The true aim of the angelic revolution, therefore, is not to achieve equality but to replace one hierarchy with another, and Satan himself admits: “orders and degrees/Jar not with liberty, but well consist” (V.792-793). He is truly the deft Deceiver. First he rouses the pride and private passions of the angels, by declaring them uncreated gods, thereby luring them into a futile rebellion. With these firmly in his hold, he makes them feel their lesser stature, so as to assert his own superiority over them, and all the while intimating that he alone can overpower God. What is this, if not a prime example of the Art of Tyranny, appearing time and time again on the stage of history, a spell cast by ambitious men over a decadent and fearful people?

The capital difficulty of understanding Milton today is manifest in the great profusion of sects and opinions surrounding the interpretation of Paradise Lost. Among these, the most intriguing view is perhaps the Romantic school’s identification with Satan as the embodiment of revolutionary freedom, and with Milton as a poet “of the devil’s party.” In my estimation these Romantics are quite mistaken, but they are not totally without reason. Certainly Milton was a republican, a revolutionary, an overthrower of the monarchy, and even a defender of regicide; certainly Satan is the same—so it appears—against the monarchy of God. It follows, then, that Milton is with Satan, who must be the true hero.

But how can this be? The very argument of Paradise Lost, not to mention Milton’s plain and sincere religious beliefs, abhor such an interpretation. And yet the figure of Satan rising up against all heaven and hell looms so large over the whole work that it is hard not to see him as the hero–or, at the very least, as the protagonist. We have arrived at an impasse. If Milton is with Satan, he will seem to contradict the principle of Christianity, which he professes, but on the other hand if Milton is with God, he will seem to contradict the principle of liberty, which he also professes. In the following, therefore, we shall examine the role and beliefs of Satan, whether he is hero or tyrant, and, proceeding in an orderly fashion, come to some understanding of Milton’s idea of freedom.

The Dramatic Significance of Satan

The first error that we must disabuse ourselves of is the notion that Milton wrote an allegory. For a reader of our day, it is very easy to treat Paradise Lost as mere mythology and consequently not take it seriously, or only take it seriously insofar as it really depicts something else—some kind of social commentary disguised with a veil of religion. The somewhat obvious point to the contrary is that nobody who writes allegories thinks that the events therein really happened, but Milton clearly believes that the Fall is a real event, as real as execution of Charles I. Even without the clarity of external knowledge, in Paradise Lost itself the poet maintains a clear distinction between the classical elements and the biblical, between “those gardens feign’d/Or of revived Adonis, or renowned/Alcinous, host of Laertes’ son,” which are in fact just poetic figures, and “that [garden], not mystic, where the sapient king/Held dalliance with his fair Egyptian spouse”—the garden of Solomon.^[1] These expressions would make little sense if the classical and the biblical are equally myth. The invocations found at the beginning of the Books VII and IX, also stress the true nature of the Hebrew or Chirstian narrative. The nine Muses are “an empty dream,” but Urania the muse of Horeb is real; the jousts of “fabled knights” of the medieval romances are “feigned,” but the War in Heaven is real.^[2]

By this, I do not intend to say that artistic licence in no way exists in Paradise Lost—a writer of serious historical fiction may very well invent things which did not happen, embellish things which did, and employ symbolism. But the characters in historical fiction are symbolic not by being abstract metaphors, as in allegories, but by being individuals with some pre-eminent and representative characteristic. Considered this way—and not counting certain irregularities^[3] —Paradise Lost shares more with modern psychological masterpieces such as The Red and the Black, or with Shakespeare’s historical plays than with Pilgrim’s Progress or Gulliver’s Travels. Satan is no more an abstraction of Rebellion than Julien Sorel or Henry Bolingbroke. Milton’s intention seems rather to cast Satan as a preeminent rebel, the Rebel of Rebels. By the representative power of his great sin, he could be considered an archetype for fallen humanity. In the words of Lord Macaulay, the characters of the Miltonian demons are “marked by a certain dim resemblance to those of men, but exaggerated to gigantic proportions, and veiled in a mysterious gloom.”^[4]

Pandemonium of Despair

It should not surprise us that the Romantics are so much in love with Milton. Though his style is classical and dignified, Paradise Lost breathes forth an agitated spirit unknown to the works of classicists, which caused Hugo (the glory of French Romanticism) to say, “Paradise Lost is a drama before it is an epic.”^[5] It is, first and foremost, a drama of Man.

Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree [...] 
Sing heav’nly Muse [...] (I.1-2)

—these are the first lines, the great argument of the Christian epic. Why then does Milton begin in Hell with Satan as the main character? The magnificence of the Archfiend, the sympathetic distress of the fallen angels, elements which strike a chord with the melancholic nineteenth-century poets, are too often met with bafflement or repulsion by the generality of Christians who have never courted despair. But the condition of the fiends is very real and close to us, although their despair is magnified to infinitude by the absolute nature of their sin. This heightening of agitation is precisely what a Romantic seeks, and what makes him so well-fitted to embrace the emotional exhilaration of Paradise Lost. And we must follow in their path, if we wish to understand the mind of Satan and his nearness to the human condition.

The tragedy of the angelic rebellion is that it is entirely absurd. If God is omnipotent, as Milton holds, then the devils are merely deluding themselves if they think they could actually prevail. Beelzebub comes to the same conclusion a hundred and fifty lines into the poem,

What can it then avail though yet we feel
Strength undiminished, or eternal being 
To undergo eternal punishment? (I.154-156)

To which Satan raises the possibility that although they cannot win against God, they may yet strive to “grieve” him, and bring evil out of good, if Satan does not fail. Beelzebub seems to accept this plan, and, as the mouthpiece of Satan, bills it to the demons in Pandemonium. Such a plan is manifestly more realistic than Moloch’s proposal for self-destructive war; Belial’s proposal to sit around and hope that things do not become worse, and Mammon’s proposal to build a capitalist utopia. For, as Beelzebub points out, there is nowhere they can escape the dominion of God:

[...] For he, be sure,
In height or depth, still first and last will reign
Sole King [...] (II.323-328).

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