我的惡/善：對彌爾頓筆下革命英雄的善惡漸變演繹之詮釋

(1)

國立臺灣大學文學院外國語文學系博士論文

Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures College of Liberal Arts

National Taiwan University Doctoral Dissertation

我的惡/善：

對彌爾頓筆下革命英雄的善惡漸變演繹之詮釋 Evil by my Good:

The Shifting Moral Interpretations of Milton’s Revolutionary Hero

德瑞克墨菲

Derek Murphy

指導教授：唐格理博士

Advisor: Kirill Ole Thompson Ph.D.

中華民國 105 年 7 月

July 2016

(2)

摘要

彌爾頓的史詩巨著《失樂園》（Paradise Lost）並沒有落入文學理論的俗套，而是引發了一場持續三百多年的爭論，即：彌爾頓筆下的撒旦到底是不是故事中的英雄人物，不論是出於偶然還是主觀意願。這部史詩的背景是《聖經》伊甸園的故事，其核心主題與這個故事一樣，都是關於”誘惑”。在《失樂園》中，撒旦對亞當和夏娃的惡意誘惑似乎證明瞭他的邪惡，但同時，我們也會對他在這一冒險行動中所展示出的英雄情懷產生認同感。許多西方的批評家認為這正是《失樂園》的魅力所在，他們的觀點是彌爾頓筆下的撒旦應該是被唾棄的人物。而另一方面，有些人則認為這種傳統的解讀是中世紀的落後思想，即：人們應當服從權威和已繼承的智慧，並嚴格地控制自己的想法和熱情。而且他們認為這種解讀完全違背了當代社會所宣導的自由寬容和浮士德價值觀。這篇論文首先將探討對《失樂園》的傳統解讀，以及它所引發的反應。我會闡述彌爾頓的作品所體現的西方文化中的道德反轉：從一開始把”撒旦”奉為政治革命的象徵性人物，到後來批判為人性墮落的典型。

分析了文學理論和大眾在”政治認同”角度對撒旦這個人物的評價的變化之後，我將對”後現代思想”和”存在主義”著作與《失樂園》進行比較性閱讀，例如《撒旦的現實意義》（對自由的強烈渴望帶來焦慮，並需要行動）。撒旦的認同危機可以分為三個主要階段：在被異化的危機中形成了主觀意識、對權貴話語權的反抗，以及最終沒能免除對自己的定罪。

這篇論文的目的是展示現代思想家們對”邪惡”定義的普遍否定，而這種否定是與人類的自由和創造力的源頭相矛盾的（這種否定會導致自由和創造邊的消亡）。此外，我還將闡述：

對所謂”邪惡現象”的沉默是怎樣導致和延續社會不公，以及少數族裔的邊緣化。

關鍵字: 彌爾頓、失樂園、浮士德、傅柯、現代主義、撒旦崇拜

(3)

Abstract

Paradise Lost is a unique text in that responses to Milton’s epic have not evolved in line with trends in literary theory, and instead rehash the three hundred year old disagreement on whether Milton’s Satan is, in any sense, either by accident or deliberation, the hero of the story. This dialogue, like the biblical story of the Garden of Eden on which the epic is based, centers on the theme of temptation: in Paradise Lost Satan’s deliberate and malicious destruction of Adam and Eve seems to guarantee his guilt, yet it is hard not to sympathize with the heroic passion of Satan’s daring odyssey. Many modern critics read this as exactly the genius of Paradise Lost, that it is a seductive text, and that Milton’s Satan must be resisted. On the other hand, it’s easy to argue that this orthodox reading is medieval—a duty towards obedience to inherited wisdom and the strict containment of your own passionate tendencies; and that this reading is also completely at odds with the liberal, Faustian values of contemporary society. In this thesis, after exploring the orthodox response to Paradise Lost (and the reaction it generates), I’ll demonstrate how Milton’s writings are symptomatic of an ethical inversion in Western culture, which first caused Satan to be celebrated (as a symbol for revolutionary politics) and later condemned (as humanity confronted the depths of its unrestrained depravity). After tracing how responses to the character of Satan have evolved in literature and entertainment in line with political sympathies, my original contribution to knowledge will be a comparative reading of Paradise Lost through the lens of postmodern thought and existentialism as Satan’s over-proximity with the Real (the abyss of freedom creates anxiety which demands action). Satan’s crisis of identity can be divided into three major shifts: the development of subjectivity through a crisis of alienation; his resistance to a totalizing power discourse that defines his being; and his ultimate failure to exempt himself from the systemic order that relied on his transgression. The aim of this thesis will be to show

(4)

how universally modern thinkers agree on the concept of evil as a negation of what is, in favor of anything else but this—a negation that is paradoxically the source of all human liberty and creativity (which nevertheless leads to death); and also to demonstrate how the silencing of so- called satanic elements allows and perpetuates social injustice and the marginalization of minority voices.

Keywords: Milton, Paradise Lost, Faust, Foucault, modernism, satanism

(5)

Evil by my Good

The shifting moral interpretations of Milton’s revolutionary hero

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… (PL 5.108-112)

(10)

Introduction

Milton’s writing demonstrates an evolving response towards political revolution and terrorism;

his first major poem demonizes Guy Fawkes’s infamous Gunpowder Plot, but one of his last works (Samson Agonistes) shows a sympathetic hero destroying a temple to slaughter his enemies in a way that, in a post 9/11 world, cannot help but be met with skepticism. Paradise Lost lies between these two works, and may represent Milton’s struggle to understand his fallen place in society after his hopes for political reform were dashed with the return of the monarchy.

Milton’s major themes—which center on rebellion and resistance versus obedience and

conformity—are especially relevant today. These same themes are major issues in critical theory and postmodern thought; much of which uses Miltonic language in a way that is not entirely incidental, since the history of Western philosophy is in large part a rational attempt to distance itself from religious discourse. This attempt, like Satan’s quest for liberty, never quite succeeds.

Despite the fact that Milton’s Satan was seen as a positive symbol for human

individualization and Promethean courage by liberal-minded artists, philosophers and writers for several centuries, the orthodox responses to Paradise Lost of the 20^th century mostly aimed to silence his voice and reject any notion of his heroic qualities. This is especially problematic given the fact that Satan’s liberal politics and ideology, his Faustian confidence in will and power, and his self-righteous pursuit of his own agenda have been absorbed by Western culture

(11)

reappropriated into a symbol for political dissent, is a fitting parallel in this regard. For decades, critical responses to Paradise Lost stagnated into a hegemonic power discourse which resisted alternative readings (despite postmodernity’s explicit struggle against exactly this issue). While contemporary responses to Paradise Lost have finally begun to move beyond the conservative agenda, few studies return to the unsolved, and crucial, debate over the inherent moral values in Satan’s act of transgression. This thesis, therefore, will offer an alternative reading of Milton’s Satan that can only properly be grasped in context of the historical evolution of literary

representations of the Devil.

Milton’s Satan, whether or not it was the author’s deliberate intention, became the literal face of progressive, liberal tendencies which, when suppressed, sometimes used revolutionary violence to transcend conservative restrictions; these liberal tendencies have since become contemporary moral values, and as such, nearly all Western heroes mirror Satan’s insurgent position in Paradise Lost. This identification between heroes and traditionally “evil” characters is becoming more and more self-aware, as contemporary entertainment reclaims villains by flipping the narrative and allowing them to share the injustices that led to their misdeeds. Noting the rise of revolutionary enthusiasm and the trend of recasting villains as tragic heroes in just the past decade, it’s possible to claim that Milton’s Satan is the unrecognized founder of

contemporary ethical sympathies regarding the right to disobedience and dissent.

Whether or not Satan is the “hero” of Paradise Lost has been the central controversy in Milton studies, however this issue faces the unique danger of being misappropriated or

obfuscated by clever interpretations with subjective, even subconscious, predispositions. Given these two claims—that Milton’s Satan is relevant to contemporary literature, social values, and political revolutions, and shares qualities with contemporary heroes resulting from direct literary

(12)

influence; and that there exists a very real resistance to recognizing this relevance—my thesis is not only well justified but uniquely timely.

I’ve found it particularly surprising that, despite contemporary incredulity about whether Satan can be shown to have heroic qualities, there is an enormous wealth of material and sources to support my claims. The Romantic infatuation with Milton’s Satan is well known, but the massive influence this single literary character had on later literary and political movements and popular literature is rarely admitted. While the conservative, orthodox reading of Paradise Lost has become mainstream, no studies have been done on the political environment that led to its success despite contemporaries calling it “intellectually dishonest”. It is also important to point out that while Milton scholars will resist the idea that the C.S. Lewis or Stanley Fish continue to dominate critical discussion, the majority of common readers guides—the kind most students assigned during their first contact with Milton’s epic—take for granted that Satan is evil and must be resisted. In this thesis, when I refer to the “orthodox” or “conservative” reading of Paradise Lost, it is this reading that I am describing: the one that continues to form the basis of a pedagogical system committed to resisting Satan’s rhetoric by ridiculing or refusing him as categorically untrustworthy.

Background Context

In 1605 a group of provincial English Catholics attempted to blow up the House of Lords during the State Opening of England’s Parliament, thereby assassinating King James I and restoring a Catholic monarch to the throne. The daring plot was revealed to the authorities in an anonymous letter, and during a search of the House of Lords at midnight on the fourth of November, 36

(13)

Fawkes. At their trial on 27 January 1606, eight of the survivors, including Fawkes, were

convicted and sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered. Fawkes was questioned and tortured, but jumped from the gallows, breaking his own neck to escape the final punishment.

Parliament decreed “an annual and constant memory of that day” to be “solemnly transmitted to all posterity […] how bad men can be to destroy, and how good God hath been to deliver” (qtd. in Tournu 360). Fawkes became “the face” of the Gunpowder Plot, with his effigies traditionally burned on a bonfire, commonly accompanied by a fireworks display on November 5^th.

To the Protestant English public, Guy Fawkes was a Catholic terrorist sent by Satan himself. And yet the unprecedented amount of damage a small group could do stirred the public imagination, and inspired a flurry of literary works. According to Robert Appelbaum,

There were journalistic accounts, memoirs, sermons, fictionalizations, allegorizations, lyric poems, political and philosophical meditations. The so-called King’s Book (1605), which documents proceedings and statements responding to the plot, including the confessions of Guy Fawkes and Thomas Winter and the speech of James VI and I to Parliament, provided what was intended to be an official account.

[…] Then there are the fictionalizations, narrative poems, dramas, prose works which either tell similar or parallel tales about political violence or else embroider the real story with allegory and imaginary incidents. Both Macbeth (first performed in 1606) and Jonson’s Catiline (1611) have the plot in mind, though they deal with it only indirectly, but there are many other plays at whose core lies an allusion to a plot to destroy a nation by sabotage and assassination in the name of religion. (463)

(14)

In 1626, at only 17, John Milton wrote In Quintum Novembris to commemorate the event, in which Satan, disguised as St. Francis, approaches one of the conspirators in a dream and plants the idea; but is thwarted by God, who lovingly protects England:

But meanwhile the heavenly father looked down from above with pity on his people, and thwarted the Papists’ cruel attempt. They are seized and taken off to severe punishments. Sacred incense is burned and grateful honours paid to God. All the joyous crossroads smoke with genial fumes; the young people dance in crowds, for in all the year there is no day more celebrated than the fifth of November. (Dartmouth)

Although gifted in poetry, Milton made a name for himself as a supporter of divorce based on incompatibility, beginning with The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643). Milton made the controversial claim that men (and women) should be free to leave an unhappy marriage. The topic was most likely sparked when his newly wedded wife, Mary Powell, deserted him soon after the wedding. After having difficulty getting his books properly licensed, he wrote the Areopagitica in 1644, which argued for “the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely

according to conscience, above all liberties.” It remains one of the most complete arguments for freedom of speech and press ever written. “Let her [Truth] and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter? Her confuting is the best and surest suppressing.”

This was a period of intense national turmoil, as armies led by Parliament and King Charles I battled and England’s eventual fate as a Protestant country was constantly threatened.

Finally, Cromwell’s New Model Army arrested Charles I and, after a swift trial, beheaded him on January 30^th, 1649. Less than 2 weeks later, Milton published The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates to defend the new government’s actions. “It is lawful,” Milton writes, “and hath

(15)

and, after due conviction, to depose and put him to death.” Milton’s loyalty and support earned him a role as defender of the new republic, with a paid post.

When Cromwell’s death in 1658 caused the English Republic to collapse into feuding military and political factions, Milton stubbornly clung to the beliefs that had originally inspired him to write for the Commonwealth—even as it became clear that the tides were shifting and the monarchy would soon be restored:

Milton responded to events as they happened, writing with an awe-inspiring urgency, desperation and courage. As Parliament was being recalled, he penned The Readie &

Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth, ready for publication just as the new Parliament convened. (Beer 225)

As the republic disintegrated, Milton wrote several proposals to retain a non-monarchical government against the wishes of parliament, soldiers and the people, but was against the popular tide, which was welcoming back King Charles II.

Upon the Restoration in May 1660, Milton went into hiding for his life, while a warrant was issued for his arrest and his writings burnt. He was arrested and imprisoned late in 1660, but released again in December after only two months of imprisonment. Nevertheless, he refused to change his ways and remained Republican, unwilling to work for the new government.

Instead, he turned back to poetry, where he could voice his opinions allegorically without directly criticizing the new King. In 1667 he published Paradise Lost, whose central character (Satan) is a failed revolutionary hero trying to unseat an unjust tyrant who passes leadership onto his untested son rather than the most deserving, or someone the people elected (Milton’s core beliefs were against hereditary rule, and for election or meritocracy).

(16)

Satan’s “errors” include assuming the right of freedom of conscience, the right to overthrow tyranny, and the right to question the stipulations of government:

Will ye submit your necks, and choose to bend The supple knee? Ye will not, if I trust

To know ye right, or if ye know yourselves

Natives and sons of heaven possessed before By none, and if not equal all, yet free,

Equally free; for orders and degrees Jar not with liberty, but well consist.

Who can in reason then or right assume Monarchy over such as live by right His equals, if in power and splendour less, In freedom equal? or can introduce Law and edict on us, who without law Err not, much less for this to be our lord, And look for adoration to the

Of those imperial titles which assert

Our being ordained to govern, not to serve? (5.780-802)

On the surface, Paradise Lost seems to mirror the key political problem of Milton’s life: the right of a people to rebel against their government. But while his prose and political writings defend that right, Paradise Lost (if we assume Satan to be the villain and failed revolutionary, associated with the evil terrorist Guy Fawkes) seems to deny it. Perhaps therein lies the necessity of the biblical theme: everyone knows how this story ends: God is omnipotent and omniscient, Satan has no chance at victory, therefore even if a veiled allegory to the current political situation, the material is not incendiary as it shows a failed, rather than a successful, revolution. And yet, the

(17)

greatest lines are given to Satan, who throughout seems to have the most persuasive arguments, that are nevertheless crushed by brute force and manipulation.

To further complicate things, Milton’s next major poem, Samson Agonistes (1671) shows Samson as a brooding, suffering figure—similar to the Satan of Paradise Lost (with biographic elements of Milton thrown in, such as blindness) who himself destroys a temple, crushing the ruling classes of his enemies. As David Quint points out, “What is less apparent is that Samson’s destruction of the temple is another re-enactment of the Gunpowder Plot, carried out this time upon rather than by the Catholic or crypto-Catholic foes of English Protestantism” (266). For this reason, Samson Agonistes has become criticized as pro-terrorism, most notably by a piece by John Carey (TLS, 6 September 2002) which compared Samson to a terrorist bomber moved by religious conviction to destroy the lives of others.

According to Quint, a Catholic temple actually did fall down in London, in 1623 on the 26^th of October, which according to the Catholics own new Gregorian Calendar, was November 5^th. This resulted in “the typology that made Samson, in his last heroic feat, an antietical version of Guy Fawkes” (266).

The hand of Providence did not fail to be detected: God had brought down their own house upon those who had tried to bring down the House of Parliament. Samuel Clarke, in England’s Remembrances published in 1657 and reprinted again in 1671, the same year as Samson Agonistes, included the Fatal Vespers in his narrative of the realm’s two great deliverances from the Catholic peril: the Armada and the

Gunpowder Plot. (266)

A summary of Milton’s depictions of tragic heroes could then, go like this:

1. Guy Fawkes is a failed terrorist (villain) 2. Satan is a failed terrorist (half sympathetic)

(18)

3. Samson is a full-fledged revolutionary hero who uses violence and terrorism to destroy his enemies (successful hero)

The intended but thwarted attempt at regicide was almost unthinkable to the young Milton, but in his own lifetime he would write to defend the righteous revolution that culminated in the death of King Charles I. After defending the new Republic with passion for many years (even while watching Cromwell become a tyrant in his own way), Charles II resumed the monarchy, and Milton himself became a villain—one of the “king-killers.”

To illustrate the confusion of the times, we could point out another probable influence on Milton’s writing, Sir Walter Raleigh. A favorite of Queen Elizabeth’s, Raleigh captured public imagination with his quests to the New World, and his naval capacity in saving England from the much larger Spanish Armada. After Elizabeth died, he was accused of participating in a plot to assassinate James 1 and, after years of imprisonment, followed by a period of freedom for a new voyage to discover El Dorado, was finally put to death on 29 October 1618. One of the judges at his trial later said: “The justice of England has never been so degraded and injured as by the condemnation of the honourable Sir Walter Raleigh” (qtd. in Crawford v. Washington).

As Margaret Irwin writes in the introduction to That great Lucifer: A Portrait of Sir Walter Raleigh, “He it was who devised the plan that brought about the destruction of the Armada, who sailed into Cadiz harbor to grapple with Philip of Spain’s war fleet and who, before he laid his head on the block, called to the headsman to let him feel the edge of the axe”

(iv). Raleigh would also become a figure of inspiration for American writers, including Thoreau.

We have only to study the career of this sturdy Devonshire worthy to come under the spell of his enduring charm and real manliness; to admire the unswerving loyalty with which he ever served his country; and to feel, with Robert Louis Stevenson, that

(19)

Raleigh.” To every patriotic American this heroic figure should appeal with a special enthusiasm, since, as Charles Kingsley has said, “To this one man, under the

Providence of Almighty God, the whole United States of America owe their existence.” (Metcalf xiii)

Raleigh illustrates an example of a man who is both hated (by the Spanish as a vicious pirate, and later by Royalists as an insurgent) and celebrated as hero, depending on the vantage point.

This is perhaps the first time in history times were shifting so quickly that he could be both.

Likewise, Guy Fawkes continued to inspire Milton’s writing, albeit in a confusing role—

a terrorist who can be seen as demonic or heroic depending on motive and circumstance.

From the beginning to the end of his poetic career, Milton’s imagination was haunted by a historical event, the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, and by the literature that described that event […] reshaping and redistributing its language and conceits in order to suggest the continuity between the Gunpowder Plot and what he saw as another crypto-Catholic conspiracy against England, the Restoration of Charles II. In doing so, he created a private typology that lent a shape both to his career and to the political history of his times. (Quint 261)

This “private typology” might be why Milton’s works have been radically interpreted. Milton’s Satan was called heroic by Romantics and Modernists; then demonized by literary critics of the 20^th century, culminating in conservative readings that warn against a straight reading of the text.

It is illuminating to read Milton’s work in its biographical context. On top of the political texts, which are fairly straightforward and almost certainly record Milton’s true feelings on a variety of subjects, we have an early text on Guy Fawkes as a Satan-inspired Catholic deviant and terrorist, and later the heroic and noble (and yet suffering) Samson, who seems to fulfill Fawkes’ intentions but through the power of God, in righteous vengeance. Terrorism, regicide,

(20)

mass murder and violent revolution are not bad in themselves, it only depends on whose side you’re on, and possibly the motivations of the act. At the very least, we find some ethical fluidity and sympathy between characters.

In the middle, we get Milton’s masterpiece, Paradise Lost. Satan, like Guy Fawkes, uses terrorism as a desperate attempt to injure a more powerful enemy, and fails (or rather, he

succeeds but learns in the process he is being manipulated into bringing about God’s plan for him). Something in the attempt is both tragic and noble. It is no wonder the morality of Milton’s epic has frustrated critics. It is especially difficult to discuss the literary characterization of Satan, because many readers (in the USA mostly) believe an actual devil to exist. Consequently,

sympathy with Milton’s Satan reeks of blasphemy. Conservative critics have been careful to maintain that, regardless of our reader responses, any possible reading of Satan as a hero must be accidental:

Milton’s God is out of balance because Satan is so magnificently flawed in

presentation, and to account for the failure of God as a dramatic character the reader is compelled to enter upon the most famous and vexing of critical problems

concerning Paradise Lost, the satanic controversy itself. Is Satan in some sense heroic, or is he merely a fool? (Bloom 7)

Rather than dismiss readings of Christ’s rebuke which deviate from an orthodox Christology, might we not grant that Milton’s text is unclear? This is at odds with what most readers recognize as Milton’s prodigious control over his material, but perhaps the epiphany on the pinnacle of the temple is meant to be puzzling. Perhaps Milton’s praxis is in the service of a theory which aims to point out certain expressive and cognitive limits. (H. MacCallum, qtd. in McMurray 7)

(21)

But these “confused” readings of Paradise Lost only emerge from the assumption that Milton cannot have intended Satan to be the hero, when actually, as Neil Forsyth affirms, it is entirely possible:

Milton’s greatness as a poet consists partly in an ability to articulate two opposing messages at the same time. The Romantics thought that, in Blake’s famous words, he was ‘a true Poet’ and ‘of the devil’s party without knowing it’. Is ‘Lycidas’ then an early instance of Milton’s supposed sympathy for Satan in Paradise Lost? Is Milton giving away his unconscious preferences even while he insistently states the opposite?

He may, I would argue, have just done that in Comus, the masque written for performance in 1634 and published now in 1637. The masque praises chastity and virginity. Yet the finest poetry is given to Comus the rogue. Of course, in a drama, we expect both sides of the story to be articulated. But the bad guy, the one who attacks the young girl’s chastity, gets most of the good lines. (Milton: A Biography 55)

When I read Paradise Lost for the first time during a graduate course in literature, I was

surprised to find Satan eloquently defending libertine ideals I also valued; standing up against an omnipotent tyrant like Prometheus; and using poetic language that echoed the valor of

revolutionary heroism.

When I mentioned casually that Milton’s Satan had all the qualities of an epic hero, I was quickly corrected. Apparently, not only was that assertion flatly untrue, but it was also exactly the mistake that Milton purposely and cleverly lured me into. By presenting Satan with heroic qualities, the unsuspecting reader will let their guard down and be convinced by Satan’s rhetoric, proving just how crafty the devil really is.

I pointed out that Milton himself was a revolutionary; that he tried to overthrow the king and wrote political essays supporting regicide and the people’s right to self-govern; that he

(22)

believed in rule by merit and was against rule-by birth on principle; and that Satan’s speeches in Paradise Lost mirror Milton’s own political views.

Milton had created a marvelously shifty text, my professor replied, full of reader

harassment and complication, and although on the surface Satan appears sympathetic, that’s just one of his many tricks. You can’t trust him, you can’t trust yourself, and you can’t trust the text.

It was obviously very complicated, and as I was just a graduate student I couldn’t be expected to understand, but take his word for it: the most reputable scholars in Milton studies agreed that we needed to be careful – that viewing Satan as the hero was a rookie mistake. I had been fooled, he told me. We were at an impasse. Decades of literary theory had spoken, and I was the novice.

But questions remained: dilemmas churned up in the reading of Paradise Lost that were never resolved. Did Satan truly have free will in the face of God’s omniscience? Is God the hero of Paradise Lost because he’s morally superior, or simply because history is written by victors?

Or is Paradise Lost a subversive text, hinting at a hidden, secret history—the untold story of humanity’s greatest tempter (and ally)—which continues to be marginalized, buried, taboo?

As I read deeper, I discovered that the interpretation and discussion of Paradise Lost has for decades faced a peculiar form of censorship that is unique in literary theory, and based entirely on political and religious grounds rather than evidence or rational argument. To me, this uniquely skeptical atmosphere concerning the literary character of Satan in Paradise Lost had no place in academic pursuit, and yet I came up against it again and again. Through name-calling and dismissal, all investigations into Satan’s motivations were automatically rejected.

(23)

Even relatively benign comments, such as the following from Lydia Dittler Shulman in Paradise Lost and the Rise of the American Republic, begins with the assumption that Satan must be resisted:

The artistic decision to make Satan an eloquent and at times persuasive orator (whose deceptive rhetoric continues, to this day, to beguile the susceptible reader) was motivated, one suspects, by Milton’s direct experience of corrupt politicians and gullible followers during his twenty years of public service. (12)

I was even more startled to learn the profound influence Milton’s Paradise Lost has had on the last three centuries, not only in literature, but in politics and culture: his defense of liberal ideals, while controversial at the time, have become the backbone of western civilization’s most deeply cherished notions about the right to personal autonomy. For this reason, Milton’s Satan was viewed as a hero for centuries—not just by common readers but by literary elites, philosophers, artists and poets (some the history’s greatest minds; hardly susceptible readers). The

revolutionary spirit sparked by Milton’s Satan had a massive influence on the political revolutions of Europe and America, the philosophical and political thinking of America’s founding fathers, and the Enlightenment thinkers that preceded them.

Not long after after the publication of Paradise Lost, freethinkers who found themselves at odds with traditional religious values began openly aligning themselves with the politics and majestic enthusiasm of Milton’s Satan. The Duke of Wharton established the first gathering of gentlemanly decadence that became known as “Hellfire Clubs” in 1718. Walter Raleigh had started something similar, which was referred to in 1592 as the “School of Atheism” (Blackett- Ord 43). A Dublin Hellfire Club was founded in 1735 by Richard Parsons, the First Earl of Rosse, meeting regularly at the Eagle Tavern on Cork Hill near Dublin Castle (Joyce 123). Sir

(24)

Francis Dashwood’s “Monks of Medmenham” pagan revelry club of around 1750 was and is still informally referred to as a Hellfire club (Ashe 111).

Scottish poet Robert Burns, staunch supporter of the French Revolution, wrote of his

“favorite hero, Milton’s Satan,” and of his virtues: the “dauntless magnanimity; the intrepid, unyielding independence; the desperate daring, and noble defiance of hardship” (qtd. in Low 200). In 1790, Jacques Pierre Rissot, one of the Girondin leaders and a key figure in the French Revolution, honoured Milton as a founding father of the French republic.

William Godwin asked in his Political Justice of 1793, “why did Satan rebel against his maker? It was, as he himself informs us, because he saw no sufficient reason for that extreme inequality of rank and power which the creator assumed” (Leonard 411). Godwin’s daughter Mary—wife to Percy Blysshe, permeated her novel Frankenstein, or the modern Prometheus (1818) with references to Paradise Lost. The nameless monster says to his creator: “I ought to be thy Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed.

Everywhere I see bliss from which I alone am irrevocably excluded” (78).

The eccentric, iconoclastic poet William Blake noted famously in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell that “the reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels and God, and at liberty when he wrote of Devils and Hell, is because he was a true poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it” (182).

In the 1821 A Defense of Poetry, Percy Blysshe Shelly embraced the positive depiction of Satan even further:

Nothing can exceed the energy and magnificence of the character of Satan as expressed in Paradise Lost. It is a mistake to suppose that he could ever have been intended for the popular personification of evil. Milton’s Devil as a moral being is as

(25)

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, not from any mistaken notion of inducing him to repent of a perseverance in enmity, but with the alleged design of exasperating him to deserve new torments.

Robert Southey’s criticism, in A Vision of Judgment (1821), of the group of writers headed by Byron and Shelley as “characterized by a Satanic spirit of pride and audacious impiety” was well received: although meant as moral condemnation, Byron took delight in the description of him as the author of “monstrous combinations of horrors and mockery, lewdness and impiety” (Bone 172). Byron took up the theme of a “Satanic” school and developed the “Byronic hero” who would, like Satan in Paradise Lost, be a tragic figure who is admirable even when wrong.

According to R. Merciless in the foreword to Henry M. Tichenor’s 1917 Sorceries and Scandals of Satan:

This Satanic symbolism, born in Milton’s pen at the end of the seventeenth century and raised by the rakes of London in the eighteenth century now grew to full form in the nineteenth century, when Baudelaire and even earlier French poets dared to publish works which overtly praised and honored Satan and proclaimed him the hero of those who love freedom, reason and happiness. Priests and politicians were scandalized and horrified by such works. Revolutionaries, however, were inspired.

(23)

In 1846, an anonymous poet wrote, “To thee, Satan, fair fallen angel, To whom fell the perilous honor Of struggling against an unjust rule, I offer myself wholly and forever, My mind, my senses, my heart, my love, And my dark verses in their corrupted beauty” (qtd. in Bloom 181).

This was symptomatic of a newly creative culture being forged from resistance to traditional

(26)

values, against the restrictions of a community defined by limited rules of artistic production and value.

Baudelaire was put in the dock in 1857 for his volume of poems, Les Fleurs du mal (which included The Litanies Of Satan). According to Peter Gay, “With an indignant show of wounded propriety, the imperial government charged him with blasphemy and obscenity” (35).

In 1858, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon employed Satan as a personified symbol of liberty—

who by his initial resistance opened a path for dissonance and true freedom.

Come, Satan, come, slandered by priests and kings! Let me embrace you, let me clutch you to my breast! I have known you for a long time, and long have you known me. Your works, oh blessed one of my heart, are not always beautiful or good; but you alone give sense to the universe and prevent it from being absurd. What would justice be without you? An instinct. Reason? A routine. Man? A beast. You alone animate labor and make it fertile; you ennoble wealth, serve as an excuse for

authority, put the seal on virtue. Hope still, proscribed one! I have to serve you only a pen, but it is worth millions of bulletins. (qtd. in Merciless 23)

It is interesting to compare the above passage with Rilke’s The First Elegy: as Satan was the first rebellion, the first “No” that made choice a possibility, so Rilke’s Orpheus introduces “the daring first music (that) pierced the barren numbness. . . The Void felt for the first time” (7). Orpheus, like Satan, is a tragic hero who “keeps going, even in his ruin” (5).

In the late 1860s, Giosue Carducci’s poem “Hymn to Satan” celebrated the Prince of Darkness as the symbolic champion of human reason and rebellion—”Hail, O Satan, O rebellion, O you avenging force of human reason!” —and was likely an anthem for republican forces of Italy overthrowing the secular influence of the Pope by force of arms (qtd. in Augias 281).

(27)

In the late 1870s anarchist Mikhail Bakunin interprets the biblical garden story to show how Satan was responsible for giving us rationality and critical thought.

…Here steps in Satan, the eternal rebel, the first freethinker and the emancipator of worlds. He makes man ashamed of his bestial ignorance and obedience; he

emancipates him, stamps upon his brow the seal of liberty and humanity, in urging him to disobey and eat of the fruit of knowledge […] Let us disregard now the fabulous portion of this myth and consider its true meaning, which is very clear. Man has emancipated himself; he has separated himself from animality and constituted himself a man; he has begun his distinctively human history and development by an act of disobedience and science—that is, by rebellion and by thought. (10)

It is no accident that Satan is associated with science; for centuries Satan had been tempting various versions of the “mad scientist” motif stemming from Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus (which may include Manfred, Faust, Captain Ahab and Dr. Frankenstein). The difference was, rather than warning tales of tragedy, the triumph of science ensured that these daring innovators were given the accolades they deserved—even while being accused of impiety.

This literary and philosophical tradition of linking the mythical character of Satan, the rebel angel, with the human struggle for freedom, liberty and self-determination likewise featured in George Bernard Shaw’s 1897 play “The Devil’s Disciple,” in which the main character, Dick Dudgeon, a fearless and brutally just American Revolutionary war hero, explicitly proclaims himself a Satanist:

I knew from the first that the Devil was my natural master and captain and friend. I saw that he was in the right, and that the world cringed to his conqueror only through fear. I prayed secretly to him; and he comforted me, and saved me from having my spirit broken in this house of children’s tears. I promised him my soul, and swore an

(28)

oath that I would stand up for him in this world and stand by him in the next. That promise and that oath made a man of me. (26)

The portrayal of Dick, a self-proclaimed apostate who follows neither the laws of religion or society but rather a moral code of his own, as a hero, had become publicly acceptable: the production was so popular when it was staged in New York City that it became the first Shaw play to successfully earn a profit. It ran for 64 performances at the Fifth Avenue Theater, grossing $50,000.

The fundamental human rights defined in the US Declaration of Independence— “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”—are so similar to Milton’s prose writing (and to many of Satan’s speeches) that Alfred Waites published a side-by-side comparison of Milton’s writing with Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence in 1903 to “impress the reader by the similarity of ideas and the sequence of thought.” Milton’s Areopagitica, a pamphlet defending the right to free press, had a noticeable influence on the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Nobel Prize winner Anatole France’s 1914 novel, The Revolt of the Angels, tells the tale of a guardian angel who educates himself by reading books in an earthly library, abandons his heavenly master, and joins a group of Lucifer’s demons plotting a renewed revolution.

The iconoclastic American social commentator H.L. Mencken likewise argued for liberty against moralistic tyrants under the banner of the devil. “I made up my mind at once that my true and natural allegiance was to the Devil’s party, and it has been my firm belief ever since that all persons who devote themselves to forcing virtue on their fellow men deserve nothing better than kicks in the pants” (37).

To a large extent the entire mood of Modernism is infused with a jubilant spirit of

rebellion, deviousness and a self-conscious, deliberate deviation from the traditional moral codes

(29)

grounded in religious authority. Habermas sums up the issue even more clearly in Modernity: An Unfinished Project:

The anarchistic intention of exploding the continuum of history accounts for the subversive force of an aesthetic consciousness which rebels against the norm-giving achievements of tradition, which is nourished on the experience of rebellion against everything normative, which neutralizes considerations of moral goodness or practical utility, a consciousness which continually stages a dialectic of esoteric mystery and scandalous offence, narcotically fascinated by the fright produced by its acts of profanation – and yet at the same time flees from the trivialization resulting from that very profanation. (41)

Modernism represents a great seductive force, promoting the dominance of the principle of unrestrained self-realization, the demand for authentic self-experience, the subjectivism of an overstimulated sensibility, and the release of hedonistic motivations quite incompatible with the discipline required by professional life, and with the moral foundations of a purposive-rational mode of life generally. (42)

This shift makes it easy to see how, not only Satan, but with him Guy Fawkes, came to be seen as revolutionary heroes. Lewis Call, a history professor and post-anarchist writer, writes that “as commemoration of the Powder Treason morphed into the more secular Bonfire Night in the nineteenth century, the anarchistic element of the holiday became manifest. The rehabilitation of Fawkes corresponded to a growing sense of frustration at the expansion of British state power and he became an unlikely heroic symbol for the forces of anti-state-ism” (158).

Thus, both Satan and the Guy Fawkes tradition had become not only merged, but rehabilitated as tragic heroes: defiantly rebellious, willing to die for their cause, refusing to be

(30)

placated. The debate between Modernity and traditional values was often framed in speech that deliberately and self-consciously echoed Milton’s Satan:

He spake: and to confirm his words, out-flew Millions of flaming swords, drawn from the thighs of mighty Cherubim; the sudden blaze Far round illumin’d hell:

highly they raged Against the Highest, and fierce with grasped arm’s Clashed on their sounding shields the din of war, Hurling defiance toward the vault of Heav’n. (1.663- 69)

In response, the church warned against dangerous Modernist trends of “extolling human progress to the skies, and with rash and sacrilegious daring” (Pius X, Pascendi Dominici Gregis, 1907);

and the Futurists responded in their Manifesto of 1909: “We fling our defiance at the stars… we hurl our defiance at the stars” (Apollonio 19-24).

Going backwards, we can find the same language professed by Captain Ahab of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, first published in 1851: “I now know thee, thou clear spirit, and I now know that thy right worship is defiance. Of thy fire thou madest me, and like a true child of fire, I breathe it back to thee” (472). The similarity is not incidental. In a documentary note on

Melville’s marginalia, Robin Grey adds, “Milton’s characterization of Satan in Paradise Lost influenced Melville’s rendering of Ahab’s defiant speeches against God and Nature.”

The right to rebel, to defy, to refuse – these are the things that make us human, that give us freedom. The essential problem facing mankind (but especially creatives, writers and artists of that time period) was how to free themselves completely from tradition and outside influences, so that they could fully discover and be themselves (and hence create something new and worthwhile). Georg Simmel, in The Metropolis and Mental Life (1903), writes:

The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to

(31)

social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life.

The fight with nature which primitive man has to wage for his bodily existence attains in this modern form its latest transformation. The eighteenth century called upon man to free himself of all the historical bonds in the state and in religion, in morals and in economics. Man’s nature, originally good and common to all, should develop unhampered. (409)

This aim of artistic independence, to create the new without being hampered, started as early as Baudelaire who in 1855 wrote “The artist stems only from himself… He stands security only for himself. . . He dies childless. He has been his own king, his own priest, his own God” (qtd. in Whitworth 191).

Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra was published in 1885, and Beyond Good and Evil in 1886. Both books champion Promethean virtues of courage, audacity, daring, revolution and freedom, with imagery from Paradise Lost—”If you thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee” (146).

Towards the end of the 19^th century, it was a widely held belief in liberal society that revolution was always real, necessary and good (even when violent). In fact, a person could not be fully human without casting off all influences and rediscovering their true self. According to Agamben (The Open: Man and Animal) “Dasein is simply an animal that has learned to become bored; it has awakened from its own captivation to its own captivation. This awakening of the living being to its own being-captivated, this anxious and resolute opening to a not-open, is the human” (70).

Similarly, Adorno writes that Kafka’s heroes “become guilty not through their guilt – they have none – but because they try to get justice on their side. ‘The original sin, the ancient

(32)

injustice committed by man, consists in his protest – one which he never ceases to make – that he has suffered injustice, that the original sin was done against him’” (270).

But this defining characteristic of humanity, at least in Christian tradition, is not human at all; feeling God’s authority as a burden and facing the choice to disobey was, we are told, an experience that started with Satan, and was passed by him, directly and deliberately, to Adam and Eve. We wouldn’t have ever been human, in Agamben’s sense, if we hadn’t “had our eyes opened” to our own free will, and its conflict with divine rule. The essential protest against the original injustice is a feature tying literary representations of the devil together with Modernist heroes of revolution and rebellion.

George Steiner points out that Monotheism, as a “tyranny of the revealed” challenges the Modernist quest for human individuation:

But the exaction stays in force – immense, relentless. It hammers at human consciousness, demanding that it transcend itself, that it reach out into a light of understanding so pure that it is itself blinding. We turn back into grossness and, what is more important, into self-reproach. But the ideal is still there, because, in Blake’s shorthand for the tyranny of the revealed, light presses on the brain. In polytheism, says Nietzsche, lay the freedom of the human spirit, its creative multiplicity. The doctrine of a single Deity, whom men cannot play off against other gods and thus win opens spaces for their own aims, is “The most monstrous of all human errors.” (38)

Steiner concludes that the aftermath of religion was more difficult than it seemed; and that the meaninglessness of a post-religion modernity had led to barbarism and hell on earth.

In our current barbarism an extinct theology is at work, a body of transcendent reference whose slow, incomplete death has produced surrogate, parodistic forms.

(33)

to be a more dangerous process than the philosophies anticipated. The structures of decay are toxic. Needing Hell, we have learned how to build and run it on earth. (55)

After the bitter and destructive impact of World War One, the progressive zeal, optimism and rationalistic confidence that had been present with the maddening growth of new technologies and a more connected world began to breed deep distrust, pessimism and fear.

A religious revival turned away from the liberating principles that had motivated social changes for decades and encouraged heated nationalism and blind allegiance to governmental offices. Revolution was not only discarded as a philosophical and artistic ideal; it became a criminal offense. The 1917 communist revolution in Russia, and the failed German revolution of 1918, provoked The First Red Scare (1919–1921): “a nation-wide anti-radical hysteria provoked by a mounting fear and anxiety that a Bolshevik revolution in America was imminent—a

revolution that would change Church, home, marriage, civility, and the American way of Life”

(Levin 29).

Legitimate labor strikes were represented by the press as “crimes against society,”

“conspiracies against the government,” and “plots to establish communism.” Adding to the hysteria were the very real terrorist plots involving 36 mailed bombs to prominent members of the U.S. political and economic establishment in 1919, and the bombing of Wall Street in 1920.

Suspecting communists or anarchists (but ultimately indicting no one) several states enacted

“criminal syndicalism” laws outlawing advocacy of violence in effecting and securing social change, which included free speech limitations. These laws provoked aggressive police

investigation of the accused persons, their jailing, and deportation for being suspected of being either communist or left-wing.

(34)

Americans saw Soviet Communism and its evil twin, German National Socialism, as pure expressions of the satanic in man. As Herbert Hoover puts it in a post-humously published biography of the New Deal, “The world is in the grip of a death struggle between the philosophy of Christ and that of Hegel and Marx” (299).

The situation deteriorated further after World War Two with the Second Red Scare (1947–1954), which received the label “McCarthyism.” Anti–communist fear was aggravated by the Chinese Communists winning the Chinese Civil War against the Western-sponsored

Kuomintang in 1949. Americans were taught to seek out invisible spies all around them, breeding an environment of paranoia and finger-pointing not seen since early religious witch hunts.

The Cuban Revolution of 1953-1959 and threat of immanent nuclear war (after the world had witnessed the massive destruction at Hiroshima in 1945) brought the conflict closer to home and led us into the height of the Cold War. Revolutionaries who had been championed by an earlier USA—whose history began by declaring and fighting for its independence—now reeked of communist idealism.

To weed out hidden conspirators and distance itself from the Soviet Union, the phrase

“under God” was added to the pledge of allegiance in 1954, and in 1956 “In God We Trust” was added to all US currency. Atheism was seen as anti-nationalism.

During this period, in response to the obvious inability to treasure and support such a dangerously status-quo challenging revolutionary text such as Paradise Lost, scholars began to screen Paradise Lost to make sure it didn’t inspire readers to take it “the wrong way.” Literary commentaries on Milton’s Satan focused on the inherently obvious “problem” of Satan.

(35)

Rather than allowing readers to form their own opinions of the text, these theoretical manipulations warn against falling into the trap of a “false” reading, and argue that Milton’s writing was meant as a temptation or challenge for the faithful, which must be met with caution and distrust.

Charles Williams, in his 1940 introduction to an edition of Paradise Lost, contended that Satan is not a hero but a fool. This stance was repeated by his friend C.S. Lewis, who wrote his 1942 preface to Paradise Lost with the aim of “preventing the reader from ever raising certain questions” (69). In the 1945 Is the devil an ass? Professor Musgrove concludes we must assume that Satan is evil.

For a while, there was controversy between the Satanist and anti-Satanist interpretations.

In 1944, Elmer Edgar Stoll wrote a reply to Mr. Lewis called Give the Devil his Due.

How can we but be impressed (even though we do not join in it) by the almost unanimous verdict of admiration rendered by the poets and poetical critics, Romantic or not—by Burns as well as Blake, by Shelley in his enthusiastic praise as by Byron in his imitation, by Coleridge and Wordsworth, Landor, Racine, and Chateaubriand, Hazlitt, and Ruskin? (114)

And it is, in my opinion, quite impossible that for not much less than three centuries the readers of Milton should, in the mere matter of the imaginative and emotional impression of his ‘glorious fiends’, have been so prodigiously mistaken. (124)

In Lucifer and Prometheus 1952, Zwi Werblowksy recognized that a new turning point had been reached in which the “dashing Satanist had given way to the conventional poet who would not say anything unless seventeen people had said it before, and the pendulum has now gradually swung back to a definitively Christian, though not precisely puritan, interpretation of Milton’s poetry” (2). Werblowsky notes that there are two main responses to the question of “how Satan

(36)

strikes us”, the first purely literary and historical (Milton in context of research), the other mainly psychological (our personal reactions to the text); and that these responses are rarely separated.

It is important to point out that these two problems are, as a rule, not properly kept apart. The ensuing confusion makes it seem that often when the Satanist-anti-Satanist war appears to rage the heaviest, the parties concerned are actually talking about different things. (4)

But as the Promethean virtues admired by Satanic sympathizers became more closely aligned with both the rhetoric of Communist revolutionaries, and later the Nazification of Nietzchean Zarathustraism, the heated political situation encouraged liberal academics to hold their tongues, and the conservative, religious interpretation of Paradise Lost won out.

In 1967, Stanley Fish cemented this reading of the text in Surprised by Sin, claiming that the poem tempts the reader in the same way that Satan tempted Adam and Eve. The reader’s job is to overcome the temptation and see Satan as the villain: “The reader who falls before the lures of Satanic rhetoric displays… the weakness of Adam and … [fails] to avoid repeating his fall”

(38). Fish claimed that Milton had created a program of “reader harassment”; designed to scold unwary readers who allow themselves to be tempted by the grand rhetoric of Satan into

momentarily pushing aside the “imperative of Christian watchfulness” (12).

When confusion arose, commenters on Paradise Lost would assume that Milton didn’t know what he was doing, or that the book was simply inscrutable. This was also a time of profound social changes. Things began to fall apart when the fear tactics stopped working, and Americans began to question and refuse to obey their corrupt government. The Civil Rights Movement brought out political dissidence. Malcolm X and the Black Panthers, inspired by Communist revolutionary texts, advocated political violence. The Vietnam War saw the rise of

(37)

student protests and conscientious objection. The Watergate scandal destroyed the faith many Americans had put in their elected officials.

In the 1963-64 “Free Speech Movement” at Berkeley, an unfocused rebellion against everything and nothing, was prompted by a postmodern ideology that painted the individual as a product of circumstance and left no room for personal will or freedom of choice. In the anti- intellectualism which resulted, along with a resurgence of a “be here now” mentality, Satan was more likely to be sympathized with as a spokesperson for the immediacy of subjective

experience and his struggle for liberation. Maybe this is what led literary instructors to emphasize that, even though Satan seems like a revolutionary hero, and even though other revolutionary heroes were being celebrated in popular culture, Satan alone needs to be refused.

The hippie movement and increased interest in Eastern philosophy witnessed the birth of a number of new “cults” with charismatic leaders, and the dissolution of the nuclear family as young people went off to live together in communes. In 1966 Anton Szandor LaVey founded the

“The Church of Satan.” Even though LaVey’s church viewed Satan as “a symbol of pride, liberty and individualism, and as an external metaphorical projection of our highest personal potential”

and did not believe in Satan as a being or person, the explosive media attention shocked

Christian conservatives, who began to look for a conspiracy of hidden Satanist groups, secretly worshipping the devil. The same mechanisms and paranoia that fueled the “Red Scare” of the 50s and 60s, now transitioned into the “Satanic Panic” of the 70s and 80s.

An interest in hypnosis and “recovered-memory therapy” brought out “witnesses” who believed they’d been the victims of ongoing sexual abuse at the hands of international Satanist organizations. Books like the mega bestselling Rosemary’s Baby (1967) by Ira Levin, which turned into a 1974 movie by the same name, warned of the dangers of secret Satanists living

(38)

among us. William Peter Blatty published The Exorcist in 1971 and it was made into a horror film in 1973. Steven King got his break writing Carrie in 1974, when people were greedily consuming Satanic paranoia and certain America was being destroyed by an international Satanist conspiracy. Michelle Remembers, in 1980, led to wide-spread allegations of satanic child abuse (the FBI, after hundreds of investigations, never found a single example of actual satanic violence). Misplaced fears were further aggravated by the 1980s “death metal” rock music was so frequently denounced by Christian conservatives that it began to deliberately work in Satanic themes and names.

But gradually, the characteristic ideals of the hippie movement (peace, acceptance and love) matured into a New Age spirituality that replaced more conservative social elements.

We’ve evolved from the cowboy and Indian movies of the early 50s to reach Last of the

Mohicans and Dances with Coyotes, reimagining historical conflict to assuage (or heighten?) our sense of cultural guilt at being founded on violence. There’s been a shift from conservative religious ethics to broader, humanist values embracing non-mainstream sexuality, individual gratification and fulfillment, and self-direction and empowerment.

Mirroring this shift in popular culture, for the past several decades literary theory has focused almost exclusively on reading between the lines, tearing down status quo readings, and championing the voices of “subaltern” minority voices, including colonized territories, gay and transgender studies, historical victims and shattered identities. The battle cry of postmodern literary theorists, based on Foucault, Derrida, Badiou, and Zizek, is to challenge authority, to resist definitions, to be fluid, to cross boundaries, to “Deterritorialize.” Universal meaning has broken down into fragmented, traumatized, unrepresented narratives—majority narratives have become merely points of view, and we are quick to defend and redefine traditional villains.

(39)

Within just the past decade, there has been a rapid shift in the characterization of the Other—from monstrous, to misunderstood; from frightening to friendly. Thus, vampires, werewolves and witches have changed from being evil creatures of the night, to tragically misunderstood victims of judgmental traditionalist organizations who are constantly challenging their right to exist. In 2012 we even had the movie Wreck-It Ralph, in which all the classic “evil”

characters from video games were given the chance to express their feelings in a bad-guy support group. The common feeling was “They can’t change who they are, they have to accept

themselves as evil.” Their affirmation goes, “I’m bad. And that’s good. I will never be good.

And that’s not bad. There’s no one I’d rather be, than me.” (Naturally, the hero of the movie, Ralph, makes the transition from bad to good—demonstrating to children everywhere that good and evil are not fixed boundaries, but fluid definitions which can be altered by making good choices. His quest also mirrors the journey Satan follows in Paradise Lost to a surprising degree.)

These themes are often used as a platform to encourage racial tolerance, sexual liberty, and above all else, the pursuit of freedom. Our ideological alignment with revolutionaries has become even more dramatic in just the past few years: political revolutions including the Arab Spring (2011) have earned our respect and support, and burgeoning dissatisfaction with bipartisan politics, economic frustrations and the collapsing real estate market. New levels of dissatisfaction against financial corruption led to the Occupy Wall Street movement of the same year. Modern rebels like Edward Snowden or Julian Assange are controversial but admired by many.

Meanwhile the plots of various films in our entertainment machinery are converging into one story, replayed everywhere: a powerful but corrupt government and an unlikely hero who leads a revolution—a theme repeated by a dozens of major Hollywood films every year. One of

(40)

the biggest commercial successes in recent years, the Hunger Games trilogy, ends after the protagonist takes down one government but then assassinates the head of the new government as soon as it appears: underlining perhaps Foucault’s argument that power, in any form, must be resisted. The TV shows Revolution, Falling Skies, Defiance, Spartacus, all feature armed revolution against powerful forces in defense of freedom.

The revolutionary trend has not shied away from war on the gods: recreations of classical mythology franchises in which revolutionary heroes challenge deities directly include Clash of the Titans, Percy Jackson, and the God of War video games. Hollywood even came very close to reproducing a Paradise Lost movie which was to star Bradley Cooper, but the project has fallen through several times. In 2016, however, several new TV shows have gotten dangerously close to portraying satanic heroes. DareDevil, Damien, and Lucifer are all based on diabolical characters, rebelling against the “evil” roles they’ve been cast into.

This normalizing influence of liberalism—to take traditionally “evil” characters and make them sympathetic by looking at their true motivations—has been going on for the past decade, but until this year has shied away from directly attempting to exonerate Satan, or deal directly with God and the Devil as characters, instead of through metaphor. Surprisingly,

however, the trend is moving quickly towards direct theological positioning: Marvel’s Batman v Superman (2016) uses the terms God and The Devil dozens of times, and the central conflict of the story is represented by a painting of Lucifer falling from heaven (which turns upside down at the end of the film, representing the idea of moral fluidity). In X-men: Apocalypse the chief villain is a superpowerful being who claims to be the god of the Old Testament. The Xmen team up together to destroy him and save humanity.