Evil Personified…Dante’s Satan

In the Inferno Satan, or “The Emperor of the Universe of Pain,” is trapped in ice from the waist down. His head has three faces: one is “fiery red,” another is “between white and bile” and the third is black. He has bat’s wings that keep flapping as if to help him escape but all they can do is “freeze all of Cocytus” (Dante’s name for the ninth circle). He is weeping and in his mouths he gnaws on three sinners whom he keeps “in eternal pain at his eternal dinner.” They are Judas Iscariot, Brutus and Cassius. (The center of Dante’s hell holds those “treacherous to their masters.” Judas betrayed Christ; Brutus and Cassius betrayed Caesar. Virgil  guides the character “Dante” through hell and these last two are for his benefit.)

Satan is gigantic as Dante describes him: “I am closer in size to the great mountain the Titans make around the central pit, than they to his arms.” Virgil and Dante leave the inferno by using the “Great Worm of Evil” as a stairway and “we walked out once more beneath the Stars.” (Interestingly Dante uses this word to end each of the three books of The Divine Comedy. For him “stars” are the symbol of hope and virtue in this epic poem of redemption.) And that is all that we have of Satan. He is trapped, weeping and eating for eternity.

It seems to me that he is too helpless to personify a cosmic force that produces injury. Of course in Dante’s literary universe the punishment fits the crime. Thus, he is portraying a defeated Satan.

So we have three vanquished characters: Iago arrested and standing mum; Milton’s fallen Lucifer; and Dante’s trapped  Satan. Do any of them personify evil?

The theme of good versus evil has given us some great literature and memorable characters with good usually the victor. I’ve been wondering how modern writers would compare. The work that comes to mind (possibly because the final movie is coming out in a month)  is the Harry Potter series. That would mean rereading all seven volumes. Perhaps a project for another day.

Evil Personified…Milton’s Satan

In his epic poem Paradise Lost (published in 1667), Milton created, perhaps unintentionally, one of the most compelling and complex characters in literature. His Satan is eloquently skilled in the art of rhetoric. He is also, it seems to me, very “human.” In the first book of the twelve-book epic, we learn his motives: “Th’ infernal Serpent. He it was whose guile/ Stirred up with envy and revenge deceived/ The mother of mankind” (lines 34-36). Again it is jealousy that causes “evil,” that causes “Lucifer” to fall and to seduce Adam and Eve “to that foul revolt.”

Satan (derived from the Hebrew word meaning adversary) first feels jealousy when the “Father Infinite” declares that he has a son who is exalted above the angels: “This day I have begot whom I declare/ My only Son…whom ye now behold/ At my right hand. Your head I Him appoint” (Book Five, lines 603-606). The archangel Raphael tells Adam that Satan was “fraught/ With envy against the Son of God that day” and “could not bear/ Through pride that sight and…resolved/ With all his legions to dislodge and leave unworshipped, unobeyed, the throne supreme” calling God a tyrant (lines 661-670).

He is next jealous of Adam, “a creature formed of earth” as Satan tells his fallen comrades, and given a “Magnificent…World” or paradise and angels to serve him. Satan sets out to revenge what provokes his envy and he enters paradise in the form of a serpent. “But what will not ambition and revenge/ Descend to?…Revenge, at first though sweet,/ Bitter ere long back on itself recoils./ Let it; I reck not” (Book Eight, lines 168-173). At this point jealousy has overpowered reason and Satan does not care what form he must take to accomplish his goal.

There is another time when Satan loses his “reason” by which I mean that he is overcome by emotion: when he first sees Eve, my favorite lines in Paradise Lost. “Such pleasure took the serpent to behold/ This flowery plat, the sweet recess of Eve…her heavenly form/ Angelic, but more soft, and feminine,/ Her graceful innocence, her every air/ Of gesture or least action overawed/ His malice…That space the evil one abstracted stood/ From his own evil, and for the time remained/ Stupidly good, of enmity disarmed/ Of guile, of hate, of envy, of revenge” (Book Nine, lines 455-466). However, the “hot Hell that always in him burns…soon ended his delight” and he continues with his plan of revenge.

If we understand evil as a cosmic force producing injury—that is, something that has no motive—as with Iago, I don’t consider this Satan “evil.” Like Iago, he feels betrayed and therefore believes he is  justified in the injuries he attempts to perpetrate. We may not agree with his actions but I think we can understand their cause.  Perhaps to find evil that is “thoughtless” or without purpose, we need to look at an earlier work: Dante’s Inferno.

Evil Personified…Iago

In the New York Times Sunday Book Review of June 5, 2011, in his review of Sarah Winman’s When God Was A Rabbit, Henry Alford gives as an example of one of life’s biggest questions, “What makes Iago evil?” It is a question that scholars have debated for a long time but I’ve always found the answer simple: Jealousy.

From the very first scene of the play we know that Iago resents the fact that Othello has made Cassio a lieutenant when he claims that “Preferment goes by letter and affection.” In other words, he thinks that favoritism is Othello’s motive and that “there’s no remedy. ‘Tis the curse of service.” Iago feels that he is the victim of an injustice; he feels frustrated because he is helpless to right the “wrong.”

Not only is Iago jealous because Othello promoted Cassio over him, but also he thinks that there is a possibility that Othello “slept” with his wife, Emilia. In his soliloquy closing Act I he says:

  “I hate the Moor,/ And it is thought abroad that ‘twixt my sheets/ [H’as] done my office. I know not if’t be true,/ But I, for mere suspicion in that kind,/ Will do as if for surety.”

Even though the infidelity is merely rumor, Iago will act as though it is a fact, giving himself an excuse to “tenderly” lead Othello “by th’ nose/ As asses are.” His jealously and resentment of Othello probably have a racist foundation. One of his actions is to create discord between Othello and Brabantio, Desdemona’s father. He tells Brabantio “an old black ram/ Is tupping your white ewe.” An underlying cause of racism is a feeling of superiority. The fact that Othello is his superior in rank feeds Iago’s resentment.

At the end of the play after he has killed Desdemona and learns from Emilia the truth about the handkerchief,  Othello asks why Iago, “that demi-devil,” has “ensnar’d my soul and body?” It seems to me that Iago’s answer shows that he regrets nothing: “Demand me nothing; what you know, you know: From this time forth I never will speak word.” His unwillingness to apologize, in either sense of that word, proves to me that he feels his actions are justified.

Jealousy is a malicious intolerance that blinds one to anything beyond that emotion. It makes Iago a schemer and a manipulator who deceives and betrays everyone. Is he the personification of evil?  One of the definitions of evil (noun) is “a cosmic force producing " injury. Perhaps that is what Shakespeare had in mind when creating Iago, who has more lines in the play than Othello does. However, if it is a “cosmic force,” evil needs no motive. I see in Iago all too human motives.  Instead of personifying evil, Iago may be Shakespeare’s depiction of all that is negative in the human character when emotion is uncontrolled by reason.

Another literary “personification of evil” is Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost, the character I’d like to consider next.

Meanderings of the Mind……Poppies

The other day as I was making lemon poppy seed bread (delicious with homemade lemon curd), I wondered if these were in fact the poppy seeds I could use to grow the brilliantly colored flowers. I did some research via Google.

These tiny black seeds are from the opium poppy. (The species name—papaver somniferum—means sleep inducing.) However the seeds used in my bread are from the ripened flower’s dried seed pod. Opium is derived from the “latex” of the unripe fruit. The seeds were used by many ancient civilizations. For example, the Egyptians used them as sedatives. Others thought the seeds had magical powers of invisibility. (Pondering how that belief came about.) It is said that the seeds help to alleviate asthma, whooping cough and insomnia. Today many countries use them to make a paste for such dishes as puddings, cakes and pastries.

Thinking of poppies brought to mind John McCrae’s World War I poem, “In Flanders Fields.” It’s in the form of a French rondeau: thirteen lines of eight syllables, plus two half line refrains of four syllables, in three stanzas using only three rhymes in a  scheme of AABBA, AAB with the C refrain, AABBA with the C refrain. The refrain is identical with the beginning of the first line of the poem.

http://public.wsu.edu/~wldciv/world_civ_reader/world_civ_reader_2/mccrae.html

John McCrae (1872-1918) was a Canadian physician and became Lieutenant Colonel and commander of the Canadian General Hospital at Boulogne during the war. He wrote the poem after a friend of his was killed in the fighting. He was apparently sitting in a dressing station and looking out at the fields of poppies growing on the graves. Scholars have been arguing whether the poem is pro or anti-war ever since it was published in Punch in December, 1915. (The poem seems to me to be a lament about war and lost lives. The speaker is dead, one of the many buried beneath the poppies.)

In my research I did find how to grow poppies. The seeds like the chill of winter so you need to spread them on prepared soil in the fall and come spring you will have a field of vibrant-colored petals.