Brent Hardy
Speer
World Literature I
20 October, 2003
Satan, My Hero
Much has been written about the Biblical Satan. Beginning as an Accuser in the book of Job, he becomes the tempter of Christ in the wilderness and the one who possesses Judas to betray his friend and master in the New Testament, and ultimately transforming, in modern times, into the abstract of evil, selfishness, and pride. In modern times he is the central character of a pseudo-religious movement that honors him for his rebellion against tyranny. Despite the fact that the word hero evokes the notion of goodness in most people, Satan shows the qualities that, when viewed in a certain light, make him the hero in the epic story of the Fall of Man. In Milton’s Paradise Lost, though, Satan embodies the hero who, filled with pride and the notion of his own infallibility, seeks to dethrone God himself and, after failing, attempts to mar the crowning achievement of all Creation.
The hero, as defined by the American Heritage Dictionary, is “a man, often of divine ancestry, who is endowed with great courage and strength, (and) celebrated for his bold exploits...” Satan was thus a hero by this definition. He was of divine ancestry in that he was one of the first created beings, the first in many church writings. Called Lucifer at the time, he was close to the presence of God and given great authority. His courage and strength were proven when he, “Against the throne and monarchy of God, Raised impious war in Heav’n and battle proud.” (Milton, 136) All the fallen angels celebrated his exploits by raising Pandemonium, the place of all demons, from Chaos in his honor. He then received the accolades of Sin and Death for allowing them to enter into a corrupted world. The common conventions that define the hero are present in Satan as seen in Paradise Lost.
Despite Milton’s attempts to distance himself from the pagan style of epic poetry, he still used many of the same conventions for the nature of the hero. Satan exemplifies the conditions set forth by the founders of the epic genre. Milton, though he altered many of these conventions to suit the type of story he wished to tell, followed these pagan guides and applied them to his own devout version of Christianity. While the result showed similarities to the works of Virgil and Homer, it was uniquely Christian in tone. Because Milton used many of these conventions, Satan had marked similarities to other epic heroes.
The most obvious reflection of the epic conventions to be found in Paradise Lost is the trip to the underworld undertaken by the hero as a quest to seek knowledge. Satan was cast out into void after he lost his rebellion against the Divine Authority and he embarked on a quest for knowledge thereafter. This quest was similar to the tale of Aeneus, who plucked the Golden Bough and was then led into the underworld, and the tale of Odysseus, who quested into the underworld in order to speak with Tiresias and learn his future and the futures of his men.
Satan
also showed similarities to Odysseus when he gave his speech Beelzebub after
the fall. Satan told him that, “All is not lost, the
unconquerable Will, and study of revenge, immortal hate, and courage never to
submit or yield: and what else is not to be overcome?” (Milton, 138) Satan
tried to raise their spirits by announcing that they would continue to fight
against God, despite being banished into Hell.
Odysseus, upon facing the Sirens, encouraged his men, “Then we die with our eyes open , if we are going to die, or
know what death we baffle if we can.” (Homer ln.1243-1245) He encouraged them again as they passed the
Sirens and saw the danger posed by Scylla and Charybdis, saying “Have we ever
been in danger before this? More
fearsome, is it now, than when the Cyclops penned us in his cave? What power he had! Did I not keep my nerve, and use my wits to find a way out for
us? … Heads up, lads! We must now obey
orders as I give them.” (Homer ln. 1294-1302).
This only worked, though, when one was a sort of national hero, as all
heroes of epic literature were.
Odysseus was the king of Ithaca and men would naturally follow him if
only because of that. Satan led the
forces of Hell in their defiance of God, and they looked to him for leadership
after they were banished from eternal bliss.
Milton also utilized a convention which calls for a scene where the hero girds himself for war in Paradise Lost. The scenes where Satan rallied the legions of Hell and encouraged his lieutenants and then held the conference in the halls of Pandemonium were paralleled in the Iliad when we viewed Hector donning his armor before his battle with Achilles and were told of the history of each piece. The tension built as the hero concentrates on what he was going to do. As the preparation for war was finished, Satan stood ready to go and explore the “new world,” gather information on it’s newly-created inhabitants, and discover how to deprive God of the wondrous new inventions that had captured his attentions.
Ultimately, though, the hero was defined by his willingness to sacrifice something important for the cause that he or she followed. Satan was willing to risk an eternity in Heaven being an important servant to God because he devoutly believes that God was a tyrant not worthy of ruling over the kingdom that he had created. Satan chose to sacrifice paradise for the chance that he could overthrow the tyrant and rule over a Creation ordered as he saw fit. He loses the war, though, and his sacrifice is for naught. It did not hinder him, though, for he knew that it was better to rule in Hell than to serve in Heaven.
Thus, Satan is the hero of Paradise Lost because he fits the most criteria. Despite the fact that Milton was devoutly Protestant, he cast Satan as hero because God was all-powerful and could naturally face no obstacles which he could not overcome. The other possibility for hero, Adam, was improbable because the creation of humanity seemd to be more incidental, and seemed more of a development in Satan’s scheme to deny the Almighty his plaything.
Satan has been argued to be the hero of Paradise Lost by two of the greatest Romantic poets, namely Percy Shelley and William Blake. Marriage of Heaven and Hell states that Milton, by writing “in fetters when he wrote of Angels and God, and at liberty when of Devils and Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it.” (Blake) Poetry, to Blake, was full of energy and dynamics, and would be hindered by any semblance of control or structure. Satan, as the ultimate rebel against divine control, represented the fuel for Blake’s poetry. He spoke of his Muse as being his Genius, but he used interchangeably the word Daemon, which in Greek means the same thing.
Shelley also argued that Satan was the flawed hero of Paradise Lost. He invariably compared Milton’s Satan to his own Prometheus in Prometheus Unbound. He said, in the Preface to Prometheus Unbound:
...The only imaginary being resembling in any degree Prometheus is Satan; and Prometheus is, in my judgement, a more poetical character than Satan, because, in addition to courage, and majesty, and firm and patient opposition to omnipotent force, he is susceptible of being described as exempt from the taints of ambition, envy, revenge, and a desire for personal aggrandizement, which, in the hero of Paradise Lost, interfere with the interest. The character of Satan engenders in the mind a pernicious casuistry which leads us to weigh his faults with his wrongs, and to excuse the former because the latter exceed all measure. In the minds of those who consider that magnificent fiction with a religious feeling it engenders something worse. But Prometheus is, as it were, the type of the highest perfection of moral and intellectual nature, impelled by the purest and the truest motives to the best and noblest ends. (Bloom, 4)
Shelley saw in Satan the same drive against divine oppression that Prometheus showed toward Zeus when he brought fire to mortals. The major difference between the two is that Satan had his own self-interests at heart while Prometheus was giving humanity the technology it desperately needed to progress.
The concept of Satan must have appealed to Milton as a poet, and thus clashed with his strongly-held religious beliefs. Milton spoke out against tyranny and the monarchy on occasion, yet he then used monarchial terms to apply to God’s rule over Creation. This was what prompted Blake to assert that Milton was truly a member of the Devil’s party without knowing. In writing a justification for the execution of his king, Charles I, and attacking Parliament on the necessity for the mandate of the masses to determine legislation, Milton paralleled his most famous creation- the Satan that dared defy his ruler.
Bibliography
Blake, William. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Plate 6. 16 November, 2003 <http://www.blakearchive.org/cgi-bin/nph-dweb/blake/Illuminated-Book/MHH/mhh.h/@Generic__BookView;cv=java>
Bloom, Harold. Introduction. John Milton's Paradise Lost: Modern Critical Interpretations. New York: Chelsea House, 1987.
Milton, John. Paradise Lost. The Annotated Milton. Ed. Burton Raffel. New York: Bantam, 1999
Vechinski, Matthew James. An Epic Hero on the Divide. 16 November, 2003 <http://vechinski.darktech.org/matthew/works/essays.miltonpl.pdf>
Homer. The Odyssey. Trans. Robert Fitzgerald. New York: Vintage, 1990.
Virgil. The Aeneid. Trans. Edward McCrorie. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1995.