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Again, to correct popular belief, it is said nowhere that Satan was an angel, least of all most powerful, in the Bible, New Testament and Old.
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This is quite true, though the Pauline epistles remark that Satan can appear as "an angel of light" (2 Corinthians) and as the "prince of the powers of the air" (understood both by the Fathers and by the medieval theologians to be fallen angelic powers).
Late Jewish traditions (early AD) state that Satan had been an angel of high rank, and apply a passage in Isaiah that refers to the fall of "Lucifer", the "shining one", to the fall of Satan.
Gregory the Great (
c. 540-604) in his
Moralia, after listing nine hierarchic orders, says this of Satan, "he wore all of them [all the angels] as a garment, transcending them all in glory and knowledge." Thomas Aquinas (1274-1323), greatest of the Doctors (Teachers) of the Church, designated Satan as "the first angel who sinned" and argued that, as to his original order, Satan was not of the seraphim but of the cherubim, because "the cherubim is [sic] derived from knowledge, which is compatible with mortal sin" (
Summa Theologica 1, 7th article). According to Jerome, Gregory of Nyssa, Origen, Ambrosiaster, and others, Satan will be reinstated in his "pristine splendor and original rank."
So, while John Milton gives us a splendidly compelling poetic portrait of Satan as a fallen angel, the idea did not originate with him, and had been an accepted notion in Christian and Jewish theology for over a millenium and a half.