Forget everything you think you know about the devil. Before the shadowy villains and horned tempters of modern pop culture, there was John Milton’s Satan—a character so compelling, so tragic, and so fiercely heroic that he has captivated and troubled readers for over 350 years. In his epic 1667 poem, Paradise Lost, Milton set out to “justify the ways of God to man”, but in the process, he created literature’s greatest anti-hero. He crafted a fallen angel who is far from a simple embodiment of evil, but rather a complex, noble, and courageous figure who defies the Almighty.
So why did a devout Christian poet make the devil the most interesting character in his poem? The answer lies in the turbulent times Milton lived in and the revolutionary ideas he championed.
The Rebel You’re Supposed to Hate
Milton doesn’t give us a monster; he gives us a tragic hero. Satan’s fall is presented as a profound tragedy, driven by pride and a thirst for revenge against a God he sees as a tyrant. This is a stark departure from the traditional Christian view of a purely malevolent being.
This Satan is a leader. He is eloquent, persuasive, and charismatic, able to rally the fallen angels to his cause with powerful speeches and sway Adam and Eve with reasoned arguments about knowledge and power. When he famously declares, “Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav’n,” you feel the defiant energy of a born revolutionary. He may be fundamentally evil, responsible for the fall of humanity, but his depiction is so deeply human and ambivalent that it has sparked centuries of debate.
A Revolutionary for Revolutionary Times
To understand Satan, you have to understand Milton. Milton wrote Paradise Lost after his own world had been turned upside down. He was a passionate supporter of the English Civil War and the execution of King Charles I. He worked for the new republic under Oliver Cromwell, a man some saw as a heroic liberator and others as a power-hungry dictator.
It’s impossible not to see the parallels. Was Milton using Satan to explore the complicated legacy of a revolutionary like Cromwell? Like Satan, Cromwell was a complex figure who rebelled against a monarch he believed was unjust, driven by a powerful sense of his own righteous cause. Satan’s war against the monarchy of Heaven is a divine echo of the very real wars over authority and rebellion that defined Milton’s life and England’s history.
The Freedom to Choose Damnation
Ultimately, Satan’s compelling character is essential to the poem’s central theme: free will. Milton believed that for humanity’s goodness to mean anything, it had to be a choice. Adam and Eve were created with the ability to choose between good and evil, and their temptation by Satan is the turning point for all humanity.
By eating the fruit, they gain knowledge, but they also fall from grace and are subjected to death and suffering. Satan is the catalyst. He tempts them with the promise of god-like knowledge and the power to control their own destiny. According to Milton’s logic, this fall was a necessary, if painful, step. Without the knowledge of evil, humanity could never truly understand good or make authentic moral choices. In a sense, Satan’s rebellion, and the choice he offers, is what makes us fully human.
Milton’s grand, majestic language and use of unrhymed blank verse give the story an epic, stately quality befitting its themes. It’s a cornerstone of English literature for a reason. But its lasting power comes from the uncomfortable questions it forces us to ask. Paradise Lost presents a world where the lines between hero and villain are blurred, and where rebellion can seem as attractive as righteousness. It doesn’t give us easy answers, but instead throws us into the heart of the conflict between divine authority and individual freedom, leaving us to admire the beautiful, terrible, and unforgettable figure of Satan.