I have the feeling that over the past years, we’ve started seeing more TV shows that are either sympathetic towards Hell and Satan, or somewhat negative towards Heaven. I just watched “Hazbin Hotel” today, which isn’t too theological, but clearly is fairly negative towards Heaven.
In “The Good Place”,
Spoilers for The Good Place
the people in The Bad Place end up pushing to improve the whole system, whereas The Good Place is happy to spend hundreds of year not letting people in.
“Little Demon” has Satan as a main character, and he’s more or less sympathetic.
“Ugly Americans” shows demons and Satan as relatively normal, and Hell doesn’t seem too bad.
I only watched the first episode of “Lucifer”, but it’s also more or less sympathetic towards Lucifer.
I have a few more examples (Billy Joel: “I’d rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints”, or the very funny German “Ein Münchner im Himmel”, where Heaven is portrayed as fantastically boring), but I won’t list them all here.
My question is: how modern is this? I’ve heard of “Paradise Lost”, and I’ve heard that it portrays Satan somewhat sympathetically, though I found it very difficult to read. And the idea of the snake in the Garden of Eden as having given free will and wisdom to humanity can’t be that modern of a thought, even if it would have been heretical.
Is this something that’s happened in the last 10 years? Are there older examples? Does anyone have a good source I could read?
Note that I don’t claim Satan is always portrayed positively, or Heaven always negatively :).
The idea of Satan as the embodiment of evil is arguably an early medieval borrowing from Zoroastrianism. In the Book of Job he works in conjunction with God as a tester of souls, and his roles in the garden of Eden and the temptation of Jesus aren’t inconsistent with that. And a lot of the popular folklore associated with him originates from morally-ambiguous trickster figures from other traditions that were absorbed into Christianity.
Satan is very much evil in the Book of Job. He literally kills the dude’s entire family and ruins his life.
Milton’s Paradise Lost doesn’t paint Hell as pleasant, but Satan is absolutely the protagonist of the story. That’s 1667.
I have friends who are still religious and it seems like they’ve pivoted from “lake of fire” to a more “hell is the absence of God” vibes
I live in a crunchy granola area so I just assume that’s how the church here operates to keep patrons.
Historically hell has often been depicted as a rather cold place, away from the warmth of god’s love or what have you.
Anecdotally, 20 or so years ago, that’s what I remember being taught in CCD class when my parents were still making me go.
Dante’s Inferno (c. 1321) for example, depicts the 9th and deepest circle of hell as a large frozen lake. And many of the damned he encountered throughout the different circles are at least somewhat sympathetic, especially at the first level of where the inhabitants are by and large good people who just to not be Christians. (And to be clear, Dante often found himself at odds with the church, so his works don’t necessarily reflect official doctrine and were absolutely written to reflect his own agenda, that said a lot of our modern ideas about hell owe a lot to Dante’s depiction, and any actual mention of hell in the Bible is scarce to non-existent depending on how you interpret certain passages, so his version is just as valid as any other in my opinion)
I mean, that’s literally the actual historical interpretation.
I think you misunderstood parts of The Good Place: >!It’s not people in The Bad Place pushing to improve the system, they try their hardest to prevent any improvements (except for Glenn, he’s the only demon that tries). Michael only became better because he learned ethics from a human perspective.!<
And that’s what The Good Place is fundamentally about: you can’t expect people to be good, if they don’t get the opportunity to become good people.
If you count Hel (one L) from Norse religion, older than the bible.
the idea of the snake in the Garden of Eden as having given free will and wisdom to humanity can’t be that modern of a thought, even if it would have been heretical.
In Gnosticism, the snake is sometimes identified with Jesus, while the god of the old testament is the demiurge. You’re correct in that the catholic church really didn’t like that.
We don’t know how old Hel is and it’s probably the single most syncretized aspect of Germanic/Norse belief.
It’s honestly pretty annoying that the Romans didn’t just dislike recording details about other religions, they’d actively lie about them, like Tacitus saying the Germanics didn’t have anthroform gods when we have so much proof now that they did.
Religion is pretty hard to believe if it wasn’t the one you were raised into. And it’s often times pretty hard to get out of the one you were raised into.
But outside of religion, a pretty common fictional view is that heaven is the extreme end of order, and hell is the extreme end of chaos. Neither one can harbor any middle ground, and thus they would both suck to be stuck in.
Inside religion, whatever your religion’s version of heaven is, usually depends on what “your people(local and as a whole)” would want it to be. It changes over time and distance to better fit. But never bring up that it has changed, as it has always been this one and true correct way of depicting it, to question that is some kind of sin… and hell of course is similarly fluid despite having always been “this” way.
In truth, they have both been depicted every which way imaginable.
It’s funny that you bring the evolution/interpretation thing because Hell didn’t even really exist for centuries
Yeah, that’s just one of the ways it has changed over time for some cultures, hehe. There were plenty of millenia before hell was even thought of the first time, we probably will never know what the first written use of it was, let alone the first time it was used in oral storytelling. But with what little evidence we do have from thousands of years ago, we can see that the idea of hell was never consistent since.
Mark Twain had some interesting ideas about Heaven, Hell, and Satan.
Letters from Earth was written by Mark Twain in 1909, but publishers refused to publish it until 1962. So, I’d say it’s fairly modern, starting around 1962 and becoming more acceptable since then.
I would suggest it’s the other way around. Sympathetic versions of hell and the underworld are if anything older. For that matter the concept of hell is very much borrowed from religions that came before Christianity. Heck the vast majority of our imagery for Christian hell comes from medieval retellings of Greek and Roman myths. Maybe with little bit of the pity and empathy taken out though.
I completely forgot to mention His Dark Materials! Hell doesn’t appear, but Heaven is portrayed as actively bad.
As a Christian I find it strange that the literal embodiment of evil is celebrated like this. Like people act as if the biblical satan is a good guy
as someone who bats for the other team, the combination of your faction’s hegemonic ubiquity and your more limited conceptions of heroism makes it really easy to read your literature from our perspective in order to gain spiritual insight and inspiration
for example Milton’s Lucifer in Paradise Lost taught me great lessons on what it means to stand up again when all seems lost
“Awake, arise or be forever fallen” ✊ 👆 👇
Anyway I hope this was helpful
In The Prophecy (1995), Christopher Walken played a corrupted Gabriel who is jealous of humans because God stopped talking to him (?). Viggo Mortensen plays Satan, not exactly sympathetically, but not too unrelatable. Constantine (2005) had a similar sub-plot With Tilda Swinton playing a jealous Gabriel, and of course Neo as Constantine.
You should watch more Lucifer.
You have a very flawed perception on what’s going on in the good place if you think the actors from “the bad place” are working to get people into heaven, or the reason the people of heaven leave so quickly.
But I’ll bite on what I perceive to be a barely good faith question and not a concern troll post.
When you look at the idea pushed (especially in the last few hundred years) of a dichotomy of infinite joy or infinite suffering, there’s a lot of realism that can be pushed in the gray areas. The absolutist of everything is good because everything is good and everything is evil because everything is evil has been portrayed from the good side for a long time, the somewhere in between that modern media takes from brings things towards the middle on both sides, but concern trolls can’t rationalize heaven to be anything but perfect, so they go on tirades about media they don’t care to look at critically, whenever they feel their absolutist belief of heaven good is analyzed with a modicum of scrutiny.
I know I probably shouldn’t engage, but I really just wanted to spark a conversation. I find the trope interesting. I agree that my Good Place example isn’t that good, but still, no need to be so accusing.
Why not engage?
I do believe you should watch some more Lucifer, you would probably change your opinion on the portrayal of heaven and hell in it. Heaven is a walled off garden of aspiration for all of the metaphysical beings in the show, and hell is a place of such suffering that the only ones content to be there have never experienced heaven. I don’t believe it matches the characterizations you’re claiming it does, despite having watched an entire episode.
And being sympathetic towards Lucifer is not the writers attempt to portray hell as good. Lucifer is a character of manipulation and uses temptation to get what he desires. The devil, as much as it is portrayed in the Bible, doesn’t act with deeds of evil, but deeds of manipulation and temptation.
Heaven’s Gates, locked with barbed wire
Bow down to the God of Fire
Because subversions of tropes are dope, and that in itself became a trope. Also, demons weren’t always beings of evil energies spawned in hell. They used to just be invisible entities that were mostly neutral in ancient Grecian mythology. What’s happened in the last ten years is all forms of media are easier to create than ever. So you’re gonna see a lot more of practically everything, but especially a lot more of what is popular and I guess deep down people still get hot over bad bois.
