Satan is Beautiful (& Other Lessons From My Father)

As children, when my brother and I were planted in front of the TV watching whatever fancies cable brought us, my father would sometimes walk into the living room and watch alongside us. Over time, we came to expect some run-of-the-mill comments from him. He would often scoff at what we were watching and tell us that it wasn’t real. For some strange reason, we—usually just I—would take his accusations of fakeness as an affront and scramble to defend the realness of what we were watching, be it Transformers or Jumanji.

One day we were watching Hellboy II when Dad walked by. He peered at the humongous, bright red demon on the screen while on his way out the door and told us that it wasn’t real. But this time he gave a reason: “Satan is beautiful.”

My father had put two words together that, to my developing mind, were diametrically opposed. How could this be? Satan? Beautiful?

My father saw the confusion on our faces, so he sat down. He told us that Satan was created as the strongest angel—more powerful and more beautiful than even Michael and Gabriel. It was Satan’s disobedience that got him banished from heaven, but this banishment did not take from him any of his power or beauty.

With this story, my father devastated the physiognomic framework that Western thought had developed over centuries. Physiognomy—the idea that what is beautiful is good, and what lacks beauty is morally depraved—from Aristotle to Jim Crow, served as a philosophical pillar of the west.

On a random Tuesday, on his way out the door, my father professed an aesthetic critique, using the Ethiopian Orthodox canon, that quietly obliterated the foundations of Western thought.