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.