Since the dawn of man the idea of evil has always existed in different forms and figures. Yet, in Western culture, since the middle ages, the face of evil has remained the same: the Devil. He is presented as a former angel, fallen from Heaven for being too prideful. The realm in which he rules – Hell – is full of fiery torment, lakes of fire, levels of sinners being tortured based on the weight of their sins. Where did these images come from? How did they embed themselves so deeply into Western culture that there is a single dominant idea of what evil looks like? The answers to these questions can be found in the Bible, where the Devil and Hell are described; yet they are lacking in the pervasive ideas of evil found deeply embedded into modern Western Secular society as they are inherently religious in nature and can not be used to signify a secular idea. It is only in analysis of the interaction of Greco-Roman culture and the Christian orthodoxy in the 14th-15th centuries that a distinctive change from religious to secular can be seen. Interactions of Christianity and Greco-Roman culture reveal shifts between the religious and the secular, a transference and transformation of religious demonology to secular cultural ideas of evil. These interactions are seen most clearly in the interpretation of the Devil by the Eastern Romans in the 14th century and the deliberate Christianisation of ancient Greek myths in Dante Alighieri’s Inferno in the 15th century.

The Devil, the antithesis of God, is a major figure in the Christian religion, and when discussing his influence and depictions in a secular society, it is important to talk about when he is mentioned in the Bible and how these depictions, drawn out in the definitive book of Christianity, has come to affect the secular image of the Devil. It could be argued, using the depictions of Satan in the New Testament, that the Bible itself has completely shaped what the secular view of Hell and Satan is. On Satan’s origins, the Bible does seem to support the popular notion that he was ousted from heaven; in the New Testament Jesus says, “I watched Satan fall from heaven like a flash of lightning” (Luke 10:18). Although this does not show the believed divine war that ultimately caused the fall of Satan, it does show that Satan was once a part of heaven and he fell. Another part of the New Testament discusses the divine war with a serpent called the “Devil and Satan”, in which God’s angels eventually triumphed over and this great serpent was “hurled to the earth”(Revelations 12:7-9). This, along with the Book of Luke, fully show the origins of the Devil, and even implies that the Devil was once an angel by saying that the Devil and “his angels” were thrown down to earth. Yet, Revelations is a book that is very symbolic and the timing of this divine war is really ambiguous, it is unknown if this is a past, future, or just symbolic event of God’s defeat of evil. Hell is also extensively described in the Bible as the place in which those who disobeyed God will be sent to be tormented forever. These ideas are very present in the modern western secular view on Hellas as well. In Matthews 13, the passage describes that Jesus will send his angels to “gather from his kingdom everything that causes sin as well as all lawbreakers” and then will “throw them into the fiery furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Matthews 13: 41, 50). Hell is described in the Bible as a place of eternal torment and torture, and lines up with the western secular idea of Hell. However, the Bible itself is a religious text, and the ideas of the evil – the Devil and Hell – are only accessible to those who read the Bible, meaning that everything contained in the Bible is solely religious and is completely separate from a secular culture. This means that the Bible cannot be the sole perpetrator of dissemination of ideas of evil into secular society, because the Devil and Hell only exist in a religious realm with the Bible. Therefore, there must have been events that shifted the ideas of the Devil and Hell from a religious sphere to a secular one.. In essence, major shifts in religious orthodoxy and secular society had to have occurred for the ideas of the Devil and Hell to immerse themselves fully into a secular culture.

The Bible had established that Satan was perhaps once an angel and was originally from heaven, but he is mostly depicted as the complete antithesis of God. While there are mentions of a divine war in Revelations, it is symbolic at best and provides no concrete evidence of Satan’s origins. It is in the interaction of Eastern Roman culture and the Eastern Roman Christian orthodoxy in the 14th century that shows a shift from religious to secular in terms of ideas about the Devil. The Byzantine Church paid less attention to the Devil and the study of diabology overall compared to its Western counterpart because it believed more in “mysticism and and apophatic view of theology”, a belief that stresses “[His] unknowableness” and an approach to the divine that is more abstract (Burton Russell 29). Yet, the Byzantines themselves “fleshed out the image of the Devil” based on “Byzantine heresies, sermons, and folklore” (Burton Russell 29). A connection between Byzantine culture and the Byzantine Church can then be drawn: ideas of the Eastern Roman orthodoxy bled into Byzantine culture itself and once there these ideas were transformed into something wholly new. In a sense, in Byzantium, religion became secularised and these cultural ideas became divorced from the orthodoxy it had been born from, and signals one of the first shifts of religious orthodoxy to secular culture. The Byzantines also “believed that the Devil is a creature of God rather than an independent principle…that the Devil and the other fallen angels were created good but fell because of pride” (Burton Russell 29). These ideas, although religious in nature, are also still completely different from what is lined out in the Bible, and is a representation of the secular ideas of the Devil. The Byzatines took the Eastern Roman Orthodox and created something new, culturally, with its interaction with what the Byzantines themselves believed in. The western notion of the Devil is that he was originally good, but fell because he sought to be better than God, ‘pride’, and this idea is clearly found in how the Byzantines themselves thought of the divine and the corruption of it. Thus, the interaction of the Eastern Roman Christian orthodoxy with Byzantine culture signified a change in religious ideas to secular ones, an appropriation of religious ideas that created something entirely new from its religious counterpart.

The ideas of Satan are found widely in western secular society, but so is the idea of Hell. Described in the Bible as a place of hellfire and eternal punishment, the idea of what Hell is far more fleshed out than what is found in the Bible. These ideas of Hell can be seen in Dante Alighieri and his masterwork Divine Comedy, in which the poet’s version of Hell is described extensively. Yet the question still remains as to why it is Dante’s Hell that is the primary idea of Hell in western culture. This question is perhaps best answered by setting Dante as someone who deliberately set out to secularise religion: according to Franke, Dante is, in some respects, “the premier secularising thinker and writer of the modern age” (Franke 1). Dante “proposed to take the philosophical and theological knowledge of his day, which was accessible only to the learned who were versed in Latin, and serve it up in the vernacular language” (Franke 3). Thus, Dante set out to disseminate the ideas of Christianity into the culture so that those who were “too immersed in worldly obligations” (Franke 3) could also learn about philosophy and theology, something which was previously inaccessible to them. Dante grounded the ideas of Hell in language that the secular person could understand and because of this, his ideas on Christianity, Hell especially, is what is the most popular in western society. In addition to Dante’s deliberate secularisation of religion, the church may have also had a hand in spreading Dante’s ideas. The church actually denounced Dante’s poetry, with a Dominican, Guido Vernani saying that his poetry was a “poisonous vessel of the father of lies” and that it “leads not only the sick and ignorant but even the learned to destroy the truth which might save them” (Ferrante 368). This idea led to the banning of Dante’s poetry at a Dominican chapter in Florence in 1335, but “it apparently continued to be popular among the brothers” (Ferrante 368). Clearly, in trying to ban the work of Dante, the church actually helped to spread it even more, and it could most likely be inferred that while the church condemned “various passages from the poem”, it only helped to further Dante’s work in secular society (Ferrante 368). Thus, Dante’s ambition to secularise religion and the church’s response to his poetry led to the rapid spreading of his ideas in secular society.

Although Dante set out to secularise religion, his ideas of Hell needed to originate from somewhere, and they ultimately came from the Greeks, especially their mythology. This is because Dante saw the Greeks as “not a historical people but a moral and aesthetic one” (W. Most 19). To Dante, the Greeks were more of a collection of ideas than as actual people and thus the ideas of the Greeks are found extensively in Inferno, especially in how he structured Hell itself. Yet, many of the ancient Greek myths of the underworld are described as purely evil in Inferno when previously they were only agents of justice, perhaps grey morally but not as black and white as Dante portrays them to be. For example, Dante uses Charon as the ferryman in Hell, transporting those who are damned to the judges of Hell, who are also based on the judges of the underworld. In Inferno, Dante describes Charon as the “demon Charon with eyes like burning coals” (Dante 3.106). Calling Charon a demon, Dante is essentially casting Charon as a figure of evil, rather than just the ferryman of the dead that the Greek myths described him to be (Graves 114). One of the judges of the Greek underworld, Minos, is also ‘demonised’ in this way(Graves 114). Dante describes him to be “grinning, grotesque, and hale” and “delivers his verdict with his coiling tail” (Dante 5.4-6). This represents a sort of ‘Christianisation’ of the Greek myths and represents the blending of ancient Greek culture and the Christian orthodoxy of Dante’s age. This is due to the fact that to Dante “the ancient Greeks were pagan competitors against Christian Rome and that these Greeks had “to be defeated by Providence so that Rome, and Christianity, could one day prevail” (W.Most 21). This meant Dante felt compelled to represent these Greek myths in a way that framed them as “evil” so that he could depict Christianity prevailing over the pagan ideas of the Greeks, and in doing so, created a Hell that was widely accepted by secular society. It is then this interaction between Greek myths and Dante’s ideas on the Christian orthodoxy that another shift was created from religious to secular. Ultimately, Dante, with his secularisation of Christianity and use of ancient Greek mythology transformed the Christian orthodoxy into something wholly secular, and is perhaps the figure that has affected western secular society’s perception of evil and Hell the most.

The presence of religion in secular society is something that should always be analysed because it shows just how pervasive and powerful that religion can be. It also represents how culture in a secular society is formed and how this culture is born from an interaction. In the case of Christianity, the interaction between the Christian orthodoxy and the secular societies in which it had taken root led to the creation of several ideas on figures and places found in Christianity itself. Yet, these ideas are wholly secular ones, they are figures that are only ambiguously defined in the Bible and it is the interaction with the secular cultures of Rome and Greece that they become real. The Devil and Hell are places that are used to convert people to Christianity and are only vaguely defined as people and places of absolute evil. It is only with the interaction of the Christian orthodoxy with Eastern Roman culture that the Devil obtained a face and it is with Dante’s Inferno and his blending of Christian ideas and Greek myths that Hell became an actual place that people could imagine in their mind. Through the study of these interactions it can be seen why the images of Hell and Satan are so pervasive in western secular society today and tracking its development shows the fluidity of religion and its power to change to fit the lines of society.