On ‘Paradise Lost’: What Temptation Looks Like

A literary reflection by Rachel Bomberger on John Milton's Paradise Lost.
This is one installment of a monthly series providing reflections on works of literature from a Lutheran perspective.

Of Man’s First Disobedience, and the Fruit / Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste / Brought Death into the World, and all our woe, / With loss of Eden, till one greater Man / Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat, / Sing Heav’nly Muse, …

… What in me is dark / Illumine, what is low raise and support; / That to the height of this great Argument / I may assert Eternal Providence, / And justify the ways of God to men.

— John Milton[1]

A winged giant floats in painful torment on a burning sea, adrift in total darkness save from the dull glow of the “fiery gulf” all around him. “With head uplift and eyes that sparkling blazed,”[2] he pulls himself out of the flaming mire, sets foot on a blasted shore, and casts his scornful gaze about him:

Is this the region, this the soil, the clime … this the seat that we must change for Heaven, this mournful gloom for that celestial light? … Hail, horrors! hail, infernal World! and though, profoundest Hell, receive thy new possessor — one who brings a mind not to be changed by place or time. … Here at least we shall be free. … Here we may reign secure, and in my choice, to reign is worth ambition, though in Hell: Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.[3]

It’s the stuff of Hollywood, written 300 years before the invention of cinema. Satan — the ultimate antihero, the first and greatest “rebel without a cause” — struts onstage and immediately usurps our attention, daring us to pay attention to anything coming after this moment that isn’t him.

Who’s the Real Hero Here, Anyway?

Of course, Satan isn’t the real hero of John Milton’s Paradise Lost — not even close. Milton’s sweeping epic, drawn primarily from Genesis 1–3 but informed more broadly by all of Scripture, theology and the literary tradition that came before it, has much loftier ambitions than simply to offer the archfiend a stage and a microphone. Milton’s goal is to retell the story of the creation, the fall and — yes — the redemption of mankind in the grand style of Homer or Virgil. To Milton’s credit — and, even more, to the credit of his “Muse” (that’s the Holy Spirit, in case you missed it) — he largely succeeds, creating what is not only arguably the greatest single work in the history of English literature but also a faith-filled, mostly[4] orthodox and profoundly moving masterpiece of sacred imagination.

But what are we to make of Satan?

This question has plagued critics since the poem was published, though it has only gotten more attention since the advent of modernism in the twentieth century. Why, everyone wants to know, if Satan is supposed to be the bad guy, did Milton make him just so darn cool?[5]

An Age of Antiheroes

It’s a question we would do well to ponder and keep pondering as we live through what many have dubbed the “age of the antihero” in film and television. Everywhere we look these days, there they are: TV’s Walter White, Dexter Morgan and Tony Soprano; Marvel’s Deadpool, Wolverine and Loki; D.C.’s Joker, not to mention the entire Suicide Squad; and many, many others.

What is it about these characters that so appeals to us?  

According to H. Eric Bender, writing for Psychology Today, “Antiheroes liberate us. They reject societal constraints and expectations imposed upon us. … Antiheroes do things we’re afraid to do. They are who they are and they do as they want — without apology.”[6]

As it turns out, audiences love a charming but unapologetic rebel. Antiheroes have the undeniable charisma that comes from mixing just enough good to be sympathetic with more than enough evil to be exciting. It’s a heady cocktail for human hearts stained by sin.

“Because Good Is Dumb”

There’s no denying that Satan (Milton’s version, at least) fits the glamorous antihero “type.” When the book opens, nine days after his fall[7] from heaven, Satan is the unquestioned champion of his own story. He picks himself up, dusts himself off, rallies his demons around him by the sheer force of his powerful and charismatic personality and sets about plotting his grandiose revenge. He heroically volunteers to bust out of hell and make a perilous solo journey across the void to scout out the newly created Earth and see whether it can be conquered by force or guile.

And like a true hero, he succeeds in his mission of spycraft and sabotage. Eve succumbs. Adam falls. Sin and Death build a wide bridge between Earth and Hell over which all of Satan’s minions can pass on their way to colonize and rule their newly conquered domain.

Seeing the story through this lens, one can almost — almost — understand the ongoing appeal of Satan as (to borrow verbiage from the Satanic Temple) “a literary figure who represents a metaphorical construct of rejecting tyranny and championing the human mind and spirit.”[8]

Through this lens, the situation at the end of Book 9 (immediately after the Fall) can be pretty aptly summed up by the words of Dark Helmet in the Mel Brooks film Spaceballs: “Now you see that evil will always triumph, because good is dumb.”

Imaginations “Straining at the Leash”

But is good dumb? Can Satan really be the hero of the story? Could John Milton, pious genius that he was, really make such a giant mistake as to forget who his hero is?

Of course not. To fall into this line of thinking would be silly — or worse, says C.S. Lewis, “wholly erroneous.”[9]

As Lewis reads the poem, Satan isn’t quite as cool as everyone seems to think. What’s more, the fact that he happens to be “the best drawn of Milton’s characters” is, to Lewis, proof not of Satan’s intrinsic allure but of Milton’s own fallen human nature. (This is an assessment with which Milton, a devout Puritan, would no doubt heartily agree.) “To make a character worse than oneself,” Lewis says, “it is only necessary to release imaginatively from control some of the bad passions which, in real life, are always straining at the leash; the Satan … within each of us, is always there and only too ready, the moment the leash is slipped, to come out and have in our books that holiday we try to deny [him] in our lives.”[10]

Imagining a completely righteous character like Christ or one of his angels, says Lewis, is hard: “His whole inner landscape is one we have never seen, and when we guess it we blunder.” Imagining Satan, on the other hand, is shamefully easy. Both writing (Milton) and reading (us) about that “cool” arch-villain — who, despite being absolutely evil, is still also devilishly attractive somehow — comes much more naturally to us than it should. You could even say we were born to it.

Enter “Real Good”

That’s why it’s so desperately important to read Paradise Lost not in excerpts but in its entirety. Only when we see the whole sweeping saga can we begin to grasp the truth Simone Weil once expressed so well: “Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.”[11]

It isn’t until Book 3, when we fly out of Satan’s dim domain and up to the free, clear air of Heaven, that the smog over our imaginations begins to lift. Here we see God’s plan of salvation already in motion — and with it, we begin to understand what true heroism looks like.

Watching Satan approach Earth, the Father foresees (though, importantly, does not foreordain) that Adam will fall, and the Son responds without hesitation, already interceding for mankind:

Behold me, then: me for him, life for life, I offer; on me let thine anger fall; account me Man: I for his sake will leave Thy bosom, and this glory next to thee freely put off, and for him lastly die well pleased; on me let Death wreak all his rage. Under his gloomy power I shall not long lie vanquished. … But I shall rise victorious, and subdue my vanquisher, spoiled of his vaunted spoil.[12]

Behold, friends: The true Hero has just entered the scene, and our story can never belong solely to Satan again.

Not Only Dangerous, but Dull

Indeed, as soon as Satan leaves Hell and enters Paradise, his glory — and his narrative appeal — begin to fade. We watch him throw a temper tantrum over the beauty of creation and spy jealously on Adam and Eve in their bliss. (What a creep!) We then see him single out Eve as the weaker partner and, like the craven bully that he is, isolate and attack his prey, filling her innocent head with abject lies as he seduces her to disobey God’s clear command. As the poem advances, Satan descends, as Lewis says, “from hero to general, from general to politician, from politician to secret service agent, and thence to a thing that peers in at bedroom or bathroom windows, and thence to a toad, and finally to a snake.”[13] The Norton Anthology of English Literature, in its introduction to Paradise Lost, identifies this same clear progression: “As we are introduced not only to Adam and Eve but to Paradise, our sympathies gradually shift. Satan is no longer a glamorous underdog, fighting his adventurous way through the universe against enormous odds; he is a menacing vulture, a cormorant, a toad, a snake. He is not only dangerous, he is dull.”[14]

Dangerous. Dull. Miserable. Jealous. A peeping Tom. A bully. A vulture. A cormorant. A toad. A snake.

Pathetic.

Compare this so-called antihero to the eternal Son of God — He who vanquishes the might of Satan’s armies and drives them before Him “thunderstruck”; He who in mercy offers Himself for man’s salvation without hesitation — and there is simply no comparison.

Christ’s Story — and Ours

In the end, despite his stage-stealing opening lines, Paradise Lost is not Satan’s story.[15] It is Christ’s story. It is Adam and Eve’s story. It is also our story.

Lewis suggests that Milton made Satan attractive simply because it was the easiest thing in the world to do. I think there’s more to it than that. In his carefully crafted poem, Milton did nothing by accident. Lewis himself notes “the emotional connexions whereby he really manipulates our imagination”[16] and observes that, “If Heaven and Earth are ransacked for simile and allusion, this is not done for display, but in order to guide our imaginations with unobtrusive pressure into the channels where the poet wishes them to flow.”[17] In other words, Milton did not mean for us, his readers, to be merely observers; he fashioned his story so that we would be participants in the grand drama, whether wittingly or no.

To that end, he plumbed the depths of his own fallen, sinful human nature to create a compelling and, yes, almost irresistible antihero in Satan. Adam and Eve may have been tempted by the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil; readers of Paradise Lost are tempted instead by the character of Satan himself. He is the fruit our sinful flesh craves.

Yet if we walk patiently with Milton through the entire poem — if we read it with eyes of faith, a heart that hungers and thirsts for Christ’s righteousness, and an imagination open to the poet’s “unobtrusive pressure” — we find the temptation to admire Satan growing less and less as the story goes on. In place of our misguided fascination, we find nurtured in ourselves a deeper, more clear-eyed understanding of the ugliness of sin and what it means to live as fallen human beings. We also find ourselves gasping inevitably in gob-smacked awe at God’s jaw-droppingly infinite mercy. Having been confronted both by our own pitiful inability to resist temptation and by the pure Gospel of Christ’s sacrifice for our sins, we, like Adam, can end the book proclaiming, “O goodness infinite, goodness immense, that all this good of evil shall produce, and evil turn to good, more wonderful than that which by creation first brought forth light out of darkness.”[18]

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[1] John Milton, Paradise Lost, I, 1–6, 24–26.

[2] Milton, I, 52,192–193.

[3] Milton, I, 242–263.

[4] Per C.S. Lewis: “Heretical elements exist in [Paradise Lost], but are only discoverable by search: any criticism which forces them into the foreground is mistaken, and ignores the fact that this poem was accepted as orthodox by many generations of acute readers well grounded in theology. … And as far as doctrine goes, the poem is overwhelmingly Christian. Except for a few isolated passages it is not even specifically Protestant or Puritan. It gives the great central tradition. Emotionally it may have such and such faults; dogmatically its invitation to join in this great ritual mimesis of the Fall is one which all Christendom in all lands or ages can accept.” A Preface to Paradise Lost (London: Oxford, 1942), reprint edition 1969, 71, 91, dl.icdst.org/pdfs/files4/2cf71f4fa9ccbe4bbcd655eea8c822e6.pdf.

[5] For one example, see Edward M. Cefelli, “Introduction: Milton for Our Times,” Paradise Lost and Other Poems (New York: Signet Classics, 2003), vii-xviii. He writes: “The character [Milton] created is so brilliant, especially in the early going, so articulate, so driven, so almost-human in his frailties that he cannot fail to resonate with modern readers. … Is this attractiveness of Satan’s adequately explained by Milton’s need to create a worthy antagonist for his story? Did he inadvertently raise his archvillain too high and make him too humanly appealing?”

[6] “Rise of the Antihero: Why we find Breaking Bad and other antihero-centric TV series compelling,” Psychology Today, September 29, 2013.

[7] If you can call recoiling from the wrath of the Son of God and throwing himself “headlong … down from the verge of heaven” a “fall” (IV, 864–865).

[8] This wording comes directly from a flyer advertising an after-school “Satan Club” promoted in several public-school districts by members of the Satanic Temple. See Sarah Al-Arshani, “Parents in a Connecticut town worry as ‘After School Satan Club’ plans meeting,” USA Today, posted November 23, 2023.

[9] Lewis, 92.

[10] Lewis, 99–100.

[11] Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, translated by Arthur Wills (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1952), 120, archive.org/details/gravityandgrace/page/n121/mode/2up.

[12] Milton, III, 236–251.

[13] Lewis, 99–100.

[14] “Paradise Lost,” The Norton Anthology of English Literature, vol. 1., ed. M.H. Abrams, 6th ed. (New York: Norton, 1993), 1474.

[15] Note that Satan abandons Eden as soon as Eve’s temptation is over and disappears from the book entirely after his return to Pandemonium in Book 10.

[16] Lewis, 42.

[17] Lewis, 44–45.

[18] Milton, XII, 468–473.

Cover image: “Satan Contemplating Adam and Eve in Paradise,” by John Martin, 1824-1827.