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The Quest for Redemption: Penitent Demons Leading Christians to Salvation in Medieval Christian Exempla Literature

In the early thirteenth century, an anonymous author of Christian exempla related the story of a demon who disguised himself as a man and entered a church during the celebration of the Servicium Angelorum. The demon disrupted the sacred service with a great deal of commotion. When an elderly man in the church asked the demon why he was interrupting the service, the demon remarked that he wanted to prevent the celebration of the angels. Revealing his true identity, the demon explained that he had once inhabited heaven with the blessed angels, but had lost his place among them. The demon further divulged that he “would willingly climb a burning ladder that extended from earth all the way to heaven” and “gladly suffer torture until death . . . in order to finally be able to regain the place in heaven that he had lost.” By describing the demon’s intention to prevent the celebration of the heavenly angels, the author painted the demon in a very familiar light: deceptive, in his human form, and unholy, in his opposition to that which Christians considered sacred. Yet, the demon in the exemplum above was much more complex than this simplistic reading suggests; the demon professed to the goodness of heaven and, therefore, indirectly contributed to the celebration of the holy angels. The exemplum composer highlighted the demon’s emotions: specifically, the tremendous regret he felt about his fallen state. This complex and conflicted demon was not unique; accounts of demons expressing sadness and regret for their loss appear often in exempla collections between the late twelfth and early fifteenth centuries. Despite the prevalence of such ambivalent demons in medieval exempla, demons who express regret for their fall and who long to return to God are rarely, if ever, mentioned in the modern scholarship on demons and