I have often imagined Satan as a super intelligent being perhaps only a little less intelligent than God himself.  However, in the fiction story told in the book, Perelandra, written by C. S. Lewis the being representative of Satan is described as more like “an imbecile or a monkey or a very nasty child”.  Perelandra was the story of the Fall of Man repeated in another Garden of Eden on another planet.  In this story, Eve (The Lady in the story) does not succumb to the temptations of Satan (called the “Unman” in the story) even through he used “plenty of subtlety and intelligence” to try to seduce her to sin against God (named Maledldil’s in the story).  However, the story noted that the Unman regarded intelligence as a weapon and when the Lady dismissed him for a while it reverted to its true form of practicing petty wickednesses such as grabbing fur or feathers to torture a beast or pulling up leaves of a plant.  The Unman was at heart not a sophisticated intelligent being at all but just wicked, a nasty child.  “Thought was for it a device necessary to certain ends, but thought in itself did not interest it. “

C S Lewis’s observations ring true.  Satan is not a being with a super intelligence.  He is a trickster, devious and cunning but not in an intelligent way – in a destructive way.