Why is the Devil usually depicted tormenting sinners? The Devil is often shown using his trident for this purpose (forgetting for the moment his trident is an adaptation from the god Neptune). In Dante’s Inferno he is shown eternally chewing the three great traitors of all time.
Satan is supposedly the author of evil. The chief advocate of evil. He rewards evil, at least when you do it on earth.
Why is he classically shown tormenting sinners in hell then?
This is as much a literary question as it is a theological one. But I put it in GD just in case.
Theologically, he isn’t traditionally. Hell is a punishment for Satan as well as evil-doers. Satan does not reside there theologically speaking although since Hell is not a physical place, there might be some debate about that. He exists in this world.
Literarily? I would say that it is Dante’s doing, but perhaps Dante got it from other sources that may no longer exist or be oral in nature.
Even in Dante, Satan himself is depicted as being frozen in ice at the center of hell, his three monstrous heads gnawing on some of history’s most infamous traitors (Judas Iscariot and two of the guys who offed Julius Caesar).
Note: I’ve never actually read Dante’s Divine Comedy; from secondary sources I know there’s a lot of tormenting going on, but I’m hazy as to who or what is actually inflicting all those fiendishly ironic punishments of the assorted sinners.
As a trick, so that you get suckered into condemnation to hell… where he gets what he really wants, a soul to torment for eternity. Because, you know, he’s evil.
I mean, the part where God can’t forgive us unless he sacrifices his son (who is him) to himself… that’s a little shaky. But the Satan part seems to hold up ok.
As I understand it (witnessing), the Devil built his kingdom on the backs of his angels (aka demons) - passing the suffering onto them, who then passes it on to those people they can deceive and control to take on that suffering. That is the reason, people are deceived into taking on the suffering of the devil. The Devil’s kingdom is a pyramid scheme. People are suffering (on earth and in Hell), paying for the sin of the devil, willingly in a contractual way as they have accepted the way of sin.
Biblically Hell was made for the devil and his angels (Matt 25:41).
Satan is also said to be before the throne of God accusing us night and day Rev 12:10,
I have read the Inferno (and the other two books also, not as good.) Mostly the torments are from the environment, though sometimes the sinners torture each other. I don’t remember a lot of demons running around doing the torturing.
BTW, Dante clearly knows that the Earth is round, since he places the mountain of Purgatory on the other side of the Earth from Jerusalem IIRC.
Thanks, Voyager.
Another Great Literary Work I haven’t actually read, but Paradise Lost by John Milton has definitely done a lot to form the popular conception of Satan and Hell. I don’t think Milton really gets into the “torments of Hell” part so much–Paradise Lost is more about the Fall (of angels and of men) than about the consequences thereof–but Milton definitely did a lot to cement the popular idea of Satan “reigning” in Hell.
So, from the New Testament, we get the notion of Hell being a place of torment. From Dante we get the idea of Hell being a place of ironically appropriate torments (arranged by sin); or at the very least, Dante really popularized that idea and fixed it in everyone’s imagination. From Milton, we get the idea of Satan as the King of Hell; or, again, at least in the English-speaking world, Milton really popularized the idea and fixed it in everyone’s imagination (and may even have straight up invented it). Adding up the original New Testament idea of Hell as a place of torment; and the idea (from Milton) of Satan as being ruler there; and you get the popular notion of Satan as being the chief torturer of sinners, even though the idea isn’t really there in the original descriptions of Hell in the New Testament. To complete the Western cultural triptych of Influential Depictions of Hell, Hieronymus Bosch (over a century after Dante, and a century or so before Milton) painted some infamously freaky pictures which probably helped cement the idea of the torments of Hell specifically being inflicted by grotesque demons.
None of that is necessarily from the Bible, though. From chapter 20 of the Book of Revelation, we get the idea of Satan being “bound” in Hell, or some sort of abyss, anyway:
Note that Christians have never been able to agree on the chronology of the End of the World; premillennialism gets a lot of attention in pop culture Christianity, but amillennialism and postmillennialism are and have been adhered to by more Christians over the years than premillennialism, and under those views it could easily be interpreted that Satan is in fact already locked up in “the Abyss”.
At any rate, returning to Revelation 20, after the “thousand years” (whenever that time period may be, and exactly how long it actually is)
Which clearly (well, as clearly as anything in Revelation, anyway) says that Satan isn’t the one doing the tormenting.
Note that here sinners are described as being tormented “in the presence of the holy angels and of the Lamb”. In contrast, we have Matthew 8:12
(Or in the King James Version, “…shall be cast out into outer darkness”.)
This language has sometimes been taken to imply Hell as “separation from God”, which doesn’t really fit with the language in Revelation implying people being tormented “in the presence of…the Lamb”. But that’s the Bible for ya.
The traditional position, I believe, is that the Devil tries to convince humans on earth that evil deeds are good, fun, and enjoyable. Those who believe the Devil, turn to evil, and are not saved then descend to Hell, where they find that the Devil was a liar and that the end result of their sin is torment, rather than fun and enjoyment.
Dante lived in the 14th century, depictions of Hell with devils tormenting people long predate him. Example : this from 12th century Germany
IIRC (but that course was a long time ago) the whole pitchfork and hooves thing was about early Christians poo-pooing Roman gods or various other horned gods from pagan tradition and depicting them as being in Hell too - the trident identified Neptune, the goats legs were for Bacchus, and so on.
There is no “Devil” in the classical sense in the Bible. The point of the books of the Bible is that there is only one God. There isn’t a good god (God) and an evil god (The Devil) battling it out on Earth. There is only one God. The Devil is mentioned in the Bible, but the Devil in the Bible is not a big red dude with a pitchfork.
There also is no “Hell”. The closest thing to it is the lake of fire mentioned in Revelations, though judgement and burning are referenced elsewhere.
So where did Hell and the Devil come from? They were borrowed from other religions as Christianity spread.
The Devil’s form is based a lot on the Greek god Pan and the Satyrs. The pitchfork comes from Pluto/Hades, aka the Greek/Roman god of the underworld. The common vision of Hell as a place filled with fire and brimstone and tortured souls also comes from Greek and Roman mythology. Throw in a few other references, like the Jewish Gehenna (often translated as Hell), the Philistine god Beelzebub and the Canonite god Baal, and throw in a bunch of wild interpretations from western literature over the years, and you have the modern version of Hell and the Devil.
There are references to a place filled with fire and brimstone and tortured souls in the Bible (that is, the New Testament). I already mentioned Revelation 14:9-11:
(In the King James Version, “burning sulfur” is “fire and brimstone”.)
The reference to “the second death” leads some to interpret this as supporting “annihilationism”; all those bad people will simply be burned up in the “fiery lake of burning sulfur”; presumably only “the devil” and “the beast” and “the false prophet” will be “tormented day and night for ever and ever”; and in Revelation 14, it just says that “smoke of their torment will rise for ever and ever”, so maybe those human followers of “the beast” will be tortured a little bit before “the second death”, and the smoke from this will go on and on, but not the sinners themselves. Some people will also raise questions about the meaning of the Greek words here translated as “for ever and ever”, saying it doesn’t literally mean “for all eternity” but something more like “for eons and eons”.
Moving beyond Revelation, we have Luke 16:19-31; there’s no sulfur (brimstone), but there is fire, and someone being tormented in the fire:
The whole passage seems more of a parable than a cosmological description; the “rich man” being tormented in Hades can apparently talk to people in Heaven(?), even though there is a “great chasm” between them.
Put it another way, if Judeo-Christians swiped the idea of bad people being punished eternally from Greco-Roman thought (Sisyphus and Tantalus and Ixion and so forth), that particular act of “cultural appropriation” seems to have already taken place by the time the various texts which make up the New Testament were written.
No, it was popular throughout the Middle Ages. Sculptures and paintings were used as a visual aid for teaching: having appropriate punishments was handy for remembering which sins were being referenced.
