenemy of Satan, who is Wrath. The problem is that Jophiel is considered the Angel of forgiveness.
Raphael is considered the enemy of Asmodeus, though I don’t know that he is specifically associated with Chastity.
Only two Archangels are named in the (Protestant) Bible: Michael and Gabriel. The deuterocanonical Book of Tobit adds Raphael, and the Pseudopigrapha (Enoch?) gives us Uriel, for four. The other names are from Talmudic, Kabbalistic, and purely speculative sources, and are all coined by the formula [Hebrew term for attribute] + -iel.
For purposes of aiding Kid Charlemagne in game creation, everyone is playing along that all the “coined” names are valid.
Helpful hint: It might be useful to “reverse engineer” the traditional and proposed names to match their meaning against the Seven Virtues.
BTW, while the various formulae list seven virtues, and the list that KCh is working with is a classic one, there is also the distinct list of the four Cardinal and three Theological Virtues:
Another list of the Seven Virtues consists of a combination of the four Cardinal Virtues and the three Theological Virtues:
Cardinal Virtues: * Prudence, Justice, Temperance, and Fortitude Theological Virtues: * Faith, Hope, and Love (charity)
The Wikipedia article does a quite good job of summarizing the different lists, though I’ve never heard the 4+3 system as being specific to Roman Catholicism before.
Actually no. The game is pretty good (laving aside the bad organization), but the information and so on presented is almost totally made up. Outside of a few names and ideas, it’s not really connected to Christianity or even actual history very much.* It does manage to get the rough beliefs of each religion down, but ironically religion itself isn’t terribly important in the game.
*Don’t believe me? They had angelic crusades against pagan gods long before said gods would have existed.
Not necessarily. I’m sure there are a few theologians and theological hobbyists on these boards who can provide lots of cites, but IIRC Satan and Lucifer have distinct characteristics.
Satan: Identified with the devil only relatively recently. Before that (at least up through the book of Job), merely a prosecutor of mankind. Not necessarily an enemy of God any more than a Quality Assurance department is to a software production team (eh, you can draw your own conclusions here, I guess).
Lucifer: Believing himself to be God’s finest work, led a portion of the angels into open rebellion against God at the time of mankind’s creation. Lucifer lost and was expelled from Heaven.
From that point of view, Lucifer and Satan are necessarily distinct (Satan, at least in early characterizations, serves God; Lucifer opposes God). Warning: my information is filtered by Milton and other much-removed sources, so YMMV… if I’ve got this dead wrong, please feel encouraged to say so.
