Beyond Personhood: The Devil as Persona in Christian Theology

Abstract In recent decades, theologians have considered the status of the devil in Christian doctrine with renewed seriousness. Contemporary proposals habitually locate the devil within the conceptual framework of personhood, though they do so in strikingly divergent ways: from Robert W. Jenson's construal of the devil as person , to Joseph Ratzinger's description of the devil as Un‐person , to Philip G. Ziegler's account of the devil as adversarial, adventitious, and anarchic . This essay argues that the tensions internal to these proposals arise not from disagreement about the reality or agency of the devil, but from the inadequacy of personhood as a category for naming the devil's mode of existence. Drawing on conceptual and theological resources from Origen of Alexandria and Gregory of Nyssa, I propose that the devil is better conceived as persona —understood not as a psychological self or interior subject, but as a performative, relational, and inherently unstable mode of identity. Understood thus, persona provides a conceptual register capable of affirming the devil's operative presence while refusing to ascribe to the devil the metaphysical density, relational integrity, or interior coherence proper to theological personhood.