Sexy Satan: John Milton's Paradise Lost (episode 1)

Sexy Satan, what have you done? You made a fool of every one!

On this episode we tackle the rather thorny question of Paradise Lost's charismatic protagonist (?) or antagonist (?) or antihero (?): the hottest guy in Hell.  Why does an epic on the cosmic history of Christianity, written by a radical Puritan, present us with so commanding and appealing a character?  

Additional music: "Gonna Fly Now (Theme from Rocky)" by Bill Conti.  https://archive.org/details/rocky_202111/1976+-+Rocky/01.+Gonna+Fly+Now+(Theme+from+Rocky).mp3

Transcript

Hey, there, Pals-for-Life.  Welcome back to the Classic English Literature Podcast, where rhyme gets its reason.  And so does blank verse, free verse, prose, drama, etc., etc.

So I was at the local instantiation of a well-known and omnivorous American discount retailer the other day, seeking quality goods at reasonable prices, when I noticed a fellow patron’s T-shirt, one he no doubt purchased on a previous visit to this cathedral of capitalism.  It was a black shirt with white lettering and graphics.  The graphics were of a menacing skull and an automatic rifle while the lettering read: “I’d rather die on my feet than live on my knees.”  This sentiment has among its putative originators the playwright Euripides and the emperor Constantine, but I doubted that the fella with the suitcase of light beer, a bag of pork rinds, and a truck battery was commenting on avatars of classical honor.  I may be wrong.  Rather, I reckoned that his sartorial commentary indicated his support for the Second Amendment, the constitutional right, in America, to bear arms.  Perhaps I should also note that the T-shirt, ironically, was sleeveless.

But it got me thinking about the peculiarly individualistic type of defiance so common in the American character.  For my non-American listeners, many staunch supporters of the Second Amendment see in it the right of the citizen to resist the unjust incursions on his or her privacy with violent force if ultimately necessary.  Many see the ownership of firearms as a fail-safe against tyranny.  Now to those who are skeptical about firearms, this may seem ludicrous.  Surely, if the US military – the largest and most lethal fighting force in the world’s history – decides you are an enemy, you have very little chance against holed up in your camper with an AR 15.

But it’s the principle of the thing, see? Yes, you will be reduced to a fine, powdery ash, but the important thing is you stood up.  The individual as sovereign – it’s an idea very deeply woven into the American double helix.  It’s not exclusively, or even originally American, of course, but has really become one of the most defining features of its culture.  Just think about the most popular Hollywood movies.  Think of Westerns like High Noon or Shane: a stoic individual must stand against the injustice of his environment to protect the innocent.  Or just about any police movie – the maverick cop who just won’t play by the rules.  The justice system is a joke.  Sometimes, vigilantism is the only way to serve justice.  The Dirty Harry trope.  Or the endless recycling of superhero movies: reclusive, secretive, usually wealthy men dress up in tights and masks, have awesome fistfights without other people in tights, and destroy a city in order to save the city.

One might say this fetishization of individualism finds its origins in America’s immigrant stock.  Only people of great bravery and self-assurance would gamble their futures in a new world.  Famously, American historian Frederick Jackson Turner proposed his “Frontier Thesis,” arguing that the frontier – what, to European eyes, was terra icognita – forged American individualism, self-reliance, and inventiveness.

Now, again, I don’t want to claim this as the sole provenance of the American spirit – in previous episodes, I’ve talked about the crucial importance of Lutheran theology in the formation of modern individualism and the democratic impulse.  As I’ve said, to believe that one has direct access to God without the intervention of an institutional church leads quite naturally to believing that one does not need monarchy.  This belief in the sovereignty of the self is endemic to – indeed, perhaps the sine qua non of – modern Western civilization.

(phone rings)

Hello, yes?  Ah, yes.  No, I know this podcast is supposed to be about literature.  I quite agree.  Well, I am driving to a point.  Yes, a point about Milton.  Yes, Paradise Lost.  It’s coming directly.  Yes, thank you for your call.  Bye bye.

(phone hangs up)

Sorry about that.  Umm . . . yes.  The point of this desultory babble.  Well, I think that these somewhat muddled musings can do something to shed some light on one of the most interesting and vexing questions about John Milton’s massive epic poem Paradise Lost, and that question is: Why is Satan so attractive?

Hold that question in your mind, because I’ll come back to it, but for many listeners that question may lack context, so allow me to provide some.

We’ve already talked about Milton’s activity during the Civil War and Interregnum periods, his deep commitment to the Parliamentarian cause and the Puritan religion, and we’ve also explored his poems of “apprenticeship” – those pastorals which prepared his way for composing an epic.  That epic is called Paradise Lost, which he composed between the years 1658 and 1663.  I say “composed,” but that doesn’t quite catch the monumentality of what he accomplished.  You see, in 1652, Milton lost his sight, and so the “writing” of Paradise Lost might more accurately be called the dictating of Paradise Lost.  He dictated its over 10,000 lines of blank verse to his daughters, who transcribed the text.  Can you imagine that?  Seriously – 10,000 lines of some of the most complex and stirring iambic pentameter just pouring out of your mind, directly into recitation.  It seems to me a task akin to the building of the pyramids or the great Gothic cathedrals, except this was a single man.  Just incredible.  In 1667, the poem was published in 10 books, but a 1674 edition expanded it to 12 books to bring it more in line with the Homeric and Virgilian standard.

Anyway, the epic really centers around the Fall of Humanity in the Garden of Eden, but in order to treat that subject, Milton must also deal with the Fall of Satan.  That story is nowhere to be found in the Bible – in fact, Satan hardly exists in the Jewish Bible at all, and when he is, he’s not the embodiment of cosmic evil that later Jewish apocalypticists and Christians would summon.  Rather, he’s more like God’s bad lieutenant, a ruthless prosecutor.  But there are a couple of references in the prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel.  The Christian Book of Revelation depicts Satan as a great dragon defeated by the archangel Michael, and that’s the more familiar depiction to most folks today.

But where did John of Patmos, the author of Revelation, get this image?  There are a number extrabiblical sources and apocryphal sources including the Book of Enoch (well, this book is, in fact, canonical in Coptic Christianity), which tells of a rebellion against God and its leaders being cast from heaven.  A Jewish work called The Life of Adam and Eve depicts Satan’s refusal to bow before Adam and so is evicted.  The Book of Jubilees also includes some insurrection narratives.  

Whether John of Patmos knew these works is perhaps doubtful, but he certainly knew the culture they created.  And I’m pretty sure John of Milton had some familiarity, in addition to the writings of early Christian theologians like St. Augustine, Origen, and Pseudo-Dionysius, who give reasonably elaborate accounts of Satan’s fall.  One should not discount, also, the influence on Milton of classical mythology and Dante’s Inferno.

So what did Milton make of all these disparate materials?  Well, Paradise Lost is a very, very dense poem, and even doing a couple of episodes on it will not even begin to do it justice, so I’m just going to focus on a couple of things that I find particularly interesting.  But to even do that, we need to do the quick and dirty:

The scene opens in Hell, where Satan and his fallen comrades regroup after a botched rebellion. Determined not to submit, Satan rallies his troops.  The fallen angels hold a fiery council in Pandemonium, debating their next move. After much back-and-forth, Satan volunteers to sneak out of Hell, cross the chaotic abyss, and corrupt God’s newest creation: humankind. 

Meanwhile, up in Heaven, God observes Satan’s schemes but allows them, as humans must have free will to choose good. The Son of God offers himself as a sacrifice to redeem humanity—a moment of cosmic grace before all the doom.

Satan arrives on Earth and sneaks into Eden, where he spies on Adam and Eve – rather creepy, that.  But, you know, Satan. He’s torn between envy and admiration of their blissful innocence, but his bitterness wins out, and he begins plotting their downfall. The best way to effect this, of course, is to become a serpent.  

God can smell what Satan’s cooking, so he sends the angel Raphael to warn Adam and Eve. Raphael recounts the story of Satan’s rebellion in Heaven, painting a vivid picture of the original celestial clash.  Not sure that’s what his orders were, but it’s pretty awesome. Raphael describes the total  war in Heaven between Satan’s forces and the loyal angels. The rebellion, obviously,  doesn’t go well for Satan, because, you know, God.

Then Raphael tells Adam the story of creation. So, this whole war occurs before anything exists?  Perhaps Milton’s daughters should have taken a more commanding editorial role.  Anyway, over six days, God shapes the cosmos, creating the perfect paradise of Earth, all leading up to humanity’s debut.

Adam gets chatty and tells Raphael about his first moments of consciousness and meeting Eve. He’s totally googly-eyed over Eve. Raphael, though, gently warns him not to idolize her too much.  Raphael, evidently, is a Puritan.

Here’s the famous part of the story: Satan, cunningly disguised as a serpent, tempts Eve to eat the forbidden fruit. She falls for his smooth talk (never once questioning the existence of a smooth-talking snake), eats it, and then convinces Adam to join her. They both realize what they’ve done and spiral into shame and blame. Paradise: officially lost.

Satan slinks back to Hell, with some very unbecoming gloating, while Adam and Eve face divine judgment. But there’s hope—God promises redemption through the future Messiah. The angels transform the fallen serpent squad into literal snakes, a fitting punishment.

God sends the angel Michael to escort Adam and Eve out of Eden. Michael shares a vision of the trials and tribulations humanity will face, but he also hints at eventual redemption. It’s a tough goodbye, but the message is clear: all is not lost.

Michael wraps up his vision, revealing the ultimate triumph of Christ and humanity’s salvation. Adam and Eve, though heartbroken, leave Eden hand in hand, ready to face the unknown. 

pause

So . . . a happy ending?  We’ve talked about the idea of the “felix culpa” (meaning the “blessed fault” or “happy fall”) before – that’s back in episode 62 on George Herbert’s poem “Easter Wings” – and it's the idea that Adam’s sin the garden was fortunate because it allowed for the blessing of redemption.  Take that as you will – Milton certainly entertains the notion here.  Myself, kicking around paradise eating fruit in the birthday suit seems a perfectly lovely way to spend an eternity.  Your mileage may vary.

Anyway, this leads to a rather interesting observation concerning an understanding of Milton’s religious verse.  Scholar L.A. Cormican argues that an objective, new critical approach to such poetry is impossible because in Milton we cannot make the “distinction between the doctrinal content and the literary art, or concentrate on the purely ‘aesthetic’ side of his poetry.”  That means: in order to know how Paradise Lost works as a poem, we need to know Milton’s theological positions.  All the more so as Milton himself believed that poetry should be morally didactic – it should teach to elevate and purify the human soul.  I will have more to say on this point in the next episode, but I wished to introduce it now because of the complications it introduces as we ponder the question of Satan’s character.  Surely, there is no Anglican or Puritan doctrine that allows for an attractive, magnetic, sympathetic Satan.  And yet, for over three centuries, that is what readers believe Milton has presented.

So, get into your handbasket and strap in.  We’re going to Hell.

We meet Satan in the fiery pit after he and his companions have been cast from heaven, and at first you might sense some regret at this unfortunate turn of events.  He looks upon Beelzebub, a demon second only to Satan in power and crime, and says:

O how fall'n ! how chang'd 

From him, who in the happy Realms of Light 

Cloth'd with transcendent brightness didst outshine 

Myriads though bright.

You might sense sorrow, repentance, ruefulness, dear reader, you might indeed.  But you’d be very, very wrong.  As Satan continues his speech, those opening lines become rather sardonic acceptance, not contrition.  What emerges is Satan’s defiant sense of sovereignty.  Despite his complete defeat at the hands of God and the Archangels, Satan spitefully spits recalcitrant contempt.  It was worth it, because no one had tested God before:

so much the stronger prov'd

He with his Thunder: and till then who knew

The force of those dire Arms? 

And now in ruin fallen, Satan continues to declare his self-assurance:

yet not for those,

Nor what the Potent Victor in his rage 

Can else inflict, do I repent or change,

Though chang'd in outward lustre; that fixt mind

And high disdain, from sence of injur'd merit,

That with the mightiest rais'd me to contend,

And to the fierce contention brought along 

Innumerable force of Spirits arm'd

That durst dislike his reign, and me preferring,

His utmost power with adverse power oppos'd

In dubious Battel on the Plains of Heav'n,

And shook his throne. What though the field be lost? 

All is not lost; the unconquerable Will,

And study of revenge, immortal hate,

And courage never to submit or yield.

This is Satan’s first invictus moment.  His failure may have cast him down, his beautiful features now hideous: these outward conditions may be altered, but within he remains the same.  He cites his fixed mind, high disdain, and sense of injured pride.  He speaks of his daring, his mettle, willing to be proven in the shaking of Heaven’s throne.  He cherishes his “unconquerable will” and the “courage never to submit or yield.”

Holy crap!  Come on, admit it – Satan sounds totally badass!  He went big because he deserved big.  He bristled under the “tyranny of Heaven” and did something about it.  I find it pretty easy to get riled up (“Rocky” theme), pumped, inspired.  I don’t have to take crap from anyone!  They’re never gonna grind me down!

Then I remember: oh, wait.  This is the Devil, embodiment of Cosmic Evil.  Not a role model.

But for a moment, he was pretty seductive: he appeals to our ego, our sense of specialness, our outrage at the other that keeps us down, that refuses to recognize that specialness.  Temptation starts in vanity, maybe.

But it also really feels heroic, doesn’t it?  It’s like every sports movie ever made: the contender is down but not broken.  Stirs the soul, you gotta admit.

Until he takes it!  Muhahahaha!

No.  Ok.  But lest we think of Satan merely as a seductive embodiment of ambition and resilience, an object lesson, in fact, of the temptation we must abjure, an instrument of darkness that, as Banquo, win us with honest trifles to betray us in deepest consequence, I’d like to point out that Milton’s Satan is not merely a bracing antagonist, not merely a rebel about whose recalcitrance we timid conformists fleetingly fantasize.  Ah, no!  This Satan offers an alternative, subjective reality, one governed merely by the force of individual will.  Check this out.  Satan surveys his new kingdom, and, in a sense, declares it good:

Hail horrors, hail 

Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell

Receive thy new Possessor: One who brings

A mind not to be chang'd by Place or Time.

The mind is its own place, and in it self

Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n. 

What matter where, if I be still the same[?]

The Archfiend casts himself not as the condemned and shamed – he is not damned to Hell, in a passive sense; he possesses Hell as an active agent.  Hell must receive him; it is perdition itself that Satan subjugates to his desire – and I use that word advisedly: there seems something of the sexual conquest in this passage.  His unchanging, resolute mind penetrates the horrors of the infernal world.  He says that the mind – consciousness, apprehension – is its own place.  That is where Satan lives, not in fiery prison of God’s devising.  In a cosmic advancement of Hamlet’s pithily subjective “there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so,” Satan moves the apprehending self, the mind, not just to determine the qualities of things – whether they are good or bad – but the experience of things themselves, maybe even the things themselves.  Individual consciousness seems to be the creator itself, the maker of things, not just the judge of their accidents.  He is his own reality – what matter as long as I am the same!

That is just mind-blowingly solipsistic and I confess to a certain thrill at the fortitude and possibility opened by living such a conviction.  

Not for nothing, this also puts the notion of God’s omnipotence on blast.  Yes, God defeated Satan in the great war, but Satan perceives that more as happenstance, an unfortunate serendipity.  Only the “thunder” made God greater, he says.  Now, is thunder a metaphor for natural strength or military strength?  Did God win not because he is essentially more powerful but because he happened to field a larger army?  The implication is certainly dismissive, and then, of course, God has no power in Hell: this was not built “for his envy” and he “will not drive us hence.”  What worse can he do to us, Satan asks?  This is the limit of his might.  Here we are free.

Now actually, given this monumental statement of self-fashioning, the more famous line that follows almost seems bathetic: “To reign is worth ambition though in Hell: / Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav'n.”  This line has found its way into the pop culture zeitgeist from time to time – movies, heavy metal music – for freelancers and entrepreneurs it's almost a shibboleth.  But to me it feels like a bit of a let down from “the mind is its own place.”  It feels like a petulant child, sent to his room, saying that he wants to go to his room.  

The angel Abdiel, who was once of Satan’s party but abandoned it when he saw Satan’s mutinous arrogance, calls the Archenemy on this petulant behavior.  In Book 6, he says

This is servitude,

To serve th' unwise, or him who hath rebelld

Against his worthier, as thine now serve thee, 

Thy self not free, but to thy self enthrall'd;

Not only does Abdiel dismiss Satan’s temper tantrum, he also fundamentally questions his enemy’s psychological justification.  There is no freedom in such solipsistic ambition – one can only be enslaved to oneself.  There’s a paradox here, though: Abdiel argues that true freedom comes only from submission, which seems quite in line with Milton’s doctrinal attitudes.

But Satan has an answer for that, too.  In Book 4, he again speaks to his conception of the relationship between mind and place as it pertains to the self:

which way shall I fly

Infinite wrath, and infinite despair?

Which way I fly is Hell; my self am Hell!

So, his mind is the supreme creative agent of his experience and can remake space to its image, and then, in a supreme synthesis, his mind and its fashioned place actually become his self.  That’s crazy!  Either ultimate sovereignty or ultimate hubris.  Perhaps both.  Perhaps they’re the same thing.

And he dismisses utterly Abdiel’s idea of freedom through submission to God: 

O then at last relent: is there no place

Left for Repentance, none for Pardon left? 

None left but by submission; and that word

Disdain forbids me.

Supreme pride, supreme ego.  That disdain leads the Fiend to engage in, well, almost a guerilla war against God, a terrorist insurrection.  Since he can’t defeat the Almighty on the open field, he will resort to sabotage:  

So farewell hope, and with hope farewell fear, Farewell remorse: all good to me is lost; Evil be thou my good; by thee at least Divided empire with heaven’s King I hold, By thee, and more than half perhaps will reign; As man ere long, and this new world shall know. 

We know the story from here, right?  Satan goes to Eden and despoils God’s finest creation, believing that he has been justified and avenged.  Let’s leave the story here, because I want, in the next episode, to look at that spoliation more closely.

pause

Now, Milton probably intended that the reader be appalled at Satan’s breathtaking hubris and take to heart the lesson of godly humility.  But, boy, did he have to make Satan so sexy?  Maybe.  Fair is foul, after all.  But it’s easy to see how Milton is riding the ragged edge of failure here.

Oh, no.  Are we going to go down the road of critical Milton-bashing like in the “Lycidas” episode?  Well, sort of.  But in a way that I think is more interesting than, for instance, Dr. Johnson’s cranky complaints about that poem’s artifice.  

See, readers have long debated just who is the hero of Milton’s epic.  Is it Adam?  Is it God?  Is it Jesus?  Is it conceptual, like the idea of redemption.  Or is it, as many feel in their guts, Satan?  And if he’s the epic hero, how do we understand Paradise Lost as an epic and what do we make of Milton’s Puritanism?

It’s a vexed question that goes back almost to the early days of the poem’s circulation.  John Dryden, probably the most significant poet of the era immediately following Milton’s, felt that this confusion weakened the epic’s effectiveness: it would have been better “if the Devil had not been his hero, instead of Adam.”  In classical epic, like that of Homer or Virgil, and even in the English vernacular epic Beowulf, the protagonist is meant to embody the values of the culture that produced him.  Beowulf is the ideal Germanic man.  Epics and their protagonists often seek, in some way, to secure civilizational foundations through narrative.  That doesn’t work so well in Paradise Lost, unless you look at it as an example of extreme irony.  Dryden complains, in understanding Satan to be Milton’s hero, that the writer has violated the purpose of epic: surely Satan does not stand as an embodiment of Christian civilization.  Unless of course one could say that “yes, he certainly does,” and thereby have Milton ironically condemning all of Christendom.

That seems unlikely.  Even the perturbable Dr. Johnson found no fault with Paradise Lost on religious grounds, claiming that “every line breathes sanctity of thought and purity of manners.”  This is not to say, though, that the great doctor enjoyed the poem.  He avers that “no man ever wished it longer than it is"  and that “its perusal is a duty rather than a pleasure."  He finishes, “We read Milton for instruction, retire harassed and overburdened, and look elsewhere for recreation."   No critic today is so withering in his praise.

But Johnson offers little to resolve the question of Satan’s putative protagonism.   That question returns in the period after him: the Romantics of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.  William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge admired Milton greatly and, like Johnson, did not doubt Milton’s orthodoxy.  They celebrated him for his proto-individualism and his commitment to radical politics.  Yet it is William Blake who presents us with the boldest thesis regarding Satan in Milton’s epic.  In a mystical and enigmatic poem from 1793 called “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” Blake explains the tension many find in Milton’s poetry:

the reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of angels and God and at liberty when of Devils and Hell is because he was a true poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it.

Well, that’s a bold and presumptuous statement!  Blake knows Milton better than Milton.  He implies that Milton lost control of his character and made him far more attractive than he meant to.  That explains a lot, if we accept it.  But I find it difficult to believe that Milton could master everything else – while blind and dictating – but baubles his intentions in such a well-drawn and dominating character.  Other Romantics agreed with the effect of Blake’s assessment,if not the cause. Percy Shelley, himself a radical atheist who saw Milton’s God as a tyrant, thus legitimating Satan’s revolt, disagreed with Blake’s implication of Milton’s lack of control: “Nothing can exceed the energy and magnificence of the character of Satan in Paradise Lost.  It is a mistake to suppose that he could ever have been intended for the popular personification of evil.”  Lord Byron agreed, and one can surely see the seeds of the Byronic hero in Milton’s devilish creation.

pause

If we return to Professor Cormican’s assertion that we must understand Milton’s doctrine if we are to understand his epic, we find that we are not really any further along.  As the period of high Romanticism waned in English poetry, a treatise by Milton called De Doctrina Christiana was discovered in 1823, published in 1825.  In it, we find that Milton held quite a few heterodox views, including anti-Trinitarianism, its advocacy of polygamy and divorce, his belief in free will over Calvinist predestination, and, interestingly, the denial of an eternal Hell.  Condemned souls were merely annihilated, not subject to infinite torture.  Why?  Because, as Satan himself says in the poem, Hell is a state of mind, not a place.

So, what do I think?  Well, I haven’t yet made a call on the general question of Paradise Lost’s protagonist.  I tend to think it may be a theme rather than a character: probably the theme of justification.  That’ll feature in the next show.  As to what is going on with a sexy Satan?  Well, I don’t think Sexy Satan is due to Milton’s incompetence nor his ignorance.  My feeling is that Satan is so compelling because he has to be in order for Adam and Eve to fall, and for all of humanity evermore to succumb to his charisma.  Milton’s Satan tempts the reader to join the party of the damned, and Milton wants us to resist, like Abdiel, to renounce our attachment to the Devil and submit to God.

The problem with Satan seems to me not Milton’s, but a change in the Western zeitgeist.  Dryden saw Satan as a structural problem, an aesthetic one.  But he is reading the poem in the context of post-Restoration England and its augustan obsession with form and balance and symmetry.  The problem comes with the Romantic revolution, when the seductive characteristics that Satan embodies are no longer temptations to be avoided, but attitudes to be aspired to.  Satan’s firm resolve, his refusal to submit, his insistence on self=determination and sovereignty, his resentment of submission and conformity.  All these are Romantic virtues, not theological vices.  Satan is attractive to us, in the centuries since Shelley, because we live in the world that the Romantics created, the world of rugged individualism, in which justice and the law are not always synonymous, in which the fallen may rise.  (Rocky theme)

Let’s talk about that redemption next time on the Classic English Literature Podcast.  We’ve covered the fall of Satan, so we’ll move on to the fall of Adam and Milton’s theodicy.  I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode.  Please spread the word about the show – the more the merrier.  You can send me text with any comments or questions right from the episode page.  You can also get hold of me on Facebook, Instagram, You Tube, and Bluesky – uh, for now anyway.  If your pockets are simply bulging with cash, and its interfering with you trying to get at your keys, feel free to send some that filthy lucre my way by clicking the “support the show” button.  I thank you so much for your time, attention, and support.  Be well, and I’ll see you next time just outside of Eden.