The Trial of Lucifer

Every legal system worthy of the name rests upon a simple principle: no one may be condemned without first being heard. Lucifer has been condemned in the Scriptures, cursed by the Fathers of the Church, frozen in the deepest ice of Dante's Inferno, invoked as a bogeyman in sermons and catechisms for two thousand years. And yet he has never spoken. He has never been permitted to speak within the very system that condemned him. This book was born of a question that is not theological but juridical: what if we have heard only one version of the story? THE TRIAL OF LUCIFER is a literary, philosophical, and dramatic trial - conducted with historical and philological rigour. The material is real: the sacred texts, the depositions of the prophets, the works of the Romantic poets, the theological treatises, the testimonies of the mystics. The form is that of the courtroom drama. Witnesses for the prosecution: Isaiah, Ezekiel, John the Apostle, Saint Peter. And the great interpreters of the tradition: Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Dante Alighieri. Witnesses for the defence: William Blake, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Milton, Goethe, Dostoevsky, Mark Twain. And the Italian poets Mario Rapisardi and Ulisse Barbieri, who in the nineteenth century gave Lucifer a powerful and long-forgotten voice. The Judge, finding himself persuaded by neither thesis, appoints a Court-Appointed Expert to reconstruct the historical and philological genesis of the figure of Lucifer: which texts contributed, which were excluded from the biblical canon and why, and how the translation choices shaped the image we know today. This is not a book against faith. It is a book in favour of the responsibility of judgement. The Jury is you. You are not asked to acquit. You are asked to listen.