I’ve been rereading Milton’s Paradise Lost. I am not alone in this; earlier this year, every time I checked Twitter, someone was commenting on Paradise Lost. There seemed to be a gravitational pull toward Milton’s epic. Many people, from Jaspreet Singh Boparai at The Critic to Ed Simon at LitHub, found themselves commenting on this very old poem—and not just the poem, but the concepts of good and evil, the nation, and the very possibility of virtue in a world like ours.

This is not a coincidence. We are living through a strange time. It is not unprecedented, despite the insistence of countless recent writers to the contrary, but it is undeniably very strange. It is a time in which a father is using his son’s blood to chase immortality; nations create elaborate bureaucracies to eliminate individuals seen as less worthy; and online personalities singing unequivocal praises of the Greek Dark Ages attract tens of thousands of followers. In this time, in which humanity seems to exist in thrall to claims of youth, strength, and power, Milton’s strange poem is newly attractive and newly disturbing in equal parts. That, I believe, is no accident.

Milton’s poem has always been disturbing, and for one primary reason: his Satan. The Satan of Paradise Lost is a staggering invention. Far from the brutal, subrational tortured behemoth of Dante, Milton’s Satan is oddly appealing. He’s manly, assertive, creative. He’s compelling. He has a goal and he pursues it relentlessly. He refuses to submit to fate. He’s a powerful speaker and a visionary.

In a word, he’s heroic.

To read the first half of Paradise Lost is to find oneself admiring the Devil, and that is a disturbing place to be. It is so disturbing, in fact, that many readers claim that Milton has made a misstep somehow. William Blake wrote that Milton had to be “of the Devil’s party without knowing it.” John Dryden, who believed that Milton had made Satan the hero of Paradise Lost, rewrote the poem in rhymed verse and “corrected” what he saw as Milton’s imaginative error; for decades, his translation was far more popular that Milton’s original.

In rereading the poem, I understand where Blake and Dryden are coming from. Milton manages to bring Satan very near our hearts in the poem; he speaks, as it were, to our longings and comports himself in the way we imagine a hero would.

This bothers people. It bothers me. I do not like that I admire the Devil for exemplifying certain virtues. If the courage, creativity, and indomitability we see in Milton’s Satan came from a character with any other name, I would find myself praising him.

The question becomes: Is this an imaginative failure on the part of the artist? Does Milton stumble here, lured by some darkness in his own vision into loading the Prince of Darkness with virtues? Or does he load his Devil with attractions intentionally, drawing us into this sympathetic relationship with darkness for some moral purpose of his own?

Types of Devils

Before we can answer that question, we must understand Milton’s Satan in its place in the tradition of Christian conceptions of the Devil. Leaving aside the medieval idea of the Devil as a fork-tailed, pitchfork-wielding monster whose toothy grin mocks fallen souls (an idea that may, for all I know, be the most accurate one we have), I want to look at the two other defining depictions of Satan in the contemporary Western imagination: Dante’s and C.S. Lewis’.

I will begin with Lewis’ because it is easiest for me to accept. Lewis is an Augustinian of the first order; he believes absolutely that evil is the negative of Good, and he demonstrates this in his writing by making evil always small, petty, gray, dull. Even his fiercest evils, like Tash in The Last Battle and the devils of That Hideous Strength, are shown to be pale, flaccid, and tasteless in comparison with goodness. In the comic essay “Screwtape Proposes a Toast,” Lewis shows Hell as a nasty little place, and its bureaucracy consumed with petty details, squabbling over minute differences in the diabolic hierarchy.

In teasing out his Augustinian convictions to this degree, Lewis is following a thread plucked from Dante, whose Devil (“Emperor of the kingdom dolorous”) is bestial and gibbering. By having abandoned God, Dante asserts, the Devil has lost not only his own reflected beauty but even his mind. Virgil explains to Dante that the intellect is the light of God in the mind; by this reasoning, Hell includes the loss of intellect, language, and coherent thought.

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