People have a very interesting penchant for not understanding subtlety. For instance, children regularly tend to think that the evil queen from the Snow White is ugly, because she is evil and cruel, and threatened by the Snow White’s beauty. In fact, she’s not only not ugly, she’s the second most beautiful woman in the world, who is vain enough to mind not being the first enough to resort to murder.
Likewise, people tend to imagine Devil as a horrible, scary person.
How can someone appear horrible and scary if their fundamental role is that of a deceiver and a liar? It’s incredibly silly. It’s obvious from the Bible that Devil can appear as whatever is most useful for him in his lies and deceptions. He can fake appearances with no problem at all. What he can’t fake is the essence. He can fake whatever you think would be the appearance of God, but he can’t fake the feeling one has in God’s presence, because that’s about the substance.
Devil is, or should I correctly say “was”, because he happened to have one of those accidents that make one unavailable for all further appearances, not scary in the sense that he has horns, hooves and tail, and essentially looks like the Balrog from the LOTR movies. The scary part is not his appearance, because he would carefully avoid that; it was the feeling of ominous warning from somewhere that you would feel in his presence. You suddenly feel the need to be careful, to mind your every thought, word and action, to observe things with your inner eye and watch carefully, for you are in danger. There is never anything obvious about it, nothing you can point your finger at, and the only threat seemingly comes from having to oppose the reasonable arguments of Satan with those of faith and inner feeling, for which you have no direct evidence, nothing firm you can hold on to, while it is obvious that you will be laughed at or suffer other consequences if you choose faith over “reason and evidence”. And yet, only faith can save you.
The thing is, you don’t have to know how everything works. You don’t have to provide evidence for why you feel something is so. After all, the concept of having to back everything with reason and evidence is a modern folly. Despite all the nonsense about reason and evidence, people still have no idea how three quarks glued together bend spacetime and thus cause gravity. They can tell you in great detail what gravity does and how it behaves once it’s there, but nobody actually knows what it is and how it came to be. Souls exist despite science having no idea about them. Gods likewise exist despite the ignorance of science. You don’t need to understand how the presence of God influences the soul in order to experience it. I didn’t need to know how my yogic techniques actually work in order for them to work; I figured out the mechanics of it decades later. Trusting your inner feeling is much more important than having evidence to back it up. Every thief and deceiver will try to get you to trust reason and evidence over your feeling. They will try to get you to trust your eyes, so that they can pull a fast one on you. Devil is merely the ultimate expression of that principle. He’s not scary in a sense of being a red goat-man with fire in his eyes, he’s scary in a sense of being a calm, reasonable man who is trying to use reasonable arguments to convince you of something absolutely fatal and false, and you can point to nothing concrete to disprove it despite feeling a deep need to oppose it, and the only salvation for you is to resort to blind faith in order to reject everything you see and seem to know to be “fact”.
The scary part of Satan’s presence is that it forces you to dive blindly into the abyss of faith, rejecting the apparent salvation offered in form of reason and evidence, saying “I don’t actually have to know how something works in order to see that it’s evil, because I see the moral character of the fruits”. Satan forces you away from your comfort zone, forces you to resort desperately to the aid of God whom you can’t see, while the reasonable and logical gentleman offers you apparently rock-solid evidence, from the direction of which you can smell fire and brimstone and doom. That’s why he’s dangerous and terrible – because you can save yourself from him only by the most desperate of means.