According to Steadman, “The first large-scale offensive against the Satanist position began shortly after the first gunfire of the Second World War.” Charles Williams challenged the tendency to confuse Satan’s views with those of the poet himself, and emphasized (negatively) the devil’s egotism, his “self loving spirit” and the inaccuracy of his boasts, claiming “Hell is always inaccurate” (261).
In the 1942 preface to Paradise Lost, (which he claims was written with the aim of
“preventing the reader from ever raising certain questions”) theologian C.S. Lewis responds to Raleigh’s claim that Satan must either be a hero or a fool, by making him comedic and ridiculous.
Evil is not founded on reason, but on an absurd and baseless send of injured merit.
He thought himself impaired because Messiah had been pronounced Head of Angels.
These are the “wrongs” which Shelley described as “beyond measure.” . . . No one had in fact done anything to Satan; he was not hungry, nor over-tasked, nor removed from his place, nor shunned, nor hated—he only thought himself impaired. (92) According to Lewis, Satan “lies about every subject he mentions” and it was difficult to
“distinguish his conscious lies from the blindness which he has almost willingly imposed on
but also for a world of lies and propaganda, of wishful thinking, of incessant autobiography. . . Some, to the very end, will think this a fine thing to say; others will think that it fails to be roaring farce only because it spells agony” (100).
In other words, only egoistic, foolhardy, self-deceiving readers will side with Satan. This accusation was met with resistance. Helen Gardner responded diplomatically, citing the devils
“enormous pain and eternal loss,” and that, though Satan was “in no sense the hero of the epic as a whole,” he remained, nonetheless, “A figure of heroic magnitude and heroic energy.” Gardner also points out that, in the reality of his damnation and in his monomaniacal self-concern he resembled the tragic heroes of the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage (qtd. in Steadman 262).
For A.J.A. Waldock, Milton’s own “inexperience in the assessment of narrative problems”
was primarily responsible for the striking inconsistencies in his Satanic image. “Milton’s allegations clash with his demonstrations,” he argues, “and in any work of imaginative
literature . . . it is the demonstration . . . that has the higher validity” (qtd. in Steadman 263). In other words, when Milton’s comments as narrator clash with the reality of the text, we must reject his comments. Waldock also acknowledges that the changes in Satan’s character “did not generate themselves from within: they (were) imposed from without. Satan . . . does not
degenerate, he is degraded” (83). The problem with Milton’s Satan, he concludes, is that Milton let him get out of hand unintentionally (qtd. in McMahon 70–71).
William Empson disagrees, claiming that Milton’s Satan is “consistent, plausible and ethically superior to Milton’s God. “Satan’s revolt against an omnipotent creator was not per se absurd; for in the devil’s own eyes the divine adversary was not almighty. Satan doubted not only that God had created the angels, but that He could in fact create anything. From the very beginning of the poem the devil sincerely believes that he has disproved God’s omnipotence”
(Steadman 263). For Empson, Satan’s “moral absurdity and progressive degeneration . . .
redounded less to Satan’s dishonor than to the discredit of the deity who had ruthlessly degraded him. . . To worship a wicked God is morally bad for a man, so he ought to be free to question whether his God is wicked” (Steadman 265).
Steadman glosses these two responses, “For Waldock, the epic was a failure because it was not a good novel. For Empson, it was a success because it lacked a good God.” (263) The conservative reading was once again gaining the upper hand. Douglas Bush sees in Satan the
“spirit of Hitler” and sees his first speech as “a dramatic revelation of nothing but egoistic pride and passion, of complete spiritual blindness” (qtd. in Steadman 263).
Williams claims Satan’s description of his revolt against the Almighty is clear evidence of the essential “inaccuracy” of Hell: Satan claims “that he and his followers ‘shook his throne’;
it is only afterwards that we discover this is entirely untrue. Milton knew as well as we do that Omnipotence cannot be shaken; therefore the drama lies not in that foolish effort but in the terror of the obstinacy that provoked it, and in the result, not in the fight but in the fall” (qtd. in Thorpe 258).
In John Milton and the Transformation of Ancient Epic, Charles Martindale writes that
Aeneas is a true leader who conceals his private emotions in the interest of his public duties; Satan by contrast speaks out of mere bravado, and his concealment serves his own evil desires, not the true interests of those he has misled. (4)
Christopher Hill, in Milton and the English Revolution, reads Paradise Lost as Milton’s quarrel with himself: the republican Milton, a free and rational individual, revolting against the Christian Milton who accepted God’s power. “On this reading, Milton expressed through Satan (of whom
he disapproved) the dissatisfaction that he felt with the Father (whom intellectually he accepted)”
(366–67).
The Romantic reading, which was boldly proclaimed in the past century (by many of history’s greatest writers), was now seen as a mistake:
Unfortunately William Godwin, William Blake, Mary Shelley, and her husband advanced the reading of Satan as hero first posited by John Dryden. While such a reading is perhaps an outcome of political/social issues of the time, the power of Satan’s speeches, and the attraction that evil so regularly seems to provoke, it provides a faulty and incomplete view. (Duran 34)
When S. Musgrove asked in 1945, “Is the devil an ass?” the implication was yes. According to Musgrove, Milton’s readers would have immediately feared and distrusted the character of Satan.
In GUR. Hamilton’s Hero or fool? the implication was fool. “Milton does not need to prove that Satan is evil; he expects readers to know it and to believe it from the start” (qtd. in Leonard 448) C.S. Lewis had earlier pointed out that “a creature revolting against a creator is revolting against the source of his own powers—including even his power to revolt. . .The same rebellion which means misery for the feelings and corruption of the will, means Nonsense for the intellect”
(97). For Hamilton, who viewed evolution as “an unlovely and terribly pessimistic belief,”
Satan’s hypothesis is obviously agreeable to his pride, for it enables him, like any evolutionist who dispenses with a person God, to regard himself as superior to the source of his creation. (23)
Even Carl Jung, in the preface of Lucifer and Prometheus, sees sympathizing with Satan as a
“danger”:
It thus happens that Prometheus, the sinner and culture-hero, can be detected in the Satan of Paradise Lost. Milton’s Satan has absorbed so many Promethean qualities that we are in danger of admiring him and sympathizing with him. Satan is in trespass and thus sinful; but at the same time he represents our (Greek and unregenerate) aspiration toward new and higher levels of existence, our human battle against heavy and indifferent odds. (xix)
Merritt Y. Hughes, in “Satan and the ‘Myth’ of the Tyrant” (1965) argues that the weakness of the Satanic portrait was “its power to fool readers into its own delusion of power and make them say that Milton’s Satan is a noble anticipation of the Nietzschean superman” (qtd. Steadman 266).
Stanley Fish writes in Surprised by Sin (1967) that “epic heroism, of which Satan is a noteworthy instance, is the antithesis of Christian heroism, and a large part of the poem is devoted to distinguishing between the two and showing the superiority of the latter . . .The devil’s false heroism draws from the reader a response that is immediately challenged by the epic voice, who at the same time challenges the concept of heroism in which the response is rooted”
(48-49). Consequently, the reader who falls before the lures of Satanic rhetoric displays “the
weakness of Adam” (38).
Fish confirms his views in the 2001 How Milton Works, claiming the readers who would make Milton a Romantic liberal stem from “a systematic misreading of it, a misreading
performed in the poetry by Comus and Satan, a misreading of the poetry as old as Blake and Shelley” (14). Going further, Fish claims that readers who disagree with him “falsify [their]
experience of the poem” (qtd. in Forsyth 23).
John M. Steadman gives a good summary of the critical responses to Paradise Lost in 1976, by claiming that, even though Satan was seen as a hero for three centuries, that idea had now been firmly stamped out.
The case for the devil seems so generally discredited that its affective and persuasive force is likewise undermined—when readers are so conscious of Satan’s absurdities that they forget his cunning and power, so alert to the fallacies underlying his pretensions that these lose their aesthetic value as probable (or apparently probable) illusions. . . . For roughly three centuries, readers have demanded justice for Satan;
and the validity of his title as hero has been the oldest, and possibly the most persistent, of many controversies over Paradise Lost. (255)
Milton criticism for the next several decades would follow the Fishean reading, that Satan’s grand rhetoric in Paradise Lost tempts readers into sympathizing with Satan; therefore the poem demands an active process of resisting all of the emotional impact of the poetry, and turning it into a purely academic exercise.
According to John S. Diekhoff, admirers of Satan are literary heretics; Satan is a bad angel and Milton knew it (31). “Evil is his good, to do ill his sole delight, not because by some paradox of thought evil is to him really good, but because it is contrary to the will of his enemy”
(33).
Barbara Lewalski (according to Forsyth in The Satanic Epic) argued that Milton’s intention in using an epic model is “neither to debase the epic genre nor to exalt Satan as hero, but rather to show the human face of evil and its perversion of the good (71).
Achilles’ actions are those of a man driven by grief and rage into desperate, aberrant behavior, whereas Satan reaches the logical end-point of his debased heroic course in
this display of exultant self-congratulation, Achilles’ triumph inspires tragic terror.
Satan inspires reprehension. (Lewalksi 62)
For John Shawcross, Satan is “a vacuous braggart.” The devil’s glorious speeches exhibit the
“false high style of the dissembler and buffoon” (With Mortal Voice 104).
David Quint’s 2014 Inside Paradise Lost is an excellent example of the subtle
propaganda campaign against Milton’s Satan; close-reading of individual passages is combined with editorial comments meant to put Satan in his place and remind us not to sympathize with him. Anything that looks at all like heroism is to be ridiculed as a “diabolical impersonation.”
As they clash their shields in Book 1, they may look like Roman soldiers roused to battle, but they equally look ridiculous: like so many swashbuckling braggarts
sounding defiance against a deity whom they, in fact, dare not fight. . . These diabolic impersonations of Ulysses suggest how aspects of his heroism can be perverted toward evil; together they constitute a kind of anatomy of the ancient hero and a compendium of his career. . . . Satan’s ensuing voyage is a version of the wanderings of Ulysses, and part of the point— and joke—of Milton’s imitation is that what looks like the opening of the Iliad in Paradise Lost turns out to open an Odyssey (37-39).
Like earlier commenters, Quint claims that Milton’s words are “at war with themselves” and that his devils got away from him. Paradise Lost (according to Quint) was meant as a warning, but the power of Milton’s poetry charms readers to their own destruction.
The power of Milton’s poetry may nevertheless exceed its admonitory, demystifying purpose. In the peasant onlooker’s heart, joy and fear redound together, but the joy of the fairy elves’ charming music may outweigh the salutary fear that this music can
lead to lunacy or demonic possession. Once raised, these devils are hard to put to rest or to return to airy nothing: back to the words on the page” (34).
It should alarm us to find contemporary literary criticism that uses logic more commonly seen in 1st century Christian apologetics, who used the argument of diabolical mimicry to explain away similarities between Christian worship and earlier pagan practices.