The Complex Legacy of Lucifer in John Milton’s Paradise Lost: A Study of Rebellion and Redemption
*The Fallen Angel* (French: *L’Ange déchu*) is a painting by French artist Alexandre Cabanel. It was painted in 1847, when the artist was 24 years old, and depicts the Devil after his fall from Heaven. The painting is at the Musée Fabre in Montpellier.
Three hundred and fifty years ago, John Milton gave Lucifer a voice through his poem *Paradise Lost*. Upon its release, *Paradise Lost* was hard to ignore, regarded instantly as either a work of genius or heretical nonsense. Writing an epic poem of this nature was bold, but it was Milton’s masterpiece.
Since its publication, Milton’s poem has spawned critiques, defenders, and copycats. A whole genre of fictional characters were born from Milton’s prototypical “antihero” depiction of Satan.
C.S. Lewis, author of the *Chronicles of Narnia* series, critiqued *Paradise Lost* in his work *A Preface to Paradise Lost* in 1942. Lewis’s critique was composed during the height of the mid-twentieth century, which the value and quality of Milton’s representation of Satan as a hero was reentering the cultural conversation.
The division found in Satan’s reception is intriguing because defenders of the work and its critics have to contend with whether it is appropriate to turn the Devil into a tragic hero. Some writers argued whether Milton’s Satan is morally superior to Milton’s God, whose immoral actions toward Satan provoke and may even justify his attempted revolution.
Percy Bysshe Shelley says of Milton’s Satan:
Milton’s Devil as a moral being is as far superior to his God as one who perseveres in some purpose which he has conceived to be excellent in spite of adversity and torture is to one who in the cold security of undoubted triumph inflicts the most horrible revenge upon his enemy.
Shelley believes Satan’s behavior is justified, and from a certain point-of-view, is it not? Is not freedom from oppression a noble cause? Should God and his system be punished for being tyrannical? In the process of anthropomorphizing God, Milton imbues Satan with the attributes of a great leader of men. All the men who follow the Devil can’t be as evil as the Devil.
Perhaps there is a hierarchy of evil with the most evil being at the top and this supremely evil spirit is able to galvanize the dormant wickedness within their followers. If that is the case, is this not true of Milton’s God? Because if God is atop this hierarchy, how did he allow evil to rest inside of his son unchecked?
Milton’s Satan is compelling. As a character, he pushes the plot forward like a good protagonist should. His ability to push the narrative does not arrive because he is morally good, but because he has a desire made clear to the reader.
Artistic and theological lines blur while interpreting *Paradise Lost*, primarily due to Milton’s use of religious imagery as a literary backdrop. Milton invokes familiar mythological symbols such as Adam, Eden, Eve and God, which the reader already possesses some association. These symbols exist as important parts of the human canon, and so to give them new literary life tugs at a primitive part of the psyche.
* *A Preface to Paradise Lost* is one of C. S. Lewis’s most famous scholarly works. The book had its genesis in Lewis’s Ballard Matthews Lectures, which he delivered at the University College of North Wales in 1941. It discusses the epic poem *Paradise Lost*, by John Milton.*
Returning to Lewis. *A Preface to Paradise Lost* was as influential as *Paradise Lost* on many levels. Lewis tackles a series of Milton’s ideas. He shoots down the notion that Satan is a figure worthy of celebration or even empathy, but is just a character of artistic value. Lewis says, “Milton’s Satan is a magnificent character” in the sense that “Milton’s presentation of him is a magnificent poetical achievement which engages the attention and excites the admiration of the reader.” Lewis then challenges the idea that Milton’s Satan “ought to be an object of admiration and sympathy, conscious or unconscious, on the part of the poet or his readers or both.”
For what it’s worth, Lewis’s goal was not to convert those who admire Satan into Christians, but to create a clear vision of the symbol readers are absorbing. It’s important to distinguish between the narrative achievement of the poem and empathizing with the actual Devil.
Empathy for the Devil would not jolt culture unless the idea speaks to a buried piece of our collective experience, something lodged beneath the psyche of mankind. Controversial literary figures have existed in the past, but the discussion around Milton’s interpretation of Satan spanned centuries.
In 1977, Christopher Hill, a Marxist and probably the most radical of the humanist critics, argues that Milton uses the Satanic revolution to investigate his own “deeply divided personality.” Is Milton using Satan as a psychological device? And were readers subconsciously drawn to this fictional Satan with the hopes of exploring their own inner-darkness?
Frankly, to be truly human is to know the darkness which rests idle beside the light, an inner-shadow projected of equal or greater height, yet of different mass. As we see in Milton’s Satan, exploring the dark side of existence is about more than just exiling evil into a lake of fire to burn— it’s about human nature, the unpleasant desires which are born by simply existing within an inherently flawed world.
In this world, an inner-antagonist has always and will always plague humanity, and this antagonist is the divided personality Christopher Hill attributed to Milton. This hidden division within mankind possesses two caricatures vying for supremacy and it is that symbolic truth Milton’s Satan resurrects in the reader by giving Lucifer a voice. The symbol of Satan in Milton’s *Paradise Lost* expounds on the central question religion and psychotherapy has to answer for centuries:
Where do all wicked compulsions originate?
There might be reason to extend empathy toward the wicked, a reason behind why as a culture consumers are obsessed with shows about serial killers and mob bosses. We intuitively understand the “rebel” archetype and how this figure, when oriented properly, represents a profound challenge to the cultural shadow — the unspoken rules and unchecked power structures of society. In entertainment, we have an affinity toward Scarface, Tony Soprano, and Walter White. Perhaps the thing attracting us so much to these descendants of the literary Satan is relatability.
There is no such thing as a perfect being, and approaching what that means will cause systems and hierarchies to be held to task for their capacity to change the good into the evil. Inner turmoil is a line separating average citizens from any man or woman sitting at the edge of a moral cliff adjacent to villainy.
In recent years, researchers have been trying to understand the darker traits of human nature. Where do the likes of Ted Kaczynski, Jeffrey Epstein, Charles Manson, Jim Jones, Joseph Stalin, and Adolf Hitler originate? Were these figures born or created?
Let’s take Ted Kaczynski for example. Kaczynski, also known as the “Unabomber,” wrote down his beliefs in a work called *Industrial Society and Its Future*, a 35,000 word manifesto. The manifesto argues that the Industrial Revolution created a harmful destructive process through technology, forcing humanity to adapt to machinery. This technological adaptation, to Kaczynski, establishes a sociopolitical order which suppresses any potential for human freedom.
On paper, this argument makes sense. His manifesto boils down to two coherent arguments.
First, humanity has become so dependent on technology that the real decisions about human life are made by unseen forces like corporations and the flow of the market. In Kaczynski’s words, our lives are “modified to fit the needs of this system,” and the diseases of modern life are the result: “Boredom, demoralization, low self-esteem, inferiority feelings, defeatism, depression, anxiety, guilt, frustration, hostility, spouse or child abuse, insatiable hedonism, abnormal sexual behavior, sleep disorders, eating disorders, etc.”
In Kaczynski’s mind, humanity must revolt against the industrial system and killing was necessary to make a lasting impression on the existing hierarchy. Second, technology’s momentum can’t be stopped.
Kaczynski was a prodigal son, a math genius created and cultivated by the academic power structure from an early age. He went Harvard at sixteen years old, joined the math department at UC Berkley at twenty-five. He eventually exiled himself to Montana in an attempt to escape the world, living without running water and electricity. One day, his peace was shattered. He recalls hiking to his favorite wild place for some relief and found a new road cutting through it. In an interview in 1999, Kaczynski said, “From that point on, I decided that, rather than trying to acquire further wilderness skills, I would work on getting back at the system. Revenge.”
For Kaczynski, like Milton’s Satan, the system he belonged was oppressive, constantly stripping him of his autonomy. From a young age, his gifts placed him in academia. The cry for freedom was loud in his head, louder than it is for most. The system in its entirety needed to be rebuilt through a philosophy of his own making, and the beginning of this rebuild must begin with revenge against the system itself.
It just may be epistemologically impossible to divorce the beliefs of the wicked from their actions. Because what are actions besides beliefs in motion? The capacity to possess disdain for a system’s participants should not be conjoined with disdain for the system. If Kaczynski or Satan held these beliefs as a philosophical exploration of the plight of the oppressed without the call for violence, could their ideas have merit? The perception of oppression will always exist, whether it be real or not is as relative as time. However, the dilemma is how to respond to the perception of oppression. Is nihilism an adequate response to pain? Sadism?
Figures like Adolf Hitler, Ted Kaczynski, Joseph Stalin, or Satan intrigue because they do not exist outside of our psyche as an ephemeral wicked “other.” No, they do not exist just to wag a moral finger against. Instead, they exist as reminders of humanity’s capacity to harm others in order to accomplish a goal.
Descendants of Lucifer like Kaczynski and Hitler fight an internal war against the archetypal father. It is society and all of its rigid rules and structures holding together the masculine symbol. All people, not just the Luciferian descendants, learn how to exist under the scrutiny of an order preexisting their birth, and in those moments, a darker nature desires a violent disruption to these rules. In the eyes of the Luciferian descendant, rules and boundaries exist to be tested by any means, broken, and loyal adherence becomes psychologically irreconcilable, so chaos appears to be a better regime than perceived oppression.
In the Greek creation myth, a succession of usurpations of the masculine order by the next generation occurs. Cronus, the youngest son of Uranus (the sky) and Gaia (the earth), was the god of time and the ruler of the Titans. With his mother’s blessing, Cronus castrates his father Uranus, throwing his penis into the ocean, killing his father and separating Heaven from Earth — masculine removed from the feminine. The castration of the phallus symbolically and physically marks the overthrow of the old regime.
Despite Cronus’s efforts to escape a similar fate by devouring his own children, the cycle inevitably repeats, sealing his downfall. Cronus was overthrown by his son Zeus and cast into Tartarus. Notably, Zeus doesn’t kill Cronus, the embodiment of time, but instead imprisons him — symbolizing that time cannot be destroyed, only contained. This mirrors the rebellion that Kaczynski advocates, a revolt against the unstoppable march of the future.
Christian mythology breaks the symbolic cycle of divine usurpation by having Satan’s rebellion ultimately fail. This serves a crucial purpose. The creation becomes a narrative about upholding law and order, with God successfully squashing the uprising of his rebellious son.
Perhaps the most critical stories giving insight to humanity are those that are most controversial. A true understanding of human nature comes from recognizing that the line dividing good and evil doesn’t run through nations, social classes, or political parties, but through the heart of every individual. The assumption that absolute evil is the greatest flaw of the rational mind is not entirely wrong, but is it better to exist in this reality as the obedient son, never disagreeing with the structures and rules society provides or standing up for what’s right regardless of who it may harm?