Abstract

This paper investigates how the secular priest Gabriele Biondo employed the symbol of Lucifer in his writings to express the conflict between reason and faith. Biondo distinguishes between two forms of truth. In the first sense, truth can be understood as the uncovering of the actual reality presented before the senses. In this sense truth coincides with faith. In the second sense, truth pertains exclusively to the intellectual capabilities of created beings and, therefore, is closely associated with fantasy and imagination. According to Biondo, even though God revealed himself to Lucifer through the Son, Lucifer understood the Person of the Son as a combination of unresolvable contradictions. These dilemmas originated when Lucifer was confronted with the mystery of the dual nature of Christ. The impossibility of reconciling his rational arguments and presuppositions about divinity with the evidence of the facts led Lucifer to abandon his faith in a Trinitarian God and to replace the Christian God with a rational and logical notion of God. This logical God can be equated to self-love. Three main consequences depend on this choice: desperation, isolation, and annihilation.